Help Me Rhonda, Yeah, I've been Sunset Stripped by Mike Marino 1965. Lights...cameras...action!

Mickey was silver birding across the ocean Paci fic from Honolulu to California. Doc Yucatan summed up L.A.best. "Hollywood can get really fuckin' weird, kid." All the way from the Sunset Strip to Sunset Boul evard. "It's nuthin' but a buncha glitz, glam and glimmer where that old broad, Norma Desmond puts on a pair of her Whiskey-a-go-go go-go boots to go-go-go, all the time. Weird shit goin' on in that town, I mean to tell ya." Doc had been th ere a couple of times and it scared the hell out of him. Doc Yucatan! Go figure. Southern California was hot rods and surfboards, beach bums and beach bunnies, G TO's and 409's. It was drive in theaters with backseat passion pits and impassio ned b&w siver screen zombies. Backseats became heaven on earth with blooming gar dens of pubescences exciting your senses with visceral, not, cerebral beauty. Ra dio's blasted away with an endless monaural summer of "Help Me, Rhonda, yeah, gi t her outta my heart...." Annette Funicello fulling filling her Mouseketeer biki ni top with Funicello jell-o, ever expanding, a giant mushroom cloud of Cali-cle avage, deemed as national monuments of deliciously flavored implants. The Pendle ton shirt, the frat shirt, and penny loafers were worn with pride during beach b lanket bingo's with lot's of bongo's on the beach keeping time with the pounding surf as the California sun would set gently below the Pacific horizon. Beach bo nfires roar to life, accompanied by small transister radios and even bigger radi os with big songs filling the California night. The Little Surfer Girl was procl aimed Queen of the Beach, while the Midnight Cowboy was stranded in the fog of N ew York streets. Ah, but then there's Anahiem. Hear tell it's the hap, hap, happiest place on God s little back forty of earth, (if your a Hollywood mincing pixie named Tinkerbel l). It's where money and magic come together in the wonderful land of the Diety of Disney, with the lord high Mickey Mouse and Pluto posing as the pope ruling c hildhood with a cast iron heart. (That's Pluto the dog, and not the former plane t, washed up now, faded and forgotten, a child star from TV's past.) Those who k now Mickey Mouse best, swear up and down the streets of the Magic Kingdom, that he talked about "Fantasia," released in the Dirty Thirties. Mickey claimed, in a secret interview held deep in the underground, (real cloak and dagger shit), to have tripped out on acid with Huxley and Hoffman and he saw walking and talking brooms while on purple double dome. Walt simply brought the hallucination to life on the screen. This whole psychotic episode explains why a mouse, a talking one albeit, would make friends with a sputtering duck with no pants. Mickey also claimed to have banged Betty Boop at a cartoon bangers ball, but has never been substantiated. Step right up, yelled the barker, "There is n o admission charge at the doors of perception...it's all free to a willing and p aying public, as long as they're buying it, and the best part, ladies and gentle men, all perceptions come without a guarantee, just "as is." is all, so buyer be ware, very aware." > Grauman's Chinese. Schwabs drugstore. Swiss pharmaceuticals, condoms, and eggrol ls...Where starlets and their dreams are both made. The next fertile garden of A va waiting to have her topsoil tilled and turned by a gardener in the limo's bac kseat crouched like a wild animal on her hands and knees, begging to be "discove red" for her talent, raw and cooked, later, she can rehearse on the casting couc h where studio heads expect to be treated to "studio head." Topping the tinsel town turrets, Madam Hollywood sashays and shows off her brill iant signage electric. The Hollywood sign...the landmark that defines the city o f Angels. The sign, a amphetamine metaphor for a debutantes gown slightly worn, you know. The kind you find hanging on a rack in the Salvation Army store over t here, alongside that tarnished tiara on the shelf side by side with the wax figu re candles and old waffle maker with the frayed cord. The tiara is oxidized, wit

h that sexy too-long in the garden patina..naughty, haughty and high above the b usy streets below, all laid out in sections, strips, a jigsaw puzzle to be put b ack together, the streets themselves draped with curb to curb red carpet, a herp ian rash rolled out for the talentless, who ran ahead of the pack of chatty goss ip columnists from Photoplay magazine nipping at their stirrups, flashbulbs bulb ing and popping about, as they poke about the rumor trash bin to find the truth about the profoundly profane sexuality of the studios, not to mention, the mosai c of matinee idolatry and the papier-mache machismo of cowpokes, who break open, manly pinatas cracked with a stick on the dusty set of Vera Cruz with pissed-of f Mex's on their tail.. It was an age of Ben Hur, Ben-Hims and Ben-Hers, all in wide screen technicolor Cinemascope. Coonskin caps and breech-cloth coverings. Cleopatra sweating and ba rging up the Nubian nubile Nile with her mutinous christian, Fletcher, to meet a blonde Arab in the desert who went by the name of Lawrence. It was the ring-a-d ing-ding martini-martoonie era of Chicago gangsters and Vegas desert rat packs B ig breasted buxom bikini's filled the carnivorous carnal buffet, it's table over flowing with it's ice carved mountain peaks. Yodel from the Alpine tops, and the y come running, those bleached boys of the beach with bushy, bushy blonde hair-d o's against a Panavision backdrop shot in 35mil pre-psychedelic film, and is the location set where Route 66 head-on crashed into the pier at Santa Monica Boule vard, shooting out to sea, see, the ocean blue, where the highway ends and Pacif ic poetry begins, her gentle waves a sonnet on the sand. Her riptide was her hea rtbeat and her surf, her soul. Roll the dice...see where they land as pirates run up to you with clubs and kidn ap the kid in you, tied to the mast, held for ransom, then walking the plank int o the unknown. This time the roll showed craps for Mickey, the kid, not the mous e. The lustful city of lost angels, with broken wings and no auto repair shop to fix them. It's L.A! A sleazy, sinister, sinamatic cinematic version of a tribe of chromatic Black Dahlias, double-breasted dykes dressed as three-piece men wit h fedora's cruisin' the back alley pages of pulp fiction novels, (cheap novels m ind you) printed on a mimeograph with that get high ink smell that anarchists lo ve so much just before an assassination..then...distributed to lonely people on lunatic streets lined with Googie architecture, hotdog stands, and Bob's Big Boy . Mickey stared in star studded awe at the California landscape from the Califor nia bound jetliner high above the three-dimensional California bas relief that w as Los Angeles in 1965. A refreshing frescoe complimenting the city's asphalt Gu ggenheim gallery of frozen architectural murals and frenzied, motionless human s culptures encased in bronze like naked gods in Greek mythology. Mickey had gotten lei'd yet again leaving Honolulu airport just hours before. Th ey have a delightful habit lei'ing tourists when the land, Aloha!..and when they leave, Aloha, again! Jet nose down now, on an angle, the pilot was preparing th e plane for landing, carrying it's young passenger far away from his Atomic Hula and her palm tree paradise, but was soon would toss him into the wide open wait ing arms of the Amazon Goddess of Southern California. Hooray for Hollywood! ... then, according to parental plan, de-plane, re-board, re-bound back to De-troit, after a year and a half on his own living as the robbing son, Crusoe, in paradi se. The kid from the Midwest was naive, no doubt about that. He had absolutely no id ea what L.A. had to offer, or what price she would exact from him in return. Lif e was a gamble anyway, so he just stared out of the panes of the plane to the ci ty below...her nightgown of nightlife spread open to reveal some of her neon sec rets. She was a seductress of the first degree, and Mickey, weak as ever in thos e teen years, was ready to follow foolishly, this Tenderloin Temptress to the ga tes of her hell. The plane began its descent, readying itself for a bounce-bounce landing. Mickey

stared at the lights of sprawling Los Angeles below him. The outline of the str eets, the tired old drunk eye-socket red of tail-lights streaming in all directi ons at once...an automotive etch-a-sketch with faulty synapse on amphetamines. H is heart and soul wanted to see this wonderland, feel this wonderland and experi ence it, good and bad, first hand. Always the adventurer, there were no more Nor thwest Passages to seek out in buckskin, game to be brought down with black powd er and bedding down with a half naked brown skinned squaw among the evergreen bo ughs at night. Mickeys wilderness was the city, and all the cities he hadn't exp lored yet. As he gazed at the looming luminescent city below him, he didn't know what he would find there. In time he would, once again, become a child of the s treets, living as a deadbroke jailbait hipster runaway on the runway of the Suns et Strip. LA revealed her perfectly milky urbane breasts, topo maps from the forest servic e, lost in the city. Each one a giant crystal ball that required gazing, fondlin g and rapt attention. The breasts also acted as mammary maps with each perfect mound a 3-dimensional, perfectly round topographic map, showing the underground system of the city, backing up with strange human sewage of pill poppers and tra in hoppers, junkie's and junkettes, whores and queers. Hustler's and hookers wit h too much eyeliner. Mere human facades covered in cosmetics resembling ghetto g raffiti. They run now...animated automatons from the turn of the century, mechan ical whirly-gigs toys in motion, trying to escape on a slo' mo treadmill in a ra ts cage to disappear, with bleeding psyches into the gauze mist of night alleys, tripping over the wino's lying on asphalt beds with broken bottles for pillows. L.A., la-la-land, below the airliner. The mean streets of LA have a beat, cadenc e, all their own. Keeping time to a combination of improvised jazz notes, that l ead, not follow. Everything juxtaposed in a collage, pieces of a quilt intersper sed and added, like the cartoon sequence in Hitchcock's "Sabotage". It's arms an d loins spread wide to welcome the unititiated and eat you alive, dangerous sex you can't avoid with a crucifix or morals. Quicksand drawing you in deeper, deep er yet into a cold, damp bottomless well of vice. The jet liner was closing in and the Pacific was receding in the background as C alifornia came into focus in the foreground. Touch dawn, taxi down the runway, b raking and stopping. California...LA-X marks the spot. Mickey literally bounced down the aisle, into the terminal and back out on the street. As he looked for a cab or bus or something to take him into town, he remembered the ticket to Detr oit his parents had bought for him to escape Honolulu.. The trashcan next to him as he pulled out a cigarette was the recipient of his parents TWA largesse as t he ticket transformed, morphed into trash, and not transportation. The city of l ost angels was about to claim another child of the night into her bordello of ch intz, glitz, sex and drugs. Smelly cabby again, cheap it Sam, no-tell motel street at La Cienago near the St rip. Driving through the Saturday LA, not much different from the Monday - Frida y, LA, except the traffic was thicker, like dried blood in an alley, or syrup on a stack of hotcakes. The cab pulled up at a beat-up old transient motel, each r oom with it's own resident demon with personal demons all their own. Mickey paid the cabbie off, grabbed his one gym bag he hauled around in Honolulu and checke d in with the motel clerk with one good eye, not pasty and white like his other one. He was now a "resident" as he paid for a week and walked down the courtyard to r oom 12. The key had to be worked to unlock the door, as nothing in LA fits right at first. The room had those tawdry, yellowed shades that had seen too much sun to fade them from the outside and the smoke from too many Chesterfields to stai n them from the inside. The light bulb was dimmer than the ass of a firefly and the towel rack came off the wall with the slightest touch. There was a radio, am only in those early days, preachers mostly, and fast talking Mexicans from bord

er stations south of the border, s.o.b.... The bed was another story. Flop house chic for a world of wino's, thin mattress with too many stains from too many sources that only the night knew and wouldn't tell anyone about. All Mickey knew is, they weren't his stains but belonged to someone or many someone's else. The window to the courtyard was grimy but he cou ld still see out and watch the parade of lost souls coming and going in this ski d row fiesta of the invisible people of any city USA. The ones no one wants to know, or admit to the fact that they do exist. Admittin g that, is admitting guilt. Let's see. That one's a pimp, and that's his whore walking into room 4 for the p ayoff of his cut of her work after a beating for holding out on him, a lousy thi rty bucks. These were cheap whores so every penny counted. Fifteen dollar blowjo bs and twenty five dollar fucks. Making a living on her knees and on her back ea rned her a place to rest her head. Mickey would soon be swallowed whole on the Strip named Sunset, not Bouelevard, but Strip, as in to bare your soul, now strip, show and tell. The scene on the S trip of 1965 was a Phil Spector wall of sound surrealism, where you could be any body's little baby, for a few bucks, and a little da-do-ron-ron and Vaseline. Th e neon a-go-go was real gone, with white thigh high boots, bleached blonde boys with jeans to tight lining the street under the lights on display in a butcher s hop window. Meat on a hook. Young Troy Donohues from the plaid and proud mid-wes t, machismo melting away like a glacier in a receding Ice Age leaving the farm b oy exposed for the Broadway show tune he has just become, bending over to take a big bow to massive applause from the invisible audience who sweat as nervously as he does under the seering heat of the hot, blinding stage lights. On the other side of the street, in the shadow of the crosstown bus lights, stoo d hollow eyed, tender young runaway girls, aging rapidly and repeatedly, learnin g how to not wear makeup, vamping, badly at first and coming out looking like sa d-eyed Emmett Kelly not-so-funny-are-we circus clowns with tiny cleavage as they pad their small cup training bra's trying to appear older than their 14 years t o attract willing customers to come in under the big top to enjoy the show. Urch ins itchin' to go, but cannot, and do not pass go, do not collect $200. Soon wis e and cynical beyond their young years, these are the cherry popped vaginal vete rans who bravely went behind enemy lines to lie down in the trenches with the tr oops. Blood, sweat and tears erupted from the Madonna in quiet pain for her lost children of the tarnished nights. Street slaves to addictions and sex, beaten i nto submission with whips of real and imagined humiliation. The steamy street beat had a ferocious bongo-city intensity, as bands played the clubs up and down the Strip. The Doors, The Byrds, Frank Zappa, Sonny & Cher... it was a scene where, yes, yes, the beat goes on, 24 hours a day. Oh give me a h ome where the Buffalo Springfield roam and Ronnie Specter holds the Teen Queen s cepter on the night of the prom. "Tamborine Man, hey, Mister," he said he saw th at he conspired at the back table with some inventive mothers. Over in the corne r, over there, there's a man with a gun over there....beware he says dressed as a Mongol, and laughing like a Lithuanian lunatic. The strait jacket fits too tig htly and his eyes bulge as big as Desoto hubcaps. Mickey unpacked what little he had, and put it in the dusty drawers in the dingy room. His parents would now be pissed on overload as they had not heard from hi m, and he had not descended from the plane at Detroit Metro. He'd call another d ay, when he could raise a shield of indignation and false righteousness...but fo r now, time to go out as the sun was setting, a social vampire now, soon he woul d once again become one of the shapeless nightime neon shadows of the steamy Sun set Strip. He didn't realize it at the time, but he was jumping overboard into s

wirling waters, the tempest tossed seas of LA sleaze...an ocean of sex and viole nce that would suck him into a vortex of vice to a rockabilly back beat that wou ld send him careening on his own sociological Deadmans Curve...for crissakes, he lp me, Rhonda, yeah! The Atomic Hula FREE E-NOVEL To Order Email: theroadhead@gmail.com The Atomic Hu la is a literary labyrinth about Mike Marino's coming of age as a 15 year old ru naway in the altered states Sixties. It's a writers journey on a road that takes him from living as a busted, broke beach bum in Hawaii to the sleazy streets of the Sunset Strip. It ends with the Death of Hip at the end of the Summer of Lov e in San Francisco. It's hipsters, sinners, saints, a whacked out cab driver nam ed Doc Yucatan, a transsexual beach bum and enough sex, drugs and rock n' roll t o last a lifetime. The Atomic Hula is bio-graphical and bio-hazardous at the same time. All events are true and only the names have been changed to protect the not so innocent. Published by Spare Change Producttions & Sal's Mimeo