The road to Hollywood is long and exhausting. For me, it was over five thousand miles long. Unless, of course, you grow up on North Beachwood Drive in Los Angeles. In that case Hollywood is always just out your window, beaming down from the side of a mountain, huge white letters grinning like teeth, asking what you’ve done so far today.

The road to the Hollywood sign, which is the symbol that springs to mind across the globe when one mentions “the H word,” is also long and exhausting. The difference, of course, is scale. It’s certainly no more than a mile and a half from the heavily-populated end of North Beachwood Drive to the sign itself, but between you and your destination is Mt. Lee Drive, which winds and twists along the side of the mountain. Dust and pebbles. Oppressive heat (when I was there, anyway). And you can’t drive on it: there are no cars allowed.

The Hollywood sign is managed by the Hollywood Sign Trust, and its publicity (yes) by RBI Creative. I got in touch with them to ask if I could get an up-close-and-personal guided tour of the sign, assuming that civilians could get as close as they wanted, within reason, but that a really close examination of the monument would take special privileges. It turns out civilians can’t really get that close at all: the most you can do is trek up Mt. Lee Drive, the ill-chosen shoes you wore because you didn’t know you’d be hiking slipping in the dust, saving the sad pool of liquid at the bottom of your water bottle for the downhill hike you know is only an hour away.

Luckily, incredibly, telling people you’re working on an independent radio documentary opens doors that would otherwise be closed. Specifically, car doors!

The Hollywood Trust hooked me up with Anton, a young production coordinator tasked with taking me up to the sign. He hopped gingerly out of his sedan to unlock the gate that keeps cars at the foot of Mr. Lee Drive, stunned tourists gawking jealously from all directions.

(The tourists bear mention: they are everywhere on North Beachwood Drive. The road up to Mt. Lee Drive makes for a frustrating drive, because there are people double-parked all over the place so they can hop out and take pictures of their loved ones with the sign off in the distance behind them. For most people, this is close enough; if you fly from Japan to the US on a sightseeing tour, the sight has pretty much been seen by the time you’re standing there. Not so for everyone, though, as I would soon find out.)

On our way up the mountain we pass aggrieved hikers who didn’t know what they’d gotten themselves into. My schadenfreude is kept to a minimum – it could fit in the glove compartment – but it’s there.

After parking at the top of Mt. Lee Drive, we approach a chainlink fence. For various reasons, chief among them vandalism and the fact that a young actress named Peg Entwistle committed suicide by leaping from the H in 1932 (back when the sign still read ‘Hollywoodland’), the sign is not remotely accessible to the public. The most you can do, after all that hiking, is stare at the back of the top of the H through a fence. It’s kind of a drag.

Unless you’re with Anton, who has a key to the fence. We stepped through and he attached a rope to the fence so that we could stable ourselves as we descended toward the sign. Since visitors aren’t welcome on the sign, no attempt has been made to make it accessible; it requires skittering carefully down a steep slope dotted with nettles and tripping roots. It is, truth be told, kind of a pain in the ass. Which is fine, since that’s what it’s supposed to be.

Next time: what the Hollywood sign is made of, and how to crush the dreams of a Jersey girl!

I have started writing this post a dozen times already. Each time, I stopped.

After leaving Portland and arriving in Los Angeles, the exhilarating final stop on my tour of ten Hollywoods, my trip took an unexpected turn. I was summoned back home to Massachusetts to be with my family; to celebrate my grandfather and deliver a eulogy. It was hard to focus on interviews or blogs during that period.

The trip back to Los Angeles was a messy, eighteen-hour affair involving seven hours at Logan Airport, an unplanned stopover in Denver, a frantic (fruitless) search for a hotel in San Francisco at 1:00 AM, and finally an exhausted arrival in Burbank. That was a long day, let me tell you.

But, as you can see from the photos above, I did make it to my destination. It was with some disappointment that I noticed there is not an actual street sign marking the intersection of Hollywood and Vine in LA. I know, right? It’s a huge, buzzing tourist trap, and there’s a neon diner sign attached to a restaurant named after the landmark, but the city has not gone out of its way to provide the particular photo opportunity I’d driven across the country to find.

There’s a point to be made here about how you can drive up and down and all across a continent looking for something in Hollywood and Hollywood will stubbornly refuse to give it to you, but let’s save that for later, shall we?

This post is just my way of saying game on: posts will resume with regularity, postcards will be sent out to my supporters very soon, and I’ll be sharing my LA experience, including my incredible trip up onto the Hollywood sign itself, in the next 48 hours.

For now, enjoy the photos I took in Los Angeles of the city, that particular intersection, and some of the scrumptious eccentricity of my dear friend Hank’s apartment. If one in ten people on Earth were as good at interior design as Hank is, there would be no more war.

“If I hear myself on NPR, I’ll shoot you!”

Angel says this to me with a smile on her face so I’m sure she’s just kidding. Well, I’m like 60% sure she’s just kidding. I don’t think she actually owns a gun, but after my first several hours poking around the Hollywood district of Portland, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that someone who lives there would get a little violent under the right (which I guess is to say wrong?) circumstances.

By chance, the first woman I spoke to, Ally, was perfectly friendly. She didn’t have time for an interview, as she was busy re-finishing a wooden chest out in her driveway, yellow latex gloves sticky with some dripping amber fluid. She recommended I talk to her neighbor across the street, who does work rescuing dogs with the ASPCA. I thanked Ally and tottered off across the road.

Sadly, her neighbor does not have the same fondness for independent radio that she does for dogs. After ringing the doorbell, I spotted her on the other side of her living room window, hair straight and dripping wet, mouthing silently “Do I know you?”
“No,” I mouthed back, “but your neighbor Ally told me I should come talk to you about your work with the ASPCA.” She didn’t get it. Reluctantly, she disappeared into another part of the house and emerged into her backyard. She yelled at me to come stand on the other side of her tall fence, just the top of her head peeking over. I explained the project and she waved me away brusquely.

Undeterred, I approached another house, and then another. At each I was summarily dismissed by a stern female voice from beyond a closed screen door.
“I’m a very private person,” one woman told me. “Go away.”

It would be churlish of me to attempt to grade the Hollywoods I’ve visited on my trip. Obviously there’s no objective, qualitative way to measure the myriad good, bad and in-between features of these unique places. That said, the Hollywood neighborhood of Portland, an otherwise thriving modern city, was about as exciting as a burlap sack full of other burlap sacks.

Now in defense of the gorgeous Hollywood Theatre, with its bright, aging façade, and the Hollywood Star, the neighborhood newsletter, I couldn’t get anyone from either of those great organizations to talk to me. They were all busy and/or prickly. So I’ll be speaking to them on the phone sometime soon to get a more rounded view of the place they call home.

The truth is, though, that these Hollywoodites were not a trusting group, by and large. I know these are strange times we live in, but I am not a threatening guy. My glasses are purple, OK? They are purple. Who doesn’t want to talk to a guy with purple glasses? Now we know.

Here I am, two thousand miles later, almost at my destination.

I’ve stopped along the way in a handful of neat places. Unfortunately I was just passing through, so I didn’t have much time to explore or soak up local culture. And besides, these aren’t Hollywoods, so who cares, right? Also, please pardon me for taking some of the above photos on my phone, as I wasn’t always in a position to whip out the 7D (as when I was driving past that double rainbow in Denver).

Roswell, New Mexico appears to be a tourist trap. Which doesn’t sound like a newsflash, so let me clarify: it does not appear to be anything other than a tourist trap. Maybe I was just in the wrong part of town, but other than nondescript commercial storefronts and apartment complexes, it was one tacky alien-themed business after another. And yet I couldn’t find one alien-themed restaurant to eat at. Honestly! Get it together, Roswell.

I think I might move to Denver. Well, I was considering it until my grandmother forbade it. When I called to talk to her today, my cousin Jason answered the phone, and when he passed it to my grandmother, the first thing she said was “What, you think you’re the only man in my life?” So when she tells me I can’t move to Denver, Denver is off the table.

Which is a shame! I met up with two old friends there (one of whom has a glamorous job writing subtitles for pornographic movies) (really), and the four blocks on which we hung out (on the west side of City Park and, deliciously, Gaylord Street) were Totally Great™. Just hip enough – I only glimpsed one lonely egregious hipster mustache – without making my eyes roll back into my head. Also the cost of living hovers somewhere very close to reasonable, and I’ve gained an appreciation on this trip for creating art in a smaller artistic community than, for example, New York. There are advantages and disadvantages to being an artist in a crowded city where everyone has something to say, but that’s another blog post for another night.

Oh and yeah, huge double rainbow on the highway as I drove in. I wish I could make a cutesy reference to that double rainbow guy on YouTube but I’ve never gotten through that video and I refuse to link to it, so… tough titty.

Ew, that was a disgusting thing to say, I take it back.

Everything you’ve heard about Salt Lake City is probably true. Everyone is really nice, the streets are Disney World clean, Mormon architecture is kinda gross and their statues are uniformly pretty hilarious. I gasped – actually gasped – when I drove into the city: it’s nuzzled up cozily against some mountains, and is a gorgeous sight to behold at sunset. It feels very modern (which makes sense), and somehow American (again, not a surprise), and I understand the layout of the city is all based around the location of Temple Square, which is lovely and verdant and more or less exactly what you want your religion’s garden of earthly delights to look like.

Also? It is teeming with smiley tour guides. Do not make eye contact with the tour guides or they will smile and try to talk to you! Which is bad, if the only thing you have to say to an employee of the Mormon church is something about the hideous cruelty of pouring millions of dollars into Proposition 8!

I can neither confirm nor deny that Salt Lake City’s Metropolitan Inn is haunted as fuck, but I did have some pretty unpleasant nightmares there. So it’s either grumpy ghosts or a global psychic disturbance caused by the untimely death of Amy Winehouse.

From SLC it was just a hop, skip and seven hours to Baker City, Oregon, where I camped out for the night at the Oregon Trail Motel. Baker City swept me off my feet with its small-town cuteness (there it is again), despite being home to the worst Chinese food anyone has ever eaten (I checked). The Eltrym movie theater is terrific, despite their tolerance for local girls answering phone calls (that’s plural, mind you) in the middle of movies.

And now here I am in Portland, Oregon, at last. Yesterday was a bright, hot day, the hottest so far this summer, I’m told. I’m staying on East Burnside Street, and at the moment I’m sitting in a coffee shop and gray light is pouring in through the windows. I am wearing green plaid flannel, so as to not alarm the locals. Breaking news: coffee in Portland is great.

I know, right?

Last night around midnight I sat on my friend’s stoop and read and watched the drunk foot traffic go by. Despite the fact that my back has been wrenched all out of whack by five days of nonstop driving, the Long Drive has introduced a certain sense of zen laissez faire to my mentality. If I just keep driving, I know I’m going to get there.

The weather said no rain in Portland until the fourth of August, so I gathered my wet clothes from the washing machine (thank god for friends with washing machines) and crept outside onto the cool grass to hang them on a line with clicking wooden clothespins. After days on the highway evenings in motels the night air had a revitalizing effect on me, and I went inside to go to sleep early.

When the rain started, around four in the morning, I awoke and smiled. I’ve always loved the sound of rain on the roof in the suburbs; it’s one of the things I like least about living in a second-story apartment in Brooklyn. And the thought crept into my head slowly, slowly that my clothes would be soaked through in the downpour, and where a week ago I might have sat bolt upright in consternation or at least brooded and cursed the weather channel until sunrise, now I rolled over and pressed my face into the dark pillow and let myself sleep. It doesn’t matter, I thought. I’m going to get there.

Spoiler alert: that awesome disco helmet is from New Orleans, not Hollywood Park.

You know, blame it on lack of research, but I hadn’t anticipated that so many of the Hollywoods on this trip would be suburbs. I’d tell you to go through the other posts and count the times I’ve described someplace as a “quaint suburban nook,” or a “charmingly well-lit suburb,” but I would only be embarrassed by the results.

How could I know that Hollywood Park, the small city-within-a-city in San Antonio, would be the suburb to end all suburbs? Not only is it a quaint, charmingly well-lit suburban nook, but it’s a quaint, charmingly well-lit suburban nook with its own city government! I spoke to the mayor of Hollywood Park, Bob Sartor, this morning. He doesn’t like the word “suburb,” and prefers to call his dominion a “bedroom city.” In the sense that there’s a whole city around it, but Hollywood Park is like its own little bedroom within the city.

In this analogy San Antonio is a house. OK? I’ve been driving for nine hours.

Anyway: Hollywood Park was incorporated in 1955, and since then, according to one resident who’s been there since the mid-1960′s, the most significant (only?) thing that’s happened in town is the construction of a major highway in the neighborhood’s back yard. It’s increased the level of noise pollution that Hollywood Parkians have to deal with, but in the time I spent wandering through the streets, snapping photos and chatting people up, it didn’t seem to be a problem.

And while you may be thinking, “Really? The only thing of note that’s happened is a highway?” I encourage you to remember Hollywood, South Carolina, where the major news story of the last decade was the installation of a traffic light.

The three people to whom I spoke at greatest length each had a peculiar perspective on their home city, a shared experience of Hollywood Park that seemed to be wound up with what most people expect of Hollywood, California. Travis and his wife wanted a house on a big lot of land that they could gut and rebuild according to their needs and specifications. Mickey moved from Washington, DC to be near his son in case he winds up in the hospital again (“There’s a machine in here that keeps me running,” he told me, thumping his breast harder than I would if I had a delicate piece of medical equipment installed behind my ribs). Martha’s husband had always wanted to live in Hollywood Park, she said, and though she doesn’t know exactly why, she suspects it had something to do with the mysterious power of that name, Hollywood, and all it evokes. “Unfortunately,” she told me on the phone, though there was a smile in her voice, “he’s not here anymore to tell us.”

Each of these people felt that, in their own way, they’d been following “the American dream,” and wound up in Hollywood. I’m beginning to get the impression that whatever you might be dreaming of, there’s a Hollywood out there somewhere where you can find it.

Conservatively, I calculated that my trip across the country would be roughly seven thousand miles. To answer your next question: yes, that may be only conservative thing I have ever done.

As I write this I am in Roswell, New Mexico, at a hotel whose staff have made the decision to leave a flyswatter in each room instead of going to all the trouble of just not having flies in every room in the fucking hotel. The silver lining, I guess, is that the flies make great company after a long day in the car with nobody but Roy Dotrice and his rousing audiobook performance for companionship.

I shall name one fly for each place I’ve been so far. Maryland is my favorite fly, I’ve just decided.

Why am I in Roswell? There’s a joke to be made here about my ship crashing nearby, but I simply don’t have the energy to make that joke. I’m in Roswell because the next Hollywood, the penultimate Hollywood, is in Portland, Oregon. From San Antonio to Portland is roughly two thousand miles all by itself, making this far and away the longest leg of the trip. The plan right now is to arrive in Portland on Sunday.

What lies between now and Sunday? Tomorrow night I’ll be in Denver. The next night in Salt Late City. And Saturday night I’ll be… somewhere in Idaho, maybe? It’s up in the air.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to call and say hi or check up on the project, now’s your chance: the next 72 hours I’ll be in the car, alone but for the dulcet tones of Roy Dotrice’s voice.

Say what you will about Hollywood being a bad part of Memphis, I didn’t see anyone in Hollywood doing coke in the bathroom. Which is more than I can say for the Mexican restaurant I ate at in a totally separate part of the city. Not that there’s anything wrong with doing coke in the bathroom of a Mexican restaurant – except for yes, there is everything wrong with that, nevermind – I’m just saying that people’s impressions of things are defined by context.

It makes sense, therefore, that all I heard about Memphis’s Hollywood were horror stories, largely from people who’d never spent any time there. The media’s coverage of the neighborhood is apparently fairly dismal, biased and not terribly keyed into the systemic problems that keep the economically troubled part of town in dire straits.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the few people I spoke to with anything nice to say about Hollywood was Colin, who lived there for eighteen years of his life. He grew up in the northern part of the neighborhood, and said it was a wonderful place to be a kid. He got a lot of “Hey, white boy,” being the only caucasian kid in his elementary school, but said he never felt out of place or like he didn’t belong. This jives with something that came up in my interviews both with the director of the local community center and with Dorothy Cox, a community organizer attempting to turn the neighborhood and its reputation around: Hollywood’s sense of family.

Not community, not some nebulous word meaning “togetherness,” specifically family. It came up with each person I interviewed as something that makes the neighborhood special: the sense of family that exists between people who live there. Doubtless this is at least partly because they feel that they know the truth about their part of town and many other people are misinformed by the media’s portrayal of their home. That truth, as described to me, is that the neighborhood is indeed on a dangerous slide into trouble, but it’s not an unsafe place to be.

Dorothy Cox used to live in Hollywood, and now works on Shasta, directly off of Hollywood Street. She moved away for twenty years but now she’s back, having witnessed the gradual degradation of her old stomping grounds. I’m looking forward to going back through my interview with Dorothy and her coworker Bill to dissect her ideas about the are, including her (controversial) plan for what she called “gentle gentrification.” Living in a part of Brooklyn that’s in the process of less-than-gentle gentrification, I confess I have my own doubts about this plan, but then I haven’t been on Hollywood Street in Memphis for more than six hours.

After leaving Hollywood, I enjoyed some superb ribs at the bar of Rendezvous, and then got to take some pictures of a bunch of fire spinners I met through my couch surfing host, Jason. Most of today’s photos are of art by Jason or his friends. Enjoy!

Also, sorry for the brief pause in posting: I was in New Orleans catching up with friends and not thinking about Hollywood for 36 hours. Now we’re back, just in time for The Long Drive…

Here is an incomplete list of things white people told me about Hollywood Street in Memphis, Tennessee:
-You will be the only white person there
-Don’t go there at night
-Don’t go there alone
-Don’t talk to anyone there
-It isn’t safe
-You might meet a prostitute
-You will definitely meet at least one crackhead
-It’s a bad part of town
-It’s the bad part of town

Are you seeing a pattern, here?

I am the whitest non-albino person I know. I get upset when the orange clothes I buy from J. Crew don’t match the orange clothes I buy from the Gap. That being said, it wasn’t the fact of potentially being the only caucasian person in this Hollywood that put me on edge, but rather the fact that there’s obviously some complicated, Memphis-specific cultural mishegas surrounding that part of town. So much so that the neighborhood, such as it is (it’s a street that runs north through Memphis, with a smaller area designated as the Hollywood neighborhood), is interrupted at one point by a small street, called Alicia Drive. Maybe the idea was that if they didn’t call Alicia Drive Hollywood, the dire economic straits of Hollywood wouldn’t bleed over?

It sounds silly, but this is more or less true: Alicia Drive, on the southernmost part of Hollywood Street, is a charming suburban nook. Every one of the people I met on Alicia Drive (none of whom had any interest in talking to me – more on this tomorrow) was white. As I moved north, though, the demographic makeup of the people I saw and met in the street shifted so abruptly that it was jarring, and from that point on I was the only white guy, as far as I could tell. Suddenly, the charming houses were in disrepair, some even boarded up.

In my experience – which was obviously bounded by my short time in Memphis and the fact that I was on Hollywood Street during broad daylight – the panic over Hollywood seemed to have been exaggerated, in some cases to the point of farce. Did I always feel comfortable in the neighborhood? No. Did I ever – once – feel threatened, or that hostility was being directed at me? No. Were people curious what a lone, bespectacled, fairly queerish (let’s face it) guy was doing walking around and trying to interview strangers with a microphone? Well, yeah, of course. But not so much so that they wanted to talk to me, sadly.

I did end up speaking to three community organizers who are working actively to turn the neighborhood and, critically, its perception in the local media around. Their take on Hollywood, its past, present and future, coming tomorrow.

“A mess, a mess,” Eric says to nobody in particular. “Life’s a mess.”

We are sitting in my car in Eric’s driveway, and he has just finished explaining his legal troubles to me. The history of Hollywood, AL is not all sunshine and nuclear energy stations, it turns out. Eric’s family has lived in town for over a century – hell, they owned a good part of it for most of that time.

I met Eric by chance through his neighbor, and we wound up driving through town (and around the Bellefonte plant and the nearby river) together. He showed me the cemetery where some of the town’s oldest residents are buried, some of their headstones engraved with strange masonic symbols he couldn’t explain. We also went by a house owned by Eric’s family where Jesse James once stayed. The house is abandoned now, ever since Eric’s uncle was killed there several years ago.

This sort of thing – the shadow cast by the façade of the sleepy southern town where nothing happens – is the stuff Eric reveals to me over the course of the day. The town’s former mayor, who Eric will only refer to as ‘Corruption,’ applied for federal grants, won them, and then used the money for personal gain, not to improve the town. And not because Hollywood didn’t need improvement: the water in Hollywood’s water tower (informing you in no uncertain terms that this Hollywood is the real Hollywood) was badly contaminated. Eric pointed out houses in a loop around town, indicating homes where people died of lupus after being poisoned by the water supply. He tells me that during this period Corruption was having cases of bottled water delivered to her home, and that the problem was never permanently solved, just fixed temporarily: Hollywood now gets its water supply from Scottsboro.

And that water tower: it’s not alone in its defense of this Hollywood as the authentic one. By all accounts, this Hollywood was the first, though whether this enhances its authenticity is subjective. The mayor, after directing me to a stack of “We’re the real Hollywood” bumper stickers (which, strangely, don’t indicate which Hollywood they refer to), told me about a meeting convened in the 1980′s in Hollywood, Florida. Present at the meeting were the mayors of the thirteen Hollywoods in the US that have mayors.

I know, right? I need to find the minutes of that meeting. The goal of the conference was to plan a strategy to combat Hollywood, CA’s intended takeover of the word ‘Hollywood,’ as there were plans to copyright the term at the time. The League of Hollywood Mayors succeeded. Hollywood’s current mayor, Virginia Bergman, was not at the meeting, as it was before her time. When asked her favorite thing about Hollywood, she had no ready response. And no response later in the conversation after thinking about it. How refreshing, I thought, to hear some honesty from a politician instead of an empty lie. Mayor Bergman went on to explain to me that Hollywood is located just off of a highway that serves as a bustling corridor for the drug trade, a fact the town is hoping to combat by enlisting the help of a drug-sniffing dog.

Eric had prepared me for this part of the conversation: he made note of the meth labs dotting Hollywood. Occasionally, he told me, they burn down. I guess that’s an occupational hazard of operating a meth lab. Eric found this trend disturbing, as any citizen would, but Eric is particularly invested in Hollywood and its future, since so much of his history is tied up with the town. He’s run for mayor twice, and by his own admission may feel more passionately about the community than anyone else in the world.

–

On my way out of town, I spotted a huge black cow lounging in the shade behind a wire fence with another, more reasonably-sized cow. I pulled over and climbed through some tall grass toward the fence. The humidity was stifling, and the crickets sang ceaselessly, as they always seemed to do in Alabama, but now they were joined by some new insect that produced a slow, rhythmic clicking, like a metronome dictating the plodding pace of the day.

The cows were uncooperative. The larger of the two stood up and moved away from the fence as I approached, disturbing a vast cloud of tiny flies that had been lounging on his haunches. He was a corpulent thing, all dark skin and swishing tail. A comically outsized, bulbous penis dangled obscenely from his hindquarters.

As I leaned closer to the animal, I placed one hand on the fence to steady myself, and felt a short, sharp shock. Not as bad as the time I electrocuted myself changing a lightbulb at a cousin’s house, when time seemed to freeze and I imagined myself hovering momentarily in the air like a cartoon, but slightly worse than the worst accidental static shock you’ve gotten when shaking hands with someone wearing scratchy socks during winter in the middle of a big shag carpet.

“Ow!” I yelled, “Fuck you, cow!” I actually shook my first at him. The rhythmic clicking I’d heard was not, it turned out, a bug, but the sound of an electric current running through the fence. Grumpy but unhurt, I walked back across the street to my car where I looked down and noticed that both of my legs were peppered with tiny, pill-shaped bugs. How am I covered in ticks from one minute of standing in the grass? I wondered, but as I leaned down to brush them off, I realized they weren’t ticks. Which was good news.

They were nettles. Forty, fifty nettles. I spent five minutes untangling them from the hair on my legs and discarding them on the side of the road.

I had apprehensions about the type of people I would meet in Alabama. In the end, though, everyone I spoke to was unswervingly sweet and generous with their smiles and their time. I like Alabamans.

It’s the cows you have to watch out for.

IDIOT KILLED BY REAL AMERICANS; PRETTY MUCH ASKED FOR IT. That’s how I imagined my obituary would read when I entered Alabama and never came back. Poking around the Lowcountry of South Carolina with Brian was one thing, but venturing by myself to the Bible Belt and sticking my nose into other people’s business felt like quite another. Fortunately for me, Hollywood, AL was not what I expected it to be.

As I understand it, the way most people encounter Jehovah’s Witnesses is as follows: you’re in the middle of dinner, someone knocks on your front door, tries to convert you, you nod politely and close the door. Imagine my surprise when I knocked on Harry’s door, had a ten-minute conversation with him, and then he tried to convert me. “Read your Bible every day!” he told me.

Harry, like a lot of other people, moved to Hollywood to work at the nuclear power plant that began construction in the mid-1980′s. Halfway through construction of the second cooling tower, construction on the Bellefonte (that’s “BELL-font”) nuclear facility stopped. Why? It’s unclear (which is an anagram for ‘nuclear!’), but the reasons seem to be chiefly economic, and I was assured by several people, including the mayor, that safety risks were not to blame.

Whatever the reason for the cancellation of the plant’s construction, it certainly didn’t help the town’s economy. On the bright side, the influx of workers who showed up at the plant seems to have stuck around. I couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that this Hollywood is between breaths. It’s a tiny little town in the same way Hollywood, SC was, sure, but there was a sense as I explored the main road that more or less completely comprises Hollywood, AL of… anticipation? Of something just on the verge of happening, something to crack open the status quo.

And then it occurred to me: of course! The incandescent rebirth of Quetzalcoatl the infinite fire serpent in 2012!

Wait, what? No, sorry.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) recently decided to restart construction on the Bellefonte plant. Nobody knows yet if they’re going to move forward. The company in charge of the construction has a board meeting scheduled for next month at which they’ll decide the fate of the plant. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re also deciding the fate of Hollywood – the town will still be there one way or another – but if they finish the plant and it goes into operation, that will bring four thousand new jobs to the town (and nearby Scottsboro, too, but this isn’t Going Scottsboro so whatever). Which would mean maybe the Hollywood Shopping Center, utterly abandoned during my visit and apparently for the last thirty years, too, could get some business going.

Completed in April, the TVA’s nuclear training facility across the street from Hollywood sticks out like a sore. potentially radioactive thumb. It is an angular gray building, inside and out, and it was built to facilitate training of the workers, contract and otherwise, who will soon be flooding the area if the plant’s construction continues. I tried to speak to someone involved in the construction who might have intimate knowledge of the proceedings. I was gently rebuffed, but there’s still hope: assuming he can get approval from his supervisor at the TVA, I might be able to interview him on the phone next week. Fingers crossed, everyone.

Tomorrow: the real Hollywood, exploding meth labs, the illuminati, and I get electrocuted!