1988 Was a Circus of Poor Choices

I moved to LA the first time in 1988. I planned that summer around the Circle Jerks/7 Seconds show at the Sports Palace in St. Louis. I was going to stay until then, and take off after.

That was a great show. It was in an old skating rink, and I think punk is always best in a basement, backyard, or somewhere where it looks like a band shouldn’t be playing. Some longhaired kid made the first mistake of showing up, then the second mistake of getting in the pit for the skins-only pit; he was carried out of there after a brutal stomping. Punk shows were dangerous back then. Now, your first show, your dad takes you, gives you earplugs, and drives you home in a Prius. It’s definitely better, but not the same.

So I went to LA with little more than a few clothes and a box of books, and the address of a friend of a friend. If I went into detail on this, it would really derail the story. So let me just say it was someone I hadn’t met in person, only over the phone. He had a room available, and I took it.

I enrolled in Santa Monica College with the idea that I would transfer to UCLA or USC for film school. But in my distorted-expectation mind, chances were I would break into filmmaking the hard way before then. School was just to kill time and to weasel money out of my parents. I was nineteen, by the way, a reasonable age to still do this, although I’m still somewhat ashamed by it. But aside from a few gigs working as an extra, there weren’t a lot of calls coming in for my talents.

I did make a lot of great drug connections at that school. I met deadheads for the first time, and they introduced me to the wonderful open-air drug markets that was the Grateful Dead parking lot. For $40, I could buy an entire sheet of 100 hits of acid, which I could sell for $3 apiece. I sold a lot of them for $5 at a couple of goth clubs the rich kids went to.

I thought I would be hanging out with Johnny and Winona or Sean and Madonna, doing blow at the Chateau Marmont, talking about art and life and in the wee hours, they would ask me to read them some of my poems, and I would be like, no, and they would say PLEASE THEY’RE SO GOOD, and I’d be like, okay, and they would turn off all the lights and I would read out of my notebook by flashlight and they would be HOLY FUCK THIS KID IS DEEP and say things like WE HAVE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO BRIAN (DePalma) and HANK (Bukowski) HAS TO HEAR THIS KID and I’d be like, hey guys, they’re just poems.

Poetry was kinda hot back then. It was common to go down to the old Largo across from Canter’s and see Justine Bateman or Judd Nelson reading poetry. It’s where I met Tommy Swerdlow, who later got strung out on dope and wrote Cool Runnings while kicking heroin in rehab. Poetry seemed like a doorway in, especially when you were geeked out of your mind on coke.

And geeked out I was! Coke was everywhere. I hung out with a coke dealer who had a shitty Ford Escort with a $2000 Alpine stereo. It was the first car I ever saw with a CD player. It brought the value of the car up to $1500. We made deliveries and pickups and did rails most Thursdays through Sundays. Sundays were for coming down.

The only thing that saved me was poetry. There was a reading series at the Midnight Special Bookstore when 3rd Street was a street and not a promenade, where they had an open mike. There were a lot of really great poets then that turned me on to true creativity. The only one still in my life is SA Griffin, a working actor who did poetry on the side, pretty much the opposite of everyone else. I was still rhyming poems when I heard him and his crew.

They showed me I could write about anything, with an honesty I had been afraid to utilize. Their language was simple, but the emotions were complex. They said whatever they wanted to say without fear or shame. There was a tiny magazine called The Moment that I read like it was a secret I had to memorize and eat.

I couldn’t be in a punk band, for that I needed friends and social skills. I couldn’t afford a camera or film stock. I quit painting because little tubes of paint were harder for me to come by than drugs. But I could always find something to write on, and if you couldn’t borrow a pen, you could steal one.

I ditched school and hung out in the library. I read Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and Steinbeck. All the usual straight-white-young-man stuff. And then I read Bukowski, and was hooked.

At 19, I had never seen anything like it. It hit me harder than hearing Minor Threat for the first time, the band that made me fascinated with everything punk, which in turn, gave me a funny name and a dream of Fuck You America, I’m Making Art for a Living. Hell, it was even better than Henry Rollins’ poetry on the Black Flag Family Man record.

I really started writing like a motherfucker then. (nod to Cheryl Strayed here) Suddenly, my writing got a lot better. The old guys (late 20s) paid attention to me at Beyond Baroque and The Pik-Me-Up Cafe. I saw myself as having value beyond the half-sheet of acid in my pocket.

Tommy Swerdlow had a chapbook published by Zeitgeist Press in San Francisco. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, better than a record, even. Dude had a tiny book of awesome poems and a drug habit. What’s cooler than that?

So fuck film school, it’s all mainstream bullshit anyhow, right? I’ll go to San Francisco and get a chapbook on Zeitgeist Press then work my way up to City Lights for the perfect bound, Pocket Poets collection. I would hang out with Ferlinghetti and Corso, right? They must be looking for some new poets up there. WAIT TIL THEY GET A LOAD OF ME.

So one day, a friend of mine told me she was going to visit her boyfriend in San Francisco, and wanted to know if I would like a ride up there. When she showed up, I threw everything I could fit into the back seat of her Honda Civic. She asked me why I was bringing so much crap. I told her I wasn’t coming back. Whatever didn’t fit in her car, I left behind. FUCK IT.

I walked into an apartment complex in the Tenderloin with $1040 of hard-earned LSD sales money. First, last, and deposit was $1000. $40 left over. It was late on a Friday and the electricity couldn’t get turned on until Monday. But they rented it to me there on the spot. As fucked up as I was, I was clearly the best applicant they had.

I had stayed in LA for a year. I was high on coke probably about 150 of those days, a conservative estimate. I dropped at least 50 hits of acid, if not 100. I started drinking in the mornings. I found out California weed gave me motion sickness. I did that great Sunset Strip crystal meth a few times. I read a bunch of books, wrote 400 poems, got into one super gnarly gang fight, hung out with a former child star and the kid of a famous ’60s actor, and took a crew of goth girls ice skating. I saw Olivia Newton-John at Ed Debevic’s. I didn’t do that well in school.