When I was in sixth grade I was still trying to listen to pop music to fit in, but one day my dead mom let me wear her Doors shirt, a bleach stained black t-shirt with Jim Morrison’s mug shot from Dade County Florida on it, and underneath that the words “charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, profanity, and drunkenness.” I could have shown up to school that day in a disingenuous outfit of Body Glove gear, but instead I chose to celebrate a moment in history when a sexy rockstar got drunk and whipped his dick out. I’d arrived. Within a few months the Guns N’ Roses albums Use Your Illusions I and II hit the shelves of Tower Records and the Wherehouse Music Store and my mom, who was born with the anarchistic aplomb, the witty or sometimes just brutal anger and the frantic creativity with which an outsider (punks, goths, metalheads, angel-headed hipsters) learns to deal with mainstream society, was right there with me, choosing which of the two to cassettes to buy first, because she only had enough money for one. I chose Use Your Illusion II first, the one where the hit single “Don’t Cry” starts with “If we could see tomorrow, what of your plans?” as opposed to the version from Use Your Illusion I, which went like, “Talk to me softly, there’s something in your eyes.”
Mom was more like a partner in
crime than a parent, so we navigated the road of heavy metal together and we
were all in, which made our once-weekly (Sunday, of course) trips to Hollywood
Boulevard a necessity.
I think Hollywood had been the
epicenter of the Heavy Metal scene since the late eighties, but I didn’t join
in until 1992, when I was thirteen. By then, it was more pop than
underground, which was perfect for a girl and her mom – I wouldn’t develop a
taste for genuine rawness until 1994, when I became a Riot Grrrl (which is when
Hollywood turned on me one night when my riot grrrl band played at a venue just
a few blocks from where all this giddy consumption of metal culture had
occurred, and I got jumped by a gang of skinheads after my show, who broke a
bottle over my head and then dragged me around by my hair until my Mom made her
way through the crowd to protect me and they beat the shit out of her as well).
Hollywood Boulevard had roughly two Heavy Metal shops per block in the early nineties, from at least Highland Boulevard to La Brea Boulevard. They mostly stocked the same goods, but with a slightly different focus. There was a shop, for example, that mainly catered to heavier bands with more male than female fans, like Megadeth, Pantera, Iron Maiden and Slayer. There was one shop that catered to a similar crowd but also carried weapons and a pin-back with a swastika on it - the Army Surplus store . We had to go in each shop regardless of its varying degrees of hostility or friendly inclusion of peacock feather earrings or peace sign pins among the pentagrams kept in the glass jewelry display case (not to say we didn’t like pentagrams, but we also liked peacock feathers) – that was part of the ritual. Go in each heavy metal shop, counterbalance the joyful vapidity with a trip to Chatterton’s bookstore where the grumpy old man that owned it had been friends with Bukowski, and end the day at an aspiring sports bar called Snow White cafĂ©, for which Mom saved enough money to buy me a slice of cheesecake and two glasses of white wine for herself (our business wasn’t necessarily welcome there – Mom probably didn’t tip much and we were always the only weirdos there, but I loved all the murals of the eponymous fairy tale on the walls). Mom was supposed to be sober, or something like that.
What else was part of the ritual, before the two bus rides we had to take there, totaling at least two hours of travel time each way?
Dressing up – piling some extra grim reapers and fairies onto the normal the amount that weaved its way into both our outfits (somehow, pewter fairies and castles, as well as jewelry made from polished stones, were always available in heavy metal stores, maybe because it was all fantasy?) Mom dressed up more than me, because her experience of the metal scene involved sexuality and maybe attracting a mate, whereas my experience was a sweet haze of forgiving Axl Rose for using the N-word because maybe he was using it ironically. Good God, my Mom – she looked so cool. She’d regularly spend money she’d gotten off her best friend to get her hair cut at a salon on the boulevard that specialized in heavy metal hair, almost managing to get her frizzy tresses that never quite made her look anything but imbalanced, to lay in wild waves like Lita Ford (“Went to a party last Saturday night, didn’t get laid, I got in a fight, uh-huh, it ain’t no big thing”!). She’d always piled on the costume jewelry but now it was silver rings (gold was for the mainstream, silver was for witchy rock n’ rollers) on each finger, sometimes 2 on a finger, of the aforementioned pentagrams and Grim Reapers (the fairies were more my deal). She wore huge hoop earrings in each of the three pierced holes she had in each ear. Often she wore a leopard-printed scarf in her hair, the same black dress and a dirty neck (she rarely bathed) encircled with silver necklaces strung with charms, more grim reapers but also a half-moon with a smiling face or a bit of ironic catholic iconography like a small laminated pendant of the Virgin Mary. To top it off, the smells of cigarette smoke, patchouli, and, if you got close enough to smell her breath, Vodka.
What I remember most fondly now is what embarrassed me at the time, Mom sometimes taking pictures of the heavy metal guys she called “babes.” She did this pretty much whenever she had film in the camera. She was like, “Hey, you’re a babe, can I take a picture of you?” Always so self-serious, these metal guys in their twenties, who desired not my cool-looking Mom but women who looked like cheerleaders, only half of them said yes. It makes me smile to think of the awkwardness she caused with this bit of objectification, and what I wouldn’t give to have found these rolls of films when looking through the piles of bedbug-ridden junk she left behind when she died, instead of the three undeveloped rolls of pictures of her cats that I unearthed instead, the last favorite subject of this rock n’ roll woman whose mental illness got the best of her.
