Her curvy wick burns end to end
like life's big questions unanswered
over
and over
again.
Cycles spin
hearts align and misalign
seek some level of comfort
in the blood flood
towards extinction.
And our cells replicate, die out, replicate like our loves
like our doubts
like our victories and defeats
all in the service
of some resilient
resistance to acceptance
distraction
the devil's stepchild.
He wrote this poem with those little word festooned refrigerator magnets the second he got home from his shift. Just another night waiting tables at Cantor's. Turk had seen it all in his 45 years working in this bastion of Hollywood late-night tradition, where the hip meet the square over matzo ball soup, pastrami and cheese Danish. He wasn’t Turkish but in the psychedelic mid 60s wore a fez at the oddest times. Even he sometimes didn’t answer when someone called him by the name his father also carried, Henry.
What has recently been sticking in Turk’s craw is the notion that he has finally passed some seemingly tangible milestone--that these young kids in here now just think of him as an old fuckin’ loser. He knows he looks 20 years older than he is to these kids but the difference between 70 and 90 makes little difference to women under 40. They see him as some crotchety geriatric guy still shuffling through the same no-future job when in reality, the pension plan and retirement fund he set up years ago with his tip money are doing quite well, thank you.
But to some, he's something of an institution in this part of town. A couple generations of Angelenos have never known a time when Turk wasn’t poetically taking his sweet time between tables with hot coffee and a tartly sarcastic joke about someone’s choice of apparel for the evening. He’d started there after he flunked out of UCLA in 1958 due to too much partying (they called it “running ‘round” back then), too much sunning and too many late nights hot-rodding around Santa Monica. Too little reality, they call it now.
He used to hit the smoky jazz clubs in town and at the beach to hear the cats blow cool and the chicks, cooler. Chet Baker, Russ Freeman, Stan Getz. In the 60s, he’d drive his roommate’s Vette up and down Sunset from Ciro’s to the Whiskey and the then swinging Hollywood Playboy Club before it moved to Century City. We won’t go into his roomie’s lucrative own night job business selling hash oil and Thai sticks to the kids on the Strip. Play money.
Sure, they may think that his wobbly gait and less than steady hand carrying the plate of latkes just proves his frailty. But they don't know what a stud he was back in the day; he liked to think he “took advantage of the sexual revolution of the times. I found out why they called it ‘free love’, baby.” They had no clue that he actually has had even more women (and the occasional, irresistible pretty boy) in the most recent 20 years of his life. “The young kids don’t don‘t know what they’re missing,” he often tells himself whole-heartedly, “Older cats know their shit, man.” If they only knew that the reason he moves so poorly is that the hip that has given him all this trouble, was broken when he was in his 40s in a freak accident, at a particularly out of control sex club in the early-80s. The scar on his hip a badge of honor of sorts to him, at least.
The evening had begun innocently enough. He’d been out on his night off, catching L.A. punk scene heavies --Exene and DJ Bonebreak of X, Carlos Guitarlos & Gil T (of Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs who hosted these Blues Mondays here for 3 years), Blasters’ pianist Gene Taylor and on completely out-of-tune harmonica, a historically inebriated Lee Ving from primal L.A. punk legends, Fear--slashing through blues edge in the basement at Cathay de Grande, the former Chinese restaurant and punk mecca at Argyle and Selma in the center of Hollywood. As usual he was the oldest cat in the room but on this night it was early, and dead. There were only a half dozen of the flashy L.A. punks, a smattering of die-hard city blues fans standing always off to the side with the leftover hippies on the fringes. But no frothing crowd on the dance floor as there were many nights here and upstairs when the seminal hardcore, rockabilly, Paisley Underground and garage bands wreaked havoc. This was shortly before Van Halen recorded their homage called, “Top Jimmy”.
So Turk stood, arms crossed, swaying stoically as he has a tendency to do, in the sweet spot—dead center mid-dance floor. It was where all the sound comes together, where he could put himself aurally and visually between the players, a factotum extra member of the band…all ears. Suddenly, he was nudged softly by a couple dancing, up close and personal, winding around him on the empty floor.
“Sorry, buddy.” Turk knew that voice. It was Tom Waits and his then recent new bride, Kathleen Brennan, finding their groove. He looked back to the one little booth directly behind him to see if his roomie, Stereo Steve, a major Waits fan, took notice. What Turk saw was Stereo, engrossed in conversation with a portly but cute and drunk blonde while Stereo’s brother Jason, who years later made a killing in processed meats, was staring intently into the eyes of a rambling redhead who was visibly giving him a hand-job under the table.
Ving, by now, playing in the wrong key, got fed up with himself and lunged onto the dance floor. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and held it unsteadily up towards the emergency sprinklers jutting from the ceiling. He wavering facilitated in the scorching of his thumbs until he gave up and instead, made vertical leaps with his fists punching holes into the acoustic ceiling tiles. Covering himself with white, shredded ceiling dust.
In the midst of all of this subtly lugubrious mayhem, rising like a lurching, drooling bleary-eyed storm from behind the guitar amp backline was Top Jimmy himself. Stumbling over the amps with not a glance from Guitarlos, he fell into the mic stand up front and began bellowing Jim Morrison’s “Roadhouse Blues”.
After an hour or so of this typical Hollywood behavior, Turk got bored when the set break went on too long, the redhead had fallen drunk cutting her head on the cheap beer glass she’d shattered, Jason had come and Stereo Steve had run out of drugs.
He called it a night but not before heading to a clandestine after-hours joint that was just getting started that time of night. He liked getting there just prior to 2am after which it took forever to get any attention. Once the riff-raff got there the sessions with the Mistresses took longer as the patrons got drunker and less manageable. He’d waited patiently in the small room reserved for slackers without appointments but being Monday, the wait wasn’t long. He was only a couple of paragraphs into an article in Rolling Stone on The Eagles latest exploits when he was called into his regular room at the end of the darkly lit hall that smelled of Lysol in spite of the black candles on the walls. Every step down the hall seemed less well-lit, the dark colors of the walls, velvet draped doorways all gave the impression of a slowing down of time even while his pulse rate heightened the closer he got to that door.
The last thing he remembers, he was strapped to a St. Andrew’s Cross and had been receiving some major flogging when the goddess applying the whipping, all 300 lbs. of her—he quietly called her Large Marge in his private moments alone when he was feeling naughty--whom all on the premises referred to quite adoringly as ‘Mistress Ann’, keeled over stone dead from a massive coronary. On her way down, she took out the cross and crumbling Turk’s hip like dry kindling. She had just uttered, what at her services a few days later would have truly been the most appropriate epitaph, "Had enough yet, bitch?"
It had taken him about ten years to really recover. By the time, he’d healed enough to get around he was a madman. He’d really enjoyed the Percocets the Doctor had prescribed and wound up taking a few months off work first to heal, and then to deal with kicking the jones he’d developed for the mindless numbing the pills allowed him.
Once back at the restaurant he was truly surprised about how a) little had changed and b) how much all of the little girls seemed to have missed him. Even some of them who he had never seemed to get anywhere with, some he’d never even seen before. They started fawning over him, asking all kinds of sympathetic questions. Some seemed to have been talking amongst themselves about his reputation and some of the slightly older ones even seemed to be worried that they didn’t want to miss their chance to be a notch on his infamous bedpost. Why not try this intelligent, experienced, interesting guy their friends had told them about. So in spite of the pain and the new re-acquaintance with skunky herb to replace the tranquilized blanket he’d been living under, he found himself busier than ever with the girls.
But that was old news; tonight he couldn't get these two women out of his head. They came in late in his shift. Business as usual, but for a brief moment there, he had felt a strange sensation that the petite straw-haired girl with the major rack had been giving him the once over. He’d had a hard time hiding his blossoming hard-on as he circled the table waiting for them to decide what they wanted. He knew what he wanted.
She looked great. Vintage, thrift punk chic. Broad patterned black fishnets, short black leather skirt and calf-high black leather boots with a 6“ heel, 80’s Siouxsie black sleeveless T and silky mid-length sleeve top. He figured this hot little package, might have some deep seeded thing for older guys and in fact wondered if he hadn't run into her in Hollywood years before. Something about her seemed familiar...the shy, sideways glances, the line of her clavicle peeking out of the ripped out neck of the tee...He felt for a flash that she rally wanted to be seen with him in her sights, but then when her friend returned from the head, they just fell all over each other and he got distracted with some drunk Mexican musicians trying to figure out the menu. Maybe she looked familiar or he was just flashing back to the days when he was fucking every other hot chick that ordered a blintz or a chicken salad or a chocolate malt there late at night.
Back in the day, they'd come in high after buying a joint or two or a hit of acid or E in the parking lot. He was always surprised how the stream of good-looking women just never slowed down over the course of his years there. Seems there was some fountain of youth just around the corner somewhere. He never could convince anyone to tell him where it was, though for a long time, just the proximity to these flowers of youth kept him feeling younger than his years.
He thought back to the time when he'd spend his days in Santa Monica or Venice. At the beach, he’d often finding a bit of sexy fun as the sun went down, having just enough time to get back to the deli for his night shift. He wondered if this shy blonde might have been one of those little teenaged girls he’d shuffled through in those hazy days.
Maybe she was one of those three blondes he had convinced to go home with him on the night before Easter one year. He got them to crawl around him naked at 4am looking for imaginary Easter eggs he’d claimed were hidden around his apartment before all crawling into his shower. They wound up on the balcony bending him over the rail and taking turns on him with the strap-on one of them had conveniently pulled from her bag of tricks...hard to piece that one together clearly...
Perhaps, wait, this COULDN’T be the little girl from the alley at the beach that he had met...the young girl of 14 or 15 who he had pulled into an alley and fucked against the wall on that sunny day when he was pushing 40. He had often wondered about her...never could really figure out if he’d been completely fucking with the head (and hot body) of an almost Lilliputian temptress or if she’d been the one tying his head and cock in knots...he had never been able to forget the otherworldly softness of her skin, the tightness of her sex, the willingness of her spirit. Turk so wished he’d have that one moment back just so he’d know, concretize his memory. Should his guilt really be so strong after so long a time...and should his continued excitement at the memory be something that had pushed him on year after year, looking for just one more experience as sudden, as surprising, as unexpected.
