This is like the twilight of the gods, I thought. I live in a fan’s house and I play concerts in the living room. Big James loved it. “The guy from Thelonious Monster stays at my house!” he’d bellow. “Fuck yeah!”
It was a comedown. A big one. In 1993, Thelonious Monster had played before tens of thousands of screaming, can’t-get-enough rock music fans, and now here I was croaking out my songs in front of a crowd of tens made up of a bunch of slack-jawed goobers and voyeuristic gawkers who probably cringed at what they saw. If they remembered the old Bob, this was his comeuppance. It felt like some cruel cosmic payback for some transgression I couldn’t even remember. What could I have done to deserve this? I could see the writing on the wall, the signpost up ahead, the “No Exit” warning. Things were headed toward an ugly, spectacular crash on the dead-end street of my life.
REDEMPTION
On February 3, 1996—the thirty-seventh anniversary of the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens in a rock-and-roll plane crash—I found myself on rain-slicked city streets in front of Hollywood Moguls, a then-popular nightclub with a façade that resembled, with no weak sense of irony, a decrepit tin toolshed. Traffic lights and headlamps shined on the pebbled mirror of wet asphalt and a cold, sickly rainbow of red, green, yellow, and white reflected back toward a starless sky. The holidays were a month past and although the rest of the city had fallen back into its routine, you couldn’t have guessed from the boisterous club-goers who clogged the sidewalk and bunched up at the door. With a certain crowd, the festivities never ended. And here I was, broke, hungry, down on my luck, but with a firm grip on the invisible keys to every door of the city’s underground as well as its celebrity haunts. I was on the hunt for a soft touch. This was a pattern I had established whenever money got tight, and it was tighter than a firmly clenched fist at the moment. I knew where everybody hung out, and with a little luck, I wouldn’t have to make too many stops before I could spot a friendly face who would let me borrow some cash. Credit cards and checks are worthless currency when you want to buy drugs, and I needed something quick.
Since my earliest days on the club scene, I’d known how to get in a door. I never paid a cover charge and I never waited in line. Tonight was no different. I pushed my way to the front of the line and the doorman recognized me. We exchanged nods.
“Go on in, Bob,” said the huge gorilla who guarded the gate.
“I don’t think I’ll be here long,” I told him, speaking the plain truth as I squeezed between him and the wall.
Inside the club were knots of party people who crowded the floor and the bar. The electronic music pummeled me and I could feel the vibrations from the subwoofers rattle my guts. In my current condition, it wasn’t a pleasant sensation. I felt like I might hurl whatever I had stored in there, although it couldn’t have been much since I had hardly eaten over the past week. I headed for the VIP area and got past the red velvet rope. I did a quick scan and noticed my friend Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction sitting in a corner. Dope-sick and covered with a thin sheen of sweat, I struck up a conversation with him and, with little time to waste, hit him up.
“Uh, say, man, do you think you could let me borrow maybe thirty or forty bucks?” I asked.
Perry was no fool. I could tell right away that he knew what was up and why I needed quick cash, but he showed some mercy and reached into a pocket and said, “I only have hundreds, Bob. Here, take this.” He handed me a crisp note. I ignored the sad—maybe disgusted—look on his face and I snatched the bill with the quickness of a rattlesnake strike.
“Thanks, Perry. I’ll get you back on this real soon.” I could tell that as soon as my fingers touched that money, he had written it off as gone for good. He was probably right. I didn’t have time to dwell on it or even bother to make small talk with my savior. “Uh, I have to run, man,” I said, and I quickly made it out to the street, where I had parked a new Ford Escort wagon. It belonged to a chick named Sandy, who was the girlfriend of an out-of-town drug dealer. I had told her I only needed it for an hour and here I had already been gone for three. Drug time is different from any other time you’ll ever know. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast, but it never, ever has any relationship to actual minutes on a clock. I fumbled the keys with locked-up fingers and slid behind the steering wheel. The Escort’s little four-banger chugged to life and I pulled away from the curb as fast as I could. There was no time to waste and the money I had gotten from Perry was my passport to a better place. But before I got there, I had to travel through purgatory. I drove east on wet surface streets to the intersection of Seventh and Alvarado, just west of downtown.
This was MacArthur Park, a place made famous by songwriter Jimmy Webb in his odd orchestral elegy to the city. The line “someone left the cake out in the rain” still has the power to confuse listeners, but anyone who has
