Motels I have known: The hair metal Ramada in the 80's

Never send your son on the road: Part Four

There was a place on Sunset Boulevard just east of Tower Records where I began staying in 1985 when I would fly a startup airline called Pride Air that originated out of New Orleans and had $49 flights to Las Vegas and L.A. and a few other cities.  It was one of those two-bit operations that leased old 727’s and flew them in off-hours so their gate fees were reduced. You’d get on the plane for a 10 p.m. flight and they’d close the doors right on time, and then you’d sit there for the next 30 to 45 minutes while they tried to start the engines.  I kept expecting the First Officer to come on the speaker and say “All right!  We got ‘em spun up and we’re outta here,” when they finally got them started. 

I had moved to New Orleans from Long Island.  I was feeling the walls of the small town where I lived, Sag Harbor, beginning to close in on me and was already giving serious thought to moving when one night in the fall of ’84, I walked down to the Corner Bar to watch Monday Night football.  I spied some of my buddies at the bar the minute I walked in.  They were local guys – plumbers and clammers and scallopers and nail-pounders – and they were sitting in a row at the bar with shots and beers in front of them watching the game.  I saw a free bar stool and sat down and ordered a beer.  I said something to the guy next to me about the game, and without turning to me, he whistled a bird call.  Just like that.  A perfect bird call – twee-twee-twee-chirp-chirp ­– something like that.  That was when I noticed the other guys weren’t talking either.  The quarterback would miss a pass, and instead of saying something like, “stupid fucker,” a guy would whistle another bird call. 

This went on throughout the first half of the game, with yours truly happily joining in, of course.  Somebody in the bar won the half-time pool and bought all of us a round of drinks, and we kept tweeting and chirping.  Soon the Corner Bar began to fill with people from up the street at the Sandbar and the Black Buoy who had heard a bunch of fools down at the Corner Bar were doing bird calls and had walked down to check us out.  I don’t think I paid for a single drink during the second half or the time I spent after the game refining my bird calling and throwing back beers and shots.

I have a vague recollection of walking home later, but I have a much better memory of waking up the next morning.  My tongue felt like a stretch of dry pavement and my head felt like someone had spent the night beating on it with an oar, but my memory of the night before was perfectly fine and much too attractive.  I had had way too much fun sitting there for four or five hours doing bird calls and never passing a word of spoken English with another person.  Instinctively I knew the time had come to get out of town, so that morning I picked up the phone and called my ex-girlfriend, who was a real estate broker, and put my house on the market.  I was living in an apartment on Royal Street in the French Quarter exactly two months later.

New Orleans was a perfect place to put off writing the novel I had not been working on back in Sag Harbor.  The Quarter had a bar on Chartres Street called the Napoleon House, the kind of joint that in any other city would have been called either quaint or a dive bar, but in New Orleans it was just another French Quarter watering hole.  I began passing many evenings in the company of others similarly inclined toward procrastination of one kind or another, sipping Sazeracs made with rye whiskey and Peychaud bitters or Pimms Cups made with Pimms No. 1 and lemonade and 7-Up with a slice of cucumber floating on top.  I know…it sounds like something that should come with a paper umbrella sticking out of it, but the drink was invented at the Napoleon House in the 1940’s, and sitting there surrounded by the place’s peeling walls with the French doors open to the street and the smell from the river occasionally wafting in, it was heaven on earth for a writer with a drinking problem, or a drinker with a writing problem, both of which described the me of 1985 to a proverbial “T”.

The other way to put off writing my novel, I had come to learn, was to actively pursue the pretense that I was writing something else, and the something else that was in the firmament of the moment was a screenplay.  Luckily enough, I had some connections in Hollywood from the first novel I wrote, Dress Gray, which I had sold to the movies back in 1979.  In fact, it was being made into a television mini-series, scripted by no less a literary and filmic giant than Gore Vidal and starring a very young and eager to please Alec Baldwin. 

I had gotten to know Gore when he first signed up to write the script, right after I sold the book to the movies even before it was published.  Gore wanted to meet me before he started the script, so he invited me for drinks at his suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.  Fresh from being feted all over town after Dress Gray hit the bestseller list, I floated into Gore’s suite already fortified with about three martinis and greeted the great man heartily by informing him cheerily that he and my mother had been born on the same day in beds next to one another at the West Point hospital, and I was happy because Gore writing the screenplay sort of kept it in the family, so to speak.

Well, the traffic was thick out on 5th Avenue and 59th Streets both, but inside his 4th floor front suite at the Plaza, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.  It seemed that Gore had neglected to inform anyone of the fact that he had been born the son of the West Point football coach at the post hospital, and here was this half-drunk young whippersnapper who not only knew that well-concealed fact, but was telling him that his mother and my grandmother had been friends and he and my mother were born next to one another.

Off to a somewhat awkward start, the evening managed to progress apace, and soon we were trading family stories and I was telling him that one of the main characters in the book, a certain Colonel Hedges, was based on the man who had been my regimental commander at West Point, a certain Colonel Alexander M. Haig, who had infamously declared “I am in charge here,” just after President Reagan had been shot.  This delighted Gore no end, that in his screenplay based on my book he would be able to skewer such a cold-bloodedly evil piece of human scum like Haig. 

Which was probably why I was invited out to Hollywood to witness the making of “Dress Gray” in 1985.  They would pay my airfare and to put me up at the Ramada on Sunset Boulevard, and I could visit the set at Warner Brothers out in the valley and witness all the big Hollywood goings on that would not have been possible if I hadn’t sat down during the summer of 1977 in a rented house in Sag Harbor and written the book.  Gore would be there, they told me.  He lived part of every year in a grand Spanish mansion somewhere up on Outpost Drive, and he was in town for the filming of the screenplay he had written for “Dress Gray.”

So I hopped a Prime Air flight to L.A., and damn if the engines didn’t start up on time, and before I knew it I was checking into the Ramada on Sunset Boulevard right next to Tower Records.  Checking in just ahead of me was a rock and roll band of the then popular “hair metal” variety – their feathery coifs towering above their skulls like carefully twirled sculptures of cotton candy, teetering along on platform shoes, their leather pants belted so tightly around their microscopic waists it seemed impossible that they had consumed real food in weeks.  I stood there listening to their excited chatter.  They had just signed a big record deal with a label I recognized, they were headlining that night at the Whiskey, and from the Ramada, they would be heading out on a 30-city tour!  A limo would be picking them up later and taking them to an album signing party at Tower Records! 

I looked out the window of the Ramada.  Tower Records was right there across the street.  You could walk there in less than two minutes, but these dudes would be arriving in a limo!  Life was good for these young rockers!  No, life was fantastic!  A limo!  Flashbulbs would be popping!  Champagne corks would be popping!  Chicks would be clutching at their sequined sleeves and skinny leather-encased legs begging for autographs!

I got checked in and dumped my stuff in my room and was headed out to meet Gore for drinks when I noticed something funky going on.  Most of the doors on my corridor were open, and as I walked past each room, I could see large suitcases with big belts around them stacked next to the  bed.  People were walking from room to room, and in the rooms I could see into, people were standing around in groups watching me carefully as I passed the open doors.  I wondered which rooms the rockers were staying in.  Must have been on a different floor, because they sure weren’t on mine.

I took a cab into Beverly Hills to meet Gore at the Beverly Wilshire.  I joined him at a table in the bar, and he ordered a bottle of his favorite champagne, Dom Perignon, which they delivered to the table in a nickel-silver bucket mounted on a mahogany stand.  Gore and I had toasted to one another’s good health when four men pushed loudly through the bar area and sat down at the table next to us.  They were, to put it kindly, corpulent.  Everything was corpulent about them: their faces were fleshy and round and pink and freshly shaved; their chins were many; their suits were of a size that could have been un-sewn and reassembled as two-person tents.  Even their cigars were corpulent, enormous, rotund, log-like things that when puffed upon exuded great fog-banks of thick smoke.

Gore observed the men with a certain detached aplomb, as if by simply making a wish, they would be swept away, leaving us in peace, breathing air uncontaminated by either their smoke or incessant chortling, which they proceeded to engage in with an entirely different sort of aplomb.

But of course nothing could wish them away, not these four.  It seemed that they were music executives, there to celebrate signing a new band to their label.  Gore and I were trying our best to sip our champagne in peace, but the back-slapping congratulations they were sharing were more and more difficult to ignore as their merriment grew louder.  I caught the name of the label.  It was one I recognized, one of the “majors,” as they were known in the business.  And then I caught the name of the band.  It was the same group of hair-metal head-bangers who were staying at my motel on the strip!

Gore was sufficiently perturbed by the smoke that had now rendered each of us practically invisible to the other that he had gone over to the maître d’ to see if anything could be done about their cigars.  I leaned a little closer so I could hear what they were saying about the band.  One guy was exclaiming loudly about how badly he had taken those suckers to the cleaners.  The contract they had signed was so bad, they wouldn’t see a dime of real money from it unless they went double platinum!  Everything was charged against the band’s royalties – travel costs, equipment rentals, trucks and buses for their tour, hotels, food while they were on the road, even the fucking limo the label was sending to pick them up for the signing at Tower tonight!  Those stupid fuckers think everything’s going to be top dollar!  It’s top dollar all right!  Right off the top of their gross!

So the hair band and I were staying at a run down Ramada on the Strip, and the guys who owned their label were drinking champagne and toasting each other at the Beverly Wilshire.  Is this a great country, or what?

Gore returned with the maître d’, who picked up the bucket of champagne and moved us to another table across the bar, but I could still hear their chortling and back slapping from there.

Watching the filming of “Dress Gray” the next day was exactly the way I had heard making movies described by friends in the business:  watching paint dry.  But Alec was impressive in the role of Ry Slaight, and Hal Holbrooke more than managed to put across the execrable military smarm of Colonel Hedges, and the rest of the cast was almost as good.  I was surprised when one of the bit players came up to me and introduced himself and said he was “from the neighborhood” back in New York.  He had grown up on Sullivan Street, just down from my loft on Houston, and had delivered groceries to me from the Pioneer Market on Bleecker as a kid. Sure enough, I remembered him as one of the Italian-American kids from the neighborhood.  He told me his dad was one of the guys who made the mozzarella in the back room at Joe’s Dairy on Sullivan.  I remembered him too.

I met one of my Hollywood friends for dinner at a joint on the Strip.  The traffic on Sunset was terrible when he drove me back to my motel.  Something was happening ahead of us.  We could see the red and blue lights of cop cars and paddy wagons flashing against the glass of nearby office buildings.  We got closer.  Whatever was happening was happening at my motel!

He dropped me off and I tried to push my way through the crowd that had gathered along the sidewalk.  When I finally got through, a long strip of yellow crime scene tape blocked my way to the motel’s front door.  When I picked up the tape and stepped under, a cop came straight up to me and told me to get back, this was a crime scene.  It’s also the motel I’m staying in, I told him.  Let me see your key and some ID, he barked at me, real cop-like.  I’ll show you my key, but you don’t have a right to check my ID.  I’m a guest at this motel.  If you don’t believe me, let’s go in and ask the guy at the desk.

The cop checked my key and looked me over.  Are you a citizen? he asked.  What do I sound like? I snapped back.  What, like I’m French?  The cop told me to follow him and we went into the lobby.  There were officers of every description in there.  Guys with FBI on the backs of windbreakers, DEA guys, a bunch of them with INS and BP on their jackets.  What the hell is going on? I asked the guy at the desk.

“It’s an immigration bust,” he replied kind of sheepishly.

So that’s what I saw in my motel corridor earlier!  Some smuggler had moved dozens of illegals into the place, using the motel as a holding area before they were moved out of or into L.A.  It was a stop on an illegal immigrant underground railroad.  The people I had seen in the hall looked like they were Chinese, Latino, white, and some of them were black.  They must have come from all over the world, and they were waiting to be moved on when the bust happened.

The motel’s desk man signaled me over to the side.  “Listen, man, I couldn’t tell you earlier, you know?  I mean, this is so weird, but you and the band are the only American dudes staying here.”

Well, I guess that’s what you get when the producers pick up the tab for your airfare and hotel:   Pride Air and the Underground Railroad Ramada on Sunset.