That's Our Viva!
aka How I got married, failed at kicking dope, but succeeded at scoring it while the L.A. riots raged.
When you’re strung out you have to worry about a lot of things, but two things you don’t worry about are the future and the right now. The right now is for copping more dope, and the future is for getting clean. Then, every so often, the future becomes the right now and you decide to give getting clean an actual try. So, it was in the spring of 1992 when me and my accomplice, co-conspirator, full-time running partner and part-time wife decided enough was enough, and headed to the fresh air and high climes of Lake Tahoe Nevada to get the so called “monkey” off our back.
In 1990 we were living in a small 150 dollar a week room with payphone and toilet in the hall. The room had filthy floor to ceiling curtains, a pom-pom green bedspread, and a TV bolted to the wall. We lived in that carpeted ditch for 18 months. We were high, happy, hopeless and in love. But now it was 1992, and much had changed, poetry having given way to screenwriting, and though the words were worse the money was better. Good enough to rent a little two-bedroom shack in early 90s Silverlake and almost pay for our habit.
I had defied all odds. I was a junkie success! Not a huge one, but big enough for my holocaust survivor in-laws to decide a real Jewish wedding was in order.
On April 4th , not yet 30, and strung out to the gills we got married in the Crystal Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There was a braided challah as long as a canoe, and the guests’ tattoos were courtesy of Auschwitz, not Kat Von D. As is the tradition from the old country, the bride and groom are given a half-hour or so to consummate the marriage before coming back for the feast. We went up to our fancy room and did a big fat shot, getting not one speck of blood on the bride’s six thousand dollar dress. We came back down and smiled, as Jew after Jew pressed checks in my hand. It got me higher than the dope! My wife’s grandfather, a tiny Hitler-defying force with twinkling blue eyes and a lumber baron’s moustache cut the massive challah to cries of “mazel tov!”The only men in the room wearing black hats were he, myself and a small putty faced man named Mendy Rosenberg. I was shitting in high cotton.
My favorite part of the whole event was the next morning when Kenny Butler, my surrogate dad and dope dealer drove up from the ‘hood and met me in the hotel driveway in his pale yellow late 70s Cadillac Seville. He rolled down the window, handed me a gram, knocked the ash from his Pall Mall into the birds of paradise and said in his alto-methadone drawl. “Beverly Hills Hotel, huh?”
I had a couple of weeks work on the script I was writing before we could go on our honeymoon. Our plan was simple: Get our hands on some good detox meds, drive up to my in-law’s woodsy condo on the north shore of Lake Tahoe and get straight.
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For me the most exciting thing about Lake Tahoe was Ernest (pronounced Ernesht), an old master Hungarian pastry man who had survived the war, and come to America. The fact that the best Magyar baker in the western hemisphere was in an inconspicuous storefront in the ass end of Tahoe’s North shore was strangely thrilling and I would start thinking about him and what to get as soon as we hit the turn off to route 50. Usually, we went with a Dobos torte, a big round, decadent eight-layer chocolate buttercream dream with a rock- hard, burnt sugar topping you needed a ball peen hammer to crack, but since we were going to be there ten days we decided to save that for later,and started off with a Kokosh, which like all of Ernest’s wares had to be ordered in person for pick up the next day. It was custom order action only. He baked you a cake like he was making you a suit, and he had the wry couldn’t-care-less apathy of the master craftsman who no longer cares if his genius is appreciated.
We picked up our Kokosh the next day. It was a masterpiece! A long strudel-shaped cake of about 40 inches. For the next few days it sat on the island in kitchen getting shorter and shorter by the hour. Shoot a little smack, eat a little Kokosh, shoot a little smack, eat a little Kokosh. Of course, the sloppy business of detox and craving was still looming, but right now it was strong white heroin and a three-foot staff of the greatest chocolate coffee cake man has ever known. What a honeymoon! There was no need for the beaches of Tahiti. All we needed was a knife, a fork, and of course, a spoon.
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On April 29th four LAPD officers were acquitted after giving Rodney King a savage beat down that the whole world saw. By the next day LA was on fire from Watts to K-town. We sat on an old shit brown sofa and watched it all on a nineteen-inch screen.
It was a sick, helpless feeling, but instead of being scared or relieved we were far from the action, we felt like our child was in harm’s way. Those were our streets on that TV screen! We weren’t sure what to do, but when we saw the Viva market on Western and Venice blazing out of control we both leapt from the couch.
-That’s our Viva!
The Viva was one of our essential meeting spots with Kenny. Now, it was personal.
Within 30 minutes we had packed our clothes and cake, and were streaking back to Los Angeles. Detox would have to wait.
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When we hit the town of Gorman 67 miles from LA, the traffic heading north was a bumper to bumper. It was like a Thursday rush hour on the 405. The natives were beyond restless, they were smashing appliance store windows all the way up to La Brea and Sunset. It was time to jump in the Mercedes and run for your lives. So, as whitey grabbed the kids and headed for higher ground, we streaked back to the battle, tearing south on “I 5” toward the blaze.
We got to LA at dusk and called to Kenny to let him know we were back.
- What’s going on?
- Shit’s jumping.
- Can we meet you?
- Yeah. You know that Popeye’s on Figueroa?
I didn’t, but the wife did from her USC days and nodded her head.
- Yeah, we know it.
- Be there in 20.
- Okay.
The drive there was eerie. We were the only car on 110 heading through downtown. From the overpass the city was a bean field of burning ruins. The pink sunset sky blasted purple with smoke and doom. It was post apocalyptic, and rightfully so. The white man had pushed it too far. He had gotten away with so much for so long he thought he could get away with everything, but his technology had turned on him and caught his soldiers clubbing old Rodney like a baby seal. He should have known enough to suck it up and send those four cops down as an offering, but old whitey got too big for even his britches. He didn’t just pull down his blue pantsand shit on Black LA’s living room floor, he shoved their face in it and said “smell it.”
The brothers showed their rightful displeasure with a mad blast of anarchy, burning and looting from South Central to Hollywood, with an extra dose of destruction saved for K-town. But the Korean store owners weren’t having it. They boarded up the doors and windows and got on their roofs with shotguns. They had to send in the 7th infantry to sort it out.
When we dipped off the Harbor and down onto Adams it was martial law. There was no one walking, and barely any cars. The only thing on the street was a smoky haze and throngs of teenage boys on bicycles, circling like seagulls, scavenging for the last scraps of unrest.
We pulled into the Popeye’s parking lot and waited in the post nuclear fog. Twenty minutes came and went, then thirty. There was no yellow Seville. We started to get jumpy, surely a band of urban pirates would descend on us like locusts and make us pay for our audacity, but the only people out were the seagull boys and they were looking for treasure not justice. Thirty-five minutes passed, forty-five, fifty, there we sat, holding our ground and why not? An empty pool of concrete outside an abandoned fried chicken stand in the middle of a burning city. Can you think of a better setting for a late 20th century production of Waiting for Godot?
At the one-hour mark six police cars headed north on Figueroa flanking the entire two-way street in a triangle formation. One in front, then two, then three, like black and white bowling pins headed toward the ball. Never seen that before, maybe we shouldn’t be out here. And then a faded blue 70s dodge van swept up next to us with a hard swerve. The fucking pirates! They had come, but not on foot. But when we looked out, we saw Kenny’s smacked back face, the ubiquitous Pall Mall dangling from his smirking lips. With a Pennsylvania Dutch mother, and a black Texas Ranger dad he was a shade or two lighter than Billie Holiday, but a lifetime of junk had given him the same tragic beauty. He was a fucking pirate, but he was our pirate.
I got out and went to the van, I had seen it parked in his driveway, the Seville behind it, but I’d never seen him drive it and in this heightened environment it had startled me. As I walked up the first thing that caught my eye was Jay, Kenny’s sixty-year-old crack head brother, riding shotgun with an actual shotgun across his lap.
Kenny rolled down the window.
“How was the honeymoon?” he drawled.
- Got cut a little short.
He handed me two half grams.
- Better take two, I don’t know when I’m coming back out.
I took the balloons, and put ‘em in my mouth out of habit, thanked Kenny, headed toward he car, thenstopped and called back to him.
- Hold on a second.
I reached into the back seat and grabbed the last foot of Kokosh and went back to the van.
- Here, take this.
- What is it?
- Best chocolate coffee cake you ever had in your life.