Today's Blind Items - The Squat - Part One - A Dancing Boy Story

I was fifteen, and homeless - I'd run away after being cast out of the industry, and was living in a room above a garage in east Hollywood with four other kids, three of us actors.

The place was a hoarder house, owned by this fat pervert who worked in f/x but was also a crack dealer and purveyor of videos - some of them featuring us, and kids who had previously squatted there. That was the price we paid for not sleeping on the streets.

And just about every night, we'd take the bus to Santa Monica Boulevard and rent ourselves out.

I don't like to talk about this episode - even in rehab and therapy, less because of what happened but because of how it ended (we robbed a house and got caught). 

But I know: you want the red meat. So I'll give you some...in pieces.

One of the kids, who was 17 at the time, and had been one of those very recognizable walk ons from a number of tv shows but who was by then an addict and dealer, dealt to this one person who in a few years - three to be exact - would become famous for his addiction; he was by then already quite famous for his acting. Also: he would be dead. Those were the few times I met him - he was already using at the time. The reason I liked him - he'd sometimes stick around after the sale and get high - is that he didn't look down on us. In a way I think he saw himself as one of us, or at least as being like us. I mean, if I'm not mistaken, the mother had literally sent him and his siblings out on street corners to perform. He was always drinking a Coke, and smoking a Camel. One night, with one of the others, he took the bus too.

But I imagine you also want to know who visited not the apartment but the house.

In this one case I don't know what he was buying - crack or tapes - but I saw him come and go repeatedly, and I met him one time: let's just say he and the owner were...watching tv. This person himself had been an actor coming up, and had been fired by the big dog himself after a mother complained. Let's just say that even if it had happened later - when the one aspect of it was legalized - it would not have been a misdemeanor under California state law.