Archive for the ‘People’ Category

Tanja & the Bear

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

The inaugural Platinum Oasis, 2001. Each artist had a room to do our installation inside the Coral Sands, a gay speed and sex motel on Western just above Hollywood (back before it was all a mall). (I remember moving stuff around and finding a used rig behind a nightstand, coated in dried blood). Either I was looking particularly stressed and hungry or else Margie Schnibbe was feeling particularly motherly. She kept sending her adult babies and her furry bear down to my room with food and drinks.

Tanja & the Bear

What I remember most about the bear is that he was extremely drunk and his bear suit was soggy with sweat. This photo is my friend Tanja with the bear.

Click on the image to see it get larger, just like magic.

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Grandma Tranny Goes Shopping

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

The remodeled Vons on Alvarado had its grand unveiling last weekend. It is now officially un-ghetto.

In the center of the parking lot is a big truck covered in pictures of delectable juicy tender meat. They are giving away samples of this meat and blaring NASCAR style country music, the kind that white folks who support the war in Iraq and enjoy their meat like to listen to…although there aren’t too many of those kinds of white folks in this neighborhood.

The new un-ghetto Vons is packed, which it never used to be. My checkout line isn’t moving. There’s a matronly Hispanic tranny all dressed up like she’s going to church, looking like someone’s manly grandma, and in her huge fists she has a bunch of coupons that apparently do not apply to the goods she’s purchasing. Of greatest urgency is this one coupon she is sure is going to give her a free 16 ounce bottle of coke. She doesn’t care what the checker says. She has extraordinary sculpted eyebrows that are designed to make clear her disapproval of whatever is in front of her, and she is determined to turn this into a war of wills.

The cute little cholita running the next checkout lane has been forced to tone down her makeup and redo her hair since as of last weekend this is officially a non ghetto Vons. She is trying hard not to laugh at the situation. The heavily pierced Hispanic girl just behind the grandma tranny is not amused. Her boyfriend is. Which way they end up leaning as a couple likely all depends on whether or not they get to buy their stuff anytime soon. Behind them is a hipster with a jar of maraschino cherries. Behind him is me.

The checkout guy holds his ground against the grandma tranny. She pays with small change and then heads off to argue her case to a manager.

Country music is still blaring from the meat wagon.

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Celia, Baja, 1991 #2

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Baja 1991This is a shot of my (now ex) wife, down in Baja California, a week or so after we got married, which was somewhere around 1991, I’m pretty sure, although I have really always struggled with dates.

We were living in London at the time.

She bought the blue dress at Ardvark on Melrose when we stopped off in LA for a few days before heading to Mexico.

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Loving Touch.

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Long Beach, 2002Long Beach 2002.

I was dating a girl who liked to bite.

It didn’t last long.

She was into pain.

I wasn’t.

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Daniella from Fresno

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

Frank Ford, 1997Daniella was from Fresno. Her boyfriend was a gangster wannabe who managed a Burger King. He’d get drunk or high and beat her. He’d take whatever money she had and spend it on drugs, so she hadn’t been able to afford her hormones.

Fresno did not sound like a great place to be transgendered.

Hollywood is everyone’s land of dreams, and Daniella came down to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a model or an actress. If she could only get that going, maybe she could ditch her Burger-King boyfriend, bust loose from Fresno, afford hormones, and live a life free from abuse.

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Frank Ford, Hollywood 1997

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Frank Ford, 1997Summer of ‘97 and Frank was on one of his weird kicks. At this point he was sort of starting a one man cult of which he would be the only member but not really the leader. Unlike most cults, Frank’s cult had no leader. It pretty much had to be this way because Frank was very impatient and not at all interested in following directions.

This was all made simpler by the fact that the goal was one of style. Most of Frank’s often extraordinary undertakings were done for aesthetic rather than experiential purposes.

Frank later became half of the design team “Loy and Ford” who had a very successful run a few years ago.

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Celia, Baja, 1991

Tuesday, July 14th, 2009

Baja 1991This is a shot of my (now ex) wife, down in Baja California, a week or so after we got married, which was somewhere around 1991, I’m pretty sure, although I have really always struggled with dates.

Then, as now, the thing I enjoyed the most in life was spending all day, every day at the beach. What I didn’t realize is that this is somewhat rare. Even my surfer friends nowadays have this ridiculously activity oriented approach: they head out, surf for a couple of hours, and then leap back into their cars and dash back into town so that they can engage in activities and feel like good, productive, patriotic Americans. Surfing is leisure to them, but leisure is an activity.

This makes no sense to me. It’s a Calvinist thing, from what I understand.

One awesome thing about Celia was that she really could chill out on the sand without any compulsion to do activities. She understood leisure.

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Jose’s New Teeth

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

I stopped in at the old corner grocery store next to where I used to live. Annie and Terry the Armenian ladies who run it were very glad to see me.

They said I got out just in time. My old building has been going down hill. No more single folks living alone in apartments. It’s either families of 4 in a small one bedroom or groups of drugs addicts, rockers and party boys turning singles into crash pads. The police are out there regularly now.

Jose the building manager has been wasting away. He’s lost a lot of weight on this latest tweaking binge, which makes those weird oversized false teeth he got in Mexico look that much larger. His wife has left him. I’m not sure if she took the kid. His beautiful truck that didn’t run is gone, as is his motorcycle.

I’m not sure why the owners keep him on. As he goes, so goes the building. They set up a conference call between them, me and Jose so that he could tell me (in between smacking on his weird false teeth) how I’d stolen the window screens, the closet door, the light fixtures, the carpet, and everything else I guess he stole out of my apartment after I left so he could trade it in for crack…The owners weren’t buying it any more than I was, and after he ran out of things to accuse me of and just started prattling inanely they cut him off, apologized to me, and asked if it was okay if they keep $50 of my deposit just to make him happy. I was cool with that, but when I went to pick up the money, in cash, from Jose, he tried to short me $200.

surveillance

I wrote about Jose’s new teeth several months ago, before his crack or meth use had gotten out-of-control.

Jose the tweaker manager of my ghetto apartment building has new teeth.

I’m not sure where he got them or why he has them. He’s a relentless scavenger. Maybe a tenant left them behind after moving. Maybe he found them on the street. There seemed nothing wrong with his old teeth. They appeared to be pretty regular, which is to say unnoticeable because the only time you notice teeth is when something is wrong, like they are unnaturally white or they are rotten or they are seriously snaggled or they are really stained or several prominent ones are missing…

Jose’s new teeth are very noticeable.

They were made for a head much bigger than his, and the weird effect is exacerbated because he seems to be shrinking, maybe due to all the speed. Because they don’t really fit, his speech is a little slurred and he can’t seem to get his lips to cover them, so what he does instead is the sort of freakish grimace that I think is meant to be a grin.

Whatever drugs he’s doing, it’s a combo that has him at his most agreeable in the 6 years I’ve lived here. He’s not looking so good, but he’s happier (in a manic way) than he’s ever been…

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Junk

Sunday, November 19th, 2006

My buddy says he and his girl are going back on methadone. They just haven’t been able to kick this time around.

I ask him what he’s gonna do with all his rigs. He asks if I need ‘em for props. Yeah. I do. I need to shoot some rigs and I haven’t had any laying around the apartment in a long time. 10 years.

I expect he’s gonna bring over a handful. Instead, he brings over a tupperwear dish with maybe 50 or more.

The next morning he sticks his head in my apartment. There was a clean rig in that batch. Can he get it back?

They ran into an old high school friend the other day. Her boyfriend is a dealer. She offered her number but they didn’t take it. They know where to find her, though. Walking distance. They head out on foot, find the chick, cop and are back in no more than 15 minutes.

Sometimes I wonder how a nice boy from a good family like me ended up living the life I’ve lived…and still live, I guess, because even with 10 years clean it remains all around me. Shooting pictures of junkies is not a walk on the wild side for me, not a descent into a murky darkness I feel compelled to explore but merely a step out the front door. It seems this shit is always gonna be a part of my life, and I suppose that makes perfect sense, really, since it is part of how I got from there to here.

Occasionally someone suggests that I should try to notice all the nice stuff around me, because, they tell me, it’s there. And it is. But for some reason I’m more interested in pointing out the things that surround us all but most of us remain unaware of. I assure you there’s a junkie in your midst. There’s probably a homosexual or two. Someone on the corner will sell you crack. I don’t care where you are. That girl-next-door porn fantasy? She might really be next door. Whether all this is good or bad is a matter of opinion, and that opinion doesn’t change the fact that it is. Period.

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