Cicciolina moved in with Koons. I, heartbroken and even deeper in debt, moved into a shitty little apartment in a shitty little neighborhood in Hollywood known as "Little Beirut." I got a job assisting a production designer friend. The scene where John Bender crawls through the ceiling in "The Breakfast Club," I built that space! It was on-set during the making of the film that I met Molly Ringwald.
Like me, Molly had been through a heavy bout of partying (unlike me, she hadn't driven her partner's milk white '65 T-Bird into a tree off Mulholland Drive). We hit up AA meetings—before and after work, at lunch, on weekends. Molly had just over a year, I was nearing six months. She was rigorously studying French lit, reading through Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," from "Swann's Way" right through to "Time Regained." Over languorous picnics in Griffith Park I quizzed her with a French 3 phrase book. We had fun together.
One night we saw the movie "Repo Man" at the Nuart, went for hot dogs at Pink's, and shared our first kiss at a red light at Melrose and Highland in her black BMW convertible, the sky splashed with stars. We went to Helena's, got a quiet table in the back, and drank ginger ale and smoked cloves and stared into each other's eyes until they kicked us out
of the place.
From that night on we were inseparable.