Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Soffee, Anne Thomas.
Nerd girl rocks paradise city : a true story of faking it in hair metal L.A./
Anne Thomas Soffee.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-55652-586-9
1. Soffee, Anne Thomas.
2. Groupies-California-Los Angeles-Biography.
3. Narcotic addicts—California—Los Angeles—Biography.
4. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Biography.
5. Richmond (Va.)—Biography. I. Title.
CT275.S5888A3 2005
979.4’94053’092—dc22 2005008628
Names, Real and Otherwise
Being a celebrity gets you a lot of perks, but it also means when you act up in public, people get to talk about it. Names of the famous and infamous have not been changed. As for my friends, associates, and partners in crime, I have generally changed names, physical characteristics, and identifying details unless they requested otherwise, and I thank those who requested otherwise for being good eggs. In making these changes I have tried to remain true to the spirit of What Actually Happened as much as I could.
Additionally, I am sure that hard-line Big Book thumpers are waiting to take me to task (again) for breaking the Eleventh Tradition and mentioning Alcoholics Anonymous by name instead of using the approved euphemism “a twelve-step program.” This was an artistic choice that I did not make lightly. In short, everyone knows what “a twelve-step program” means, and in the end I chose to sacrifice anonymity in order to tell my story clearly and succinctly. If your recovery panties are all in a bunch about it, maybe you should talk to your sponsor about why you’re so concerned about my anonymity.
Cover and interior design: Mel Kupfer
Cover image: © Erika Dufour/LuckyPix
© 2005 Anne Thomas Soffee
All rights reserved
First edition
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 1-55652-586-9
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
With love to my husband, Tad Hill,
who doesn’t tease me (much) about my past
contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
“That Girl Has a Ring in Her Nose”
Hipster Backlash and Metal Without Irony
1
“I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”
King-Sized Beds and the King Himself on the Road to L.A.
2
Confessions of a Reluctant Danzig Bimbo
“Sorry, Kid, We Don’t Speak Irony”
3
Strippers, Clown Rooms, and Danzig Among the Mangoes
Day Jobs and Night Moves on Hollywood and Vine
4
Payola Means Never Having to Say “You Suck”
Where Everybody Knows Your Name Except for the Girl in the Leather Bra
5
Idle Worship
Getting Punk’d Ten Years Before Ashton Kutcher
6
I, Industry Weasel
Gabba Gabba, We Accept You, We Accept You, One of Us
7
There Goes the Neighborhood
The Smell of Hairspray Gives Way to Teen Spirit
8
Last Call
L.A. Throws Me the Least Festive Farewell Party Imaginable
EPILOGUE
Tattoo Me
What the World Needs Now Is Olallaberry Pie
acknowledgments
first and foremost, I offer humble thanks, apologies, and miss yous to all of my L.A. people: Marcia DePriest, David and Margaret Perry, Wayne Pemberton and Tye Smith, Andrew Lucchesi, Brian Frehner, Alex Almanza and the whole mediting crew, Triza Hogsett, Bud Thomas and everyone at the Blacklite, John Sykes, and Patrice Sena, to whom I owe more than I can say.
Between here and there, I tip my hat to Brigit Owers, Dave Schools, and Jim Morris, for putting me up and putting up with me.
Years later and miles away, I owe huge thanks to the people who have been super cool to me when I needed it most (and, in some cases, deserved it the least): Janiece Bernardini, Fran Tribble, Lucy Smith, Auntie Rocky, Karen Riddle, Melissa Burgess, Sabrina Starke, Vickie Holpe, Jeff Gordon, Lynn Barco, Betty and Raymond Millsaps, Randy Hallman, Tom DeHaven, Cynthia McMullen, John Chapin, Claudia Brookman, Sylvia Sichel, Tom Robbins, Mary Dyer Patillo, and Heather Short. Big thanks also to Bishop Walker, Doug Blanchard, Laura LaTour, Woodrow Hill, Kevin Musselman, Marilyn Flanagan, Stacey Ricks, and all the other cool people I met (and re-met) on book tour—you guys rock!
I couldn’t get this done without such a bang-up crew. Seriously. I couldn’t. I am completely beholden to Jane Dystel and everyone at Dystel and Goderich, and, at Chicago Review Press, Cynthia Sherry, the indefatigable Catherine Bosin, Elizbeth Malzahn, and Sara Hoerdeman, and the coolest editor ever, Lisa Rosenthal, who actually takes the time to look up Stiv Bators because that’s the kind of thorough gal she is.
And, finally, to my family, who continue to tolerate my public disclosures with grace and patience. George Soffee, Kevin and Christy Stone, Chuck and Mooty Jones, Mark Gershman, Herbert Gershman, Jason and Xine Soffee, Gary and Holly Bohannon, and, of course and always, extra big and grateful love to Ronnie and Dot Soffee. Apologies to my parents for writing another memoir. Don’t forget, graduate school was your idea! Sincere and sheepish thanks to Rita and Jathan Stone, who I hope will overlook the scandalous content of this volume and instead focus on my excellent grammar and occasional literary references. In fact, you two should probably just stop reading here.
in memoriam
Hunter S. Thompson, Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee Ramone, Joe Strummer, Stiv Bators, Johnny Thunders, Elvis Presley, and, of course, Lester Bangs
prologue
“That Girl Has a Ring in Her Nose”
Hipster Backlash and Metal Without Irony
FRESHMAN YEAR
“Could we please not listen to the Fuck You Music right now?” Maura, my long-suffering freshman roommate, begs for a reprieve from Metallic KO as she looks up from her desk full of calculus notes. Her assessment of my choice of music is right on; I got heckled by a bunch of frat boys again on my way back from the dining hall, and I am working out my aggression and disenfranchisement to Iggy and the Stooges, out of place as they may be here among the august halls of the College of William and Mary in colonial Williamsburg. I shrug my shoulders. I’m not deliberately trying to make life hard for Maura, but some things just call for Raw Power, and frat boys screaming “weirdo chick” is one of those things. If I’m stuck here at Chino Central, damn it, Iggy’s coming with me, and there’s nothing anybody can say to change that. Maura slams her book shut and storms down the hall to an Iggy-free zone, and I flop down on my single bed and stare up at my autographed Johnny Thunders poster and wonder how I’m going to last three and a half more years in this ivied pit.
Before I went to college, I never felt the need to wear my personality on my sleeve. Well, maybe never is too strong a word, but I left the fishnets and hair dye behind in middle school, along with most of the other outer trappings of my musical tastes. A Ramones T-shirt or a well-worn pair of combat boots said all I needed to say at Open High, my alternative public school; with mohawks and chains de rigueur in the student lounge, I stood out more by not standing out. Nobody yelled “weirdo” from the windows at my high school, like the boys
in the dorm across the courtyard do when I walk out my door here at William and Mary. We may have been weird at Open High, but we were weird together, with our Friday night philosophy symposiums and existential literature classes that met in Monroe Park (street people welcome to join in any discussion). The closest we came to thinking anyone was weird was a raised eyebrow or two behind the back of Mark Russell, or, as we called him more often, “the Republican”— but even that rather sizeable quirk was accepted by the rest of us at Open in the spirit of diversity. The spirit of diversity is trumped by the spirit of ’76 here, though—at William and Mary, the wrong logo on your polo shirt can make you a pariah and the slightest variation from convention is cause for public ridicule. I didn’t know this when I agreed to come here.
Growing up near the Virginia Commonwealth University campus in Richmond, I thought college was a place for freethinkers and cool bands, girls with groovy retro go-go boots and guys in leather jackets. VCU is known for its art school. William and Mary is known for being really, really old. I should have realized things would be different there. Really different. And I would be miserable. Really miserable. Eventually, I give up. I’m obviously never going to fit in, since everyone has already decided I’m a total freak based on what? My plain jean jacket and nonpastel sweaters? My simple blunt-cut bob and the tortoiseshell schoolboy frames I thought made me look so studious and collegiate? Tough crowd, these William and Mary folks, but I’m done playing to the crowd and I’ve got their weirdo right here. When the Fuck You Music stops working for me, I decide to show them what weirdo is all about. I have nothing to lose.
My first big step toward the reclaiming of my weirdness is the Piercing of the Nose. Big deal, I hear you say. Just slide it under the door, won’t you? Piercing is so planned community, so Hot Topic. Allow me to remind you that this is Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1985. Nonstandard piercings have yet to hit the mainstream. Indeed, they won’t even do them at the mall jewelry stores, and tattoo parlors won’t be branching out into hole-punching for another few years. No, I’m on my own with this one, and with an ice cube, a needle, and Give ’Em Enough Rope cranked up really loud, I succeed in accessorizing my left nostril with an understated gold ring. Looking at my handiwork in the mirror, I am beyond pleased. The backdrop of my nerdy brown bangs and Mister Peabody glasses makes the nose ring look even weirder. Maura buries her face in her hands and shrieks. Just the effect I was going for. Perfect.
For two days, I am riding high. Walking across campus, I hear conversations stop in mid-sentence, disgusted sorority girl cries of “That girl has a ring in her nose!” Pity the weirdo kids of today, who can hang metal from their faces until they resemble a five-subject binder and never draw a second glance. It was so easy to shock at Williamsburg in 1985. Delighted with my success, I take to borrowing Maura’s Laura Ashley dresses and matching headbands, just because the irony of the juxtaposition tickles me so. My British Literature professor forgets my name in the middle of asking me a question because he’s so distracted by the nose ring. Maura refuses to eat lunch across the table from me in the dining hall, then proceeds to bring her sorority sisters over one by one to check it out. The cafeteria ladies ask questions and the football players curl their lips in disgust, which is no huge change from how they treated me before, but at least now I own it, because I chose the reason. I am weirdo, hear me roar!
My one concern is the same one that has plagued me since I first donned fishnets and leopard skin to sneak out to a punk show in seventh grade: the parents. Since I am conveniently an hour away in Williamsburg, my plan is to avoid coming home for the next four weekends to give my nostril time to heal. After that, I can slip the ring out just before I pull up in front of the house and no one will be the wiser or the more in trouble. That’s the plan, anyway, until I spot my sister Christy crossing the student commons toward me a week into my great adventure. Two years ahead of me and obedient to a fault, her presence is a constant reminder that my parents are only fifty miles and a collect call away—a call she never hesitates to make when she feels like I am “ruining her good name,” which is frequently. Known as “the Bod” on Fraternity Row, my sister is the universal object of unrequited lust, shaped like a centerfold and staunchly and unremittingly Catholic to the core. In a particularly galling example of ironic justice, she ends up ruining my good name when one particularly loathsome Phi Tau pads his resume by claiming he’s bedded “one of the Soffee girls.” Thanks to my sister’s legendary chastity, everyone assumes it’s me—besides, you know how those weirdo chicks like the freaky stuff. Still, I dutifully allow her to drag me along to keg parties and mixers, where she introduces me to leering football players and oxford-clad cads who shake my hand while staring down the front of her blouse.
I hope against hope that maybe she doesn’t see me, but no, she’s waving. Maybe she’s late for class and will just keep on walking! No such luck there, either. She’s headed straight for me. With a sense of impending doom, I lift my intro psychology text higher, higher, until it covers everything below my eyes. Then I peer out from behind it, trying my best to act nonchalant.
“Hey.” My voice is muffled by 300 pages of Freud und Jung. “What’s going on?”
She’s not buying it. Her eyes narrow, the same way they do when I make my command appearances by her side at frat parties wearing baggy jeans and slouchy black sweaters. It doesn’t take much on my part to set off her Ruining-My-Good-Name Meter, and I know this is going to blow it right off the scale, surpassing even the time she sent me home to change into “something dressier” for a Kappa Sig mixer and I came back wearing a vintage off-the-shoulder cocktail dress, seamed fishnets, and my only new clothing purchase since starting college—a pair of brand-spanking-new, first-run Air Jordan basketball shoes. You know, for all the hoops I shoot. I think she actually cried that night.
Q: Do you really shoot hoops?
A: Sorry. It was a poor attempt at humor, since you can’t see that I am every bit of five-foot-two. Not that height has anything to do with it. I made the mistake of asking one of my European History study-group partners if he played basketball, since he was well over six feet tall. He scowled and asked me if I played miniature golf. So much for making friends with casual banter.
“What’s your problem?” She makes a grab for the book, but I hang on for dear life.
“Nothing! Just, you know, studying.” I make a quick switch, dropping the book at the same time as I raise a sweatshirt-covered hand and place it oh-so-casually alongside of my nose. You know, like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus was about to get bitch-slapped by his older sister for wearing a nose ring.
“Ohhhhhhh . . .” Her eyes narrow even more as she grabs the cuff of my sweatshirt. “You didn’t!” and with one good yank she pulls my arm away, revealing my forbidden adornment. I suck in my breath, waiting for what I know is coming. The one ace my sister knows she always has, and has never once hesitated to use. She sneers disgustedly at me and hikes her backpack up on her shoulder before delivering the standard line.
“I . . . am . . . telling.”
“So tell,” I say with mock-bravado. She knows and I know that she’s beaten me, but I have my pride. “I don’t care. I’ll tell them first! I’ll call them tonight!” Yeah. Right. No matter, because she’s already stalked off across Barks-dale Field, flipping her hair at me, in a hurry to get away before anyone sees her talking to me. You know, good name and all that. I sigh into my psychology textbook, realizing that my days as a cutting-edge style-maker are numbered. I pack up my books and head out to stroll through the tourist area one more time before I have to go back to being the plain old weirdo chick I was a week ago. It’s times like this I understand why my dad was so hot for me to go to William and Mary. He already had a narc waiting.
That night, I break my usual self-imposed social exile to accompany my friend Stacey to a party hosted by the college radio station. Stacey is doing her freshman purgatory as a radio station grunt in the hope that she’ll be gr
anted one of the crappier time slots for her own radio show when she becomes a sophomore. My own music nerd arrogance prevented me from doing the same; having already hosted a show for two years on cable radio in Richmond, I told the WCWM station manager that I’d be damned if I was going to file records at a college station, thank you—which basically means I shot myself in the foot with the one group of William and Mary students with whom I might have gotten along.
Q: So you earned your rock ‘n’ roll cred working at a cable radio station?
A: Actually, the radio station was a side gig, even though my show was really cool—I did an hour and a half of sixties garage rock and an hour and a half of seventies NewYork punk. I just kind of slid into the radio gig through my writing internship at a local independent monthly paper called ThroTTle. It was billed as “The Magazine of Acceleration for the Eighties” (ahem), and it accelerated me from writing op-ed pieces for the photocopied Open High School newspaper to interviewing Henry Rollins and cadging free passes to hardcore shows before I could even drink. Well, legally, anyway.
The radio station folks are the closest thing William and Mary has to a music scene, which is sad because I can’t stand any of the music they play on the station. It’s all spectacles and shaggy hair and thrift-store paisley shirts, Throwing Muses and They Might Be Giants and Camper Van Beethoven. The bands have clever names and cleverer lyrics and wouldn’t know a power chord if it bit them on the ass. These bands are rock ‘n’ roll like Kenny G is jazz. It’s all too clean and smart for me. But I need to parade my nose ring around one last time before I am forced to take it out, and a radio station party is as good a place as any, so I dutifully trot out a Misfits T-shirt and a pair of holey jeans and make the long hike over to the off-campus party to wow the plebeians with my unbelievable punk rockitude.
Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A. Page 1
