ON & OFF THE ROAD #2

Dennis Hopper died a couple days ago. 

In Los Angeles you can live off the crumbs of the film industry. Even the music business is really just the retarded nephew of the big guy on the hill counting the weekend gross. Movies being the universe--there are the galaxies of cars, music and porn. So I wrote throwaway tunes for Roger Corman's soft-core flics; sold porn videos; hung out at Cheetahs to see my best friend's girlfriend dance and rented out all the old cars in my driveway to movie shoots in the desert. I spent seven years in America's version of the city of lights and ended up on a hill overlooking a lake that was really a reservoir. There's no rust out there in the desert, so the steel lasts longer, but eventually all the cars will die and the middle of the last century will become entirely virtual. 

We were the only tenants up there on our hill and our home-owning neighbors complained about the oil stains on the road. The road, that's right--not our driveway. We had nowhere to put the '55 seafoam green Studebaker; the 73 Riviera; the '69 paint-stripped Barracuda, (the rolling equivalent of a homeless ex-con on a bender); the '61 Benz 190 with the Chevy V8 engine that popped a wheelie if you tapped the gas too hard. And my personal vehicle, Donna, as in Donna Reed--(oh it was a Wonderful Life)--a canary colored Plymouth Volare with pushomatic, glow-in-the-dark transmission buttons. We had nowhere to put the family jewels, because the garage was the recording studio. So when Love and Rockets moved in, Daniel Ash parked one of his Harleys right out front with a big-ass pirate flag and we never heard from the grease-stricken neighbors again.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To get to heaven I had to take the highway. Even route 66. So I bought a a '73 Buick Electra 455, (biggest power plant GM ever built), from a one-eyed, one-legged homeless Vietnam vet in a Massachusetts parking lot. I knew the car was shit, but the 8-track tape player worked and it came complete with Dr. John's Night Tripper and the first ZZ Top album. Definitely worth 600 bucks. After the fucker broke down on the George Washington bridge, the garage we towed it to called her Christine, but eventually she made it to the promised land where I sold her to a friend of mine--and the undercarriage promptly fell out of the chassis. I guess she liked me. Way before the house on the hill, the studio and all those other cars, I ended up in a room in Louise Brooks' old house-on Ivar Street, just up the hill from Hollywood and Vine. And taking the bus. Amidst the piss 'n puke environment of the 101 Freeway underpass at the bottom of my block, someone had long ago painted Louise's portrait on the cement. Not graffiti, but an urban gallery; the the reception desk to my hill. The neo-gothic house had been extended over the years, til her bloated length hovered precariously over the shifting dirt of another L.A. hill. A fat backside, but the face she turned to Ivar was all svelte columns and elegant archways. My room was small, but the the black & white tiled bathroom alone was bigger than at least two New York City apartments I've lived in. 

The window next to where I planted my bed opened onto a ledge-cum-balcony that I was never quite sure would support me for too long, but ended up making it through the earthquake that cracked a 10cm wide gash down the length of the street. Directly across the lane in the next house was a window where a long-haired naked man, with the generally beefy body type of Harvey Keitel, often came to stare. Usually either when my girlfriend was around; or when it was pretty clear that he had company of his own to show off. I eventually became acquainted with the aging Lothario next door. Virgil Frye was quick to let us in on his life story, as is so often the case when time has already made it clear that the first chapters are sure to be the best. Vrigil hit the coast from the Midwest with his buddy Dennis in the 50's. They were the same--peas in a pod; ready to take over where Jimmy Dean would leave off. Except that Hopper got all the breaks. Why Dennis actually acted in Giant and Rebel without a Cause and his pal Virgil only got on the Easy Rider payroll as a makeup artist is anybody's guess. Life just isn't fair sometimes... Actually Frye did make an uncredited appearance in the classic film, and hell, JD Souther never got credited as screenwriter, so who's to say Frye wasn't screwed as well? 

Virgil ended up playing bit rolls in B grade horror movies; a TV show here and there; and stage-plays, something that in Hollywood is about two rungs below porn and maybe just above busboy at Duke's. But he was Dennis Hopper's old friend. And most importantly, he'd sired one of the better known set of breasts of the second half of the American Century, otherwise known as Punky Brewster, aka Soleil Moon Frye. So Virgil taught acting classes, mostly populated by contemporaries of his daughter. And stared at us through his drapeless window. When I heard last week that Hopper had died, I immediately thought of Virgil and googled him to see what had become of my almost-famous neighbor. It turns out that his daughter made an acclaimed documentary about her Alzheimer stricken father; partially an attempt at reclaiming a relationship before the fog surrounding her dad thickened for good. 

I also learned that Virgil, before heading west for fame and fortune, had actually been  a Golden Gloves boxing champ. Not an inconsequential achievement. But clearly not enough for Frye--even if it might have meant a clearer route to a more fulfilling chapter two. 

Years ago, when my ASCAP checks finally started paying for more than  a tofu-dog, I noticed that some music I'd written got placed in a Punky Brewster segment. We were somehow connected, the Fryes and me, at the nether reaches of the Hollywood circulatory system. Not just in the wannabe world of a car-less, dream filled Hollywood hill.