California Dreaming part II
Venice Beach Circa 1987. Bought a red tank top that said venice beach lifeguard on it, and I think i put it on right away. The guy who skates around with the electric guitar and turban hadn't upgraded to rollerblades at that point, he was still on rollerskates. The smell of inscence, patchouli, weed and body odor wafted through the air. The hair was bigger, the cutoff shorts were acid washed, the tans were natural, but what amazes me when i walk down the boardwalk these days is how little has changed in the last twenty years. Last week i saw some guy in a top hat standing next to a bored looking girl lounging on some steps smoking. He was hawking a new freakshow that had opened inside one of the buildings on the boardwalk, trying to tempt us with two headed babies, and wolf women and snake charmers. You might think Venice would be the perfect place for a freakshow, obviously someone did, the problem is that venice IS a freakshow already. You can see dudes with battleaxes in silver loincloths, men with scorpions on their heads, freestyle psychadelic rappers, acrobat troupes, contortionists and yogis who dive onto broken glass for free, unless you decide you want to make a donation. Who needs to go into some wierd dark building?
1987 was the heyday of hackysack, and TW and I were members of the self appointed hackysack team back at our chicago highschool, at least until the administration decided to outlaw it in the quad. Smart move, jerks, at least if kids are hackysacking in the quad they aren't sneaking off to do drugs and engage in premarital sex. I guess they didn't see it that way. Probably figured since it was mostly the burnouts playing it, there must be something degenerate about the activity. California was the mecca of hackysack and TW and wasted no time getting a circle going on venice beach. It took only a couple minutes for a couple guys to join us, then about ten minutes later another dude walked up, started hacking, and said hey to his friend who was already playing with us. His buddy was like "I thought you were going to school today" like this was some special event on a weekday afternoon. Dude's classic response was "school? Fuck school?" Coming from a school where if you cut three times in a semester you were expelled, TW and i were suitably awed, and our impression of california as a paradise for teenagers was confirmed.
After we'd gotten our fill of Venice Beach, Brenda took us back to the house she was living in in Studio City. This house was the former home of none other than the bionic woman herself, miss lindsey wagner. It could only have been cooler in our mind if lee majors had lived there. You had to take a small winding road up into the hills to reach the house and tha landmark Brenda pointed out to us to find the road was a place called oil can harry's. Oil can harry's had no windows, and a big sign with a picture of a snidely whiplash looking guy twirling his mustache. It was the first gay bar TW and i had ever seen, so of course we had to harass each other about how the other guy wanted to go in their every time we drove past it. The house was on a verdant hillside surrounded by fruit trees, again, exactly what we thought a california house should look like. Brenda lived there with a couple of other dudes, who we partied late into the night with. I remember one guy starting in with his vietnam war stories about three in the morning, but the rest of the night is pretty hazy. TW and i woke up sometime in the afternoon, annoyed with ourselves for missing the prime tanning time. We managed to lay on the roof and get a little sun before heading out for the evening's festivities. To be honest, much of the trip is rather hazy, so i'm just going to describe things as i remember them without worrying about being chronological. This was the party scene in hollywood in the mid eighties so i'll let people fill in the blanks in terms of the various illicit activities we were up to as well, without going into specifics.
Brenda had an ex boyfriend who was some kind of manager at the beverly hills theater, and i think our second night was spent watching some kind of new age concert there and hanging out with the hippie dudes backstage afterwards. We met a few of brenda's ex boyfriends on our trip and they all seemed to still be in love with her which worked out well for us. I'd never heard of the band giving the concert at the theater that night, but i was still overwhelmed by the fact that we were backstage with access to a big cooler of free beer and a table full of munchies. I remember the new age flautist being very full of himself, and while i was in awe of being backstage, I don't think anyone has ever been awed by a dude who plays the flute. I remember him not liking us very much.
The next morning started in the afternoon again. in fact, just about every morning of our trip started in the afternoon, and every afternoon we said the next day we were going to wake up early so as not to miss prime tanning time. The one day we did get out in the morning we had stayed up the entire night and took off around 9AM rather than going to bed. The plan was to go to Malibu, another place we'd only heard about in movies. It's hard enough to navigate LA when you haven't been up all night consuming various substances, and we somehow ended up lost in one of those weird LA industrial neighborhoods that looks like a scene from some postapocalyptic movie like the Omega Man. I think it was also a sunday, so this place was totally deserted, and we nearly ran out of gas there before finding another freeway entrance and getting back on after god knows how long of driving around not seeing a single other human soul. We eventually found a gas station and somehow ended up in Seal beach, which is about two hours south of Malibu. It felt like a sort of victory finding a beach at all, but our joy was short lived, as the night's actitivies started to catch up with us, and TW nearly passed out in a public bathroom filled with flies that he said reminded him of something out of a horror movie. We got the hell out of seal beach and headed to Long beach, for no other reason than it was nearby and we'd heard of it. Parked in a very sketchy neighborhood becuase we didn't know any better and followed the screeching sound to the arena where they were running the long beach five hundred. We played hackysack on the sidewalk amidst the roar of the engines, the smell of the exhaust, and the shimmering of the heatwaves coming off the concrete. It sounds like a nightmare, but i remember us having a good time in spite of it all. Ah youth.
We went to a number of different bars on the sunset Strip, and this is during the hair metal heyday. We had these IDs that could not have been more cheesy, and we still got in everywhere, it was just that kind of trip. My idea of being smooth and using a creative pickup line was to approach women and say "do you want to buy me a drink." The women didn't seem to find us as smooth as we did. We were also in our cologne phase at that point, and probably smelled like a couple of french whores, which probably didn't improve our image. Getting up and singing with an impromptu jam band including charlie sexton and members from gene loves jezebel was the high point of our bar hopping, but even that didn't impress the ladies much. The closest either of us got to making sweet love on our trip was the night the english woman offered to marry me.
We'd been out with Brenda's friend who had brought her sister along. They were both English, and the sister took a fancy to me. I couldn't say exactly how old she was, when i visualize her she seems at least twenty years older than i was, but since i was in highschool my impression was probably off. We all ended up back at her apartment, and she took me into her bedroom where we started making out. Cool, I thought, this is gonna rock. Then she started talking. And talking. Spinning yarns about her father who was dying on an island off the coast of nicaragua that she stood to inherit, but only if she was married. He was going to die soon, and she needed to act fast, and would I be interested in marrying her and accompanying her down there, with the understanding that we could divorce as soon as the old bastard kicked off, and she would make me rich. Even in the wee hours of the morning after a night's revels, it sounded impossibly far fetched to me, but she maintained it was all the god's honest truth. The thing was, I'd have to go with her right away, no going back home and finishing highschool, it was now or never. Brenda said she didn't know for sure, but she knew their family had money and it could be true. I said i'd have to think about it. And i did, i actually considered taking off with her in a plane. Whatever happened, i figured it would make a hell of a story. I still sometimes wonder how much, if any, of what she was saying was true. I'll never know, because I wasn't quite adventurous enough to take the plunge. I didn't sleep with her either.
On our last day in LA, we finally managed to get up before noon, determined to get a nice bronzing before heading home. We'd gone to the beverly hills theater again the night before to watch the Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard Fight on the big screen there, which was a blast, and we saw tons of famous people, but we didn't go out partying afterward. that morning we finally met Gordon, one of brenda's housemates we'd heard about but not seen up until that point. Gordon supposedly had some kind of job at one of the movie studio, but so far as we could tell he spent all his time getting high, eating artichokes, and surfing. Brenda was out someplace, and Gordon made us Artichokes for breakfast. He said he ate them, dipped in mayonaise, every single day. Neither of us had ever had artichokes before, and we were both impressed. Gordon also gave us loquats off the tree in the backyard, which no one had thought to mention to us. It was like a walk on part in a movie, he showed up, dropped his punkrock surfer wisdom on us, fed us strange fruits, and vanished. It really was the perfect ending to our trip. so perfect we forgot to pack and ended up being late for our plane. We were gonna have some time to kill at the airport, so we got a couple of coronas to keep us occupied. What we forgot was something to open them with. That sucked. I remember tom's face as he described trying to open the last beer in the bathroom on a sink fixture, and seeing the chip in the lip of the bottle just before he took a drink. He held the bottle up to the light, hoping against hope, and saw the tiny little particles of glass floating down through the golden ambrosia. All good thing must come to an end.
