I met Jerry Stahl in 1995, just as the press for Permanent Midnight, his Hollywood-writer-hooked-on-junk memoir, was ramping up. Stahl called me a few weeks after the Los Angeles Reader—where I worked as managing editor—ran a cover story about his work. He pitched me a piece, called “My Life in the Bush of Hosts,” about the Permanent Midnight tour and the ordeal of having to recount the worst moments of his life again and again with a smile on his face to hype his book. This led to a regular column with the Reader called Bad Liver. Selections of his Reader stories are included in a new collection of his journalism, Gonzo Neurotic: The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl, which will be released by ZE Books on September 22.
Many of the stories in the collection were published in magazines such as California, Details, Chic, and L.A. Style (and the L.A. Reader), titles that died without leaving a digital footprint. “It’s like 15, 20 years of my life never happened because I was a journalist, you know, back in magazine days, if people remember what magazines are,” Stahl tells me in a recent interview.
He’s had notoriety as both a TV writer and a novelist (his seventh, Bad Sex in the Afterlife, will be published in early 2027), but Stahl is arguably at his best as a journalist, where he casts himself as the cynical chronicler who is both mortified and mesmerized by the world in which he’s been assigned, painting a hilariously deranged portrait of the horror he has witnessed.
“I did a piece for California Magazine about a nude singles weekend at Elysium in Topanga,” he says. “I just remember that horrifying scene at the buffet line, where everybody’s genitalia were right at the potato salad level. And I looked down and saw a pube in the coleslaw. I had retro–acid reflux from the memories.”
This article was featured in Alta’s weekly newsletter
SUBSCRIBE
For decades, Stahl’s been a quintessential chronicler of weirdness in Los Angeles and beyond. Ahead of his new book’s release, Alta Journal caught up with him to ask about five places in L.A. that have permeated his psyche—in a good way.
MacArthur Park: “I spent a lot of time in the bad old days in MacArthur Park. When I go by there now, it’s like being triggered. I have a real gut memory of that place, and I always kind of loved it because one half was just families and people playing soccer and skipping around, and the other half was purgatory and hellish. But that’s where I would buy my drugs when I got to know people down there. And it became like a weird degenerate family.”
L.A. Central Library: “I really love the Central Library. Not to go all Susan Orlean, but it was a great place for me to work. I could do what I had to do and then retreat into the library and pretend I was just a normal guy. Sometimes when I’m stuck [when writing], I still go down there.”
Musso & Frank Grill: “When I was first clean, somebody gave me an apartment in the basement of a crack house. It was across Cherokee Avenue from Musso & Frank. It was free and I had nowhere to go. I had no running water, so every morning at 11 when [Musso & Frank] opened up, I would go over there and use the facilities. And [the servers were] so happy to see me every day. I looked like something the cat would not have dragged in. But by the time I’d been doing it a month, they would give me a free orange juice every day. I’d sit down, or, if I could afford it, I’d pay for it. They were human beings, you know? [I appreciated] any time in those days when you had some sort of human encounter, because, being a dope fiend, you’re literally out in the cold. It was such a human moment that I still remember it. I don’t go there as much now because I’m not a big fan of liver and onions these days. I went there with, actually—name drop—[Anthony] Bourdain too, back in the No Reservations days, speaking of liver and onions.”
Hollywood YMCA: “I’ve always loved the Hollywood Y. Even back when I had no place to shower, which seems to be a theme, I would go to the Hollywood Y because there are all these old bastards and there was this one actor, he was in everything—Lawrence Tierney. He was really a rough customer. [It was] just a weird community of people who would go there, this unlikely bunch. I don’t know why I felt this weird sense of community with guys I never met. On the other hand, I also noticed that, after 60, guys’ testicles hung down on their knees. And I swore that would never happen to me, but that’s a whole other subject. I just love the timelessness, and I just love that old scuzzy vibe. It’s whatever the opposite of glamour is.”
Silver Lake Reservoir: “I had this $400 apartment that was basically just a room. But I had this insane view of the water while I was writing Permanent Midnight. I would just sit there and stare at it while I was writing. I had these two little cats, Mickey and Minnie, my daughter’s cats, one on each shoulder, and I would sit there watching the reservoir. Before that, back when I was still getting high, I would shoot up and then run right around the reservoir. You know, before I got my wheatgrass. I was the most in-shape dope fiend you can imagine. It was such an L.A. kind of dope fiendism, of which the reservoir played a primary part because that’s where I ran every day. And I still love it. I walk around there with my older daughter periodically.”•
Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein is the director of communications for the California Native Vote Project. He spent more than five years as the senior director of video for sports and features for the Los Angeles Times and has worked as an editor at Spin, Los Angeles Reader, and Orange Coast. His work as a documentary writer-producer has appeared on VH1, ESPN, the Food Network, and NBC.
