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Welcome
to my new blog!
What
you are about to read is the title story from my book Escape From Houdini
Mountain. My new memoir
collection Showgirl Confidential will be
published in September on Punk Hostage Press.A book signing
party for Showgirl Confidential will take place Sunday, Sept.
29, 2013 at Skinny's Lounge, 4923 Lankershim Blvd, North Hollywood, CA, 6:30-9:30pm. The official launch party & reading is Wednesday, October 16, at Skylight Books,1818 N. Vermont, Los Feliz,CA, at 7:00pm. Both events are free!
More readings
to be announced soon!
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| Ruins of the Houdini Mansion, Laurel Canyon |
ESCAPE FROM
HOUDINI MOUNTAIN
It was 1981, and I’d been slam dancing the night away at the
legendary club The Starwood in
West Hollywood, with my pals musician Kid Congo, artist Brad Dunning, and a
noted cult rock star, who will hence be dubbed Mr. Monster. I had a little crush on Mr. Monster,
but then, everybody did. He was tall and rangy, good-looking in
a macabre sort of way, and was known for being completely wild, both on and off
stage. So when somebody suggested
we all drop acid, I didn’t hesitate. Last Call rolled around a little too soon, and we beat it out of there
before the lights went up.
After killing a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and beaucoup
Budweiser at my house Disgraceland, we were all itching to get into trouble.
Brad suggested we go to the old Harry Houdini mansion, up in the wilds of
Laurel Canyon. The next thing I clearly remember is all of us running through
the underbrush, screaming “HARRY! HAAAAAAA-REEEEEEE!” like Allison Hayes as The Fifty Foot Woman when
she was stuck in those pesky high-tension wires yelling for her
husband. We were all joking about
Houdini’s ghost acknowledging us, because apparently when he’d been alive he
was really into séances. Mr.
Monster and I both heard music coming from Houdini’s guest house, rock and
roll. For some reason, even though
the music seemed pretty loud, the other two insisted we were hallucinating, so
we split off to investigate.
By this time, we were full on tripping—that kind of
heart-skipping, strobing, blood-and-rust-in-your-mouth, peaking LSD high.
Kid and Brad made their way down the hillside back onto the
street to the car, thinking we’d only be a minute, and Mr. Monster and I
trudged through the woods to the Houdini guest house, which was built into the
side of the hill with windows about a story and a half up from the ground. Mr. Monster, who in his stocking feet
was tall enough to give any NBA star a run for his money, suggested that if I
stood on his shoulders and then he stood up, I’d be able to spy into one of the
windows. Loaded and devil-may-care
enough to actually think this was a good idea in the pitch dark on a rocky,
uneven hillside, I climbed aboard. Steadying myself on the rotting window ledge, I saw about ten bikers: really big, scary, Bachman Turner
Overdrive-sized bikers, with beards, beer bellies, straggly hair, greasy denim,
and black leather jackets. They
were all sitting around this trashed room with candles everywhere, listening to
a boom box, drinking beer and smoking some very skunky pot. Back then, punks were punks, bikers
were bikers—there was absolutely no crossover whatsoever. At that point, Mickey Rourke
probably hadn’t even entertained the idea
of riding a Harley.
All of a sudden, one biker looks up and spots me with a huge,
cartoon-like double take. He
thought I was hanging on the side of the building and ran towards me,
chivalrously offering his hand. I
guess he couldn’t believe his good fortune at discovering a nubile teenage girl
clinging to his window ledge at, like, 4:00am!
“No, it’s okay,” I said, all casual, as though this was
normal.
“I’m standing
on someone.”
“Well, why don’t you both come in?” he said hospitably,
gesturing to a side path that led to the door.
I jumped off Mr. Monster and we walked up to the house. We were immediately offered
refreshments, contraband, and a guided tour of the residence, where the whole gang
was apparently “homesteading.” It
was far beyond any Roger Corman chopper-trash B movie.
We’re sitting in the bathroom, Mr. Monster and me, on the
crumbling old claw-footed tub, with the Leader Of The Pack, who is astride the
toilet. He’s a skinny, pale guy
with darting crystal-Meth-powered eyes and a Mansonesque intensity. We’re smoking a joint. There’s a stoned-out lull in the
conversation, and The Leader gets all weird and silent. Then, with what can
only be described as a sinisterly quiet psychotic rage, he says,
“I was in ‘Nam,
you know. One day I got this
letter that my stepmother, the fuckin' bitch, slit her own throat with a milk
bottle!”
Me and Mr. Monster share a brief sidelong glance, and in my
acid consciousness, I knew I wasn’t the only one who was starting to get
scared. Then The Leader said, with
all the veins in his neck and forehead bulging,
“When I found out she did that, man, IT MADE THE WAR FOR
ME!”
He then busted into a red-faced, clenched-jawed, sociopathic
grin.
I squeezed Mr. Monster’s hand in what I hoped was a signal,
and he made some off -the-cuff excuse about leaving, but The Leader wouldn’t
hear of it. Not wanting to offend him since it was clearly apparent he was
deranged, we agreed to go and look at his pride and joy, his Master Bedroom. He led us out into the
woods behind the guest house, further up the hill. It turned out to be under a flagstone gazebo that was fitted
with a bare bulb lighting fixture that actually worked. He pulled the switch, and sitting on
top of a massive pile of trash was a round, king-sized bed with a ratty
velveteen leopard bedspread! We
stared in slack-jawed awe until he motioned us back to the guest house, and
said sort of confidentially that we could use this bed if we wanted to “make
it.”
What we did make was
more excuses for having to leave right now, but we didn’t want to appear as
though we were freaking out, which we were really starting to do.
As The Leader left to get us a new beer, Mr. Monster grabbed
my hand and we ran for it.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the leader jumped into the middle of the path
like a character in a cheap ninja movie and demanded to know where the fuck we
thought we were going. He herded
us back to the house, and in desperation (after another failed escape attempt)
I told The Leader that we’d decided after all that we’d like to “make it.” I
think I even winked.
So we went out back to the gazebo, and sat on the bed in the
dark feeling all paranoid, like maybe if we waited there long enough, they’d
forget about us. We were there for
maybe five minutes, maybe twenty—who knows?—and we began making fake sex noises, so the bikers would think we were fucking. Somehow, I’m not sure how, we really started to have sex. We were making out
and Mr. Monster yanked off my tattered jeans and white '50s majorette boots in
one fell swoop.
Suddenly, first softly and then louder, we heard singing. At
first we assumed it was coming from the boom box, but because we heard
underbrush rustling and some muffled laughter, we realized it was the bikers,
somewhere in the shadows on the hill, serenading us. They were singing, a cappella, in perfect harmony, “In
the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight…” complete with the
“Ow-wee-mo-weh, ow-wee-mo-weh” choruses.
Naturally, this took things to another dimension, with or
without the acid. We began
laughing hysterically. I remember thinking that if we were gonna die, this was
a hell of a way to go! I’m not
even sure if we came, we were so wasted.
We got our clothes together and ran through the trees and bushes
down the hill, then hitched a ride down to Sunset Boulevard with an old man in
a pick-up truck who was delivering papers.
The next day,
Mr. Monster came by to hand deliver his brand new British import 45, and
when I called Brad and Kid to tell them what happened, they both confirmed that
they’d waited over three hours for
us on the street and then went home.
A week later, reading the L.A. Times, there was a report in the Metro Section that two
teenagers who’d been trespassing one night up near the Houdini mansion had been
shot with a BB gun by “transients.”
No suspects had been taken into custody.
* * * *
This is going to be a great book!
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteIt must be funny book.
Pu-erh