Category Archives: Autobiography,memoirs and confessions

Merry Christmas

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I’m up early, staring at the tree. It looks good even in daylight which is good for a Christmas tree, sometimes they look strange then, things off, lights blinking ridiculously. But not this one. It’s pretty perfect. Our drunk friends did a nice job, though I still see a few Cheetos. No presents under it yet, we haven’t even started shopping, that’ll be today. We always do the last minute thing. Know where to go (which isn’t the Galleria) and be back in time for eggnog and A Christmas Carol. The one with Alistair Sim, the spooky one. Or maybe A Charlie Brown Christmas, which I’ve probably watched at least once every year since it came out in 1965. That was in Maine, there was snow on the ground, it snowed like crazy that year in Maine. Snowed even on the following Mother’s Day, a regular blizzard. Out here they were surfing and tanning and making stupid beach movies, in Maine they were shovelling and cursing the slush. The next year, 1966, How the Grinch Stole Christmas came out for the very first time, and I’ve probably seen it every year since. That was in Maine, too, and there was snow on the ground. Those two Christmases were rather remarkable for me, I remember, since we lived in the same house for both. I can’t remember us ever having two of any holiday in one house during my childhood except 1965 and ’66. Maybe that’s why I have such fond memories of Maine. Brunswick, the little town we lived in, was all dolled up in Yuletide everything, but in an old fashioned way. It was cold and snowy but just like a movie. We had a huge tree and decorating it was a blast. Mom had her own tree, too, in the den. It was aluminum, white, and decked with blue balls, with a blue spinning lamp that reflected on it, and it sparkled, and we weren’t allowed to touch it. That was very early sixties, that tree, very Jackie Onassis. I don’t know if they still even have trees like that. The real tree, though, was big–huge to an eight or nine year old–and had a zillion ornaments, some brought all the way from Austria-Hungary by my grandparents. We had to be extra careful with those, especially the perfect little bird’s nests with the tiny eggs. I wonder if you can still buy those? Or do you have to import them from Austria-Hungary, which hasn’t even existed for a hundred years. A Never-Never Land, like a fairy tale, or a drug induced hallucination, whatever. Leave it to me to have half my relatives from a place that doesn’t exist. The other half came from Ireland, and the tradition was to drape the tree with strings of popcorn and oranges if they could afford them and light it with candles. Whiskey and candles were a bad mix, the one leaving you to forget the latter, and houses would burn down in Irish neighborhoods every year, one or two. Or so my dear mother told me. We had electric lights. Everyone did by the time I was born.  We had a train too going around the tree. We still do.  Maybe you’ve seen it.

I loved Christmas as a kid, and I love Christmas now. I can’t help it. I’m just a sucker for the tree and shopping and wrapping presents and eggnog (lots of eggnog). I think I even like hating the same stupid carols they play over and over and over. Feliz Navidad, oh lord. In Maine groups of kids went door to door a-caroling, I remember that vividly. Out here no children have ever come a-caroling to our door–any of our doors, and there’s been four of them since 1980. Though one Christmas Eve we were at a friend’s place in Hollywood and gay carolers came to his door. Gay as in gay, though they seemed gay as in happy too. You’ve never seen carolers until you’ve seen gay carolers. They were dressed in Christmas to the nines. I’d never seen Christmas handcuffs before. Later I knew a lady who showed me her’s. L.A. is different from Maine, and Silver Lake was different from anywhere.

It’s still traditional in our household, though. Well, I did just notice that the gingerbread couple in the snow globe are anatomically correct. I’d never noticed that before. It was a gift, years ago. That’s a lot of snickering behind Brick’s back. And there are Cheetos hung on the Christmas tree with care. But otherwise it’s a traditional Christmas here, as always, and so I’ll deliver my traditional Merry Christmas to all of you who’ve read this far. And a Happy New Year. I hope your holidays are the best.

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Claude Van Damme

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I wore one of Claude Van Damme’s jackets for years. A team jacket, a heavy thing, all lined and hip and cool and big shouldered. A friend swiped it from his dressing room. It was an extra, he never missed it (or so she told me.) That was my pre-blazer look. A Claude Van Damme jacket, Italian army boots and, at the time, strong as an ox. Stupid as an ox, too, but we’re talking looks here, not brains. Anyway, there’s a photo of me wading into a brawl, breaking it up. Probably about 1987. Some asshole punks had hauled the longhair soundman down to the floor by his ponytail and were kicking the shit out of him. It was ugly, vicious, cowardly. I started pulling them off of him. It was like tossing dolls across a room. One of them took a swing at me. I went to hit him, realized I could kill him just like that, so I bitch slapped him. Whack, whack. He crumpled, the room went silent, nobody moved.  I went back to the bar, the band started up and it was like nothing had happened.

Violence is a weird thing, man, a weird thing.

The sleeve to the Brother Brick Says single by nmy brother Jon's band, Claw Hammer.

The sleeve to the Brother Brick Says single by my brother Jon’s band, Claw Hammer.  The long haired cat on the left is the prick who started it…he lit out quick and avoided the pounding he deserved. Used to see him slinking around, followed by a bunch of kids who for some reason idolized the guy. He gave off that weird Manson vibe…if you hang around the underground scene long enough you run into types like him. I figure he’s either in prison or a lawyer by now. Maybe a preacher. Maybe dead.

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Breath

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A friend’s wife died. Sad. More than sad. I hear about those things now and feel a momentary chill.

I lost my wife for a few minutes some years ago, they brought her back, but I’ll never forget those few minutes. Sometimes I hear her breathing next to me in the middle of the night and suddenly I remember her beautiful blue lips and knowing I was on the very cusp of being a widower. So many thoughts go through your head in those few minutes, you can’t believe how many thoughts. The doctors were so good, though…man, they were good. I got her back. After a couple weeks she walked out of the hospital. I thought the nurses were going to cheer. It’s such a rare thing, one told me, to see someone walk out like that after what happened. But she walked out, smiling. Amnesia, but smiling.

Eventually life returned to normal. But that precipice is something to peer over, and I don’t think anything’s been the same since. A lot seems pretty insignificant–I quit my writing gig, it suddenly seemed a waste of precious time–and much of the insignificant has vast importance. Like hearing her breathing in the middle of the night. Something I never even noticed before. Not in the same way. Knowing that once, for a few minutes there, she wasn’t breathing at all.

That was over five years ago, and this is the first time I’ve ever written about it. I just realized that. You think you can write about anything, but you can’t.

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Innocence

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Just reading I piece I wrote about the day Elvis died and how all the ladies at work we’re crying their eyes out. Got me remembering those ladies. Tough dames, all those girls, working class and divorced once or twice and life hadn’t always been easy and now they were doing the working wife thing, which was new in the 1970’s, very new. They were sweet, but get them all together and they were a pack, foul mouthed, chain smoking, been around the track already broads and all totally horny. That I knew because they would talk about being horny. All the time. They had the itch. I got the itch, they’d say. I’m so horny I could fuck a telephone pole. I was a dumb kid then, not yet twenty years old, and would buy my burrito off the lunch truck and join them. At first they protected my innocence, but not for long. Time to grow up boy, they’d say. Soon enough they’re banging their drunk boyfriends on a Saturday night or wondering if the old man could still get it up. They doubted it. The old man never seemed to have the itch like they had the itch. I would listen and pretend not to. The concept of horny middle-aged ladies was new to me, alien almost, I didn’t quite comprehend the itch. That is till the pack turned on me. The loudest one–from Cleveland, I remember, she with that Great Lakes plain-spoken abrasiveness–started complaining about how horny she was. How she wasn’t getting any at home. The others agreed. No one seemed to be getting any. That surprised me, I’d thought that married people (excepting one’s parents, of course) got it on all the time, else why marry? They groused a bit more. Then I noticed them all eyeing me. Cleveland blurts out maybe we should all jump the kid here. I froze. They all stared and smiled. Cleveland says yeah,  just pin him down and take turns. They laughed. I blushed. Then she gave me a look I’d never seen before. We’d have you flopping like a fish. Her tone was almost menacing. I must have looked stunned and she cackled  The others laughed too, evil laughs, cackling, evil, lascivious laughs.  They were all just staring at me, cackling. Grown up lust. I’d never seen it before. Never even knew it existed. It was a distant world of forty and fifty somethings and I wasn’t even a twenty something yet. I was a freshman at a community college, still living at home. Mine was still a world of crushes and instant adolescent erections and the endless distraction of teenage females. This was the mid-70’s and the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and a zillion hippies had finally reached the high schools in a big way. The girls wore micro mini’s and tee shirts barely concealing breasts held aloft as if by magic. We’d stare open-mouthed.  Heat waves were torments. The school’s air conditioning barely worked and we’d sweat in our jeans and corduroys in class while the girls flounced about lazily in Daisy Mae cutoffs and halter tops.  Screwing seemed to be frantic and incessant. Playboy was full of real live women, we thought, perfect and sweet and naked and we’d save the centerfolds for further study. But this, these middle-aged women and their itch and their telephones poles, this was sex, raw and sweaty and urgent and not always pretty. Reality. I didn’t even know it existed, not like that. Not even the letters in the Penthouse Forum we read at a friend’s place because his parents were psychologists and thought it healthy that their son read Playboy and Penthouse and Oui (Hustler wasn’t out yet, thankfully) mentioned telephone poles.

I’d never felt so uncomfortable in my young life. One of the ladies noticed. Oh come on, she said, leave him alone, he’s just a kid. He’s awfully big for a kid, another said. He’s still a kid. Never seen kid with a package like that. Yeah, but he’s just out of high school. The debate went back and forth, but at last their maternal instinct won out. It was uncomfortably quiet for a moment. Cleveland stopped her cackling and looked at me. It’s OK boy she said. You’ll learn soon enough. And I did, soon enough.

It’s a funny thing, but at some point in your life you begin to identify with the old people in your memories. The young you becomes so fresh and unjaded as to be unfathomable. Somewhere back there you stopped being the protagonist in your own life story. You become  one of the secondary characters. You’re the dude on the far end of middle age looking at the young stud in the making and thinking man, you got some story ahead of you. You look at him and smile. The kid smiles back, clueless, nothing but innocence.

A duck walks into a bar…

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My brother used to annoy the hell out of me with this joke: A duck walks into a bar. Bartender says what do you want, duck? Duck says you got any grapes? Bartender says no, I don’t have any grapes. I got whiskey, gin, vodka, run, beer, you name it, but no grapes. And besides, I hate ducks. You show up here again I’ll nail your web feet to the floor. The duck leaves. Next day the duck walks into the same bar. Bartender stares at him. Duck says you got any nails? Bartender says no, I don’t have any nails! Duck says you got any grapes?

My brother told that joke a hundred times. I began to hate that joke.

A couple nights ago there was a delay in the set as Charlie Haden’s orchestra was getting together the right charts. Someone said tell a joke. Haden looks up. A joke? OK. I know this great joke. He hobbles up to the microphone. Let me get it straight in my head first so I don’t screw it up, and thinks a minute. OK. Here it is: A duck walks into a bar…..

OK…when your brother deliberately torments you a zillion times with a stupid duck walks into a bar joke it’s one thing. I mean you wind up hating the joke. But when Charlie Haden tells the same joke, do you seethe or do you laugh? I laughed. I had to. Everybody else was.

Besides, it was funny.

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Selfie

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I’ve never taken a selfie. In fact I never take photos at all. I’m a writer, and there are rules about those things. I did take a selfie once, though, accidentally. But that was before selfies had been invented and I just deleted it. Had I known Facebook would also be invented I would have saved it, along with the cat pictures I took and would never admit I took. Those were deleted too. The fun thing about digital photography is the delete button.

I accidentally took a shoefie once, but shoefies still haven’t been invented so I deleted that one too. I once took an analog shoefie, however, and still have that one. There was no delete button then. All you could do was throw out the picture when you got it back from the Fotomat. But it was such a nice picture of a shoe I kept it. I’d put that uninvented shoefie right here, but it’s tucked away somewhere with a zillion other pictures of my past life and I don’t feel like looking for it right now. I’d see all that hair and I’d sigh and get all morbid and pensive. Nothing worse than a big guy gone pensive.

Like I said, I never take selfies. Look what happens.

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Cold

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We haven’t had a good December cold snap like this in a few years.  Thirty eight degrees just before sun up this morning and people are freaking. People from Buffalo and Chicago and NYC and Erie and Canada feel betrayed. I thought I left this at home they say. As if thirty eight degrees in December would even make the news back home. Southern California thins the blood, they’ll say. Those deep winter days hovering in the eighties will do it. People suffering through the Ice Age back east watch pretty young things in shorts marching in the Rose Parade, see all the short sleeves in the stands, the palm trees and flowers and all that warmth and before you know it the car is packed and they’re heading out here never to see snow again. Then comes arctic air. It slips uninvited down the coast all the way from Alaska and temperatures plummet and the mountains are white with snow almost to the bottom. Angelenos dig out heavy coats from the recesses of their closets, ladies buy stylish boots they’ll never wear again. People complain about the frigid temps all day long, and Jackie Johnson almost gets excited. Somebody downtown dies of exposure.

There was a cold snap a few years ago that took some of the valleys down into the high twenties….I remember I’d gone out to Sierra Madre to the Cafe 322 to catch some jazz. (Chuck Manning was playing tenor, maybe it was his quintet.) Afterward a few of us stood outside talking, all macho and freezing. Finally someone gave in and we made for our heated cars. As I drove home via the 210 the temperature kept dropping till it hovered at the freezing point. I decided I needed to go past that and keep driving till it got below thirty degrees. I headed up the Angeles Crest Highway into the mountains at midnight till the thermometer read 27 and the signs warned of black ice. On the way down the cold air seemed to refract the light in ways we never see down here in balmy southern California, and the city glittered like diamonds all the way to the Pacific.  I pulled off and got out of the car and drank my coffee and all was utterly silent. Just me and the city and the arctic air. L.A. doesn’t do cold well, but it does it beautifully.

When I got home I wrote a long account of the night–the cold, the jazz, the black ice, the steaming coffee and the glittering diamonds. Even the music I was listening to in the car. I can’t remember what I was listening to now, or any of the details. I lost that story long ago. All I have now is this, a scant paragraph and a vision of what the city looked like from a couple thousand feet up, and how quiet it all was, hushed and brittle. At night I think maybe I should make that drive again up into the mountains to regain the details. The feel, the bite of the cold, the warmth of the coffee, the glittering diamonds of the city. The silence. But it’s so warm in the house, and there’s always a game on, or a movie, or music on the stereo or things to write. A book to read. Dessert. Whatever. And besides, maybe this time when I turned round way up there I wouldn’t see glittering diamonds at all. Just a big cold city, wishing it would warm the hell up. 

Rose Parade...and you thought it's be like this every day.

The Rose Parade…and you thought it’d be like this every day.

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The Bags

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A great band the Bags were, hard and fast and smart and totally L.A. They didn’t need the English, not the Bags. This was home grown, our own town sound. Actually, there never was an Alice Bag Band as they call them in the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization…legal reasons meant they couldn’t be listed as the Bags (there was  a law suit, ugliness). It’s a shame when a band gets their shot at posterity and finds out they can’t use their own name. Oh well. I still have their lone single, on Dangerhouse, I bought it back then. Its B-side was their best tune, I always thought, Babylonian Gorgon:

Don’t need no false reasons for why I’m out of place,
I don’t goose step for the master race.
I don’t scream and twist just for the fun of it.
I’m poison blood when I’m pissed! *

And oh yeah, Alice was hot. Dangerously hot…

Alice Bag gun

(Great shot, that I believe was sliced from a larger photo. I wish I could credit the photographer but I have no clue.)

This clip of the Bags playing “Gluttony” (see below) is from The Decline of Western Civilization. We even knew back then that it was a classic flick. Director Penelope Spheeris nailed it. If only she could have filmed twenty bands, there were so many great bands in town back then. Spheeris and her camera people really captured the feel, sound, smell, and energy of those shows. The exhilaration and the scariness. It was cool, that music scene, it was happening. We went opening night. You’ve never seen so many cop cars. Hollywood Blvd looked like a black’n’white parking lot. Fuck the pigs we said. Not long afterward like Lee Ving I spent a night in the Wilcox Hotel, aka the Hollywood jail, where I took on eight cops. They won. Later I became a well behaved intellectual.

Everybody had the soundtrack album, I still do, and most of us can recite extended passages from memory. I even quoted this movie a few times while writing all those Brick’s Picks columns, and the jazz fans never knew. I wonder if they wondered who Lee Ving was. One of those session cats, maybe. Or a bebop disc jockey from Hong Kong. I never explained.

Wow, going back,way back…that scene was thirty five years ago almost. A swell time was had by all, though a bunch died. In fact two of the Bags did. It happens. Though listening to this cut, about a minute in, when the tune explodes out of a dirge into pure, electrifying L.A. punk rock, you’d think nobody is gonna die, ever.

Oh yeah, check out Alice Bag’s well crafted memoir, Violence Girl. Saw her do a reading a few months back at a hip hang in Los Feliz. She read a chapter, talked some, and then did a remarkable little take on “Babylonian Gorgon”. Glad I went.

And lastly there’s a memorial page for guitarist Craig Lee, who had become the quintessential LA Weekly music critic. AIDS killed him in 1991. People took it hard. The next day someone spray painted “We Miss You Craig!” all along Hyperion Avenue in big broken hearted punk rock letters.

“Gluttony” by the Alice Bag Band from The Decline of Western Civilization:

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* “Babylonian Gorgon”….I think Craig Lee wrote both song and lyrics. I assume he was talking about what they used to call the Huntington Beach scene in 1979, the year this single was released. Though maybe he was alluding to Darby Crash (of the Germs) as well, who seemed a little fascinated with the dark side. That Bowie thing that people have forgotten about. Neither of them meant it, it just shocked the hippies. That went all the way back to the Velvets, with Lou Reed going on about shiny boots of leather…that weird place where bondage and leather and Nazi look and fashion meet. I think that theme has exhausted itself here in the States, maybe so many of the devotees died during the AIDS epidemic, and most bikers you see now are lawyers and stockbrokers. Europe seems as fascinated as ever, though. Then again they invented both kinky leather bondage and fascism, not to mention nice uniforms. We’re just dumb,sloppy Americans. Even as the Third Reich met its cataclysmic end in fire and ruins and annihilation, you have to admit their soldiers looked better.

But I think Craig Lee was also over reacting to the demographic change then taking place in the L.A. punk scene. By 1979 kids were pouring in from the suburbs. They’d listen to Rodney on the Roq spinning all this amazing music and get their high school outcast buddies and head to the Hong Kong and Madame Wongs and raise holy hell and scare the bejesus out of the jaded old–almost twenty five, some of them–Hollywood scenesters. And the English music press–which is what we all read then, Zig Zag and Sounds–was full of frightening fascist punks and the Rock Against Racism response, and I think Craig saw those white surfer kids here with their close cropped hair from “the Beach” (Huntington to Hermosa, inclusive) and assumed they were all big scary nazis. But this wasn’t England, and these kids weren’t nazis, they were bored surfer kids exploding with testosterone and energy. And as the Hollywood scene sank into heroin the best new stuff began coming out of Fullerton and San Pedro and Hermosa Beach anyway. But that was still in the future a bit. The Bags were part of the first wave of Los Angeles punk bands who played the Masque–that demented bashed up little hole off Hollywood Blvd–and  helped changed rock’n’roll forever. For a couple years there, from 1977 to maybe 1980, the Hollywood punk scene–all the Dangerhouse bands–made some of the best rock music of its time. There was so much creativity in the clubs back then, all this spontaneous brilliance and inspiration, and rock’n’roll–our rock’n’roll, raw and new and uncompromising–seemed like the most important thing in the world.

Now that was a footnote.

Philately

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I got my AARP card as soon as I turned 50, just to terrify my 40 something friends. They’d blanche, grab onto something for balance and order another drink. One in particular, a writer, cute as a bug, seemed to take it especially hard. Happy birthday she said. Yup, I’m fifty. Wow, fifty. I even got my AARP card. She laughed. No really, look. She looked at it, the smile disappeared. Oh no Brick, she said, and this look came over as she thought of all the years she’d wasted collecting stamps, to quote Rufus T. Firefly.
 
I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even snicker. I just waited several years and wrote this.

My wife’s birthday

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October 28 and it’s my wife Fyl’s birthday today. Never mind how many. We’re at that one-candle-will-be-fine age. Otherwise you’ll need a fire marshal on hand when it’s time to blow them out. I asked her where she wanted to eat and it was closed. So was her second choice. I said how about crab’s legs? She loves crab’s legs. As much as the crab did, almost. We thought where, you know someplace fancy? Hip? Gauche? She said keep it simple so we’re off to Cameron’s in Pasadena. And not even the right part of Pasadena, but the part east of Pasadena City College where the Rose Parade passes by in silence and shame, devoid of media coverage, bands blowing clams all over the place and people ripping the roses right out of the still living floats. Ghastly. My brother and his wife lived near there once till the heat drove them out towards Pedro and the fog. They had a living room that tilted. The whole living room off center, like the gravity was stronger on the other side of the couch. I weirded me out. Well it didn’t, but it could have, but that was before Facebook and inanity. Where was I?
 

Oh yeah, I just wanted to wish my wife a happy birthday and successful conclusion to a profitable birthday month. She sure can make the most of a birthday month. I remember when the birthday month was a birthday week. When we were newlyweds she got just the day, you know, her birth day. Hence the word. But over our three plus decades it’s stretched some. That gravity again.

She’s not on Facebook, actually. So instead of posting this I could just turn to her and say Happy Birthday Phyllis! I will, too. This is just practicing. Don’t wanna blow it again. She’s still pissed off about the Arbor Day thing. A tree is a tree, I figured. I was wrong.

Anyway, it’s been a good birthday month. I sure miss summer, though. Octobers are rough that way. Dark and if not quite brooding certainly chilly. I’ll adjust by November. Christmas comes soon after. I love Christmas.

And I love my wife. So she gets to feast on crab legs in the bar at Camerons. She said 7:30 so I ought to think about getting ready, instead of blathering on and on like this.

Bye.
 
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