A History of Grunge – There was a sleaze bag flophouse hotel in the 90210 zip which made the scumbag artists who lived there seem like they lived in Beverly Hills. I did errands for a dude who lived there with an old zine correspondent of mine who wrote feminist sword and sorcery fiction, and her partner worked at Edge City. He smoked ample amounts of weed with very big name and very poor science fiction writers, and I was included in the hits, between my various treks to a lawyers office on Santa Monica to mail out something weird to fuck up some mark’s day. I got super blasted and on my return thought I might have been dusted when I encountered three young black girls in a gutter screaming and laughing in the bucolic brush between SM and Sunset. Then I saw what they were reacting to and didn’t blame them for their flummoxed vexation — an enormous headless rat on a curb, biggest fucking rat I ever saw. They kept caterwauling as I went back to the apartment where my client held court with the architects of now, and then headed down to Tower Records and strolled the aisles till I found this record. I had enough loot left from my delivery fee to procure and brought it back to my manager’s apartment, where I continued to be stoned out of my skull and listen to it multiple times invoking an eviction notice. That evening to give my manager some space and peace from our shared SRO I went and saw Repo Man at a local one dollar for three movie cinema, with Hardbodies and some other exploitative tax write off. Gluey Porch Treatments and then Drugstore Cowboy weren’t too far behind.
Black Flag – My War, by Chris Estey
