Grassy Knoll Conspiracies, Part 1

The Hispanic transvestites were back, throwing empty Bud Light bottles at us from atop the roof of their former brothel.

            “Damn it!” Vanya sneered. “They almost hit Snuffala.”

            Vanya had kicked the drag queens out of the building a few months back when she converted it into a half-way house for fellow AA members, and a few of them showed up every now and again with a six pack and saucy epithets. I met her while out walking the then-gritty east end of Sunset Boulevard in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood. She stood outside the front door, furiously waving sage to cleanse the negative energy with her nine-month-old daughter, the aforementioned Snuffala, wrapped tightly against her chest.

“Hey, chica, chica!” called the platinum-haired gender-bender. “¿Qué estás haciendo (What are you doing)?”

 “Hey, chica!” The hennaed one reached for her crotch. “¿Por qué no agitas esto (Why don’t you shake this instead)?”

Vanya covered the baby’s ears as she countered with her limited Spanish lexicon. “Jódete (Fuck you)!”

“¿Por qué estás cubriendo sus orejas? Debería estar cubriéndole la cara, pobre (Why do you cover her ears? You should cover her face, poor thing).”

Swish! went the sage. “Puto puta (Fucking bitch)!” Swish, swish!

Our gaggle eventually left, and I helped Vanya clean up the shards of brown glass strewn about the sidewalk. In the process, I learned that she had been a D-actress whose third husband stole one of her script ideas and made a hit film and career for himself. She also was an ex-con for petty crimes committed during the subsequent alcohol- and heroin-induced haze. Newly entrepreneurial thanks to money from her latest fiancé, she bought the building with plans to rent the dozen or so upper studio apartments to fellow recovering addicts so they could get back on their feet. She also converted the street-level space into a coffeehouse called The Grassy Knoll, named for the infamous sloping hill inside Dealey Plaza where a second gunman supposedly waited for President Kennedy’s motorcade. Sounded like just my kind of place.

            “I’m a barista downtown,” I tendered. “Why don’t you hire me?”

            “I can’t pay you anything.”

“Give me a deal on an apartment and I’ll work for tips.”

This proved to be a lopsided bargain given that, with The Grassy Knoll’s clientele, I never made more than a few bucks a day. But I’d been a nomad for the better part of a year after venturing west from Milwaukee, crashing on couches and overstaying my welcome. I currently slept on the floor of a wannabe producer’s unheated sunroom, and things had gotten tense between us. I craved my own space again.

That space turned out to be a flophouse room with a hotplate and wretched brown shag carpeting that definitely had been retched upon more than once. While not in AA, I was in OA or Overeaters Anonymous. I had been an on-again, off-again bulimic since high school, and the eating disorder had once again been consuming my life. Soon the thoughts of food were competing with the sounds of pigeons perched outside my studio’s filthy windowsill. Every so often we’d find them wandering the halls.

            Vanya didn’t live in the building, but there were quite a few characters who did. A member of the American Indian Movement hid out there; he disappeared after a black Buick Regal with tinted windows was spotted outside. Author Jerry Stahl lived there for a few months, right after he’d gotten off heroin and before penning Permanent Midnight. Jerry was still fragile at the time, meatless bones and skin brushed with the yellowish hue of jaundice. Once rain poured into the broken window of his apartment and ruined his papers and few meager belongings. I cleaned the place up while Jerry lay wrapped in an old blanket, shivering uncontrollably. I remember thinking, there but for the grace of God.

The building’s basement housed a space for twelve-step meetings and a small secondhand bookstore, wryly titled The Book Depository. These venues always attracted an interesting bunch including Dukey Flyswatter, a crowd favorite.

“Hey, Dukey!” called an anonymous voice. “Where’s your mousetrap?”

Dukey was one of LA’s original punk rockers and lead singer for the campy metal band Haunted Garage, which performed such horror hits as “976-KILL” and “Welcome to Hell” in front of lingerie clad dancers dubbed the Gore Gore Girls. He looked as if he’d just wandered in off a horror movie set, with wild green hair and deep, black crevices beneath his eyes. The latter were the result of regularly attaching mousetraps to his face which, along with piercing his body with hatpins and other forms of self-mutilation, made Ozzy Osbourne’s dove-chomping seem like child’s play.

“C’mon, Duke,” implored another attendee. “Do it, do it!”

Soon a unified chant rang out as Dukey pulled a mousetrap from his jacket and waved it around the room. Snap!

 “Yeah!!”

The crescendo rose as another mousetrap appeared. Snap!

“So cool!”

Mayhem erupted when, for an encore, Dukey pulled out a massive rat trap and stuck out his tongue. Snap!

A Polaroid taken at the time showed Dukey in full rodent-catching regalia with his arm around me as I pulled away in disgust. Apparently, he occasionally attached traps to his penis as well, although thankfully I was never privy to such member maiming.

            Joey, the bookstore owner, sold more conspiracy theories than tomes. The few that did line the walls covered such tin foil-hat favorites as UFO sightings, the moon landing hoax, and the Illuminati. Joey was in his mid-thirties, sporting black-rimmed glasses and a widow’s peak. While he eagerly tendered tales about the New World Order or other government subterfuge, he never bought into the whole Holocaust denial. That was left to two unlikely members of Jews for Jesus: a slightly-built, twenty-something schmoe and his two-hundred-pound Black counterpart. The latter never spoke except to echo his partner’s wild assertions.

“How can you argue against the worst genocide in human history?” Joey admonished. “Six million people died!”

Our Messiah-loving Semite shrugged. “It was all just an elaborate plot to build sympathy for the Jews so they could get their own state.”

“All a plot,” his partner repeated.

“What about the concentration camps?”

“What about the Japanese internment camps?”

“Yeah, what about ‘em?”

“I know, I know, but we didn’t try to systematically exterminate an entire race! How do you explain the gas chambers? Anne Frank’s diary?”

“Delousing stations. Propaganda. It’s all fake.”

  “Fake. All fake.”

            “But you’re Jewish, for god’s sake! How can you betray your own people?!?”

            “Spreading the great Zionist lie is the real betrayal. We’re just speaking truth to power.”

            “Truth to power.”

            I believed myself to be a divine scribe to all of these antics, wandering from table to table in the midst of some cosmic revolution that brewed along with the coffee.

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