Mike Cuenca

Borders, Love & Rock & Roll

“Don’t judge a book by its cover”.

My ass, don’t judge a book by its cover. I ordered tons of albums from Columbia House just because of their cover. Pere Ubu’s MODERN DANCE? Because of the cover. Bauhaus SINGLES? Because of its cover. Pulp? Because the DIFFERENT CLASS cover looked so damn rad.

There was no way of sampling this stuff. And as history proved, if a band cared enough about its visual representation then chances are it matched their sound. And sometimes a great album cover enhances the music. It affected everything. This whole package. And Pulp. Looked. Rad. As. Fuck.

As soon as I got the CD I flipped through its booklet. The sets the band mates posed in were in color, the members themselves were in black and white. And wore sharp suits. Well, not Candida Doyle. She was pale with dark hair and wore a skirt and a long-sleeved top. I played the thing a thousand times. Jarvis Cocker was so fucking cool, man. And all his songs were about boning. And as a performer he acted out his lyrics with his hands. Not corny but slick. I wanted to be that guy. Move aside, Brodie Bruce.

But Candida Doyle. What came to my attention was this: I definitely had a type. Don’t ask me where this came from; I don’t know. Maybe because of Snow White. The Wicked Queen? Disguised as an old hag? My goodness. I’m kidding. No, the Wicked Queen as is. Kill. Me. I later read that for Martin Scorsese, growing up in an Italian dominant neighborhood meant that blondes were incredibly exotic. Well, pale girls with big light eyes and dark hair were my Achille’s heel. And none were ever interested in my dorky ass. These gals I never could build the courage to talk, turned out, also loved Pulp. They were arty, well-read, had impeccable style, liked foreign cinema, and duh, had great taste in tunes.

Wasn’t always that way. I liked blondes as a kid. One of my biggest crushes that would send my pre-adolescent heart fluttering was a dirty blonde. She lived right across the street from my brother’s house. We’d play wrestle on his yard and I’d spend all night replaying our encounters in my head. By thirteen I had a Nicole Kidman poster on my wall. Even a Jenny McCarthy one where she’s naked, sprawled on a pink silk sheet. I’m not attracted to any of these women now but back in junior high? Mama mia. My mom hated the McCarthy poster. She’d ask me to take it down. I wouldn’t. One afternoon I come home from school and it’s gone. “What happened to my poster?”

“You’re too young to have that on your wall!”

The next day I come in. The poster is back up. I furrow my brows. I walk into the entertainment room and there’s my brother Luis Osvaldo. He glances at me with a smirk, nodding his head and then winks.

Back to Pulp.

So on the AOL chat boards hoping I would meet the love of my life I would search for local gals who dug that band. I became online friends with them. And a couple I met in real life. Shared very brief platonic friendships and they introduced me to more music and enlightened me with finer points: “Did you know that Pulp was originally a goth band?”

Jumping back in the timeline:

I’m hanging out with Chris and Deez in the Crystal Court branch of the South Coast Plaza Mall… the part of the mall that sucked ‘cause there was nothing fun there. We notice a new bookstore. A two-story bookstore. It’s called Borders. I see that they’re hiring. I was working as a telemarketer with Chris and Deez and it was so mind-numbing. We had to get people to do these surveys and they’d cuss you out, slam the phone on you, flirt with you, ignore you, blast the radio in your ear. It was a drag. I wanted out. Here was a chance. I filled out the application. Turned it in. And then I got a call.

I was over it. Over basic schooling. I did one year at Middle College High, learned that I could do independent studies and continue taking my college classes. By the middle of my Junior year I will have graduated. But with this program I could work in the mornings and continue my courses at night. Independent studies gave me so much freedom. I went from a very “brilliant but lazy” student nabbing C plusses and B minuses to getting straight As. Independent studies let me be inventive. And I actually learned shit. And retained it. I continued making short films on my camcorder, cutting them via equipment on the college campus. I was taking introduction TV/media classes while devouring whatever my film history professor tossed my way: THE ROARING TWENTIES, BONNIE AND CLYDE, DO THE RIGHT THING, etc. etc. Ahhh! What a breath of fresh air!

My first day of class he showed us a doc with a narrator going over the birth of cinema. I had never paid attention to a silent film before. And then the footage comes on: this guy, very gothic-looking, resembling the vampires that starred in the plethora of stolen vampire books I’d lug around as a Freshman, is still with his eyes closed. And his make-up is stunning. A showrunner, Caligari, is spouting words depicted on a title card. The gothic man is Cesare. And he’s a somnambulist. He’s opening his peepers for the first time in X amount of years. Slowly, slowly he peels his lids open to reveal big, wide maddening eyes. My own eyes were in a trance. What is this? Movies can do this?? It just clicked. It clicked for me. It reflected all the shit I was into at the time. I learned all about German Expressionism, I jotted a list of titles to seek, and then we watched THE GOLD RUSH, my first Chaplin. Film was never the same for me. It was right there and then that I went: I am going to make movies for a living.

Ha! Have fun with that shit, pal.

I needed money. And I wanted to save up. But I also wanted to move out of my parents’ house because I had had it. I was tired of fighting with my dad and being called a loser all the time and a waste of space, to put it nicely. Man, I just wanted to be left alone. It was like school, what do people want from me? Leave me the fuck alone. I don’t bother you, don’t bother me. But my dad consistently bullied me. I can now see why he handled things the way he did but me in my late-teens couldn’t. Borders seemed like a good opportunity to not only have access at a discounted rate to a world of books that could really teach me something, but I could start saving up to move out.

The first job I ever had was as a cashier for Luis Osvaldo at his car alarm & radio shop. But I didn’t want to be working for my brother. I wanted independence from my family.  

To contradict, the other gig I had for a very long while was as an unorthodox server, if you will. My mom, fed up with my dad’s gambling plights, lashed at him. As a treaty my dad started hosting bookmaking nights for his acquaintances out of the garage. And these excursions were just like the ones Tony Soprano was involved in on THE SOPRANOS: they’d last all weekend, into all hours of the clock. And these men would get hungry. We didn’t have any of those online door delivery food services like everyone has now. My dad would buy an ass-load of groceries, my mom would cook all weekend, and we’d feed these derelict men, charging each by the plate. Un cafecito? I would walk from the kitchen through the backyard with a tray full of mini coffee shots into this smoke-filled, booze drenched den. And the gamblers would tip me. Outrageous money for a thirteen-year-old. By the time I was seventeen I had about five-thousand-dollars stored in my savings account. Eventually my mom had enough and was tired of casseroling over a hot stove all weekend and the dominos at Cuenca’s came to an end. I wrote this into SCENES FROM OBLIVION as the lead character’s (Misha’s) source of income.

I go to Borders for my job interview. I luck out. Matt, one of the managers, is a musician. He interviews me and the interview shifts into us talking about punk bands (his favorite is X). Another time punk rock abetted my life.

“So, Mike, what instrument do you play?”

“Uhhh… bass.” And this is something I used to say all the time without realizing what I was saying, “But I don’t know how to play chords.”

This was always met with a puzzled look. You don’t need to know chords to play bass. You just need to know the notes. Ask Joe Strummer. He showed Paul Simonon how to play bass by taping the notes on his fretboard.

Matt just laughed and went, “I play bass! Why’d you pick it?”

Because I loved Crass and Joy Division and the bass made those bands, that’s why. “It sounds cool!”

“Right! It’s the instrument that always stood out for me. It just spoke to me, you know?” Hey, he said what I was thinking.

Matt hired me. And when I went into this job interview, as Yvonne Trinh will verify, I was dressed as one would for a chance at employment. But on my first day at Borders? I came in with liberty spiked hair and a torn-up blue shirt held together by safety pins and band patches. And this was my truck-to-floor/inventory gig.

Yvonne was one of the booksellers at Borders. She was into rockabilly. And the color green. Sweet and very friendly. Maybe trying to insinuate a conversation she politely tells me that the books I’m about to stock on a shelf aren’t books that belong on said shelf. I snap at her, “I know!” and she backed away. Little could we foretell that we’d become very close and she’d be one of my longest, dearest and best friends.

Pictured: me and Yvonne in 2001 or 2002. In the background that Fakes/Fuzz Guns poster I put up at Geez Louise plus the metallic blue bass I got at of Out of Vogue.

First day on the job I’m filling paperwork next to the other new hire who’s about a decade or so older. Dave “The Mod” Durling was from Boston. Hilarious like a Seinfeld character. But subtle. Not cartoonish. We became immediate friends. Just one of those people you click with in a second. Dave’s one of the best people I’ve ever met and someone who’s knowledge of films and music I greatly admired.

Check out Dave’s story: he gets a call that his mother has passed, he packs, leaves the lights on and everything at his Boston apartment as is, flies out here for the funeral, ends up reacquainting with Liz, one of his sister’s friends who he had met the prior year while she was visiting Boston, they go home together, a month later and they had gotten married because why not? Now he’s here in Orange County, broke, married, with his electric bill running amuck at his apartment back home. This is 2000. It’s 2022 and Liz and Dave are still married.

But, man, did we get along. And we initially bonded over our love of Kevin Smith movies, particularly CLERKS. Day in, day out, Dave and I would communicate in CLERKS and Tarantino movie quotes. Dave had been an aspiring filmmaker and musician and things just didn’t pan out.

Dave gave me a list of his favorite movies. Or maybe movies I should watch. I checked out every single one of those. Movies that are my all-timers now. Movies I watched repeatedly like TREES LOUNGE and DIRTY HARRY, just to name two. He also gifted me a stack of filmmaking books and director bios including REBEL WITH A CREW, Robert Rodriguez’s story on how he made EL MARIACHI for nada. Dave was a huge Beatles fan. Huge Britpop fan. Former suited Mod. Hence, Dave the Mod. We both loved Blur and The Who (particularly the first three albums) and when I’d mention some ‘80s band I really dug he’d turn to me and go, “Kid, how the hell do you know about all this?”

I was a nerd! A vampire (lmao) preying on any overlooked tune, comic, or movie.

My schoolmate Kat comes over. First time over to my parents’ house. She takes a look at my room and all my stuff and she goes sourly, “Must be nice to be rich.” That’s always stuck with me. Rich? We weren’t rich. Sure, the furniture in my room was bought by my dad but all my media shit I bought with my own savings or damn right stole from Columbia House. Rich? Are you kidding me? But Kat came from a large Mexican family all sharing rooms in a small house. I told myself I would never take any handouts from that point on. Well, save for the times I was flat broke and had to crawl on my hands and knees.

Through Kat I met Luis Navejas at Santa Ana College. Luis was friends with Kat’s sister. Dude. Was. Cool. Luis had shaggy hair and thick sideburns and wore ‘70s style shirts and bell-bottom like pants and Wranglers. A little hunched over, always with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, eyes hidden behind aviator shades. He was a musician and in a band with the rest of his brothers and they were called Enjambre. Enjambre means swarm in Spanish and avejas means bees and their last name is Navejas. Get it?

Luis loved the shit out of FIGHT CLUB. And Brad Pitt. That was his idol. And he emulated him a bit. And I in turn saw Luis as my role model and emulated him. Gone was my black attire replaced by colorful vintage tees (the ones I could find to fit me, I was lanky and short and hadn’t hit my growth spurt) and tracked down Wrangler polyester pants in all shades. Wore ‘em for years.

Luis was taking film courses too and he had just moved from Mexico. We’d toss movie ideas back and forth. One came to me while I was stuck in traffic, I told Luis and we expanded upon it. That’s one of my many dream projects I have never tackled because it needs a budget. But there was this other script I had written and I gave it to him. I wanted Luis to play the lead because I dunno. And he drew a character sketch.

I had horrible acne. Always have had bad acne until fairly recently but goddamn, it was horrible. Chunks of puss-filled dangling flesh. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I just couldn’t. Bad self-esteem. I started writing a story about a man, a very lonely man who walked around with a mysterious briefcase and just observed people from a distance, the bottom of his face wrapped in scarves. This man was the narrator and watched several one-setting scenarios on his route to work, seven total, each one very loosely based off one of the deadly sins. Through them you got to learn a little about him. What I revealed at the end, in a very Cesare the Somnambulist unwrapping, is that he is horribly scarred underneath. And he had to go around smiling like nothing was wrong, as his questionable profession called for. I worked intensely on the script for a long while and it’s the first script I ever completed. This was the movie I wanted to make. My first feature film.

At Borders I had now made friends with Dave and Yvonne and was friendly with Peter K (of the future Aaron/Lloyd/me crew). And then I saw her… Roseanna.

Now this kid here, me? Always had crushes on girls. Huge crushes. But I was too shy. In second grade two gals complimented my eyes and I nervously cussed them out because I didn’t know what to say. It’s taken me years to feel comfortable accepting a compliment. So when I saw Roseanna and she told me she dug one of my band pins my heart did sixty-eight cartwheels. I got lunch with her once at the Del Taco nearby. I was trembling. She then mentioned her creepy, annoying boyfriend who wouldn’t leave her alone. My heart sank. But then my spirits were lifted when she brought me burned CDs of artists I had never heard of.

“Oh, you love Pulp? Well, I love Pulp. And if you love Pulp you’re gonna love these.”

I was way into Britpop at this juncture.*

*The scenesters at this point tend to eschew people who don’t stick to one subculture. I fucking loved/love it all. But isn’t that what punk’s all about? Acceptance and growth? You would think. So who’s the poseur, I used to say. Or as I wrote on a chalkboard at Borders: Who watches The Watchmen?

If THE CROW soundtrack got me into the Mary Chain and The Cure, and the RUSHMORE soundtrack got me into The Creation and the Kinks, well, the TRAINSPOTTING one made me a full-fledged Britpop fan. Not only was Pulp on the soundtrack, but Blur too. And I became a massive devotee. TRAINSPOTTING was a huge influence on me. I started dressing like Marc Renton and his crew and paid a shit ton of money to import from the UK the exact same purple with yellow stripe sambas Renton wore. I even started using heroin. I’m kidding. No heroin. I was also big into Radiohead. THE BENDS and OK COMPUTER were on constant rotation in my room. I used to wear a green-sleeved baseball tee with the words “Fake Plastic Trees” scribbled with a sharpie on its chest that got a ton of approval from Borders folks older than me.*

But for some reason I had never heard of Suede (known in the states as The London Suede). Suede aside, not sure if I see the correlation between Pulp and the other bands Roseanna introduced me to. But she burned me Suede’s HEAD MUSIC. “Everybody hates this album and they say only girls like it but those people are stupid. They’re just mad Bernard Butler’s no longer in the band. But it’s great!”  HEAD MUSIC along with Modest Mouse’s THE MOON AND ANTARTICA and LONESOME CROWDED WEST, The Birthday Party HITS and Bikini Kill SINGLES.

I couldn’t believe this girl I had a crush on was introducing me to all this rad music. I later did a CD swap with Yvonne. I lent her Bikini Kill SINGLES and she lent me a burned CD of X’s first two albums, LOS ANGELES and WILD GIFT, which were super tough to get a hold of at the time. And that’s how Yvonne and I started to bond. I used to confide to her all my girl problems (as depicted in next week’s stunning chapter) and she used to tell me all about this skinhead/Mod dude she was seeing who was starting to grow cold.

Nothing ever transpired between Roseanna and I and she ended up quitting, or getting fired, and taking off with her sometimes stalker boyfriend who wouldn’t leave the store. But she set a precedent for the sort of girls I would be interested in: women with awesome taste in music who wanted nothing to do with me romantically. And you knew they were into cool music because of how they dressed. It all went hand-in-hand. This is all before alt-culture appropriation, of course, a topic I let the protagonists in BOYS ABOUT TOWN do a deep-dive on. Why was that important to me? I didn’t relate to my Cuban culture, it didn’t accept me, and had found my own.

But Pulp. Pulp. Pulp. All roads lead to Pulp.

I tell Dave that I’m going to form a band. Because you wanna know what I had just learned? I read somewhere (or maybe misread) that Jarvis Cocker had initially formed Pulp in order to become famous enough to be a director. That was his passion. And I took inspiration. I didn’t want be in a band to be a rock star to hook up with people like everyone else. I wanted to garner enough attention in order to be able to pursue what I really wanted to pursue: making movies.  

I started writing songs. They would just come out of nowhere. I didn’t put much thought into them. Once I learned how to play and sing simultaneously, and boy, that took a minute, I would just mumble a melody as I played whatever on my bass and the melody would guide whatever note I’d move to on the fretboard. It’s still how I write music. A made a whole demo tape. Ten, twelve songs. A demo tape I don’t have any more and would love to give a listen to. Guitarist Monica and Luis’s brother Rafa and I would try to play them as we auditioned random drummers off Craig’s List. It never went anywhere. And I gave up on all that.

But in true me fashion one thought lead to another. The next time I see Dave I go, “Wait. Forget the Jarvis Cocker route. I got it. I know what I’m going to do.” I had been going to so many music festivals, why don’t I host my own? And I’ll use the benefits from the festival to fund my movie! I’ve read REBEL WITHOUT A CREW! I can do this! I can do it!

“You can do it? How are you going to do that? You’re seventeen!”

Roseanna was gone now. And the doomsday clock at Borders continued to chime. Eventually they, meaning upper management, had to separate Dave and I. He was the best friend I could have at that age and we spent our Monday through Friday shifts yapping and laughing our asses off relentlessly via a horde of inside jokes. Dave kept his position. And I was moved to the registers. I hated it. I’d close my eyes at night and all I would see was the cash register opening and shutting. I was stuck behind the counter. And I wasn’t allowed to read. The shifts were slow as hell and you’re telling me I’m at a bookstore with my thumbs up my ass and I can’t read? I mean, I did anyway. Underneath the camera. Couple pages at a time before I’d get caught. Penny Rimbaud’s remembrance books. An Andy Warhol book. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Bob Dylan’s TARANTULA. An outlaw poetry book. I felt so motivated.

Soon Dave quit because he and Liz were moving back to Boston (“Gotta take care of that electricity bill now”). I was so bummed. Just wasn’t the same. I too quit Borders and wound up hired at the corporate 100 Virgin Megastore.

But I was focused. That festival. It’s gonna happen.

The people who I admire, who I personally believe in, who I see so much potential in, I’ve always wanted them to succeed along with me. I got Alex Guillen to say yes to being on the bill. I got the neighbor down the street in a band to say yes to being on the bill. And I nearly got Weezer and Green Day to be on the bill. “Your band will get all this recognition,” I told Alex and my neighbor. I was on the phone at all hours of the day talking to agents and managers and venue owners. This kid. This kid who could only stutter every time he got on the phone. I tried to get Placebo, no dice. I went to their show at the Palladium, somehow got backstage and I’m seeing Eric Erlandson and Sofia Coppola around me and I’m going holy shit and there’s Brian Molko and I go up to him and vomit all the information about my benefit festival and he tells me to shut up and like a diva, walks away. We crept into UCLA with Jacob for this Hank Williams tribute concert to try and talk to Beck. Security caught me in the wings and when I tried to escape I flew back against Elvis Costello, spilling his drink. DUDE, ELVIS COSTELLO!

Jacob was in that last minute One Minute Rice band that Alex Guillen and I threw together for that one birthday party. And Jacob was Jackie’s brother.

March 5th, 2000. I’d never been up to LA before. Not on my own. I didn’t have a car quite yet. Guitarist Monica and I are given a lift by her dad and we’re dropped outside the Virgin Megastore that was over by Fairfax and Sunset. A line is starting to form. It’s very early in the day. The Smashing Pumpkins are playing a free show in support of their new MACHINA album. I’m not entirely into it although I kinda dig some tracks. There’s no promise we’ll get in. And have no idea how we’re going to get back to Santa Ana. We get in. We watch the show from the third floor. A clear view. They play in the outdoor plaza. On our way out, I see these kids that I know for a fact go to our school district. They can squeeze us into their car. One of them is Jackie, this girl I’d gone to elementary school with. These kids are Pumpkin-heads and I’m just thrilled to meet folks who are the into the same band! Monica aside, I didn’t know any Pumpkins fans.

Jackie loved My Bloody Valentine and Catherine Wheel and PJ Harvey and Jacob disliked female singers and was really into Fugazi. Through Jackie I met Alex Guillen and his brother Gio. Alex and Gio were currently in a band and would later form Deathday. I was really into Jackie. Mainly because of how she dressed and her taste in music. I wanted her Pumpkin-head friends to adopt me as one of their own. But they were a very tight group. Months later Jackie and I very-very briefly casually dated. She got me into shoegaze and more into Sonic Youth (my original intro had been the JUDGEMENT NIGHT soundtrack like a ton of folks my age). But I did treat our fling like a therapy session in which I recounted my dark days at Saddleback high as I have here. This was a bad pattern of mine for years in relationships. And because I could only hang out with her at night, this guy right here, stupidest thing I could have done at that point in my life, dropped out of my evening college courses. All for a girl. All for a fling. Dropped out and never went back.

Jackie and I wound up having a falling out. I flipped out on her one day when I was working at Virgin. Well, I treated her callously when ringing her up. We hadn’t seen each other in a long minute and, I’m not here to call people out, but someone who fancied me didn’t want me seeing her, got jealous, and started spreading rumors that she and her friends were talking shit about me and my rambling ‘therapy sessions’. I believed said person and coldly took it out on Jackie during business hours. I could have just called her and inquired but, no, I blew up, cussing her out, accusing her of things. She yelled at me that I’m crazy. And I sure was acting nuts. The manager on duty laughed and then threw on Prodigy’s “Smack my Bitch Up” loudly on the speakers. Crudely funny to me now. Not funny at the time. Jackie and her friends reciprocated by hurling a rock through the back window of my car. That whole situation was handled immaturely but what do you want? We were teenagers. But my general mistrust in people and why the ending of MANHATTAN had me break into tears later on in life, the seed of it was planted here. You just can’t trust people but you gotta have a little faith in ‘em. Which is what my debut feature JERRY POWELL is really all about. Beneath it all.

I stopped hanging out with the gossiping admirer. I now couldn’t get a band together. I was finally in with the cool Pumpkins loving kids but now they hated me. Dave had moved away. I wasn’t taking film courses anymore. Deez and Chris? We had drifted. And this corporate fucking job at the Virgin Megastore was killing my spirits. My acne got even worse. Flaring up. I looked like a ripped-tomato. Went into deep depression. I had been struggling with dejection briefly as a tormented teen but now here it was full-force. I suck. I’m fucking stupid. My fucking dad is fucking right. I shouldn’t have been born.

One night I’m with my two buddies Leeno (a stoner who didn’t care for rock music but loved Portishead) and Michelle (an elementary school and MCH schoolmate). We meet with Alex Guillen at the Block, outside the Starbucks. Leeno and Michelle have been very supportive. I was very sad. Feeling in the dumps. Cheeseball, but on the drive over there The Beatles “Yesterday” comes on. I look at Michelle and tell her this song is how I feel.

I had told Guillen a while back about my filmmaking pipedreams.

“If Jarvis Cocker can do it…”

“Yeah, well, you’re not Jarvis Cocker.”

Rafa (Luis Navejas’ brother who used to jam with Monica and I) used to tell me, “You can’t sing.”

“Punk rockers don’t have to sing!”

I played him “Orgasm Addict” by the Buzzcocks. Rafa listened and looked at me, “That guy knows how to sing.”

He was right. I couldn’t sing. But who cares!

Guillen, “I like your demo tape. But you need to work on your lyrics.”

Fuck my lyrics! Lyrics don’t matter!

I didn’t want to hear it. I had dreams, man. I had drive. I was stubborn and I didn’t want to hear it. But this night Guillen put it bluntly: it’ll never happen. He was right. “Despite all the computations…” I needed to hear it. This stupid festival plan was now falling apart. I had no assistance. I couldn’t keep it together. He gave me suggestions. I still didn’t want to hear them. I stopped hanging out with him too. I distanced myself from everyone. Leeno, Michelle, Luis. All of them. Another bad tendency of mine.

What am I going to do?

That night I tried to kill myself.

Punk Rock & Horror Shows.

October 10, 2022

I call my mom to verify facts.

“The teacher had you write an essay about your parents and your home life and you typed up a whole newspaper,” she tells me then laughs.

“Wait, what?” I vaguely recall this. I mean, I don’t even remember where I park my car half the time.

“You were in second grade. It was supposed to be a blurb and you brought her a stack of pages!”

On that typewriter in my dad’s office I started making up stories. And I went above and beyond on creative school assignments. Math and history assignments? Horrible. Get me to pay attention in class and you’d receive a medal. But when I was given wiggle room I’d go to town.

“That’s what happened. You had a teacher and you showed her that her statistics were wrong. School officials noticed and that’s why you were taken out of high school.”

At fourteen or fifteen I was placed in a dual enrollment program at Santa Ana Middle College High School: you’d take college courses and also receive high school credit. And it happened at the best time. Because I took a film history class. And that changed my entire world. It really did.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Since the reason I had a social worker it’s ‘cause I had gotten arrested.

“You started wearing all black, and spiking your hair and dressing the way you did. Which was shocking. Neither of your brothers turned out that way and we didn’t know why you did. They sent over a social worker who told me and your dad that you’re a good kid. ‘He’s intelligent and has high grades. You just need to see what he has on the inside; not what he wears on the outside. You have to accept who he is.’ And because of what she told us we did. And I’m not calling you out now, you’ve made your decisions, but you received three scholarships, mi niño —three scholarships and you turned them all down because you didn’t want to go to school anymore. You said for what you wanted to do, you didn’t need it.”

Jesus Christ.

===

1996-1998.

To say I was peculiar is a nice way of putting it. Misguided. Upset. I was a Freshman in high school and nobody, not one soul knew I was dating a popular cheerleader a grade higher. Especially not the boys who picked on me; athletes Liliana hung out with. It was as cliché as it gets. They would gang up on me and mock me and spit on me in gym class. So I started carrying a huge knife in my backpack. Next time I get shoved around I’m gonna stab a motherfucker.

I got this ghoulish preoccupation with vampires. One kid in school, whose name totally escapes me, would go to the Barnes and Nobles in Costa Mesa and steal a shit ton of books and flip them at a huge discounted rate. In some way, similar to what I used to do with my bootleg music tapes. I had him nab me almost a dozen books on bloodsuckers.

“Secret destroyer, hold you up to the flames.”

My favorite band were The Smashing Pumpkins (MELLON COLLIE being the one CD my dad ever bought me, a double-disc set too). I spent many late afternoons lying on my bedroom floor, staring at my glow-in-the-dark-star covered ceiling, listening to that album as darkness enveloped the room. And soon their goth-pop masterpiece ADORE would be released. The song “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, as popular and overplayed as it is, carries a title that perfectly describes exactly what that band is. How they feel. Which is how an eccentric, angsty yet hopeful teenager feels. And Pumpkins fans, actual Pumpkins fans, are very special people I’ve come to find out. Nirvana fans were angsty and rebellious, but their time had passed, and now this band was the most popular in the world. Sure, they too were angsty and rebellious, but they were also romantic and mystical and covered an array of styles, reflected in the hearts of their listeners.

SCREAM had been released and I watched it about six to eight times in theatres. I wanted to hear what people would say when the killer was revealed. This one guy during one of the showings goes, “Who is that in there?” I think about his frustration all the time. It made me chuckle at the moment. SCREAM lead me to pay close attention to HALLOWEEN and PSYCHO; Hitchcock becoming my favorite director. It was easy. He was a household name. I was fucking blown away by PSYCHO. The goddamned dialogue. The pacing. That music. And then one nite during a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE commercial break I’m flipping channels and I stop on PBS and it’s showing this old black and white movie with an eerie, chilly score. I don’t know what it is but I am captivated. A brother is taunting his sister at a cemetery telling her that they, whoever they are, are coming for her. I couldn’t stop watching. And when the ending hit it fucking hit, let me tell you. I was in shock. Couldn’t believe it. But I fell in love with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. I immediately brought it over to Alex Solis ‘cause I showed him everything.

“Dude, we gotta watch this!”

“Whoa, this is just like RESIDENT EVIL [the 1996 video game]! But better!!!”

My mom was a horror nut. I say was ‘cause now she hardly goes near them due to her health issues. She gets too involved with them. But that’s all she ever watched: Spanish soap operas and horror movies. My dad? Hated ‘em. So when he was off gambling on Sundays my mom would sit on her throne and marathon all the horror programs UPN would screen: THE PUPPET MASTERs, HELLRAISER, CUJO, the FRIDAY THE 13THs, this one flick whose ending haunted me forever and I recently learned was BURNT OFFERINGS, and so forth. But no vampire movies at nite. No way. They gave her nightmares and she’d always wake up checking her neck for fang marks. Nite or day, you couldn’t trouble me with any that stuff. At five years of age I’d hide under the coffee table when the Freddy’s coming for you song would play on the TV. I was such a ‘fraidy cat.

Until I got a taste of the real thing.

1994. There was a burglar, maybe serial rapist preying on our neighborhood. It was a Sunday. My dad was off who knows where and my mom was marathoning her horror shows. There’s a knock at the door. This is right when we had moved to Seventeenth Street. We didn’t have a peephole. After this we did. I look through the blinds covering the window to the left of the door. I see a white tee, blue jeans, kind of like a greaser/mechanic, and I immediately associate the person with Luis, my brother. He usually visits late Sunday afternoons after he gets out of the car shop.

I don’t know how she sensed it from the entertainment room on the other side of the house. Call it instinct. I go to unlock the door and my mom flies in like a bullet screaming, “No! NO! NO!”

The guy kicks the door open and my mom throws herself right at it as he rabidly swings his arm through the crack, trying to grab at her.

“Call the police!” she screams.

I panic. She’s shrieking. The guy is yelling angry nonsense.

“CALL THE POLICE!”

The rotary phone is literally next to me. I can’t think clearly so I run across the entire house, through the entertainment room, into my dad’s office and phone from there. I’m yelling at the cops about what’s going on. I run back to the living room, to the front door of the house and my mom is on the floor in tears. The door has been shut.

My mom, who is far from an athletic woman, found the strength in her to protect that entry. The guy gave up and ran away. Of course, it took the cops a good hour before they showed up. And by that point Luis had arrived. I told the cops I thought the guy was my brother. They give Luis a hard, suspicious look. I gave them one too. The following week a neighbor a street or two down wasn’t as lucky. I was too young to care to learn if the criminal was ever caught.

Enter: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

You know when you never hear or know of something and then you come across it and now all of a sudden you’re noticing it everywhere? That’s what  happened with CHAINSAW. I was eleven and I kept seeing the name TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE everywhere. So I rented it and watched it with my parents, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin (all who lived with us at the time), super late at night. It was the greatest, most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. It was beautiful. And I was scared for my life. The whole time I’m sitting there convinced it’s a true story. And I can’t believe this happened. Months later when we’d go on a cross-country road trip my heart raced as we drove through Texas at dusk.

The movie ends. I’m trembling, making my way to my sleeping quarters (I no longer had a bedroom). My dad stops me and goes, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“…whu--- huh--- what?”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s Sunday night.” I blink my eyes at him a few times. He concludes, “Take out the trash.”  

The garbage men come by on Monday morning. I forgot.

Uhhhhh………..

It’s two AM. I’m dragging the garbage bins out. And as I’m making my way to the sidewalk from a distance I hear… bbrrrrrr… BRRRR… BRR! BRR! What sounds like a fucking chainsaw!!!! I am not kidding here. I fucking hurl the trash bin, all the garbage falls out, and bolt inside the house in terror!

My dad, “What in the hell…?”

Turns out it was our meth head neighbor down the block who was mowing his lawn in the middle of the night.

But TEXAS got me cinched. And I delved into horror.

So here I was, a freshman, the Smashing Pumpkins on my discman, meat clever in my backpack alongside a stack of Dracula books. And no friends.

The way Saddleback High worked is that the freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors all had different lunch hours. Hence, nobody knew I was dating Liliana. Which I was actually relived by because she was cute and I was a lot younger (adding that I was a year ahead in school) and a skinny-bone-Jones and a dweeb and no one would believe their eyes anyhow. But because of the school’s offbeat scheduling you just never crossed paths with anybody anymore. My nerdy MacArthur junior high friends all went to other schools and I never saw them again. And our schedules clashed so I rarely saw Solis outside of our Saturday hangs which were becoming less frequent.

But when we did hang Solis and I would goof off with our large assortment of action figures. We’d have them get into adventures and I’d tape the whole thing. Listen, this is as dorky as dorky gets. I spent many hours in my bedroom, yeah, playing with action figures until I was about eleven years old. But I’d make up stories and give the toys dialogue. With Solis now puppeteering I could actually record this.

And this is not long after I gathered the school kids who made that video homework assignment. If they could make a movie, I could make a movie. So I wrote some sort of script. My memory doesn’t serve me well so I have no idea what it was about. But I rehearsed them and started taping them with my camcorder. We got into a verbal fight, never spoke again, and I never finished the thing.

A year later is when I was dropped into Middle College High. I was supposed to be a high school sophomore but instead I was on a college campus! Chris Pierce and Jonathan “Deez” Saldovar were my best friends. I’d gone to grade school with them but we didn’t actually become friends until Santa Ana Middle College High. There was this punk rock kid named Max in one of our classes. And Max always wore a Circle Jerks shirt and Sex Pistols patches. I inquired about those bands and he gave me shit. Typical punk. Chris and Max became friends and in the blink of an eye Chris was an anarcho-punk.

I was either in a history or who knows what class. There I met Megan. “It’s pronounced Me-Gan,” she’d say. And Me-gan had a boyfriend, or someone, can’t remember, who was roommates with Travis Barker. And this was when he was still with The Aquabats. Just some random trivia. I see Me-Gan working on this cool poster. She’s drawing this punk with spiked hair (“They’re called liberty spikes.”) who’s protesting and there’s a bullet going through his head. I asked her what that is. She said it’s from an album by her favorite punk band. “Do you listen to punk?”

“Punk? What’s punk?” I asked her.

“Here,” she reached into her backpack and slammed a CD case on our shared school desk. “You can borrow it but bring it back. If you don’t I swear I’ll beat the shit out of you.” I put this scene into SCENES FROM OBLIVION, my abandoned first feature film.

I didn’t quite get the Subhumans. But I tried. I played THE DAY THE COUNTRY DIED over and over, reading along the lyrics. I gave Me-Gan back the CD and eventually nabbed Subhumans - EP/LP and Crass – CHRIST – THE ALBUM (next to BEST BEFORE, certainly the weirdest and most inaccessible Crass album) from a grimy (and nifty) Tower Records at the Anti-Mall. The rest is history.

By the time I was supposed to be a junior I dressed like a walking newspaper.

The first concert I’d ever been to was Green Day opening for Madness. With Chris and Deez. And then the first show I ever went to was also with Chris and Deez at The Showcase Theater in Corona; Narcoleptic Youth and Atomic Bombs on the bill. I always thought musicians were like Gods; you could never meet them in real life. They were ants on a stage and that’s as close as you got. And here they’re right in front of your face, playing loud, playing fast. After their set they’re selling their own band tees and patches at a booth in the venue. They were so approachable. This is what punk meant to me. These musicians were real people like you and I. That night I came home a tad late without calling in. My dad lost his shit and hurled me against the closet door. And our callous feud began.

I got into politics. It was 2000. Chris, Deez, and I were about to head off to the Warped Tour. I was gonna pass out all these flyers. The flyer had a drawing of Christopher Columbus on it and at the top in bold black letters it read “RAPIST”. I made about fifty to seventy copies but I also made a big mistake. I left the original flyer in my dad’s photocopy machine. And when he saw that shit, oh my God. He flipped his lid and accosted me, yelling that this is communist propaganda.  

A year later when I was trying to get a band together, this girl Monica, a guitarist accomplice of mine, we were working on songs in my room. She had parked in our driveway and on her rear windshield she had a decal of Che Guevara. My dad saw that and— let’s just say Monica left exasperated and sobbing. No commie anything around my dad. Nothing, nothing near him that resembles the country he was forced to leave.

Our collective parents gave us so much shit. Deez’s parents were chill but Chris’s were conservative Christians. They’d scoff at our “anarchist leanings”. We were fledging and naïve and thought we could change the world. We couldn’t even change our band patches without leaving huge holes in our clothing. I was dressing now in all-black with sewn on patches everywhere and political logos, raiding record shops for anarcho or crust albums.

I picked up The Adicts’ SONGS OF PRAISE from Black Hole Records thinking I was in for some crusty stuff and then I was shocked to hear this dude that reminded me of Robert Smith belting out the catchiest punk singles I’d ever heard. Still one of my favorite bands. They all are. I’ve never abandoned anything I grew up listening to.

What I consider one of the greatest coming-of-age summer days of my life, one which I intended to loosely replicate in BOYS ABOUT TOWN and wasn’t able to, is when Deez, Chris, and I hit up Bionic and I bought two albums that forever shaped me: Rudimentary Peni’s DEATH CHURCH and The Adolescents’ blue album. That afternoon I met my future second girlfriend Amanda #1 aka Chris’ cousin. A couple rounds of truth or dare later and I was beguiled. With time, me being with Amanda would cause my friendship with Chris to dissolve. Went from best friends to full on enemies. We patched things up as adults.

Liliana had been the girl next door, personality-wise. She actually lived at the opposite end of the block. We didn’t have much in common except for sharing first experiences. She was my first everything and I was with her from the ages of twelve to fourteen. Amanda was definitely not as conservative as Lily. She was into punk. And movies. She most definitely loved SCREAM and its trail of teen slasher knockoffs and watched BUFFY regularly on TV. She was offbeat. Adventurous. And loved to cover her face in glitter. That was the first thing I noticed about her. That and her radiant cat-like green eyes. I found her really beautiful and she even shared a prominent resemblance to Katie Holmes, a compliment she got a lot; DAWSON’S CREEK was all the rage amongst young teens at the time. Amanda also went to school in an entirely different district. In Fullerton. And get this: she too was a cheerleader.

Remember Angie? The stoner who was into the Doors, Misfits, and Smiths at Middle College? Well, she hung around this other group of kids who I wound up getting along with really well. And these kids were very much into ‘60s and ‘70s rock. There was this girl Kat. She was into Janis Joplin. Boom. Off I went and got The Big Brother & the Holding Company’s albums and Joplin’s PEARL from Columbia House. I didn’t know shit about this music. How could I? My parents only listened to old school Spanish stuff. There was no such thing as dad-rock, a term that used to send me laughing. “Yeah, dad-rock to me is Julio Iglesias.” Because of my Janis Joplin deep-dive I thought Robert Plant was a woman. I got lent Zeppelin’s first album and I’m playing it in my mom’s car as we’re driving away from the video store and “Whole Lot of Love” comes on and I thought, “Man, this chick sure knows how to belt!” I got Led Zeppelin’s entire discography in box set form and played it endlessly in my room. Amanda and I would spend hours on the phone talking. She’d ultimately get aggravated and tell me to put some other music on in the background because it’s been five months of NON-STOP LED ZEPPELIN. Her dad chimed in, “What’s wrong with that?”

And I must have played Sabbath’s PARANOID album about eight-thousand times. That album is the most addictive album of all fucking time. And soon I got into Donavan and Dylan and Jefferson Airplane and Creedence. And MORRISON HOTEL, the Doors’ best album, IMO. I was hearing all these things for the first time. And one day I go into Bionic and I buy a Dystopia album along with the Beatles SGT. PEPPER’S. The middle-aged clerk gave me a puzzled look, “These both are for you?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a very strange kid.”

That Beatles album knocked me out. When I’d take over the stereo in my parents’ car while they were driving, as any teenager should, that’s the album I’d pop on ‘cause I knew they both wouldn’t get annoyed by it.

I just got reminded how I caught my mom humming along to my NEVERMIND CD.

“What’s your favorite band, ma?”

“Los Bukis.”

So I got into all this different kind of rock music all at the same time. Some of the ’70s loving schoolmates also dug the shit out of the ‘80s and soon I was drowning myself in The Cure and Depeche Mode and New Order, Bauhaus and Siouxsie. Goddamn, man. To be a teenager and discovering all these worlds and really marinating in albums. Really marinating in them. I would give anything to experience all those tunes for the first time again.

Rewinding back to the first year at Middle College High. 1998-1999. Deez, Chris, and I bonded over our love of Korn. Uh-huh. Those first two albums. But the third one was the bait-- Todd MacFarlane of SPAWN animated one of their music videos. But we hit it off like you would never believe. The two had been childhood friends and now I had joined the party.

I was so damn angry right before we had become friends. So pissed off. Tired of being bullied around. Ignored. Cast aside. Here I was at this new school and I didn’t know anybody. I ended up befriending this shifty tall kid named Rikk. And Rikk had major chicken pox scars. And he was super deep voiced. There definitely was something odd about him. And we talked a lot about our love of slasher movies. And soon we were talking about the kids in school we hated. Specifically, which ones we would kill had we the chance. This gets very dark here-- we’d go over how we’d murder with knives. And it got to the point where we’d act it out. Soon we were drawing maps of where we’d commit these acts. There was this outdoor elevator right by our school bungalows. Boom. We’d get so-and-so there. And I’m not kidding when I say it started to get too grim. And me? I just went, “Fuck it. Fuck them. Fuck everybody.” But my moral compass sounded off. No way was I actually going to do any of these things. I stopped hanging out with Rikk. Instead, because of my love for horror movies I started writing a slasher script where two school kids do exactly what we were jokingly going to do and they film the whole thing and release it. But I don’t know anything about making movies. Maybe I should start taking this seriously. I was on a college campus and there were a ton of film courses! What am I waiting for?

But my friendship with Deez and Chris and all the shenanigans we got into distracted me from my goals. One afternoon we caught this new music video. It could have been CKY.  And the music video is made up of pranks done on a camcorder. Remember when I used to hurl rocks at cars from my rooftop? Now I was like, “Dude. We should do pranks and I’m gonna record it.” And we did. Cut to Deez pushing Chris in a shopping cart down Seventeenth Street during rush hour and he’s mooning all the cars. Got it on video. That school elevator? Pissed in it. Got it on video. The Taco Bell drive-thru sign? Kicked it down. Got it on video.

My neighbor was Elvia Palacios. My mom’s friend. Also Cubana. Her son Gilbert was a handful of years older than me, Deez, and Chris. We gave him dough to nab us beer from the local 711. And we got Tequiza. The first beer I ever had. And actually, I didn’t even drink much of it. I downed about two-and-a-half inches worth. I just didn’t see the appeal. I didn’t know what being drunk was. I didn’t know that’s the reason people drank. Chris finishes his beer. We’re on the Santa Ana college campus now; I lived three blocks from it. We’re in the lunch area on the second floor and I think it’s a weekend so the whole school is deserted. Or so we deem. I see this group of cholo-looking kids walking below us. I grab my camcorder and look at Chris. “Dude. Throw it.” Deez chuckles. I turn the camcorder on.

Chris doesn’t even think twice. He gets the beer bottle, and I think I even get one too, and we all hurl them at the mini-cholos. We don’t even wait to hear the bottles break. We high-tail it, laughing our asses off, camera still running. We run into that famous elevator laughing so damn hard. I tape us having a grand ol’ time in there. We hit the bottom floor, the elevator doors open, we rush out and --- WOOOOOOOP! Campus security corners us.

They take my camera. They sit us against a wall. The cops show up. They take a good look at the three of us. “What gang you in?” Santa Ana used to be riddled with gangs. We don’t say a word.

The other cop takes a look at our shoes. “Huh. Never seen a gang wearing Chucks before.”

Campus security hands them my camera. “They have this.”

They look through my recordings. “Oh,” the cop chuckling. “This is incriminating.”

There it was, all immortalized: all the vandalizing, the pranks, and if you rewound far enough, footage of Solis making his action figures hump (“Hey, make sure you don’t see my face!”).

And on our persons? The rest of the Tequiza bottles.

Oh, man. Oh, man. We were in hot shit. We’re cuffed. Thrown into the back of a police car. Neither of us is able to mutter a word. My dad is going to fucking kill me. My dad is going to shit. My dad is going to fucking shit my skeleton out through my mouth. I glance over at Chris who looks as upset as I feel. We realize the cops are playing The Offspring in their vehicle. Welcome to OC.

“I’ve got a bad habit.”

My dad and I had been getting into it bad. My mom had been away in Cuba that past summer and my pops without my mom around was a wreck. He didn’t know how pick his own clothes, couldn’t handle laundry, kept forgetting to eat, kept forgetting to shave. And we would get into yelling matches all the time. It was terrible. One day he caught me, Deez, and Chris paired off with girls (me with Amanda), doing some questionable sexual activities in separate rooms of the house and he threw me out. I had to go stay at Amanda’s parent’s place.

Now we were in a juvenile holding cell awaiting our murky assignations with our parents. We thought we were going to do time. In juvey. We didn’t say anything for a while. I then said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a zombie attack and all the cops get eaten and the zombies can’t get in here and we’re just like here watching them die?” We started to laugh. Cheer up.

I was the last one to leave. And I sat there by myself for a very long time, shitting bricks. Apparently, they showed all our parents the footage. Ay caramba!

The cops, “They won’t say how they got the beer.” I grew up around my dad’s love of gangster movies. I knew better. Rats don’t make it past the front gates. Mum’s the word.

It’s my turn to go. My parents have zero expression on their faces and they’re there with my niece Karina. She just gives me a look. I get into the back seat of the car. No one’s said a word. We get home. No one says a word. Definitely not what I expected. My parents are very colorful and dramatic but now they’re on silent. I go to my room. My dad comes in. And he just says to me, very low-voiced but stern, “All the times I invited you to have a drink with me and you never did. Instead you vandalize and get wasted with a bunch of delinquents.” And he walks away.  

Teenage Mallrat.

In junior high I was the leader of the nerds. That sounds stupid. Scratch that. In junior high I was friends with this group of socially awkward kids that were into comic books and whatnot and I was the most extroverted of the bunch. I planned things and everyone got on board, no questions asked. I had zero friends in sixth grade and got teased a bunch ‘cause of my weird SoCal/Cuban accent which makes me sound like a Brooklynite via Malibu Rum. But in seventh grade Alex Solis was my best bud.

Every Saturday Solis and I would get dropped off at the South Costa Plaza mall to hit up the comic book store but most importantly the movie house across the street. The first flick we watched there was ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS. We howled in our seats. Gotta do this again. I’d make an itinerary: what time pictures started, their runtime, when they got out, how much time we had before the next flick we were totally gonna sneak into, etc. I got very good at it. We’d watch two to four movies every Saturday. Didn’t matter what they were. We’d viddy everything. Sometimes twice. Never got caught. And then we’d do some mall ratting: hit the McDonald’s, loiter with our refillable drink cups, max our time at random shops (testing those Sharper Image massage chairs to the limit), you name it.

Eventually we built a crew of outcasts.

By this point I’d gotten into the Columbia House hustle. Sign up. Get twelve CDs for a penny. And then you had to buy one a month at full price or whatever it was, and the full price was twice the amount that stuff cost in stores. But I never paid for any of them. If you invited a friend you got an additional five CDs yourself. And I did that. Got a bunch of school kids to join. And I slowly started building my CD collection. But here’s the thing: they didn’t have my social security number. They had no way of proving I was me. So, what’d I do? Started making up names: Cosmic Cosmo, Joris Brown, Lingo DePingo. So not only did I get my five per, I got the thirteen that each of these fictional people signed up for, and I had them all shipped to my dad’s office next door to the house.

My dad, livid, “What is all this shit? Who’s Cosmic Cosmo? You’re getting notices that these people owe Columbia House and BGI money! What do you think you’re doing? You want to get arrested? Is that what you want? Because I’m not paying for any of this shit!”

“How are they going to arrest me? They don’t have my picture ID, they don’t have my social security number. They can’t prove I’m any of those people.”

My dad paused. “…you have a point there.” Then, “But you need to stop this shit. And now!”

I signed him up and he got a bunch of music he wanted and never protested again.

Hey, man, if you believe Cosmic Cosmo is a real person without doing any sort of background research and you’re shipping them free stuff, sounds like that’s more your problem than mine. This was no mom and pop. This was big business. F- ‘em.

Across the house on Seventeenth Street was a dollar store. And I’d pick up stacks of blank VHS tapes and cassettes. The VHS tapes I filled with movies I’d dub rentals onto via two VCRs; the birth of my movie collection. And the Columbia House CDs I taped to cassette. I then would photocopy album covers via my dad’s office printer and sell these bootleg tapes out of my backpack to kids at school. And that’s how I got my comic book and theatre money. I also never ate at school. My dad would give me five bucks a day for lunch. I’d pocket it. And starve. I was really undernourished and sick all the time but f-that. I had to get the latest Wizard comics magazine and the next issue of Uncanny X-Men, goddamn it! And go to the movies! These things are important!

And I loooooved Marvel Comics. My brother Angel tried to get me into baseball cards. And I’d collect them. But I’m not much of a sports enthusiast. He saw I was an awkward kid who had a hard time making friends. I was always on the living room floor, inches away from the TV set. He was trying to expand my interests. But I just didn’t care.

Saturdays they’d have Hannah Barbara reruns and I’d watch them. I’d race from school to catch the SUPER MARIO BROS cartoon, doubled with THE LEGEND OF ZELDA one, and I’d have a field day eating my Super Mario Bros/Zelda cereal while tuning in. The cereal came in one box but two bags separating both properties. It was kinda cool. And don’t get me started on the REAL GHOSTBUSTERS or the hours of NINJA TURTLES I taped on VHS. I somehow figured out how to tape stuff off the TV with the VCR without anybody showing me.

“We were stupefied. You were a whiz kid,” my mom says.  

And if I ran out of tapes, well, I might as well use one of these home videos in exchange. You’d pull the tab off at the front so you couldn’t tape over them, as you did with cassettes, but, hey, wait, if I stick a piece of paper there it could take the tab’s place. And, oh, man, did I get in trouble. I erased a lot of valuable family memories.

My dad as a result, “Me cago en tu alma!” [“I shit in your soul!”]

I’d watch my recorded episodes over and over. I collected them. And my favorite ones were the TO BE CONTINUED ones. Because that meant there was more to the story! Man, did I love cliffhangers.

And then the X-MEN: ANIMATED SERIES came out. And I swapped out collecting baseball cards for collecting X-Men trading cards. Each episode of the X-MEN cartoon lead into the next. Long-form storytelling! I went bananas. I used to play the infamous Chris Claremont-inspired X-Men arcade game all the time and that’s the only knowledge I had about these spandex-clad superheroes before this…

See, my dad had a gambling habit. Legend has it my mom almost broke her water while pregnant with me during an impromptu trip to Vegas. He just dragged her out there. But he’d give me a wad of cash and let me play arcades while he went off to the gambling tables or whatever and my mom would hit the slots. I spent hours and hours and hours at the arcades. The Simpsons arcade game got me into THE SIMPSONS, the X-MEN one got me to watch the highly anticipated cartoon show.

Angel noticed the X-Men trading cards. I don’t like baseball? Fine. He takes me to this comic book/collector’s convention at the indoor mall that would eventually become The Block in Orange. Around the time “The Death of Superman” came out there was this big comics boom. Copies of Superman’s death were selling like hotcakes and people were flipping them for huge profits. Enter the age of multi-cover variants and superhero crossovers. My brother collected comics for their potential value; I started buying them for the value of their stories. I’m not going to say I got obsessed but the serialized storytelling format, and how the books themselves were better than the cartoon adaptations I was watching on TV really grabbed me. The characters had such rich histories. How I could not be enamored?

But the one that really hooked me was this reprint of Amazing Fantasy #15, Spider-Man’s first ever appearance, his origin story. I got it at an airport when I was flying solo to North Carolina to visit Angel during a winter break; he had moved because of his career. I re-read the thing over and over. I had no idea that’s how Peter Parker became Spider-Man. And the tragedy of it all: his arrogance, his selfishness because he had always been this kid that was bullied around (just like me) who now thought of himself as a hot shot with these amazing powers gets his uncle killed for not stopping the robber who would eventually do the deed. I wasn’t used to stories like that. I featured this exact same comic in JERRY POWELL during a flashback depicting Jerry’s “origin story”: little Jerry is sitting with his nose in a comic book while his mom fills the entire house with gas.

My dad would rent two to three movies every other night at Blockbuster. I’d watch whatever he’d check out, of course. Name an early ‘90s Hollywood movie, I watched it. And the next morning, especially on Saturday mornings, I would rewatch whatever I really dug before he had to return the tapes.

One day I go in with him to pick out movies and I see this colorful comic book-ish poster on display. It’s for a flick out soon on video. And I’m just in awe. The thing actually resembles a comic book cover. But what really captures my attention is the illustration on the poster’s bottom right corner. It reads “In this issue… STAN LEE.” And let me tell you, I was going through a Stan Lee phase. And here he was, in a movie!!!

“[Stan Lee], the creator of the most important titles in comics history.” – Brodie Bruce, MALLRATS.

I immediately bolted up to the Blockbuster counter. “When are you going to have that movie?!”

“Which movie?”

“That one with Stan Lee!”

“MALLRATS? Uhhh… let me check. Ummm… I think in like three weeks.”

Do you understand how long those three weeks took? Do you? Everyday I’d come in. “Is MALLRATS in?”

“No!”

And then three weeks later, “Is it in yet?”

“I think it’s been delayed.”

The following week, “Is it in now?”

“Sorry, duder. Someone rented it.”

“FUCK!”

Everyday I’d pop in and the movie was checked out. What the fuck was going on here? But I ended up making friends with the employees. And, man, did they hook it up later. Any poster I wanted, any display I wanted, they saved for me. When Universal re-released all their classic monster movies they gave me the four cardboard cutouts of Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolf Man, The Creature, and Dracula. I had them all up in my pop culture wallpapered room. And my evil ass had a blast with them too. Because I’d put the Wolf Man, for example, in unsuspecting parts of the house. I’m laughing as I’m typing this. I’d hide it behind the shower curtain, in my parents’ closet, behind doors and it was always met with, “HOLY SHIT!” or “VETE P’AL CARAJO!” [Translation: “Go fuck yourself!”]. It would scare the living shit out of everybody because you’d just see this figure there, a shape you wouldn’t expect, in a dark corner of a room you’re entering. I’d cackle from my room and my dad would bolt in, hurling the cutout at me, “You’re going to fucking kill someone one of these days! Giving me a fucking heart attack!” Sometimes I would spook my dad’s clients. “You’re going to get my license revoked!”

And, honestly, sometimes it would also backfire on me because I’d forget where I’d place them.

You’d walk into the bathroom and on the left was this huge rectangular mirror above the sink. To the right was the shower/bathtub. I’d peel the shower curtains just right and sneak The Creature in there. My parents would be gone. It’d be late at night. I’d switch the lights on as I’m entering the bathroom, catch a glimpse of something in the mirror and scream, “AH!!!!!”

And my mom also got me back. Several. Goddamned. Times.

I was such a little shit.

Anyhow. One day I say, f-this, I’m buying the MALLRATS VHS. And I did. I am so stoked to watch the movie. And I throw it on and I’m just sitting there going… uhhhhhhhh….

Because all these people do is talk talk talk. I’m not sure I’m even following along. This is so boring. But then, some of the jokes start to land. “She was going down on me at the time!” And I begin to laugh. Really hard. Especially because of Jay and Bob. And then I see what Brodie does at the mall. His refillable drink cup. His love of comics. How he just lounges around all day, spouting useless trivia. My jaw dropped. I pointed at the TV. “Hey, that’s me! I’m Brodie!” And to this day, Brodie is in my top ten all-time favorite movie characters. I didn’t even care that Stan Lee was in the movie anymore. This was the first time I had ever seen anything that I actually related to. And that’s all I’d ever wanted, to be able to relate. As an overlooked kid who felt so out of touch with reality this movie meant the world to me. I could not stop watching it. And Solis became a fan too. And then eventually I would have classmates come over to slurp some soda pops and chomp down cheap frozen microwavable Tina’s burritos (my dad, “What, am I feeding your entire school now?”) while I would show them my favorite movie discoveries of the week.

I then got into the habit of glancing at everyone’s reactions during the movies. And this a cold hard fact for me: you can tell a lot about a person by how they react to movie scenes or a characters’ actions. Volumes are spoken this way. Really intriguing stuff. Ammo once said to me that during my movie nights I’d spend more time watching people’s reactions than the movies themselves. Explains the inclination to want to create my own.

From the age of seven I was taping everything I found interesting on the ol’ home video camera. Then we got a mini cam and I began to compile hours and hours of footage. My parents would sit down to watch this stuff and my dad would complain that I was wasting tapes filming nonsensical shit. One tape had me just observing Luis sitting around on his couch, minding his business. My dad, “What the fuck is this? The Luis Cuenca Affinity hour?” I’d tape my dad shaving, sometimes he’d be nude and I’d laugh and nab him incognito and then show laughing family members via the viewfinder. “What is this? What are you watching?” he’d casually join us. Then upon realization, “Are you fucking kidding me?!?”

Mahahahaha!

One day it was raining and I love rainy days. I spent some time on Seventeenth Street filming cars driving by with their headlights on, zooming in on flooded areas, watching twigs floating and then going down the sewage drain. Riveting stuff here, folks. I edited using my two VCRs and managed to add a soundtrack to the footage. It was a Bush song. I think off SIXTEEN STONE. I don’t remember which. But I played the song while I taped the cut footage off the TV. And, look, I made a music video. Hey, that was pretty cool.

Instruments.

         Me and Brett clashed a lot. I wouldn’t have a problem with the fella now; I’m sure we’d get along fine. But what did I know? I was inexperienced. I’d never been in a band before, much less lead one. But Brett I met off a Craig’s List ad and he was our drummer. He was one of those types of cats I wish I had always been friends with because of his impeccable taste in tunes. But either he played way too hard, or played way too fast, or way too way too, or so I thought, and I didn’t know how to communicate what best worked for our songs.

I was the youngest. And looked younger than my age. Something that’s always plagued me because it makes it difficult for people to take me seriously. Brett with Ian Capalouitto on bass (also met off Craig’s List) were three to five years ahead. Guitarist Anthony was around my age. He was in another band with Brett. That’s how I met him.

But at 7:30pm it was game over. We’d be at practice and Brett would stop drumming.

“It’s time.”

He would chuck his drum sticks aside, rise from the kit, plop himself on a couch in front of the boob tube and we’d all be left hanging, instruments in hand. Well, I didn’t play. I just sang.

And why’d Brett stop band practice? Because, well…

“The Simpsons are on!”

You did not fuck with Brett’s nightly Simpsons re-reruns!

And Poul replaced him.

          Look, I’m not a musician. I’m a songwriter. My dad bought me a guitar for Christmas and I was twelve. I’m guessing I was twelve. I didn’t know what chords were. I didn’t know how to strum. There weren’t YouTube tutorials then.  I didn’t know what to do with the thing. I thought you just pulled a string and magic would come out. I later learned that only works on your penis.

Hey, oh.

I come from a lineage of artists. On my mom’s side. Her cousin, Pedro Caverdos Quert, invented an instrument called the Caverchelo. Her aunt was a composer: Angelina Quert Diaz, the most important figure in Guantanameran music in Cuba:

My mom said I had an affinity for the piano when I was a toddler. Man, if she had been strict about it. The tangent universe possibilities are endless. I still dwell on that. Dude, she should have forced piano lessons! She forced God’s judgement on me, why not an instrument! “God will punish you!” she’d scream every time I did some sort of disparate.

But let’s be realistic here: I have a hard time being taught anything by anyone. When they paid for lessons I just wouldn’t listen. I don’t recall any of this.

As a teen I lived at the house on Seventeenth Street. My front door opened up to a sidewalk separating one of the busiest streets in Santa Ana, if not the busiest; sort of like stepping from your front door and boom, there’s Sunset Blvd. with its rows and rows of endless traffic.

Me and the neighborhood kids would climb my roof and hurl rocks at the cars. Let me repeat that: me and my neighbors threw rocks at cars from my roof. We’d laugh and dunk and if some kid did that to me now I would make minced meat out of ‘em! What a bunch of idiots we were. That’s what I’d do when my mom told me to stop playing video games and get out of the house. Getting out of the house by getting into trouble. When those kids’ parents got wind of what we were doing? Holy hell! I went from the kid who got made fun of and beat up to the kid who got other kids beat up by their parents.  

My dad running out of his office, eyes on the rooftop, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?! ARE YOU CRAZY?!”

After my dad relocated his business from Main St., where the Guitar Center and Koo’s Chinese Takeout were (at this time both gone the way of the dodo), we moved here. Next door was a separate individual space that he turned into his office and then he converted its accompanying garage into his clients’ waiting room-slash-our entertainment room.

Like most Hispanic moms decree: the actual living room was hands off. If I ever stepped foot on that carpet my mom would chase after with a vacuum so there weren’t any marks on it. Plastic coverings on the sofas were too tacky for her, but those luxury fixtures were reserved for special guests; the fine china was for display. I’m talking a working-class family pretending to be middle-class.

My dad, “If I wanted to stare at furniture all day that I’m not going to use I’d go to Montgomery Wards!”

But mom got her way.

(She always cared too much about how other people or friends perceived her or her lifestyle. Nowadays she’s over it. So that’s why I’d always embarrass her in front of friends. This eventually lead me to follow the belief that no one gives a crap about how you’re perceived as much as you do. So, dress how you wanna dress, live how you wanna live. People are just projecting most of the time, anyway. You wanna be free? Fuck being judged.)

CUT TO:

Later on. I wasn’t quite living at home, spending most of my time in Ventura County or sleeping in my car. The Lips, the most cherished, or actually cherished of the bands I’ve been in, played a show in my mom’s pristine living room. My parents were in Cuba.

Me, Poul, Caro, and Colin moved all the furniture out, shoved aside the display cabinets with all that fancy dish-ware, set up in the living room and I think booked some other bands to play too. Since I lived off such a busy street, we could be loud. No one would care. And I made this rad punk comp to play in between sets and off we went. Drug Dealer Aaron invited a slew of people over. We all did.

The house was packed. And I mean, packed! One dude passed out hugging the toilet bowl and everyone pissed over him, dudes firing over him with the girls squatting. He wouldn’t budge. And kids were in every single damn room. I made sure they stayed away from my dad’s business but some made sure to bone on my parents’ bed.

But the cops did show up. They burst in and all these under-agers bolted like roaches on the ceiling when you flip the lights on at night. What a massacre. And then inside the garage was my folks’ mini-van and on its hood, long lines of cocaine had been abandoned amongst rolled up dollar bills and cut-up straws. We put all the furniture back in its place, it was easy ‘cause of the imprints on the carpet, and I got away scot-free.

Years later, as it always goes when you’re an adult and can casually talk about the sins of your past with your parental figures, my mom tells me, laughing nervously with that classic nervous laugh of hers, “I knew you had a party at the old house.” “What, a neighbor?” “Yeah, Elvia told me. I didn’t tell your dad.”

Anyway. The entertainment room had our huge, big screen TV (spoiled, I was) and a ton of couches. And then my pops built a doorway that would lead into the hallway of our actual house so clients could use the bathroom. During my dad’s business work hours, seven days a week (‘cause that’s how much of a workaholic he was and, mind you, with no secretary), we’d have all these strangers pilling up in the hallway. To the right of that entryway was my bedroom. Picture that. Eventually, when I’d really get into movies, I would curate stuff for the clients in this waiting room. All movies with Spanish subtitles, the tapes rented from the Blockbuster in walking distance. My folks preferred to support the local mom and pops (Video Sky), and Blockbuster was a hell of a lot more expensive, but they actually carried subtitled movies. Since my parents weren’t bilingual and since most of my dad’s Mexican clients shared the same hurdle, the rental fees were tolerated. The best part for me is that some of the clients would stick around and watch a whole movie before going about their day.

Extra info: what’s now the Frida Theatre in Santa Ana’s arts district, a very scuzzy area in the day packed with dope dealers and street dwellers, screened movies solely with Spanish subs. So, transitioning to foreign movies was easy-peasy for me. I sometimes actually prefer watching things with caps as I’m hard of hearing; it’s what I grew up with.

But my dad still had a hard time driving new business to the office, busy street and all. “It’s that ‘Beto’ on that sign,” he would repeat. “Beto’s Income Tax. The Americanos are scared. El Be-to.” The poorly translated dad joke lives on.

So, at twelve years of age I decided I was gonna nab him an Open neon sign so drivers could notice there was a business there. I mean, traffic would pile up right outside the door. And what’d I do? To help my dad out? With my mom behind the wheel I returned the guitar he had bought me because I didn’t have enough cash, went over to the neon sign emporium and got him one for Christmas. When he unwrapped his gift, he looked at me suspiciously, frowning, “…wait, what happened to your guitar?”

He never let it go. For years he would accuse my mom and I of returning the guitar, buying this cheap-looking and probably cheap (it wasn’t) open sign for his business, and pocketing the rest of the cash. Why the hell was he so hung up on that? But the sign remained displayed, glowing, bearing all kinds of weather until he was forced to close shop.

I didn’t buy an instrument until a handful of years later. I got a bass. And I got it at Out of Vogue.

Out of Vogue was on Commonwealth next to Geez Louise. It specialized in vintage/mid-century furniture and was owned by Mike Atta, guitarist for Middle Class. Middle Class were from Santa Ana and were arguably the first hardcore punk band, their most “famous” single being “Out of Vogue”. No surprise Atta sold a bunch of retro instruments there too. *

*I’LL BE AROUND is laced with personal nods to my formative years as a music-player. Peter, one of the three kids trying to sneak into the music festival, wears a yellow Middle Class t-shirt. I’ll point out more in entries to come.

It was love at first sight. I got this metallic blue no-name bass from the ‘50s. I was so inspired by how it looked that I painted my entire room aquatic blue. I wound up with an eight-track and stuck to that bass like glue and recorded whatever nonsense came out. I learned a Crass song, got it down, and that’s it. I didn’t learn other people’s tunes, and I still really don’t, and I didn’t play along to anything and just figured it out on my own. Much like anything I have a curiosity in. And I don’t do it by the book either, against everyone’s criticisms. You should see how I type—pinkies up in the air. I do what works for me. There ain’t no right way to do shit, is how I see things. But, when I got a guitar, it was during my Bo Diddley phase. So that’s how I play.

I still don’t know a lot of chords. I teach myself some and then forget because I don’t keep at it. I learned what I learned to get by and to afford me to write songs. Hence, not a musician. You can also argue that I’m not a filmmaker because I’ve never shot anything on film, if you wanna be anal about it.

“Anal’s a polite word for what you are.”

I heard a few musicians say, “When I go on stage, that’s all my rage; everything pent up, I just let it out all out. I become a different person.” And I witnessed this first-hand. There was this co-worker from Borders. His name was Alex Hovis. Very reserved, almost timid, soft-spoken. I caught his band at The Hub in Fullerton. And when I saw him play on that small stage, when I saw his performance, he was a different person: he was daring, he was snarling, he was melting into his instrument. I went, “Whoa, dude. I too can transform!”

But there’s no way in hell I was gonna play guitar in a band. I wasn’t good enough. But I could sure write stuff and maybe show better artists and they could play my tunes! ‘Cause I could front! Wait, how? I was a shy fucking dude around large groups. But I took inspiration from Hovis. I wanted to be in a band just like The Seeds. So badly. So, garage rock tunes I’d do.

Before all this, tho, there was One Minute Rice. Ridiculous! Me, Alex Guillen, and this kid Jacob, and I don’t know who was on drums, all got together very quickly for a backyard birthday party and sloppily covered The Beatles’ “Happy Birthday” with me singing and playing guitar (I say that with large bunny ears). My strap kept slipping and my guitar kept crashing. It was fun. And we didn’t have a band name and had to come up with something quick. Hence, One Minute Rice.

But I got the bug, man.

And stupidly, full of fervent drive and guileless hope, I thought to myself, “Hey, maybe if I start a band we can get really popular. And maybe we’d be popular enough that I could find financiers to make my first movie.”

So, here’s this kid who grew up disconnected, with the worst social skills possible, having meth pipe dreams that someone out there would give a shit enough to notice him in order to be able to achieve his dream of making a movie. And that’s all it’d mostly ever amount to: dreams.

The Cuencas:

         I’d get out of grade school around 3pm. My dad would scoop me up and bring me to his office. He was an accountant. His own business. And his office was sandwiched between what at the time was a Guitar Center and this Chinese take-out place called Koo’s.

From the backseat of my parents’ car windows I’d see a bunch of musicians with multi-colored hair and leather jackets lurking around. They were punkers but my mom referred to them as “hippies”, not knowing what that actually meant.“You better not grow up to be a hippie!,” my mom would warn in Spanish.

Followed by my dad going, “Son unos delincuentes.” [“Bunch of delinquents.”]

But who could blame them? All the gangs in ‘80s movies were punk! Think about it: TERMINATOR, POLICE ACADEMY (the series was a staple in my living room), doesn’t matter, whatever, we can list them off.

Now, the way my dad became an accountant is sort of funny. And this is all hearsay ‘cause he never shared anything. Well, save for two stories:

One about his dog when he was a kid getting scared shitless after a bottle rocket went off. He spent hours looking for the dog, worried sick. Found him dead of heart failure hiding under his bed.

The other tied into his fear of scorpions.

No, not the band. The creature.

“Wind of Change” rules. I will blast that. Right now.

We were watching HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KID and you know when that huge-ass scorpion appears? My dad shivered and turned from the TV to the newspaper (he always watched TV with a newspaper sitting on his gut) going, “No jodas!” The nearest translation being something akin to, “Fuck off.” My mom then taunted him. That’s my family. All ball-busters.

Now, this is a lady who nearly faints every time she sees any sort of reptile. You show her a rubber snake and she screams. When ANACONDA came out, it was her nightmare. I asked her once, “Well, if you’re so scared of snakes how’d you do on your wedding night when my dad pulled his pants off?” Hahahahaha! She turned red, all embarrassed that I said this in front of her friends, who all started howling, by the way, and she yelled out, “Muchachito! Coño! You with that language. The same as your dad!”

You have no idea how much she freaks when a lizard rears its scaly hide. During our second short stint living in Miami, Florida she’d have me smack all the lizards that would cling to our backyard screen door with a broom before she’d enter the kitchen that accompanied it. I will always associate the Disney animated short THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW with this ‘cause she had pulled me away from the haunting TV screen to go take care of these cold-blooded fiends. She was scared of lizards? Well, that Headless Horseman scared the shit out of three-year-old me so thank the heavens for this vicious chore. Americanos made their kids do their dishes and take-out the trash? My Cuban mom made me go gangbusters on these fucking things. WHACK! FWAP! PAP!

Oh, and my aunt, her sister Irene (pronounced Ee-Reh-Neh), same reaction but to cockroaches. Had a blast showing her the cockroach segment in the first CREEPSHOW once. Muahahahaha!

What is it with this whole fainting spell amongst my family when encountering certain species of the animal kingdom?

My dad’s scorpion story goes— and I added this to FRENCH NOVEL as one of Hue’s voice-overs but I pulled it from the final cut— there was this local café where he grew up in Guantanamo, Cuba. Apparently, a scorpion got into the coffee grinder one morning and all the people who drank that batch died of poisoning. This horrified my dad as a kid. And it stuck.

But, no, that’s as far as it went when it came to his past. I watched SAVING PRIVATE RYAN with him at home when it hit video and he had to keep turning away from our big screen TV, going, “You wouldn’t understand.” No, I wouldn’t understand. Why don’t you tell me?

I’d only seen my parents kiss once. And I’d only seen my dad cry twice. Actually, no, three times:

When I showed him DANCER IN THE DARK (my sixth time watching it, probably). When the credits rolled he turned to me with red eyes and said drily, “Why did you show me that?”

And when his brother died. And when his mom died. News from the homeland.

We visited Cuba in 1994. I documented most of it on our home camera. I have the tapes now. My dad hadn’t seen his mom since he left the old country. She had Alzheimer’s, didn’t recognize him. He fell on his knees, trying to remind her who she was. If he cried then he didn’t let me know.

During that trip I met my dad’s childhood best friend: Orlando.

As an adult my mom would remind me, “You remember Orlando? He sends his regards.” How could I forget him? “He’s always asking about you.”

Orlando passed some odd years ago.

When they were kids, my dad, Heriberto-- Beto, for short---

Oh, shit. Oh, yeah, he’d say, “You know why los Americanos don’t get their taxes done here? (Because my parents never referred to Caucasians as white people; they referred to them as ‘Americanos’, just how all Asians are ‘chinos’, and so on and so forth) Because they see my name and they read ‘Be-to’ and think of ‘Vi-ro’ (‘virus’ in Spanish) and run away.”

…what?

Stupid dad-joke that doesn’t translate well. And I’d just roll my eyes. And of course, with my dad, if you didn’t laugh at his joke he would repeat it thinking you didn’t get it the first time.

“No, we don’t laugh ‘cause it’s terrible,” Lida, my sister-in-law, would say.

--but Beto and Orlando dived into a river. Orlando jumped in head first and hit a rock and went deaf for the rest of his life. So he’d communicate by scribbling on little bits of paper.

We were drifting on this small boat in what could have been the same river and Orlando pointed out to me all these homes surrounding the canal, scribbling: YOUR DAD HAS KIDS ALL OVER HERE.

And my dad turned pale and blurted, “Don’t tell him that!” Then to me: “Oye, don’t tell your mom that. Won’t hear the end of it.”

I didn’t repeat shit. “Look at that! My dad was a slut,” would have thought eleven-year-old me, had I such thoughts.

Orlando wasn’t toooooo far from the truth.

One day CHRISTINA comes on. Christina was (is?) what Oprah is to English-speaking folks. She had a guest on. This soap actor. We hear this voice coming from the TV that sounds just like my dad. My mom yells out, “Look at him! Look at him! Identical!”. I go up to the TV with my dad. This soap actor, a popular one at that, I’d have to ask my family what his name is, is there telling Christina that he’s never met his father, doesn’t know who he is, and he mentions his mother’s name and my dad turns that same familiar pale he turned when I was on that boat with him and Orlando.

“I had relations with a woman of such moniker.” That’s the more poetic, broken-English way of putting what he said.

My half-brother Betico (Beto Jr.) went back to the motherland a couple of decades after he escaped with his family on a raft.

Quick note, with Cubans, if there are two people with the same name the elder keeps their name but the younger one gets an ‘ico’ appended to it. Actually, it doesn’t even matter if there’s two of you. If you’re younger in general you get it. Or if your mother’s senile as hell you’ll still get it even though you’re a grown-ass person. But first they have to call you by everyone’s name first until they get yours right. So, my brothers Angel and Osvaldo (who prefers to go by his middle name ‘Luis’) always, to this day, get called Angelito or Osvaldito by our mom, and me, I get Michaelito. It’s ridiculito, if you ask me.

Since my two full-blooded brothers and I are so far apart in age, whenever Angel (the eldest) would take me around town, people would confuse him for my dad. But Betico? Dude, I look more like him than anyone else in my family. Striking resemblance. Both lanky and tall with bad posture and messy/curly hair. Eerie, I’m telling you. I take after my dad more anyway, while Angel and Luis take after my mom. I get my lips and nose from my mom, everything else from my dad (including his dad-jokes and sometimes temper). But my green eyes, my green eyes I get from my grandmothers on each side who were both named Lydia and both had blue eyes (my cousin Maritza is the only person amongst my big large family to have light-colored eyes). You can argue that my eyes are kinda blue, and kinda green.

“Linger on, those pale blue eyes.” – Lou Reed.

Betico was hoping to locate his mom. In layman’s terms, the woman my dad knocked up. He learns that she’s dead and had a son. Another son with my dad. And that she was the village prostitute (I hope to fucking God no one translates for my mom any of this stuff I’m jotting down).

Turns out my dad’s other illegitimate son is named Orlando. Orlando, I repeat. He was named after my dad’s childhood friend. And when I meet him in person in 2016, briefly, as I was traveling back from Guatanamo to Havana, I’m immediately transported back in time because he looks just like how my dad looked like when I was growing up. You know, when I think about my parents, because I wasn’t close to them as an adult (I keep in touch a lot with my mom now) and rarely visited them, I imagine them just as how they looked when they played a large part in my life… twenty + years ago. I am just blown away. Same mannerisms. Same voice. Everything.

Heriberto died before he ever got to meet Orlando. Betico’s discovery was news to him.

And see, my dad wasn’t this macho dude. He was a hard worker, provided for his family, drank like a bandit on his off-time, and was a gambler and ballbuster who sometimes went too far, to be Frank. But he still didn’t like to show any vulnerability. Except for when he passionately and dramatically recited poetry aloud (I could post a video). Maybe not until his last years when he turned from commanding dude with dagger-like eyes to Mr. Magoo did he let people come see the softer side of Sears. So, as backed by Betico’s detective work, he never shared shit about his youth.

Everything I know about my dad I learned from my mom, or my aunts, or my uncle. Mainly during that 2016 trip:

My mom’s sister, my mom being the youngest of her siblings, Nuerka (pronounced Nee-Ooor-Ka), told me, “You know how your parents met?”

“I know that story.”

“Yeah, your dad saw her from afar and he was infatuated with her. He was crazy about her! Love at first sight! Believe me. He was twenty-five and she was fifteen.”

“Wait a minute, I thought he was twenty-five and she was sixteen when they got married.”

My uncle, also named Angel, “They were eleven years apart.”

Aunt Nuerka, “Ten.”

Me, “I thought it was nine.”

“Ten.”

Uncle Angel, “Eleven.”

Me, “Whatever.”

Nuerka, “Point is that he was obsessed with her and she would run away hiding, going, ‘El Viejo! El Viejo viene!’” [“The old man! The old man is coming!”]

One afternoon my dad kissed my mom during a screening of a Brando movie she was attending with her sisters. She ran home in a panic, crying, thinking she’d been knocked up. Because back in those days, as seen in CINEMA PARADISO, whenever a couple would go to kiss, the frame would cut, and next thing you know they were married with a kid. That’s how naïve my mom was. You get knocked up by kissing in her world. Heriberto and Arelis got married shortly after. And soon? They had my eldest brother Angel and, two years later, Luis.

As the timeline shows, all my dad’s dirty deeds which produced offspring children were committed in his late-teens or early-twenties.

Nuerka added, “Your dad never strayed after he met your mom. And I wouldn’t tell you a lie. He talked a lot of shit. He whistled and howled as most of them do. But he never strayed. I guarantee it.”

But…

The way my dad became an accountant (thanks for getting back on topic, Mike) was HE pretended he was mute. He pretended he was mute because to this day my mom doesn’t know how to speak English and my dad never learned either! So he took community college courses that they didn’t offer in Spanish and would never have admitted him into in order to get his certification to become accountant. But because my dad is my fucking dad and he had a booming voice and loved to spin yarns and command the stage and dare not a soul derail him, he was chatting away on campus with friends and a professor over heard him. Caught red-handed. But because he was so charming they let him pass.

And now he owned his own business. Enough to support my mom and this total accident of a kid. Anchor baby, they tell me. Meet my mom and the first things out of her mouth to you while pointing at me will be, “Accidente.”

She doesn’t mean harm. In a way, she’s delighted. She kind of laughs nervously when she says that. But it’s like, gee, thanks. Thanks for reminding me I was never meant to be here. I mean, are any of us planned? Aren’t the majority of us accidents? Sure. Some are. But she nearly died when she had me. She wasn’t supposed to have me. She was too old. They had to cut her open. And she chose to have me than to live, against my dad’s wishes. Enter guilt-trips.

By the time I was five my brothers were married, awaiting, or about to have, children of their own. So, what do you when the kids have flown the coop and now you have to start all over with this pain-in-the-ass, overly hyper, spouting gibberish a mile-a-minute child?

You plop him in front of a television set and tell him to behave.

My mom was a babysitter and also cleaned houses. I used to have this big red scar under my left eye until my mid-teens. There was this two-year-old my mom was sitting. And he was in his crib. But that little shit had these long, sharp fingernails. I went over to play with him and the motherfucker ripped the skin half an inch underneath my eye with his talons. I bled everywhere. Screamed. Cried.

Luis would joke, “Hey, the Yankee Scarface!”

Well, actually, Luis, the original Scarface was Italian. But I didn’t catch the Howard Hawks one until later.

But most of her life, my mom didn’t really work. Lots of health issues. Bad health issues. But during this time she was cleaning offices or rich people’s homes and on those days I was stuck at my dad’s office. Just watching the clock turn. Just as I did at school. Nothing to goddamned do. No, I could be at home right now catching the last five minutes of GILLIGAN’S or WOODY WOODPECKER and tuning daily, same bat time, same bat channel for some WHIZ! BANG! POWS! in all its four-color Adam West glory. But, nooooo, here I was marooned with the TV always set to Univision for all of my dad’s Spanish-only speaking clients, broadcasting its CHESPERITO and CARRUSEL nonsense; shows I wanted zilch to do with.

No. 3: 2002/2021. Tower Records, Tustin.

September 2021. The plane lands. I’d gone to Chicago to catch the Pumpkins in their hometown at Riot Fest. Caught their set right there in the front, only the guards and a barrier between us. Thunder and lighting and rain pouring. It was great.

But most of that trip I was feeling low. I was questioning everything: my relationship at the time, this training program I was in. I was aiming to get certification so I can work on film sets in key roles and be something more than a no-budget filmmaker who hasn’t gotten anywhere. I was concerned about too many damn things to list or bother anyone with now. I was not content. For every smile I had, two anchors appeared and weighed it down. But, hey, what else is new?

Waiting for Joey Halter to scoop me up at LAX I get a message from Charlie Bagcal:

Poul is dead.

A clip show races through my head. I thought of the crash, him punching me hard in the gut in a mosh-pit, us smoking weed out of an apple with Caroline, how we met. We had a falling-out when he was clumsily booted from our band, as it goes, back in the aughts. We didn’t talk for years and were friends again by 2011. And then he vanished in 2013. The last time we kicked it was during the RETURN OF THE JEDI anniversary screening at the Egyptian. He was a STAR WARS nut and we had a freakin’ blast. Parted ways. And then nada. Sometimes that just happens. People part ways and don’t reach out.

Last I heard he was living up in the boonies somewhere as a park ranger. But that information could be wrong. He was off the grid.

But everything changed after this striking news. For the best. I dropped out of the course, aborted ideas I had, made sure I got so busy that I couldn’t think about anything else, and I started to push my significant other away, picking fights when there were none to be had instead of maturely assessing the situation. But I don’t need to go into all of that.

Point is: Charlie’s message was a reality check.  

“Time for decisions to be made.” – THE REPLACEMENTS, “Hold My Life”.

—

I first met Poul at Geez Louise in 2002. I was posting up flyers for my band The Fuzz Guns.

I worked at Tower Records. A job I really dug because I didn’t want to wear no stupid uniform and they didn’t make you wear a stupid uniform. I had been at the Virgin Megastore after Borders and they made us don their company tees and up-sell all the damn time.

And that ain’t me, babe.

“Hey, you want a copy of The Zombie Survival Guide to go with your ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ digipack single? No? Well, how about this new arbitrary album that we’re constantly pushing even tho it sucks-ass and has zilch to do with your music taste, blatantly obvious by what you’ve set down on the counter? No? How about this George Clinton Chia-Pet? I’m sure it’ll look great in your home.”

One of the managers, “Up-sell, Mike! Up-sell!”

“Motherfucker, you just want to look good to HQ so they can see this store is doing better than the other stores and give you a promotion. You fucking weasel. Why don’t you up-sell my fist up your urethra Franklin?”

I never said that. But I sure thought of it!

Even in school, when Orange County had enforced school uniforms I flipped. I bought a shirt that said ORGASM DONOR on it. Here I am in seventh grade, not really knowing what that means, sitting in the back of the class as I usually did, proudly wearing that shirt. And then my teacher told me to turn it inside out, but she also couldn’t stop laughing. My dad eyed the shirt eventually and told me I’ll get far in this world.

I was by far the youngest at Tower (as always amongst my peers back then). And there was this dude, Darby, who I hung out with. Who was kinda cool. Kinda weird. My sort of cat. And there was a manager whose name I can’t remember. She kind of looked like Lara Flynn Boyle so I’ll refer to her as Lara. Lara was a chain-smoker. Always frowning. Always appearing as if running away from something that she consistently allowed to catch up to her, addicted to the game. This Tower was in the Tustin Plaza. And there was a dining area outside of it because of the Wahoo’s Fish Taco next door. That’s where the smokers went on their breaks. One day we see Lara in one of the chairs out there. But she’s slumped over. She’s passed out. The key tip-off here is the big pile of ashes building up from the cigarette in her dangling hand.

Darby pulls up next to me as I’m looking out the window, “Fuck.”

“What?”

“Shit. Fuck.”

Darby runs outside to wake her up before anybody could catch a gander. He shakes her and shakes her and she slowly begins to move. She was feeling sick. And had to go home.

Learned then that they both were junkies. And had been hooking up for a while. But no wonder I couldn’t connect with them when I tried to geek out about music: they were too involved with drugs to care about music. And music was my remedy.

“WHY ARE YOU WORKING AT A RECORD SHOP IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT MUSIC?!”

This triggers another memory. 2003. I was seeing this girl and she had flown me out to Philly on a trip. This was around the period I initially entered the insomnia realm. I was so goddamned tired. Her brother was a shady dude. And I was at her parents’ house, in the backyard, being antisocial and reading this big ass Oscar Wilde compendium. I had fallen asleep, sunk into the patio chair much how Lara was over at Tower. Her brother tells her to go wake me up before their parents noticed ‘cause I looked very suspicious.

She wakes me up.

“Are you okay? My brother thinks you’re on drugs. Are you on drugs?”

“No, I’m not on drugs! I’m tired. I passed out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure! What do you think? I smuggled a kilo of heroin up my ass on a flight to Philly?”

Anyway. Do you know how badly I wanted to connect with someone with the same music taste? I always associated Darby with Darby Crash and I don’t remember if he even listened to the Germs. He was just a bit checked out when it came to tunes, like I mentioned. Eventually we lost touch. And the rest of the staff at Tower? This Brad dude who I thought I could bond with via our love of anarcho-punk (never heard him play the stuff but his backpack had a Crass patch and some pins) was a fucking dick. And every morning when he came in he’d blast Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious.” Day in. Day out. Sometimes on repeat.

They wouldn’t let me put on any music at this place too even though I was married to the counter for it was an arranged marriage.

Tower used to rent out porn in those days, too. Man. There was this incredibly old dude who used to drop in every Tuesday, like clockwork. He’d rent a stack of Buffy the Vampire Slaver VHS tapes accompanied by a random anal sex vid. Never swayed.

Another time this other guy turned in a stack of porn tapes all bloodied up.

“Those are going in the trash,” Ernie said, eyes on, and distancing himself from the pile.

Ernie was a manager. Thirty-years older. Long haired. Beard. I mean, he had that Dennis Hopper/EASY RIDER look about him. Usually in a Grand Funk Railroad shirt. One day I managed to sneak in Suede’s DOG MAN STAR on the speakers.

He comes in, “What is this?”

“Suede.”

Grumpy, commenting on Brett Anderson’s vocal-styling, “Hmph. This guy listened to too much Bowie.”

He took Suede off.

Whatever, Ernie. But I liked Ernie. Something about him. Maybe ‘cause he reminded me of Hopper and I was a Hopper fan boy.  

I saw EASY RIDER at the perfect age. Right when I was getting into punk. Right when I was questioning all this shit that the powers that be forced upon society. These guys in that movie had long hair and just lived each day, day by day, no reason to conform and do all the bullshit that the public demanded from them. Live free. Who cares? They were my heroes. And they get harassed for looking the way they do by the local yokels? Fuck off. And then Jack Nicholson? Now that guy steals the show. That guy is fucking cool.

I wanted to be cool. I wanted Ernie to think I was cool too. I wanted all those older rocker guys managing Tower to take me under their wings.  

I tried to give them up-to-date news on the stuff they were into, to fit in:

“Oh, did you hear about that Sabbath reunion? And Tony, uh, Tony, um,” ---

I couldn’t remember Tony Iommi’s name ‘cause I get nervous unless I’m drunk when I’m talking about something I’m passionate about with people I look up to. And I stutter a lot.

“Yeah, Tony was all like—”

One of the older staff members, “Who the fuck is Tony?”

Ernie, “Tony?”

Me, “Uh… yeah. On guitar. The guitarist.”

Ernie, “This kid. ‘Tony’. What are you, fucking friends with him? You mean, Tony Iommi. Iommi, not Tony. These kids, man…” Turned to the staff, “Didn’t know them two were on a first-name basis.”

Everyone laughed.

Hey, he was right. These celebrities are artists, not your goddamned brunch buddy (unless they are).

Ernie would later inspire a record shop owner that Bobby works for in BOYS ABOUT TOWN; a segment we have yet to film but soon will.

And then there was this other dude. Punk guy in his thirties. Tall, spiky blonde hair with a ’77 Clash look. He was in a band called The Fakes. And he got wind that I was in a band too and asked me to join them on a bill. Our first real show! And he made this rad pop art inspired poster for the gig. 11x17. It was eye-catching.

This was the poster Poul was letting me tape to the store’s window. He takes a look at it:

“Which one’s your band?”

Enthusiastically like a total dweeb, “Oh, The Fuzz Guns!”

“Yeah? What do you sound like?”

“Oh, kind of like The Stooges and MC5 but more Standells and Seeds. Like, garage rock.”

“I like those bands.”

“Yeah, but our drummer sucks.”

“Really?” All self-assured, “Well, I’m a drummer.”

Cutaway: September 29th, 2022.

It’s the morning of my 39th birthday and I sprained my ankle getting out of bed. I can’t walk now and I’m thinking, “Wow, I just gave myself a birthday present.” I try to get up again. The pain shoots up my leg. “Are you shitting me? I am officially fucking old…”

And I stretch. I jog. I do daily workouts. This is somewhat left-field, is what I’m saying.

I have a day planned, and I gotta cancel everything ‘cause it looks like I’m just gonna lay here in bed now but, hey, that’s what happens when I try to stick to plans. 

Plans are more like ideas to me anyway. It’s like when I make a movie. I’m not really making one until I’m there on set the first day and call action. It’s always so hard to get the ball rolling too. I can have the script, I can have it cast, but scheduling all that shit on my own? Oof. Takes months. And with my attention span and multitasking disorder? Forget all rules. So, yeah, it’s not actually happening ‘til it’s actually happening. Anything goes.

And I am so out of this week…

Had a ball staying up for over twenty-four hours, accurately twelve of them spent in convo on my couch with a close friend, britpop music videos playing in the background off the projector, only to get an hour of sleep in, go to work, and make the grave mistake of getting a couple drinks after at the Drawing Room (and the Cha Cha) without any additional rest and without eating anything. Came home, got up in the middle of the night—and, ooooooh, man. That was trip. I felt like I was lost in orbit. Like I was being totally sucked up into space and flung everywhere, man. I had no equilibrium. I couldn’t even sit back down. Knocked a bunch of shit over in my bathroom, stumbled to get a glass of water, poured water everywhere, colliding against something off my kitchen counter, and in doing so, slipped, hit my head against a cupboard, wobbled, and fainted.

I got up on all fours, woozy as hell. I tried to stand but all I saw were interplanetary glowing dots and waves and stars dancing in my pitch-black kitchen— it must have been Marc Bolan reaching out to me since it was his b-day week too. “All I want is easy action, baby.” I made a mess of myself, had to take a shower (via blurry vision: what is all this stuff on me?), nearly slipped in there too, and then I couldn’t knock back out again once I tamed the beast. I’m trying and I’m trying and I’m tossing and turning in bed and this weird smell is also keeping me up. Eventually? No point in lying there. So, I got up and saw this huge fuck-off pool of Trader Joe’s Sesame Dressing spread way across my kitchen floor (I live in a large studio). That’s what I had shoved off my counter and glass shards were everywhere. Oh, yeah. And my kitchen sink had been flooded/clogged for over a week. Couldn’t get a hold of my building manager. A mess.

Unrelated, but this reminds me that back in February I took a bite of a pizza that had been left out a day or two and it had gotten so hard that when I chewed it--- CRACK! -- it chipped my top left molar. I spat out the piece of tooth and now I have a hole there I still haven’t taken care of and maybe never will.

God fucking damn it.

So here I’m trying to stretch my ankle. I’m testing how it feels to walk on the floor and—eh. This sucks. I text friends that it looks like today’s not gonna happen. And, oh, shit! I have to show run at the Chinese Theatre tomorrow. How am I gonna do that hoping around like Tigger with one leg?

But the ankle pain gradually went away. I went from sort of hoping around to limping to carefully walking to walking just fine. Well, the more I drank. Tequila, the kinda stuff that soothes the soul.

“Hey, Mike. What happened to your sprained ankle?”

Laughing, shrugging, “I don’t know, man.”

And the pain hasn’t returned. Guess it was temporary.

The night before was aces: got to catch Roxy Music’s 50th anniversary show thanks to Kayla Cummings nabbing us floor tickets for my birthday. We were seated not far from Chynna who I wound up drinking with until the wee small hours out on the NoHo Chandler Bike Path. Chynna was in from the boondocks where she now resides and I hadn’t seen her in three years. Pre-lockdown. I dropped Kayla home and there were still two hours ticking ‘til closing time. Hey, it’s officially my birthday. I don’t wanna go home. Who wants to grab a drink? You know what? I never drink alone. Why don’t I go to a bar alone and see where the nite takes me, if anywhere? But I rang up Chynna who I knew wasn’t gonna crash out anytime soon since she’s a nite-owl. Of course, one round at the bar turned into: let’s hit up the liquor store. That always leads to an all-nighter. And even though I was way more under slept than usual, keeping in mind that I can’t sleep once the sun begins to rise, when the opportunity to add a new experience knocks, I take it. You’ve got one life, man.

We wound up chatting about the car accident. And I went over a few details that I had never discussed.

Yesterday she wrote to me:

“Is it weird that I was trying to imagine how you experienced that night over the last several days? I was wishing you would write it down. It’s kind of spooking me out right now.”

So, yep, I only got three hours in. No regrets. But…

...and I can’t help but chuckle now…

…it’s not until later that I consider: did my inability to walk the early morning of the 29th have anything to do with my former limp which magically went away after the Big Crash?

Life, if you follow along, is like a well-plotted story, occasionally tying a neat little bow over choice scenarios. 

Introduction:

           Some folks say a magician should never reveal their tricks. But I’ve always found what’s behind the curtain fascinating. The more I learn about a favorite artist of mine the more I can understand their work. Love nerding out about that stuff… 

“Did you know that the reason…?”

Sometimes collaborator and friend Ashlee Elfman was gonna work on an “Oral History of Blvd Du Cinema” book because the behind-the-scenes on all the no-budget stuff I’ve worked on, or how events in life shaped these ideas (domino effects), I think are a lot more interesting, and better, than the movies I make. But it fell apart. It was very ambitious.

So I’ve been toying with the idea of jotting down the history of my zero-budget productions. I’ve gone back-and-forth with it throughout the years— even doing a John Fante/Arturo Bandini sort of thing, changing names. But, eh, I’ve got nothing to hide (well, unless it involves a person who should get a fictional name). Besides, I used to write about my daily encounters on Livejournal (remember that) many moons ago. I always pull from the archives there and reshape incidents to fit whatever made-up story I’m working on. So is it really made-up after all? Hey, I did make a movie called JERRY POWELL that’s all about trusting perceptions, and more over, yourself. How much have we doctored our own memories?

Anyway. I like keeping records of things. And it’s also for any close friend’s sanity. Because I recount the same tales. Repeatedly. I think, as the past has proven, that once I jot something down, I never bring it up again. Besides, quoting a famed author, “I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.”

Bare with it, tho, if you care to read, ‘cause I speak in tangents just how my movies play out and I’m non-linear. Just know that it’ll all eventually come full circle.

“Please be patient,” says the impatient.

---

No. 1: 2002.

There we were on the 5-freeway headed south and it had just started to drizzle rain. Something was telling me to get off at the next Santa Ana exit, to go to my parent’s house and nab some more CDs for the road; all I had was New Order’s SUBSTANCE and it was a two-hour drive to San Diego. But I didn’t listen. Ignored intuition. It’s a double-album. We’ll be fine.

It was a few days after Halloween and I had just closed shop: Geez Louise. That’s where I had met Poul Johansen a few years earlier. Now I had inherited his gig and responsibilities at said store in downtown Fullerton: drop/pick up the register cash from the bank, open up, steam recent vintage clothing arrivals, keep track of inventory, ring-up customers, tidy up, close-up, you know, the basics. By myself. It was cool. I felt cool. Some nice responsibilities for a whatever-year-old kid. One time I even let a buddy sneak a keg into the dressing room and handed customers empty cups. But that was later.  

I used to play a lot of Bo Diddley at Geez Louise. And girl group stuff. I love The Shirelles. Joey, the owner, one day came in and upon hearing the tunes I was serenating the place with joked, “What are we? A vintage clothing store?”

Joey had a stack of totally awesome albums in one of the counter drawers there too. Flipper GENERIC, Christian Death ONLY THEATER OF PAIN, Misfits EARTH A.D., it was the first time I heard all of those. I ripped them onto CD-Rs.

Anyway. There was this cheap digital camera around and I got the idea to dress-up in all the leftover Halloween costumes. I pretended I was dead and Poul snapped photos of me in a cape, head hanging upside down from the counter. Wish I still had those. I then got the even brighter idea—and I get those a ton ‘cause I’m reliably spontaneous and unreliable when it comes to sticking to plans– to hit up my friend Chynna and go visit her and her boyfriend Jon in San Diego. Why? I dunno.

“What kind of beers do you guys like?”

I’m glad she asked that ‘cause I sure wasn’t twenty-one yet and was too embarrassed to admit it, and this meant we weren’t going to hit a bar. Chynna liked Pabst. And Pabst she got.

Chynna’s pretty much the older sister I never had. I was (am) a big fan of her comic books, particularly Blue Monday, which, as the advertisement that drew me to it in the first place noted, was pretty much Archie but with mods, punks, and rockers. I was blown away. I looked at the poster drawings in the background of the ad’s panels. These kids were listening to the same shit I was listening to! No way! I hardly knew anyone into the same things. I was pretty lonely. I wrote to her a gushing email* in which I quoted Ren n’ Stimpy (“Your grandmother sucks eggs!”).

*The email was later printed in the back of one of the issues of Blue Monday.

That got a laugh out of Chynna, and soon we became internet friends (AOL chat). A few years later I met her in person. She invited me to her birthday party in SD which revealed a very small world coincidence, the first time I maybe truly experienced something like that, but if I keep talking about it I’ll never get back to what I was originally saying…

So. Oh, yeah... Poul and I hit the road. In our costumes. And because my memory is a bit frazzled still from the terrible thing that was about to happen, I can’t remember if he was or if I was the one wearing the rainbow-colored clown wig. I’ll never know.

We were near Oceanside. And the cars on the road began to gradually slow down. It’s getting a bit dark now, and the rain is coming down heavier but it’s not pouring, you know? I went into the slow lane. It was clear. Well, save for one car a bit up ahead. And all of a sudden that car just quickly hops over into the right shoulder, as if it could literally hop over to the right. I squint my eyes at this large lump of clothing lying up ahead on the road. That’s what the car in front of me had avoided. What am I looking at here? And as Poul and I speed closer to it, we both drop our jaws, and I yell out, “Oh! Shi---”

Cut off. I didn’t finish my short sentence.

I don’t know which way I swerved. But it was like the movies. Slow-mo. We were spinning on the highway. 360. In circles. I’m seeing headlights, I’m seeing the rain drops on my windshield. My head jerks to the right. BASH!!! We crash right into the center divider.

BLACK.

I’m on the highway. Walking. Blood or rain, or maybe I imagined either or both, like a curtain over my eyes. I was swaying. I look and I see scattered blurry VHS tapes all across the lanes. I stumble.

BLACK.

I’m in an ambulance. I’m on my back. I’m trying to sit up. But I can’t stop talking. I’m wearing an Eater shirt, by the way. The ‘70s UK teen punk band. One of my favorites. I’m asking the paramedic what his favorite punk bands are. He’s keeping me conscious, telling me he loves The Stiff Little Fingers. I laugh loudly, “Stiff Little Fingers are awesome!”

BLACK.

I’m staring at what’s possibly the ceiling of an emergency hospital as I’m wheeled down a hallway.

BLACK.

I look up from a bed. I see a worried Chynna.

BLACK.

(I think) there’s my mom. And Luis, my brother.

What the hell happened?

The car had been hit from every direction. It was a Daewoo. A burgundy Daewoo. My first car. I picked that color ‘cause that was my girlfriend-at-the-time-of-purchasing’s favorite color. When my dad learned that he gave me this look. Not a bad look. Just one of those, “Of course it is”-sorta looks. It was a small car. And in that car I got to know the entire Beatles discography, and Bowie’s HUNKY DORY (and SPACE ODDITY), and the Psychedelic Furs’ TALK TALK TALK. And I bring to mind being stuck in traffic as on my delayed way to go visit that girlfriend (Amanda #1) who lived in Fullerton. I was driving from Costa Mesa where I worked as a truck-to-floor clerk (basically one of the people that got to Borders Books at six in the morning to pull the new stock from the storage rooms and put them on their respective shelves). This was quite a hike for me on that sardines-in-a-can 57-freeway going from Costa Mesa to Fullerton, listening to The Verves URBAN HYMNS on repeat. To this day, when I hear that album, I see myself on the 57-freeway in red break-light-flooded traffic as the afternoon turned into night. But now this car was an accordion. If anyone had been sitting in the backseats, they’d be dead.

This kid Aaron, the first person to get me drunk on scotch, not wasted, but drunk, and the first person to give me my first bump of blow, bragged that he decided at the last minute to not join Poul and I, and that he for sure would have bitten the dust in that accident had he. I’d squint my eyes. He had never even been invited on this impromptu San Diego trip. I Iooked up to Chynna. There’s no way in hell I would have invited Aaron out there. Aaron was one of the first in a long line of people I’ve met who wanted to share credit on something they had nada to do with.

But it was a dead body. There was a dead body on the road. In that slow lane. Before we had crashed, Poul and I had passed one of those big yellow illegal immigration crossings signs that used to appear on the freeway whenever you were nearing the Mexican border. I think they’re gone now. So, this could have been an illegal immigrant that had been crossing the freeway, had gotten hit by a car, and was now just there, dead. I still see the dude. He was on the ground, profiled, facing up, as if in a coffin; the lane, a funeral home. And he was about sixty (?) with salt-and-pepper-hair and beard and maybe a grey suit. I mean, I couldn’t believe my eyes. And I know I wasn’t seeing things because Poul saw him too.

So, what I did was immediately swerved to avoid him, lost control of the car, got hit every which way but loose, and crashed. The VHS tapes all over the place were gifted to me by my sister-in-law when she closed her second-hand shop. They had been sitting in my trunk since who knows when. Now they were decorating the highway. One of the tapes my eyes landed on before I passed out was BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II.

Poul and I had smashed our skulls together. And I had a brain hemorrhage. I was dead. But I’m stubborn and eventually got up.

“You never got me down, Ray.” – Jake LaMotta in RAGING BULL.

Just a few days before this, I had gotten fucked up with this trio of dudes I hung out with. We were all tragic figures of some sort. Well, they were. I just romanticized tragedy. They were Peter K, Lloyd L, and that Aaron dude. Actually, the only tragic one was Lloyd who had lost his sister recently, wore the word “sad” on his shoulders, and was now doing drugs and Hi-Ho Silver’ing while at it. These were the guys I hung out with all.the.time. The people that got me out of the house like no one else could when I’d be working on this one script. A script I wanted to make into a movie and then a comic book and then completely abandoned but not until after actually finishing it. See, that was the thing. I was like I’m never gonna feel accomplished unless I actually, you know, uh, accomplish something. A.k.a. finish whatever the hell I work on. I’m sure even someone older and wiser had told me that shit, “Just finish it.” I had two completed movie scripts down, man. The first one took me forever but now I was on a roll…

…I would watch black-and-white Godard movies all day. And ‘60s spy movies. And got really into both Seijun Suzuki’s TOKYO DRIFTER and BRANDED TO KILL which I’d watch on repeat, taking notes (one time I put on TOKYO DRIFTER at Poul’s house and he, a film aficionado and former aspiring filmmaker, went, “Where do you find all these cool movies?” The Criterion Collection, Poul. The Criterion Collection. But I didn’t say that.) And then I would work on my story, which was inspired by everything I just mentioned…

It was about this aspiring musician who couldn’t get a break and meet the right people to form a band and in shopping around for like-minded folks winds up getting swept up in this totally groovy spy plot that was a tribute to pop art, all the ‘60s go-go stuff I was into (I was an aspiring Mod with no money to spend on the attire—but oh, how did I try), glam rock, X-Ray zap guns, teleportation devices, and spirals ‘cause I have an obsession with black-and-white-spirals. I called it (badly) THE SECRET NOIR (“The Secret Black? Really?”). I recently found the script. Not the movie script, mind you, but the one I had adapted to be a comic book. Thought I had lost both. That rickety-old PC I typed my fingers off on as a teen had crashed. And those floppy discs? Who knows where they wound up. I still dream of making that story into a movie. I kid myself, “If I ever have a big success, that’ll be the movie I make next! It needs a big, great budget!” I mean, I wrote this whole scooter chase sequence cut to “Friday on my Mind” by The Easybeats. There ain’t no compromise here. ‘Cause that’s all I ever do: COMPROMISE.

But every night the trio would ring me up. I’d book it from the house, hop in a car, or got into my own car and we’d roam the streets of Orange County, California (and sometimes LA). 

Peter and Lloyd were already friends. And I had worked with Peter at the Boarders I mentioned. Aaron, I knew from The Block, this outdoor mall where, in 1999, a bunch of rando punk kids I wish I’d been friends with hung out. He worked at the Van’s Skate Park there and rolled up on me once when I was wearing a Subhumans tee. He showed me his Subs tattoo in return-- similar to the one I’d get later in Atlanta. Now he had ran into me while I was working at Geez Louise. But he looked different. No longer dressed like an anarcho-punk, but still missing teeth ‘cause they’d been kicked in at a hardcore show or whatever the hell he had said. Now he was dressed kind of sharp. Button up. Nice pants. In all black. He told me he worked down the street. At the In-and-Out Burger on Harbor. What?

“Dude, you know they’re all Christian? There’s bible verses at the bottom of their cups.”

One of my friends growing up, Deez, his cousin worked at an In-and-Out as an entry-level manager and made bank. And I’m talkin’ bank for a teenager. They take care of their employees. $18 bucks an hour in 1999? You kidding me? “If you don’t go to college, you’ll be flipping burgers,” I heard the old-folks saying. Well, that motherfucker makes more money than you do on retirement. I figure Aaron’s doing alright.

On a lunch break I go over there. I see Aaron outside the entrance, back in his dirty punk clothes. He’s spanging, suckering customers to give him change. He tells me he’s made over fifty dollars in a couple hours. He says let’s hang but, “Let me get out of my dirty work clothes.” Aaron goes inside the In-and-Out restroom. Few minutes later he comes out looking all spiffy, shiny, and new; his punk ‘drobe stuffed into a bag.

The rest I’ll skip ‘cause I don’t remember how the four of us all actually started hanging out together. But one night we jumped this grade school’s fence and Aaron offered us blow. I’m pretty sure it was everyone’s first go. I mean, I had only smoked weed once at this point. This stoner friend of mine named Angie who I went to Santa Ana Middle College with (at sixteen), and who had gotten me into The Doors and The Misfits and The Smiths (her three favorite bands), always encouraged me to smoke weed with her. But, nah. I kind of grew up in a bubble, or my own universe of invention, and I was content with my movies and my music and my comic books, and, well I didn’t want my parents to wig the fuck out (again; more on that later). Plus I had all this Catholic guilt. But screw this. I was in a band. I was never at home anymore. My dad and I had stopped trying to kill each other all the time mainly ‘cause I just made sure to avoid him by celebrating my last couple years as a teenager being out with friends and experiencing goddamned things instead of just learning about them from a television screen.

“If I ever catch you with marijuana, I’ll kick you out the house!,” my dad would yell.

Well, he never said anything about cocaine...

We all did huge key bumps. SNIIIIIIIIIIFFFFFFFFFF! SNIFF! SNI—II-FF! SNIFF! SNI-- whuuuuut… the fuck. This thing going down my nostril, dripping into my throat, making my mouth all numb. What is—ohhh, I gt it. Aaron later became ours and everybody else’s coke dealer. I think we all had equal addictions because of this. But days before the big crash – ha-ha, I’ve never referred to it as that, but it may stick—we’d all gone to someone’s place. It’s all foggy now, but I had ripped for the first-and-only-time cocoa puffs. Basically, weed peppered with coke out of a bong. When Peter took a rip, I couldn’t stop laughing. He thought he was on fire and ran outside of the house screaming. We had to calm him down.

So now I was all paranoid…

Oh my God. The hospital is running blood tests. This shit’s gonna show up in my system. They’re gonna know about all the fucking drugs I’ve been doing. My parents are gonna know. Oh, man. I am so fucked. Or was I? I mean, I think my parents at this point were realizing that I was way different from my much older brothers (we’re talking about 20+ years difference) and that since I’m the first one born in the states that, well, dealing with me was gonna be a little bit different and that I took no advice and kind of did what I wanted without permission. I had already been arrested at fifteen. But I graduated out of high school two-years before due date, so they couldn’t hold anything against me. I also always used the band as an excuse: “I’m going to practice in Ventura.” That was usually a two-to-three-day venture. I had a job (I always had a job, since the age of twelve or thirteen). I paid for my own things. I didn’t drink. What’s there to worry about?

If anyone found out anything about any drugs, no one mentioned a word. They were totally devastated because of the accident. But I’m far from a hypochondriac and someone that can’t handle too many unnecessary restrictions so I couldn’t be in that hospital bed any longer. Against the medics’ wishes, I ripped off whatever IV bags were stuck to my veins, got up, got dressed and my mom took me to the junk yard. I can’t even describe my car’s make-over.

Poul thought I had died. He said when he saw me being carted into the ambulance he thought, “That’s it. He’s gone.”

Months later, during band practice, Poul abruptly stopped drumming and let out a huge scream. That’s when he learned he had cracked his ribs in the accident.

He had said, “My cousin’s a lawyer and she basically said the only person I can sue is you, which I’m not going to do.”

“Can we sue the car manufacturer?”

“Why?”

“The air bags never ejected.”

No one did, tho. Or if someone did, I never caught wind.

World Premiering at DANCES WITH FILMS 8/28 11:55 (midnight) at the Chinese Theaters in Hollywood, CA.

Tickets on sale soon.

Can’t tell you how much it means to us that American Zoetrope and one of my favorite filmmakers/heroes selected our SO GOES THE NIGHT screenplay as a finalist. Surreal when we got the news!

Many thanks to Judge Francis Coppola and the Zoetrope staff.

Get it while it’s hot!

If you rent it today you'll be able to stream it unlimited for 72 hours: INFO HERE.

Poster Art: Ai Mi Tran

Layout: Carlos Rossi

Read the interview here: Voyage LA.

I’m posting this as a collector and advocate of physical media and supporter of movie houses. I’m not knocking streaming services entirely, just how they’ve made the average person lazy and prevent them from thinking outside the box.

“...[Netflix] pivots away from providing what you might want to watch to what the corporate entity wants you to watch.” 

“Until it’s on a disc or a thumb drive or a VHS tape at your place, you don’t own what you own.”

WINNER BEST ACTOR and BEST SCREENPLAY @ HVFF

First shoot date on IBA couldn’t have gone smoother. Didn’t think the day would actually come. 

Joey Halter as “REX DOLLARS”

Sofia Beeson as “PHOEBE”