Rock and Roll High School: Growing Up in Hollywood During the Decade of Decadence

by Marisa Tellez

  I became a huge fan of Taz after The Waters Club show and just like the Taz fatties, I went to every show from that point on. Well most anyway. I was still only 14, so if it wasn’t an all ages show, I was shit out of luck. Another issue was transportation, not to mention my curfew. Headlining bands like Taz always went on late, usually around 11:00pm or so. By the time they’d finish their set, I’d have just enough time to bolt home and make my curfew…about twenty minutes late.

  Ronan on the other hand, was free as a bird with no rules. Going with him to Taz shows became a huge inconvenience for him because he’d have to miss out on any after parties, just to get me home on time. It’s something he would bitch about quite often, so I’d alternate between going with him and begging Lucy to give me rides.

  Another Taz show was coming up at The Roxy, and unfortunately, Lucy was going to be out of town that weekend. My only shot at going was to ride with Ronan, but he was adamant about not missing another after party. Wanting to go to the show, I went against my better judgment and decided to take my chances at whatever grounding my parents would give me. So shortly after midnight when Taz finished their set, I was heading out to the Taz after party with Kyle and Ronan, instead of racing my way home.

  The after party was in an apartment on Highland, just north of Franklin, by the Hollywood Bowl. When we walked in, there were about forty people hanging out in a surprisingly large apartment with high vaulted ceilings and a fireplace. I took a closer look at everyone in the room and realized I was the only girl there. Every other female was a fully sprouted woman with curves, boobs, and legs stemming from their necks. I was most definitely way out of my league.

  Kyle, Ronan, and I found an uninhabited corner to hang out in and pulled a few beers out of the stash we brought with us. They started talking about the show while I stood by barely saying a word. I didn’t really have anything important to say anyway. I was just excited to be at the party and loved people watching. My eyes continued scanning the living room for new faces walking into the apartment and listening in on conversations that were within my range of hearing. Everyone always had something “big” that was about to happen. This person was friends with that rock star, or that celebrity and was definitely going places. There were showcases that had been played and demo tapes that were in the hands of big record executives. All that hot air being blown around the room by people with their inflated egos, yet they were still hanging out at the same party as my goofy teenage ass.

  Two beers later, my bladder was acting up, so I ventured off on my own to find the bathroom. I walked down a small hallway and must’ve looked lost because some guy asked me if I was looking for the bathroom. I said yes and he pointed to a closed door.

  “I think I just saw KK go in there though, so it might be a while,” he said before walking off.

  Damn, I really had to pee too. But I figured if KK had just walked in there, he probably wouldn’t be very long. About five minutes later, I was still waiting. I was about to knock when I heard the sounds of male grunting from behind the door. Was KK in there taking a shit? Who takes a dump in the middle of a party? A few moments later, Kyle came to find me.

  “Are you still waiting for the bathroom?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I heard grunting. I think KK is taking a shit,” I whispered.

  Our conversation was interrupted by the sounds of a female moaning from behind the bathroom door, followed by more male grunts. Kyle put his ear to the door, listened for a few moments and smiled.

  “I think he’s going to be a while,” he said.

  “He IS taking a dump isn’t he?” I said completely oblivious.

  “No, I think he’s banging his girlfriend.”

  “Banging as in beating her up?” I said with my head cocked to the side like a confused dog.

  Debauchery was in full effect on the other side of that bathroom door. Literally, right in front of my pre-pubescent face, and I still had no idea what he was alluding to.

  “Banging as in fucking her in the bathroom,” he said bluntly.

  My eyes widened. Laughing at my reaction, Kyle led me down the hallway and back to Ronan. After another round of beers, we decided to call it a night.

  By the time I got home, I was only two hours late for my curfew, so I figured my punishment would be minimal. Back then my mom was always the disciplinarian, and my dad went with whatever she said. Boy oh boy was she pissed when she woke up the next morning. I ended up getting grounded for an entire week. But once my grounding was over, I resumed seeing Ronan and going to more Taz shows.

  The more Ronan and I hung out, the more our lifestyles clashed. He literally had nothing to do everyday but wake up and breathe. I on the other hand, had school to tend to, homework to do, and curfews to obey. I tried to talk him into going back to high school, but he wasn’t having it. He hated school and said it was a waste of his time. Hell, he hated everything. It seemed like nothing made him happy, not even me.

  Ronan told me I was a mindless puppet for doing everything my parents told me to do and that I needed to start thinking for myself. He also told me I didn’t dress sexy enough and was a lousy kisser. I decided not to tell Jude and the Alhambra crowd what was happening. Instead, I confided in Sadie, Carla, and Tasha about the things he was telling me. Naturally, they said he was an asshole for saying those things to me and to dump him, which of course I didn’t do. Ronan was my first boyfriend, and I didn’t want to rock the boat. So I took all his personal jabs as constructive criticism and things I needed to improve about myself.

  I envied Ronan’s life of being able to come and go as he pleased, and I was beginning to resent my parents for all their rules. I started fighting constantly with my mom about having a later curfew. My defense was that I was responsible, not doing drugs, and since I hadn’t been in any major trouble, she had no reason not to trust me. Therefore, I felt a 3:00am curfew for me to hang out in Hollywood wasn’t an unreasonable request for a 14 year old to ask for.

  Along with battling my parents and Ronan, I also started fighting with Sadie, Carla, and Tasha. They kept riding me to dump Ronan. I was sick of fighting with them over him. So halfway through my sophomore year, I stopped hanging out with them. Instead, I would alternate my time between hanging out with Jude, or my new friends, identical twins Arwen and Ariah Gordon.

  Arwen and Ariah were two pixie sized, new wave girls with multicolored styled bobs, and funky clothes. I’d only known them as acquaintances back at Muscatel, but we’d recently become closer friends when the three of us landed in the same Home Economics class together.

  Arwen was older by a few minutes and definitely the more laid back of the two. Ariah, on the other hand, was a hyper little spider monkey that had taken up the hobby of embarrassing my sister Lucy. Whenever we saw her in the halls at school, Ariah would duck behind Arwen or me, then peek out and pretend to shoot Lucy with an imaginary laser blaster, making the sounds “P-tew! P-tew!” in a squeaky voice as she shot her. Lucy would simply just shake her head at us and run away.

  Arwen and Ariah knew all the skaters at Rosemead High, including Brandon. Although technically I was with Ronan, a small part of me was still crushing on Brandon. Not that it would’ve mattered anyway since he was still with Erica.

  I was lingering around school campus with Arwen and Ariah one day, when we got on the subject of Brandon and Erica. I had never officially met her before, but the twins had. They said she wasn’t very friendly and that her and Brandon seemed very awkward around each other.

  The three of us continued strolling through the semi empty campus. We entered a two-story building, which stood at the front of the school, and our cackling echoed the halls as we made fun of Erica and Brandon. We acted out weird scenarios on how we thought they acted around each other. We made fun of her clothing and how Brandon’s bangs had gotten so long that he looked like a sheepdog and couldn’t see what Erica REALLY looked like. We made farting sounds with our hands and laughed our asses off as we walked up
the stairs. We had just reached the top of the stairwell and were wiping tears from our eyes when we noticed Brandon and Erica leaning against a wall, staring right at us.

  Arwen and I immediately froze. Ariah squatted down and decided to shoot them. “P-tew! P-tew!” she squeaked out and then ran down the stairs. Arwen and I turned on our heels and followed after her mumbling, “omigod…omigod…omigod” as we barreled down the stairwell. The three of us ran down the main hall, completely out of the building, and didn’t stop running until we were in Panther’s Square on the other side of campus.

  “You don’t think they knew we were talking about them do you?” I asked. “I don’t know. Did we mention their names when we were walking up the stairs?” Ariah asked.

  “Did you see the look on their faces? Of course they knew we were talking about them,” Arwen stated.

  Although we found the whole incident hysterical, I was worried Brandon might be mad at me. Surprisingly, he wasn’t. I saw him in the halls at school a few days later, and he stopped to chat with me like nothing ever happened. Erica, on the other hand, would shoot me dirty looks every time I saw her the rest of the school year. Arwen and Ariah told me she’d do the same to them too.

  Shortly after my 15th birthday, I was chomping at the bit to get the ball rolling with my driver’s license. At the time, my high school offered a free Saturday morning driving class called Behind the Wheel, which basically stuffed three students in a car with a teacher who would instruct you on how to drive.

  The driving lessons I had with my dad over the last few months, not to mention the countless hours I spent playing Pole Position when I was little, totally came in handy when it came to my Behind the Wheel class. I was a pretty good driver who needed little to no correction and the same went for Ross, a hot skater friend of Brandon’s who was also in my driving class. But our 3rd person Clark, well he was a mess. Our one-hour class consisted of ten minutes of me driving, ten minutes of Ross driving, and the other forty minutes of Clark trying not to take out random pedestrians.

  Ross and I would sit in the backseat with our hands clinched and our eyes closed when Clark drove. After a few sessions, Ross and I asked our teacher if we could go home after each of our ten minute lessons were done, rather than staying for the entire hour. We justified it by saying Clark was probably nervous with Ross and I riding in the car, and it would be best for him to give Clark 100% of his attention. Luckily, for Ross and I, the teacher agreed.

  On the shit side of things, my relationship with Ronan continued on a downward spiral. He was highly sensitive, extremely jealous, and continued to find more things wrong with me that he could bitch about. He also repeatedly pressed the sex issue. The only thing we had done up to that point was make out. I’d only seen his penis once when it accidentally popped out of his boxers while he was changing. It had a lot of skin like a Shar Pei. Much more skin than I remembered seeing in the porno at Carla's house.

  The subject for most of my fights with Ronan was my curfew because he wanted a girlfriend with the same freedom he had. Anywhere we went always had to be planned around my curfew so he could get me home on time, and that got on his last nerve. There was one weekend when we went to a party a few blocks away from my house. I noticed he had been drinking quite a bit, so I told him he should probably cut back on the booze since he would have to drive me home soon. We ended up getting into a huge fight, and he left me deserted at the party with my curfew rapidly approaching. I didn’t want to call my parents for a ride because they knew I’d been out with Ronan, and I didn’t want them to be mad at him for leaving me. So I ended up walking the entire way by myself, and of course I got grounded for being late.

  By this time, my friendship with Sadie, Carla, and Tasha was almost non-existent. As for the twins, I rarely talked to them about Ronan, nor did I bring him around them, so they didn’t know what a dick he was. The only group of friends that hadn’t started to hate him were Jude and the rest of the Alhambra crowd. I’d only bring him around if her or Ron had a party. But even that quickly stopped once I heard rumors that he was flirting with random girls after I’d leave the parties to make my curfew. Nonetheless, I wanted to believe the best in Ronan, despite the fact that he was showing less and less of that towards me.

  On another bad note, my Uncle Gilbert, one of my dad’s older brothers, had recently passed away. His funeral was going to be in Arizona. Lucy, my dad, and I were going to make the drive out there for the funeral services while my mom stayed at home with Ginger, who was sick at the time. We’d be away for an entire weekend, and I welcomed the forced vacation from Ronan. I hoped that being with my family would help me clear my head a bit and that my time away would help him get his shit together too, aka stop being such a big asshole to me. It was wishful thinking on my part because nothing changed when I got back to L.A. I cringed to think what or who Ronan was doing while I was gone. Even though he made me crazy, I thought I was “in love”, so I stayed in the relationship.

  The only highlight of my sophomore year was reaching the 15½-year mark. That was the minimum age to apply for a drivers permit, which I received right after I was eligible. The remainder of the school year was essentially a blur of Taz shows and fighting with Ronan. I couldn’t wait to turn 16, so I wouldn’t have to depend on anyone to give me a ride anywhere again.

  In the fall of 1989, I started my junior year at Rosemead High and was pleasantly surprised when Brandon and I landed in the same 3rd period guitar class. Aside from a few small chats in the hallways at school, we really hadn’t spoken much since our softball days at Muscatel. But having a guitar class together quickly changed that, and it wasn’t long before we quickly rekindled our friendship. I didn’t realize how much I missed him and was so happy to have him back in my life again on a regular basis. By this time, he and Erica had long been broken up, and he’d recently started dating another senior, a chubby Goth girl named Grace.

  I vented my frustrations to Brandon about the problems I was having with Ronan. To my surprise, he seemed to be having similar issues with Grace. She was extremely jealous and wouldn’t let him go anywhere without her. One of his best friends was a girl named Jenny that he’d known since 1st grade, but Grace didn’t like that he had a good friend who was a girl. She badgered him into ending the friendship with Jenny, which he eventually ended up doing.

  The first few weeks of the semester, our guitar teacher, Mr. Simmons, taught us some basic chords. But from then on, every class became "practice time”, which essentially was kids disappearing into one of five small rehearsal rooms to sleep, goof off, or for the few of us that were actually interested, play guitar. As long as we learned to play a song each Friday for our weekly tests, he didn't give a shit what we did.

  Aside from learning how to play guitar, that class became relationship therapy for Brandon and I. Sometimes we’d camp out in one of the rehearsal rooms with the other kids to learn a song for our weekly tests. But usually we’d get our own room, jam a little bit, and give each other advice on our dysfunctional relationships, both of which we knew we had to get out of.

  Meanwhile, my one-year anniversary with Ronan had recently passed, and it was certainly nothing to be excited about. I was still enduring his hostility and critique when I finally realized it was beginning to take its toll on me. All we seemed to do was fight, and I wasn't a fun person to be around anymore. I dressed the way he wanted me to dress, I wore the makeup he wanted me to wear, and yet it still wasn’t good enough for him. All of my friends hated him. Even the Alhambra crowd turned on him after they caught him cozying up to Elanna the vulture after I left a party one night. The daily fights with Ronan were stressing me out, and I needed to plan a ditch day to blow off some steam. So Arwen and Ariah suggested we plan a day to go to the beach.

  Getting problem. I had spent a solid year putting a fail proof system into play. When I was in grade school and junior high, my mom would usually write the sick notes for me to bring to the attendance office. During that
time, I learned how to forge her signature but certainly not an entire letter in her writing. But once I got to high school, on occasions when I was legitimately sick, I made it a point to write out the notes in MY writing, then have my mom sign off on them at the bottom. Of course it looked shady to the office administrators, so I suggested they call my mom to verify the notes. After a few instances of receiving that type of letter and speaking with my mom, they assumed that was the drill with me and stopped calling her to confirm my absences. Naturally, that left me free to write a note anytime I felt like ditching school. I was a resourceful little shit back then.

  When I came home from the beach that afternoon, I mean, “school”, I had no phone messages from Ronan. We had gotten into a fight the night before, so I was expecting some kind of mea culpa waiting for me when I walked in the door. Coming home without any messages from Ronan really pissed me off. I stomped into the living room and slammed my bedroom door. A moment later, there was a knock on my door.

  “Are you okay in there?” My mom asked.

  my absences excused on ditch days wasn’t a “Yeah, I'm fine,” I said as I threw my backpack on my bed. “Why did you slam the door?”

  “Cuz it slipped out of my hand.”

  “Why is your door closed?”

  “Because I want to listen to music.”

  “Are you mad?”

  I started to get heated and said, “No, I just want to be alone

  and listen to music.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes mom. Everything’s fine,” I said with my teeth

  clinched.

  “Okay. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,” she said

  finally relenting.

  I threw in Mötley Crüe’s new album Dr. Feelgood and curled

  up on my bed. Surely fantasizing about Nikki would calm my