by Rob Binkley
Johnny led me over to his VIP table and whispered in my ear: “I told these girls you’re an adult film producer.” He pointed at his menagerie. “See these beautiful women? You can have any of ‘em you want.” He pointed under their miniskirts; all of them opened up for a peek.
Being a good boy from Palo Alto, I was stunned. All I could say was, “Hold that thought,” before I fled. I found Brian, who was surrounded at a different table. For some reason they thought he was a porn producer, too. He was on another one of his verbal rolls.
“I advise all you beautiful ladies to escape from complacency now, flee this land of fake plastic trees or watch Rome burn from your box seat at the Hollywood Bowl!” Brian crunched ice. “You’re welcome to join us. We’re off to see the world before it’s too late and we’re all hanging from the end of a rope, with no music.”
One girl said, “You sure are a wordy asshole.”
Brian sighed, “Nobody gets me.” Then he leaned back and grabbed the Scarf Chick walking by. “Kiss me. For luck.” Brian stuck his tongue down her throat. The Scarf Girl let him kiss her, then kept on strutting and chewing gum like it never happened.
Brian elbowed me. “Told you she liked me.”
“They’re hookers!”
“Everyone’s a prostitute in this town, Binkley.” Brian didn’t get it, so I let him live the dream. A few hours later, a few strippers offered to treat Brian to a lap dance if he gave them another swig from his private reserve. Brian gave Scarf Chick first dibs since she kept doing drive-bys.
This time, she took a big swig from his flask then kept on walking. Ten seconds later, we heard her fall into a table.
Rational thought had escaped into the funhouse….
The night was getting blurry. The next thing I remember, the girls were dancing in front of us like the Vegas entertainers they most certainly were. We admired their moves. “I don’t know how they can dance. I can’t even chew gum!”
Johnny deadpanned, “LA is one helluva drug.”
When the girls finally figured out we weren’t porn producers or anyone related to the Adult Video industry, they danced off into the crowd. “Gone!” Brian just laughed, “More lost souls dance into the night.” We went looking for another spot.
We walked up the hill to the famed Chateau Marmont Hotel at one o’clock in the morning. Johnny pretended to be a guest, then used his mind control powers to get us all in.
He informed me, “This is where Belushi died doing speedballs with Robin Williams. Never do speedballs with a man named Mork!” Brian had no idea what he was talking about.
Johnny led us to a tiny bar hidden in a corner under some stairs and ordered expensive scotch from an old bartender named Elroy, who impressed the Pied Piper of the Sunset Strip by dishing on all the old Hollywood lore.
Elroy said, “Ava Gardner used to give blow jobs in this very speakeasy.”
Brian chimed in: “Wow. Is she here tonight?” Johnny gave Brian the death stare. Elroy moved on to more enlightened patrons. Johnny called Brian an idiot for not knowing his 1940s Hollywood starlets. Brian shot back, “I pride myself on things I suck at!”
In the hotel, we were suddenly mixing with women of a much higher social register than the hippies, hookers, and porn stars we’d been associating with for the past forty-eight hours. Brian leaned into me, now in full Messiah mode. “Look around, Rob. Most people today are miserable. They have very little hope. The grand dream of Western Civilization has failed. It’s time we pulled out of this tailspin.”
I told him everyone at this private playground didn’t seem miserable; they were “stoned immaculate.”
“This is not reality,” Brian said. And he was right.
Then I met Brooke. Having known her for twenty minutes, she became my new BFF. An aspiring actress from an unnamed “flyover state,” she said she loved me but had somewhere to go.
“No, you don’t.”
“But I have an early call.”
“Who doesn’t?” I begged her to stay. She smiled; she was a sweet doll. I leaned in to give her a kiss.
Then Brian put a flame to our revelry.
In a burst of apocalyptic idiocy, he decided to rip off the “choker” he’d been wearing all night (a tie with a T-shirt—his idea of class) and hold it over a burning votive candle. I tried to stop him, but he was too busy giving another one of his goddamned speeches, waving his flaming tie in the air.
“I’ve had it with you scenesters! You’re all a bunch of slaves! Our civilization is six billion people trying to find happiness by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in! This whole scene is a perversion! Sexy ladies join me while you still have souls to save!”
The room took it in stride. A few drunken beards clapped, two girls in fluorescent tubetops booed, a frat boy belched as rebuttal.
Elroy the barkeep called hotel security. “You idiots are outta here!”
Brian bolted for the door. I grabbed Brooke and we split through the back exit, sprinting past the pool and the parking valets. Brian was way ahead of us.
We fled into the night to the soundtrack of a distant police siren. It’s unclear what frame of mind I was operating under at this point, but something propelled me to rock on with this mentally unstable drunken degenerate who was still waving his burning tie in the air.
It must have been the moonshine.
We slowed down heading west on Sunset just as we neared The Comedy Store. I was yelling at Brian when we ran into Johnny taking a piss on the front wheel of a parked yellow “Lambo” he said was Pauly Shore’s. Johnny had left the Chateau before Brian went nuts, so we told him all about the incident. If he thought Brian was a crazed nutcase before, this removed all doubt. He was not amused.
Brian changed the subject to tell Johnny about our impending gonzo world adventure. Johnny kept saying, “Go man, go! You can do anything you want. Go smoke opium in ‘The Triangle!’” Johnny just wanted Brian to leave town.
By this time the bars were closed, so Johnny left and Brian hailed us a cab. We paid the cabbie to take us back to the Safari Inn. I convinced Brooke to come back to the motel with us. When she saw we only had one bed (to save on costs), she asked if we were gay. I told her, “Yes, bi-curious?” So we all hopped into bed together. Brian hated when I pretended to be sexually ambiguous, but he was too drunk to care at this point.
Once Brian started snoring, Brooke convinced me to go back to her place on the beach, where we spent the next two nights together. Actresses … gotta love ‘em.
Brooke had to go to work eventually, so we said our goodbyes and I met back up with Brian in Hollywood. We finally peeled ourselves away from all the random hippies, actresses, and freaks with whom we’d been partying to head down to Manhattan Beach to see how the other half lived.
First we stopped by the FedEx store on La Cienega Boulevard to pick up the documents my assistant Jody had mailed me five days prior to finalize the sale of my cafés. When we walked out of the store, two of Brian’s old fraternity pals from Arizona State University came tearing into the parking lot to pick us up, screaming at the top of their lungs.
We piled into their Toyota 4Runner and hauled ass down the 405 to Manhattan Beach (“hauling ass” in that we were in bumper-to-bumper traffic going 7 mph the entire time). It took three hours to go forty miles, which gave me a lot of time to think.
Spending time with these crazy ex-frat boys was the tipping point to me deciding to get the hell away from America for a year. It was clear that, after a week of mindless debauchery, Brian wanted to go completely crazy and be freer than he’d ever been. Now I finally saw what he was running from: normalcy. These guys.
Watching him with his old pals made me realize how little he had seen outside of America, and how very different we were as people. Brian looked normal but he wasn’t. I looked weird and I was. I had long hair and wore T-shirts and flip-flops to work, while Brian wore a suit and cell phone as his uniform until two weeks ago.
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Brian was a social chameleon who changed colors depending on the crowd, while I was a bit of a maverick. I didn’t need to be part of groups unless it was convenient. It’s true I had a certain level of contempt for the organized friendship thing—maybe because I went to San Jose State (a commuter school) and lived at home. I already had all my friends and didn’t need any more.
In contrast, at the many universities Brian got kicked out of, he always belonged to the supposedly cool fraternity. The word around the 4Runner was that he was a legendary Phi Delta Theta. It occurred to me during our drive that I never experienced Brian’s “legendary” fratboy days. I never visited him during those years because I was either out of the country or working on my espresso bars.
All these thoughts ran through my head while I watched Brian hoot and holler and change his stripes before my eyes in that 4Runner cruising down to Manhattan Beach.
The second we arrived at the ASU Phi Delta reunion party at some brother’s beach house, the stories of Brian’s past delinquency started coming. And coming. Some highlights:
• Pledge Brian was found passed out in the Jewish fraternity, pants steaming with piss. He was delivered back to the Phi Delta house, complete with the couch he was still passed out on and wearing his pledge pin.
• Pledge Brian got caught licking college girls’ asses in bars for sport. He set the Arizona State record of forty-seven straight before he went to jail.
• Pledge Brian got busted for driving a moped through the Pi Beta Phi sorority house with two guys on the back. He got a DUI.
• Brian was eventually expelled from ASU for barfing on the dean at a sophomore Tri Delta mixer and had to move back to California and find another school to pillage.
It went on and on.
This is the same guy who’d been espousing metaphysical wisdom like some combination of Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts for the past week??
On Manhattan Beach, Brian fell back into his college “Belushi” persona. I watched him hold court amid his old herd. His altruistic revolutionary spirit had vanished into thin air. It was fairly disturbing to see his transformation.
What I saw while partying with these investment bankers, stock traders, and corporate “brosephs” repulsed me. I was searching for truth, and all I saw was nothing but twisted Americana.
These guys were the embodiment of everything I hated about this country. It wasn’t their entitled conspicuous consumption that pissed me off; I can obviously deal with that. Brian and I liked hot chicks, booze, and a good party as much as the next guy.
And it wasn’t their yuppie attitudes that bothered me. We were all children of the eighties, and like all these Todds and Chads we wanted to make a lot of money and overindulge at every opportunity. That wasn’t the problem here.
The problem was there wasn’t a glimmer of heart or soul or curiosity or compassion in any of them. They were all alpha male aliens from a different planet; they were apes from Planet Frat. Planet Fart. Planet Winner. Where winning meant nothing other than trampling over anything that’s standing in their way in a four-wheel drive with monster truck tires.
After a few hours with these guys it was clear, when compared to every criminal locked in prison, the “winners of the world” were committing far more obscene crimes against humanity and getting away with it.
The Hollywood rejects we partied with last week seemed like saints in comparison. They were the Beats I was looking for—the original people, not always the most hygienic and most certainly delusional—but at least they were genuine and on a path with something resembling a heart.
If this was “winning,” I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted way more than normalcy out of life, much more than just the textbook American Dream. I wanted to be “real” and measure my success by my own yardstick, nobody else’s—especially not Uncle Sam’s.
Brian was now screaming over the ska music: “I got four black eyes that night and they were all worth it!”
The Phi Deltas gave us hell for not making it to the Rose Bowl like we were supposed to on New Year’s Day. They mocked us for wasting New Year’s Eve, “partying with the West Hollywood freaks.” “You both probably got AIDS! You did! I can see it on your dicks!”
These are direct quotes.
I pretended to laugh then quietly escaped inside to make a call to the outside world. I rang Johnny and begged him to come get me the hell outta there. I wanted to go home.
When the party died down, I told Brian I wanted to leave. The bros fell silent. They could see there was a black sheep among the herd trying to sneak off with one of their own. My painted toenails (which the commune girls gave me back at the Safari Inn) gave me away.
“You leavin’ with the hippie!? Screw that, bro. You gone gay on us, Rakow?” The bros roared, then took more shots of Jim Beam. I wanted to escape in a hot air balloon and fly back to Palo Alto.
Johnny finally showed up three hours later in his 1979 purple El Camino. When he laid on his horn, it played “La Cucaracha.” I grabbed Brian and said, “If you want to stay, stay. But I gotta find a new scene.”
“Rob, wait.”
“Maybe this whole world trip wasn’t such a good idea. I get it. You’re not ready…. Just exchange those tickets for vouchers and I’ll see you back in Palo Alto.”
Brian dropped the frat boy act and I saw the real him again. He grabbed a bottle of tequila and stuffed it in his pack. “C’mon.”
The freak was back.
We casually angled for the door. While I pretended to laugh about something, Brian whispered, “That was all bullshit dude, a pure Darwinist act of survival. They aren’t ready to hear about my satoris—‘pearls to swine’ man. I don’t want any part of this American shitshow.”
Johnny wasn’t exactly thrilled to see Brian jump in the back of his El Camino, but he didn’t say anything—he just tore rubber.
We hauled back up the 405 to Venice to mingle with the “other side.”
“The irony is we look like frat boys to these Venice Beach misfits,” I said as we sat down at a rooftop hotel bar that looked more like a glorified youth hostel.
“But we don’t have buttoned-up hearts, man. These cats see that, right?”
“Um …”
The place turned into a dance party after sundown. By this time, Brian and Johnny had buried the hatchet and were entertaining themselves by shoving red ashtrays up the asses of all the animal topiaries stationed around the party like they were red buttholes.
“Real mature!” I yelled. Brian stopped and grabbed me. “Thanks for making us leave that douchebag festival!” We jumped up and down like we won the Rose Bowl. We were two grown children gleefully burning our past to the ground.
Venice shut down early that night, and Johnny had no intention of driving us back across town to our favorite motel (the Safari Inn), so he dropped us by the Beverly Hills Hotel to find some chick named Twila who lived in Benedict Canyon.
“See you boys on the other side! Don’t bang any trannies over there!” he said.
By this time, Brian and I were fully smashed (again) so we decided to try to hitch and save some money. We walked east up Sunset when Brian threw someone’s garbage can at me, then ran off like a kid. He was so ripped he left his pack on the ground. I grabbed it and chased him down. He hid in the bushes, then leapt out at me like some wasted jungle cat.
“You are absurdly high!” I screamed.
“Just think, Binkley. Tomorrow we’ll be walking through a jungle! Life is amazing!” He was bingeing on the possibility of youth … and it was starting to piss me off.
I corralled Brian and got him to walk back to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we jumped in line on somebody’s cab and took off for the Safari Inn. After a few minutes in the cab, Brian hopped out at a stoplight to pee. The cabbie started cursing; I begged him to wait. The cabbie thought I was insane when I went into some bushes looking for Brian.
He had suddenly vanished up a tree, down a hole, in a gutter. Wa
s this the end of our rampage? If I could lose him in LA, what horrors would befall us in a foreign romp?
Returning to the cab alone, I saw the cabbie had left our drunk asses. Thankfully he had thrown our backpacks out of the car after he ransacked them looking for something of value. I picked them up and started walking east alone. I tried calling Brian, but got his voicemail.
I don’t know how long I walked (cursing him to hell), but I eventually got a call from Johnny to come and get Brian, who was now magically with him and Twila at a gay karaoke bar in Beverly Hills.
“Rob! Come get your boy. He’s running amok in Liberace’s Slipper! He’s flirting with disaster, man. Get here—this is serious!” Johnny gave me the address and hung up.
A gay karaoke bar in Beverly Hills?? How the hell did Brian run back into Johnny so fast? I was almost to West Hollywood; we must have been walking in opposite directions.
Needing a lift, serendipity struck. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the same cabbie coming up behind me that had abandoned us a few minutes earlier. I flagged him down and acted like it was a life-or-death emergency. The driver cursed me in Farsi but I threw him fifty bucks and he took me in.
A few minutes later we arrived at a karaoke bar called Liberace’s Slipper. I immediately saw Johnny running out of the bar with a girl I presumed was Twila. All he said was, “He’s your responsibility now!”
I went inside just in time to see Brian get thrown down a flight of stairs. “That didn’t hurt!” Brian did a stunt roll to the bottom and skidded to my feet, laughing.
“That hurt.”
Two Korean bouncers followed him down the stairs. “You had enough?” I jumped into the fray before they kicked Brian’s teeth in. “What’s going on here? This is my client. He’s a celebrity!”
The bouncers explained they warned “my friend” to lay off the boss’s lady (who was a transsexual), but he’d been “cruisin’ for a bruisin’ all night.”
Brian, still laid out at my feet, laughed, “All night?? I just got here!”
I asked the bouncers to back off and explained that Brian is off his medication and his lawyer will call them the next morning with a solution to this “huge mistake.” They threw us both out the back door, “Stay outta the Slipper, you piece of shit!”