The Christopher Milk Reunion

I had serious reservations from the very start about the Christopher Milk reunion, but when you stand to earn more for three evenings’ work than you’ve earned in the past half-decade, you tend to start treating your reservations as you might a fellow passenger on a bus or on the subway who suddenly jumps to his feet shouting, “I must warn you that the Islamic extremists who control my thoughts are commanding me to remove all my clothing, defecate, and then write Death to the West on the windows with my own feces.”

I’d never really thought of us as an act that would go over very well in Las Vegas, our appearance in which was arranged by our friend Celine Dion, but it hadn't yet dawned on me that Las Vegas was no longer the province of Older People in polyester clothing of colors that don’t occur in nature, but of persons my own age. I am now officially — and to my infinite chagrin — an Older Person myself, a fact that kicked me vengefully between the legs the other evening when, in the midst of the Lakers game, there was a segment featuring the former UCLA and NBA star Bill Walton, his sons (one of whom plays for the Lakers), and a couple grandchildren. I reflected on how little Bill, who dutifully intoned a succession of wisecracks having to do with his ancientness, resembled the flame-haired Grateful Dead fan of his Portland Trailblazers days. He is snow-topped and prolifically creased now, our Bill — and a few years younger than I!

I may not wear much polyester clothing (except for my black wedding suit, which I bought in London in 2002 because it was both reasonably stylish and reasonably affordable, albeit containing no trace of anything other than polyester), and am proud to have loathed the Grateful Dead even while employed by a big fascist law firm in San Francisco at which all the purportedly hipper young attorneys all just loved ‘em, or at least claimed to), but am probably older now than the average Vegas visitor.

As I have mentioned here in the past, I draw some small consolation from the thought that so many of the Playmates and Penthouse Pets of the Month I oohed and aahed at in my youth are all at least as old as I now, and must have poison injected periodically into their foreheads to resemble their younger selves. But this is the Nate Robinson of consolations, at least size-wise, a metaphor sure to leave those who haven’t been watching the NBA Finals scratching their heads.

So there we were in the desert, I and Rafe, who’s turned into Ozzie Nelson in his old age, and Karl, who weighs twice what he used to — and who now is apparently doing rather handsomely in human traffic, though he’s never been one to tell one hand what the other’s doing, except maybe when playing his bass — and little George, whom I used to tease viciously back in the daze for worshipping a seven-year-old guru, but even more for having expressed the belief that I wasn’t a terrific drummer, which of course I wasn’t, but one was discouraged from speaking truth to power in those days, and the greatest power, through sheer force of will, was my own, ill-qualified though I may have been to wield it.

I had dared to imagine that the decades had made me a better person, but of course no such thing is the case, and it wasn’t long before the old resentments had raised their ugly heads. The good news was that the audience loved us, though I had the unpleasant feeling not a few of them imagined that we were Emerson, Lake & Palmer, as on that night in 1973 when Rafe and Karl and I commandeered their limousine in front of the Continental Hyatt House and went joy-riding in eastern Beverly Hills.

For me, the highlight of the experience was when Celine joined us by surprise the second of our three evenings and sang “Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace” with the beaming Rafe, who was relieved not to have to reproduce the high notes he was able to hit on the record only with the help of a variable speed oscillator. A nice gal and a major talent, Celine, though her accent presents no Nate Robinson-sized challenge for those of us losing our hearing. I once considered trying to assemble a Grateful Dead tribute band — not because I like the music, but so I could call it the Dreadful Grate.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!

Johnny Dislikes This

While living in the UK, I kept hearing miraculous tales of how kids like Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys, whose appeal eluded me, were acquiring gigantic audiences via their MySpace pages. By the time I tried to fling myself aboard that bandwagon, it had already passed, though, and I wound up sprawled and bloody in the street — or, as a Brit would have put it, road.

For a very long time, I didn’t get Facebook, but then the guitarist’s wife started a fan club there for the band with which we’d nearly, but not quite, changed the course of popular music in our time, and what a lot of fun it was for a few months — so much, in fact, that I started my own account in earnest. Then, realizing that I might be able to use this whole social networking lark for my own nefarious ends — specifically, inducing people to buy things I’d written, designed, or composed and recorded — I began opening accounts for a variety of alter egos.

With minimal diligence, one of them had soon amassed over 2000 Facebook friends, whereupon I thought: Whoopee! But then, as I passed the 2400 mark, I began getting wacky error messages that I was abusing the friend-adding feature…by requesting new friends! I was still able to transmit requests, but only after proving myself a non-robot or something by typing a couple of words in a little box. It slowed me down a bit, but what a small price, having to type a couple of words, for a friendship that might last a lifetime, or a prospective customer. But then Facebook’s algorithms somehow decided that my rampant abusiveness had to be stopped cold, and I was advised,

Block! You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users. You have been blocked from adding friends because you repeatedly misused this feature. This block will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. When you are allowed to reuse this feature, please proceed with caution. Further misuse may result in your account being permanently disabled. For further information, please visit our FAQ page.

I have made it a lifelong custom both to avoid reading users’ manuals, to participate in forum discussions, and to refer to FAQ pages. As far as I could see, absent my turning to those potential sources of clarification, I’d been doing precisely what Facebook was conceived to allow one to do — make lots of friends with a click or two and a wink. I reconciled myself to having to be content with the 2400 friends I’d made already. If worse came to worse, I thought, I could always start yet another account.

But then things started getting scary. On Tuesday, when I went to the gym, a couple of steroid abusers I’d seen before but never spoken to came up to me while I was on the stationery bicycle. The more articulate, the gum-chewer, mused, “Nice car you’re driving,” though my 2002 Subaru Forester bears the scars of my 10 months in Madison, Wisconsin, where people will say, “Have a great day!” or, “How’s that bratwurst workin’ for ya?” with a big smile, but then damage the hell out of your car as they back out of their parking spaces, and not leave a note.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’d hate to see anything, you know, like…happen to it,” he said, smirking, pulling his wifebeater down to expose the tiny Facebook tattoo just below his collarbone. The sight of it chilled me, but not nearly as much as the enormous FB I discovered on getting home had been burned on my lawn.

I have decided, in the light of these developments, to revert to making friends as I had until mid-2009. On seeing someone with whom I think I may be on the same wavelength, I will approach them with the utmost shyness, offer them a little bouquet of wildflowers, and mumble, “Will ‘oo be my fwend?” In a real-life setting, most people, whether or not they will admit it, find derhotacization irresistible.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!

Small Hudson Valley Town Rocked by Pre-World Cup Violence! Dozens Flee!

There are lots of British expatriates here in Beacon, and obviously a lot of native Americans too, though the kind who were simply born here, rather than descendants of aboriginal peoples with feather headdresses and whooping. In advance of England and the USA squaring off against each other on Saturday in each country’s first World Cup game, you might have expected at least a few punchups, as the Brits would have referred to them, but so far there hasn’t been a single reported case of Anglo-American violence. Even at our most popular pub, the Queen's Legs ("We're always open" (thanks, TLD)), there hasn't been a single incident of head-butting.

If only that were true our other ethnic communities were getting along as well.

Last night on Main Street, a group of Honduran thugs stood out in front of our most popular Swiss restaurant chanting, “Federer [the famous Swiss tennis champion] sucks,” and challenging members of the wait staff to refute that Switzerland’s alleged neutrality during World War II was morally indefensible, their argument being that there was noting morally ambiguous about Nazism, to which the only reasonable response was outrage. My understanding is that none of the Swiss servers was born fewer than 30 years after Adolf Hitler’s suicide, but the Hondurans reportedly weren’t accepting that as an excuse.

Over on South Chestnut Street, an unlikely coalition of snarling Nigerian and South Korean students cornered Bob Papadakis, the owner of one of the city’s most popular Italian restaurants (not a single one of which, as in most places in America, has even one Italian employee), and berated him for the dismal fiscal health of the country of his Greek grandparents jeopardizing the European economy as a whole, and thus the global economy. Neighbors report that he tried to placate his tormentors by inviting them in for a glass of ouzo, but that none accepted it. If there’s some small solace in this, it’s that Nigerians and South Koreans were able to put their own traditional animus aside for a moment in pursuit of a common persecution of a third nationality.

I hear now as I write this that a group of North Koreans has assembled outside our sole Ivorian delicatessen waving placards that on one side depict their so-called Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, looking both younger and more attractive than in real life, and, on the other, Ivory Coast striker Didier Drogba, looking sort of like Willie Horton in those TV ads designed to lead voters in the 1988 presidential election fearful that Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis would fill America’s streets with capriciously paroled rapists and murderers.

Many experts believe that Spain will emerge the winner of this year’s competition. Far better Spain, I think, than North Korea. I have long regarded Spanish cuisine as western Europe’s most delicious, and think it infinitely endearing that Spaniards lisp as a matter of course, pronouncing Ibiza, for instance, as Daffy Duck would. It fascinates me that the Brits, among whom I used to live, are quite happy to pronounce Ibiza as the Spaniards themselves do — and to go there in vast numbers in their late teens to behave as obnoxiously as it is possible to behave — even while staunchly refusing to acknowledge that Tenerife has four syllables, rather than three. Londoners will compound this by insisting on pronouncing the vowel in taco, for instance, like that in the English word hat, though their pronunciation of dance, for instance (they pronounce the vowel as in want) suggests it’s just sheer contrariness at work — or, as they would put it, bloody-mindedness.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley), Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

Prison Diary, Part 463

I know I write an awful lot about my 15 months’ incarceration in the Men’s Correctional Facility at Derelict Hills, but that’s because the whole experience was so very jarring for a middle class Jewish boy with a BA like myself, and if you’re really that disgruntled, it isn’t as though there aren’t 17 million other things you could be reading on line if you really wanted to, instead of whining. It isn’t as though I’m holding a gun to your head, as I held one (a plastic one, mind you) to the head of the cashier at the Stop-‘n’-Spend convenience store where my troubles all started, not because I’m a bad person at heart, but because my teammates, for the fun of it, had spiked my cocktail with an animal tranquilizer whose effect was to make me want to date women of questionable morals and hold up convenience stores.

I was lucky enough to be incarcerated a couple of weeks after the State Department of Corrections came to be overseen by Eric “Duffy” Moran, a former inmate who’d earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Phoenix while behind bars, and was branded as living proof that dramatic self-rehabilitation was possible even in a correctional setting where inappropriate sexual approaches and drugs were both commonplace.

It was Moran’s view, not at all popular with Republicans, that prisoners who were treated with respect and kindness were far more likely to become useful members of society on their release than those systematically brutalized. Under his stewardship, male and female inmates were regularly bussed to each other’s prisons for so-called “mixers,” at which we would in theory refine our social skills. Special classes were offered in small talk and etiquette to prepare us for these occasions, and I observed personally that they were enormously beneficial. I saw a fellow convict serving a life sentence of murdering and dismembering four prostitutes delight with his charm and wit a trio of gals from our sister prison, the Women’s Correctional Facility at Derelict Hills, and can tell you that it was a heartwarming spectacle.

You might have imagined that, because of the whole testosterone thing, it would have been male inmates who caused most of the trouble at these mixers, but no such thing was the case. It was actually self-proclaimed bull dykes who started both of the riots that I witnessed. Whereas the so-called daddies of the men’s wing were for the most part quite happy to allow their so-called punks — by far the most feminine of all us revelers — to mix and mingle with whomever they chose, their female counterparts tended to the belligerently possessive. This paragraph hasn’t been very funny, but they can’t all be gems.

Heartened by the relative success of our mixers, our respective wardens decided we might be ready for an actual cotillion, at which heels and hose would be required for the ladies and punks. The problem was that all the inmates of the women’s wing were designated ladies regardless of how short their hair might be cropped, how prolifically they might be tattooed, and how many contraband male hormones they might be injecting. Many of these persons had never worn high heels or petticoats, and doing so made them self-conscious and volatile. Krystelle, one of our most desired punks, whose photograph a great many of us displayed on the walls of our cells, made a vaguely catty remark too audibly about the bull dykes’ tottering, and the next thing you knew we were being indiscriminately tased to stop our rioting.

The warden threw the baby out with the bathwater, taking all future mixers off the social calendar, though we’d obviously done fine in a less formal setting. For recreation, we now had to be content with fielding teams to compete against those from The Men’s Correctional Facility at Corpulence, a minimum security lockup popular with the sort of corporate malfeasant whose acts hurt incalculably more people than any 100 muggers’ and drug dealers’ put together. We ate their lunch, so to speak, at baseball, basketball, bowling, and touch football, but they trounced us mercilessly at golf, tennis, croquet, and sailing. We minimized damage to our collective self-esteem by agreeing to regard the latter as less manly.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

My daughter hasn’t spoken to me in eight years, and may never speak to me again, but I believe nonetheless that I’ve done better at parenting than any other job I’ve had. So at the beginning of March, as I observed the first anniversary of my most recent banishment from actual employment, I began to look into adoption.

Naturally, I’d have preferred a white child, preferably one with blue eyes, but the only blue-eyed white kids a single man can adopt nowadays are Romanians, and I remembered too well the nightmare my former semi-sister-in-law’s (hereinafter, my fossil) adoption of Romanian twin boys turned into. They seemed quite sweet at the airport, but she’d hardly gotten them home before they started trying to burn her house down and behead her in her sleep. The child psychologist to whom she took them didn’t speak Romanian, but speculated they might have anger issues owing to having been abandoned by their birth mother and raised by sadists.

The medications that were prescribed for them calmed them down considerably, but then the elder, Virgillu, reached adolescence, and the first thing he did was seduce my fossil’s female mail carrier. They eloped to Mexico together, my fossil’s mail wasn’t delivered for weeks, she fell behind on her mortgage payments, the bank foreclosed, and she and the twin left behind wound up living in her Honda Accord, for which she was unable to afford gas because the only place Alexandreu would eat was Red Lobster, which may seem cheap if you go there once in a blue moon for a special occasion, but which takes a real bite out of a high school teacher’s paycheck if she has to go there every night.

Heartened by the realization that some of our most noted entertainers — Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga — had all adopted children of African origin — and yes, yes, I know that if you go back far enough, we’re all of African origin — I was all set to fly over to see what Maui, from which Maddie had gotten hers, could offer in the way of orphans when Haiti, in the USA’s own watery back yard, was devastated by the January 12 earthquake, and my broker texted to urge me to get down to Port-au-Prince sharpish.

At first, I regretted my decision, as all the decent hotels left standing were full of journalists. But then I realized that for the money I’d been planning to spend adopting a Mauian kid, I could get five or six little Haitians. I went for it with hardly a moment’s hesitation, getting five boys. Fearing they might be ridiculed at school by children whose parents had voted against John Kerry because he speaks French, I gave them new American names — Jamaal, Rashid, Jamir, Rayshawn, and Kayshawn — on the plane home. Waiting for the airport bus at JFK, I realized that Rayshawn and Kayshawn sounded nearly identical enough to cause confusion and resentment, and decided that the former could retain his original name of Antoine, though now spelled Antawn.

Back home in Beacon, my friends and family greeted us with naked skepticism. How on earth, as an unemployable old person, did I suppose I was going to feed, clothe, and educate five young men, the youngest of whom wouldn’t reach 18 for 11 more years? I explained that I viewed the adoption as an investment. I would to enroll the boys in a basketball academy as soon as I got them squared away in elementary school; the chances of at least one of them making it either to the NBA, in which the minimum salary is now $25 million per season, or one of the better-paying European leagues struck me as pretty good. Failing that, I felt that the odds favored at least one of them becoming a major league middle infielder, as Haitians share a genetic gene pool with Dominicans, and can you name a single MBL team lacking a Dominican shortstop in 2010? Well, all right: Derek Jeter, but that’s only because of his endorsement deal with Ford, which I understand spends a great, great deal of money keeping him in the Yankees’ starting lineup.

As I write this, everything’s going much as I’d hoped. Jamaal, the second eldest of the boys, can already dunk at 13, and Jamir, who I’m not supposed to know encourages his little classmates to call him Jimmy, has been shown to have the highest IQ in the history of the Beacon School District. When we play Scrabble, the boys try implacably to sneak Kreyol words past me, and sometimes I let them, having found out the hard way how important it is to try to meet your kids halfway.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

My Gift Is My Blog, and This One's for You

I reviewed Elton John’s (American) debut album in Rolling Stone. I actually loathed most of it — the pompous orchestrations, the cringe-inducingly awful lyrics, the vocal affectations. I liked the way he sang the beginnings of the verses of "Your Song" enough, though, to be moved to uncharacteristic generosity, and gave it a middling-tending-toward-positive review.

If only I’d stopped him in his tracks, as I’d earlier stopped Led Zeppelin. The Tumbleweed Connection album, on which he and his ludicrous lyricist Bernie Taupin sought to evoke an American West they’d seen from 35,000 feet or in horse operas, struck me as pretentious crapola of the most egregious sort. Nor was I much happier when he lightened up and got popular, with the excruciating "Crocodile Rock," which celebrated the legacy of Neil fucking Sedaka. Well, Neil fucking Sedaka’s Brill Building pop had stained my early adolescence, and I was goddamned if had the slightest patience with his legacy being celebrated. (And then, a few years later, those other great faves of mine, The Captain & Tennille, whose only contribution to Western culture is having inspired Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” ended one of their own hits by chirping, “Sedaka’s back!” For me, they might as well have chirped, “Polio’s not cured after all!”)

My girlfriend worked for the publicist who, at Elton’s famous LA debut, at the Troubadour, had scurried from writer to writer shrieking, “Fan-fucking-TAS-tic!” after Elton stopped boring everybody half to death with his Sensitive Ballads and did his little Jerry Lee Lewis homage at the end. She reported that Elton was actually a reasonably nice person, self-effacing and humble. Bernie paid me the compliment of being visibly intimidated when we were introduced, and their art director, a Brit called David Larkin, was nice to both me and my girlfriend. I continued to find Elton’s music noxious, but when he performed at Dodger Stadium dressed as Donald Duck, I was prepared to let bygones be bygones.

Shortly after the release of the Guns N’ Roses album on which the purportedly Elton-admiring Axl Rose railed against “niggers” and “faggots,” Elton, who’d bravely (no sarcasm!) revealed his homosexuality well before, publicly embraced Rose, and I wasn’t so sure I didn’t admire his having done so, as I believe that no person can hope for genuine enlightenment without confronting the things that he fears and hates most. For this reason, I habitually seek out eloquent expressions of viewpoints opposite my own. I hoped Elton might be doing something similar, though I’d have found that much easier to believe if he’d persuaded his new bud to tell millions of GNR fans that he’d come to recognize both racism and homophobia as repugnant.

Not long thereafter, Elton embraced the comparably homophobic Eminem. Once again, the friendship produced no mea culpa, and I got the unpleasant feeling that Elton was doing a grownup version of what small or timid grade school boys do with bullies — cozy up to them in hopes of being admitted to their entourages; better a little self-loathing then the relentless persecution! Maybe they hate faggots, Elton’s behavior seemed to say, but they like me!

Now we learn that he entertained at the recent wedding of the racist, homophobic, misogynistic (or maybe not) right-wing radio personality Rush Limbaugh, reportedly for a million dollars. As you’ve read here before, I’m not entirely sure that Limbaugh, like Glen Beck, isn’t a master satirist in the Sascha Baron Cohen mode, and that his stentorian loathsomeness isn’t intended to make his audience recognize its own stupidity. I am pretty sure his work causes widespread suffering, but the "Throw the Jew Down the Well" scene in Borat might have heartened a few antisemites. If we’re going to grant Baron Cohen satirical license, as a society that prizes freedom of expression must, how can we withhold it from Limbaugh?

In the end, one of two things is true. Elton John is either in on a joke that you and I aren’t quite sharp enough to savor, or a vile little whore who sold out one of the Great Causes of our time for a million dollars.

I wouldn’t have considered it for less than $10 million, and the opportunity to debate Limbaugh live on the air.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]