Aladdin I. Shadow

A young man stood against the wall in front of a night club. It was after eleven o’clock at night.

Aladdin I. Shadow had platinum blonde hair and a chiseled face, which made him look like a young Greek god of sorts. He wore elephant flares that would have made him trip all over himself had it not been for the three inch platforms that he wore. The platform shoes were a dark gold with brass heels and soles and went Click Clack, Click Clack. When he walked he made a sound like a broken clock.

Tonight he wore a red and silver lurex shirt which he would open as far down as his mood permitted him. If his he felt alright the shirt would be buttoned midway down his chest, if he was down it could be buttoned up to the throat, and if he was really happy it would be buttoned down to the navel. This kept the boys happy and the girls even happier.

His mood was just so-so, hence the shirt open midway down his chest. He was a funny sort, not an actor but more of a reactor. This meant that he hung out a lot but didn't really instigate anything, making him instantly likeable to everyone. He went with the flow as long as someone else started it.

Mood was a very important component in his life. When he was up he was called Lad and when he was down he was simply called Shadow. Things were complicated in his mind but to others they probably looked simple. That’s the way things always look when you’re eighteen years old.

A tall girl with brown hair cut in a shag hooked her arm around his and without slowing down her walk pulled him into the club.
“What gives?” Lad asked her.
“You looked all glum and mopey just standing outside on the sidewalk all by yourself”, she said, topping it off with a sweet kiss to his face.
“You take me too seriously, Raggedy Jane”.
“No, you do!”

Raggedy Jane dressed like a big glam doll with huge red spots on her cheeks and large distended false eyelashes sticking out of a pale baby face looking like a doll gone berserk. Her clothes were a jumble of thrift shop left-behinds with some sharp glam fashions, so she’d tie a lumberjack shirt like a halter above a pair of glittery hot pants.

“Gimme a stick of gum!” she barked, going through the pockets of Lad’s tight pants.
“Gimme a second to give you one!” he barked back. He reached into his jacket and pulled out two sticks.
“Here, take two. That ought to keep your mouth full for a change”.
“Danke schoen!” she slugged, jamming the two sticks in her heavily lipsticked maw.

The club stank heavily of stale beer with the walls wrapped in cheap pine. Posters of Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan greeted them as they walked in. There were several lipsticked kiss marks around Mick Jagger’s crotch. Marc only had one. Further down the bar was a mirrored dance floor.

The DJ in the booth was playing “Dynamite” by Mud. The Chinn-Chapman style drums beat a deep, thick tattoo that penetrated every corner of the club.

“She comes in looking like dynamite”, the band wailed over the powerful drumbeat.

“I ALWAYS COME IN LOOKING LIKE DYNAMITE!” Jane yelled in Lad’s ear as they entered the fray. Kids were dancing and showing off with glitter on their cheeks and tops of metallic colors with high-rocketed shoes and boots intended to upstage each other with height.

They went into a hip-swinging dance until Raggedy Jane leaned over and saw a girl in the crowd and began waving her arms broadly like a lunatic.

“LITTLE DOT! LITTLE DOT! OVER HERE, WHORE!” Jane yelled, making Lad’s ears ring even louder. He turned slightly and saw their friend Little Dot somehow dancing and pivoting closer and closer towards them on the dance floor.

Little Dot earned her name because like the comic character wore nothing but polka dots, the louder the better. Her dresses, shoes and handbags were always in polka dots. Once she tried to bleach her hair to have polka dots but it nearly fell out completely, so she settled for a blonde Veronica Lake waterfall instead.

“Raggedy Jane! Aladdin!” Little Dot smiled, not missing a step to the Mud song as it faded and Showaddywaddy started up with their one good tune. Aladdin smiled quietly.

“Dot, I love your Garbo look tonight, how fantabulash!” Jane screamed, hugging Little Dot as showingly as possible.
“No, bitch, I’m Dietrich tonight, not Garbo!” Little Dot yelled back as they traded invisible kisses on each other’s cheeks.

“I’ll be right back”, Aladdin said as he walked off the floor towards the bar.

A tall boy with a fuzzy Afro and bright red overalls waved Lad over. “Hey, brother, long time no see!”
“Hey, Gunk! What are you drinking?”

The kid called Gunk made a bitter face and grumbled, “Ginger beer”.
Lad laughed and Gunk then smirked, “Want a sip?”

“No, I’ll wait until I’m old enough to drink real beer”.
“Hey, is your dad home?”
“No, he’s out with some broad in Murrieta Hot Springs or some shit like that”.
“Cool, man. We can raid his liquor cabinet while he’s out screwing Anita Bryant”.

Aladdin frowned. “Nah, he’s getting wise to me. I see pencil marks on the label now, so he suspects I’m jacking his sauce”. They both laughed. He looked at a round metallic disk on Gunk’s overall.
“Hey, you didn’t say anything about my Slade pin”, Gunk said. ” I made it myself”.
“It’s okay, I guess”, Aladdin said begrudgingly. It was a homemade creation in magic marker.

“What do you mean ‘it’s okay’? What’s wrong with it?”
“Well, you spelled everything right. If it’s Slade you’re supposed to misspell everything, like you’re trying to piss off your English teacher. ‘We’re all crazy’ is supposed to be spelled ‘WEER ALL CRAZEEE’”.
“Oh shit”, Gunk frowned.

“I’m going back on the floor”, Aladdin tapped his feet loudly. “Come on and join us!”
Gunk gaped at the girls on the dance floor.
“I want to bang Little Dot so bad”, Gunk gushed. “Put in a good word for me”.

“Little Dot doesn’t like sex. She’s so loaded all the time she doesn’t even remember what fucking means”.
“Don’t tell me that!”
“Bye”, Aladdin smiled as he danced through the crowd. The DJ moved into “Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls and the kids all screamed at the beginning like David Johansen.

He reached Raggedy Jane and Little Dot’s little circle and joined them.
“Where have you been?” Raggedy Jane wailed. “We’ve been just so severely traumatized without you!”
“I was talking to Gunk. He’s madly in love with Little Dot”.

Little Dot made a sour German face. “Nein to nerds! Nein to nerds! Ich nicht lieben du nerds!”
“Oh, she really thinks she’s Dietrich tonight!”
“That’s okay, he made a correctly spelled Slade button tonight”, Aladdin announced.
“SIE! SCHEISS DAS NERDEN!”

As Aladdin danced he scanned the room to see if he recognized his other friends, what few he had. Every once in a while he’s catch some old guy, old enough to be his father scamming up to some girl his age. It made him angry, and some even closely resembled his father in a weird way. It never was the same after his mother died three years ago.

Dancing to silly songs like Tiger Feet and My Coo-Ca-Choo was a narcotic that numbed him from the tragedy of losing his forty-year old mother to cancer. The loud colors of his clothes and the explosive music served as a benign shellshock from the grief he really felt. It didn’t hurt that he befriended his rich female classmates who accepted him like a brother, so he accepted as many female friends as he could.

With the surrogate brother role he was handed he kept his drinking at home while his surrogate sisters got as drunk and stoned as they wished. His dad had good taste in liquor so it didn’t bother him to stay sober. Besides, Hollywood cops scared him. They always seemed desperate to prove that they were tougher than the rest of the Los Angeles police force.

Cops hated the glam clubs and would occasionally raid the place with a few firemen to create the justification that attendance was unsafe, when in fact the occupancy level was not over exceeded at all. When the police and fire chiefs made their big production it always culminated at the cash register by the bar with the register ringing and some money would flash in and out of unknown hands.

Little Dot and Raggedy Jane lustfully posed with Virginia Slims hanging off their lipstick lips and air kissed to Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and stopped everything to scream out, “BABY JANE’S IN ACAPULCO WE ARE FLYING DOWN TO RIO!!!”
Smoke drifted out their skulls when they screamed.

****************

After the club closed they went down to the coffee shop down the block with the other kids. It was always a good idea for all the kids to go the same coffee shop to prevent the lowriders from picking on them. The car club kids always came in to Hollywood from their neighborhood to mess with the glam set.

The waitresses hated all the glam kids and always took their time handing out menus and taking their orders, their way of letting them now they weren’t welcome.

Jane, Dot and Aladdin took a table of their own.
“Oh look”, Jane frowned at the waitress. “We’re getting our menus fifty years later”. The waitress practically threw the garishly colored oversize plastic menus at them.

Little Dot spun every page of the menu like a speed freak. “Trash, trash, trash, trash, trashtrashtrash and more trash. Yuck!”
Aladdin smiled. “Why don’t you say it in German, Miss Dietrich?”
“It’s past midnight, sweetie I’m doing Carole Lombard now. Marlene was SO last night!”

Raggedy Jane stared at the menu with intensity. “Thousand Island or Ranch? The night has a thousand eyes!”
Little Dot lit up another Virginia Slim. “Miss Dot will have an iced tea and your salad crackers, dahlink”.
Raggedy Jane looked at Lad. “What’ll it be?”

“Grilled cheese sandwich with French fries”, Aladdin said.
Little Dot cackled. “That’s drunk food! You’re not even loaded!”
“I didn’t have dinner tonight. I’m pretty hungry”.

They waited another fifteen minutes for the waitress to make a cameo appearance. The other kids were getting pretty impatient with their service, too.

“Jesus, my stepdad comes around more often than this fucking waitress does”, Raggedy Jane grumbled. “Oh, here she comes”.

Their taciturn waitress took their order but didn’t bother to take their menus from them. The three teenagers simply took the menus and threw them into the booth next to them. The coffee shop hostess glared at them from across the lounge.

“Now, check your food before you eat it”, Jane advised her friends. “Someone may leave a special souvenir in there just to show you how pleased they are to serve us”.
“You betcha”, Little Dot puffed away.

CUT THAT’S A WRAP

EPILOGUE: The waitress took so long with their order that Little Dot got bored and sat on top of their table and sang "Falling In Love Again" looking bored and smoking languidly until the coffee shop hostess charged their booth and threw our friends out. They ended up going through a Jack In The Box, and that's the way it was.

America Drinks And Goes Home

Dizzy Dean played guitar in a Guns & Roses tribute band and my wife Ruthie made stage wear for him, so he put us on the guest list for an all-tribute band show at the House of Blues. Ruthie plus one; I was the plus one. We were going to see three tribute bands, curious to see who would look the most and sound the most like the real thing. There was a Poison tribute band, the other was a Judas Priest tribute band, and then there was the aforementioned Guns & Roses tribute band.

We were going slowly down the Strip towards the club, the traffic sludgy being that it was Friday night. All seemed to trudge along well until we had to stop at a red light across the street from The Star Strip, a notorious strip club.

In a vain effort to entice potential patrons to drop what they were doing and go across the street, a big-assed stripper in a halter top and ass-baring shorts in sky-high heels strutted onto the crosswalk. Lucky for her she still had the green light.

She went into a little dance, no a twitch, the kind an antelope does when stuck in a bear trap. Then she began twerking, pumping her big bubble butt ass up and down faster than a Dupont paint can mixer. The light changed to green for me, red for her. Still, she twerked in our faces.

“TURN IT LOOSE, WHORE!” I yelled.
“She’s not going to get out of the street”, Ruthie groaned.
“Oh yeah?”

I slammed my size 11 on the accelerator headed straight for Little Twerk. With absolute terror in her cheap blue contact lenses she jumped out of the way from my Murder Chariot. I missed her by that much.

It was a good thing we got to get on the guest list because we didn’t have enough to get in, not enough to drink anything, and just enough to pay for parking on an expensive Sunset Strip parking lot. The House of Blues sat on the Sunset Strip, with an old Mississippi Delta wooden shack frame house and old country porch sitting atop the massive concert hall. There was nothing country about the building – most of the customers were the same old gaggle of coke sniffing Porsche riding cosmos haunting the Strip since time began.

When we entered the club Thorny Rose, the Poison tribute band, were already up and playing loud enough to make an airport jealous. I nudged Ruthie and pointed up.
"Let's go upstairs!"
"Yeah!"

We walked up the stairs to the balcony with a few chunky girls dressed to the nines falling into us running downstairs.
"JESSICA, WAIT FOR ME!"
"Excuse you!" Ruthie yelled. "Bitch".

We pushed through the crowd in the balcony only to find an Olympic sized bar with patrons waiting three deep for their drinks. I looked above me and smiled.
"Hey, check it out!" I yelled. "There's a higher level and it's pretty empty!"

There was a higher level practically kissing the rafters of the barn-roofed club and there were a few scattered night clubbers here and there. Not crowded at all, so we made a bee-line to that level.

"I wish I had a drink", Ruthie complained. "It might make this place a little more bearable".
"Yeah, I know".
I looked below me at the ground floor of the club and there was a dense crowd of fans rocking out to the placebo looks and sounds of Thorny Rose. The guitarist was short and fat, looking more like Buddy Hackett with a wig than like C.C. Deville.

"I've heard of Unskinny Bop but this is ridiculous", I yelled into Ruthie's ear. Ruthie turned to me with some chewing gum.
"As long as we can't have anything to drink let's have some gum. Maybe it'll make things better!" she said. I guess it did.

We hung from the railing enjoying the show, and it was alright. Well, alright until more people began racing up to our level with their drinks in tow. Thorny Rose played their big Cat Dragged In song or whatever the hell it was and after a failed attempt at wringing an encore, got the boot from the sound man, who burbled over the PA, "THORNY ROSE, EVERYBODY....THORNY ROSE. NEXT UP, APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION!"

A big howl from the crowd and I looked down at the lower level to see the bar now five man deep.

A blonde girl with a drink in each hand snuck in next to us with someone who didn't look like a boyfriend. Her hair stuck up from sweat and her skin looked clammy. Her glasses were fogged up like a midnight harbor.
"HEY!!! IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!" she yelled, her eyes rolling up in her head. "WASN'T POISON GREAT? THOSE GUYS CAN REALLY ROCK THE HOUSE WHHHOOOOOOOO!!!!"

We both smiled with her and at her. Her male friend grabbed at one of her drinks.
"Let me have some of your drink, Marcy!" he yelled.
"NO, RANDY! YOU BOUGHT THIS JUST FOR ME! IT'S...MY BIRTHDAY!"
"Just a sip!"
"SHIT! ALL-RIGHT!"

Randy practically tore the plastic cup out of her cold, nearly dead fingers and took a rather long, generous sip from her drink.
"HEY, ASSHOLE! THAT WAS MORE THAN JUST A SIP! GIMME THAT!"
"Oh, okay! What the hell!" Randy was getting kind of drunk clammy himself.
"DON'T BOGART MY BIRTHDAY DRINK, DUDE! GET YOUR OWN!"
"You got two drinks, girl!"
"I - SAID!" Her eyes began closing down like she was ready to go to sleep. "GET YOUR OWN COCKTAIL, RAN-DEEEE!"

Finally the lights turned down again and the crowd cheered. The Wizard of Oz voice from the PA wryly yelled, "GIVE A WARM HOUSE OF BLUES WELCOME TO....APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION!"
"WOOOOO-HOOOOOOO!" Marcy hooted loud enough to split my already broken ear drums.

Appetite For Destruction came out to low, cold blue lights as the band cranked up the highly dramatic beginning to "Welcome To The Jungle". Dizzy Dean wore a top hat, black curly wig, dark sunglasses with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.

They slammed into that perennial metal classic when the fake Axl Rose went into his patented Jimmy Cagney soft shoe shuffle, swaying back and forth with the mike stand. Marcy lifted up her drink in the air and one-sixth of it sloshed on us.

"WOOOO-HOOOO! AXLLLLLLL!!!! HEY, I'M SORRY GUYS! IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!" Marcy yelled.
"It's no problem", Ruthie smiled. "We have to freshen up!"
"Let's get the fuck out of here!" I yelled in her ear.

Illustration by Derek Yaniger.

We quickly went down one level, the one by the bar, but the steps to the ground level was jammed with people and took a lot longer. For one thing one guy was pushing and shoving his girlfriend on the staircase.
"DAMMIT, MISSY, WHAT'S IT GOING TO TAKE TO MAKE YOU BELIEVE I LOVE YOU????" He then shoved her so hard I thought she was going to fall on me.

Ruthie was about to step down to the ground floor until I saw something grotty and yanked her by the arm back up on the stair case. "LOOK OUT!!!!"

We both looked down at a deep puddle of bubbly orange vomit with spiky white speckles sticking up from the mush. As soon as anybody stuck their foot in that sickness they would surely slip across the floor with their pants painted in that puke.

"YUCK!" Ruthie grabbed her nose and mouth. We traversed around the vomit puddle and walked around the heavily packed ground floor.

In the dark all over the club we could see overweight men in their thirties and forties wearing their best black tees bearing the emblem of their favorite band. Aging groupie faces were marching around in fishnet stockings and short skirts, sized too small for most of them.

We found a small area by the sound board and club goers jealous of our discovery kept trying to stand in our spot. The room stank of stale beer and the floor was sticky of not so dry drinks. There was even a faint stench of wee in the club, which greatly enhanced the drama of "Paradise City".

Because of our unintentional sobriety everything appeared clearer and sounded more vivid than ever. We processed people with disabled motor skills, pissed to the gills, and it crackled with a disturbing electricity. I took a look around and saw grotesques worthy of a George Grosz caricature.

Above the noise and smell of Clubland I started thinking: When I drank, did I ever act like this? Was I really that bad? I must have been the most unbearable asshole in the world. This is so bad I just want to call up everybody on the planet and apologize for ever getting drunk and obnoxious. This is the hardest wake-up call I've ever been handed.

The topper to the show was the acapella section of "Sweet Child O' Mine" WHERE WILL WE GO? WHERE WILL WE GO-OH-OH???? AYE-AYE-AYE! when a few club-going commandos began swinging at each other and the bouncers dove in like a pair of firefighters putting out a blazing skyscraper.

"I think I've heard enough", I yelled over the loud music. "How about you?"
"Yeah, let's go", Ruthie agreed. We spat out our gum in the bin, done with the show. As we exited the club I took one last look and swore I saw a cloud of steam rising in the air around the room.

When we got outside the stars popped from the dark might blue sky with harsh punctuations of glaring street lamps every few feet. The air was comparatively fresh and clean from the night club's olfactory cocktail of stale beer, urine and vomit. We got to the car, I pulled out of the lot and looked at Ruthie.
"So that's the House of Blues. I not only heard everything, I smelled it, too".
"Yeah, we got a lot of bang for our non-buck. Well, Dizzy was great!"
"Yes, he was". I drove down Sunset Boulevard thinking about club soda on ice with a splash of lime juice. Straight, no chaser.

WRANGLERS' CANYON/CRASH WALKER Double Novel Out Now!

Meet Crash Walker: a man too obtuse for trouble, too lazy to kill anyone, and in addition incredibly boorish, self-centered and incredibly good looking enough to earn contempt from everyone he meets, especially from other men. He is the star of my double novel set WRANGLERS' CANYON/CRASH WALKER.

The western novel format is an extremely limited one. Most stories from that era are rigidly defined; they have to be, of course, since they are confined to a specific point in time. The standard western tale has been told countless times via literature, television, radio shows and motion pictures for over a hundred years. The biggest challenge for me was to write something fresh within that classic genre.

I made a concerted effort to avoid the current nouveau Western clichés by drawing on a pair of disparate influences: With Wranglers' Canyon I went for a more surreal approach, so I used Alejandro Jodorowsky's classic film "El Topo" as a major influence, but more importantly I drew from the erotic horror films of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco.

As for our hero, Crash Walker, although he populates both novels, no two stories could be more different; in Wranglers' Canyon our hero is a floater, drifting between jobs as a cattle driver, ranch hand, rodeo rider, singing star, convicted criminal, ultimately promoting to Sheriff of Jonestown. He accepts the role forced on him.

In the second novel Crash Walker,which takes place 100 years later, he's a western television star in Hollywood during the post-JFK era. This time he’s the target of an ominous conspiracy to exploit him as a puppet politician propped up to serve a small Californian committee of powerful businessmen. In the second novel, unlike the first, he doesn’t accept the role forced on him.

He’s also charged with the murder of a right wing television star, making him simultaneously famous and notorious, but not quite the way he wants it. Through it all he films toy commercials, performs publicity stunts, makes public appearances, visits his mentally insane missile designer father, and dodges an even more mentally unstable ex-girlfriend.

Walker is even more of a fantasy figure in the second novel than in the first one, i.e. his name isn’t even real, it’s a showbiz name created by a casting agent. While the first novel challenges the bridge between fantasy and reality, the second one has its feet firmly planted in reality with our star earning his keep with fantasy.

TV westerns were a major pop culture force during the Sixties, putting our hero squarely in the center of the action in Hollywood, placing him at Sunset Boulevard parties, teen festivals by the beach and Hollywood movie premieres. If it happened in the Sixties then Crash Walker was most likely there.

The book you’re reading is presented in the double novel format so popular during the paperback publishing boom of the Forties and Fifties. Both novels have been joined together in one volume because in addition to starring Crash Walker they also have parallels in characterization and plot development. This was a surprising coincidence, given that both novels were written four years apart of each other.

In both novels Crash Walker responds to a whirlpool of turbulent change forced upon him by men of control, greed and societal pressure. These are tales about troubled times and the man who meets them head on.

Wranglers' Canyon/Crash Walker, Andy Seven’s double novel is available for $3.99 at all popular eBook retailers, including:
Amazon Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Wranglers-Canyon-Crash-Walker-Seven-ebook/dp/B0149J3P8Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1440213205&sr=1-1&keywords=9781483557540
iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/wranglers-canyon-crash-walker/id1032555968?mt=11
Nook (Barnes & Noble):
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wranglers-canyon-crash-walker-andy-seven/1122574654?ean=9781483557540
Oyster:
https://www.oysterbooks.com/book/APoGRc2kxCC2tR8NZvJNtm/wranglers-canyoncrash-walker

Each website provides a short sample - about four chapters worth - of the novel for previewing before purchase so you can see what deviltry is brewing in this shiny beast.

Fifty Years in Los Angeles

This is the year and that was the year and it all comes down to half a century of living in Los Angeles, mostly Hollywood. No, it doesn't all seem like yesterday; in fact it feels like several lifetimes ago. The Twentieth Century didn't fuck around, what with every decade feeling like another life spent.

How did I even get here? I was just a European boy living the Yankee life in Rhode Island and liking it. I was living in Kennedy Country (New England) and our man John F. Kennedy was in The White House. Everything seemed cool. My father was in the electronic designing department at Brown University in 1963. A few months later Kennedy was toast and so was New England for us.

My father joined the New Frontier headed towards outer space and the psychedelic landscape of Hollywood. He got a job offer from Aerospace in Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach, Manhattan Beach, Long Beach and all points south turned Southern California into a veritable Boomtown for Aerospace workers. My father heard the siren call to Boomtown USA, not mere gold but better, designing spacecraft, missiles and rocket appendages. Welcome to Los Angeles.

Sixties: My first home in Los Angeles was around West Hollywood in the Fairfax District...it was insane, we were sandwiched in between CBS Studios with its ever watching eye, the Silent Theatre and the enormous Pan Pacific Auditorium...we'd have dinner at Canter's and I'd stare at the freaks with their long hair and beads...my Mom said, "Andy, don't stare"...people were getting pissed...I remember watching the Watts riots on TV and my parents said "Stay home today"...

Two years later we moved to Beverly Hills...I went to a modern Hebrew school where half the kids looked like they came from mixed marriages but I didn't care.... they were building Century City down the street and LBJ was going to speak at the Century Plaza Hotel with kids marching down Olympic Boulevard, protesting the Vietnam War...we were too broke to do anything big on Saturday night my dad took us out for a ride (families used to do that sort of thing) down Sunset Boulevard which was crowded as hell, especially since there were so many paddy wagons pulled up in front of Pandora's Box on the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights.

Seventies: My teenage years were spent in endless nights at Rodney's English Disco and watching countless glitter bands at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium...glam rock seemed like it would never die, it just got bigger and crazier and I got into the scene, platforms and velvet flares...Westside days spent going to summer school at University High and Rhino Records in Westwood...taking endless jazz music courses, harmony theory and the whole damn Big Band thing at the Dick Grove School of Music in North Hollywood...

Then driving down to gay discos like The Other Side in West Hollywood...Santa Monica Boulevard haunts like a weird old dream even to this day...and then there were punk rock memories at The Masque, playing there and even living there with Spazz Attack and Brendan Mullen, moving to punk palace The Canterbury, big mistake but so what?

Eighties: Disappointed by the decay of Hollywood punk and shitty new wave I retreated into endless movie shows at The Beverly Center, sitting in my car in the darkness of the Centinela Drive-In with the Studio Drive-in across the street, right by LAX so during the film you'd watch the jet planes swooping down for a landing...

I lived across the street from A&M Records on la Brea Avenue in a trashy courtyard next door to a massage parlor..one rainy night I found a hundred dollar bill by the parking lot...bought a leather-bound saxophone case with it...Rajis was the rockin' club by the end of the decade and I watched The Nymphs, Haunted Garage and Pygmy Love Circus, the greatest club ever...I started my own band Trash Can School and we recorded at Radio Tokyo in Venice for about three years (1988-1990)...it was epic.

Nineties: My band played with some amazing bands at The Shamrock and Jabber Jaw, I'll never forget them...I lived at The Gramercy Apartments in Koreatown, apartments that recalled every noir film you've ever seen...Elisha Cook Jr. must have drifted through the walls several times...after I broke the band up I moved to the Miracle Mile and went to every lowbrow art show at Luz De Jesus on Melrose Avenue, there was Pablo and Pizz and Robt. Williams and XNO and Billy Shire, Golden Apple Comics representing, too...

Then there was Johnny Legend and Eric Caidin putting on sleazy movie shows at the Florentine Gardens on Sundays...I married Rebecca and we created fashions for The Fetish Ball and every other kinky fetish event in town... we also had a band called Cockfight and made a funny video with Ron Jeremy, it was clean, it's cool.

Y2K: Rebecca and I worked morning, noon and night...dealing with bullshitting imagineers who knew nothing about art, smarmy stylists who knew nothing about fashion and a lot of TV people who wanted to interview us and show our clothes....then there were the Comic-Con assholes who knew nothing about anything and the money slowed down so I worked at Dodger Stadium for awhile in the executive office designing their merchandise catalog...the palm trees circled around Dodger Stadium looked like a dreadlocked tribe of dinosaurs looming over the city...bored with that I drifted into a 15-year career with Los Angeles County....played my last show ever at Headline Records on Melrose Avenue...LA, always LA.

Teens: So fifty years later I still eat at Canter's and haunt the streets of West Hollywood. Now I'm a writer, writing, always writing...tell the story even if no one wants to listen, read the words of God even if no one believes anymore...making clothes for myself and other people, hitting the Garment District in the early morning...although there were a few detours here and there in New York and Europe I always returned to Los Angeles like an old habit I couldn't shake off..I'm still in Hollywood...still making noise, still making trouble...take my advice, don't forget to go to the beach.

\

"Iggy, We Hardly Knew Ye"

When I was eighteen years old I frequented a club called Rodney’s English Disco, which was on the Sunset Strip. It was hosted by a man named Rodney Bingenheimer, who was apparently the world’s biggest rock fanboy and official welcome wagon to visiting bands in L.A. I went there on weeknights because the admission was free, on a dead night the drinks were sometimes free as well, and things were low-key enough to catch people at their least pretentious, posey and unguarded selves. And some nights were more unguarded than others.
There was the night a Congressman from a Midwestern state came by (with bodyguard). He asked Rodney what’s the deal, and within minutes a groupie named Lori Mattix came by and disappeared in the back room with the Congressman and Rodney. Nothing much was thought of it then, however, a few months later, there was posted on the wall of the club a letter with the official Congressional Seal on it. It was from the same Congressman thanking Rodney for showing him such an entertaining evening. I had a nice chortle over that. The most unguarded nights, however, were the Iggy Pop experiences.
On a slow Tuesday night Iggy came in, but I didn’t believe it was him. I couldn’t believe Iggy was so short and stocky. I was used to seeing him as he appeared on the cover of “Raw Power”, platinum-haired and silver jeaned. Tonight he showed up in blue denim dungarees and his hair was dyed black. Worst of all, he wore a T-shirt with his face on it (old Stooges photo circa 1970). Now, you have to bear in mind the Stooges had broken up, Iggy didn’t have a band or a solo career yet, and frankly, he was a drunken, stoned mess. I sat by the bar and he leaped onto the stool next to mine, craning his head towards me and staring right at me, hoping I’d make the association between his face and the image on the shirt. I was tired, in a bad mood, and didn’t care.

There were four other patrons in the club besides myself, all at the bar. No one would indulge Iggy by acknowledging him. In fact, everyone there seemed to think he was a washed-up, useless loser. Rodney was playing records in the DJ booth, which was an elevated platform above the dance floor. Iggy went up to the DJ booth and talked to Rodney.
Rodney picked up the club mike and announced to all five of us, “Okay! Tonight we have a special guest star, live at Rodney’s English Disco, it’s Iggy Pop!” Side 2 of “Raw Power” started playing over the PA and Iggy sang along to it on the club mike, or at least attempted to. He was on downers and seemed to have trouble spitting out the words when he wasn’t having problems remembering them. Here’s a partial transcription:
“Dance to the b-b-b-beat of the...uh....lose sleep...uh....Raw Power is...uh....s-s-s-sure to come...uh....” Two girls at the bar laughed derisively at this pathetic display. They were with an Englishman who found the whole affair, well, “Disgusting!” he spat bitterly. “Fucking failure! What a disgraceful bastard!”
The next tune on Side 2 was “I Need Somebody”. Iggy struggled with the words once more. “I need...uh....just l-l-l-like, uh, y-y-y-you....”, he stammered statically.
“Oh, this is just awful”, the girls at the bar moaned, in between shrieks of laughter.
“What a bloody egomaniac, he is”, the horrified Englishman grunted angrily. “Wearing a T-shirt with his bleedin’ face on it!”
Next song: “Shake Appeal”. Iggy fared just as badly on the vocals, loud and distorted, the record playing over the PA too quietly to hide how incredibly bad he was. He lasted another two songs (with more running commentary from the Brit and his two clubmates), and then he called it a night. I felt sorry for him, but I found the whole scene fascinating. This was the same guy I’d see on the bus sitting in front with all the old ladies. He’d always get off at the Strip, walking down the street with the saddest, most dejected look I’ve ever seen.
One month later, an awful biker bar hippie blues band played Rodney’s. They were set up on the dance floor. Iggy pushed up through the crowd, back in platinum blonde hair, and bum-rushed the bandstand in dress, high heels (three sizes too big), and wearing full women’s make-up. He didn’t look very feminine, if anything the drag merely exaggerated how masculine he really looked. While the band blasted through another inept hippie blues workout, Iggy would stand in front of the bandstand contorting his body, doing handstands and cartwheels in front of the band and posing like a Vogue Magazine model, predating “Voguing” by a good 15 years!
Bravo, Iggy! While the singer was perfecting his worst Jim Morrison blues-man delivery, Iggy grabbed the mike from him and hooted a hog-calling yell.
“WOOH AWWRIGGGHT! WELLIFEELAWRIGGHT!” Iggy bellowed. “GOOOBLOOZMAYUNNN!” Iggy roared.
The fat hippie blues singer was terrified by this insane drag queen crashing his set. The audience loved it because Iggy woke everybody up from their deep slumber the blues band was inducing, I went home shortly after this but found out several days later that at the end of that night Iggy was grabbed up by the police and jailed for female impersonation and being under the influence of drugs. Needless to say, life got better for Iggy Pop and we’re all the better for it.