It was Christmas when I stumbled upon some interesting family history. I was twelve years old and I had been staying with Jane and Larry in Whittier, and we had all gone to one of my uncles’ house to celebrate the holidays. It just sort of slipped out. My uncle was sitting at the bar in his living room and had tippled maybe a little too much. He was talkative. He put a hand on my shoulder and asked, “So, you’ve been staying with your auntie Jane, huh?”
How drunk is this guy?
I wondered. I answered back, “She’s not my aunt. She’s my sister.” I thought I had scored some points with that response, but then I noticed a tense silence had fallen on the room and I saw the looks everybody was shooting my uncle. I knew something was up. Something I wasn’t part of or supposed to know. “Okay, so what’s going on?” I demanded.
Jane and Nancy hustled me into the bathroom to have a little talk. The three of us huddled in there for an uncomfortable moment before Nancy just came out with it. “Bobby, I’m your mother.”
That was heavy.
I’m sure I suspected something like that. I had heard my mom talk about the hysterectomy she had before I was born. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew how to use a dictionary. I had looked up the word. Whoa.
How could she have had me?
I wondered, but I didn’t think too hard about it. Maybe there was some other way children were born that I didn’t know about. It hadn’t been much of a concern for me until this moment. I didn’t know what to say to Nancy when she dropped the news on me. She and Jane watched me and waited for my reaction. I turned to Jane and said, “I wanted you to be my mom.”
Nancy’s lip started to quiver. She put a hand to her mouth and bolted from the bathroom. I stood there alone with Jane and hoped for an explanation. “Bobby, we’ve all done the best we could. It was a difficult situation, and, someday, you’ll understand.” Tears pooled in her eyes. “We all love you.”
I just stood there, stunned. It was a Christmas I knew I’d always remember. Jane patted me on the back and said, “Let’s go back out there and join the party.” Everybody else seemed to carry on as if nothing had happened. Nancy and Jane pulled themselves together and my uncles freshened their drinks. I tried to tell myself nothing had really changed, but I suddenly felt like I was in a room full of strangers.
It was definitely weird, but that’s just how people did things back in those days. People covered up and hid things. Family secrets. Secrets from the neighbors. Nobody questioned things, even the most obvious. People didn’t want to pry too much in those days, I think. It was probably easier that way. When Nancy got pregnant with me, Idie and Helen shipped her off to St. Anne’s, a charitable social services agency run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Heart. St. Anne’s, which first opened its doors in 1908, was where Catholic families sent their pregnant teenage daughters to do penance for their promiscuity. There, on North Occidental Street in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, they could carry their children to term hidden away from the world. Idie would visit Nancy on the weekends and they’d take occasional trips to the Echo Park lake, where he’d paddle her around in one of the little rowboats that were available for rent.
Nancy, I found out later, had a terrible delivery. She was in labor for two days and her pelvic bones cracked when I pushed through. Idie and Helen decided to adopt me and brought me home. Even after the Christmas revelation, I still considered Idie to be my real dad. I never met my biological father—and I’ve never wanted to. Oh, I know his name and his story, but he doesn’t matter to me. He’s never been a part of my life and he never will be.
Idie provided me with as good a childhood as possible, but it was getting tougher for him all the time. By the time I was fifteen, I was getting unruly, and he was retired and not able to generate much income. He decided to sell the Palm Desert house and move us into a mobile home. To this day, I think it was an unbelievably dumb move. How much could the mortgage have been on that desert house? A hundred and fifteen dollars a month? So we continued our steady journey down the economic ladder. Still, Idie kept going. He continued to drink hard, but it, and his age, began to catch up to him. Doctors said he needed heart surgery. Helen gave me the news. “Bobby, your dad has to go into the hospital and have an operation.”
Okay,
I thought. It sounded serious, but doctors know what they’re doing, so everything would be all right. I was wrong. Idie went in, but he didn’t come out the same. He idled for a few months in a zombielike state. He wasn’t the vivacious, exciting dad I’d grown up with. He was just another old guy in a hospital gown now. Then one day he died. I was shocked. He was gone. The seed of anger started to take root.
What kind of life is this?
I wondered.
How can the one guy I cared about and loved suffer all this shit? How could he lose his business, go broke, and then be gone in an instant? Is this all there is to look forward to?
I was fifteen, and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
Idie had given me a lot of his personality. I must have absorbed it through osmosis. Like him, I could never handle the nine-to-five routine. The old man was all over the place and strictly in the moment. I was just like him. Now I was on my own and left to my own devices. I raised myself from then on. I took up Idie’s favorite pastime and became a big fan of Bacardi 151 rum mixed with cola. I’d sneak it from the liquor cabinet. Helen never noticed. The raw alcohol taste of the rum took some getting used to, but mixed with enough cola, I could bypass the gag reflex. I loved to feel the warmth of the booze heat my innards and spread to my arms and legs. Even better was the way it made my head feel. I could achieve some degree of peace and satisfaction. I felt complete. Confident. It was a magical elixir. Some kids in my class thought Wheaties were the breakfast of champions. I knew different. Getting a buzz on before I left the house made school more interesting. I could talk to girls and I discovered they liked the bad boys. I was this wild desert kid. I lived for cigarettes, booze, dirt bikes, and trouble. These rebellious skills would serve me well when I started my rock-and-roll band as an adult. But I also discovered Jack Kerouac and his philosophy, which urged a sort of mad love for life. I adopted that as my creed.
Be mad for living,
I thought.
Always.
I mean, what other choices did I have? I was on my own and I was pissed off.
Punk rock entered the picture. If ever there was a style of music that reflected what I felt at the age of fifteen, it was punk. I didn’t know much about it, but I became obsessed with it. You have to remember that back then, there was no Internet, no cable TV with hundreds of channels, and no twenty-four-hour entertainment news cycle. If you followed music, you got your news through the radio or
Rolling Stone
and
Creem
magazines.
Rolling Stone
came out every other week, and
Creem
was a monthly publication. The quest to keep current had to be done from street level, so you combed the record stores and you tried to go to shows. At fifteen or sixteen I was in a record shop every day. I had enough musical sense to be able to draw parallels between Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan. I understood that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were like the Rolling Stones. I heard the Ramones and recognized they were a Phil Spector girl group at their core. The new music was not unfamiliar to my ears.
But I kept reading about these other bands in the music magazines. The Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys, the Damned. What the fuck were they all about? The record stores I went into didn’t have any of that music yet. Being a completely obsessed music geek, I would go in and bug the clerks.
“You got the Sex Pistols yet?”
“No, kid. It’s on order.”
“What about the Damned?”
“Nope.”
“Dead Boys?”
“Who?”
“When’s the Sex Pistols’ record going to get here?”
“Soon. Look, kid, why don’t you check out the new Peter Frampton album?”
I was frustrated. But one day, a Sex Pistols record finally arrived. I walked out of the store with my latest purchase, a twelve-inch single of “Anarchy in the UK” backed with “I Wanna Be Me.” I hurried home and went straight to my room to put it on the turntable. I played the B-side first and was floored.
This is it! This is fucking revolutionary! These guys are the new Beatles.
I played the record a few more times. What I heard felt so important that I went into the bathroom and cut off my long hair with a pair of scissors. The hippie era was dead. Punk rock was here. I needed more.
The records began coming into the stores. Next came the robot-riot sound of Devo. That was followed by the Clash’s rock-meets-reggae underclass anthems. This stuff was like a tidal wave that washed over me. It even affected my musical heroes. I had recently seen Iggy Pop perform on
The Dinah Shore Show,
an afternoon talk and variety program hosted by the aging big-band singer. I couldn’t believe it. David Bowie played keyboards in Iggy’s band. I had been obsessed with Bowie since his ultra-flamboyant Ziggy Stardust days, and here he was looking subdued and anonymous as he pounded the keys while Iggy sang “Funtime.” When I saw that Iggy was scheduled to play some shows in Southern California, I had to go.
The Golden Bear was a tiny little club in Huntington Beach that sat across the street from the city’s famous pier on the Pacific Coast Highway. I pushed myself inside for the show. I was a little disappointed that the club was so small that Bowie had decided not to show for the gig. It didn’t matter. The energy was high wattage. You could feel it as soon as you were inside. There was an opening act. A punk rock band from right in town. I think they called themselves the Crowd. Huntington Beach boys. They probably had only been together for a few weeks, but their rough edges weren’t a drawback. With the first blast from the kick drum, the crowd exploded in this weird up-and-down dance I found out was called the pogo. The energy was unbelievable. Punk rock was great on records, but it couldn’t be fully understood unless it was heard live. Preferably as close to the stage as you could get while being slammed and jostled by dancing kids. I was amazed by the girls too. Punk rock girls were badass. They had wild haircuts and didn’t wear underwear. I was sold.
After that first show I saw at the Golden Bear, I couldn’t stay away. I saw the Ramones. It was the most energetic show I had ever seen. Bodies bounced and the music pulsed. Then I started to catch the Los Angeles bands: the Circle Jerks, the Plugz, and anyone else from the big city. The important thing was to be there. By my senior year of high school, after a steady diet of Los Angeles–bred punk rock, I knew that was the town for me. I just had to figure out a way to get there.
B
y my senior year of high school, I was a smart-mouthed, music-obsessed kid who liked to read everything I could get my hands on. I also drank Bacardi rum for breakfast. Just your average, all-American teenager. I had left Palm Desert with Helen two years before and we shared an apartment in Huntington Beach, California, in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. I was already enrolled at Golden West, a local community college, and took some classes there along with the last of my course work at Marina High School. Because it was a community college, anyone could enroll, and as a student at Golden West, I was allowed a stipend from Social Security. Five hundred dollars a month was a solid chunk of change for a seventeen-year-old kid like me and all I had to do to ensure it arrived in the mail was to remain affiliated with a college. It was my main hustle in those days.
That was a busy year for me. Along with school and rock-and-roll shows at the different clubs that stretched all the way from Orange County to L.A., I had also discovered speed, weed, and cocaine. Like any other teenage stoner, I was introduced to marijuana early. It was one of those things that was always around at high school parties, teen dances, wherever kids would meet. It was freely shared. “Do you get high?” was not an uncommon opening question when meeting new people in those days. No stranger to booze, weed didn’t seem like a big step to me. Its effects were gentle, but it somehow seemed cooler. More rock and roll. Young. I liked the communal aspect of sharing a joint and as I traveled that circle, it was inevitable that I would come across stimulants. Pills, powders, and capsules. “Try this, Bob!” someone would say.
“What does it do?”
“It lets you keep going.”
That was the truth. Those little tablets, a multihued rainbow, kept me going all night long and brought things into a sharp, focused perspective. They were just the thing for when the sloppy effects of booze threatened to end the party. Powdered bathtub crank, made by anonymous bathtub chemists, was just as good. A quick line snorted off the back of a hand or a dirty mirror was like a burst of electric energy. Cocaine was around too. It was more expensive than the other stuff, but it had its own mystique. In the seventies, it had come into its own and I was right there to snuffle it up whenever it was around.
But all these hobbies cost money. While I got $500 every month from Social Security after Idie’s death, it hinged upon my being a student. And with my tastes and habits, I needed more dough. I was industrious and I liked money. I ended up working three jobs. Two was typical for a kid back then. I worked in a record store and I also had a job at a little pizza parlor where I tossed dough, slung sauce, and made deliveries. The third job found me at a carpet-cleaning enterprise that contracted with commercial real estate and kept the floors of banks and office buildings spotless. For a kid, I pulled in pretty good money. Of course, that can be a dangerous thing, and it went to my head. Helen still tended to think of me as a twelve-year-old child, and I chafed at the idea. The fact was that I made decent money and financed weekend trips to Las Vegas, I bought good drugs, and I generally did as I pleased. She tried to lay down the law one night in the kitchen.
“Bobby, you just can’t do whatever you want. We have rules here.”
I ignored her.
“Bobby, did you hear what I said?”
“No,” I said as I shook some cornflakes into a bowl.
A tone of anger crept into her voice. “You need to show me some respect, young man!”
“I don’t ‘need’ to do anything.”
And then, for added emphasis, I took a plate from the rack and smashed it on the floor and stalked out of the kitchen and went to my room, where I slammed the door and cranked up the Clash on my stereo. It wasn’t one of my finest moments. It was stupid and small, but it hurt her. And much more than I knew.
A few days later, Helen told me, “I can’t live like this anymore.” She retired. She was done. She packed up and left to live with her sisters in a retirement community on the edge of Los Angeles and I was on my own as a high school senior. The separation was good for us. Helen was free to enjoy her retirement and I learned fast about rent and responsibility. A two-bedroom apartment like ours, a block west of Beach Boulevard, the main drag through town, cost a steep—for then—$650 a month. I took on a roommate to help with expenses and keep solvent, but I was totally unprepared for what I had taken on. Even with the money I had coming in from work and Social Security—and the help I got from family as long as I did okay in school—I had no idea how to budget. I was lost emotionally and financially. If rent was due in four days and I only had $450, I’d immediately go out and spend $200 on cocaine and booze to feel better about the situation, but then I’d be even farther in the hole.
I took on an additional job. There was a nightclub in Costa Mesa called the Cuckoo’s Nest that was a popular spot for surf punks from Orange County and rusticated hillbilly punks from landlocked San Bernardino County and the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County. The club shared a parking lot with a redneck bar called Zubie’s and the local cops and beer-addled urban cowboys had no problems hassling the kids, who, naturally, pushed back. It was a fun place. Chaotic. I hung out a lot with a band called the Popsicles who were managed by Kim Fowley. They weren’t quite punk and they weren’t quite rock. In a lot of ways, the Popsicles were like a male version of Fowley’s earlier group the Runaways. They were good-looking enough to be featured in
Teen Beat
magazine. If they’re remembered at all now, it’s for their cover of ABBA’s “Tiger.” You had to have some balls to cover ABBA in those days. It was a fun scene, and with pressure from the rent and my living situation in Huntington Beach, I decided to get smart and get out. As soon as school was over and I graduated from Marina High, I moved to a house in Costa Mesa, where I rented a room for $75 a month. A great burden had been lifted from my young shoulders. And I had a lot more money for drugs. That was good.
I stayed enrolled at Golden West College. One of my roommates, Dave Hansen, took courses there too. It was a sun-struck campus of low-slung buildings near the old grasshopper-like derricks that pumped the last drops of crude from the oil fields that spawned the area’s 1920s oil boom. The school was close to the surf and had lovely, lovely coeds, tanned and ripe, like creatures straight out of a soda ad. It was like being in the middle of a Beach Boys song come to fleshly life. I enrolled in journalism courses and wrote for the school paper, the
Western Sun
. I covered the local music scene. One of the first things I wrote was a review of an AC/DC show at Anaheim Stadium. I was really proud of that.
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 meth, and used cocaine, all to the detriment of my studies. I loved the rock-and-roll party lifestyle and felt at home there. Drugs and alcohol were central to it. The Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones all endorsed drugs either outright or through their music, and it seemed to me that I was following some grand rock tradition. As a bonus, when I was high, I felt really good. I had fun. I was only at LACC for two semesters before I flunked out. The Social Security people contacted me.
“Mr. Forrest, we see you’re not currently enrolled in classes at Los Angeles City College.”
“No, no,” I said with practiced nonchalance. “I’ve been accepted at Cornell University. You know,
the
Cornell University. That’s why I’m not in those classes.”
In the days before computers and the Internet, this kind of scam was incredibly easy to pull off. Records got lost all the time. The mail was slow. Any number of things before the advent of the Digital Age could slow things up or cause delays. And all you really needed was a little time to work the system. I had some family near Watkins Glen, New York, so I decided a short break from L.A. might be fun. An academic vacation of sorts. I took off for the East Coast with Sheree. I admit that I liked the prestige of being a Cornell undergraduate, even though, technically, I wasn’t. In fact, I hadn’t even bothered to apply. When I got to Watkins Glen, I went to the financial aid office on campus and put on a little show to keep the money coming in.
“I’m not even registered here? How can that be? I’ve come all the way here from Los Angeles, and now I’m stranded here? You have all my paperwork. I sent it in months ago!”
The poor clerk in the office looked stunned. “Well, this does happen from time to time. Here, let me get you started,” she said, and handed me some forms to fill out.
I worked my hustle. I ran my hands through my hair in a pantomime of false despair. “This is so bad … so bad. What am I going to do? I just did this whole life-changing thing to move here. I left my home all the way across the country. My financial aid’s been transferred here!” I looked upset. I looked like I was about to cry. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if I enrolled in some drama courses. That stuff could come in handy down the line given my increasing reliance on putting on these kinds of shows.
I convinced her. She sighed and peered over the rims of her glasses. “Okay, okay,” she said. “Now that we’ve started the paperwork, everything will be fine. You can register.”
I signed up for classes. I skipped drama, but I took on a full load of art and history courses at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country. That alone felt like a huge accomplishment. Of course, my hustle didn’t always work. This particular one only lasted for about a month. I had thought that once I had my foot in the door as a registered student, I’d just slip through the cracks and nobody would ever notice that I’d never even bothered to apply. They did notice.