Category Archives: Autobiography,memoirs and confessions

Leslie Van Houten

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When I heard Leslie Van Houten was granted parole I had a weird reaction, startled, then a chill. Completely unnerved for a moment. But then we live on Waverly Drive, and so did the LaBiancas, and the Manson Family’s visit on August 10, 1969 is by far the most famous thing that every happened on Waverly Drive, and if you live on this street long enough you’ve thought about it a lot, when you drive along that stretch, or when someone asks, or whenever a parole hearing comes up. Now a 67 year old murderess gets out–though all she did was stab a dead lady, over and over and over–and there is not a person on Waverly Drive that doesn’t wonder for a ridiculous second if she will come back here, as if she could do anything at all. Still, though, there was a momentary chill, and memories of all the homicidal craziness that followed in the seventies and eighties, from the Zodiac to Son of Sam to the Night Stalker, a golden age of psycho killers. Now one harmless old lady is released, dues paid, and it bothered me. How odd.
Leslie Van Houten3

Leslie Van Houten, 1970

Day trip

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Rented a Dodge Ram pick up yesterday and headed out to the desert. No CD player. The low point had to be east of Pearblossom in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a 38 Special rock block to listen to. Hold On Loosely has been earworming its way into my skull since, breaking me down like my own personal Room 101, southern rock. Freedom is slavery, war is peace, you see it all around you, good lovin’ gone bad. The high point musically was…well, there was no high point. A lot of high desert hard rock and ranchera. We had dropped by Charlie Brown Farms in Little Rock for a date shake, then the long drive out to Barstow. The desert is great from the cab of a climate change special, you feel like Mike Dukakis in a tank. I watched the ruins of Job Harriman’s Llano Del Rio disappear in the rear view mirror, probably the only time all day I thought about politics. The 18 was closed, and they dog legged us along the 138 and then up another desert road to rejoin the 18 near Phelan. They farm a lot of meth out in Phelan. Cook it right on the rocks. A guy explained it to me one night, unbidden. I don’t think he had slept in years.

We passed through Barstow, picked up the 40 for a couple miles and got off at the Calico exit. Calico Ghost Town has been a slow favorite since I first went there when I was a kid. Hell, that was over half a century ago. Back then I thought it looked like a less fun Knotts Berry Farm (apparently Walter Knott had grown up in Calico, and used the proceeds from the mine to recreate Calico in Buena Park) but I didn’t know then that you could take your beer right on the train. Doubtless some of the appeal for me is how the old pre-Snoopy Knotts Berry Farm was cloned from the place, somehow redolent of ancient times in Southern California. Fantasy world and Calico girls I’m coming back. But to be honest my single favorite thing there is the extraordinary display of tortured seismology looming over the parking lot. Sedimentary layers bent all which ways, even straight up vertical. It screams earthquake, but all you hear is desert silence.

After Calico we went over to Rainbow Basin Natural Area, the reason for the pick up truck and 38 Special, it was perfect for driving the back roads. Not a bit of pavement in the place, just badlands bisected by narrow twisting graded road, gullies, loose rocks, and the occasional diamondback rattler. It is a perfect riot of geology, the land eroded for so many eons was absolutely gorgeous. This was once–actually several times–a large Miocene lake bed. Winter rains carve it anew every year, and tectonics torture the area–there’s a syncline to die for–though the black layers of ash are from better days, when nearby Amboy and the Cima Dome were alive with volcanos. Nearby are layers packed with fossils–most of the large mammal fossils you will see in our local museums that were not plucked from the La Brea Tar Pits came from the Rainbow Basin and thereabouts. The striations are vividly colored, everything from deep sandstone red to a brilliant green clay. So many colors, it would be a ball high on psychedelics and not driving or being way too old and epileptic for that kind of thing. Somewhere in the middle a Foreigner rock block came on and I turned off the radio. There was no other sound at all. Not a bird, not a bug, not even a breeze. Nothing.

After a glorious couple hours in Rainbow Basin, we tooled back on down Irwin Road towards Barstow in our giant pick up truck, trying not to go too fast. It’s the hemi, I explained to the wife, just to actually use hemi in a sentence. We hopped a left onto Old Highway 58 for Idle Spurs, still my favorite steak house ever. Incredible steak and a couple Jamesons. (You can pretend I took a picture of our food here.) We took our time eating, thoroughly enjoying it, and it was nearly dark as we climbed back into the cab of the pick-up, a little too late to drive all the way home on the 66. I love that old trestle across the Mojave, linking the two sides of Barstow, north and south of the tracks. Nearby was the old Harvey House, and I can only imagine the disappointment of Judy Garland fans who pilgrimage here. For a moment I thought On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe was going to stay in my head forever, like The Trolley Song did one terrible year after hearing it on a Palm Springs radio station twice in one weekend, but it disappeared back into the closet.

We turned right onto the 66 and as we headed west Barstow faded into Lenwood and then into nothing. It was too dark for sightseeing, and the excursion was nearing the twelve hour mark anyway, so we made for the interstate. All seemed perfect, the last of the light disappearing behind the mountains as we got back on the 15 heading south, nestled contentedly in the cab of our gas guzzling monster truck. There was just the night, the road, and us. There is something profoundly reassuring about driving through the desert in the dark, just you and the wheels and the stars. Then a rock block of Boston interrupted my philosophizing. Egad. People livin’ in competition, the singer complained, and all he wanted was to have some peace of mind. Bad seventies memories came flooding back and I realized that I was entering my 59th year to a soundtrack of lame classic rock. I hate these songs, with all their inane lyrics and uninspired riffs and soulless guitar solos. Can’t I find any good driving music out here in the desert? More Than a Feeling came on, and as the singer watched Marianne walking away, away, awaaaaay, I asked the Lord in a moment of existential crisis why, oh why, had He forsaken me. The Lord let the guitar solo finish before answering. The desert is beautiful but cruel, He said, like good lovin’ gone bad.

barstow sign

Voice

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A long time ago at a day job I used to leave robocalls. The company email server would fail so I had to leave a mass phone message telling everyone in the building their email was down. About 500 people would get the phone message. I could walk across the floor and hear my own voice dozens of time as people listened to their messages on speakerphone. It sounded like a series of echos. A dozen people would ring me back and tell me what a nice voice I had. I’d thank them. One time I was getting over a nasty case of strep throat. It scarred the vocal chords and knocked me down an octave or two. My voice went deep, way deep, with a sandpaper grain to it. The email server went down again and I left a mass message. I could hear it echoing across the floor. I could hear people discussing it in their cubicles. It’s an odd sensation walking across a floor and hearing people talk about your voice from inside their cubicles. None of them had any idea I was passing by. The reviews were all positive. The ladies especially seemed to love it. Some listened to it twice. I got calls from several of them. They’d giggle and tell me how sexy my voice was. I thanked them. Some came by my cubicle and told me in person. I thanked them too. Some I’d never seen before came by and introduced themselves. I said hello and thanked them. One said my voice was incredibly sexy. I blamed the strep throat. She said you ought to get sick more often. I said I’ll try. She batted her eyes, purred a see ya tiger, and slunk away.

(2008)

 

Thirty years ago

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Thirty years ago. That’s Edwin Letcher and Edward Huerta of Moist and Meaty chatting up a rock star storm, though considering Edwin’s street garb I don’t think M&M were playing that night. Photo probably by Don Butler. Al’s Bar maybe?  I look like a bouncer. I wasn’t, but then I always looked like a bouncer. This was back when I invariably seemed to be the tallest, strongest, and gnarliest dude in a room full of ill fed bohemians and fucked up punk rockers. Pretty punkettes would ask me to walk them to their cars in the crackhead neighborhoods our hangs were always in.

That’s Dolph Lundgren’s jacket I have on. A friend was working a shoot and realized he had two matching jackets so she copped that one for me. I wore it to death. Then I switched to blazers. Before then I was strictly the flannel tied around the waist kinda guy, sort of the uniform of the day, though I believe only Mike Watt fans sport that fashion these days. Back then I could tie a long sleeved shirt around my waist.

Before then I used show up at the crazy clubs to watch berserk bands while wearing an outrageously hot pink shirt and telling people to fuck off. The chicks dug it but the dudes would back off, bewildered, a big giant scary guy who might hurt them in the queerest shirt they had ever seen. Punk rock, baby. Reagan was president, fuck the world.

Doubtless later the same night after this photo was snapped everyone piled into our little pad off of Sunset in Silverlake. We had loud crazy parties till nearly sun-up almost every weekend, people making a mad dash for the liquor stores before 2 a.m. and then coming to our place to wake up the neighbors. Thirty people crammed in a backyard bungalow, laughing and yelling and high as kites, the music–I had a hundreds of incredibly loud and/or weird records then–roaring incessantly. On a good weekend we had parties on both Friday and Saturday. I remember one weekend people leaping off the roof into the hedges. I have no idea why. After the people finally staggered home we’d screw loudly in whatever darkness remained. Oh, we were the perfect neighbors.

We threw hundreds of parties in our hosting career. Some spontaneous, some planned, none nice. I would so hate living now next to us then.

If I ever give up writing and turn to scanning, I have thousands of pictures from those days. There are ten photo albums–remember those?–waiting in analog silence above my record collection. Though they are just a couple arm lengths away, they seem a million miles from these quick and easy electrons I’m staring at now.

Brick, Edwin, Ed Huerta c. 1987

Edwin in his beloved green corduroy jacket with Dukie Flyswatter’s fake blood on it, Ed Huerta looking eerily like a stoned version of his current unstoned self, and me probably unsmiling because I had had a front tooth yanked and it made me look like a hockey player until they could replace it. The look did fit the jacket, though.

Cute

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Not that we’re looking–we’re renters for life–but the wife keeps finding cute little places in the L.A. Times Hot Property section that are a million five or more. And the thing is, they are cute little places. The kind of house you see tucked away on a hillside cul de sac amid shade trees and roses. It’s gotten to the point now that cute costs as much as fifty average Americans make in one year. Pretty cost twice that. You don’t even wanna know gorgeous.

We were driving in a stretch of Burbank a couple nights ago, where the city butts up against the Verdugos and can’t go any further. Cute were the bottom end places, most of the houses were in the pretty range, with the occasional gorgeous occupying half a block. We must have gone miles, winding with the streets, once coming smack against the mountain, the bottom of a cliff really, and you could smell pine and hear birds we don’t hear down here in the Silver Lake hills. But it occurred to me as we drove along that we had never been up there before. Never been on any of those streets, and that we know no one who lives up there. They’re not in our class, the wife joked. But they aren’t. They’re in the class where cute is a mere million five, and I can’t even imagine that.

Rock dove

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We no longer have pigeons in Silver Lake. We have rock doves. Indeed, there was one on the sun deck. Just one. Very selective, our rock doves. The elite. Not like the mobs of pigeons you’d see in the Ralph’s parking lot, waiting for the crazy bird lady. But Ralphs is gone, the bird lady is gone, and the pigeons are gone, who knows where. There are other parking lots, other bird ladies. So there was just the one rock dove, gleaming after a winter’s rain. He landed on our sun deck with its million dollar view, and the mere mourning doves and finches and sparrows scurried out of its way. The rock dove carefully selected only the choicest seeds, looked about, and then, tired of slumming it, flew off to the rich people in the hills, where he can find a finer selection of avian cuisine and bird baths sculpted in Carrara marble. Meanwhile, back on our sundeck the mourning doves and finches and sparrows rushed back in, bickering, pecking, a disorder of tiny dinosaurs with no class at all. Gentrification has a long way to go among these birds.

A hoi polloi of pigeons, unwilling to discover their inner rock dove.

A hoi polloi of pigeons, unwilling to realize their inner rock dove.

Blue Christmas

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Come Christmas I especially miss Charlie O’s…many a chilly December night I spent time in there sipping whiskey and listening to saxophoned renditions of Blue Christmas. A reharmonized Blue Christmas, perhaps, alien and even utterly unrecognizable to those of us not be bop musicians, but the head would return soon enough and it would be a blue, blue Christmas all over again. Herman Riley would let the last notes fade in a sigh and the sound of pads closing, one by one, till there was nothing but utter silence in a stilled room. The patrons would wait till every last air molecule passed through the bell of his horn into the ether before applauding. I think about that often now. For some reason I’ve thought about it even more this Christmas. The vibe is some rooms seems timeless, but alas they are anything but, and once their time is over there’s only silence and memories.
Saxophonist Chuck Manning on some night at Charlie O's.

Saxophonist Chuck Manning on some night at Charlie O’s.

Eleven hours

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Damn. Eleven hours. That might be a record. We considered breakfast but the place looked like the remains of a riot so we settled for cookies and scrapings of hummus and cup after cup after cup of strong coffee, punctuated with beer and other things. John Ramirez was reading aloud from my blog of parties past–that was new, people reading my blog aloud at my own house, but it was so late I was past the point of self-consciousness–as Carey Fosse was spinning jazz at the stereo. Heard so much Bud Powell my ears we’re ringing with it as I awoke around eleven, then noon, and finally a few minutes ago. Bouncing With Bud, over and over, every take Michael Cuscuna could squeeze into that double CD, rattling through my head between all the seizure meds and Benadryl and memories. Hadn’t heard it that album in years and certainly never heard it played in its entirety, both discs, every out take, at five in the morning. He played good, that Bud Powell. Better than I can write right now, and certainly better than I am cleaning the house right now. Instead I am sitting here stumbling through this post surrounded by wreckage and listening to Shin Joong Hyun and thinking just how groovy and swinging and punk rock a bohemian life style can be. No responsibility, just happenings, experiences, and the lies–well, exaggerations–we tell about them later.

Great tree, too. A beautiful Christmas tree. Each one like a work of art assembled by all these weirdos, and after two weeks it’s gone forever.

A wad of gum

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Had one of those surreal evenings last night, with middle aged men threatening violence, bottles breaking crazily on concrete, a very drunk clown chick, and an angry man shouting about a vomit covered floor. Inside, a man was singing Black Sabbath songs in a Santa suit. Outside a group of guys discussed Ollie Halsall, which I didn’t think was even possible in Los Angeles. At one point I stumbled into a cloud of weed smoke so thick I thought I was Bob Marley as a guy was telling me how somebody fucked somebody and somebody was mad that somebody fucked somebody even though somebody wasn’t fucking somebody anymore so why would somebody care who was fucking anybody. I said I didn’t know. Finally, at three in the morning, I received a call warning me that there might a wad of gum in my car. I didn’t pick up, but let the caller prattle on about the wad of gum (and his words now remain, like oral literature, among the blinking messages on the machine) as I sat on the sofa in the dark, wide awake, listening to Heinrich Schütz.

I love this town, I really do.

A cold

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Helluva cold that was. It hit out of the blue–don’t they always–and rapidly whipped through the usual litany of symptoms, finishing up it’s business yesterday. I cursed my healthy immune system–that’s all the symptoms of a cold are, really, your immune system getting hysterical–and watched a lot of old movies. Some channel was showing a string of film noir, which was perfect, and even more perfect was the sticky southern gothic perfection of A Streetcar Named Desire, me crumpled on the floor, sneezing, coughing, aching, high on sweet cherry cough syrup, reciting Stanley’s lines.