. . . a hundred lives are shoved inside
by John Doe
When Exene & I lived in West Hollywood, from 1979 to 1982, there wasn’t a moment’s rest. It seemed every day & every night someone was knocking on the door of our tiny duplex w/ a couple quarts of Eastside beer, a Bukowski-endorsed local brew. There were only 4 rooms, including the bathroom, which had aluminum foil for wallpaper. 1118 N. Genesee Ave was half a block north of Santa Monica Blvd, the Spike (a popular leather bar) & the strip, where most of the gay hustlers worked, even one of our friends who went by the name Tony the Hustler. I believe the rent was $250 & the place was just south of the heart of the beast.
Exene had an eye for decoration, loved anything—especially bark cloth—from the 1930s & ’40s. Our place had as many pieces of that as she could bring from Florida & what we found at junk stores. We loaded our mantelpiece w/ as much scary voodoo-type stuff as we could find, hoping it would discourage people from breaking in. Of course, there was nothing to steal except maybe a couple guitars, a rhinestone tiara, or some engineer boots. Billy Zoom slept on the couch for 3 months or more. Our biker roadie, Chuck, fell asleep smoking in a chair, set fire to it & the prized leather jacket he was wearing. I remember waking at 3 a.m. to smoke, Chuck & Billy yelling & someone, maybe me, hoisting the smoldering chair out the door, over the wall of the four-step, tiny balcony/landing that led to our front door & onto the curb. We drenched it with the garden hose & crawled back to bed. We were roused again an hour later by a fire truck clanging up to our duplex & hosing down that beautiful, tenacious & now sad 1940s chair. After playing two shows at the Whisky a Go Go, we were filmed in that living room, high on speed, drinking & tattooing each other for The Decline of Western Civilization. I believe we had an impromptu wake there for Exene’s sister Muriel. In the middle of the night I gave teenage runaway Gary Ryan a black eye for screaming that I had slept w/ his wannabe girlfriend Lorna Doom of The Germs. Only now I can admit that I had. And in that Hollywood duplex we wrote or lived all of the songs for Wild Gift & Under the Big Black Sun.
