(unpublished essay–1998)

It was last summer.  A Sunday night in fact, in a little East Hollywood dive called the Garage.  For years it had been a bath house called the Bunkhouse, all cowboy and leather, back when this neighborhood had been all bad boy and leather.  That was before the Plague.  I seem to recall wandering into to it once during it’s next, non-deviant phase, the name of which escapes me but it was something collegiate, pathetically so, being that the only college within miles was a battered City College a few blocks away.  Then Silverlake came into vogue and someone bought the place and brought back the deviants and began booking bands on Sunday nights.  Those Sundays became quite the chic hangout for the hungover crowd.  The fact that the corner of Melrose and Virgil was not in Silverlake—not even “Silverlake adjacent” as the realtors say—did not prevent the various national magazines—the Rolling Stone’s and the Buzz’s and the Los Angeles’ and Hirsute Woman’s Whatever’s—from labeling it as such. From then on you could see a smattering of tourists mixing uneasily with the boys in leather and the punks and the jaded old scenesters.   But that ‘s all ancient history.  I’m on my way to see the Nip Drivers. Continue reading →