Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway (10 page)

 

There was a moment of stunned silence in the room. And then SLAP! Sandie got me good, right across the face. I didn’t even see it coming, and I saw stars for a moment. Then, before I even knew what I was doing, I had my older sister by the throat, and was pushing her against the wall like a wild woman.

 

“Don’t you ever—EVER hit me again!” I screamed.

 

I pulled my fist back, about to give it to her right in the mouth, but then I froze when I saw the terror on my sister’s face. Before anything else could happen, I felt myself being lifted from the ground as T.Y. grabbed me from behind and pulled me away. “Enough!” he was screaming. “Girls, that’s ENOUGH!”

 

Sandie was crying now, and I couldn’t hold back anymore. I started sobbing and ran out of the room, completely mortified. I ran out of the house, and when I was on the street, I sat on the curb sobbing harder than I had ever sobbed in my entire life. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, and I felt like I was going to vomit. The feeling of dread was all-encompassing, and I honestly would have welcomed death with open arms at that moment. My entire world felt like it had crumbled around me. At the end of the street was the Lincoln Bank building, and I imagined how it would feel to plunge from the top of it, to feel the black wind whistling past my ears, knowing that in a fraction of a second all of my pain would suddenly end.

 

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was T.Y. I stiffened and didn’t look up at him, but he sat down next to me anyway. I stared at the sidewalk. I heard that voice of his saying, “So how’s it going, Cherie-zee?”

 

There was something weirdly comforting about his voice, but I was still crying, I was still torn apart inside. “Not so good, T.Y.,” I managed to blubber.

 

“Come on, darlin’,” he said, and I felt his big hands running through my hair. “Your sisters will cool down. I mean, look, I know this must feel like the end of the world right now. But it isn’t. Not by a long shot.”

 

“That’s what you think,” I said in a small shaky voice.

 

T.Y. shrugged. “I hate to break it to you, kid,” he said, “but life is full of tough situations. It’s how you react to them, that’s what matters. You know what you just had? You just had a learning experience, darlin’. That’s all. In fact, when you really get down to it, that’s pretty cool, because now you just grew up a bit more. What happened last night isn’t the most important thing . . . it’s what you take from it, and what you do next that matters. You see?”

 

I sniffed, and wiped the tears away from my face with a shaking hand. T.Y. put his arm around me and looked up to the sky. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said in a dreamy voice.

 

We sat there in silence for a few moments. Then I turned to him. “You’re not disappointed in me, T.Y.?”

 

T.Y. laughed that deep, sweet laugh of his. “Oh, hell no, Cherie-zee. I’m not disappointed in you at all. In fact, I’m proud of you. You just chalked up some real life experience . . .”

 

Somewhere off in the distance I heard a car door slam and an engine rev. It was Gail leaving, and as she sailed past the two of us, she waved out the window. I waved weakly back at her, watching her car disappear down the road.

 

T.Y. turned to me. “You ready to go back in?”

 

I shrugged, and looked up at the sky. I felt as if a great weight had lifted off of me. I turned to him and said, “Sure, T.Y. I’m ready.”

 

He took my hand, and we walked back into the house.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

The Orange Tornado

 

 

 

 

There was a point when I realized that you could get away with just about anything so long as you do it with enough conviction. Take my image for instance. When I first changed my look, the kids at school didn’t know what to make of it. I guess most of them thought that I had lost my mind, but I didn’t let it bother me. In fact, I secretly enjoyed that they were so freaked out by me. Marie often had to come to my defense when the kids would try to come after me: I remember one kid threw an apple at me, smacking me right on the head. Before I could even react, Marie had jumped on him, and she gave him an almighty ass kicking. But slowly, in almost unperceivable steps, they started to come around. When they realized that their opinion of how I looked didn’t matter to me in the slightest, a begrudging kind of respect made its way around my school. Soon people were talking to me again . . . even sitting with me at lunchtime.

 

Big Red was more agreeable, too.

 

Once, just before class started, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, and standing there, bigger and uglier than ever, was Big Red. I folded my arms and just stared at her.

 

“Uh, Cherie . . .” she said, her face registering utter confusion as she got a load of the lightning bolt, the hair, the outfit.

 

I didn’t say a word.

 

“I, uh . . .” Big Red looked around, and then dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper. “I just wanted to tell you . . . that I’m sorry. That we’re cool, okay?”

 

She looked like she was waiting for me to respond. I didn’t say anything. I just stared at her like she had two heads.

 

“Uh . . .” Big Red carried on, “we are cool, aren’t we?”

 

I looked at her for a moment. Then I turned and walked away, leaving her standing there with her mouth flapping open.

 

Not long after that, I noticed others who were cutting their hair in a shag and borrowing other things from my look. I had gone from teen terror to trendsetter in less than a year. At first, it pissed me off: all of those square kids who were jeering at me and calling me names were now suddenly dyeing their hair and dressing like genderbending little glam rockers. But then I started to see the funny side. This was a valuable lesson in the mentality of the crowd.

 

There was a part of me, deep down, that almost missed being an outcast in school. A contrary, punkish part of myself really enjoyed hating everyone. Still, I figured that there were plenty more people out there to hate. There was always something to kick against. Just because I was having an easier time in school didn’t mean that the Dereks of this world had gone anywhere.

 

I didn’t go to Rodney’s club anymore. It was finally closed down. The place had become a magnet for all kinds of negative attention, and it eventually went under in a cloud of legal and financial problems. Some people said that Rodney’s died the moment that Rodney allowed Chuck E Starr to play disco records, breaking the glam-rock hegemony at the club. Of course, the fact that the place was always full to the brim with drunk and stoned underage kids probably didn’t help matters. All it took was for Iggy Pop to fall over in the club a few times, and then the press started writing about the scene at Rodney’s in their typically overblown and hysterical way. Once that happened, the club’s fate was pretty much sealed. Once the club closed, Chuck E Starr packed up his records and moved over to the Sugar Shack.

 

Since the passing of Rodney’s, the glitter sluts, the space-age Lolitas, the young, the damned, and the glamorous dispersed all around Hollywood. Some went on to full-time groupie-dom, camping outside of hotel rooms trying desperately to score a member of a band—any band at all—while others spun out on drugs and booze. Me, I followed the music, and found myself hanging out at the Sugar Shack.

 

The Sugar Shack was in many ways a continuation of what had been going on at Rodney’s English Disco with one big difference: it was an under-twenty-one club, meaning that when the security people checked IDs, they were making sure that you were underage before they’d let you in, which is an interesting reversal of normal circumstances. Paul was a regular at the Sugar Shack with me; Marie, too. Everybody knew us at the Sugar Shack back then. We had cultivated the most outrageous image, and there were already armies of kids who’d based their entire looks on how Marie and I dressed. We fell in love, had our hearts broken, and broke hearts at the Sugar Shack. The Shack provided the greatest soundtrack to a childhood that you could ever imagine.

 

As Mom and Wolfgang had gotten more and more serious, and Mom spent more and more time away from home, the Sugar Shack became the closest thing I had to a stable family life. I knew everybody who went there regularly. Most of the time I just went there by myself, wanting to dance, make new friends, watch, and be a part of the carnival-like atmosphere.

 

It was at the Sugar Shack that I met a man who—for better or worse—would change my life, forever.

 

They didn’t serve alcohol at the Sugar Shack, and that night I was sat at the juice bar sipping a Coca-Cola. The club was tiny, and always packed with kids. At that moment Chuck E Starr was DJing disco, so I’d stepped off the dance floor to take a break. But I knew that soon he would drop a crowd favorite like “The Time Warp” or “Suffragette City,” and kids would line up to do their best moves, checking themselves out in the mirrored columns as they danced. Of course, just because they didn’t serve alcohol didn’t mean that kids didn’t drink it: they just went out to the parking lot and guzzled everything from flasks filled with booze stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets, to Colt 45, or Mad Dog 20/20, before they staggered back inside blasted out of their skulls. Quaaludes were also a favorite, and in the upstairs room you could see survivors of the glam-rock scene—guys in huge platforms with fire-engine-red hair and their best Ziggy Stardust outfits staggering around totally luded out, making out with each other and getting into all kinds of trouble. I liked quaaludes a lot, but alcohol didn’t really do it for me. I found the spectacle of those drunk, crying, puking, and fighting kids a little pathetic. No, I was there to get off on the music . . . and the music was amazing. At that moment hundreds of kids were on the dance floor, doing their best moves to Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You.” I was watching, smoking a cigarette and admiring the sea of beautiful people. I could already see a few booze casualties in the crowd, and I smiled a little to myself. Not everyone could handle their drink as well as my father could.

 

“Hello,” said a voice to my right. It had a theatrical, booming quality that startled me. I figured that it was maybe some random creep trying to make a move on me, so I turned to tell him to fuck off, but when I clamped my eyes on the figure next to me, I stopped myself. I immediately realized that this was no ordinary creep. For a start, he was not under twenty-one. Not by a long shot! The stranger was tall—real tall—and wearing the ugliest, tackiest bright orange suit that I had ever laid eyes on. The suit looked dirty and crumpled, as if he had woken up wearing it. He looked like some weird cross between a tangerine and Lurch from The Addams Family. Under the flickering club lights, it looked like he was wearing makeup and he looked impossibly old to me. Like somebody’s insane, cross-dressing grandfather! He was so strange and tacky-looking, that I started to laugh. He seemed unperturbed, though; he just kept staring at me, radiating this air of overblown importance. No, this guy was no ordinary creep. This guy was an extraordinary creep.

 

“I’ve seen you around,” the tangerine-Lurch said. “You come here a lot, don’t you?”

 

“Yeah,” I told him, turning back to my Coke to signal that the conversation was at an end. Instead of taking the hint, he just stood there smiling at me. I started to get an uncomfortable feeling. I didn’t like the way that this guy was looking at me. I thought of Derek, and then pushed the thought away. No. This guy seemed weird, but harmless. Probably just some kind of burnout, the kind of freak that you see everywhere in Hollywood clubs, just some creepy old dude who used to be a child actor or something. Or he could have been in the entertainment industry—a journalist, club promoter, or something. Otherwise he wouldn’t have even made it past the bouncers. But I was in a club packed with people. This creep couldn’t try anything.

 

“I like your look,” the freak was saying. “I like it a lot. You got balls, you know what I mean? The platinum-blond hair . . . the tight pants . . . the makeup. Very cool. And you have this look in your eyes that says, ‘I can beat the crap out of truck driver.’ ”

 

This made me laugh. I looked up to him again, and said, “What exactly do you want?”

 

He straightened up, took a deep breath, and announced, “My name is Kim Fowley.”

 

I stared back at him. He was standing there, rocking back on his heels, as if everything had just been explained because he’d uttered his name. I still had no idea who this creep was. After an awkward moment’s silence, I said, “Well, good for you. Am I supposed to know you, or something?”

 

Actually, the name did sound vaguely familiar. Not that I was about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that. I think I’d heard Rodney mention it once or twice, but beyond some vague connection with the music industry, I really didn’t have a clue who this guy was. I was getting intrigued, though. What exactly did he want? He smiled at me again, and called for someone to join us over the thunderous sound of the club’s PA. “Joan! Joan, come over here!”

 

A girl walked over to us. She was around my age, really pretty, with brown- and blond-streaked hair, dark eyes that seemed to radiate right out of her face. She walked over from the edge of the dance floor and stood next to Kim Fowley. She seemed real shy, and was hiding her face behind that long dark hair.