Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A.

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  “Hollywood is turning out to be a lot like Bixby,” she agrees. I almost wish Hollywood were a little more like Richmond. At least I was allowed to be sarcastic there. In any case, I resolve to try and find a position with a magazine where I’m allowed to write maybe not 100 percent Lester Bangs style but at least with a little humor and some semblance of journalistic ethics. I decide to send my Sunset Strip piece to Spin and see if maybe they could at least tell me if it’s worth anything. I don’t have any illusions about them printing it or hiring me. I’m just running out of options in Hollywood, and New York is as far from Hollywood as Hollywood is from William and Mary.

  “Well, ladies, I bid you farewell!” This from Frasier Crane, headed toward the door with two giggling girls in tow who resemble lower-rent versions of Raelynn and myself—and, with all due respect to Raelynn, wherever she may be, we are not exactly Park Place and Boardwalk to begin with.

  “It’s nice to see that some of the patrons of this establishment appreciate a good offer when it comes their way!” The party girls have continued toward the door but Frasier Crane is still calling across the bar at us, making sure we see him leave. If I didn’t know better, I’d think old Frasier Crane’s feelings were a little bit hurt. Somewhere, deep down inside of all of us, is that kid who got picked last for dodgeball every time.

  “Later, Fraze,” Raelynn calls cheerily, waving at him as he finally turns to go. I shake my head, wondering if I can edit this story for my parents as I am sure they know Cheers. In the meantime, though, poor Frasier Crane is out of sight, out of mind, as two raging hair farmers are motioning to us from the far side of the room. Without even tactfully waiting to make sure our spurned suitor has left the building, we pick up our free drinks and head over to meet our new friends.

  Later that night, after the hair farmers have been deemed unworthy of further investigation and the free beer has stopped flowing, Raelynn and I sit at a Winchell’s doughnut shop on Hollywood, sipping coffee and commiserating about what brought us to Hollywood in the first place. I tell my sad tale of woe, the Tinee Giant and Axl Rose and the all-poster format, and then it is Raelynn’s turn.

  “I grew up in a town so small that the only thing I could picture myself doing was working at the Tastee-Freez,” Rae-lynn says between bites of her doughnut. “I felt like I was destined for something big, and the Tastee-Freez was the biggest thing in town. So that’s what I did, for ten years.”

  “Was that before or after you got married?” I know that Raelynn came to Los Angeles right after her divorce was final. This in and of itself makes her seem incredibly worldly and, well, old to me, even though she isn’t even thirty. In my narrow little worldview, I have very few contemporaries who are divorced. In fact, I have one, and she is it.

  “Oh, after. Everything I did was after I got married. My wedding was three weeks after my high school graduation.” She picks at her doughnut, then wraps it in a napkin. “Clint was a nice guy and all, but I shouldn’t have married him. What did I know?”

  I nod, because I totally understand. I had the usual schoolgirl fantasies about me and my high school boyfriend Andy running off and getting married, setting up house downtown and raising punk rock babies. Thank God for the little bit of impulse control I do have, because otherwise where would I be right now? Married to Andy, that’s where I’d be, and I have nothing but circumstance to thank for that. I was born into a family, a city, and a socioeconomic bracket where you didn’t get married straight out of high school. Raelynn wasn’t so lucky. And now, by some weird twist of fate, we’re on parallel paths on the other side of the country, me seeking my fame and fortune as the next Lester Bangs and Raelynn as, well, honestly, I don’t even know what Raelynn’s plans for the future are. But here we are, anyway, a couple of white chicks sitting around eating doughnuts. All roads really do converge.

  We get up and clear our table and head out to the car. We stop long enough to sneak a peek into the Thai dance hall next door, the open door tempting us but the lack of English on any of the signs making us think twice. On the stage, a female singer stands alone in a blue circle of light. She is young, pretty, and slight, wearing a silver-sequined evening gown and an elaborate updo. The club itself is gorgeous, posh, and empty but for three businessmen in the far back booth. In a particularly surreal detail, the singer seems to be singing a Thai rendition of “Crazy” by Patsy Cline. We are mesmerized.

  “I guess you never do know how things are gonna turn out, even when you think you do,” Raelynn says with beery sentimentality. “I mean, Jeez, look at her.” Raelynn seems lost in thought for a moment, then goes on. “She probably dreamed about coming to America her whole life ...and now look. She’s singing for drunks at the—” She looks up above the door at the club name, a curving red and yellow neon vine of Thai script. Raelynn is undaunted. “At the Akka-makka-bakka-lakka Lounge.”

  I nod again because, again, I totally understand. In fact, I feel like that girl, only without the sequins or the Patsy Cline. Clear across the country, half a year of butt-kissing, interviewing, and paying dues, and for what? To write nice things in a free paper about a guy with a nipple ring and no last name.

  Crazy indeed, I think to myself. Maybe I should move to Bixby, Oklahoma. I hear the Tastee-Freez is down a waitress.

  With Hollywood less than I hoped it would be, I find myself inexplicably homesick for Richmond. There are so many little things I miss—Bill’s Barbecue, and Mrs. Fearnow’s Brunswick Stew in the yellow can, and highways that don’t deserve the moniker “Death Ride from Hell.” I am so homesick that I jump at my mother’s offer to come out to visit for a week, even though I know it will be a week of tourist tours and celebrity spotting instead of drinking at hip dives and trolling for hair gods. She arrives with a list of must-see destinations, and I dutifully chauffeur her wherever she wants to go. I take her to see Johnny Carson tape, and since we’re in Burbank, she takes me to IKEA for some apartment furniture—everybody wins. We do the Pacific Coast Highway and Beverly Hills, and even, God help me, the Hard Rock Cafe. At night I turn the television up loud in hopes that she won’t hear the gangbangers’ gunshots echoing up and down Hollywood Boulevard. One night I don’t turn it up loud enough, and I come back from brushing my teeth to find her crouched by the window.

  “Sssssh,” she says, her eyes wide with excitement. “I think I heard a gunshot!”

  “Oh, that,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant. “That’s just a truck backfiring. The Hollywood Freeway is really close!” She seems to buy it, or want to, anyway, and doesn’t mention it for the rest of the visit.

  The highlight of her trip is our afternoon on Rodeo Drive, not so much for the shopping, since we can’t afford to buy even a Louis Vuitton keychain there, but because coming out of Harry Winston Jewelers, we run smack into Margaux Hemingway, surrounded by a sizeable entourage and made up like a Kabuki chorus girl. As she is hustled past by her handlers, looking imperious and yet somehow just a little dazed, my mother stops and stares, literally open-mouthed, on the street corner.

  “That was Margaux Hemingway,” my mom hisses in a stage whisper. “And not a bra in sight!” God bless Margaux Hemingway. I always had a soft spot for her after that.

  After my mom heads back to Richmond, I am still wistful, maybe even a little more so, just wishing I didn’t feel like quite so much of a nerd among all the hipster goings-on. For that very reason, when GWAR comes to town to play the Hollywood Palladium, I actually go— something I never did when they played on the corner of my street in Richmond, because really, how many times can stage blood and mayonnaise be fun?

  Q: Mayonnaise?

  A: Yep, this is another one of those things that I get to be an old fart about. “Back in my day, GWAR didn’t have all those fancy sets and special effects! They just threw mayonnaise on us from giant food service jars! And we liked it!”

  Oh, and for those of you who somehow missed the whole GWAR phenomenon, they’re a theatrical shock-metal band from Richm
ond who wear big scary costumes and create all kinds of mayhem as part of their show, drenching the audience in (generally) simulated bodily fluids and acting out all manner of violence and perversity onstage. The guys in GWAR started out as art students at VCU, and when I was at Open High you could catch Death Piggy, later to become GWAR, at apartment parties and hardcore matinees on any given Saturday if you were so inclined. Since the whole gorefest got old really fast, and also since I’m not all that keen on scraping dried mayonnaise out of my eyeglass frames, I was generally not inclined. I usually only went if my brother’s band was on the same bill, or if it was a party with free beer. Family and free beer. I have my priorities.

  But yeah, this time I actually cough up for a ticket and fight the crowds to go see GWAR in Hollywood, just because they remind me of home. Inside the sold-out Palladium, I feel like grabbing people, shaking them, all of these people swarming up toward the stage as if this is a big fat deal. “For God’s sake, it’s just GWAR,” I want to say. “They’re not serious! You’re not supposed to be buying this!” Apparently no one outside of Richmond knows that this is all a big silly joke. I feel like I have seen the Emperor without his clothes, and it’s just Dave Brockie from Death Piggy. I try to grab the band after the show, too, see if they want to get a beer or a taco with the hometown girl, but the roadie at the backstage door says they’ve already been invited to hang out with Ozzy Osbourne, and Satan knows I can’t compete with that. It all just seems so surreal, like a bad fever dream—“I dreamed I was going to eat a taco with Dave Brockie, but Ozzy Osbourne showed up and wanted to hang out with him instead.” I remember Dave panhandling for quarters outside Hard Times so that he could get a piece of pizza before their show. I hope Ozzy’s buying. I was going to buy. It’s still a little weird to see the world be aware of GWAR, something that seemed destined to be an inside Richmond joke. I probably shouldn’t be so surprised; I’d realized it was getting out of hand a couple of years ago, when I was leafing through a metal magazine while my dad watched Monday Night Football.

  “Look,” I’d said, showing him the magazine. “It says here you can enter this sweepstakes and win a phone call from GWAR.”

  “They call here all the time,” he said, unimpressed, “and I didn’t even enter.” He’s right, too—on any given day, someone from GWAR or any number of other lesser-known Richmond bands called to hound my brother for recording advice, drum expertise, or just general musical knowledge. It’s not for nothing that Stacey dubbed my brother “Richmond’s Phil Spector.”

  My dad’s reaction is equally deadpan when I tell him I paid fifteen dollars to see GWAR at the Palladium.

  “The next time you come home,” he threatens, “I’m going to charge you five dollars to see your brother.” Funny guy, my dad. But he has a point. And I’m out fifteen dollars, dinnerless, and covered with stage blood.

  After the Wikked Gypsy debacle, I find myself getting fewer assignments at the weeklies. Los Angeles may be the big city, but when it comes to the metal scene, it’s a small town, and everybody at all the weeklies has seen—and disapproved of—my snarky review and the resulting hate mail. On the one hand, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since one, I’m not getting paid anyway and two, since I’m now on double-secret probation I can’t say anything the least bit negative, and unfortunately the bands they’ve been backing don’t exactly inspire positive words. When I finally do get an assignment, a puff piece on a power-ballad band called—I kid you not—Spread Eagle, the finished product is so phony I almost can’t bring myself to sign my name to it. A byline’s a byline, though, and at this point beggars can’t be choosers. I cringe and sign my name. I feel dirty when I see it in print.

  Q: So, would you say that this was where you hit rock bottom with your journalistic integrity?

  A: Yeah—but that doesn’t mean I stopped digging.

  If I’m limited to doing free publicity, I figure I might as well do it honestly. The less work I get from the magazines, the more time I spend at Around the World, where at least I feel like I’m not pretending to be objective. Morgan and Heather are thrilled with my newfound enthusiasm for gratis envelope stuffing and actually do start sliding some creative work my way—that is, if you consider one-paragraph press releases creative. I try, anyway.

  “It is so fantastic to have you on board,” enthuses Morgan when I turn in a typo-free press release that I could have written in my sleep. It’s for Frankie Avalon’s son Tony’s band, and I make a big deal about rock ‘n’ roll pedigree and use terms like “hard rocking” and “in your face” as if I really mean them. “I can just tell that you’re going to be an awesome publicist!” Morgan always sounds breathless. I think it’s the spandex. I am glad to finally be writing something, but so far I’ve seen little evidence of the rapid advancement I was promised. Not only that, but Morgan made a big show of presenting all of the interns with personalized business cards with the company’s logo on them last week, and Renee’s say “Associate Publicist” underneath her name and mine don’t say anything. I console myself with the fact that they don’t say “Assistant Intern,” but I am more than a little burned up.

  The “Associate Publicist” cards are just one more tick mark on my growing list of gripes about Renee. I don’t mind that she gets to pick swag before me; after all, she does have a year of seniority on me and the swag is really the only pay we get. I don’t complain when she corrects me on proper envelope-stuffing form—glossies go in face down, then press release, then CD—because I am new to this whole envelope-stuffing thing and I yield to her superior stuffage skills (in hindsight, telling her that in a mock adulatory tone probably didn’t help our relationship any, but she was kind of snotty about it, so . . .). Still, I try to get along with Renee. It’s not easy given my propensity for the smart-ass response. But I bite my tongue and I try.

  My ability to be nice to Renee eventually hits a wall. The Stud Wall, to be exact. Those of you who watch a lot of HGTV probably think I’m talking about an office-remodeling project gone wrong. I’m not. The Stud Wall is actually a legendary feature of the bathroom at Around the World. It started with an autographed picture of some forgotten but comely client, sans shirt. Other clients started adding their shirtless glossies to the wall, too, like dogs peeing on a fence. Then random musicians started appearing, culled from the stacks of magazines from which we clipped mentions and reviews of the bands on our roster. Sebastian Bach, Jon Bon Jovi, Stevie Rachelle, Blas Elias. The rule has always been that Stud Wall subjects have to be shirtless, pouting, and hot. That’s the public rule, anyway. Apparently there is also an unspoken rule that I (as usual) manage to break with my first contribution to the Stud Wall.

  My subject, snipped from the pages of Rolling Stone, is undeniably shirtless. His pecs are massive and glistening and his biceps firm; no one could argue that he is not hot. His stage antics drive the girls wild, especially when they roll the giant bed out onto the stage and he does the air-humping bit. In my book, and in millions of other people’s, he is unquestionably a stud. In fact, his very name is a testament to his studliness; the “LL” stands for “Ladies Love.” Ladies Love Cool James. LL Cool J. My first proud contribution to the Stud Wall. I tape him up in between Bret Michaels and Kip Winger and think nothing else of it. That is, until I go to powder my nose a day later and find that LL has come up missing.

  After a thorough and exhaustive thirty-second search of the closet-sized bathroom, I find LL residing in the wastebasket, all by his lonesome. A fresh piece of tape and the situation is resolved. I call it a fluke and return to my envelopes. The next day, LL is gone again. This time the wastebasket is empty. I begin to get suspicious, but I’m not sure who’s to blame. In any case, it’s a matter of principle now, and I spend the next hour digging through the mostly metal magazines in the sludge pile, finally unearthing another picture of LL in an ancient Billboard. I tape him back up, this time near the ceiling, with extra tape. And I wait.

  LL maintains his lofty perc
h for over a week. I come in on Saturday to catch up on some filing and he’s still there, pouting down at me, Kangol pulled over his eyes, looking studly as ever. He’s there when Renee stops by to grab some CDs to take down to the DJ at Riki Rachtman’s Cathouse. He’s there when she goes into the bathroom to spruce up her face and prop up her cleavage for said DJ. And when she comes out, he’s gone.

  Just like that. Without a trace. Probably buried in the depths of her skanky cleavage, I think as I scowl at the LL-less Stud Wall. Poor LL! What a way to go. If he has to go buried in tits, would that they were at least nice ones, and not bigoted, over-tanned padded ones in a cheap Frederick’s of Hollywood push-up bra. LL at least deserves decent foundation garments. I can’t say that I am really surprised; we are, after all, talking about an eighteen-year-old Orange County strumpet who drives a Fiero with the license plate “6E Lady.” Poison is probably about the deepest thing she can comprehend musically. Obviously LL is too sophisticated for her tastes, poor baby.

  I don’t put LL back on the wall after that. I keep my feelings about the Stud Wall incident to myself, not letting on that I know who banished LL or even that I’ve noticed he is gone. I let bygones be bygones for about a month. Then, one Saturday when I have the office all to myself, I slip down to the AM/PM store and buy a copy of every rap magazine they carry. On Monday, when Renee comes in to open the office, she is greeted by the new residents of the Around the World Stud Wall Mach 2 in all their Nubian glory. To those who would argue that the Flava Flav fold-out poster was a poor choice for a centerpiece, well, I say you just don’t get his charm, boyeeeeee.

  Soon after the Stud Wall Segregation incident, the bathroom is painted a lovely teal and two framed prints of flowers are hung on what once was the Stud Wall. A note posted on the office bulletin board asks us to please not tape anything to the walls as we might peel the paint.