Flash. Jim Miller
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referred to me as “the loser” during my son’s formative years. This made for a painful and ambivalent childhood for Hank. Nonetheless, the harder Trish and her Mom tried to push him away from me, the more he pulled his way back. Even as a very young boy Hank would draw pictures of “Daddy at a music show” or “Daddy writing.” It drove them fucking crazy and I loved him for it.
A couple of years after Trisha moved out, she hooked up with Kurt, an ex-frat boy from USC who had a job in real estate. They got married and Kurt set about ruining Trisha’s life in a whole new way. He had affairs, berated her in front of Hank, and dissed me constantly. Kurt was an all-star. His saving grace: money. Hence Trisha was long-suffering and materially comfortable in West LA.
Trisha and I met back in 1987 at Al’s Bar, the legendary punk spot in the loft district of downtown LA where a lot of artists lived. It was walking distance from the Atomic Café on the edge of Little Tokyo. I loved Al’s, both for the good music and for the fact that it was a place where Bukowski used to drink. The neon sign behind the bar said, “Tip or Die.” I was there that night to cover a tiny theater troupe’s version of Kerouac’s Tristessa. They put the show on in the alley behind the bar and an audience of a dozen or so people sat on the same kind of metal bleachers they have at little league fields. It was a dramatic adaptation of the Kerouac novel about Jack and his friends in Mexico City, and Jack’s brief dalliance with a soulful, tragically beautiful prostitute, whose name means “sadness.” The actors entered stage right from the back door of the bar and did a decent job of invoking the beat mood with no set, no costumes, and no music. Spare, earnest, and bittersweet. My review was entitled, “Beat in the Alley.”
I remember spending a lot of time during the play staring up at a high rise framed by the narrow alley and glancing over at Trisha. She was dressed in all black (a sort of uniform then) with long hair dyed bright red. Her eyes were blue-green and she had a sweet smile that lit up her face. After the play, we both stayed to listen to a cowpunk band from Austin, Texas, named Hillbilly Tryst or something like that. I bought her a beer and we talked about the play, about the Beats, about music. We agreed that life was tragic. She let her friends go home and left with me, strolling down the dark street lined with sleeping bodies under dirty blankets or flattened cardboard boxes. When we got to my car I kissed her softly and gazed into her alabaster face. We looked up at the crescent moon above the looming skyline. The whole city was mine, the big wide world. I was in love. We went home together, and it was all good, for quite a while.
Back then, Trisha rented a room in a big house up in the Hollywood hills from the guy who ran The Grave on Hollywood Boulevard. Actually she chipped in for his rent. The place was really owned by a nearly senile old woman in the valley who lived there when she was a kid. She hadn’t done her homework, and Zane, the Ghoul, and Trisha were getting the whole two-story house with its nice yard overlooking a canyon and a view of the Hollywood sign for a mere pittance. Zane, who managed the club at night, had a day job with the Water and Power Company so he more or less had his shit together. The Ghoul, on the other hand, played in a local band called Night of the Living Dead and was a full-on junkie.
By this time in my youth, I had grown my shaggy hair out to about shoulder length and usually never wore anything fancier than jeans, a t-shirt, and black converse sneakers. Trisha used to make fun of my lack of fashion sense. That said, the Ghoul, who rarely bathed, never washed his clothes, and made little effort to conceal his track marks, made me look like a GQ cover boy. He usually lounged around the basement room in a leather jacket with no shirt underneath and boxer shorts. When I came over Trisha and I would do everything we could to avoid being drawn down into his lair. Suffice to say we never chased the dragon.
The rest of the place was fantastic. Zane, a manic Aussie with a thick mane of long red hair, had an impressive collection of Marilyn Monroe photos that lined the hallways upstairs: Marilyn in Playboy, Marilyn in Bus Stop, Marilyn pouting, Marilyn teasing, Marilyn tragic and innocent, Marilyn in death. He and his girlfriend, Cat—an aspiring actress who had her own place but basically lived with Zane—had filled the living room with vintage furniture carefully selected from stores on Melrose—late-fifties and early-sixties Moderne. The end tables of the leopard-skin couch were littered with copies of Screw, The Hollywood Reporter, and BAM.
Trisha worked on Melrose in a salon called the Union Jack, which the owner had decorated with British rock posters, Sex Pistols, Clash, The Who, etc. Whenever I could, we’d meet for lunch or for drinks after work. We scoured used-record stores for hidden gems, had lots of coffee, and looked through second-hand shops. During that period, Trisha never said a thing about money. We just talked and made love and went out to see music. She read a lot so we rapped about books mostly. We’d both started and then stopped college and figured we didn’t need to pay somebody to tell us what to read. She liked the Beats, but also Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Thus the talk had a lot to do with sex and death and suffering and angst and carpe diem. One thing Trisha didn’t share with me was an interest in politics. I just assumed we were in tune at a basic level.
Sometimes we’d go downtown between the Nickel and the Garment District to Gorky’s on open mic night to listen to bad poetry for laughs. Gorky’s was a hip Russian-themed cafeteria that served borscht, brewed their own beer, and had music, art, and poetry every week. Before I met Trisha, I had a brief flirtation with poetry. I read a lot of Bukowski and wrote a few pieces about waking up with a bad hangover and hating the world. When I went to my first open mic night at Gorky’s I discovered that everyone else had read a lot of Bukowski and had a lot of hangovers. We all sucked. After that realization, I still liked to go to Gorky’s, but solely for amusement. One night, Trisha and I almost bust a gut laughing after an English grad student from USC read a poem about a roach crawling on her IUD. The woman wasn’t pleased with our response and flipped us off. Of course, this only made us laugh all the more.
Sometimes there would be surprises though. One evening, after a series of poets who overcame their lack of skill with the language by yelling at the top of their lungs, a petite young woman in an X t-shirt nervously came to the mic and read an elegy called “Anonymous” about a man who died on the street outside her loft downtown. It was a cry for those who die unknown in solitary rooms, a howl for the utterly forlorn. It was so stark and beautiful after what had preceded it that quite a few people, myself included, were moved to tears. It was beyond irony, for once.
I was pretty busy then with the LA Scene. I did a whole series on the culture of the homeless men who lived by the Los Angeles River. I spent a week sleeping under bridges and hanging out in homeless camps interviewing men around bonfires. One group I found was a band of scavengers. They sold scrap metal on the black market so they’d rip it off of anything they could find and bring it in to the yards. It was a good enough gig to get some of the guys out of the camps and into hotel rooms in the Nickel. Some, though, thought that rent was a waste of coin and preferred to live alfresco. I remember one night in particular. It was February during a cold snap and I was sitting by a fire under a freeway bridge sharing a few bottles of wine and cheap whiskey with twenty men. There was a kind of code in the camps that reminded me of those scenes in The Grapes of Wrath where folks on the road would help each other out sometimes. Some of the veterans remembered the old days too. That disappeared when crack hit the scene and people started killing each other for pocket change. A few months after my series, the LA Times did a similar thing, but I never got a call or a credit from anybody.
Speaking of crack, I also did a story on the “Contra Cocaine” posters put up all over the city by guerilla poster artist Robbie Conal. The poster featured a skull in the tradition of the calaveras in Mexican Day of the Dead art, but this one was wearing a pinstriped suit with a camouflage background. The heading provocatively made the connection between the Reagan Administration’s support of the contra insurgency against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua with the little known fact that the contras were flying coke into the US with the help of the CIA. Overnight, 10,000 of these posters went up all over the city, from the alley near my studio apartment in Venice to telephone poles and other public spaces in LA and in seventeen different American cities. I got a photographer to take some greats shots of the posters in Skid Row downtown and interviewed Conal and a local professor at UCLA about the significance of the gesture. The CIA-funded drug