Hollywood: Rock Of Ages

by Chris Solberg

  Cupkake was out front of a Burger King on Nordoff Ave. and had burnt through the last of his cash after spending all his money at the Rainbow. All he had left was a handful of chump-change which I was wasting every time I hung up on him. By the time I picked up the phone, he was literally on his last dime trying to get a hold of me.

  Apparently his rendezvous had gone horribly wrong as the evil grey glow in the east began to make it’s appearance. He woke up naked on the floor, staring at the feet of somebody he assumed was the enraged father of the girl he went home with. As the feet left the room to retrieve a what Cupkake believed to be a shotgun, he hastily gathered up his clothes and scampered out the door and into the grey unfamiliar neighborhood. He had no idea where he was, but knew he was somewhere in The Valley, and miles from home. Eventually he found the main drag and hiked to the nearest sign of civilization which happened to be the Burger King. That’s where he found the pay-phone and began to call me.

  At first, I thought he was fucking with me and I pictured him sitting up in bed at some posh apartment watching TV. I was skeptical and was telling him he was full of shit, but I could hear a panic in his voice because he had no more change. Cupkake pleaded, “I’m serious! You gotta come get me!” Finally I decided to take the call seriously and asked him where the hell he was. Like I said, he really had no idea where he was, so there was no way to give me directions. Usually you would put the chick on the phone and she could tell you how to get there. But in this case, that was obviously

  going to be impossible. In my morning stupor I was thinking, “If you can’t give me directions to where you’re at, how the fuck am I ever going to find you? You’re screwed!” Eventually I shook off the cobwebs in my head and told him to name the nearest intersection he could see. He told me Nordolf and Canoga, so I wrote it down just in time to hear the phone robot voice

  droning: “Please deposit 45 cents for the next three minutes”. I told him I’d look it up on a map, not even knowing for sure if I had one, and heard the connection go dead. His fate was in my hands now for sure.

  I had the urge to close my eyes for a second, but knew if I did, I wouldn’t wake up until 11 o’clock, so I got up. I was grumbling under my breath, but as I gained my senses, I began to grow curious as to what predicament Cupkake had gotten himself into. Sunday morning hangovers were usually dealt with by a hair-of-the-dog beer and a jump in the pool. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do, but here I was climbing into the Yellow Banana and heading up the 170 into The Valley. That summer was a hot one and the Valley was notorious for being 10 to 15 degrees hotter depending on which part of The Valley you were in. By the time I hit the freeway it was about 8 am and it was already starting to heat up. Well, the faster I get this done, the faster I get to that beer and pool. Luckily I did have a map, but I was really unfamiliar with the Valley so I knew none of the major cross streets. Sure, I knew the names, Sepulveda, Canoga, Chatsworth, Devonshire, but I had no idea where they were. This led me to take awhile to find him on the map, but when I did, I discovered he was right off the 118. Of course, the 118 was at the farthest reaches north, and then you had to go all the way west into the total furthest reaches of the Valley. He couldn’t have been further away if he tried. But luckily, The Valley is laid out in a symmetrical grid, so finding your way around is not hard. I found the off-ramp, I found the street, I found the Burger King, and then I found Cupkake.

  By the time I found Cupkake, it must’ve been 111 degrees outside. The Valley is full of different neighborhoods, some nice, some downright nasty. Cupkake ended up in Chatsworth which is about as far as you can go without officially leaving LA. The good thing is that Chatsworth is a pretty nice place, especially for being in the Valley which harbours all sorts of filth. Chatsworth is one of those places with nice perfectly lawned houses and quality shopping centers. To this day in California, you can judge a neighborhood solely based on whether there is an Albertson’s, Ralph’s or Von’s in the area. So if there isn’t...look out! Chatsworth has all three on every intersection and the gas stations are not in cages. In most parts of the Valley, parking lots are full of broken glass and gravel. But Chatsworth has nice smooth freshly paved black driveways with Spanish tiled roofs on the stores. You don’t have to feel nervous when you walk around, which leads me to my next point. The first thing I noticed when I rolled in to rescue Cupkake, was that the sidewalks were full of women and children wearing the same color t-shirts and carrying balloons. Obviously, some sort of cancer walk had been organized, and today was the day to walk! This did not hit me as funny until I spied Cupkake.

  Cupkake was a mess. With the summer heat beating down, Cupkake was in the same outfit he had worn last night. In the Rainbow, it was the “it” outfit reserved for the best of nights. But in the glaring Valley sun, it had morphed into a macabre spectacle. His hair was all over the place, he was wearing his bright red leather jacket in the desert heat, and because he lost his underwear, his dick was flopping out of his holey jeans every few seconds. Mind you, the neighborhood was filled with mothers and small kids toting balloons, so this was about as far away from Hollywood as you could get. Both literally and figuratively. In Hollywood, you could walk around in an ape suit and nobody would bat an eye. But this was not Hollywood, and this was not flying with the townspeople of Chatsworth. Not one bit.

  He saw the Yellow Banana come around the corner and was so desperate to catch my attention that he started jumping up and down waving his arms like a madman. He was sweating like a junkie, and his eyeliner was running down his face like crackwhore. When I saw this, I started laughing like a hyena. Because his pants were bleached with the stripes, he looked like just like Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice, jumping around Chatsworth like a

  psycho marionette. He looked about out of place as Courtney Love at a White House function. With all the women and children doing the cancer walk, I’m surprised nobody called the cops. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the police showed up five minutes after I found him. Well, this was just too good to pass up, so I pretended not to see him and drove past. I could see him in the rear view mirror waving like a maniac. Of course jumping and waving meant you couldn’t hold your dick in you pants, so once again that fell out several more times. If I remember right, he had destroyed his fragile pants in the rush to get dressed, so there was even butt cheek showing. I flipped a bitch and drove down Nordoff again in the opposite direction watching him dance out of the corner of my eye and trying not to laugh. After that, I figured enough was enough so I turned around and pulled into the Burger King where he burst into the car. He told me that everybody was giving him dirty looks and he didn’t even have any money to buy a coke in the desert heat. At that point I felt bad for acting like I didn’t see him, but that faded away pretty quick. After we got back to the apartment, Cupkake hit the sack for awhile while I hit the pool to relish the moment and a few beers. I told everybody about it and later Cuppy came out and filled us all in on the adventure from the first person perspective. After a few beers and laughs, we put it behind us and headed for more adventures. That’s just the way it was!

  Thanksgiving Hollywood Style - Vinnie Vegas

  A lot of people living in LA come from somewhere else. In our apartments, I don’t think there was a single person who was originally from LA, and a lot of the Mites came from all across the US. So this meant that on Thanksgiving, there were always a few people alone because they had to save money to go back home for Christmas. Eventually we created a tradition of putting something together for Thanksgiving and inviting whoever was alone so they could be around company instead of eating Top Ramen. We’d fix something reasonable, and then drink a lot of beer and watch all the football games. People were really thankful and a lot of times they’d break out a good bottle of brandy or something, so it usually had a very festive atmosphere. But, the first time we tried this, it didn’t go exactly as planned.

  Cupkake had returned from the Ultra Pop tour and had hooked up with some hott
ie named Sheri out in The Valley. She had her own apartment which was very unusual for any given girl at the time. Not only that, but it was nice inside and she had pretty cool furniture. When I first moved to LA, I fantasized that I’d be dating girls where you could swap spending the night at each other’s place. I pictured the apartments looking exactly like hers, but she was an extreme rarity. Most girls lived at home, or if they did have an apartment, they shared it with God knows who, and the place was a pig-stye.

  Cupkake’s girl was spending Thanksgiving with her parents in Santa Barbara, so he called me up to see if I was going to be around. Ernie’s roommate Dave Chapman was going to be alone as well, so we made plans to drive out to Cupkake and fix our own Thanksgiving dinner. We stopped off at Rock N Roll Ralph’s, and got a small turkey and all the stuff that goes with it. We got a bunch of beer, but for some reason, Dave insisted that we also get a bottle of Tequila. That was strange because Dave never really got drunk, much less swill booze! But he seemed to have a little twinkle in his eye that day, so I went along with it. Tequila it is!

  We got to Cupkake’s and had a few beers while he filled us in on some road stories. Both Dave and I noticed right off the bat that there was a shrine of photos built in the shelf unit for some guy that was certainly not Cupkake. It looked like the bass player from White Lion, or maybe it was Autograph? Well we never figured out who this guy truly was, but we did razz Cupkake about it and he’d just change the subject. Dave broke out the Tequila and we started doing shots. I still don’t know why he was in that mood, but he was happy as a clam and even a little rowdy. This was unusual because Dave was normally a quiet and reserved kind of guy. Go figure.

  We started to prepare the food and we had three guys in a small kitchen trying to fix things between shots of Tequila. Sometimes you know that you’re doing too much Tequila, but you do it anyway. Realistically, one shot every half-hour is ok, but one every five minutes is no es bueno. At that point, we didn’t need no stinkin’ directions, we started preparing food on the fly by picking temperatures on whims, and adding water or milk to things by eye. Tequila eye that is! Before long somebody had spilled something, and we all started busting up. We didn’t bother to clean it up.

  Don’t worry, we’ll get that later!

  We had things boiling, and every burner had a pot of something heating up. The Turkey was on high so it would be ready quicker. So with everything under control, we decided to get serious about our drinking. Soon we were out on the couch talking real loud and playing some sort of drinking game. At that time, it seems like we went through a time warp because the next thing I knew, it was getting dark outside and it was suddenly six o’clock at night.

  It was obvious that this house was one of those houses where all the knick-knacks were perfectly positioned, and to move any of them around would be grounds for dismissal. Cupkake had gone to the bathroom, so me and Dave started moving things around starting with The Shrine. We mixed around the photos and put some upside down as well. Then we took all the other things like sea-shell frogs playing wind instruments, and scattered then around as well. One hit the deck and broke, so we put it back quickly before Cupkake could see it. We sat back down and acted as if nothing was amiss, but as we waited, Cupkake never came back out. We went looking for the man and found him passed out drunk on the bed. We tried to wake him up, but he was out cold. I think you know what happens next. With all the Tequila in our system, we then decided to dress him up in his girlfriends underwear. We took off his clothes and put him in a bra and panties, then we gave him pantyhose and some high heels we found in the closet. We were laughing our asses off and decided to up the ante since he wasn’t moving at all. We got into her make-up, and put lipstick and eyeliner on his face, topped off by the most appalling powder blue eyeshadow you ever saw. For the final touch, we put his hair up in pigtails with scrunchies. About then, we realized that we had been neglecting the food, so we went into the kitchen which was a disaster. Pots had boiled over and a grey haze of smoke filled the room. Stuff was all over the floor and chopped potatoes and carrots were scattered about the counter. There must have been 50 plates out on the counter and 10 glasses filled with all sorts of strange cocktail mixtures. Somebody made ice cream, didn’t eat it ,and it was now a gooey mess spilling over on the floor. We both looked around and realized that the entire place was a mess, not just the kitchen. We had an M&Ms war earlier and the cat was nowhere to be found. At that point we decided that we’d better bail before Sheri got home.

  We hopped in the car and howled with laughter the entire way home. Before long, my stomach hurt so bad from laughing that I thought I was going to puke. I never met Sheri, but she was obviously a complete neat freak and I can’t imagine what her face looked like when she came home. She probably expected Cupkake to be waiting for her on the couch while watching Married with Children on TV. Instead the house was a complete wreck, the kitchen was destroyed, there was a burnt carcass still smoldering in the oven and empty beer bottles everywhere. To make it worse, she finds Cupkake passed out in bed dressed like a Santa Monica Blvd. drag queen. Boy, there’s absolutely nothing you can do at that point. You just have to sit there and take the verbal abuse, and I’m sure it was thick! He probably wasn’t even aware that he had the make up on as he was trying to explain the chaos. But what can you explain? Can you imagine drinking Tequila and then waking up in drag? How must have that felt? Well needless to say that relationship didn’t last too long after that fiasco. And after that night, Dave went back to being the mild-mannered quiet guy he always was. Go figure!

  The dark side

  ULTRA POP TOUR - New York, New York - Cupkake

  We pulled into the “Big Apple” for the first time as a band. It was the summer of 1989. As we approached the city from the west, I had never been so amazed with anything in my entire life. There were skyscrapers as far as the eye could see. I had seen a lot of cities by this point in the tour, but none of them held a candle to the City of New York. The two buildings that stood out the most, were the World Trade Center. Two giant towers on the south side of the city, towering above the rest. Me being a San Diego boy, had never seen anything quite like this. We entered the “Washington Tunnel”, just west of the city. I did not realize that this tunnel went under the massive Hudson River. The Hudson River was at least a mile across where the tunnel began and you could see large ships making their way up and down the river. We exited the tunnel, drove a few minutes and popped out the other side... right downtown New York City. No warning. No easing into it! Bam! Your there! The vibe in this city was like no other. There was an energy about New York that I will never forget. The city was littered with all types of garbage. Newspapers blew across the streets and almost “danced” a ballet as they tumbled across the streets. Trash cans overflowed on every corner, and old, dried, black gum spots occupied 80 percent of the sidewalks surface. There were so many different sounds. Vehicle horns off in the distance, machinery grinding away, busses brakes screeched, and music played from various open windows in the area. All of the sounds almost blended together in a harmony like no other. It was music to our ears.We were not in the city for more than 5 minutes before our vans were being pelted with watermelons and grapes. We were stopped at a red traffic signal, waiting for it to cycle to green when a half-dozen teenagers on the south side of our vehicles just carelessly began throwing fruit at all the passing vehicles. The bold teens stood right out in the open for everyone to see. They did not bother hiding from anybody. It was really strange. We were a little confused, but thought this must be how this place operates. When I look back at the situation now, it was pretty cool. None of us were scared, we were just wondering where all the fruit came from? Local restaurant dumpsters? The funny thing was, none of us wondered why we were being pelted with fruit. Come to think of it, if we lived here locally, we would probably be doing the same. Pops was driving the passenger van at the time and he just sat there and laughed while he turned the windshield wipers on a smeared
watermelon across the windows. We had a green traffic light so he took off to leave the watermelon throwing teens behind for the next victims. The traffic became very heavy and there were pedestrians and vehicles everywhere. It was getting very difficult for Pops to navigate and avoid a collision with the numerous people and vehicles in the area. If I could not see out the front windshield, how could he? I swear, it was not more than ten seconds after I thought we would most likely be in some traffic collision, when I heard a loud scraping noise. I asked, “Pops, did you just hit that trash truck?” Pop calmly replied, “Not as far as you know.” The entire passenger side had a long, deep scrape across the side of the van. We did not stop, we continued on. Nobody was chasing us, so that was good news.