Scar Tissue (13 page)
“Did you know that before World War Two, ten percent of the population of Lithuania was Jewish?” he said.
Then he went to his library and got some Lithuanian genealogy books out and desperately tried to find out what the chances were that I had some connection to a Jewish bloodline. I humored him, but I knew it was a lost cause.
So Haya and I were having these talks, and they were getting serious and sad, because she was driven in school and under the domination of her family, but we were madly in love with each other. The stress of college and her unique family dynamic was taking a toll on our sex life.
I was terribly hurt and confused, and my ego and sexual confidence started ebbing.
Little by little, our relationship was disintegrating, not in an immature way but in a profound way, when we both quietly understood that our worlds might be too disparate and there might not be a future for us. We wound up having our final talk at Hillel’s house, which had become a sanctuary for me during that unmanageable year. Hillel gave us his room, and Haya and I looked at each other and said, “You know, this really isn’t going to work.” Then we lay there in Hillel’s bed, holding each other tight and crying for what seemed like hours because we both knew that this great love was coming to an end.
I never made the decision to quit UCLA at the end of my first year. My classes were over, and once again I went to that job board, but this time I found something really interesting. It was a job as a jack-of-all-trades for a graphic arts film company, and they were paying ten dollars an hour, which was way over the minimum wage. The company had compact office space on La Brea. The offices were modern and high-tech, and the owner of the company, David, was very manicured, very pristine-looking, and clearly gay. Just by observing, I could tell that he ran a tight, efficient ship. My interview went well (I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I was an eighteen-year-old male), and I started work the next day.
My job consisted mostly of running film to the developers, being in charge of the petty cash, and doing whatever else David wanted. This was one of the first companies to specialize in graphic animations for commercials and network logos. David had gotten in on the ground floor of computer animation and was making a fortune. Even though I was just a runner, he took a shine to me and began to explain these complex graphic applications. It wasn’t a sexual thing; from day one we had open hetero-homo discussions about the desirability of men versus women. Even though I was the embodiment of the type of boy he was constantly searching for, he never sexually harassed me or made me feel uncomfortable in the workplace.
It didn’t take me long to apply my lifelong skill of taking advantage of situations, so when he sent me out to buy personal things for his house, such as a new quilt, I’d usually order two of the same item and keep one for myself. No one ever seemed to notice, and since he had a house in the hills and a Ferrari and a Porsche Carrera, I didn’t think he’d miss it. He must have seen me much more for what I was and much less for what I thought I was getting away with, because he was no dummy, but he let me slide.
To me it was summer vacation, and I was making money faster than I could spend it. Mike was working at an animal hospital, and our friend Johnny Karson, who used to hang out with Haya in junior high school, had a job at Warner Bros. For years Mike and I had dreamed of getting our own place in Hollywood, so the three of us decided to pool our resources and rent a nice little house right near the Formosa Café. We settled into the house, but three weeks later, an even nicer house down the block went up for rent. It had a larger yard, and it was a couple of hundred dollars a month cheaper. So we jumped ship, battled to get our security deposit back, and moved down the road.
Pretty soon it was evident that JK was the odd man out, since he had a nine-to-five life working at Warner’s. Mike and I didn’t let our jobs get in the way of our partying, which, even at the first house, consisted of shooting a lot of cocaine. We’d blast a B-side song by the Police called “Fall Out,” and then Mike and I would shoot the coke and run around the house in a temporary state of euphoric mega-bliss. We’d raise our arm high in the air to stop the bleeding and start rhapsodizing, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, this is a good one, this is the big one, this might be too much, oh no, it’s not too much, I’m good, I’m good, oh this is incredible,” and then we’d sing along with the song. One rather normal, non-coke-shooting citizen would have to deal with these two madmen who were paying more attention to their own world than the outside world.
When JK planned to go away skiing at Mammoth for a few days, Mike and Hillel and I decided to have the party to end all parties. Mike and I went on a booze-stealing binge and stocked the house. Then we emptied all the furniture out of the house so there’d be more room for dancing. Hillel helped us distribute flyers, and I duct-taped huge letters to the living room floor that spelled out
DANCE
.
Mike had been squirreling away these colorful pills from the animal hospital, not to consume them but as souvenirs. We had a chest-high shallow mantel that went all the way around the house, so we alternated patterns of blue and yellow and red pills along the mantel, creating a kind of Japanese rock-garden effect.
Then the hordes arrived. The booze started flowing, and the music was pumping and people were dancing and disappearing into bedrooms and going off in the bushes, and it became the best party we’d ever gone to, let alone thrown. As the night wore on, everyone started consuming the pills, not realizing that they were for doggie constipation or feline psychosis or whatever.
At some point, the house took on a life of its own, as if its energy was pulsating out of the windows into the world. We passed out sometime early the next morning, and when we came to, Mike and I looked around the place. It was a war zone. The floors were covered in an inch of goop; there were food and crushed pills and vomit and empty beer bottles and cigarette butts and general debris everywhere. I knew JK was coming home that night, so I got out some mops, a bucket, water, and soap and went around that house the entire day and cleaned every nook and cranny. By the time I was done, it looked like no one had ever come over.
Even though I was able to hold down my job at the graphics company, I had definitely become a cocaine addict. We had a fairly constant supply, because both Mike and I were making money, and he was able to supplement what we bought by trading bass lessons for coke from some dealer in Topanga Canyon. I’d look forward to the days he taught, because as soon as that lesson was finished, we’d be shooting the cocaine. There was never enough to go on for more than an hour or so, but I had a real need to get those drugs in me. The psychological addiction was in full effect. I wasn’t physically weak, but psychologically, I wanted cocaine constantly.
My burgeoning use wound up exploding into some episodes of full-blown cocaine psychosis. One time I got ahold of a lot of coke and shot it by myself all through the night and into the next day. I was alone in my bedroom and became convinced that someone had broken into the house in broad daylight. Then I started having visual hallucinations of this intruder going through the house. I’d rush into room after room, convinced that he had jumped out of the window right before I got into that room. So I thought, “Okay, I know how to deal with this.” I climbed up onto the roof of the house, holding an old car tire, thinking that I’d lure the guy out and then throw the tire at him so that it would perfectly donut him and immobilize him, like in a cartoon. Luckily, Mike came home and talked me into coming down.
It wasn’t only coke that I was abusing. Around this time, I met a punk-rock girl who asked me why I would shoot cocaine when, for twenty dollars, I could shoot speed and be high for two days. I ended up spending a night with her, shooting speed and getting crazy high. Every time I took speed or coke or even a speedball, something would flip inside my head, and no matter what I was doing or who I was with, I’d grab a pencil or a marker or some paint and I’d start drawing on paper or cardboard or people’s walls, whatever. I just had to draw the minute those drugs hit me. And if I wasn’t drawing, I was having sex.
During that summer of 1981, heroin hadn’t become prominent on the drug scene. I remember being at Al’s Bar downtown with Mike and seeing a whole table of young punk rockers who were nodding out, and thinking that didn’t look like too much fun. But there was another voice in the back of my mind that had been speaking to me every now and then. It said, “You’ve gotta find some of that heroin again. That’s the drug that people are afraid of, so it’s got to be the best drug.” I wasn’t looking back fondly on my fourteen-year-old’s experience with that one line of China White; I was more into the idea of taking a truly subversive drug.
One day a new guy came to work. He looked like a rockabilly singer, with a black pompadour, big black Roy Orbison shades, super-pale skin, and a bizarre demeanor. I asked my coworker Bill what was up with that guy.
“That’s the way you look when you do heroin,” he said.
Bingo. Here was my connection to the world of heroin.
After a few days, I approached the guy and said, “Can you get me some of that damn heroin?” He said, “Absolutely, absolutely.” Junkies always want to get new guys drugs because they can rip them off. So we made plans to do the heroin that night at my house. I was so excited that I rushed home and told Mike and JK that I was going to shoot heroin that night.
“What? You can’t shoot heroin. You’ll die,” they cautioned. I told them that this guy had shot it for a while, and they were so intrigued that we decided they should watch me shoot up.
That night the guy came over and was taken aback to see an audience sitting on chairs around the kitchen table. But he set up the spoons and went through the whole ritual of cooking up this Persian dope, which I’d never seen before. Because it was oil-based, he needed a lemon to cook it up with. First he fixed himself and got a little stoned, and then he said, “It’s your turn.” He fixed up the rig, and it was brown. I’d never shot up anything that was brown before. Everyone was on pins and needles, wondering if I was going to die. I shot up but didn’t feel much. I asked him for some more, and he said okay, but this would be the end of the dope. He gave me another shot, and still there was no great dreamy go-sink-into-the-couch-and-sleep-for-twelve-hours opium rush. Later I found out that the dope he scored was pretty weak. It was a decidedly underwhelming high, and it didn’t light my fire or inspire me to go searching out a heroin connection. It was a waste of money, and the grand spectacle of doing it in front of my friends fizzled out, and everyone left.
By the fall of 1981, even though I hadn’t made a conscious decision, I was not a UCLA student anymore. School didn’t fit into this raging, drugging-clubbing lifestyle I was leading. I certainly didn’t look like a student. I had traded in my already weird Spigot Blister haircut for a flattop. I had been seeing flattops around the club scene, and I thought they looked cool, so I went down to Bulgarian Bud’s Flattops on Melrose Avenue, and for four bucks they shaved off all the hair on the sides and back of my head and left a half inch of hair standing straight up on top of my head. When I did that, it was like I had totally erased all my ties to my past. Now I was a crazy, out-of-control punk rocker. When I showed up for work the next day, David was amazed. “Oh my God, you’ve cut off all your hair,” he said.
Just then a Devo song came on the radio, and I turned it all the way up and started dancing all over the office.
“That’s a very violent style of dancing,” he fretted. But I was off and running into my new identity.
The whole time I was working, I was dipping into the petty-cash box, getting more and more into shooting cocaine, and drinking lots of alcohol and taking lots of pills. I didn’t see it happening, but the wheels were falling off of me. I didn’t care about work, I didn’t care about my health, I didn’t care about responsibilities like paying rent, I was just on a runaway train ride. The horribly ironic cosmic trick of drug addiction is that drugs are a lot of fun when you first start using them, but by the time the consequences manifest themselves, you’re no longer in a position to say, “Whoa, gotta stop that.” You’ve lost that ability, and you’ve created this pattern of conditioning and reinforcement. It’s never something for nothing when drugs are involved.
After I called in sick one too many times, David fired me. I felt really sad that I had let him down. I was also sad that the goose laying the golden eggs was gone. Then I got more bad news. It seemed that JK had brought a copy of the party flyer we had printed up to our landlord. He told him that we had distributed the flyers in record stores on Melrose and had a wild party that endangered the house. Meanwhile, JK had lined up two other friends to move in. By the time his eviction procedure worked, we were ready to go. Our lives had begun to self-destruct to the point where we couldn’t have paid rent regularly.
Before we left the house, I did manage to scrape together some money and buy myself a used car. I had been using a Capri that Steve and Peggy gave me as a high school graduation present. I never maintained it, so for the last year, it had no muffler and zero brakes. I’d routinely hit the curb with my wheels when I wanted to stop. One morning the car just ceased, and when I checked the oil, it was bone dry. The whole engine had turned to stone, so I said good-bye to my car, thanked it for a couple of years of faithful, accident-free service, and left it on the street. I picked up a copy of
The Recycler
and found a beautiful ’62 T-Bird for six hundred dollars. It was big and bad and, soon enough, would become a mobile bedroom for me.
For some reason, it didn’t faze us when Mike and I found ourselves out on the street. The whole concept of sleeping didn’t make much sense to us then. There were all these new clubs opening and a whole post-punk scene developing in Hollywood. There was the Lasa Club and the Zero One after-hours bar and the CASH Club, which stood for Creative Artist Space of Hollywood. We’d end up at these places because we were out all night, every night, going with this invisible flow, following the party.
