The hell you say...
I was attending some conference in Arcadia way back in the day, and around 2am when the hotel bar was closing, a bunch of us (none of whom was from Southern California, let alone LA) decided to drive a rental into LA to party some more.
Well, we drove through some fucked up scary parts of East LA and somehow ended up drunk off our asses weaving around in Watts blasting heavy metal. We saw some guys at the end of a street warming their hands around a trash can which they were burning garbage in, right in the middle of the street (which meant nothing to us at the time), so we decided to ask them for directions, since they seemed like locals.
Somehow, they must have determined that we were not from around there, and they didn't seem too friendly as we pulled up smiling.
As the driver started accelerating backwards at a rapid rate of speed, we could see behind us that another group of guys were attempting to put another flaming trash can in the middle of the road to block out path, and some of these guys had bricks in their hands, and they seemed even less friendly than their buddies we had previously met at the other end of the block.
The dude driving, who I only met for the first time while drinking hours before, did an incredible stunt man spin with the rental car, and screeched the tires causing clouds of burning rubber to rise behind us as we hauled ass out of there.
Our only damage was a couple of dents from a few brick strikes, but that only inspired us to get even more shit faced when we finally found the late night LA titty bars, and I heard later that the driver BS'ed his way out of paying for the rental car damage.
Aw, memories...
ADG