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

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  The next day was worse. He was already talking when I woke up, to no one in particular. He was pacing around my tiny apartment, digging through his bag of stuff and tossing his gorgeous hair around furiously. I could pick out little bits and pieces of what he was saying. “They don’t know who they’re messing with . . . want me to run for office? I ain’t your fool . . . that ain’t in the Constitution . . . get me a lawyer . . . show them who’s boss.” I got a cup of coffee and watched him, rapt and horrified, for about an hour. It was like I wasn’t even there. Stacey called, and after my efforts to pass him off as the television finally failed, I told her the truth after swearing her to secrecy. At the time of her call, I still had hopes that things might get better, that maybe we were going through an adjustment period, a post-incarceration debrief. But that was a week ago, and things have gotten worse since then. It’s a testament to the seriousness of the situation that I was able to have an entire phone conversation about the depth of his insanity and he didn’t even notice, couldn’t even hear me over his own constant string of paranoid ramblings.

  Once I determine that the situation isn’t going to change and that, in fact, he is batshit crazy, I give up on encouraging him to look for work. Instead, I start encouraging him to find somewhere else to stay. He has a little black book full of girls’ numbers, and I urge him to call them while I am at work.

  “You want me to call other girls?” He looks like he might cry. “I thought you were my girlfriend.”

  What is there to say, really, to something like that? “I’m sorry,” I say simply, not delving into the whys or the wherefores because they’re things you just don’t say to someone. I’m sorry you turned out to be crazy. I’m sorry you stay up all night laughing and whispering. I’m sorry you wander up and down the hall, muttering and scaring my neighbors. The building manager has asked me twice when he’s leaving, and even Tommy has been checking on me to make sure everything is OK. If I weren’t so busy trying to figure out how to extricate myself from the situation, I would be embarrassed. Embarrassment is always the first thing to go.

  Finally, I pour out the whole sordid story to Raelynn. She is aghast, but not surprised.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I’ve got to get him out of there.” I’m losing sleep and I’m afraid of losing my lease. “I don’t want to throw him out on the street, though, Raelynn. He can’t manage.”

  “But he can’t stay with you—you can’t manage him.” She’s right. The only peace I’ve had in two weeks is when he’s asleep. Then I sit and watch him, his mouth finally still, his gorgeous face and muscled torso belying the madness inside. I watch him sleep and I feel horrible and guilty and mean because this was all a game to me, back when he was just another dumb hair-metal guy I could make fun of with my friends at the Blacklite. Stupid is funny, but crazy is not. I don’t want to play this game anymore, but I’m in too deep to quit.

  Raelynn and I decide we will give him a week to find somewhere to go, and when the week is up I will change the locks and put his things outside, no ifs, ands, or buts. I don’t know if a week is fair and I don’t know if he even understands how long that is, but I do know I can’t live like this. I go home and tell Dwight the news.

  “That’s it? Just like that?” I nod. “You’re gonna be sorry, babe, because I’m on my way up!” His eyes are wild as he stuffs clothes back into the garbage bag he came with. “I’m about to have a number one hit. My agent is buying me a Jaguar because he knows I’m gonna be huge.”

  He doesn’t have an agent.

  “One week,” I remind him, and then I leave and go spend the night at Raelynn’s.

  The last night of Dwight’s week happens to coincide with the Widespread Panic and Phish show at the Variety. No fan of Phish but eager to see Dave, who I haven’t seen since before I moved to L.A.—thanks to the bad timing of his last West Coast tour coinciding with my visit to Athens— I’m always up for a Panic show. Dave calls as soon as he gets into town, and we make plans to grab a quick drink before we head for the show. As I gather up a few things for the rest of the evening, I’m stunned to see Dwight watching me with a look of indignant rage.

  “Did I just hear you right?”

  “It depends,” I say, throwing a hairbrush and lipstick into my bag. “What did you hear?”

  “Well if I didn’t know better, I’d swear I just heard my old lady make a date with some rock star RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY FUCKING EYES!” He slams his fist into the wall.

  “OK.” I take a deep breath, hoping it will subliminally encourage him to do the same. I keep talking, all the while backing toward the front door. “First of all, it’s not a date. I am having a drink with an old friend.” Almost to the door, keep talking. Calm, soothing tones. “Second of all, he’s not a rock star. He’s just a guy in a band that happens to tour.” Fudging it, but who’s to know? “And third of all, I am not your old lady and I want you out of here when I get back.” Technically there are still several hours left until his official deadline, but when you start punching walls, it’s time to go.

  “You are a cold-hearted woman,” he says, his face still to the wall, his fist still resting on the crumbled plaster. Tell me something I don’t know. I open the door quietly and slip outside.

  In the hall, Tommy is waiting, summoned upstairs by the shaking walls. He doesn’t ask me anything but gives me a hug and a beer. I wish he wasn’t somebody else’s boyfriend just like I wish Dwight wasn’t crazy. Wishes aren’t horses, though, so I know that no Prince Charming is on the way to spirit me off on his dashing steed. A cold beer from a junkie is better than nothing, and I take it and hope that things will be better when I come home.

  “So this is where you hang out now?” Dave is taking in the ambience at the Blacklite serenely; Dave is a Southern gentleman and a hippie, and as such, he is pretty laid back about most things, including drag queen hookers. I’ve missed hanging out with Dave and my Richmond friends; in almost two years I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like not to worry about someone becoming violent, crazy, or just plain mean for no reason at all. Aside from Tommy, all of the guys I know out here are loose cannons, and now I’ve let the loosest one move into my place.

  “Yeah, this is it,” I say, kind of proud to have brought him to such a happy, inviting place. Of course, the Quaalude I took backstage at the show is probably making the Blacklite seem a lot more pleasant and comfortable than usual. I’d read all about ’ludes in CREEM, but they were taken off the market in the United States in 1984 so I never had the chance to try one until now. What was the FDA thinking? This is great stuff. Everything seems to be moving at about a quarter speed, which is just so much easier to deal with than real life. As an added bonus, it’s making the evening—and my time away from Dwight—seem four times as long.

  Q: If Quaaludes are off the market in the United States, where did you get one?

  A: Ah, the wonders of bands with major label deals and European tours!

  “Oh my God, Annie.” Carmella howls with dismay. She looks Dave up and down, clutching her rhinestone necklace and shaking her head as she takes in his tie-dyed shirt, moccasins, and shaggy beard. “Annie, Annie, Annie!”

  Dave smiles benevolently at her, completely and utterly unoffended. I smile too, thinking I’ll answer her eventually. It’s the same reaction I had to the gaggle of hippie chicks in the bathroom at the show, who took a break from their sink baths to back me into a stall and ask me a million rapid fire questions about Phish because, given my incongruous bustier and leather jacket coupled with my backstage pass, they assumed I was with Elektra.

  “Talk to me, Annie!” Carmella cries. “Say something!” I wonder what her hurry is. I’m almost answering her when she throws up her hands in dismay and runs over to Billy in slow motion.

  “Annie’s over there with Charles Manson, and he’s put her in some kind of trance!”

  On any other night, this pronouncement would have me howling with laughter. On Quaalude nigh
t, though, as amusing as it is, the best I can manage is a slow grin, spreading across my face, and a languid sip of my beer. Dave’s reaction is about the same. Billy looks over at us and shakes his head. There’s not much he hasn’t seen, working here, and I think he at least has a general idea of what’s going on. He knows enough to call us a cab, and I crash for the night at Dave’s room at the Hotel Roosevelt, thankful for a respite from Dwight and his rambling.

  8

  Last Call

  L.A. Throws Me the Least Festive

  Farewell Party Imaginable

  by early 1992, Raelynn’s prediction seems to be coming true. She’s right, things have changed. Of course, she doesn’t stick around to see the change happen; the postcard I receive from Austin says her new place is adorable and half the price of her apartment in L.A. After the Dwight debacle, I pretty much stop going to Boardner’s or really anywhere but the Blacklite. I’m not without company, though—Tommy has been spending nights at my place once again, in spite of the fact that half of the building is aware of what’s going on. I don’t relish my position as the other woman, but Tommy is the perfect companion for me at this point, since all I want to do is drink, take pills, and try not to think about the fact that I’ll probably be out of a job soon, and then what? With my reasons for being in L.A. vanishing one by one, it’s going to be hard for me to justify getting another day job. That is, if I can even find one.

  Raelynn’s postcard has me thinking about my options, such as they are. I, too, could probably get an apartment— a real apartment, with rooms and stuff—for half the price I’m paying for my slummy little room, provided said apartment was anywhere but Los Angeles. If I’m not writing, why am I shelling out to live in a city this expensive? A year ago I could have argued that it was the music, but that’s less true now that grunge has moved in. There are still more good bands here than in Richmond, but that’s hardly worth double expenses, to say nothing of the travel cost of going home twice a year to visit.

  My dad sees this as a golden opportunity to lure me home. “Now that your little friend moved away, you ought to think about coming home,” he says every time I make a lonely call with nothing to say. “You can come back here and go to school.”

  School. I was so glad to be done with school three short years ago. And for what? To be the next Lester Bangs, to change the face of metal writing and bring back the days when rock magazines had something to say. I thought I was going to take rock ‘n’ roll journalism by storm. Instead, the only thing I’ve taken by storm is a dive bar full of men in dresses. My dad doesn’t know this, but he does know I’m running out of excuses to stay in L.A. “Why don’t you apply to graduate school at VCU and see if you get in?” he says, hoping to trick me into starting to make plans to come home. He’s a crafty one, my dad.

  “I don’t know. I kind of like it here,” I say, and I am telling the truth. Fortunately he doesn’t ask what it is that I like, because there’s no way I could tell him half the stuff, and even if I tried, it would sound preposterous. How do I love thee, Hollywood? Let me count the ways.

  I love that I still run into Glenn Danzig at the supermarket occasionally, and when I do, he really does recognize me now, and he reminds me that he keeps my John the Conqueror root on his dresser. I love the dive bars that feel like Bukowski stories come to life—are Bukowski stories come to life, where I weave a Bukowski story of my own. I love that my leftover credentials from the music papers can still get me into most of the clubs on the Strip for free, even if I don’t want to go as often as I used to. I love that I can walk down to the newsstand on Hollywood Boulevard at any hour of the night and read on the sidewalk to my heart’s content, because it’s never raining and it’s always seventy degrees. I love the Bodhi Tree bookstore, where you can browse everything from Buddhism to Witchcraft and drink free tea while you do it, and the Sisterhood Bookstore where you can buy rude feminist stickers and nag champa incense with your pocket change. I love that the malls are three stories high and the clothes are months, sometimes years, ahead of anything Richmond sees in its paltry one-story malls. I love being able to break bad without feeling like I’m ruining anyone’s good name. I love the drag queen hookers and their smart-mouthed comments, and I love Billy the bartender who lets me keep drinking even after the front door locks at two. I love the heavy metal radio station with the morning show slogan “It’s hard when you wake up,” just because that would never fly in stodgy old Richmond. And maybe love is too strong a word, but I have a deep and abiding affection for my convenient downstairs sometime junkie boyfriend, who sneaks me soup when I’m sick, gets in bar fights to defend my honor (or the shred I have left, anyway), and spends stolen evenings nodding out in front of the television with me on my crappy little futon. It’s no rock-star waterbed, but it’s home.

  When the application for the VCU Creative Writing program arrives completely unbidden, along with a cheery Mary Engelbreit card from my mom, I stick it under a pile of Guns N’ Roses CDs and forget about it until right before the deadline. When she calls and asks me how my application is coming, I lie and say fine, then spend a frantic three days holed up in the apartment creating a portfolio of short stories, fueled by beer and tacos delivered by Tommy. Not that I think I will ever get in, and not that I really have given the whole idea much thought. More than anything, I am buying some more time to figure out what I’m going to do with my life without my parents bugging me to come home. At least this way I have a couple of months where I can say I am “waiting to hear something” and that will keep them off my case. The stories are little more than a diary of the past few months, all drugs and hookers and bar fights, sparing none of the tawdry details. Toward the end of the second day I convince myself I’m channeling Bukowski, but I know deep down that this is not the case; I’m just writing sloppy first-person stories from the point of view of a messed-up rocker chick who drinks too much. No poetry here.

  I mail the stories off and don’t think any more of it; I know that once they get a load of my mediocre transcripts and my non-academic resume since I left school, it’ll be all over. I feel sorry for my parents even thinking I have a chance. Their little girl is not the academic type, sad but true. When I was in high school, though, I took a creative writing class from a man who was. He favored poems that described elderly homeless people in wincing detail and begged to be read in a chest-thumping chant. “You are a writer,” he would say solemnly to the students who penned such poems. “Even if you never wrote another word in your life, you would still be a writer.” His eyes would gleam moistly at them as he let the weight of his weighty, weighty words sink in.

  At no time did he ever declare me to be a writer. In fact, my smart-ass rock ‘n’ roll short stories left him so cold that he made a special request that I take no further classes from him during my tenure at Open High School. Not that I was chomping at the bit, anyway. I sharpened my pen in the other creative writing class Open High offered, where a gruff newspaper sportswriter slashed us all democratically with a red pen—“trite!” “hackneyed!” “where’s your voice?” He pulled no punches and had no favorites. I made As in his class, but there’s a wide divide between the copy desk and the ivory tower. I know I’m not cut out for higher learning, not with literary idols who OD on cold medicine and Darvon. They’ll sniff me out for sure.

  So what am I supposed to do with my life while I wait to hear from VCU? Since everybody else at work seems to have a screenplay stashed away on a floppy disk, I start my own. I figure it can’t be any worse than Fresh Moves, and somebody paid for that. I title my screenplay Low Rent. It’s about Tommy and Tina and the Blacklite and, in a cameo appearance as the poor misunderstood girl with no future, me. Hemingway said “write what you know,” and at this point I don’t know much else. In a somewhat overwrought but nonetheless gripping act of sublimation, I have Tommy get creamed by a truck on the way to Mister Kim’s Liquor Store in the final scene. The closing frame is his trademark red and gold Olde English 800 t
allboy can, crushed on the pavement, pouring out into the street.

  Q: Wow, that’s subtle.

  A: Hey, I didn’t go to film school, OK?

  Writing a screenplay is easier than anything I’ve ever written, which makes The Idol’s failure to cough up the second half of his even more pathetic in retrospect. I don’t have to worry about internal dialogue, or describing what the characters look like, or any of the stuff that takes up all of that space in fiction. I don’t have anyone breathing down my neck to be nice like I do in journalism. Unfortunately, there’s also no room for the snarky observations and smartass Lester Bangsisms that make writing fun for me in the first place. I map out the plot on index cards, then stash them in a drawer and forget them.

  It’s a Monday morning in mid-April. I’m editing another workers’ compensation report, and I’m having a hard time making sense of the report because we’ve fired most of our translators and replaced all of our transcriptionists with part-time minimum-wage employees. I’m currently working on a report from a kitchen assistant who was harassed by a baker with a suggestively positioned baguette. He hang the breads like panes at me shout you like. I’m puzzling over how to punctuate it so that it makes sense without illegally putting words in the complainant’s mouth when I see Andrew standing beside my cubicle.