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

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  At the next intersection, the motorcycle is parked on the curb, silent. Travis Bickle is leaning back on the leather seat, arms crossed, feet on the handlebars. I move to walk around the bike and he swings his feet down, boots hitting the pavement with a thud.

  “What’sa matter?” His New York accent is thick and taunting. “You can’t stop and say hi?”

  “Hi,” I say, and try to walk around the bike.

  “Where ya goin’ in such a hurry?”

  “That’s some more of your business,” I say, trying to sound tough.

  He looks me up and down and nods. “You must be goin’ to a meeting.”

  I am confused, impressed, and maybe a little offended. Surely there are other places on Hollywood Boulevard that people go at night; how many times have I walked down this same street to go to bars, the newsstand, or just to the taqueria for some dinner? Is it that obvious? Am I the last one to see the giant arrow pointing at my head? He grins and nods when I don’t respond. He’s found me out.

  “Check this out,” he says, dropping his leather jacket onto the seat of the bike. He pulls off his black T-shirt, too, revealing muscled arms completely sleeved with inkwork, a chained heart with a banner that reads “Carla” over one pierced nipple, and, when he turns his back to me, huge Olde English letters across his shoulders that read “LIVING SOBER.”

  He picks up his shirt and puts it back on. Then he gets on the bike, throws me the jacket, and motions to the seat behind him. “Get on,” he says.

  And I do.

  We pull up in front of a one-story bungalow off Melrose Avenue. This isn’t the Hollywood Recovery Center, I think to myself as Travis Bickle parks the bike and helps me off. I guess now is when he buries me under the porch.

  “The meeting is at ten,” I say hopefully.

  “That meeting is full of pussies and crybabies,” he says. “You didn’t want to go to that one.” He unlocks the front door and we walk into an empty living room. There is no furniture and the walls are stark white. Peering down a hallway, I see another white room, this one with a king-sized mattress on the floor.

  “Do you live here?” All signs are pointing to serial killer at this point, but I feel a lot like I did at the Iggy Pop concert—at least it’s a memorable way to go.

  “I don’t like no clutter,” he says, leading me into the kitchen. In the middle of the kitchen sits an antique dentist’s chair. I am intrigued. I walk around it.

  “I tattoo,” he says proudly. “Little hobby. You want a tattoo? That’s a good first date thing, huh? A tattoo?”

  I look at him to see if he is serious. He appears to be. The fact that I don’t refuse immediately seems to encourage him. He grabs a photo album from the counter.

  “Look at my stuff. I’m good,” he says, flipping through the pages. “I don’t do nothin’ free, either. You’re getting star treatment, a free tattoo from Danny. It’s ’cos it’s a date, that’s why.”

  I look at the pictures. They look good, but what do I know from tattoos? A tattoo is something I have always sort of wanted, but a tattoo is not really a sort of thing. It occurs to me that this might not even be his portfolio, that getting me in the chair could be the prelude to hacking me into little bits. So I ask a very reasonable question.

  “Can you do a Danzig logo on my stomach?”

  “Danzig? That guy’s a little weenie.”

  “How about a Rolling Stones one, on my shoulder?”

  “This stuff you want, this rock ‘n’ roll stuff, that’s fuckin’ crap,” he says impatiently. “Lemme show you what I want to do. Get in the chair.”

  I am taken aback. This is getting a little too real. I ask if I can call Tommy and see what he thinks. Travis Bickle pounds a fist on the counter and yells “You gotta call somebody else and ask them about something that’s gonna be on your body for the rest of your life?” He runs a hand through his greasy hair. “What’sa matter? You can’t think for yourself?” He points again to the chair. “Get in the chair!”

  And I do.

  To say that Carole is disappointed with the way my evening turned out is an understatement. I spend my entire next session convincing her that I don’t need a weeklong inpatient detox to save me from myself. It does not impress her in the least that I haven’t had a drink since our last session. It also doesn’t impress her that I’ve hardly been seeing Tommy at all; of course, that’s not entirely been my choice, as Tina has been doing her best Dragon Lady impression since the riots. With everyone confined to the two-story building from dusk until dawn for the duration of the curfew, Tommy and I did an exceptionally poor job of hiding our liaisons from the rest of the tenants, and hell hath no fury like an aging strip-o-gram dancer scorned.

  Carole stammers a lot about choices and patterns and boundary issues, all the while pushing for me to commit to round-the-clock supervision until I leave L.A. I finally agree to a compromise—an intensive outpatient program and a contract to go to a meeting every night. I don’t have a problem with the outpatient program; it’s a lot like school. I take notes, do worksheets, and raise my hand a lot. That I can do. It’s the meetings that I’m not too sure about, but I promise to give it a shot.

  Q: You’re fudging again. What about the tattoo?

  A: Right, the tattoo. It’s an abstract scorpion in red and black Maori style. A combination of two of the cheesiest aspects of tattooing—astrological signs and phony tribal designs. On my chest, which, after the ankle and the completely unoriginal small of the back, is the cheesiest spot for a girl to have a tattoo. The sad thing is it’s not quite cheesy enough to be ironic; it’s just . . . cheesy.

  I decide to try the pussies and crybabies meeting again, this time taking a circuitous route to avoid running into Travis Bickle. I’m actually worried that he might be at the meeting itself, but he’s not. He would fit right in if he were; the meeting is about one-third bikers, one-third rockers, and one-third unknown quantities like me. I help myself to a Styrofoam cup full of bad instant coffee and sit down next to a bear of a guy with a gray beard and wire-rimmed glasses. People take turns talking about their stressful lives—breakups and layoffs, bill collectors and child support. Grand jury indictments. Each story is more miserable than the last, it seems to me, but after each tale of woe, the speaker cheerfully adds a qualifier along the lines of “ . . . and I choose not to drink over that.” The idea!

  The bearded man seated next to me speaks toward the end of the meeting. His name is Fisher, and he identifies himself as “an addict, alcoholic, nerd, and geek.” Dude. I’m so there. He shares about feeling like he’s not as cool as everyone else in this meeting but that he earned his seat just like they did. Nods all around. After Fisher, a guy who looks like Mickey Rourke also identifies as an addict, alcoholic, nerd, and geek. I don’t speak up, but inside I’m thinking that’s me, too.

  After the meeting, Fisher shakes my hand and asks if I need a lift home. He has three guys in tow, his sponsees, he calls them, who look like the bastard love children of Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders. If Carole could see me now, she’d yank me out by my ear, but she needn’t worry because my head is so busy digesting the concept of addict, alcoholic, nerd, and geek that I’m not even thinking in that direction. We pile into Fisher’s rust bucket Datsun and putter off toward my apartment in a cloud of highly California-illegal gray exhaust.

  As we smokescreen our way down Hollywood Boulevard, I continue to mull my future as an alcoholic nerd. So engrossed am I in the speculation, that when one of the sponsees gestures out the window and snickers, “Check it out, there goes C. C. DeVille,” I don’t even look up. (I’m sorry, Stacey. I owe you one. I just had a lot on my mind.) Within blocks, my reverie is interrupted by Fisher rapping on the dash with a sparkly lucite baton.

  “Hit it, guys,” says Fisher, and I squirm around in my seat to see what they’re going to hit. In the back seat, the Keithlets grab big plastic dinosaurs out of the rear windshield and wave them slowly side to side.

 
“What the world needs now . . . is love, sweet love . .” The Keithlets croak in unison, wagging the dinosaurs at passing cars. I’m fascinated, partly by what this has to do with anything and partly because I never met any guys who looked as cool as these guys but were willing to make such idiots of themselves with total abandon. None of the guys at Board-ner’s would be caught dead singing Dionne Warwick songs and waving plastic dinosaurs, much less in a Datsun. They keep singing, and I turn and look at Fisher for explanation.

  “It’s the only song the brontosaurus knows,” Fisher explains. “We’re going to the House of Pies; olallaberries are in season. Wanna come?”

  “No, thanks,” I say, figuring I already have a lot to digest without pie.

  “Well, maybe next time. You coming tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know.” Right now I am thinking yes, but it’s still daunting, this whole without thing. It’s a long time from now until ten o’clock tomorrow night, and between now and then there’s Tommy, and Mister Kim, and the Blacklite if I end up needing a drink between now and then, I probably won’t feel like coming back. What would be the point?

  “It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. . . ”

  “This is my building, here.” The Datsun putters to a stop in the middle of the street. As I gather up my pamphlets and fliers, Tina comes out of the building in her sexy nurse strip-o-gram outfit.

  “Hellllooooooooo, nurse,” howl the Keithlets.

  “I like your building,” says Fisher, watching her arrange her stethoscope in her cleavage.

  I look up on the balcony and see Tommy leaning against the railing. A red and gold tallboy rests on the table beside him and a cigarette dangles from his lips. He points at Tina, walking down the street toward her car, then motions for me to hurry up and come inside.

  “On second thought,” I say to Fisher, “if it’s not too late, I think I would like some pie.”

  “Pie it is,” he says, checking his rearview mirror and making an illegal U-turn in the middle of Normandie Avenue. “From the top, boys!”

  “What the world needs now . . . is love, sweet love . . .’ Over the dinosaur chorus, I hear the clattering of a red and gold tallboy can hitting the street behind our car. Looking back, I can see the streetlight illuminating it as it rolls toward the gutter, glinting gold. I turn around and close my eyes, listening to the dinosaurs sing.