Never in my life have I found myself face-to-face with She Who Shall Not Be Named for Fear of Lawsuit, or, as my friends call her, the Widow. Now the time of our encounter is nigh. She knew Kurt better than all of us put together. Kurt knew Pollack better than anyone in both their waning days. So I've come, at my own expense, to Los Angeles, where the Widow lives. I've already been here far too long.
It's been a dispiriting few months. The widow has thwarted all my attempts to speak with her. She uses a vast army of lawyers, publicists, bodyguards, personal assistants, salon employees, and bouncers to deflect attention from her daily routine. One night, at the Viper Room, I saw what looked like her ankle step out of the back of a Bentley, but one of her behemoths had me in a head lock before I could take out my tape recorder. Another afternoon, I left a message with her messaging service's messaging service, and a few hours later, this was on my voice mail:
"Listen, you fucking prick. This is the Widow. I don't know who you think you are trying to talk to me, but if you try and get anywhere near me or my family, I promise you that I will hunt you down, cut off your balls with a chainsaw, and grind you into fucking horsemeat. You sexless asshole, I will destroy you and then I will eat you and lick the blood off my fingers and laugh and I won't go to jail because no one cares about you and I'm a fucking superstar. And you ever reprint this message in a book, I promise you that I will hunt you down again and kill you again, and this time, I won't leave any evidence. Don't fucking mess with me. I mean it. Good-bye."
I shivered when I heard the message.
"Ruth, listen," I said.
But the apartment was empty. Ruth had left me months before. I wept and cursed my former wife.
Someday, I thought, she will ache like I ache.
Now, a year past deadline, running out of money, barely shaven, wearing the same rumpled khakis and blue oxford shirt two days running, I must speak with the Widow. There are holes in my story that need to be filled. Only the Widow can fill them.
An occasion has arisen. I read in the Los Angeles Times that the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, Food Not Bombs, and the Spartacists Youth Brigade are honoring the Widow for "relentless lip service to unpopular causes." This is my opportunity. The Widow would never surround herself with goons while the left was watching.
She appears early, in a flash of glamour. Everyone wants to touch her. She's an honored guest among people who are normally reluctant to honor guests. Her smile is wide. Her eyes glisten. This is all she ever dreamed about in the heroin dens of Portland. She's a star.
"Widow!" I shout. "Widow!"
"Hi!" she says.
This is my chance to ask her all the questions I've ever wanted.
"Are you glad to be here?" I say.
"I am," she says. "It's all about being liberal, which is very important."
"How's your new album coming along?"
"Great!"
"Oh, that's really cool. Listen, I'm writing a book about Neal Pollack, and I was wondering..."
The Widow's eyes fill with cold, hard hate. She looks at my tape recorder.
"Is that on?" she says. "Because I'm not talking to you anymore if it is."
"Buh, buh, buh," I say.
She grabs my recorder and throws it against the wall. Her goons appear. They toss me onto the street. My pants rip at the knee. They're the only pair I have left.
Because I have nothing else to do, I walk, which is easier in L.A. than you might imagine. Wandering past all the coffee shops, record stores, and empty furniture warehouses, I look into the hills at a million lights. Neal Pollack probably walked these same streets when he arrived here in 1980. He knew L.A. better than anyone, just as he subsequently knew Seattle and so many other points on the open American road. There was nothing glamorous about Neal Pollack's L.A., Neal Pollack's America.
Pollack and his Do-It-Yourself message defined the '80s, the true, noncommercial '80s. He didn't care how anyone felt about him, which was good, because everyone wanted him dead. As Jello Biafra said during an early Dead Kennedys show in someone's basement in Colorado Springs, "Don't hate the media! Become the media! Unless the media is Neal Pollack. Then you can hate the media."
The list of bands he influenced and subsequently alienated in L.A. alone is almost too long to believe: the Alley Cats, the Avengers, the Bags, Black Flag, Black Randy and the Metro Squad, the Controllers, and the Dickies, with whom he was once stuck in a pagoda with Tricia Toyota. Then there were the Dils, the Eyes, F-Word, and the Flesh Eaters. Every night for one memorable week at their pad in the Cambridge Apartments, the Go-Go's blew Pollack beyond an inch of his life. He also befriended and betrayed Hal Negro and the Satintones, the Mau Maus, the Nerves, the Randoms, the Screamers, the Skulls, the Last, Wall of Voodoo, the Weirdos, X, and the Zeroes.
"But Darby Crash and the Germs were the greatest of them all," he wrote in Slash. "I remember one night I was dry-humping Lita Ford in the alley behind the Masque, and Darby came up and said, 'I need a ride to the Whisky A Go-Go.' Then he threw up all over me."
At midnight, I'm still walking, lost in memory. A limousine pulls up. The Widow pops out of the sunroof.
"Neal Pollack was a liar and a thief!" she says. "And he still owes me five dollars! Put that in your book!"
Well, at least I got one quote out of her.
Neal Pollack's Never Mind the Pollacks: A Rock 'n' Roll Novel was just published by HarperCollins and is available at all bookstores worth their salt.
