Wild Side Walk: Pt 7.

(Unexpurgated) 1982: Report from the astronaut

photo: Law & Order (LA 1982)
©1982 www.stuartpage.com

Snake and I go for endless long walks around Hollywood, in and out of Motel rooms down on Sunset Boulevard where I meet people whose lives really are one big party, some places we're not allowed in, it seems a lot of people make their living in privacy. Some of the people I meet are wondering what I want from them. I mean, “…if you didn't come looking for a fuck or suck, or smack or some real good Colombian, then just what the fuck you wan' man?” I tell them what I'm doing in USA, wandering the streets and bumping into people, carrying a camera and collecting stuff. I’m not sure what I'm doing it for, but I just had to come. I wonder whether I sound like a tourist, a breed of humans who take lots of money to another country and eat and drink lots and take lots of photos. These people have made it their profession to live off other people's affluence, knowing that there's just as much money now as there ever was, it's just that fewer people have it, and call it their own. Fair enough that they distribute it more evenly. I'm always aware that back at the hotel I have a plastic wallet full of $100 American Express Travel cheques, and some people around here would like to see this middle class honky spend a little of it.

Down on Santa Monica Blvd., ("Boys Town"), Snake spies a group of kids he knows, standing on the corner listening to an enormous MARANTZ stereo with a handle. I notice straight away how they each have a distinctly different image that they are creating by their style of clothing. All the boys in the group seem about 12 to 16, and mostly white, although I see a few black guys across the street. One guy has a swashbuckling look about him, like a modern day musketeer - another guy with bleached hair and a well-baked tan like a true Californian surfer - and another looking like a valet, with well pressed appearance, as opposed to the more rugged masculinity of the others. The bravado desperado comes over immediately and holding his bulging trousers, asks me if I want some of it? I notice a lot of gleaming white Cadillacs and Lincolns slowing down, their male occupants leaning forward in their driver seats to peruse the Boys Town produce. The boys tell me that sometimes they get to go to Colorado on ski-ing trips, all the coke they want, and that they knew guys who'd been all the way to New York, accompanying their sheik on a business trip. It's a pretty dicey game, any night you might get picked up by some psychotic maniac, but quite often by wealthy dukes who drive through on their way to and from Santa Monica, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Westwood or Hollywood Hills. The wealthy people have moved out of Hollywood, down long boulevards to the mansions and security of these suburbs. I found out one night just how secure.

I had missed the last bus after an excellent Laurie Anderson performance at the UCLA campus at Westwood, and decided to try walking towards Hollywood, which would take me on a route through Beverly Hills. At first there were footpaths, but soon I found that I had to walk on the edge of the road, and almost got hit by a car that swept past me in the outside lane. Eventually I felt trapped not being able to go in either direction without walking on the road, and the roadside was thick bush right down to the tarmac, and proved to be impenetrable. So I looked around for a telephone booth, and tried hitching a ride, but of course nobody stops around here, unless you're pulling up a well-alarmed and video patrolled driveway. I couldn't find a phone or any particularly friendly looking entrance-ways, and didn't feel like triggering whatever devices Bel Air Alarms Co. had installed.

Fast, classy, anonymous looking cars swooshed past me as I clung to my little island, feeling like a target. I suddenly saw a cab flash past, so I wolf whistled loud as I could, but it was on the other side of Sunset Blvd. and vanished. I wondered whether the Tow away No Stopping signs had anything to do with it. Next minute the cab was back and the driver Leighton tells me, "Yeah, you whistle good, you know how to get a cab". He also wondered what I was doing in a desert like Bel Air. He told me there's too many people trying to make it around Hollywood, a lot of cab-drivers are actors trying to make it, but you need a good agent, have to know a lotta people, go to all the parties, have big tits and a good face. His FM radio was blaring out Pac Man Fever, Betty Davis Eyes, We got the Beat, real Hollywood stuff, up tempo, fairly banal lyrics, as he was telling me, “It's still winter man, in summer people get really loose around here. Lotta Vietnamese, Chinese, we got everybody here”. So for $10.10, I got swept up from Bel Air, where I was trapped in the safest place to live, and deposited back in Hollywood, where there's plenty of room to walk around.

(To be continued).

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