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Heartbreak Kid: on the streets of Hollywood in the 1960s
By: C. Steven Blue
This is a memoir of my teens and twenties, growing up in Hollywood during the turbulent 1960s-1970s. It is a poetic memoir, a hybrid book of prose, poetry and artwork.
Here are the first five pages:
By: C. Steven Blue
This is a memoir of my teens and twenties, growing up in Hollywood during the turbulent 1960s-1970s. It is a poetic memoir, a hybrid book of prose, poetry and artwork.
Here are the first five pages:
It was the end of high school and summer 1968 was here. To celebrate, I wanted to drop LSD and watch the sunset on the beach. My wife Jenny agreed to be my designated driver. As we headed to Santa Monica in the late afternoon, I was already coming on strong to the acid. My whole body tingled. I gazed out the front window. Everything I saw had trails, like rainbow-colored comet tails—the traffic lights, the cars, even the people walking.
By the time we got to the beach, I was so stoned that I couldn't talk or even get out of the car. All I could do was curl up in a fetal position in the back seat. Jenny said, "You probably took too strong a dose!" She was so scared! Not knowing what to do, she drove us back to Hollywood and pulled up in front of the police station, ran inside and asked for help.
The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on an observation table, with very bright lights shining down on me. There were at least six people leaning over me, looking straight into my eyes, and some of them were in uniform! Oddly, I wasn't instantly paranoid. When they told me they had shot me with Thorasine, I realized why. They said I had had a bad drug experience, then proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions, none of which I remember.
I never found out what their questions were, but from then on I knew I was on their radar. My long hair and love beads surely had marked me as one of the hippies they loved to hassle on the Sunset Strip.
I was lucky they didn’t arrest me right then. They just let my wife take me home, where I discovered I felt really great! I think the Thorasine gave me one of the best acid trips I would ever have.
I took out my drawing pad and a pencil. Images of wonder and excitement displayed themselves right on the blank page, as if by magic. I couldn’t draw them as fast as I could see them, but I did end up with two drawings that were pretty weird. Looking at them later, though, I actually thought they were pretty cool.
With all the drugs and alcohol I was ingesting, how did I ever survive to get clean and sober in my 30s? I guess I was one of the lucky ones . . . but more about that later.
ϟ
My name is Steven. I was born right smack dab in the middle of the 20th century, on January 20th, the day that is Inauguration Day. Since 1986, it is also, sometimes, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
My birthday always follows the years: I was 10 in 1960 and 20 in 1970. I would be a half century old at the turn of the new millennium.
My birthplace was Phoenix, Arizona, but my family moved to Pasadena, California when I was 2 years old. We would often drive back to Phoenix to visit Nini. She was Mom’s mother, but for some reason we never called her Grandma. To my sister, brother and I, she would always be Nini.
My sister, Kathy, is a year older than me. We were both born at the 7th Street hospital, just a few blocks from Nini’s house. My brother, Bob, who is two years younger than me, was born in Pasadena after we moved there. I would live in the L. A. area throughout my childhood, my teens and my adulthood, until I retired from work. I may have been born in Arizona, but I was a Southern California boy, through and through!
My earliest recallable memories are from Nini’s house on Thanksgiving Day, 1953 . . .
It was my own private underworld, and fascination was the driving force of all I could see and hear. All the giggling voices were above me as I crawled out from beneath the dining room table to see what all the commotion was. Nini, Mom and Dad were still spiking the fruitcake. It would be many years before I would understand what that meant.
Later that day, while all the grownups were busy, this little 3 year old went wandering off down the street on my own first adventure. Mom spotted me and she was frantic! By the time she finally caught up to me on the north corner of the block, I was smiling mischievously, with a look of wonder in my eyes. Much to her relief, I had not yet attempted to cross the street.
ϟ
I loved growing up in Pasadena. In the late '50s, Mom would let us three kids spend New Year's Eve camped out in our sleeping bags on Colorado Boulevard, saving places for our family to watch The Rose Parade the next morning. Our house was only three blocks north of the parade route, so Mom could check on us if she needed to.
The parade route was an all-night party. Hot rods and custom cars cruised up and down the boulevard. People huddled in their own little areas, clutching hot chocolate or coffee, trying to fend off the winter night chill. Giant bonfire parties raged on the front lawn of Pasadena City College, where throngs of students gathered to celebrate.
Pasadena was a busy hub for its youth back then, with soda shops, record stores, the Boys and Girls clubs, Friday night school dances and the Saturday night dance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
Bob's Big Boy Restaurants played a big part in Pasadena’s culture. There was Big Bobs and Little Bobs, both on Colorado Blvd., about 10 miles apart. Big Bobs had carhop service, while Little Bobs was only an indoor restaurant. On the weekends, people would wait in a line several blocks long to get into Big Bobs—Greasers and surfers, all the teenagers in their hot rods, trying to get into the carhop service to order burgers, fries and Cokes served right in their cars. The scene was right out of the movie American Graffiti! It even inspired a song by Jan & Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena."
ϟ
When I was 9 years old, I became interested in science, particularly electricity. Mom, who was always supportive of whatever interests we kids developed, waited until Christmas and then surprised me with an electrical set, a crystal radio kit and a set of different kinds of magnets.
Experimenting with the electrical set, I learned how to build simple electric circuits that actually worked. I learned the difference between AC and DC currents, which came in handy later in life when I became an electrician in Hollywood, creating the stage lighting behind the scenes in television and live theatre.
I built the crystal radio, but even when I was finished I couldn't understand how a rock crystal could actually make a radio work without any other power. This fascinated me and sparked my lifelong interest in all things metaphysical and astrological.
The magnets were also fascinating. I played with them for weeks, attracting anything metal lying around the house, yard or garage. I used them at school, pretending to my friends that they were magic. I used them to tease the girls by grabbing bobby pins right out of their hair. I learned that if you put the same poles of two magnets together (either north or south) they will repel away from each other. I dreamed of someday finding a way to use magnetism to actually repel a space ship right off the earth and out of our atmosphere, without any kind of fuel. Maybe I wasn't so far off. Maybe someday we will do just that.
ϟ
The ‘60s began as I turned 10. That year our babysitter, Beverly, taught Kathy and me how to dance the California Swing as we watched American Bandstand on Saturday afternoons, broadcast live on TV from Philadelphia. Boy, did I love to dance!
Bob and I used to ride our bikes downtown to the Pasadena Bowling Alley at the corner of Lake and Colorado behind the Thrifty Drug Store. While we were bowling, we'd order extra crispy french fries with blue-cheese dressing for dipping, instead of ketchup. The dressing was from Bob's Big Boy. It was the best blue cheese dressing in the world! Bob's was famous for it, and they bottled it for sale. You could even get it at the local supermarket, and Mom used to bring it home.
I belonged to the Pasadena Boys Club. I loved going there because there were so many interesting things to do and learn. I'd swim, play pool, and create stuff in their machine shops. There were volunteer counselors who taught me how to use a lathe, drill press, table saw, metal bender and other tools. One of them taught me how to make a multicolored teardrop, which was really popular in those days and a lot of fun to make. Here's how:
When I was done, I had what looked like a multicolored gemstone in the shape of a tear. It was so cool! I drilled a hole in it and wore it around my neck.
The Boys Club also had a summer camp, Camp Norris, which I went to for two weeks every summer. We swam in the lake, rode horses, explored the forest, and made campfires at night, where we would roast marshmallows and sing . . . “skin-a-merink-a-dink-e-dink, skin-a-merink-e-doo, I love you . . . Camp Norris!”
We'd all bunk together by age group in large bunkhouses and be served pancakes for breakfast every morning—bad pancakes! I got so sick of them that I wouldn't eat pancakes again until I was an adult.
My first year at camp, when we were riding horses through the forest, I fell off mine. It scared me so bad, I wouldn't get back on. The next year, they made me get back on a horse, and I was fine after that.
The Boys Club celebrated Tom Sawyer/Sadie Hawkins Day every summer at a park adjacent to the club. Our families came, and we'd all barbeque hot dogs and hamburgers and play games. The kids had a treasure hunt. Then, the parents joined in for a gunny sack race and tug-of-war in the mud: There was a long rope, with a pool of mud in the middle, and families on each side trying to pull the other side into the mud. It was all great fun!
They also had a contest called "Mr. Full Pockets." They would count everything the boys had in their pockets, and whoever had the most stuff won. When I was 11, I won the contest and got my picture in the local newspaper. There was also an article about my win in the monthly newsletter of the company my dad worked for.
During the summer, Mom would often give the three of us each a quarter to go to the Saturday matinee at the Washington theatre, at the corner of Lake and Washington. It was enough money for the movie and treats. I would get popcorn and Coke, along with Milk Duds, Flicks or Ice Cream Bon Bons. While I stuffed my face, I could see the latest Commander Cody episode, a cartoon and two movies. My favorite movie was The House On Haunted Hill, or no, maybe it was The Mask because it was in 3D and I could keep the glasses we wore to watch it.
Summertime was my favorite time. School was out and Mom would pack a big picnic lunch and take us to the beach at Belmont Shore. There, we would spend the day body surfing, hunting sand crabs, building sand castles and, of course, eating. Summer was also a great time to play hide-n-seek with everyone in the neighborhood. When we played hide-n-seek, my favorite place to hide was in the top of a tree right across the street from our house. I would climb the tree and perch on a branch where I could see everything that was going on but no one could see me. It seemed like I always got away with it.
Mom would also set up a sprinkler in the front yard for us and our neighborhood friends to run through in our bathing suits to cool off. Then she'd set up a table on the front driveway and cut up a bunch of watermelons for us all to eat, so we could spit seeds outside and make as big a mess as we wanted, then run through the sprinkler again to wash off all the sticky juice. When we were finished, we’d take our watermelon rinds into the middle of the street and skip them down the road, like skimming flat stones on a lake, to see who could get them the farthest. Even though the rinds ended up all over the neighborhood, nobody complained.
Mom also made the best homemade hard-shell tacos in the world (her mom's recipe). The secret is in the making of the shells. Whenever she'd make them, all my friends wanted to come over to our house for dinner. She passed the recipe and the know-how down to me, and I've been making them for years. Now my kids make them too.
ϟ
Kathy and I loved to go to the dance at Dewald's Ballroom every Saturday night at the Civic Auditorium. Her boyfriend was a surfer, and his surfer buddy had a '49 Cadillac Hearse, with purple velvet interior. He painted it bright orange and turned it into a surf wagon. They would show up at the Civic after the dance ended and we'd all pile into the back of it, cruise Colorado Boulevard and end up at Bob's Big Boy. We'd wait in line with the rest of the cruisers until it was our turn to get into the carhop service. We'd all order burgers, fries and Cokes. They'd let you add extra flavors in your Coke if you wanted and I always had them add cherry and chocolate syrups. Cherry-chocolate Cokes were my favorite!
Sometimes Bob and I got to go to the beach in the hearse with my sister and her boyfriend. They'd always go to County Line (the L.A./Ventura county line) on Pacific Coast Highway, which was one of the best surfing spots in SoCal.
We'd watch the surfers catch waves all day while we'd swim and play and lay in the sun. In the summer of 1962, Mom let me spend a weekend there with my sister, her boyfriend and all the surfers. My sister's boyfriend, Mike, taught me how to surf and I stood up on a surfboard for the first time, riding a wave into the shore. What a blast!
Each evening, the surfers would build a big bonfire on the beach. They put all their surfboards around it in a big circle, stuck on edge into the sand to create a wind block. Then, we put our sleeping bags just inside the circle, so the boards blocked us from the wind. We fell asleep on the dark beach, watching the bonfire and the bright stars.
Across the highway from the beach was a little restaurant called Mother's. We'd go over there in the morning for breakfast. They had a pinball machine that I loved to play. So did my brother. I became an expert on it and would often win game after game for free. I'd spend hours at Mother's playing pinball
By the time we got to the beach, I was so stoned that I couldn't talk or even get out of the car. All I could do was curl up in a fetal position in the back seat. Jenny said, "You probably took too strong a dose!" She was so scared! Not knowing what to do, she drove us back to Hollywood and pulled up in front of the police station, ran inside and asked for help.
The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on an observation table, with very bright lights shining down on me. There were at least six people leaning over me, looking straight into my eyes, and some of them were in uniform! Oddly, I wasn't instantly paranoid. When they told me they had shot me with Thorasine, I realized why. They said I had had a bad drug experience, then proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions, none of which I remember.
I never found out what their questions were, but from then on I knew I was on their radar. My long hair and love beads surely had marked me as one of the hippies they loved to hassle on the Sunset Strip.
I was lucky they didn’t arrest me right then. They just let my wife take me home, where I discovered I felt really great! I think the Thorasine gave me one of the best acid trips I would ever have.
I took out my drawing pad and a pencil. Images of wonder and excitement displayed themselves right on the blank page, as if by magic. I couldn’t draw them as fast as I could see them, but I did end up with two drawings that were pretty weird. Looking at them later, though, I actually thought they were pretty cool.
With all the drugs and alcohol I was ingesting, how did I ever survive to get clean and sober in my 30s? I guess I was one of the lucky ones . . . but more about that later.
ϟ
My name is Steven. I was born right smack dab in the middle of the 20th century, on January 20th, the day that is Inauguration Day. Since 1986, it is also, sometimes, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
My birthday always follows the years: I was 10 in 1960 and 20 in 1970. I would be a half century old at the turn of the new millennium.
My birthplace was Phoenix, Arizona, but my family moved to Pasadena, California when I was 2 years old. We would often drive back to Phoenix to visit Nini. She was Mom’s mother, but for some reason we never called her Grandma. To my sister, brother and I, she would always be Nini.
My sister, Kathy, is a year older than me. We were both born at the 7th Street hospital, just a few blocks from Nini’s house. My brother, Bob, who is two years younger than me, was born in Pasadena after we moved there. I would live in the L. A. area throughout my childhood, my teens and my adulthood, until I retired from work. I may have been born in Arizona, but I was a Southern California boy, through and through!
My earliest recallable memories are from Nini’s house on Thanksgiving Day, 1953 . . .
It was my own private underworld, and fascination was the driving force of all I could see and hear. All the giggling voices were above me as I crawled out from beneath the dining room table to see what all the commotion was. Nini, Mom and Dad were still spiking the fruitcake. It would be many years before I would understand what that meant.
Later that day, while all the grownups were busy, this little 3 year old went wandering off down the street on my own first adventure. Mom spotted me and she was frantic! By the time she finally caught up to me on the north corner of the block, I was smiling mischievously, with a look of wonder in my eyes. Much to her relief, I had not yet attempted to cross the street.
ϟ
I loved growing up in Pasadena. In the late '50s, Mom would let us three kids spend New Year's Eve camped out in our sleeping bags on Colorado Boulevard, saving places for our family to watch The Rose Parade the next morning. Our house was only three blocks north of the parade route, so Mom could check on us if she needed to.
The parade route was an all-night party. Hot rods and custom cars cruised up and down the boulevard. People huddled in their own little areas, clutching hot chocolate or coffee, trying to fend off the winter night chill. Giant bonfire parties raged on the front lawn of Pasadena City College, where throngs of students gathered to celebrate.
Pasadena was a busy hub for its youth back then, with soda shops, record stores, the Boys and Girls clubs, Friday night school dances and the Saturday night dance at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.
Bob's Big Boy Restaurants played a big part in Pasadena’s culture. There was Big Bobs and Little Bobs, both on Colorado Blvd., about 10 miles apart. Big Bobs had carhop service, while Little Bobs was only an indoor restaurant. On the weekends, people would wait in a line several blocks long to get into Big Bobs—Greasers and surfers, all the teenagers in their hot rods, trying to get into the carhop service to order burgers, fries and Cokes served right in their cars. The scene was right out of the movie American Graffiti! It even inspired a song by Jan & Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena."
ϟ
When I was 9 years old, I became interested in science, particularly electricity. Mom, who was always supportive of whatever interests we kids developed, waited until Christmas and then surprised me with an electrical set, a crystal radio kit and a set of different kinds of magnets.
Experimenting with the electrical set, I learned how to build simple electric circuits that actually worked. I learned the difference between AC and DC currents, which came in handy later in life when I became an electrician in Hollywood, creating the stage lighting behind the scenes in television and live theatre.
I built the crystal radio, but even when I was finished I couldn't understand how a rock crystal could actually make a radio work without any other power. This fascinated me and sparked my lifelong interest in all things metaphysical and astrological.
The magnets were also fascinating. I played with them for weeks, attracting anything metal lying around the house, yard or garage. I used them at school, pretending to my friends that they were magic. I used them to tease the girls by grabbing bobby pins right out of their hair. I learned that if you put the same poles of two magnets together (either north or south) they will repel away from each other. I dreamed of someday finding a way to use magnetism to actually repel a space ship right off the earth and out of our atmosphere, without any kind of fuel. Maybe I wasn't so far off. Maybe someday we will do just that.
ϟ
The ‘60s began as I turned 10. That year our babysitter, Beverly, taught Kathy and me how to dance the California Swing as we watched American Bandstand on Saturday afternoons, broadcast live on TV from Philadelphia. Boy, did I love to dance!
Bob and I used to ride our bikes downtown to the Pasadena Bowling Alley at the corner of Lake and Colorado behind the Thrifty Drug Store. While we were bowling, we'd order extra crispy french fries with blue-cheese dressing for dipping, instead of ketchup. The dressing was from Bob's Big Boy. It was the best blue cheese dressing in the world! Bob's was famous for it, and they bottled it for sale. You could even get it at the local supermarket, and Mom used to bring it home.
I belonged to the Pasadena Boys Club. I loved going there because there were so many interesting things to do and learn. I'd swim, play pool, and create stuff in their machine shops. There were volunteer counselors who taught me how to use a lathe, drill press, table saw, metal bender and other tools. One of them taught me how to make a multicolored teardrop, which was really popular in those days and a lot of fun to make. Here's how:
- Cut out several small squares of 1/4" thick plastic.
- Glue the squares together with glue dyed in different colors.
- Draw a teardrop shape on top.
- Cut the shape out with a band saw.
- Use an electric sander to shape the whole thing into a round, teardrop shape.
- Sand the teardrop with rough and then fine sandpaper until super smooth.
- Buff it out with a buffing wheel until crystal clear like glass.
When I was done, I had what looked like a multicolored gemstone in the shape of a tear. It was so cool! I drilled a hole in it and wore it around my neck.
The Boys Club also had a summer camp, Camp Norris, which I went to for two weeks every summer. We swam in the lake, rode horses, explored the forest, and made campfires at night, where we would roast marshmallows and sing . . . “skin-a-merink-a-dink-e-dink, skin-a-merink-e-doo, I love you . . . Camp Norris!”
We'd all bunk together by age group in large bunkhouses and be served pancakes for breakfast every morning—bad pancakes! I got so sick of them that I wouldn't eat pancakes again until I was an adult.
My first year at camp, when we were riding horses through the forest, I fell off mine. It scared me so bad, I wouldn't get back on. The next year, they made me get back on a horse, and I was fine after that.
The Boys Club celebrated Tom Sawyer/Sadie Hawkins Day every summer at a park adjacent to the club. Our families came, and we'd all barbeque hot dogs and hamburgers and play games. The kids had a treasure hunt. Then, the parents joined in for a gunny sack race and tug-of-war in the mud: There was a long rope, with a pool of mud in the middle, and families on each side trying to pull the other side into the mud. It was all great fun!
They also had a contest called "Mr. Full Pockets." They would count everything the boys had in their pockets, and whoever had the most stuff won. When I was 11, I won the contest and got my picture in the local newspaper. There was also an article about my win in the monthly newsletter of the company my dad worked for.
During the summer, Mom would often give the three of us each a quarter to go to the Saturday matinee at the Washington theatre, at the corner of Lake and Washington. It was enough money for the movie and treats. I would get popcorn and Coke, along with Milk Duds, Flicks or Ice Cream Bon Bons. While I stuffed my face, I could see the latest Commander Cody episode, a cartoon and two movies. My favorite movie was The House On Haunted Hill, or no, maybe it was The Mask because it was in 3D and I could keep the glasses we wore to watch it.
Summertime was my favorite time. School was out and Mom would pack a big picnic lunch and take us to the beach at Belmont Shore. There, we would spend the day body surfing, hunting sand crabs, building sand castles and, of course, eating. Summer was also a great time to play hide-n-seek with everyone in the neighborhood. When we played hide-n-seek, my favorite place to hide was in the top of a tree right across the street from our house. I would climb the tree and perch on a branch where I could see everything that was going on but no one could see me. It seemed like I always got away with it.
Mom would also set up a sprinkler in the front yard for us and our neighborhood friends to run through in our bathing suits to cool off. Then she'd set up a table on the front driveway and cut up a bunch of watermelons for us all to eat, so we could spit seeds outside and make as big a mess as we wanted, then run through the sprinkler again to wash off all the sticky juice. When we were finished, we’d take our watermelon rinds into the middle of the street and skip them down the road, like skimming flat stones on a lake, to see who could get them the farthest. Even though the rinds ended up all over the neighborhood, nobody complained.
Mom also made the best homemade hard-shell tacos in the world (her mom's recipe). The secret is in the making of the shells. Whenever she'd make them, all my friends wanted to come over to our house for dinner. She passed the recipe and the know-how down to me, and I've been making them for years. Now my kids make them too.
ϟ
Kathy and I loved to go to the dance at Dewald's Ballroom every Saturday night at the Civic Auditorium. Her boyfriend was a surfer, and his surfer buddy had a '49 Cadillac Hearse, with purple velvet interior. He painted it bright orange and turned it into a surf wagon. They would show up at the Civic after the dance ended and we'd all pile into the back of it, cruise Colorado Boulevard and end up at Bob's Big Boy. We'd wait in line with the rest of the cruisers until it was our turn to get into the carhop service. We'd all order burgers, fries and Cokes. They'd let you add extra flavors in your Coke if you wanted and I always had them add cherry and chocolate syrups. Cherry-chocolate Cokes were my favorite!
Sometimes Bob and I got to go to the beach in the hearse with my sister and her boyfriend. They'd always go to County Line (the L.A./Ventura county line) on Pacific Coast Highway, which was one of the best surfing spots in SoCal.
We'd watch the surfers catch waves all day while we'd swim and play and lay in the sun. In the summer of 1962, Mom let me spend a weekend there with my sister, her boyfriend and all the surfers. My sister's boyfriend, Mike, taught me how to surf and I stood up on a surfboard for the first time, riding a wave into the shore. What a blast!
Each evening, the surfers would build a big bonfire on the beach. They put all their surfboards around it in a big circle, stuck on edge into the sand to create a wind block. Then, we put our sleeping bags just inside the circle, so the boards blocked us from the wind. We fell asleep on the dark beach, watching the bonfire and the bright stars.
Across the highway from the beach was a little restaurant called Mother's. We'd go over there in the morning for breakfast. They had a pinball machine that I loved to play. So did my brother. I became an expert on it and would often win game after game for free. I'd spend hours at Mother's playing pinball
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