it's a neat old battered velvet box that is satin-lined inside:
The less personal antiques I've kept in here over the years (I think I started this box during college and continued adding things to it through my early twenties) are two little notebooks; one is a giveaway pocket notebook from union-made Carhartt Master Cloth Overalls, from 1947, and a little blue daily calendar, another free giveaway, from American Surety Company, from 1943. Someone has written their social security number in that beautiful old-fashioned cursive, but there are no engagements or anything written in the calendar.
Then there are little assorted things like write-ups pertaining to me in some way that I'd ripped out of L.A. Weekly -- these are all from when I was in high school but I think I moved them from an old treasure box to this one because this box was sort of like my brag book -- it has numbers I got from boys and a couple girls from bars and parties when I was sowing my wild oats, a couple old love letters, and a couple very sweet friendship letters. The clippings from the L.A. Weekly are about Elizabeth Dunn's birthday party at Jabberjaw and also a show my old band Foxfire played with The Third Sex, Patsy and Longstocking at the Impala. One of the friendship letters is from an ex-friend and it makes me miss her friendship -- part of it goes: I want you to believe in me, not like some dashboard jesus that tells the temperature, but the way everyone wishes that can believe in themselves." The love letters from exes are too depressing to look at but it's just that sort of thing you have to keep one or two of, and the telephone numbers are seriously just like a reminder to myself at the time that wow people actually found me physically attractive, or at least enough.
The prize of this box is a little come-on note that Steve Adler formerly of Guns N' Roses handed to me when I used to be a security guard at the building where he lived. It's a pretty sleazy little note:
This is normally the type of thing I'd think is gross, but I LOVED Guns N' Roses obsessively when I was in my early teens, so I couldn't help but be flattered, and also, Adler was just a really sweet goofy guy, and it was sort of impossible to feel mad at him. A lot of the other rich people that lived in that building would act like they were cool with me, as a palatable representative of the working man that they had to see when they entered their building, but then when they were in a bad mood about a neighbor making noise or the mail being late or when they were drunk, they turned into complete dicks to me. But never Steve Adler -- he was always good-natured. I think he is a little brain damaged and that he's had a stroke, because he only talks out of one side of his mouth, so maybe that also accounted for my feelings of friendship for him. He asked me the next day if I got his note and I was just like "Uh-huh," and didn't follow up with any sign of interest or anger and he totally just left it at that and went on acting sweetly goofy. Steve Fucking Adler from Guns N' Fucking Roses!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
