The Sunset Strip Diaries (26 page)

I went to a party with Willa a few days later and some homely fat guy in glasses offered me a sip from his bottle of wine. I remember drinking from it and then just total blackness. I had been roofied.

I could hear, but couldn’t move my body. I heard Willa laughing at me and talking behind my back, making fun of me. Someone brought out a snake and was letting it crawl all over me. I couldn’t get it off me, let alone move at all. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even open my eyes because I was completely shut down except for my hearing. It was so scary. Then I woke up in a room on a bed. The weird fat guy was sitting in the corner, staring straight ahead. I rubbed my eyes and immediately looked down to see if I were naked- I wasn’t. I was fully clothed and so was he. But what if he had raped me and put everything back on me? I didn’t know. I had no recollection of anything. Nothing hurt, so I didn’t think I had been raped, but I wondered if he peeked at me, lifted up my shirt or something, felt me up maybe. 
I asked him where I was and he said I was in the Yucca building. I got the fuck out of there, running a block or so to Willa's hotel room without shoes. I jumped over glass on the sidewalks, crying and sweating.

I remember the very last day I ever saw Willa. We went to visit Michael at some girl’s apartment on La Brea and Franklin. Beautiful, young Birdie Montgomery was also there in a sheer floral baby-doll dress and cherry lip gloss. Willa despised Birdie, but found her stunning. She randomly took Birdie into the bathroom and made out with her (again, things like that were kind of just normal behavior in that town). Not too long after that, the keys to my car were missing. We all started looking for them in the apartment. While everyone was searching, Birdie took me aside and whispered that she saw Willa hide my keys. She was sure Willa was planning to steal my car, but was afraid to tell me because Willa had threatened her. I was like,
Was that before or after you guys made out?
Then it dawned on me that Willa
was
planning to steal my car. She had asked me earlier in the week to show her how to drive it (the transmission skipped, so I had to skip over third gear, even though it was automatic). Does that mean she would steal a car? Probably. The bitch wasn’t scared of much. She ended up living with the little Hindu man who owned the liquor store, and driving
his
car. His store was robbed not too long afterwards, and he was shot in the private parts. He lived.  

I never saw Willa again.

***

Okay, so there I was, in the thick of things. I didn’t seem to notice that the crowds on Sunset were no longer large. Things were very slowly dying out because there was a new sound trickling through radio and MTV and it was as sure as shit not glam. It started with a band named Nirvana. They looked dirty, angry,
styleless and colorless -quite the opposite of what the Sunset Strip stood for. Nirvana was from Seattle, so the record companies began to look to the North for bands and less to the Hollywood scene. My friends and I were so drunk that we didn’t even pay attention. It wouldn’t be long until we would be forced to take notice, but at that time, things were still a party to us.

Journal Entry 5/27/1992

Birdie Montgomery asked for my number the other night and I gave it to her. She has been calling me. She is actually my rival- a threat to me. She appears to be dumb, but she is actually quite sneaky. She is very sweet and smiley to girls while insulting them and/or stealing their boyfriends. It doesn’t matter that they all talk about her when her back is turned. She has the code cracked and it would be too much trouble to compete.  And the girl is beautiful, more so than me. The thing that sucks is that she wouldn’t think twice about doing anything she could do to win popularity over me or bag a guy I liked- we aren’t close enough at this point to where she would have loyalty toward me. I have to be very careful not to give anything away in our fake phone conversations. I have the upper hand for being admired and fawned over without having slept around as she already has. I played my card better than she did already. I will win in the end because her age shows and she can’t be subtle.

Regardless of the fact that she annoyed me, I started to hang out with Birdie. She was
so
pretty and had
such
great clothes and
such
expensive cosmetics that, being the user I was, I was like,
Where do I sign up
? I liked that she lived with her parents, so we wouldn’t have to worry about our safety. It was like another Cristabelle. She was really fun, girly, and enthusiastic. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and all that shit. Birdie felt that we needed to stick to our kind: pretty girls, and she was peeved if I talked to anyone who wasn’t good looking. She gave me a lot of crap for that. She loved to talk about the ‘less fortunate,’ which made me uneasy.

One night, I was with Michael and one of his female acquaintances, who was rather average looking but harmless. Birdie showed up and saw her, thinking I had brought the girl along. She scrunched up her face and asked me right in front of the girl, “Is
this
another one of the girls you’ve picked up as a
friend
? I swear, you pick up all these unwanted
friends.”
Without missing a beat, I said, “And you’re
one
of them, honey.” Michael started cracking up.

Birdie and I had a crazy night about a week later. We were driving back to her parents’ townhouse at about three in the morning. We were at a stoplight and looked over to see two guys who we knew from around Hollywood. One of them was pretty well known- he was the singer of a popular band who I had seen on MTV. The other guy was named Sparkle- he was blond, swishy and feminine with tons of makeup and glitter all over him. We thought he was amusing. They yelled stuff to us, we yelled stuff to them. They followed us to the townhouse parking lot, got out of the car, and came to our window. Birdie had her camera out, so Sparkle grabbed it and put it down his pants to take pictures of his thing. We were all laughing and making jokes. Hardy har har. Then we were getting tired so we started to say goodbye to the guys; we were going to be on our way.

Sparkle said in his sassy girl voice, “I need you to give me thawt roll of film.” Back then, you couldn’t erase a picture on your camera. Whatever pictures you took were on the roll of film, period. Birdie said in her bitchiest of voices, “Give you the
film?
Uhhhhh,
No”
(But she said it like “
No
-wh”).

Sparkle’s eyes got a little mad, and he sighed like a thirteen-year-old. “I
said
,
give me thawt roll of film! There is a picture of my
dick
on your camera.”

We stared at them in the dimly lit parking lot. Birdie then put the camera in her inside coat pocket and lifted her eyebrows. She always had to be totally dramatic. I looked at the two of them and thought, as I had in similar instances,
Shit, what could happen with these two wimps? I could probably take on both of them and kick their asses myself.
I wasn’t worried- I was kind of a bad ass. I yawned and hoped she would hurry up. I was tired.

Suddenly, something changed in Sparkle. I watched his soft powdered face go from lisping Valley Girl to something entirely different. His eyes turned red. His whole expression and his body language suddenly morphed into some Satanic fucking demon. He tilted his chin downwards, looked up at her with evil eyes and said in this slow, deep, possessed voice that sounded like
The Exorcist
, “I said,
give me the film.”

Birdie and I screamed at the same time. He reached through the window, grabbed her by the neck, and started choking her. I panicked, jumped out of the car, and went around to try to pull him off her but the other guy grabbed me.
Oh shit- these guys are going to beat us up! And Sparkle looks like he will sacrifice us to the devil afterward!
We were flying all over the place. Sparkle started punching Birdie and she was screaming bloody murder, but no one came outside to help. I was shitting my G-string.

“Give him the film! Give him the film!” I yelled to her as my arm was twisted back and nearly ripped off my body. Sparkle stopped punching her and she fumbled with her leopard skin coat to get the camera. She was visibly shaking. She had black mascara running down her face and her nose was running. She handed him the camera and he opened it and yanked out the film. The other guy let me go. I got back in the car and locked the doors and we looked at each other with our eyes bugged out.

“What the fuck just happened?” I asked her.

“Drive!” she said.

Journal Entry 5/17/92

I am lonely, sick, and unhealthy.  Girls are calling me asking for advice on what they should do to land my guy friends. I don’t even know who some of them are or how they have my number. Some stranger came up to me and said that people used to drive by my grandma’s house as if it was a tour. What the hell? He said he knew Fritz and Andy and they talked about me all the time. I put on an ultra-bitchy face and said, “I am sure they do,” and flipped my hair and walked away. Yuck. They
wish
they still knew me. Please. It must have subliminally affected me though, because I told off the financial aid woman at school today and gave two weeks’ notice at my job.

I don’t know why a) I thought I was so great: I wasn’t, and b) I thought quitting school and my job was a good idea. I guess they were getting in the way of my partying. I thought that maybe I could try to be a dancer. I stayed up eating tacos with Michael one night and he warned me not to do it. It wasn’t every day that I agreed with a guy wearing lipstick, but I somehow knew he was right.

Okay, so, I was still feeling all cool, popular, and untouchable. What a feeling that is- it is a real high to get to feel like that. Maybe I was getting too big for my britches, or maybe it was flat out karma for all of my conceit, but out of nowhere I was blindsided by something I thought would never happen.

Jimmy was still garnering attention with his new band and Razz, of all people, was convinced they were going to make it big. The next thing I knew, Razz, the one who told me how
out
Jimmy was, the one who told me to dump him
countless
times, the one who told me to go out with someone
cooler,
got so into Jimmy that he ditched
me
for
him
! (slams fist on table) I felt so betrayed. The hypocrisy! If that wasn’t bad enough, Jimmy moved into the same apartment building as Michael and Strange and they
started to hang out with him too- (screams) and they didn’t
invite
me
! They didn’t want me around! They all stopped calling me. I couldn’t believe Jimmy had the audacity to weasel into my crowd. He had hated them so much! And they thought he was a huge dork!
What had happened?!
I had to put a stop to it. I couldn’t let that shit fly.

Journal Entry 6/11/1992

I don’t want to talk about it. Everyone is making friends with Jimmy and starting to ditch me. I never thought it would happen to me. Even
Strange
is ditching me and he has no brain in his head. Oh wait…that is surely why. Anyway, I talked to Razz for a few hours. He said, “Honey, I can’t even count my real friends on my five fingers and you are one of them. The only chick, too.” He kept saying it wasn’t what I thought, no one was ditching me, and that Jimmy and I should just get back together. Never! I would never, ever in my life be that dumb. Aside from that, isn’t Razz the person who tried to break us up for two years straight?

I went over to Teddy St. John’s that weekend and laid by his father’s pool. He made me a chicken patty sandwich, poured me a drink in a fat glass, and stayed very quiet.

“What’s wrong with
you?
You’re supposed to be obnoxious,” I said, eyeballing his soft skin and full lips.

“So. What’s up with Jimmy?” he said in his deep voice, locking his big dark eyes on mine.

“Nothing. He just wants to kill every guy that speaks to me.”

“Well, the guy has your name tattooed on his back and says he wants to fucking marry you.”

“So? So what! SO WHAT.” I asked for some suntan oil and spent the rest of the day on a raft in his pool, ignoring him.

Journal Entry 6/19/92

Fuck Razz, fuck Teddy, and fuck Michael. Those three are the biggest traitors on earth. They ditched me and left with Jimmy the other night! Fuck Robbi too! He was hanging out with Jimmy as well! They all try to screw me behind his back and when they see Jimmy, suddenly they cling to him! I can’t believe people actually don’t want to be around me! I was popular for so long and it never crossed my mind that I would ever be on the other end.