MY LITTLE RUNAWAY

Former Runaways drummer Sandy West died Saturday after a long battle with lung cancer. When I heard the news, via an email from a publicist, it took my breath away. Sandy West was my first rock and roll crush, and now she’s gone.

I saw The Runaways in December of 1978 at the Whisky. I was 13, I was with my dad, and it was my first real club show. I was just a kid from the Valley. I’d never been inside a Hollywood club filled with people of all day-glo colors. And the band was incredible. The power and energy from Joan Jett, Lita Ford, Laurie McAllister and Sandy West literally changed my life. Lita was the obvious sexpot onstage, but I instantly fixated on Sandy’s steady beat and totally grooved to her solo turn on “Right Now.” It’s one of those songs that in retrospect is really not objectively very good (sort of like Bob Welch’s “Ebony Eyes”) but I nevertheless couldn’t help but love it.

My Sandy West obsession began in earnest as soon as the gig ended. Dad and I walked across the street to Licorice Pizza, where I bought an import copy of And Now… The Runaways, the band’s latest, and sadly their last, album. I played “Right Now” over and over. True luv.

My friends at school laughed at me. They said the Runaways were terrible, that Sandy couldn’t even keep a proper beat. I never backed down in the band’s defense, but I’ll tell you, it was a lonely battle. There weren’t many Runaways fans at Sepulveda Junior High.

When Dad had his birthday in May of ’79, I invited Sandy, in a roundabout way: I placed an ad in The Recycler, a weekly classified paper, inviting her to “The Caveman’s” birthday party (my dad for some reason like to call himself “The Caveman.”)

She actually responded to the ad. Unfortunately, my stepfather, Doobie, picked up the phone and blew my whole trip. Before I could get on the phone, he blathered on about what a bit fan I was and how I’d be so excited to speak with her. All pretense of cool went right out the window the moment Doobie opened his mouth. Not surprisingly, Sandy didn’t celebrate with the Caveman and his kid, and the Runaways broke up before the ‘80s began.

I still love the Runaways, and am still amazed at how fresh they sound three decades later. It’s not brain surgery; their music is merely nasty, trashy fun, created by bored suburban girls who were trying to play their way out of the dead end of teen life. It's a dream all of us had.

You finally made it, Sandy. Be well, wherever you are.

DEEP DOO-DOO

One of the things that most annoys me as a homeowner are the assholes with dogs who can’t be bothered to pick up after their animals. I’ve often walked to the patch of lawn in front of my lovely property in the bowels of Valley Glen, only to see still-moist excrement from some irresponsible dolt who hasn’t any respect for their neighbors. Our neighbor Jean has the right idea: She has a small wooden sign posted on her property. It depicts a crouching pooch doing the doo. Painted inside the mutt’s torso is one simple word: NO!

I keep meaning to buy a sign on the Web, but it somehow slips my mind amid the gazillion other things that fill space in my brain. Still, I do my best to monitor the situation by eye. Our front door is partially glass, so I can check out the scenery if I’m so inclined. Often, if I see a dog and his human pausing on our lawn, I’ll open the door and walk down the driveway in order to create a bit of fear.

I’ve never actually caught anybody in the act, though. Not until Sunday morning. It was my turn to get up with the kids, so I was up early – making breakfast, filling sippy cups, changing Olivia’s diaper. I randomly looked outside and saw a man paused on our lawn with his Rottweilers. When he walked off, I checked it out.

There it was, red-hot (well maybe not red, but surely hot) fecal evidence. Now, what to do? Carrie, my wife, was not yet up, and Emmett and Olivia were puzzled as to why I was outside. I turned back to them, told them I’d be right back, and sprinted to catch up to the offender. I was barefoot, wearing only plaid flannel pajama bottoms and old ratty T-shirt. I caught up to him as a I turned the corner, and cut right to the chase.

“Hey… you gonna pick up after your dog?”

He looked guilty, but you never know. I don’t know people usually respond to such things. Are they embarrassed? Pissed? I was amped on pure adrenaline (no coffee yet) and was prepared to carry his dog’s shit by hand and chuck it onto his lawn if need be. All I can say is that it’s this guy’s good fortune that he came back to clean up his dog’s mess. I am tired of being shat upon.

MEAT AND GREET

The too-blonde woman with the brand new face was gushing as she saw the object on the table. “Dahhhhlng. It’s gorgeous.”

She could have been looking at anything – jewelry, a pocket pup, an 8-ball of coke in a shiny platinum vial. You just never know when you’re sardined into the bar at the Cabana Club in Hollywood. Yet the object of desire was a book. A fucking book. Granted, its physical gorgeousness may go a long way in determining its success, but, well, you don’t see books lovingly caressed like that every day. Who needs to bother to read it when you can just rock it in your arms forever? Right?

Book parties are certainly crowded like this – it’s the rare writer who turns down lure of free booze and food – but it’s not quite this blonde, not with so much cleavage. Then again, the book’s called Hooking Up: You’ll Never Make Love In This Town Again Again, the sequel to the scandalous book of a decade ago which will forever be indelible in my mind for a scene in which it alleged that George Harrison just isn’t an English gentleman. He gets serviced by a random bird and can’t even be bothered to utter a small thank you after his happy ending. Say it ain’t so, George! We all knew you were the Quiet One. I thought it was McCartney who was the Asshole One. Hookers are people too.

But I digress. I went to this book party to give props to my comrade Carly Milne, a woman I met when we both worked for the “Bible” of the adult industry. She was one of the four contributors to Hooking Up and played hostess at the party. But my trip was also a sort of anthropological field trip. In years past, I made the bulk of my living by spending evenings in bars and nightclubs; now, I rarely get out, and that’s totally cool. I’ve put in my time. It was fun, and I’m glad I did it, but I’m also glad I only do it once in a great while. Nothing’s changed, really. Maybe the clothes ad the hair, but the bottom lnie is always the same at places like this. Everyone there wants to hook up in some way, shape or form. When you’re on the outside and not feeling that pressure, the mating rituals seem really obvious. Good luck kids, and wear a condom.

As for Carly, she felt the need to shrug and yell out to me “I hope I transcend this.” And my first thought was, “why?” If I had written a book like this, I might think of it as my greatest accomplishment. I guess she felt like she had to say that to me, but she didn’t have to. She’s published, she hustles, does good work and she understands P.R. That puts her ahead of about 90 percent of the other writers in L.A. Mazel tov to her for going after it.

Now I’ve got that gorgeous book on my coffee table. Maybe when the kids are asleep I’ll give it a read. Or maybe I’ll just stare at it longingly.

CLOSURE

It’d been 12 years since I last made the drive up to Frazier Park. The last time I visited the tiny cabin in which my mother lived with her husband (number 3). It was late summer, 1994; my mission was to find the money I’d given my mom a few days earlier. I saw her on a Sunday. Later that day she collapsed and was airlifted to a hospital. Two days later she was dead. The money would be used to help pay for her funeral.

Her husband, Jerry a.k.a. “Doobie,” was somewhere in Wyoming when he heard mom was in the hospital. He could have caught the next plane to be by her side. But he’d filled his boda bags with vodka, and saw that the Greyhound left sooner than the next plane. So he bought a bus ticket. He didn’t get back in time.

We held the funeral without him. He was in the hospital with pancreatis, near death himself. I didn’t care. Served him right for the way it all went down.

A few months passed and I tried to make my peace with him, even though he did stupid things like accuse me of stealing his mother’s jewelry from the house (I got questioned by the Kern County Sheriff). My uncle, Stuart, and I met with him for dinner at various chain restaurants off the 5 in Valencia. We tried to somehow reconcile grief and anger and all the other raw and confused emotions that stared us all down after mom’s death.

But even as Doobie wept, he got remarried – to a big biker chick, I’m told – within a year of mom’s death. This, to me, was a big fuck you to my mom’s memory and I shut him off. The marriage lasted only a few months.

Over the next decade, I spoke with him only once, when his own mother died, in 1997. But even during a call that was meant to offer sympathy, the end result was an ugly shouting match that ended with the phone thrown onto the hook.

Doobie called me earlier this year to tell me he wanted me to have some of my mother’s possessions. He cried to me on the phone about her. How much he missed her. How she meant everything to him. I told him that in my eyes he killed her. Killed her spirit, sapped her will to live. Wasn’t there for her on her deathbed. I knew she wanted to leave him, but she was afraid. Afraid to start over. She was 48 and she felt old. But he didn’t want to hear this.

My mom had been systematically beaten down over the course of three abusive relationships (five, if you include her parents), and she would never be happy. Had given up on the idea of being happy. It was enough for her not to be alone. That’s why she stayed with him. It was awful, but it was the path of least resistance. She was ill with a debilitating kidney disease and no longer had drive to do more than just get by with what little she had.

He didn’t want to hear of her unhappiness. He refused to believe it. Memories washed away by gallons and gallons of cheap vodka.

Yet I knew I had to let it go. I was a cauldron of negative energy whenever we spoke, and I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

After months of procrastination, I finally drove up to Frazier Park. The town had changed a great deal since my last trip. Lots of development, lots of big properties. Doobie’s lot is small, and from the front looks like a junkyard, the sore thumb where the crazy old man lives, the place that singlehandedly drives down the block’s property values.

Doobie had aged several lifetimes in the decade since I’d last seen him. He was once a hippie troll with a Jewfro. Now, at 60, he looked 20 years older. He was white-haired, feeble, missing teeth. A career scenic artist, he no longer had full range of motion in his meal ticket – his right arm. This was a lifetime of alcohol and drug abuse staring back at me. He was the guy who’d taught me to roll joints, how to mix a drink, with whom I’d snorted a bunch of cocaine long ago. Party on, Doobie.

I went hoping to take home one last piece of my mom. I grabbed some photos, some items that belonged to my grandparents. A large painting of my mom hung from a living room wall. He said he’d been working on it for eight years. He pointed to the mountaintop where he scattered her ashes. He showed me a memorial he created for her in the front yard, consisting mainly of rocks, flowers, a coffee mug. I added a plastic dinosaur belonging to my son, whose middle name, simply the initial “J,” is the same as my mother’s.

I stayed for about 90 minutes and I was careful to avoid any subject that might provoke conflict. Better to go out on a good note. I knew that he loved my mom in his own destructive, massively fucked-up way. He just didn’t know any better. We choose to remember things differently, but there’s no longer any reason to kick on him. He’s been splayed out on the floor a long, long time. I left without having raised my voice even once.

Good-bye Doobie.