And then it happens. Suddenly I’m shaking hands with the Prince of Darkness himself. Avram was right; he’s about my height, and less scary up close. He’s handsome, in that lantern-jawed super-villain way, but almost shy, lowering his head and looking up as he greets me in a hoarse Jersey voice.
“Hey, how ya doin’?”
“Great, thanks. Hey, I loved the Misfits.” Stupid, stupid, stupid! I might as well have said “What was that crap?”
Glenn is gracious, but does let a slight eye roll slide past. It’s not until later that I find out he’s not speaking to Jerry and Doyle any more.
“Yeah, thanks.” He looks fidgety, like he’s waiting for me to do something, say something, produce something for him to sign. I need to move fast. I lean in and start blathering.
“Hey, uh, actually, I don’t really live here, I’m just visiting, and, well, I’m really on my way to Los Angeles because Steve Peters from Metal magazine . . .” Glenn tilts his head, looks puzzled. Shit! I’m losing him! I cut to the chase. “Well, anyway, I’m trying to write for some magazines and I was just kinda wondering, and, like, maybe you know, uh, who is a good person to talk to?”
Glenn looks thoughtful, crinkles up his face like he’s thinking, and then shrugs his massive shoulders at me.
“I don’t know, who?”
Huh? Did he think I had asked him a riddle? I tactfully rephrase the question.
“No, I’m just asking you . . . you know, in case you know . . . like a magazine, an editor . . . who’s good?”
“Oh, man, I don’t know.” He shrugs again. “There’s lots of ’em out there, though. Good luck!” And that’s the end of my audience. It’s over, and I scored not so much as a Scooby Snack. Dummy, dummy, dummy! I am mentally kicking myself with stiletto spikes, which hurts even though they are figurative. Why didn’t I make myself more understandable? Why didn’t I ask him something really scintillating that would have made him stop greeting other Betties and stay and talk? Then I could have pumped him for contacts, asked for an internship, something. Instead I just confused him. And I blew it. Big time. I feel my nerd level rising in spite of my video bimbo attire.
As I am berating myself, the crowd in the dressing room is thinning out. It looks like the satanic orgy I had been hoping to witness is not going to happen. I wonder how Avram is doing in the parking lot. I help myself to a few Gummi Bears and slip outside. Avram is exactly where he said he would be, the prince.
Half an hour after the show has ended, there are still several dozen diehards hanging around by the band’s tour bus. Avram and I decide to wait and see what happens when the band comes out. We are interested to see which of the Betties the band will pick to take on the bus. I’m wondering if Red Bra is going to pass; I’m betting at the very least that she’s not going with Eerie.
After another fifteen minutes or so, the backstage door opens, and the band, Betties, and roadies pour into the parking lot. To my intense confusion, the roadies and Betties scatter, and the band hurls itself directly into the crush of teenaged fans surrounding the bus.
I think at first they are just trying to shove their way through and get the hell on the bus, but that is not the case. Once at the center of the crowd, they whip out their Sharpies and it’s autograph time all over again. They don’t quit until every kid in the crowd has four signatures and a photo if he wants one. For the kids, who have been waiting patiently since the show ended, this is obviously the best moment of all of their lives. I’ve never seen such awestruck faces on a bunch of baby-faced little satanists, and the band takes the time to meet and greet each and every dark little one of them. Such nice boys. Having thus satisfied all pressing social obligations, Danzig boards their bus—alone— and takes off for Irvine.
As we are leaving, curiosity gets the better of me. I capture a roadie who looks about fifteen and make up a lie.
“Hey, dude, have you seen my friend around? She’s got on a red bra and two nose rings.”
He nods. “She’s on the crew bus.”
“Are they taking her to California?”
He shakes his head and snorts. “Nahhhh . . . they’ll be done with her any minute now.”
I guess I might have figured, but I can’t help but be a little taken aback. So this is what it’s all for. We dress ourselves up in seventy-dollar velvet dresses and red bras and for what? So we can spend twenty minutes in the back of a bus with a tenth-grade dropout who can lift heavy things.
As I’m contemplating the sad reality of life’s injustices, the bus door hisses open and Red Bra emerges. She’s got her spike heels in her hand and a dazed look on her teenaged face. She looks around the parking lot as if she’s never been there before. Catching sight of the satin square stuck to my leather skirt, she grins crookedly and gives me a conspiratorial wave. I wave back—we sluts stick together. She lets out a howl and waves her shoes in the air.
“Rock ‘n’ rolllllllllllllll!” she cries, and takes off running barefoot across the gravel parking lot.
3
Strippers, Clown Rooms, and Danzig Among the Mangoes
Day Jobs and Night Moves on Hollywood and Vine
the very first thing that jumps out at me about Los Angeles is not the highways, or the gang members, or the Hollywood sign looming down over the hills like a cheesy postcard. No, the first thing I notice is the embarrassment of would-be hair-metal gods looming large around every corner. If I were to say that you could not drive to the drugstore without shooing the hair-metal gods out of the way, you would probably think that I was merely being metaphorical. Try telling that to the hair-metal god who took his sweet time crossing against the light in front of my car, with turquoise necklaces draped across his bare romance-novel chest and leather pants glistening in the California sun, when all I wanted was for him to move his ass so I could get to the drugstore and get some Sine-Aid.
Hollywood is lousy with hair-metal gods because in every city, every small town, and every scene in America, there is that one band that is just a little too big for their small-town pond. Their singer is a little more flamboyant, their guitarist a little more well-muscled, and their chops a tiny bit more polished than the rest of the bands on their circuit. Sooner or later, this band, pumped full of the adulation that has been showered upon them in whatever corner of the country they call home, becomes convinced that they are ready for the big time and decides to take Hollywood by storm. They have a big farewell concert, their local paper runs a feature story with a big color photo, and they load up the Econoline and head for the Sunset Strip— where they are chagrined to find that they are now in direct competition with every other “best band in town” for the same few pay-for-play gigs. Any scholar of supply and demand can tell you how this story ends. I can tell you myself, because it is on my first day in Hollywood that I see the final scene for myself. Strutting down Hollywood Boulevard, in black stretch jeans and a zebra-striped shirt, is a poodle-haired Poison look-alike . . . pushing a shopping cart full of empty cans.
Lest I end up with my own can-filled cart, I figure I’d better get to finding housing posthaste. Needless to say, my parents shot down my original plan to get a room by the week in the cheapest Hollywood motel I could find (think Tom Waits), and instead made arrangements for me to stay with friends from Saint Anthony’s, which is, I guess, as close to in loco parentis as they could get from three thousand miles away. As grateful as I am for their hospitality, I am embarrassed to be imposing; here I am, a total stranger showing up after more than a decade since they’d left Richmond and St. Anthony’s behind for the west coast, demanding a place to stay. I’m equally ashamed of caving into my parents’ wishes even this far from home. I’ll bet Lester Bangs didn’t have to stay with people from his parents’ church when he moved to Detroit.
Q: Are you sure? Maybe he did.
A: Actually, I am sure. Lester Bangs and the rest of the CREEM staff lived in a big commune-style farmhouse, which boggles the mind because how cool would it be to live wi
th the whole entire staff of CREEM including Lester Bangs? That said, Lester Bangs’s parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, so even if he had had to live with their friends, it might not have been as cool as a CREEM commune but it would have made a damn interesting reality show.
My first order of business, though, before I even think about finding an apartment, is to let the good folks at Metal know that I’m ready for my close-up now. With invitation in hand and visions of Lester Bangs in my head, I pull up in front of their offices on Hollywood Boulevard in my road-weary Hyundai. As I jockey my car into the parking space and check my teeth for lipstick, you might think I would be worrying about my credentials, or my knowledge of the local metal scene, or the questions they might ask of a potential freelancer. Instead, I’ve spent the whole drive from Tucson agonizing about what to wear.
Q: What to wear? Are you serious? Do you think Lester Bangs was worried about what to wear?
A: Well, that opens up a whole lovely kettle of worms about gender bias and beauty standards and the fact that Lester Bangs could still get laid even though he basically looked like a walrus, but let a woman put on ten pounds and she’s a pariah. However, I’m going to save that for a more tedious book.
My Sun Records T-shirt isn’t broken in enough to be presentable yet, and most of my clothes fairly scream Richmond, Virginia, and are therefore utterly unsuitable. You scoff, but large, unrecoverable chunks of my life have been spent planning Entrance Outfits. For every milestone, every once-in-a-lifetime chance to finally be cool and show them all, I have had in my head the Perfect Entrance Outfit. Granted, it never plays out in real life the way it does in my head, but I make the plans all the same. Case in point: my first day at Open High School. At fourteen, wide-eyed and metal-mouthed, I was never quite cool enough to fit in the way I dreamed I would for all those years leading up to my less than grand entrance in 1981. I had been planning my Entrance Outfit literally for years, changing the clothes, the hairstyle, and the soundtrack to keep up with the cutting edge. For the entire summer before ninth grade, I practiced painting on my Entrance Face with Wet N’ Wild makeup to the backbeat of Blondie and the B-52s. I imagined strolling in on the first day of school in a pink-and-black-striped stretch top, unseasonably warm leather pants, and black ankle boots, none of which I actually owned. Oh, and I would have a Pat Benatar haircut. Her music was far from cool, but she had great hair. Everyone would stop what they were doing and stare at me, the cool new girl, and my life would finally be complete.
According to my ninth-grade student ID picture, I did not wear a pink-and-black-striped stretch top on the first day of school. Instead, I wore a black Ramones T-shirt, probably with seasonally appropriate Levi’s jeans with added ventilation at the knees. My hair was short, but it was more Johnny Rotten than Pat Benatar—plenty cool but hardly cute. And then there were the braces, and the unfortunate truth that I did in fact look fourteen, not thirty and jaded like I always did in my fantasies.
Looking back, a black Ramones T-shirt is, in fact, cool as shit. I can show my ninth-grade ID to my grandchildren and say, “Look, kids, Granny was punk rock the first time around, when everyone was still alive and there was no Hot Topic to co-opt this shit.” I can show it to the neo-mall-punks today who think that Korn is “old school” and Marilyn Manson invented fishnet way back when. Looking back, I had punk rock cred. I just didn’t know it at the time. I sure wish Jimmy Stewart had dropped by and filled me in. It would have saved me a lot of misadventures. But then you wouldn’t be reading this now.
In the end, for this Entrance Outfit I settle on jeans, motorcycle boots, and a plain black stretch jersey top, figuring my best bet is to be understated in the hope that they might forget how unhip I look as soon as I leave the office. Speaking of unhip, the offices of Metal turn out to be in a decidedly un-metal high-rise office building, and I realize as I ride up to the seventh floor in the mirrored elevator that I was probably very silly to assume that they would be above a nightclub, or maybe on the main drag of skid row in downtown Los Angeles. Heavy metal magazines are a business just like everything else, maybe not as big a business as, say, Rolling Stone, but in order to put out a glossy monthly and distribute it all over the country, you need secretaries and production staff and editors and circulation folks, and for all that you need office space—real office space, not vacant rooms over nightclubs, like we had for our little newsprint weeklies back home. I mentally smack myself for being so naive and step off the elevator onto the bland beige carpeting of the seventh floor.
I knock on the unmarked door of suite 721, but no one answers. I knock again and wonder if I’m being hopelessly dorky and off-the-farm for knocking and am I supposed to just walk in? After about a minute of fretting about it, I walk in, figuring what the hell. I find myself in a small room, empty but for a cheap laminate desk, on top of which sits a box of last month’s issue of Metal. Aside from the desk, there is one lonely chair sitting in the corner, and the room looks utterly deserted. At first I take the box of magazines for a good sign, since it at least means I am in the right place, but almost immediately I realize that the lack of furniture, decor or, hello, people is in fact a very bad sign, and that perhaps my one possible connection has packed up and left town. I’m lamenting my bad luck when I hear voices in the back room, renewing my hope in the continued existence of my potential Lester Bangsness. I clutch my letter and make my way to the back room.
Two women, appearing to be in their mid-forties, are looking over some papers spread out on a desk in a sparsely furnished office. They’re dressed business appropriately, in dark suits and heels, making me suddenly feel very stupid in my pseudo-disinterested biker-chick attire. I hold up the letter and smile weakly as they look at me like what the fuck, only in a polite, business-lady way.
“Um, hi, I’m a journalist... .” It sounds phony, even to me, but I press on, because really, I haven’t got a choice at this point. “And, uh, Steve Peters told me that I should come by the office and maybe he would have some freelance assignments for me?” Unfortunately I don’t catch myself before adding the self-conscious rise to the end of my statement, and I mentally flog myself for sounding more like Jan Brady than Lester Bangs. Way to make a first impression.
“Oh, Steve Peters.” The woman behind the desk smiles sympathetically. “He doesn’t work here anymore. He hasn’t been here in about a month.” He doesn’t work here anymore? The nerve of Steve Peters, I think, abandoning me just when I need him most. Who does Steve Peters think he is? Did he not realize that I would drop everything when I got his letter, load everything I owned into my car, and drive to L.A. on the vague promise of Rikki Rocket interviews and Faster Pussycat profiles that he had dangled in front of me like a stinky mackerel? What was he thinking? I regain my composure and press on.
“Oh, gosh, that’s too bad,” I stutter in the understatement of the decade. If these women only knew I’d uprooted my whole life on the advice of the unsuspecting and now missing Steve Peters . . . then what? They’d probably have me put away, and they’d probably be justified. Immediately I collect myself and realize that I’m probably in the presence of the new editor, and that even being here in her office is probably almost as good as having gotten a letter, so I make my move. “Hey, can I give you my resume and some clips, so that you can add me to your list of available freelancers?” I’m mentally congratulating myself on my awesome save when she drops the bomb.
“Well, the reason we let Steve go is that we’re going to an all-poster format, so we really don’t have any need for writers. But thanks for stopping by.”
Hear that noise? That whirring noise? That’s Lester Bangs spinning in his fucking grave. An all-poster format. What is this, Tiger Beat? Fucking Teen Scene? How the hell is a music magazine going to an all-poster format? I hide my indignation, thank them for their time, and go back to my car, defeated and connectionless. If I were psychic, or maybe just a little more perceptive than I am, I would have seen this as the first sign of the com
ing apocalypse, Mach whatever. This is probably how everyone at CREEM felt when they saw disco coming down the pike, but at least they had each other, and I don’t have four years to wait for the second coming of punk.
I should have realized right then that I had arrived in Los Angeles too late to make a difference and that I should cut my losses, turn my car around, and drive back home. But knowing when to cut my losses has never been my strong suit, so instead I drive to the nearest coffeeshop—well, not the nearest coffeeshop, but the nearest non-trendy coffeeshop, one with a giant fiberglass chicken on the roof, because even in the face of dashed dreams and missed connections, I go for the absurd. I shell out a buck-fifty for a cup of coffee, grab an L.A. Times and start circling classified ads, because I’m here now, damn it, and I’m going to make the best of it.
I circle five possible jobs—two typing, two temp agencies, and a bookstore. Ambitiously, I also look through the apartment ads, even though I have less than a grand left from my initial $1,500 to underwrite my CREEM dream, and am probably looking at about that for a deposit and first month’s rent. When I finish circling all of the apartments that are under five hundred dollars a month—all six of them—I need pie. I order a piece of coconut pie and eat it joylessly, wondering, as I have repeatedly over the past few weeks, what have I gotten myself into. I have no prospects here, no backup, dwindling funds, and my one possible connection has packed up and left town. I can’t afford the housing, my clothes are hopelessly unhip and unoriginal compared to everything out here, and, as if I didn’t have enough to contend with in the way of morale-bashing at this point, where I was passably average looking—albeit a little nerdy—in Virginia, here in the land of leggy supermodels with suntans and silicone, I feel as though I resemble nothing so much as the Pillsbury Doughboy in metal-slut drag.
Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A. Page 6