Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

I took a sip of water. I paused for the effect of recollection.

It is important to understand what was going on in those days. After years of deadness, Los Angeles suddenly had this legitimate scene. Nik cut his hair super short. He knew what would work. No gigs unless you had that look. But already Nik betrayed himself with harmony and hooks. Why not? The Sex Pistols and the Clash had harmonies and hooks. Okay, you spat and you cursed, but it wasn’t ever that far from the Beatles. What you couldn’t do, though, ever, was play solos. No guitar pretension and no drum solos and no complications. Fine. But LA was not London. LA had to answer for the Eagles and Jackson Browne. LA had some issues in it. Somehow out of the good sun and the long days, LA felt a deep ugly rage. It was swollen with heroin and debauched wastedness. It was a badly stitched, angry-red, keltoid-scar rage. It was a self-scratched, blue-inked, infected-prison-tattoo rage. I understood, almost instantly, what that rage meant. I loved that rage, the anti-tan pasty look, the deliberately ugly. I understood how subversive ugly could be. We had a terrible hunger for the nasty, the horrible, the deformed.

ADA

So you were involved in the punk scene?

ME

Not really. I was also too old, for one thing. I would soon be pregnant with you. No — I was a veteran of pre-punk LA. We went to Rodney’s English Disco and the Sugar Shack. That was an underage club. We used to take quaaludes in the parking lot because there was no drinking allowed. The glitter scene — we didn’t call it glam then, we called it glitter — was all about looking good, looking sexy. So you are eighteen, on quaaludes and dressed like a whore — I don’t have to explain that this often led to a less than fulfilling outcome for young women. By the time I was twenty-one, I was already bored of all of it.

Then I discovered Johnny Rotten. I first read about him in the Melody Maker and New Musical Express. I used to go to the Universal News stand on Las Palmas and get the British magazines—

(Ada later would insert a shot of Universal News as it looks today. It still has the sign in plastic blue sans serif letters on stained concrete.)

I would read about how the Sex Pistols cursed on TV. How they insulted the queen. How they put safety pins in their ears. How they vomited at the airport. And how they insulted their audience, told their audience they were being ripped off. The thing that really got me was the interviews I read. Johnny Rotten said rock and roll was boring. He said sex was boring. They wore zippered bondage pants, but they couldn’t be bothered. I was like, yes! Not because I really thought sex was boring, but because I knew that was revolution. No one except us girls understood how subversive Johnny Rotten’s anti-sex stance really was. So obnoxiously and unanswerably defiant, the perfect retort to any concern: It’s boring . Even SEX bores us. I wondered why Rotten didn’t attack the other rock-and-roll cliché and say drugs were boring? Still, rock and roll is like 90 percent sex, so the nihilism of Rotten’s anti-sex stance cannot be exaggerated.

ADA

Do go on, Mom. We can always cut it out later.

ME

Right. Right. I had already wearied of even my own easy allure. I saw girls making their own T-shirts (because making your own was the thing). One girl I remember made a ripped white T-shirt that read: No, I don’t want to give you a blow job. Girls shaved half their hair to make themselves look like Soo Catwoman, the Sex Pistols’ girl sidekick. I even loved Sid Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. She had a face like a wound. I loved her gobby big mouth, her lumpy thighs, her sallow bad skin.

I wasn’t heavily into any scene; I had a job and everything. But I still walked around Melrose in my layers of pinned black clothes, steaming in the sun, and I would hear the Brentwood girls giggling and pointing their chins at me. I looked down on them. We all did. But even as we wanted that Nancy ugly, we thought we looked really good. There is no escape, finally, from it. I mean, we didn’t really want to look bad, we just had this very contextual, specific aesthetic that was precious because it was only readable to those in the know. Who cared about anyone who didn’t get it? Sure, we still gave blow jobs to boys, but only to certain boys, the right boys. The boys who got it.

ADA

Okay, but maybe you could get back to Nik?

ME

Right, I should get back to Nik. Around this time, Nik formed his band the Fakes. Nik had the sensibility down. And Nik had the look down. He was born to look pasty and skinny and angular. The look wasn’t the problem. The sound, well, that was always the issue. Nik’s other band, the Demonics, had a small following, they had some weird sonic experimentations. They veered into long, meandering songs. They were dark in an out-of-step kind of way. No one knew what to do with them.

Anyway, Nik invented the Fakes as the antidote to the darkness and oddness of the Demonics — the Fakes were a side band designed to play power pop and have fun. They came right at the moment when the nihilism of the punk scene had run its course and people were hungry for some simple rock pop, some harmonies, with a danceable beat as long as the band looked New and Cool. People could dance to the Fakes, and they became much more popular than the unclassifiable Demonics. Nik did it as a kind of lark. He did it as a kind of calculation.

ADA

But Nik’s pop songs were always the best thing he did. The other projects don’t age as well, don’t you think?

ME

He doesn’t feel that way. But he loved making fun pop songs and was very good at it.

ADA

What happened with the Fakes? With that sound, why didn’t they make it?

ME

Well. They almost did.

ADA

What do you mean? I never knew that.

ME

I shouldn’t have brought it up. It is a long sore story.

ADA

How come I never heard about it before? What happened?

ME

I don’t even know what happened. You’ll have to ask Nik. But he won’t talk about it.

ADA

Well, can you tell me everything you do know?

ME

I can’t. I would be guessing. You will just have to ask him.

ADA

You two never talked about it?

ME

We never did.

ADA

I don’t believe it.

ME

It seemed almost rude, somehow. Like it violated the rules between us. We don’t talk out everything. We keep a lot in the air between us. Why is this so important?

ADA

It’s not, I just feel like it would explain a lot.

ME

I don’t think it would explain much about Nik. At all. I think you are missing the point about Nik. Making it with his fake band? I don’t think it was important. But you could make it seem that way if you wanted to.

Ada said nothing. She glared at me.

ME

I’m sorry.

ADA

Cut.

That was the end of my interview. I guess it didn’t go so well. She took her two-person crew and went over to Nik’s to do his interview. Wait until she tried to push him into her narrative suppositions, her easy causations, her inciting incidents, and her cinematic reductions. Her “editing later.” Try it out on Uncle Nik.

I never get mad at Ada, so this feeling was new for me. I was mad, I could feel it. I resented her wanting to know everything. And to order it somehow. The truth is, although I never asked Nik about it, I also used to wonder what really had happened.

I had first glimpsed the way things were going when I watched him play at the Fakes’ first three gigs. By the second gig, all the little girls had come out. The underage girls from the Valley. It was like the word went out into the little-girl underground. The front of the stage was a sea of pogoing chicklets in miniskirts and golden perms. They wore lots of eyeliner and they gave their love to the boys on the stage. By the third gig, the Fakes were a hit, a sensation, albeit on an extremely local level. I’m not sure exactly how that happened. Had the Fakes been touted by a mention on KROQ? I don’t remember the details. And Nik would never talk about it, no matter how drunk he was. I could, I guess, go back through the Chronicles, but of course that would not be an accurate rendering of history. Or, another way to put it, it would be an accurate rendering of how Nik viewed it, history put through the Nik-o-lyzer. In any case, as I recall it, this was the moment one of the pestilent pop impresarios appeared in Nik’s life. Lee “Lux” Smith had long lurked at the periphery of the various Los Angeles scenes. I have sort of tracked him over the years. He always turned up in the margins, he always had his icky fingers in an anthology or a documentary. His mother was a famous actress — he worked out of her enormous Laurel Canyon mansion. He had the odor of privilege about him; he drove a pristine white 1966 Mustang convertible.