THE WESTSIDE PIERS

CBGB in the late 1970's

Back in the late ‘70s, I lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in a sprawling loft at the top of a six-story walk-up  building. I’d gone to New York for a  short visit and wound up staying for months, living with Kristian Hoffman of the Mumps and  Bradley Field, drummer for Teenage Jesus And The Jerks. Their loft  had formerly been a silver plating factory, and for $25.00 a month in rent, a pre-Cramps and Gun Club Kid Congo and I moved in as their tenants.  Kristian and Bradley were Bowery homesteaders, the only tenants who actually lived in the building, which also housed some  sweatshops and Sons Of Italy meeting hall, as well as the office of the landlord  Yat Ting Moy, a Chinese doctor who giggled when he saw the loft bed Kristian and Bradley had constructed.

 “Bed in the sky!” Dr. Moy said.

Though Kristian and Bradley had made the place more than habitable, with a bathtub salvaged from the street,  a huge collection of vintage Halloween decorations, and moth-eaten taxidermy, the loft was pretty dirty… well, the floor was, anyway. No matter how hard we all scrubbed, it was always dark with old tarnish from the plating factory, and our feet were constantly black.  Bands would practice there almost every night: The Mumps and Teenage Jesus of course,  also James Chance and The Contortions, The Fast, and a side project of Lydia Lunch’s called Beirut Slump.  I was consumed with rock and roll and that was one of the reasons I was in New York to begin with, because you could walk five blocks down the Bowery and see The Cramps, The Deadboys, Television, The Talking Heads,  Richard Hell , The Ramones or Blondie  at CBGB’s, any night of the week. But sometimes  all of the bands’ practicing got to me, too much of a good thing.  I took to sitting up on the roof of the building, hanging laundry on the clotheslines we’d strung and then just hanging out, writing in my diary or surveying the endless sea of  buildings, a sea of  tar paper, pipes,   chimneys, laundry lines, and water towers spreading to the East River in one direction and to the Hudson in the other. For even  more quiet in the midst of the city, I’d take  long walks across the Village to the decrepit piers lining the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side under the highway.

 Kevin, my boyfriend at the time and the main reason I was in New York, was the one that introduced me to the piers.  He was wonderful: a kind, talented, funny sensitive man.  He played bass in the Mumps, and worked at a store that sold party goods and novelties.  He had giant blue eyes, chiseled features, and a slightly femme James Dean look.  He was also gay, but that didn’t really matter.  We bonded immediately – could read each other’s mind, had exactly the same sense of humor.   He was my boyfriend, we were in love, really, we adored each other—but we never actually had sex.  We kissed and held hands a lot, but that was it.  We’d spend hours at night at Max’s or at bars like The Ninth Circle, then take our separate subway trains.  I guess I was probably the only person he ever met at the piers during the daylight hours.

At night, the piers were overrun with drug dealers, hustlers, johns, and vicious, strung-out Puerto Rican drag queens who’d rob their tricks blind at knifepoint.  There were tractor trailers parked at the loading docks and the inky shadows surrounding them seethed  with anonymous night crawlers cruising for rough trade and older businessmen taking a Walk On The Wild Side, trying to buy some hot young ass, stepping over puddles of piss , slipping on spilled semen.

           

But in the mid-afternoon solitude, in the wintry sunlight or late summer golden pink  haze, looking across the  choppy, silvery river to the Jersey Palisades, the piers were beautiful and not dangerous, except maybe structurally.  Every so often you’d hear about one caving in. On the Jersey shore, there were ancient-looking factories blackened with the soot of their own belching smokestacks. Topped with grimy neon signs that appeared unchanged since the ‘50s, if not before then.

 CHOCK FULL O’NUTS…  THE HEAVENLY COFFEE, WISE POTATO CHIPS, SAVARIN, and ironically enough, USE CRISCO.

  Me and Kevin used to laugh about that one, wondering how many other pier-cruisers ever caught on to it.  There was always a faintly brackish smell of seawater mingled with the stench of the trash barges, the diesel fuel of the sightseeing Circle Line crafts, tugboats, and the Staten Island Ferry.  Seagulls wheeled overhead and pigeons cooed on the wooden pilings.

           

Depending on which pier you were on, you could clearly see the Statue of Liberty or maybe even the George Washington Bridge.  Once in a while, you’d be joined by a quiet derelict  looking for a place to crash or someone who wanted to smoke a joint in peace.  The piers were a good place to meetyou could get mugged or killed at night, but during the daytime people respected each other’s privacy.  Kevin and I would talk for hours about everything.  We’d meet there almost every day.

Kevin has been dead for many years, but I  still treasure those times.  In hindsight, I think we helped each other grow up out there on the river, two lost souls barely out of our teens, trying to make sense  of the insane world we were living in. We’d smoke a joint, and water would slap against the support beams; you could always see it moving as you stared down through the cracks of the weathered boards and asphalt-covered planks.  It was calming to face the Palisades and watch the afternoon slowly turn to lavender twilight, and to know you could be with someone, sharing the moment without words.  Sometimes it would seem as thought it was very early in the century; it was easy to imagine foreign steamers chugging into the harbor, bringing thousands of immigrants to Ellis Island…until the shrill horns of the rush-hour taxis or the rumble of the West Side Highway above and behind you cut into the illusion.

All the  crazed hubbub  of the city would almost, but not quite, muffle the moaning that was beginning to come from inside the long-unused warehouses, the early-bird rentboys gathering in the shadows, turning their first tricks as darkness fell. 

Kevin Kiely & me, 1978   Photo: Theresa Kereakes

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NOVEMBER 5th, 12th, 19th, 2014,  LOS ANGELES:

 IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU: MEMOIR WRITING WORKSHOP

 WITH PLEASANT GEHMAN

 Wednesday evenings 7:45-10:00 PM

1954 ½ Rodney Drive LA CA 90027

  Space is limited!

 For more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/749269365140806/

JUST A CRAZY LITTLE PLACE...MEMORIES OF THE SUGAR SHACK

 Sugar Shack coupon courtesy of Chuck Starr

 When most people think of their teenage years, they remember things like football games or the Senior Prom. Not me. The summer of 1975 was a highlight in my Peak Experience-filled teens.  And nothing is sweeter in my memory than the nights I spent at The Sugar Shack in North Hollywood.  The Shack, as we called it, was a refuge for  “adventurous” teenagers- oh,  wait, I really meant to say Juvenile Delinquents With Very Little Parental Supervision. If you imagine combining the degeneracy of the Weimar Berlin with an episode of Romper Room featuring  Jayne County as the hostess, and  a soundtrack by Suzi Quatro, you’ll get an idea of what an average night at The Sugar Shack was like.

I was Sweet Sixteen and had just moved to LA, a city that was in the throes of a strange musical limbo. The Hollywood club scene was in that  “no man’s land” between the end of Glitter Rock and the beginning of Punk; but let me assure you, there was plenty going on. While the rest of the world was grooving to the boss sounds of the latest Disco hits, there was a crowd of Tinseltown hipsters-although we would’ve abhorred being called that- going to see Toni Basil or The Tubes at The Roxy, Queen or Iggy at The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, or the Cycle Sluts, a theatrical drag queen troupe/ heavy metal band who were in residence at The Whisky A Go-Go. Since many of us were too young to drink legally, we’d prime ourselves for these gigs by scarfing handfuls of Quaaludes- the original Rorer 714 article- which could be purchased in The Rainbow’s  parking lot for a mere buck a pop.

Back then, rock music wasn’t the only thing that was caught in a gray area. My crowd and I were streetwise and sophisticated enough to be experimenting with drugs and sex, but hideously below the legal Age Of Consent. Since it was The Swingin’ Seventies, our nascent sexuality was also one big fat gray area…and it’s not like anyone was keepings tabs, either!  Our adventurous spirit fit in perfectly with the prevalent freewheeling attitude of the time. Mixed with the handfuls of pills we took combined with the Olde English 800 tallboys we guzzled in back alleys, it made any sort of sexual classification totally irrelevant.

We were a crowd of groupies, teenage hustlers, bisexual school girls and fringy sluts out, as the New York Dolls said, “Lookin’ For A Kiss”…or more, if we could get it…and usually, we could. Our favorite hangs were late-night coffee shops where trannie hookers turned tricks in the Ladies Room; places like Arthur J’s on Santa Monica Boulevard or   the two haunts on Hollywood Boulevard: Danielle’s and The Gold Cup which was immortalized in Black Randy’s song “Trouble At The Cup”.  Mostly we hung out at these establishments after hitting Westwood to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the millionth time.  None of these places served liquor, so of course they didn’t card anyone. You could be totally at home in your fishnets, heavy make up and Sally Bowles’ fierce Divinely Decadent attitude. After all, who was gonna to hassle you about your appearance…a stoned drag queen? Rodney’s English Disco had closed and The Masque wasn’t open yet, so these were our haunts…until The Sugar Shack opened.

Located in the depths of LA’s San Fernando Valley on Magnolia and Whitsett, The Sugar Shack was a juice bar where you had to show ID to prove that you were under twenty one…unless of course you were Kim Fowley or Rodney Bingenheimer or a visiting rock star. The place was tiny and wood paneled, with a long bar down the right side as you walked in. There was an upstairs lounge area that had a working fireplace,  clanging pinball machines, and couches were everyone eventually wound up  writhing around   with someone they’d just met.

 Main attraction was the dance floor, which took up at least a third of the club. Racks of colorful lights whirled around overhead, along with a Disco ball, a siren that sounded frequently, and strobe lights.  The notorious Chuck E Starr was the DJ playing Shack faves like Roxy Music’s “Do The Strand”, The Sweet’s “AC/DC” or “Fox On The Run” and   “Planet Queen” by T. Rex. He also favored hits from LA’s “grown up” (read: 21 and over) gay clubs, like The Andrea True Connection’s  “More, More, More” and  “Party Line” and Hot Chocolate’s  “You Sexy Thing”.    Ziggy Stardust look-alike Rick Ferris (aka Rick Bowie) would   jump up and lead an off-handed, infinitely hot Hustle.  Everyone in the whole place was in love with him, whether they’d admit to it or not.  But he big crowd pleaser was anything from The Rocky Horror Show – the entire dance floor would be filled with kids doing  “The Time Warp” in Busby Berkeley precision, and  “Cherry Bomb” by local gals and Shack regulars, The Runaways.  David Bowie was in a class by himself– “Rebel Rebel” and “Golden Years” were heard multiple times a night and no one ever got tired of them- everyone went insane. My late bestie Randy Kaye, (Co-editor of my punk fanzine Lobotomy and later an A&R man for Slash Records) remembers:

“No matter what Bowie song Chuck played, we’d all scream and run to the dance floor!”

 The main thing I remember about the dance floor- aside from making an ass of myself on numerous occasions by literally falling off my silver glitter platforms in a Quaalude stupor- were the mirrored panels that surrounded it on three sides. They were covered in a thick band of kiss marks in every conceivable shade of lip-gloss because everybody would   dance facing the mirrors and   kiss their own reflections. How very Seventies; we might’ve been messed up, but we sure didn’t lack self-esteem!

 

The Runaways

 “The Sugar Shack was a magical place,” sighed Cherie Currie, former Runaways lead singer, who, along with her twin sister Marie were the belles of the ball.

“Everyone would make a circle around Cherie and she’d…like…do her stage moves,” Randy said.

 Jane Wiedlin, who in the days before The  Go-Go’s was a Shack regular, remembers:

“ Me and my friends were all afraid of Cherie!  The Sugar Shack was fun, but it was full of teenagers.  I wanted to meet rock stars, so I liked Rodney’s and The Rainbow more.”

“The Sugar Shack was a great place to sort of…get over Rodney’s, where everyone was fucking three guys a night! ” said my former roommate Ann MacLean, who was in 11^th grade at the time.

“ You’d get there early, get really wasted in the parking lot, then hang out with gay guys and make out with your girlfriends. I remember a lot of chicks wearing those chubby rabbit fur jackets, which I thought were so cool! Money wasn’t important… everyone was running around screaming “GIRRRRL!” and “MISS THING!” and we’d all cram into the girl’s restroom to make out with each other.”

“There were a lot of bisexual girls,” recalls Rodney Bingenheimer, wistfully and with great relish,

 “I brought Roger Meadows-Taylor from Queen there and he loved it! When I brought all of Blondie there, they couldn’t believe what was going on- a club only for teenagers? They thought it was really wild!”

 Drama always ran high at The Sugar Shack. When the beautiful blonde bartender Vicki Ronald became the singer for Kim Fowley’s “punk” project, Venus And The Razorblades, everybody speculated in hushed whispers, wondering if it would cause a rift between her and Cherie.  They not only looked identical, they were best friends.  Date-stealing was common. If you lost sight of your paramour for even a few minutes, it was a safe bet you’d find them entangled with someone else in a parked car on one of the dark residential streets or in the alleys surrounding the place.

“God, I remember getting there really early to drink in the car,” Randy Kaye recalled, “…and then waking up on some side street, not knowing how I got there!”

 My close friend and bon vivant, the late Dennis Crosby (grandson of Bing) recalled:

“Sex in cars… sex on the couches upstairs… sex in the girl’s bathroom…French designer bell-bottom jeans that laced up the front and the back…Tuinals and Southern Comfort…  stumbling outside to puke across the street then going back inside to dance!”

 Because most of us were underage, the good stuff usually happened outside or after hours. The movie Foxes, which featured Cherie Currie, came close to what our secret teenage lives were like back then, but it didn’t quite cut it- outrageous as the film was for the time, it still whitewashed our real life experiences. We were rock n’ rollers adrift in suburbia, dealing with the adult-like harsh realities-and hardcore substance abuse as escapism-when most of us weren’t even old enough to drive! And as for driving: getting to the Shack was a nightmare that involved sneaking out of the house, and either hitch-hiking (which we all did then) or careening across Coldwater Canyon in a car with seven other people who weren’t old enough to drive yet either. 

Eventually, most of us stopped going to The Sugar Shack in favor of  a  gay club in Hollywood called Gino’s II…and then punk rock happened, dividing our crowd into two very distinct factions. Some of us saw it as the Second Coming;  the others preferred dance music, puka shells and feathered hair.

The Sugar Shack’s been closed for decades, but I still can feel the ecstatic sweat of the dance floor when Chuck Starr hit the siren and threw on “Suffragette City”; the enthusiastic and utterly wasted casual sex with someone whose name you didn’t know… and hoping all week long that you’d see them again the next Wednesday night. I remember my red heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses, kept on after dark and miraculously never lost.  I always wore my Carmen Miranda 1940’s style Kork- Eaze wedge platforms and “Drive-In” pants:  Chemin De Fer bell bottom jeans that  zippered all the way  from the front waistband to the back through your crotch so  they’d fall off you in two pieces. It was  such a rush to get out of the house on a warm, jasmine scented summer night…and watching Rick Bowie strutting  around in the strobes  on the dance floor like he owned the place.

I remember a lot about those Sugar Shack nights, and what it was like being a teenager in Los Angeles during the Seventies. To my own amazement, as these memories come flooding back to me in minute detail, I put on “The Timewarp”…and evidently  I didn’t kill too many brain cells  back in the day,  because my body remembered every move as though it  had been imprinted into my DNA.  Dancing in my living room , I take Just A  To The Left and  then  A Step To The Right  with  the sassy  flair I used to show off on the Sugar Shack’s dance floor.

 I’d gaze into the mirror looking myself directly into the eyes, slowly lower my lids, pucker up my Mary Quant Black Cherry glossed lips and   kiss my own reflection, just as the final chords of the song ran out.

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The   story you've just read is from my forthcoming memoir Good Girls Go To Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere , which will be published by Punk Hostage Press in early 2015.

 Saturday, September 27  I will be reading from  my book Showgirl Confidential: My Life Onstage, Backstage, And On The Road  with the women of Punk Hostage Press at Beyond Baroque,  681 Venice  Blvd, LA, 90291  at 7:00pm. Info is here:  https://www.facebook.com/events/345505825625345/

  Get a signed copy of Showgirl Confidential here:  http://www.princessfarhana.com/shop.htm  

THE END OF THE ENDLESS SUMMER

Spin & Marty 

I flattened myself out on the green-painted deck of Veteran’s Memorial Park Pool, abandoning myself to the sun, to the summer heat, daydreaming the afternoon away. Vet Mem was from another era—even in the late ‘60s.  It belonged to an America that was slowly slipping away with incidents like Kent State, Altamont, hippies and Black Panthers becoming a sleekly mainstream watermark of current events like the  bloody footage of Vietnam on the news every night, “our” boys at My Lai.   But in Middletown, Connecticut, at Vet Mem Park, veterans were still treated with respect, and old values steadfastly clung to the wooded, landscaped grounds. Spring water bubbled up from a pipe, fresh and freezing cold.  There was a petting zoo with goats, lambs, chickens, bunnies and four or five beautiful fallow deer, butting each other and rubbing their newly developed antlers up against tree trunks to ease the itching.  They were the kind of deer that looked like fawns all their lives, with white flag tails and Bambi spots on their backs.  When you’d hold up some weeds or a carrot brought from home, they’d shove their wet obsidian, squared-off noses through the openings in the Cyclone fence, nudging almost desperately at your hand.

The pool itself was located in an ugly post-World War II cinderblock building, painted a jarring, chalky, Atomic Age turquoise.  For a quarter you rented a locking wire-mesh basket to your bathing suite and held the key while you swam. I’d watch the older girls and women change, trying to get a glimpse of heir bodies, and imagine what it would be like to look like that, or touch grown-up flesh not quite as taut as my own.  The women I spied on all had swaying breasts, thighs milky white in the light filtering through the screened-in windows.  Still just a kid, I’d carry my rolled-up towel to the snack bar and buy Jujubes or Snow-Caps or Junior Mints—movie candy, really—for a dime.  Then I’d spread my towel out on one of the splintery wooden chaise lounges, or maybe just keep it balled up on the grass so it wouldn’t get wet, while I spent the next three or four hours racing, doing cannonballs off the sides of the pool, or if you were old enough (and I was just getting to the), flirting with the lifeguard on duty.  I was at “that awkward age” –still wanting to dunk my little brother, race with the boys, but just beginning to notice the mating dances going on all around me.

There were a couple of lifeguards and  they were almost interchangeable.  Both were cute, bronze, with shaggy, Sun-In bleached Bobby Sherman hair.  They were lithe and tan in baggy, faded swimming trunks, with shiny silver whistles on lanyards, dangling onto their thousands-of-yards-of-Mark-Spitz-Butterfly Stroke pecs.  The lifeguards were perfect objects for testing the waters  for real flirting, and  I spied on the girls who tried to get the lifeguards’ attention, as well as spying on the lifeguards’ girlfriends, who were really pretty.  

The sun was still high at four p.m., but by that time I’d be a little whipped from all the chlorine and fancy diving, remembering to keep my legs together and as straight as possible, toes curled, chest out and back arched.  Exhausted, I’d get as flat as possible, deeply inhaling the intoxicating summer smell of pool water on hot concrete, mixed with the cocoa-butter smell of Coppertone lotion which had been seeping into the concrete and floating on the water in a thin film all summer long.  It smelled good enough to eat.  There’d be laughter in the background, blasts from the lifeguard’s whistle, and, of course, staticy Top Forty coming from someone’s small, tinny transistor radio.  I’d be covered in little droplets of chlorinated water in my snugly fitting royal blue one-piece with the nautical red star hanging just above my belly button like a military decoration.  I was daydreaming of what life would be like as a teenager.

Time seemed to move slower back then, but my body could sense adolescence was approaching rapidly.  My friends in school were already giggling about boys—though I couldn’t see being interested in my classmates when there were lifeguards around.  My mother worked in the Theatre Department at Wesleyan university, and I had a number of crushes on Theatre Majors, mostly artsy, scruffy hippie-types.  Even though the Summer Of Love wasn’t too far in the past, the lifeguards at Vet Mem held a different sort of fascination for me, in a Tiger Beat magazine kind of way.  The lifeguards seemed all about Teen Promise, proms and shit like that.  The boys in my class looked like Timmy from Lassie in their drip-dry Sears plaid shirts, and the J.C. Penney’s jeans that had elastic insets in the back of the waist panel were hardly what one would term “attractive.”  Most of the boys looked like they hadn’t figured out how to wash their own ears yet, and many of the girls towered over them, even in sneakers.  They were just boys –little kids.  I didn’t want Timmy from Lassie, I wanted Spin and Marty – long, tall dangerous teenagers with musclely arms and flat stomachs under clean white Hanes t-shirts and faded, baggy Levi’s. 

Spin and Marty were in a black and white Disney series and lived on a dude ranch.  They were always on horseback.  They looked strong and capable, gentle when they handled livestock, more interesting when they handled rope lariats and rifles.  Spin was wilder, Marty a little more compassionate, but they both had sun-bleached butch buzzcuts under their trashed straw cowboy hats.  They dragged their boots and mumbled, looked like they knew how to smoke, swear, and especially kiss.  Annette, Darlene, and Doreen from The Mickey Mouse Club always guest-starred as either Spin or Marty’s love interest.  I hated Annette, was jealous of Darlene, but Doreen was attractive in a slutty, back-seat-of-the-car-at-a-drive-in way.  When she kissed Spin on a hayride in one episode, I got an immediate stomachache.  I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what desire was at that point, I just thought the butterflies were because of something I’d eaten.  Still, I watched Spin and Marty religiously, and the stomachaches became more and more frequent.  Boys my own age were out of the question.  Lying by the Vet Mem pool that summer was almost like being encased in a chrysalis, sleeping, waiting for adulthood.  It was palpable.

Nowadays, all lifeguards look young and callow to me, too straight arrow and blank, like the good-looking boys and girls on Baywatch.  Except for Pamela Anderson—who had that awesome  Doreen/drive-in movie whorey look.  Spin and Marty are a faded black and white memory from the past.  When was the last time I saw one of their episodes, before Watergate?  I realize how they helped to shape my perception of sexual attractiveness—long limbs, pretty faces, smooth androgynous chests… and sometimes, in moments of sheer perversity, I can’t help but imagine the fate that befalls  the black and white  era ex-Disney stars, those clean cut, adolescent Midnight Cowboys.  Maybe it was Doreen that I’d heard had been in jail for writing bad checks, I’m not sure.  And poor Annette, Rest In Peace.

I imagine Spin old and haggard now, perhaps living in a one-bedroom dump in Tujunga, skin red from years of outdoor work, a few divorces, a failed Country and Western career, an  alcohol problem.  Maybe he got into Meth or something.  Marty probably grew up fey and latent queer –maybe he hustled when the agents stopped calling and the parts stopped being offered.  Did some hardcore porn in the ‘70’s.  Maybe I’d even bumped into one of them at a K-Mart or bought something from one from them at a swap meet!  You never know.  And whatever happed to Timmy?  Child stars, childhood.  We really were innocent back then.  Nobody would even make a kid’s show about a dude ranch anymore, no way.

These days, the idea of going to a public pool is repellent to me, and not just because of athlete’s foot and pee-water.  Drugs for sale, gang violence, molestations, petty crimes in the locker rooms.  If I had kids, I wouldn’t let them go no matter how hot it got.  They’d have to be satisfied with seeing Baywatch reruns.  And look who Pamela Anderson Lee is with now.  She probably preferred Spin to Marty, too.  Even the beach is too polluted to visit.  Do they eve even show Spin and Marty anymore?

Oh man…those long, lazy preteen summer afternoons at Vet Mem—suntan lotion and candy, lifeguards, covert spying missions, waiting for my period to come, waiting for some kind of indefinable action.  Testing the waters of my own undiscovered sexuality.

 And as for daydreams?  Well... who has the time?

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 The story you’ve just read is from my book Escape From Houdini Mountain ,  signed copies available here:  http://www.princessfarhana.com/shop.htm

Or as a paperback or Kindle edition on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Houdini-Mountain-Pleasant-Gehman/dp/0916397688/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409526182&sr=8-1&keywords=Escape+from+Houdini+Mountain