Probate was over. Before the estate sale, I brought several bookshelves from Ruth’s condo to my house. Movers had boxed up Charlie’s books and records. I returned as many as I could to the shelves.
I filled any free space with the remnants of my personal book collection. They’d been stuck in boxes of their own for over five years.
One of these texts, originally purchased by me in the early 2000s, is titled Mary, Ferrie, & The Monkey Virus, by author Edward T. Haslam.
In the late 1980s, while still teenagers, my bandmates and I would drive from the West Side to play gigs at an East Hollywood bar called the Anti-Club, on Melrose Blvd. between Ardmore and Kingsley, about a block west of Normandie.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c0e7748-4d08-4de1-9bf7-fcd567e53977_650x509.jpeg)
Occasionally we’d keep driving up Melrose to where the avenue splinters off, or withers away, at Western. Past Hyperion Ave., or “Little Hyperion”, as I later called it, Melrose turns into a narrow sidestreet, then disappears.
Following Beverly Blvd., which we did sometimes, instead of Melrose, the disconnect was more profound. At Western, the boulevard splits into a confusing set of four different roads, separated almost haphazardly in different directions. Obeying traffic signs and lights here requires courage and patience. It’s like hitting a wall. Breaking through the wall, for me, was like entering Oz for the first time, or Barsoom, a land of snake-like roads, some leading into the hills, some into an ungentrified section of L.A. so far untouched by corporate hands. A romantic land of mystery.
One time, our purpose was to visit AMOK, a bookstore on Sunset Blvd. at Hyperion notorious for specializing in subject matter other shops wouldn’t touch. We were looking for bootleg music videos on VHS: punk stuff, Sun Ra, King Crimson, outtakes from Spinal Tap.
I had only recently heard about this place. On display next to Sun Ra was a VHS tape entitled Manson Family Videos. Next to that an autopsy instructional video. There were books on UFOs, JFK, Jim Jones, Pol Pot, Ed Gein, and Korla Pandit.
If you think snobby record store clerks, like the ones depicted in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, are bad, try snobby extreme bookstore clerks. They don’t argue about the aesthetics of corny pop tunes. They simply stare at you, silently, until you feel death beams entering your eyes and leaving at your feet.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Josh Haden's Mémoire to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.