by John Doe
Behind Circus Books on Santa Monica Boulevard stood an unassuming, chalk-white, 1920s apartment bldg. Circus Books was a typical dirty bookstore from the ’60s, when pornography was for perverts & homosexuals. We loved it for its lawlessness, people watching & service to a community right in the heart of the gay hustler district, West Hollywood.
At the end of the hall on the ground floor was Exene & Farrah Fawcett Minor’s apartment. They were both lapsed Catholics from Florida, both of which usually lead to bad behavior. They had a talent for egging each other on to great heights of chaos. On any given night Farrah would throw a drink in someone’s face and make it seem like it was the person’s fault or, at least, they deserved it. Exene always had her back & occasionally instigated the fracas.
The studio apartment was unremarkable except for a few sturdy built-in cabinets that were part of any building from the 1920s or 1930s. Naturally there was a Murphy bed & a fold-out couch where they slept. More punk rockers slept on & did who knows what on Murphy beds than you could count. It’s a testament to the functionality & practicality of the invention. (Thank you, Mr. Wm. Murphy & your SF opera star paramour.) Exene & Farrah’s front door opened directly into the main room. An attached bathroom and kitchen was somewhat divided by those built-ins. It was perfect for any aspiring starlet or punk-rock girls looking for an affordable lifestyle that left plenty of time for dreaming, writing, drawing, or generally fucking off.
The greatest benefit of the place was its location, directly across from the Starwood, the Whisky a Go Go’s main above-ground competition for live music. When DIY shows at veteran halls weren’t happening or the Masque was shut down, we saw countless punk-rock shows there. The Damned’s debut w/ flour billowing up from the floor-tom as the first, rocketing song was counted off. Devo, as they left everyone speechless w/ their airtight, mid-west, rhythm section, catchy songs, uniforms & dance moves to boot. Cheap Trick, before they graduated to the Top Ten & arenas. The Germs’ penultimate show, which everyone hoped wasn’t the end but secretly knew it was.
The apartment on La Jolla was ground zero for the party before & after almost every show. To her friends, Farrah went by the name Fay, which, not surprisingly, was also a pseudonym. She was a hellion then & during that time earned a place in history by inspiring several songs. Owing to her Southern roots, she would transform their small space into the most inviting party atmosphere. I always thought of her as a character from Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote. Exene was an able cohort & stylist of the environs. Florida souvenir ashtrays & pillow covers were cleaned & placed just so. The Murphy bed folded up, the decks cleared & low light from table lamps all set before everything went to hell or at least pretty damn haywire. The drink Fay invented she called the “fast gin fizz,” Gordon’s gin & Nehi strawberry soda. It tasted pretty horrible (Darby Crash once announced, “This tastes like GAASSS!”), but the sugar from the soda pop seemed to inject the gin straight into your veins, brain & heart of crazy. Anyone who went to any show at the Starwood in 1977 or ’78 probably passed through this door. At the time word of mouth was king & news spread quickly when the gig or the party & the gin was on. Somewhere there’s even a few rolls of film that Jenny Lens shot of a beautiful shit-show that was crowned by Cherie the Penguin swanning out of the bathroom with nothing on but strategically placed pieces of wet toilet paper—or was it shaving cream? K. K. Barrett, drummer for The Screamers & Fay’s boyfriend at the time, was an artist who excelled at re-creating the reentry rubber stamp placed on people’s wrists by the Starwood staff. One or two people would pay to get in & the rest of us would get in w/ fake hand-drawn stamps—genius!
This is how bonds & alliances were made & broken. This is how a bunch of outsiders, fuckups & loners turned into a bohemian, punk-rock community. People exchanged stories of where they came from, crazy shit they had done in their young lives, ideas of what was & wasn’t cool or what was or wasn’t punk rock. It was like going to the strangest, coolest graduate school of music, art & life, even though everyone was just fucking around & having a wild time. This place was the same as dozens of other apartments or houses where other friendships, partnerships & insanity took place. A short time after Fay & Exene moved out, a group of women—Trudi, Hellin Killer & Mary Rat—would move into another ground floor apt in the same building, which was aptly dubbed the Plunger Pit.
