Scar Tissue (11 page)
My senior year at Fairfax was rife with contradictions. Me and my friends were definitely outsiders, living by our own moral code, one tenet of which was Thou Shalt Steal Your Meals. Mike and I refined a method of food thievery that was unbeatable for about two years, until the supermarkets finally caught on to it. I would go into the market and fill up a little red plastic basket with the finest provisions they offered—filet mignon, lobsters, cognac, you name it. Then I’d take my basket over to the magazine rack, which was directly adjacent to the entrance. I’d pick up a magazine and set my basket on the floor and, while I was perusing the magazine, I’d surreptitiously slide the basket under the chrome railing. Then Mike, who had been waiting outside, would dash in, grab the basket, and go right out the exit door. Soon we had an eight-foot-tall stack of empty red baskets behind my house, a testament to our continuing ability to feed ourselves in style.
We still used our old tried-and-true bottle-up-the-pants method to steal booze. Once I even upped the ante and stole a pair of skis. I went to the back of the sporting-goods store and asked, “What’s the best pair of skis that you have in here in my size?” The salesman said, “Well, these racing skis.” I waited for him to leave, and I picked up the skis and walked right out the front door. I had decided that if I walked boldly right past the cashier, they would think, “He’s picking up something that he’s already paid for, because he’s not stopping.”
In some respects, our antisocial impulses were getting reinforced by the music that we were listening to. When I first started Fairfax in 1977, punk rock had just begun to make itself felt in Los Angeles. But it was a tiny subculture. Blackie, to his credit, was on the cutting edge of the new music scene. He was one of the first people to frequent a punk-rock club called the Masque, which was on Hollywood Boulevard. Whenever punk-rock groups from New York would come to town, they’d play the Whisky, and Blackie and I would always wind up at the Tropicana Motel, a seedy old classic paradise on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was where the bands stayed and where the afterparties were. At that time, my favorite record was Blondie’s first. Every one of those songs was indelibly etched on my soul, and I was totally in love with Deborah Harry.
So when Blondie came to town, we headed to the Tropicana for the party. They had a suite, and Debbie was in the front room. We started talking, and I was smitten, totally melting. In my delusional state, I thought, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You might never see this woman again. You better make your move.” With complete earnestness, I said, “I know I haven’t known you that long, but will you marry me?”
She smiled and said, “That’s so kind of you to ask. I think you’re a great guy, but I don’t know if you know this—that guitar player I was playing with tonight, who’s back there in the bedroom . . . well, that’s my husband. We’re very happily married, and I really don’t have any room in my life for another man.” I was crushed.
Mike and I began hanging out in the punk scene by necessity. Shortly after we started Fairfax, I had brought Mike to the Rainbow one night. Before we got there, we drank a lot of Michelob beer. I had a tolerance for alcohol, but apparently he didn’t. We were sitting at Blackie’s power table, and the girls were there, and the music was going, and Mike looked at me and said, “I’m not feeling so good.” He started to rush outside, but before he could go two feet, he began projectile-vomiting all over the Rainbow. Not what they wanted from two underage kids in their establishment. He threw up all the way into the parking lot, where they gave him the boot. Then they came in for me and said, “Get out there with him. You’re never coming back here again.” I kept trying to get back in for a year, but they had really eighty-sixed me. It was time to find my own scene.
My first punk concert was a daytime show at the Palladium. Devo was playing, along with the Germs. I was standing in the back, just fascinated. The music was cool as shit, these people looked incredible, almost too cool for me—there was no way I could ever be accepted by this crowd, because they were light-years ahead of me in terms of style. I remember walking over to the side of the stage, where people were going in and out of the backstage area, and there was this girl with some fucked-up punk-rock haircut, and she was taking giant safety pins and piercing her cheek with them, one after the other. That was new to me.
Mike and I began trying to worm our way into this new scene, where, unlike at the Rainbow, I had no clout. There was an explosion of amazing bands in L.A. at that time, X and the Circle Jerks and Black Flag and China White, the list could go on and on. The energy was unbridled, more creative and exciting and bombastic than anything anybody had ever seen. Fashion-wise, energy-wise, dance-wise, music-wise, it was like the dawning of the Renaissance in my own town. Rock had become this boring old beast, ready to die, and now there was fresh crazy-ass blood flowing through the streets of Hollywood. The first wave of punk rock had already crested, but there was a second coming. It wasn’t a violent hard-core scene, like the bands from Orange County. In Hollywood it was more about creativity and originality. The Screamers and the Weirdos were two of Hollywood’s first punk-rock bands, but they sounded nothing alike.
What all these bands did share was an element of anarchy and nonconformity. That first X record, or all the Black Flag records from that time, were masterpieces. Darby Crash’s lyrics for the Germs were as good as it ever got in the world of punk rock. He was on to a whole other level of intelligence.
So Mike and I hung out in the parking lot of the Starwood, probably the best punk-rock venue around then, and we started to poke our noses through the door of this world. The Starwood was a tough club to sneak into, but there was a side door near the parking lot, guarded by a huge bouncer. If a fight broke out and his attention got diverted, we’d slip in as fast as we could. Sometimes, if a bunch of people were going in, we tried the crawling thing and used them as cover. When we couldn’t sneak into the show, we’d linger in the parking lot, but neither of us had a lot of mojo or game, so we’d have to watch the goings-on. Nobody was inviting us to hang out.
One time Mike and I sneaked into the Starwood for a Black Flag show. We were fish out of water. We loved these bands, but we dressed all wrong and we had the wrong haircuts and the wrong shoes and we didn’t even dance like all the punks. Those guys had the really cool boots with the chains wrapped around them and the right combination of ripped-up plaid clothes and spiked haircuts. Mike and I were lucky to have one leather jacket between the two of us.
Black Flag put on an amazing show. They had a guy onstage called Mugger who was in charge of security. Every time someone tried to jump up onstage and dance around a bit and then jump back off, Mugger would just attack the person and get into a brutal fistfight. During all this, the band did not miss a beat. One guy managed to get past Mugger and stage-dive. He flew right by me, and I got kicked in the head with his heavy steel-toed boot. I almost passed out.
One of the reasons we didn’t plunge feet-first into this scene was that in some ways, we were still model students at Fairfax. At least I was. It was a strange dichotomy. I smoked tons of pot, took pills, and drank on the weekends. But it never got out of control. I never missed school. It was important to me to be the straight-A student. In a way, I was a rebel by getting good grades, because most of the stoners and the druggies were getting no grades. I didn’t want to be like them. When I was a junior, I got my report card, and it was A’s all the way down the line, which I loved. I wanted to be the best at whatever it was that was in front of me. On my terms. I didn’t necessarily want to study for hours to get there, but I wanted to do enough at the last minute.
By this time we were all thinking about college. At the end of my senior year, my grades were starting to slip, and I had to go to Mrs. Lopez, my Spanish teacher, and beg, borrow, and steal to get a B. Mike was having his own problems with grades. He always vacillated between being an absolutely brilliant student and an absolute flunk-out. Our last semester he was in Don Platt’s honors history class with Haya. Platt was a no-nonsense general who was in total command of his class. He was bald but in great physical shape, with a perfect tan, a suave Gavin MacLeod type.
Mike and I had been running around like maniacs the week before his big final, and he didn’t study for it, so he cheated. The last guy on Planet Earth you’d want to get busted by for cheating was Don Platt. He was not afraid to call you out in front of the class and humiliate you. That’s what he did to Mike, who came out of class that day white as a ghost. Getting a D in Platt’s class would put a pretty major dent in Mike’s chances for getting a good grade-point average.
But it wasn’t my worry. I was already a shoo-in to college with my grades. In fact, I planned to go to Don Platt for one of my recommendations so I could go to UCLA. I had been Platt’s student for three years, and I had aced every one of his classes, so I knew he’d give me the crown jewel of all recommendations. A few days later, I went to see him after school, and he had a very unwelcoming look on his face. I asked him for a recommendation, and it was as if he already had a speech prepared. “Anyone who associates with Michael Balzary is not a friend of mine, nor is he getting a recommendation from me. For all I know, you and Michael were cheating the whole time you were in my classes.”
This was absurd. I was probably the best student he’d had in ten years. The only time I’d even come close to crossing him was in my first semester. I had chosen to do an oral report on Uriah P. Levy, who was a great American naval officer. During the course of my research, I discovered the derivation of the word “fuck.” It came from the early naval logs that the captain would keep. If a crew member was punished for having sexual intercourse, it was noted in the log as “FUCK” (for unlawful carnal knowledge). That was too good a factoid not to share with the class.
So I was up there spieling on Uriah P. Levy and the navy, and it was all Monty Pythonesque to me. I got to the punishable offenses, and I walked up to the chalkboard and wrote “F, U, C, K” in huge letters. I looked over at Mr. Platt, and the blood was rushing to the top of his bald head, but I never cracked a smile and continued to explain the concept. Meanwhile, Mike and the rest of the class came unglued, but there was nothing Platt could do. I had him.
Now he thought he had me. I tried to make my case for the recommendation, but he wasn’t having any of it. “There’s the door,” he said. I walked out of there shell-shocked. Ultimately, I wound up going to the geometry teacher, and he was nice enough to write me a great recommendation. But I still had to get even with Platt.
Somewhere along the line that semester, I had stumbled upon some cardboard boxes of beautiful big black and red plastic marquee letters. Thinking they might be useful for an art project, I kept them. At the end of that Memorial Day weekend, the night before we were supposed to return to classes, Mike and I were driving around, stoned on pot, listening to music, when a brilliant idea came to me.
We drove up to the marquee in front of Fairfax High and started climbing up the pole, armed with the appropriate letters. Then we spelled out
DANDY DON PLATT SUCKS ANUS
, and motor-oiled the pole and the platform to inhibit the progress of anyone who would try to take our message down.
We looked up at the sign, congratulated each other, and went home and fell asleep. The next day we went to school, and there was a whole hubbub of activity around the marquee, people taking pictures and workmen trying to circumvent the motor oil and get those letters off.
Nobody ever came to Mike or me for questioning. We weren’t even suspects. Maybe Platt had screwed over enough kids that there was an abundance of people with a motive. But that wasn’t the end of it. At the end of that summer, we decided to leave a message for the incoming class at Fairfax. So we went back to the box of letters, climbed back up that pole, and left
DANDY DON CONTINUES TO SUCK ANUS
.
I
was thrilled to find out I’d been accepted to UCLA. Not only was I going to the same university my father had, but Haya, who could have gotten into any school in the country, had chosen to stay home and go to college with me. It was like the planets had aligned.
But I came back down to earth pretty fast. I never felt at home at UCLA. The student body was filled with Poindexters and Asian kids who weren’t there to socialize or yuk it up at all. Everyone there was all business, all the time. I didn’t make one friend the entire time I was there. Besides, club-going and partying at Donde’s house and running around with Hillel and Mike was way more important to me than studying Chinese history, which was, don’t ask me why, one of the classes I signed up for.
On top of these general woes, my finances were completely on the skids. I had no income except for the twenty dollars a month my mom was sending me. So I reverted to my old practices. When it came to getting textbooks, which were incredibly expensive, I went to the campus bookstore, filled up my basket, walked over by the exit, nudged it past the sensors, then bought a pack of gum and picked up my free books on the way out. When it came to food, I’d go to the school cafeteria, which had a great selection of hot and cold meals, and fill up a tray. Before I got to the register, I’d start going backward in line, as if picking up things I had missed, until I got to the end of the line. Then I’d walk out with the food. I never got caught. Hillel would often come and join me, because he was on a budget, too. Those meals with him were probably the most joyous moments of my college career.
That year, Hillel, Mike, and I perfected something we called dining and dashing. We’d pick restaurants that had a lot of traffic and a lot of waitresses, like Canter’s on Fairfax. We’d eat our food, then individually slip out the door. The sad thing was, we didn’t stop to think that these poor waitresses were getting stuck with the check, and even if the restaurant didn’t make them pay for our meal, they weren’t getting their tips. It wasn’t until years later, when I had to examine the consequences of some of my earlier behavior, that I began to make amends by going back to these places and putting some money in their tills.
