The Day Paul Stanley Walked Next to Me at a Private School in Van Nuys

@thiscatcollages

Words by Iván Salí

I don't remember what kind of car he drove, my dad says it might have been a Lincoln minivan. There's no way he'd let a Mexican kid park his car even if he would've known I was a lifelong KISS fan...and so was my dad. I wanted to know what it was like working in Valet Parking, out of curiosity and mere boredom, so I went to work with my dad. To be honest I was in it for fifty bucks at the end of the day. I'd already heard my dad had seen Paul Stanley, but I didn't know it was this place: a small gated private kindergarten sitting right behind a Jack in the Box in Van Nuys. A private lot I had walked by so many times on my way back from school.

That day, I was a runner. It meant I had to greet parents as they drove in through the gate, get them out of their car, then find a space in the paved parking lot area for their car, and when there wasn't any space left, we'd turn the school's synthetic-grass soccer field into a parking lot, too. This happened every time there was a school event for the parents. We tried our best not to run over their children.

I didn't think too much of seeing a celebrity like Paul Stanley, but I did think of just how much I listened to his singing voice before going to sleep, on my way to and from school, the market, while I was doing homework; I listened to all KISS' corny hard rock on my first teenage years. I learned some English singing along. Their entire discography took about 2 GB worth of songs on my iPod. I was obsessed.

Tio Pepe was there, too. He worked in Valet Parking with my dad. He dealt with the clients; distributed the money at the end of the day. He said he signed a contract with the private kindergarten director and if we were caught talking to the parent-celebrities or asking them for a photo we'd get fired. I would've liked to tell Paul that he and my dad share the same zodiac sign: Capricorn. They have a quiet attitude in common. My dad saw himself as the Starchild, at least back when he was a teenager himself before he met my mom, and coming to the U.S. was not a thought in his mind. My dad crossed the border to work with cars and people in a different way. 

Before he crossed, he was a chauffeur for reporters of La Oreja, a Mexican gossip TV show in the mid-2000s that aired from Mexico City at six pm every weekday. He worked there for three years before they fired him. He then got in an airplane to find a job in California. I didn't talk to him much when I was a kid. While I was in school or sleeping, he was there chasing down telenovela celebrities, helping the reporters harass them. Sometimes he'd come back with interesting stories and gifts from celebrities. On one of those nights, he had to stay out working. I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard my cooking and noise coming from the TV. I saw these monsters wrapped in silver gear running around a stage mounted on a sports arena. They had guitars wrapped around their hairy torsos and wore black and white makeup on their faces that gave them their on-stage identity: The Starchild, The Demon, The Spaceman, and The Catman; my favorite one was The Fox. The makeup helped them stand out in the glam-rock era of the 70s. They were a hit with the youth. My mom told me to go back to sleep, but I kept staring at the screen displaying the live performance. My dad handed me the DVD case. I recognized those faces from another vinyl he owned. He then showed me the part where Gene Simmons spits out blood on stage and the band proceeds to play “God of Thunder.” 

In a parallel universe, I share this memory with Paul Stanley. In another life, I say “hi” when he walks next to me and we hold a conversation. I ask him how the rest of the guys are. I ask him for an autograph and a photo. I would have wanted him to invite me to his studio that must have been pretty close from Van Nuys, too. But I kept my mouth shut because Tio Pepe said that at the most I could just wave at him, otherwise we'd all get fired. So I just glared at the unmasked Starchild without his giant-sized glitter-boots, and then there wasn't much left to idolize. Not being able to say anything took all the excitement of seeing him up close. He was just a dude that happened to be famous walking next to me and I guess I had to respect his privacy even if he had impacted my life in a way he probably would never know, just like any other artist. My dad wasn't fangirling as I thought he would have, I think because he was used to it. None of us had even parked Paul's car that day anyway, he parked it himself in a separate lot on the other side of the school building. I've never had my car valet parked so I wouldn't know if I'd let a stranger into my car. 

@thiscatcollages

Sometimes valet parkers got lucky and cherished photos with women like Paris Hilton or Salma Hayek outside of some expensive restaurant in LA, just ask my Tio Beto. One time my grandfather, Papa David, crashed Lindsay Lohan’s car at a private party, she was too drunk to care. Sometimes being a Valet was dangerous, too. Tio Gabriel was killed at midnight trying to break up a fight while he was working at a West Hollywood restaurant, He even had the chance to do Valet at a party where I got to speak French to a legit French crepe-maker who insisted I should not waste my time learning his langue mere and instead should learn Cantonese, because economically speaking French was useless. Most of the men in my family on this side of the border have worked in Valet Parking at least once. I had to join them for the experience.

Rockstars love to retire in L.A. If you’re one of those that gets to live in the hills closer to the coast or in a mansion surrounding the valley, you’ve got it made, you even have immigrant workers opening the fancy doors of your car for you. So, Paul Stanley decided to live here and enroll his daughter in a little private kindergarten. After he walked by and nobody said a word to each other I saw him a couple of hours later talking to other parents and then he drove out. 

At the end of the day, I got my fifty bucks. On the five minute ride back home my dad drove while I cued "Rock Bottom" to blast through the car speakers. A few weeks later, Tio Pepe and his crew went to work there again and one of the runners he hired had forgotten someone's keys in his pocket. A very angry parent had to stay there, stuck with their child for a good minute. They all got fired. We never worked there again.

I think my dad would have liked to work as a roadie, perhaps as a tour bus chauffeur. Maybe in some childish fantasy of his, he is KISS's roadie; hauling ass for a quartet of Jewish rock stars. Maybe that went through his head when he decided he was going to live in Los Angeles, another perfect city to chase down celebrities. As soon as he got here he got to work with my uncles who were all making their humble living doing valet parking, operating mobile machinery that was already familiar to him.

My dad, to some extent, felt comfortable fetching someone else's vehicle and got a little work out running back and forth. He did it out of necessity for twelve years. He parked cars for a long time, but he doesn't earn a living driving other people's cars anymore; the COVID-19 pan. demic was a catalyst for the Valet Parking industry to finally crumble. 2020: new decade, fewer jobs. Now he washes his own clients' cars, but so far none of them have been any celebrities.

Iván Salí is a poet based in the San Fernando Valley experimenting with words, images, and sound. His literary work has been published in a variety of journals and magazines including Curious Publishing, Dryland, Drifter Zine, Backlash Lit, and more. He earned a B.A. in English, Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge where he's advocated for quality of education that addresses racism and social justice. Iván happens to be undocumented; born Iván Salinas in Ciudad de México, he immigrated to Los Angeles when he was ten years old to reunite with his family. Since then he's lived in a state of Nepantla: in-between lands, languages, y culturas. In his free time, he enjoys DJing.