West Hollywood, November 18, 1987It's the day before my 27th birthday, a Wednesday night, about 11:00 pm. I have spent the last hour and a half cruising at Mugi, the gay Asian bar in Hollywood.
In West Hollywood in the 1980s, in the first years of the AIDS epidemic, you don't go to the bars looking for someone for that night -- only sleazoids and druggies go home with someone they picked up right then. You talk, maybe kiss and grope a bit, and make a date for a few days later.
Which presents a problem: After two hours of looking at hot guys, and probably kissing and groping more than one of them, you're revved up, full of energy, excited, horny, and rather lonely.
I've been striking out, which makes the horniness and loneliness worse. I'm tempted to go to the Gold Coast, the sleaze bar on Santa Monica and La Jolla, and pick up a sleazoid, someone I don't even find attractive.
Instead I use my usual plan for assuaging the horny/loneliness: I go back to my childhood, when I used to buy comic books at Schneider's Drug Store.
Book Circus, on La Jolla across the street from the Gold Coast, sells mostly gay porn, but there's an eclectic selection of used books -- I've bought 19th Century Russian Literature, the Bhagavad-Gita, and The Fleischer Story (about the studio that produced Betty Boop and Popeye Cartoons). Plus general interest magazines like Time and Newsweek, and comic books.
It's mostly empty at this hour: I see a sleazoid who struck out at the Gold Coast recharging his engine with a copy of Advocate Men; an elderly bespectacled queen browsing in the used books; a couple of street kids or hustlers, hard to say which, wandering aimlessly about without looking at anything.
The night manager, looks up from his half-eaten hamburger and french fries and glares at me. His name is Jacob, but I'm going to call him Comic Book Guy, after the character to be introduced on The Simpsons in a few years: in his 40s, dark beard, fat, with chubby hands and a gigantic belly, always dressed in a tank top and shorts, even in the winter, nasal sarcastic voice, elitist disdain of anything you decide to buy.The full story, with nude photos and sexual situations, is on Tales of West Hollywood.