The Sunset Strip Diaries (6 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

Down the Rabbit Hole

September rolled around and I turned fifteen on the first day of school. I went to the local public high school, which was only three houses down from where I lived. Middleton had been a very small school that had a ninth grade class of about twenty people, most of whom continued on to a private high school. My new school was HUGE, and full of people I had never before seen.

I was completely alone, I had no one to talk to whatsoever. I was walking around this
enormous
school, with all of these lockers and different buildings and I was so scared, I was shaking. I couldn’t believe I had only five minutes between classes to find the next class. I couldn’t even find my locker, as a matter of fact. The entire three grades of Middleton Junior High had taken place solely on the second floor of one office building! My whole junior high experience consisted of only three classrooms! I couldn’t believe I had been set loose in this colossal institution with no one to tell me where to go and what to do. I wanted to run back to my house and cry for ten days straight.

Not only was I scared, alone, and ignorant of where anything was, but I had gone completely overboard on my “look.” I thought,
Okay, this is high school. I need to walk through the doors looking like a hot babe!
So I put on something really skimpy, because I thought that is what high school kids looked like.  I had never been so wrong.

I barreled through the doors in an off-the-shoulders black shirt, a really short skirt and very high heels. The entire place looked at me as if I was insane. I was floored. I thought,
Isn’t this what I’m supposed to look like, who I’m supposed to be?
I was wayyyyy overdressed for a student, and way overdressed for a teenager in general. People started laughing at me. Guys talked shit under their breath; girls giggled. I could hear people whispering that I was a hooker. I wanted to die. I teetered around in my high heels, trying to walk on cracked cement with my new books in hand and a cigarette hanging off my lips. I could barely make it up the stairs without falling. I looked around at the other girls and they were dressed in regular clothes, like the girls at Middleton. Almost all of them looked completely innocent. I looked like I was about to hit the stage at The Spearmint Rhino. I couldn’t believe I was so off the mark with my look. What an idiot! No one wanted to be my friend. I would only embarrass the shit out of anyone who stood next to me. I was so humiliated that I stared at the ground all day- I couldn’t look anyone in the eye.

I ran into Jeff Hunter a few times at school and he wouldn’t give me the time of day. He had distanced himself from me and it was clear I was not to try to hang around him. He had quickly started dating a senior named Shannon, and she was already his girlfriend. He told her he had hooked up with me over the summer and she was not very happy about that. She took to yelling “SLUT!” at me in the halls, in front of everyone. This was only in September and I had three more years of high school to go. My reputation was completely ruined by the first month of school and, even though that girl would graduate in June, that rep stuck by me and ruined me for the rest of high school. I was still a virgin and I was already being called a whore.

But back to this scraggly, hesher bitch, Shannon. She was pretty ballsy, now that I think about it, because she was about half the size of me. I should’ve kicked her ass but I didn’t know that I could at that point.

I remember being pissed that I spent all of that time becoming the Ultimate Rock Chick and then looking at who Jeff Hunter chose over me. She wore flannel shirts and those knee-high, suede moccasin boots with fringe. She had huge bags under her eyes, wore no makeup, and had thin, short, feathered hair with a roach clip fastened into it. She had no tits, no hips, and no lips.
Come on!
I thought.

But I was too much of everything and I was displaying it all at the same time; I was too embarrassing for any boy to get near. I remember wondering why all of the girls in the locker room were staring at me when I changed for P.E. Must have been the fact that I was in a red lace Fredrick’s of Hollywood matching bra and panty set while they were wearing Sears cotton undies. I wore full-on lingerie under my clothes! I mean, how did I even
get
that stuff?

So anyway, after a month or so, I did the only thing someone in my situation could do. I found the misfit crowd who hung out in the smoking section. They were the rejects of all of the cliques. Anyone who didn’t fit in to the popular crowds went there. There were a lot of heshers (also known as rockers or Heavy Metal kids) in black Iron Maiden concert T-shirts and Vans; guys and girls in tie-dye Grateful Dead shirts; some alternative /goth /ska /skinhead /punk types in black (with a bit of purple or red); and the occasional chick who looked too old to be in school, and who looked like a stripper (that was the group I was put into and there were only two of us at most).

The group of misfit kids was pretty cool. Most of them had problems with which I could identify. I smoked Marlboro Reds with them at lunch and hoped I would make a friend. To my relief, a tough girl named Abby started talking to me. She had wide set eyes and large features; light brown, messy hair parted to the side, and lots of eyeliner. The bottom half of her hair was dyed black and the top part was light brown- it looked like it grew out and she gave up on doing her roots. She never smiled. When she talked to me, I couldn’t tell if she was deciding to kick my ass or she didn’t mind me. I shared a lighter with her.

I looked around my school to see if there were any guys who were into the Sunset Strip scene. They would be considered “glam” guys and would most likely be into Poison and other bands that wore makeup and looked like women. All I saw was the usual white trash heshers with thin hair and black T-shirts. I was more interested in the type of people I saw in
The Metal Years
movie: guys with dyed black hair and style. I sighed.
Nope. Not at this school.

Or so I thought. One day while I was smoking a cigarette with Abby by the bungalows, I saw a glam guy walk by. My head turned as he passed and I nearly choked on my cigarette: he was 6’1” or 6’2”, had long, dyed black hair, pink Converse All Stars and tight black pants. He wore a colorful t-shirt and a fedora with a leopard print band around it. I knew straight away he was the type of guy with whom I would need to align myself if I was going to get into the Hollywood music scene.

I needed info. I did some recon by asking around the smoking area, teetering around in my black velvet high heels and leopard-print tube skirt. In between games of Hacky Sack, a few hippies told me some dirt. The guy’s name was Jamie. He was in eleventh grade, and he was the drummer in a band that played on the Sunset Strip. They called him a “Glam Fag.”
Perfect!

I was thrilled, rubbing my hands together. Now I would just have to get him to notice me! He appeared to be the only person who
hadn’t.
  Whenever he passed the smoking section, he never socialized with the big group of mostly guys. I never saw him smile, only smoke cigarettes, hit on girls, and make sarcastic remarks. He walked around with an air of conceit, aloofness, and all around dickery. I saw that he wrote “I am God” on the side of his Converse. I thought that maybe I saw wrong. Certainly no one would write such a thing…would they?

It was a Friday in mid-October when he got around to noticing me. He walked up to me and asked me what kind of bands I liked and I stuttered some sort of answer designed to impress him. While looking around at other chicks, he kind of
told
me we were going to go on a date. I was a virgin, but he couldn’t tell that by my revealing clothes that I found so cool and grown up. All they did was advertise to this guy that I would sleep with him. Not what I had intended. 

I awkwardly agreed to go out with him. I went home and announced to my parents that I was going to go on my first date that very night. They were like,
WHAT?
They were bumping into each other trying to figure out what to do. They hadn’t thought of the rules yet, I could tell. They were probably trying to come up with something right then and there. They were used to me hanging out with Jeff at our house, but this was different: I was going to get into a
car
with a boy they had never met and drive away with him.

I was uncomfortable as I got ready that evening. Jamie had been almost
mean
to me when he asked me out. He didn’t smile at me or look me in the eye when he talked to me. He seemed almost bored even asking me out. I could have sworn I saw him roll his eyes when I was answering his questions! It didn’t feel right. But I had nothing to compare it to. It fit right along with my impression of men. They wanted you to be sexy and they wanted you for only one thing. I felt a red flag go up in my head, but I quickly pushed it away. I told myself I needed to do this. I needed to go. I didn’t want to be the only girl who hadn’t gone on a real date. The guy was a Hollywood guy in a band and he hung on Sunset. He reminded me of Tommy Lee. He wasn’t some little wimp like Jeff
. I have to go on this date.
This was my chance to get into the Hollywood crowd, the one I read about in
L.A. Weekly
and
Music Connection
. This guy had a car, he had the look, and he appeared to have had the connections to where I wanted to be
.
I had to go.

It was freezing that fall and winter in California. I remember being very cold. I wore black tights, a black skirt, and a leather jacket over my top. I distinctly remember wearing a cross earring in one ear and a silver spider web or shark’s tooth in the other. Jamie called me to get directions to my house and I was very meek over the phone. He shouted at me a few times and sounded very bored, like he was going through the motions just to screw me. He didn’t even try to hide it. It was like he had done it hundreds of times and he was sure he was about to do it once again. He told me to wear something that was easy to take off, and that I had better not be on my period. Yes, you read correctly. Those were his exact words.

I was scared shitless. If I flaked, what would happen at school? This was my chance to be cool and date someone older. Maybe I could get out of doing what he was implying…maybe I was hearing him wrong. Was this what the Hollywood crowd was like? How would I ever handle it, if I couldn’t even go on one date with a Hollywood guy?
I have to toughen up and deal with it.
I made myself go against my danger instinct, something I would do countless more times as a teenager. I told myself to bear whatever happened, to resist my urge to flee. That is how I dealt with my father and that is how I would soon deal with a lot more men. I would mentally shut down and bear it.

Jamie pulled up in front of my house in a white Mustang and honked the horn with the motor still running. His license plate frames said, “It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.”  My mother told me I had to bring him in to meet her and my dad. She at least knew what to do there. I ran out to the car and said that my parents wanted to meet him. He ignored me and said that we were late or something, and to just get in the car. I blindly obeyed. We sped off. I think he even burned rubber! I weakly mentioned the curfew my parents gave me and he ignored me. I looked down on the dashboard and the first thing I saw was a picture of a blond girl. I asked him who it was and he sarcastically said, “My fucking pen pal. Who do you
think
? It’s my girlfriend.” He had a picture of his GIRLFRIEND on his dashboard! While taking me on a
DATE
! I am not making this shit up.

I was stunned.  This guy was ten kinds of rude. In two years’ time, I would eat his kind for breakfast, but that night I was not there yet. I did not know my value.  I was terribly scared, but strangely excited. He asked me if I had a cigarette. I said I only had one left, and he said, “That’ll do.” I gave him my last Marlboro Red and he popped it in his mouth while turning up the radio. He had a dark five o’ clock shadow and very pale skin- I thought he was hot. He wore leather pants that I found to be a little much at the moment, but whatever. It was very L.A. Guns, a band who I liked very much.  He asked me where a liquor store was, and I guess I directed him to the nearest one. I just remember him coming back with a bottle of Southern Comfort. I had never even heard of it. I had never tasted alcohol. He opened the bottle in the car as we drove and told me to have a sip.

Southern Comfort was disgusting; it lasted like licorice and cough syrup. It was warm going down my throat and I felt buzzed after one sip.
One sip
. I suddenly felt wonderful, euphoric even. I
loved
the feeling; I felt bold and happy, rolling down the window and feeling cold wind on my face. I smiled into the night air. Hearing Poison on the radio, being with a guy with long black hair and a white Mustang…This is what I wanted. This is what I was waiting for. This was the Hollywood scene and I was ready.
Let me at ‘em,
I thought.