Rolling on the Hooker Bus

Photo by Rebecca SchoenkopfOur girlfriends had a fantabulous femme evening planned: chocolate souffl and drinks at the chic Huntington Beach pan-Asian eatery Red Pearl and getting pawed by Italian men at Newport Beach's Dolce, the night culminating in a frothy frappe of slut-seeing at Dennis Rodman's playground, Josh Slocum's. And all of this on a Sunday night—the night that used to be reserved for sitting around in our pj's watching another incomprehensible X-Files. What could go wrong?

Well, everything, really—but it all went wrong in all the right ways.

For instance? Nothing much was going on at Red Pearl, but that just meant more room at the bar for us and our excellent dirty martinis (and the bartendrix is a stone fox; tip her well). Please tell me you people were home watching Tony Blairand the English Parliament—the government, not the electro-clash group—on C-SPAN. And at Dolce, no pawing was being perpetrated; though I would have been happy to sit by and watch my friends get mauled, I'm a one-man woman, and that man ain't got an Italian bone in his very tall body. In fact, though we had what seemed to be six different waiters, we could barely get crema for our caffee. (One busperson, whom my sister loved because he looked like a convict, actually threw our breadbasket on the table while looking off, bored, in the other direction. That's probably why she really liked him: oh, so hard a man/con/busboy to get!) Adding to the fun, an unattractive multimillionaire made sorrowful cow eyes at our sweet girl P, whom he had once tried to talk into being kept—while his date never took her eyes off him. Plus, you can smoke there!

The night went quickly downhill from there, with a swift zip up Coast Highway to Josh Slocum's. Rodman's Newport joint is a fabulous place—all glittery inside, with faux-Roman ruins and an interior night sky like the bayou in the Pirates of the Caribbean. If there just hadn't been any people there, it would have been marvelous. After paying a $5 cover (how embarrassing! Paying a cover to go to Josh Slocum's! God, I hate me!), we did a quick circuit through the jammed bar. Meatheads? Check. Annoying little Justin Timberlake boys? Check. Men lurking in packs at the bar waiting for any woman to start dancing so they can leer and slaver? Check and check. Yes, meat markets are just as I remembered them from last week—oh, with one exception: I have never been to a meat market peopled by women for hire.

After one quick perimeter check, we four retired to the smoking patio, where we could sink into the very comfy velvet couches. It was easier to eavesdrop there. A lovely, slim blonde sat down next to us to finish a 15-minute cell-phone call before rejoining her even prettier friends inside. Her call consisted of prattle about something that happened on Jay Leno and the amusing travails of her cohort Pookie. It climaxed with the urgent, “I looked around, and . . . what happened to Pooh Bear?”

Meanwhile, an ugly little curly-haired Timberlake (I will never understand the brillo-headed appeal) tried to cadge a cigarette off me while he was already smoking one. Did he see a Circle K on my forehead? I was not polite.

Inside, the friend of Pookie joined her colleagues at a table accessorized with a giant bottle of Grey Goose and a very ugly man. P thought one of the girls was a porn star—perhaps the one on the Blink-182cover—but none of us could vouch for it. We could vouch, though, for the Deal That Did Not Go Down. A drop-dead brunette was whispering with a not-attractive man. “Well it depends,” she said aloud, and he whispered in her ear. “We can do that,” she averred, before coyly proclaiming herself “just a working girl.” Whisper, whisper. “Oh, no,” quoth he, “that's way too much.” “Well, where are you?” she asked. “I'm at one and a half,” said the man. “Oh, no. That's not gonna get you anything,” she pooh-poohed, and he stomped away, unsatisfied.

Dennis himself got up to sing with the young boy band—a hideous reggae thang. Though he was dressed down in a normal getup of T-shirt and pants (we left before finding out if he would strip down to nothing), he got the crowd up by singing about hos. He led the band in some fun off-the-cuff chants like, “Look at all the hos in the room! Hoooo!” (Callback from the band: “Look at all the hos in the room! Hoooo!”) And, after inviting some lovelies to sing, he led rousing chants like, “She's got no voice, but she's got big tits!” (Band: “She's got no voice, but she's got big tits!”) Indeed, all the breasts in the room were suspiciously round—like basketballs. Rodman must have felt right at home. It was, as our friend Q described it, “Gross Newport-Beach-yuck!”

Yayyy!

There were precisely two non-pros in the room (besides us, I mean). Tora was a big, friendly girl who got up to dance with us (before the terrible band came back on, and we had to stop), and Lynn was a 46-year-old grandmother of four from Hesperia, married 30 years to her high school sweetheart, who with her husband had brought their employees out for a weekend of well-deserved seaside frolic. “Go cause trouble!” she exhorted us, beaming, and we promised we would. Instead, no longer interested in spying on the gross, Newport Beach yuck, we fled home.

* * *

Saturday's Fast Times at the Space party was not actually hosted by Phoebe Cates; the Space Men were just lying. But there were plenty of Madonnabes in cut-off lace and prom dresses with bows and slutty Sunset Strip zebra skirts and Milli Vanilli(in “Choose Life” shirts and white mops on their heads) and a couple of guys in racquetball outfits and two ladies dressed in white Dynasty jumpsuits and a Pat Benatar and an unhappy businesswoman with one of those awful, fluffy bows at her throat and tennis shoes and socks under her suit for the commute. So that was all good then. The only problem is we're kind of getting sick of parties that consist of seeing a band in one room and then traveling into the other room to see a band, and then going back for a third. The Space has started hosting new bands instead of the same 10 Long Beach bands we've been seeing every week for seven years, and that's a huge improvement. But with such a fertile musical landscape as the '80s, couldn't we just for once have had a DJ and left it at that? Sweet Child O Mine, anyone? Please? A little King of Pop? (The Space did play canned '80s tunes for dancing—starting at 4 a.m. And the girls were still going, bless 'em.)

Two bands stood out: Super Big Knife have been together a couple of years but up until now as a side project for each of the trio (Mark Romans on drums and singers Merrilee and Miss O on guitar and bass, respectively). Now, though, it's starting to become more of a main gig. “People keep inviting us places,” baby-voiced Merrilee said, “'cause I guess they like us!” Well, duh! Not only were they shredding and rocking way better than girl groups like The Donnas and singing bad-girl things, but O has a tendency to pull up her miniskirt and show her lace-encased butt for a long, hot summer of a moment.

And Maxeen, whom we'd written off last time we saw them as cute little boys whose music we couldn't remember, looked much less like The Police this time but sounded much more like them—the hard, early Police, not the moony, ballady, Jaguar-shilling ones.

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