LEAP I moved out with five dollars and a pack of cigarettes into a garage. I got sick of the garage because they had me on liquid lobotomy tranquilizers and I just detoxed from them all at once. They pulled me off them after a year, and I got really ill so I was in and out of emergency rooms. I was real physically ill.
LEAP The doctors just cut off your....
LEAP Well, they said I didn't need them any more because they were letting me go. I got out on letters. I sent the doctor a letter, the psychiatrist that only visited once a month and I sent my counselor a letter, and the head nurse, staff. I wrote, "There's nothing that I'm getting out of this. You need to release me so I can learn more. I can only learn in the outside world. You can't keep me here." I was an adolescent in an adult facility. I was the youngest one in there. It was because I was a ward of the court that they could sign it like that. A special case.
So after that I lived in a garage and I had this really icky boyfriend. I met the icky boyfriend at this place. I wanted to get out. He was also a way to get out so I could get a home. I had five dollars. so I moved in with him to a garage. I worked at McDonald's doing janitorial maintenance, stock and inventory. I used to wake up at five in the morning and go there. Then I lived in the projects and then I lived in a house in Torrence. I didn't care if I was not eating well because I was free. I had to eat the McDonald's food because they didn't pay you enough there. After that I lived in Long Beach. I lived in the streets for a year, and on and off for a couple of years. I lived in a car for a while. I lived in an abandoned building for a year.
LEAPWere you the only one living there?
LEAP No, that boy was on the streets with me. One thing about the streets - there's not a lot of security. This city's different. San Francisco is the best place to be homeless, even though it's the worst place to be poor because it's so expensive here. It's the least dangerous. If you're in LA or a major city like New York, and you're on the streets, you feel a sense that at any moment I could be pulled over and locked up in jail because I don't have a home, and that's a crime. And that crime, you could lose everything because you have a backpack full of clothes. In LA they'll push you through a system. It's just terrible, so I got off the streets and got on welfare. I told the welfare office I couldn't work, I was too stressed out and I needed disability. I said, "I'm too depressed. I'm too stressed out to work." They gave me a hard time about it. I said, "I have records. I think you should give me the disability."
In Long Beach I lived on the streets and did the smorgasbords with a couple of people. I stole the food and the imported beer and sold the food at the motel that skanky people lived in. Sold the beer, traded it for things and money and showers. Then the detectives came and there were no beer bottles. They never found out how any body got into the smorgasborg. There was a burglar robbing the register at the same time. I know the feeling of robing the smorgasbord. I felt like a different person that night. I was like, "I can't believe it. This is the first robbery I've ever committed." I felt a sense of de-virgination. Of being de-virginized in a whole other way. [laughs] You know what I'm talking about? I guess it's kind of like if you kill somebody you might feel different? I felt that way after robbing a place. I felt a sense of impending doom on top of it because I was a street person and I just had a feeling detectives were gonna be coming around any time, you know, and I should just shut my mouth. So that was what I did. I just didn't speak. Just acted like a dumb street girl and worked.
Then I lived in Wilmington in a welfare hotel and I ended up getting robbed there. I took a billy club to the door of the people that robbed me. They were smoking crack and shooting up and stuff and I took a billy club to the door and said I want my money because I'm not going back to the street. I started a war in that hotel and I got out through the roof top and climbed down some scaffolding down the side of the building. There were about forty people and it didn't look good because I was one of the only white people in the hotel but it was pretty mixed. It was pretty pen-like, too, ex-convicts. A lot of ex-convicts and I was one white girl with one billy club. [laughs] I just wanted to beat the door and get my money. I didn't want to involve any cops because they don't like cops so I said, I'll get the money my way. I'll beat the door down, they can give me the money, and it'll be cool, I'll just leave.
LEAP But they chased you out of the building.
LEAP Yeah, because they had guns and stuff. I got out through the roof. A lot of gang-type stuff. Then I ended up living in Long Beach for a while and I was in a band. The band was actually notorious. This band called DON'T ASK. It was a hard-core band, we were together for three years. It was my first band. I was the singer. We built a sound proof room inside an apartment. It was a room inside a room. All the wood was stolen by a skateboard gang in Long Beach. Took the wood and built the room. Long Beach was very ghetto and gang -ish. They tell you when you go to Long Beach don't go down certain streets. Drive-by shooters. It's real trendy, drive-by shootings in Long Beach.
I lived in this building that was a real dump and called it the pink palace and there were mushrooms growing in the hall and there were women getting raped in the bathroom at the end of the hall and there was trashy, trash, the worst ex-cons, dealers, thieves in the building and people were dying in the hallway. Literally. There was a guy with flies around him that had drowned in his own puke and I said, "What is this guy here, he looks . . .is he okay?" And some guy goes, "Uh, he's been here since yesterday." I go, "Well, he's fucking DEAD." He was dead. He smelt bad, that's all I know. The whole building did. A few people died in that building actually. The building was not up to code, nothing was right about that building. It was right by the police station to boot. Long Beach is so bad, there's a police station down the street and people are dying in the buildings. You roll someone over and "Oh, my god, they're dead. Somebody call the morgue."
Through my band there was a lot of shit going on. A lot of acid. LSD and hash and drugs going through that band. Lots of sheets of acid. That's how I discovered San Francisco. That's where the sheets of acid came from and mescaline and other various things that were brought to this studio. The landlords abandoned the building. We paid the utilities by throwing parties. We put LSD in the price of the ticket and wanted to make Long Beach FRIED. It was really violent. We wanted to mix hard-core and psychedelia together and mash the two in the eighties. My way of doing it was definitely induced by LSD and taking Black Flag and putting them on acid. Like Circle Jerks and Cro Mags and shit like that and making them psychedelic. You know, Butthole Surfers. It's taking the nostalgic generalization of rock-n-roll and using it that way.
We sued the building and the landlords. We started a class suit and a lot of people moved out and said we couldn't get away with it, it was too much, we were crazy. We did it any way. And I sued the police department too, for false arrest. They arrested me because they were paid off by the people in the building to arrest people to get them to drop the suit. W e didn't drop it and I ended up suing them. They arrested for under controlled substance, I wasn't under anything, I was sober right after band practice, even though it was true that I was selling acid and skunk weed. I was not a pot smoker but I was a seller. It was actually just being moved through the band. Somebody used their twenty thousand dollar inheritance, invested it all into gold-stamped hash, skunk weed and acid. It stayed taped underneath a hole in the floor with a bunch of money. [laughs] It was crazy. It wasn't something I wanted. I wanted out of it, but it was sort of like I couldn't really get out of it, it was a really touchy situation. I was just putting up with it and dealing with it.
I was living around a lot of violence. Street violence. There was this one woman - I was on acid one night, I was going to see forty-five grave and Tex and the Horseheads. At this place called Fender's ballroom in Long Beach and this woman was getting raped in the bathroom so I went down there. The guy was a real sloppy drunk, junky. He was really easy to kick over. I kicked him over, he fell on the ground, I took the door and repeatedly hit him in the head with the door. I just kept going BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! until I got stopped. They said "You're gonna kill him." I had an adrenaline rush. I didn't really want to. I wanted to kill him. I didn't see him get up. I pulled him by the leg, I pulled him out and just dumped him over the side of the building by the back stairs to the trash. I said don't ever come back here but of course he wasn't coherent. I went to Fender's Ballroom. I asked the woman if she was okay. She didn't want to speak. She was so shell-shocked she didn't talk to me and she just shut her door.
I did win the law suits. Three law suits. Another one was assault and battery. it was like a fist fight with me and a man. The same people threw a bag of cement at some other tenants. Actually the woman that was married to this guy used to wash her underwear in red iodine. [laughs] She told me that was a good way to wash your clothes. She soaked her underwear in red iodine. She was a little bit out of it.
Long Beach is really a bizarre place. They tore the building down when we left. We lived there rent-free for two years, took the building over. When we moved out te building was excavated. Leveled. It was a parking lot.
ZANNE Probably just as well.
LEAP I know. But I wish I had pictures of it like that. Before and after. It was funny. After that I lived in Bixby Knowles and I decided I was gonna - I was just sick of my life and I started getting really horny for women. I was already always horny for women but I don't think I could ever come out because I thought that would just really be the fucking clincher because I was always kinda running from it, you know. So I got on my neighbors' phone, we were trying to find queer bars in Long Beach. I almost had an affair with her but I almost ended up getting in a fist-fight with her husband, the ex-drummer of Boss. We got in a fist-fight, me, him and his girlfriend. His wife was just doing her thing in the other room.
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