The Sunset Strip Diaries

by Amy Asbury

  I remember the very last day I ever saw Willa. We went to visit Michael at some girl’s apartment on La Brea and Franklin. Beautiful, young Birdie Montgomery was also there in a sheer floral baby-doll dress and cherry lip gloss. Willa despised Birdie, but found her stunning. She randomly took Birdie into the bathroom and made out with her (again, things like that were kind of just normal behavior in that town). Not too long after that, the keys to my car were missing. We all started looking for them in the apartment. While everyone was searching, Birdie took me aside and whispered that she saw Willa hide my keys. She was sure Willa was planning to steal my car, but was afraid to tell me because Willa had threatened her. I was like, Was that before or after you guys made out? Then it dawned on me that Willa was planning to steal my car. She had asked me earlier in the week to show her how to drive it (the transmission skipped, so I had to skip over third gear, even though it was automatic). Does that mean she would steal a car? Probably. The bitch wasn’t scared of much. She ended up living with the little Hindu man who owned the liquor store, and driving his car. His store was robbed not too long afterwards, and he was shot in the private parts. He lived.

  I never saw Willa again.

  ***

  Okay, so there I was, in the thick of things. I didn’t seem to notice that the crowds on Sunset were no longer large. Things were very slowly dying out because there was a new sound trickling through radio and MTV and it was as sure as shit not glam. It started with a band named Nirvana. They looked dirty, angry, styleless and colorless -quite the opposite of what the Sunset Strip stood for. Nirvana was from Seattle, so the record companies began to look to the North for bands and less to the Hollywood scene. My friends and I were so drunk that we didn’t even pay attention. It wouldn’t be long until we would be forced to take notice, but at that time, things were still a party to us.

  Journal Entry 5/27/1992

  Birdie Montgomery asked for my number the other night and I gave it to her. She has been calling me. She is actually my rival- a threat to me. She appears to be dumb, but she is actually quite sneaky. She is very sweet and smiley to girls while insulting them and/or stealing their boyfriends. It doesn’t matter that they all talk about her when her back is turned. She has the code cracked and it would be too much trouble to compete. And the girl is beautiful, more so than me. The thing that sucks is that she wouldn’t think twice about doing anything she could do to win popularity over me or bag a guy I liked- we aren’t close enough at this point to where she would have loyalty toward me. I have to be very careful not to give anything away in our fake phone conversations. I have the upper hand for being admired and fawned over without having slept around as she already has. I played my card better than she did already. I will win in the end because her age shows and she can’t be subtle.

  Regardless of the fact that she annoyed me, I started to hang out with Birdie. She was so pretty and had such great clothes and such expensive cosmetics that, being the user I was, I was like, Where do I sign up? I liked that she lived with her parents, so we wouldn’t have to worry about our safety. It was like another Cristabelle. She was really fun, girly, and enthusiastic. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and all that shit. Birdie felt that we needed to stick to our kind: pretty girls, and she was peeved if I talked to anyone who wasn’t good looking. She gave me a lot of crap for that. She loved to talk about the ‘less fortunate,’ which made me uneasy.

  One night, I was with Michael and one of his female acquaintances, who was rather average looking but harmless. Birdie showed up and saw her, thinking I had brought the girl along. She scrunched up her face and asked me right in front of the girl, “Is this another one of the girls you’ve picked up as a friend? I swear, you pick up all these unwanted friends.” Without missing a beat, I said, “And you’re one of them, honey.” Michael started cracking up.

  Birdie and I had a crazy night about a week later. We were driving back to her parents’ townhouse at about three in the morning. We were at a stoplight and looked over to see two guys who we knew from around Hollywood. One of them was pretty well known- he was the singer of a popular band who I had seen on MTV. The other guy was named Sparkle- he was blond, swishy and feminine with tons of makeup and glitter all over him. We thought he was amusing. They yelled stuff to us, we yelled stuff to them. They followed us to the townhouse parking lot, got out of the car, and came to our window. Birdie had her camera out, so Sparkle grabbed it and put it down his pants to take pictures of his thing. We were all laughing and making jokes. Hardy har har. Then we were getting tired so we started to say goodbye to the guys; we were going to be on our way.

  Sparkle said in his sassy girl voice, “I need you to give me thawt roll of film.” Back then, you couldn’t erase a picture on your camera. Whatever pictures you took were on the roll of film, period. Birdie said in her bitchiest of voices, “Give you the film? Uhhhhh, No” (But she said it like “No-wh”).

  Sparkle’s eyes got a little mad, and he sighed like a thirteen-year-old. “I said, give me thawt roll of film! There is a picture of my dick on your camera.”

  We stared at them in the dimly lit parking lot. Birdie then put the camera in her inside coat pocket and lifted her eyebrows. She always had to be totally dramatic. I looked at the two of them and thought, as I had in similar instances, Shit, what could happen with these two wimps? I could probably take on both of them and kick their asses myself. I wasn’t worried- I was kind of a bad ass. I yawned and hoped she would hurry up. I was tired.

  Suddenly, something changed in Sparkle. I watched his soft powdered face go from lisping Valley Girl to something entirely different. His eyes turned red. His whole expression and his body language suddenly morphed into some Satanic fucking demon. He tilted his chin downwards, looked up at her with evil eyes and said in this slow, deep, possessed voice that sounded like The Exorcist, “I said, give me the film.”

  Birdie and I screamed at the same time. He reached through the window, grabbed her by the neck, and started choking her. I panicked, jumped out of the car, and went around to try to pull him off her but the other guy grabbed me. Oh shit- these guys are going to beat us up! And Sparkle looks like he will sacrifice us to the devil afterward! We were flying all over the place. Sparkle started punching Birdie and she was screaming bloody murder, but no one came outside to help. I was shitting my G-string.

  “Give him the film! Give him the film!” I yelled to her as my arm was twisted back and nearly ripped off my body. Sparkle stopped punching her and she fumbled with her leopard skin coat to get the camera. She was visibly shaking. She had black mascara running down her face and her nose was running. She handed him the camera and he opened it and yanked out the film. The other guy let me go. I got back in the car and locked the doors and we looked at each other with our eyes bugged out.

  “What the fuck just happened?” I asked her.

  “Drive!” she said.

  Journal Entry 5/17/92

  I am lonely, sick, and unhealthy. Girls are calling me asking for advice on what they should do to land my guy friends. I don’t even know who some of them are or how they have my number. Some stranger came up to me and said that people used to drive by my grandma’s house as if it was a tour. What the hell? He said he knew Fritz and Andy and they talked about me all the time. I put on an ultra-bitchy face and said, “I am sure they do,” and flipped my hair and walked away. Yuck. They wish they still knew me. Please. It must have subliminally affected me though, because I told off the financial aid woman at school today and gave two weeks’ notice at my job.

  I don’t know why a) I thought I was so great: I wasn’t, and b) I thought quitting school and my job was a good idea. I guess they were getting in the way of my partying. I thought that maybe I could try to be a dancer. I stayed up eating tacos with Michael one night and he warned me not to do it. It wasn’t every day that I agreed with a guy wearing lipstick, but I somehow knew he was right.

  Okay, so, I was still feeling all cool, popular, and unt
ouchable. What a feeling that is- it is a real high to get to feel like that. Maybe I was getting too big for my britches, or maybe it was flat out karma for all of my conceit, but out of nowhere I was blindsided by something I thought would never happen.

  Jimmy was still garnering attention with his new band and Razz, of all people, was convinced they were going to make it big. The next thing I knew, Razz, the one who told me how out Jimmy was, the one who told me to dump him countless times, the one who told me to go out with someone cooler, got so into Jimmy that he ditched me for him! (slams fist on table) I felt so betrayed. The hypocrisy! If that wasn’t bad enough, Jimmy moved into the same apartment building as Michael and Strange and they started to hang out with him too- (screams) and they didn’t invite me! They didn’t want me around! They all stopped calling me. I couldn’t believe Jimmy had the audacity to weasel into my crowd. He had hated them so much! And they thought he was a huge dork! What had happened?! I had to put a stop to it. I couldn’t let that shit fly.

  Journal Entry 6/11/1992

  I don’t want to talk about it. Everyone is making friends with Jimmy and starting to ditch me. I never thought it would happen to me. Even Strange is ditching me and he has no brain in his head. Oh wait…that is surely why. Anyway, I talked to Razz for a few hours. He said, “Honey, I can’t even count my real friends on my five fingers and you are one of them. The only chick, too.” He kept saying it wasn’t what I thought, no one was ditching me, and that Jimmy and I should just get back together. Never! I would never, ever in my life be that dumb. Aside from that, isn’t Razz the person who tried to break us up for two years straight?

  I went over to Teddy St. John’s that weekend and laid by his father’s pool. He made me a chicken patty sandwich, poured me a drink in a fat glass, and stayed very quiet.

  “What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to be obnoxious,” I said, eyeballing his soft skin and full lips.

  “So. What’s up with Jimmy?” he said in his deep voice, locking his big dark eyes on mine.

  “Nothing. He just wants to kill every guy that speaks to me.”

  “Well, the guy has your name tattooed on his back and says he wants to fucking marry you.”

  “So? So what! SO WHAT.” I asked for some suntan oil and spent the rest of the day on a raft in his pool, ignoring him.

  Journal Entry 6/19/92

  Fuck Razz, fuck Teddy, and fuck Michael. Those three are the biggest traitors on earth. They ditched me and left with Jimmy the other night! Fuck Robbi too! He was hanging out with Jimmy as well! They all try to screw me behind his back and when they see Jimmy, suddenly they cling to him! I can’t believe people actually don’t want to be around me! I was popular for so long and it never crossed my mind that I would ever be on the other end.

  Journal Entry 7/4/92

  I went to a party and ended up throwing an open beer at Strange and it nailed him. He tackled me in front of everybody and put me in a headlock. I pulled a phone out of the wall by tripping over the wire. Michael and Strange moved and are now living with a dancer named Gypsy who lives in a dreadful part of town. She has spiky, honey-colored hair; pale skin and a friendly demeanor. She wears really crazy hooker clothes, like, things she should not be wearing in public. Especially in the daytime! But she seems like a nice girl. When we got back to her place after partying the other night, Michael was passed out in my car and I couldn’t lift him out of it. The neighborhood was so bad that I was getting scared. But then I saw a gay hustler on the corner wearing a neon pink spandex bodybuilding suit that went straight up his ass and showed both buns. When car headlights hit the corner, he turned his ass toward the car, advertising. That was amusing. Michael finally woke up when I was dragging his lifeless girl body out of my car. His Cover Girl powder compact fell and broke in the street. Razz would’ve looked down on that shit because he wears Shiseido. We got upstairs and opened the door and Gypsy’s beloved Dalmatians ran out of the apartment. We were so tired and they wanted to play with us. Michael just slammed the door and left the poor things out there.

  Journal Entry 7/8/92

  It is 8:15 at night and I am still not over my hangover. I got so wasted that I blacked out. Apparently, I went to a party at Chris Holmes of WASP’s house- but I don’t remember going there or anything about the party. In the beginning of the night, I went over to Gypsy’s to get Michael and Strange to go to Red Light District. We scrounged up some change and bought a bottle of Night Train and it got me drunk within five minutes. Gypsy is one of the sequined bikini dancers on the pole at Red Light. She kept bringing me drinks between songs. I saw one of the most handsome guys I ever saw in my life that night. His name is Joey and Michael just happens to know him. I started talking to him by the bar and out of nowhere, Jimmy flew up and grabbed my arm and yanked me away! Then he got in the guy’s face and said, “Do you have a death wish?” The guy got scared and took off and Jimmy was thrown out of the club shortly thereafter. I got even drunker. I couldn’t stand, let alone drive. The next thing I remember, I was in the backseat of my own car making out with Andre, Jimmy’s egotistical asshole drummer who is very hot, but who I have always hated. He is always such a dick around me. I don’t even know how we got to that point because I just remember we were talking shit to each other at the beginning of the night. I guess we just started making out. Don’t get me wrong- I really do still hate him, I can’t stand him. He is so arrogant. He asked me about hooking up with Robbi earlier in the year and I admitted to it. I blacked out after making out with him in my car. I think it was that Night Train. That shit is evil. I just remember sleeping on the floor with Strange and those Dalmatians, after puking my guts up.

  Andre panicked the next day and tried calling me with a very rehearsed speech to do some damage control, but his idea of damage control was to piss me off, I guess. In a nutshell, he told me a) I was a slut, b) I was all over him and he didn’t even find me attractive in the least, c) he was innocent; he had only made out with me because he was drunk, and d) Jimmy would kill me, and would only be mad at him.

  I didn’t fall for that shit. I knew he would be thrown out of his band immediately. He had a lot more to lose than I did. But I did nothing. We both kept quiet and tried to forget the whole thing.

  Journal Entry 7/9/1992

  My sister was saying that Hollywood is such a hard place to be a part of because it is all based on looks and image. She says she feels like shit for weeks every time she gets back from there. It is true. A lot of people come from all over the country to try to be in this scene; to make it in Hollywood. Most fail. As for me, I guess I am kind of a fly on the wall, a spy almost. I am in the middle of it, but I also see it from an outside point of view. My friends in bands have sort of a cult-like following, so the same crowds of people show up at their shows. The “usuals,” such as me, arrive late- just in time for the headliner, with whom they are usually buddies. Some of us go there to party, some go to see someone they have a crush on (not a good idea) and some actually go to see the band. The actual performance is very loud and it gets very hot in the club and sometimes too smoky. You can’t hear anyone talk and sometimes you can hardly move. The sluttier bands have the biggest audiences, filled with girls. The girls won’t smile at anyone except the two friends they brought along. Slutty bands know that the girls they bang will show up and bring friends, so they bang away. They also flirt with every single girl they pass out flyers to. Very average girls get all excited and feel pretty and come to the show to see the guy on the stage who was talking to them. The band hopes that on the night of the show there will be someone from a record company or someone from one of the magazines writing a good review and taking pictures of how many people were there. All of the unknown miscellaneous guys just stand around hoping some of the girls will sleep with them.

  Half of us usually get thrown out of a club on a regular weekend night. Someone will steal a bottle from the bar, smash a fire extinguisher’s glass, won’t pay for something, or the most common
, get into a fight. Sometimes we are thrown out just for being too drunk (like I was at The Roxy one night- they threw me out on my ass). The people who are not our friends usually stare at us because the girls are so pretty and the guys are so weird or maybe because of how loaded everybody is. We will hardly speak to anyone we don’t know (except when the guys are “promoting,” then they try to be friendly). After the shows, there is either a party somewhere (from which we will all be thrown out by cops with flashlights) or we make our own party up at Errol Flynn’s burned down and haunted estate at the top of Fuller (in which we will also be thrown out by cops with flashlights). We migrate a lot in a typical night. For a few years now, it has been the same thing. Go to show. Go to Rock n’ Roll Ralphs and get Jim Beam and see all of our friends buying the same thing. Go to parties and leave because of cops; go to Errol Flynn’s and leave because of cops; go pass out, anywhere. Wake up and be miserable.

  At the parties, something pathetic will usually happen. Someone will fall into a glass table. Strange will try to do a beer bong and it will come out his nose. Michael will go outside and try to reason with the cops while staggering drunk. Bang will go around trying to bite people. Boy Mandie will grab you by the hair. We leave the clubs with glasses still in our hands. I’ve been burned by countless cigarettes, thrown up in every place known to man, had beer cans thrown at me, drinks dumped on me by strangers, and have been left places, stranded. Guys ask you to marry them in a slur, you hear rumors about yourself, you try to walk straight in front of the cops so they don’t notice you getting into your car and driving off. You help your wasted friends off the lawn or out of the hallway; you go looking for toilet paper after pissing in a bush and use a leaf instead. We have all come across the very rich and the very poor. We have partied in Malibu amongst stars and in parking lots alongside homeless people and junkies.