Tag: Batman

San Diego 1999 : “At first I was stoked, but I still wasn’t primed”

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The classes for my second semester at San Francisco State were finally going into finals and I had definitively figured out that I was not ready to be going to college. The International Baccalaureate program I’d been enrolled in for my last couple years of High School was roughly equivalent to taking college courses early and I was burnt out and needed a break. I still didn’t drink alcohol or use any drugs but I wanted to live in punk houses, travel, go to shows, explore forbidden spaces and just generally use my creative energies for my own enjoyment instead of anything the established world placed value in.

The situation in the Japanese style house we’d been living in near the Berkeley-Oakland border had progressed from rent strike to all out war with our landlord. In a way we were probably looking for structure and boundaries but the milquetoast we’d been paying rent to had demonstrated that no matter how excessive our behavior became he would never find the strength to inflict actual consequences. We had spray painted a message calling for his literal death on the side of the house and shot at him with a bow and arrow but he continued to meekly knock on our back door to beg for rent or inform us he’d been digging through our trash.

Me and Francois were the last ones left – Jonas, Chris and Little Four had already moved on because a house without a roof, phone or electricity wasn’t even worth living in for free. We held a yard sale with all the remaining appliances and furniture that came with the house in our driveway but only a random truck driver showed up as our neighborhood was desolate and devoid of human life. We traded him the microwave and a black leather bean bag Chris used to sleep on for a ride with our bags to the Greyhound Station.

I don’t think it was the beginning or end of any month and we didn’t bother to tell Mark, our long suffering landlord, that we were even leaving. Whether the things we sold at the yard sale had been bought by him or a previous tenant they certainly weren’t ours.

I’m trying to figure out why I never tried to move into The Manor myself and the best I can think of is that I’d either already arranged with Brandi to move back to Chicago with her at the end of Summer or that I’ve flubbed the timeline and this was actually the Summer of 1998 [Note: I did, it was] and I’d be moving up to the Bay for college soon. It’s possible that neither of those things were true and I was just broke, socially awkward and content to hang around and occasionally sleep on an old couch that sat on an outside porch.

Like a lot of these stories the specific year isn’t especially important outside of placing these events in the years leading up to 9/11.

The Manor was a very large either Victorian or Craftsman style green house on the end of E Street in Golden Hills. The block ended on an abrupt diagonal cul-de-sac caused by the 94 Freeway and The Manor only had heavy vegetation instead of neighbors on the back and left hand sides which no doubt made it easier to have large parties where nobody complained or called the cops.

The kids who rented it were close to my age and had mostly gone to Point Loma High but I knew everybody from social stuff and shows. To the best of my recollection it was Nina Amour, Lhasa, Erica Redling, Dan Bryant, Ramon, Badger and Steve Lawrence had a little spot in the attic to paint and keep his records. I could be leaving somebody out or conversely saying someone who only hung around actually lived there – the house had a lot of bedrooms and I only ever passed through the ones that wound around to the bathroom and the ladder to the attic.

[I just got some corrections on minor details: Steve was in a nook in the living room, Badger shared the attic with Martina and Ramon did not live there.]

Steve and Badger were a package deal by that point, maybe had been for a couple of years already. I think they had both lived at the apartment above the Golden Dragon in Hillcrest where Rory had supposedly pushed a girl off the balcony. They were constantly making up bands and working on music together – Cutewood Mac and one I’ll go into detail about in a minute here called Stimulated Emissions.

I’m not sure how they had gotten the rocket motorcycle – maybe it was in the classifieds or they had just seen it sitting in somebody’s yard with a free sign but they’d brought it over and dumped it in the side yard by the driveway. Somebody had taken sheet metal and put it all around the body of a motorcycle so it looked like a missile with a rounded nose in front. Whoever made it might have gotten parts from the actual shell of an ICBM or something because everything was symmetrical and well shaped.

Of course it didn’t run at all when they got it and neither of them knew anything about working on motor bikes so it just sat out there collecting rust. Then me and Francois and Paul brought the bumper boat. We had just done The Natural Museum of California where we’d stolen the skeleton of a beached whale from one of the colleges and strung up the spinal column between two trees on the archery range in Balboa Park.

Everyone we’d shown that too thought it was really cool so we were pretty eager to find our next “prank” or “caper”. I wouldn’t have guessed that our next big thing would also be theft themed but Paul was the one who had cased things out and come up with the idea in both situations. It wasn’t like all of our stunts only centered on stealing things.

When the Republican National Convention came to San Diego in 1996 we had dressed up in old suits and sunglasses like the ones in The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video and made cryptic protest placards based on the Eightball graphic novel called Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. Pictures of the Mr. Jones character and snatches of text like “Value Ape” and “What’s The Frequency Kenneth?”.

That last phrase has a bit of history: in 1986 a mentally ill man who thought television networks were broadcasting directly to his brain posed the question while attacking newscaster Dan Rather outside the New York studios of NBC. Along with the reference in the Eightball comics it was used as the title of an REM song around the same time in 1994. We got some newscaster attention but none of them understood the references or what to make of us.

One of them asked me if “Value Ape” was supposed to be a kind of statement on “ape values” – maybe something like an earlier iteration of the “Reject Human Return to Monke” meme. Eventually I got bored and tried to sneak into the actual convention which earned me a brief detainment by the police. I’ve inherited an indelible streak of anti-authoritarianism from my father and when an officer asked if I had a last name my first instinct was to saucily poke his chest and say:

“Not for strangers!”, in a sing-song voice. Moments later I had my legs spread and my head slammed against a wall as I learned the first of many lessons that would have come sooner if I’d been born with a different skin color. Now I’ve had a broad enough range of police interactions that I’ve written several essays on the theme of cop psychology.

Aside from the absurdist faux-protest our usual entertainment was trespassing but when we did steal things it was never for any kind of profit or something’s monetary value. Paul had driven past a run down independent Family Fun Center spot in National City and figured out the bumper boats were unsecured and would be easy to get over a short fence. The plan was to try to ride it as far as possible until the fuel ran out in the open ocean.

When we were loading everything into the van Paul borrowed from his parents we accidentally spilled some of the gasoline from the motor. Paul made up a cover story that we had been flying miniature airplanes and his dad seemed to buy it – the stolen bumper boat didn’t end up on the news or anything. We tried to pilot it around Mission Bay but the momentary inversion had flooded the motor and we weren’t able to get it going again.

At the end of the night we brought the boat over to The Manor where the large ring shaped flotation segment was turned into a tire swing for the side porch. The fiberglass section ended up uselessly leaned against a wall and the motor met the same fate as the rocket bike – broken down with nobody with the know-how to get it going again. Between the two vehicles and the yellowing grass in the yard I used to joke that it looked like a white trash version of Batman’s Bat Cave – a bunch of busted crime fighting tools that were only gathering dust.

I just made the connection now that the Bat Cave was underneath Wayne Manor in the comics and the house was called The Manor. The coincidence makes the whole thing a little more amusing but I’m not sure how funny any of it is a quarter of a century later. It’s funny to me at least.

Me and Dan, or Nad as Steve called him, had gone to Junior High together but this was my first time seeing his impressive record collection he’d amassed in the intervening years. I had a lot of interesting oddities from Thrift Stores, library book sales and bargain bins but I hadn’t had the knowledge or money to get into very much contemporary stuff. Dan had a ton of it and he let me spend a couple of days digging through it to make myself a mix tape.

I’d just heard of Cat Power somewhere so when I saw the Psychic Hearts 7 inch on transparent colored vinyl I was excited to throw the first side on my tape. Over countless listens it became one of my favorite songs but without either the liner notes or the internet I didn’t know any of the background information – most importantly the fact that it was a cover.

A couple of years down the line I was in New York checking out a hip basement record store on the Lower East Side, maybe Bleecker Bob’s, when what I know now to be the original came on the sound system. It sounded overly aggressive to me compared to the understated quiet rage of the version I’d fallen in love with and without thinking I blurted out:

“Who’s the dick screwing up the Cat Power song?!”

The record didn’t screech to a stop like it does in the movies but every pair of eyes in the store, employees and customers alike, did whip around to fix me in a withering gaze. I got thoroughly schooled and of course I now know that the song was both written and originally recorded by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. I really like the cover art on his version of the record but I’ve still probably only heard it a couple of times.

Sonic Youth is one of those bands where while I’m aware they were hugely influential to a ton of the music I’m into I haven’t gotten around to listening to nearly any of their actual output. Another one would be Black Flag – when I think about it now the only song I actually know of theirs is TV Party. I’m not avoiding either band in an effort to seem cool or anything, I just didn’t happen to come across any of their tapes or records in the formative years where I was listening to a lot of tapes and records.

For some reason I was attracted to their green covered experimental EP Slaapkamers met Slagroom while flipping through Dan’s records and I put a song on my tape and bought my own copy when I came across it in a Reckless Records new arrivals bin in Chicago. I just listened to it again and it instantly sounded recognizable as I’ve probably heard it more than any of the band’s other work. I’m sure they have a ton of other songs that I’d recognize if someone played them for me just from being in rooms where they were playing.

During the time that I was hanging out at The Manor Steve and Badger seemed to be taking a break from hard drugs and created a set of Stimulated Emissions songs inspired by our friend Nick Feather relapsing. Or maybe they were getting high the whole time they were writing all of it – it’s not like I would have recognized the difference as I didn’t do any of that yet. They played in the living room of The Manor and made a bunch of copies of a tape called Future of 88.

The band’s name is a reference to the word laser which is actually an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, something I knew from writing a paper on lasers in grade school, but it was also intended to share the initials for “straight edge”. The songs were short, catchy and rode the line between being a total joke and absolutely serious:

“At first I was stoked but I still wasn’t primed

Then I was primed but I still wasn’t honed

Now I’m honed and I’m gonna kick your fucking ass!”

I might be mixing up the order on those and the year in the title. It seemed like everyone had a copy of the tape for a minute but now we’ve all led chaotic lives and moved around and lost stuff and there doesn’t seem to be a copy uploaded to the internet anywhere. It went amazingly well the last time I mentioned not having the tape for a semi-jokey San Diego genre band from this era so I’ll try it again.

Anybody got a copy they wanna put up for streaming somewhere or send me? That would be cool.

Whatever year this was the Summer at The Manor was when I first met and became close with Andy Panda. Everybody called him “jailbird” at the time because he’d often wear a black and white striped prisoner costume. I thought that was cool because I had been wearing the same thing to sneak off school grounds after San Diego High changed its open campus lunch policy to closed in my senior year.

I’d run around downtown and pretend to run and hide from cops who would gamely pretend to chase me – it was a lot of fun.

I had just graduated but Andy was still going to El Capitan High School in El Cajon. He’d been selling weed at school and was nervous because the following school year was supposed to introduce drug sniffing dogs. He also had a heavy sounding punk band called Heathen Azure with Jose and Fern.

We would spend a lot of time on the side of the house playing a simple game called “bread ball”. There was always a lot of rustic looking bread that was going stale – I think Badger was working as a delivery driver for Bread & Cie in Hillcrest and brought it home after his shifts. We’d take turns tearing it into little chunks and lobbing them in the air for the other person to hit with a plastic bat.

When it was starting to get hard and dry out it would explode in a really satisfying way. Eventually the game was moved to the side of my parent’s house and the bread was switched out for little dried up tangerines and occasional rubber bouncy balls. If you got a good swing on one of those it would disappear into the air above the cul-de-sac and most likely you wouldn’t be finding it again.

The whole thing was super simple without any attempt to keep score or add complexity with any rules beyond the joy of sending easy underhand pitches flying with a bat. I hadn’t really played games like this growing up and it was powerfully bonding in a way I hadn’t experienced before. There’s probably a lot to this that I can’t just explain with words in the place of lived experience but you should get the general idea.

I don’t really remember a lot of crazy parties at The Manor. For a couple weeks there always seemed to be a circle of suburban skater kids getting stoned in the living room. I didn’t pay much attention to it but there was a day when one of them was waxing philosophical and said:

“I wonder how many tokes are in a joint?”

Lhasa had been hanging out but she suddenly stood up in disgust and sarcastically said:

“I don’t know, I’ll go ask the owl!” before storming out of the room. Eventually they got the hint that nobody that lived there was hanging out with them anymore and took it to one of their own houses or somewhere where people were actually into an interminable smoke session.

There was the night that Adam got naked. Adam is a goth DJ who goes by Deadmatter now but at the time he was in a band called Thomas and the Tiddlywinkers. I don’t think they were playing that night – people just mentioned his band because as the naked guy he became the subject of conversation. Someone was also mentioning that he’d just come back from Europe as if that would somehow account for his behavior.

He got insanely drunk and lost all of his clothes around what must have been the bathroom as he’d managed to rip off one of the glass shower doors and was carrying it around to cover himself. He was so far gone that he hadn’t seemed to notice that it was just regular glass as opposed to frosted or printed glass and wasn’t doing anything to hide his nakedness – it just made him look more ridiculous.

Maybe if it had been fogged up like he was taking a hot shower it would have done something. He wasn’t taking a hot shower though – he was carrying around a perfectly transparent glass door that only emphasized his nakedness and drew more attention to it. Now that I think about it he was probably the first “naked guy” I saw at a party and as such he set the bar pretty high.

I saw a lot over the years and eventually ended up as the “naked guy” at the party a few times myself but nobody ever topped the bit with the glass shower door.

Los Angeles 2012 : “xiǎo fèi! xiǎo fèi!”

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I’d been thinking about doing the Hollywood & Highland Superhero thing ever since the night that a Charlie Chaplin named Ponytails jumped on the Venice bus around two in the morning and talked up the ease of the hustle and magnitude of the money the whole way to Culver City. He was pretty good as the Chaplins went – painted his face like a black & white movie and the hat, suit & cane were all high quality as opposed to the cheap costume store stuff. I don’t know how he navigated the other half of his life with what was essentially a Hitler mustache but he clearly made it work.

I spent a couple of days with Steve, Badger and Bubba when they lived at Hollywood & Orange and were making a go of things with Gamelonian LX Cruise Ship some time in 2002. It must have been early in the year because I only remember seeing Christopher Dennis as Superman and the Batman I would later learn was named Jay among the Marilyns and Chaplins. In May of that year the first Spider-Man movie would ring in the era of the Twenty First Century Super Hero Blockbuster Movie and explode the number of costume characters that could be found working the block at any point in time.

A series of events as random and disparate as the adventures that brought an immortal mutant to a Top Secret Canadian bio-weapons program would result in my own transformation to Wolverine. First I cut off my long hair and threw it into the fire during a Mojave Rave performance that was inspired by the dark magic cult from the Clive Barker film Lord of Illusions. Next came the hit-and-run bicycle incident that destroyed my Library of Congress tape player: after being knocked on my back I discovered that the only thing that seemed to alleviate the new pain and discomfort at the base of my spine was hula hooping.

I was inspired by Aaron Hibbs from Sword Heaven and his recent feat of setting a Guinness World Record by hooping for over 74 consecutive hours. I figured that if he could go that long I should at least be able to hoop non-stop for a single hour and started biking to Venice Beach to borrow a hoop from the friendly proprietors of an oxygen bar and put in my daily hour. Before this point I’d never managed to keep a hoop up for even thirty seconds but never underestimate the power of positive role models and light competition. Then I left to tour the United States as part of the Trapped in Reality tour and started adding daily Insanity (from the creators of P90X) workouts with Rain.

All of this put me in the best physical shape of my life and while I was still fairly scrawny I did have enough muscle definition to do a convincing take of Hugh Jackman’s popular version of the character. I’d spent the majority of my adult life wearing long hair, makeup and shopping from the Women’s department as much, if not more, than the Men’s department of Thrift Stores. After chopping my hair off I decided to lean into the “masculine drag” thing and was dressing as butch as possible. I was also shaving regularly but because I’m lazy I let my mutton chop sideburns grow to epic proportions in order to reduce the necessary shaving area.

All of this meant more and more people on the street had been calling me “Wolverine” or just “X-Man” throughout my many tours and travels that Summer and early Autumn and I pretty much knew that once I was back in Los Angeles I would be taking a serious shot at it. The final piece of the puzzle was beginning to cohabitate with my future wife and the love of my life who ended up having the know-how to help me with the gravity defying signature hair style.

I already had black leather pants from my time in a band called Black Light Jim Morrison, I bought myself a value pack of white “wifebeaters” and my friend Eric Landmark gave me his old padded black motorcycle jacket. I was trying to devise some kind of high quality metal claw until I learned that the cops on the block would harass you for anything but plastic. The costume shop on Hollywood Boulevard had a set of clawed gloves for the blue and yellow costume – I cut a space for the claws in the back of some black gloves I could wear on top so it wouldn’t clash with the rest of the getup.

I had already tried a little bit of busking while still in High School when I became obsessed with the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow after my friend Sean loaned me the book and some videos. I quickly taught myself the human blockhead (hammering a nail directly into the sinus cavity) and the trick where you suck a condom into your nose and pull it out of your mouth. I took my act down to Mission Beach but soon ran into a problem – while people happily held their children up for the hammer and nail routine the moment I pulled out a condom they’d cover the kid’s eyes and storm off in anger.

It perfectly encapsulated the hypocritical nature of America’s seemingly contradictory attitudes towards sex and violence. Nobody saw an issue with their children watching me do something that would probably end with injury or death if they tried to imitate me at home but the moment I pulled out an object that could potentially save their lives, entirely removed from any sexual context I might add, the act became too “extreme”.

It was making me miss out on potential tips so I tried substituting one of the balloons that clowns use to make animals. While the condoms automatically inflate upon reaching the mouth the balloon seemed to have just disappeared. I reached in and found it bunched up at the back of my throat – I’m lucky I didn’t accidentally choke on it. That idea was off the table but my act in its original form did bring in a little bit of money which was exciting at that age as I’d never really had any.

What this experience prepared me for was the always difficult first moment of showing up and announcing yourself as potential entertainment instead of just another pedestrian or spectator. In this case my costume was doing most of the heavy lifting but I did need to announce myself as a costumed super hero worth paying to take souvenir photos with and at least pretend like I believed it. It’s always hardest until you make that first dollar, from then on it’s kind of like coasting downhill except for the fact that it’s still a nonstop grind.

I quickly learned the ins and outs of the business as it was in Hollywood in the Winter of 2012. Every character on the Boulevard does it a little differently and the distinctions are a bit like alignments in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. First you’ve got your boy scouts who are Lawful Good – they don’t put too much pressure on tourists to take photos, they don’t suggest a tip amount and they carefully avoid anything that might be construed as intimidation while collecting tips.

With the exception of the dudes who build amazing Autobot costumes that light up and transform into car form the Lawful Goods make no money whatsoever and eventually shift toward Lawful Neutral, True Neutral or even Chaotic Neutral. That last one is probably where I would have placed myself: do anything short of physically grabbing folks to get a photo, flash a five dollar bill as suggestion when requesting a tip and stand close until you get it. There are lots of little nuances like whether or not you flash the five a second or even third time when the tourist proffers a single dollar but I’m not going to get into all of them.

The Chaotic Evils are the no-fucks-given total assholes. They put an arm around a tourist’s shoulder and don’t give up until the photo happens, flash a twenty then full on surround the tourist until the mark ends up shelling out a full twenty for each of the three to four characters in the photo or they are at least satisfied they took them for as much as possible. Another aspect of the Chaotic Evils is that there are locations which are considered high value – mostly in front of the Mann’s Chinese Theater and they physically intimidate the other characters to restrict access to these spots. For reasons I am about to get into they always wear a mask, sunglasses or both.

I quickly learned that the easiest way to make money is to either be a Spider-Man, which I wasn’t going to do, or work with at least one Spider-Man. The nicer part of this equation is the costume recognition: blue and red in combination are extremely visually conspicuous, the costume design is iconic and in 2012 it was the most successful franchise in recent Super Hero films and popular with every demographic of tourists – especially children.

The less nice part of the equation is the mask: when you can’t see a person’s facial expression it creates a certain amount of ambiguity where you can’t tell if they are just asking for a “no pressure” tip or threatening unpleasant consequences if you don’t give them the largest tip possible. This ambiguity creates discomfort and the quickest way out of it is to just give them money. Once out of the situation you will second guess yourself as to whether you were actually being intimidated or it was all in your head. If someone does decide that it was the former or the Spider-Man was being particularly obvious about it even with a photo there are six to a dozen Spider-Mans on the block at all times and they can always say it wasn’t them.

For all of these reasons and the additional fact that a morph suit makes for a cheap costume there was always a surplus of Spider-Mans around. This led to a few random failed gimmicks like the Spider-Man that carried a ‘50s Sci-Fi looking ray gun that only served to lose him photos as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the character and the Spider-Man that threw himself in the garbage in case anybody wanted a comedic photo with a Spider-Man in the garbage. (nobody did). This second one always had weird stubble nearly an inch long that poked out through his mask and his costume was extremely filthy.

Just as there were lots of Spider-Mans there were different types of Spider-Mans. I never worked with one but there must have been at least one Lawful Good Spider-Man. The mask is a fundamental part of the costume and you can’t say with certainty that somebody picked the character for the intimidation factor until you see their body language and behavior. Sunglasses are another matter entirely. None of the Super Heroes had dark sunglasses as an essential part of their costume so when a Hero wears them they are doing it deliberately for the intimidation factor and are probably some degree of asshole.

There were a few lone wolves and some female characters with “sexy” themed costumes that always worked in the same pairs but most of us worked in groups of three to four with whoever was around that we thought would help us make the most money. Three was ideal money wise – tourists are used to getting gouged and shelling out fifteen dollars for a souvenir photo with street performers probably sat comfortably on the better side of the acceptable/ridiculous margin. With four characters it started to seem excessive.

I worked with a lot of Spider-Mans when I started. There was a good looking French one that always lifted his mask up and winked because he was trying to find acting work and pick up women. He was okay but my other two Spider-Mans both wore the black symbiote alien costume and started to show signs of “moral drift”. Every character on the Boulevard had their own story arc with “moral drift” – the ideals that you start with versus the realities you end up with when you figure out how to make money.

They were okay individually but seemed to bring out the worst in each other. One day we took a photo with a Japanese kid, maybe 13 years old, and one of the Spider-Mans got him to give a twenty to each of us. He seemed scared, confused and like he maybe didn’t understand American money that well yet. That was a breaking point for me – I kept the twenty but I didn’t like how the whole thing made me feel and I went back to working with the “Boy Scout” types. Maybe one or both of them felt bad too but I kind of doubt it based on who they ended up working with.

Although the hustle in question was pretty “broke ass” and geeky this was the only period of time I’ve ever spent as part of a hustler subculture. Unless you think selling drugs counts, then it would just be the first time. This was the time that I learned to carry my cash folded in a certain way and hold it a certain way and count it a certain way and spend it a certain way.

I lived like I didn’t have a bank account. When the rose sellers showed up at night I would buy my wife roses to surprise her with. I’m not sure if I’m conveying what I want to say – what I mean is that there is a kind of masculine swagger subculture that centers around the precise ways you handle the cash proceeds from hustling and I am grateful that for a short period of time I got to live in that reality.

There are a lot of stories that I could tell and characters I could talk about but for now let’s talk about Christopher Dennis and Carmelita. Dennis is the original, he started coming out as Superman in the ‘90s when there were no other characters and was always Lawful Good, in character at least. There was a story that he believed that Christopher Reeves was his actual biological father. When I started he didn’t come out much but evidently ran a flophouse for other characters in his place on Orange.

Dennis was going through a divorce and constantly partying on meth around this time from what I heard. There was a Spanish girl named Carmelita and I can’t remember if she actually lived in Dennis’ apartment or just hung around but she started doing the female sidekick thing. She got a Supergirl costume and teamed up with Dennis’s Superman who was spending more time out in costume as a kind of mentoring favor. He evidently wanted favors as well: he thought she should be expressing gratitude by having sex with him.

Carmelita wasn’t interested so she got a Batgirl costume and started working with another housemate named Jay. Jay is the best Batman on the Boulevard, his costume is really well made and he does look intimidating – but in a “better not start crime in Gotham” kind of way as opposed to the “better tip me twenty bucks for a photo” style. I heard some stuff about him getting in fist fights with other characters but never saw it first hand. Same thing on the meth – never heard explicitly that he did it. He absolutely did do the try to get Carmelita to fuck him part though.

She wasn’t having that either and was Supergirl again but in the market for another mentor. I feel like Jay or Dennis were maybe walking around looking for somebody to shunt her off on. I had just walked away from the Spider-Mans and was finding myself working with this sort of annoying head trauma type Captain America who was also from Spain a lot. I suggested that they work together but he wasn’t interested. Supergirl and Wolverine doesn’t make much sense continuity wise but I was ready enough for a change to try anything at this point.

She turned out to kinda be dead weight. She wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes: blonde hair, mini skirt, reasonably thin. I mean her teeth were a little weird but that was it. Her energy was just off. It was low confidence and self doubt, when she asked people if they wanted to get a photo she gave off the vibe that she expected they probably wouldn’t. I had to pull in all our shots. She wanted to keep working with me because I was wifed up and there was no danger of me trying to fuck her, or at least if she didn’t continue the sidekick curse by switching to Jubilee. (little joke there, I never would have expected that or treated her that way). As much as I empathized with her situation I needed a partner that helped bring in money.

I was wondering whatever happened to Christopher Dennis so I looked it up. He got worse with the meth, ended up homeless and died in 2019 by hitting his head falling into a clothing donation bin while in meth psychosis. Any character on the block will tell you he had an absurd amount of support and second/third/nth chances. At least two documentaries, lots of help from Kimmel, he still found a way to fuck it all up.

I ended up living in Santa Monica so I tried the boardwalk. The Super Hero thing was not it there. I tried hula hooping but didn’t really have an act. I moved on to other hustles. I want to mention a pair of other incidents: My friend Billy from Monster Party cast replica quality Xenomorph bodysuits from Alien. One day he suited up and we tried it out. I had to line up our shots as he couldn’t see out of the suit. It was surprisingly unpopular but one Japanese tourist wanted a picture of the Xenomorph holding his infant son.

That kid would be ten years old now. I hope he likes the picture.

The Black actor with achondroplasia (dwarfism) from Gummo would come out in a Mr. T getup. Apparently he was an awful alcoholic for years but managed to get sober. He never made much money but I think he came out to people watch and have something to do. There were a couple of other smaller guys who came from the Lucha Libre world. They did things like Smurfs and Puss in Boots – the costumes were always really nicely sewn especially the wrestling boots. I wonder if they made their own.

They had no interest in working with Mr. T.

One day the whole Boulevard was slow and me and him teamed up by the wax museum. We were playing a game of shouting out sales pitches that riffed on his stature. We started with the obvious:

“Get a picture with Mr. T – Half Off!”

“How about a little tea?”

“Get a picture, we won’t short change you!”

We went on like this for a while. I think we were doing it for our own amusement – nobody seemed to notice us and we weren’t really directing it at anyone. Eventually I started coming up with ones that kind of offended him, or maybe he was joking about that too, I couldn’t even tell. I can’t remember the more offensive ones.

I don’t think we ended up taking a single picture.

I only ever saw Ponytails, my Charlie Chaplin mentor, one or two times. He would show up late and get drunk big spenders from the bar crowd. He claimed twenty was standard but once he got a hundred. Everyone out there seemed to always talk about that “one big tip”. Maybe it never even happened but was something to dream about night after night of only bringing home a few fives and a handful of ones. It’s kind of how it is for gambling addicts – that one big jackpot keeps them coming back.

I never came back.

When I was a homeless drug addict and needed money I learned that flying a sign worked better for me than most people. I looked a bit like Jesus and that always puts Christians in a charitable mood. My sign always said the same thing – feel free to use it:

“Homeless – Hungry – God Bless”

Every word was true.

Eventually I shot a video in costume for a band called Sexting. Many of the characters are visible. The Spanish Captain América pops up
to hype me and a “sexy” pair cover their faces with folding fans. Watch how Mr. Incredible, Darth Vader and Scream surround a hapless East Asian tourist. Chaotic Evil 100%
Looks like Mr Incredible only got worse. Here he is assaulting a Batgirl two years later in 2014, I don’t think it’s Carmelita but she might have dyed her hair or did a wig. His muscles are just padding but he acts like he’s got roid rage. He tried to strangle me over the Chinese Theater spot. The German Batman is what you’d call a boy scout – for the cameras at least.