Scar Tissue (12 page)

Hillel had a lot of free time on his hands that first semester, because he didn’t go on to college after Fairfax. I’d meet him after school and hang out with him on the weekends and get high on pot. He was a late bloomer to drug use, but he loved his weed.

I relished the time I spent with him, since I sure wasn’t looking forward to school. I hated all my classes except one: an expository composition class taught by a young female professor. Each week we had to write a composition that she’d critique. Even though I was the great procrastinator and would wait until the night before the paper was due to even think about it, I loved that class. I got an A on every paper, and like Jill Vernon, the teacher would keep me after class and encourage me to write more.

If some of my other classes had been Recreational Drugtaking 101 or, better yet, Advanced Coke Shooting, I might have fared better at UCLA. I was fourteen the first time I shot coke. I was at one of my dad’s parties back on Palm Street, watching all the adults shooting up, and I badgered them into making up a small load and shooting me up. At the end of my senior year at Fairfax, I started shooting up again. One of the first times, I was alone at home and felt so ecstatic that I called Haya. I told her, “This is the greatest feeling ever. We have to do this together.” I didn’t see it as a road to death and insanity, I just saw it as a beautiful, beautiful feeling.

As euphoric as that feeling is, the comedown from shooting coke is horrific. Dante’s
Inferno
times ten. You fall into a dark and demonic, depressing place, in an agonizing state of discomfort, because all of these chemicals that you normally have to release ever so slowly to keep yourself comfortable in your skin are now gone, and you have nothing inside to make you feel okay. That’s one of the reasons I took heroin a few years later. It became the eighty-foot pillow to break that cocaine fall.

I never had any qualms about using needles to ingest drugs. Once I even made shooting up into a weird art project. I was still at Fairfax, and I’d had a fight with Haya. She had been ignoring me for a couple of days, so I drove over to her dad’s store, where she worked. I pulled up in front of her car and, in broad daylight, stuck an empty syringe in my arm and drew out a couple cc’s of fresh blood. Then I walked up to her car, squirted the blood back into the palm of my hand, smeared it on my mouth, and made blood kisses all over her windshield and the driver’s-side window. My romantic little blood project worked. I went home and got a call later that day: “I got your message. That was so nice. I love you so much.” Unfortunately, the blood stained the glass, and despite repeated washings, we never could erase all the traces of those blood kisses.

I was comfortable with syringes, but my dilemma was how to get them. I figured it out one day when I was walking through a supermarket that had a pharmacy. I saw an advertisement for insulin, and a lightbulb went off in my head. I realized that if I went up to the counter and acted like a diabetic and ordered my insulin first, when I asked for syringes, they wouldn’t even question it. I marched up and ordered the Lente U 100 insulin. The pharmacist went to the refrigerator and got out a box of insulin vials, and as he was walking back, I offhandedly said, “Oh, you’d better throw in a pack of micro-fine threes, too.” Without missing a beat, he grabbed some syringes. That scam worked for me for years and years.

My drug use increased exponentially during that first year at UCLA. I knew that just down the road, life was in session, and that was where I would go for my education, which included going to every concert I could afford. I saw the Talking Heads and the Police. I even went to New York with Donde to visit his family and see some shows. It was Donde’s birthday, so we dropped some acid and went to Tracks to see John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards, then to the Bottom Line to take in Arthur Blythe. To our amazement, Blythe had Kelvyn Bell, the great guitar player from Defunkt, playing with him. The show was incredible, and after it was over, I went to the bar and talked to Kelvyn about music and about his guitar playing and the records that I knew he’d played on. He was very happy to engage about music with this eighteen-year-old boy from Hollywood who was blazing on acid.

I was excited because Kelvyn was one of the people who had gotten me seriously into music. Donde had his Defunkt album, and when we’d have people over to the house, he’d put it on and say, “Everyone get around. Anthony’s going to dance,” and I’d bust some moves. Dancing became this playful competition for us, and at one point we all started going to dance contests. We’d show up at Osco’s, a hip punk-rock disco on La Cienega, and Hillel and Mike and I would enter the contest. We were off the map. Most people would break out conventional dance moves that you’d seen before, but we’d go out and invent steps.

Besides constantly playing records, Donde also had an inexpensive electric guitar and an amplifier. On the weekends when he wasn’t working at his dad’s telephone answering service, he would sit there and bang away on this electric guitar. He knew a few chords, but he had a really harsh tone, so when he’d start noodling around, I usually got out of the house. Still, one day Donde suggested that he and I and Mike should form a band. He’d play guitar, I’d sing, and Mike would play bass. Though it was more of a joke than anything else, we rehearsed a few times at his dad’s theater in Hollywood. The biggest contribution to this project was the name. Our friend Patrick English used to refer to his dick as a “spigot,” and I thought it was such a fantastic nickname that I became Spigot Blister. Donde named himself Skid Mark. I forget Mike’s name. We called ourselves Spigot Blister and the Chest Pimps, the chest pimps being the pimples that resided on Mike’s pubescent chest. Our rehearsals consisted mostly of making noise. In retrospect, it was more of an exercise in coming up with personas than coming up with music. We didn’t write any songs or even any lyrics, we just made some bad noise and screamed and banged on things. Eventually, we lost interest in the whole project.

But seeing Kelvyn Bell was inspirational for me, and I had a distinct feeling, even though I didn’t have a concrete means of achieving it, that whatever I ended up doing with my life, I wanted to make people feel the way this music was making me feel. The only problem was that I wasn’t a guitar player and I wasn’t a bass player and I wasn’t a drummer and I wasn’t a singer, I was a dancer and a party maniac, and I didn’t quite know how to parlay that into a job.

Every attempt that I’d made to even keep a job had turned into a dismal failure. Back at Fairfax, I went through a succession of shitty little jobs that highlighted how incapable I was of fitting into society. I worked at a collections agency, I worked for a country store, I even worked as an underage waiter at the Improv, but I got canned from each of these gigs. At UCLA, I was so desperate for money that I read a notice on the crappy-jobs-where-we-can-exploit-the-students-and-get-them-to-work-for-nothing board that a rich family in Hancock Park needed a dog walker for their two German shepherds. I didn’t mind taking the daily walk, and I didn’t mind hanging out with the dogs, but it was a pathetic situation to have to walk these dogs for all of twenty-five dollars a week.

Sometime during that first year, I couldn’t pay Donde rent anymore, so I had to leave. I went back to that same job board and found a notice that said, “Room and board for young male student, willing to participate in the caretaking of a nine-year-old boy. Single mother needs help taking the boy to and from school.” The woman lived in a small, quaint house in Beverlywood. She was a young mom who’d been jilted by some dude and was now alone with a so-called hyperactive, attention-deficit kid who was being dosed with Ritalin. She liked me right away. My responsibilities weren’t that great, basically making sure that the kid got to school in the morning and was picked up in the afternoon and served a snack.

For me it was ideal. I had a roof over my head, some food in my stomach, and a nice room where Haya would regularly visit and we would engage in some noisy lovemaking sessions. After a while, I bonded with the little guy. He might have been a touch mentally challenged, but he wasn’t hyperactive or suffering from a shortened attention span. When we were together, he wasn’t spastic or out of control. I had read that when adults took Ritalin, instead of having a calming effect, it would stimulate the postadolescent chemical balance. One night Hillel and Mike came over, and we decided to test those theories. Sure enough, in combination with a nice stolen bottle of Finnish vodka, we were off to the races. We ate handfuls of the Ritalin and became three drunk comets running around the house. The kid had a great time, and when his mom and her date came home a bit tipsy, she partied with us, never realizing that we were high on her son’s meds. Eventually, though, she fired me from the job.

I was almost history at school, too. From the first few weeks, I had felt totally alienated from campus life, so much of an outsider that I memorialized the feeling with a harsh, bizarre haircut. I decided to cut all of my hair really short except for the back, which was long, down to my shoulders. I wasn’t mimicking hockey players or people from Canada, it was just my idea of a punk-rock haircut. It was probably inspired by David Bowie and his Pinups era, but it wasn’t flaming red, and I didn’t have the standing-up thing in the front, I had bangs. To people at UCLA, it was abominable. Even my friends were freaked out by it. But Mike approved. He always said that one of my greatest accomplishments was that I had invented the mullet.

The height of my alienation from UCLA came later that year. Mike and Hillel and I had just finished one of our Canter’s dine-and-dashes. We were tripping on acid, wandering the streets. We passed an alleyway, and I stumbled on all these clothes that had been discarded by a bum. I immediately had an acidic moment of clarity and stripped naked and donned this oversize, strange, mismatched set of clothes. In a way, they were beautiful and regal; the pants even had some kind of silk iridescent pattern streaking down. Combined with the Spigot Blister haircut, I was quite a sight. I stayed up all night, and in the morning, I went to my classes wearing this mystical bum outfit. But I was still hungover from the acid, so I went out and lay down on the lawn.

Haya spotted me. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I’ve been up all night on acid, and I can’t hack my astronomy class right now,” I said.

“You look terrible,” she said. She was right. I looked terrible and I felt terrible, and that was the moment when I realized that I wasn’t going to cut it in this environment. What I didn’t realize then was that Haya and I were not going to make it, either.

I’d had two regrettable instances of infidelity during that year at UCLA. The first was with a well-endowed party girl. She kept coming by my house and wouldn’t leave me alone. Before we went out dancing one night, I made it clear to her that I was in a committed relationship. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we split a quaalude at some point that night and went back to her apartment. She started to make sexual advances, and I remember thinking, “I’m going to do this. I’m gonna sleep with this girl, and I’m going to regret it forever, but I can’t stop myself.”

She disrobed, I lost all control, and I slept with her. I had a great time and then felt just crushed, demoralized, and disgusted with myself afterward. You instinctively know that nothing will ever be the same, and you have to carry that knowledge around with you like a huge weight. The next time you see your girl, you can’t look at her straight in the eyes the same way you did for all those years.

The second infidelity was even worse. I was writing a paper for one of my classes and needed some help, and it turned out that Karen, Mike’s sister, had some expertise in that area. I’m sick to my stomach just thinking about this. Karen had a little house in Laurel Canyon, and Haya dropped me off there. Once again I was putting myself in a dangerous situation, because Karen was a wildcat. By the time I got there, she was already drunk on a bottle of wine, and she’d just eaten garlic soup, which didn’t exactly turn me on. But she was looped and insistent, and when you’re eighteen years old, it doesn’t take that much provoking to get you to a place where you can’t stop yourself. So we ended up having a very—for me—tormented sexual romp. A huge amount of guilt and shame and self-disappointment immediately followed.

I don’t mean to say that these episodes destroyed my relationship with Haya. I was able to encapsulate them in a protective wrapping of gray matter and understand that they meant nothing as far as the way I felt about Haya. But there was enough other baggage in our relationship that seemed to ultimately doom it. The major problem still was the conflict between her loyalty to her parents and her feelings toward me. Her parents’ disapproving voices were always in the back of her mind. And if anything, her parents’ attitudes got more inflexible as our relationship progressed. One night when I was still living in Donde’s house, Haya and I spent a few glorious hours together. We were under the impression that her parents thought she was somewhere else, so she was so happy. We were lying in bed, talking and laughing, and it started getting late, and then the phone rang.

I picked up the phone, hoping it was a call for Donde, but the male voice at the other end was as cold as ice and as serious as stone. It could have been an executioner.

“Anthony, put Haya on the phone.”

I looked at her, and she knew she had to take the call. She started listening to his tirade about how she was no good and how he would disown her, and she started crying. I tried to tell her that I loved her and that they didn’t have her best interests in mind, but she just sighed and said, “No, this is my family. I can’t turn my back on them.” And she went home to the people who were doing that to her.

By the end of that first year at UCLA, Haya and I had begun to have talks about what we were going to do. At one point, Hillel had even given me a chai, the Hebrew letter that signifies life, and I wore it on a chain around my neck. I guess this baffled Haya’s dad enough for him to call me into his house and ask about my background. I explained that I was mostly Lithuanian, and he liked that.