Pain and Excess From Suburbia to Hollywood

What Carolyn See has done for Topanga Canyon, what Kate Braverman has done for palms, Susan Compo now does for Orange County in “Pretty Things” (Verse Chorus Press, $16.95, 203 pages), a raucous and ribald tale that follows its principal character from the suburban sprawl of Orange County to the mean streets of Hollywood, where she falls victim to the worst excesses of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.

“Pretty Things” is framed by an account of the life and work of a woman called Giselle Entwistle, a Hollywood agent and manager with a small stable of highly eclectic but mostly unsuccessful talent, ranging from a Tupperware salesman whose progressive dinner parties are a kind of performance art to a struggling country singer who lives out his cowboy fantasies by rounding up stray shopping carts for Stater Bros.

But the client who demands and holds our attention is Pandra Jane, the woman whose coming-of-age memoir, titled “Charm School Drop-Out,” is a book within the book set in the 1970s.

“Her family lived in a small home in Orange County, California,” the fictional Pandra writes, always referring to herself in the third person. “Their house was like the shoebox crafts you made in grammar school, with a cellophane window where the heel would be. If you looked in, you’d see Pandra, her mom, her sister, her father about as dimensional as crayoned cutouts with Popsicle sticks for spines.”

Pandra’s restless spirit compels her to escape from the shoe box of an Orange County adolescence, a world of compulsory square-dancing and the regimented riotousness of Senior Ditch Day.

Her first act of rebellion is to reinvent herself as a surfer at a time when surfing was still an authentic subculture rather than just a cliche of pop culture.

When Pandra finally flees Orange County, she makes her way to Hollywood, where she joins the cast of “The Real Don Steele Show” as a dancer, makes the scene at the glam-rock clubs as a groupie and finally crosses the ambiguous line that divides an accommodating fan from an unapologetic call girl. Before she hits bottom, she is implicated in a squalid incident at the Twilight Motel in Twentynine Palms that may or may not result in the death of a rising rock star.

“Pandra began to find her picture in tabloids like the National Intruder,” she writes. “She looked at her grainy face, her image permanently out of focus and in a duplicitous register, as if she had a ghost.”

Compo conjures up these times and places with wit, savvy and ironic good humor. She observes how readily a Cockney accent can be assumed and discarded by a young woman who cuts hair at a hip salon in Hollywood but lives in an apartment overlooking the graveyard of the San Gabriel Mission. She recalls when the now-stylish Century City shopping mall still featured an old-fashioned cafeteria, for example, and she knows that the venue where Pandra first glimpses the superstars of glitter-rock started out as the Earl Carroll Theatre: “Through These Portals,” its sign once read, “Pass the Most Beautiful Girls in the World.”

“A wealth of charmed knowledge” is how Compo describes one of her cracked but winning characters, and the same phrase nicely sums up what she brings to her own work--a high-spirited story that allows us to sense the pain that throbs just beneath the surface.

One of the characters in “Pretty Things” is the author of a book of bedtime stories for cats that comes with “a bound-in ribbon bookmark designed to keep a feline listener rapt.” As it turns out, a red ribbon is sewn into every copy of “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” by J.T. LeRoy (Bloomsbury, $23.95, 224 pages), an elegant touch that belies the harrowing stuff of LeRoy’s autobiographical short stories.

J.T. LeRoy is an authentic wunderkind of a distinctly postmodern kind. He began to publish his work at age 16, writing under the fearful pseudonym “Terminator,” and his first novel was published only last year when he was 20. His latest book, which draws on the journals that he kept when he was an adolescent, helps us understand the crucible out of which his remarkable prose first boiled up.

A 15-year-old boy, for example, subjects himself to an ordeal of sadomasochism to atone for his own sexual misadventures in the story titled “Natoma Street.” “Fix me,” the boy begs his tormentor. “Save me.” But he cautions the man whom he has paid to “discipline” him to spare his pretty face because it is, so to speak, a tool of his trade.

And, before the ordeal is over, he allows us to glimpse the childhood terror that turned him into a hustler on the streets of San Francisco in the first place. “At some point I feel Howard’s belt beating me, as he will almost every other day as my new loving father,” LeRoy writes, “till we move out of his trailer 31/2 months later, stealing all his cash, gold cuff links, and school ring.”

The same unflinching self-regard, the same confessional stance and the same searing memories characterize all of the loosely collected stories. In the story titled “Meteors,” the boy recalls his mother staging a freak accident on a visit to Death Valley in a mad plot to snag yet another new husband: “You’re going to get hit by a meteorite,” she announces. “It was a pretty good-sized rock we found,” the boy recalls. “It took her a few tries, cracking the windshield, hitting the seat and my back before she nailed me.”

The abuse, the excess and the horror endured by the characters in this gifted young writer’s work only grow more heartbreaking as we make our way across the hellish terrain of his childhood and adolescence.

So the red ribbon, as J.T. LeRoy allows us to see for ourselves, is yet another expression of bitter irony: We might expect to find such a bookmark in the family Bible, but not in a book about the unholy places and unspeakable deeds that the author describes so powerfully and yet so disturbingly.

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.