The Sunset Strip Diaries (30 page)

Nobody stopped to help us. We mopped the food and drinks off our cute outfits, trying to pull ourselves together. Being the Einstein that I was, I got out of the car on the freeway and checked the tires to see if they were still intact. We decided to continue in the smashed car, sticky and frazzled, to the show. The show must go on, people! We thought we were going to the Academy Awards or something, but when we got there, it was a nondescript place in the middle of nowhere that was only missing a rattlesnake and some tumbleweeds. I half expected some cowboys to come out and have a motherfuckin’ shoot-out.

I was hoping to meet a rad guy, but when I got there I already knew everybody. Our little clan got there in bits and pieces and eventually formed one big ball of chaos. The couple hundred other onlookers who came there to see the show stood around and watched all of us cause a ruckus. All of the random guys tried to get near Birdie and me. Birdie had her hair professionally done, in big perfect curls. She had on fake eyelashes, red glossy lipstick, a little plaid schoolgirl skirt, and Frederick’s of Hollywood spiked platform heels. I had on black velvet platform shoes (they were Birdie’s- do you think I can afford shoes?), a tight black vest with no shirt underneath and black and white gingham hot pants. My own friends were hitting on me and girls were snubbing me left and right. All of the random girls tried to get near our guy friends, like Alleycat Scratch, etc. The girls were saying to them, “You
must
be from Hollywood,” and they called us sluts because we knew all the guys. It surely didn’t look good with all of the guys hugging us and saying hi to us and hanging on us, but I no longer care about such things.

All of the Hollywood people pulled their usual antics, and let me tell you, in an area outside of Hollywood, their antics were completely unacceptable and worthy of being thrown out of the place. First off, Lesli started throwing me up against the wall. I wasn’t fazed, but when he started spilling beer on me, that was a different story. Nevertheless, the security guards saw him tossing me around and they jumped him, beat the crap out of him, and threw him out. Then, Michael was thrown out for whipping out his thing and peeing in the lobby, right on the carpet in front of everyone. After that, Robbi (I so desperately want to spell his name with a “Y”) was thrown out for drunkenly messing with Faster Pussycat’s wires and amps and stuff up front. I saw that one of his front teeth was knocked out; I was told it was from the night before when he tried to jump out of the car on the freeway.

When I returned Birdie’s shoes to her at the end of the night, she noticed that there was a small rip on one of them from the car accident (my feet jetted out in front of me and hit something in her car when we crashed). She told me I owed her new shoes. I was like
,
bitch, you got us in a
car accident
. If you wouldn’t have
crashed
, your fuckin’ shoes would still look good. She said that if I wouldn’t have
worn
them, they would’ve been safe at home with no rip. Then I was like, okay, well then my ribs hurt. You need to pay for my medical bills. She dropped it.

That next weekend my car stalled right in the middle of rush hour traffic by the Hollywood Bowl. My radiator blew up and the car was overheating. Some guys pushed it to the left, into a horrible crack neighborhood, where it sat while I got a ride back home somehow. What was I going to do without a car? Birdie was grounded from her parents’ car after crashing it on the freeway, so we were both out of luck. During all of this, I was living at my mother’s. As you can imagine, I wasn’t exactly doing the chores she assigned me. I was like,
Wait
…
chores
?
I just came off speed that I don’t remember doing, was raped, and then was dancing with strippers in my underwear. Then I was in a car accident, dodging bullets and trying not to be killed, all while in cute pink outfits.
I don’t remember much about my chores, but I do know that I was supposed to take out the trash and I couldn’t be bothered, so it was often left there to rot as the garbage men passed our house because the cans were not out front.  I also came home at ungodly hours, if at all. Not only that, but I was always banging pots and pans at three in the morning, drunk (I distinctly remember slicing potatoes and making hash browns in a skillet). I had phone calls at all hours of the day and night and I was always rude and hungover. My mother put up with this stuff for only six months or so.

I was fired from the clothing store after missing so many days due to the sprained ankle/hurt foot. Without a job, I couldn’t come up with $200 to give my mother for rent that month, and she told me I had to move out.  She also cited the fact that I was partying too much as another reason I was being booted. I thought it was totally unfair and didn’t see what the problem was.

My sister was majorly on speed by that point and couldn’t kick it. She was hooked. I marched straight up to my mother and asked her why my sister could be a drug addict and stay in the house, and I couldn’t stay in the house and be a boozer. I really threw my sister under the bus for self-serving purposes. It wasn’t like I was worried about her and trying to get her help. It was only to show my mother she wasn’t being fair- and to point out that she wasn’t paying attention.

My mother confronted my sister and asked her point blank if she was on drugs- she of course said she wasn’t. My mom let it go and my sister was back to doing them the very next night. She didn’t ask her again, and said nothing about my sister’s extreme weight loss and staying up all night. In my house, as long as you weren’t making a scene, you could apparently do whatever you wanted. I wouldn’t know though, because I was always making a scene.

My mom suggested I go live with my dad. He had been hanging around and was trying to see us; we even went to visit him a few times. I tried to put my hard feelings behind me. I still wanted a dad. Maybe it would work out. Maybe I was just imagining all of that yucky stuff.

When I asked my dad if I could live with him and his girlfriend, Debra, it seemed promising for a whole minute. I was happy to be able to spend some time with him, maybe repair our relationship- after all, it had been three or four years since he lived with us. Maybe he had cleaned up his act a little. He agreed to assist me in paying for school, and I was relieved, until he dumped an entire handful of quarters in my hand for school books. Back then, the cheap little paperback companions were $20.00 maybe, but the rest of the school books ran up to $75.00. I looked at the five dollars in quarters and thought,
Uh oh. This is gonna suck.

I tried to make myself at home at their apartment in Sherman Oaks, surrounded by dream catchers and Native American paintings. It was a one-bedroom apartment and I was to stay on the living room couch. They slept in the room, which was fine by me, except that the bathroom was off their room. They kept their door shut at night and sometimes I really had to pee. I didn’t want to knock on the door in the middle of the night in case they were doing it or something. I would have rather pissed outside in a bowl on the little patio.

The first night I cried myself to sleep.  They kept the sliding glass door open for some cat or something, so I was freezing and my nose was running. I felt myself getting sick. The blanket they gave me had blood on it, like from someone’s
period or something. I was disgusted and longed for my own blankets and crocheted afghans at my mother’s place. I stored my one box of belongings under the coffee table. As I lay there on the itchy couch, I thought about what a mistake it was to move there. I didn’t realize what misery I would be in. When I woke in the morning, I had spider bites all over me. I went to call Birdie and the phone didn’t work.  I sat there and stared at the view of a stucco wall- it was the least of my worries, but it depressed me further.

I went to dinner with my dad the next night. He took me to a dark steakhouse where he seemed to know the staff. I told him stories of the latest guys I was dating, and how they were not getting the best of me, how I was in control. I thought he would be impressed, but he told me not to be a ball buster. After a few drinks, he started to tell me things I wished he hadn’t. He admitted he had had numerous affairs while married to my mother, some of them with girls only a few years older than I was at the time. He later bragged of a waitress somewhere, who was sixteen and in love with him. Then he told me about lot of gross sexual conquests he had, some of them with people I knew as a child. It was really disturbing and I felt that he had crossed a boundary by telling me such explicit things.  I felt horribly and disgustingly violated, but I was frozen. I wrapped my brain in some sort of protective coating and tried to pretend I didn’t hear it.
No…no...I am not hearing this.
Strangely, or maybe not, I was sick most of the time I stayed with him. Not only that, but I drank more than I ever had.

A few guys from a popular hair band lived in the same building as my father. He said he was friends with them and told me to go down to the Jacuzzi to meet them. I found it strange, but tried to play it cool and went and said hi. I did have their album after all, and I knew all of their songs. It would be cool to brag about it, I supposed. One night soon thereafter, one of them saw me coming into the lobby from my night out. He wanted to come back to the apartment with me! He was very bold about it and didn’t seem to be deterred by the fact that I lived with my father, an acquaintance of his. I turned him down flat. He wouldn’t take no for an answer and literally chased me through the halls until I got to my dad’s place and shut the door in his face while he tried to invite himself inside (my dad and Debra were out somewhere). As I locked the door, I realized something: my dad had given him the okay to try to screw me. I was really hurt and tremendously disturbed. It tore a bigger hole in my soul. I had come a long way, but still, a part of me always thought, 
Is this all I am? Is this my value?
It was so confusing. Afterward I thought,
Well, maybe the guy was just ballsy…maybe my dad
didn’t
give him the okay…

But then, a few days later, I got kind of a weird lecture from Debra. She thought I should go out and try to meet rich men. I knit my eyebrows together and sat down on the stool in the kitchen to listen to her as she boiled some water for tea.
What was up with this lady?
She wanted me to go to the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills and order a Brandy Alexander at the bar. She said if I sat there and just sipped my drink, I would meet wealthy movie executives and the like. I remember thinking…
Uh…okay. A Brandy Alexander is gonna be the clincher, huh?
She then explained to me that a woman is bought dinner and gifts as compensation for giving her body in the bedroom, and that it was perfectly acceptable. I felt uncomfortable with that statement. It ruined the thought of courtship and romance. Both of those things were very far from my life, but I always imagined that they were at least out there somewhere
.
Between Debra advising me to trade my body for riches and my mother telling me never to marry and never have children because it wasn’t worth it, I was pretty messed up in the head. I never followed Debra’s advice because I didn’t want rich guys- I liked broke musicians!

My father and Debra were cooking small dinners at first, but then they got on some sort of drug and starting keeping little to no food in the house. I was constantly starving. I longed to be able to go through a fast food drive-thru. I started dropping a lot of weight just because there was nothing to eat. But even worse than that was the fact that they did not buy toothpaste or laundry soap. I am not kidding. I smelled
so
gross. My hygiene embarrassed me at school. I was so ashamed! My dad used baking soda to brush his teeth. I thought,
Okay, fine.
But they used cheap shampoo as laundry soap and it did not get odor or stains out of my clothes. There were no sharp razors in the shower so I had hairy legs and armpits unless I went somewhere else to shower.  One day I left school because I smelled so badly. I had no job at this time, so I knew I was in real trouble if I thought my dad would feed me and take care of me properly.

I quickly found out why my father and Debra were eager to have me stay with them. I had a car and they didn’t. My car was not running, but that would soon change. They were very secretive and talked amongst themselves for a few days, coming up with some sort of plan. The next thing I knew, my car was towed somewhere, a credit card was "borrowed" and my radiator was fixed on someone else's dime.  Once the car was running, I could never use it. They considered it theirs because they had it fixed. I had to take the public bus to school, all the way on the other side of the Valley.

I managed to take my car to school once and found that my dad had left beer cans on the floor and a pot pipe in the ashtray. There were ashes all over the floor of the car. I was very angry that he didn’t think of the trouble I could get into for driving with that shit in my car. Not only that, but he broke my gearshift off and left the car out of gas. Couldn’t the guy drive somewhere without having to get fucked up in some way? Couldn’t he wait to get home to have beers and smoke pot? I thought,
Whatever
,
he is going to help me pay for school next semester
. I decided to try to spend as much time away from him as I could.