Jonathan Kundra & Cynthia Plaster Caster

Jonathan Kundra

          The people with whom I worked at Bizarre didn’t follow any single pattern. Kimberly the secretary was a good sort, a salt-of-the-earth type, a former member of the “Actors I have Fucked” club, and strongly devoted to her boyfriend, who was a recording engineer and a few years younger then she was. Besides Kim, Herb Cohen, and Joe Gannon, the office suite housed Leon Danielle (née Lenny Danofsky, a, well, decorative Hollywood type, he kept his perfectly tan skin supple with frequent application of a lotion, and had a wife who looked somewhat like he did), Grant Gibbs (a gentle sort of beatnik-type who handled difficult people well), and Dee Barnett, the straight-looking and usually-stressed-out bookkeeper. A tall Englishwoman named Pauline came in from time to time to deal with United Mutations fan-relations business. An office assistant named Liz, a teenaged Jewish groupie who was the daughter of somebody’s friend, also showed up sometimes, and for a while there was a semi-junkie publicist from New York, the former editor of a fan magazine called Circus, named Jonathan Kundra.

          I hung out with Jonathan some. He was a tall, bony-looking guy in his early to mid-20s. Liked to get stoned but, as I recall, took a dim view of acid. He told me that he’d got his job at Circus by lying about his qualifications, and that until he’d done it he’d had no idea about how to edit a magazine.

          Jeff Simmons told me after Kundra had taped an interview with him to promote the Naked Angels soundtrack album that he really didn’t know where Kundra was coming from. When the publicity came out Simmons declared it “too rank”, and had had some sport at the expense of some of the show-biz clichés in it.

          Kundra had a tall, lean girlfriend named Cathy. He was notably dark and Jewish; she was notably blond and shiksa. Nice couple. One evening Kundra, Cathy, a drummer from Seattle named Jon Keliehor, and I went in my microbus to Foster’s Blue Grotto, an old-style beatnik coffee house. Foster was an old friend of Alfredo’s who I’d met soon after arriving in LA. We had some coffee and snacks, listened to the jukebox, and played some pinball. We were in a good mood when we left, and Kundra was carrying Cathy across the street piggyback.

          Then a cop car cruised by slowly and one of the cops yelled out its window, “Hey! If you’re gonna grab ass don’t do it in the street!”

          Cathy jumped down from Kundra’s back and they dashed across the rest of the street to the sidewalk, where Keliehor and I were already standing, waiting for them. The cop car then did a squealing tight u-turn and varoomed up to where we were standing. Then the cop snarled, “Don’t run away from me when I’m talking to you!”

          And then they had Kundra and Keliehor and me up against the cop car, and one of them frisked us while the other one, a little bundle of strut and sneer out of some cartoon, hit on Cathy, asking her what she was doing with trash like us. And then they went through our wallets and radioed in to see what they could get on us. I, for some reason, had my car registration in my wallet, and they found that I had an overdue parking ticket. Five dollars. And then one of the cops showed himself to be promotion material by noticing that a VW bus with the same plates as my registration card was parked like two cars away. All this time there was probably crime going on somewhere in the district. It was the turf of the LAPD’s notoriously corrupt Rampart Division. Foster told me later that those two cops had been hitting on him for protection money, and were hassling his customers to put pressure on him to pay.

          Anyway, I ended up spending the night in jail and getting released the next morning without being charged. The others took the keys to my bus from my handcuffed hands and drove home. Keliehor picked me up in the morning. Kundra took it all in an irritated-but blasé manner, as befitted his New York cool.

          Having once edited a fan magazine, Kundra had a highly-developed sense of who was in what he called the “pop aristocracy” and who wasn’t. One who was pop aristocracy, in Kundra’s vision, was the notorious and truly bizarre Cynthia Plaster Caster, who had some kind of a contract with Bizarre, Inc.

          Cynthia was at the time without a regular plater, or person to administer oral sex to the rock stars in order to keep their dicks in shape for casting. Cathy thought it might be fun to have a go at being Cynthia’s plater, which freaked Kundra out (“I guess I’m a sexual hypocrite; I’m really more old-fashioned than I thought I was, after all,” I remember him saying with sadness and wonderment in his voice). As a result of the conflict inherent in this situation, Cathy left town and Kundra headed back after her to New York City.

          Once, when l was talking to him on the phone after he’d returned to the East Village, he told me he’d just done up some smack and was getting ready to, “go and hit the street for an egg cream.” It was our last contact. All Google reveals of his subsequent existence is that he was still editing fan mags in the mid-to-late 80s.

Cynthia Plaster Caster

          One of the people whom I met at the offices of Bizarre, Inc. and who became a friend of mine was Cynthia Plaster Caster (her original surname had been Albritton). For those who have never heard of her particular niche in rock culture, Cynthia made plaster casts of the erect dicks of rock stars and others in the rock world. A recent brief check on her website reveals that she still does.

          I heard about Cynthia and her collection of plaster artefacts around the office for a few weeks before I met her. Pauline, the tall skinny Londoner who was more or less in charge of United Mutations (the fan-relations operation), had seen them and was rhapsodic about the size of Jimi Hendrix’s. “I couldn’t even get my hands around it!,” is what she told me, her elegant voice expressing wonder and awe.

          There’s something about a collection of plaster casts of people’s erect dicks that provokes people into some attitude or another. Art. That’s what the people in the office told me about why Zappa had brought Cynthia out from Chicago — to get her castings an exhibition at a major gallery.

          Anyway, we eventually ran into each other at the office. She was a cheerful, friendly, outgoing sort of person. Someone who likes a laugh. Shortish. A bit chubby. Midwestern accent. She seemed almost automatically to assume that we were peers, colleagues, friends.

          So we hung out some. I remember sometimes we got ripped with some other people — Herb’s secretary Kim Allen, notorious Hollywood scene-maker Rodney Bingenheimer, a queer groupie and his friends, and Dee Barnette, Bizarre’s bookkeeper — at Dee’s digs, where we watched TV, with Cynthia and the male groupie making comments on the various attributes and attractions of the rock stars on the tube.

          Cynthia was always ready to tell her tale of how she’d been a shy, non-glamorous-looking, virginal Catholic girl who’d taken up plaster-casting dicks, or ‘rigs’, as she called them, as a means of getting past the other groupies to meet rock stars. A queue-jumping technique, one might say.

          She referred to herself as the ‘Master Plaster Caster’. She and her former partner, Dianne Plaster Caster, had become notorious for their efforts in Chicago (to the point where Jonathan Kundra considered them to be ‘pop aristocracy’). Dianne had been the plater, keeping the rig in erectile mode by oral stimulation while Cynthia mixed the alginates (stuff dentists use to make casts of teeth) and made the cast. Dianne had gone back to Chicago, though, and Cynthia was on the lookout for temporary platers, which led to Jonathan Kundra’s anxiety situation over his girlfriend Cathy. She had me audition a couple of groupies to assess their plating technique — without my rig being cast, of course — for which I was ever so thankful to her. I remember in particular one young plater, an Australian woman who lived around the corner from the Café Figaro and who sang in musical comedies. Hearing her belt out the opening bars to “Ok-lahoma” in her Aussie accent was a hoot. Later she claimed to be feeling an epileptic episode coming on and injected herself with some thorazine, which I thought was creepy.

          Cynthia told me that how she really saw herself, and the career she really wanted, was as a curator.

          Her father, she told me, had been a postman, and she’d worn one of his old Post Office shirts as her smock when making many of her casts. For some reason she gave me that shirt, and I wore it for a long time before it disintegrated.

          She went back to Chicago about the time I left Bizarre, and we didn’t keep in touch. When I contacted her recently via her website she wrote back saying that she didn’t remember me, but she did remember the Post Office shirt.