It began the night I punched someone in the face for the first (and sadly, only) time, a birthday present of sorts to me from a random weird dude who was into that kind of stuff. When I said I’d never had the pleasure, he offered his face, requesting I keep my giant skull ring on for full effect. It (the punching) wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be — no blood, no bruising, no fun sounds like in the movies.
Actually, maybe it didn’t begin that night — as I’m told we made out the month before on Valentine’s Day. But I remember little of that night, just the unfun stuff, like waking up next to a bucket of my own vomit the following morning in a semi-dressed state. So perhaps he came to the show because of the promise of more of that attractive behavior? Or because our mutual friends were walking in it? I don’t know. But I digress.
So. It began (or didn’t begin) the night Alice Cooper hosted one of our fashion shows at the Avalon in Hollywood. A really fantastic human, that Alice Cooper, not at all the shock rocker one expects — or maybe people don’t expect that anymore because of all the golfing and Jesus and Republican nonsense? Backstage, as he got his makeup done, I watched him transform from amiable family man to “Alice Cooper” when — makeup complete — he put on the red and black leather Mariachi-from-hell outfit that we made for the occasion and slowly beat his rusty baby-head codpiece with a cane, making intense eye contact in the mirror and referring to himself as “Alice” in what I couldn’t tell was the third person or a reference to the character.
It was a pretty wild night as Junker shows go, lots of craziness and kooks to juggle. During an early run-through for the local 11 o’clock news, one of our models — who unbeknownst to us wore nothing under his leather trenchcoat — opened it up and whipped his dick back and forth for the cameras at the end of the runway. (Tod would later walk in on Dick Whipper and another model — who was transitioning from male to female and would go through a full medical transition on Doctor 90210 a few years later — involved in some kind of shenanigans in the mens’ dressing room bathroom. He said the smell would haunt him forever.) Alice must have remained pretty oblivious to the hijinks, because when he saw that one of the other models in the show was our friend and porn star, Kimberly Kane, he made a point of letting us know that he wasn’t comfortable with nudity or sex acts. Born agains really have no fun. And I keep digressing.
He sat with Eric Erlandson and I watched them smiling while looking up our models’ short dresses as they passed by on the runway, their grins especially wolfish when Kimberly came out topless. Two men with well-deserved reputations for being perverts, were Eric Erlandson and Mike Mills.
He was a nice enough fellow, super smart. We’d actually met years before the sketchy Valentine’s Day make-out, gotten into a bit of an argument at an after-hours drug fest/World Cup viewing at Dominick’s — but he didn’t remember that at all. I had a boyfriend back then, so when he started hitting on me, I wasn’t terribly receptive, which seemed to lead to the argument. I guess rock stars, even alternative ones from the 80s/90s aren’t used to being rebuffed. But this time around, being single, celebrating my birthday after our fashion show and drinking heavily — well, it clouded my judgment a little. (It should be noted that of the members of REM, my middle and high school years had decidedly not been spent pining for the bass player, rather the singer. But I think we all know how that turned out.)
I was sleeping with a chef at the time, by which I mean whenever we happened to be in the same town. He called from the Sofitel, where his LA restaurant was located, to see if I wanted to come over. I told him I was just down the street and he should come by. If he’d taken me up on the offer, I guess I wouldn’t have ended up at the Four Seasons but in a different expensive hotel suite with a different much older man that night.
Mike had just gotten back in town from REM’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and was super jazzed on that. It was pretty much all that he talked about, just to remind us in case we had forgotten. I had a hard time not asking lots of questions about Patti Smith — who had inducted them and was far more exciting to me — but I could tell he was getting annoyed with my many requests for stories about how great she was. I also recall him singing Sweet Caroline at top volume with my friend Ingrid, harmonizing with her drunken Irish birthday-cake-sugared-up (diabetes-be-damned) voice like the pro that he is.
At some point Ingrid left and I was alone with Mike for a second on the couch. That’s when he went in for a kiss. And it was terrible, just awful, which made me think: perhaps that’s why I didn’t remember our previous hook up, or why I drank to such excess on Valentine’s night. A few minutes later, he said something like: let me try that again, I can do better. And it was. And I was drunk. And he was living at the Four Seasons while his house was being built high above the Hollywood Bowl. And I had never been to the Four Seasons. Or so my drunken logic went.
After much food and booze, we drove Ingrid home. She thought I was getting out of the car to stay with her, even tried to talk me out of Four Seasons-going while Mike sat there, slightly bemused, as she spoke of his reputation for being a male whore. I just said: I’ll be okay, call you tomorrow. And then we arrived at the mostly empty lobby, where I did a walk-through in my brightly colored backless mini-dress and motorcycle boots — surely the picture of their normal clientele.
When we got to the room, I was kind of underwhelmed. It didn’t seem nearly as luxe as the branding would suggest. It was like a Ramada Inn, just bigger and with better ingredients. We got in bed and kissed a bit, but I pretended to be far more drunk than I actually was because I realized — having now seen the inside of a Four Seasons hotel room — I’d gotten what I came for. And this is the part where I suggest that, however shitty it sounds, you should never go to a hotel room with a man unless you’re willing to have sex with him, because that’s exactly what’s expected of you if you do. No one thinks you’re going to kick it and chat. You’re going to fuck. It’s part of the societal transaction, like it or not.
In the morning, it was another story altogether. I couldn’t pretend to be drunk anymore. I knew that the easiest way out of the room and back home was to just have sex with him. So I let that happen rather than even begin to awkwardly try and navigate my way through a sexless scenario — path of least resistance and all that — which led to me laying on my back staring up at him as he screamed my name at top volume.
There’s a few things to note here:
1) I was doing absolutely nothing to deserve said screams. (I’m perfectly capable of eliciting them, but was really just cold-fishing it, so that was puzzling.)
2) My name is not easily screamed, doesn’t roll off the tongue. It was super-weird to hear it being yelled by a sweaty, ovoid pink man as he pumped away.
3) Unlike the Ramada Inn, I imagined that at the Four Seasons, screams from a room might elicit calls to security or something, was slightly terrified of someone coming and pounding on the door. Maybe their walls, like their towels, are thicker because luckily no one did.
And then it was over. He ran to the shower, asked if I was hungry. Well, yeah, and I felt like I had most definitely earned some room service at this point, which would be a pretty spiff way to end this adventure. When I said yes, he grandly offered me anything I wanted…from the mini-bar. Apparently, I warranted screams, but not room service. I recall the selection as less than dazzling and settled on a bottle of pasteurized orange juice — not something I would ever drink normally — but it seemed rude to not take something. Having just had sex to be polite, it totally made sense to continue going through the motions. This was not the Four Seasons visit of my dreams.
Bottle of Minute Maid in hand, back into my mini-dress and motorcycle boots, Mike Mills and I took an early afternoon stroll through a much more populated Four Seasons — my first ever non-solo walk of shame.
We got on the elevator and after a couple of floors, a man eating a fruit plate got in. He looked at me, looked at Mike, ate a grape and said to me: Hey, you look really familiar. I replied: That’s because we went to high school together, Ian.
Yeah. Of all the elevators, Ian — who I had not seen since the 90s in Florida — somehow found his way on to this one. I remembered he was a rich kid who had been kicked out of the fancy private school in town and sent to slum it in the public school with the rest of us. Partied a lot, not terribly bright. Once that awkwardness was out of the way and he knew who I was, he looked at Mike and said: Hey, you look really familiar too. God bless Mike’s response: Yeah, we didn’t go to high school together, Ian.
Then Ian got a funny look on his face, while I imagine he puzzled over who Mike actually was, and asked me why I was there. I blurted: Oh, I had a fashion show last night. Again with the puzzled face. Why are you here Ian? He replied: I’m working the Tarantino press junket. And then the elevator doors opened and he got off. I wondered how long it would take him to realize with whom I was riding on that elevator and to decide that I must be a hooker now and blast it out to the Cypress Lake high school class of 1997.
I don’t recall the ride home as being very eventful — silver Mercedes, quick kiss goodbye outside of my tiny DTLA apartment and that was that. Later that day he asked if I wanted to come see his house, and — curiosity getting the better of me — I dropped by. It had a spot in almost every room in the house for a TV. I didn’t even own a TV at that point in my life and was pretty horrified. Also noticed that the master bedroom didn’t have his and hers sections, as one sees in most giant fancy homes. He was just building himself an enormous bachelor pad, which seemed kind of sad to me. I think me noting these things out loud led to our second fight and that was pretty much the last time we hung out.
I have since visited the Four Seasons many times on my own terms, which means still dressed fairly inappropriately for the scene. Been for cocktails, to lunch, for late-night meetings with Robert Rodriguez in the bar and early-afternoon meetings with Vince Neil in his suite (which is always strewn with empty champagne bottles and room service trays, as that’s just where they live and hold court when they’re in LA). Once met Frank Miller there at a meeting with Robert in a fancy suite to go over sketches for the Sin City 2 costumes we were making. He talked to my boobs, couldn’t look at my face. But, my clothes were on and I was offered real room service that time around—is that how you know you’ve made it?
