Story Telling Time

This one wants to cheat on her boyfriend
with me and I
This one wants to cheat on her husband
with myself and me

They have to tell a story
"he passes out and farts after he's done"
"he's not a real man"
"he goes to strip clubs but laughs at me in a bikini"
Shakespearean tragedies
these aren't the merry wives of windsor

I'm the cheat sheet
when they cheat
they want andy
andy andy seven drive me to heaven

Unhappy women
shower in my spiderweb sperm
spreading my juice
all over their breasts
smearing it on their thighs
using my jizz for lipstick
while screaming about
their shitty boyfriends

Andy Seven Ltd. · Velvet Candybar

20 Years of Him, 20 Years Of Her

This week marks our 20th Wedding Anniversary, a marriage built on love, support and unlimited creativity. In the twenty years we have spent together we have supported each other and inspired each other to do our best work. My marriage to Rebecca has seen so much in the past 20 years: a band together (Cockfight), collaborative work together in clothes design, TV show appearances and videos, the worst earthquake in Los Angeles’ history, paintings I couldn’t finish so she completed them for me and it goes on and on. The creativity never ends. More importantly she’s the nicest girl I’ve ever met.

People ask us what do we do to stay together and the answer’s so simple it’s ridiculous. I wanted to marry someone who understood me and I didn’t have to explain myself every five minutes to her. She didn’t have to do that to me, either, because we both got it. I didn’t want to be involved with someone different than me. I guess it was the old punk rock tribe mentality; you keep to your own people and never stray too far from the camp. Once you do you’re fucked.

It was ironic that by the time I met Rebecca I was through running after girls in bands, whom I found to be all selfish, stupid and worthless, so it was funny I didn't realize she was the same Rebecca from Frightwig. She was so different from the idiot Hollywood girls that I’d wasted my time trying to be friends with. She was smart, she was funny, and she drew better cartoons and comics than anybody I’d ever met.

I liked Rebecca right away because she was the classic punk rock tomboy girl I’ve always liked, the kind Jaime Hernandez always championed in his Love & Rockets comic, which not surprisingly, Rebecca turned me on to. I’ve always had a theory that frilly girls were New Wave and tomboys were punk rock. She was also the only girl I met that seemed impressed with my punk rock record, video and comic book collections. She knew more about superheroes than I did! In 1992 it was still considered uncool for pretty girls to like comics, so she was definitely special. Actually, I first saw her at Golden Apple Comics in March of 1992. One year later we were married.

Our wedding was at the LA County Superior Court building where the Registrar-Recorder’s office was located. Weddings were held in the building at the time, not anymore, but since it was the Friday before Valentine’s Day the crowd of people waiting to get hitched was huge. A judge called us in his office with two witnesses, and just like a Justice of the Peace in the movies pronounced us husband and wife. I got her an awesome ring with colored stones, an Amethyst, a Blue Topaz, and a Citrine with a gorgeous setting. We were married on Lincoln’s Birthday, and it guess it was symbolic cause we freed each other by getting married, haw haw.

The following night we had a big party in Culver City and all our punk rock pals were there. It even made the gossip column in the LA Weekly, so that week we were punk rock news. Our marriage split Hollywood hipsters straight down the middle: some said we’d never last and some admired the fact that our marriage was so solid and that they could rely on us being a couple forever. One of the most memorable moments I can recall was when we sat in the darkness of Bar Deluxe in 1999 and seated across from us were Lux Interior and Poison Ivy, holding hands like an old couple and being happy because nobody noticed them. At that moment I understood how great perseverance was for two people who’ve been together forever.

All nerdiness aside, I don’t recall us ever having more than a small handful of arguments, pretty minor over the course of 20 years, and she’s even less boy crazy than I’ve been girl crazy, so infidelity has never been an issue. Some couples act like they’re always looking for someone else, but we never did. As far as I’m concerned Rebecca’s always been the perfect girl for me.

Top photograph by Carlos Serrao.

You Goddamn Subversive Kids!

Let’s be honest, people are peculiar about getting married. Forget about the baseball game proposals, is there anything scarier than some douche in a chick flick asking his girl, “Honey I think we should grow old together”.
Holy shit, is there anything scarier than a bickering old couple? That’s romantic? You really want to picture yourself fifty years from now, spaced out and smelly, arguing with some old cunt you’ve been stitched to for fifty years?
The worst part to getting married, ironically enough, is the engagement. Before we got married, people were so dramatically opposed to our wedding we actually had to be sneaky about it.

The Engagement: Rebecca’s parents essentially hated any guy that dated her, and she had an ex-boyfriend that threatened to call Immigration on her and have her deported. I, on the other hand, did not have my father’s blessing. When I leaked, no oozed out the information to my older brother I was getting married, I added, “By the way, before you meet her, I ought to let you know, she’s black”.
My older brother passed on the news to my father, who bristled, “She’s black? What??? It won’t last! Typical Hollywood marriage, it will fall apart”.
On the other hand, her family was less than thrilled to hear Rebecca was marrying a Jew.
When she oozed out the information to her Hollywood scenester friends she was getting married her phone rang off the hook. Late at night. From her ex-boyfriends. She let the answering machine take the calls, and we’d listen to their whiny voices, “Heyyyy, Rebecca”, “Rebecca, I saw this foxy girl the other day, she was hawtttttt, when she turned around it was yooouuuuu”…we lay in bed and laughed like devils at these dorks.
Rebecca played in a band for something like 5 minutes with a girl I used to date, and she said, “Ugh, Andy Seven, he’s totally in love with me, what a freak!”
“Really? We’re getting married in a few months”.
“Oh! Well!” she flustered, “Uh, harrumph, he’s very special, you know. He has a private side to him, that you know, uh, nobody else knows about that makes him so special”.
Yeah, bullshit.
The rest of Rebecca’s friends were Echo Park gays that thought I knew nothing about homosexuality and would be shocked by their behavior. I don’t know where they got that impression but they kept camping it up like a drag queen’s convention every time they’d see me.
“Girl, my ovary is killing me!”
“Honey, my titty rings are so on fire!!!”
Even that idiot Eric Erlandson from flop group Hole weighed in by saying, “Andy Seven??? What’s Rebecca doing with Andy Seven??”
“Why? What’s wrong with Andy Seven?”
“Don’t you know???” Articulate bastard, isn’t he? That must explain why Drew Barrymore dumped him in less than four months. He must know his women!

The Welding, uh Wedding: We got married at L.A. County Superior Court, leaving religion out of the marriage process. With two witnesses present, it was a long, slow process because we got married on Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12). Since Valentine’s Day fell on a Sunday we decided Honest Abe’s Birthday would be the next best thing (Friday). Everybody had the same idea, so we sat on the waiting room floor with 100 other couples. Some of them wore bridal dresses with cute little mija flower girls standing by.
What slowed everything down was a gay couple (who protested the gay marriage ban) at the front door of the office and held up proceedings for everybody.
When we finally made our vows Rebecca laughed through the whole thing with tears in her eyes. I guess she was happy.
Just so we wouldn’t leave anybody out of our wedding ceremony we had a wedding party the next night in Culver City (Palms, actually). All of our friends were there, and Flipside Magazine took pictures for publication in their next issue. The next day Courtney Love phoned Rebecca, “Are you really married to Andy? How ‘good’ is he?”
I never did like Hole.
Fifteen years later we’re still married, lasting longer than most marriages and with the enmity of our families. It’s ironic to think that the most subversive thing I ever did in my life was get married. One thing's for certain: if we grow old together we’ll never look it, because when you’re happy you always feel young.