The next day, as I fill my calendar with appointments for job interviews, I tell myself that this is only temporary, I am paying my dues like any good superstar, and that soon I’ll have so many freelance assignments I’ll be able to leave the nine-to-five life behind and spend my mornings lying in my king-sized Dave Schools waterbed, writing up reviews of the rad shows I saw the night before.
I carry this cocksure attitude with me to my first interview, where, fortunately for me, the tie guy who interviews me is starry-eyed over my rock ‘n’ roll cred as listed on my resume.
“Wow. Says here you interviewed Henry Rollins,” he says, his wide eyes belying his attempted corporate nonchalance. I am momentarily taken aback; with his starchy attire and junior-executive haircut, he strikes me as the last person who’d be impressed with Henry Rollins. “What was that like?”
“He was pretty cool,” I say blithely, not letting on that not only was I scared shitless but I had taken my high school squatter-punk boyfriend Andy along and let him ask all the questions while I sat on a speaker, chewing my lip and fiddling with my tape recorder. I wrote the article and I got the byline (though I was honest enough to share it with Andy), but my contribution to the whole experience consisted mostly of sitting dumbstruck and staring at Henry in his little nylon shorts. That and turning beet red when he turned to me and said in his best serial killer voice, “You know, I’m not getting laid enough on this tour,” which I think was a calculated attempt to fluster me, and I definitely cooperated. Not with the lack of sex, but the flustering. I think I may have even squeaked. But Tie Guy doesn’t need to know that. “It was the cover story,” I shrug.
“You interview anybody else I might have heard of?” Tie Guy is starting to lose his starchy edge and is actually leaning across his desk, eager for tales of punk rock insider dirt. Not exactly what I’d expect from a guy who looks more Boy Scout than Black Flag, but I’m one to talk. Not wanting to let him down, I fish around for another recognizable name to drop.
“Actually I just asked Glenn Danzig a few questions last week after his show in Tucson,” I say as casually as I can muster, figuring my true role as mistaken-identity bimbo can be my little secret for now.
“No way—the Misfits rock!”
It is at this point that I realize I have the job. We make some small talk about my editing skills and experience with WordPerfect (none at all, but who’s telling), then he offers me the job and I accept. Just like that—thanks, Aunt Delta. This ain’t no Mudd Club, but it’s rent money and the boss digs the Misfits. For ten dollars an hour, I am now a fulltime editor of workers’ compensation claims. Rock on!
With the forthcoming money from my shiny new day job and L.A. Times classifieds in hand, my West Coast mom and I go looking for an apartment for me. I say no to an adorable efficiency bungalow in West Hollywood—one, because it backs up to the freeway, and two, because it has easily accessible ground-floor windows, something that has to be pointed out to this naive southern girl. Sometimes loco parentis is a handy thing. After rejecting three buildings that are so seedy we don’t even get out of the car, I sign a lease on an efficiency apartment on Normandie Avenue right off Hollywood Boulevard. The mottled brown shag carpeting looks like the jungle room rug up and died, but for $395 a month, it’s my kind of place. Besides, it has a Murphy bed, an ironing board that pops out of the wall, and a dresser built into the closet, which places it way ahead of any also-rans in sheer weirdness points. We don’t have Murphy beds in Virginia; in fact, we barely have efficiency apartments. I feel incredibly cosmopolitan as I dine on my first take-out burrito from the corner taco stand in my new digs. In addition to the Murphy bed, I have a folding card table, a single wooden chair from the Salvation Army, and a sickly little plant I found by the trashcans. I feel like I’m playing house, but at the same time I’m a wee bit smug about my spartan surroundings. It’s not much, but it’s all mine, and I did it without having to resort to financial help or even loans from my parents, a fact that I am quick to point out during my victorious first phone call home on my very own phone. “Yes, I have a job, and I have an apartment, and guess what, I even bought a can of peas!” With my electric typewriter and my coffeemaker perking away, I feel like Kerouac, or Hemingway, needing only the bare essentials because the rest is for pansies.
Q: Did you really just compare yourself to Kerouac and Hemingway?
A: Not technically. If you read between the lines, I was actually comparing my furniture to theirs, which is much less pretentious.
My neighborhood is not particularly glamorous, either. I’m on the eastern edge of Hollywood, which I’ll soon come to learn is the less desirable edge. West Hollywood is trendy, pricy, and, well, gay. East Hollywood is mostly poor immigrants—Mexicans, Central Americans, and, inexplicably, Armenians. The souvenir shops and tour offices don’t extend down to my end of Hollywood Boulevard; instead I have liquor stores, massage parlors, and rooms by the week. Around the corner from my apartment, a low-rent strip mall is home to an even lower-rent strip club, the intriguingly named Jumbo’s Clown Room. I’m told— though I don’t investigate it myself—that the “Jumbo” in the club’s name could be appropriately applied to some of their dancers, many of whom are too fat, too old, or too strung out to dance at the upscale clubs at the other end of Hollywood. The only business that I patronize in my neighborhood is Mister Kim’s, on the corner of my street, where Mister Kim always saves me a newspaper and the beer is extra cold.
Q: Why do I feel like I’ve heard of Jumbo’s Clown Room?
A: Maybe because Courtney Love danced there in the eighties, in her pre-Kurt, pre-plastic surgery, pre-IV-diet days. Also, from what I understand, Jumbo’s is now a hipster burlesque hangout and boasts the best-looking dancers in Hollywood. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that.
Even though, like my neighborhood, it’s far from hip, I dig my new job from the start. I have my own upholstery-covered cubicle and a computer—my own desk, even, with a little metal plaque that has my name on it! I tack up a picture of Suzi Quatro and one of Keith Richards and claim my cubicle as my own. I don’t feel the least bit demoralized or insulted by the concept of the cube farm; I am basically just happy that there are no hams waiting to be gift-wrapped. Andrew, the guy who hired me, is neck and neck with me for obscure music references dropped into daily conversation, and my fellow editors are a good-naturedly disgruntled bunch of would-be novelists, screenwriters, musicians, and poets, which means snappy patter is mandatory. Our file assistant, a six-foot-two punkabilly teenager in a zoot suit and pompadour, keeps me up to speed on upcoming shows and cool places to shop in Hollywood between cigarette breaks and impromptu manic dances. Then, as if I hadn’t lucked out enough, there are the reports I’m being paid to edit.
The claims we deal with are all job-stress-related or, as our billboards say, el estres de trabajo. Most of our clients speak Spanish, which means most of the reports I edit have either been through a translator or were filled out by someone whose English leaves something to be desired. Sometimes both. In any case, the reports border on dadaism a lot of the time, and Andrew and I devote far too many of our working hours archiving the “greatest quotes file,” which includes gems like “I was very popular at work because of my earring but then my boss was yelling at me all the time, the bitch whore” and “I was eating cereal in the break room and the boss grabbed my bowl and threw it away, saying that cereal was a food to be eaten at home and not at work.”
Q: That’s very cruel of you to make fun of these poor people who suffer from job stress.
A: In the case of our employer, “suffering” is a relative term. According to California law at the time, if you could prove that 10 percent of the stress in your life was caused by your job, you qualified for workers’ compensation.
Q: Ten percent? Is there anybody whose job doesn’t cause 10 percent of their stress?
A: Exactly. My employer went on to singlehandedly almost bankrupt the California Workers’ Compensa
tion system and greatly influence the sweeping California Workers’ Compensation Reform Act of 1993—but it sure was fun while it lasted.
I’m having so much fun hitting taquerias and swap meets with my new work friends that I sometimes have to remind myself of my real purpose in Los Angeles. After a full day of editing and writing, the temptation to go out drinking at a piano bar with the guys from work is great—but you don’t achieve rock ‘n’ roll greatness in a piano bar. It’s easy to get comfortable, though, with a group of people who don’t expect you to impress them with your nonexistent rock ‘n’ roll hipness, and I really do like just about everyone at my office. I don’t even mind that Andrew’s standard nonwork uniform is the dreaded paisley shirt. It’s not what I came to L.A. for, though, and after a laid-back month of Trivial Pursuit parties in the Valley and sushi nights with the girls, I know I need to get back to my main objective. I hole up in my apartment for a weekend, combing the local music magazines for opportunities, soon getting my name added to the freelancing rosters of free weeklies Rock City News and Hollywood Rocks. Getting on the list is a heck of a lot easier than I ever thought it would be; the fact that I even own a typewriter and plan to use it has one editor practically fellating me on the spot. When pressed, he admits that most of their submissions are handwritten on torn-out notebook paper. My English degree and years of published work are just the icing on the cake; apparently it’s the little things, like being able to form complete sentences and come reasonably close to meeting a deadline that qualify you for this work. Of course, it would be tough for them to be too choosy considering the pay. Like the free weeklies at home, they don’t pay anything other than comp admittance at shows and the occasional last-choice swag thrown my way, but the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single motorcycle-booted step, and I am stepping. I review Rude Awakening, a band from, of all places, Richmond, and earn my first Hollywood byline less than a month after my arrival. I feel vindicated, proudly sending copies of my review home to my parents to show them that their fears were obviously for nothing as I am on my way now.
My first couple of months writing for the weeklies are heady. My name is on the guest list at the Whisky, the Roxy, and the Troubador, places I’ve read about for years in CREEM and the other magazines I slavishly pored over. The fact that my reviews arrive on time and with all of the words spelled correctly keep the editors calling, and I even get sent to review a couple of fairly big name groups—that is, if Night Ranger can still be considered a big name in 1990. I feel like all of that time I spent the summer after graduation sending out resumes and clips is finally amounting to something, even if the something is not exactly a direct result of my mailings. If I hadn’t been so relentless with the query letters, I never would have gotten that one fateful response from Steve Peters, and then I never would have packed up and moved to L.A., where I discovered the promising world of free weeklies just waiting for me to show up and take them by storm. I feel I am finally where I am supposed to be. Things are happening. I am making a name for myself.
With Night Ranger being as far as I’ve made it up the journalistic food chain, I don’t have a chance of scoring a guest list spot for the Iggy Pop show at the Hollywood Palladium. I missed out on Iggy Pop at the Richmond Mosque in 1981 because I was only fourteen and didn’t have a good enough fake ID to get in. I eventually did get my chance to see him live; unfortunately, it was at William and Mary Hall six years later, and some dumbass frat-boy loser—probably one of the same ones who yelled “weirdo chick” at me from the windows of Fraternity Row—hit Iggy in the face with half a grapefruit hurled from the stands and pissed him off. This was the tour where Iggy was opening for the Pretenders. That, and the fact that it was at William and Mary—hello—made it cold consolation for the show I missed, which culminated in a riot replete with police brutality and bloodshed, just like any good punk rock show. The grapefruit would not have been out of place in Richmond; nor would it have been out of place at any number of Stooges shows in the seventies, where Iggy would have hurled back at least a few choice words as a rejoinder. But this is 1987 Iggy, a kinder, gentler Iggy, who just wants to put on a show and isn’t serving anything harder than root beer backstage (yeah, I know because I was there, Bucky). Iggy at the Palladium promises to be true punk rock. I will be there.
Q: Did you say Iggy Pop was opening for the Pretenders? Didn’t you mean that the other way around?
A: Would that I did. It calls to mind the 1967 tour that had Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees—which is exactly what I said in my review of it in the William and Mary student paper, or tried to, but my review was rejected by the sorority-girl editor for being “too unobjective,” which isn’t even a word, Miss Editor-Britches.
The night of the Iggy Pop show, I don my Sun Records shirt, now slightly worn in thanks to the rough machinery of the apartment laundry machines, and drive myself down to the Hollywood Palladium. Even though as the new kid in town I won’t be covering the show for any papers and indeed will have to pay for my own ticket, just the fact that I am on the rosters now makes me walk a little taller. I’m not just “Anne from Virginia” anymore, I’m “Anne from Rock City News,” just in case anybody’s asking, and that’s enough to keep my shoulders straight as I cough up the ten bucks for my ticket and make my way to the floor. There are a couple of opening bands, Celebrity Skin and Alice in Chains, neither of which I know from Adam’s housecat, but because it’s Iggy, I want to get there early and get a good spot. I wind my way through the crowd, between elbows and shoulders, using my usual under-the-radar small-person technique. I notice that I am seeing more and more elbows and fewer and fewer shoulders as I make my way to the middle of the crowd. I am by far the smallest person I can see. I am also the only female. I wonder what the deal is—do L.A. girls not like Iggy Pop? How could they not? How could anyone not? I grit my teeth as I plant my feet and stake out my spot, waiting for Iggy to start.
I actually kind of like Celebrity Skin—what I can see of them, anyway. They’ve got a New York Dolls thing going on that I can respect, some makeup, some costumes, and even some dancing girls.
Q: Dancing girls?
A: Yes, dancing girls make everything better. There’s not a band alive that couldn’t benefit from a dancing girl or two.
I dig Celebrity Skin. I can’t say the same for Alice in Chains. Cool name—you’d think they’d give you a show with that, but no, they come out in flannel and sweatpants—sweatpants—and act like they’re doing us a favor by making us wait another half an hour for Iggy Pop. Losers!
Q: I guess they showed you, huh?
A: If by “showing me” you mean that they showed me that it’s possible to get rich and famous without putting any effort into your stage show and then blow it all through drug addiction and self-indulgence and end up dying alone and miserable and have no one find your body for weeks, then, yeah, they sure showed me. Hey, I know it’s harsh, folks, but these are the facts. I just report ’em. Little did we know that within months we wouldn’t be able to dig our way out of smug Seattle junkies in flannel. Had I known at the time, I would have done something drastic to try and save rock ‘n’ roll, and maybe Layne Staley’s life in the bargain. My kingdom for a can of Aqua-Net!
As it is, I take no greater action than withholding my applause. Not that they care. As far as Alice in Chains are concerned, we are intruding on a very private moment and they’d just as soon we all go home. If it weren’t for the promise of Iggy Pop, I surely would. But I’ve been promised the Godfather of Punk, damn it, the one forgotten boy, whose lyrics Melissa and I cranked up in eighth grade while we dolled ourselves up in fishnets and glitter to go stand outside clubs we couldn’t even pretend we had a chance of getting into. I was there to see the poet whose positively foul version of “Louie Louie” made my mother threaten to tear the tone arm off my Emerson portable record player. For Iggy, I’d wait through Celine Dion and Alice in Chains. Finally, Iggy takes the stage—and the crowd goes wild.
Q: God, that’s such a cliché.
A: No, I am totally serious. The crowd really did go wild. And not in a good way.
To say Iggy’s appearance caused a shift in the crowd dynamic would be a gross understatement along the lines of saying my father would rather I had stayed in Richmond. There is a sudden lurching, in waves, forward and back, interspersed with bursts of directionless activity, almost like small explosions throughout the crowd. I can’t tell what song Iggy is singing. I can’t tell much of anything about what is going on around me at that time outside of my immediate surroundings. From my spot in the dead center of the floor, I can’t see anything but T-shirted chests and backs, smashing up against my face, depriving me of air until I think I am going to pass out, then backing up and smashing again. Every time the crowd lurches, I have to run, holding on to whoever and whatever is closest, to keep from falling. My feet sometimes leave the floor entirely and I just ride with the crowd. At first I am panicked because I know there is no way I’ll be able to keep this up for the length of the show. Eventually I’ll let my guard down, or get exhausted, and I’ll fall. Then what? Then I’ll die, I think, and am suddenly filled with a feeling of peace, probably magnified by lack of oxygen to the brain. But really, I will die—and what better way to go then smashed to death at an Iggy Pop concert at the Hollywood Palladium? As endings go, it is nothing if not rock ‘n’ roll. I’ll be a martyr. It will be great. And I will die wearing a Sun Records shirt and motorcycle boots, and when I get to heaven, Lester Bangs and Darby Crash will say, “Hey, cool chick, come have a celestial beer with us!” Even as I decide that I am OK with my fate, I can feel myself going limp against the crush of bodies.
Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A. Page 7