Mike was only gone for half an hour when he came back to Bob’s house ashen white. His friend had taken him to a drive-in southern-fried-chicken joint, and just as Mike was about to bite down on his first piece of solid food in days the guy asked if he could give him a blow job. Mike made the man take him right back to the house while his friend cursed him all the way home.
“He called me a cock teaser,” Mike said, astonished at the thought. “Can you imagine that?”
Dick and Bob Roberts listened to this and roared with laughter. All of us were wide-eyed suburban innocents, and we were baffled as to why Dick and Bob thought it was so funny. We found out the next night. Mike, who was sleeping in the closet because there was no room in the living room on the floor, began to raise hell about why Dick was getting to sleep in the master bedroom in a real bed, while Mike, who was a full-fledged member of the group, had to sleep on the floor of the closet. He made quite a stink about trading sleeping space for a few hours, and Dick looked worried for the first time.
It must have been a terrible night for Dick. One by one he took us into the bedroom and told us he was gay and that the only reason we had a roof over our heads was because he was fucking Bob Roberts. It was a horrifying thing to learn about a close friend for an unsophisticated bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year olds. It was like Dick had told us he had leukemia. Dennis was baffled. He knew it was earthshaking consequences, but he really didn’t know what it meant that Dick was “gay.”
It was a touchy time for everyone. Did he really suck on cocks? we all wanted to know. Up the ass? We were all very tense until I figured what the hell, we were friends and he never came on to any of us, and I started making terrible jokes about it. “I feel a little gay myself,” and that kind of thing. As much as we tried to take it in our stride, it was never forgotten. It created a break between the band and Dick. It set up a barrier of fear, and as hard as we tried we just couldn’t chalk it up as another of those strange things that happened in LA. What if that kind of thing happened to us?
At the night we escaped the claustrophobia of Bob Roberts’ house by walking up and down the Strip, around the record stores and headshops, trying to score chicks. Three hot months passed at Bob Roberts’ house. I suppose that if we could have afforded it, we would have used drugs to pass the time, but it was simply too expensive for us to get into. I smoked a couple of joints, but I didn’t like getting stoned. It made me nervous. Yet it was impossible to face the months of future shock without a buffer. Everything went so fast, we all grew so quickly, that we needed lubrication to keep on going. I was twenty years old, and I never in my life tasted alcohol. The first time I took a drink, I chugged on beer out of sheer terror. It was quite an evening, my first glimpse of the weird LA scene. The group and I were standing in a psychedelic headshop across the Boulevard from Tower Records, when an LA surfer waif, one of those seventeen-year-old girls with sunstriped blond hair and a plastic surgeon-manufactured pug nose, asked if I was a singer. Not that she had seen me anywhere, but she said that I looked like I was a singer in a rock and roll band. She invited the five of us up to a party on Sunset Plaza Drive where a film crew from the University of Southern California was filming a documentary about hippies.
We walked up the hill with her to a white stucco house. As soon as we got through the front door the chick disappeared up a staircase. The house was unfurnished, wood floors and large windows overlooking the city. There was a table made out of a door turned on it’s side resting on four bricks and a dozen pillows thrown about the room. There were also kittens, at least twenty-five of them, sleeping, crawling, pissing on the floor. In the corner, with her head resting on one of the pillows and her body covered with sleeping kittens, was a little girl. I stood there for a long time waiting for the surfer waif to return from upstairs, and when she didn’t come back I sat down on a pillow next to the sleeping girl and looked out of the window at the city below. The other guys went upstairs to explore the house.
A half an hour must have passed when the front door opened and a tall, dirty-looking hippie came in. He walked over to the sleeping girl, kneeled down and kissed her on the cheek. She didn’t move. He gently rolled her over on her back, and I even helped. Then he kissed her on the lips. I thought “What the fuck’s going on here? What is this?” The girl groaned with pleasure. He unbuttoned the top of her jeans and as he worked her pants down around her hips she smiled in her sleep, caressing the kittens on her chest. I watched in disbelief as the guy leaned over and gave her head. She began to moan rhythmically in her sleep, although I doubted she could have slept through all that cunt lapping. When the guy came up for a breath his mustache was glistening wet and he motioned for me to take a turn. I whispered, “No thanks,” and went upstairs to find the band and then get the hell out of there.
The other guys were sitting in an empty bedroom watching a rolling TV screen with the sound turned off. There was a pile of empty beer cans lying on the floor next to them and a large bowl of grayish sugar cubes. The surfer waif pushed the bowl towards me and said, “Have some, baby.”
“What are they?”
“Just some lousy Watts acid.”
This all sounded like code to me, and I felt so intimidated by the cunnilingus episode downstairs that I grabbed a can of beer, held it in my paw and watched the blank TV screen with the rest of the group and the girl, who were obviously seeing a program I was not.
After I chugged the first can of beer I was drunk, and midway through my second can I started feeling sick and decided to walk down the hill in the fresh air and go home. By that time my friend was talking to herself in the corner of the room. Somebody who walked by the bedroom actually recognized me from the Hullabaloo Club, and I went downstairs to find the party had started. I never saw the girl and the cunt lapper again.
When the other guys got back to Bob’s house I was still pretty ripped. Dennis thought I was faking it, but just before my head seemed to cave in and somebody shut off the sound I threw up all over Glen and passed out.
The next morning instead of being angry with me Glen was thrilled. He had the beginnings of a new drinking partner. He assured me that the only thing to do for a hangover was to have another beer. We scraped together half a buck and went to the store to get some for breakfast. From that time on I was never without a can of beer in my hand.
My body didn’t adjust easily to the sudden consumption of booze and to tell you the truth I didn’t exactly ease myself into it. I went from teetotaler to binger. Beer all day and then cheap wine at night. Getting drunk became a part of my life. I’d collect empty pop bottles from all over Evil Hill and bring them in for deposit money. Then Glen and I would guzzle a fifty-cent bottle of Ripple Peg and Pink wine — warm — and run up a hill quick to hyperventilate and get stoned. If you ask me Peg and Pink wine had never seen a grape. They must make the stuff in a cauldron. Any stomach that can take as much of that stuff as we drank and still continue to function has to be made out of cast iron. Glen and I were a medical Ripley’s Believe It or Not. People who knew us back in those days would say, “Are you two guys still alive?”
Glen, by the way, had fucked Merry Cornwall, and the magic labia was opening for us. Word was we would be playing at the Cheetah soon. We were getting desperate for money and nothing had changed except that Bob moved out of his house. I don’t know how Dick managed to arrange it, but one morning Bob moved all his belongings into another apartment in a house next door and told us to take our time but to find another place.
The Cheetah sat on the tip of the Santa Monica Pier, part of the Pacific Ocean Palisades Amusement Park. A few years before it had been the Aragon Ballroom, a dancing emporium where all the big bands had entertained people in ball gowns and tuxedos. Lawrence Welk held court there for years. The new owners covered the massive place with gleaming chrome and mirrored ceilings and walls that bounced off three mirrored stages.
Out on the middle of the dance floor, which held three thousand wriggling bodies, there were giant chrome mushroom pedestals you could climb and dance on. I always felt like we were on a giant set from a space movie at the Cheetah. There were webs of lights blinking and popping. When the light crew threw the Cheetah into “full strobe” effect you couldn’t walk in a straight line in there. Just being inside was the closest I ever got to taking a psychedelic.
Merry Cornwall asked us to audition, again, on a Sunday afternoon. For several months Merry had been trying to convince us to move into a house with her, but I didn’t want to end up in another hippie crash pad with Merry inviting half the homeless kids of LA home with her. It was interesting how Merry was very involved in the hippie love movement and at the same time could be a no-bullshit businesswoman at the club. I thought of her as the hooker with a heart of gold. She had three kids and had never been married. She had no idea who the fathers were — just another faceless fuck on a series of one-night stands.
But in business and at the club she was responsible and straight. She wanted to manage us and promised to get us a recording contract, which Dick Christian wasn’t happy about. We had to get out of Bob Roberts’ house any day, and we took Merry up on her offer of finding us all places to live (with our salaries from the Cheetah as
