Jesus

Working on music videos in the late 80s and even into the commercial days that followed were fun. Fun in a broad sense. Certainly, not all jobs were anything less than torturous. If you got off in ten hours, you celebrated a rare half-day. Working for twenty-four hours wasn’t unheard of. And every job ended with “wrap beer” that we’d all celebrate with before we jumped behind the wheels of huge, rented trucks and pulled out of dawn-lit lots, into the early LA traffic. Christ, the liability. But little things like “meal penalties” started to exist as we moved into commercials. They had to feed us a fairly lavish meal every six hours on the dot, or they had to pay us all some penalty based on some arcane equation. It wasn’t a lot but when all forty or fifty crew members were getting it well, the meals were usually on-time. If they thought they were going to be late; if they thought they just needed an extra ten minutes to get this shot of Tiger Woods juggling a golf ball on the face of his putter they’d go around and have everyone agree to “grace.” Ok, alright. Get the shot. But don’t let it happen again. How many jobs have you had that your employers fearfully made sure that they fed you prime rib, sushi and Caesar salad every six hours? I worked on a Nike spot once which featured two TV sets come alive in a TV shop and start playing tennis with each other via the images of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi on each screen. We shot for thirty-six hours. That’s seven meals.

You’re forgetting the breakfast they had to have for us.

              But all in all, it really was fun. It was generally the same basic crew. You’d start to know all the grips and that guy who wore sandals. You’d know how each of the handful of DPs (Directors of Photography) all operated and how important having an onset dresser would be. And you’d certainly know your own crew pretty intimately. But you worked. No matter that most everyone was dreaming of doing something else and half of us had some sort of addiction, we worked. We worked hard.

              I think the part of working in those early years as a PA and the years and decades of Art Department that followed that I cherish the most is the simple idea that we could do anything. We. Could. Do. Everything. Once this behemoth of a production started rolling downhill there was no stopping it. There were no options to counter failure with. You just had to fucking make everything happen. The wildly innovative and imaginative solutions to ridiculous demands are as legendary as they are commonplace. I remember being on set for one of the “Can you hear me now?” cellphone commercials. Who was that? Sprint? T-Mobile? But you know the guy. That little guy who wore that little conservative suit and walked around saying only “Can you hear me now?” and once fucked a PA in the back of a 5-ton and it became legend. We were in some dilapidated main street location up near Ojai I think. There’s an army of set dressers. KK, the Production Designer and thus top of the Art Department ladder is telling guys what to do. It’s frantic. There’s a normal person’s concept of a month worth of home repairs and additions to be done in three hours. He spins and looks at Pete Foley who I still love today. He spits out some edict for Pete to hang some fluorescent fixtures across the span of the ceiling. Before Pete could even finish his sensible and responsible counter concerning his having no knowledge of the electrical wiring required, KK just barks. “Do the research! Become an Expert!” Jesus! That’s brilliant! Like a diamond cutting through molten glass. I still use that line today. That’s what I loved about that work. The complete absence of any sort of safety net. You either figured it out or they pushed you aside and threw money at another guy who could. Beautiful.

              All of this makes you feel like you can do anything. At some point Dean asked me to help him on a job. It may very well have been me asking him or Leslie asking us or God knows who else but I found myself with Dean in front of a vacant courtyard of little empty bungalow apartments. We were somewhere above Hollywood near La Brea. I think. Years later I’d wind up living in a similar bungalow on Fairfax below Sunset. Pat, the clear matriarch of the courtyard who’d been there for decades and was friends with Warhol and assistant to Halston and had the fucking paintings to prove it told us that we were living in Pam’s apartment. Pam of LA Woman. Pam of Jim Morrison. Who knows? I certainly believed her. When Pat passed away there was a memorial in the courtyard for her. Given who showed up I believed everything she’d ever told us.

              And speaking of Warhol, Dean and I stood before this ring of empty bungalows and found out we were being hired to redo the hardwood floors of all the units as they were now the offices of Interview Magazine. Andy’s Magazine.

              Now, I don’t know how many of you and I’m not presuming there’s a lot of you reading this, but I imagine not many of you have any expertise in refinishing hardwood floors. God knows we didn’t. Like we had zero knowledge or even the slightest interest in this trade. But we were getting paid some ungodly amount, maybe 150 cash a day and so we just figured it out. I just remember feeling like we were fucked and then – flash forward - having all of this rented equipment in front of us. Floor sanders, edge sanders, a grip of various grit sandpapers, smooth squeegees to apply gallons of finish. And more. Somehow, we figured it out and set to work. I seem to remember there being maybe four or five bungalows to refinish. I have various snatches of memories throughout, but I absolutely remember the finish. We’d done it and it looked beautiful.  We figured it out. We’d done the research and we’d become experts. I could do that shit in my sleep now.

              So, there we stood with a bunch of cash and nowhere to go. When you hand two junkies a wad of cash you can read their minds. They can’t conceive of anything else. The machine starts and equations involving price per gram, discounts for quarters, added flavors (crack) and maybe, MAYBE bills roll into action. But really, the bills get pretty pushed aside fairly quickly.

              I think Dean mentioned it before we’d actually finished the job. He slyly floated the idea that we could go to New York and hang out. He had friends from when he lived there and you know, we could do that. But you can’t just up and leave your girlfriend or your boyfriend like that. But it just floated there. This idea of being in New York. At some point we, as if indulging in fantasy checked plane fares and jeez, um, this was pretty doable.

              I truly don’t remember any conversation with Leslie about my desire/decision to go to New York with Dean. I truly wish I could. I wish I could tell you Leslie was all for it. That maybe even Jose was all for it. That maybe they both had some crazy, cool project to do and they’d be working around the clock and this was perfect timing! I wish I had anything to tell except we just went. Like we just went the next day.

              I doubt we ever called it what it became but we both knew we were going on a drug vacation. I remember the flight there for a moment because it’s the only time I’ve ever smoked on a plane. They jammed us in the back, us smokers and we smoked into little air-sucking armrest ashtrays and vacuum dotted ceilings pulling our foul air out of the cabin and into charcoal filters and the stratosphere. I’m up there now!

              It was fall or maybe early winter. I wore a cardigan sweater with a plaid trench coat over it. Likely a t-shirt and some sort of pants. I’m sure I was still wearing some type of surplus combat boots. That was my deal. Sometimes I wore a hat. But if I thought I might be somewhere to have to take it off I’d leave it at home as I knew I’d forget it and lose it. I bet I didn’t wear a hat to NY but maybe pics will emerge. I know everything I took for the trip fit under myseat. We landed and pushed into the whole airport frenzy of deboarding, moving to luggage, swirling out to taxis and dumped into the city. It was like an amusement park ride. Whoosh! Get out! You’re here! We jumped into another taxi. I followed Dean. I saw my first window washer. Those guys that would run up and throw water all over the windshield and feverishly start to squeegee it off while demanding money. I was taken aback. The need was clear. I was completely disconnected from them, and the Taxi driver considered them potholes. Something to be avoided. But I think that’s the first time I was ever face to face with desperation. I looked down. I remember feeling embarrassed. We drove on.

              Dean didn’t seem to have a really clear idea of where we were going. I guess I just assumed he’d sorted this out. I hoped at least that we were headed to dope. He mumbled answers as I’d ask and eventually, we stopped and got out. This was to be our basecamp for the next week. There was a place called Veselka. There were other storefronts with dirty awnings screaming Cigarettes! Candy! Luncheon! We started walking and so our adventure began.

              I was in an entirely different world. It was manic and cold and vibrant and fog came out of my mouth. The sun was setting into that winter orange, at least where you could see it between the epic shadows of these puny buildings. I’d only been to New York one time before. I was in fourth grade, maybe, and one morning my parents, full of glee said, “let’s go to New York!” this was so wildly out of character for my family but this happened. I was allowed to miss school and we drove up and into the heart of the city. I think at some point we were in FAO Schwarz. They thought to take me there. I think we had deli sandwiches. It was such an incredible day so full of spontaneity and out of character abandon. I’ll love my Mom and Dad until the end of the world for loving me this much.

              And so, I tried to reconcile this new input with that vaguely remembered kid stuff. We stopped in front of a building. A building like all the others. Sort of run down. Well, definitely run down but just like all the others flowing from it up and down the block. Dean pressed a button and after some giggling muttering which I couldn’t work out we walked in after a tinny buzz punctuated the air.

              Meet Durwood Wiggins. I guess this guy was a friend of Dean’s. What a name! To this day I search that name and while there are a whole helluva lot more Durwood Wiggins than you’d imagine, none fit my concept of this guy and what he would have aged into. I can’t imagine my Durwood is even still alive he was so far down the hole. And so he let us in but it seemed odd. It seemed off. I mean, he let us in and there was some sign of recognition. But they were both so spectral, so flat, so fucking autistic that I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. I just stood back and prayed for drugs. As it turned out, Durwood lived on the ground floor of a building on 2nd and B which was populated above by wonderful people selling drugs out of various contraptions and conceits all about the place. Little holes here. Little lowered pails there. Fuck! It was the Willy Wonka of drugs. Now this is my memory. The truth might be that there was one old woman in the evacuated rear of the building with one last bindle to sell. But I remember it like Wonkaville. Dean gave him some whispered cash, he left the apartment and returned in minutes with ten marked glassine bags wrapped in a rubber band.

              I remember his apartment being really long and skinny. And dark. Just tight narrow spaces with dim bulbs slighting illuminating. His apartment could have gone on for miles as it stretched back into the darkness. All I could see was this little dirty kitchen which led into a narrow and thoroughly lived in bedroom space. Clearly this is where Durwood spent the majority of his life. A bed against one wall. A narrow path between it and the TV on a crate pressed against the other border wall and again, the depth trailing off into the void. Everything happened here, where only this one light could shine.

              There was chat and nervous, anticipatory mumblings between Durwood and Dean. I felt like they were speaking a different language. The TV had the news on. So that meant it was about 6PM give or take. I waited. Eventually I saw Durwood lean over and pull a drawer from a little bureau across from the head of his bed. He pulled out a needle. The same sort of needle, or rig, or works I’d write about from my upstairs bathroom.

              Dean giggled a question to me. He was so nervous. But I was so intent on the dope I didn’t care how anyone was acting. If you’re a junkie and there’s dope in the room, your mom can burst aflame and start screaming Shakespeare while twisting snakes around her day-glo pelvis and you just go with it if you think it’ll lead to dope. The focus is so fucking intense. What he asked me was, “Do you want to take a shot?”

              So here I was, wrapped in a thrift store plaid trench coat, an olive green cardigan my grandfather had left behind and no idea of what was going on beyond the presence of heroin. Who wouldn’t say yes? Earlier I wrote about my first experience shooting dope in that ferociously sunlit bathroom. That was after this. That was the first time I did it on my own. And earlier, in college, some nameless person injected me with a quarter gram of cocaine while SWANS pounded in the other room and I said Yes! Yes! Of course, I’ll cover your 5am shift at the College diner in 3 hours. I WhamWhamWhamWhamWhamWhamd for ten minutes and they left and I sunk. But I covered their shift. Horrible

              But here in Durwood Wiggins’, 2nd and B ground floor apartment that felt like a sarcophagus and in which only the spectral souls of Dean and this little hobbit of a fellow inhabited I said yes and pushed up my trench coat and cardigan left sleeves, turned them away and just focused on the TV screen.

              I felt someone holding my arm and fiddling with its orientation. I felt an almost imperceptible prick and then.

              The Billionaires Boy Club were everything! Remember that whole thing? These douchebags from the valley trying to take all of their rich friends in some ridiculous ponzi scheme. It had such a catchy name. The Billionaires. Boys. Club. Eventually one of the man guys killed some of the other guys and God knows what happened next. It just all fades away.

              But on that TV screen in that tomb-like apartment in Alphabet City, Durwood Wiggins injected white New York dope into my left arm as the news flashed headlines of the day’s court proceedings in the BBC trial. It seemed so important, and I fell in love with it as the heroin pushed into me. There’s no TV gasp of air or Hollywood eyes rolling back. There’s just intense focus and euphoria and I love these faces and I love this TV and I’d love to live here. Imagine what you could do with this space. You could build out a whole patio and you. Could……Oomph. ..You could take a nap…. In love… You. Could. Just. Hug. her. and…and..you can…you..can..just smile..she knows…she…..knows…….you love her……….and…….it’s ok…… ………                      it’s                  ok                                she                                  loves                                       you

To be continued