Category Archives: Style

Thirty years ago

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Thirty years ago. That’s Edwin Letcher and Edward Huerta of Moist and Meaty chatting up a rock star storm, though considering Edwin’s street garb I don’t think M&M were playing that night. Photo probably by Don Butler. Al’s Bar maybe?  I look like a bouncer. I wasn’t, but then I always looked like a bouncer. This was back when I invariably seemed to be the tallest, strongest, and gnarliest dude in a room full of ill fed bohemians and fucked up punk rockers. Pretty punkettes would ask me to walk them to their cars in the crackhead neighborhoods our hangs were always in.

That’s Dolph Lundgren’s jacket I have on. A friend was working a shoot and realized he had two matching jackets so she copped that one for me. I wore it to death. Then I switched to blazers. Before then I was strictly the flannel tied around the waist kinda guy, sort of the uniform of the day, though I believe only Mike Watt fans sport that fashion these days. Back then I could tie a long sleeved shirt around my waist.

Before then I used show up at the crazy clubs to watch berserk bands while wearing an outrageously hot pink shirt and telling people to fuck off. The chicks dug it but the dudes would back off, bewildered, a big giant scary guy who might hurt them in the queerest shirt they had ever seen. Punk rock, baby. Reagan was president, fuck the world.

Doubtless later the same night after this photo was snapped everyone piled into our little pad off of Sunset in Silverlake. We had loud crazy parties till nearly sun-up almost every weekend, people making a mad dash for the liquor stores before 2 a.m. and then coming to our place to wake up the neighbors. Thirty people crammed in a backyard bungalow, laughing and yelling and high as kites, the music–I had a hundreds of incredibly loud and/or weird records then–roaring incessantly. On a good weekend we had parties on both Friday and Saturday. I remember one weekend people leaping off the roof into the hedges. I have no idea why. After the people finally staggered home we’d screw loudly in whatever darkness remained. Oh, we were the perfect neighbors.

We threw hundreds of parties in our hosting career. Some spontaneous, some planned, none nice. I would so hate living now next to us then.

If I ever give up writing and turn to scanning, I have thousands of pictures from those days. There are ten photo albums–remember those?–waiting in analog silence above my record collection. Though they are just a couple arm lengths away, they seem a million miles from these quick and easy electrons I’m staring at now.

Brick, Edwin, Ed Huerta c. 1987

Edwin in his beloved green corduroy jacket with Dukie Flyswatter’s fake blood on it, Ed Huerta looking eerily like a stoned version of his current unstoned self, and me probably unsmiling because I had had a front tooth yanked and it made me look like a hockey player until they could replace it. The look did fit the jacket, though.

Phyllis Diller impersonator

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We had a Phyllis Diller impersonator crash one of our parties once. No idea who was. He got super stoned and stopped impersonating Phyllis Diller and was just a guy in a frumpy dress and boa staring into space.

People kept asking me who’s the guy in the dress. I said he’s a celebrity impersonator. Who’s he impersonating? Phyllis Diller. Phyllis Diller? But Phyllis Diller is funny, they said, and all that guy is doing is sitting there. He’s stoned, I said. Phyllis Diller smokes pot? I couldn’t answer. I have no idea if Phyllis Diller smoked pot. I just found recently out she played the piano. I doubt the celebrity impersonator played piano, though you never know, this is Hollywood.

Well, this is Silver Lake, actually, part of Greater Hollywood. A suburb of Hollywood, on Hollywood’s eastside. East Hollywood remains as it has always been, working class, the opposite of its glitzy westside opposite. But just beyond East Hollywood were Los Feliz, full of movie stars, and Silver Lake, full of character actors and gay bars. It was in a Los Feliz rock’n’roll bar on Hollywood Blvd that an old queen in eye make up and billowing floral print fell onto the stool next to me and told us all the story of his life, how he’d been raised just down the street by Tallulah Bankhead, and what a wonderful, mad, sodden old lust bucket she’d been and how he still missed her every day, and then surprised me with a kiss on the mouth and departed. Sorry about that, the bartender said. I shrugged. It’s Hollywood. Not long afterward a bunch of us were hanging out in a living room after a raucous weekend at the Sunset Junction Street Fair. Someone fired up a joint. Is that pot I smell? came a loud voice, and a drag queen flounced through the door. Someone handed her the joint and she took a deep hit and exploded in giggles and sass. She used to be a dancer, or do wardrobe, or make up, I can’t remember, and there were some hysterical Chaka Khan stories. She loved us girls, the drag queen said. He took a few more hits off the joint and fled in the night, thanking us for the hospitality. Never saw her (well, him) again. You know, I could go on with drag queen stories. I never knew I had so many. That’s Silver Lake. Or was. They’re few and far between now. I can’t remember the last time I saw a guy in a dress, actually. I have no idea if they’re congregating somewhere else or if they’re a dying species.

Phyllis Diller left after a couple hours. Had a great time, he said. He took the stairs a little uneasily, but made it to the bottom and wobbled off into the night. He left his boa. I’d have returned it to him, but there was no internet then. Nowadays you can google Phyllis Diller impersonators and there he’d be, available for parties and bar mitzvahs. Back then they just disappeared, stoned, into the night.

Beads

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It was a Fat Tuesday at Farmer’s Market. Mardi Gras. There was a good New Orleans band doing funk, zydeco, etc and the people were drinking too much and throwing beads. The crowd was relatively tame this year and the drunkenness was toned down and I saw less wanton behavior…beads were being handed out but no one had to show anything to get them. Ordinarily that is a requirement. Well, it’s not a requirement, but of course some of the women pretend it is. Even some men pretend it is. Most are drunk. Not all of them, though. Many are quite sober, lifting their tee shirts and gracefully catching the beads. Some have a few strings. Others are burdened down by a weight of beads, some very expensive looking. That’s a lot of flashed tits, hours and hours worth. I wonder about those sober ones, the ones who flash and catch, flash and catch with such admirable skill. I wonder what they do for a living. Are they teachers, secretaries? Lawyers? Were they in the office just a few hours ago? We’re they sitting in dull meetings answering dull questions and thinking about beads?

A couple ladies stood before me. Tomorrow they’d be teaching Sunday School. Today they were dripping beads. The drunken male chorus demanded their tits. The Sunday school teachers obliged. Beads fell like rain. Tomorrow would be Lent, but tonight is about laughter and drinking and venal sin. There will be plenty of time for confession later. They’ll be heartily sorry for having offended Thee. They’ll say it over and over, a dozen times over. The more beads, the more times. A string of Acts of Contritions is worth its weight in beads.

Flung

Flung

Killer shoes

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(Many years ago….) 

Went to a party last night. A gloriously crazed one just down the street with wild music spun, drunken Germans spinning, inadvertently cracked skulls, blood, and a rather wanton little thing from Uzbekistan. She passed me a joint. I had never smoked dope with an Uzbek before. I took a hit, my head spun, and I laughed. She laughed. She said I was a very big man. I said she was a very pretty lady. We laughed again. Drank bubbly and talked about the weather. Inside the music roared and the hostess was bleeding all over everything. Out here was a night breeze and the sound of our laughter. Uzbeks are just like regular people, only drunker and with killer shoes.

If you are the drop dead gorgeous mega-rich machiavellian daughter of the dictator of Uzbekistan nobody will tell you how stupid your shoes are. Especially at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s also amazing what pops up when you google “Uzbek footware”.

Ozzy Osbourne’s hair

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I fell on my face in Fresno at a very tender age, and there’s a jagged scar where the middle of a mustache ought to be. Any chance I had at a mustache in college were ruined. I know, I tried. A big kid with a wisp of a mustache. Sad. I was doubly afflicted, actually, as my magnificent widow’s peak, long since lost, kept me from parting my long hair down the middle to look like the guy on the cover of Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4.  A record I never owned, actually, but it was for sale at the local Ralph’s and every time I was sent to the store to buy milk or Hamburger Helper there was Ozzy Osbourne flashing his inane peace signs from the LP display rack, his hair parted with ying and yang perfection. With my gap where a mustache middle should be and the part in my hair coming to grief on that widow’s peak, a hippie I would never be. Just as well. Punk rock happened and hair became way short and mustaches unheard of and all that psychic follicle sturm und drang of my teen years became moot and forgotten.

Or so I remembered it. But recently I just saw Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 in a record bin and realized, to my astonishment, that Ozzy’s hair was not parted down the middle. Not at all. It’s just sort of a squiggly unwashed mess, what you can see of it at all. I must have been thinking of some other rock star, one with perfectly bisected hair, and gotten him confused over the years with Ozzy Osbourne. I stared at the cover, blinking, realizing that my entire life, from teenhood to the waning daze of middle age, had been spent under the impression that Ozzy’s hair was parted iconically down the middle on the cover of that album. I can still see him now, in fact, his hair parted perfectly, gazing at me in line at Ralphs from the front of that album, waving his peace signs and looking so cool that all the absolutely hottest chicks in school–the ones with their skin tight ass-patched jeans who smelled like pot and patchouli and wore no underwear even on the coldest days–would have been his sex slaves. The same chicks who never even knew I existed despite the fact that I sat next to them in English class. And now I see how wrong I was (about Ozzy’s hair, I mean.) How wrong we can be our whole lives. Memory is a cruel thing, it plays tricks, it lies. It alters the course of our lives, turning failed hippies into punk rockers. But it’s too late to change now, my life has been lived and this essay written, and unless some of you pull out that album and look for yourself, you’ll never know the difference.

Pink Hat

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A few summers ago it was a very hot day at the Playboy Jazz Festival and I had snuck into the press room to cool off in delicious air conditioned comfort and have an ice cold beer. Suddenly there was a rush of reporters and activity and it was time for Hugh Hefner’s press conference. He gives an impressive performance every time, but I’ve seen too many and slipped away to another corner of the room, found a table and sat and relaxed.  Suddenly I was surrounded by photographers and video crews. Two gorgeous, sweaty babes appeared two feet away. One was tallish and gorgeous and young and confused, the other was little and gorgeous and came off dumb. Older looking. Experienced. The idiot reporters asked all kinds of inane questions. The younger one tried to answer them seriously, the poor thing. Finally one asked the little one about the future of jazz. She batted her eyes and started talking about her new hat. It was a huge cowgirl thing, big and floppy and pink and very expensive looking. She pushed it back and posed. Posed again. And again. The cameras went mad. End of press conference.

You can do amazing things with a pink hat.

The big pink hat.