Category Archives: Story telling

Jack Kerouac

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(2013)

Driving down Melrose on the fringes of Hollywood a couple nights ago I stopped at a light and saw, painted on a wall in big brushed strokes, “Read Kerouac”. I can’t remember if there was an exclamation point or not. It was kind of cool, the idea that 21st century beatniks still hunker down with dog-eared paperbacks of On the Road. They probably don’t, though.They read it on an iPad at a coffee house. This was Larchmont, one of those very nice L.A. neighborhoods with a whiff of the westside. This is an ebook kind of place. Ebooks and iPhones and electronic cigarettes. I suppose you can still be a beatnik that way. I suppose you can still read On the Road on an iPad and fantasize that you, too, could have been a road buddy with Jack Kerouac, drinking in the same bars and banging the same women and doing the same speed. There’d be poets and painters and method actors. Crackers and spades and PR’s. Parties and readings and brawls. Jazz, lots of jazz. And free verse. Not a rhyme in sight.

Maybe some little Walter Mitty of a hipster stares into the screen as he clacks away. Maybe he’s transported by his own vivid imagination to a land where everything is wood or metal or paper and black and white and good or bad or nothing at all. Yeah, baby. The high tech coffee house disappears and he’s playing the bongos and a chick who looks just like Ava Gardner can’t keep her eyes off of him. His fingers ripple across the bongos like he was born in Havana, effortless, African, Left Bank, Harlem, real, baby, real. She purrs that she loves him. She wants to love him right now, anywhere, right there. He doesn’t even look up. The coolest never do. Got no time, baby, no time, he tells her, I’m playing the bongos. She sighs but doesn’t leave. He knew she wouldn’t. They never do. Dames like her are always there. But great moments on the bongos are special.

Me, well, I don’t really read Kerouac. On the Road didn’t send me. Not my thing. I never played the bongos, either.  And sadly, I know it ain’t the 1950’s. Seeing Read Kerouac on that wall was  like seeing a Bird Lives! or Clapton is God on a wall in New York or London. You’d wonder where the scrawler had been. I mean Bird is decidedly not alive. Clapton is not divine. And Kerouac ain’t my idea of somebody you have to read. But some little nostalgic visionary down there in a nice apartment off Larchmont thinks we do need to read Kerouac. He knows what the is is. What the be of the is is. The to be, baby, or the not at all. Dig? The reefer smoke unfurls around our heads. Time to split.  Sirens dog us as we head down the street. But they’ll never find us. We’re invisible. Invisible men. Ultraviolet. You need the right shades to see us and baby, you ain’t got ’em. He and Ava and Cassidy and  Marlon Brando’s gardener disappear into the night. It’s a big city. They’re out there somewhere. Read Kerouac is written on the wall, in letters big and red and glistening.

Of course, Melrose being Melrose my first reaction was that Read Kerouac was a band name. Or maybe some viral marketing for an upcoming film of the same name. Or maybe it was left there by an independent film production crew. Or maybe someone was making a video.

Maybe it’s an art project.

I like the Walter Mitty of a beatnik idea best, though. Some little internet nebbish at a Starbucks stares into his screen which dissolves to black and white and the clatter of a manual typewriter. Words flow, in streams, in torrents, like a Charlie Parker solo. He’s playing the bongos, and making literature with every word he speaks. Oh do the women love him. They cling to him, glom onto him, breathe when he breathes. They can’t help themselves. He’s read Kerouac.

Medical marijuana initiatives

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[From 2010, I think.]

So when I got to the polling station here in L.A. yesterday to vote on the three marijuana initiatives I was so stoned I couldn’t remember which one I was supposed to vote for and which two against. All those long words, man, and that crazy legal lingo. I just stared at them for a long time. Like a real long time. I heard someone cough and turned round and there was like a line of people staring at me, wondering why I was taking so long. I kinda freaked out and just voted all three yes. Righteous. Voting for weed three times. Jah Rastafari. But as I left the booth every one was looking at me. I gave the ballot to the dude who gave me a flag sticker which I accidentally stuck on upside down. Detov I. Everyone was still looking at me weird. Well, not everyone, but the dude with the flag stickers, and the old ladies, the guys in line, and the pretty chick with the big, the one who told me I signed on the wrong line. They were all looking at me. They could all tell I voted yes for all three weed initiatives. Which ones were cops? Which ones were narcs? Which ones were gonna tell my prospective employers? I started shaking and asked for my ballot back. I wanted to change my vote to no on all three. The guy said I couldn’t. I got upset and said why not? It’s too late, he said. I started freaking out. You mean they know I voted for all three pot initiatives? Now everybody in the place were all looking at me, everyone, even the incredibly old people who could barely do anything. I couldn’t believe I said that out loud. I might as well have screamed look at me, I am so high!!!! And I was. I mean righteously high. Totally Bob Marley. Insane in the membrane. I split so fast, nearly ran out of there, cut across the lawn and walked home. Thank god I had a bowl full on me. I ducked behind a tree and fired up a good one, keeping an eye out for cops and old people. I exhaled slowly. It felt good. I waited till it grew dark and walked the several blocks back to my pad. Walking felt good. Felt natural. I felt one with the birds singing and the stars blinking and the car alarms. Jah Rastafari. Too bad I’d driven to the polling station.

It was a lot easier when pot was illegal.

Sarge

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(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.

Parking on Santa Monica was fucked as usual. I popped into Jay’s real quick for a burger (better than Tommy’s), then crossed Virgil there (right at the magic invisible line where Hollywood’s southeastern fringe meets Virgil Village; those hills back over my shoulder, that’s Silverlake…) and passed the permanently grafitti’d billboard.  This is varrio La Mirada Locos 13. I quicken my step. This is a marginal neighborhood, but getting better. Still, there’s a pretty unfriendly crowd over at the 7-11 parking lot. But that’s not the reason I pick up the pace. The Nip Drivers are on the bill tonight, and I can hear from a block away that they’ve already started.

You’ve probably never heard of the Nip Drivers. A little more ancient history, going all the way back to the mid-eighties. I’ve been a Nip Drivers fanatic from the moment I heard “Cindy” on Adam Bomb’s old show on KXLU.  Weird minor chords and keening vocals that suddenly lurch into fierce thrash and back again…. We went and saw them at the old O.N. Club (a long since abandoned cliffside hole on Sunset–I think that was the very first Silverlake club but don’t quote me on that) in what must’ve been 1984. It was a stunning show. Really, really weird. Weirdness for its own motherfucking sake. The bassist was so miniskirted skinny she looked frail, with an ancient, tiny, even frailer amp. The skinheaded drummer just wailed away, his kit skittering across the floor in all directions so he had to pull it back into formation after each song. The guitar player was good, laying out big jagged melodic chords. And this demented singer—he spent what seemed like the whole set hiding–crouched down behind a P.A. speaker, singing and engaging in snappy patter with the audience, telling us how much better he looked than us. The audience too seemed from another planet (I recall the late Craig Lee reviewed the show for one of the local papers and referred to the band and its following as the under-underground.)  This one weird looking skinhead in particular spent the entire set vibrating and jerking like an amphetamine St. Vitus dance. We were witnessing yet another example of that stunning reinvention of the whole concept of rock’n’roll that punk had unleashed and that LA’s South Bay was reinventing again through Black Flag and Saccharine Trust now this crazed bunch. It got nasty in the crowded club. The weirdos let loose, spazzing, freaking the normal people who reacted hissily. Some UCLA nerd looking dude bitched at my wife for standing in his way, blocking the view from his table. She dumped a beer on his head. He got up screaming a protest. I stared him down and out of the club. The band continued on its demented way. “Cindy” in particular soared.  This was 1984. America was hopelessly Reaganized. We sought escape and truth in madness in dank clubs dug out of the crumbling hillsides of Los Angeles.

Fifteen years later I pay my five bucks to get into the Garage. It’s maybe two or three songs into their set, the place was packed, the band wild, and I was back, back almost at the door. No idea of who else was in the joint. It was packed far beyond the legal limit. Just smoke and a sea of heads washing back and forth in the mosh. A nasty edge in the air. Very cool, very mid-80’s, and very nostalgic.

The moshing had gotten a little heavy up front, apparently. That inchoate bouncing electrons style, instead of the more ritualized swirling hurricane of the ’80’s.  Kids these days.… Then something about the bouncing bodies set me off that a brawl had broken out. A tremendous crush of leather clad punks and pretty boys came washing back, surging like a wave. The bar narrows towards the door, and the panicked bodies in front of me began piling up, so I went into the standard unlock-the-knees edge-of-the-pit stance. On they came. Some of that there’s-a-riot-goin’-on thrill began surging in my gut. The wave was on me, bodies actually lifted up off the floor, and there, where the floor narrowed down almost at the door, it crested and broke and spit out—Sarge!  Flying backward past me, bouncing on his ass, with a knot of six hardcore-looking dudes trying to untangle themselves to get at him. I couldn’t believe it. The nostalgia swept over me like deja vu.  Sarge picked himself up, ran up to me, yelled “that motherfucker hit me over the head with a bottle!” and threw himself right back into the maw. He grabbed one—apparently THE one—and threw him up against one of the booths and made to clobber him so hard that assuredly the stupid bastard’s jaw would’ve been busted clean, teeth scattering across the floor like chiclets. But half-a-dozen arms reached out and grabbed his arm, yanking it down. They then combinedly hurled him backward once again, past me, on his ass.  Sarge scrambled to his feet and made to go at them again. Now I had been watching this seconds-tick-like-minutes scene more bemused than alarmed. I’ve known Sarge for years, through his many fights.  I was there the night he was jumped by two big Huntington Beach punks at the Anti-Club, and he dispensed with them readily, biting off an earlobe in the process. (The sight of these big, spoiled rich thugs searching that filthy floor for the missing lobe is something I’ll never forget). And I’ve broken up a few of his confrontations when they were turning ugly or bad. But this was Sarge’s movie, and a great one it was. Sarge vs.half-a-dozen stupid punks (they would have been stupid metal-heads in ‘79) and beating a couple of their asses in the process. Still—there was one problem. So, as he got to his feet next to me I said into his ear— “Sarge you got two kids now.”  He looked at me. “But that motherfucker hit me on the head with a beer bottle!  Look!”  There was blood on his fingers. I just shrugged. He glared at the little motherfucker, now bottleless and scared silly. The motherfucker’s friends never moved, either. They kind of slunk back, feigning more interest in the show. It was a goddamned draw. Sarge vs. half-a-dozen punks. Sarge roaring—”If I ever find that sonofabitch by hisself I’ll kick his ass!” And he went outside to nurse his sore skull on the curb and complain loudly to all that would listen.

Some homeless black guy had been hanging out front, lackadaisically spare changing, mostly just talking. He went up to Sarge. “It ain’t worth it man. I been there, too. And it ain’t worth it.  Anymore violence ain’t gonna do you no good.” Sarge thought about it. “Thanks, man”, he said, “you’re right. I got kids.” And he reached into his pocket and gave this itinerant wise man a few bucks and went home.

Inside, the Nip Drivers just tore that place up. One of the best shows I’ve seen in years.

315

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I was just at a party this weekend on the 4th of July out here in LA.  It was at our old friend Edwin’s place, up in Lincoln Heights, with a spectacular view of downtown LA and Dodger Stadium, Hollywood and the East Side, and on a clear day all the way crosstown to the Pacific.  On July 4th it’s an ideal spot to watch the city erupt in pyrotechnic frenzy.  Edwin and I go back quite aways; I’ve known him since the early punk days back in Santa Barbara, from ’78 through ’80.

The party began a little slow but grew incredibly crowded and then wound up absolutely surreal. What a maelstrom of fireworks. They were coming from everywhere.  It was wild. Even wilder was the fire started by an errant rocket in the empty lot on the steep slope in front of Edwin’s; the brush and trees went up like mad. Neighbors watered down their roofs as mothers hustled their broods to safety. And hipsters were fleeing in high-heeled panic. Car horns, yells, cackling laughter, sirens, flashing red lights, swooping helicopters. The first load of water they dropped missed the flames but soaked Tracy of the local weirdo band the Hindenburg Ground Crew.  He retreated, sopping wet.  There was a big Wurlitzer organ on Edwin’s lawn and someone was playing “Light My Fire”. And the Roman Candles and screaming Fizzbusters and bottle rockets and cherry bombs and M-80’s and M-40’s and machine gun strings of firecrackers never let up for a moment. In the middle of all the giddy madness I began joking aloud, and another older guy there made a wisecrack back, and suddenly we realized that we knew each other from a long time ago.  It was George, aka Al Poe, a long lost friend from the Santa Barbara daze a quarter century before…. We sat and drank beer and smoked weed and shouted about old times over the din of the helicopters. We laughed a lot and then went over the list of folks no longer around….Chuck aka Kid Basterd, Dan DeManne, Eric Pace.  George said 315 was dead.  I looked stunned.  He said it was in the Santa Barbara News-Press.  Someone had told him over the phone.  We both grew pensive just for a moment.

Back in those heady and heedless days, when punk was brand new and funny and scary and unbelievably radical, Santa Barbara had a small but frenzied scene that matched, for a fleeting moment, the madness and invention of any scene anywhere, whether London, New York, the Masque in Hollywood.  I plunged into it a little late, but there was already a legendary figure–315.  I knew his sisters, but Three was just this crazy quilt of stories and tall tales and jokes (such as the acid trip that wound up with his sister Nancy renamed Verandah and Bill rechristened as 315)  .  My then-girlfriend, now wife, Fyl knew him well, as did George, and, well, everyone.  I can’t remember where he had gone to.  A few months later the scene in Santa Barbara suddenly went limp everyone split for New York or Frisco or Hollywood (and eventually Silver Lake, where we wound up). 315 showed a few months later in LA.  This was 1980-81.  I can’t remember where he was staying, but he was with his vivacious and completely mad young girlfriend Mary Toole.  There’d be these parties at yet another Wells sister Mary’s house down in Culver City.  Everybody high, and everybody talking at once.  Crazy crazy music on the stereo.  And what a character he was, dominating parties already packed full of crazed personalities.  He was older than us, by several years, and that age difference seemed to give his particular form of craziness a sense of authenticity.  An electricity or magnetism that comes from sheer iconoclastic orneriness, I guess. I remember Billy Zoom would come by, with his peculiar sense of solemnity.  It was all punk and rockabilly and wild conversation and the rarified air of pure inspiration. 315 and I got the drunkest I have ever been in my life at those bashes.  Then a bit later he and Mary Toole up and split for Atlanta.  We called them a couple times; you could reach them at some noisy watering hole the name of which escapes me now.  I remember he was picking up a southern twang. Then we lost touch, and 315 passed into legend.  We became completely enmeshed in the evolving LA music underground.  And then jazz.  Where we remain.  But whenever the survivors of that old Santa Barbara scene would gather, 315’s name always came up.  And no one ever knew what he was up to anymore, except that it could not possibly have been ordinary.  No one had his phone number, or an email address. We just all hoped to see him again.  Then, finally, I run into George and he tells me 315 is dead.

It’s hard to grieve much with helicopters circling a hundred feet overhead.  All around was anarchy, glorious anarchy–panic on the one side, party on the other. The Eastside sky was lit with pyrotechnics from every stadium and seemingly every backyard as far as you could see.  Across the lane Fyl watched the advancing fire, fascinated. Edwin was by turns hosting and trying to get a bucket brigade organized.  I watched as a friend was pressed into symbolic service, pointing a waterless hose in the direction of the flames.  It’s the thought that counts, I guess.  An addled woman parked her car in the middle of the street and then disappeared.  A fire truck arrived and pleaded for a parking space.  Enormous mega-cherry bombs resounded from somewhere, echoing everywhere.  Roman candles burst overhead in red and green.  When someone turned and asked me if we should evacuate too and I said “What? And miss all this?” It was “Apocalypse Now” for aging punk rockers. Best 4th of July ever.

The Fire Department got there just in time.  No one was hurt, no structures damaged. That Edwin sure knows how to throw a party.

I’m sure 315 would have dug it.  Rest in Peace, man.  Rest in fucking peace.

(2007)

Ernie Krivda

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Written in 2007 and appearing on the LA Weekly.com site, this seems ancient now, from another life time, another person really, utterly unjaded and trying hard as he possibly can to be a jazz critic. Fun story, though, and a very fond memory.

I love my buddy Dean. Ya can’t not love him…he’s a nut. And inspired, brilliant, funny, knows everything and everybody Sicilian motormouth of a musician from New York City with a heart the size of Indiana. A place he probably hates. So Dean begins emailing and calling me at work on Monday morning (no kidding…it was a Monday morning) and starts in at turbospeed about some guy whose name I never did get except I think it sounded Slavic or Balkan, something central European and points east who’s a saxophone player from Cleveland and he’s the best and yadda yadda freaking yadda. And something about a neighbor who gets his Sicilian heart and points south a-stirring, and they are new best buddies, and she’s a sweetheart, and I’ll love her, and she’s an ex-dancer or something, and she comes from Cleveland, and she’s a publicist now and has this new client who’s this saxophonist from Cleveland, and she’s got him a gig or showcase at Catalina’s and you have to be there because I told her (in a drunken moment I am sure) that you are a “jazz journalist” for that weekly whatever it is you write for and I promised you’d be there. Continue reading →

All out of vanilla Haagen-Dazs

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(2012)

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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They plow under everything in Hollywood

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(2012)

Went to Musso and Frank’s 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 ex’s, 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’s. 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. The world was going to end any minute.

Sometimes for dinner we’d scrape enough together for 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.

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 Franks, though, hasn’t changed. Not one whit. Not even the waiters. Certainly not the wallpaper. Or the menus. Or menu. What Charlie Chaplain 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’s 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, whose 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 Franks (they have valet parking now…that’s different) we wandered over to Hollywood Forever cemetery. 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.

Liquor store heaven

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(2015)

It was 1992 and I was the last guy out of my office building before the mob descended. Another two or three minutes and I would have spent the weekend up on the roof. I turned left onto Wilshire. The guy I’d sent packing just before me turned right and two blocks down was engulfed by a mob who tried to drag him out of his car for looking Korean. There was a gunshot that startled the crowd and he floored it, knocking people over and running over a few feet and aside from a busted window and some baseball bat dents on the hood, he was OK. I knew none of this as I drove around like an idiot sight seeing a bit on my way home. I headed straight east since the pillars of smoke were in every other direction. So many fires and not a lot of cops. Mostly no cops at all. Downtown I passed all kinds of National Guard and slipped through the hills, home. We picked up a 12 pack, my brother Lex came by and we spent the night drinking beer and watching the city burn on the news. Next day there was a riot party in the Hollywood Hills somewhere that was a blast and we all drank and smoked and ate and told our scary stories then rushed home to beat the curfew. Hollywood by then was full of cops and soldiers. Armed civilians patrolled neighborhoods. Circuit City was cleaned out. A lot of gunshots in the distance and a pall of smoke blowing over Silver Lake and we breathed in the fumes of a thousand liquor stores now in liquor store heaven.

A lady in a chiffon dress reading Thucydides

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(2013)

I’m sitting adjacent to an immense stack of books I’ve gotten cheap from the History Book Club and Scientific American Book Club. I take each along to work as I read them. I am literally — now there’s a pun — the only one carrying a book. Over the past year, out of the  hundreds and hundreds of fellow employees I’ve seen, I saw less than ten with a book in their hand. Ten. People don’t really read books anymore. They read things online — webzines, news sites, blogs, TMZ. Facebook. A little of this, a little of that. A million opening paragraphs, a little less beyond. A rare piece it is that finds readers in the last paragraph. Must be a big story, something juicy, or maybe one helluva writer. But books, no. Too much time, too much depth, too many words. We live in a different time. Hence those ten employees with a book in their hand. Ten out of a thousand. One per cent.  Continue reading →

Incredibly drunk writer

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(2013)

An incredibly drunk writer went off on me at a party last night. That’s not unusual, writers and drinking kind of go together, and writers love to talk and, when drunk, they love to argue. It’s their charm. But this was different. This was intense. She came out of nowhere and was suddenly there, right in my face, ranting. Ranted at me about the LA Weekly–which I haven’t written for in two years–and editors and the business and how nobody pays writers anymore. She began crying once or twice. Outright weeping another. A lot of incoherence. She had me cornered with my back to an incredibly steep drop down the hill and I couldn’t move. Or say anything. What do you say? You slip outside to smoke a cigar and some demented chick in an Attack of the 50 Foot Woman tee shirt starts ranting at you. Yelling, crying, cursing, weeping, confiding and telling me I’m awesome. I’m not sure where the awesome came from. I had never seen her before in my life. I finally managed to break away. I saw her inside later, tear streaked, broken hearted, inconsolable, shitfaced.  She avoided everyone and they her. She apparently made a beeline for her poor ex and totally went off him. He got the full treatment, without the awesomes. Ugly scene. Glad I missed it, or maybe I wish I’d been there for it. Because that was a great party. And if a great party doesn’t have a disaster or two it’s not a great party.

One time at a crowded anarchic bash at our house my wife Fyl slipped on a rug while dancing and fell and struck the coffee table. Tore a three inch gash in her back. This was the night that the seven foot tall homeless schizophrenic (who’d been off his meds for some time) suddenly hated Jews and women. He’d liked them fine earlier in the evening, been quite pleasant. But he’d been partying…. He wasn’t violent at all about it, just verbal, right to their faces. Intense, this big giant dude looming over chicks and telling them how much he hated all women. Odd, even for our parties. Then Fyl slipped and fell and the whole houseful of drunken stoned people went into a panicking herd mode. They shouted advice, orders and admonitions. Concerned en masse, even the schizo one. They crowded around to help, which was useful.  They crowded and freaked and weirded out and panicked. If I didn’t do what they said right now  then I was the worst husband ever. They followed me around the house, admonishing me as I tried to recruit somebody sober to take her to the emergency room. I finally had to do a Sgt. Bilko routine–Attention! Shut up! Attention! You! Shut the fuck up!–to get them to calm down and get out of the way of the front door so Fyl could get out. They massed there, in our tiny slip of an entrance hall, so tight they could barely move. I managed to get them out of there, not quite by force, but almost. Somebody took (a very calm) Fyl to the emergency room and someone took the (also suddenly calm) homeless guy back to the park he lived in. Fyl, stitched up, tough as nails, returned from the emergency room and resumed partying. On top of all that I’d forgotten to invite the guy who’d been at every party we ever threw. Every one. An omen, the inebriated Greek chorus said, you should have known. But how does one know ahead of time what one his forgetting? This is the stuff of Aeschylus, not a mere blogger. So to ameliorate Fate, the gods and the drunks, we threw another party the following week. The missing man was there, and all the people from the first party except the homeless guy.  They bitched at me for being a party nazi and yelling at them the week before. They all remembered themselves as being perfectly calm and logical at the time

Drunk people do that when they’re not drunk. Think they were logical. Remember things they can scarcely remember. See things through rosé colored glasses. Well, cheap red wine and beer colored glasses. If they’re drinking whiskey they can’t see anything at all.

I have a zillion more stories I could tell but I still know all the people. They still come to the parties. In fact I just deleted a charming anecdote involving a pretty lady and a pair of roller skates, but nevermind. And then there’s the time I accidentally punched out the shortest guy in the room. Totally by accident. My knuckles connected with his eye socket with an audible crunch. He dropped to the floor trying to draw a penalty, but it was my party so I couldn’t be thrown out. Got a lot of stares for unsportsmanlike behavior, though. And I’d done nothing. Totally innocent. But when the biggest guy in the room punches out the littlest no one believes the big guy is innocent. None of you do reading this. You’re thinking what a brute

My favorite party ever was at our pal Edwin’s place on the 4th of July some time ago. A bottle rocket set the hillside on fire and mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. With minutes it was a regular conflagration. The fire department helicopter showed up and dumped a load of water which missed the fire but completely soaked a guest. He came back sopping wet and disgusted. Those things look so accurate on TV. Some idiot hipster chick parked her car in the middle of the lane and ran off screaming. I remember she left the car door open and music blaring for who knows what reason. I saw mini-dressed party girls in brightly colored fuck me pumps trying to run down the street. Their heels clicked and clacked crazily on the pavement. The firefighters couldn’t get their trucks through and were pleading through megaphones for people to move their cars. A valiant bunch of party dudes got a hose and held it aloft to douse the flames which would have worked had it been connected to a water line. The young and hip were in a complete panic, though you can’t blame them, really. San Diego county had just gone up in flames, houses gutted, people dead, the moon a vivid orange. But the geezers couldn’t give a flying fuck. We sat around swilling beer and cooking hamburgers and cracking wise, having a helluva good time watching the show. A party-side view of a brush fire is a rare thing. They’re usually off in the distance engulfing houses but this was right across the street. Flashing lights and screaming sirens. The crackle of two-way radios. The sky filled with rockets and whizbangs and Roman candles. Whistling Petes shrieked like incoming shells and festive projectiles big as bombs exploded loudly. Someone had dragged an old Wurlitzer organ out on the lawn and above all the din you could hear the strains of Light My Fire.

Hours later some of the hipsters came back to retrieve things they’d left in the panic. Hats, ice chests, a purse, a boyfriend. The geezers made fun of them, not to be mean…well hell, of course it was just being mean. It was funny. The kids looked ashamed. Sometimes you have to be tough to have a good time. And so a crazy drunk lady flipping out last nite at Mona & Jeff’s was just the sign that the scene was rocking. Mona and Jeff would tell you that too. Anarchy is a good thing. We’re all old punk rockers anyway. We may not act like it, much, or look like it, but put a bunch of us together with too much beer and it’s fuck you, weirdness and laughter all night long.