“Hi. I’m Beck, and I’m Going to Be Famous!”

How faking it until making it can actually work

North Hollywood, California: Spring of 1986

A rebel with countless futile causes, I put myself through senior year of college by ghost writing research papers and working in a pizzeria on Reseda Boulevard in the Valley. The joint got robbed once a month, employees locked in the storage room at gunpoint; we snorted lines of coke off the countertops while making calzones; the assistant manager was a bull dyke named Ava.

“Meet my daughter, Dana,” she’d announce, introducing a brunette woman roughly her same age who was as feminine and voluptuous as Ava was boyish and slim. “Daughter?” I’d ask, native Midwesterner that I was and still rather naive. “They’re lesbians, dickhead,” said my coke snorting, calzone rolling colleague Dwayne, a Hell’s Angel when he wasn’t restocking the salad bar.

Despite being clueless and likely because of it, Ava, Dana, and I became fast friends. We started with idle chit chat that rapidly accelerated to exhilarating Saturday nights in West Hollywood. The gals did their best to thoroughly corrupt me, and they thoroughly succeeded. My reward was an invitation to become their roommate in a condo sublet off the 101 Freeway. I accepted.