John Albert by Susan Tyler

I REMEMBER WHEN my relationship dynamic with the late writer John Albert went from being friendly acquaintances to something like the hipster Honeymooners. It was when my then-wife and I moved into a house up the street from John and his then-wife. It was the early 2000s. The house was a Spanish bungalow fixer-upper in Silver Lake, just before the intense gentrification-shit hit the fan (guilty as charged). The house is now valued at over twice what I sold it for when I got divorced in 2008, and now you’d have to pay cash for more than the asking price. Back then, though, the human-scale mortgages and rents, the unassuming taco stands and coffee shops, and the pocket park where our dogs would play provided a low-key structure to our neighborhood and a reliable rhythm to our days.

John was writing a book at the time, and I was the newly minted deputy editor of the LA Weekly. We’d often start the day walking with our dogs in Elysian Park and end it chatting about work and life while they romped across the street from the house. The point being, we had a commons and we had things in common, not the least of which was that we were both taking tentative stabs at normalcy after our so-called wild years had grown tiresome. This all provided organic conditions for a deep friendship to grow.

Later, we’d get divorced around the same time. We lived together briefly in my mid-forties bachelor pad—hipster Honeymooners turned Echo Park Odd Couple, he the sloppy Oscar to my neurotic Felix. Our dogs by now were as close as we were. Eventually we’d remarry and become first-time dads just months apart, long after we thought we had passed our sell-by dates. John’s son was born a day after my birthday. Fatherhood became our focus and provided a new, welcome ingredient to our friendship.

Deep friendship is a mysterious, alchemical thing, even more so, arguably, when it arises between adult men, laden as we are with so much baggage and bullshit related to sharing anything like feelings. I have less time on the horizon than in the rearview mirror, and being at such a stage, I’ve spent a great deal of this past summer reflecting on the loss of John, who died unexpectedly from a heart attack in early May. I’ve experienced plenty of loss in my life, but losing a best friend is unlike any I’ve experienced before. I’ve been taken aback by it. The reason I feel this way probably comes down to a simple truth that remains hard to say out loud: I loved him dearly.

That John and I became such good friends well into adulthood, despite—or because of—the baggage and bullshit, seems like a rare gift. I think part of what’s so remarkable is how few and far between these types of intimate friendships are, especially for men, who are currently suffering a well-documented crisis of loneliness, despair, and excessive death. The crisis has spurred sober warnings from the Surgeon General and a New York Times article suggesting that pickleball may be the cure. Though I’m luckier than many in this regard, I’m aware of my own dearth of intimate male friendships and fascinated by the difficulty that men have making deep and lasting connections with each other.

By contrast, my friendship with John felt like it was foretold. Before we were neighbors, we had friends and associates in common. John was among the many significant authors, artists, journalists, and designers whose careers gestated around Ray Gun Publishing, the former L.A. indie-publishing darling of meaning- fully tattooed Gen Xers, where maverick graphic designer David Carson rose to fame in the early 1990s and MSNBC’s Alex Wagner had her first gig out of college. From roughly 1996 to 2000 I was an editor there, first for the snowboarding magazine Stick, and later for the eponymous indie music and style magazine Ray Gun and the pop-culture title Bikini. Still, it felt like our friendship was more than the sum of cultural and geographical proximity. There was something elemental to it. Maybe it was the water that brought us together. Surfing, to be specific.

As with most of the significant stations in life—sex, identity, career, marriage, eventually fatherhood—I got around to surfing later than most who do get around to it. I was a runaway from a gunmetal geography that traces back to Syracuse, New York and I’d hotfooted it all over the world before finally landing in Los Angeles. In retrospect, it seems weird that it took me so long to get here. Once I had arrived, though, I was thirsty for the California sun and surf to bleach out the past. Which is to say, I was well into my thirties when I decided I needed to go surfing.

John, an erstwhile junkie, accidental rock star, and refugee from the dusty eastern suburbs, had been getting in the water regularly since completing court ordered stint in rehab. All of this was more than a decade before I moved a few doors down and he taught me how to surf. By that, I mean he took me surfing with him two to three times a week while offering little or no guidance other than what freeways we should take.

We’d drive together, usually in my Jeep Cherokee, to El Porto, at the north end of Manhattan Beach. It wasn’t the friendliest place in the world, but I’m told there were worse. Depending on traffic, the drive sometimes took half an hour, sometimes an hour. On the way to and fro, we’d talk about the Dodgers, and our existential dread. He was always funnier than I was about the latter. About everything, really.

After surfing, we’d often stop for donuts at a nondescript ma-and-pa donut shop in an El Segundo strip mall. I have euphoric memories of those just-out-of-the-oven donuts. The proprietor, a stereotypically sassy Vietnamese woman, loved to tease me for some reason. This delighted John to no end, and provided fodder for additional shit-giving. Sometimes we were joined at the beach by various of his or my friends. Over time, we built a little community around surfing at El Porto, where the waves are almost always crappy but often less crappy than anywhere else within driving distance of Hollywood.

One day not long into our routine, when I was still a full-on kook, I must have gotten in someone’s way while paddling out to the lineup. Before I knew what was up, some burly guy was barking at me, claiming local status the way real locals never do, yelling at me for some offense of which I was unaware. I was still trying to figure out what was going on when John paddled over, acting like he was down with the dude.

“Hey,” John said, insinuatingly. “That guy do something?” He nodded toward me as I bobbed toward Catalina.

The angry guy, veins popping, went off: “Fucking this, fucking that…” Really, nothing at that break on that day was worth getting bent about.

John never postured as a tough guy, but he had little patience for fake tough guys. He paddled a little closer, looked this one dead in the eye, and said, “Yeah, I see… Well, he’s with me.” That was that. Angry guy just paddled away cursing under his breath.

There’s no arguing with charisma, and John had it coming and going. I think that was the day he claimed me as a brother of sorts.

The feeling was mutual, and we became great friends over the years, but to be honest, I was pretty moonstruck before we ever got in the water. There were many reasons: John’s acuity, his transgressive wit, his been-there-done-that bona fides, and the Factory-like assemblage of left-of-the-dial Angelenos circling in his orbit. The thing that got me first, though, was his writing.

A mutual friend had sent me a draft of his first major foray into literary journalism when John and I were still just acquaintances. It was a memoirish piece that told of the misadventures of a crew of ex-punk-rockers, recovering junkies, assorted neer-do-wells and otherwise deeply scarred men who joined an amateur, fast-pitch baseball league. It was called “Hardball.”

This was in the late ‘9os, and by then I had run two titles for Ray Gun Publishing. At that point, culture was fast approaching terminal postmodernism and ironic posturing had started giving me heartburn. The characters in “Hardball,” cast out as they were from the shipwrecks of their misspent youths, were swimming against the tides, scrambling for something earnest. I found it immediately compelling.

In this passage, John relates how his team, the Griffith Park Pirates, arose out of a bold suggestion from dope-sick friend Mike Coulter, late of the near-great Lifter, a band described forlornly by one music mag as “the forgotten heroes of ’90s teen angst”:

Mike pulled himself upright and announced that he needed a cigarette, so the two of us headed out into the large weed-strewn backyard and sat at an old wooden picnic table someone had stolen from a local park. My girlfriend recently quit smoking—again—and understandably didn’t want her house to smell like cigarettes. I noticed Mike’s hand trembling as he retrieved a single, bent Marlboro from his pocket, carefully straightened it out, and lit it. There was a silence as he smoked, punctuated by the sniffing of his constantly running nose. Eventually, Mike looked over at me, wiped his nose with the back of his hand like a little kid, and asked, “Hey, do you wanna play catch?”

John said yes, and one thing led to another. Before long, they were doing something they hadn’t done in longer than they could remember—signing up. In this case, for a hardball league rife with strapping former jocks who meant business. The gambit was as ridiculous as the stakes were high.

The area where most of us live, Silver Lake, is the virtual epicenter of hipster irony. Sincerity is at best ignored and at worst ridiculed. This is a neighborhood that once boasted a well-organized adult kickball game, where Scooby-Doo lunch pails are collected like rare coins. If Mike and I had casually announced we were going to permanently sear the image of, say, Shaun Cassidy into our buns, nobody would have batted an eye. This was different, though. In this endeavor we risked committing the worst of all possible social sins: caring and looking stupid.

John’s manuscript, a version of which would be published in the LA Weekly in 2000, immediately stood out in a Vice– and McSweeney’s-centric climate of low-stakes irony. The piece then evolved into Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates, published by Scribner in 2005. The book, criminally out of print, captured pre-professional Silver Lake/Echo Park and a hunger for something beyond hipsterdom like nothing else I can think of. Critics hailed it, and the work has been optioned several times since its publication. In some dank corner of Hollywood, in fact, it’s still in development. That it is out of print but still in play underscores the dichotomy of John’s legacy: important yet underknown.

***

As I mentioned, John died of a heart attack on May 3 at the age of 58, leaving family and friends—many of them survivors of not-so-polite society—stunned and saddened. His passing warranted its own report in the Los Angeles Times, which remarked on his cultural impact and quoted some of his better- and lesser-known associates (including this writer) testifying to his impact on the culture.

For friends, his legacy is marked by a lightning-fast, withering wit that combined the streetwise charisma of someone who had lived dangerously with the intellectual range of the son of academics. All that was in his person and his writing, a vocation John arrived at in his mid-thirties after various incarnations, from seminal post-punk musician to junkie to flailing screenwriter. When he finally found his footing as a narrative journalist, John told sprawling, poignant tales of his atomized, at-risk cohort. And yet, despite all that, John Albert may be the most significant Angeleno writer you’ve never heard of.

John didn’t help his case. He disliked self-promotion. Even a whiff of social-media humble-bragging—tools of the trade for writers trying to gain traction in the attention economy—would earn a disparaging aside. And while his stories frequently dealt with the bills coming due for prior transgressions, he never glamorized the urban underbelly the way lesser hands tend to do. What he did do was steadily chronicle the anxieties, struggles, and occasional triumphs of the latchkey kids who grew up in the smoggy, sprawling, unsupervised Southern California suburbs of the 1970s and ‘8os, people who eventually made their marks on the city. In dozens of pieces for LA Weekly, Slake: Los Angeles, Playboy, and numerous anthologies, John spoke for this damaged-goods constituency, picking up an essential thread in the L.A. narrative where Joan Didion and Eve Babitz left off.

***

John Albert came from Claremont, where his father taught psychology at the eponymous college and his mother worked as a social worker at Loma Linda Hospital. There, in the late 1970s, where the burgeoning metropolis stalled along the barren desert and the children ran bored and underattended, he became painfully aware of early-onset yearning. John writes about this in the tragicomic “The Satori Underground,” a story he did for the Rare Bird Lit anthology Yes Is The Answer (and Other Prog-Rock Tales). The story starts with our bemused narrator going to see King Crimson with his best friend Dwight. The two knew little about the band other than that guitarists Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew were associated with their hero, David Bowie. Here, John describes their teenage state of mind:

For some inexplicable reason my friends and I wanted desperately to be old and jaded. For me the oppressive stillness of the Southern California suburbs and an inner emotional turmoil resulted in a painful restlessness. For others, including Dwight, there were also broken homes. All this merged with above average intellects to create a hunger for adventure which drew us to new music and literature, but also a destructive underworld of drugs and crime. And so instead of skateboarding and kissing girls we spent our teenage years using heroin and dressing like middle aged criminals from some dreary, nonexistent European city of another era.

Dwight died several years later, after reconnecting with his drug-addicted, career-criminal father. He fell while attempting to escape out an irth-story window at Downtown’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility using a rope made of bedsheets. Dwight was sharing a cell with his father at the time. In this passage, also from “The Satori Underground,” John writes about their drive home from the King Crimson show:

When I eventually woke up, Dwight was driving the car back into the desert as the sun rose. I remember thinking that he looked old in his suit, staring out at the road with heavy-lidded eyes. I faded out again and when I regained consciousness it was the afternoon and I was in Dwight’s mom’s house. I wandered into the backyard. Dwight was sitting in a lawn chair holding a guitar […] play[ing] the David Bowie song “Heroes,” singing the words in a raspy whisper: “We can beat them—for ever and ever, we can be heroes—just for one day.”

Attempting to transcend the sun-blasted sameness of his suburban milieu, John spent some of his ensuing teenage years forming the innovative death-rock group Christian Death. Characteristically, he quit the band just as it was gaining a cult following. Rozz Williams, the original singer, later killed himself. These early losses, and others that would follow, left John with a fraught hyperawareness of time passing.

Still, as much as existential yearning and underlying dread were favored motifs, and as often as his pieces delved into addiction, loss, and illness, they were always exciting to read—alive with bracing insights and sly humor. The lives of John’s friends, many of whom died before I got to meet them, were vivid to me through his writing. And through them, I got to know parts of Los Angeles that preceded my arrival or exceeded my grasp.

***

When I was hired as deputy editor of the LA Weekly in 2002, part of my charge was to bring in fresh voices. John was among the first I turned to. For someone less sure of themselves, the initial assignment I gave him would have been a tough sell: a cover story on the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This was a slightly risky proposition at the time as the band had little cachet among cool hounds such as Pitchfork Media and, truthfully, had done little to spark my interest in its 20 years of making records. Which is why their 2002 album By the Way was so shocking.

That record set narratives of friendship, loss, recovery, and growing pains to a sweeping soundtrack of musical styles that referenced everything from the Mamas & the Papas to Los Lobos. Somehow it captured a changing Los Angeles zeitgeist that I found myself and my friends trying to sort out at the turn of the century.

Music writing, though, is as a genre actuarily averse to stepping out on a limb. Taking the Red Hot Chili Peppers seriously would require a writer confident enough to listen without prejudice. Someone like John Albert. In “Sons of the City,” he writes:

Though fast approaching middle age, the band has unfortunately aged exceptionally well. This[,] combined with a willingness to interject overtly sexual images into their lyrics[,] has pretty much damned them to the populist mainstream regardless of how inventive their work. Only the band’s past appetite for heinous amounts of narcotics gets them slightly off the hook with arbiters of cool. Still, be so audacious as to mention their latest disc in the same category as a hallowed masterpiece like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and you’ll get laughed out of the used-record graphic-novel store. But the truth is, the Chili Peppers’ latest release is one of the most interesting and creative new records around and arguably belongs in the pantheon of great Los Angeles albums with the works of the Beach Boys, the Doors, the Flesheaters, X and others.

John would go on to write about all sorts of things for me and others: the first hints of the decadent new Hollywood party scene (which would peak with the notorious Bling Ring robberies), street artists, gun culture, authors, science, and, of course, music. Always, though, he returned to his favorite subjects— the friends who made it and the friends who didn’t. As with Babitz, his own Venn diagram of relationships gave him his greatest inspiration and produced his best writing.

Those bonds can give and take, as John shows in “The Hep-C Generation,” the 2010 piece he wrote for the first issue of Slake: Los Angeles. It tells the story of recovering addicts attempting to stave off the life-threatening hepatitis C virus contracted from sharing dirty needles in the late 1970s and early ‘8os. In it, John writes:

I have the virus. So do nearly all my old friends. My best friend from childhood, who I grew up skateboarding and smoking pot with, is infected. The pink-haired pixie from the San Fernando Valley whom I took to my senior prom has it, as does the formerly homeless, nihilist friend with the cigarette burns on his arms who, as an adult, became a wealthy production designer on blockbuster films. In fact, the majority of the kids I knew in the thriving Los Angeles underground of the late seventies and early eighties—from the slam-dancing kids at the Starwood to the young junkies emulating Johnny Thunders outside the Cathay de Grande—have hep c.

At a time when the disease was the leading cause of death among chronic virus-caused infections, some of John’s peers were driven to seek experimental treatments from shaky doctors in shady places. Later in the piece, John crosses a pedestrian bridge into Tijuana on a blazing hot day, guiding us into this underworld, and into the past that led him there:

My journey into Mexico that morning began about three decades before in the backroom of a small record store on a boulevard in Pomona lined with Pentecostal Churches and vacant lots. The town, thirty miles east of Los Angeles, was once the hub of a thriving citrus industry. It has long since degenerated into one more suburban slum. A gangly ex-radical in his thirties who had glommed on to the local teenage punk scene ran the store. He sold vinyl over the counter and purple tabs of LSD under it. His hippie friend, “Jesus,” would drive an old ice-cream truck around the city sell- ing weed and hallucinogens as well as the occasional snow cone. My friend Rozz had recently dropped out of high school and was living with his new boyfriend, Ron, in a back room of the store where the two of them explored sadomasochism. One would periodically hear the sound of a cracking whip followed by a delighted scream. Love was in the air.

In my opinion, that piece, and its prequel, “Running with the Devil: A Lifetime of Van Halen,” written for the second issue of Slake, are among the definitive narratives of his generation—the lost sons and daughters of Didion’s Golden Dreamers, squeezed, in our storybooks, between the oxygen-sucking boomers and digital-native millennials. As John puts it in “Running”: “It is the soundtrack to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I know because that world is where I come from.”

John Albert was in and of this world and also above it. I don’t believe it takes away from the wild ride that is Wrecking Crew to share its final reward:

These days, when I’m flying in a plane, I look down and see baseball diamonds—each just a brown square inside a larger green square. They’re everywhere, and they look like nothing else. I imagine what it must be like to live in that particular town, to work there and feel like it’s your home. And I think of how friends down there play baseball together on those fields, just like we do. I’m sure some people think that grown men playing on an amateur baseball team—not to mention broken-down men fending off their personal demons—is slightly pathetic. But it isn’t about trying to recapture the past—not at all. It’s about embracing the present. I’ve spent far too many hours regretting things I’ve done and fearing what lies ahead, and I don’t think I’m so alone in this. When I’m out there on the field, my troubled past kind of disappears. In those brief moments, nothing else in the world matters because I am right where I want to be playing baseball with my friends in Los Angeles.

I ended up playing a season for the Griffith Park Pirates many years ago, although John was no longer playing on the team. Just another gift from a friend whose body of work on the nature of community, and how it is forged in a place as vast as Los Angeles, will keep on giving—like surfing, or the intimate language we developed over years. We still talk in my dreams sometimes, bobbing towards Catalina, waiting for the donuts to come out of the oven.