The Sunset Strip Diaries

by Amy Asbury

  He came by a few weeks later. I couldn’t look at him. He apologized to me, saying cocaine was a very sexual drug. I knew inside that he was talking about something filthy and I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t think about what he was apologizing for, even though I had made reference to it when I was screaming at him. I made my mind not think about it. I was picking at my big purple candle and wishing he would leave. I just let him ramble on; I didn’t answer him. I remember feeling like I used to feel when my mother would force me to listen to a sex talk, learning about menstruation or something. Just really uncomfortable, no eye contact, picking at something and not responding whatsoever. I was praying he would just hurry up and finish the speech. I kept telling myself it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. Don’t think about it.

  I heard a song around then that always made me cry because it struck something really weird in me- “Janie’s Got a Gun” by Aerosmith. It was about a girl who killed her father because he had abused her. I often had that same fantasy. Although I felt sorry for him on some days, most days I loathed my father. I wanted him dead. I was so deeply hurt and angered by him that I would have killed him myself if I could have. I shopped around through some of my rougher guy friends to see how much putting a hit on him would be. I found out someone would do it for five thousand dollars. I didn’t have that kind of money. I wished he would stop coming to the house and disrupting my life, so I could have a chance at being happy.

  I started to get a lot of anxiety for the next couple of months. By the time Christmas came, I was back in a deep depression. Christmas, a time I adored, would not be the same this year. My family was broken apart. We were living at my grandmother’s. Most of my belongings were gone. And the yuckiest thing of all was that my father gave a half-assed admission to molesting me. It absolutely broke apart my soul. At the time, I told myself I was depressed over a guy or something. I think it was Andy (please).

  I saw a commercial for the Rudolph Claymation special that they showed on TV every December. The next day at school, I felt a stinging pain in my heart, like heartbreak. I missed watching cartoon TV specials with my sister; I missed being a child. I didn’t want to be a teenager; I didn’t want to be in all of the situations I got myself into. I wanted my old dad back, the one who played church hymns on his guitar and bought me Beach Boys records. I wanted both my parents to be normal and still married. What happened to my dad? Will my mother ever look me in the eyes again? What happened to them!? I was going down some stairs at school between classes, when my mind started to go. I sat down on a step and put my head in my hands. People walked around me. I started blacking out. My fists clenched. My nails were making marks in my palms because I was squeezing so hard. My eyes were crushed shut and tears were pushing through. My mouth was open and nothing was coming out. A girl I hated from P.E. asked me if I were okay. She was the only one who did.

  The next thing I knew, I was screaming and crying at the top of my lungs, running through the halls. I couldn’t control it- I didn’t know where it was coming from. I remember seeing a kid I knew from grade school stare at me in fright. I don’t know how much time lapsed, but I remember being in a different spot when a bunch of security guards came up in a group to restrain me. I was kicking and screaming at them and it seemed they couldn’t get control of me. Or maybe they were trying to be gentle with me and were having a hard time. They dragged me into an office where I continued screaming at the top of my lungs for a half an hour straight.

  They didn’t know what to do with me. Someone sent for Abby, who came in, made everyone leave, and tried to talk to me. They tried to arrange for me to be institutionalized but Abby was vehemently against it. She begged them not to lock me up and started crying on her own. She had been locked up before and she didn’t want it to happen to me. My mother was called and when she came in, Abby started yelling at her. Something happened with the insurance company- I think it might have been that they wouldn’t cover me coming in unless the police were bringing me in after a threatening incident, but I hadn’t threatened anything? I don’t know. All I do know is that I couldn’t get a hold of myself. My mom was cold, aloof, and annoyed, which made me feel worse.

  A few days later, I was at the breakfast table with my sister, mother, and grandmother. My mother wasn’t talking and she wouldn’t look at me. I said out loud that I wanted to kill myself. She said, “Just do it already and stop talking about it; I am sick of hearing it.”

  I wanted to smash her into a billion pieces. I remember thinking, I knew it! She doesn’t love me! She doesn’t care if I die! She used to be so proud of me, smiling at me with love in her eyes. Her eyes were flat, dead, and black now. I am her first-born child…what happened? Could she really have lost all feeling toward me? I wanted so badly for her to take me in her arms and say, “If you died, I would never recover. I love you so much; you are my world. Please don’t ever do anything to hurt yourself; you are precious to me.” But that isn’t how it went. She told me to go ahead and kill myself already.

  I reached down for her milk in a swift movement, to dump it in her face a la Alexis Carrington from Dynasty. She had been a victim of my anger before, so she quickly tried to block what she thought was going to be a punch with a punch of her own, and the milk went splattering all over both of us. In a burst of adrenaline, I jumped on her and started kicking her as hard as I could. Then I punched her with all of my might, cursing like a demon. I heard my grandmother’s cracked voice begging me to get off my mother. Either my grandmother or my sister grabbed me by the back of my shirt and tried to pull me off her. My mom was just kind of balled up and trying to protect herself. I don’t remember any damage she did to me in return or if she even tried to retaliate. I just knew I felt enough anger to break through a brick wall. I felt as if I could punch a hole right through her.

  I was acting out of impulse that day. I now know as an adult what an incorrigible act it is to strike a parent, no matter the reason. It is with absolute shame and disgrace that I recall this incident.

  Sometime shortly thereafter, the cops came and arrested me.

  My sister says:

  “I remember that fight; it’s when things got totally out of control from like, then on. I was just frozen, watching. You stormed off afterward. Mom was crying and called the police on you. I ran to find you. You weren’t crying but you had a lot to say. You were positive Mom hated you and you were just plain old pissed off. We talked for a long time and I told you Mom called the police. You didn’t try to run but you wanted to go and tell her off and I tried to keep you from doing that. My heart was racing and I couldn’t believe it escalated to that. I wondered what took things to that point. I didn’t know everything; I was barely there. Then the police came and took you away and it seemed like you were gone for months. It was a living hell that whole time.”

  When the cops picked me up, they asked me if I was on cocaine. They revealed that my mother told them I was on it. I said I wasn’t. They said they would be testing me so it would be best to admit it. I said I truly was not on any drugs. They handcuffed me outside of my grandmother’s house; the house where I always felt so safe and wonderful as a kid. I always loved going there. It was sad to have had a scene such as this take place there, in front of the wood fence and the birds of paradise bushes; in front of the sidewalk where, with a key, my mother wrote “Linda Marie” and my uncle wrote “Scotty” in the wet cement.

  I sat on my handcuffed hands in the back of the cop car, embarrassed. When we stopped at stoplights, I didn’t look out the windows. I could feel people staring at me. Finally, we arrived at some back entrance of a hospital. I was taken into a room where they drew my blood and gave me a urine test. They gave me some orange juice because I was getting a little dizzy. I cooperated with everything they were doing and deliberately acted very calm, just so my mother would look like she was overreacting. I knew not to mess with the police. I wasn’t a complete idiot. They took me to a ward on the second or third fl
oor. It was a psych ward with unbreakable windows and security guards and what not.

  I was assigned to a very passive and soft-spoken shrink with a specialty in eating disorders named Dr. Bernstein. He was not a good match for me because I didn’t respect him. I found him to be a huge pussy and treated him awfully. Sometimes I just sat there for the whole hour and picked at his distasteful couch, while he asked me incessant questions about my father’s and my relationship. I shunned the questions. I always told him, no, nothing happened with my father. I wouldn’t even let my mind wander in that direction because it was such a disturbing thought. I pushed away all thought of it and was angry when he continued to ask. I wanted to talk about the guys I was dating and I wanted to shock him. He had no change of expression no matter how deranged my stories were. He diagnosed me as manic-depressive and put me on Lithium. I felt cool that I got to be on a drug. I couldn’t wait to tell Abby.

  After a week or so, I figured out the ward through some of the girls. They reaffirmed the obvious: I had to act stable. I had to draw pictures of rainbows and sunshine in art therapy. I had to behave. I had to show them they were wasting a space on me; that someone else who was severely troubled and out of control needed my spot. I knew it was crucial that I do the best acting job of my entire life: I had to act like I was normal.

  It was devastating having my freedom taken away. I couldn’t listen to my music. I couldn’t get on the phone and call Justin or Abby. I couldn’t go watch TV. I couldn’t do much of anything that wasn’t supervised. I had to eat shitty food, go on dorky supervised outings in a van, take a paper cup of various white pills, and be signed in and out to do everything. I didn’t like that my eyebrows were growing together in a unibrow and that my legs were so hairy (we couldn’t have razors because we were always on suicide watch). A unibrow can really put a bitch over the edge- I felt like killing myself just over that alone. Anyway, I knew I needed to get out of that place and get back in school if I didn’t want to flunk a grade and suffer the humiliation.

  All of the teenagers in the ward had to march down to a little schoolroom to receive our studies each day. I enjoyed my writing assignments and I loved looking through the books they had available, because they had some really crazy erotic novels in there, of which I am sure they weren’t even aware. I found them back in the depths of the bookshelves, and then curled up and read away, looking studious.

  I desperately wanted to be out of the ward for Christmas. I wanted to drop kick my mother for abandoning me in that place, but I had to get out, no matter the cost. I ended up staying only a few weeks and was let out a few days before Christmas.

  My dad called one night and asked to talk to me. When I got on the phone he said, “I heard you were in a mental hospital.” I tried to tell him how awful I felt to even have gotten to that place, but he started laughing and saying, “Ohhh, poor baby,” in a sarcastic tone. He said his friends were making fun of him for having a mental daughter or a crazy daughter, or something like that. I was so hurt that I couldn’t even react. I started mentally calculating how long it would take me to save up five G’s.

  I no longer had the option of fitting in at school, especially after my breakdown. I knew a lot of people in the school smoking section had heard the news of my whereabouts, because I received a huge purple card, created by Abby and signed by like, fifty people. I was embarrassed because it said “Hope you get out of the loony bin soon” or something like that. So needless to say, I wasn’t going to be getting any dates or making any new best friends any time soon. Frankly, I wasn’t attracted to the selection of boys anyhow. Actually, that isn’t true- there were one or two I found attractive, but I knew that I wasn’t normal and never would be. There was no way I could date like a regular person. The other girls had socially acceptable clothing, standard parents and knew the rules of how to behave around boys. I had bypassed the innocence of dating, I had never had a boyfriend, and I had already had sex. I knew I would scare the shit out of some poor boy if I accepted a date with anyone who wasn’t tattooed. It was okay with me though; I didn’t want to be like the other kids in school and be into Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, C & C Music Factory and Bel Biv Devoe. Kids stared at me with my straightened purple hair, blue nails, and big boobs. I carved a heart in my ankle and filled it with ink from a pen. I pierced my ears a bunch of times with a needle. Although I had gone through a ton of shit, I still wanted to be a Hollywood chick, but my plans kept failing. I needed get back on track.

  I started to make more trips to the record store down the street, and I soon realized that they carried local Hollywood magazines like Bam and Rock City News. Bingo! Those magazines were a gold mine. They were a great window into what was going on down on the Sunset Strip. I saw pictures of tons of people on Sunset Boulevard watching bands play at places like The Roxy, the Whisky a Go Go and Gazzarri’s. The women were beautiful. Most had really long hair, made up faces and wore cool-looking tight dresses. They looked like my Barbie dolls. I couldn’t imagine what stores sold clothing like that; I certainly didn’t see outfits like that in the stores at the mall. I saw ads for the Hollywood Tropicana, a mud-wrestling bar. The girls had dark tans, sequined bikinis, teased blond hair, and silicone breast implants.

  The guys featured in the magazines were gorgeous. Many of them had beautiful faces solely because of makeup, but that didn’t bother me. I saw tattoos, I saw long black hair, and I saw skinny legs in tight black pants. It was like a dream to see that many attractive guys in the same place. They all appeared to be wearing a brand of clothing called Lip Service. It was made up of crushed velvets in black and purple and sometimes a hint of burgundy. The main Lip Service logo was a cross and skull. They made pants with the logo print and jackets with a big skull in back. Some of the guys wore floppy velvet hats or T-shirts with the logo.

  I stared mostly at pictures of a band named Tryx and another called Pretty Boy Floyd. They were local bands who encompassed what I found attractive and hip. I studied their interviews and learned their names, their likes, their influences. I cut out their pictures, put them on my walls, and dreamed of seeing them play live at a show.

  I loved Tryx because they were creative and stood out (and maybe because I loved kids’ breakfast cereal). They each wore a certain color, head to toe. One guy (the singer, Jessie Star), was in red leather, with a red stripe in his dyed black hair; another was in turquoise (Roxy DeVeau), another in purple (Tracy Dahne), and another in pink (Cody Marks). They even had color-coordinated tattoos. I think the pink guy had a Pink Panther, the blue guy had a Smurf, and so on. I couldn’t figure out who was the cutest. I read all of their interviews and longed for the day I had a car so I could go to Hollywood to see them and all the rest.

  I spent the remainder of the year looking at those magazines every week. I began to learn the names of the popular people. Screaming Boy Mandie from the Glamour Punks. Stevie Rachelle from Tuff. Theodore Love from Imagine World Peace. Paulie and Sunny from Swingin’ Thing. The ‘Miss Gazzarri’ dancers in bikinis with a sash over their breast implants, like Miss America. With each issue, I became more consumed.

  I had to get there.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Tattoo Shop

  I studied Rock City News with a hunger. Soon I knew what I should look like, what crowd I should try to break into and the spots in which I should be seen, if I ever had the chance. I knew the names of the clubs, the bands who were in rotation and who was up-and-coming. I knew the labels of the clothing I should be wearing and the stores in which I should be shopping. I had a pretty clear picture of what I was going for. I also knew it was not going to be easy to make it into a scene so obscure and so based on a coolness factor. I knew good looks were always welcome, so I could be on the fringe at the very least. But it was clear you had to have more to hang with the Big Dogs- you had to be kind of a ‘name.’

  I wished I could meet some Hollywood people so I could tag along with them when they went out, but it was very rare to run into someone
from that crowd outside of Hollywood. And I knew I was very far from getting a car of my own and driving there myself. I was sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting. I would lie on my bed and look out the window while listening to Hanoi Rocks, Jetboy, and Roxx Gang records, daydreaming about the Sunset Strip. I always had on men’s boxers and my cut-up Faster Pussycat shirt. My room was jam-packed with pictures of all of the bands I liked. There were stacks of tapes and records, bins of makeup and perfume bottles, and random pins and stickers all over the place. I don’t think I had made my bed once since we moved into my grandma’s. I just crawled under a pile of clothes and went to sleep each night.

  It was the beginning of 1990 when I saw a real live Hollywood guy in Canoga Park. I nearly shit my polka dot biker shorts. I was tripping over myself because I knew I had to act and act fast. I couldn’t pass up my ticket to Hollywood, my ticket out of misery in the Valley. I originally saw him in a fast food parking lot and I knew right away he was from Hollywood. He had long, dyed black hair; tattoos, combat boots and Lip Service clothing. Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner! I watched him get into his car that had a cartoon skull painted on the doors. Then I saw something that made my heart skip a beat: his bumper sticker. I knew the bright pink script on a black background meant none other than Riki Rachtman’s World Famous Cathouse, located in Hollywood! It was frequented by Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns, and many other rock stars and beautiful women. The guy had access to the Cathouse! I had been reading about it in magazines since I was fourteen. I never thought I would meet someone who went there. I started sweating and wanted desperately to talk to him, but he was getting in his car to leave and I couldn’t make my feet run over there and act like a fool. I was mad at myself. How would I ever get to Hollywood?