by Tamra Lucid.
One of the most charming of our many bass players introduced her to me. She was way too cool for him, although he was cool, too, in a quirky way. He understood his lower rank, and she liked that about him. His adoration tickled her sense of irony.
She said to me once, when I told her how beautiful she was, that she thought her head was too big. “In fact,” she confided, “it makes me look like Hello Kitty.” She was the coolest looking bass player I’d ever seen. We planned to play together. We both knew she should be the bass player in my band, at least for a while.
Having been adopted by parents who never found out her date of birth she had no idea when she had been born, not even the year. But she knew where she was born: in South Korea. She was an infant carried into America in her adopted father’s arms.
She grew up in southern California with the keen sense of style of a counterculture icon. So cool the bands and the scene regarded her as royal. Her style called back to the riot grrrl fascination with hairdos and fashions of the early 1960s, but she had other looks. Punk, goth, and classic rock all at once, she was Carnaby Street, Granny Takes a Trip, and SEX in Chelsea, a walking encyclopedia of underground styles. Many in the Los Angeles punk community admired her as the coolest girl of them all.
Our bass player brought her to one of our better parties. Our parties, in this 1954 post and beam house perched above L.A., have had a strange arc. At first they were magical. Relationships began. Marriages revived. Bands, films and businesses were born. Many partygoers commented on the flurries of synchronicity and the surreal enlightening conversations. The downward spiral went unnoticed at first. Then it became obvious. Eventually the parties became so unpleasant we gave up on them altogether. People drank too much, made envious remarks half disguised as friendly jokes, They pitched us their strategies for success, and expected us to save them though there was nothing we could do. But not her. She was always a pleasure to see, and to talk to about the world, relationships, cult films, and music. We should have at least played a gig together.
At the first party our bass player brought her to she wound up sitting with an older woman, a well-known psychic who told her about herself, including her birthdate. Impressed but still skeptical she accepted it as a good excuse for having an annual party. Her new astrological sign felt accurate. An idea haunted her, the possibility that the mystical aspect of reality might be real after all.
She was known for being the girl crying on the stairs in Paul Sapiano’s film The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down. She was senior producer for six episodes of Vinyl Rewind, a music review and listening party that lasted seven seasons. She photographed cool bands for Razorcake. She played guitar for Gigi and the Jabettes, which she described as the cutest all girl GG Allin cover band on the planet, while describing herself as a combination of the guitarists for The Cramps and Motley Crue.
She gave me two riot grrrl cut and paste collages for the first and only issue of my zine The Good The True The Beautiful. Pasta Goddess featured a model showing off her cleavage in a tight black dress. Her bottom half was a manual pasta machine. Fresh pasta emerged from where her pussy should have been. In Consumerism, a collection of fancy meats in queasily bright colors lounged beside words like “buy” and “sale.” The title was cut out and each letter pasted individually, so it looked like a kidnapper’s ransom note.
She also attended a gathering at my home that included o.g. riot grrrls Allison Wolfe and Madigan Shive, but also young women you never heard of who were accomplishing things you were never told about. As the organizers of this afternoon soiree, Ronnie and I had a lot of ground to cover. She could see that, and she was charmed by how committed we were to being good hosts. So she helped us. Usually when people do that they intrude and disturb the rhythm of the event. She helped intelligently. We were impressed by her grace.
In 2014, she came over for tea and was surprised by the red date soup I had made for her. Ronnie had read about how healthy red date soup is. I researched. Ronnie got the ingredients. I made the soup. She said it tasted like the red date soup her adopted grandmother made. The ginger was fresh and the jujubes tasty. I didn’t want to blunt the blissful flavor so I served tea only after we were done. Organic peppermint with the tiniest dash of dark maple syrup. She was impressed.
We talked about the death of the music business, great scenes we had known, and vague plans to make music together, though she often said she wasn’t good enough to play with us, a judgment I refused to accept. I told her that Diane, the keyboardist on our Tacoma Ballet album, had piano lessons when she was ten years old, and had never played with a band. Reviewers considered Diane a highlight of the record. I explained that’s how I like to record. Mix experienced maestros with people who can’t tell a cord from a chord.
We thought we had plenty of time. Yet another example of waiting too long. Made the same mistake with saxophone genius Bobby Keys when he wanted to record with me, and with the poet John Trudell, too. It’s funny how we never learn. We all know impermanence but it’s never going to happen to us.
A big dog howls above me as I write this, in one of the dark windowed houses at the top of the hill. His mournful singing is not to the moon, or with sirens. It’s so close to Halloween it’s not hard to imagine something terrible on that hill. But it’s really just the song of a lonely old dog.
The presidential election of 2016 had drastic consequences for the girl who should have been my bass player. In shock after the election, like the rest of us, she got in a fight with her boyfriend. She became a name on the official record of cases of domestic violence. A clerk couldn’t find any government paperwork related to her adoption or her immigration from South Korea. Her domestic violence case plea for protection became an illegal alien case against her.
She had lived all her life in Los Angeles. She had thirty-year friendships. She had gone to school here since kindergarten and earned good grades in college. She personified everything about the great American girl. She was a brilliant, loyal, sarcastic, witty, sensitive, sexy, take no shit free spirit. She had seen, and knew about, inspirationally cool things, She was a witness to counterculture history who looked cuter in cat ears than anyone I had ever met.
How can you blame an infant for her parent’s negligence? She believed she was an American citizen. When she had been granted a driver’s license and a passport no one had told her she wasn’t. The authorities listened to her appeal for mercy then delivered their punchline: the law is the law. She was an illegal immigrant. She had to go. And because of the egregious length of her illegal stay she was banned from ever returning.
Ordered deported she went into shock. What would she do with her beloved cat? With her vinyl collection? The amazing clothes she had hunted and gathered all her life. She didn’t know how to speak Korean. She had no knowledge of her relatives, and no way to find them. No one waited for her there.
As she tried to think her way through this traumatic dilemma she couldn’t sleep. She became so anxious she had to force herself to eat. There had to be a way out, she wanted to believe, but she had been told there is no way out. She began drinking—hard. To get a few moments of relief from the doom drawing nearer every day she had to stop knowing what she was feeling.
She looked into shipping her cat, half her clothes, and her records, but she didn’t have enough money. Besides, she needed to sell her clothes, her records and even her bass, to have money waiting for her in a bank in Korea. But to sell so many collectibles would take too long. She contemplated a yard sale. She drank to forget how close she was to getting on a plane and leaving herself behind.
Then in the delirium of too much booze and not enough food or sleep she realized that she could not allow herself to be bullied and defeated. She would not accept the futility of surrendering to fate. She would do the honorable thing.
The night before I had a nightmare about calling 9/11, about a bass player putting down a bass, about a particular party she had attended. Swimming in the pool with her Revlon red lipstick intact she laughed when I called her the Asian Esther Williams. I woke up sobbing.
Her friends were surprised and concerned when she appeared live on Facebook that morning, exhausted and agitated. She had been drinking all night. Most of us had seen this bitter side of her but never so sharply. She reduced rants to a few sardonic sentences. Her asides were very dark jokes, but not as dark as the joke that is life. Her friends tried to text her and call her. They direct messaged her. Several had gotten in their cars and were on their way to her place.
But no one could stop her. She had made up her mind. She had it all timed. Her friends watched in horror as she hung herself by the neck until she was dead. The social platform had become a gallows. Several minutes of her lifeless body on display caused a surge of traffic driven by texts and direct messages. Thousands of reactions later Facebook deleted the livestream.
I expected to hear her story on the news but the only thing I could find was a blurb about livestream suicides as a social media problem. Her friends didn’t want people digging into her life so they didn’t cooperate with the local reporter who asked questions. Rumors circulated that she had to resort to becoming an escort, or that she was a kept woman, but no one knew the truth. The only thing we all knew was that she was too cool to be in a newspaper or on the evening news reduced to a tragic statistic.
In 2025, stories of families broken and of innocent people sent to prisons on other continents make headlines again. I felt she sat beside me watching the news. A ghost and a half. The same men whose reckless cruelty had killed her were killing again. The world had learned nothing in seven years, she told me in the way the dead tell us things. In fact, she gravely nodded, it had gotten worse.
“You’re strong,” friends tell me. I was strong, for a long time. But when you fight for so many years and you lose so many battles, no matter how much you want to take that fighting stance again your body, racked with ancient fury and trauma, won’t let you.
I don’t write songs anymore. I don’t feed hummingbirds. This storm has washed so many starfish onto the beaches. Girl Whose Name Rhymes With Pamela, you are the last starfish I throw back into the sea. Your story can’t be forgotten. When the angel of death tells me my task was hopeless I won’t say it mattered to that one. I’ll say it mattered to me.