Category Archives: Autobiography,memoirs and confessions

Silverlake, Silver Lake, whatever

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My wife and I have lived in Silverlake for over thirty years now. Excuse me, Silver Lake. Back when we moved to Silverlake people who had been here thirty years called it Silver Lake. Then they all died and it was Silverlake for a few years. Then it got on the cover of Los Angeles Magazine and was Silver Lake again.

Thirty years. Maybe 31. Maybe 32. Whatever. You think we would fit in by now. But every time we start to fit in the neighborhood changes again. Now we know maybe four people in Lago del Dorado, and none of us fit it. Sketch Hall, who lives over by the Bates Stage and does his laundry in the San Gabriel Valley because that is where all the Chinese restaurants are; Carey Fosse, who also lives over by the Bates Stage but never does his laundry; and Mikaleno, would hang out by the Bates Stage a couple sheets to the wind before heading off to Sketch’s for a night cap but who lives south of Sunset and you know how we north of Sunset people are. Actually all three of these guys lived south of Sunset. That just occurred to me. Shows you the class of people I have been hanging out with. But at least Mikaleno does some great laundry, perfect Navy creases, he gave me a lesson in folding a handkerchief once but no matter how I tried his looked like a guy who had folded handkerchiefs in the navy and mine looked like a guy who had been a college drop out. I can’t remember who the fourth person is. Maybe they bought a fixer upper in Highland Park and are being picketed as we speak.

Anyway, we used to be the cute straight couple on the street and now all the unstraights have moved to Boystown or out to the country to live in a cute little cottage and go mad with boredom and have been replaced by beautiful young starlets who could be my children if not grandchildren but they are far too beautiful so I must have adopted them.

And that is Silver Lake to me.

silverlake yoga

Man, you Google Silver Lake and you get this. Has this neighborhood gone to hell or what?

Sham 69

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I saw Sham 69 at the Whiskey (the Dead Kennedys opened) back in 1979. Right there on the Sunset Strip. Great set. I loved Sham 69. Loved that first album. OK, it was dumb. Way dumb. The Ramones looked like intellectuals compared to Sham 69. What about the people who are lonely?/You don’t really give a shit/People that you never meet. It wasn’t exactly poetry. It was oi. Oi! None of us Californians had ever even heard somebody say oi! before punk rock. Now snot nosed rich punks from Pacific Palisades would say oi! Oi? Yeah, oi! It was a very deep time. The hippies had Dylan. The Beats had Ginsberg. And punks had oi. Well not all punks. Just the less coherent ones. Swilling beers and yelling oi! They don’t say it now, though, they are lawyers. But this was 1979, and they were all here at the Whiskey for Sham 69. Though criminal as they tried desperately to look, none of them stole the microphone when Jimmy Pursey, the singer, stuck the microphone in the audience for the sing along. A bit of English football camaraderie, that. If the Kids are United we all chanted, they shall never be united. Deep stuff. Rhymed even. To this day when I hear that ferocious guitar riff I can’t help singing along, me, a very late middle aged jazz critic, singing if the kids are united, they can never be divided.

Sham 69 did White Riot in their encore, too, the Clash song. Jimmy Pursey stuck the microphone into the crowd again and the kids all sang I wanna riot, a riot of my own! They repeated it. Repeated it again. And started to repeat it one more time when the microphone cut out. Jimmy pulled the microphoneless cord back from the crowd and shrugged. They’ve stolen the microphone a stage hand yelled. The band roared on, Jimmy grabbed another mic and finished the tune. The audience was mad with testosterone, swirling, bouncing, pushing and shoving. It was a moment of punk rock heaven. Meanwhile the stage was flooded by stage hands and sound men and bouncers peering into the boiling mass, looking for the culprit. No one leaves till we get the microphone back someone announced over the PA.

Let me explain. I was in a punk rock band then, the drummer, and we had drums and guitars and amplifiers and even an avocado ranch to practice at. But we didn’t have a microphone. Our singer had to scream bloody murder to be heard above our proto hardcore din. Suddenly right there in front of me was this beautiful, state of the art, zillion dollar microphone. Being a drummer, I didn’t make the connection between it and us, but my guitar player–who shall remain nameless, as he has three beautiful daughters and a grandchild–did. Take the mic, he yelled into my ear. What? Take the mic! Steal the mic! We need a mic! So I stole it. It took a tug or two but it came off the cord. I stood there in the packed crowd, staring at it. Hide it! my guitar player yelled. Hide the mic! Stick it in your pants! So I did, hoping it would pass for a rather impressive hard on.

A small army of bouncers began moving through the crowd. Big dudes, muscular, mean. The sound man announced that someone had stolen the microphone and no one was going to leave till it was returned. They began patting people down on the floor. We better return the mic I said, stupidly. My guitar rolled his eyes. Then they’ll know that you stole it, he said. It dawned on me that it was actually me who had stolen it, and it was in my pants, feigning manhood. I must have looked panicky. Drop it on the floor, my guitar player said, and we’ll tell them we found it. So I retrieved it from my pants and dropped it on the floor. He picked it up and yelled Hey! We found it! We found it! He held the microphone aloft for all to see. Several bouncers rushed over. He found it, one said. He found it said another. My guitar player said and since we found it for you can we go backstage and meet the band? The bouncers rolled their eyes. C’mon, we found this expensive microphone for you! He whined like that for thirty seconds. OK, alright, let them backstage for a minute. And lucky felons that we were, we were led through the mass of sweating kids, past several other bouncers and either up or down some ancient stair to the backstage area.

It wasn’t what I expected. No lush chairs. No cocaine on mahogany tables. No greenless M&Ms. And the girls appeared perfectly nice and fully clad. Someone with an English accent said these guys found the microphone and want to meet the band. The girls rolled their eyes prettily. We were led into another room and there, exhausted, was Sham 69. Oh my god, real rock stars. It was like meeting the Rolling Stones in 1965, if the Rolling Stones were midgets. Because Sham 69 were dinky, like five foot tall. Well, five foot four maybe. We towered over them. I remember them peering up through exhausted eyes. Back home guys our size were always trouble, the toughest football hooligans. Here we were just kleptomaniac punk rockers. I shook Jimmy Pursey’s hand. You were great, I said, with genuine originality. Fanks, he said.

Their manager ushered us out again. C’mon now, the lads have another set to do. Back up (or down) the stairs we went, thanking the bouncers profusely. They thanked us for finding the microphone. You guys really helped us out, they said. Most people would have tried to steal it. I still feel a tinge rotten about that. Then they let us out a back door and into the December night, where the punks were chucking beers at passing cars.

Meanwhile a buddy of mine I didn’t know yet mouthed off to the bouncer at the door when they tried to search him for the microphone. I don’t have your fucking mic he said and got worked over good. Beat up by bouncers at the Whiskey for being such a punk. He told me this twenty years later and I laughed it was so funny but I bought him a beer for his pain. When he reads this I’ll have to buy him a whole six pack.

sham 69 buttons

(And I don’t want to use without permission, but there is a great live shot of Sham 69 at the Whiskey by the Jenny Lens here.)

This story can also be found on Brickspicks.com, along side all the cultural stuff I’ve written about.

We don’t know the real Richard Ramirez, she said.

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Once, at a nice little cocktail party in town, I met one of the women who’d proposed to Richard Ramirez. The Night Stalker? Yes. Why? He was nice, she said. She’d written him lots of letters. He’d written some back. He was into pentagrams, she said. She was pretty, quite sweet, a little off, but not so off that you’d imagine her wanting to marry Richard Ramirez. I didn’t say anything. You’d be surprised how tongue tied you get when someone tells you they want to marry Richard Ramirez. Of course, he’s long gone now, and the woman who did marry him–breaking this lady’s heart, apparently–is a widow who for the rest of her life will have to explain why she married Richard Ramirez. I doubt anyone will understand.

Well, Charlie Manson’s wife would. He’s going on 80, she’s young enough to be his great grand daughter. She loves him. Manages all his social media sites, and even cut an x into her forehead to prove it, though it’s just a little scar now. She doesn’t believe a word about Helter Skelter. He had nothing to do with killing all those people, she said. He doesn’t manipulate anybody. The only thing that he’s trying to manipulate people into doing, she said, is planting trees and cleaning up the Earth. Charlie is nice to everyone.

Richard Ramirez’s wife said the same about her betrothed. We don’t know the real Richard, she said. He’s kind, he’s funny, he’s charming.

I didn’t ask the lady at the party anything about Richard. I got a bad vibe and snuck off to the other side of the room. Everyone was eyeing her. She was pretty, after all, with very nice legs. She was striking in her black dress and lace and raven hair. She was crazy. And she’d wanted to marry the Night Stalker.

Love is a beautiful thing.

 

Post script: Manson’s marriage never happened, so I pulled this story, apparently. But what the hell, here it is.

Musso and Frank

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Went to Musso and Frank yesterday and had a tasty meal. Sometimes you get delicious stuff in there, sometimes you wish you’d ordered something else, but that’s not the point. You go for the vibe, the history, that ancient coolness which is such a rare thing in this town. They plow under everything in Hollywood and build something new. Almost nothing is saved. And even if something is saved, will anyone notice? Or care? Los Angeles is where people come to start all over again, it’s a whole city full of people who’ve cut loose from their families, their exes, their pasts, themselves even, and pretend all of that never happened or they never knew those people back home or never had been a male cheerleader, a hit man, a mom. And we pretend the old neighborhood never existed, the old restaurant, the old film studio, the old anything…it just gets plowed under like the time I saw Tiny Naylor’s in Hollywood being leveled by a bulldozer. I stood there across La Brea helpless, all the times I’d been there passing before my eyes, and all the times I might have been there going up in a poof just like that, unfulfilled. The bulldozer reared back, lowered the blade again and pushed right through the dining room. Again and again. Tiny Naylor’s lay there, a disemboweled heap where once incredibly hot waitresses held trays piled high with hamburgers. The men would stare. Their dates pretended not to notice and seethed. The bulldozer plunged into the wreckage and scooped up a mess and let it drop into a big dumpster truck. Dust filled the air. I couldn’t watch anymore and wondered why L.A. ate its own past for lunch like that. Ate it and digested it and used the nutrients to raise new shopping centers, apartments, schools. There’s a school now where once a famous bowling alley once stood. The school was needed. There’s always another bowling alley. And too bad about Tiny Naylor’s , but there’s always Norms. Of course our Norms is now a hospital. Hospitals are needed. And there’s always Astro. Norms we used to go to when we were punk rockers and broke. We’d have spent all our money at the Brave Dog or the ON Klub and walk to Norms the next morning after scraping together a few 99 cents breakfast’s worth of spare change and the odd crumpled beer soaked dollar bill or two. Then we’d walk back to the house, smoke whatever dope was left and listen to loud records all afternoon, laughing and not worrying about a thing. Reagan was president and the world was going to end any minute.

Sometimes for dinner we’d scrape enough together for the Old Spaghetti Factory. We’d walk down there on a Friday night as Sunset Boulevard began filling up with Friday night cruisers. We’d order extra bread and fill our pockets. You could live on bread back then. Bread and beer and weed. On the way home we’d stop on the Sunset Boulevard overpass and watch the Hollywood Freeway come to life, white lights coming at us, red lights disappearing around the Scientology Celebrity Center on their way to the Valley. Dusk fell and the city turned to blackness and light and the craziness of the 1980’s.

That Old Spaghetti Factory is gone now. Just a shell where a restaurant used to be. They had to leave it like that, a shell. Whoever bought it was not supposed to tear it down. Historical designation. Like that helped any. It looks like a monument to post-war Berlin, like a B-17 dropped a big bomb square on the thing and everyone inside eating spaghetti is in heaven now.

Musso and Frank, though, hasn’t changed. Not one whit. Not even the waiters. Certainly not the wallpaper. Or the menus. Or menu. What Charlie Chaplin once ate you can eat now. What Bogie once drank you can drink now. What Orson Welles once complained about you can complain about now. That’s what Musso and Frank is. Continuity. Between it and the Pantry you know what was then is still now, only a little more expensive. Continuity is a rare thing in this town. Studios hire editors to maintain continuity in their movies, so one scene looks like the next, the curtains, clothes, who’s holding what beer and with what hand. It’s all fake, of course. One scene was shot weeks after the one before it. But you can’t tell. It’s a nice trick. LA’s like that. Stuff looks like it’s always been here.  It hasn’t. That hospital was once a Norms. That public storage warehouse was once a silent movie studio. That school was where Robert Kennedy was shot. But you can’t tell. Continuity. That’s a take. Let’s break for lunch.

After Musso and Frank (they have valet parking now…that’s different) we wandered over to Hollywood Forever cemetery in the rain. Parked the car by Johnny Ramone’s grave with the big bronze Johnny Ramone on top. Kids kept coming up, carloads or straggling little groups. They looked up at Johnny and held back tears. We looked the other way. The Fairbanks are down there, Douglas senior and junior. Their crypt lies at the far end of a long reflecting pool, and everything is marble and perfect. A perfect pair of swans glided across the water, and the rain came down and the swans never noticed.

(2013)

 

This story can also be found on Brickspicks.com, along side all the cultural stuff I’ve written about.

Fireflies

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Found this essay from a few years ago I’d never posted. It was back during that spell of ricin tainted letters in the mail, you might remember those, and then they popped the dude mailing them. He was from Mississippi, which automatically confuses a Yankee like me. It’s a whole other civilization down there, exotic, inexplicable and sometimes downright weird. For starters, the ricin mailer was an Elvis impersonator. That was weird. Funny, yes, but weird. This particular Elvis impersonator, the ricin mailing one, was a martial arts instructor on the side. Odd too, perhaps, but it would have helped with some of those latter day Elvis judo steps. But why an Elvis impersonating, martial arts instructing, organ harvesting (organ harvesting?), paranoid novel writing (one plot involved a involved the CIA, the president and a secret airbase in Arkansas) feller from Mississippi would send deadly ricin in letters to a left wing president and a right wing senator and sign his own right wing nut of an Elvis impersonator’s name makes any sense at all completely escapes me. But I did know an actual Mississippian, blonde and proud and drawling and belle-like, and I asked her how it all made sense. With antebellum grace she apologized and said she doesn’t watch the news. Oh. The matter was dropped, and I forgot all about it.

Good thing, too, as the whole story, it turns out, was screwed up. The Elvis impersonator was off the hook, it was just some wacko behind it all. Some small town hatred. I can’t remember the Faulknerian (if Faulkner was John Kennedy O’Toole) details. Fortunately, soon afterward more ricin laced letters emerged, again from Mississippi. The president got one again, and Mayor Bloomberg. No one got hurt, and they found the ricin in a guy’s refrigerator. His pregnant wife fingered him. She, perfectly, was a beauty queen, and more perfectly, a former reality TV star, a pregnant former reality star. Pregnant again, that is. Her earlier progeny by a flurry of fathers scampered about the house, the little darlings, cute as bugs. Most perfect of all, delicious even, was the fact that she had lied and it was not her husband but she herself who mailed the letters. Revenge, she said. Depression, they said. Some sort of deep south zaniness with ricin in the icebox. She’d ground the castor beans in the kitchen. It got all sad and tawdry and Tennessee Williams and doubtless screenplays are being passed around as we speak.

She’s in jail now. I lost track of her. Where once they brought her a crown and red roses by the dozen, now they bring her meals on a tray. That’s not funny or ironic, it’s just sad. Mississippi madness. There’s not a chance that a Yankee would understand it, not at all. Elvis and beauty queens and ricin don’t really mix up north or out here on the Coast.

I remember re-reading this thing a few times, and not liking it. Oh, I liked parts, but it was such a mess. I pulled things out and it didn’t get any better, so I put them back in, and it still didn’t get any better, so I pulled them out again. Then during a southern California heat spell a couple years back, when the air hung limp with humidity late into the night and there was an eerie southernness to everything, I wrote a beautiful and evocative final paragraph that talked of fireflies. I miss fireflies. Then the weather broke and I reread that paragraph and deleted it. Zapped it into the cornfield. I just tried rewriting it now but it was no good. So I deleted that one too. And now either I junk this thing or post it. I still haven’t decided.

If I could I’d vacation every year in the south, just to see the fireflies. I have fond East Coast memories of chasing fireflies. Maine fireflies. New Jersey fireflies. Fireflies like faraway fireworks on balmy Virginia nights. I wouldn’t chase them now, those fireflies, I’d watch them. I’d swat mosquitos and drink spiked lemonade and watch the fireflies. Then I’d fly back to Los Angeles and bask in the cool night air.

All out of vanilla Haagen-Dazs

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(2010)

Was out  late last nite. Saw some great bands in a little Mexican dive in Lincoln Heights. I love the East Side. Silver Lake used to be East Side. Maybe not the tops of the Swish Alps, but in the lowlands, along the boulevards, and almost everything south of Sunset. It was Latino and gay and leather and punk rock and bohemian with traces of hippies and hints of jazz even, left over from the Soap Plant daze. Alas, Silver Lake is so Westside now. I remember years ago watching a blonde–one of those ultra blondes–walking down a nearby street with tits like grapefruit. Perfect orbs. You could teach geometry with those things. I stared a minute and thought Good Lord, what has become of my neighborhood? It wasn’t much later at the Mayfair (now Gelson’s) that a gorgeous power blonde–she had to be an attorney, just had to be–stormed up to the manager on perfect legs and screamed You’re all out of vanilla Haagen-Dazs! She was livid. Gave him hell, the poor bastard. He apologized. She said something wealthy and angry. My wife, watching, burst out loud laughing.

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This story can also be found on Brickspicks.com, with all my cultural stuff.

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Licking

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[A Facebook post….]

The wife’s tribal records still list her by her maiden name and we’re trying to get her name changed to reflect her married name. Tribal land she owns, etc. It’s complicated. They asked us to fax our marriage certificate. Turns out we were married so long ago and in such a technologically primitive time–1980–that the state seal watermark on our marriage certificate won’t show up when faxed–faxes hadn’t been invented yet. They asked about the file number on our certificate, too–but there is no file number on the certificate, since computers hadn’t yet reduced us all to ciphers. I believe we did have electricity, however. As the Office of the Trustee of the American Indian won’t accept an emailed scan (too easy to fake) I am going through the nostalgic ritual of putting a piece of paper in an envelope and then mailing it. Licking the envelope. Remember that? All those germs sent coursing through the mail. Saliva had household purposes. We don’t lick emails. Well, I don’t. Not usually.

Of course, in 1980, I would never have told five hundred people this story. We were not fascinated by the inanely trivial then. Maybe it was the threat of nuclear war. Maybe we were too high. Or maybe we didn’t know five hundred people. Whatever. So sad to invent social media and then use it to blow sweet nothings into each other’s digital ears all day. Or perhaps that’s a sign of progress.

And no, I did not lick this before posting.

Palm Springs

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(2013)

One Saturday night a couple years ago we were out in Palm Springs watching their Christmas Festival of Lights parade. Fire trucks and marching bands and agricultural machinery and prancing queens and everything bedecked in lights and fiber optic cables, as beautiful as it is absurd. The parade goes down Palm Canyon Drive and we’d booked a room on Indian Canyon Drive a block away. Two minute walk. It was chilly, not a cloud in the sky, a bone chilling desert winter’s night. A zillion glittery stars over head, and faint smudges of galaxies unimaginably far away, so far and so vast it’s better not to think of them at all. We didn’t.  Continue reading →

Singing Christmas Tree

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(2011)

A few christmas parties ago our techie neighbor gave us a robot alarm clock….you set the alarm and when the time hit it would go berserk and roll around frantically, bumping into things, racing about, its alarm screeching and whooping and generally being absolutely awful.  He set the time for 11 pm or so, wrapped it with pretty christmas wrapping paper and put it under the tree. By 11 pm the party was truly happening, packed and loud and not out of control but threatening to. A good party always threatens to. The sofa facing the tree was full of pathetically stoned people. It’s like they showed up, sat down, and hadn’t moved since. They couldn’t. They’d melted into it, become one with the fabric. It was almost zen.

Suddenly our neighbor’s present began thrashing about in its wrapper and screeching and whooping. No one noticed but the stoners, since they were staring at the tree and had been for hours. All the pretty lights. Now one of the presents starts thrashing about and bleeping and screeching and whooping. Ummm wow, that’s fucked up. Fuck. Dude, yeah, that’s fucked up. Then stoner paranoia set in. Maybe it was terrorists. (It had only been a year or two since 9/11.) Dude, terrorists at Brick and Fyl’s party. Fucked up. The whooping and thrashing suddenly stopped. Someone fired up a bowl.  Continue reading →

Free drinks at Harrigan’s

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Signing my wife up for Indian Health Services to see if she can get a break on increasingly expensive dental care (even with dental insurance), the case worker asked my wife what tribe she was. She pulled out her tribal ID. Yankton Sioux. Don’t get many Sioux in here, the caseworker said. What tribe are you, my wife asked. My father was Lakota Sioux, the caseworker said, my mother Rosebud Sioux. They talked about South Dakota and I thought to myself in like Flynn. Sioux Nation looking out for its own. She wrote my wife’s name in at the top of the list.

If there was only an Irish equivalent. Somehow free drinks at Harrigan’s doesn’t quite cut it.