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own. It was called punk rock, and it was my thing now.

CHAPTER FIVE
     

     
    I continued to get a lot of shifts at the Black Angus, the steak house in Northridge where my brother worked. Once I had socked away a few paychecks, I decided to rent an apartment. I headed straight for Hollywood and began my search for the perfect place. Well, the perfect place that I could afford. Okay, so I was looking for a cheap place.
    One of the best spots I had found to sleep in my car was on Orchid Street, just up the hill from Franklin. It seemed natural to look in that area—though, of course, anywhere up the hill was out of the question because the higher up you went, the higher the rents were. One morning I woke up, left the Maverick parked in the shade of a wooded hillside block, and walked down toward Franklin in search of a bargain in the skeezy, treeless streets below.
    Orchid went through to Hollywood Boulevard then, right behind Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—Mann’s at the time. That short block of Orchid between Franklin and Hollywood was one of the most drug-infested lanes in the city, visited nightly by dealers, hookers, and cops. The Chinese Theatre was a mess back then, too, full of creeps.
    I saw an “apt for rent” sign in a window and ducked into the Amour Arms, an apartment building on that block behind the Chinese Theatre. The place available was a ground-floor studio apartment, one room with a hot plate and a little fridge. The window looked out onto an alley—there were alleys behind all the buildings in this part of Hollywood. The price was $240 per month.
    When I told the woman who managed the place that I would take it, she said it was a Section 8 building. I said nothing.
    Then she said, “Are you Section 8?”
    “I don’t know,” I told her. These days I know it’s the designation for federally subsidized low-income housing. But back then I had no idea what it meant.
    “Well, do you go to the music school?”
    “No,” I said. In fact, not only did I not attend the school, I didn’t know about its existence until she mentioned it that very moment. I had to ask Slash about it later. Turned out just around the corner, above the wax museum on Hollywood Boulevard, the Musicians Institute trained shredders like Paul Gilbert of Mr. Big and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
    “Just say you do,” she said. “Say, ‘Yes, I do.’”
    “Yes, as a matter of fact, I do go to the music school,” I said.
    I got the apartment.
    My first night there, a police chopper buzzed overhead, beaming its searchlight into the alley my window faced. My room was briefly as bright as midday and I heard a lot of rustling, running, and shouting outside. Helicopters—“ghetto birds,” as the other residents called them—circled over Hollywood all the time. And those searchlights shined into my window on a nightly basis as the cops chased people around the alleys of my new neighborhood.
    The other thing I noticed that first night was an odd sensation when I first turned out the lights and flopped down on the mattress on the floor. It felt as if something were crawling on me. At first it was on one of my legs, then on my back. When I felt it on my face, I jumped up and turned on the lights. My bed—the entire apartment, in fact—was teeming with cockroaches. I went to war with rolled-up newspapers. I say newspapers plural because I had to throw away one after another as they became wet with bug guts after a dozen swats or so. I could never quite win that war, though, and soon I had to reconcile myself to falling asleep with those bugs crawling on me. Ah, the glamorous life of Hollywood.
    Still, after living in an unfinished house in Seattle, crashing for a week in a San Francisco squat, and sleeping in my car and showering at my brother’s place, I finally had a place to call home. And anyway, cockroaches don’t bite.
    A mother and her twenty-year-old daughter lived across the hall and they were always