Hollywood: Rock Of Ages

by Chris Solberg

  To his credit, Cupkake remained calm and actually kept the conversation light and jovial which seemed to confuse Dean. He did a fantastic job at never giving the impression that anything was dire; indeed, that nothing was out of the ordinary. This was a tactic which never gave Dean the upper hand, and I dare say, might have saved his life. I think Dean wanted a situation where we were shaking in our boots and begging for mercy, but that never happened. I tried to stay calm and come up with a plan. If we could just get him outside we could simply lock the door, but Dean was on to us. He’s say something like “Naw, naw, naw, I’m not going there, what do you think I’m a fool?” the whole time waving the gun around. This of course made me think that gunfire might be imminent, so I had to come up with a better plan. Part of me couldn’t believe this was happening; after all, 10 minutes earlier it had been a normal uneventful night. I suddenly realized how so many people must have been in that same position before they were snuffed out forever. You’d never think in a million years that tonight is going to be your last night on Earth.

  But with that thought, I decided that this would not be that night. So when Dean was distracted again, I grabbed the derringer out of the case and held it behind my back. Now it was only a .22, but a gun is a gun, and that means I could kill Dean with it. Imagine my position; now I’m seriously considering killing a man! From possibly being killed, to possibly killing a man, all in 10 minutes time! My thoughts raced to how our dream apartment would literally be stained with blood. Everything that we had so carefully planned would come to an end in one night! I envisioned the LAPD showing up in their black uniforms and silver badges cuffing me while their walkie-talkies squelched messages in the hot summer night. How could things ever be the same after that? It’s very clear, they wouldn’t. But even with all those visions going through my head, I knew that if I shot Dean, Cupkake would still be alive and that’s all that mattered.I had met Cupkake’s parents plenty of times and I thought of them as I fiddled with the Derringer behind my back. There came a time when Dean’s demeanor changed dramatically and he became a bit more sinister and started using the Uzi as a prop to make his points. That’s when time literally slowed down to almost nothing, and I could hear myself breathing. I actually felt my pulse slow down, as opposed to pick up. For a good 5 seconds I fully expected him to raise that Uzi at which point I would have killed him. I stared at the back of his head like an Australian Shepherd waiting for a cue, but it never happened. Somehow, out of nowhere, Dean seemed to hear an inner voice which made him stand down, or maybe he actually felt the hand of Death tapping him quietly on the shoulder. I don’t know what it was, but he suddenly started packing up the guns and looked as if he were going to leave. And he sure seemed in a hurry to skedaddle that’s for sure.

  Maybe the gravity of the situation finally hit him and he decided to get the hell out of there before he changed his mind. Regardless, the incident seemed to de-escalate very quickly much to my relief. One last moment of dread was when he looked in his briefcase and couldn’t find his derringer. Of course he thought Cupkake had it, so he turned around to face him. At that time, I placed it back in the case and by the time he looked back down it was there. I gave him a look like he was crazy for not seeing that derringer in the case the first time, and he gave me the strangest look I’ve ever seen from a man. He couldn’t figure out whether he was losing his mind or that Vinnie was going to kill him with his own gun. And I guess in his state of mind, each option was equally possible. This seemed to actually scare him and he decided to pack it up.

  Dean rounded up his girl and headed out to his car. We watched him put the case in his trunk and then without a cue, his girl bolted up the street into the dark. Dean seemed drained and did not pursue her. He was yelling for her to get back to the car but she was acting like a cat who got outside. She’d come back halfway and then bolt again as he tried to grab her. This went on for a half hour until I saw him drive away. Later that night we saw her perched on the wall of our apartments like a lunatic gargoyle as she sat there all night talking to herself. To this day I don’t know how she made it back to San Diego. We never saw Dean again.

  Hollywood or Babyalon

  LET THE GAMES BEGIN - Vinnie Vegas

  Hollywood is a place where anything can happen. I’m sure that’s why so many people are attracted to it. Whether you are trying to make it in movies, TV or music, you are always one day away from that big break. However, for some that day never comes. And a lot of people never come to terms that they’ve exceeded their shelf-life, so they remain clinging to a hope that everybody else can tell is past due. But Hollywood is always replenished with a fresh new crop of hopefuls from around the country, and these newbies create an energy that is unparalleled. To be is part of this group is indeed exciting and the essence of what Hollywood is.

  As for me, I was trying to find a band so I could start my own Hollywood adventure; that was proving to be harder than I anticipated. So I decided to split my focus to include some of the plentiful things Hollywood did have to offer. Girls, of course, were a big part of the scene in Hollywood. Never was there a time where girls were so willing to have fun. You never had to talk them into it, you just started up and they went along with it. I really felt guilty when I turned my attention towards chicks because I came up to Hollywood to get into music. Well, I felt guilty until you had your paws around a warm and soft body while Lita Ford was singing a duet with Ozzy Ozzbourne on KNAC. Hey, the band search was not panning out very quickly, so why not play a little in the meantime, hmmm?

  The first girl Cupkake and I met in Hollywood was a girl named Heidi. We knew that we were going to have to make as many new friends up here as possible and Heidi was now officially square one. We knew that we couldn’t simply rely on our San Diego friends if we really wanted to integrate into Hollywood, so it was a cool feeling to have our first LA friend. Heidi was from New York and had a thick East Coast accent. There were a cell of people in Hollywood who were anti-glam and she was one. These people were usually a mix of Heavy Metal and Goth, and hung out at places like the Coconut Teazer instead of the strip. This crowd considered themselves more with it and hip as opposed to all the “posers” on the strip. They may have had a small point, but basically they were just full of themselves. They were into bands like Jane’s Addiction and Mother Love Bone as opposed to Poison or Dokken. It seemed like heroin played some part in this scene.

  A lot of the bands these people were into had “boy” names like “Jet Boy”, “Motorcycle Boy” and “Sick Boy”. Another band big on the Teazer Scene was “Love/Hate” which like the other acts, played the Teazer exclusively and avoided The Sunset Strip all together. They considered themselves above it all, but these bands all had one thing in common; they all sucked bad! In LA, there has always been a clique of people who fawn and rave about certain bands being the “next big thing”, and then when you finally see them live, you think, “they can’t possibly be talking about THESE guys!” It started back in the late ‘70s with the band X and continues to this day. Well, to be fair, the bands weren’t the ones that sucked as much as the singers did. Faster Pussycat started out in the glam scene but later defected to the Teazer crowd. And guess what? Their singer sucked too; it was a requisite. Love/Hate somehow got signed to a major label, MCA I think, and became the flagship band of the Teazer. Don’t ask me how because if you ever heard the singer, you’d swear you never heard worse. Now given this, I’m not sure why Heidi took a liking to Cupkake, the king of glam, but she did.

  Heidi had the quasi-mohawk haircut where the sides of her hair was shaved short, but the back was long. Kind of a punk mullet if you ask me, popular on the East Coast with Anthrax fans. She introduced us to our first Hollywood celebrity; Ron Jeremy. We didn’t believe that she knew him but when she held firm, we insisted that she take us to meet him. Nowadays, I don’t know what we were thinking; why on earth would you want to meet a male porn star??? But we did, so we marched down the street to meet the man. It
hit me on the way over that if it really was him, and he answers the door... then what? What do you say to the man? Why are we here? I started to panic but we were past the point of no return. Well sure enough it was him and we made some small chat, then asked if we could get a picture before we left. He agreed but insisted that we stand next to him with our index fingers pointed out toward the camera. I couldn’t figure out why and thought for sure that he was going to whip his dick out and flop it across my hands. I never wanted to run so fast in my life but instead froze like a deer in the headlights with my fingers out. As it turns out, its a visual gag he always does with people who want their picture took with him, but for a moment... I was scared!

  Heidi was nice enough and obviously had a thing for Cupkake, but he really didn’t show much interest in her. One weekend she buzzed at our gate, but Cupkake was down in San Diego for the weekend. We ended up partying anyway and kept the festivities going until sunrise. As a man, sometimes you get the distinct impression that something fun is right around the corner if you play your cards right, so you do anything to see that through. And so in the evil grey glow of the morning we marched down to Pappy Smears and did something that until then, I had never done in all my life. I bought beer at 6:01 am, the moment it was legal to sell again. After that, we didn’t really see Heidi again. It was our first experience with something that we became familiar with later on. People in Hollywood sometimes disappear without a word and you never see them again. It happened a lot.

  A couple of weeks later I met a girl who was part of a pack from Ontario that we met out on the strip. Nicole was one of three blond hotties who were accompanied by a dark-haired girl who acted like a Long Island Jewish yenta. Somehow the Yenta ended up with Cupkake for awhile and

  tormented him with her bossiness and hen-pecking. As usual, we simply grabbed the girls and brought them back to the pad. I remember there was no making out that night, instead we just stayed up all night engaged in drunken antics and hijinks. We had a stunt we would pull where us guys would lavish attention on each other while ignoring the girls. We would stroke each other’s hair, grab dicks, and even kiss each other sometimes all in the name of good fun. Ernie was really good at this. This would infuriate the girls, who for the life of them, could not understand why they were being left out. Man, we’d pour it on thicker and thicker while the chicks got madder and madder. Plenty of times the girls would grab us by the arm and drag us into the bedroom just to show us who’s boss. Man, that trick worked like a charm every time. Devious! Nicole was a cute little blond who was fairly shy at the time. But she really took a liking to me and would show up quite often. I was so drunk that first night they came over that I couldn’t remember her name the next day! When she called, I didn’t know what to say, so I called her “fluff”. Somebody had told me that was what you called a girl on a porn set who’s job it is to get the star hard before they start filming. Don’t ask me why I said that, but that’s what came out. Nikki thought it was the most dearest thing, and loved me to call her fluff after that. She figured it was a cute pet name that I came up with. God, if she only knew! Cupkake and the Yenta didn’t last long, and after they stopped seeing each other, the cohesion of the unit kind of fell apart and I didn’t see Nikki anymore. However, a few years later, she got a hold of me and had a professional job with one of the big theater companies. We ended up going out a few more times and it was nice to see her again. She would show up to my place after work dressed professionally and I was impressed at her adult demeanor. She was a good girl.

  HIJINKS IN THE VALLEY - Vinnie Vegas

  One night, Cupkake and I had hooked up with the two girls we’d met in Phoenix and for the life of me I don’t remember where we went. They had moved out to LA a few weeks before and we made it a point to show them around the new town. I know it wasn’t a club or anything so we must have been at a party, but I do remember that by the time we drove them home, we weren’t that drunk, which was very unusual; but somehow, my girl was suddenly tanked. We rolled up to their apartments and the girl was stone cold wasted. Out like a light! So at two in the morning, somewhere off of Van Owen, two guys and one chick were loudly trying to carry what amounted to be a dead body across the street and up the stairs. I guess only in LA can a bunch of cackling hyenas carry a dead body in the dead of the night without anybody calling the cops. I don’t know why it took three people to carry her, but it did and we did a horrible job, dropping her in the dirt and street every five seconds and laughing it up the whole time.

  We got her upstairs and into the apartment, but their flat had loft where her room was and we were already beat so we plopped her down to catch her breath. Like I said, she was basically a dead body so she had no idea what was going on around her. As we tried to figure out our next move she began farting really bad. I mean we’re talking alpo dog food farts it was absolutely horrendous. Nobody said anything out of respect, but she started farting more and more, and the stink got worse and worse. Both me and Cupkake were trying our best not to burst out laughing because we knew his girl was mortified for her friend. And she should’ve been, it smelt like a sewer in there. Eventually, we got her upstairs and into bed. I climbed into bed with her, and went to sleep. In the morning, she woke up to a nasty hangover and wouldn’t get up. So I decided to go downstairs and round up Cupkake, and we headed back home to watch football. I can only imagine the horror she must have felt after her roommate told her what she missed the night before. Too funny!

  Girls were of course a huge part of the scene back then, and I cringe sometimes when I think back to the way I treated some of those chicks. These kind of things would just not fly these days, if you do a girl one night and totally toss her away after that, she’s not coming back. A lot of guys thought that was a part of the whole rock star mystique and it seemed to work for them. I for sure did not let women lead me around, but I did not treat them like animals either. One girl stands out as being the brunt of some rude behavior on my part. I am not proud of it, and yes I cringe when it comes back to mind of just how much of a dick I was to her.

  There was a girl that I dated for awhile who really latched on to me. Like Jimmy, our upstairs gay neighbor, she had a lot of money and used to shower me with fine wine and gourmet food. The trouble is that when it came down to it, I really didn’t like her that much, but she was persistent and I certainly didn’t mind the lavish treatment. It’s amazing what some girls will put up with. She would have pool parties at her place in Monrovia and invite all her girlfriends to come over, so this was a hit with my guy friends. We did this a number of times and everybody seemed to enjoy themselves. But over time, I began to notice a Vinnie shrine starting to grow on her mantle place with all sorts of photos and mementos of me. Other people noticed it as well, and so the die was cast.

  I knew that if I ever spent the night, then something might happen and it would ruin our friendship. So as the day wound down, we’d play out this Kabuki dance where she would keep an eye on me at all times and I’d try and bolt out the door like a dog. You could feel the tension start to rise around 7:30 when it was do or die time, and Cupkake could sense it too. We would give each other sideways glances and creep towards the door. Without a word I would bolt out the door with Cupkake right on my heels. We’d run down the street fumbling with the keys, jump in the car, fire up the engine and squeal outta there faster than a NASCAR pit team howling with laughter the whole time. One time she jumped in her car and chased us back to Hollywood. I told Cupkake to roll by my apartment without stopping, and I dove out of the car like MacGyver. She saw him go around the corner and chased him around the narrow Hollywood streets. She didn’t know where Cupkake’s apartment was and he wanted to keep it that way, so he pulled fast into someone’s driveway and killed the lights. He saw her shoot past, waited a few minutes, then drove home. Now can you imagine this? Who would put up with that?

  THEATER OF THE MIND - Vinnie Vegas

  My girlfriend Barb from San Diego didn’t last long on
ce I moved to LA, but she made a valiant stab at trying to retain what we once had. She would even bring up girlfriends for playmates and that was hard to ignore. But basically I was moving on no matter how many chicks she brought up. One night Barb was up visiting and we had already gone to bed when Cupkake and his bandmates came blasting through the front door. Though I was in bed, I really wanted to bolt up and join the fun. But I felt obligated to stay in bed with Barb because I thought it would be thoughtless of me to leave her alone in the room so I could be with my friends. I heard the usual commotion of people funneling in, and the fridge opening up for beers. I heard girls giggling and Liz-Bone’s baritone voice making wisecracks.

  At this point, it was strictly theater of the mind as I lay in the dark with Barb. I knew exactly what was going on even though I couldn’t actually see it. I heard Votel and Ernie playing their grabass games and for some reason Cupkake decided to turn on the TV at 2 in the morning. I heard one loud mouth girl who obviously decided to be queen bee that night prancing around in a sheer skirt with a bandolero belt. I’m telling you I could hear it! I could clearly hear her bandolero belt jingling every time she strutted about the room, and I knew exactly where she was at any given time!. I was dying to go out and join the fun, but I couldn’t do it. Not only that, but I could tell by the sound of the action that it was going to be one of those fun nights involving half-naked girls and drunk guys. I didn’t need Barb to know that this went on at a regular basis; well actually, who cared but I just wasn’t in the mood for that drama. I heard the usual cackling and woo-hawing going on, and then I heard the loudmouth girl suddenly rise above the din because I guess she was put out at not being the center of attention. She announced something and then the entire room got quiet.I could hear the bandolero belt jingling softly and I knew immediately that she was taking off her clothes and then was dancing naked in front of the TV. How do I know this? If you heard how quiet the room got, then you’d know there was no other explanation! Now the room was dead quiet save for the sound of the bandolero belt that she apparently decided to keep on and the sound of newsman Hal Fishman droning on in the background. I was dying in that room! I could feel Barbie seething under the covers because I’m sure she figured out that this kind of thing was normal in our lives... and it was.