"whaddya think--doable?", paul asks, pointing to a tiny blip that had just turned the corner at the end of the block.
royce, instantly: "nah, he walks old."
it's autumn 1990, and i'm sitting with my new roommates in royce's mitsubishi galant on a saturday evening, parked near some seedy bar i'd never heard of but would come to know well, getting my first lesson in the fine art of cruising, LA style.
"he walks old?", i ask, incredulous, from the backseat. "he, if it even is a he, is half a mile away, for chrissakes, and it's dark. how can you possibly--"
"shut up and watch, and maybe you'll learn something," paul snaps without taking his eyes off the target, and sure enough, as the guy nears, his age becomes apparent even to me. as this geriatric all-of-40 year-old comes abreast of the car, he mistakes royce and paul's triumphant grins for interest, leans in hopefully and then back out again just as quick when they break into the opening lines of "from a distance", wave him away and start laughing (they were real funny that way, those two).
as noted more than once in these pages, i've often wondered how much my choice of first gay roommates had to do with the fag i would end up becoming. academic at this point, i suppose, but i will say this for 'em: those boys taught me well. within a month, i could pick the three doables outta a crowd of a dozen at a hundred yards, just from the way they walked. it's a skill that would serve me well in what would turn out to be the fading days of a golden age.
* * * * *
i try to explain to the young'uns sometimes what it was like living gay in weho in those days, before the meth and the internet changed everything, and the opportunities for instant, baggage-free sex were everywhere. it was a heady time, especially for a sex-starved 34-year-old just off the turnip truck, and saying i took to it like a duck to water--to the point where i started to scare even my seasoned, slutty roomies a little--would be a bit of an understatement.
in those days--and even now, really--west hollywood was divided vertically by the berlin wall known as la cienega boulevard; the glitzy, worked-out, pubic-hair-trimming types tended to stay west of this line (unless they wanted to go slumming), and the rest of us preferred the cheap drinks and cheaper company to be found to the east.
the two principal cruise bars of east west hollywood in those days were gold coast (still there, sort of) and spike (god,
i miss spike), and i would become equally at home in both. but since my primary interest in going to these places was never clubbing itself, i quickly became far more at home working the streets that surrounded them (see the helpful infographic i just whipped up below).
(oh, and where did we live?
if i hadn't understood why paul had been so insistent on that particular house when we moved in, i would soon see his point.)
by way of shorthand, paul, royce and i quickly adapted the nomenclature that pretentious LA realtors used to put lipstick on crappy neighborhoods (i.e., every low-rent shithole within 10 miles of the place being advertised as "beverly hills adjacent") to describe these areas, and thus our favored hunting grounds became
1. gold coast adjacent
what can i say about gold coast? it's one of those bars that looks about the same now as it did when it first opened, and back in the day, it attracted lotsa beer-drinking boyhounds and the boys who loved 'em. while i spent many happy hours there, it was its immediate sphere of influence that interested me far more.
see, gold coast was ideally situated for my purposes--right on the boulevard just across la jolla from the smutty bookstore (a), big parking lot out back (b), and, most important, backed up by a cut-through with diagonal parking--well, here, i'll show ya--
note to the four forlorn guys parked diagonally above:
give it up, bitches--it ain't coming back
known infamously, affectionately and forevermore as vaseline alley (c).
by day sedate and businesslike, this little plot of pavement was transformed after sundown into an ever-changing panoply of sexual seekers of all ages and stripes, the only thing uniting them being that fire down below, as the line of cars went round and round. it was here that i scored some of my most memorable conquests--
the stardust twins and that guy with the infant-seat that a certain commenter will never let me live down (and yeah, noblesavage, i know i'm gonna go to hell when i die) in the parking lot, and
my first love in my favored pole position spot in vaseline alley, for instance.
and if the crush got too much, all you had to do was take a walk (or a drive) down la jolla towards melrose, and watch for the boys on foot and the headlights coming toward you. guys would beckon to you from the bushes of the more well-landscaped houses you passed, and drivers would slow, check you out and throw their doors open for you if they liked what they saw.
eschewing the shiny benzes and bimmers (invariably, either desperate oldies or coiffed weho faggots), i would always keep an eye out for the dented subarus and nissans with duct tape and different-color fenders, because i knew therein would be the wild young boys i loved so much, fresh off their dishwashing jobs at trendy westside eateries, looking for a little action before heading home to their girlfriends in inglewood and montebello. if they were willing, i'd drag 'em home to 841; if they were gun-shy, no worries--i knew every dark alley and unattended parking garage within a five-mile radius.
i drove down la jolla yesterday, stopped at the sign at waring, reflexively looked left (old habits die hard, i guess), wondered if the upscale yuppies living behind those protective walls of dense foliage had any clue how many truckloads of used condoms had to be removed from their pretty little back garden in the process of transforming it from the boarded-up derelict it had been 20 years ago into the polished jewel it is today.
i'm thinking their realtor may have failed to disclose that little factoid.
2. spike adjacent
one night, wanting to get away from yet one more houseful of royce's friends from texas, i announced on my way out the door where i was headed, showed up all bleary-eyed next morning and when one of 'em asked me brightly if i had had fun with spike and jason--and once paul, royce and i managed to pick ourselves up off the floor--the place gained its new name.
i remember one time--i still feel kinda bad about this--i was leaving spike with some guy when a much hotter guy pulled up to the curb with a wave, i leaned in, he grabbed my shirt, pulled me halfway through the window with one heavily-tattooed arm and, nose-ring to nose, snarled, "you'd rather be with me, right?", i said, "drive", and he took off in a screeching puff of smoke with my legs still waving in the air, leaving the other guy behind in his dust.
that was the way you had fun with spike and jason.
oh, and to those readers who may feel i'm giving west weho short shrift in this post, lemme just sum up that most sanctified holy of holies like this: you could tell the main cruising streets over there--larrabee, cynthia, and (especially) keith--by the trail of blood left by herds of manicured queens dragging their poor lil' pomeranians up and down the sidewalks until their tiny paws were raw on the pretext that they were just out for a "walk" in case they ran into one of their equally secretly-slutty girlfriends (and tell me i'm wrong about this, anonymous).
me, i preferred the no-bullshit honesty of east weho--you ran into a guy on the street at 4am there, there was no pretense--you were there because you wanted to fuck, and you both knew it. saved everybody a lot of goddam time.
anyway, moving on...
3. drake's adjacent
[you know how you always laugh at people in respectable neighborhoods who raise a shit-stink when some porno establishment moves into their midst outta fear of the element it'll bring with it? well, turns out they might be onto something.]
for the first few weeks, i was behind the curve on this one--i'd follow the trail of cars down la jolla to melrose as usual, make the left along with 'em, and then watch as, instead of making the next left back towards gold coast, more and more would keep heading east.
what the fuck?, i'd ask myself, and one night i followed to find out.
and, holy shit, what i found--a whole new hunting ground had sprung up around a glossy new adult video store named drake's that had just opened in the trendy melrose district. and, unlike the darkened slightly-seedy neighborhoods that surrounded spike and gold coast, these were clean, brightly-lit streets filled with neat little bungalows full o' moms and pops who clearly had no idea what had just hit 'em.
to this day, i still dunno what it was--maybe it was all the light, or maybe it was the fact that the cops hadn't yet caught onto this movable feast--but, where business at the previously-discussed locations was generally conducted somewhat furtively and under cover of darkness, drake's adjacent was more like the
american graffiti of gay cruising. seriously--streams of cars full of young guys waving and hollering at each other with music blaring as they passed, others making out with each other on their hoods and trunks and hollering back, doors opening, occupants exchanging--it was like nothing i had ever seen before.
and lemme tellya--it was fun.
key memories:
(1)
horrifying grandma. it's like 3am and i'm stopped in the middle of the street--curson or sierra bonita, i don't remember which--talking to a buncha kids who are leaning in my windows, and some woman in curlers and bathrobe comes storming outta her house, waves her fist and curses us from the middle of her yard, and we just look at her until she gives up and goes back inside.
(2)
the night the empire struck back. i know what they are the minute i turn the corner onto sierra bonita, and what they mean--those ugly black rubber hoses stretched halfway across the street--slam on my brakes, and, after thinking a minute, wave my arm out the window in a "follow me, boys" gesture, slalom left around the first traffic-counter and then right around the next, with a whole line o' cars behind me doing the same, as we form a continuous serpentine conga line dodging the traps the evil homeowners had induced the authorities to lay for us in an attempt to kill the party. it's the only gay trend i can lay claim to starting, and i take some small pride in that (shut up, noblesavage).
(3)
the night the universe told me the fun was over. as dawn is breaking over the stubbed-out end of a long, fruitless saturday night, a really hot, well-dressed guy rounds the corner into the alley, gives me a long look
finally, i think
disappears back from whence he came
what the fuck?, i think
and then reappears, glaring, leading his equally well-dressed wife and their two young daughters in frilly dresses, their eyes shielded by their mother from the sight of the degenerate in the car across the way. i assume their destination is, first, the garage adjacent to the house, and then probably church, but i'm so far down in my seat by that time that i really can't tell you for sure.
* * * * *
this, folks, for better or worse, was west hollywood as i experienced it in the early- to mid-nineties--no AOL, no manhunt, no grindr, no digital at all; just analog, up-close and personal.
i really don't know what else to say about those years--i was a kid in a candy store, and, like any kid gorging himself on long-forbidden treats, conscience really didn't play a large part in some of the decisions i made back then.
kids today just look at me when i tell 'em these stories. "you're telling me you used to could just drive around and pick up guys on the
street?", they ask me incredulously.
if you only knew, boys--if you only knew.
