Nerd Girl Rocks Paradise City: A True Story of Faking It in Hair Metal L.A.

by Anne Thomas Soffee

  “Well, I’m going to do it,” Tommy announces, and, finding no takers, heads off to conquer the Sav-On alone, a drugstore cowboy without a posse.

  “Maybe he’ll bring us something,” I tell Aunt Titty. (I am blissfully free of all taboos when it comes to things that other people stole, especially if they’re drugs.)

  “What kind of pills you like, honey?” Aunt Titty rummages in her purse, pulling out a variety of brown prescription bottles and lining them up on the bar. “Luvox . . . Xanax . . . ’Mipramines ...now that, that’s just estrogen, you don’t need that.” She puts one bottle back in her purse.

  “I like Xanax,” I say, holding out my hand. She opens the bottle and shakes out a half-dozen pills. I’m fascinated. “Are these all your prescriptions?”

  “Of course they are. Whose do you think they are?” I can’t imagine. I don’t tell her that I haven’t taken a drug that was actually prescribed to me in years.

  “How’d you get so many?”

  “How? Look at me!” I look at Aunt Titty. In her orange spandex disco dress and Diana Ross wig, she looks like half the patrons of this bar and every girl at Boardner’s . . . utterly and mind-numbingly average. “I’m a forty-eight-year-old transvestite streetwalker. If I don’t need antidepressants, who does?”

  “So you just went to the doctor and told him about your life, and he gave you those?”

  “Well, I went to about four doctors. You got insurance, honey?” I nod. My coverage lasts through the summer as part of my severance package. “I tell you what. You go right down here to Kaiser Permanente Hospital . . .” she points toward the hospital, which is only about six blocks from my apartment. “You tell them you want to see a psychiatrist. Not a psychologist! A psychologist can’t give you nothing. And you tell them you need something for your nerves.” She looks me up and down and frowns. “Tell them you lost your job and your boyfriend’s a junkie and you can’t sleep at night.” I smile, because who knew I wouldn’t even have to lie? She smiles back and pats me on the shoulder. “They’ll fix you right up.”

  I had no idea it was going to be that easy.

  When Tommy comes back to the building from looting the Sav-On, there’s a party in full swing in my one-room apartment. Me, Aunt Titty, and three guys from the Saint Francis Mission are making short work of my liquor supply to the tune of Exile on Main Street. Tommy, always my knight in shining track marks, grabs my arm and pulls me out into the hall.

  “What the hell is going on in there?”

  “I’m not exactly sure.” I remember Billy trying to close the bar for at least an hour before Titty and I finally left. We’d taken turns sweet-talking him into one more round about half a dozen times. By then it was well after dusk and we’d had to sneak out the back door with him. When we got around the corner to where my car was parked, the guys from the mission yelled down to us from their window, but the desk clerk wouldn’t let us go up, and, well, the next thing I knew, we were all at my place. Scout’s honor.

  “They’ve got to leave.”

  “You’re not kidding.” One of the guys from the mission really stinks. “Hey, how was the looting?”

  “Ahh, it was lame. Everything was already gone. Oh, I got you something.” He pulls a tube of Preparation H out of his pocket.

  “Smart-ass. Hey, help me get these guys out of here.”

  “Well, we can’t just put them on the street, it’s after curfew, and besides, in case you forgot, there’s a riot going on. What do you want to do?”

  I shrug. “I guess we take ’em back where we got ’em.”

  Ten minutes later, me, Tommy, Aunt Titty, and the homeless guys are creeping through the deserted streets of Hollywood in my Hyundai with the headlights off. There is no one, absolutely no one, on the streets of Los Angeles. I feel like I am in a low-budget science fiction movie where the aliens have come down and scooped up everyone but a handful (or a Hyundai-full) of junkies, drag queens, and hoboes. I’ve never seen Los Angeles like this.

  Apparently, tonight is the night for a lot of people to see things they’ve never seen before. The baby-faced National Guard soldier who pulls us over doesn’t know what to make of this particular bunch of curfew breakers.

  “Turn on the tears, baby,” Aunt Titty mutters to me as the soldier walks toward the driver’s window. If I wasn’t planning to cry, the rifle pointed at my face works as an excellent motivator.

  “Good evening, folks.” He shines the light on me, then Tommy, then across the back seat, stopping on Aunt Titty long enough for her to manage a crocodile tear or two herself. “Are you all aware there’s a curfew for the city in effect?”

  “That’s why,” I say, trying my best to tear up, “we were tryin’ to get home!” In addition to the tears, I turn on the southern accent. I figure if it works on cops it might work on soldiers, too.

  “Well, are you close?” He looks perplexed, like he’d rather deal with gangbangers or something else they’d actually briefed him for before they put him on this corner.

  I nod vigorously and dab at my eyes. “Uh huh, yes, sir,” I sob, feeling utterly ridiculous calling an eighteen-year-old kid “sir” but hoping he’ll be flattered enough to let me go.

  “I want you to listen to me very carefully,” he says wearily, shining his flashlight across the back seat one more time. “I want you to go straight home, do not stop anywhere, and I want you to stay there. And if I see you again tonight . . .” he shines the flashlight in my face for emphasis. “I’m going to arrest you. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I promise, sir!”

  “Thank you, baby!” cries Aunt Titty, giving him a Miss America wave, and I peel out, leaving the poor guardsman looking like he might cry, too. They prepare you for a lot of things in the military, but I’ll bet they didn’t prepare him for us.

  Q: So did you turn around and go straight home?

  A: Are you kidding? I only look honest. There was no way I was bringing those guys back to my place again. We completed the mission and then went straight home. Scout’s honor.

  Less than a week after the end of the riots, I show up at Kaiser Permanente for the appointment that I hope will be my ticket to legitimate pharmaceutical relief. I am actually on time for my appointment, so eager am I to avail myself of white-market pharmaceuticals at co-pay prices. I’m wearing my most subdued interview clothes—a black skirt, business pumps, and a tan silk jacket—on Aunt Titty’s advice, trying my hardest to look like a nice little girl who’s just under too much stress.

  “Hi, my name is Anne Soffee and I have a two o’clock appointment to see a psychiatrist.”

  The receptionist looks up and down her page, then flips forward a page, then back a page. She taps the calendar with her pencil.

  “Honey, your appointment was yesterday.” Shit! This unemployment crap has me all mixed up. I never know what day it is any more. “That’s OK, just have a seat,” she says, scratching out my name and flipping through the book some more. “I’m sure somebody can see you. I’ll see who we have with a slot available.”

  I sit down, relieved that I’m not going to have to get up at the crack of lunch again tomorrow. After a while, a tiny woman with a shock of white-blonde hair and oversized orange spectacles motions for me to come back to her office. I go in and sit down and she introduces herself as Carole, staff psychologist.

  “Oh, well, there’s been a mistake,” I say, getting up to leave. “I’m supposed to see a psychiatrist. That’s what I requested.” She motions for me to sit back down.

  “Everyone has to see the psychologist first,” she says. “That’s how we determine what you need.” Drat. I try and remember the coaching Aunt Titty has given me, the things I’m supposed to say and not say. If what I remember is correct, the worse my life is, the more likely I am to get lots and lots of prescriptions, but I’m not to mention any drugs specifically or let on that I’ve been taking anything up until now. Carole gets out a clipboard and starts asking me questions, s
tarting with the basics and then getting more abstract. “So what brings you to us? Why do you think you need help?”

  “Well, I’m under a lot of stress.” Good start. I take a breath and start counting off stressors on my fingers. “I got laid off from my job—oh, and right before that happened, my best friend, well, my only friend really, she moved to Texas. And I don’t really have anyone to talk to about it, you know, because my family is really far away. Oh, except my boyfriend. Only he’s a heroin addict. And I can’t really talk to him that much anyway, because he has another girlfriend so we can’t see each other so often because we have to sneak.”

  “Really.” She makes some notes. She doesn’t seem the least bit impressed by my story, which worries me.

  “Oh, and my boyfriend’s girlfriend lives two apartments down from me.” Carole raises an eyebrow and makes a note. “It’s very stressful,” I add.

  “Yes, it sounds like it could be,” she says. She makes some more notes on the clipboard then looks through some papers on her desk.

  “It sounds like the best fit for you would be our code-pendency education program. Do you know anything about codependency?”

  I know that it sounds like another hot California buzzword but I don’t let on. I shake my head.

  “Well, simply put, it’s a dysfunctional relationship pattern. It means that your self-esteem is tied into an enabling relationship, usually with an alcoholic or an addict.”

  If I had a cookie, I would give it to her for using that many therapeutic buzzwords in one sentence. In any case, it sure doesn’t sound like a ticket to prescription relief. I frown.

  “I don’t think that’s my thing. What else have you got?”

  Carole looks perplexed. She puts down her clipboard and folds her hands. “I’ll tell you what,” she says, leaning back in her chair. Her tiny frame is lost in the huge leather chair. She looks like Edith Ann. “I want you to come back and see me once a week. We’ll talk about some options for you and see what else we can work out.”

  “I don’t have all the time in the world,” I say. “I’m moving back to Virginia in July, so I only have a couple of months.” Unspoken message: Hand over the scrips, lady, and stop wasting my time.

  Carole is nonplussed. “We don’t need all the time in the world,” she says blithely. “We’ll just take it one day at a time.”

  GAH! I hightail it out of her office and back to the Blacklite, to talk to Aunt Titty about what went wrong.

  Titty tells me that the best I can do is go back to Carole and try again. I go back, twice, without the first prescription being written or even mentioned as a possible solution. Titty tells me to kick it up a little, really give her some stories from my horribly stressful life.

  “Tell her about that night that that asshole punched Tommy in the nose for hitting him with a dart!” I only vaguely remember that night. I was in the bathroom when the actual fight happened. When I came out, the puncher had been thrown out the door so hard he’d broken his wrist on the pavement. I felt sorry for him and drove him to the hospital, then I cussed out the nurse when she said he’d have to make a statement about how it happened, which he’d already told me he wasn’t about to do because he had a habeas out on him. She called the police and we had to make a break for it, the poor guy holding his wrist and howling in pain.

  “OK, what else?”

  “Tell her about the time that suit came in here and said you weren’t a lady.” That was some night, too. I was standing at the jukebox, drinking a bottle of Budweiser, and some business Joe who obviously didn’t know from the Blacklite walked up and tried to talk to me. Billy asked if he wanted to “buy the lady a drink” and he said that if I was a lady I’d be drinking from a glass, not the bottle.

  The nerve! Billy got out the biggest mug in the place, filled it with beer, and handed it to Brandi. She walked up to the suit and just as sweet as you please batted her eyes and asked, “Am I a lady?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she dumped it over his head.

  “But those stories don’t even have anything to do with me, really,” I worry.

  “Yes, but they’re good stories,” Aunt Titty says, and I guess they are. I worry that there is too much alcohol in both of them, though. Over the past couple of sessions, Carole has been pushing me less toward the codependency program and more toward the substance abuse one. She’s a nice lady, and I know she means well, but I can’t figure out how she is so off-base on this one. I can’t make her see that Tommy is the one with the drug problem and I’m the one with the stress problem. It doesn’t occur to me that I probably reek of alcohol every time she sees me and that every stressful incident I relay in our sessions takes place in a bar.

  “I want you not to drink between now and our next meeting,” says Carole. “Do you think you can do that?” Can I? Of course I can. Will I? That’s another story.

  “Ginger ale?” says Billy indignantly. He looks like I’ve hurt his feelings. “What’s with that?”

  “I just have a lot of stuff to do tonight,” I say.

  “No, you don’t.” He knows me too well. He puts a ginger ale and a shot of Jack Daniels in front of me. I get all misty; Jack and ginger is what Keith Richards drinks. It’s what Stacey and I used to drink on his birthday every year. I pour the shot into the ginger ale and play “Brown Sugar” on the jukebox. I’ll quit tomorrow, I tell myself, and Billy winks at me.

  epilogue

  Tattoo Me

  What the World Needs Now Is Olallaberry Pie

  i could devote a whole book to all of the humiliating and deeply personal details that finally allow me to consider that Carole might have a point. You could then file this book between Elizabeth Wurtzel and Who the Fuck Cares on the sad-little-overeducated-girls-with-sub-stance-abuse-problems shelf. This ain’t that kind of party, and besides, I’d like to maintain a shred of human dignity, or at least be able to pretend that I have.

  After a particularly demoralizing weekend, Carole finally convinces me to take in an AA meeting—“Just to see what it’s like, no commitments, no strings.” She and I look over a schedule and decide that the ten o’clock “late night” meeting at the Hollywood Recovery Center would be the best choice for me. I get the feeling that she’s deliberately screwing up my drinking schedule, but what the hey. I’ve grown to trust Carole more than I ever thought I would at that first session just two weeks ago. We’ve covered a lot of ground in a little time; since I am scheduled to leave Los Angeles in forty-five days, Carole has me coming in almost daily. She gained big points with me in our most recent session when she told me that she used to be the resident ditzy blonde on the Wolfman Jack show. Her job was to giggle a lot and say “I don’t know, Wolfman!” whenever he asked a question. I figure if anybody can pull my butt out of the tailspin it’s been in for the past year, Wolfman Jack’s bimbo sidekick can. (I may not have met my goal of becoming the next Lester Bangs, but even in feelgood California therapy, I go for the rock ‘n’ roll irony.)

  At nine o’clock that night I set out to walk to the Hollywood Recovery Center. Hollywood Boulevard is just starting to come alive. I do my best to fade into the dingy brick of the tourist shops and dive bars in my tank top, overalls, and sloppy ponytail. It’s been weeks since I’ve bothered to drag up before going out to the bars; why would I bother to drag up for a meeting? In spite of my ragged appearance, a number of the cars that drive past slow down, check me out, and make offers. Hey mamacita . . . you working? Am I working? What do they take me for, I wonder—the world’s laziest hooker? I walk on, ignoring the offers and thinking about what I may or may not give up.

  I’ve told Carole again and again that I’m not ready for the concept of life without. I tell her I need the option of taking a Xanax or a Valium when Tommy chooses Tina over me, and I need to be able to relax with a beer when I get all knotted up over how long I’ll be able to pull off the graduate school facade before they realize they’ve made a horrible mistake. Those are the bad times, when I need someth
ing. Then there are the good times, when I want something. Last night was Billy’s birthday, and we celebrated and toasted all night long. I brought him a rose made out of red wrapper Trojans and a card that said “I would have gotten you something cheap, but you already have me.” Brandi dressed up in a cowgirl outfit with assless chaps and a G-string. We went into the ladies’ room and I wrote “Happy Birthday Billy” across her cheeks and stuck the rose in between. She sashayed out of the bathroom and bent over the jukebox casually, like she was looking for a song, and the whole bar went wild. I can’t imagine never having any more nights like that. How do normal people stand it?

  “Cheer up, honey.” I look up and see a dark-haired girl, a real streetwalker, in jeans and a halter top, leaning on a pair of crutches. “It ain’t that bad.” I take it as a sign, as anyone probably should when the crippled hookers start giving them sympathetic advice.

  I can hear a motorcyclist cruising slowly behind me, and I pick up my pace. I keep my head down, eyes passing over the grime-encrusted stars on Hollywood Boulevard. Imogene Coca, Eartha Kitt, Montgomery Clift. Hollywood might have let me down, but at least I’m not the only one. I imagine all of the Midwestern families who come on vacation, expecting glamour and gloss. Hollywood today is washed-up metal bands and crippled hookers—and one very nervous southern girl on her way to a late-night meeting. The motorcyclist revs his engine and speeds ahead.

  Two blocks later, he is back, idling in the crosswalk, blocking my path. I have to look up to cross the street, and when I do, I meet his eyes. Travis Bickle, I think. He looks like De Niro. A dashing psychopath on a purple-flake Harley. He revs the motor, twisting with a tattooed hand. I look away but I can still feel him staring at me. I figure he must be wondering what turnip truck I fell off. In a few weeks, I’ll be back in Virginia, buying school supplies and seeing if I can get my old job back at the mall. It will be just like I never left, I think dejectedly. Three years in Los Angeles and nothing to show for it.