A FRIEND IN THE MOVIES - 2016

My hillbilly girlfriend and I moved to the East Village in 1978. The twenty-two year-old blonde actress came from West Virginia and I hailed from New England. Alice was in the theater like Bill, our upstairs neighbor. I wrote poetry. One day Bill announced that he had been cast in a western called HEAVEN'S GATE.

"A small role."

"Better than no role."

I was happy for Bill and wished him luck.

Michael Cimino's tale of the West was based on the 1982 Johnson County War. The epic film sprawled across the silver screen. Viewing the momumental flop, I tried to spot Bill. I didn't see his face once and he later told me, "My scenes ended up on the floor, but I have another gig."

"As what?"

"As a biker."

"A biker?" I loved motorcycles, even though I had only driven a Vespa once down to Tony's Fried Clams on Wollaston Beach.

"Yeah, down in Georgia."

"EASY RIDER country."

Billy and Captain America from Dennis Hopper's road movie had ended up badly in Dixie.

"Ill be fine, plus EAST RIDER was just a movie."

"And life stranger than fiction.

Bill starred as Vince in THE LOVELESS directed by Katherine BIgelow..

I like it a lot.

Alice and I broke up in 1979.

In 1983 she was cast as a hapless victim opposite David Bowie's vampire in THE HUNGER. Bill was also in the movie. She died in the first scene and I once more hadn't spotted Bill's face from the first frame to the last..

I saw the movie in Paris, where I worked as a doorman at a nightclub.

New York wasn't my city that decade.

A year later Bill played an evil biker in STREETS OF FIRE.

I had a 150cc Vespa scooter in Paris.

I wasn't a biker, but I was an outlaw in many ways.

STREETS OF FIRE remains my older brother's favorite film and Frunk is a lawyer.

Bill had a feel for outlaw roles.

Over the next few years he played an LA counterfeiter, a Viet-Nam War sergeant, a military investigator in Sai-Gon, the Messiah, a Concentration Camp boxer, and a Viet-Nam War cripple.

"You died three times. How did that feel?" I asked on his passage through Paris between films.

"Not so bad, plus I rose from the dead in the Jesus one."

"Only to be crucified again."

"Never felt a thing." He showed me his hands.

In the 1990s I quit the nightlife and worked selling diamonds on Manhattan's West 47th Street.

The Shabbas Goy, but I was really a sheygutz to the Hassidim.

A shifty gentile.

Bill and I didn't see each other too much.

He had a wife, a kid, a career on screen and the stage.

Bill had acted in twenty-one movies during that decade. VICTORY a tale from Joseph Conrad had been shot in Java. Each year I spent six months in the Orient writing novels. I lived all over Indonesia from the far East in Irian Jaya to Banda Aceh at the western tip of Sumatra. I had hoped to run into Bill out there, but our paths didn't cross, until we met in Maine 1995.

My family came from outside Portland. Falmouth Foresides. My grandfather and his friends had dammed a stream to create Watchic Pond. To the north on Route 11 Bill had a camp on a Thompson Lake, which was much bigger than Watchic Pond. His wife had spent her childhood summers at their camp. A big camp for kids. She wasn't from Maine, but like all summer people she loved the Pine Tree State. After dinner Bill and I went fishing at night. He had grown up on the Great Lakes. this was my first time fishing. He fished for bass nin the darkness and I drank Gansetts. We didn't speak much. Even I knew talking wasn't good for the fish. In the silence I realized we had been friends a long time. I said nothing and the next day drove up to Washington County, the last place created by God according to my Aunt Jane, no destination in mind.

In 2000 Bill was nominated a second time for an Oscar. He had nailed the role of Nosferatu in SHADOW OF A VAMPIRE. The stench of the grave wafted through the cinema whenever he was on the screen. He was a presence unlike HEAEN'S GATE, but he onfinished out of the running at the Academy Awards ceremony.

I watched the show from Thailand. My girlfriend Porn had won Worst Girlfriend of the Year in Pattaya and I thought Bill and her looked the same, even if he had been bald in the movie.

Later that year I escaped her vampire hold, but only just.

After 9/11 I left the USA. Thailand became my home. I had a baby with Nu. We lived along the Gulf of Siam and I ran a fake F1 merchandise website, which was # 1 in Google and this was not a good thing. I drive a 400cc Honda. It was plenty fast.

Bill came out there with his new wife to judge a Bangkok film festival. She was sweet. Bill knew how to make a scary face. He scared my daughter.

After all he had been a vampire.

I was scary other ways.

Bill never asked how.

Bill made even more films in the 00s. He was praised as 'the actors' actor'. I didn't see much of his work. Thailand had its own cinema; ghosts, soap operas, and slapstick comedies.

They liked things simple like the laughter scene in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS.

The Thai cyper-Police arrested me in 2008.

For the crime of copyright infringement.

Ferrari had hoped for me to do time in the monkey house.

The Thai court fined me $100.

In their eyes I was a good farang.

Bill was no criminal.

He spoke with directors, cameramen, soundpeople, and everyone else in that industry and they loved him for being Bill.

I drove a 1970 400cc Yamaha. It had no papers. In Thailand that wasn't a crime.

My first wife left me. I found someone else. We had a baby too.

I had two families now.

That April I flew back to the States.

Bill invited me to a premiere at Lincoln Center.

I was exhausted by the trans-oceanic flight. I slept through the entire film.

It was a good film for me. I like sleeping and only bad films wake me.

I liked sleep almost as much as motorcycles.

Work was getting scarce after the Crash. Bill was in a bunch of films.

Some of them I liked.

I loved THE HUNTER and said, "It's the first time I've ever seen you in a film."

"Really?"

"Yes."

At least he didn't ask how, but we are old friends.

Never on the screen.

Never on the stage.

Just in real life.

Bill's a grandfather now.

Seems like only twenty years ago that his son was young in Maine.

And my family is ever bigger, because at the end of the day or night family matters.

It's the way of the world, both here and everywhere.

One more small thing.

Bill looks good in a cowboy hat.

But so does everyone else.

Especially when you have friends in the movies.

The Smell of Eucalyptus 1986

In June of 1986 I came back from France to write porno scripts with an old girlfriend strung out on H. North Hollywood, the ground zero of the XXX film industry. Obviously I was not thinking straight, but I had confused lust with love, especially since Sharon was a porno actress skilled at faking orgasms.

One rainy night Sharon drove her big gas-guzzler over to rescue Harry Reems for an OD. She called 911. the dispatcher said EMS had been to that address too many times.

"It's a waste of time," said the dispatcher.

A junkie herself Sharon knew better and on a very rainy night we drove over the Hollywood Hills to a Laurel Canyon cottage. The nocturnal gloom was thick with the scent of eucalyptus trees. The door was open. I recognized Harry, having seen DEEP THROAT once in a Times Square theater. We were in time to revive Linda Lovelace’s co-star from death. He groaned, “Stop slapping me.”

I sat by the bed, as she rummaged through the desk, closet, and under the mattress without finding a stash. Sharon left to score and never came back.

The rain worsened to a deluge. I was going nowhere and settled into a lounge chair with a blanket over me. It was cold and damp. I was going nowhere.

The next day Harry woke around noon and asked, "Who the fuck are you?"

I explained, And then threw me out. My parting shot.

"You have a small dick."

I walked outside.

It was a sunny California day, but weren't they all.

December 18, 1978 - East Village - Journal Entry

Alice left the East Village to catch a flight to West Virginia. We have lived at 256 East 10th since August. I carry her heavy blue bag down to the street corner. It's not too cold and she wore a long green Mormon dress, a distressed purple sweater, and her favorite high-heeled boots. I want her to stay with me, but said nothing. We barely speak and both of us succumbed to the pull of our old homes. She to Appalachia and me to the South Shore of Boston for the holidays.

She hailed a cab and a Checker stopped on the corner of Fitst Avenue. I threw her bag in the back. Neither of us said good-bye, as if there was nothing in this city was holding her. Not me. Not her career. The taxi disappeared into the traffic. We hadn't had sex since before she announced she was pregnant after the New Wave Vaudeville Show. These last weeks I had watched her weight gain. Some, but she had been eating like she had been rescued from starving on a deserted island.

After an hour I get a phone call from Jim Bottomly. He's driving up to Maine and can drop me at the Sturbridge entrance to the Mass Pike. A good place from which to hitchhike to Boston. Last night the temperature had been below freezing. The New York Times forecasts it will be bitter cold tomorrow, but it's only fifty five miles from Sturbridge to Boston. There is no mention of snow.

Later.

The Patriots announce that Chuck Fairbanks will be leaving the Patriots after the playoffs to coach at Colorado U. This move must have really charged the team for the playoffs. Why couldn't he have waited till after the New Year? Probably because the Press had the news and couldn't hold their sand.

Lately ruminating watching television, playing solitaire, and listening to the radio has a greater appeal than writing at the kitchen table. Claptrap no one wants to read.

Other than a stand-up piano and books on drama Alice left little trace. I smelled the pillow. She is too clean to leave a scent. I wonder if she is coming back. She might just go west to hit it big in Hollywood. Another young ingenue to the slaughterwhorehouse. No chance of being the sex symbol Hollywood wants in their grips, but I could go with her. I'll be just as broke there as here.

Standing at the rear window overlooking the alley, I reflect on the past year. I fell in love for the first time in my life, not counting Janet Stetson, Linda Imhoff, Hilde Hartnett and Ro Lohin. All of them ended up in disaster. Not Alice. Our one night stand, a menage a trois in a chilly swimming pool graduated to a weekend fling to a summertime affair ot living together. I rescued Alice from her hometown. Chemical City. She would have come here anyway. The bright lights of the big city dazzled her hillbilly heritage. She is gone, but I live with her and she lives with me with no end in sight.

Second achievement also tied to Alice. I moved from the SRO on West 11th Street to 256 10th Street. My grandmother once said, "Better a bad apartment with a good address than a good apartment with a bad address. My SRO was a single room with linoleum floor and a sagging bed. Off a 5th Avenue. But a dump. 256 is a cockroach-ridden tenement apartment in a neighborhood beset by a drug epidemic, but I didn't have a phone on 11th Street and now I can reach out to people, not that I have been able to find a good job.

I have worked at Serendipity 3 as a busboy, a waiter at an executive dining room on Wall Street, as a production assistant for an Edward Albee tour, and painted Alice's father's house in West Virginia. I haven't done much since summer and the new year promises more nothing.

Bad things.

Too few to mention.

Maybe a baby.

What is Christmas
Snow falling between the drifts,
The glow on holiday lights in the windows
Falling on the winter wonderland.
Presents, giving and receiving.
Friends, old and new,
Families
Together
Telling old stories and future dreams
We celebrate the birth of Jesus
The legend celebrated by Christians. I'm an aethist.

I beleive more in Santa Claus.
The New Testament claims the Son of God
Was
Born in Bethelhem
The Son of God to be crucified
On a cross for our sins.
None of my sins required a death sentence.
Christians see Jesus as a God
Muslims regard him a a messiah.
Nothing like a religious war
For Jesus and Christmas Day

Later

Grant and I discussed the fact that Americans are poorly read, rarely roaming from the curriculum prescribed by a Christian government and the churches ruling over our souls. We watch too much TV and eat too much potato chips. Where are the Renaissance men? Damn, I can't spell that word and I'm too lay to look it up the the dictionary.

2023 Renaissance.

Got it right on the second try.

The Star's Speech

In the winter of 1986 my cousin Sherri invited me out to North Hollywood to write screenplays for her XXX films. The athletic brunette was moving from before the camera to behind the lens. While not MGM her proposition appealed to me. I was living in Paris. It was cold. LA was sunny, even the Valley, and I packed my bags and flew West to make my mark as porno's Hemingway. I should have tried to be more like Jacqueline Susann. The producers criticized my scripts as 'too smart' for their all-male audience. I dumbed down to PIZZA CHEESE AND ME followed by CUM TOGETHER. Even these stories based on sex, sex, and more sex were too intellectual for the powers-that-be in the adult film industry. Sherri apologized for having wasted my time. "Hey, I got to come out to LA in the winter." It was snowing back in Paris. She gave me a hug and took off for a shoot in Sherman Oaks. I booked a flight back to New York and then got in my rented car to drive to the Pacific. Traffic on the Ventura Freeway was light, but a VW Golf convertible cut across the lane in front of me. I cursed the female driver, until the blonde turned around with a smile. It was Jody Foster. I had loved her since TAXI DRIVER. I called out to her, as she exited from the Freeway. She continued on her way. She was a true movie star and they don't associate with failed writers for XXX films. Our paths have yet to recross, but I have followed her career through FIVE CORNERS, THE ACCUSED, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, CONTACT and even her brief stint as Marge Simpson's voice in the TV show THE SIMPSONS. Her sexuality was no secret to the public. Jodie like women and women liked her. She had been in a relationship for decades, but the actress never came out of the closet, as if she had been in the military under the orders from the Pentagon, 'Don't say, don't tell.' Last week her silence came to an abrupt end at the Golden Globes Award, during her acceptance remarks after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award. "I already did my coming out about 1,000 years ago back in the stone age, those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers, and then gradually and proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met." Some gays and lesbians criticized Ms. Foster for taking such a long time to tell the truth, especially since her speech seemed to be off-the-wrist (she was wearing a dress), but better late then never and I applaud her courage to ell it like it is no matter what the time. I still will call your name out whenever I'm on the Ventura Freeway. I know she heard me. To see Jodie Foster's speech please go to the following URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efYg0vQyPGA

Whiskey A Go Go

I saw this poster somewhere and thought, "How cool."

The Whisky à Go-Go on the Sunset Strip was made famous by the mini-skirted DJ Rhonda Lane, who danced in a cage during Johnny Rivers's set, thus giving birth to the go go girl. The Miracles scored a 1966 hit with GOING TO A GO GO and go go bars sprung up around the country. The LA club between Clark and Hilldale launched the careers of the Byrds, Alice Cooper, Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Doors and the Mothers of Invention.

In the late-70s the Whiskey went punk with The Germs The Dogs, The Runaways, Quiet Riot, Renegade, X, Mötley Crüe and Van Halen.

While I was living in LA during the 90s, I drove by the famed Hollywood nightclub without ever stopping inside.

I hated valet parking.

Yesterday I tried calling the number on the poster.

It's still working.

Rock on.

To hear X playing NEW WORLD at the Whiskey a Go Go, please go to this URL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ_kaTExJhQ

Bad To The Bone

Fame has been cruel to the blonde star Lindsay Lohan. The troublesome actress most recently fought with a low-ranking GOP congressional staffer, who had been secretly taking photos of Lilo at W Hotel party and this spat was preceded by a car accident. The girl hasn't been able to get a break, since her troubles began with drugs, drink, and driving in LA. Rehab, jail, community service, rehab, and now the actress is asking for a reset, "I want my career back. These problems were my college years ... but they were in the public eye. I was irresponsible. I was experimenting." Her nude pictorial in the January/February 2012 Playboy was a huge success as well as her hosting of SNL, but film work has been slow in coming with producers worried about legal problems from the bad girl. Personally I think she's a great influence on the kids today. They have no balls. And the girl just wants to have fun. If she had been living in New York none of her bad luck would have happened. Well, maybe not all, but less for sure. We know how to keep our mouths shut.

An Actor's Incredible Journey

There is no TV in my top-floor apartment. I watch nothing by NBC, CBS, or ABC. My late father would be happy with my rejection of the 'boob tube', although my apostasy was more due to my inability to operate the new-fangled remote controls than the content offered by networks. I hear people talking about TV shows. The names of the shows' characters populated and my ever crowded limbo of contemporary popular culture, so last night's EMMY contestants registered zero recognition with my synapses. Everyone at Frank's Lounge watching the televised event knew everything about these people. I felt like Rip Van Winkle woken from a long sleep, but I was amused by a friend's comment about many of the lucky winners' acceptance speeches. "What is this show "Incredible Journey", that every winning actor thinks he's been on?" Aldo had been reared on the Gold Coast of Florida. "You don't know the struggles of traveling from a bodunk town in square state to attending acting classes at a square state cow college then surviving the purgatory of nos while everyone jokes about you're being a waiter and finally coming to LA to sell your body and soul to TV." I came from Boston. We had culture. These actors came from the Midwest. The odds against making it were a million to one. "And who would have dunk it?" Certainly not their old man." "You got that right." Aldo worked in TV on the production side. His Emmys were on the mantle at his Jersey home. "Who would have think it?"

Taboo in The Tiki Theater

Yesterday TV funny man Fred Willard for lewd behavior at the Tiki Theater by an undercover LAPD officer at 8:45pm. At first I thought the arrest had occurred at the Tiki Cineplex, which is featuring Ice Age: Continental Drift, Ted, The Amazing Spider-Man, Brave, Magic Mike, and Savages on its multi-screens, although none of those movies are possible of rising an erection, so further research discovered the location of the Tiki Theater in Hollywood. At one time scores of XXX theaters and porno parlors lined the streets of Hollywood. Police harassment, political pressure, religious outrage, and more importantly the advent of online sex sites shut down the Babylon of the west and The Tiki has survived on Santa Monica Boulevard as LA's last XXX straight porno theater as well as the last with a turnstile entrance. Online reviews of the Tiki are hilarious; For a $10 admission, an elderly Korean man pushes a paper raffle ticket under a bulletproof glass screen that looks like it's been slathered in Vaseline. A sign next to it reads NO WEAPONS, NO DRUGS, NO SEX OF ANY KIND (that means you too, dog fuckers). You click through a well worn turnstile and try hard not to touch any surface as you make your way through heavy, black velvet curtains into 900 square ft room with 30 theater style folding chairs. A quarter of the audience is wearing hooded sweaters and smoking crack, another quarter is jerking off, the rest are jerking each other off, cruising for a jerk off or doing something so vile you probably wouldn't want to see it. Let's assume they're hiding murder weapons or making a list of items to add to their next rape kit. Appropriately enough, the bathroom is in the theater to the right of the screen so if you are looking for some uh, privacy - the Tiki is sensitive to your needs. If group masturbation isn't exactly your thing, you'll be relieved to know that there's a well worn stall about 50 paces from your seat. You sit through a half-hour of amateur porn until the moans and groans from the audience work your last nerve. You quickly exit the theater and immediately head to the nearest bar where you try and drink away the memory of the last hour. And in case you were wondering the name of the movie I saw was POONTANG CLAN. harleyguy88 on July 12, 2010 at 4:26 pm this place is truly filthy and run down. when i was there it was scummy and dark. i could see by the flickering screen crackheads scrounging around the floors for pieces of coke. they would light up and smoke whatever they would find. this continued the entire time. it stank of dirty butthole in here, big time. also worth mentioning a guest appearance from the neighborhood “lady of the night”, walking in and looking like joe namath in drag who serviced almost everyone in the theater, including my throbbing man meat. hey, whatever, a hole’s a hole and all discretion and good judgement leave you once you step foot in this den of base and disgusting human behavor. seriously the nastiest place in los angeles, not for the faint of heart. beware. One reviewer actually witnessed the arrest; 7/19/2012 I really have experienced better. But before I give my sincere firsthand experience I have to talk about all the commotion that was going on while I was there last night. I was at the Tiki taking in the midnight movie and while I was getting comfortable with myself there was this bickering and some cops popped out and arrested this old man. Judging from these comments Willard's lawyer was not wrong in telling the press the following; “With all due respect to the individual officer, our belief is that Fred did nothing in any violation of any law. We will be working vigorously to clear his name in this matter". Hopefully justice will be done.