The Sunset Strip Diaries

by Amy Asbury

  A few months later, I was coming home from school on that hateful bus. I looked out the window at a stop light and I saw something that intrigued me. It was a little tattoo shop! Tattoos were very Hollywood. I was not discouraged by my unfavorable dealings with Casey, who I met because I saw his tattoo shop bumper sticker. Tattoos were a symbol of rock and roll, of rebellion, of guts. I knew I had a higher chance of meeting a Hollywood guy in a tattoo shop than anywhere else in my town (it was either that, or I would be walking into a room full of Hell’s Angels or Marines).

  I decided to check it out one day. I wanted to take action. I needed to do this! I got off the bus before my usual stop and crossed the street toward the tattoo shop. It felt thrilling and dangerous. It felt bad ass. It felt adult. When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a black-haired tattoo artist working on someone’s arm. He looked up and I recognized him as none other than the guy from the parking lot. I couldn’t believe my luck. I could hardly breathe and left the store after barely looking through a few racks of assless chaps. My heart was pounding as I got back on the bus to go home. I had to make sure I came back. I had to meet the hot tattoo guy and get my ticket to Hollywood, the town where I belonged. But what would be my reason for going back? I had no business at a tattoo shop…unless...unless I…needed a tattoo.

  I know, I know, I was pretty lame. And don’t ask me how I got money for a tattoo, because I can’t even remember. I just know that in March of 1990, I went back to that tattoo shop with balls of steel. I thought, Okay, I am not going to blow this. My ticket to freedom is in this shop. My new life could start because of this shop. There is a hot guy in there and I could flirt with him and get to go to Hollywood. I had to make it happen.

  I waited for a day that I felt pretty. I think it was a day that I liked my makeup application and/or hair styling and outfit. I was nervous all day at school thinking about getting a tattoo in front of the hot guy. What if he wasn’t even there? What if he WAS there, and I cried in front of him because the tattoo hurt? What if I were too nervous after getting my tattoo to talk to him about Hollywood? I would be stuck with a tattoo and nothing to show for it. What if he had a girlfriend?

  After school, I took a deep breath and got off the sweaty, smelly, crowded bus in the crisp March air. I entered the shop, hearing L.A. Guns blaring. My favorite band! Playing there! Right there! It was a sign! I couldn’t believe somewhere else in my neighborhood was playing that music, as they were not as mainstream as other bands. My adrenaline was pumping very strong. I wanted to drop to the floor and do a few push-ups and jump back up.

  I was greeted by the parking lot guy. He had bright, electric blue eyes. My heart felt like it would jump out of my chest. He locked eyes with me and I felt weakened, but made myself continue. I somehow got the words out of my mouth that I wanted a tattoo. He gave me a book of tattoo drawings to look through, to decide what I wanted. Oh…I hadn’t thought of what I wanted! I couldn’t let on that I didn’t even care what tattoo it was…I had to pretend I was really there for a tattoo, and if that were true, I would’ve at least had something in mind! Crap…

  I pointed to the first feminine thing that I saw: a very plain sketch of a fairy. It was not elaborate and didn’t even look professional, but it was either that or skulls and flames, so I quickly pretended to be in love with the drawing. It looked like a drunken retard drew the thing.

  “I drew that myself,” said the guy, who introduced himself as Jimmy.

  I announced that I wanted it on my ankle, over the heart I had carved. He asked me if I was eighteen and I said I was, hoping he didn’t want I.D. He took my word for it.

  So there I sat with my ankle in the Hollywood guy’s hands. He had rubber gloves on, and started to dig into my ankle with a tattoo gun filled with ink. I was never so happy. I know: I was crazy. But a L.A. Guns song was playing. A couple of cool Hollywood people were in the background. Lip Service clothes were on racks in front of me. And the tattoo didn’t even hurt. I don’t know if that is because I had developed a very high pain tolerance or the ankle just isn’t sensitive, but I remember thinking, What’s all the stink about tattoos hurting? People sure are babies. You would think that I ripped a beer bottle open with my teeth afterward, but I didn’t.

  My euphoria of being tattooed did not end there. Jimmy said, “If I do a good job, can I take you out?”

  And I am ashamed to admit my answer, but, I will tell you. I said, “You can take me out if you do a bad job.”

  Classy.

  Jimmy called me a day or two later and we went on a date (I don’t remember where), and we were inseparable from that day on. I spent all of my time with Jimmy, who, despite the long hair and tattoos, had been educated at an upper-crust Catholic private school. It was something he kept secret, along with his upper-middle-class upbringing in the suburbs and his former blond crew cut. He had created a new image for himself, just as I had. He lived in his own apartment (wow!) on Coldwater Canyon and was a graphic artist; he had created many of the ads I looked at in Rock City News and Bam. Tattooing was something he did on the side (he had a picture of Drew Barrymore in his shop, getting tattooed near her bikini line).

  Jimmy was not just a frequenter of the Cathouse. He was in the inner circle; part of Riki Rachtman’s close group of friends. There were always articles and mentions of Riki and the Cathouse in magazines, but he was most recognizable from MTV, where he was a host for the rock show Headbanger’s Ball. I knew his crowd was the in-crowd. Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses was one of the Cathouse members (who reportedly got him the MTV job), as was Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat. There was also a guy named Shannon Hoon, who was in a band called Blind Melon. He was friends with Axl through his sister or something. There was a guy named Tip, a guy named King T and some other dudes I don’t remember. The members of Riki’s inner circle wore leather jackets with a skull and a Cathouse logo on the back, as opposed to the T-shirts that were available to the public. You couldn’t just buy one of those jackets- they weren’t for sale. You had to be in that inner circle to get one.

  After dating Jimmy for a few glorious months, I threw a wrench into my life. Once again, it was due to my own impulsive behavior. I got into a venomous fight with my mother, who I still hated with the fire of a thousand suns. I was still deeply wounded and seething at her for telling me to just go ahead and kill myself and I somehow wanted to give her a chance to give me a different answer than the one she gave the time before. I took a knife, walked out of the house with it, and told her I was going to kill myself. I guess I wanted her to chase me and say, “No! Please don’t! I love you so much and I would die if you did such a thing!” But instead, she called the cops, remaining bitterly cold. I knew in my heart I would hate her for the rest of my goddamned life. And I did.

  I remember going into my grandmother’s room, lying on the bed and calling my good friend from Middleton, Todd Lewis, to tell him I was about to be locked up again. He kind of helped me to cool down. Next thing I knew, there was a cop in the doorway. I was about to be dragged back to the psychiatric ward. I thought Awwhh shit.

  I wasn’t really going to hurt myself. I knew the whole thing was going to be a big waste of time and a huge disruption to my life (most of all my new relationship), but I was the one who had cried wolf. So I had to deal with what I had started. I asked the cops if I could go to the bathroom first, before I went through the long process of being hauled off, tested for drugs, and put into a holding tank. I really did have to go to the bathroom, and everyone was reluctant about letting me, in case I was going to kill myself in there somehow, or climb out a window. When I came out, they handcuffed me and put me into the back of their police car in front of all of the neighbors. I was taken back down to the same hospital to have my freedom taken away. Again. (Sigh.)

  I was on suicide watch at the hospital and I was bored to tears. At first, I shared a big room with four girls who were younger than me. I broke down one night in that room, laying on the floor and crying to a sta
ffer named Lori, an anorexic looking, redheaded lady with a Brooklyn accent. She tried her ‘tough love’ bullshit, which made me cry harder. She was so cold and rude, thinking that it was the only way to deal with someone like me. I longed for somebody, anybody, to put their arms around me, hug me, and tell me they cared about me. I felt so trapped. My mother had used that same tough method with me and it only hurt and angered me further.

  The people in the hospital ward came around with a little tray full of white paper cups that contained various pills for each of us, just like the last time. I never knew what the hell I was taking. We had to take what they gave us because they checked under our tongues to make sure we swallowed everything. It could have been cyanide for Pete’s sake, but you had to follow the rules or stay in there even longer. When my mother came to visit once with my sister, I pretended to be very spacey and very drugged. I wanted her to feel guilty, to feel bad for handing me over and letting them drug me. I detected a hint of concern, but nothing came of it.

  I spent my days doing whatever was asked of me. If you disobeyed, you had to go into seclusion, and if you got physically out of hand, they would strap you down with restraints. I never had that happen to me; I was sure to be well behaved. I got the picture the first time and was not about to stay in there longer than I had to. I had things to do, a life to live, rock stars to meet. Debbie, a chubby, good-natured girl, was restrained one time for a totally ridiculous reason. She was not a threat to anyone- she was a kid. I was so frustrated for her, I knew she was just having personal feelings that she wanted to express and she couldn’t. She had to learn to play by the rules to get out, just as I did.

  I was soon moved out of the big room with the younger girls and into a small room that had two beds. My roommate was a girl my age named Eden. She had dyed black hair just past her ears and was sort of punk/goth/alternative. The type I would’ve hung out with at school. She was really cool. Eden and I used to get up in the huge window overlooking a busy street and take off our clothes and dance in our underwear. Sometimes we put lotion on our butts and then stuck them on the glass to make butt prints. We held up colored signs that said, “We’re crazy!” That was one of our thrills, that damn window and the rush of acting like crazies.

  One day we were all taken to a pool to go swimming. All of the girls were allowed to wear two-piece bikinis except for me. They banned me from the two-piece. They said I looked too sexual. It made me feel bad and dirty toward myself. I did not have a stripper bikini; it was a regular, store-bought bikini. No one had boobs the size of mine, of course, but that wasn’t my fault. That was my body. It reinforced the thought that I was a blatant sex object even if I didn’t want to be, and it made me feel that anything that happened to me was my own fault for looking the way I naturally did. That was kind of the story of my life at that time.

  Eden and I had a crush on a guy who worked in the ward who was only a few years older than us. Not a crush crush, but more of a boredom crush. His name was Tad and he was pretty hot, for a guy who wore Dockers and didn’t have tattoos. We would summon him, ask him useless questions, and then check out his ass. He was always a little nervous to come into our room alone and managed to remain professional around us. I entertained the thought of trying to seduce him out of having nothing better to do, but I decided I was really into Jimmy. I missed him terribly while locked up. One day he called the payphone for me. He said that he had spoken with my mother and she told him I was only sixteen. Gulp. I had told him I was eighteen when he gave me the tattoo, and I had never corrected myself. I didn’t expect to still be dating him! I thought for sure he would dump me for the lie, especially since he was twenty-one. But he didn’t.

  Jimmy and I continued dating when I got out of the hospital. I really clung to him and spent a great deal of time with him in his apartment. The cool thing was that he clung back to me. We both seemed to be starved for affection and we were more than happy to shower it on each other. As the year went on, Jimmy became my first boyfriend and we entered a serious relationship. He still went out all of the time, to both the Cathouse and Riki Rachtman’s other club, Bordello, but I wasn’t afraid of competition. He was smitten with me and we were crazy for each other. Looking back on it, it was my first time being in love. Was it comparable to the love I have for my husband now? No. But for a sixteen-year-old it felt very real and my heart was twisting and turning with every argument or crying spell. Every song reminded me of him and we were very big into baby talk and romance. It was us against the world. He and his eyeliner, tattoos, and long black hair, and me looking the part of a rock and roll girlfriend with a bikini model’s figure, tiny clothes and of course, my tattooed ankle. We were a perfect match.

  Just my luck, none of the time we spent together was in Hollywood. We hung out at his place on Coldwater Canyon watching movies and then he moved to a condo somewhere else, where we spent a lot of time by the pool and drinking with friends. We made dinners and were just homebodies. I loved him, so being with him, wherever that was, was fine by me. The guy didn’t have a dime, which was evident when he made me several dinners of white toast and spaghetti, costing under $3.00 per dinner. Don’t get me wrong, it was somehow totally delicious.

  While I enjoyed most of my time with Jimmy, there was one thing irking me. I desperately wanted to start going to the Cathouse with him and his friends. But I was banned from both of Riki’s clubs, Bordello and the Cathouse, supposedly because I was underage. Please. This was Hollywood. I knew Jimmy could get me in. I started to become a little bitter toward him. He loved me, but he wasn’t about to ruin his standing with the most prestigious crowd in town. None of the guys brought their girlfriends out and he wasn’t about to be the one pussy who brought his girlfriend everywhere. We got in several fights that summer because I felt kind of trapped. I could only go places when Jimmy decided to bring me, and he didn’t want to bring me out with him very often, if at all. I couldn’t let on just how desperately I wanted to go to Hollywood, so I let it go. I had fallen in love with the guy.

  I started to hang around my childhood girlfriend Cristabelle around that time, on days I wasn’t with Jimmy. She was fifteen, a year younger than I was, and she wanted to go out and have fun. She had long, thick blond hair, dark eyes, and an athletic body. She wore well-made clothes and there was an expensive, powdery scent in the air when she walked by. She lived with her parents in an affluent area of Sherman Oaks, south of Ventura Boulevard. Her parents drove a Mercedes and a BMW and had a gorgeous home that literally overlooked the San Fernando Valley. There was a cobblestone driveway in the front leading up to a very landscaped two-story house full of antiques. There was a formal sitting room which we weren’t allowed to enter, a maid named Luisa, and two or three white Persian cats and kittens who padded around the slate flooring in the foyer. The backyard had a huge swimming pool and a patio full of white padded lounge chairs.

  Leaving my run-down neighborhood to come to that house was always like going to an expensive day spa. There was food, beauty products, clothes and every amenity I could think of. But most of all, I was safe. That is the main thing I felt. Safe. I felt protected by Cristabelle’s family. If something happened to us, we would be rescued and have a full legal team behind us. When something happened to me at home, I was on my own. You can bet your left tit that if Cristabelle’s gynecologist tried getting fresh with her, there would be a cop arresting that doctor the very next day and he would pay for what he did. If we got a flat tire, or if someone tried to scam us or we were abandoned somewhere, we would be saved. Before Jimmy was in my life, I was left places and no one would come get me. People tried to take anything I did have, and did horrible, horrible things to me. But nothing bad would happen to me when I was with Cristabelle. That was one of the main things I looked for in a friend as the years went on. If a girl came from a solid family, I was very likely to make friends with her.

  Cristabelle’s room was a cloud of pastels. It was full of designer clothes, perfume bottles, and s
cented candles. Little fairy and angel trinkets were dotted about the shelves. Pictures were matted and framed on the walls; it was very different from the haphazardly taped magazine pictures on my own walls. Her bedding was always so soft: she had a thick, white goose down duvet, egg foam under the soft sheets and six goose down pillows. My own bed contained precisely one flattened pillow and it was so old that cavemen probably used the thing. I never slept as well as I did when I was at her house. Next to her bed was a bubbling aquarium that hummed us to sleep at night. There was central air always keeping the place cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It was heavenly.