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| The Pretenders' Brass in Pocket |
I try to approximate the time travel Billy Pilgrim is able
to effortlessly accomplish in Slaughterhouse 5 by researching every facet of my
memories on the internet. If I suddenly
remember that for a long time I saved a postcard of cats dressed as people in a
box of special things for years and years, I look up “postcards cats as people”
and voila, now I know that what I’m remembering is a postcard by Alfred Mainzer. Three shadows from my past are coming to
mind, however, as unsolvable mysteries that I can never find adequate online
information about, at this is them:
Nardi’s Gay Bar in Pasadena, CA on Colorado Boulevard: when my mom’s best friend Bill Tunilla was
still alive and before his legendary used bookstore went out of business, I spent
at least 3 hours a weekend sitting in the little area of collapsing, gray from
filth wing chairs in the center of the store, encamped among stacks of books
and magazines mom and me set aside to look through before they got shelved for
sale. Bill’s loyal customers always
thought those chairs were there for them, that Bill, their god of cat/England/literature-loving
bachelorhood put these chairs there because he loved talking to them so much, but
HELLO!, those chairs were there for me and my mom, the queen and princess of
Bill’s bookstore. The 3 of us were
outcasts, and as a little kid I thought of gay people as outcasts too, so I loved
the fact that there was a gay bar next door to the bookstore, and I was endlessly
pleased when I heard songs I liked (usually The Pretenders’ Brass in Pocket)
coming through the wall from their juke box.
I only got to go in there a couple times and only for a few seconds each
time. It was eventually torn down. But when?
I don’t remember, and this seems a very important fact for me. I have so many dreams where Bill is still
alive and we’re hanging out in an old version of Pasadena that no longer
exists, often in his bookstore that was torn down along with Nardi’s, and the
dreams feel so real but they are just dreams.
But if I could only find some cache of information about Nardi’s online,
preferably a pictorial history of it, I would feel so much less frustrated by
the fact that Bill can be so alive in my dreams and so dead in the waking
present.
Little Nell: Like
many weirdos, I loved The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was a teenager,
feeling that it was “my” movie, and getting excited when I noticed little things
in it I’d never noticed before (“Wow, did you see that? The people in the crowd at the wedding are
the same actors who play Magenta, Riff Raff and Columbia! Is that supposed to mean that they had their
eye on Brad and Janet from the get-go and somehow orchestrated their flat tire
so they’d have to end up at the castle?!
I wonder…”). By far my favorite
character was Columbia, played by a woman named Nell Campbell, called “Little
Nell” in the film’s credits. What would
be my dream Rocky Horror minutiae to unearth some day while very bored and
looking at stuff online? Pictures and
pictures and pictures of Little Nell in her day-to-day life as well as in her other film
roles, and very many in-depth interviews with her about her dreams and
aspirations. But she has hardly any
online presence. The Wikipedia page
about her has no photos, and when I type “Little Nell Campbell” on Google, it
auto-completes to “Little Nell Dead?” Shit, if she is dead, I want to see what her urn is an unusual shape and if Tim Curry
did the eulogy. But I never find any adequate information about her to sate my curiosity.
Michelle Johnson:
Michelle was one of the artsy adults I totally wanted to be like when I was
a little kid. She was a friend of my mom’s,
and when I was a teenager, we hung out a few times without my mom, practically
as peers. Because her name is so common,
I have a particularly hard time Googling her, because there are so many women
with her name, even just living in the area she used to live in when I still
knew her. I have to be satisfied just
wondering what she looks like or thinks like now, when I wake up from dreams in
which she’d been a character.
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an Alfred Mainzer cat postcard
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| Little Nell as Columbia |
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This is the bookstore that expanded on Colorado Boulevard -- the owner owned the whole block and raised Bill's and Nardi's rents impossibly high so he could make them go out of business, and expand his store. This is where retired CalTech and Occidental College professors go to buy $7 slices of carrot cake and Cafe Au Laits to sip while sitting in the coffee shop there, listening to Enya and looking over their recent purchases: The new issues of the New Yorker and The Atlantic. That's alright, but what about the outcasts?
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| Billy Pilgrim |
