They took me to Cedars Sinai and did an X ray, and after a while, the doctor came into the room and said, “You broke your back, and it doesn’t look so good.” I had been keeping a pretty optimistic stiff-upper-lip outlook on the whole thing, but when he gave me the prognosis, I started weeping. “There goes my summer. There goes my athleticism. There goes my life.”
I started hitting on every nurse who came by, desperate for painkillers, but they wouldn’t give me anything until the doctor had okayed it. Then Blackie came rushing in, screaming, “What did I tell you? Now who’s right? Did I not tell you this would happen? You smoke pot. You jump off the thing. This was bound to happen.” I just looked at the nurse and said, “Somebody take him away from here. He’s not allowed in here.” At last they got me medicated, and rigged up a pulley system with a harness and a medical bustier girdle. I was told that my vertebrae were flattened like pancakes and that a month in traction would help stretch them back.
During the first week in the hospital, I got visits from Mike and Hillel and a few other friends. By now I had won Haya over, and she was kind of my girlfriend. Once she came to visit and lay down on the bed with me and let me feel her up, which was a real treat. “Okay, broke the back, but at least I’ve got my hands on the breasts of the girl I’ve been in love with since the first day of Spanish class.”
After two weeks of traction, I started getting stir-crazy. One day Hillel came to visit, and I told him, “I can’t stay here for a day longer. You have to get me out of here.” He went downstairs to get the car ready, and I unstrapped the girdle, rolled over, and tilted myself up on my two feeble legs. With my bare ass flashing out of my hospital gown, I started lurching like Frankenstein down that hallway. All the nurses went crazy, screaming that I couldn’t go anywhere for two more weeks, but I didn’t care. Somehow I made it down the steps, and Hillel helped me into the car. Before I went home, I made him drive me to the building where I had messed up so I could try to figure out what I’d done wrong.
I spent the next few weeks horizontal in my own bed. I got some lovely visitations from a friend of my father’s named Lark, who was a beautiful, relatively successful twenty-something actress. She came by at all hours, during the day, late at night, whenever, just to fix me up sexually. I had gotten my girdle back, and I had to keep telling her to be real careful, but I was getting absolutely ridden by a wild nymphomaniac banshee. That made the convalescing time a little more pleasant.
That summer I went back to Michigan, but I was still struggling with my back. Every time I’d get an X ray, the doctors always said it didn’t look right—it was crooked, the vertebrae were still smushed. It was never good news. But over time, my back progressively got better. At some point Mike took a Greyhound out to visit me. He showed up at my house after this torturous journey, looking totally haggard and sleep-deprived, since he had been squeezed the whole way out between a giant snoring Indian and someone who kept constantly throwing up. He had a Penthouse with him, and I remember opening it up and all the pages were stuck together. “Uh, that was the way it was when I got it,” he lied.
But he was as happy as a bunny rabbit once we got settled in. My mom treated him like her own son, and Steve let us take his car and explore Michigan. We took a camping trip to the Upper Peninsula, we visited my aunt and my cousins, and we went water-skiing. We were two kids, grown up in some ways but children in other ways, but certainly not thinking of ourselves as children—thinking of ourselves as Masters of the Universe over all other life forms, including adults. We were hipper, cooler, smarter, we knew more about pretty much everything there was to know more about, and we were fine with that. Adolescence is such a fun time in your life, because you think you know it all, and you haven’t gotten to the point where you realize that you know almost nothing. So we had our summer fun, and when Mike was ready to go back, I remember my mom going to town with bags and bags of food for this poor kid who had to go on the Greyhound. She baked him a pecan pie and gave him a huge industrial-sized bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and treated him like a little prince.
I went back for my second year at Fairfax, but things were getting increasingly troubled at home. After the bust, while my dad was waiting to be sentenced, he became a lot more careful. He stopped selling drugs completely and became the prototypical starving actor. We’d fight over the most mundane things. One time he was outraged that I ate a can of his soup; another time I infuriated him when I ate a sandwich out of the refrigerator that he had been coveting all day.
Around this time Blackie also tried to impose a curfew on me. He arbitrarily decided that I had to be in by midnight. If I broke curfew, I’d be locked out. One night I went out skateboarding and got home a few minutes after midnight, and the door was locked. I knocked and I knocked and knocked, but there was no answer. Finally, he came to the door, totally incensed. “What did I tell you? There’s no getting in here after twelve.” He complained that he had to get up early to go to acting classes, and I was interrupting his sleep. This from the same guy who kept me up till six in the morning throughout my junior high years.
The next time it happened, my neighbor came out and offered to let me crash on his couch, but I declined. I had tried to leave my window open a crack so I could sneak back in, but my dad was so security-conscious that he’d make sure the house was airtight before he went to bed. So I had to wake Blackie again, and he was even madder this time. We had a shoving match in the kitchen, and he told me that I had to either follow his rules or get out.
It was a no-brainer. I called Donde Bastone, this friend of mine, and asked if he wanted a roommate. I had met Donde during my first year at Fairfax, but by the eleventh grade, he had dropped out and was dealing weed out of his own house on Wilcox. He was the only sixteen-year-old I knew who had it together enough to have his own pad and a great little car. He agreed to let me move in, but he laid out exactly how much rent I had to pay and what my responsibilities would be around the house.
In the middle of the day, Haya came over in her huge car, and we started loading my stuff. It consisted of some clothes, my stereo, and a large neon Shamrock Billiards sign that my dad had given me. Unfortunately, as I was pulling out of the driveway, Blackie came home.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Where do you think you’re going?” he said.
“I’m out. I’m leaving. You’re seeing the end of me.”
“What’s all this stuff in the car?” he asked.
“That’s my stuff,” I maintained.
“That’s not your stuff, that’s my stuff.”
“You gave me this stuff,” I reminded him.
“I gave it to you as long as you’re living under my roof. If you’re not in the house, it’s not your stuff.” We had this big argument over the belongings, which I lost, but I didn’t even care at that point. I just wanted out.
I moved in with Donde and immediately concluded that he was way ahead of his time in many different ways. For one, he had an extraordinary record collection (complete with special shelving units built to house it) and a really nice sound system. Part of his deal, along with being a knucklehead and smoking pot, was to play music all day and all night. Every waking hour in that house, there was a record spinning. Thankfully, he had incredible taste in music. He wasn’t one of those guys who was exclusively into ska or punk rock or vintage blues; he was into everything. And because he had friends who worked at record companies, he was always getting advance copies of albums by David Bowie or Talking Heads.
Our house also became the party house, and we’d throw these rather gala affairs every couple of weekends. It was one of those periods when the drugs and alcohol were working to perfection and not interfering with getting work done, and no one was strung out on anything. Donde always seemed to come up with some cocaine for these parties, and cocaine then was a treat, not something that we had all the time, so we weren’t carried away with it.
Around this time my relationship with Hillel intensified. I was taking a health
class that was two doors down from Hillel’s art class. His art teacher was very liberal, so I’d get passes from my health class to go to the bathroom, and I’d go and have some intense conversations while Hillel was doing his anatomical drawings. Mike and Hillel were also becoming friends and developing an interesting musical bond. Anthym was about to play a series of shows at other high schools, and out of nowhere, Hillel began to secretly teach Mike how to play the bass guitar. Todd, the current bass player in Anthym, wasn’t a very good musician, though he did provide the band’s PA system. But Hillel and Alan Mishulsky, the other guitarist, and Jack Irons, the drummer, were authentic musical talents, so Hillel was looking to replicate that on the bass. When Todd walked in on a rehearsal one day and saw little Mike playing Anthym songs on Todd’s bass through Todd’s bass amp, he took his equipment and quit the band. So Mike was in.
Right before they started playing around, I approached Hillel and asked if I could introduce the band. Actually, I got the idea from Blackie, who had long been introducing his friends’ bands with comic ironic Vegas-type speeches. Hillel agreed, and for my first introduction, I reworked one of Blackie’s classic vamps. I used Cal Worthington, who had become famous in L.A. for his tacky late-night used-auto ads.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Cal Worthington calls them the hottest rockers in L.A. Their parents call them crazy, and the girls call them all the time, but I call ’em like I see ’em, and I call them Anthym,” I screamed. Then I flew off the stage into the audience and danced for the entire show. It didn’t matter one bit if I was the only person dancing, I was so into supporting my friends’ art.
But as much as I was a fan of the whole band, it really became about me and Mike and Hillel. Hillel had known Jack and Alan much longer, but when he found us, he felt that we were his guys. For one, Hillel was really into weed, and those other guys weren’t. We were into insanity and pushing the envelope, and Alan and Jack were much more mama’s boys. So me and Mike and Hillel became the real Three Musketeers for the next two years in high school. For our own amusement, we created alternate identities, three Mexicans who spoke in stylized Cheech and Chong accents. I was Fuerte (strong), Mike was Poco (small), and Hillel was Flaco (slender). Together, we were Los Faces. We were a gang, but not a ruffian gang; we were a comedy gang. We spent hours and hours playing these characters, and it helped us develop a sense of camaraderie that would last for years.
Meanwhile, my friendship with Haya was progressing, but not as smoothly as my bond with Mike and Hillel. We still had one major problem—I wasn’t the nice Jewish boy her family had envisioned. I’ll never forget the way she explained the situation to me: “This is how it is. I love you. You’re my man. But my parents can never know, because they don’t want me to date someone who isn’t Jewish. So as far as they’re concerned, you and I are best friends, and we work on school stuff together, and that’s it. Don’t be affectionate toward me when you come over. Just act like my friend.”
It was hard. Her father barely spoke a word to me. Her mother was more cordial, but they both smelled something uncomfortable in their lives, and it was me. I could always see how their repression manifested itself in her psyche. As much as she tried to not limit herself to her parents’ confined world, they still exerted a strong hold on her, a bond that she’d fight against, but when push came to shove, she’d never break it. She was their daughter.
I knew she loved me, but she was afraid to go too far with that love. During eleventh grade, I was crazy about the idea of making love to her. I’d had all of these different sexual experiences, but never one based in true love. I knew how much fun fucking could be, but here was a chance to do it for real. I was trying to get her to sleep with me, but she wouldn’t commit. “No. Give me time. I’m not ready. There’s a birth-control issue.” She kept putting it off, and it became this ongoing “Are you ready yet?” In the meantime, she’d give me hand jobs, which she was great at, but I wanted this girl in my arms while I was inside her.
It was maddening. She was my world. I adored her. I would have done anything for her. But she wasn’t giving it up. Seven months into the relationship we went on a date, and I was wearing my best clothes, and I’d done my hair the best I could. We went back to my room with no intention of anything happening, and started to kiss. We took off our clothes, and we were basically in a sphere of love and light and warmth, and the rest of the world disappeared. It was better than I ever could have dreamed, it was that thing I had been looking for, that love mixed with the rapture of sex.
Once Haya and I started having a regular sexual relationship, I couldn’t have been happier. I wanted to have sex with her all day and all night, every day and every night. If I didn’t see her for a while, all I could think about was being with her. When I’d go on a trip to Michigan, I couldn’t wait to see her again. Every song I listened to was about her. We had our special songs, David Bowie’s “Heroes” and the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere.”
My senior year at Fairfax was rife with contradictions. Me and my friends were definitely outsiders, living by our own moral code, one tenet of which was Thou Shalt Steal Your Meals. Mike and I refined a method of food thievery that was unbeatable for about two years, until the supermarkets finally caught on to it. I would go into the market and fill up a little red plastic basket with the finest provisions they offered—filet mignon, lobsters, cognac, you name it. Then I’d take my basket over to the magazine rack, which was directly adjacent to the entrance. I’d pick up a magazine and set my basket on the floor and, while I was perusing the magazine, I’d surreptitiously slide the basket under the chrome railing. Then Mike, who had been waiting outside, would dash in, grab the basket, and go right out the exit door. Soon we had an eight-foot-tall stack of empty red baskets behind my house, a testament to our continuing ability to feed ourselves in style.
We still used our old tried-and-true bottle-up-the-pants method to steal booze. Once I even upped the ante and stole a pair of skis. I went to the back of the sporting-goods store and asked, “What’s the best pair of skis that you have in here in my size?” The salesman said, “Well, these racing skis.” I waited for him to leave, and I picked up the skis and walked right out the front door. I had decided that if I walked boldly right past the cashier, they would think, “He’s picking up something that he’s already paid for, because he’s not stopping.”
In some respects, our antisocial impulses were getting reinforced by the music that we were listening to. When I first started Fairfax in 1977, punk rock had just begun to make itself felt in Los Angeles. But it was a tiny subculture. Blackie, to his credit, was on the cutting edge of the new music scene. He was one of the first people to frequent a punk-rock club called the Masque, which was on Hollywood Boulevard. Whenever punk-rock groups from New York would come to town, they’d play the Whisky, and Blackie and I would always wind up at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy old classic paradise on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was where the bands stayed and where the afterparties were. At that time, my favorite record was Blondie’s first. Every one of those songs was indelibly etched on my soul, and I was totally in love with Deborah Harry.
So when Blondie came to town, we headed to the Tropicana for the party. They had a suite, and Debbie was in the front room. We started talking, and I was smitten, totally melting. In my delusional state, I thought, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You might never see this woman again. You better make your move.” With complete earnestness, I said, “I know I haven’t known you that long, but will you marry me?”
She smiled and said, “That’s so kind of you to ask. I think you’re a great guy, but I don’t know if you know this—that guitar player I was playing with tonight, who’s back there in the bedroom . . . well, that’s my husband. We’re very happily married, and I really don’t have any room in my life for another man.” I was crushed.
Mike and I began hanging out in the punk scene by necessity. Shortly after we started Fairfax, I had brought Mike to the
Rainbow one night. Before we got there, we drank a lot of Michelob beer. I had a tolerance for alcohol, but apparently he didn’t. We were sitting at Blackie’s power table, and the girls were there, and the music was going, and Mike looked at me and said, “I’m not feeling so good.” He started to rush outside, but before he could go two feet, he began projectile-vomiting all over the Rainbow. Not what they wanted from two underage kids in their establishment. He threw up all the way into the parking lot, where they gave him the boot. Then they came in for me and said, “Get out there with him. You’re never coming back here again.” I kept trying to get back in for a year, but they had really eighty-sixed me. It was time to find my own scene.
My first punk concert was a daytime show at the Palladium. Devo was playing, along with the Germs. I was standing in the back, just fascinated. The music was cool as shit, these people looked incredible, almost too cool for me—there was no way I could ever be accepted by this crowd, because they were light-years ahead of me in terms of style. I remember walking over to the side of the stage, where people were going in and out of the backstage area, and there was this girl with some fucked-up punk-rock haircut, and she was taking giant safety pins and piercing her cheek with them, one after the other. That was new to me.
Mike and I began trying to worm our way into this new scene, where, unlike at the Rainbow, I had no clout. There was an explosion of amazing bands in L.A. at that time, X and the Circle Jerks and Black Flag and China White, the list could go on and on. The energy was unbridled, more creative and exciting and bombastic than anything anybody had ever seen. Fashion-wise, energy-wise, dance-wise, music-wise, it was like the dawning of the Renaissance in my own town. Rock had become this boring old beast, ready to die, and now there was fresh crazy-ass blood flowing through the streets of Hollywood. The first wave of punk rock had already crested, but there was a second coming. It wasn’t a violent hard-core scene, like the bands from Orange County. In Hollywood it was more about creativity and originality. The Screamers and the Weirdos were two of Hollywood’s first punk-rock bands, but they sounded nothing alike.
Scar Tissue Page 8
