Jennifer Finch

Yesterday we lost Jennifer. I never could bring myself to call her Precious. Is it bad? It’s not cool, I acknowledge, not fair. If someone asks you to forget their name and call them something new, you oblige. You don’t hang on to the old name with pride like I do, you adhere and oblige politely. I didn’t. It was never Jennifer, either, it was always Jennifer Finch. I met Jennifer Finch when she was like 15. She had a crew of cooler girls, a little older than her, who took her in but she outshined them all immediately. They were older and cooler but all you could pay attention to was Jennifer. I met her through Courtney. Jennifer Finch was living with her dad in the 310, kind of near Westwood, over there, an area I’d never dabbled in. It was a residential neighborhood near where my dad worked. Jennifer had 310 pride, she scoffed the east siders. Courtney was floating around and staying where she could and Jennifer took her in. Courtney lived with Jennifer and her dad. I met her dad a couple of times, he was big and white and silent and put up with Jennifer, they were a team somehow. There wasn’t a mother and Jennifer was adopted. Courtney told me that no one would adopt Jennifer Finch for a year. She was a baby in waiting. Maybe her persevering through that waiting, a baby getting stronger and more independent, not really needing a mommy, a daddy, that made her who she was. Courtney needed a parent and was an orphan when she met Jennifer. How did Jennifer’s dad even deal with that? The two of them. I remember Courtney living in their house with them for that summer. The hair dye, the telephone calls, the drugs. Did her dad have an accent? It seems like he was maybe British. I met Jennifer Finch on the street, she was working something, I’m not sure what, I met her outside of Club Lingere and we couldn’t get in. It was a crisis and Jennifer was all over the place with it, working the front door person, scouting out people who exited, trying to get their hand stamps on ours somehow, trailing the band that loaded in. Jennifer eventually got in but I didn’t. Courtney and I both met Pat Smear through Jennifer. From there I met Celebrity Skin and my world opened up into outsider freaks in LA. She was a very connected young person. Later on I knew her as a keeper of things. She took photographs and kept track of them. She held on to things, memorabilia, she knew what was important. She seemed like more of a manager than a member of a rock band but she was so young. And barefoot and scrappy and holding things together in the way that kids from LA did. She was a professional who paid attention to the needs. She was hilarious, her mouth was huge and she laughed with a crooked laugh. Her eyes would get serious and she’d busy herself with an issue but was so quick to laugh and join in. Hers is one of the phone numbers I still remember, I can rattle it off. I did in my book, the actual number, it starts with a (310), but when I shared the pages of my book with Jennifer, she asked that I not include that number so it won’t here now either. She also requested, in a professional manner and one that surprised me but didn’t, that I list her in my book as ‘Jennifer Finch, the bass player of the Los Angeles band, L7.’ As if. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t how I was treating characters in my book. Even though I’d written about her and the time she put the first needle in my arm on the roof of a house on the side of the 101 freeway, she wanted to be cited as Jennifer Finch the bass player of the Los Angeles band, L7. She wanted her due in only the way that a kid from LA would. Me writing about her shooting me up didn’t phase her, she’d needed her props clear and defined even in that way. I ended up just calling her Jennifer in the book, ‘I don’t really use last names, it’s not my style,’ I told her. She was ok with that but last year I was in Los Angeles and I texted her when she didn’t show up at something. Someone told me she was sick so I texted, ‘Are you feeling better?’ and she texted back, ‘Yes.’ This was weird. We had a full on friendship still, we loved each other a lot, we were never not in touch. And that was all she wrote. I thought maybe she’d changed her number so I texted, ‘It’s Roddy.’ My message went ‘read’ but she didn’t answer. ‘Are you doing ok?’ I texted. ‘Read’ but still nothing, I called her and it went to mail. I continued to text and it freaked me out. I thought maybe she was mad at me for the book. I kept texting and my messages went ‘read’ but still nothing. In kind of a panic I reached out to Donita and sniffed around a little to see if maybe I was in the doghouse. I couldn’t bring myself to ask Donita what was up with Jennifer, I felt funny about it and I just let it go. I talked about it more, though, to friends and my sisters, and I worried about it. I left her messages some more and I texted some more. My texts always went ‘read’ but never got answers. Then in New York, after I left LA, I got a message back from her boyfriend who had Jennifer’s phone. I’m writing too much about the present. Jennifer was in L7 and as far as I was concerned it was Jennifer’s band. She wore the pants as far as I could tell. Does anyone remember Shove, the first single that was on SubPop? It’s still devastating. Jennifer might have been the boss but for me it was all about Suzy. I hadn’t even considered Donita at the time, Suzy is a goddess, I couldn’t get enough. When they eventually toured with Faith No More (wow, the name of my band is a weird thing to type, I don’t know why) they were strict about taking on the support act gig. They asked to read our lyrics and make sure everything was cool. We ended up touring Europe and it was wild. Things were good and things were messy and I was high on dope for a lot of it. Dean who was playing guitar with us at the time started hanging out with Jennifer and they were a couple for some years. Jennifer was sober at the time and I remember when I rode on their bus once, Jennifer was taping me with her camera as I was nodding out. She brought it up years later, that she still had the footage of me fucked up and nodding out on their bus and it made me cagey but what can you do? No shame, no regrets, that was a time. Jennifer was so young to be sober but it was just like her. She was sober forever and got sober before most of us. She really owned that shit. She did meetings, NA, I think, not AA. She and Suzy were both sober. Jennifer carried herself in that world like the badass she was. Funny but responsible, she always had a foot in the responsible. She did it really well, I think she took care of her dad in that same way. We talked about boys and I loved where she’d go and how she’d spin. She was so frank about what she was doing and what she wanted. Her boyfriends didn’t always work out. She housed lots of kids it seemed like. She was good at the internet, she’d morphed into that kind of workhorse, the kind of kid that is savvy, she had always been that. Her father passed and she held on to the house and then maybe moved to another, that part gets fuzzy but I remember she took care of people. There were always multiple renters and people in other rooms, sober people mostly, or boys with skateboards getting sober. That sums it up for her periphery. Boys with skateboards getting sober. And rock. And barefoot. She was always barefoot. Her energy was unbridled and barefoot. All business and barefoot. Her boyfriend, Jack, reached out to me when I was back in NYC and let me know that Jennifer was sick. There was a long text explaining her situation. ‘The treatment is going well. Her improvements are subtle but continuous, however, her ability to communicate is one of the things most affected. Her speaking and awareness has improved, but there is still a ways to go. When I saw your message came in today, she gave me the thumbs up to connect with you. I think she initially kept her diagnosis discreet in the hopes that her recovery and treatment would be quick enough to not cause worry or concern for others. ( plus the desire to share this publicly when the time was right.) I understand this can be a lot to take in, so I apologize for breaking this news to you. She loves you very much.’ I loved her very much and I never saw her again. I heard the room in the final days was peaceful. Courtney was there with her two dogs and helped facilitate a smoother passing. She told me there were hundreds of friends that came through. Hundreds. ‘Dyed black hair with grey roots,’ she kept texting me. I get it. We’re all older, we’re mostly sober, we’re all still covering up things. I loved Jennifer so much, part of why this is hard is because of her spirit. Jennifer Finch was unstoppable. The strength of who she was, the victor she was in a city that’s so skeptical of victors. Her laugh and her spirit and her bossiness and her triumphs. Jennifer Finch is the best. Like, the best

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