“You’re a transvestite prostitute,” I say mournfully. I always thought his legs were too smooth to be natural.
Tommy laughs so loudly the asshole next door bangs on the wall until Tommy hurls a combat boot back.
“No. I’m not a transvestite prostitute,” he says, and then gets serious again. “Do you know Tina?” I shake my head, and Tommy points at the wall where he just threw my boot. “She lives two doors down from you in the back apartment. The Filipina chick.”
“You mean the stripper?” There is one Asian girl— well, a woman actually, no spring chicken—who I sometimes see leaving dressed as a sexy cop, or nurse, or even, at Christmas, Mrs. Claus. She has pitted skin and cold eyes; Raelynn calls her Noriega and insists that the guns she packs in her sexy cop holsters are real.
“Well, she does strip-o-grams, but she’s actually an actress.” Tommy pauses. “She’s my, well, we kind of date.”
“When?” I can’t figure out the logistics on this one, since for the better part of a week he’s been in my apartment.
“She’s been out of town for two weeks,” he sighs, “visiting her sister. But she’s coming back tomorrow.”
I sigh, too. I should have known this was too good to last.
Q: You’ve got to be shitting me. You’re being ironic, right?
A: Don’t forget . . . he lives right downstairs. Convenience makes up for a lot in my book.
“So how long have you two been dating?” I’m hopeful that we can continue what we’ve got going on. Maybe I can usurp her if they are just casually dating.
“About three and a half years.”
Shit.
Before I can make a counter offer, the phone rings. As I’ve been doing ever since the screenplay debacle, I let the machine pick up so I can see who it is. It’s Raelynn. I’ll call her back; I want to wail to her about Tommy’s bombshell, but I can’t with him here.
“Hey, Anne. Raelynn. I know you’re probably still out with that nasty boy downstairs . . .”
“Hey!” Tommy looks indignant. I snap up the receiver and tell her I’ll call her back, then turn to Tommy.
“You probably ought to go downstairs.”
“Why?”
“Um, I don’t know.” Maybe because you have a girlfriend? Maybe because you’ve been stringing me along for free drinks for two weeks? Maybe because I feel like an idiot and not for the first time this month? “I just think you should is all.”
“But this is probably the last night that I’ll actually get to spend the whole night here,” he complains. “I mean, I still want to see you. That’s not going to change. We just have to be discreet.”
You would have to be pretty damn discreet, by my estimation, for your girlfriend to not find out you were seeing the girl two apartments over. And I don’t know if Tommy has it in him. He’s usually pretty loaded, which doesn’t make him the picture of discretion. Still, I have to admit, I want to keep seeing him. Time for another sigh.
“OK, look. Go downstairs for about a half an hour and then you can come back up and spend the night. I just need to take care of some stuff.” I need to call Raelynn and debrief, I need to take a Valium, and I need to listen to sad songs about being the Other Woman, not necessarily in that order. Once I take care of all of that, I’ll welcome Tommy back, against Raelynn’s advice and my better judgment.
7
There Goes the Neighborhood
The Smell of Hairspray Gives Way to Teen Spirit
hey, guess what? I’m the next lucky winner,” Rae-lynn says as she passes my desk on the way out of Andrew’s office. Andrew follows her at a respectful distance as she goes to clean out her desk. He refuses to meet my eyes as I stare in disbelief at the person who just fired my best friend. The ongoing job cuts are not Andrew’s fault, and the order in which they’re being carried out isn’t his doing either, but nowadays he eats lunch alone. It’s like he has the stink of death on him, and no one wants to go to Del Taco with the Grim Reaper. I feel sorry for him, but pissed off at the same time. He’s my friend, too, but he’s also the Man, or at least the hatchet man. And now, with Raelynn gone and Andrew as good as gone, I’m going to be spending a lot of lonely lunch breaks at Del Taco myself.
“It’s not a big deal,” Raelynn says that night, over drinks at Boardner’s. “It’s not like it was a career. It was just a job. And besides,” she adds, twirling her lemon wedge in her gin and tonic, “I’ve been thinking of moving to Texas, anyway. I hear Austin is cool.”
“Texas?” I can’t believe Raelynn would leave me here alone. Outside of Tommy, who I now can only see a couple of nights a week, she’s my only companion—my partner in crime, shoulder to cry on, and never ending font of calming blue pills. I can’t imagine what I’m going to do without her. “Why not just look for another job? It’s a big city. You could probably find a better job!” I try hard to sound encouraging, but Raelynn is decisive.
“Nah, it’s not just the job. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. You will, too,” she adds, downing the rest of her drink. “It’s not the same here anymore. You see it happening, don’t you? It’s all changing.”
I don’t answer but she knows that I see it. I see what she’s talking about every time I venture back out to the Strip, which is less and less often these days—truth be told, for the past few months I’ve spent a lot more time at the Blacklite than anywhere else. When I made the decision to come out to Los Angeles, spur of the moment though it was, there were some factors that were key in convincing me. First and foremost was Hollywood’s position as the Mecca of metal. I came out here because I wanted to be where metal was happening, and when I got here, I was not disappointed. From Boardner’s to the Strip, the city was crawling with metal bands who needed reviews, publicity, press kits, and girlfriends. For a year and a half, I was in high cotton, if in no other way, at least where metal was concerned. But that first Palladium show, the one where I almost bought it, was a harbinger of what was to come. Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and their Seattle ilk are taking over the airwaves and the newsstands, clad in grubby flannel and drab thermals, leaving the lingering hair gods out in the cold with nothing but their fringed suede jackets and skintight pants to keep them warm.
With the influx of grunge bands, our roster at Around the World is down by half. The new bands come in with publicists from Seattle and established followings of their own. They don’t come to Hollywood green, like the hair bands did. Some of the local bands who haven’t hit yet try weakly to get with the program, trading their long hair for goatees and dressing down to look the part, but that doesn’t help us—when you’re trying to establish yourself as a grunge band, the last person you want in charge of your image is some broad who looks like a leftover extra from a Great White video.
“Yeah, I know,” I say glumly. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do when this place closes. I feel like I should be trying to do more music stuff, but I just can’t get excited about these new bands.” The only band we currently have on our roster that is even showing a hint of making it through the hair metal shakeout is Ku De Tah, and they do the funk-metal bass-slappy stuff that drove me crazy when I first got here but now doesn’t seem so bad compared to everything else. I do most of the work on their account, since Renee won’t touch anything that smells of rap, but so far all of their contact info has her name on it. I haven’t brought it up with Morgan and Heather because I know they’ll just blow sunshine up my ass about tours that are never going to happen, and besides, Raelynn is right. I feel the change coming, and I know that I am not long for Around the World or Los Angeles either. I just don’t know where I’m supposed to go from here.
“I hear Austin has a pretty good music scene.”
“Yeah, right. Honky-tonks and hoedowns aren’t my style, but thanks anyway.” I’m just trying to cover up my hurt feelings, and Raelynn knows it, so she doesn’t take offense. Instead she slides me two Valiums and orders us another round. I don’t know what I’m gonna
do without her.
Q: So obviously you were completely unaware that Austin was already well on its way to being the next important music scene.
A: Not totally—South by Southwest had been taking place for four years at that point, and of course I’d heard about that, but most of what was coming out of Austin then was a little too close to Athens-style alternative for my taste: too clever, too smug, and not nearly grimy enough to be compelling. In short, the difference between a feed-shop trucker hat and a boutique trucker hat is kind of like the difference between a Mexican poncho and a Sears poncho, with all nods to Frank Zappa.
So let’s recap. I am not writing for any magazines. I am barely doing any publicity. I am not making any new connections in music journalism, and I am not meeting any influential persons in the music industry. I am, however, spending a lot of time in a drag queen hooker bar, processing a lot of bogus workers’ compensation claims, and having an affair with an unemployed junkie behind the back of an aging stripper. Just in case you thought this wasn’t all working out famously, you know.
With Tommy being less available, I’ve gotten his permission to take my other gentlemen friends—and I use the terms gentlemen and friends very loosely—to the Blacklite on the nights he is with Tina. Since Tina doesn’t drink, there’s no chance Tommy and I will ever run into each other there with other people, not that that really matters but it’s something I want to avoid. As Raelynn pointed out when I finally decided it was time to introduce her to the Blacklite, unless you’re looking for a drag queen hooker, there is really only one reason to go to the Blacklite, and that is to get hammered. I would dispute that; in fact, I would say that I go for the ambience, and the camaraderie, and for the eclectic jukebox that I’ve grown to love. (Bar-Kays, anyone?) The men from the Saint Francis Mission across the street don’t seem interested in any of these things, but they’re another one of the things that keeps me coming back. Why? Because when they’re looking to buy a lady a drink, until they reach that magical point of inebriation where they can’t tell the difference anymore, I’m the only lady there.
That’s mainly a concern on the nights I come to the Blacklite alone or with Raelynn—since getting laid off, she’s consented to come along a few times, but usually not, as Raelynn is not nearly as enamored with the Blacklite as I am. Most nights I bring male company, the vestigial hair gods I find on the Strip and at Boardner’s, still proudly tossing their tresses and polishing their licks, not yet comprehending that the hair-metal boat sailed months ago and they weren’t on it. I bring them to the Blacklite . . . out of meanness. Pure, simple meanness.
Like Kelsey Grammer at Boardner’s last year, a part of me will always be the eighth-grader who got picked last in gym class. More specifically, I was the girl who sat out couples skate at Golden Skateworld while my friends sped around the rink with pimply-faced boys who snuck cigarettes behind the building and carried smuggled airline bottles of vodka in the tops of their tube socks. At Golden Skateworld, as I sat alone on the upholstered benches while Foreigner’s “Cold as Ice” played over the crackling loudspeakers, I told myself that it didn’t matter because I was brainy and talented and those boys were dumb as dirt and going nowhere. They might look like Matt Dillon and my friends might go all moony-eyed for their kisses, but they didn’t have a brain among them and that made me better.
I told myself that again in high school, when I didn’t get a sideways glance from the punk rock guys in the bands that the Open High kids flocked to see. I made fun of their mala-props and acted as if their slack-jawed Marlon Brando rebellion didn’t make me ache with longing. I honed my sarcasm in the coffeeshop with D&D-playing guys who were moony-eyed over me, something I pretended not to notice because I didn’t like them like that. The cool guys were always the butt of our running sour grape commentary, pointed observations about their shallowness and low intelligence. Yes, I see the irony...now. As a teenager, I thought I was the picture of depth, as did most of my fellow coffeeshop denizens.
Q: What is it about coffeeshops that draws self-important assholes with delusions of enlightenment?
A: Ummmmm . . . the scones?
Pity the poor would-be hair gods who have to pay penance for my teenaged slights. Completely ignorant that they are going to pay for crimes they did not commit, they ask me out and suffer for their foolhardiness. I bring them to the Black-lite to see if they will squirm, and if they do, woe be unto them, because when it comes to making verbal mincemeat of good-looking-but-not-very-bright men, spurned nerd girls are nothing compared to drag queen hookers.
“Oh, Annie, this one can read,” says Carmella with mock astonishment when my newest plaything, a strapping blue-haired Bangladeshi drummer named Arafat Kazi, recites the drink specials. The girls are charmed by his accent, educated as he was in posh post-colonial British schools, and I am impressed by his ability to cite Arthur Conan Doyle and Bruce Dickinson in the same breath. In fact, it’s how we met—standing outside of Boardner’s one night, waiting to find out where to go for the inevitable after party, I thought I heard someone over my shoulder quoting Poe . . . and when I say quoting Poe, I don’t mean squawking “Nevermore” or some other such tripe that any idiot with a tenth-grade education or a working knowledge of The Simpsons could quote. I mean an entire stanza of one of Poe’s less-lauded poems, recited in the accent that will later charm the Blacklite “girls,” making it just that much more compelling and lyrical to my drunken ears. The fact that the poem is “To Annie” easily passes as kismet at three A.M., and I am more than willing to stagger off down Cherokee Avenue to Arafat’s basement apartment, leaving the after parties for another night. His bookshelf rivals my own back in Richmond, a little heavier on the British literature, but he has an excuse, and having someone actually get my literary references for the first time in months is refreshing and challenging. Unfortunately, it’s probably also his undoing. “You wastin’ your time with her,” Carmella says, stroking his massive thigh. “She likes the stupid ones.” She’s right, as terrible as it sounds, and though Arafat is probably the most formidable opponent I have found yet, he’ll be nothing more than an exotic tryst for me, largely because I can’t verbally bat him around like a dimwitted ball of twine.
He is a sport, though, sticking around long enough to see a catfight that moves from the bathroom to the barroom to the street and finally ends in broken fingernails, tears, and hugs for two besotted working girls, and a round for the house when they air kiss and make up. We are inseparable for the better part of a month, but like the college-radio people at William and Mary, Arafat’s intense devotion to things lofty and literary soon evokes a lowbrow backlash from my anti-intellectual side. I start snapping at his poetry recitations and stop laughing at his ironic asides. I don’t like having to think so much when I’m trying to have a good time, and I especially don’t like it when he tries to engage me in egghead banter in public. There’s a reason I left my Norton anthology at home. Doesn’t he know he’s blowing my cover? I finally have to give him the “It’s not you, it’s me” talk, which he takes with all of the dignity and grace of a heavy metal drummer who was raised by a cadre of servants and housemen. Even after we’re no longer an item, I know I can always call Arafat for mid-morning jaunts to shoot the shit over Grand Slams at the rock ‘n’ roll Denny’s and get quick answers to my nagging “who wrote that poem that goes . . .” questions when nobody’s listening, like when I am sneaking a go at the New York Times crossword in my apartment, with the shades drawn—and occasionally I kick myself for whatever glitch in my programming that yearns for a bonehead beau.
My next contestant doesn’t fare nearly as well at the Blacklite, where the girls are still a little bitter over Arafat’s absence and don’t hesitate to let me know.
“Annie, Annie,” sighs Brandi as she runs her fingers through the glossy curls of my next victim. “This one isn’t nearly as cute as the last one. What’s your name, baby?” Baby ain’t saying; instead he storms out of the bar, issuing
a barrage of profanity, presumably to walk home since, as usual, I’m driving. This is all perfectly hilarious to me, Billy, and the girls at the Blacklite, and we all have a round on the house and replay the events leading up to his departure again and again. That one I was a little sorry to see go; he was tough-guy good-looking, and I’d barely even gotten a chance to talk to him before Brandi scared him off. I tell myself that he was probably sour, anyway, and serenade Brandi with a resounding chorus of “her” song on the jukebox —Brandy, you’re a fine girl, what a good wife you would be—because she’s better company anyway, and definitely better dressed.
One night, back at Boardner’s on Raelynn’s insistence (“I just can’t deal with the Blacklite tonight; I’m tired of hanging out with men who have nicer tits than I do”), I give my number to Steve Stavros, the guitarist for the Seen, a local funk-rock knockoff group with the same slappy-bass solos and homeboy rap interludes as all of the other local funk-rock knockoff groups. Lately, any band that isn’t trying to be Pearl Jam is trying to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and it’s all wearing just a little thin with me. I give him my number in spite of my misgivings, though, because I’ve gone out with guys who have done a lot worse than rip off Parliament, and besides, he’s kind of cute. We go out on a couple of dates, real dates, that he actually pays for—movies, dinner, drinks, the works. I’ve almost forgotten what a real date was like. I go along to a couple of parties to see his band play, the first time since Richmond that I’ve been “with the band” in the Pamela Des Barres sense. I’d almost forgotten how heady it was, even when the band isn’t exactly what you’d pick if you had your choice. Just watching him on stage, and looking through the crowd at the girls eyeing him, a lot of them better looking than me, makes me feel like the fucking prom queen for once in my life. We don’t have much to talk about, and his looks are more Charlie Watts than Keith Richards, but as long as I recharge my prom queen batteries by seeing him on stage every couple of weeks, I’m happy. I don’t take him to the Blacklite, largely because I know that, in the eyes of the girls, the last one was cuter and they won’t hesitate to say so.
Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A. Page 15