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mikecuenca · 2 years ago

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Trash Heap Souvenir No. 8

Borders, Love & Rock & Roll

“Don’t judge a book by its cover”.

My ass, don’t judge a book by its cover. I ordered tons of albums from Columbia House just because of their cover. Pere Ubu’s MODERN DANCE? Because of the cover. Bauhaus SINGLES? Because of its cover. Pulp? Because the DIFFERENT CLASS cover looked so damn rad.

There was no way of sampling this stuff. And as history proved, if a band cared enough about its visual representation then chances are it matched their sound. And sometimes a great album cover enhances the music. It affected everything. This whole package. And Pulp. Looked. Rad. As. Fuck.

As soon as I got the CD I flipped through its booklet. The sets the band mates posed in were in color, the members themselves were in black and white. And wore sharp suits. Well, not Candida Doyle. She was pale with dark hair and wore a skirt and a long-sleeved top. I played the thing a thousand times. Jarvis Cocker was so fucking cool, man. And all his songs were about boning. And as a performer he acted out his lyrics with his hands. Not corny but slick. I wanted to be that guy. Move aside, Brodie Bruce.

But Candida Doyle. What came to my attention was this: I definitely had a type. Don’t ask me where this came from; I don’t know. Maybe because of Snow White. The Wicked Queen? Disguised as an old hag? My goodness. I’m kidding. No, the Wicked Queen as is. Kill. Me. I later read that for Martin Scorsese, growing up in an Italian dominant neighborhood meant that blondes were incredibly exotic. Well, pale girls with big light eyes and dark hair were my Achille’s heel. And none were ever interested in my dorky ass. These gals I never could build the courage to talk, turned out, also loved Pulp. They were arty, well-read, had impeccable style, liked foreign cinema, and duh, had great taste in tunes.

Wasn’t always that way. I liked blondes as a kid. One of my biggest crushes that would send my pre-adolescent heart fluttering was a dirty blonde. She lived right across the street from my brother’s house. We’d play wrestle on his yard and I’d spend all night replaying our encounters in my head. By thirteen I had a Nicole Kidman poster on my wall. Even a Jenny McCarthy one where she’s naked, sprawled on a pink silk sheet. I’m not attracted to any of these women now but back in junior high? Mama mia. My mom hated the McCarthy poster. She’d ask me to take it down. I wouldn’t. One afternoon I come home from school and it’s gone. “What happened to my poster?”

“You’re too young to have that on your wall!”

The next day I come in. The poster is back up. I furrow my brows. I walk into the entertainment room and there’s my brother Luis Osvaldo. He glances at me with a smirk, nodding his head and then winks.

Back to Pulp.

So on the AOL chat boards hoping I would meet the love of my life I would search for local gals who dug that band. I became online friends with them. And a couple I met in real life. Shared very brief platonic friendships and they introduced me to more music and enlightened me with finer points: “Did you know that Pulp was originally a goth band?”

Jumping back in the timeline:

I’m hanging out with Chris and Deez in the Crystal Court branch of the South Coast Plaza Mall… the part of the mall that sucked ‘cause there was nothing fun there. We notice a new bookstore. A two-story bookstore. It’s called Borders. I see that they’re hiring. I was working as a telemarketer with Chris and Deez and it was so mind-numbing. We had to get people to do these surveys and they’d cuss you out, slam the phone on you, flirt with you, ignore you, blast the radio in your ear. It was a drag. I wanted out. Here was a chance. I filled out the application. Turned it in. And then I got a call.

I was over it. Over basic schooling. I did one year at Middle College High, learned that I could do independent studies and continue taking my college classes. By the middle of my Junior year I will have graduated. But with this program I could work in the mornings and continue my courses at night. Independent studies gave me so much freedom. I went from a very “brilliant but lazy” student nabbing C plusses and B minuses to getting straight As. Independent studies let me be inventive. And I actually learned shit. And retained it. I continued making short films on my camcorder, cutting them via equipment on the college campus. I was taking introduction TV/media classes while devouring whatever my film history professor tossed my way: THE ROARING TWENTIES, BONNIE AND CLYDE, DO THE RIGHT THING, etc. etc. Ahhh! What a breath of fresh air!

My first day of class he showed us a doc with a narrator going over the birth of cinema. I had never paid attention to a silent film before. And then the footage comes on: this guy, very gothic-looking, resembling the vampires that starred in the plethora of stolen vampire books I’d lug around as a Freshman, is still with his eyes closed. And his make-up is stunning. A showrunner, Caligari, is spouting words depicted on a title card. The gothic man is Cesare. And he’s a somnambulist. He’s opening his peepers for the first time in X amount of years. Slowly, slowly he peels his lids open to reveal big, wide maddening eyes. My own eyes were in a trance. What is this? Movies can do this?? It just clicked. It clicked for me. It reflected all the shit I was into at the time. I learned all about German Expressionism, I jotted a list of titles to seek, and then we watched THE GOLD RUSH, my first Chaplin. Film was never the same for me. It was right there and then that I went: I am going to make movies for a living.

Ha! Have fun with that shit, pal.

I needed money. And I wanted to save up. But I also wanted to move out of my parents’ house because I had had it. I was tired of fighting with my dad and being called a loser all the time and a waste of space, to put it nicely. Man, I just wanted to be left alone. It was like school, what do people want from me? Leave me the fuck alone. I don’t bother you, don’t bother me. But my dad consistently bullied me. I can now see why he handled things the way he did but me in my late-teens couldn’t. Borders seemed like a good opportunity to not only have access at a discounted rate to a world of books that could really teach me something, but I could start saving up to move out.

The first job I ever had was as a cashier for Luis Osvaldo at his car alarm & radio shop. But I didn’t want to be working for my brother. I wanted independence from my family.

To contradict, the other gig I had for a very long while was as an unorthodox server, if you will. My mom, fed up with my dad’s gambling plights, lashed at him. As a treaty my dad started hosting bookmaking nights for his acquaintances out of the garage. And these excursions were just like the ones Tony Soprano was involved in on THE SOPRANOS: they’d last all weekend, into all hours of the clock. And these men would get hungry. We didn’t have any of those online door delivery food services like everyone has now. My dad would buy an ass-load of groceries, my mom would cook all weekend, and we’d feed these derelict men, charging each by the plate. Un cafecito? I would walk from the kitchen through the backyard with a tray full of mini coffee shots into this smoke-filled, booze drenched den. And the gamblers would tip me. Outrageous money for a thirteen-year-old. By the time I was seventeen I had about five-thousand-dollars stored in my savings account. Eventually my mom had enough and was tired of casseroling over a hot stove all weekend and the dominos at Cuenca’s came to an end. I wrote this into SCENES FROM OBLIVION as the lead character’s (Misha’s) source of income.

I go to Borders for my job interview. I luck out. Matt, one of the managers, is a musician. He interviews me and the interview shifts into us talking about punk bands (his favorite is X). Another time punk rock abetted my life.

“So, Mike, what instrument do you play?”

“Uhhh… bass.” And this is something I used to say all the time without realizing what I was saying, “But I don’t know how to play chords.”

This was always met with a puzzled look. You don’t need to know chords to play bass. You just need to know the notes. Ask Joe Strummer. He showed Paul Simonon how to play bass by taping the notes on his fretboard.

Matt just laughed and went, “I play bass! Why’d you pick it?”

Because I loved Crass and Joy Division and the bass made those bands, that’s why. “It sounds cool!”

“Right! It’s the instrument that always stood out for me. It just spoke to me, you know?” Hey, he said what I was thinking.

Matt hired me. And when I went into this job interview, as Yvonne Trinh will verify, I was dressed as one would for a chance at employment. But on my first day at Borders? I came in with liberty spiked hair and a torn-up blue shirt held together by safety pins and band patches. And this was my truck-to-floor/inventory gig.

Yvonne was one of the booksellers at Borders. She was into rockabilly. And the color green. Sweet and very friendly. Maybe trying to insinuate a conversation she politely tells me that the books I’m about to stock on a shelf aren’t books that belong on said shelf. I snap at her, “I know!” and she backed away. Little could we foretell that we’d become very close and she’d be one of my longest, dearest and best friends.

Pictured: me and Yvonne in 2001 or 2002. In the background that Fakes/Fuzz Guns poster I put up at Geez Louise plus the metallic blue bass I got at of Out of Vogue.

First day on the job I’m filling paperwork next to the other new hire who’s about a decade or so older. Dave “The Mod” Durling was from Boston. Hilarious like a Seinfeld character. But subtle. Not cartoonish. We became immediate friends. Just one of those people you click with in a second. Dave’s one of the best people I’ve ever met and someone who’s knowledge of films and music I greatly admired.

Check out Dave’s story: he gets a call that his mother has passed, he packs, leaves the lights on and everything at his Boston apartment as is, flies out here for the funeral, ends up reacquainting with Liz, one of his sister’s friends who he had met the prior year while she was visiting Boston, they go home together, a month later and they had gotten married because why not? Now he’s here in Orange County, broke, married, with his electric bill running amuck at his apartment back home. This is 2000. It’s 2022 and Liz and Dave are still married.

But, man, did we get along. And we initially bonded over our love of Kevin Smith movies, particularly CLERKS. Day in, day out, Dave and I would communicate in CLERKS and Tarantino movie quotes. Dave had been an aspiring filmmaker and musician and things just didn’t pan out.

Dave gave me a list of his favorite movies. Or maybe movies I should watch. I checked out every single one of those. Movies that are my all-timers now. Movies I watched repeatedly like TREES LOUNGE and DIRTY HARRY, just to name two. He also gifted me a stack of filmmaking books and director bios including REBEL WITH A CREW, Robert Rodriguez’s story on how he made EL MARIACHI for nada. Dave was a huge Beatles fan. Huge Britpop fan. Former suited Mod. Hence, Dave the Mod. We both loved Blur and The Who (particularly the first three albums) and when I’d mention some ‘80s band I really dug he’d turn to me and go, “Kid, how the hell do you know about all this?”

I was a nerd! A vampire (lmao) preying on any overlooked tune, comic, or movie.

My schoolmate Kat comes over. First time over to my parents’ house. She takes a look at my room and all my stuff and she goes sourly, “Must be nice to be rich.” That’s always stuck with me. Rich? We weren’t rich. Sure, the furniture in my room was bought by my dad but all my media shit I bought with my own savings or damn right stole from Columbia House. Rich? Are you kidding me? But Kat came from a large Mexican family all sharing rooms in a small house. I told myself I would never take any handouts from that point on. Well, save for the times I was flat broke and had to crawl on my hands and knees.

Through Kat I met Luis Navejas at Santa Ana College. Luis was friends with Kat’s sister. Dude. Was. Cool. Luis had shaggy hair and thick sideburns and wore ‘70s style shirts and bell-bottom like pants and Wranglers. A little hunched over, always with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, eyes hidden behind aviator shades. He was a musician and in a band with the rest of his brothers and they were called Enjambre. Enjambre means swarm in Spanish and avejas means bees and their last name is Navejas. Get it?

Luis loved the shit out of FIGHT CLUB. And Brad Pitt. That was his idol. And he emulated him a bit. And I in turn saw Luis as my role model and emulated him. Gone was my black attire replaced by colorful vintage tees (the ones I could find to fit me, I was lanky and short and hadn’t hit my growth spurt) and tracked down Wrangler polyester pants in all shades. Wore ‘em for years.

Luis was taking film courses too and he had just moved from Mexico. We’d toss movie ideas back and forth. One came to me while I was stuck in traffic, I told Luis and we expanded upon it. That’s one of my many dream projects I have never tackled because it needs a budget. But there was this other script I had written and I gave it to him. I wanted Luis to play the lead because I dunno. And he drew a character sketch.

I had horrible acne. Always have had bad acne until fairly recently but goddamn, it was horrible. Chunks of puss-filled dangling flesh. I couldn’t bear to look at myself in the mirror. I just couldn’t. Bad self-esteem. I started writing a story about a man, a very lonely man who walked around with a mysterious briefcase and just observed people from a distance, the bottom of his face wrapped in scarves. This man was the narrator and watched several one-setting scenarios on his route to work, seven total, each one very loosely based off one of the deadly sins. Through them you got to learn a little about him. What I revealed at the end, in a very Cesare the Somnambulist unwrapping, is that he is horribly scarred underneath. And he had to go around smiling like nothing was wrong, as his questionable profession called for. I worked intensely on the script for a long while and it’s the first script I ever completed. This was the movie I wanted to make. My first feature film.

At Borders I had now made friends with Dave and Yvonne and was friendly with Peter K (of the future Aaron/Lloyd/me crew). And then I saw her… Roseanna.

Now this kid here, me? Always had crushes on girls. Huge crushes. But I was too shy. In second grade two gals complimented my eyes and I nervously cussed them out because I didn’t know what to say. It’s taken me years to feel comfortable accepting a compliment. So when I saw Roseanna and she told me she dug one of my band pins my heart did sixty-eight cartwheels. I got lunch with her once at the Del Taco nearby. I was trembling. She then mentioned her creepy, annoying boyfriend who wouldn’t leave her alone. My heart sank. But then my spirits were lifted when she brought me burned CDs of artists I had never heard of.

“Oh, you love Pulp? Well, I love Pulp. And if you love Pulp you’re gonna love these.”

I was way into Britpop at this juncture.*

*The scenesters at this point tend to eschew people who don’t stick to one subculture. I fucking loved/love it all. But isn’t that what punk’s all about? Acceptance and growth? You would think. So who’s the poseur, I used to say. Or as I wrote on a chalkboard at Borders: Who watches The Watchmen?

If THE CROW soundtrack got me into the Mary Chain and The Cure, and the RUSHMORE soundtrack got me into The Creation and the Kinks, well, the TRAINSPOTTING one made me a full-fledged Britpop fan. Not only was Pulp on the soundtrack, but Blur too. And I became a massive devotee. TRAINSPOTTING was a huge influence on me. I started dressing like Marc Renton and his crew and paid a shit ton of money to import from the UK the exact same purple with yellow stripe sambas Renton wore. I even started using heroin. I’m kidding. No heroin. I was also big into Radiohead. THE BENDS and OK COMPUTER were on constant rotation in my room. I used to wear a green-sleeved baseball tee with the words “Fake Plastic Trees” scribbled with a sharpie on its chest that got a ton of approval from Borders folks older than me.*

But for some reason I had never heard of Suede (known in the states as The London Suede). Suede aside, not sure if I see the correlation between Pulp and the other bands Roseanna introduced me to. But she burned me Suede’s HEAD MUSIC. “Everybody hates this album and they say only girls like it but those people are stupid. They’re just mad Bernard Butler’s no longer in the band. But it’s great!” HEAD MUSIC along with Modest Mouse’s THE MOON AND ANTARTICA and LONESOME CROWDED WEST, The Birthday Party HITS and Bikini Kill SINGLES.

I couldn’t believe this girl I had a crush on was introducing me to all this rad music. I later did a CD swap with Yvonne. I lent her Bikini Kill SINGLES and she lent me a burned CD of X’s first two albums, LOS ANGELES and WILD GIFT, which were super tough to get a hold of at the time. And that’s how Yvonne and I started to bond. I used to confide to her all my girl problems (as depicted in next week’s stunning chapter) and she used to tell me all about this skinhead/Mod dude she was seeing who was starting to grow cold.

Nothing ever transpired between Roseanna and I and she ended up quitting, or getting fired, and taking off with her sometimes stalker boyfriend who wouldn’t leave the store. But she set a precedent for the sort of girls I would be interested in: women with awesome taste in music who wanted nothing to do with me romantically. And you knew they were into cool music because of how they dressed. It all went hand-in-hand. This is all before alt-culture appropriation, of course, a topic I let the protagonists in BOYS ABOUT TOWN do a deep-dive on. Why was that important to me? I didn’t relate to my Cuban culture, it didn’t accept me, and had found my own.

But Pulp. Pulp. Pulp. All roads lead to Pulp.

I tell Dave that I’m going to form a band. Because you wanna know what I had just learned? I read somewhere (or maybe misread) that Jarvis Cocker had initially formed Pulp in order to become famous enough to be a director. That was his passion. And I took inspiration. I didn’t want be in a band to be a rock star to hook up with people like everyone else. I wanted to garner enough attention in order to be able to pursue what I really wanted to pursue: making movies.

I started writing songs. They would just come out of nowhere. I didn’t put much thought into them. Once I learned how to play and sing simultaneously, and boy, that took a minute, I would just mumble a melody as I played whatever on my bass and the melody would guide whatever note I’d move to on the fretboard. It’s still how I write music. A made a whole demo tape. Ten, twelve songs. A demo tape I don’t have any more and would love to give a listen to. Guitarist Monica and Luis’s brother Rafa and I would try to play them as we auditioned random drummers off Craig’s List. It never went anywhere. And I gave up on all that.

But in true me fashion one thought lead to another. The next time I see Dave I go, “Wait. Forget the Jarvis Cocker route. I got it. I know what I’m going to do.” I had been going to so many music festivals, why don’t I host my own? And I’ll use the benefits from the festival to fund my movie! I’ve read REBEL WITHOUT A CREW! I can do this! I can do it!

“You can do it? How are you going to do that? You’re seventeen!”

Roseanna was gone now. And the doomsday clock at Borders continued to chime. Eventually they, meaning upper management, had to separate Dave and I. He was the best friend I could have at that age and we spent our Monday through Friday shifts yapping and laughing our asses off relentlessly via a horde of inside jokes. Dave kept his position. And I was moved to the registers. I hated it. I’d close my eyes at night and all I would see was the cash register opening and shutting. I was stuck behind the counter. And I wasn’t allowed to read. The shifts were slow as hell and you’re telling me I’m at a bookstore with my thumbs up my ass and I can’t read? I mean, I did anyway. Underneath the camera. Couple pages at a time before I’d get caught. Penny Rimbaud’s remembrance books. An Andy Warhol book. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Bob Dylan’s TARANTULA. An outlaw poetry book. I felt so motivated.

Soon Dave quit because he and Liz were moving back to Boston (“Gotta take care of that electricity bill now”). I was so bummed. Just wasn’t the same. I too quit Borders and wound up hired at the corporate 100 Virgin Megastore.

But I was focused. That festival. It’s gonna happen.

The people who I admire, who I personally believe in, who I see so much potential in, I’ve always wanted them to succeed along with me. I got Alex Guillen to say yes to being on the bill. I got the neighbor down the street in a band to say yes to being on the bill. And I nearly got Weezer and Green Day to be on the bill. “Your band will get all this recognition,” I told Alex and my neighbor. I was on the phone at all hours of the day talking to agents and managers and venue owners. This kid. This kid who could only stutter every time he got on the phone. I tried to get Placebo, no dice. I went to their show at the Palladium, somehow got backstage and I’m seeing Eric Erlandson and Sofia Coppola around me and I’m going holy shit and there’s Brian Molko and I go up to him and vomit all the information about my benefit festival and he tells me to shut up and like a diva, walks away. We crept into UCLA with Jacob for this Hank Williams tribute concert to try and talk to Beck. Security caught me in the wings and when I tried to escape I flew back against Elvis Costello, spilling his drink. DUDE, ELVIS COSTELLO!

Jacob was in that last minute One Minute Rice band that Alex Guillen and I threw together for that one birthday party. And Jacob was Jackie’s brother.

March 5th, 2000. I’d never been up to LA before. Not on my own. I didn’t have a car quite yet. Guitarist Monica and I are given a lift by her dad and we’re dropped outside the Virgin Megastore that was over by Fairfax and Sunset. A line is starting to form. It’s very early in the day. The Smashing Pumpkins are playing a free show in support of their new MACHINA album. I’m not entirely into it although I kinda dig some tracks. There’s no promise we’ll get in. And have no idea how we’re going to get back to Santa Ana. We get in. We watch the show from the third floor. A clear view. They play in the outdoor plaza. On our way out, I see these kids that I know for a fact go to our school district. They can squeeze us into their car. One of them is Jackie, this girl I’d gone to elementary school with. These kids are Pumpkin-heads and I’m just thrilled to meet folks who are the into the same band! Monica aside, I didn’t know any Pumpkins fans.

Jackie loved My Bloody Valentine and Catherine Wheel and PJ Harvey and Jacob disliked female singers and was really into Fugazi. Through Jackie I met Alex Guillen and his brother Gio. Alex and Gio were currently in a band and would later form Deathday. I was really into Jackie. Mainly because of how she dressed and her taste in music. I wanted her Pumpkin-head friends to adopt me as one of their own. But they were a very tight group. Months later Jackie and I very-very briefly casually dated. She got me into shoegaze and more into Sonic Youth (my original intro had been the JUDGEMENT NIGHT soundtrack like a ton of folks my age). But I did treat our fling like a therapy session in which I recounted my dark days at Saddleback high as I have here. This was a bad pattern of mine for years in relationships. And because I could only hang out with her at night, this guy right here, stupidest thing I could have done at that point in my life, dropped out of my evening college courses. All for a girl. All for a fling. Dropped out and never went back.

Jackie and I wound up having a falling out. I flipped out on her one day when I was working at Virgin. Well, I treated her callously when ringing her up. We hadn’t seen each other in a long minute and, I’m not here to call people out, but someone who fancied me didn’t want me seeing her, got jealous, and started spreading rumors that she and her friends were talking shit about me and my rambling ‘therapy sessions’. I believed said person and coldly took it out on Jackie during business hours. I could have just called her and inquired but, no, I blew up, cussing her out, accusing her of things. She yelled at me that I’m crazy. And I sure was acting nuts. The manager on duty laughed and then threw on Prodigy’s “Smack my Bitch Up” loudly on the speakers. Crudely funny to me now. Not funny at the time. Jackie and her friends reciprocated by hurling a rock through the back window of my car. That whole situation was handled immaturely but what do you want? We were teenagers. But my general mistrust in people and why the ending of MANHATTAN had me break into tears later on in life, the seed of it was planted here. You just can’t trust people but you gotta have a little faith in ‘em. Which is what my debut feature JERRY POWELL is really all about. Beneath it all.

I stopped hanging out with the gossiping admirer. I now couldn’t get a band together. I was finally in with the cool Pumpkins loving kids but now they hated me. Dave had moved away. I wasn’t taking film courses anymore. Deez and Chris? We had drifted. And this corporate fucking job at the Virgin Megastore was killing my spirits. My acne got even worse. Flaring up. I looked like a ripped-tomato. Went into deep depression. I had been struggling with dejection briefly as a tormented teen but now here it was full-force. I suck. I’m fucking stupid. My fucking dad is fucking right. I shouldn’t have been born.

One night I’m with my two buddies Leeno (a stoner who didn’t care for rock music but loved Portishead) and Michelle (an elementary school and MCH schoolmate). We meet with Alex Guillen at the Block, outside the Starbucks. Leeno and Michelle have been very supportive. I was very sad. Feeling in the dumps. Cheeseball, but on the drive over there The Beatles “Yesterday” comes on. I look at Michelle and tell her this song is how I feel.

I had told Guillen a while back about my filmmaking pipedreams.

“If Jarvis Cocker can do it…”

“Yeah, well, you’re not Jarvis Cocker.”

Rafa (Luis Navejas’ brother who used to jam with Monica and I) used to tell me, “You can’t sing.”

“Punk rockers don’t have to sing!”

I played him “Orgasm Addict” by the Buzzcocks. Rafa listened and looked at me, “That guy knows how to sing.”

He was right. I couldn’t sing. But who cares!

Guillen, “I like your demo tape. But you need to work on your lyrics.”

Fuck my lyrics! Lyrics don’t matter!

I didn’t want to hear it. I had dreams, man. I had drive. I was stubborn and I didn’t want to hear it. But this night Guillen put it bluntly: it’ll never happen. He was right. “Despite all the computations…” I needed to hear it. This stupid festival plan was now falling apart. I had no assistance. I couldn’t keep it together. He gave me suggestions. I still didn’t want to hear them. I stopped hanging out with him too. I distanced myself from everyone. Leeno, Michelle, Luis. All of them. Another bad tendency of mine.

What am I going to do?

That night I tried to kill myself.

#trashheapsouvenir

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