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"Drag queens were the first people who influenced me," Carmel would tell a reporter years later. "Living with them, I learned how to dress like a real woman."
Carmel liked San Francisco's underground better than Sydney's; she went to punk shows, and kept cutting hair, working from salons or out of her house. To drum up more business, she'd approach friends on the street, stare at their heads, and ask with mock concern, "Who did your hair?" She frequently woke up early at Slut Central, and sat for hours in front of a mirror, re-creating her look. How was anyone going to take her seriously as a hairdresser if she herself didn't have the most cutting-edge, fuckingest do? The Pebbles/Flintstones tuft thing was suddenly and horribly uncool -- this week it had to be a massive rooster-comb spiked mohawk. She married one of her housemates to get a green card, so she could stay in the country. And then she and Timmy Spence formed a band and scared Sacramento.
Pillar of Salt was a post-punk synth trio that got some radio play in the early '80s with the song "Surfin' in the Sewer," written by Carmel and Spence. The band lasted for all of two public performances. In one of those extravaganzas, the group opened for the Psychedelic Furs in Sacramento. Carmel hobbled onstage in a tight-tight dress with stuffed monkeys stitched onto it. Her ears were pierced multiple times; she laced together the holes. There was, of course, the mohawk. The crowd was aghast -- nobody looked like this in Northern California. Even the Furs were taken aback. Pillar of Salt went to stay with friends in the suburbs, leading to one of those encounters that is remembered now as pure Carmel.
It is a sweltering, 100-degree, windless day in the Central Valley. A little boy asks a freaky-looking girl and her pals if they want to come swimming at his house, down the street. The adults borrow some swimsuits, and pad down the scalding sidewalk. Spence dives in the pool. The kids splash around. The mothers of the children lounge on deck chairs. It's an idyllic, banal scene straight out of Redbook magazine -- until the sliding glass doors to the house open, and there stands Carmel, in exaggerated mohawk, tattoos, and a swimsuit several sizes too large, her breasts fully exposed. Silence washes over the back yard; a mother frantically waves the kids to come out of the pool.
Spence recalls Carmel seizing the moment, making the rounds of the women at poolside, offering them solid, if unsolicited advice:
"What the fuck are you doing in Sacramento?" she demands. "You're 28, divorced three times, your husband beats you. What the fuck are you doing?"
The women are stunned. Like so many who would come in contact with Carmel, though, they actually find themselves listening to a half-naked crazy tattooed girl with rooster-comb hair, while she questions their very existences.
There would be other adventures, many of them road trips during which Carmel continued her quest to collect American kitsch. But she soon realized she had enough kitsch in her home -- perhaps too much. She might as well capitalize on what she already had. She opened a small collectibles store on Folsom at Ninth Street and called it I Wanna Live, in homage to the Susan Hayward movie. The name would prove to be the ultimate irony.
To her friends, Carmel had always seemed naturally wired; as far as they knew, she had never been into drugs much. But in the 1980s, everyone seemed to have reasons for slipping into the constant party. Bad crowds circulated everywhere. "She's becoming a major fuck-up," friends whispered behind her back. It's probably heroin, said some. Others thought it was speed. She began working the streets of the Mission as a prostitute. People talked about the night she found herself alone on the floor of her shop, thrashing about in convulsions.
On Jan. 6, 1983, a complaint was filed in Municipal Court against Carmel Chandler and Larry B. Dawson, claiming unlawful import and sale of methamphetamine within the state of California. A search of Carmel's home on Jackson Street yielded white and brown powders, and a syringe. She pled guilty in Superior Court to charges of dealing, and got three years probation, with one year to be spent at Walden House.
She was lucky.
As Carmel walked up the steps of the rehab facility in the Upper Haight, she mentally reviewed her situation: Nice job. You haven't been in America three years, and you're already an addict and a convicted felon. You're as low as you can get.
When Carmel reached for her appointment book, the man with the bandanna pulled out a 9mm, semiautomatic pistol and fired twice, point blank. The first shot hit her in the left eye, the second tore into her lung. She fell to the floor of the Tarantula and landed on her back, a puddle of red growing on the concrete. She would be pronounced dead in less than an hour. The man ran outside, turned, and fired once more through the window -- a technique hit men often use to ensure they're not being followed. The bullet ricocheted, striking a circus clown in the wall mural right between its eyes.
Penny Small left her apartment on the crest of Lombard Street and headed for Walden House. It was the Christmas season of 1983, and she was due to visit a wayward grandson, who was cooling his heels in rehab. Penny, a tough-minded, intelligent woman whose husband ducked out early and left her to raise the children by working as a barmaid, was in her 60s. She had made some shrewd real estate investments over the years, playing landlord to the Cole Valley hippies during the heyday, and now could afford a good living-room view of the bay.
