The Dirt Page 3

  I began dating a girl named Mary. Everybody used to call her Horsehead, but I liked her for one simple reason: She liked me. I was so happy that a girl actually talked to me. After weeks of drugs and rock and roll, I was cool but still pathetic. I had painted toe- and fingernails, torn punk clothes, eye makeup, and a bass guitar I carried everywhere, even though I still couldn’t play and wasn’t in a band.

  We stood out and were ridiculed everywhere we went. At school, I’d get into fights because a group of black kids would call me Alice Bowie and block the hallway to keep me from passing. On the way home from school, I started casing houses. I’d knock on the door as I passed by and, if nobody answered two days in a row, the next afternoon I’d smash the back door in and grab whatever I could hide under my jacket. I’d come home from school with stereos, TVs, Lava lamps, photo albums, vibrators, whatever I could find. In our complex I’d ransack the basements in each apartment pod and break into the washing machines with a crowbar in search of quarters. I was angry all the time—partly because the drugs were fucking with my moods, partly because I resented my mother, and partly because it was the punk-rock thing to do.

  Almost every day I’d sell drugs, steal shit, get in fights, and fry on acid. I’d come home and lie on the couch tripping on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert until I passed out. My mother didn’t know what was going on: Was I gay? Straight? A serial killer? An artist? A boy? A man? An alien? What? To tell the truth, I didn’t know either.

  Every time I set foot in the house, we’d get in arguments. She didn’t like what I was turning into, and I didn’t like what she had always been. Then, one day, it happened: I couldn’t take it anymore. On the streets I was free and independent, but at home I was supposed to be a kid. I didn’t want to be a kid anymore. I wanted to be left alone. So I tore the place apart, stabbed myself, and called the police. It basically worked, because I was free of her afterward.

  I spent that night with my friend Rob Hemphill, an Aerosmith freak who thought he was Steven Tyler. To him, Tyler was the punk that Mick Jagger could never be. After his parents kicked me out, I slept in Rick Van Zant’s car. I’d try to wake up before his parents, but usually they’d leave the house to go to work and find me sleeping in the backseat. The third time they caught me, they called my mother.

  “What’s going on with your son?” Mr. Van Zant asked. “He’s sleeping in my car.”

  “He’s on his own,” my mother said, and hung up.

  When I could, I went to school. It was a good way to make money. Between classes I’d roll joints for kids, charging fifty cents for two. After two months of good business, the headmaster walked around the corner and caught me with a bag of weed in my lap. That was my last day of school. I’d been to seven schools in eleven years and was fed up anyway. After being expelled, I spent my days under the 22nd Street bridge, where all the other burnouts and dropouts killed time. I was going nowhere.

  I found a job at Victoria Station washing dishes and rented a one-bedroom apartment with seven friends who had also dropped out of school. I stole another bass and, for food, I’d wait by the garbage can outside Victoria Station until the busboys threw out meat scraps. I was quickly growing depressed: Just a year ago I’d been ready to take over the world, and now my life was going nowhere. When I ran into my old friends, like Rick Van Zant or Rob Hemphill or Horsehead, I felt alienated, like I had emerged from a gutter and was getting them filthy.

  I didn’t feel like going to work, so I quit. When I couldn’t afford rent anymore, I moved in with two prostitutes who felt sorry for me. I lived in their closet, hanging posters of Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings and Deep Purple’s Come Taste the Band on the walls to make it feel like home. I had nothing going for me. One day, I came home to my closet and my mother-whores were gone. The landlord had kicked them out, so it was back to the Van Zants’ car. Winter was fast approaching, and it was freezing cold at night.

  For money, I started selling chocolate-covered mescaline outside concerts. At a Rolling Stones show at the Seattle Coliseum, a freckle-covered kid came up to me and said, “I’ll trade you a joint for some mescaline.” I agreed because the mescaline was cheap, but as soon as I did, two cops burst out of a nearby car and handcuffed me. The kid was a narc. He and the cops dragged me, kicking and calling them names, underneath the Seattle Coliseum.

  For some reason, however, they didn’t book me. They took my information, threatened me with a ten-year mandatory minimum in jail, and then let me go. They said if they ever saw me again, even if I wasn’t doing anything wrong, they’d put me behind bars. I felt like my life was blowing up: I had nowhere to live, no one to trust, and after all this, I had never even played in a single band. In fact, as a musician, I sucked. Just weeks before, I had sold my only bass guitar for money to buy drugs to peddle.

  So I did the only thing a punk rocker who’s hit rock bottom can do: I called home.

  “I have to leave Seattle,” I pleaded with my mother. “And I need your help.”

  “Why should I help you?” she asked coldly.

  “I just want to go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I begged.

  The next day, my mother came to put me on a Greyhound bus. She didn’t really want to see me again, but she didn’t trust me with the money. She also wanted to remind me that she was a long-suffering saint for helping me and I was a selfish jerk. But the only thing that I could think was “Boom! I’m out of here and never coming back.”

  All I had in the way of music for the ride was an Aerosmith tape, a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape, and a beat-up boom box. I listened to those cassettes over and over until I arrived in Jerome. I walked off the bus in six-inch platform boots, a gray tweed double-breasted suit, a shag haircut, and fingernail polish. My grandmother’s face turned white.

  Away from Seattle and my mother, I didn’t cause any trouble. I worked on the farm, moving irrigation pipe, through the end of the summer. I saved the money I made and actually purchased a guitar—a fake Gibson Les Paul that they were selling in a gun shop for $109.

  My priggish aunt Sharon visited the farm a couple of times with her new husband, a record executive in Los Angeles named Don Zimmerman. He was the president of Capitol Records, home of the Beatles and the Sweet, and he began sending me cassettes and rock magazines. One day, after receiving his latest package, it dawned on me: Here I was listening to Peter Frampton in fucking Idaho, while in Los Angeles the Runaways and Kim Fowley and Rodney Bingenheimer and the dudes from Creem magazine were all partying at the hippest rock clubs imaginable. All this shit was going down over there and I was missing it.

  They were charging two bucks for a shot of tequila at the Stone Pony, and I wasn’t going to pay that. We should have been drinking for free that night since the Southern-rock band I was playing in was on the bill. They were originally called Ten-Wheel Drive, but I told them that if they wanted me to join, they’d have to change their name. Now we were Spiders and Cowboys, which, on a scale of one to ten as far as band names go, gets a 4.9.

  In North Hollywood, I walked down Burbank Boulevard to Magnolia Liquor to get a half-pint of cheap tequila. It was as cold as a witch’s tit, and I stared at the ground the whole way, thinking about what I could do to teach Spiders and Cowboys about good music. I hadn’t spent my life playing guitar and neglecting my kids, my family, my schoolwork—everything—just so I could end up playing in a southern-rock band.

  When I walked into the store, the guy at the counter sneered, “You look like a rock-and-roller type.” I couldn’t tell whether he was complimenting me or making fun of me. I looked up and saw a kid with wild dyed black hair, messy makeup, and leather pants. I think I told him that he looked like a rock and roller, too.

  I’m always on the lookout for people I can play with, so I decided to ask him a few questions and see if he had any potential.

  He had just moved here and was living with his aunt and uncle, who was a big shot at Capitol Records or something. His name was Frank, he played bass, and he seemed like an al
l-right guy. But then he said he listened to Aerosmith and Kiss, and I can’t stand Kiss. I never fucking liked them. I instantly crossed him off my list of possible people to play with. I was into good music, like Jeff Beck and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

  fig. 6

  “Listen,” I told the kid. “If you want to see a real guitar player, come on down to the Stone Pony after work.”

  He was an arrogant kid, and I didn’t think he’d show up. Besides, he only looked to be about seventeen, so I doubted they’d let him in the door. In fact, I forgot all about him until I saw him during the show. I was playing slide guitar with the mike stand and doing all these insane solos, and his jaw just dropped open. Somebody walking by could have stepped on it.

  After the gig, we had a few drinks together and talked about the kind of shit that people who’ve drunk too much tequila talk about. I gave him my phone number. I don’t know whether he ever tried to use it, because I went up to Alaska to do some gigs. I didn’t care anyway: He liked Kiss.

  My uncle Don hooked me up.

  He let me drive his powder blue Ford F10 pickup with fat radial tires; he scored me a job at a record store, Music Plus, where the manager would stuff our noses full of cocaine; he took me shopping for bell-bottoms and Capezios at the mall; he brought me Sweet posters to paper my room with. And there was a crazy onslaught of new music everywhere—X, the Dils, the Germs, the Controllers. L.A. was what I’d been looking for, and I was going out of my mind.

  It would only be a matter of months before I blew it all and was homeless and unemployed again.

  At my uncle’s, I felt like a punk rocker who had been dropped in the middle of a Leave It to Beaver rerun. His family led a clean-cut yuppie life in a perfect little house with a perfect little swimming pool. The kids would ride their bicycles outside until Mom called them in for dinner at dusk. They’d take off their shoes and wipe their feet and wash their hands and say grace and put their napkins in their laps. There are those of us who see life as a war and those who see it as a game. This family was neither: They preferred to sit on the side and watch it pass by from a distance.

  For me, it was a war: I had angst dripping out of my pores. I wore skintight red pants that laced up the front, Capezios, and makeup. Even when I tried to fit in, I couldn’t. One day my cousin Ricky was kicking a ball around the yard with some friends, and I tried to join them. I just couldn’t do it: I didn’t remember how to kick or throw or stand or anything. I kept trying to motivate them to do something fun, like find some alcohol, run away, rob a bank, anything. I wanted to talk to somebody about why Brian Connolly of the Sweet had bangs that curled under, and I didn’t. They just looked at me like I was from another planet.

  Then Ricky asked, “Are you wearing makeup?”

  “Yeah,” I told him.

  “Men don’t wear makeup,” he said firmly, like it was a law, with his friends backing him up like a jury of the normal.

  “Where I come from, they do,” I said, turning on my high heels and running away.

  At the mall, I’d see girls with their Farrah Fawcett hairdos shopping at Contempo, and all I could think was, “Where’s my Nancy?” I was Sid Vicious looking for a Nancy Spungen.

  Eventually, I just ignored my cousins altogether. I’d sit in my room and play bass through an old amplifier which was half the size of the wall and made for a stereo instead of instruments. When I decided to come to the table for a meal, I wouldn’t apologize or say grace. I’d ask Don things like, “Tell me about the Sweet, man! Do those guys do a lot of drugs?” Then I’d go out to the clubs and come home when I felt like it. If they tried to impose a single house rule on me, I’d tell them to fuck off. I was an arrogant, ungrateful little shit. So they kicked me out, and I left in a rage. I was as mad at them as I was at my mother, and once again found myself alone and blaming everybody but myself.

  I found a one-bedroom apartment near Melrose Avenue and conned the landlady into letting me rent it without a deposit. I didn’t pay her a penny for eighteen months, even though I managed to hold onto my job at Music Plus for a little while. The store was heaven—cocaine, pot, and hot chicks coming in all the time. I had a sign near the register: “Bass player looking for band.” People would ask, “Who’s the bass player?” When I told them it was me, they accepted that. They’d tell me about auditions and invite me to gigs.

  One of those guys was a rock singer and hairdresser (always a bad combination) named Ron, who needed a place to live. I let him stay with me. He had a bunch of girlfriends, and soon we had a small scene. I met a Valley girl named Alli at Music Plus, and we’d all snort an elephant tranquilizer called Canebenol, drink beer, and hang out at a rock club called the Starwood. Then we’d head back to my cinder-block apartment and fuck and listen to Todd Rundgren’s Runt. I had all the free drugs, records, and sex I wanted. And I bought a car, a ’49 Plymouth that cost a hundred dollars and was so shitty that when I went to pick Alli up at her parents’ house, I’d have to drive backward up the hill because the motor couldn’t handle it any other way.

  Then I got fired from Music Plus. The manager accused me of stealing money from the till, and I told him to fuck off.

  “Fuck you!” he yelled back.

  I went into a blind rage, punching him in the face and stomach. I kept yelling, “What are you gonna do?”

  There was not a lot he could do: He only had one arm.

  The worst part about it is that he was right: I was stealing money from the till. I was a volatile kid who did not like to be told off, even when I was wrong.

  I EVENTUALLY FOUND A JOB selling Kirby vacuum cleaners over the telephone, but I couldn’t seem to close a single deal. One of the other salesmen told me about a carpet-cleaning job that was open to anyone with a car. So I took the steam-cleaning job with the sole intention of going to people’s houses and setting up the steamer in front of their bedroom door to keep them away while I raided their medicine cabinets and took all their drugs. For extra money, I’d bring a water bottle with me and tell people that it was Scotchgard, and I could seal their carpets so that the dirt wouldn’t stick. I explained that the going price was $350 for the whole house, but, since I was a student trying to work his way through college, I’d do it for a hundred if they paid me in cash and kept it quiet. So I’d walk around the house spraying water and stealing whatever I thought they wouldn’t notice for a few days.

  I was starting to make a lot of money, but I still didn’t pay my rent. The apartment complex was like a skid row version of Melrose Place. My neighbors were a young couple, and when they broke up, I started fucking the wife until the husband moved back in. Then I befriended him, and we decided to deal quaaludes because they were in fashion that month. I probably ended up swallowing as many as I sold.

  At the same time, I started to put my first band together with Ron and some friends of his: a girl named Rex, who sang and drank like Janis Joplin, and her boyfriend, Blake or something. We called ourselves Rex Blade, and we looked good. We had white pants that laced up the front and back, tight black tank tops, and ratty hair that looked like Leif Garrett on a bad day. We rehearsed in an office building next to where the Mau Maus practiced. Unfortunately, we didn’t sound nearly as good as we looked. In retrospect, the only thing Rex Blade had going for it was that it was a good excuse to take drugs and it earned me the right to tell girls I was in a band.

  As usual, my shitty attitude made this period in my life a short one. I think everything I’d experienced was always so short-term and transient that if anything remained stable for too long, I’d panic and self-destruct. So I got thrown out of Rex Blade for making the classic young rock-band mistake that so many others have made before me and will make until the end of time. This happens when you first start writing songs. Your words seem very important and you have your own vision that doesn’t accommodate anyone else’s. You are too narcissistic to realize that the only way to get better is by listening to other people. This problem was compounded by my stu
bbornness and volatility. If I was Rex or Blake, I would have thrown myself out of that band, too, along with all the little three-chord wonders I thought were such masterpieces.

  Days later, the police knocked on my door and threw me out in the street. After a year and a half of not paying rent, I had finally been evicted. I moved into a garage I found in the classifieds for a hundred dollars a month. I slept on the floor with no heater and no furniture. All I had was a stereo and a mirror.

  Every morning I’d swallow a handful of crosstops and drive to make the 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. shift at a factory in Woodland Hills, where we dipped computer circuit boards in some sort of chemical that could eat your arm off. After working there, playing Pong all day, and fighting with the Mexicans (not unlike the diversions I would later enjoy with my half-Mexican, half-blond lead singer), I’d drive straight to Magnolia Liquor on Burbank Boulevard and work from 7 P.M. to 2 A.M. Before leaving, I’d stuff as many bottles of booze as I could fit in my boots and drive an hour to my garage. I’d guzzle the stuff and stand in front of the mirror, fan out my thickening black hair, twist my mouth into a sneer, sling my guitar around my neck, and rock out, trying to look like Johnny Thunders from the New York Dolls until I passed out from exhaustion and alcohol. Then I’d wake up, pop more pills, and start all over again.

  It was all part of my plan: I was going to work my ass off until I had enough money to buy the equipment I needed to start a band that would either be insanely successful or attract tons of rich chicks. Either way, I’d be set up so that I’d never have to work again. For extra cash, whenever someone came in to buy liquor, I’d only ring up half the price I charged them. I’d write down the amount I didn’t ring up on a slip of paper and put it in my pants. Then, at the end of the night, I’d total up the money I’d fucked the store out of, pocket it, and close up, eighty bucks the richer. My accounting was never over or under by more than a dollar: I’d learned my lesson at Music Plus.