NOTHING SAYS ‘CHILDHOOD’ TO ME LIKE JODOROWSKY
I grew up in Beverly Hills back when ‘the homeless’ were called ‘bums’ and I’d never seen one. When a black man strolling around meant the police would — PRESTO! — appear to question why. When maids wore uniforms to serve dinner and women called them ‘my girl.’ When no one wore seatbelts and moms smoked in cars with the windows closed.
This dull and bleak historical pause spun out in many ways but the most RIVETING to me was the advent of ‘old’, ‘straight’ people Turning On, Tuning In and Dropping Out. The most sensational of these was my Dad’s good friend, B.
B. was a B.H. lawyer with a house full of Picassos, three kids and a fashionable wife. We went there for Superbowl Sundays … until one year there was no party.
B. fled from All That to wear caftans in a swingin’ pad on Malibu beach with a ‘conversation pit,’ round waterbed and heated floors. Peter Max replaced the Pablos. The wife was switched for a wispy dolt named Moonbeam — I think he took her from his son. I really liked going over there.
B. bought his way into the Psychedelic Elite and invested heavily in and/or brought EL TOPO to the U.S. I went to his screening of it for his old, rich friends stirred in with old freaks, though I’m not quite sure what ‘old’ was to me then.
Jodorowsky was there, and said stuff. I wore a vinyl polka-dot miniskirt, white tights and white boots — my bossest outfit. That movie BLEW MY (pubescent) MIND. It hacked up my ostenible ‘reality’, then flushed it.
The last time I saw B. was on the Party Circuit, as an adult. I was looking for a bathroom and spied him on the floor of a dirty bedroom, inhaling helium in a corner from a tank, squeak talking to no one.
