Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Washing machines

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OK, the washer died. Well, it disintegrated. The dryer died a couple months ago when finally I could not fix it. They were nearly thirty years old and for a full three quarters of our marriage they were in the laundry room whirring and spinning and sloshing and sometimes clumping like a Maureen Tucker drum track. It was sad seeing them go, worn out and useless. Speaking of which, there were some guys laying down linoleum in the kitchen for you to spill beer on and the landlady had them take the carcasses down to the street for large item pickup or whoever gets there first. She figured I’m over sixty and a gimp and there was no way I could manage. Three decades ago when we left our old neighborhood in the heart of Silverlake (a crackhouse opened up three doors down, a shooting gallery three doors up) and moved to the toney Silver Lake suburbs I remember manhandling those machines by myself down the steps, carrying them across the lawn and getting them onto the truck, then lugging them up the steps here and manhandling them into place in 90 degree weather. Apparently washing machines are heavier now, or steps steeper.

Anyway, getting new ones next week and I’ll be damned if I lift a finger to help. Now get off my lawn.

Leesa

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Didn’t know I had this one, a shot of the Creamers from back in the mid 80’s, Sue Gorilla on guitar, and Leesa Poole just gorgeous at the microphone. I liked Leesa a lot, we were good buddies, and for a while she ran an office on Wilshire Blvd next door to where I worked, her day gig and my day gig side by side. I think we’re talking 1987. I can’t remember what she did, maybe corporate recruiting, while I worked then at the corporate headquarters of US Borax, running the mail room and shipping department and a small warehouse and sundry other sections. It was my sole stint as a manager, with a crew of ten or so. Leesa had called and said let’s do lunch in a couple days and at the appointed time she came down to my basement office to pick me up. I was in my usual blue collar business casual. She wasn’t.

No, she was dressed to kill in a leather mini miniskirt and crazily ripped black hose and wild heeled boots, while above she was in some tight spangled tee shirt and a studded denim jacket and her hair a platinum explosion. There was a billowy scarf and jangly bracelets and rings and necklaces and look at me earrings. There was even a tattoo. She looked fabulous and was probably the wildest thing seen on Wilshire Boulevard east of La Brea in years. I laughed—I mean I’d never seen her in this get up, on stage she looked positively puritanical in comparison, but this I assume was her daily office duds. My crew, on the other hand, did not laugh, or do anything. They were stunned into complete silence and just stared, eyes wide, jaws dropped. Remember, this was still the Reagan 80’s, dreary and conservative, and nothing had been seen like Leesa since the wild 70’s, and none of that even then had ever permeated my crew’s working class enclaves. As Leesa and I headed out they found excuses to follow us down the hall, one even ran ahead to hold the elevator door open, and when the door opened again on the first floor there was somehow a small audience trying to look like they weren’t staring. I have no idea how they collected there so quickly, but office buildings before the internet were like villages of a few hundred people, and juicy information could be passed from floor to floor with astonishing speed. Before we’d even left the building the chatter had begun.

I can’t remember where we had lunch or what we talked about, but I do remember that by the time I got back to the office the news of my supposedly wanton escapade had gotten all the way to the ninth floor. It didn’t help that I quite literally knew every single person in the building, especially the secretaries with whom I worked very closely. Every secretary, even today, is like a switchboard. If they heard that I was messing around with a real live movie star who looked exactly like Debbie Harry (as the report had it by the time it reached the ninth floor) then their entire department would know it as well, as any nearby secretaries. Over the next couple days I had to explain to the secretaries that no, I wasn’t having a fling with a wild rock star. It was just lunch, I said. Yes, my wife knows her, we’re all friends. Yes, my wife knew about the lunch. No, she’s not a movie star. No, she’s not a rock star. She’s a singer in a band. No, not a famous band…. I must have been convincing as the chatter and whispers faded away. Besides I was a nice guy. I wasn’t chasing anybody around any desks or being a creep. There wasn’t much to hang such a juicy rumor on. But lesson learned, and that was the very last time I ever let the day gig get a glimpse of my real life, something I stuck by for the next twenty five years of my professional life. It’s better that way. Let them think I’m normal became a mantra. Well, sort of normal anyway.

I hadn’t remembered any of this in years, perhaps decades, until I saw this photograph. Fun band, the Creamers. I doubt Leesa ever knew the stir she caused at US Borax. I doubt anybody I knew outside work ever did. I never told a soul. Some things are better left unspoken for thirty years or so.

Scott Drake

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Scott Drake, center, with Chris Bag of Claw Hammer and one of those unidentified women. This was at Edwin & Debi’s legendary New Years in August bash some time in the late 80’s. One hundred drunken weirdos yelling Happy New Year at the stroke of midnight on some Saturday in August in Lincoln Heights. Best New Years Eve Party I ever attended, and it wasn’t even cold. Anyway, Scott was in fine form, and not long after this he totally weirded out a pair of gothy satanists. They looked great, all in black everything, and they had the whole jaded thing down, but then Scott showed up in the middle of their Anton Lavey shtick, they introduced themselves, he wordlessly burbled and squeaked, and they fled. Who needs language anyway?

Analog Brick

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No plans today—tomorrow we’re doing the retired shtick and heading out to LACMA way early to get the primo old people seats for Gilbert Castellanos, one of the most fired up trumpeters this side of New York City, I’ve been waiting for this one. So today I’ll probably just fuck around with those pictures. It’s a trip, man, they’re like a time capsule we buried twenty years ago after leaving our camera at Mr. T’s. We bought a disposable or two afterward—those things still took vastly better shots than cell phones did for years—but Fyl lost interest in taking pics (most of the best composed shots were her’s, mine are sort of splatted onto the film) and I began seeing everything in words. Another thing I noticed is that we only pulled out the camera when we knew the people around us, bands we knew, people we knew. There’s none of the bands from all over the world we’d go see back then at Rajis or the Anti-Club or the Shamrock or wherever. There’s no jazz or salsa or African or country shots, none at all. There’s almost no people not at gigs or parties or the Sunset Junction, and only a handful of us at home. None of the people I hung with in the various scenes in all my years at the Weekly. None of the newer people who’ve been coming to our parties in the last fifteen years. There isn’t a single picture of anyone I worked with ever. It’s completely different from the range of things I post and blog about. Completely different from what I wrote about in the Weekly. It’s sort of like my writing and these pictures were by two different people. Analog Brick and digital Brick. The upside of that, however, is that analog Brick was much better looking. And a lot of people since gone look very much alive.

Anyway, interesting time going through interesting times.

Me, wasted, with somebody else’s girl.

.

The birds hushed and the light became unreal

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Just outside Wisconsin Falls sometime in the 1990’s the light was so startling we pulled off the road to watch a sudden summer storm roll our way. For a few minutes it was like being in one of those old Flemish stormscape masterpieces or a big sky canvas out of the American west. The air grew still and heavy, the birds hushed and the light became unreal. You could almost reach out and touch the sudden two dimensionality. We snapped two pictures and the rain broke and we made a dash for the car.

Mustache

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My god, a mustache. I don’t remember that at all. Otherwise I look like every other 22 year old kid stuck in post hippie late ‘70’s Santa Barbara, bored out of his fucking mind. I was totally into punk rock but this being Saint Babs and not LA you could still look like this even if you couldn’t stand the Dead. It was summer of 1979, tho’, and apparently somebody cut my hair soon after the picture was taken, probably some chick who was nuts about me but I was too dumb to notice. Apparently there was a string of those—the female to male ratio in Isla Vista then was 60 to 40, and if you were male and breathing you could get a date—but I was completely and utterly oblivious. I once spent a couple hours alone with an attractive willowy coed with eyes like deep pools (I wrote) on her bed in her softly lit dorm room interviewing her for my writing class and she was laying back and looking seductive and purring and I laid at her feet (bare, by then) taking notes as she ran her fingers up and down my arm. She’s touching my arm, my notes said. I was very serious about being a journalist, and I did get an A on that essay. But I wasn’t a drummer yet. Maybe that explains it.

Anyway, I assume that my feeble attempt at a mustache blew off in a Santa Ana. Otherwise Fyl would not have bothered with me a few months later, as she detested mustaches and hippies, nor was I taking notes.

On a train

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We were married in November ‘80–some gave us six months, others figured there’d be a baby before June—and it being the tail end of the seventies we had no money for a honeymoon for four months. So come March we went to that Niagara Falls of the West, San Francisco, and on the train, the sole evidence of which is this shot. Beautiful trip. Back in those pre-internet, pre-cell phone days a trip on a train was good as being sealed up in a time capsule for a few hours, nothing leaked in or out. But somehow, word came that the president had been shot. It came in whispers and snatches of conversation from coach to coach, stranger to stranger, President Reagan has been shot, and passed on to the next car. That’s all there was, just that one line of news. Was he dead? No idea. We just sat and watched the scenery pass by.

New car

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Us in 1989, in front of our brand new car. I was a week from 32 and believe I had started to shave.

Think that was our second Chevy Celebrity, which all the cops drove, and as we cruised down the Hollywood streets all the other cars would slow down and the crack dealers would slip into the shadows. We were never broken into, even outside Al’s Bar in the optimistically named Arts District just off Skid Row. Not even a crackhead was dumb enough to break into an undercover cop’s car. Sometimes even cops thought I was a cop, and would nod or make secret hand signals so not to blow my cover. I didn’t know the signal but would nod back. I also worked for the CIA and FBI and learned how to say I’m not Migra en español. I remember showing up at a gig to nervous whispers at the door. I got out of the car and a girl came out to meet me. Can I help you officer? Sure, I said, you can help me unload my drums. She carried the snare. Fun car.

That’s a movie star’s jacket, some huge gnarly hunk, I can’t remember who. A friend had copped it from his starwaggon. He had two, she said. Fyl still has that black jacket she’s wearing. It still fits.

Anyway we look very sweet in our nice couple buying a car get ups and clearly not the sort of people who had loud drunken parties full of punks, freaks and losers in their house every single weekend.

Middleageitis

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The older you get the more you realize just how grumpy forty somethings are. Sheesh, who invited them to the party? Perfectly fun thirty somethings are suddenly miserable to be around. They’re easy to spot: just say anything and they’ll complain about it. And complain. And complain. Anyway, if they don’t kill themselves or turn Republican they’ll get over it and twenty years later they’ll be looking at all the shit they no longer have to worry about, giggling like idiots. Actual idiocy is still a decade or so away.

My atavistic trip back into the real world for a week.

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Lost my iPhone—it apparently slipped between the seats in an Uber and is forever lost in the bowels of a Toyota—and took nearly a week to get a new one. It was our sole connection to the internet, as I’d put away the desktop when I realized that my epileptic hypergraphia was out of control and my brain a sizzling, sputtering epileptic mess—basically, I was losing it—and figured that an iPhone would help contain the problem. It has, for the most part, with only occasional lurches into hypergraphia and other charming intra-ictal personality traits. Anyway, I was frantic for a few hours after losing the phone, it’s like our entire lives were on it, then it dawned on me that I didn’t actually need the internet right away for anything. I began to thoroughly enjoy not having a digital existence. Suddenly all these projects around here got completed. More reading got done. Instead of Twitter and Facebook and whatever it is that men do on the internet I was watching old movies. Didn’t write one fucking sentence, the spigot had been turned off. It was quite terrific. 

Then late yesterday afternoon a lovely little thing in a postal uniform knocked on the door. She looked just like the messengers who are always delivering telegrams at just the wrong times in old movies, except you don’t tip them. Your phone, sir. I thanked her, signed, sighed and opened the box. Spent the next hour trying to maneuver through the tortuous maze Apple forces those among us who do not have any other Apple devices handy to wend our way through to turn the fucking thing on (now that was a sentence, I must be out of shape.) Then spent the next couple hours downloading all the apps that control our lives—I had made a list ahead of time that had them in order and checked them off one by one, like a good secretary. Then I looked at Facebook but couldn’t get into it. Looked at Twitter but it was all massacres and death. Email was just email. Even my blogs failed to spark. Nothing on the little screen sparked, none of my usual digital haunts. It all seemed so, uh, lifeless. Two dimensional. Too digital. So I put it down.

But here I am again.

Sigh….

Sent from my fucking iPhone.