May-December Continuum

One summer night I was driving home in my car, not paying much attention to the other cars driving by me. In the lane next to me was a car of about four teenage girls, listening to music and having fun. The car started driving side by side with me, not slowing down or speeding up from me.

When we stopped by the light one of the girls leaned out of her window.
"HEY!" she smiled. "What's up! D'you wanna hang out?"
I just smiled back. If she knew how old I was she wouldn't have started up, or would she?
"Hey! C'MON!" she laughed. She was probably drunk or something, but when they realized I wasn't interested, they pulled away and drove off.

This made me think of when I was younger and it wasn't unusual to see a 16-year old girl date a 22-year old guy. It was a generally accepted thing in my high school; it didn't seem like a big deal.

Around the time this carload of cooze happened I read Pamela Des Barres' memoir I'm With The Band, where she writes page after page of dating older rock stars even though she was hovering 16 to 18 years of age. Her friends in The GTOs shared similar relationships, and Frank Zappa even responded with songs like Motherly Love ("...you know it doesn't bother me at all that you're only 18 years old..").

While the male is always characterized as being a lech it's always been a fact that many younger girls are attracted to older guys, sometimes much older guys. At what point did this become viewed as some sort of dirty, sinister thing?

Altogether now...THE INTERNET. That's right, ever since social networking as dictated to one and all what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, we now have to listen to bluenoses proclaim any man dating a young lady as filthy and that immortal Internet word, CREEPY. The Internet loves that word, that and "disturbing".

Listen, if a teenage girl wants to date a rich, old crone I couldn't care less. She's getting what she wants and you know he's getting what he wants and who the fuck is anybody to judge either of them? By the way, if an older woman with stacks of cash wanted to cruise me I'd definitely let her dock in my harbor. Why not?

I fucking hate the Internet. I now have to read how Kim Fowley, a great artist, is a "rapist" (nobody said shit when he was alive...interesting), Woody Allen, another devil, etc. Every man, thanks to the Internet is now a pervert. It's boring and I don't care.

It doesn't matter that Charlie Chaplin, Steve Cochran, and countless other stars married or dating far below their age group and their women didn't give a damn, either. When do you think this whole shame circus started? You guessed it, social networking.

Look, I'm not going to hang around some high school tomorrow looking for ladies to hustle, but I'm not going to flip out over their lack of maturity. And see the average American nightclub keep an underage girl from getting in...please, everything's permitted and it's a consensual thing. Just stay off Twitter and Facebook or they'll stone you like an Islamic tribunal.

A Proper Burial

I was tracing and cutting fabric in the workroom when Dovina came in and happily announced to me, "I'm back! And I've got some cool swag!"

She came back from the blacksmith's shop and he always packed her down with weird metal objects we sometimes could use and usually couldn't. The girl came back to her workroom with bags filled with metal bracelets, bizarre rings that could be used for notions, and everything else imaginable.

What caught my attention, though, was a tiny plastic shopping bag she pulled out of her handbag. A furry spotted paw stuck out of the shopping bag.
"What's that?"
"Oh, look at this. Timothy was going to throw this in the trash and I said, 'Don't you dare!', and he said, 'Do you really want this?' I figured he needed a home".

Smiling, she pulled out a pelt of a bobcat, all four paws, tail and head intact. The head exposed a snarling cat face without a lower jaw. Whatever face the cat made at the time of its death and subsequent skinning, it didn't look terribly happy, gold eyes blazing and face permanently twisted in a snarl of anger that was there for keeps.

"Now, let's see, I think I'll put it...over here!" She did an eenie-meenie-miney-moe spin around the room until she found a red plastic hook around the sewing machine to hang the pelt on.
"There!" she smiled. "What do you think?"
"Well, it'll definitely have something to look at. It already has a disapproving look on its face".

For the next few days I came in working to the spectacle of having dead bobcat with face giving me a Fuck You look all day. It wasn't a Jean Paul Gaultier moment but I simply shut up and dealt with it.

Before I go any further let me explain a thing about Dovina. The relatives on her mother's side practiced witchcraft and a few of the relatives on her father's side practiced voodoo. There was also the time someone came over with a toy voodoo doll and had a power outage the next day along with a few other technical malfunctions in the house. And then there was the time she gave me a $2 dollar bill. I got rid of it right away at the market. Needless to say, the apples I bought all had brown, rotten centers in the middle. Hmmm.

Dovina slammed down the phone after getting yelled at by Miss Prewett, one of her fussier clients.
"Oh, that bitch! I was up all night sewing that stupid dress for her and now she says it doesn't fit her and I don't know how to sew! That cunt".
Her cell phone rang a little perky jingle. "Hello? This is she! Hi, how are you. What? They told me it was good. Insufficient funds? Ughhhh..."

Another client wrote her a bounced check and now she had to get on the phone and get them to pay cash to cover the bad check. The next day she appraised my work. "No, No, NO! All wrong. Do it again!"
Dovina took the dress and threw it in my face.
"Don't throw shit in my face!"
"My clients demand a certain standard from me and you can't deliver", she snarled.
"Oh, like the way you delivered to Miss Prewett?"
"FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!!! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOM! NOW!"

We fought like crazy for the next few days, and ironically kissed and made up in the apartment we had next door.
One week later: "Hey, why don't you put away that pelt? It's freaking people out".
"I don't know", she moaned behind her sewing machine. "It's kind of cute. Puddy Tat's so lonesome".

"Please put it away. Seriously, Dovina. The customers aren't cool with it".
She finally broke down and put away the pelt.
"Well! You won't have to worry about him any more. He's gone for good".

The fighting gradually stopped, the checks were all good and the customers were a little more civilized (most of the time; you can't change that much). Things were relatively back to normal.

But then things got weird, really weird. She went back to telling me I couldn't sew or do anything useful. She began sewing with all the lights out. Nobody could work with her because the workroom was draped in darkness. She hired inexperienced women to assist her and would quietly complain about them behind their backs. And then she simply left town and abandoned me.

The workroom was gutted and a new tenant moved into the space. It was like the workroom ceased to exist. Dovina now lived abroad with her parents and had no desire to ever see me again.

Fast forward two years later and I'm in Dovina's room, going through her things, all left behind for me to sort out. There was fabric, notions, belts, sewing needles, all matter of implements. I opened up box after box, storage container after storage container.

I saw a tiny pink plastic shopping bag at the bottom of a storage container. I felt something soft in it. I pulled it out, a thin spotted tail followed by a pair of furry paws and then topped with a snarling cat face with pointy ears. The bobcat was still in the house, looking right at me, staring straight at me with nothing but hate on its face.

It was then that I decided to finally do the humanitarian thing for this poor creature. I marched it down in its pink plastic bag to the dumpster and threw it in. From there on in it would be picked up by the Los Angeles Sanitation Department, dumped in the Disposal Grounds and given a proper burial. And then maybe the sun will finally set down on the moon.

Lovers Come and Gone

The world is full of love songs about people you love madly and the ones that broke your heart and the ones you drop as well as the ones that drop you in return, and…it got me to thinking. I want to talk about the loves I’ve had in the past. Real and imagined (the imagined ones can be defined as Internet Lolitas with the accent on the first three letters LOL).

There are the girls you ran after and the ones that ran after you. You worried about looking like a stalker when you ran after that girl, but when a girl runs after you she makes no bones about the fact that she’s stalking you. She’ll even tell you straight out, “I’m stalking you”. “Don’t you wish you never met her”, as PJ Harvey sang in Rid Of Me. Well, sometimes. It’s sexy when it’s the girl you want, but if she’s not then it’s a scene from Play Misty For Me, all signs of manic desire, obsession, unhealthy fixation, so on and so forth.

But I digress: I’m driving up Pacific Coast Highway making a delivery, staring at the big, blue waves and listening to The Flying Burrito Brothers. Feeling like such a California boy. “She’s the devil in disguise, she’s been telling dirty lies…she calls me ‘The Man In The Fog’, ‘Take me’, she says, ‘Just one time’”.

I think about the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers, where he visits a few of his ex-girlfriends to find out who is the mother of his only child. In his quest for the mystery woman we see him visiting a biker mama, a high-strung animal psychiatrist, a reformed hippie turned Stepford Wife, and an over the hill dragstrip queen.

None of the women are connected in any way, and collectively represent the phases of his life and what interested him most at that time about women. I think we’re all like that in many ways, and in that respect I can say that what interested me in a woman thirty years ago would never interest me now, because I’ve changed. I think we’re all like that; we change our taste in people, as we do in music or films.

People search endlessly for someone to love, not because they lack independence, but because who they choose to be with marks a milestone in their life. To live an entire life without love is a life lived without reference or signposts.

But I digress: Drove for 11 hours straight yesterday, and the last job was delivering some fashion over the hill from Laurel Canyon. It was pitch black and I was already tired and felt myself floating in the darkness up the canyon and when the job was done I drove back down the canyon, floating in the darkness and feeling like a Laurel Canyon ghost. It was a beautiful feeling.

There were the girls that made me cry and the ones I made cry, but above all the ones that gave me fire, inspired me, great pretenders of the muse…some of them were the real thing and others who just didn’t have it.

I think about people who have love all the time and others who never get any, and even worse, the ones who have to fight for it, like beggars in a tent camp. Do the people who never have love dream pleasant dreams or is life just a long nightmare for them? I wonder.

P.S. Many of the girls I've loved are either still single, a few are divorced, and most of them have gone mad. What’s it all about? You will know love and love will drive you mad, but loneliness is worse.

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.