My place had a postage-stamp lawn and little porch outside the studio. I had made it—I was in my forties and still doing the work I did when I was in my twenties. And my kid seemed bent on replicating my mistakes. If my mom’s stories about my “hobo” ancestor were correct, maybe it was in the genes.
Long ago I had been relegated to weekend visits, so I was the “cool dad.” It was true, Hank’s stepfather Kurt was an asshole, but unfortunately that seemed to be sending Hank the message that people who could support themselves adequately were all assholes. Partially true perhaps, but a dangerous generalization. Trisha, Hank’s mother, had left me back when he was a baby. I had been working for the LA Scene, an upstart alternative weekly in the days before they were all bought up by media corporations. Anyway, I had been out covering a Jane’s Addiction show at the Howl club down by McArthur Park and came home to an empty apartment and a note: “Sorry Jack, I can’t do this anymore.” By “this” Trisha meant living on my shit wages with a baby. She had been a hairdresser, but quit when she got pregnant, to my surprise, apparently expecting that fatherhood would transform me into a proper provider so she could stay at home. Instead, she got a live-in boyfriend who had to leave her alone at home a lot so he could bring back an inadequate paycheck.
We’d been living in a cheap apartment in the San Fernando Valley with a banner perpetually strung on the side of the building, which read “Move In Now!” Perhaps the owner thought he needed to advertise endlessly because the combination of the 24/7 smell of greasy chili burgers emanating from the Tommy’s next door and the pungent odor of late night hops from the Anheiser Busch Brewery across the street drove everyone who could afford to leave out of the complex. None of our neighbors spoke English, a fact that Trisha frequently commented on, along with the 5:00 AM Norteño music that the neighbors blasted from their pickups as they took off for work. “It’s a hard life,” I’d tell her.
After she left, she moved in with her mother, who consistently referred to me as “the loser” during my son’s formative years. This made for a painful and ambivalent childhood for Hank. Nonetheless, the harder Trish and her Mom tried to push him away from me, the more he pulled his way back. Even as a very young boy Hank would draw pictures of “Daddy at a music show” or “Daddy writing.” It drove them fucking crazy and I loved him for it.
A couple of years after Trisha moved out, she hooked up with Kurt, an ex-frat boy from USC who had a job in real estate. They got married and Kurt set about ruining Trisha’s life in a whole new way. He had affairs, berated her in front of Hank, and dissed me constantly. Kurt was an all-star. His saving grace: money. Hence Trisha was long-suffering and materially comfortable in West LA.
Trisha and I met back in 1987 at Al’s Bar, the legendary punk spot in the loft district of downtown LA where a lot of artists lived. It was walking distance from the Atomic Café on the edge of Little Tokyo. I loved Al’s, both for the good music and for the fact that it was a place where Bukowski used to drink. The neon sign behind the bar said, “Tip or Die.” I was there that night to cover a tiny theater troupe’s version of Kerouac’s Tristessa. They put the show on in the alley behind the bar and an audience of a dozen or so people sat on the same kind of metal bleachers they have at little league fields. It was a dramatic adaptation of the Kerouac novel about Jack and his friends in Mexico City, and Jack’s brief dalliance with a soulful, tragically beautiful prostitute, whose name means “sadness.” The actors entered stage right from the back door of the bar and did a decent job of invoking the beat mood with no set, no costumes, and no music. Spare, earnest, and bittersweet. My review was entitled, “Beat in the Alley.”
I remember spending a lot of time during the play staring up at a high rise framed by the narrow alley and glancing over at Trisha. She was dressed in all black (a sort of uniform then) with long hair dyed bright red. Her eyes were blue-green and she had a sweet smile that lit up her face. After the play, we both stayed to listen to a cowpunk band from Austin, Texas, named Hillbilly Tryst or something like that. I bought her a beer and we talked about the play, about the Beats, about music. We agreed that life was tragic. She let her friends go home and left with me, strolling down the dark street lined with sleeping bodies under dirty blankets or flattened cardboard boxes. When we got to my car I kissed her softly and gazed into her alabaster face. We looked up at the crescent moon above the looming skyline. The whole city was mine, the big wide world. I was in love. We went home together, and it was all good, for quite a while.
Back then, Trisha rented a room in a big house up in the Hollywood hills from the guy who ran The Grave on Hollywood Boulevard. Actually she chipped in for his rent. The place was really owned by a nearly senile old woman in the valley who lived there when she was a kid. She hadn’t done her homework, and Zane, the Ghoul, and Trisha were getting the whole two-story house with its nice yard overlooking a canyon and a view of the Hollywood sign for a mere pittance. Zane, who managed the club at night, had a day job with the Water and Power Company so he more or less had his shit together. The Ghoul, on the other hand, played in a local band called Night of the Living Dead and was a full-on junkie.
By this time in my youth, I had grown my shaggy hair out to about shoulder length and usually never wore anything fancier than jeans, a t-shirt, and black converse sneakers. Trisha used to make fun of my lack of fashion sense. That said, the Ghoul, who rarely bathed, never washed his clothes, and made little effort to conceal his track marks, made me look like a GQ cover boy. He usually lounged around the basement room in a leather jacket with no shirt underneath and boxer shorts. When I came over Trisha and I would do everything we could to avoid being drawn down into his lair. Suffice to say we never chased the dragon.
The rest of the place was fantastic. Zane, a manic Aussie with a thick mane of long red hair, had an impressive collection of Marilyn Monroe photos that lined the hallways upstairs: Marilyn in Playboy, Marilyn in Bus Stop, Marilyn pouting, Marilyn teasing, Marilyn tragic and innocent, Marilyn in death. He and his girlfriend, Cat—an aspiring actress who had her own place but basically lived with Zane—had filled the living room with vintage furniture carefully selected from stores on Melrose—late-fifties and early-sixties Moderne. The end tables of the leopard-skin couch were littered with copies of Screw, The Hollywood Reporter, and BAM.
Trisha worked on Melrose in a salon called the Union Jack, which the owner had decorated with British rock posters, Sex Pistols, Clash, The Who, etc. Whenever I could, we’d meet for lunch or for drinks after work. We scoured used-record stores for hidden gems, had lots of coffee, and looked through second-hand shops. During that period, Trisha never said a thing about money. We just talked and made love and went out to see music. She read a lot so we rapped about books mostly. We’d both started and then stopped college and figured we didn’t need to pay somebody to tell us what to read. She liked the Beats, but also Anaïs Nin, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. Thus the talk had a lot to do with sex and death and suffering and angst and carpe diem. One thing Trisha didn’t share with me was an interest in politics. I just assumed we were in tune at a basic level.
Sometimes we’d go downtown between the Nickel and the Garment District to Gorky’s on open mic night to listen to bad poetry for laughs. Gorky’s was a hip Russian-themed cafeteria that served borscht, brewed their own beer, and had music, art, and poetry every week. Before I met Trisha, I had a brief flirtation with poetry. I read a lot of Bukowski and wrote a few pieces about waking up with a bad hangover and hating the world. When I went to my first open mic night at Gorky’s I discovered that everyone else had read a lot of Bukowski and had a lot of hangovers. We all sucked. After that realization, I still liked to go to Gorky’s, but solely for amusement. One night, Trisha and I almost bust a gut laughing after an English grad student from USC read a poem about a roach crawling on her IUD. The woman wasn’t pleased with our response and flipped us off. Of course, this only made us laugh all the more.
Sometimes there would be surprises though. One evening, after a series of poets who overcame their lack of skill with the language by yelling at the top of their lungs, a petite young woman in an X t-shirt nervously
