Craig Stephens was a freelance writer emigré from Australia who looked like he might have been the byproduct of a good-looking groupie and Paul McCartney – and that was the first thing I said to him when I met him at Barbara’s Bar at the Brewery in 99 or 2000 or ….well like everything whirling around Craig there was a blurry edge on everything, every night, dimly lit, late past 1 A.M., cocktail in hand, a girl way too good looking to be with a bum like him tugging at his waist, a friend or two running out for who knows what, an acquaintance running in to explain where the better party than this one was.
He took the McCartney jab with a curious sizing-up of who the hell would say such a thing but also had a good laugh – I liked his thick skin, his ability to have shit shoveled up to his waist and to just crawl out of it and head to the next happy hour.
That first night he didn’t tip Howard the Bartender after dropping a hundred bucks or so on cocktails for him and three friends – a fat guy along for the ride who had never left home but was probably the guy they got a ride form and two hot girls grinding their teeth as they sneered about American culture with thick, rude Aussie accents that forced Craig to pull up close to me and apologizer “They’re kinda like the Aussie equivalent of hillbillies, don’t let it get you mad.”
Howard was enraged when he sees the credit card slip with no tip and walks out from behind the bar and starts to give the “Down Under” contingent a lecture on the custom of tipping. They play dumber than rocks but Howard had paid enough attention to the conversation to point out that Craig had been here two years and had to know the custom. Howard followed the crew to the parking lot, barking like a hyena and came back in broken like a chihuahua – all Craig had given him was that McCartneyesque smile and while it worked for the lines of aspiring actresses, supermodels, rock and roll frontwomen and art tart starlets, it made Howard grumpy when it was all he got for pushing a hundred bucks worth of the sauce that night.
I brought up that story to Craig years later, he was a bit sheepish copping to it, but I told him a hustle here and there was often necessary. “Here and there? How about every day in this town!” and the expat angst was revealed from behind the smile, the journalistic detachment, the joint to take the edge off of the rent being due. He hustled gigs writing all sorts of stories, a pile of clippings that span a range of interests from the highest perches of art to the lowest dregs of cultural desperation. He was not a depraved soul but he traded in poking the glow around that soul to share with his readers what that light reflected.
He wrote for anyone who paid about anything they cared to have covered and he blasted out the prose to make sure the customer was as satisfied as the reader had been intrigued. Like the hearts he broke, he burned it bright and then freelanced on down the road to follow the next perfect-bound piper.
Craig died about a week ago. He had emailed me about some heart trouble. It sounded treatable, but apparently was much worse. On FaceBook they say his mother and sister are flying in from Australia today. Oh my deep condolences – but please know that your son lived five, maybe fifteen whole lifetimes in Los Angeles, he died an Aussie Angeleno aged 120, there were few corners of this part of the globe he didn’t have a wild story best preserved as a polaroid about.
I hope they find an organized assembly of what he wrote, it would be a diary of getting the 21st Century’s Hollywood party started.