Then we made our way to the Hollywood Hills, to the house where porn 'actor' John "The Wad" Holmes had been involved in some sort of sordid and complicated beating murder, reportedly stemming from an argument over cocaine.  I thought the place was too nice.  I was angry that a man with nothing more to offer than a giant horse dick could afford such a place, while I struggled to make ends meet.  I was a bitter and angry man when we left for our next destination.

Marie Provost was a silent film star that I knew from a Nick Lowe song.  She had died and laid there "for two or three weeks" before the cops had found her.  Apparently her pet dachshund had sustained itself by dining on its fallen master in the interim.  According to the song, she had died in a "cheap hotel up on Hollywood West," but it turned out to be an impressive apartment building that I certainly wouldn't mind calling home.  A little old lady was eyeing us suspiciously as we admired her building.  I couldn't help but think that even a small dog would not be able to live off her carcass for more than two or three days.  There was very little meat, although quite a bit of skin.  This stop was pretty cool, because I had been listening to the song for years.  "She was a winner, that became the doggy's dinner."  I felt like I knew her.

Next up was the final home of Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz.  There was a big wooden fence out front, straight out of Our Gang, so it was difficult to see the house from the street.  And there was somebody parked in the driveway.

It was a woman and it appeared she had taken up residency in the vehicle.  The erratic way she moved inside the car suggested that she was probably crazy.  So we just parked the truck and snapped a couple of quick pictures and left, fearful that our presence might trigger some frightening "street performance" by the mailing address-challenged woman in the driveway.  I felt cheated out of the full experience of this historic spot, where a depressed and washed-up actress killed herself by putting a plastic bag over her head.  We were denied the rare opportunity to drink deeply from the Fountain of Gore, and we were none too happy about it.

So it was on to Lenny Bruce's den of drugs and death, to hopefully lift our spirits -- but it did little to help.  There wasn't much to see, just a tall house hanging frighteningly off the side of a hill.  It wasn't particularly seedy or remarkable at all.  We looked up at the house and tried to imagine the ruined, bloated comic laying up there with a needle in his arm.  We talked about how we had both seen films of Bruce doing his act near the end, and how sad it was.  I was starting to get depressed.  Maybe this wasn't such a hot idea after all.

On the way to our next destination, we passed the All American Burger joint on Sunset.  "Hey, wait a minute!", Mark blurted, "Why do I know this place?"  He quickly began rifling through his many pages of notes and discovered that this was the intersection where Hugh Grant had paid Divine Brown for a job well-done.  So I whipped the truck into a 7-Eleven and we walked back to the sacred spot.  Mark asked me to get a few pictures, so I took two or three from different angles.  When I turned back around I saw him pulling a horrifyingly damp porno newspaper out of the trashcan for his bulging box of filth.  "OK, let's go," he said.

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