10:53 p.m. Hollywood Boulevard on a feverish Friday night.

I cannot remember the last time I was out in Hollywood at this hour. Hell, it has been a while since I have even been awake at this hour. After falling into an aggressive state of PMS, I have been feeling too hopelessly pathetic to manage much more than collapsing into sleep by sundown. Muscles I had been diligently toning are rapidly atrophying into useless squish. So I feel even worse and no, I still won’t move, and certainly not to go to fucking Holly-weird where the dress code this season is a tight, tiny dress in stain-free, bright summer whites.

Tim Youd in action

“Baby,” she said abruptly, unexpectedly moodily, “don’t you think I look real?” LA-based artist Tim Youd sits at the magenta lit window of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions ardently retyping each word of John Rechy’s City of Night—the ’60s novel of male hustling, drag queens and Miss Destiny masquerading her own realness on the greasy streets of Hollywood. From 10 p.m. to 3 a.m., every night for over two weeks, Youd has been imprinting the 460-page book onto a single typewriter page. His typebar now strikes the words into a pulp of black ink that is illegible. No matter because the lonely, the narcissistic, the desperate hedonists are indelible in Tinseltown—and we are all peering through the window at Youd’s flailing wet words.

Tim Youd typing away

A microphone projects the clunk, clack and ding of Youd on his Underwood typewriter, the same model that Rechy had composed the original novel on. The sound vibrates into hotdog pungent air drowning out RiRi championing us all to “werk, werk, werk.” I stand by a lingerie-clad mannequin with sculpted abs unaffected by hormones and alongside a man who whispers, “turns out she wasn’t having my baby.” He leans close and begins telling me, breathlessly, about his move to the city for a lover who wasn’t his only lover but neither was he to her.

Abruptly he stops mid-sentence leaving an uncomfortable silence between us for the first time. “The Story,” I said, feeling, suddenly, a great closeness to him—and at the same time a huge, undefined sadness. I imagine Youd types that line now. Sinking the words deep into an endless, ripped-up splotch on his page, while a dazed cockroach scrambles along Pee-wee Herman’s spit-patinated Walk of Fame star.

Through July 15, Tim Youd retypes John Rechy’s Numbers from 11 am to 4 pm at the Fern Dell entrance to Griffith Park.

On Friday, July 8, from 11 pm – 2 am, Tim Youd completes City of Night and Artillery launches its Summer issue with DJ Patrick Icon spinning. Come celebrate through the night, in the City of Night. For more info Midnight Party at LACE