DONNA SUMMER: “I FEEL LOVE” (1977)

It was 1980, the summer before I got my driver’s license, and I was waking up at 5 on Saturday, 4 on Sunday. When you’re 15, sleep is one of life’s greatest pleasures, particularly if you’re trying to slumber off a rough night. In those days, I ingested a fair amount of bottled Michelob (which we considered a “classy” beer), often procured at one of the many Valley liquor stores that turned a blind eye to underagers plopping down a 20 for a case. If I was in a barfing mood, I’d mix in some Bacardi and coke, maybe some 151 if I wanted to projectile vomit.

I woke up that summer for a job at a place called T-Shirts Plus, ostensibly a retail shop on Osborne Street in Arleta. As was the fashion of the time, T-Shirts Plus sold shirts with iron-on designs – Fonzie, Farrah, Jaws and lots of rock bands (see my previous entry).

It would have been great working in the store – getting a shift there was the holy grail, cush-o-rama, It was close to home and opend at 9. But T-Shirts Plus had a fairly large staff of adolescent Valley stoner boys at their disposal, and only the Chosen Ones got to work at the store. Most of us were used primarily for their weekend enterprise, which was selling irregular t-shirts, socks and other such stuff at swap meets around the Southland. Thus waking up before the crack of dawn.

The business was owned and operated by the Gluckmans, a bulbous Jewish family for whom no joke was too dirty. Imagine a family of real-life Weebles with really filthy mouths and lots of heavy breathing. Bernie and Beverly were the patriarchs, but the heavy lifting was done by sons Phil and Eric.

Each weekend, I was picked up at my Granada Hills domicile and driven to a warehouse in Sun Valley, where we loaded the trucks with boxes of shirts and socks. There were three potential destinations – Saugus, Long Beach or La Mirada. Each was a drive-in theater (remember those?) that held swap meets on weekend days. After a supercharged carbo-scarfing breakfast at the Pantry as the sun rose, we headed down the freeway for a day of hauling and haggling.

Richard Espin helped get me hired at T-Shirts Plus. He was a buddy from Arleta whom I’d known since the beginning of junior high. Lots of us gravitated around Espin, although was an unlikely ringleader – a short, stocky half breed of Jew and Mexican, but he had a huge heart, was totally charming and was an amazing party host. He and I connected largely because we came from the same place – half Jewish, from a broken home, raised by partying pseudo hippies who liked to get their kids high. In Richard’s case, his mom was remarried to a biker dude who was significantly younger than she.

But it was all cool – they had a pool table, and Richard had a water bed, which impressed me. What I really admired about Richard was his ability to seem totally at ease with himself, totally in control, while everyone around him was battling puberty’s heaviest demons. I did lots of memorably bad things with him over the years, and it was never less than great fun. The only time I ever saw him out of his head was the day the Lakers won the title in 1980. As we celebrated, Rich was out cold on the carpet in Robbie Perry’s bedroom. A pity, since he was a huge Lakers fan.

I was usually assigned to La Mirada (which still stands, renamed the Santa Fe Springs swap meet), and on the drive down the 5, the pussy and dick jokes flew at lightning speed, especially if Eric Gluckman and Espin were traveling together. Of course, the Gluckman kids’ preoccupation with all things sexual was not surprising. I remember one occasion where we partied at their bachelor pad in Panorama City, and among the activities was the viewing of a porn flick, starring none other than John Holmes (I’m guessing he was in pretty much every porn flick during the just-pre-video era) I believe this was my first exposure to porn, with all of its super tight gynecological angles. Didn’t seem sexy at all. In fact, another of my school chums, Don Liebig, remarked, “real people don’t do that.” I’m not sure how many of us could have answered that with any sort of authority, even the Gluckman boys, who, to put it kindly, were not GQ models.

Anyway, La Mirada was a trip, a carnival of crap being bought, sold and bartered. Over a tinny loudspeaker, a cheesy PA guy hyped items like “Vic’s Quickies,” which was some sort of food product, and admonished folks to visit the KMET stand to pick up their “whoo-ya” bumper stickers.

When PA guy wasn’t doing his shtick, a wide variety of music blasted through at the quality of an old AM transistor radio with that ear thingy lodged into a left ear. The only thing I remember is Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” all 15 minutes of it – and it seemed even longer. In fact, I can’t be certain that was played in an endless loop all day. I wasn’t a disco fan (yes, I was white trash enough to wear a “Disco Sucks” shirt), but there was something about its synthetic sensuality that oozed through my brain. On the surface, the song was all about having gooey, smelly, sweaty, bodies-sticking together-and-making-suction-sounds sex while being wired to the nines on cocaine. But, with its tightly wound electronic thumping, it sounded to me ike a ticking time bomb that never went off – the frustration of an adolescent boy, really. Listening to it now, it’s a perfect dance track, inspired genius crafted in the studio by producer Giorgio Moroder. But sitting on a folding chair in dusty La Mirada, trying to pawn off a six-pack of tube socks on an immigrant family, it was the subliminal fuel that got me through the day, keeping me going until we wrapped at 3 p.m. with a stop at Tommy’s on Beverly before heading up for partying and the next day’s early wake up call.