Back then, those guys and I spent many an evening at Laurel Elementary School, making very creative use of their playground. It was a hangout for every Hollywood kid with a bike, a skateboard, some booze to drink, or some weed to smoke. The playground had two levels connected by long concrete ramps; it begged to be abused by skaters and bikers. We took full advantage of it by deconstructing the playground’s picnic tables to make them into jumps that linked the two levels. I’m not proud of our chronic destruction of public property, but riding down those two ramps and launching over the fence on my bike was a thrill that was well worth it. As delinquent as it was, it also drew creative types, many kids in Hollywood who went on to do great things hung out there. I remember Mike Balzary, better known as Flea, hanging out, playing his trumpet and graffiti artists putting up murals all the time. It wasn’t the right forum, but everyone there took pride in the scene we created. Unfortunately, the students and teachers of that school were left paying the bill and cleaning up the aftermath every morning.
Slash jumping out at the track on his Cook Bros. bike.
The principal unwisely decided to take matters into his own hands by lying in wait to confront us one night. It didn’t go over well; we kept taunting him, he got too worked up, and my friends and I got into it with him. It got out of hand so quickly that a passerby called the cops. Nothing scatters a pack of kids like the sound of a siren, so most of those present escaped. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. Another kid and I were the only two who were caught; we were handcuffed to the handrail in the front of the school, right on the street, on display for all to see. We were like two hogtied animals, going nowhere and none too happy about it. We refused to cooperate: we cracked wise, we gave them fake names, we did everything short of oinking at them and calling them pigs. They kept asking and did their best to scare us, but we refused to reveal our names and addresses, and since twelve-year-olds don’t carry ID, they were forced to let us go.
PUBERTY KICKED IN FOR ME AROUND thirteen, while I attended Bancroft Junior High in Hollywood. Whatever I was feeling about my family breaking up took a backseat to the intense surging of hormones. Sitting through a whole day of school seemed pointless, so I started to cut. I began smoking pot regularly and riding my bike intensely. I found it hard to control myself; I just wanted to do whatever I wanted to do at a moment’s notice. One night while my friends and I were scheming about how to break into Spokes and Stuff—the same bike store where we hung out—for what reason I can’t remember, I noticed a kid spying on us through the window of an apartment across the alley.
“What are you lookin’ at?” I yelled. “Don’t look at me!” Then I threw a brick through the kid’s window.
His parents called the cops, of course, and the duo that responded to the call chased my friends and me all over town for the rest of the night. We biked for our lives all over Hollywood and West Hollywood; we turned down one-way streets into on-coming traffic, we cut through alleys and through parks. They were as tenacious as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, Gene Hackman’s character in The French Connection; every time we turned a corner, they were there. Eventually we fled into the Hollywood Hills and hid in an out-of-the-way canyon like a pack of Wild West outlaws. And just the way it goes down in a cowboy movie, when we thought it was safe to leave the hideout and head back to the ranch, we were headed off at the pass by the same two deputies.
I assume it was because I was the smallest that they decided to chase me when my friends and I split up. I rode hard, all over the neighborhood, unable to shake them, until I finally sought refuge in an underground parking garage. I flew down a few levels, weaving between parked cars, hid in a dark corner, and lay on the ground, hoping they wouldn’t catch me. They had run down there on foot and by the time they got to my level I think they were over it. They vigilantly searched between the cars with their flashlights; about hundred feet away from me they turned back. I got lucky. This battle between my friends and the LAPD continued for the rest of the summer and it certainly wasn’t a constructive use of my time, but in my mind, at that point, that’s what I considered fun.
I was pretty good at keeping my affairs to myself even back then, but when I slipped up, my mother and grandmother were very forgiving. I was home as little as possible by the middle of junior high. In the summer of 1978, I had no idea that my grandmother was moving into a unit in a monstrous new complex that occupied an entire block between Kings Road and Santa Monica Boulevard, although I knew the building well because I’d been riding my bike through it since it was a construction site. My friends and I would get high and race one another through the hallways and down the stairwells, slamming doors in one another’s faces, jumping onto banisters, and leaving creatively shaped skid marks on the freshly painted walls. We were in the midst of doing so when I came screaming around a corner and nearly bowled over my mother and grandmother, who were carrying armloads of Ola Sr.’s belongings into her new apartment. I’ll never forget the look on my grandmother’s face; it was somewhere between shock and horror. I collected myself and shot a look over my shoulder, where I saw the last of my friends take a hard turn out of sight. I had one leg on the ground, one on a pedal, still thinking that I might get away.
“Saul?” Ola Sr. said, in her too-sweet, high-pitched grandmother voice. “Is that you?”
“Yes Grandma,” I said. “It’s me. How are you doing? My friends and I were just coming by to visit.”
That shit didn’t fly at all with my mom, but Ola Sr. was so glad to see me that Ola Jr. let me get away with it. In fact, it all worked out so well in the end that a few weeks later I moved into that very apartment, and that’s when my junior varsity exploits in Hollywood really began to take off. But we’ll get to all of that in just a little bit.
I’M NOT GOING TO OVERANALYZE WHAT became my other new interest—kleptomania—aside from saying that I was a pissed-off early adolescent. I stole what I thought I needed but couldn’t afford. I stole what I thought might make me happy; and sometimes I stole just to steal.
Tearing up the bike track out by the Youth Center in Reseda.
I stole a lot of books, because I’ve always loved to read; I stole a ton of cassettes, because I’ve always loved music. Cassettes, for those too young to have known them, had their disadvantages: the sound quality wore down, they got tangled in tape machines, and they melted in direct sunlight. But they were a breeze to lift. They are like a thinner pack of cigarettes, so an ambitious shoplifter could stuff a bands’ entire catalog in their clothes and walk away unnoticed.
At my worst, I’d steal as much as my clothes could hide, then dump my payload in the bushes and go steal more, sometimes at the same store. One afternoon I stole a few snakes from the Aquarium Stock Company, a pet store that I used to hang out in so much that once they got used to my presence I don’t think they’d ever considered that I’d steal from them. They weren’t complete suckers; I was there out of a true love for the animals they stocked—I just didn’t respect the store enough not to take a few home with me. I’d snatch snakes by wrapping them around my wrists and then putting my jacket on, making sure that they were nestled high enough on my forearm. One day I really went to town and took a load of them, which I stashed somewhere outside while I returned to the store to steal books that would teach me how to care for the rare snakes I’d just stolen.
On another occasion I lifted a Jackson’s chameleon, which isn’t exactly a subtle steal: they are the horned chameleons that measure about ten inches and feed on flies; they are as big as small