Echoing the timing of Darby Crash dying the day before the shocking murder of John Lennon, author Mark Ehrman died from a longterm illness the day before David Bowie’s passing earlier this month.
I barely knew Mark Ehrman but he wrote an article about me that proved quite critical in my personal and professional development. I first knew him, or at least knew who he was, at the Onyx. Now this was a coffee shop that deserves its own book, its own HBO series. It was bohemian Los Angeles in the first half of the 1990s. Mark was in the middle of that scene, enmeshed. He wrote freelance and landed some nice gigs. One of his most authentic pieces was a drive along with a junkie on what it was like to score heroin in Los Angeles. That piece appeared in Playboy around the time Pulp Fiction had put this notion into mainstream consciousness. He had one foot in the zeitgeist, a finger in the wind, an eye on the future and a hand on the pulse of the underground.
The first time I ever heard the term “trust fund” it was from a young woman at the Onyx pointing to Mark across the room and saying “if you ever want to know who in L.A. is a trust fund baby, ask him.” Instead, I had to ask her what a trust fund baby was. But see, he could really suss that stuff out, his eyes and ears were sponges; he had a piercing glare that was equal parts Rudolf Valentino and Shaggy from Scooby Doo along with being a world-class eavesdropper.
He interviewed me for the LA Times Calendar section in 1993 about my then-nascent Coagula Art Journal. It was the first real media attention the magazine had ever gotten. Somehow in our talk he mentioned that at one time he had been the deliveryman for the Honor Store. He had always looked familiar over a cup o black joe at the Onyx. I told him that working for the Honor Store was much more awesome then publishing an art world zine and that I should be interviewing him which he indicated made him suspicious that I was hiding something in deflecting praise to the interviewer. Mark was a quick read though and saw it as a genuine sentiment so he indulged me with a few good tales from those days.
Basically the Honor Store was an open cardboard box filled to the gills with candy bars, potato chips, any junk food you can imagine. At the top of each Honor Store was a box with a coin slot. You were asked to put in what you thought was fair. You were on the honor system. First thing I asked him “Was the junk expired?” It was “long expired” he told me. How did the company get around that? The guy who owned it found no statutes to giving away food; and it appeared to pretty much be one guy who bought – or was given – expired food in bulk and his employee Mark stuffing the “goods” into boxes and driving the containers around. He would concentrate on factories, places with lunch rooms, break rooms. Young Ehrman would show up at a warehouse, a factory, an assembly line and offer the box of goodies to them free of charge and then arrange a date to bring a fresh box. Maybe the box had a phone number to call to replenish it, it has been many, many years. So Mark spent a good chunk of the late ’80s driving all over Southern California to the most generic, unsexy work rooms around. I just had to know, having had my share of lose change expired cookies and peanuts from the Honor Store in a few break rooms… did the damn thing make any money?
“Tons” he said. He actually got philosophical about it for a minute. That the Honor Store made money taught him that most people were decent, if perhaps a little naive. And that motivated his journalistic pursuits to find the edge, the darkness. Years later even his tamest book, a how-to on living as an Ex-Pat (he passed away in Spain) had at its core that need to wander away from safety, security and the mundane normalcy he saw delivering those boxes of stale irresistibles.
His article came out in the L.A. Times Sunday Magazine in November of 1993. At the time, this was a huge deal, it got tons of attention. There was not a dispersed internet, everyone who read at all read the Times and the Sunday Magazine. Ehrman had originally said he wanted the piece to get in the Calendar Section. He claimed that the Arts Editor had a say over articles appearing in that section and had nixed it going into print. When he took it to the View Section. Basically the View Section was the potpourri of articles that did not rigidly fit into Sports, Arts or Metro… you’d get a lot of recipes and handicapped athlete stories there. He found out that Times editors could nix stories about the subject they oversaw appearing in other sections. They also had editing privileges. If a big rock concert made the front page, Robert Hilburn got to make sure a photo of Bob Dylan appeared above the fold instead of Jerry Garcia. When Walter Hopps died it was news, but it was front page news because of Christopher Knight.
But Ehrman persisted. He did so, he told me in a subtle put-down, not because he cared so much about the article itself (and by extension my magazine and me), but as a FU to the Calendar Section arts editor at the Times. It turned out that nobody got an editorial say over the Sunday Magazine and so he hustled the story hard to them and they bit, the story got published to the consternation of those who did not find my efforts to be of editorial consequence. Instantly the buzz was on for the magazine in L.A. and I never looked back. In fact, the success that my publication enjoyed in part because of Ehrman’s piece was a huge motivation in my choice to get sober.
Years later in AA, amidst the stories of bottoming out, I would tell the short tale of having had my first taste of success in life, of validation from the outside world and that was what motivated me to see if sobriety could accentuate the new good feelings. In a meeting in Silverlake one night someone asked me if I would start the sharing and my “script” ran thru my head. I was thinking of the narrative of it all when Ehrman walked right through the door! Wow talk about your pink cloud kismet. He was perfectly on time, the room had just gotten settled. But he took no seat. He walked in a circle looking at every person in the room and then walked out. My assumption was he was going to grab a coffee and be right back but the girl seated next to me sneered, “That guy’s a reporter, he comes in to look for celebrities, fucking parasite.” Oh. Every goofy impulse in me leaned me over and I mumbled, “That dude’s the reason I got sober in the first place.” It did not compute with her and I did not press it because his little twirl into the back room didn’t bother me one lick. H was doing his job, he was scouting the room, plenty of celebs made their way to that meeting, this is L.A. and that’s how the town rolls.
And Mark Ehrman rolled with it, pulling up things from its underbelly that the decent, hard-working folks wanted to read about from the safety of the break room. Rest In Peace.