I don’t know what made the girl different from all other girls, but I drove back to the house in Topanga Canyon with her and threw her into the coffin. Both of us tld each other massive fabrications about our sexual histories, and I let her believe this was just another tumble in the casket for me. Not only were we terrible liars, but we were wretched lovers, too. I’m sure it was her first time, also, because if she had an inkling of what she was doing, she didn’t let me in on it. My ass kept on slapping against the top of the coffin, our foreplay lasted about four minutes, and getting my broken thing into that hole nestled in a thatch of hair four inches below her navel was so much trouble it was more like a wrestling match. Edward Satrinao had been right!
As soon as she left in the morning I became convinced I had the clap. I didn’t even know what the sysmptoms were, and I was too embarrassed to ask any of the other guys. I went to the free clinic in Hollywood for a checkup because I didn’t have any money. The place was filled with dirty, sypilitic hippies and everybody stared at me because I brought the coffin with me. I thought th doctor needed the coffin for some reason.
As the house band at the Cheetah we opened for the Doors a half a dozen times. “Light My Fire” had turned them into a supergroup that year, and as we got to be buddies I got the impression that Jim Morrison didn’t exactly know how to handle what was happening to him.
Morrsion was always drunk. There was a great, otherworldly mysteriousness about him. We talked for hours on the pier behind the Cheetah in between gigs, sipping scotch from a bottle, occasionally both throwing up into the ocean. I passed out in Morrison’s house a hundred times. I woke up in the morning smelling of stale beer. Morrison would be asleep on the couch a few feet away from me in his black leather pants and black T-shirt. I would stumble to my feet, walk the twenty-eight miles home to Toganga Canyon.
One day on my way up the hill I heard someone calling: “Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! Excuse me!”
A woman about forty years old, I guess, had just pulled up in front of the house in a Chevy convertible. I strolled towards her, and as I got closer she said excitedly, “It is! It is!”
When I got close to her she was beaming. “You’re Tiny Tim, aren’t you?” I just smiled back, not answering.
“Do you live around here, Mr. Tim?”
“Sure, I live up the hill. How did you know I was Tiny Tim?”
“Well, I recognized you. From your nose.” She gave me the once-over, her eyes widening at my torn dungarees and the cheerleader’s skirt I had on backward. She spotted my perpetual beer can, now crushed and empty. “Would you like another beer?” she asked hesitantly. “I didn’t think you drank or smoked.”
“That’s just publicity,” I told her, and followed her into the house. She poured beer after beer into me, getting me nice and high so early in the day. I was very grateful. After an hour I had her whole story. She was from Seattle, divorced, and had moved to LA a few months before to teach music in a high school. She loved my (Tiny Tim’s) music and wanted to know if I wanted to learn how to play piano. I didn’t, but I thought maybe Tiny Tim would, and there was free-flowing beer in her refrigerator, so I told her I’d be delighted to take piano lessons.
I got to meet her three little girls, who I called the Ball sisters: Matzoh, Camphor and Screw. They acted very strange, these prepubescent little girls, and at first I figured their mother was putting Valium in their Pablum. The three of them would walk around all day drinking grape juice. I thought it was grape juice until I took a sip myself and found out it was Ripple. Three infant alcoholics! Gee, were those kids smashed!
Every day when she got home from school I’d plink on the piano with her for an hour, and then she would take me into the kitchen and fill me with beer and sandwiches. After a month of this I got up enough nerve to ask her if I could take some sandwiches home with me for dinner, and I eventually would up feeding the whole group. It probably would have gone on forever except that she began to talk to the other neighbors and told them she was giving Tiny Tim piano lessons. They all told her they knew positively that Tiny Tim didn’t live in Topanga Canyon.
One day Troy Donahue came by to hang through the hole, and he told us that he had been driving up the hill when a lady in a white Chevy flagged him over and asked if he was really Troy Donahue. She told him that she gave piano lessons to Tiny Tim and would he like piano lessons, too. He told her that Tiny Tim lived in New York, but she insisted he lived on the hill and pointed out our house.
Troy had confused her enough to make her come up to the house later that night where she found the house full of people in a drunken stupor. We kept up the Tiny Tim ruse for a while, but Russ Tamblyn, who lived nearby and visited often, slipped and called me Alice. At that point my piano teacher who was so confused and so disappointed that I wasn’t Tiny Tim but Alice Somebody that she started to weep and ran out the door. I showed up for my piano lesson the next day at my regular time, guilt stricken and wanting to make amends, but she refused to give me another lesson if I wasn’t Tiny Tim. She did give me a beer, however, and continued to feed the group a couple of times a week.
We had another sponsor in Topanga Canyon named Norma Bloom, a huge Valkyrian blonde who was secretly bald under her long blond wig. Well, at least she thought it was a secret. Norma turned up at the house one day, uninvited saying she had heard that a rock band lived there, and she just loved rock and roll, and could we teach her about it. We all explained it wasn’t a teachable thing, that it was intangible, and all she could do was listen to it, but what was it she really wanted to learn?
“I heard that musicians do it differently,” she said.
“That depends if you’re plugged into an amplifier,” I told her. Dennis couldn’t believe what he was hearing and danced around behind her back, picking at her wig like a mosquito.
“I know how to do it like Chuck Berry,” I told her.
“Was he a rock musician?” Norma asked.
Norma was filled with handy little tricks of survival. She could cook up a meal from wild plants growing in the canyon, and knew several techniques for shoplifting when things got really desperate. She even gave us a recipe for rock soup, which, as it s name implies, was soup made from a rock boiled in water and vegatables. The odd thing about rock soup was that it was delicious.
There were probably two or three girls in between my first and Norma Bloom, but I had never seen a naked girl who was as big as Norma. Everything about her was giant, her bones, her tits, even the wide pink nipples that each had a long blond hair growing out of them. I was fascinated with her cunt, which like her head (although I never saw her head) was hairless.
This barren state made it easy for me to get involved in a physiological examination that I never quite gotten into before. I spent an hour on the floor with her legs looped over the side of the coffin — practically giving her an internal examination. I’m sure it couldn’t have been too exciting, not that I was trying to be, but Norma kept squealing in delight. When I finally got around to fucking her she was near delirious from all the attention she was getting and probably didn’t realize that I was rather disconcerted because she was so big inside, too. I sloshed around in there for another hour, getting sore and bored, and I finally stopped to get some newspaper to line the coffin in because it was getting sopping wet when she called it quits. Norma came around almost every day for a month or so, and under strict orders from the group she always brought food, mostly pies that she had baked herself. Norma and I continued to have one of those lazy afternoon romances, where I would adventure into teh dark inner cavern of her loins and lose myself for an hour or two.