day one

They said that this month is National Novel Writing Month. They said that it's ok if the work is bad, just do it. Don't worry about the editing, etc.

Just get it down.
Always one to take a dare, LAist will be writing our first bad novel, guaranteed to be bad, which is why it's set in the 80s.
So here goes nothing.

..
i wanted her because she was punk rock.

i wanted her because she was as pale as the untouched snow. i wanted her because she had the brightest red lipstick id ever seen. i wanted her because her eyes were the bluest id ever seen.

i wanted her because her hair was long and black and wild and crazy and she had love on the toe of one of her sneakers and fuck on the other.
santa monica college charged five dollars a unit until you hit fifty dollars. with my sixteen unit load, all the other classes i signed up for were basically free so i took tennis to keep in shape and guitar to get free guitar lessons.

little did i realize that punk rock girls would be in the one unit guitar class, but where else would they be at two pm on a monday?
she had black mens socks on. her fingers tried to form the new chord but they faught against her.

lord only knows what they would rather be doing, and lord knows a variety of different scenarios lingered in my barely-out-of-high school mind.
i said hi and she said hi and there was lipstick on her front tooth and i wanted her.
could borrow her Sharpie when she was done with it.

she put the finishing touches on a curley cue beneath the scrawled "The Cure" she had just drawn on her folder and handed me the marker.
"my name is:____ ______", i wrote on the back of my guitar. "my number is _ _ _ - _ _ _ _.

"
it was 1986, we didnt have area codes back then.
she took the pen back and i handed her the guitar and she smiled some of that lipstick at me and filled in the blanks and a few days later she was in my cadillac as we drove down the sunset strip.
turned out her name was mmmm.

in those days when your grandmother died, she left you ungodly amounts of treasures. my grandmother left me the best gift ever. a 76 sedan deville.

biggest backseat ever. and a pretty good sized front seat.
the interior was maroon leather.

the front seat was a bench style. so if you sat there and you didnt wear your seatbelts, as most of us didnt in the 80s, because we werent pussyass bitches, and the driver took a sharp right, the passenger would slide across the car to his awaiting arm.
your best bet is the seat belt baby, i said.

only problem is, only the middle one works.
punk rock girl slid to the center of the front seat, snapped on the seat belt, and said, no problem. and pushed in the dan folgerberg 8track into the slot.

granny didnt have the best taste.
as cool as i tried to appear, the crazy fact was i was a virgin. and i was waiting and i didnt mind waiting for The Perfect Girl.

in my mind that meant that she had to love sports, love ac/dc, and love bruce springsteen.
"hey do you like baseball?" i asked her as we drove past Gazarri's.

"ha!" she said and lit up a clove. the poorman was playing depeche mode for the second time that hour.

mmmm opened the ashtray and was greeted with a variety of coins. just use the floor i told her and she went for it. right then i knew i had it made.

which made me start shaking.
cuz when you should have something and you blow it its your fault. if theres no way you should get it and you dont then you had nothing to worry about.

but if you had no shot and you got it, well, then you were the man.
i had a lot to worry about.
not that long ago i was at a roller rink next to a corn field in illinois, less than a year later there i was pulling in behind a row of restaurants whose parking lot had the greatest view ever of the Beverly Center, West Hollywood, and the twinkling lights of LA.

earlier that day i had sold a television to stevie wonder. i should have known then that i was in for something interesting.
two big black dudes marched into the store with authority, making a bee line to the 25” tvs, the largest tube televisions we had.

“stevie wonder wants a tv,” one of them told me.
i hadnt worked there long, but i had learned a LOT. the first lesson was, if youre a skinny community college kid and you get a lay down, and you fuck it up, you will be ridiculed for months.

id rather not go into the details as to how i learned that lesson but lets just say that when i was presented with these two gentlemen i got nervous because a good salesman would have these dudes leave the store with the entire store.
“we’re all sold out of tvs” i said.
behind me flashed in unison a wall of thirty six televisions, on the wall next to that flashed sixty televisions.

little televisions sat on top of console televisions along the aisles, and in the next room over was a private nook for the projection tvs.
fuckers left with two sony xbrs. best tvs we had in a transaction that lasted fifteen minutes.

mmmmm had her hand down my pants and i had learned that in order to stop yourself from making a quick mess you should think about everything else other than the best thing in the world which was happening to you.
so i thought about what happened after i sold stevie wonder two tvs.
my boss yelled at me.

“how the fuck were you able to sell the two best tv’s but no warrantee? wheres the cheese? wheres my motherfucking CHEESE!

”
because i was so creative in those days all i could think of was fuck your cheese. but i was shy back then and all i did was look at the ground and wait for my in.
“if you cant sell the total package: four head hi fi stereo vcr, a case of hi fi tapes, monster cable, and a surround sound amplifier to compliment that television then perhaps you should be back in car audio!

”
i was nineteen years old. as i was being yelled at there was a song on the radio called nineteen. kroq was everywhere.

just then the fat assistant manager walked into the office. he had heard the yelling.
“tony sold three thousand dollars of video with no cheese” the manager told the assistant manager, who ate a slice of pizza.

the assistant manager, with a full mouth said, pussy.
which i sorta thought was funny, so i laughed.
the manager said, tony im going to give you one more month to get your warranty percentage at a reasonable level, and if you cant do it, you will go back to car audio or computers.

got that.
yep.
then the assistant manager said, “wait what the hell did you sell?

”
two xbrs to a blind man.
which made me cum in her hand.
when you have a messy car theres always some napkins in a mcdonalds bag, or an old shirt, or a new shirt, or a free shirt you got at a concert.

and we listened to bob coburn on the might met play the doors for us.
the good part about having mmmm in guitar class was i didnt really have to call her. she was there twice a week and it was like a “hey what are you doing here” little joke situation which was fun.

she lived in malibu, i lived in inglewood. gas cost seventy five cents a gallon. the caddy would take $25 of unleaded.

but the good news was it only cost five bucks to go to the movies and mmmm loved movies and since there was only one theater in malibu we spent a lot of time at the la monica 3 since we fancied ourselves foreign film elites.
some nights id drive to the bu, turn around and take her to hollywood, then take her back home, make out, and drive back to west la where i sold tvs. some nights id just park in the parkinglot and sleep in that caddy so id wake up at work.

in those days people didnt smell.
well, we thought that. once the men took me out to lunch at Don Antonio’s.

since they drank shots, sometimes id be forced to have a few shots.
in those days i wore skinny leather ties cuz they made us wear suits to sell tvs. i had a black skinny tie, a red skinny tie and a teal skinny tie.

usually i wore a white dress shirt, black dress pants, and my teal skinny tie.
until i ran into bad luck.
apparently customers cant smell your BO after youve slept in your car, but they can totally smell your bacardi after youve had a few meaningless shots at lunch.

“because youre constantly shoving things into your vcr, you really should protect yourself with this five year maintenance guarantee.”
“oh its more than just a warrantee, its a guarantee.”
“is that alcohol i smell on your breath, son?

”
and there i was getting yelled at by the manager, and his pizza eating assistant manager again, but because the lady had settled for a two year, the meeting only lasted a minute.
it was then i decided to go back into porn.