Well I was thinking back and thinking back even further and I drove past it every day for the past few years and now its gonna be gone and I kept thinking that I had a good story about the Sixth Street bridge, maybe not the best story but certainly better than all the maudlin bullshitters who never even thought about the structure until the city announced it was being torn down. Suddenly it is the jugular vein of cultural heritage that tied the neighborhoods together oh bullshit, I saw one exactly ONE photo posted on the internet of the Sixth Street Bridge taken by someone regular in a car with the skyline in it. A few old professional shots scattered here and there but only Linda Gamboa posted a shot from the passenger seat of a car in what looked like 1985 or so of the road and the bridge headed toward the L.A. skyline and it was crooked and a little blurry and perfect.
So if Linda is writing about her memories of the Sixth Street Bridge, I’m sold on the authenticity of her prose all of it sight unseen. Everyone else, all your boo hoo hoo seems a little more about you boo hoo hoo-ing for yourself or even worse, for actually not having ever noticed the Sixth Street Bridge until the day they announced the demo was on the way. For me, I have saved the eulogy. I got a good kick out of that bridge and that good kick was forever always with me and so that bridge has been with me for more than half my life now so when they said they were tearing it down, well the vivid memory was still there. So there won’t be crying or celebrating or making a big deal because for a few weeks many years ago that bridge was mine.
In 1988 I would go to underground clubs like religious people go to church. The weekends centered on these places. But how to find out where they were and if they were worth going to. There were so many complications back then. There was no Social Media invitation. There was word of mouth. To find out about the clubs you had to do a variety of things in different ratios, sort of like a recipe. You had to go to parties... which means you had to find out where the parties were. It was a vicious cycle that started on Thursday mornings. Calling around, hitting a few bars on Thursday night, hitting a few late night diners. “Hey man what’s going on this weekend?” Simple stuff when you would see someone who dressed like you, fucked up but ridiculously fashionable in ways that would only be validated by high school kids dressing that way five or ten years later.
And you would go to parties to dig up what was happening after the parties. That is all the first and second party were for, besides the food and the occasional phone number. There was always something else, some other thing happening that made the party but a stepping stone. Once in a while it was a great party and all bets were off. But rarely. A lot of the time it was not even the right party. Got chased out of a few of those. So it was always a long search. Some people were out there jonesing for a fix. Others were dying to get laid. We were just in search of a place to go where nobody had ever been, an idealized setting where a few hours could happen in a manner that allowed not an iota of jaded judgment to occur. The underground was a respite from Happy Days telling us we had missed the 1950s and every ponytailed fuckhead telling us we had missed the 1960s and every early punk rocker telling us we had missed punk when it mattered and on and on and I think this shit is still going on, ask a 23-year-old. The underground was the antidote to a culture that insisted we didn’t belong, that we had just missed it, that our Saturday nights were irrelevant. Well, fuck Studio 54 was all that drove my brain on the weekend.
Some clubs you’d hit and be disappointed and others the sun rising was the saddest moment, because you knew it was over, the greatest time you ever had that you’d probably forget and that is what made it even better. The underground was better than any drug because every Saturday night drama reads better on a stage you never imagined until the very darkness that enveloped it all up and disappeared.
Some friends seized upon an idea one day that was a gold mine. Such a gold mine that we didn’t share it with anyone ever. We would just do it and it cut thru so much crap. And in doing this we got clued into the underground. There was only one ATM in Downtown L.A. in 1988 after the sun went down. Really. It sounds like there might have been horse carts and mule-pulled buggies to complete this scenario, but no, there was not. There was one ATM outdoors working after dark in Downtown L.A. in 1988 and it was the B of A in Chinatown. There was a steady stream of people stopping by here to grab cash. You could take one look at people and know if they knew where anything cool was that night. There was an art to asking. People were forthcoming if they didn’t think you were trying to mug them. They were most talkative when there was a line. One time I stood there pretending to be getting cash out so the others could interrogate this dude who we knew would be hip to it all.
You know, for everything the internet did in breaking down barriers of communication, the decentralization of it all destroyed the underground. Ninety percent of the underground clubs would not have withstood a picky Yelp review. Five selfies by different folks all Instagrammed in one night from some of those places would have killed the allure completely. Something about the silence and the privacy – things that were frustrating when you were not in the know all seem now to be the things about the underground that were what we treasure about those days and nights if we can recall them at all.
So one night I was at a party downtown, hanging out, drinking pretty good beer, wondering if maybe this was all that it would amount to when this one guy I ran with came in. It has been almost thirty years and I cannot recall his fucking name and it drives me crazy because we tore up the town together for a few years, hit and miss and I just cannot recall his name. So NoName saw me and walked straight over. This guy was usually a lot cooler, the observant type. He’d walk in and walk around and look and stare and I learned a little from watching him but this time he walked right over to me. “You want to help me do an underground club tonight?” Well, let’s put this question into perspective. You like beer, help me make a brewery tonight. You like sex, help me open a whorehouse tonight. You like free drugs, help me run a smuggling operation tonight. This one question cleared the fog away for me with a radical simplicity. I had been chasing this elusive need to be somewhere cool and exclusive and here was a man who was going to build it himself. “I’m in, let’s go.”
We drove in his pick up truck with two guys in the back. It was still legal back then, legal to sit in the back of the truck back then. He gave me the game plan. He had called a college radio station on Monday and got on the air somehow and asked the radio host “Were you the Cassette Deejay at that Saturday afterhours club under the sixth street bridge?” The deejay asked NoName what was a cassette deejay. He said it was the hippest thing in England to deejay cassettes on a boombox in tunnels under bridges “I asked the guy if he was hip to this and he was all oh yeah oh yeah, I thought they were just called deejays and he asked me what my favorite club under a bridge in London was.”
Well this info is all piling up, it is the first I had heard of clubs under bridges in London and cassette deejays. “Where did you hear about all this shit, man, did you go to London recently?” I asked him, excited about this whole new scene. We were at a red light on Seventh Street at Alameda heading East. He turned and looked me in the eye and said “I made it all up.” He had a glimmer in his eye. He was a taciturn guy, this was the most I had really ever talked to him despite hanging out on the scene around him for over a year. He barely smiled, but then he smirked, “I created a club in my head and then I promoted it on the radio for free by hyping it as being cool like the English club scene.” The light turned green and we motored onward toward Santa Fe Avenue but time for me had stopped. The car was going in slow motion as my brain frenetically tried to update reality with all this new information. You could create something out of nothing and call it art and call it hype at the same time. And it was apparently about to start.
We got to the tunnel under the Sixth Street bridge on Santa Fe, it is right where the incline has begun, semiturcks can make it up and down this part of the street but if it were pouring rain you’d stay dry under this little slice of concrete for hours. He parked the truck away from the tunnel though and he did not have to explain why. He was already planning his getaway. You see, they didn’t call them underground clubs because they were sexy or in a basement literally under the ground. They were underground because they were all illegal and the city fathers unleashed the police on them. It is different now, there are lots of clubs, bars, places to go, maybe even too many. They are all legal and quite boring. Just being at an underground club meant you were breaking the law. Sometimes the Vice Squad would send in under covers. Other times the owner of a legal bar would drop a dime and the police would show up en masse. One time a helicopter circled overhead when they shut down the New ClubHouse and everyone behind the bar got arrested and hauled away. Other times they would just knock on the door an hour before the club was supposed to start and tell you they were watching and maybe y’all did not want to get arrested.
Whatever it was, the game of cat and mouse saw an endless supply of mice getting fucked up every weekend in establishments that had not passed a fire inspection, did not have a liquor license, were not vetted by the business licensing bureau, had not bribed the city councilman to get the permits to operate a club. In all the time I spent in underground clubs there were not one-tenth the problems that popped up in legitimate clubs. But the city and the county and the state never made a dime off of the underground clubs and so their pit bulls with guns were always prowling. The busts happened, you got frisked, they took your pot if you had any, they cuffed you if you had anything harder than weed. They got all testy and hyper macho cowboy if anyone was found with a gun. One time I got frisked and walked out and the girl I was with was two people back in the line and someone ahead of her had a piece on them. It took a half-hour before she got out and they practically strip searched her right in the doorway . The guy with the gun was hogtied on the floor and she practically had to step on him to go over him to get out the door and we walked to a bus stop because they were impounding everyone’s car and she was tugging at her bra the whole way to the bus bench they had so thoroughly grabbed at what they thought were weapons.
NoName parked the truck so that he (or he and I if we were both lucky) could simply walk to truck and flee supposing the police descended. He drove a beat up old Datsun. All of this would work in his favor – if he made it to the car it looked so un-hip, so non-descript that a clean getaway was not only possible, it was probable. And if he got busted and hauled in, it was legally parked and he could get out a day or two later and get over to it and drive it away. Once your car got impounded you were racing against a ticking clock, there were daily fees. Downtown used to be a place you could tuck a car away for a few weeks and come back to it. Leave the windows open and the doors unlocked so the occasional crackhead could rifle through it. Worst thing I ever heard happening, besides the occasional homeless person taking a dump in the car was a guy finding a junkie OD’s in his car and dead already for three or four days. So NoName had already scoped everything out and had a plan, I could tell by the way he parked. The guys in the truck bed didn’t have papers, they were the last two people who the cops were going to waste their time on if they were busting a club full of underground kids. NoName had thought of everything. We got out of the truck, crossed Santa Fe and approached the tunnel. It was about ten at night. NoName said a few things to the guys in Spanish and pointed, they walked off on their errand.
Up drove this other guy. He was an asshole. I can’t remember his name either. He was one of those guys you would see on the scene and be like “Oh, he’s here, he’s such an asshole.” People certainly said that under their breath about me enough times. It’s human nature. There is chemistry with everyone you meet, just sometimes it is really bad chemistry. I saw him years later and he was still an asshole. He had that whole superior air about him and that sneer and the way of not talking to you. And then he would be all laughing and small-talking with other people you didn’t know. There is tension in every scene. Chemistry, energy, vibes, biorhythms maybe I don’t fucking know. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. No violence, just mute mutual repugnance. I saw the boombox and knew he was the Cassette Deejay. He handed NoName an aluminum baseball bat. NoName handed it to me. The Asshole took his boombox and a folding table down to the end of the tunnel, right by the river. So I’m standing at the entrance to the tunnel to the LA River under the Sixth Street Bridge on Santa Fe Avenue in a black leather biker jacket holding a baseball bat. The two guys from the truck bed come back pushing a trash dumpster. NoName is barking directions in Spanish as they line it up with the tunnel. He tells me to stand back. The two guys tip it over. Trash spills everywhere. He talks to them a little more and they begin creating a pile of trash at the entrance of the tunnel. To get in the tunnel now you can either climb over a disgusting pile of trash or you can walk through a tiny little aisle in front of which NoName and I are standing. The Asshole has been loading boxes down into the tunnel. The two guys from the truck walk down into the tunnel too and disappear. It is pitch black down there but your eyes adjust.
NoName doesn’t really talk much. I’m an idiot chatterbox to fill the space but I know to play it cool, that the vibe is heavy. The idea of me as a bouncer is absurd. The idea that I could crack an egg with that baseball bat is ludicrous. Down in the tunnel I hear music. The Asshole is the world’s first Cassette DeeJay even though the trend has already been announced on radio. NoName’s plan is manifesting. At least we are about to see how many people listened to the radio show he called. A little before eleven four girls appear from the side street around where NoName had parked his truck. They are dressed in what they think looks hip and underground, bad discotech glitter on black. NoName tells me “stay here” as he walks up to them. Well I want to talk to the hot chicks too. It dawns on me that NoName is a master of compartmentalization. Everyone in this scenario is separate. The two undocumented guys. The Asshole DeeJay, now he is bringing chicks to the club to make it “fun” but is he paying them, giving them free drinks? I will never know because he excluded me. There were times in my life that this realization would have made me resentful, hurt, emotional, perhaps acting out because of it. But this whole adventure is making me respect NoName. There was a management style. I took it in like you take in the smell of the popcorn as you walk into the theater lobby. There was much to be learned.
The trash doesn’t really smell and the first group who walk up sort of kick around the idea of walking thru it or over it. They finally walk up. It is three guys and a girl. NoName lays it out simple: Its five bucks and all the shots of tequila you can drink. The first guy hands him a twenty. NoName looks at me and makes a quick jerking motion for me to move out of the way. The guy takes a step in, impulsively and stops, “Where’s my change?” NoName is cool “Get it from them” he says, pointing at the three companions. I look at them and begin waving my hand in and the three of them pass him up and he looks at me and then at NoName and then sprints in to catch up to them. NoName smiles at me “That was good, keep ‘em moving,” he laughed. Having change for that guy was not our problem. This is the underground, your very presence here is all the customer satisfaction you should ever expect.
“Is this the Surge Club?” asks a particularly bold woman. I wish I’d had a camera and taken a picture of some of the get ups. The eighties were a transitory time. Not everyone played dress-up well. The synthetic look took time and commitment. I maintained a simple punk appearance because it was easy. So many people tried to be elaborate and failed. And going out to clubs was pretty much dressing up for Halloween. They start to arrive. NoName’s four girls was a masterstroke as none of the first few clumps of folks have left, the guys are happy with booze and potential pick-ups. And still the trash does not smell.
Cars are slowing down “Is this Surge?” NoName nods so discretely that half of them repeat the question as a yell, and still they cannot tell if he has nodded yes or no. They park anyway and they part with their five bucks. When nobody is around I ask him “What’s Surge?” He tells me that was the name of the London underground club that started the whole Cassette DJ craze and that this was the L.A. branch of the same club. Had he forgotten that he had just told me he had made the whole thing up? Was he so well-rehearsed that he was just re-rehearsing all this? None of it mattered. I just stood there with a baseball bat, the muscle for the first and only time in my life, and watched the master collect the money, basking in the light of the bulb which had turned on over his head in the conceptual cartoon panel illustrating this story in the minds of everyone who will ever hear of it.
After the bars closed at 2 AM was when things got hectic. More people were coming and they were already drunk, bold, eager to get in, full of reasons why they shouldn’t pay. NoName told one guy trying to push thru “He’s cracking skulls on request tonight” and gestured to me. But when a group of serious-looking homeboys walked up he told me “Lay the bat down. Set it down and step on it.” They came up, he gave them hugs and handshakes and let the clique walk down the long tunnel into the darkness of after-hours ecstasy for free. He gestured for me to pick the bat up again, the conductor of this orchestra. Maybe they were the real muscle, maybe they were packing, but there was no maybe about who was conducting. Six really young guys walked up with their own twelve pack, “Five bucks each and three beers” They hesitated. “There’s tons of chicks down there, lotta hot ones.” That sold them on it. NoName handed me two of the beers that he had collected, saying “Chug the first one, nurse the second.” The beer helped. The people looked cuter after that second one but NoName reminded me that this was the night time, that the good people had all gone to bed, “Keep that bottle close in case you need to break it on some jerk’s face,” he said in that bland matter-of-fact voice that made taking orders easy because they were not barked, because they were wise suggestions, because nobody else who was an expert on the underground ever opened their fucking mouths.
I cannot tell you that it was hard work, because the first night of Surge was fun. I had been to the clubs, the holes in the wall, the squats, sat in chairs and stared, leaned against walls and tried to start a conversation, hung out through godawful music, all just to be there. But this night I was missing the whole actual club but seeing every miniscule detail of the desire to be there, to be in the tunnel. I had the keys to the kingdom and did not care to jiggle the lock. The hardest thing was not helping up this one drunk girl. It was late. 4:30 AM. She was blotto and wanted in free. NoName had let plenty of women pass but this one was a little belligerent and loud and she walked away from her date, a pretty square guy, and then darted straight into the trash pile. She fell face first after a few steps and then tried to crawl up it, like a desperate mountain climber. She was wailing. The square guy was still standing at the entrance with his hand in his pocket ready to pay the admission for both of them. I walked over to her and tapped the back of her calf with the bat, “Hey there’s shit in there, human shit, dog shit, you’re getting shit all over you!” What do you say to someone in this state? It was all the motivation I could think to say. She flailed for another few seconds but stopped. “Johnny come help me...” the date darted over. I whispered to him “There’s no shit in there, man, no shit at all.” He was relieved and grabbed her by the waist and pulled, falling straight back on his ass but getting her out of the garbage pile. They walked into the night to some car they had parked up the street.
At the very first glimmer of light in the sky NoName asked for the bat. He handed me a huge wad of bills and told me that the two illegals were each stationed in the river on either side of the tunnel down a quarter mile or so and to go tell one to get the other to both go to his car. “Can I get a ride, man?” He looked almost confused, “Go get a chick in the tunnel, taxis will be here when the sun comes up.” I walked down into the tunnel, it got thick with people and cigarette smoke. I was crunching styrofoam cups beneath my feet. My eyes adjusted. Near the end was the Asshole with a boombox on the card table. He was making out with a chick. A huge bottle of tequila was on the table along with some cups. I picked up the big bottle, “That one’s dosed,” said the Asshole, breaking away form a smooch, suddenly concerned about me, maybe selfishly wanting to keep the dosed shit for himself but I took it as a shred of humanity from this previously contemptible fuck. I flinched and set the bottle back down. He grabbed an unopened bottle and handed it to me. I filled a cup and slugged a good bit of it. Rotgut but burning smooth like it was supposed to.
Walking out to the edge of the tunnel the slightest predawn light was bright enough to show the guts of L.A. in all their functional beauty. The concrete channel, stretched eternal on my left and right. Across the grey riverbed was a matching forty-degree angle slant. Above was the bridge, slung up, over and across into East LA where it became Whittier Boulevard, hit Soto, cruised through the barrio and beyond so long that it ended up damn deep into suburbia almost within a mile or two of the house I had grown up in. I signaled to NoName’s guy, he might have been fifty yards from the tunnel, a lookout. He grabbed his friend and left. The tunnel was a bit emptier. The Asshole was drunkenly consolidating boxes of tequila bottles and cups and the last thing I wanted to do was get dosed and the second to the last thing I wanted to do was help him so I did not break my stride, chugging down the tequila and getting to the top of the tunnel alone, where I smelled the huge pile of trash for the first time as I passed it. It smelled much worse now that it had been out for hours... there was definitely some type of shit in it.