Read Running With Monsters: A Memoir for Free Online

ignored her.
    “Bobby, did you hear what I said?”
    “No,” I said as I shook some cornflakes into a bowl.
    A tone of anger crept into her voice. “You need to show me some respect, young man!”
    “I don’t ‘need’ to do anything.”
    And then, for added emphasis, I took a plate from the rack and smashed it on the floor and stalked out of the kitchen and went to my room, where I slammed the door and cranked up the Clash on my stereo. It wasn’t one of my finest moments. It was stupid and small, but it hurt her. And much more than I knew.
    A few days later, Helen told me, “I can’t live like this anymore.” She retired. She was done. She packed up and left to live with her sisters in a retirement community on the edge of Los Angeles and I was on my own as a high school senior. The separation was good for us. Helen was free to enjoy her retirement and I learned fast about rent and responsibility. A two-bedroom apartment like ours, a block west of Beach Boulevard, the main drag through town, cost a steep—for then—$650 a month. I took on a roommate to help with expenses and keep solvent, but I was totally unprepared for what I had taken on. Even with the money I had coming in from work and Social Security—and the help I got from family as long as I did okay in school—I had no idea how to budget. I was lost emotionally and financially. If rent was due in four days and I only had $450, I’d immediately go out and spend $200 on cocaine and booze to feel better about the situation, but then I’d be even farther in the hole.
    I took on an additional job. There was a nightclub in Costa Mesa called the Cuckoo’s Nest that was a popular spot for surf punks from Orange County and rusticated hillbilly punks from landlocked San Bernardino County and the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County. The club shared a parking lot with a redneck bar called Zubie’s and the local cops and beer-addled urban cowboys had no problems hassling the kids, who, naturally, pushed back. It was a fun place. Chaotic. I hung out a lot with a band called the Popsicles who were managed by Kim Fowley. They weren’t quite punk and they weren’t quite rock. In a lot of ways, the Popsicles were like a male version of Fowley’s earlier group the Runaways. They were good-looking enough to be featured in Teen Beat magazine. If they’re remembered at all now, it’s for their cover of ABBA’s “Tiger.” You had to have some balls to cover ABBA in those days. It was a fun scene, and with pressure from the rent and my living situation in Huntington Beach, I decided to get smart and get out. As soon as school was over and I graduated from Marina High, I moved to a house in Costa Mesa, where I rented a room for $75 a month. A great burden had been lifted from my young shoulders. And I had a lot more money for drugs. That was good.
    I stayed enrolled at Golden West College. One of my roommates, Dave Hansen, took courses there too. It was a sun-struck campus of low-slung buildings near the old grasshopper-like derricks that pumped the last drops of crude from the oil fields that spawned the area’s 1920s oil boom. The school was close to the surf and had lovely, lovely coeds, tanned and ripe, like creatures straight out of a soda ad. It was like being in the middle of a Beach Boys song come to fleshly life. I enrolled in journalism courses and wrote for the school paper, the Western Sun . I covered the local music scene. One of the first things I wrote was a review of an AC/DC show at Anaheim Stadium. I was really proud of that.
    During weekend excursions, I became fascinated with the Starwood Club, a sweaty, gritty little night spot near the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was a great place. There was no telling what you could hear there from night to night. Lots of music. The place was managed by a guy named David Forest. He was one of those wildly flamboyant gay guys who long ago had given