During weekend excursions, I became fascinated with the Starwood Club, a sweaty, gritty little night spot near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was a great place. There was no telling what you could hear there from night to night. Lots of music. The place was managed by a guy named David Forest. He was one of those wildly flamboyant gay guys who long ago had given up caring whether anybody knew he was gay or not. It didn’t matter in Hollywood. When I found out we shared a last name, I didn’t waste any time in coming up what I thought was a slick hustle. Somebody would ask me, “Do you know David?”
“David Forest?” I’d reply.
“Yeah, man. The cat who runs this place. Nice fella. Flamingly gay.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course I know him. He’s my uncle.” I’d flash my driver’s license and show my name. Nobody ever noticed that we spelled our names differently. The ruse caught on. People accepted it as fact that I was David Forest’s nephew. David even started to believe it. It gained me access. I never had to pay to get in the club. I had the magic pass. I saw so many free shows I lost count. I also gained access to David Forest’s inner circle and was allowed into his office, where he’d hold court with his boy toys. Of course there were drugs. David would ceremoniously break out a bag of cocaine and say, “Oh, this is beautiful, boys. Look at how it sparkles! That’s how you can tell if it’s good. It catches the light like crushed pearls!” His coterie of rough trade and pretty boys would giggle and squeal with dramatic euphoria while David drew out huge lines on his desk and then brought out a sterling silver straw set with a small blue star sapphire. It was a fascinating scene to my increasingly opened eyes. I was also intrigued when I learned that the Starwood, along with several other area clubs I frequented, was owned by a reputed drug kingpin named Eddie Nash, a shadowy Palestinian with a spooky and dark reputation for violence and mayhem who would later be implicated in the grotesque “Wonderland Murders,” which left four people beaten to the consistency of guava jelly in a Laurel Canyon duplex in 1981. To a kid from the OC, things like this were undeniably exciting. You could read about these events in the Los Angeles Times, but to walk the same streets as the people you read about was a wholly different experience. I loved it. I set my brain to figuring a way to move to the big city.
The first step was to get out of Orange County. To keep the Social Security money flowing, I transferred to Los Angeles City College in Hollywood. The second step was to find a place to live, and I found a great spot, one with a serious rock-music pedigree. Three blocks east of Main Street on Fifth Street downtown was a building that had a café and bar on the ground floor called the Hard Rock. It wasn’t the fancy, upscale chain, but the place that inspired it: a wino-infested hole in the wall that had been featured on the back cover of the Doors’ Morrison Hotel album. Upstairs was a huge loft that took up the entire third floor. It cost $600 a month, but it was a lot of space … and it was over a place the Doors had made famous! I couldn’t believe it. I had learned my lesson about rent in Huntington Beach, so I enlisted some roommates. My friend Dave Hansen had a brother, a skinny kid named Chris who knew his way around the fretboard of a guitar. His punk rock name was, humorously, Chris Handsome. He came aboard along with his girlfriend, Lora Jansen, and my girl, Sheree La Puma. We were all under the influence of the punk scene, so we formed a band. It seemed like the right move. Lora played drums, Sheree handled keyboards, Chris and I played guitar, and I also sang. We weren’t a standard rock group. We weren’t even a standard punk band. We were an art-noise band. I had always had the ambition to play music, but I was convinced that it would have to be something avant-garde and not mainstream because I thought of myself as a weird-looking person and my chops on the guitar were average at best. I would never be a Teen Beat magazine cover boy like Shaun Cassidy. I’d never even be like the Popsicles and get featured on the inside of Teen Beat. It wasn’t until I saw the Replacements do a show in 1983 that I thought, Holy fuck! Really weird-looking, unattractive people can play rock music! It was a revelation, but until then, I was firmly committed to noise rock. We managed to book a few gigs at Al’s Bar, a small space on the ground floor of the American Hotel, a transient flophouse, that became known for hosting a lot of up-and-coming punk bands.
Despite the fun and the excitement of playing in a group, I had one primary mission: to keep the cash coming in. And the way to do that was to stay in school. Any school. It didn’t really matter. Unlike Chris, who had real academic goals, I only cared about that monthly check, so I drank, did crystal
