Atomic Hula - 1965
By Mike Marino
1965. Lights...cameras...action! Mickey was silver birding across the ocean Pacific from Honolulu to California. Doc Yucaton summed up L.A.best. "Hollywood can get really fuckin' weird, kid." All the way from the Sunset Strip to Sunset Boulevard. "It's nuthin' but a buncha glitz, glam and glimmer where that old broad, Norma Desmond puts on a pair of her Whiskey-a-go-go go-go boots to go-go-go, all the time. Weird shit goin' on in that town, I mean to tell ya." Doc had been there a couple of times and it scared the hell out of him. Doc Yucaton! Go figure.
Southern California was hotrods and surfboards, beach bums and beach bunnies, GTO's and 409's. It was drive in theaters with backseat passion pits and impassioned b&w siver screen zombies. Backseats became heaven on earth with blooming gardens of pubescences exciting your senses with visceral, not, cerebral beauty. Radio's blasted away with an endless monaural summer of "Help Me, Rhonda, yeah, git her outta my heart...." Annette Funicello fulling filling her Mouseketeer bikini top with Funicello jell-o, ever expanding, a giant mushroom cloud of Cali-cleavage, deemed as national mounuments of deliciously flavored implants. The Pendleton shirt, the frat shirt, and penny loafers were worn with pride during beach blanket bingo's with lot's of bongo's on the beach keeping time with the pounding surf as the California sun would set gently below the Pacific horizon. Beach bonfires roar to life, accompanied by small transister radios and even bigger radios with big songs filling the California night. The Little Surfer Girl was proclaimed Queen of the Beach, while the Midnight Cowboy was stranded in the fog of New York streets.
Ah, but then there's Anahiem. Hear tell it's the hap, hap, happiest place on Gods little back forty of earth, (if your a Hollywood mincing pixie named Tinkerbell). It's where money and magic come together in the wonderful land of the Diety of Disney, with the lord high Mickey Mouse and Pluto posing as the pope ruling childhood with a cast iron heart. (That's Pluto the dog, and not the former planet, washed up now, faded and forgotten, a child star from TV's past.) Those who know Mickey Mouse best, swear up and down the streets of the Magic Kingdom, that he talked about "Fantasia," released in the Dirty Thirties.
Mickey claimed, in a secret interview held deep in the underground, (real cloak and dagger shit), to have tripped out on acid with Huxley and Hoffman and he saw walking and talking brooms while on purple double dome. Walt simply brought the hallucination to life on the screen. This whole psychotic episode explains why a mouse, a talking one albeit, would make friends with a sputtering duck with no pants. Mickey also claimed to have banged Betty Boop at a cartoon bangers ball, but has never been substantiated. Step right up, yelled the barker, "There is no admission charge at the doors of perception...it's all free to a willing and paying public, as long as they're buying it, and the best part, ladies and gentlemen, all perceptions come without a guarantee, just "as is." is all, so buyer beware, very aware."
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Graumans Chinese. Schwabs drugstore. Swiss pharmaceuticals, condoms, and eggrolls...Where starlets and their dreams are both made. The next fertile garden of Ava waiting to have her topsoil tilled and turned by a gardner in the limo's backseat crouched like a wild animal on her hands and knees, begging to be "discovered" for her talent, raw and cooked, later, she can rehearse on the casting couch where studio heads expect to be treated to "studio head."
Topping the tinsel town turrets, Madam Hollywood sashays and shows off her brilliant signage electric. The Hollywood sign...the landmark that defines the city of Angels. The sign, a amphetamine metaphor for a debutantes gown slightly worn, you know. The kind you find hanging on a rack in the Salvation Army store over there, alongside that tarnished tiara on the shelf side by side with the wax figure candles and old waffle maker with the frayed cord. The tiara is oxidized, with that sexy too-long in the garden patena..naughty, haughty and high above the busy streets below, all laid out in sections, strips, a jigsaw puzzle to be put back together, the streets themselves draped with curb to curb red carpet, a herpian rash rolled out for the talentless, who ran ahead of the pack of chatty gossip columnists from Photoplay magazine nipping at their stirrups, flashbulbs bulbing and popping about, as they poke about the rumor trashbin to find the truth about the profoundly profane sexuality of the studios, not to mention, the mosaic of matinee idolotry and the papier-mache machismo of cowpokes, who break open, manly pinatas cracked with a stick on the dusty set of Vera Cruz with pissed-off Mex's on their tail..
It was an age of Ben Hur, Ben-Hims and Ben-Hers, all in wide screen technicolor cinemascope. Coonskin caps and breech-cloth coverings. Cleopatra sweating and barging up the Nubian nubile Nile with her mutinious christian, Fletcher, to meet a blonde Arab in the desert who went by the name of Lawrence. It was the ring-a-ding-ding martini-martoonie era of Chicago gangsters and Vegas desert rat packs Big breasted buxom bikini's filled the carnivorous carnal buffet, it's table overflowing with it's ice carved mountain peaks. Yodel from the Alpine tops, and they come running, those bleached boys of the beach with bushy, bushy blonde hair-do's against a panavision backdrop shot in 35mil pre-psychedelic film, and is the location set where Route 66 head-on crashed into the pier at Santa Monica Boulevard, shooting out to sea, see, the ocean blue, where the highway ends and Pacific poetry begins, her gentle waves a sonnet on the sand. Her riptide was her heartbeat and her surf, her soul.
Roll the dice...see where they land as pirates run up to you with clubs and kidnap the kid in you, tied to the mast, held for ransom, then walking the plank into the unknown. This time the roll showed craps for Mickey, the kid, not the mouse. The lustful city of lost angels, with broken wings and no auto repair shop to fix them. It's L.A! A sleazy, sinister, sinamatic cinematic version of a tribe of chromatic Black Dahlias, double-breasted dykes dressed as three-piece men with fedora's cruisin' the back alley pages of pulp fiction novels, (cheap novels mind you) printed on a mimeograph with that get high ink smell that anarchists love so much just before an assasination..then...distributed to lonely people on lunatic streets lined with Googie architecture, hotdog stands, and Bob's Big Boy. Mickey stared in star studded awe at the California landscape from the California bound jetliner high above the three-dimensional California bas relief that was Los Angeles in 1965. A refreshing frescoe complimenting the city's asphalt Guggenhiem gallery of frozen architectural murals and frenzied, motionless human sculptures encased in bronze like naked gods in Greek mythology.
Mickey had gotten lei'd yet again leaving Honolulu airport just hours before. They have a delightful habit lei'ing tourists when the land, Aloha!..and when they leave, Aloha, again! Jet nose down now, on an angle, the pilot was preparing the plane for landing, carrying it's young passenger far away from his Atomic Hula and her palm tree paradise, but was soon would toss him into the wide open waiting arms of the Amazon Goddess of Southern California. Hooray for Hollywood! ...then, according to parental plan, de-plane, re-board, re-bound back to De-troit, after a year and a half on his own living as the robbing son, Crusoe, in paradise.
The kid from the midwest was naive, no doubt about that. He had absolutely no idea what L.A. had to offer, or what price she would exact from him in return. Life was a gamble anyway, so he just stared out of the panes of the plane to the city below...her nightgown of nightlife spread open to reveal some of her neon secrets. She was a seductress of the first degree, and Mickey, weak as ever in those teen years, was ready to follow foolishly, this Tenderloin Temptress to the gates of her hell.
The plane began its descent, readying itself for a bounce-bounce landing. Mickey stared at the lights of sprawling Los Angeles below him. The outline of the streets, the tired old drunk eye-socket red of tail-lights streaming in all directions at once...an automotive etch-a-sketch with faulty synapse on amphetamines. His heart and soul wanted to see this wonderland, feel this wonderland and experience it, good and bad, first hand. Always the adventurer, there were no more Northwest Passages to seek out in buckskin, game to be brought down with black powder and bedding down with a half naked brown skinned squaw among the evergreen boughs at night. Mickeys wilderness was the city, and all the cities he hadn't explored yet. As he gazed at the looming luminescent city below him, he didn't know what he would find there. In time he would, once again, become a child of the streets, living as a deadbroke jailbait hipster runaway on the runway of the Sunset Strip.
LA revealed her perfectly milky urbane breasts, topo maps from the forest service, lost in the city. Each one a giant crystal ball that required gazing, fondling and rapt attention. The breasts also acted as mammarial maps with each perfect mound a 3-dimensional, perfectly round topographic map, showing the underground system of the city, backing up with strange human sewage of pill poppers and trainhoppers, junkie's and junkettes, whores and queers. Hustler's and hookers with too much eyeliner. Mere human facades covered in cosmetics resembling ghetto grafitti. They run now...animated automatons from the turn of the century, mechanical whirly-gigs toys in motion, trying to escape on a slo' mo treadmill in a rats cage to disappear, with bleeding psyches into the gauze mist of night alleys, tripping over the wino's lying on asphalt beds with broken bottles for pillows.
L.A., la-la-land, below the airliner. The mean streets of LA have a beat, cadence, all their own. Keeping time to a combination of improvised jazz notes, that lead, not follow. Everything juxtaposed in a collage, pieces of a quilt interspersed and added, like the cartoon sequence in Hitchcock's "Sabotage". It's arms and loins spread wide to welcome the unititiated and eat you alive, dangerous sex you can't avoid with a crucifix or morals. Quicksand drawing you in deeper, deeper yet into a cold, damp bottomless well of vice.
The jet liner was closing in and the Pacific was receding in the background as California came into focus in the foreground. Touchdawn, taxi down the runway, braking and stopping. California...LA-X marks the spot. Mickey literally bounced down the aisle, into the terminal and back out on the street. As he looked for a cab or bus or something to take him into town, he remembered the ticket to Detroit his parents had bought for him to escape Honolulu.. The trashcan next to him as he pulled out a cigarette was the recipient of his parents TWA largesse as the ticket transformed, morphed into trash, and not transportation. The city of lost angels was about to claim another child of the night into her bordello of chintz, glitz, sex and drugs.
Smelly cabby again, cheap it Sam, no-tell motel street at La Cienago near the Strip. Driving through the Saturday LA, not much different from the Monday - Friday, LA, except the traffic was thicker, like dried blood in an alley, or syrup on a stack of hotcakes. The cab pulled up at a beat-up old transient motel, each room with it's own resident demon with personal demons all their own. Mickey paid the cabbie off, grabbed his one gym bag he hauled around in Honolulu and checked in with the motel clerk with one good eye, not pasty and white like his other one.
He was now a "resident" as he paid for a week and walked down the courtyard to room 12. The key had to be worked to unlock the door, as nothing in LA fits right at first. The room had those tawdry, yellowed shades that had seen too much sun to fade them from the outside and the smoke from too many Chesterfields to stain them from the inside. The light bulb was dimmer than the ass of a firefly and the towel rack came off the wall with the slightest touch. There was a radio, am only in those early days, preachers mostly, and fast talking Mexicans from border stations south of the border, s.o.b....
The bed was another story. Flop house chic for a world of wino's, thin mattress with too many stains from too many sources that only the night knew and wouldn't tell anyone about. All Mickey knew is, they weren't his stains but belonged to someone or many someone's else. The window to the courtyard was grimy but he could still see out and watch the parade of lost souls coming and going in this skid row fiesta of the invisible people of any city USA.
The ones no one wants to know, or admit to the fact that they do exist. Admitting that, is admitting guilt.
Let's see. That one's a pimp, and that's his whore walking into room 4 for the payoff of his cut of her work after a beating for holding out on him, a lousy thirty bucks. These were cheap whores so every penny counted. Fifteen dollar blowjobs and twenty five dollar fucks. Making a living on her knees and on her back earned her a place to rest her head.
Mickey would soon be swallowed whole on the Strip named Sunset, not Bouelevard, but Strip, as in to bare your soul, now strip, show and tell. The scene on the Strip of 1965 was a Phil Spector wall of sound surrealism, where you could be anybody's little baby, for a few bucks, and a little da-do-ron-ron and Vaseline. The neon a-go-go was real gone, with white thigh high boots, bleached blonde boys with jeans to tight lining the street under the lights on display in a butcher shop window. Meat on a hook. Young Troy Donohues from the plaid and proud mid-west, machismo melting away like a glacier in a receding Ice Age leaving the farm boy exposed for the broadway showtune he has just become, bending over to take a big bow to massive applause from the invisible audience who sweat as nervously as he does under the seering heat of the hot, blinding stage lights.
On the other side of the street, in the shadow of the crosstown bus lights, stood hollow eyed, tender young runaway girls, aging rapidly and repeatedly, learning how to not wear makeup, vamping, badly at first and coming out looking like sad-eyed Emmet Kelly not-so-funny-are-we circus clowns with tiny cleavage as they pad their small cup training bra's trying to appear older than their 14 years to attract willing customers to come in under the big top to enjoy the show. Urchins itchin' to go, but cannot, and do not pass go, do not collect $200. Soon wise and cynical beyond their young years, these are the cherry popped vaginal veterans who bravely went behind enemy lines to lie down in the trenches with the troops. Blood, sweat and tears erupted from the Madonna in quiet pain for her lost children of the tarnished nights. Street slaves to addictions and sex, beaten into submission with whips of real and imagined humiliation.
The steamy street beat had a ferocious bongo-city intensity, as bands played the clubs up and down the Strip. The Doors, The Byrds, Frank Zappa, Sonny & Cher...it was a scene where, yes, yes, the beat goes on, 24 hours a day. Oh give me a home where the Buffalo Springfield roam and Ronnie Spector holds the Teen Queen scepter on the night of the prom. "Tamborine Man, hey, Mister," he said he saw that he conspired at the back table with some inventive mothers. Over in the corner, over there, there's a man with a gun over there....beware he says dressed as a Mongol, and laughing like a Lithuanian lunatic. The strait jacket fits too tightly and his eyes bulge as big as Desoto hubcaps.
Mickey unpacked what little he had, and put it in the dusty drawers in the dingy room. His parents would now be pissed on overload as they had not heard from him, and he had not descended from the plane at Detroit Metro. He'd call another day, when he could raise a shield of indignation and false righteousness...but for now, time to go out as the sun was setting, a social vampire now, soon he would once again become one of the shapeless nightime neon shadows of the steamy Sunset Strip. He didn't realize it at the time, but he was jumping overboard into swirling waters, the tempest tossed seas of LA sleaze...an ocean of sex and violence that would suck him into a vortex of vice to a rockabilly backbeat that would send him careening on his own sociological Deadmans Curve...for crissakes, help me, Rhonda, yeah!