Stone Arabia (18 page)

ADA

So you were involved in the punk scene?

ME

Not really. I was also too old, for one thing. I would soon be pregnant with you. No—I was a veteran of pre-punk LA. We went to Rodney’s English Disco and the Sugar Shack. That was an underage club. We used to take quaaludes in the parking lot because there was no drinking allowed. The glitter scene—we didn’t call it glam then, we called it glitter—was all about looking good, looking sexy. So you are eighteen, on quaaludes and dressed like a whore—I don’t have to explain that this often led to a less than fulfilling outcome for young women. By the time I was twenty-one, I was already bored of all of it.

Then I discovered Johnny Rotten. I first read about him in the
Melody Maker
and
New Musical Express.
I used to go to the Universal News stand on Las Palmas and get the British magazines—

(Ada later would insert a shot of Universal News as it looks today. It still has the sign in plastic blue sans serif letters on stained concrete.)

I would read about how the Sex Pistols cursed on TV. How they insulted the queen. How they put safety pins in their ears. How they vomited at the airport. And how they insulted their audience, told their audience they were being ripped off. The thing that really got me was the interviews I read. Johnny Rotten said rock and roll was boring. He said sex was boring. They wore
zippered bondage pants, but they couldn’t be bothered. I was like, yes! Not because I really thought sex was boring, but because I knew that was revolution. No one except us girls understood how subversive Johnny Rotten’s anti-sex stance really was. So obnoxiously and unanswerably defiant, the perfect retort to any concern:
It’s boring
. Even SEX bores us. I wondered why Rotten didn’t attack the other rock-and-roll cliché and say drugs were boring? Still, rock and roll is like 90 percent sex, so the nihilism of Rotten’s anti-sex stance cannot be exaggerated.

ADA

Do go on, Mom. We can always cut it out later.

ME

Right. Right. I had already wearied of even my own easy allure. I saw girls making their own T-shirts (because making your own was the thing). One girl I remember made a ripped white T-shirt that read:
No, I don’t want to give you a blow job.
Girls shaved half their hair to make themselves look like Soo Catwoman, the Sex Pistols’ girl sidekick. I even loved Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. She had a face like a wound. I loved her gobby big mouth, her lumpy thighs, her sallow bad skin.

I wasn’t heavily into any scene; I had a job and everything. But I still walked around Melrose in my layers of pinned black clothes, steaming in the
sun, and I would hear the Brentwood girls giggling and pointing their chins at me. I looked down on them. We all did. But even as we wanted that Nancy ugly, we thought we looked really good. There is no escape, finally, from it. I mean, we didn’t really want to look bad, we just had this very contextual, specific aesthetic that was precious because it was only readable to those in the know. Who cared about anyone who didn’t get it? Sure, we still gave blow jobs to boys, but only to certain boys, the right boys. The boys who got it.

ADA

Okay, but maybe you could get back to Nik?

ME

Right, I should get back to Nik. Around this time, Nik formed his band the Fakes. Nik had the sensibility down. And Nik had the look down. He was born to look pasty and skinny and angular. The look wasn’t the problem. The sound, well, that was always the issue. Nik’s other band, the Demonics, had a small following, they had some weird sonic experimentations. They veered into long, meandering songs. They were dark in an out-of-step kind of way. No one knew what to do with them.

Anyway, Nik invented the Fakes as the antidote to the darkness and oddness of the Demonics—the Fakes were a side band designed to play power pop and have
fun. They came right at the moment when the nihilism of the punk scene had run its course and people were hungry for some simple rock pop, some harmonies, with a danceable beat as long as the band looked New and Cool. People could dance to the Fakes, and they became much more popular than the unclassifiable Demonics. Nik did it as a kind of lark. He did it as a kind of calculation.

ADA

But Nik’s pop songs were always the best thing he did. The other projects don’t age as well, don’t you think?

ME

He doesn’t feel that way. But he loved making fun pop songs and was very good at it.

ADA

What happened with the Fakes? With that sound, why didn’t they make it?

ME

Well. They almost did.

ADA

What do you mean? I never knew that.

ME

I shouldn’t have brought it up. It is a long sore story.

ADA

How come I never heard about it before? What happened?

ME

I don’t even know what happened. You’ll have to ask Nik. But he won’t talk about it.

ADA

Well, can you tell me everything you do know?

ME

I can’t. I would be guessing. You will just have to ask him.

ADA

You two never talked about it?

ME

We never did.

ADA

I don’t believe it.

ME

It seemed almost rude, somehow. Like it violated the rules between us. We don’t talk out everything. We keep a lot in the air between us. Why is this so important?

ADA

It’s not, I just feel like it would explain a lot.

ME

I don’t think it would explain much about Nik. At all. I think you are missing the point about Nik. Making it with his fake band? I don’t think it was important. But you could make it seem that way if you wanted to.

Ada said nothing. She glared at me.

ME

I’m sorry.

ADA

Cut.

That was the end of my interview. I guess it didn’t go so well. She took her two-person crew and went over to Nik’s to do his interview. Wait until she tried to push him into her narrative suppositions, her easy causations, her inciting incidents, and her cinematic reductions. Her “editing later.” Try it out on Uncle Nik.

I never get mad at Ada, so this feeling was new for me. I was mad, I could feel it. I resented her wanting to know everything. And to order it somehow. The truth is, although I never asked Nik about it, I also used to wonder what really had happened.

I had first glimpsed the way things were going when I
watched him play at the Fakes’ first three gigs. By the second gig, all the little girls had come out. The underage girls from the Valley. It was like the word went out into the little-girl underground. The front of the stage was a sea of pogoing chicklets in miniskirts and golden perms. They wore lots of eyeliner and they gave their love to the boys on the stage. By the third gig, the Fakes were a hit, a sensation, albeit on an extremely local level. I’m not sure exactly how that happened. Had the Fakes been touted by a mention on KROQ? I don’t remember the details. And Nik would never talk about it, no matter how drunk he was. I could, I guess, go back through the Chronicles, but of course that would not be an accurate rendering of history. Or, another way to put it, it would be an accurate rendering of how Nik viewed it, history put through the Nik-o-lyzer. In any case, as I recall it, this was the moment one of the pestilent pop impresarios appeared in Nik’s life. Lee “Lux” Smith had long lurked at the periphery of the various Los Angeles scenes. I have sort of tracked him over the years. He always turned up in the margins, he always had his icky fingers in an anthology or a documentary. His mother was a famous actress—he worked out of her enormous Laurel Canyon mansion. He had the odor of privilege about him; he drove a pristine white 1966 Mustang convertible.

Lux started out as a songwriter. He penned a couple of hit singles for a sixties novelty group, the Ginger Jangles (yes, they had red hair). After that, Lee had attached to various marginal acts. One was a young whisper-voiced girl who was trying to do the Emmylou Harris/Gram Parsons southern angel stuff. She had long native-straight black hair and she
sang her country pop without pedal steel guitar or anything too offensively country. She had some minor success and then quickly disappeared. Then there was Lee Lux’s other protégé, an uncomfortably handsome singer from Canada who bleated out didactic political songs with acoustic accompaniment. Lux remade him as some kind of glitzed-out superstar and quickly got a record deal. Lux saw to it that they spent a lot of money, and the singer’s first album had these huge, lush production numbers. He was hyped beyond belief, shoved on billboards, and seemed to be opening for everyone. But the hype didn’t hit the right note for his still-earnest presentation. Or maybe he was too pretty or the timing was bad. His one and only record sank without a trace. You can still buy it on eBay for a chunk of money, perhaps if you are a collector of obscurities. Or a collector of artifacts of people who sell out for exactly nothing in return. But that sounds like a terrible, mean thing to collect.

One wonders, or at least I wonder, what happened to these people? Not the one-hit wonders but the no-hit wonders? Those actual people who became roadkill as the Lee Lux types move on. I can easily imagine the unreturned phone calls. The years when a second chance still feels within reach. But then what? I wonder, of course, because Nik is sort of one of them. Someone, somewhere, no doubt wonders what became of roadkill Nik. But it really pains me to think of him in this category. I shudder to think of him as a footnote in the documentary yet to be made about Lee Lux Smith. Which is one of the reasons why I thought Ada’s idea for her movie wasn’t so bad, despite my noncompliance. I really didn’t want the smug opportunists, the people who dine off other people’s lives, to tell all the stories.

After Lee Lux failed with the singer-songwriter, he let it be known he was looking for a new act.

The Fakes were not the ideal candidates for Lux. But he wanted to find a way into the new new thing. And one thing I have to concede: Lux did recognize how good Nik was and how timely the Fakes were. I remember being backstage and seeing him appear. He must have been in his mid-thirties then—he just looked old to me. He wore a sport coat over a T-shirt. He pushed the sleeves of the coat up his arms a little, which must have been his concession to the moment—he was, after all, all about concessions to the moment. But he still looked out of place with his uncommitted haircut that was short in the front and long in the back, and his iron, handsome jaw, and his way of smiling that felt moneyed and important. I watched him throw a friendly arm around Nik and whisper to him. Already he colluded, naturally he was on Nik’s side. He knew things, he could grow and spin his indispensability in the course of a conversation. Nik waved me over. I remember exactly how it went down.

“Dee Dee, this is Lee Lux.” Nik called me Dee Dee back then. Denise was only for serious moments and my mother. I held out my hand and gave him a cheeky sarcastic wink. At twenty-one I had somehow developed the manner of a drag queen. This was my version of punk attitude. He kissed my hand and I curtsied.

“Now, why isn’t this creature in the band? You can stand behind a keyboard, can’t you, darlin’?” Lee said. God, he really was a shameless sleazeball. He was so corny, it was almost fabulous, you know? Almost, but not at all, actually. Up close I
could see he had a mouthful of gleaming straight teeth. From his mother, I couldn’t help thinking. That is the thing about these sorts of people. They are quite charming, and shallow as it sounds, everyone likes some shiny teeth. (One other truly subversive thing about the Sex Pistols and the British punks: bad teeth. Bad smells, bad teeth, bad skin—this was the real stuff of rebellion. It didn’t last long as an aesthetic. But wasn’t it amazing for a moment?)

Nik and I went to Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard with Lee Lux. The rest of the band was cordially not invited. That was the first sign, I think, that this guy was bad news. But we also already knew he was bad news. Everyone knew it—so you had your guard up. But Lux used that notoriety and made it work to his advantage.

He said, “You know me. Everyone knows me. I am the king opportunist. I am the ruthless man-eating star maker. Either get with me or get out of my way because I’m not nice.”

We all laughed.

He said, “You can be nice. I can be the cutthroat. I have no qualms, none whatsoever, about doing what needs to be done. I am a shark, I am a piranha.”

Nik chain-smoked. He didn’t say anything at all, but he listened. I sipped a Coke. Lux bit into a hamburger. He said, “Tell me what you see for yourself. Where would you like to be in two years?” He pushed his french fries away from his burger and ignored them. Nik leaned his face wearily into his hand and looked around the restaurant. He said nothing, then started laughing. “Seriously,” said Lux.

Nik shrugged. He said, “Look, you know, the Fakes are just
for fun. I have much better stuff than the Fakes.” Lux nodded. He had finished every bite of his burger. I watched him very carefully—I ate nothing in those days. I wanted to be skeletal. But I was fascinated watching other humans eat.