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.

\

Nightmerica

It was 1985, yeah, we were right in the middle of the Eighties and living in America was everything we ran away from, colonial England. America finally built a class system and you were either in the upper classes with your nose in the air or the lower classes with a cocky peasant chip on your shoulder. “Vanity Fair” was the big magazine of the day, published by creepy gay Republicans and surprise, snobby Englishmen. Every issue canonized fascists like Imelda Marcos, Moammar Kadaffi, and Ron & Nancy Reagan. Yuppies were in style with their materialism and designer mania and it was cool to mock hippies, peace, love and ecology.

The Eighties were lonely and I spent many Sundays alone on the beach, tanning so I would feel sunny even though my disposition was gloomy. When I got to a good spot on the beach I pulled my jeans and t-shirt off and lay in the sand, my head resting against a bed of sand. I closed my eyes with my cool black hair falling in my face, my eyelids red and restful inside.

And the kids weren’t alright: rock music was absolute garbage in the Eighties, either New Wave nerds with their bleeping keyboards whining about Big Brother and paranoia, or Punk Rock jocks screaming their fat thick necks about Big Brother and paranoia. I wasn’t nerdy enough for New Wave and not caveman enough for Punk Rock. Goth was okay but I didn’t like drugs or fags called Damien with their clove cigarettes.

I bumped around from one temp assignment to another wondering if I had a future at all. All week long I’d check into one antiseptic firm after another in downtown LA: Atlantic Richfield, proofreading contracts, Thomas Cook travelers checks (working in their vault), Transamerica Corporation, yawn. I’d get my weekly check every Thursday and spend it on bad movies, bad records, and even worse nightclubs where I’d run into musicians I used to play with who got signed to the majors and would shamelessly snub me. It wasn’t a wonderful life.

The sky was cloudy and the sun was fighting its way through to shine down on me. The sea breeze was light and spicy. I could hear the ocean waves crashing like thunder and booming like the hooves of a thousand horses racing towards me.

The US Government wanted us to believe that they were the greatest society in the world and it was going to be a tough sell, given that our President cut off funding for programs to aid the elderly, shutting down countless institutions for the insane, and turning his back on AIDS research. And he had the blessing of the Revs. Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker. With all this apathy and arrogance I kept my fingers crossed and wished for a terrible calamity to befall the United States for their selfishness and xenophobia. Soon enough it would happen in New Orleans, in New York, even in smug Los Angeles. But not before I would suffer first, spending several years homeless and living on the streets and in jails. The past was very dark and the future had a long way to go before it would be bright again.

The sun finally broke through the clouds and its warmth engulfed me. I could hear the sea gulls shrieking in the sky as they flew in circles above me and around the empty beach.