The Warden's Birthday Party

The warden’s birthday is by the most eagerly anticipated event on the Mahomesh Men’s Medium Security Detention Facility’s fall calendar. The races mix in a way you just don’t see the rest of the year. The Aryan Brotherhood will invite a motherfucker from MS-13 to have brunch with them. Motherfuckers from the Mexican Mafia play squash with members of one of the several Asian triads. Motherfuckers usually content to slob around in T-shirts, PJ bottoms, and flip-flops suddenly find cigarettes and crack with which to bribe motherfuckers who work in the laundry to launder and press their dress chartreuses to perfection. Even the surliest correctional officers have smiles on their faces.

This year, some of the motherfuckers with musical talent decided it would be fun to put a band together to play at the warden’s birthday party. The warden is known to love The Eagles, Tom Petty, and Public Enemy, and the idea was to learn maybe a dozen of those acts’ biggest hits. D’Mock Ra-C and LaDrayvon Willis, from the Crips, were the obvious choices to play drums and bass, respectfully, as they’d backed a popular Beyonce imitator in Los Angeles. Gonsalvo Gutierrez — Double-G to his “homies”— came in on trumpet.

No fewer than four members of the Brotherhood, the Scrodham twins, Feekle and Aynl, Butch Whatever (I suspect not even the Department of Corrections knows his last name), and Butch’s “girlfriend”, Leon(a) Willits, all wanted to play guitar. The chaplain, who’d been put in the charge of the project on the strength of having been an assistant choirmaster at of Texas’s biggest megachurches, thought four guitarists was probably two too many, but Butch pointed out that many of the most popular Southern rock bands of the 1970s and ‘80s — Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Marshall Tucker Band, The Gypsy Kings, et al — had as many as half a dozen guitarists, usually with really hideous hair — and the chaplain demurred.

Early rehearsals were disheartening. None of the four guitarists actually knew how to tune his (or, in Leon(a)’s case, “her”) Telecaster, Gonsalvo seemed to think of himself as the Latin Dizzy Gillespie, and never shut up, and the Crips rhythm section’s disdainful sneering hurt his and the white musicians’ feelings, to the point at which Butch Whatever tried to cram one of D’Mock's drumsticks where the sun don’t shine, and was expelled from the band.

To everyone’s surprise, the warden himself wanted to replace him as the band’s lead singer. He claimed that whenever he performed at a karaoke bar, everyone just loved it, but it must have been because he was heavily armed. Feekle Scrodham was overheard to remark to Leon(a), “Motherfuck couldn’t carry a tune in a Department of Corrections bus.” Thinner-skinned than is a good idea in the entertainment industry, the warden ordered that Feekle’s execution be fast-tracked for two weeks sooner than originally scheduled.

Tom Petty himself sounded pretty feeble in the chorus of his hit Free Fallin’, with an apostrophe, barely winging the first note {“free”) in passing. Far better that, though, than the warden seeming to decide that the chorus should be sung not only in a key at odds with the rest of the song, but heretofore unknown. “Yo,” LaDrayvon chuckled after the group’s first run-through of the song, “we be in G. You in H.” The warden made some calls and got him too fast-tracked for execution, though insider trading had never been before been punished by death in Minnesota.

Behold My Pathos!

Eddie Money, two years my junior, dies, and I’m reminded that I’m living now on borrowed time. The girl after whom I lusted most implacably at 14 and 15 (and to whom I was of course too shy ever to speak) died of some awful degenerative disease three years ago. I feel as though being hustled down a long corridor lined by the locked doors of shops that no longer desire my custom. Someone must have come in the night and replaced my American passport with one from a country to which one gains (is condemned to) citizenship only at the age at which he wakes up aching and barely recognises himself.

My life in a nutshell. I was very successful as a writer starting at 21. I didn’t think I was very good, thought the world was playing a cruel practical joke by celebrating me as avidly as it did, and hid beneath a layer of feigned arrogance. By 27, I’d apparently passed my sell-by date, and have spent the past four-plus decades trying to regain some semblance of my early stature. I’m a thousand times better now than I was then, and a marginally better person, And I can’t get arrested. Behold my pathos! Struggling not to surrender the boredom and depression that have been trying from the age of six to drown me from within, I spend my days trying to make things — songs, short stories, graphic design — that will amuse and interest others, and maybe even inspire their admiration. They’re nearly universally ignored, not least by my wife. In desperation, I try to make people laugh on Facebook, hoping someone might say, “Wow, John, you sure can write/ sure are hilarious.” Few do. The world is in a meeting every time I call.

People mock Donald Trump (11 months my senior) and Joe Biden for having lost several miles-per-hour on their intellectual fastballs. There are terrifying signs that I might have begun my own descent into the dementia that robbed my mother and grandmother of so much of themselves. I read my purportedly amusing comments on FB the day after composing them, and am horrified by the number of errors they contain. Some months ago I designed a meme that depicted Donald Trump with the inscription Find the Cure. Ten days after posting it, I checked to see how many had commented (as usual, a tiny handful) and discovered that it actually said Fund the Cure. 

I pride myself on not being pot-bellied. I have worked out, in one way or another, pretty much every day since the age of 29, but my days of sleekness are numbered. My principal exercise now is walking, but my knees are making clear I shouldn’t make long-range plans for them. My arthritic right shoulder has been replaced twice. The left one has been whining less and less ignorably, “Hey, what about me?” I pump (an old man’s share of) iron for definition, and my shoulder screams, “WTF, dude!”

I don’t like my own country any more, and am bored senseless with my life in the UK. I think of moving to Spain, but because my Spanish refuses to get good enough for me to have the sort of probing conversations I love, laced with irony and innuendo, I will spend whatever time I don’t spend in solitude with others my own age. Expat retirees, talking about their grandchildren. I find the prospect terrifying. 

I don’t feel I’ve done a sensational job of being alive, but am frightened of ceasing to be. I am weirdly grateful about the fact that I’ll probably be gone before the climate apocalypse. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to die in agony. 

The world has no way of knowing who I’ve been — and who, for better or worse — I remain within. No one can tell from looking at me that I was once a dashing rock god, an avid seducer of pretty girls, a writer of international repute, one to whom women in diners slipped their phone numbers as I swaggered back to my table from the gentlemen’s room. The creases in my face grow deeper and more numerous. My multiple orthopaedic problems severely limit my swaggering. There’s hair on my head, but it grows ever thinner. I must remember not to open my mouth very wide, for I have grown long in the tooth. The world looks at me and sees: An Old Man — mutton dressed, in my skinny jeans and motorcycle jacket, as lamb.

I am not only older, of course, but wiser, if by wiser you mean acutely aware of— and deeply, deeply aggrieved by — what a jerk and fool I’ve been for much of my life. Given a choice between the wisdom the decades have bestowed on me and the beauty and sexual charisma I never really believed I had (growing up feeling like the dregs of humanity will do that to you), I’d take the beauty and sexual charisma in a heartbeat. 

Yet Another Remembrance of Erotic Thwartedness

I first met Bettina straight out of college, just as my career as a dancer was beginning. She was married — at 21, which seemed awfully young to me — to another chorus boy, Eddy, with whom I found myself working on The Carol Burnett Show, The Sonny & Cher Show, and the short-lived Chester Burnett Show, the viewing audience’s indifference to which scared producers from presenting anything similar until The Stevie Ray Vaughn Blues ’n’ Comedy Hour in 1983. She had emigrated with her family from Guadalajara to Los Angeles when she was a child, and was intent on becoming one of southern California’s pre-eminent dermatologists. 

As we entered our 30s, with the embarrassment of people unaware of how gloriously young we still were at that age, and would in fact remain for years to come, she left Eddy for a younger member of the dance troupe he’d put together to entertain on army bases, and was ordained to practice medicine. She bought the practice of a retiring San Fernando Valley-based eczema specialist and began earning much, much money. Physicians commonly drive far nicer cars than chorus boys, and she was no exception. 

Younger Member cheated on her, and she left him for a Belgian alcoholic with whom she had two sons. I suspect she wasn’t aware of his alcoholism when she married him. She lived with her boys in Boys Town, West Hollywood’s gay neighbourhood, where tastefulness in attire and interior decoration was rampant, and more moisturiser was used per capita than anywhere else in Los Angeles County. I periodically consulted her regarding my adult acne, and to get exfoliated. At one visit, her hygienist told me Bettina always made sure her makeup was perfect before stepping into the examination room in which I waited. That worked for me, and how! 

She left the Belgian alcoholic, and my first wife left me, and there we were, two attractive young (though we may not have realised it at the time) single brunets. Coming in to see her about my skin, I got wind of the fact that she had a birthday coming up, and asked if I might take her to a deluxe birthday brunch. 

I wore the capacious Stop Making Sense suit I’d bought in London, and was still in my 30s when I came to collect her on the big day. She, fan of British music and fashion, was palpably impressed, but not a tenth as impressed as I, as she greeted me at the door in the shortest skirt in the history of clothing, and stilettos. That worked for me, and how! We took her Mercedes to a chic bistro on La Cienega Blvd. and conversed amiably. God knows how I was able to think straight over the din of my every gland bellowing, "Secrete! Secrete!"

We returned to her home for what I had hoped would be an evening of wild torrid heterosexuality. Boy, was it not, as she turned out not to fancy me to the extent her makeup-freshening and scandalously short skirt might have suggested. I didn’t insist, but imagined that if I were to remove my suit, and all else, and to display my gorgeous self in full, her inhibitions might melt away like lemon drops. I was still running for slenderness in those days, before my knees and ankles began howling, “Enough already!”, and going regularly to the gym for muscularity. I imagined that the sight of Little Elvis in full preparedness might do the trick, but no such thing was the case. 

We made plans to go out again when I returned to Los Angeles the following month for Thanksgiving weekend. She’d decided to take her boys out of town for the weekend, and hadn’t thought I might have appreciated being so advised. I saw the writing on the wall and it said, “This doesn’t look like it’s going to work, big boy.” 

Friends of Many Lands, All Missed Terribly

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I volunteered for the Los Angeles Public Library’s adult literacy programme. My first student was an LA-born busboy from Oaxaca called Isaí, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met in spite of having been raised by a hyper-abusive religious zealot father. (My best friend, Darryll, who may be the sweetest person I’ve ever known, was himself the son of hyper-abusive religious zealot father. Maybe more people ought to try it.) I also tutored Arturo, a former gang-banger from San Salvador, Ivan, a Colombian janitor who was furious at himself for having “partied” (that is, drunk) himself through high school, and was desperate to escape “monkey work”, a middle-aged Korean former politician turned acupuncturist, and a succession of young Korean moms, most of them unnervingly pretty.

I loved the work, and my students, but hate people who make noise in libraries, and didn’t want to be one of them, and coffee shops were too noisy. So I broke the programme’s rules and invited my students to study with me in my home. One of the young Korean women, by far the most outgoing of them, told me she had trouble sleeping, and I wondered aloud if she’d considered medical marijuana. The programme got wind of the fact that I was teaching in my home and offering my students drugs, and called all my students to tell them to break off relations with me. It broke my heart.

I designed a little flyer advertising my services and taped it up in Latino and Korean neighbourhoods. I got few disappointingly few responses, but one was from a Korean architect who lived in another of the high-rises on the Park La Brea estate. He was Hyuntak to his wife and Korean friends, but David to his colleagues at work, and to me. I felt that we liked each other from the first moment we sat down together to discuss his goals. He worried that he wasn’t expressing himself well professionally. In fact, his English was flawless —and better than about 99 percent of my American friends’. At our first session, I wrote two sentences. She likes swimming more than me and She likes swimming more than I, and asked which was grammatically correct. He correctly answered that both were, though with different meanings. I would guess that 19 of 20 of my acquaintances wouldn’t have passed that test.

He was a musician, a bass player and guitarist. He brought his guitar over one Saturday afternoon and we played Four Non-Blondes’ What’s Going On? at some length. He sang well. He came over a couple of weeks later to watch my band The Romanovs rehearse. We were pretty ragged that night, but David was generous with his praise.

I moved back to the UK. David and I of course assured each other we’d stay in touch, and haven’t very much.

My other favourite student was Arouna, from Burkina Faso. He too was fantastically sweet, though for the first couple of weeks I had to ask him to repeat everything he said four or five times. He was multilingual, and apparently spoke magnificent French, and his English sounded French. He found hilarious the idea of black Americans calling themselves African American. He was extremely bright, and I tried to help him get a job teaching French or at least working at L’Occitaine, but he eventually had to settle for a janitorial job at a local hospital. As were so many of my students, he was mocked by his work colleagues for his imperfect and heavily accented English. I advised him to ask his tormentors how many languages they spoke, and to point out that he spoke four, counting the two Ivorian dialects. When his colleagues, all monolingual, failed to get the point, I suggested that he advise them in one of his dialects, “I’d love to continue this conversation, but I have an appointment to fuck your mother.” I thought he might find that cathartic. He got a job at Trader Joe’s, which changed his name to Aroun because they thought Arouna sounded feminine, and has just been awarded a bachelor’s degree from UCLA. I love him to pieces, though we speak infrequently.

Soufiane [surname withheld because he’s up for a prestigious Government Position in a Middle Eastern country I won’t mention] was the concierge at the hotel at which Cowgirl Zelda and I stayed in his hometown, Agadir, Morocco, in 2016. He too was multilingual, and good enough at English to appreciate my sense of humour, laden as it is with wordplay and irony. The first night at the resort, I won the grand prize of a bottle of cheap champagne in a guest talent contest. I gave it to Souf, who I think at the time had never tasted alcohol. I gather he liked it — a lot. He’s approximately as devout a Muslim as I am a Jew.

I Revolutionise Rock Poster Art!

In 1966, this hung in my dormitory room!

I wasn’t gigantic on the San Francisco rock boom. Indeed, I detested most of it. I thought most of the bands were ugly, and nearly all of the music self-indulgent. I don’t think there’s ever been another time when so many mediocre instrumentalists felt called upon to display their lack of talent for what seemed hours on end. I found Janis shrill and imitative. I found the Dead numbingly boring. Jefferson Airplane had a couple of nice tracks, but their fervent smugness put me off. 

But I loved Wes Wilson’s art nouveau-inspired posters for the Fillmore Auditorium as much as I hated most of the San Francisco bands whose names you might have been able to make out on them if you figured out Wes’s ultra-psychedelic lettering, inspired by that of the Austrian poster artist Alfred Roller. And boy, did I figure it out, to the point of being able to do a very credible imitation of it. 

Armed with my ability to imitate Wes Wilson’s lettering style and a great deal of bravado born out of stupidity, I ascertained the address at which Bill Graham, the city’s pre-eminent concert promoter, had his office, and, with a stack of the posters I’d drawn in my little dormitory room at UCLA while I should have been studying, and with a carload of bravado, headed for it. 

I hadn’t bothered phoning ahead to request an appointment. I was sort of a hippie — sometimes I attended class barefoot, and in a little necklace I’d made myself — and surely Bill had had much experience dealing with such free spirits as I. It hadn’t even occurred to me that Bill wouldn’t both see me and invite me to replace my idol as his in-house poster artist. 

I presented myself at his office. His young male assistant asked if I had an appointment. I rolled my eyes. How deeply uncool. The assistant did some eye-rolling of his own and asked me to wait a minute. He disappeared into an inner office, from which a window-rattling rumble of umbrage soon emanated. 

Himself stormed out to where I was waiting, breathing fire, glowering to melt the walls. He saw that I was innocence itself! — that is, a little twerp — and, instead of taking a large bite out of me, sighed, “You can have three minutes now, or longer than that later in the week if you make a fucking appointment and come back.” I gulped, and said I’d take the three minutes, as I was hitch-hiking back to Los Angeles later in the day.

He looked at my stuff, which I realise now wasn’t very good, except for the lettering. He was much kinder than I deserved. He studied my work with care, and complimented me on it.

In the end, though, I didn’t design a single Fillmore poster. Instead, my buddy Bill hired a woman I understood to be his girlfriend. Maybe he'd misplaced my phone number. Wes Wilson was heard from again 15 years into the 21st century, when a typeface named in his honour suddenly appeared. It misses the point that Wilson’s lettering was designed for curves, and doesn’t look gorgeous when all the characters are the same size. I went on to glorious careers as a polemicist, novelist, musician, actor, graphic designer, and humourist, knowing barely an hour’s frustration. 

Shot Down, and Hard!

After my little girl was born, and we moved up to the northern California wine country so she wouldn’t have to grow up breathing Los Angeles air pollution, cruel circumstances reduced me to looking for a soul-bruising, non-writing, non-singing, non-dancing day job. I got one, processing words at San Francisco’s biggest (and in many ways ghastliest) law firm, which was primarily in the business of defending a big oil company from environmental suits. 

I wasn’t good at the job, hated the idea of becoming good at the job, and got banished from posting after posting. (The firm had offices on multiple floors in three different Financial Center skyscrapers.) At one posting, I worked with two remarkable women, Kathleen McN— and Karen Nameforgotten. Both of them worked around 90 hours a week, 50 of them overtime, for which they were paid time and a half up to the point at which they started being paid double time. 

Consequently, they were earning around $70K a year (in mid-‘80s dollars), which they delighted in pointing out was more than the young associate attorneys — semiliterate and smug, every one of ‘em! — got. They spent a lot of money on stylish attire which they didn’t have time to wear anywhere but the office. I thought there must be something terribly wrong with them. Were they not American materialism made flesh? They thought there was something terribly wrong with me because I wasn’t good at word processing and had promised myself not to get better.

My first marriage was falling apart around the time I worked with them, and I’d begun looking around for new gals to woo. Karen Nameforgotten wasn’t attractive, and Kathleen and I seemed to be allergic to each other, as in I couldn’t stand her.

Or maybe I’d been mistaken. After I got banished from the group they served, and sent elsewhere, she was always the soul of cordiality when filling in for someone with whom I’d been partnered. I dared imagine she had come to find me a bit of all right, and phoned her on a particularly lonely Friday evening to ask if she might like to come over after work (assuming she wasn’t going to work straight through to Monday morning, and earn herself some megabucks) and help me drink a bottle of pinot grigio I hadn’t actually bought yet, but she didn’t need to know that. 

Her response — disdainful incredulity — reminded me of that of a pair of cutie-pies my friend Chief and I had approached on Santa Monica Beach one sunny summer afternoon around a quarter-century earlier. Said the cutie-pies, on getting a good look at us, scrawny and snide, shy and cynical, twerps. “Why don’t you two go find someone your own age?” It was entirely  possible that we didn’t look our combined 32 years. 

Kathleen McN— knew full well I wasn’t too young for her — I was forever telling her and Karen that I had no intention of turning 40 as an employee of Perfidy, Malfeasance & Sutro, as I remember the firm being called — but that made her no thirstier. It might have been she was planning to see the bit-of-rough taxi driver she was forever rhapsodizing about when not rhapsodizing about the small fortune she’d earned the previous week. 

It dawned on me that Kathleen’s cordiality had been born of the very slight danger that I might speak ill of her at my new postings, and thus make it impossible for her to earn, earn, earn! in every office of the firm’s many floors.

I wound up turning not just 40 at PM&S, but also 41, and wooing and winning the koala keeper from the San Francisco Zoo, who neither made $70K/year nor dressed terribly stylishly, but who looked like Michelle Pfeiffer, and found me sufficiently amusing to share my life for the next 11 years.

The Beach Boys: An Appreciation

The Beach Boys did for surfers what David Bowie did 10 years later for bisexuals. Known for their annoying patois, bushy, bushy blond hairdos, and sun-damaged skin, surfers had been denied a table in the lunchrooms of southern California high schools since before the introduction of public education. At my own junior high school, one of the German-surnamed fascist PE instructors had informed us boys that surfers’ penchant for lightening their hair with hydrogen peroxide was indicative of incipient homosexuality. After the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ Safari was No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart for nine consecutive weeks, though, high school surfers got to eat lunch near the cool kids’ table.

Originally from the godforsaken 110 percent white south-of-Los-Angeles suburb Hawthorne, the Boys comprised the Wilson brothers — Brian, Carl, Jackie, Marlon, Tito, Randy, Flip, and Woodrow — their oft-maligned cousin Mike Love, who’d begun losing his hair at an age when most male babies are first starting to grow hair, and a neighbour, Glen Campbell. The only one of them who actually surfed was Jackie, but the oft-maligned Mike Love had the perfect surfer voice — nasal, insouciant, and suggesting that he’d never heard a black person sing.

They were spectacularly corny in every way. Their name was corny (though not as corny as that which they’d started with, and been forbidden to retain — The Pendletones). Their attire (short-sleeved sports shirts of the sort popularised years before by the fervently collegiate folkies The Kingston Trio) was corny. Their harmonies, inspired by the likes of The Four Freshmen and The Five Caucasians, were corny. Pendleton wool shirts, earlier the province of lumberjacks, had somehow become hugely popular among surfers even though they had to be worn as jackets — that is, over another long-sleeved shirt — because they were woolen and scratchy. 

After their early hits about surfing, they sang for a while about cars, which I, for one, found enormously disheartening. At my high school, many miles north of Hawthorne, but south of Malibu, boys clearly destined to become Real Men a few years hence would gather in the student parking lot to admire each other’s cam shafts and to debate the relative merits of Ford and Chevy. I couldn’t have been less interested, or felt more left out.

Felicitously, the Boys’ automotive phase was short-lived, as Brian began to enjoy psychedelic drugs and to lose his marbles. Their music became more adventurous. They used a theremin, heretofore the favoured instrument of composers of B-movies about mad scientists, on their big hit Good Vibrations, and hired Dick Van Dyke Parks & Recreation to write incomprehensible but apparently very arty lyrics that (understandably!) inspired the oft-maligned Mike Love to remark, “WTF?” 

In the early 70s, in a brazen attempt to appear multiethnic, they hired a couple of South Africans, one of whom went on to star in The Rutles. No one was fooled.

Marble-less, Brian spent several years out of sight. When he finally re-emerged, slightly sleeker, and with slightly less terror in his eyes, he gave interviews in which he sounded like a six-year-old, or, if you prefer, Chance the Gardener. The oft-maligned Mike Love, who’d taken to flouncing around on stage like Mick Jagger on estrogen supplements, gave a speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that offended everyone, and went on to great success as a white alternative to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell with his own cousin Courtney Love. 

I have always found discomfitingly ambiguous the lyrics of their iconic hit God Only Knows. I may not always love you, Carl sings, “but long as there are stars above you, I’ll never make you doubt it…” Am I the only one who, in that, hears the singer saying he’ll continue to pretend to love whomever he’s singing to even after he’s stopped loving her, and begun spending more and more nights “at the office, catching up some some stuff”? 

Today I Am a Man!

I grew up in the third or fourth most secular household in human history. For my dad, born in New York City and brought up in southern New Jersey, being a Jew was more tribal than spiritual. He was Jewish as others at his high school were Irish or Italian. My mother, from Minneapolis, seemed to derive perverse pleasure from imagining that others were able to intuit that she was Jewish, and disliked her for it. I think they both had a sense of the High Holy Days being in the autumn. Beyond that, they knew as much about Judaism as I know about Zoroastrianism.

I was dragged along to synagogue for Yom Kippur maybe twice as a boy, and 40 years later composed a song, for my album of songs about holidays Irving Berlin hadn’t gotten around to, called “(Everywhere You Look) It’s Yom Kippur”. In my childhood home I learned that the goyim —gentiles — were prone to alcoholism and deficient personal hygiene. My maternal grandfather had gotten rich as a liquor wholesaler. 

I didn’t sign up, halfway through my 13th year, to be bar mitzvahed because i believed in Judaism, but because my sole friend, Ronald Siegel, was going to do it. If I were to be deprived of his companionship, I thought, I might as well enlist too. I had of course heard tales of boys being given large bagfuls of money for their bar mitzvahs, and the prospect wasn’t without appeal. 

We studied Judaism at Temple Israel of Westchester, the not-terribly-interesting southwest Los Angeles neighbourhood just north of Los Angeles International Airport. TIW was presided over by the most unpleasant old bastard in the history of organised religion. Mordecai I. Soloff. His breath could have decimated a small village back in the Old Country, or in the new one. His nostrils seemed being big enough to hide copies of his book When the Jewish People Was Young, which our parents were compelled to buy for us. I was troubled by his use of was rather than were. 

Mordecai I. Soloff seemed to have modelled himself after the vengeful, perpetually disgruntled, vengeful God of the Old Testament. He was perpetually pissed off, usually by boys behaving like boys rather than 45-year-old Talmudic scholars. Did I mention his room-clearing breath?

The only thing I liked about Hebrew school, which I had to attend one weekday afternoon every week, and every Saturday morning, was that a girl in the pre-bat mitzvah class wore seamed stockings, which I was pleased to discover I found enormously sexy, though I was of course too shy to speak to her. 

Came the big day, that on which I would wear a suit, read from the Holy Scrolls, and, in my little piping just-turned-13-year-old’s voice, declare myself a man. Pretty much no one came. Rabbi Soloff, furious about it, ordered his various instructors to end their lessons prematurely so that their little charges could fill some of the great many empty seats in the synagogue. I was nervous, and during my reading from the Torah, forgot for a moment that I was supposed to read each word before, rather than after, Mordecai I. Soloff pointed at it with a little golden pointer. Mordecai I. Soloff fairly trembled with indignation. Surely I was offending Jehovah himself.

Other boys in my class raked in $200 for their trouble. I got $12 (in fairness, $5,230 in 2019 dollars), a cheap wristwatch, and a nail care kit. But I did enjoy the after party, as there were delicious cold cuts from an actual delicatessen. Seamed Stockings Girl was nowhere to be seen.

Back at Orville Wright Junior High School, I, now a man in the eyes of my religion, walked from class to class with new confidence. Not. But I will point out that a favourite recreation of the sons of the local bigots, who otherwise amused themselves by torturing the school spastic, was to roll pennies in front of smaller, meeker classmates. By picking up the penny — and one could buy a delicious Tootsie Roll in those days for a penny — one exposed himself as Jewish. 

For his own bar mitzvah, I think Ronald Siegel got $500 and a Mustang convertible, though he would have to wait three years to be able to drive it legally.

If Judaism was Mordecai I. Soloff, I thought, a pox on it. When I stopped turning up at Hebrew school, he phoned and bellowed at me. I put forth the view that I owed him nothing. He bellowed more loudly. I could almost smell his ghastly breath over the phone. I stood my ground. It was one of the finest hours of my early adolescence, which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly jam-packed with fine hours. 

My Nite of Sin With the Late Jerry Garcia

A lot of the members of the Tri-Cities Body Shamers turned up late for their annual picnic this year for fear of Earle Whatshisface seizing the spotlight (though it was an afternoon event) and droning on for days about how he’d tweaked his famous pork marinade, of which no one had ever heard — behold its fame! — before he joined the group. The methamphetamine abusers — and let’s not pretend there aren’t methamphetamine users in every walk of current American life — took umbrage at Earle’s having co-opted “tweak”. 

Every years Bettye Flores’ Ladies Auxiliary set up between the arm-wrestling and cornholing concessions a little tablefor the umbrage of which one of the gals had whipped up a batch of umbrage a couple of days before. Betty’s sign painter husband Jeff, who had come out as gay, but that was between him and The Lord and whichever members of the local high school’s wrestling team he was able to lure into his Econoline with promises of fudge and cold Fanta, had made an attractive sign that urged, “Help Urself!” He’d gotten the cool, fanciful new spelling of “yourself” from a text message one of his wrestlers had sent him: F*** urself u perv uve runed my life, except with real letters rather than asterisks. 

There was always entertainment, and this year’s was a humdinger, with Buddy Whatshisface, Earle’s boy, telling topical jokes he’d gotten off YouTube, and then Denise Connors performing with her customary annoying earnestness a set of songs about being a lesbian of colour even though she was neither. Many of Buddy’s jokes were about how stupid Democrats were. The one about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not having to pay full price when she consulted a mind reader made those who got it howl delightedly. One of them waved his MAGA cap in jubilation, and exclaimed, “You got that right!” as though a truck driver and not a warehouseman at Sam’s Club.

As in previous years, some of the tweakers had tried to get the Mötörhead tribute band from Perky onto the bill, but the bass player had become a little bit too fond of fudge and Fanta over the years, and it wouldn’t do for the shamers to be entertained by an obie (from obese), now would it? It wasn’t as though those who’d been privileged to witness the real Mötörhead’s solo local performance, over in Famine in 1991, didn’t love the music, but they loved it less, at the end of the day, and in early afternoon, than they hated obies.

The group’s problem was that, the more their annual picnic got written up in the local newspapers, the fewer obies made themselves available to be ridiculed. It wasn’t until nearly three this past Sunday afternoon that an overweight family no one recognised waddled over to the edge of the lake, Papa and Uncle carrying between them a small inflatable swimming pool full of day-old-looking baked goods — cupcakes and pies and muffins and what have you. They’d hardly had a chance to spread their blanket before several body shamers dashed over to demand to know why they didn’t buy themselves gym memberships. “Don’t you got a mirror at your house?” Earle of the tweaked marinade demanded, as he did every year, and the others shrieked dutifully in amusement. “What’s your Body Mass Index?” one of the tweakers, heretofore not heard from, tried, “around a hundred?” Several of the others high-fived him for that, as the obies’ roly-poly children burst into tears.

“You’ll thank us for this later in life, hon,” Bettye Flores wheezed, sort of maternally, spelling hon properly. “If you count your calories and join a gym, you’ll actually have a later life.” Betty had never set foot in a gym, but smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and her emphysema kept her slender.

Many agreed that Earle’s pork marinade had been over-tweaked, and become tumeric-heavy, but of course they were comparing the 2019 version to their memory of previous years’, which would never have held up in a court of law, or tennis. 

The Leader: He Is Born

At around 24 months after their births, many children go through a period of shrill truculence popularly known as The Terrible 2s. The Leader had early gone through The Woeful Ones, and would later go through his Threatening 3s, during which he warned his siblings and parents thwarted him that he would harm them in ways he didn’t yet have the vocabulary to convey. By four, he’d become so rambunctious that his parents had to set aside their skepticism about psychology and take him to a child psychologist, not yet 11, who advised them that what their son was actually suffering from was unruliness. After extensive research, his parents decided on a military-themed facility known to be staunchly ruly.  Mater thought the pupils perfectly adorable in their tiny uniforms. Photographs from the time affirm that TL was particularly adorable in his. 

As he grew older, and rose through “the ranks”, The Leader, though not gifted academically, came to excel at bullying. Where other boys were content to relieve weaker classmates of their lunch money, The Leader went the extra mile, inviting his victims to reach down his trousers for the money, knowing that if they did, his paid sycophants would beat them senseless for being "fags". On other occasions, if someone had thrown up on the playground, The Leader would put the money he’d stolen in the sick, from which he’d mock his victim in a manner not reminiscent of Tucker Carlson’s — but only because Tucker wouldn’t even be born until years later — for not extracting it. “Whatsamatter?” he’d pretend to wonderwhile his sycophants shrieked with laughter,  “I thought you wanted your money back.”

Between third and seventh grades, The Leader was expelled from his school nine times, and then readmitted 10 when his father, the biggest retailer of racist supplies in the Northeast, offered to buy the school a new sandbox or something. 

Beginning secondary school at St. Darren the Egregious, whose credo, in Latin at the bottom of the school crest, was We groom tomorrow’s despots, The Leader conferred with one of the school’s counsellors. Noting TL’s subterranean grades in everything but bullying, the counsellor urged him to consider a career with the TSA or Border Patrol, though at the time the TSA wasn’t yet a tingling in the far right’s loins. The Leader’s intuition — later proved accurate — was that his future lay in pretending to be a successful businessman on television. He asked which courses could prepare him for that, and the counsellor suggested Drama, but TL thought the teacher might be a fag, and got Pater to have him drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he was killed in combat.

The Leader achieved the captaincy of St. Darren’s junior varsity cheating team after being observed to excel at hiring ringers to pass his exams for him. Where his classmates decorated the walls of their dormitory rooms with centrefolds from Playboy magazine, The Leader had the women they depicted, posing as tutors, brought to his golden private room, with its $18K toilet seat and cupboardful of antibacterial aerosol — always  aerosol! — sprays. He got pater to rent the two rooms to the left of his own and knock down the wall between them, and then to turn the one huge room into an office in which one of Pater’s team of gynaecologists could…treat anyone the young future leader had knocked up, and then compel to sign an affidavit stating that none of it had ever happened.

When he was or wasn’t getting Playmates of the Month pregnant, The Leader enjoyed organising groups to terrorise exchange students from countries whose names he could neither pronounce nor even spell, and activism, and was in the forefront of the student group that successfully demanded that the school’s support staff — janitors, cafeteria workers — parking lot be moved several blocks off-campus. Their cars embarrassed the students.

In his sophomore year, TL was caught spray-painting Your In America Talk American on the side of the school’s Spanish and Portuguese teacher’s Prius, and given a choice between being expelled and joining one of the school’s extracurricular clubs, all of which he believed to be faggy. He chose Debate, and soon proved himself a formidable, if unorthodox, debater. Where others wasted a lot of time learning about the subject to be debated, TL would just focus on his opponent’s physical peculiarities, and ridicule them. He was especially effective against self-loathing overweight girls with complexion problems. 

Academics weren’t his long suit. He thought homework was for fags, and informed his various instructors that he trusted his gut in every instance, and thus had no reason to spend his evenings pouring [his spelling] over boring textbooks while he could be impregnating Playmates of the Month, or not, as their signed affidavits affirmed.  He got his Remedial Mathematics instructor to change his grade from F to C-minus by hooking him up with Miss April ’67, who loved horses and planned to become a dental hygienist.

John Mendelssohn's Mid-2019 Social Media Friend Cull Personality Inventory

It occurred to me last night that, of my 14,382 Facebook friends, I would recognise no more than seven or eight if they sat down beside me on the bus. It is clearly time for a merciless culling. Help me in this by responding to the following at or before your earliest convenience,

What was it that made you want us to be friends? 

My nimble, zingy wit. 

My saturnine Semitic good looks. 

My kindness and generosity, 

My prodigious intellect. 

My having reviewed Led Zeppelin unfavourably well before your birth.

How do you remember feeling the day you either received a friend request from me, or I accepted yours? (Choose one from Column A, and one from Column B. No substitutions) 

As though walking on air

Ecstatic

Rhapsodic

Awesome

Joyful

Which do you enjoy most? (Choose six, in order).

My music

My graphic design 

My writing

My videos

My dancing, of which too few are aware. I am a natural. Show me even the most complicated routine and I will have it mastered by the time the pianist returns from her fag break.

What do you find most irresistible about me physically?

My gorgeous boyish body

My prominent, characterful nose

My unruly hair

My deformed-looking twice-replaced right shoulder

My stiff upper lip

Who do you most wish were like me? 

Husband 

Son 

Brother 

Bestie  

Worstie

Essay question, for gals only. I’ve always had a knack for saying exactly the right thing to women. Are you able to remember the first unforgettably wise, witty, or worldly thing I said to you? Example: "I guess what I’m doing now, during a period of what might look from the outside like unemployment, is finding…me."

Essay question, for dudes only. Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?

Essay question: Describe a time when you were feeling hopeless, or desolate, or lonely, nd found that thinking of me made you feel a lot better.

Thank you for your participation, and goodbye forever. 

The Trumpishness of Frank Zappa

I was thinking about Frank Zappa last night. I couldn’t stand the guy, and he couldn’t stand me. The only time I ever liked him was when he appeared on Crossfire with a gaggle of goons who loathed him on sight and described the USA as a fascist theocracy. I think he was overstating the case, but not by much, and if America’s Brownnose, Michael Richard Pence, ever becomes president, I suspect it won’t feel very much at all like overstatement.

Right out of the gate, Frank got on my tits with his veneration of the Father of Electronic Music, Gianni Versace. I wasn’t at all sure his tireless references to Versace’s alleged genius didn’t strike me as what the Brits of a then-far-off age would later call virtue-signalling. “I’m no mere Elvis and Beatles and Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers fan,” the references seemed to tell us, “but A Serious Artist.”

I was writing for a newspaper called The Los Angeles Times at the time of Frank’s ascendancy. I didn’t begin to get his music. Most of it seemed artsy-fartsy, and difficult for its own sake. One hears stories of how, when they auditioned for the great man, musicians like Steve Vai would have to play a particular piece of music in a succession of zany time signatures. It struck me that Frank imagined that if his band played an insipid piece of music in 11/8, it might seem less insipid. One was supposed to be very impressed that, when Frank gave a particular signal, one or several of his musicians would do something wacky, like fart or sneeze or ring a doorbell. As a lyricist, Frank was stuck on Mockery. He wanted to be perceived as a satirist, but was in fact no more than a name-caller. Jeering and sneering were his forte. I won't go so far as to suggest that it was a Trump-ish sort of satire. 

His movie 100 Motels, or 7 Shades of Grey, or whatever it was called, could probably have been less funny, but I’m not sure how.

When I failed to acknowledge his alleged genius, Frank struck back with a vengeance. In a letter to the Times, he asserted that I was a big-mouthed punk (not in the cool, Ramones T-shirt way) whose knowledge of music, if knowledge were water, couldn’t dampen a postage stamp.  He theorised that my zingily vituperative critical style suggested deep self-loathing. He was of course right in every case, but that didn’t make me enjoy the music any more.  

I remember now that I also liked Frank’s explanation of how everything got worse when record companies began hiring hip young A&R types who actually had a rudimentary idea of what they were listening to, rather than just taking the occasional wild chance on artists  the old guard didn’t begin to…get — artists like Zappa’s.

I think it was egotistical for Frank to give his children zany names for which they were sure to be cruelly ridiculed at school. That the children found the names onerous may be deduced from their having changed them, Moon Unit to Dorothy (later shortened to Dot), Dweezil to Earl, and Ahmet to Ahmad. Not, of course that I, who conspired to name my first son Nimrod (as suggested by a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band song, am one to point fingers.

Remembering Paula. Aching With the Memory

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My first live-together adult relationship ran aground, and I left Laurel Canyon for the Sunset Strip — specifically, for a 12-story apartment building right across from The Comedy Store and the infamous Continental Riot (nee Hyatt) House, from whose upper floors rock stars had taken to hurling television sets and virgins to appease the gods. My building was popular with prostitutes and drug dealers. I’d no interest in either. It was Paula who stole my heart, and took my fantasies captive. 

She looked like an Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew, or even Bill Ward drawing come to life. With her bouffant hair and dagger-toed high heels, she was of another time, that during which I, making collections for my paper route, would look over the shoulders of my bachelor subscribers, see their walls covered with pinups of bouffant-haired beauties and others in lingerie, and think, “One day I shall live among such images myself!”

I had no way of knowing for sure, but I’d have bet that Paula wore gartered stockings, and not pantyhose. It was the mid-1970s, but for Paula it would never cease to be 1962.

A year during which I had nearly come out of my skin with sexual yearning. Several of the sexiest young women in human history were my classmates at Orville Wright Junior High School, and my DNA was forever screaming at me, “Reproduce, Johnny, for God’s sake, boy!” But I was the prisoner of my own shyness, and Sue Pursell, for instance, had no inkling that I existed.

Looking as though she’d just stepped off the cover of one of the girlie magazines and adult paperback books that taunted me — they and I both knew the guy at the cash register would yell, “This ain’t a library, kid!” if I touched them — at the liquor store on Pershing and Manchester in which I would buy myself a snack after getting off the school bus each afternoon, Paula reawakened all those feelings, not least that of hopeless inadequacy. My fervently personable new girlfriend always greeted her delightedly in the elevator, but Paula and I never spoke, and I never found out if it was hauteur (be still, my beating heart!) Paula exuded, or shyness. I always assumed the former, and that, if I confessed what was in my heart, she would snicker cruelly, as Stanton’s and Bilbrew’s women did, so bewitchingly, and say, “You really must be kidding, sonny.”

And it wasn’t as though she wasn’t spoken for — by Jergen, who was German, and who obviously considered himself a playboy, as witness his white loafers without socks, and slicked-back hair and skinny man’s pot belly. He referred to the apartment he and Paula shared as “my joint.” I suspect he thought doing so made him sound gangsterish, or maybe he was anticipating Spike Lee. Paula seemed to worship him. He seemed to have no conception of how I envied him.

I thought of inviting her to see The Hollies at The Roxy with me, but was terrified of What Others Might Think. Paula, after all, was unimaginably ancient, probably in her waning forties, and I not yet 29. What would people say? I was doing my best in those days to be mistaken for a rock star, and succeeding a fair amount of the time, and Paula couldn’t have been less rock and roll. I had my reputation to think of!

I kick myself.

Eyewitness to Genius: I Was Tom Petty's Valet

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The world was my oyster. Such was my gorgeousness that I couldn’t walk through a bistro, heading toward or back from the men’s room, without half a dozen beautiful women handing me their phone numbers, hurriedly scribbled on paper napkins with eyebrow pencils as they saw me. I lived in a penthouse apartment with a view of the Hollywood Hills and drove what was left of my 1962 Porsche Speedster. (It was fashionable at the time to treat one’s luxury items with disdain.) “I Hate Everything About You”, a song of mine covered by Joey Amygdala & The Torsos, had been No. 1 in seven countries, and my mailbox was stuffed with royalty cheques. My screenplay Swish  McAllister, Gay But Unimpeachably Masculine Action Hero (“swish” referred to his basketball skills), was in development, with a major director attached, and Sylvester Stallone tabbed for the title role, though slightly antsy, Stonewall having been only eight years before. Rolling Stone had just paid me more for my cover story about Foreigner, the most boring band in the history of popular music, than for any other profile they’d ever published, and were begging for more. Did I mention that I had the world on a string, or did I use a different metaphor?

No matter. I was someone to whom others yearned to be introduced, and one summer night when my orchestra was performing at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, some sniffly record-biz type in a shiny tour jacket of the sort radio program directors were being given closetfuls of at the time asked if he could introduce me backstage to a shy little fellow with lank blond hair, a hare’s visage, and the handshake of overcooked linguine. His name was Tom Petty, and I had no way of knowing at the time that he was my destiny.

Fate’s fickle. It wasn’t so long after that inauspicious first meeting, during which Tom didn’t make eye contact and murmured, “How you doing?” so faintly that I had to read his very thin lips, that I was at the bottom, and he at the top. I had thought the Joey Amygdala royalties would never cease to clog my mailbox, and had squandered every nickel on blondes, blow, and broads. I scrawled Will write hit songs for food a little sign on a disreputable piece of cardboard with a borrowed eyebrow pencil, and huddled wretchedly in front of a Bugatti showroom on the very street on which I’d once been unable to walk for fear of being waylaid by well-wishers and seduced by lingerie models.

Passing me one night with a Playmate of the Month on each little arm, surrounded by a rang of bodyguards, Tom noticed me on his way into the nightclub at which he was to “jam” with Bruce Springsteen. He dropped a $10 bill into my little Styrofoam cup and mumbled, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He said he’d pay me $100 to hold his child-sized black motorcycle jacket while he and Bruce did their thing. I recognized it as act of great charity. One of the Playmates of the Month would surely have been happy to perform this service, or maybe even both.

At evening’s end, I rode back to Malibu in the bodyguards limousine — Tom and his Playmates and stylist and personal chef rode had their own. I was shown to the servants’ wing of his hilltop mansion, the grounds of which extended all the way down to the beach, and issued a uniform bearing Tom’s logo. The next morning, I began a week-long crash course in servility taught by Tom’s French majordomo, whose name I was unable to pronounce. How the mighty had fallen, I thought — at least until the majordomo pointed out that such thoughts were likely to negatively impact my performance. I no longer had the world on a string, nor was it my oyster, but my belly was full and my cot very much more comfortable than the scavenged sleeping bag and flattened appliance carton I’d been sleeping on in front of the Bugatti showroom.

My first assignment was as a doorman. When his fellow stars came up to visit Tom, it was my job to open the doors of their limos. I wore white gloves, as no celebrity wants to see an ordinary person’s unmanicured fingernails. No few of Tom’s guests were smokers, and would be finishing a cigarette or cigar as they arrived. A boorish few simply flicked their butts into the topiary, inspiring Tom’s squadron of groundskeepers to curse them in Spanish and more exotic tongues. I was to encourage them to put their cigarettes out in my palm. It hurt awfully, but usually for no more than a day or two.

I won’t deny that I was iffy about greeting people I’d interviewed. A few said, “Don’t I remember you from somewhere?” before putting their cigarettes out in my hand, and at one point I considered cosmetic surgery, but Tom wisely advised that I just let time work its magic. When enough of it had passed, no one would remember me. In this, as in almost everything, he was absolutely right.

Tom wasn’t only a brilliant songwriter and singer, but also one the great wits of our times. He once marveled at one of the dinner parties at which I was privileged to offer famous guests delicious canapes at no one having understood that his song ‘I Won’t Back Down’ was tongue in cheek. “I’m 4-11, weight 88 pounds, and have the handshake of overcooked linguine, and I’m not going to back down? Hello?” He was comparably amused by Rolling Stone having taken at face value his tongue-in-eheek Tale of the Switchblade Knife. It seemed that his record company had decided at one point capriciously to raise the price of Tom’s records and cassettes. Tom, incensed on his fans’ behalf, demanded a meeting, whereat he pointedly pulled a switchblade knife out of his boot to make the evil greedheads more considerate of his fans. Recounting Rolling Stone’s eager gullibility, Tom laughed so hard that champagne came out of his nose.

I’ve never met a more generous person. When an especially resourceful or devious Girl Scout made it past the security gate and offered him cookies, Tom, if he wasn’t on tour, would buy her entire supply. It became my job, after I was promoted from limousine door-opening, to award any fan who managed to elude security and knock on Tom’s door or windows, a whole box of his or her choice of Thin Mints, Caramel deLites^®, Peanut Butter Patties^®, Girl Scout S'mores^®, or even Do-si-dos^®. The Thin mints were by far the most popular.  

In the ninth year of my being a member of his staff, Swish McAllister finally began shooting, with Channing Tatum in the title role and Kevin Spacey as his accountant and co-foiler of evildoers, domestic and foreign. The movie, now streamable on Netflix, earned $781 million worldwide, and I became the in-demand screenwriter I remain. My most recent sale is of the script for the forthcoming biopic I Won’t Back Down, with Macauley Culkin playing Tom and Ryan Gosling the cocaine addict music-biz villain he intimidates with a switchblade knife.

Both USA readers and UK readers can now read my latest short fiction collection!