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The
Real Lebowskis
by Johnny Angel They
avoid straight
jobs like the plague and spend all their time on art, Tequila Mockingbird is just about ready to pass out as the sun
is
rising. She's had an absolutely hectic hellish night, what with two of the four bands she manages having just played across town from each other. Both of their sets took place near closing time, which left her rushing from the Alligator Lounge on the Westside to Al's Bar downtown to collect the bands' fees. Before that, she'd spent the better part of her day on the phones flogging a dance night for a Westside promoter, trying to fill his room with warm bodies. This particularly taxing task takes all of her phone-charm skills, as she's got to convince the jaded brigades of tragically hip Angelenos that they must see and be seen here, daunting for even the most savvy of conversationalists.
"It's a wonderful way to meet new people," she says dryly. No wonder she's so wired at 2:30 a.m. that it takes hours to wind down and get a little rest. The upshot of this racing around is a payoff of next to nothing, which may explain why Ms. M has about $17.50 in her bank account, and why she's presently making her home on the notoriously nasty corner of Yucca and Wilcox Streets, a.k.a. "Crack Alley," in Hollywood.
Even though she's on the Jersey side of 35 years old, she's still the archetypal slacker, with the notion of a 9-to-5 cocoon as appealing to her as having an anvil land on her spiky, yellow-tipped hair. The kind of life she leads sounds more suited to someone right out of college, given the wacked-out hours and pitiful remuneration.
Tequila ruminates to herself about her precarious finances and prays that one of her bands lands a deal soon, or that one of the many independent movies for which she supervises the music gets enough attention to put her onboard for a real score.
If not, she'll be out of her $450-a-month apartment and back on the danged couch tour again, and at this late date in her checkered career as an art impresario, that would truly suck. Still, she consoles herself with the thought that for the time being, she's running her own life, a major relief, better this than to be back behind the bar at Zatar's in Hollywood or some other drunkatorium, doling out the lush to stupefied creeps, watching her life drain away. That's the ticket. Pleasant dreams ahead.
Seven a.m. in Los Angeles is like 7 a.m. in any other big city, armies of crazed commuters converging on their various places of employment. Maybe the varicose-vein array of freeways that carries the worker bees gives the city its distinct aura, or perhaps it's the yellow-gray pallor of smog. Maybe it's L.A.'s lack of a central locale as destination. What's the difference, morning is morning, here or wherever.
That means rise and shine, daddy or mommy-o, it's work time! From Beverly Hills brokerage houses to Inglewood warehouses, from Hollywood movie sets to San Pedro dockside diners, the city pulses with a fervid energy. If you were a sky-cam, L.A. would appear to be a miniature of the cult film Baraka: bumper-to-bumper lines of cars discharging workers into their posts with near military precision.
The citywide sense of getting-there-on-time urgency belies the laid-back aura that's supposedly the norm here. Why, we can roll 'em up and hunker down with the best of 'em. Mañana be damned, at 7 a.m., L.A. is jammin'!
But not everyone is frantically playing the 9-to-5 game. Aside from the usual assortment of late-shifters, retirees, the involuntarily unemployed, and others with no reason to greet the sunrise, L.A. is home to a special breed of people for whom the 40-hour work week is akin to life at San Quentin. These are people who no more enjoy the tightly-bracketed Monday through Friday routine than they would a Drano enema. For them, the adrenaline rush of grabbing a quick coffee and muffin, and hurtling crazed toward an office makes their hearts beat faster with dread rather than anticipation. Just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so does the work ethic have its flip side -- the anti-work ethic.
This isn't confined to the ranks of indigents whose routine is panhandle/pass out, or the segment of the population incapacitated by drug and alcohol addictions. A large number of Angelenos devote as much time and ingenuity to beating the system -- by means legal, semi-legal, and illegal -- as their opposites do in trying to make it in said system. They are the real Lebowskis of L.A.
Face it, since most of us were old enough to use the toilet ourselves, we've had it drummed into our skulls that the path of life is basically to go to the best school and to get the best grades. From there it's on to the best college, to get the best degree and thence to land the best job. For the members of L.A.'s anti-working class, however, there was a short circuit along the line somewhere.
Take the "Reverend" Randall Tin-Ear, who might work three days a month in an office -- enough to earn his rent nut -- and then spend the rest of his time using every conceivable trick at his disposal to stay out of that environment for the rest of the month. Or Texas Terri, who hasn't been on the paycheck-collecting side of an office in 25 years. Or Sean Maytum, who regards his barely part-time work as a Hollywood set painter as "art calisthenics," and spends his days painting portraits and listening to Black Sabbath. Or Kitty Reynolds, who intends to stay in school as long as she possibly can. These are people who appear to be chronically unemployable, but by golly, they want it that way! Big deal, sociopathy, who cares, right?
Sure, self-styled bohemians litter espresso joints from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, sending out their prose gems to little magazines and arguing with their peers about existential trivia, as if they invented America's answer to the Left Bank. Always have, always will -- until the trust fund runs out or they accept reality and start using that expensive four-year stretch in college for more than an intellectual talisman. But members of L.A.'s anti-working class are different.
"If you were trying to get by in Pittsburgh where I grew up, doing odd jobs, you'd starve," says Arty Nelson, a former anti-working class guy who now edits Bikini magazine, a glossy, low-budget, Santa Monica-based version of Spin. "There, you have to have at least a 40-hour thing going just to get by, and in the thinking of the locals, 'part-time' equals 'loser.' Here, there are entire industries that are geared to making a decent living without any real time structure. The entire movie and TV industries are run by part-time laborers who make amazing amounts of money, which is ideal if your goals are two-pronged, as so many are here." What's ironic about Nelson's observations is that the great hourly wages that enable part-timers to get by with an under-40-hour-a-week job in L.A. are the result of powerful labor unions like the Carpenters, Electricians, and the Screen Actors Guild -- and normally unions fight hard for the 40-hour security blanket for the rank and file. Here, that's not even in the equation.
While it's true that every other waitperson is waiting on auditions, and every staffer at Guitar Center has dreams of Van Halen-hood underneath his or her furrowed brows, the anti-work force's goals are rarely as clearly defined. In the case of these gentlepersons, it would appear that the hunt isn't necessarily for a definite quarry, like stardom, although it would be welcome. They have concluded, however, that personal time traded for money is absolute defeat and that having their days spread out like uncharted vistas before them is truly Valhalla. This is the common tie that binds the members of the anti-working class and what baffles the hell out of most of the universe. Lack of job security can make a bed-wetter out of the toughest of the tough. But to the folks profiled herein, the challenge is to fly in the face of that dilemma, since to them, a regular job is nothing more than the chain gang disguised as factory, office, or farm.
"Dumpster diving is an art and a skill both," says the "Reverend" Randall Tin-Ear, publisher, editor, and sole staff writer of the Angry Thoreauan, a thrice-yearly magazine that serves as a showcase for his irreverent screeds on virtually every topic imaginable. In his "L.A. Issue," for instance, he goes after meter maids and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with vitriolic gusto, and devotes page after page to reviews of rock CDs as well. The 3,000-circulation magazine is his raison d'être, even though he has no idea if it's turned a profit yet. Mostly it's a forum for his completely anti-norm world views, and he treasures it.
Tin-Ear is the very model of antipathy toward the hated day job, and he's explaining to me the fine points of rummaging through dumpsters to find the essentials of gratis living.
"What they throw out in L.A. is astonishing -- everything you could possibly want or need to live your life without spending a dime," he says. "I pick dumpsters the way a consumer picks shop outlets. For instance, if I need mailers for my magazine, I pick a dumpster behind a record company or bigger magazine; they throw away all the stuff I recycle. And food, well, let me tell you, you can find many an uneaten pizza behind a Little Caesar's or Domino's."
The mental image of Tin-Ear battling rats for a crust has me choking back my lunch, and he smiles knowingly. "I can tell a good piece of food in a dumpster from a bad one just by smell. It's like a restaurant -- would you eat something that smelled rotten? You'd send it back. That's basically what I do."
A cheerful 30-year-old lad with a mess of hair that flops in his face every time he moves his head, Tin-Ear is far from an illiterate with no way to feed himself sans forage. A military brat from Alabama, he completed three years of high school ROTC and was headed for the Air Force Academy when he inexplicably turned away from the straight world. "No epiphany, man, just backed away from it," he says. A couple of years at Troy State and Auburn universities made nary a dent, and Tin-Ear was off to California.
He learned how to drive a semi, but deliberately screwed up the end of the course so as not to qualify for a Class 1 trucker's license. "Better for the world," he says, smiling. "I had these fantasies about just jack-knifing the fucker right in the middle of the freeway." He's done many a grunt job in and out of offices, and basically only takes the minimum of labor to survive.
Living as close to free as possible is his ideal. With no car and a tiny flat about two blocks from the homeless domes downtown, his expenses are virtually nil. In order to raise his $230-a-month rent, he temps in offices, utilizing his skills as a graphic artist. And he puts his street smarts to good use on those rare days in a highrise. "All of my office supplies -- the ones I don't find diving -- are in these offices," he says. "Cartridges for printers, paper, pens, and best of all, the Pitney-Bowes machine are all at my disposal." As a temp, he's never in one spot long enough to draw much attention, and he scoffs at the notion of getting caught. "Everyone in those places steals from their bosses, and why not? They're getting paid shit."
His other scams include good old-fashioned shoplifting, albeit with a modern twist. "There's a Printshop program that can do bar codes," he says. "I change a $10.99 item to $1.99, and get into the most crowded line at Hughes or Ralph's, and let 'er rip. They don't check. They just pass that baby over the light, and I've got a bargain. Keeps me in better food when I've got a little money, anyway."
Seems like a lot of work just to stay out of the clutches of the office work he's so adept at anyway, but Tin-Ear bristles at that thought.
"I devote all my time and energy to the magazine, and its creation is my sole purpose," he says. "I keep a DBA account for the record companies who buy real ads in it; major record companies and other legit businesses are difficult to deal with if you don't have a bank account. But that's the extent of my straight-world dealings. I know how many Thoreauans are out there, and I know how many are returned. But I don't keep books, so whether or not we ever break even, I couldn't tell you." His rock reviews have gotten Tin-Ear on the mailing lists of all the labels, so he enjoys the music writer's fave perk -- selling promotional CDs and pocketing the cash.
"All of that goes right back into the magazine," he says. "I don't even use outside writers much, as I can't pay them. But my life is my own all the way, something most people can't say. And even my parents back in Alabama, as nonplused as they are, have to respect me for this, whether they get it or not!"
He bristles at being called an anarchist. "An anarchist has to give a fuck, and I don't," he says flatly. "I like to hang out with friends and put out my magazine and do exactly what I want when I want to. That's not anarchy. You can call it what you want but a political stance? Hardly!"
Even in the middle of nutball Hollywood, Texas Terri stands out like a flame-topped sore thumb. A local fixture/legend, the singer/actress/hairdresser is holding court at a Denny's around the corner from her cluttered apartment near the Hollywood Palladium, and is fired up to the gills to be expounding on one of her favorite topics, the life of Texas Terri.
The utter refusal to march with the rank and file is the basis for every waking moment in her life, and that this notion has made her a subject for a newspaper feature has her tongue flapping like a barn door in a tornado. After emigrating to L.A. from Austin 14 years ago, the tattooed, rail-thin, perpetually grinning Terri became an immediate presence on the city's rock circuit, initially as a wildly dancing fan of bands, and later as the front-person of her own combos, the Killer Crows and most recently, the Stiff Ones.
Onstage, she's a maniac and a half, a bastard mutation of Janis Joplin and Iggy Pop, flailing her limbs insanely and exposing her prosthetically-enhanced bazooms. Her manic goofball persona is in full flower this evening as well, even offstage. "I regard work as death," she says emphatically. "I get so tired of being around the same bodies day in and day out outside of a job, so can you imagine what it would be like five days a week, forever? Not me, honey!" Terri hasn't worked a full-time gig since she graduated from high school (how long ago that was, she won't say). Working in her father's insurance office was an eye-opener. "All these people running around, doing shit that seemed so pointless to me," she says. "No fun at all, and I was pretty much determined to have fun all the time, so out I went."
Off to Southwest Texas State to study, of all things, nuclear physics ("I loved the idea of blowing shit up"), but also to stay out of a day job, her main priority. Her grades began to fall as her drug use escalated, and returning to Austin, she realized that she needed a new way to stay out of the clutches of the mundane. "Parents put me through beauty school, and I was cutting punk rockers' hair in Austin -- the best mohawk money could buy," she says. Bored with the insular small-town scene, she headed for L.A. where she did odd jobs like flyering windshields and catering for a while before she found her niche in show biz.
Terri can be seen in the background of a dozen movies or TV episodes. As a wild-looking woman, she's prized as an extra, usually as a hooker in a jail scene (Melrose Place, Suddenly Susan) or a biker mama (MTV videos). She doesn't exactly love the work. "All extras do all day is sit around and talk about this job or that, this director or that one, this time they got Taft-Hartleyed, or nearly did, and they're boring. But it pays the bills, and I've gotten a few small movie roles since, and I love that, being the center of attention and getting pampered." (A Taft-Hartley waiver is highly coveted by extras as a ticket into the Screen Actors Guild. It's granted when an extra gets a line to say, usually extemporaneously. Extras will stampede at directors like buffaloes for those, since they don't happen too often.)
Terri spends most of her time booking the Stiff Ones, or working on the group's songs, and since the rest of the band either works or is incapable of such tasks, she does all their scut-work -- like arranging rehearsals or sending out press kits -- solo. "Drives me nuts, there just aren't enough hours in the day for this, and it pays nothing," she says. "It's sort of a labor of love, although labor of hate is more accurate right now."
To supplement her income as an extra she barters her haircutting skills. "I get free headshots, guitar lessons, tune-ups, you name it, in exchange for chopping hair," she says. And a Texas Terri haircut is an experience; unlike a Hollywood salon with its sterile, high-tech atmosphere, one sits in her barber's chair in the middle of her cramped kitchen and gets trimmed while she waxes loquacious upon any and every topic under the sun, including the anti-work ethic.
"I don't know if I'm capable of holding down any job with my low attention span -- even one that paid a fortune," she says. "I could do it for a month, and then, I know I'd just say 'fuck it,' and live off my four weeks of high pay for half a year and then be back grinding out the auditions, booking my band, and cutting hair."
Although she's hardly a spring chicken, she seems unafraid of the prospect of aging with no safety net, which is the subtext of every 9-to-5 job. "Living in L.A. and doing what I do is basically a variation on Vegas or the lottery," she says. "Some people get really lucky in music or movies or TV; why not me? Yeah, that's the carrot on the stick they dangle in front of everyone here, but at least you don't know how it's gonna play out, which is more than I can say for what would have been back in Austin. And people complain about the aggravation of Hollywood? I thrive on it, gimme more. Keeps me young and sexy, honey!"
Do you remember your first job? I can't. But I recall moments from all the early ones being centered on the Fear of the Broom. Not because of some irrational straw-phobia, but because of the following scenario: You're standing around in the shop (or warehouse or restaurant) doing bupkes, since your normal slew of banal tasks is now complete. Bossman sees you leaning up against the wall in a coffee-break stance at a time of day not designated for it, and what does he do? Hands you the fucking broom and tells you to get busy.
The Broom, baby, the Broom. It's a symbol for all the headaches and other agonies associated with being under the thumb of a so-called superior. When I share the sweep-up metaphor with the subjects of this article, they all shake like it's Northridge '94. They can also relate like a mofo to that awful moment when your mind starts asking why you're doing this hateful routine. As you look outside and see the sun, and imagine tasting the air, and want more than anything else to run away, you have to fight that urge with every fiber of your being. That hurts like hell.
Many among us can endure and even thrive under these circumstances. But all of those interviewed expressed amazement at how regular souls put up with what seems like highway robbery, exchanging priceless days in a short life for a measly meal ticket. Life in these circumstances means being bound to an existence where your two states of mind are either numbness or fear. It runs that deep. Opinions that run contrary to the workadaddy norm have to be carefully thought out or nurtured in a crucible most people would rather avoid. Do you remember that old punk-rock anthem, Chelsea's The Right To Work, a real rabble-rousing paean to unemployed youth discontent? I always thought it would have been much more effective had it been written as The Right Not To Work myself, and although this opinion drew big laughs whenever it was broached, no one seemed to relate as deeply as I wanted.
Not until now, that is.
"Slacker? What the hell does that mean, anyway?" Artist Sean Maytum, a 30-year-old former Venice Beach surfer and current movie set-painter, has just been asked if he fits into that broad and unflattering category of castaways and misfits.
Sitting in the living room at Chez Angel, he is idly picking away at the guitar, and all the while giving detailed answers to the questions at hand. Namely, why doesn't he have a steady gig? Apprentice to a well-known local painter at $9 an hour was his last full-time job. "I'd do all the grunt work for [him]," says Maytum, "and he'd snort our paychecks away, so that didn't last." Before that, Maytum worked for Plum's Guides, which are hotel directories, selling ads. "I was so incompetent that they didn't even really fire me," he says. "Basically they asked me, 'why are you even here?' I couldn't answer. They were right! And I'd done condo construction before that, but the contractor got busted by the feds for attempted murder, and I'd sold [copy machine] toner for this Arab guy who went down for fraud. I'm a curse to small businessmen, it scares me!"
The last statement is said with a typically shit-eating grin. Today is yet another day off for Maytum, and he loves it. "I can't imagine doing a full-time job even as an art director making a ton....The actual labor doesn't matter. It's really rare to me when I find a gig where the work takes precedence over your being on time. That's what they care about -- whether or not you're physically there." His philosophy is simple. "If all you have is work, then you'll have nothing to work for. You can't step back and see what you've done -- you live to work. I can't stand that. Time off is spent in work recovery, and you try to cram your whole life into a weekend, which only reminds you of what little a life you have. I can't stand that, either."
Maytum's chosen vocation is that of painter, which he's rather good at, judging by the canvasses that occupy the back seat of his '65 Fairlane wagon. A vivid portrait of the singer Robert Palmer taken off an album cover stares back at us with enormously exaggerated pearly fangs for teeth. Maytum's other portraits also feature grotesque choppers on the subjects. He's never noticed this before but is flattered that someone else has.
"I think the natural tendency of man is to create," he says. "Not just me. But if people have no constraints they feel out of control and panic. People do need guidance, but what they end up with is a bureaucratic monolith, and an uncaring one at that." He's sold a few of his works here and there, but is far from making a living at it. What he does is set design, painting backdrops for movies and TV commercials.
"I do scenic work three to five days a month, and it pays all my bills," he says. "Pay is from $200 to $300 a day. No big stuff: B-movies, kiddie shows, a Velveeta commercial, which is ironic given that my work is basically cheese. You're not supposed to notice my work; if you do, there's something wrong."
This invisibility doesn't bother him. "I'm a paint extra," he says. But it beats the hell out of spending 20-plus days a month suffering. "The work system is built to fail. The worker is nothing, it's a hangover from the Industrial Revolution where we're just warm bodies in place, and the rest of the system is just like debtors' prison -- if you don't pay taxes or insurance, you're off to the camps. I'd rather be a mercenary than a slave."
Maytum has had some problems maintaining his lifestyle, even though he's ascetic by nature; he lives in a tiny, $425-a-month Silver Lake pad and eats cheaply.
"I made $3,500 at one job and paid every back bill, didn't work for a month," he says. "I misjudged my money, ended up broke and panicked. I figured I'd sell my stuff on the sidewalk then go on a hunger strike so everyone would see my pitiful state. I went into fantasy mode: I should be a hit man, or maybe work for the CIA, something. Then I realized I'd always be able to work and not do something awful like being a sheriff's deputy evicting poor people. And I like what I do, even though I'm an anonymous drone in the Hollywood cheese factory."
Putting down the guitar he straightens his back and looks intently at me. "I came to the conclusion that life is basically purposeless, and after accepting that, what I do today is just that: what I do. Every day is like a journey, and if I'm stuck in an office, I can't daydream, and I like to do that." He stopped surfing and skateboarding because it became too competitive -- too many pros on the Venice beaches. So for pleasure, he "listens to Black Sabbath, drinks strong coffee, masturbates, and paints and paints more." His work, as he sees it, pays him the bare minimum needed for his freedom. And that is that.
The slacker tag sends a shudder through Kitty Reynolds and Danny Serfaty, a pair of dread-locked, part-time actors and full-time students.
Sitting in a Melrose Avenue café on a sunny Sunday, they seem out of place in the light, since their preferred activity is night crawling. They get labeled slackers all the time. "We're not anything like those horrible, corduroy-wearing geeks we used to have to deal with when we lived in San Fran," sniffs Kitty as she picks at her fruit salad. "Those are slackers." Neither of the two has worked a steady day job in years, due to their endless ingenuity both in San Francisco and L.A. Danny did foundry work in Burbank five years ago after emigrating from Queens, and actually felt guilty about having a job as opposed to consciously avoiding one. "I felt like, 'This is California, I should be free,' so I got the hell out there and started freelancing" as a welder, he says. He met Kitty a while later and a true partnership began.
They relocated to San Francisco so Kitty could pursue a degree in interior design at San Francisco State, and also because of the Bay Area's reputation as a freak scene. They were sorely disappointed. "Total small-town bullshit, with all these politically-correct smelly jerks on the street begging for money," says Kitty. "And I had to get this dumb job in Berkeley for a while. But I found out that when you're in school drawing student loans, you can get all kinds of benefits -- food stamps, you name it." She's $14,000 in debt, and not at all worried about it.
They're both back in L.A. again and living the anti-work ethic life. Danny welds for artists and very occasionally freelances, and Kitty is ensconced at Santa Monica College. She's going for a B.A. in archaeology, her goal being to be sent on digs for the rest of her life. "Grants will pay our way forever," she says. "We're incapable of doing an office gig, we'd go insane." And sitting with them amidst the gleaming teeth/perfect tan/fake tits set on Melrose, she's probably right -- blend, they don't.
But they're hardly poor, either. Kitty has starred in two big commercials in the last year, one for Taco Bell, and one for Pepsi, both as a result of her Medusa-like locks framing a cherubically innocent face; at 25, she's probably the envy of half of the coffee shop, a working actress. Both of them acknowledge the irony. "We don't see ourselves as oddities, but to Middle America we are, and that's why we're landing all this commercial work," says Danny. Their dream is to collect exotic percussion instruments from around the world, and to make a go of beat/noise music. In the meantime, Kitty will remain a perpetual student, and she and Danny will continue to try to rack up national ad spots, posing as crazy kids.
They're crazy like foxes.
Had the movie and television industries not changed so dramatically in the last five years, Kitty, Danny, Texas Terri, and Tequila Mockingbird (who also does extra work) might never be anything but the least visible background in all but the most outré presentations. Not in 1998. The anti-working class has hit the mother lode in the new Hollywood; America no longer seems to want models hawking products as much as it wants funny-looking boys and girls who cut through the endless barrage of information/propaganda. So those who were formerly unemployable due to offbeat appearances are now very much in vogue.
Which is why Kitty, Danny, and Terri have found a home at Hollywood's premier talent agency for kooks and outsiders, Dragon Talent. With more than 230 people on its roster, Dragon supplies most of the multicolored heads you see in commercials, and many pierced and tattooed types who have bit parts in flicks large and small. Specializing in the marginal, Dragon has become famous in the last two years, getting notices in People and Entertainment Weekly. The times, they have changed, and Dragon is cashing in.
It figures that one of the agency's principals is a former proud member of the anti-working class himself. "When I was doing hairstyling or wardrobe, I maybe worked four days a month," says Chaim Magnum, Dragon's second-in-command. "I lunched with friends or hung out at the pool the rest of the time. I was making amazing money, and I didn't work very hard at all." Magnum's clients included Madonna and Demi Moore, and he thought his life was set, until his night-clubbing friend Robin Harrington, Dragon's owner, invited him into the corporate fold. "She bought out her partners, and I thought to myself that it could be fun to be an agent. Why not?" A star maker was born.
Magnum found that the life of an agent was the polar opposite of what he'd been doing. "Now I do 60- and 70-hour weeks and I love it," he says. "I couldn't go back to my old life, I wouldn't know what to do with myself." Magnum also doesn't see his roster as being packed with the lazy, do-nothing stereotypes of slackerdom. "They may look like slackers, but I think that most of them are driven very hard to be successful in the arts," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if any of them who landed a huge part, or got a job in production didn't dedicate themselves. It's just the straight world they seem to reject, not working hard."
Magnum says that less than 30 percent of Dragon talent have any formal training, and less than 10 percent are full-timers. (Less than 10 percent of all SAG members are full-time actors, so this isn't unreasonable.) Most of the clientele have other interests or no interests at all, and are only hoping that they land a lucrative commercial or bit part on freak appeal alone. "Once they land that first job, they all get excited," says Magnum. "Some get the bug even before their first audition. But most of them are happy to get a little income on the side without having to change the way they appear, although I don't think any of them worry about 'selling out.' I know I didn't."
Back in Boston, there was a guy called "The Jeweler" who used to hang out at the track every day.
Everyone used to wonder how the hell he managed to do this, since he never seemed to win. Got a little money from his mother and his wife, the word was, and among his compadres and fellow pony watchers, that was good enough; it wasn't like Suffolk Downs or Rockingham Park were bastions of sainthood. But being a curious lad, I asked my old man why The Jeweler didn't have a job.
"Oh, he had one for about three months after he got out of college, but he couldn't take it and had a nervous breakdown," was Dad's laconic response. No wonder I'm so enamored of the anti-working class.
Dr. Frank Clayman-Cook isn't at all. My touching story of a childhood semi-icon, as well as descriptions of various L.A. quasi-bohemians, have the Beverly Hills clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst shaking his head in dismay. "My first thought about these people is that they probably have rather fragile egos, that [they think] working for someone else is humiliating, that they'll be dominated and abused automatically," he says.
Tall, thin, and bespectacled, Clayman-Cook seems a bit unsympathetic, especially when you consider that he's lived the life himself. As the former drummer for L.A.'s legendary white blues band Canned Heat, he's seen more than his fair share of miscreants and fringies. But he doesn't buy the notion that these bright souls have seen through society's ruse and are beating the system. "Homeless people use the same logic: 'I don't need to pay taxes, I don't need the grief, I don't need a home,' " he says. "This is rationalizing. It's normally thought in the mental health community that people get pleasure from working."
The common thread among the members of the anti-working class, Clayman-Cook says, is a simple fear of real commitment. "It boils down to the idea of 'what will I do when I grow up?' -- you have to grow up first," he says. "I've met guys in their 40s who tell me, 'I wanna play in the NBA' -- and they're 5'7"! There are a lotta guys in the gym like that, too -- body-builders who spend hours training and never go into competition. Jazz and classical musicians, too -- they practice all day and work three days out of the year because they're too proud. Don't get me wrong. Just because a man or woman doesn't have a day job doesn't necessarily mean they aren't working, but someone who watches soaps all day and says that their time is their own -- that's insecurity. You got your time, so what?"
It all comes down to whether or not the person is really happy, Clayman-Cook believes. "As they get older, are they fulfilled? If so, Freud was wrong. He postulated that to be well-balanced, you had to be work-productive, love and be loved, and play joyously. I hear a lot of these people say that they have some special project, and then the world never sees or hears it. How can that be that fulfilling?"
The driving force behind the refusal to get aboard the good ship Mainstream, as he sees it, is that good old triple whammy of neurosis, fear, and denial.
"Fear of failure plays into the thinking of someone who won't work: If you never do anything, you can't fail at it," he says. And people who claim they don't care whether or not anyone sees them perform, or reads their writing, or buys their art is in simple denial. Clayman-Cook doesn't deride those who have a go at living outside the bounds of convention -- as long as they're really happy, they're all right. "A writer like yourself is a freelancer without a boss or hours, but you actually work," he says. "An actor who devotes himself to going on every audition, even if it means he's broke, or a musician who takes teaching jobs so he can keep his nights open for gigs or writing music -- these are working people. They've just decided that the normal path can't possibly lead to real happiness. In my opinion, neither can doing absolutely nothing all the time."
Back at Tequila's pad, it's about noon, and she's finally getting up. She's a lady with big plans, a new store off Hollywood Boulevard that'll sell all kinds of bizarre world music is set to open soon under her auspices, and she's once again got her motor running. The same passion for the spotlight that led her to start the first-ever cable music video show (1981's New Wave Theatre, which became Nightflight, which was the prototype for MTV) is still alive, and she proudly proclaims herself a "mediatrix."
"Had radio shows, TV shows, you name it," she says. "And I've never gotten rich off anything I've done, but I always squeak by, no matter what." Does she consider herself to be happy and successful? "Of course I do," she says. "The more money you earn, the more you spend, so why chase it around insanely? People call me crazy, but I've never put my name on anything that was second-rate. And that is far more important than anything money can buy to me."
=== from New Times Los Angeles, Thursday, July 23, 1998 http://www.newtimesla.com/ [mild obscenity censored by site author to avoid search engine filtering] ~ ~ ~  related
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