Body High 19: The Venice kiss list

These are the tales, the freaky tales

The Lovers List comes from an episode of In Search of…, a late-20th-century docuseries narrated by Leonard Nimoy. In a segment on Spanish libertine Don Juan, Nimoy told of a game between the devil and the stickman. Don Juan’s deal with Satan hinged on whether he could recall the name of one person he’s seduced.

The deal did not go well for the Spaniard.

This idea of having so many lovers that you could not recall a single one of their names impacted me. As a 14-year-old virgin, having sex with even one person seemed something I would never forget. Plus, my mom called me “Don.” The story stuck in my head.

One night in 2017, while locked out of a friend’s pad in Venice—I was trying to crack LA again after seven mostly-Oregon years—I found myself revisiting the romance list concept. Bringing forth the intimacies had become a back-burner resource, for when I craved a comforting way to kill time.

In the four decades since that In Search of… episode I have had what some say is a lot of sex partners, especially for someone who’s yet to sign into a dating app. The sex has not, however, all run together. Every naked body has a distinct place in my archives. It’s a point of pride that my recall is clear.

The sound of their orgasms, the aching looks on their faces upon coming. How they masturbate, every quirk and innovation in their self-satisfaction.

Stretch marks and scars.

I am no Don Juan. There’s no forgetting my sex partners, provided that I’m given an hour or two to pull up their names. But what of the women that I’ve only kissed, I thought as I walked up Lincoln Avenue, trying to find a bar. What about the fantastically brief brush-by encounters that raise the blood pressure, years after?

Crashing wouldn’t become possible until around midnight, and a couple of hours would be perfect for trying to list everyone I’d passionately laid lips on, with an emphasis on those that I never saw again.

Fellipe Ditadi/ Unsplash

The heart of Hollywood Encounters, the Lost Notes podcast’s latest Groupies episode, is an only child of Venice. Imagine a teenage girl walking the the ocean neighborhood’s streets with a transistor radio stuck to her ear. Now see her viewing that kid from five and a half decades yonder. The woman now knows what she did not know.

Keel’s groupie trip began with the intimate relationship that is peculiar to music. Sixties rock especially was fresh—propulsive and ground-breaking. A band could change your life in a way that’s not possible in the streaming era. Scarcity was a factor.

“In a way, when you’re listening to these musicians for so long, you feel like you know ’em. So I actually wanted to meet them.” recalls Keel. “It was all right there.” The distance between audio intimacy with an artist and actual intimacy was no big leap, Keel reminds listeners.

Not here. Not then.

The transistor radio girl would transform into high-profile Hollywood groupie, banging some of the biggest names in rock and turning all that she learned into professional industry power.

In 1972, “encounters” was the fucking euphemism that “hook-ups” is on the cusp of 2025. Keel and her girls’ encounters might include being wrapped in an bow and gifted to a Brit rocker, as a present the artist should screw. Too, there was drama. The 16-year-olds like Dee Dee would have adjust when the 14-year olds groupies hit the scene and changed the game.

These were wildly different times that we need to understand.

The early Lost Notes work done by Nick White and Myke Dodge Weiskopf is some of the best music podcasting I’ve yet to consume— sonically vivid and insanely well-edited. This season’s unfurling of Sunset Strip yarns—anecdotes that span the club cluster’s 1960s heyday and the arrival of punk—certainly sounds different from classic Lost Notes.

Writer-producers Jessica Hopper and Dylan Tupper Rupert share the entwined narratives plainly. Hopper and Rupert allow Keel and Morganna Welch and Lori Lightning and Pamela des Barres and the rest to let loose their encounters like they know their listeners have at least thought about starting an OnlyFans account.

Groupies’ conversations shine with non-judgmental clarity. The storytelling is great and bold in its own feminine way.

A Lincoln Avenue cafe near Washington, whose name and exact location presently elude me, is where I made my Kiss List. For a shade under two Venice hours I sipped a beverage and reminisced, killing time and taking names.

There was the beautiful stranger I vibed with through an intense downtown LA outdoor rock show, back when Bush 2 was still POTUS. The music ended. We began saying goodbye and hugged and the hug turned became a fantastic kiss. In the middle of a blocked-off street, our hands explored each other. When my hands reached hers I discovered she was missing a finger.

It was an unnerving surprise, but not a disqualifying one. We snogged a bit more before parting.

There’s that mother of a staffer from the community college newspaper I edited. During a house party, I cut through a bed room and bumped into the shimmering older lady. That snogging has long lived in mind as top-shelf illicit behavior and has an exalted place on the list.

And the woman from the audience at my California African-American Museum panel. I could tell from how she questioned that she wanted to kiss, and through my mic I encouraged that.

My indexing inclination is to group the lawyer from that show at The Garage in East Hollywood and that woman sitting next to me on a Greyhound ride from Sandusky to Detroit. Our escalating heat through those fast and flammable conversations remain tangibly sensational. Both episodes suspend that we’re-really-about-to-do-this? split second so that the moment feels light-years past temporal.

Just before 12 a.m, my table vibrated with a new message came. My guy was back at his crib. Time to go home. I had an unlined page with just a few first names, still fewer full names, and many descriptions based on place and and physical characteristics. (“Nine fingered girl, DTLA”)

I once pitched my editor at Random House a literary version of Too $hort’s 1987 classic “Freaky Tales.” No dice. Perhaps a better book would have been The Kiss List. Fly-by snogging cannot make a baby and probably won’t bring you to power.

Sure does make resonant memories though.

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Don’t forget that this is happening

Some of you know that I wrote about this project last week. Here is how to to help buy me time. If you want to wait until Nov. 6 to contribute I get that.