Zachariah’s new song explores the corporate logo marketing travesty that all of us 90’s kids endure every time we see a Nirvana or Ramones shirt for sale in Target or Wal-Mart. Back in 1992 I had to go to the concert to buy a $30 shirt. Now the logo is on onesies.
My wife and I once hired a hippie nanny named Sioux who hid little bags of weed for me around our house. I remember the day we interviewed her – she was about 19, naturally slender with long blonde hair and she was wearing a skirt that looked like it was stitched out of the AIDS quilt… She had on Birkenstocks. She smelled like lavender. She was gorgeous. My first thought was, “I would have totally dated this girl back in college.”
I would have totally dated this girl back in college.
When you’ve been married as long as my wife and I have, the best way to say you think somebody is attractive is to say that you would have dated ‘back in college.’
Of course, I told my wife this very fact.
“Well keep your hippie dick in your jorts,” she responded.
I laughed. I love my wife. Meanwhile, after a few conversations, I was sold on Sioux to become our nanny for our then five and two-year-old kids… but my wife wasn’t so into it.
“I don’t know – she seems flighty,” she remarked.
“Cmon, what’s the worst that can happen?” I asked. “She gets high and eats all of our ice cream?”
My wife agreed, mainly because we had a wedding that Saturday night and our other go-to nannies were already busy.
“If she fucks up, that’s on you,” she said.
She didn’t fuck up. At least that first night. In fact, when we came back from the wedding a little buzzed from the wine, we stayed up late with her and talked about the kids, how hard it was to meet guys in Los Angeles and eventually, she secretly told me that she hid a tiny bag of weed for me underneath the sage candle she had lit to ward off bad spirits on the coffee table. As she left, I thanked her and imagined that if she was my age in 1995, we would have been one of those hippie power couples that I was always jealous of at Phish concerts.
My 1995 hippie dream.
The second time Sioux babysat, I casually came downstairs wearing my old Grateful Dead 1992 Spring Tour shirt. She went ape shit. Told me it was the coolest thing she’d ever seen. I immediately felt like Phil from Modern Family, pretending that I didn’t even know I had the shirt on… even though I had been calculating the move since the week before. From the corner of my eye I saw my wife shaking her head while watching my pathetic attempt to connect with Sioux over a t-shirt.
“Nice shirt, babe,” she said.
“I guess I’ll go get ready,” I added before running upstairs to change.
When I came back downstairs, Sioux had prepared some food for the kids (all macrobiotic) and smiled one of those young hippie smiles at me – as if we were college sophomores peaking during a Run Like an Antelope solo. My wife smiled at me. I smiled at my wife. She smiled at Sioux. I kissed my kids. Sioux leaned in and hugged Wendy. They separated. The kids ate. My wife watched me as I leaned in and hugged Sioux. As I did, I stupidly whispered a single word into her ear…
“Candle?”
Sioux smiled. My wife looked confused. I brought myself out of this fantasy hippie love triangle and said, “OK, bath at 7:15 and bed by eight.”
My wife and I walked outside to catch our Lyft.
In our ride to the birthday party that night, my wife cleared her throat and calmly asked me exactly what “candle” meant.
I told her.
“Last time she babysat, Sioux left me a part of a joint underneath the candle on the coffee table and I smoked it.”
“Oh great, so she’s high around our kids?”
“Well, I mean… so what? Sometimes I’m high around our kids.”
“This is her last night babysitting,” my wife said.
I could understand her frustration. It wasn’t because Sioux was this macrame Goddess with rings on her fingers and bells on her shoes… but face it – if your nanny was sneaking joints around your two-year-old daughter, you might think about getting rid of her too.
Still, I argued that we had nothing to worry about and that by the time we returned home, we would be thrilled to find our kids in bed and that maybe we could even split the little bag of weed I was expecting to find underneath the sage candle on our coffee table.
Until we got back around 11:45 p.m.
As it turns out, Sioux had started a bath for the kids upstairs… and forgot that she began running it. She turned on the water and then came downstairs to get the kids and somehow got distracted… By what, nobody knows – food? A text? A documentary on YouTube about the benefits of Dr. Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar? Whatever the case, she suddenly remembered that the bath was on just as drops of water began seeping through our living room ceiling and landing on the floor. The puddle stain on the roof was large and substantial and we knew we were looking at some serious water damage and mold repair.
Sioux was in shambles.
Our ceiling
As she tried to explain how she forgot to turn off the water, we examined the damage and quickly lost the hippie buzz we had all generated earlier. I informed Sioux that we would pay her for her time, but that we fully expected her to be responsible for the damages once we had the roof inspected. She agreed and left, her head hung low, embarrassed and ashamed.
“OK, so she was probably high and forgot about the bath,” I said.
“Ya think?”
Stupidly, I checked beneath the candle for some weed.
There was nothing.
The damage came to over 1000 dollars. Sioux was broke and we felt bad charging her, so she offered to babysit for free until she could pay us back. Amazingly in Los Angeles, that’s only like, five nights of work…
However, my wife and I chose to not use her again.
The last I saw on Facebook she was living in Oregon with a Spanish guy named Pau.
After a long night on the sauce, dont take your 2 kids to the Magic Kingdom. Hear Zach spin his tale about a fateful hungover day a the “Happiest Place on Earth.”
Zach and Missi Pyle have a new podcast called “Missi and Zach Might Bang!” Exec. Produced by Anna Faris and Sim Sarna of “Anna Faris is Unqualified” – the show takes on celebrity guests, improvisational music and offers entertainment business advice as well! Head to http://www.ewpopfest.com to buy tickets now!!!
This morning I drove past two skinny homeless men with multiple missing teeth who were smoking cigarettes before nearly running over a mangy stray dog panting in the street. I made a left turn at the Hustler Hollywood store, narrowly averting a woman who was squatting and urinating into a discarded water bottle. I eventually parked and walked around my car, side-stepping two discarded needles some dog crap and a used condom. I dodged a speeding Hyundai that was being driven by a dude vaping and texting at the same time before opening the passenger door… and helping my kid get out of the car.
“Ready for school?” I asked.
Welcome to Hollywood.
A scene from our nice little walk to school
I was raised in a peaceful, quiet corner of the desert where coyotes and jumping cholla cacti were my biggest fears while walking to school. I didn’t see a homeless man until I was about 13. Hustler was a magazine that only prisoners and truckers read and needles were something only a doctor could get a hold of. Yesterday, my son asked me why the guy who lives in the dumpster across the street from his carpool pick-up lane is always shouting, “Ho ass bitch” while shuffling down Selma Avenue.
I am raising my children in Gomorrah and it’s starting to freak me the fuck out.
Nice little bottle of urine found by the carpool pick up
This school year, my son’s entire fifth grade class was moved to a new school campus – about 10 blocks north of the previous campus where they had been since kindergarten. The new campus is on Selma Avenue and is a stone’s throw from the Hollywood YMCA. It’s also a block south of Hollywood Boulevard, nearly 10 medical marijuana dispensaries, six seedy bars, smoke shops, two run-down hotels, a vintage street clock that has been permanently set to 4:20 and about nine tattoo parlors.
Back in my 20’s, when I was stumbling out of the bar Boardner’s (a block away from the school on Cherokee), I could never imagine that someday my son would be taking “Beginner Spanish” 50 yards from where I once puked after a night of Vodka – Red Bulls. I never thought I’d be raising my kids anywhere but some pristine little tucked away school with manicured lawns and open fields and morning sing-a-longs. Little did I know that barbed wire fences, metal detectors and cement soccer fields were going to be the norm for my children…
At a back-to-school meet and greet two weeks after the first day, some other parents expressed their concerns as well.
“We just don’t like the way the school feels,” an angry parent offered.
“We are striving to make everybody comfortable,” the principal, a 40-something man named Reggie replied.
“It’s hard to be comfortable when I smell marijuana every day when I drop my kid off,” another mom piped up.
This nearby billboard has all the kids very excited for Christmas
Hollywood has changed immensely since the rundown 1990’s. Tourism is up, souvenir stores are making great money and people from all over the world are still traveling here to take photos of the sidewalk where an actor’s name is etched into a star. Of course, when the tourists come, so do the hustlers. You’ve seen them selling rap CD’s, trying to get you to take the TMZ Tour and drunkenly swaying into your photos while dressed up in a piss-stained Spider-Man costume demanding five dollars.
This guy smells like beef and wants $5 a picture.
Look, my high school was no picnic. I witnessed a shooting, a lot of fights and certainly saw my share of LSD and dirt weed from Mexico, but I was in high school… Not fifth grade. Being raised in the desert certainly shaded me from the inner city realities of gang-ridden America, but I was also lucky enough to travel to places like New York and LA to see how other kids were growing up. Ultimately, their fast-paced lives had a strong effect on me because I headed for college in Los Angeles the minute I turned 18. Thinking back about my childhood dreams, I turned my son one day after school.
“Hey dude, where do you want to live when you grow up?” I asked him.
“Probably the beach… or New York I guess.”
Obviously he hadn’t thought this one out. Not me. By the time I was ten, I had it narrowed down to Los Angeles and Los Angeles.
My son is also already planning out his first tattoo, based on a conversation we had last week. After pouring over NBA star Brandon Ingram’s arms as we were watching a basketball game, he asked me a question.
“Dad, if you could get a tattoo, what would you get?”
“Oh wow, I dunno – probably your name and your sister’s name,” I said. “Something small and hidden and meaningful.”
“I’d probably get Savage in cursive across my eyebrow,” he said.
“You’re not getting a tattoo,” I told him.
“Why not? All the sickest rappers have face tattoos now…”
Oh boy.
The late rapper Lil Peep had the type of facial tattoos my son is craving.
As we listened to my kid’s Spotify playlist, I heard no less than ten “N-Bombs”, three songs about abusing Xanax, Percocet and Molly and over ten about Gucci, 80,000 dollar watches and ‘Lambos. Every song featured sound effects like “Skrrr” for a cool car or “Skrrrrratatatatata” to mimic an assault rifle peppering an enemy with bullets… Look, I love rap music. I chased a rap career myself at one point… but no 5th grader should be asking his dad what Codeine, Mountain Dew and Jolly Ranchers taste like together.
Alas, the reality of this situation is that I can’t afford to shell out 35,000 dollars to private academies like Campbell Hall or Oakwood… Although from what I remember from college – most of the heaviest partiers came out of these schools. Which gives me some hope… And truthfully, other than the dead guy who was wheeled away from the apartment down the block last week, the school is fun, diverse and growing and I’m actually proud to be a part of the community.
So, as the years roll along, I’ll just have to deal with the syringes, homeless guys and Hustler Hollywood foot traffic for a few more years until junior high. Luckily, that campus is located downtown in a much more secure location…
It’s across the street from an outpatient clinic for opioid addicts…
After Reading Sean Penn’s ‘El Chapo’ Piece, I Decided to See What my Old Pot Dealer From High School was Up to…
Penn meeting El Chapo
Recently, Sean Penn made headlines when he bravely traveled deep into the heart of Sinaloa to meet and converse with the notorious Mexican drug cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Right after the story went to press, El Chapo was captured – and his latest elusive time on the lam abruptly came to a close. Penn’s piece was published in Rolling Stone this week and I found it to be an engrossing piece of long lost Gonzo journalism at its finest. Penn, an actor, long known for his political involvement, put himself in the direct line of peril and danger all while partnering with a famous Mexican film actress to infiltrate the most impenetrable depths of Narco activity. He shook hands, broke bread and slammed tequila with a man that the DEA and Mexican authorities have been unable to locate for close to six months. In my opinion, Penn’s story was a hell of a lot more ballsy than anything else any pampered Hollywood actor has attempted in the past twenty years. (Sorry, Julia Roberts. Playing an AIDS-sensitive doctor in The Normal Heart may have been considered “daring” but it pales in comparison to a 55-year-old Oscar winner risking his life to traipse deep into a jungle of death for an interview for a rock-n-roll magazine).
So, inspired by Sean Penn’s courage, I decided that the recent stories and essays I have written have felt a little too “soft.” I realized that had to step it up. Knowing that I was traveling back to my hometown of Tucson to visit my mother on Martin Luther King, jr. weekend, I made up my mind that I was going to turn the trip into my own personal “El Chapo rendezvous.” I had a great idea…
My goal was to track down Ernesto Gregory, the most successful marijuana dealer in my high school. The last I had heard of Ernesto was through a photograph taken around 2011 by our mutual high school friend, Erik. He posted a picture of the two of them on Facebook drinking in the desert. Erik had captioned the photo with He’s finally out! Welcome home boss!”
Assuming that this caption insinuated that he had just been released from some high security prison, I was under the impression that Ernesto had built up an El Chapo-like narcotics network of hundreds of foot soldiers and truckloads of contraband over the past 18 years. Why else would he have been in jail? Why would Erik call him “boss?” Plus, he was wearing the typical outfit. A Large Polo Horse logo situated on a blue collared shirt on top of True Religion designer jeans. DEA agents call this look “Narco Polo.” Now I have seen Sicario. I’ve watched Breaking Bad. I had no doubt that Ernesto had risen from low-grade weed dealer at Rincon/University High School into a southwestern drug legend – living in ranches and mansions sprawled across the Tucson and Mexico landscape.
And I was going to interview him.
Ernesto in high school.
I was set to fly into Tucson International Airport on January 17th. My plan was to eat a bunch of food at my mother’s house, drink wine and play three games of Scrabble all while hearing her talk about how amazing The Revenant was. The following day, I would travel deep into the center of Tucson to meet up with and interview the most intimidating and bad-ass pot dealer my high school had known.
Back in 1993, Ernesto Gregory had owned the school’s finest lowered mini truck. He had a 200-dollar Motorola pager. His “system” – or car stereo – was as custom as they came, complete with an Alpine tape deck, a Sony Discman attachment, two 12-inch Kicker woofers, some Kenwood tweeters and a constant bass thump of MC Breed, DJ Magic Mike and Wrecks ‘N Effect blasting from his trunk. He had his own apartment on Speedway, decked out with a two-foot bong, a television with cable and an unlimited financial account on a sort of early 90’s YouTube video-on-demand predecessor known as “The Box.” He always wore a black Colorado Rockies cap and Marithe and Francois Girbaud jeans beneath over-sized t-shirts of ridiculous animated Looney Tunes characters wearing 90’s hip-hop clothing. His pager code for weed was “907.” His girlfriend was the hottest girl in the senior class – a dark-haired Mexican sex goddess named Racquel Hernandez. And he was tough. As far as we knew, he had never lost a fight. In fact, I recalled him once putting my friend from Hebrew School – Adam Richford – into a headlock and smashing his nose repeatedly until he apologized for “mad-dogging” him in the parking lot. He claimed he had connections through “uncles in Nogales,” where his product came from. And everybody knew, anyone with “uncles in Nogales” was always in the drug game… In short, Ernesto Gregory was the most accomplished 18-year-old kid I had laid eyes on in my young life.
Ernesto’s Mini Truck from our 1993 yearbook.
After I landed, I told my mom about my plan.
“Why the hell are you meeting with this criminal?” My mother asked on the car ride from the airport.
“He was the king, mom!” I exclaimed. “Didn’t you read the Sean Penn article?”
“Sean Penn’s an idiot, going to interview that drug dealer!”
“I thought that story was genius,” I said. “Besides, what else am I going to write? Another story about my kids not being allowed to bring refined sugar to school?”
Following a few glasses of wine at the house, my mom was trying to convince me to go to Wal-Mart to buy a knife for the meeting. I assured her that Ernesto and I were in good standing and that no concealed weapons would be necessary. She broke into a desperate sweat. We played two games of Scrabble before deciding to put the third one on pause because we were so tired that word like “uh” and “is” had begun appearing on the board.
Our embarrassing 3rd game of Scrabble. 12-10 after 7 moves.
My final memory of the evening was listening to my mom curse my name before she went to bed in the other room.
The following morning I fueled up on eggs and coffee, not knowing when I would be back to the house. The afternoon’s plans had been Facebook “messaged” to me by Erik, who I quickly learned from his profile hadn’t left Tucson since graduation. Erik wrote me that Ernesto wasn’t on social media, but he mentioned that he did watch a lot of TV and he had even seen my History Channel show and had once commented, “I know that fucker!” He also told me that Ernesto had demanded that Erik take down the aforementioned photo he had posted in 2011. Sure enough, when I searched for it, it was no longer online… All this solidified my drug-lord theory even more.
Ernesto had agreed to meet at 12:30. I took off in my mother’s Acura and sped over to an address located in the shadow of the bar-heavy downtown area. A place much hipper and enticing than it had been back in the 90’s when druggies and skinheads and homeless wandered Congress Boulevard scaring off any young people looking for a good time. Must have been all the drug money given to the city by Ernesto, I theorized.
I parked in a dirt lot and immediately recognized Erik, who looked like he had been a meth fiend since about 1994. He wore a saggy shirt, filthy pants and sported a patchy beard and shaved head. He had a kid’s BMX bicycle in his pick up truck bed, which I took as also a sure sign of a man on crystal meth. For some reason, heavy meth addicts seemed to always travel on way-too-small dirt bikes. Erik wasn’t unlike them.
Erik looked a lot like this guy.
I looked up just as a helicopter darted above us in the sky. DEA drone, I thought. Of course. We were most likely being followed. Hell, who knew what corner or alleyway was outfitted with a hidden camera tracking Erik’s every move. Shit, maybe the FBI had caught on to my story as well? I mean, who’s to say they weren’t tracking Erik’s Facebook page when I sent him my original message? I was starting to hit an all-time level of paranoia. Even a pigeon that flapped above us and landed on a telephone wire looked like it had a hidden camera in its eye… I tried to keep my cool.
I was paranoid that all the pigeons around us had GoPros strapped to their backs.
Knowing some of the narco protocol, I began preparing for my meeting with Ernesto.
“So, should I give you my iphone for safety precautions?” I asked Erik.
“What for?” He replied.
“Oh, I just assumed I wasn’t allowed to bring any electronics to the meeting,” I said.
“We aint goin on no airplane or nothin,” he replied.
At this point, my entire drug kingpin theory went out the window. After all, in the El Chapo story, Sean Penn was told to turn his phone off in Los Angeles, nearly 14 hours before he even made contact with the cartel in Mexico. He had been forced to travel to in two separate SUV’s, two single engine planes and armored vehicles just to meet with El Chapo’s henchmen before gaining approval. He was most likely given a full body cavity search, frisked and water-boarded. Ernesto’s lone henchman was a meth fiend named Erik who was allowing me to bring my iphone into a meeting as if I was about to pitch him a new Angry Birds app to finance… Ernesto’s notorious drug cartel was crumbling before my eyes.
“Follow my truck, we’re going to shoot pool at Pockets,” Erik said.
“Pockets? We’re not going to his house or something?” I asked.
“What house?” He said. “Ernesto likes to play pool. You play pool?”
“Sure, man – I love pool,” I said.
I hate pool.
Pockets was a stale billiard hall way too brightly lit for a Wednesday afternoon. A few biker types with chain wallets and denim jackets drank Miller High Life at the bar. A Mexican guy who looked to be on his 5th or 6th Corona sat watching a soccer game on TV. One lone female, a waitress who would have slept with Bad Blake in the movie Crazy Heart after he played a set at a bowling alley, served beer. In the far west corner stood a chubby man in an Arizona Wildcats baseball cap chalking up his cue. I recognized him immediately as Ernesto Gregory.
Pockets in Tucson.
His face had filled in and he had put on close to 35 pounds. By his footwear and saggy jeans I could tell that he hadn’t done much to change his fashion choices during the past 22 years. He wore Jordan sneakers, which were probably eight years old and had accumulated a slew of new arm tattoos, including one portrait of a woman who looked a lot like a fatter version of Racquel Hernandez. He drank what I would soon learn was Jack Daniel’s and Diet Coke and was constantly adjusting his pants from the crotch area. My first thought was that the most accomplished 18-year-old I had ever known had become the sloppiest 40-year-old I had seen in some time.
“Zach Selwyn!” He announced as I nervously approached the pool table. “What up Hollywood!”
Oh boy. He was going to call me Hollywood the rest of the day, I knew it.
“I seen you on that TV show about the words and shit!”
“Yeah, America’s Secret Slang, thanks man.”
“Yeah, American Slang! That’s it, what up big homie?”
“Nada man, just trying to catch up with some old friends, ya know?”
“Well shit, let’s shoot some stick.”
Ernesto racked up some balls and began rattling off shots. He was a damn good pool player and I knew that even at my best – which was pretty terrible – I was about to be embarrassed. But, he told me to pick a cue and even though it was 1:30 in the afternoon, I ordered a pitcher of Bud Light. The waitress brought it over and charged me for it. It cost $3.75.
As Ernesto sank shot after shot, we never once discussed drug dealing. In fact, we spent most of our time talking about girls from high school that he had always wanted to screw. Turns out, he thought I was some Olympic-level cocksman in my teens and he assumed that I had slept with every cute girl in our high school. As he dug up names from the past, I could only laugh and try to remember who some of these girls even were. Most of them I had never been intimate with, but to placate Ernesto, I played along.
“Paula Schrapner? Yeah, I nailed her,” I said. Not true.
“Jen Robbins? Blow job,” I lied.
“Did you ever get together with Laura House?” Ernesto asked. “She was DOPE!”
“Uh, we just kissed,” I said, which was actually true. One New Years Eve 1992, we had briefly kissed.
“Man, I wonder what she’s up to now?” He said, staring off at a neon sign.
As the beers flowed, I was finding that I was having a hard time getting anything out of Ernesto. He was stuck in 1993, still pining for girls who were long married, divorced and even had kids in high school of their own. He remembered football games that I hadn’t even thought about in 20 years and quoted our Economics teacher Mr. Franklin from a class I didn’t even recall taking. When I took a second to ask him about Racquel Hernandez and what happened to their relationship, he grew silent, took out a vape pen and pulled long and hard.
“You know we have three kids, right?”
“I did not know that,” I said. “Congrats. I have two. How old?”
“19, 17 and 15,” he said. “But the 15-year-old has blue eyes and blonde hair – aint no way that kid’s mine. We broke up 12 years ago. My second wife bailed on me last year. Bitch.”
Wow. Here I was, stressing out about my 9 and 5-year-old kids in Los Angeles and this guy had been divorced twice and had three kids in high school – one who he was convinced wasn’t even his. I suddenly felt like every pampered Hollywood asshole I have come to despise.
“Hey Hollywood, you never slept with Racquel, did you?” He asked.
“What? Hell no!”
There was a sudden silence. Erik looked ready to tear out my jugular. Ernesto stared me down. This was what Adam Richford would call “mad-dogging.” My mom was right… I should have bought that knife.
“Man, I’m just playing!” He said. “You should see your face, you looked like a little bitch just now!”
Everybody laughed. I pounded my beer. It was then that I decided that I had to get the whole story right here or else I was going to end up on the wrong end of a bong in the south side of Tucson come six o’clock, getting high and watching some show like Ridiculousness on a Futon. I found my courage and lowered my voice to a whisper.
“So, Ernesto – you still in the weed game?” I asked.
Ernesto looked at me and laughed. He looked at Erik and then back to the pool table.
“Man, I aint dealt weed since high school,” he said.
“I thought you went to jail or something?” I inquired.
“Shit man… I shot some endangered pregnant salamander with a rifle during bow-hunting season. Thank God it didn’t die… Luckily I only did two nights in county jail, man. Sucked ass.”
He had shot a pregnant salamander with a rifle during bow-hunting season? He did two nights in county jail? El Chapo had done something like seven years in maximum security before his first escape… As far as I know, he never complained either. Here was my one-time narcotics hero admitting to me that he was scared after doing two measly nights for shooting a fucking lizard. My story was falling apart.
Salamanders can not be hunted with rifles during bow-hunting season.
“So, what about the last 15 years? I mean, what have you done for work?” I asked.
Ernesto sunk a 9 ball and looked up at me.
“I repair windshields, man. Over at Glassworx on Speedway.”
I watched him return to the table. My heart sank as he finished off the game by dropping the eight ball perfectly in the side pocket. My story was over. The most notorious drug dealer I had known had become a windshield repair guy. There was no mansion in the hills, no ranch house in Nogales… and no harem of sexy Mexican women. Ernesto had gone straight and my story was dead.
“Why do you ask, homie?” Ernesto inquired. “You need weed?”
Being that my story was a bust, I figured that the very least I could do was to go on one more pot buying deal in my old hometown. Maybe the dealer would be the drug kingpin I was looking for and I could write something about him instead.
“Yeah, sure man. Just a little bit to get me through the next two days.”
“Well, my dude sells dime bags over at hole 14 at the Golf N’ Stuff on Tanque Verde if you want to pick one up,” Ernesto said.
Dime bag? Golf N’ Stuff? I wasn’t interested. The last thing I needed was to buy Mexican weed from a kid at the same place where I had celebrated my 11-year-old birthday party. It just didn’t seem right.
Hole 14 at Golf N stuff. You can buy weed behind the yellow house.
“No that’s cool, man,” I replied. “I gotta get home anyway – maybe we can hook up tomorrow or something.”
“Are you sure?” He said. “This kid gets good shit… he has a couple of uncles in Nogales.”
Of course he did. I threw a five-dollar tip on the wooden table and finished off my beer. I high-fived Erik and Ernesto, promised to be in touch and promptly drove back to my mother’s house where I found her nervously pacing the living room like I was 15 again and out with a senior at my first high school party.
We opened a bottle of wine and finished our game of Scrabble…
I live about a mile from the building that was once the famous swing dance club known as “the Derby.” In the mid-late 90’s, when the swing music revolution twirled its way across the streets of Los Angeles and turned regular farm boys from the Midwest into Rat Pack wannabes, “the Derby” was the swing club to frequent.
In 1996, Jon Favreau was so inspired, he made a pretty great film about it called Swingers and suddenly star Vince Vaughn had the entire town looking for “beautiful babies” and saying that everything was “money.” I passed a bootleg VHS tape of the film around my college friends and soon fell in hook, line and sinker. After graduation, I dove head first into the post-Swingers madness that raised dirty martinis all over Hollywood. Lines formed around the Hillhurst/Los Feliz street corner where the Derby resided awaiting entrance into the ultimate haven of swing-cool.
I owned 15 bowling shirts, white “creeper” shoes, Cadillac-emblazoned pants, shoulder-pad heavy sport coats, a flask, three Big Bad Voodoo Daddy CDs and a t-shirt that said “It’s Frank’s World, Were all Just Living in It.” I went to Las Vegas monthly, drank gin and tonics and swept my hair up into a James Dean-inspired pompadour. I remember feeling so confident that my “swinger” image would live with me for the rest of my days, I traveled to New York City around 1999 and searched out underground West Village swing clubs to show Manhattan that a “Real Life Hollywood Swinger” was in their presence. Somehow the façade worked and after ringing up a $290 credit card bill, I managed to make out with a girl named ‘Kitty’ who had a Stray Cats tattoo on her shoulder before retiring to her floor mattress in Brooklyn where she woke up six times during the night to smoke Marlboro Reds.
It was all because of Swingers.
And then, about five years ago, it was announced that the Derby was going to be transformed into a Chase Bank. The bar where I spent my early 20’s was suddenly going to be a place where I would curse the teller for charging me a checking account fee… The club where I once dated the hottest bartender in town was turning into a place where a gal named Evelyn would inform me my mortgage was ten days late. When I heard the news, I knew this was not good. The Derby? I thought… A bank? WWJFD? (What Would Jon Favreau Do?)
Turns out, Favreau had bigger fish to fry. Even though he could have easily bought the Derby and used it to store his Iron Man memorabilia, he ignored my twitter plea for him to buy the bar and turn it into a museum. I’m sure Vince Vaughn most likely drank at “Mess Hall,” the restaurant next door, toasting the ghosts of the barroom that made him a movie star… but he was also too busy and uninspired to save the bar. I even tweeted actor Patrick Van Horn, who played SUE in the film. He at least took the time to write me back by quipping “End of an Era.”
A week before the Derby was to be gutted, I gathered my old “Swinger buddies,” – now dads who had traded in slick sport coats and suspenders for Old Navy hoodies – and we poured out some gin for Favreau and Vaughn, for Sinatra, for dirty martinis, for the incredible wooden Derby ceiling, for the memories we had shared at the bar and for the debauched nights spent watching amazing swing bands like Royal Crown Revue sing “walk right in, walk right out…”
We even quoted the movie a few more times to make sure we still knew all the classic lines. “Get there…” “This place is deaaad anyway…” “He’s all growns up… I would never eat here.” “You’re the fun-loving out going party guy, and you’re sweating some lawn jockey?” The night went on and on.
Seanny Walls, Big Daddy Jake and the author, feelin’ “Money” in 1998. #jawline
As the evening died down, we all retired a lot earlier than we had in the late 90’s and excused ourselves back to our families. The next week, the Chase Bank transformation had begun and the last remaining memories of my first few years out of college were carried out and discarded.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in line at the Chase, staring up at the exact same wooden ceiling that I had spun girls beneath in the past. The ceiling beneath which I had done shots of Crown Royal a hundred times. The ceiling that watched over me as I tried to find assimilation with a unique sect of people during those weird times when you’re not yet quite sure who you were – who you are – or where you are going.
I got up to the bank teller and deposited my meager check, taking a moment to remark that this building was once my one-time favorite nightclub.
Without making eye-contact she mumbled, “Yep, every one of you middle-aged guys who comes in here has the same story.”
“Fuck off,” I whispered under my breath.
I took another glance at the ceiling and thought of the days gone by. Hollywood is forever a town of transformation. Very few restaurants and bars make it ten years… hence the stories you read about now defunct clubs like The Trip, The Cathouse and Gazzari’s that were the most happening places to be. In my life, the Derby was certainly my place. The place where I was part of a nationwide fad that engulfed my youth when I was a mere lump of clay awaiting to be molded into the lump of Play-Doh I am these days.
As I looked down at my bank receipt and realized how far this journey in Hollywood had taken me, I thought of the dreams I had at age 22 that were still somewhat unrealized. When places that mean so much to you as a kid disappear, you fail to immediately recognize that they will be gone for good and the memories will fade or melt into new ones until all you have left are a few photographs and some journal entries. I look back at my two years as a pseudo-swinger as important remembrances that I will take with me through all of my life. At the time I thought I’d be 22 forever, twirling cute tattooed ladies across slick wooden floors only pausing to sip drinks and wipe the sweat from our brows. I never thought I’d be 40-years-old and in the exact same room looking down at a bank statement stressing about the fact that I barely had enough money that week to cover my DWP bill.
The line leading to these steps would wrap around to Los Feliz Blvd.
Again, my thoughts turned to Jon Favreau. As the worlds most in demand director, he probably never imagined he would achieve the level of success he has back when he was simply searching for familiarity amongst the Hollywood night-crawlers of the mid 90’s. I reached back out to my old swinger buddies and arranged another drinking night to sit back and reminisce about the Derby days gone by, and we all agreed to get together on a following Tuesday night.
Of course, by Monday morning, everybody had flaked and the plans were cancelled so we could spend some time with our families. We all agreed to try again later, and I thought about how a little piece of all of us died the day the Derby did…
And a part of me knew, that somewhere, high up in those Malibu Hills, Jon Favreau was feeling the same thing…
Buy Zach’s Book “Talent Will Get You Nowhere” on Amazon.com!
Yesterday, like I do most days, I dropped my kids off at school. Then, instead of racing to the gym to run five miles on a treadmill, I went to the grocery store and bought some orange juice and roll-your-own cigarettes. Now, normally, at this point I usually turn my car back towards my house to continue writing screenplays that nobody will ever read… However, this morning was different. I merged onto the 10 Freeway heading west. My destination: Venice Beach.
I should probably mention that I had an eighth of psychedelic mushrooms in my back pocket.
I’m not really sure what inspired me to ‘shroom all by myself on the sands of Venice Beach on a random Tuesday afternoon, but I’m hearing from some friends that it had something to do with feeling middle-aged. Something to do with the routine existence I have been living ever since I had kids. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that I recently re-read an old college “drug journal” where I spent nine pages describing how I, “shook hands with a very nice lawn chair” during a mushroom trip in 1995.
Whatever it was, I knew one guy who had a connection to mushrooms and he lived in a 1973 Volkswagen Hatchback on the outskirts of Bronson Canyon. He traded me the ‘shrooms for some Screen Actor’s Guild Award screener DVDs… I hope he likes The Imitation Game.
The last time I did psychedelic drugs of any sort was sometime in early 2000 when I hiked into Sabino Canyon in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona and had a spiritual love-making session with the Sonoran Desert. I wrote about five songs in five hours, including one called “Tucson Afternoon” which I filmed a video for years later in the same desert vortex. I was in my mid-20’s and I thought that one last act of frivolity would guide me past the disappointing years I had been coasting through in Hollywood and help me find a new path. Lo and behold, I ended up connecting with a vibe I never even knew existed in my life, which is why if you look at younger pictures of me, a tremendous amount of turquoise jewelry began sprouting around my fingers and neckline around this age. Following my little desert sojourn, I immediately gave away my collection of Vince Vaughn Swingers-inspired suits and began dressing like a Laurel Canyon cowboy from 1972. That was 16 years ago.
It was time to change things up.
1999/2001. From Vince Vaughn to Don Henley.
Venice Beach on a Tuesday morning is not the Venice Beach you know on a crowded tourist-filled weekend. There are a lot more junkies in plain sight. The smell of weed is even more prevalent – as if cops have just given up – and a dozen or so 1960’s holdovers still worship the decade on the steps of a head shop where they play side one of The Soft Parade on repeat until lunch. The hot women on roller skates are much harder to find. Surfers are packing up from their early rides and beach cops twirl batons while overlooking school-aged skateboarders dropping into the inverted cement bowl. A few human wrecking balls work out in bikini briefs at Muscle Beach (Why this is an acceptable outfit in this day and age I still don’t know) and pose for pictures. Finally, scores of young aspiring rappers hustle their CD’s to Hungarian pedestrians by making them put on headphones and listen to their latest hip-hop creations. It’s a racket, but one that works. In two hours, I will be smoking a blunt with one of these rappers – a mediocre emcee named Philly Phill, telling him about my failed hip-hop album from 1999. He will be telling me how he made 75,000 dollars selling his own CD on the boardwalk in the past year.
I decided to eat a cap and a stem in order to time out my peak just as I arrived at the beach. In mushroom speak, a cap and a stem is a small amount – but probably enough for a good 8-9 hours of full tripping. With any luck, I’d be able to drive home safely around 5:30 and greet my kids as they walked in the door. Plus, I had promised my wife I would clean the kitchen.
It was 8:45 a.m. when the bitter fungi hit my mouth and it tasted as I remembered. Like chalk dipped in vinegar. I gulped down some of the orange juice and went to find a spot on the beach where I could lay out the Mexican blanket I had bought in Sayulita ten years earlier.
Now if I were to go hiking, at most, I would probably pack a water bottle and a cell phone with me. Let’s just say I packed a little heavier for this trip. In my backpack, which made me look like a college kid with scoliosis traveling around Europe in the 90’s, I had two Nalgene water bottles, an iphone charger, a Bluetooth boom box, my laptop, a portable electronic charger, a Wu-Tang Clan hoodie, some sunglasses, contact lens solution, three loose joints, two lighters, a blanket, a floppy beach hat, a cowboy hat, a pair of Dizm sunglasses, a pocket knife (In case I needed to skin a possum), a banana, a four pack of Golden Road IPA beer, my journal and three cans of La Croix sparkling water.
I could survive a month in an internment camp with that much shit.
I also had my guitar with me, in case I was able to find musical inspiration the way I did all those years ago. So, that was how my day began. Freezing my balls off, strumming my guitar and staring at the sea.
Around 9:30, I noticed it all start to come alive. The ocean was inviting, the sands swirling and the marine layer was showing good promise of burning off. I began to smile incessantly, the way that actor does at the end of Boyhood when he takes mushrooms and traipses into the Texas wilderness with that hot freshman girl. My mind immediately went back to the beach memories of my college days. Suddenly, Danielle Watts was in a bikini ten yards away. Melissa Dirks was handing out cigarettes and I was filled with the false promise of the summer of 1995 lasting forever. Only problem was, I was not 18 anymore. I was three months away from 40. Those frivolous anything-can-happen years were long gone, washed away out to the oceans of time where they will forever tread water. As I shook off the memories of the beautiful girls of my youth, I swear to God that I suddenly saw my old mushroom buddy Dan walking towards me. His hair was still long and blonde and a Grateful Dead shirt was where a daily three-piece suit rests now. I was hoping he’d come over and join me in playing a cover of Uncle John’s Band like the old days. He walked over, clasped his hands together as if to say “Namaste” and sat down next to me. At this point, I was so high, I actually called him ‘Dan.’
“I’m not Dan, brother – My name’s Epic,” he said.
“Zach” I told him, unsure of how he invaded my space. Had I invited him? Did I wave him over thinking he was Dan? Was this guy safe? Luckily, my pocket knife was within reach in case I needed to cut someone.
“What are you playing?” He asked, his brown teeth slurring through a prickly beard that resembled the druggy kids I had managed to avoid in parking lots my entire life.
“Nothing, really – man. Just strumming, looking at the waves,” I said, slurring my speech somewhat to a delivery that was part Spicoli- part McCounaghey but sounded very convincing and inviting.
“You know Melissa by the Allman Brothers?” He asked.
I did. I tried to play. The frets melted in my hand. My motor skills were down. I was not fully operational.
“You know what’s weird?” I said. “Legs.”
He nodded. I didn’t know if he could tell if I was on mushrooms or not, but we spoke about how small we all are in the grand scheme of things – How weird it was that when my guitar was made in the 70’s, there were probably 40-year-old dreamers hanging on this same beach just like we were. Now, those guys are 81.
That tripped me out. But it made me believe that this little outing was a very positive thing to do. A good decision. I was aware that the majority of men my age were stuck in some shitty job they hated, pushing emails and paper – definitely NOT on drugs on a beach watching a palm tree behave like Bart Simpson.
This tree acted like Bart Simpson all morning.
Epic said he had to leave. He rolled about 9 of my cigarettes before taking off and I thanked him for being a part of my day. He said he’d write, but we never exchanged any information. I looked at my watch. It was 11:30. I had spent two hours with a complete stranger, watching his facial hair crawl around his lips thinking they were ants. I wrote the following entry in my journal:
Venice. An Epic adventure. One with the anthill beard who melted away as I watched the Simpsons dance in the background. Wish my son wasn’t 8 and he could do this with me. That’s a terrible idea. I have been holding my guitar for two hours and I’ve played one E Minor chord. The clouds are beginning to chloroform. The sky is beginning to shift shape. Interrupted by seabirds longing for the cape. That cloud looks like fondue. OMG! Her shape her shape… Oh how I miss her shape. I’m ship shape.
I peed in a hole I dug in the sand. I smoked, even though I don’t really smoke. I put my guitar away and listened to Black Beauty by Love and Two Sides to Every Story by Gene Clark about 15 times. I smoked a little weed and tried to count the grains of sand in my palm.
I remember suddenly wishing I had brought sunscreen. I thought of all the rich people living up the strand in Malibu. I used to want to live there. I thought a lot about red Tic-Tacs and Fleetwood Mac.
The next thing I knew, a crew of the aforementioned rappers smelled the weed I had been smoking and decided to come join me for a quick puff.
“You like that hip-hop?” One of them called out, perhaps noting that I was now listening to Black Sheep A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing on my iphone.
“Yeah, man.”
“Check this out,” a guy with the letter ‘P’ tattooed on the right side of his eyelid said, forcing a homemade burnt CD-R into my hands. “Fifteen dollar suggested donation.”
Intimidated, I put on his Sony Discman headphones and listened. It was rap. Bad rap. In fact, it was terrible. Still, I bobbed my head, acting as if this guy was the second coming of Kendrick Lamar. A beach hustler who would someday open for Drake… Instead, I knew I could out-rap the dude on the spot. I didn’t dare suggest that.
Maybe as a way to just avoid any more coercion, I gave him fifteen bucks and thanked him for the CD. On the top of the record, written crudely in Sharpie marker was his name, a weed leaf and the album title: Philly Phill: Tha Game Done Changed.
Philly Phill’s homemade CD – Note the marijuana leaf my 4-year-old could have drawn.
Phill and his buddies passed a blunt. I took a few rips of it, mainly appreciating the crawling visuals of the exhaled smoke sailing skyward like dragon vapor from our mouths. We looked cool. I think I said something like, “I loooove smoke.” Phill then grabbed his Discman and moved back to the boardwalk to hustle some more white people the way he just hustled me.
It was now 1:00 p.m. I wasn’t hungry, but I was thirsty. I drank some water and felt the gross warmth of the beers in my bag. I put my guitar in its case and decided that I needed to take a walk. Get the bones moving. Rattle the cage. I made it about 50 yards before salivating over a group of four sorority girls tanning near a lifeguard station.
My whole life, I have seen drugged out dudes leering at young girls. On city streets, in shopping malls… and yes, especially on beaches. I sat and smoked and stared. I wanted these girls so badly. I wanted them to walk over and say I was handsome and then offer to take me into their parent’s beach house down the strand where we would drink margaritas and have surly, mind-bending sex… Oh, you guys want to film this on camera for your million-dollar porn site? No problem…
I think the girl in the pink bikini noticed me first. She used some phrase like, “Ew, creeper, two o’clock” and they looked over at me and turned away. Fantasy shattered. Cover blown. Game over.
This was NOT the girl in the pink bikini. But that day, I remember her looking like this…
I went back over to my blanket, where I was astounded to find my iphone, wallet, laptop and guitar untouched. I had just left everything I owned in the great wide open – amongst the homeless and the crack fiends and the beach bums – and NOTHING had been taken or touched. Miraculous. The only out of the ordinary thing that had happened was that my wife had called.
I had told her I was going to Venice Beach to find some inspiration, but I may have failed to mention the mushrooms. She left a long message. I knew my mind wasn’t quite yet ready for communication with my real life, so I didn’t listen to it. Instead, I packed most of my stuff in my car and walked over towards the cheesy T-shirt shops along the boardwalk to find something beautiful to immortalize my journey with.
I bought a dream catcher.
I passed on the T-shirt of a fisherman getting a blow-job from a mackerel.
I spent way too long in the Native American flute store listening to an R. Carlos Nakai album and smiling at the cashier.
Finally, I sat and watched a mediocre full court game of basketball where, in two hours, roughly 11 minutes of game play took place due to the fighting, foul calling and shit-talking.
“The Happy Fisherman” t-shirt I somehow passed up.
After spending a few hours around a community of people like this, you really begin to see everyone’s personalities. Familiar faces reappear on different parts of the beach. A level of contentment sets in. I began to understand how people come to these places, get sucked in and never leave.
Around 4:00 I was beginning to come down, but I knew I had to catch the sunset. A Los Angeles smog-drenched sunset is a miraculous thing to witness, whether you’re on mushrooms or not. Still, I did promise my wife I’d be home by 5:30. I called my brother, the only person I told about my little mushroom journey, and he convinced me to stay.
“No way you’re leaving the beach – you have to see last light,” he said.
He was right. The sunset was tangerine and mesmerizing and sweeping and everlasting and inspiring and I sang a few bars of a new song idea into my phone recorder. I spent an hour looking at photos of my family, realizing how lucky I was to have THEM. How lucky I was to not be sleeping on the beach that night and hustling my CD to tourists with Philly Phill year-round. I was a father and I suddenly didn’t want anything else but my family.
I thought about the traffic I was about to face on the way home and decided to wait it out, rather than get caught in the Waze vs. Google Maps battle that I would have on my journey back to Hollywood. I wrote one last journal entry:
Umbrellad beneath this canopy of calliopes. Her feathers float from her hair. The Stellar sinister society… always calls me back on there… French Fry French Fry. I would make a bad waitress.
If you ever want to re-affirm your life’s decisions, eat some mushrooms near the Venice bike path some afternoon .
I had to go. I winked good-bye to my tripping field and fumbled my way back to my car. I was Jim Morrison. I was Jack Keuroac. I was Hunter S. Thompson. At one point, I dictated into my phone that I was as talented as Ewan McGregor. I don’t know why I did that. The point was, I had discovered a fresh creative line… A new moment of light – and a beautiful reaffirming of my current position on this earth.
On the way home I slipped Philly Phil’s CD into my car stereo and turned it as loud as I could. There were only five songs. They were as wack as it gets. Still, he made more money as a musician than I did that day.
It had been 16 years since I tripped in the desert and emerged swathed in leather, denim and turquoise. Now, as I looked at my much shorter hair in the mirror and the white V-neck t-shirt I was wearing that I had bought in a 12-pack from Target a week before, I peered in the rear view mirror at the fading memory of a wonderful day at the Pacific Ocean.
Philly Phill repeated the one lyric on his CD that I had to agree with.