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.