End of summer 1985. I flew out to LA to confront a guy I’d been tipped was ripping me off. I crashed on the floor of this Canadian punk rocker who lived down the block from Chad the rip-off guy’s office on Santa Monica and El Centro, a short block east of Vine. Chad was this effete curly blonde haired surfer dude whose office was decorated in weird African fertility art, an odd choice for a surfer fag doing business putting out punk records, but it and the uncomfortable wooden African fertility bench you’d have to sit on waiting for hours past your scheduled appointment staring at a huge abstract painting underneath which sat a Doberman that would snarl if you approached Chad’s door to ask when he’d see you did the trick in intimidating people, especially young uncomfortable-to-begin-with punk rockers who knew that despite all our arrogance and feigned insouciance we had no idea what we were doing and were in over our heads. By the time we’d get in there we’d say “yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, just lemme sign that paper so I can get the fuck outta here.”

His dad was a psychologist.

Chad lived in the back of his office with his secretary Doreen. They had a horrible little room back there, nothing like the African Fertility Goddess façade upfront, just a dark squalid little room, with a toilet, a utility sink, no shower next door. Chad would take showers at the Y downtown, looking for cock to suck or to fuck him and Doreen would come over to the Canadian punk rocker’s and take hours long baths in exchange for paying a third of the rent, the evil Doberman standing guard outside the door. We’d wind up having to piss in the back yard.

Doreen was fat drab Texas trailer trash with stringy mouse brown hair, an incredibly bitter woman who was stuck living in a dark squalid room with a fake boyfriend who needed a fake girlfriend so that no one would know he was gay. This was the best Doreen could do because she evidently suffered from some sort of gruesome gynecological problem that Johnette told me resulted in her pussy being more or less sealed shut.

No wonder she was bitter.

I crashed a few days on the punk rocker’s floor, confronted Chad, got some money out of him, crashed a few days on Johnette’s floor, decided to move to LA, and called my wife in Texas with the news.

Johnette was the first girl I met who could drink me under the table. She turned me on to Oki-Dogs, the official food of LA punk rockers and male hustlers. Kosher hotdogs oily chili velveeta and pastrami all bundled up in a giant flour tortilla and served with greasy fries by manic tweakers who would shove your order in your hands before you were halfway through placing it, even sooner if you talked Texas slow like I did. The sullen sunken eyed shirtless in parachute pants street hustlers gathered round the place looking hungry for food, money, drugs, whatever they could get their hands on, especially if they didn’t need to suck cock to get it. Their haunted stares encroaching provided an atmosphere that wasn’t always conducive to fine dining, so we’d usually grab a 12-pack of beer and head back to her place.

I moved into the Tropicana Motel where Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and countless other icons of renegade excess had lived, now in the heart of West Hollywood across from the Sports Connection gym on the sidewalk outside of which were all these muscle-bound Freddy Mercury look-alikes preening and flexing in Daisy Dukes, army boots, and baby-tees.

“Oh honey, I just looove your shorts” the desk clerk would say every time I walked by.

All the gayness made me nervous.

I’d come back from my new job working in the warehouse of Soundsgood Record Imports in Santa Monica, stop off for an Oki Dog and a twelve pack, return to the Tropicana, slip past the desk clerk, lock myself in my room and watch latest updates on the new serial killer who was on a rampage in LA, quotes by AC/DC splattered in blood on the walls, soon identified as Richard Ramirez from El Paso, another guy like me who maybe shouldn’t have left Texas, who looked just like my buddy Tony Offender. The police were nowhere near to catching him and finally a bunch of guys in East LA spotted him in a liquor store, chased him down and nearly beat him to death before calling the cops.

I was starting to question the wisdom of moving to LA, but I don’t admit mistakes and so there was no turning back.

I found a ghetto apartment off Willoughby and Vine that reeked of cat piss. The previous tenants spray painted it black and left enema bags amidst the wreckage; “Rip-off Ricky Must Die” written in magic marker above the bedroom door, indelible ink that no amount of paint would cover up. The place was actually safer than it seemed because the cops were keeping a close eye on the building, stopping by often in the middle of the night looking for someone named Olga who did a brisk business in used auto-parts, which probably accounted for the ever changing assortment of cars stripped and on cinderblocks in our parking space in the alley.The big hit on the radio the end of that summer was X’s Burning House of Love, big glossy bombast from a once great punk band. All-American sex symbol Rock Hudson was dying of AIDs. Every night, dinner for two, $1.69, a single quart of Burgie beer and Springfield macaroni and cheese from Safeway. The Safeway of the Stars. Welcome to Hollywood.

A year later. Halloween night, 1986.

My wife calls me at the office. “I’ve got something to tell you, and something to ask you.”

“Go ahead.”

“First I need to ask you if I can borrow your white shirt tonight.”

“Alright.”

“Then I need to tell you I think you should move out.”

I acquiesced easily. It was, after all, what I wanted but didn’t have the balls to ask.

She showed up with my suitcase. The Tropicana was full, so I checked into the Holloway around the corner, and then we went out to dinner next door. She was wearing my white shirt.

I’d already called the girl with whom she suspected I was having an affair. I’d been keeping Rachel abreast of the situation. We thought it was funny because we’d never so much as kissed even though Jane was hysterically convinced otherwise and no amount of denial would dissuade her, and so the fact that Rachel and I weren’t fucking became our little secret, the thing we had between us that Jane didn’t know about, the nudge-nudge, wink-wink little pact that made her feel so excluded. All of which changed that night. I had a friendly dinner with my wife I’d just split up with a few hours earlier, cut it short without rushing it, waited at the motel for Rachel, we went down to the Scream and saw some bands and then back to the motel and fucked our brains out.

Jane changed her mind about the separation. I didn’t. I’d found a place to live and was still fucking Rachel. Jane said she’d packed all my stuff and would pile it up in the living room if I wanted to come and get it that night. I came by. The house was empty. There was a note on my stuff, something to the effect of if she were to come back and see everything gone she’d know it was over. I put the note back in the envelope put the envelope back on my stuff quietly left the house called her the next day and said I’d gotten busy and hadn’t had a chance to come by after all. Maybe I could do it next week. Next week I came by. My stuff was still stacked in the living room, the note was gone, I piled my stuff in the jeep and left.

I was a chickenshit.

Jane managed to persuade me to return with her to Austin that Christmas. Her grandmother didn’t know we’d separated, she was coming down from Dallas, Jane wanted to maintain the ruse, and for some reason I agreed this was a good idea.

It wasn’t.

Austin was no longer home.

We went to the Continental Club to see the Doctor’s Mob and had a thoroughly bad time after which we headed to our old place off 3rd and Oltorf right behind the Green Pastures restaurant, whose peacocks used to wander around our yard in amongst all the weird art that successions of previous tenants had left hanging from trees or resting on the luridly painted foundations of the burnt down house in the back, another art project gone awry and left abandoned. One morning shortly after we’d moved in I woke up to strange thumping noises on the roof, wandered out back and saw these peacocks strutting and preening all over the yard being stalked by our cat Atilla, panicked for a moment and then realized I was still loaded from all the drugs and alcohol the night before, “fuck it, I’m just hallucinating,” and went back to bed to sleep it off. The peacocks were still there when I got back up hours later with a brain bending hangover.

Jane wanted to say hi to our old neighbor Doyle. I sat in the car in driveway in the dark in the freezing late December 2am cold, brooding over the business of my unwelcome at the Continental Club and wondering why I’d ever agreed to come back to Austin. Wondering and brooding and brooding and wondering and wondering and brooding until I realized that I’d been sitting in the cold driveway brooding and wondering for a long time, and then it started to dawn on me that they weren’t just saying hello and I realized they were fucking and had been fucking for years, the whole time we lived there on the other side of the driveway maybe 20 feet away from Doyle’s house which was obsessively decorated in posters and fliers I’d done for various bands over the years. My wife was fucking Doyle surrounded by all my posters that I no longer had and I was sitting in the driveway freezing cold and getting angrier by the second, planning on catching the next flight back out to LA, vowing never to return.

We bought a frozen pizza on the way back to her father’s place and microwaved it. It was soggy. She persuaded me to stay through Christmas.

I haven’t been back since.