As I glumly watched the equipment being loaded in the station wagon, I saw a woman with red lipstick and matching frizzy hair pushing her way through the crowded backstage area towards me. She grabbed hold of my jeans, dragged me to a corner and said her name was Merry Cornwall, and she was the booking agent for the Cheetah. The Cheetah was the hottest discotheque on the West Coast. It was hardly a year old and already a rock and roll legend. The interior design of mirrored chrome and flashing lights made it the hippie acid palace of the decade, and I would have given my right arm to play there.
Dick Christian saw me talking to Merry Cornwall, and when he found out who she was he began laying on the bullshit thick and heavy. In ten minutes she started giving us boy-I-would-love-to-fuck-you looks. I had never really gotten those looks from an older woman before. (Merry, it turned out, was only twenty-three years old. I was nineteen.) And I was a virgin to boot, but I understood how to play the game. She told us that she adored the group and would try to book us at the Cheetah. She wanted to know where we were living so she could get in touch with us. Since we were supposed to be leaving the next day we took her number and promised to call. Merry Cornwall’s promise was enough motivation to get in touch with our only LA contact, Sergeant Garcia.
Garcia was on welfare, nearly as broke as we were, and lived in a tiny apartment in downtown Los Angeles. He took us in like long-lost inmates. We waited by Sergeant Garcia’s phone for Merry Cornwall to return our phone calls, but she never did. We got more depressed every day, dragging Sergeant Garcia down with us. John Speer played drill instructor every morning, dragging us up off the mattresses and making us set up our equipment to practice. The noise drove Sergeant Garcia out of his apartment. He would either walk the streets or go to see his psychiatrist at the welfare center. Sometimes he would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, “Harriet, take it out! Take it out!” He was starting to flip out again. This was the first time I had been exposed to somebody that crazy, and I tried my best to act natural. I made jokes about Harriet, which he didn’t laugh about, and about our being stuck in his house for the next five years, which he did laugh about. One day he came home from his shrink and told us that he had finally told his psychiatrist we were living with him, but the psychiatrist thought he was making it up and threatened to put him back into the hospital. He asked if one of us would go to his next session with him so his psychiatrist would know there were really eight people in his apartment. We thought this was very funny and drew straws to see who would go to Sergeant Garcia’s shrink the next session. Charlie Carnal won.
Charlie came back from the doctor’s and told us that when the shrink stuck his head out into the waiting room, he took one look at Charlie with his short hair and one side and long on the other and closed the door. Forty minutes later Sergeant Garcia emerged and told Charlie that his psychiatrist insisted that we move out for Garcia’s own good.
By the end of the week we were flat broke and couldn’t find a paying job anywhere in the city. We made plans to leave Sergeant Garcia’s and head back to Phoenix in three days’ time, and Dick went scurrying out into the streets for the last two days to hunt up a job so we could stay in LA. He was able to get us one more booking at the Hullabaloo Club, but again for no pay. We packed all of our things, loaded them into the car, thanked Garcia and went to the Hullabaloo Club for a farewell gig.
Dick disappeared around midnight, and just before we were supposed to go on he came back with a sharp-looking older guy in his thirties named Robert Roberts. Dick had gone to a bar, ordered a beer with his last sixty cents, walked over to the first person he saw and told the guy our whole story from Phoenix on. Bob Roberts offered his living room to sleep in, and again we were saved.
Bob Roberts lived just off Sunset Boulevard on Wetherlee Drive, not far from the Whiskey-A-Go-Go where we also dreamed of getting a gig. The neighborhood was called Evil Hill, which I thought was a very neat name for a neighborhood and I didn’t question it any further. We slept on a mattresses across the living room floor, all except for Dick Christian, who had wrangled his way into the mater bedroom. We weren’t at Bob’s a week when Mike Bruce went outside on the lawn to stretch out in the sun one morning. He was back inside in five minutes.
“There was this old guy who came out of the house next door, and kept yelling inside, ‘Bernard, get the kids and come outside! Bernard? Are you going to take the kids for a walk?’ Then this other guy comes out of the house with four poodle dogs and the first guy is yelling, ‘C’mon, kiddies, mama gonna take you to the corner.’ A couple of minutes later I was lying on the lawn with my eyes closed, and I got this eerie feeling somebody was watching me. I opened one eye and there was this guy sitting on a car, grinning at me. Finally he said, ‘Hi, fella, you got nice arms.’
We shrugged it off as weird LA people, but the following day while Mike was out on the lawn again, an older distinguished man started a conversation with him, and Mike told him about the band. The guy offered to discuss managing the group if Mike had dinner with him. Since we were practically starving and the chances were that Mike could take home a doggie bag, we insisted he accept the invitation. The man picked Mike up in a Cadillac, and we all stood in the doorway of the house grinning and waving and trying to make a good impression on our potential manager.
Mike was only gone for half an hour when he came back to Bob’s house ashen white. His friend had taken him to a drive-in southern-fried-chicken joint, and just as Mike was about to bite down on his first piece of solid food in days the guy asked if he could give him a blow job. Mike made the man take him right back to the house while his friend cursed him all the way home.
“He called me a cock teaser,” Mike said, astonished at the thought. “Can you imagine that?”
Dick and Bob Roberts listened to this and roared with laughter. All of us were wide-eyed suburban innocents, and we were baffled as to why Dick and Bob thought it was so funny. We found out the next night. Mike, who was sleeping in the closet because there was no room in the living room on the floor, began to raise hell about why Dick was getting to sleep in the master bedroom in a real bed, while Mike, who was a full-fledged member of the group, had to sleep on the floor of the closet. He made quite a stink about trading sleeping space for a few hours, and Dick looked worried for the first time.
It must have been a terrible night for Dick. One by one he took us into the bedroom and told us he was gay and that the only reason we had a roof over our heads was because he was fucking Bob Roberts. It was a horrifying thing to learn about a close friend for an unsophisticated bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year olds. It was like Dick had told us he had leukemia. Dennis was baffled. He knew it was earthshaking consequences, but he really didn’t know what it meant that Dick was “gay.”
It was a touchy time for everyone. Did he really suck on cocks? we all wanted to know. Up the ass? We were all very tense until I figured what the hell, we were friends and he never came on to any of us, and I started making terrible jokes about it. “I feel a little gay myself,” and that kind of thing. As much as we tried to take it in our stride, it was never forgotten. It created a break between the band and Dick. It set up a barrier of fear, and as hard as we tried we just couldn’t chalk it up as another of those strange things that happened in LA. What if that kind of thing happened to us?