Same Thing, Different Bottles

I’ve always wanted to be up on stage, being applauded, rather than in the audience, applauding, and have consequently made a great many decisions based on what the heart wanted rather than what the head said was feasible. As a teenager, I didn’t allow my uncle to mentor me, as he’d read that his idol, Thomas Wolfe, had mentored young writers because I was too intent on a career as a professional athlete. Never mind that my adoration of sports never came close to compensating for the fact that I played them dreadfully. Then I saw A Hard Day’s Night and decided I wanted to be the Beatles, even though my musical aptitude at the time was ltitle greater than my athletic aptitude. 

When it became ever more excruciatingly apparent in the late 1970s that.I wasn’t likely to regain my earlier (wholly unwarranted) prominence as a writer, I turned to graphic design, in which I had reason to beileve I had real aptitude. Had I not, as a  17-year-old Santa Monica High School inmate, won a hideous senior sweater that to this day I’ve never worn by designing its logo? In junior high school, I’d been comically, disastrously inept in wood, metal, and auto shops, but had enjoyed every second of print shop. As I saw it, the world was full of horrid graphic design, but I, by gum, would put things right.

I talked the proprietor of one of LA’s leading New Wave boutiques, the Village Mews, to let me design a catalogue for him, and felt for the month and half the job required as though I’d died and gone to Heaven, as I did again a dozen years later when I bought my first Macintosh with Quark XPress desktop publishing software. Purest bliss! That first day with Quark, I literally forgot to eat or drink or pee. I was The Wind in the Willows’ Mr. Toad at the moment he first glimpsed a motorcar. 

My first proper design job was at Destiny Telecomm (I thought the doubled M was a nice touch!), a pyramid scheme in the East (San Francisco) Bay run by a cadre of sanctimonious Christians who’d apparently missed the bit in the Bible about the rich not getting into Heaven. When I signed on, their signature product was phone cards that enabled the bearer to do something or other. Over the course of a week they jettisoned the phone cards, and took to selling skincare products and salad dressings. (One of my colleagues theorised they were the same thing, in different bottles.) 

Mama, can we have some of that delicious Destiny Telecomm ranch dressing on our crudites tonight?

The boss was a hyperneurotic, tennis ball-shaped little gay fellow who played the accordion at the company’s big Xmas party and believed that creating futuristic landscapes in a called KPT Bryce attested. vividly to his creativity. My immediate overseer was a hyperactive Christian who looked exactly like Homer Simpson, and whose saving grace was that you could tease him, except not about abortion, and — can you guess? — tease him I did. He’d forgotten more about Photoshop than I’ve yet to learn, all these years later, and was a talented sketcher, but a horrid designer. There was a luridly (and artificially) blond young female hipster, the poster girl for depression, iirrevocably morose. I actually enjoyed the idea of coming to work and seeing the pair of them. There’s something uniquely gratifying about making someone as staunchly morose as Andrea laugh. In that sense, it was the best job I ever had.

But then lots of new suckers gave the company money, and the over-men’s-fragranced pastor’s son who ran the show encouraged the little fat accordionist to hire lots more designers, only one of them even a little bit talented. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and not nearly enough work to keep everyone busy. The obvious solution was another hire — a black guy from actual Oakland who had the Christians-in-charge eating out of his hand within about 48 hours. He would invite one of them to come down to the graphics room to confer about something he was working on, and show them how to draw a straight line in Adobe Illustrator.  He would shake his head in awe and say, ‘I think you’ve really got a knack for this stuff.” You should have seen their faces! One morning, I heard one of them proudly confide to another, “Do you know what Dre called me yesterday? ‘Homey’!” It was hilairous, and a little nauseating.

The one guy with real talent was a Motley Crue fan from Taiwan. He was so good that he inspired me to get a lot better, quick. We went to lunch together, and he ordered in Mandarin. 

One afternoon I was openly exasperated with the little know-nothing nincompoop the fat accordionist had appointed Studio Manager. (There wasn’t enough work to keep two designers busy, but we had seven designers and a Studio Manager to oversee ‘em.) I was avidly urged to find employment elsewhere, and began freelancing for Chris Isaak’s girlfriend’s design talent agency. That ended in tears too, but you may like some of the things I’ve designed since this past autumn for Acerbia Designs.

A couple of days after I left, Destiny Telcomm, with two M’s, was busted for being a pyramid scheme. Where your Christ-child now, spawn-of-the-pastor?

Lunch With 'Lor Swift

Taylor Swift and I had been talking about having lunch together for almost a decade before it finally happened last week. In 2012, I wrote her an email complimenting her gracious acquiescence to that ghastly Kanye person at the NAACP Video Awards. A couple of years later (she gets an average of 23,650 emails and text messages every week!) she wrote back to thank me and to ask if I might want to “grab some sushi” the next time she was in Poughkeepsie, though I actually lived in Beacon at the time, and then moved back to London, and then back to Los Angeles, and then back to London again, while she became America’s Sweetheart. 

But as I foreshadowed earlier in this paragraph, the constellations finally aligned this week, and we met  She had only 18 minutes, so a place with table service was out of the question. It would have to be one of the two big sushi chains, Itsu or Wasabi, where one doesn’t have to wait for some bright young thing to come over and gush, “How you guys [London servers are trained to address gender-mixed groups as “guys”] doing today? I’m Tristan, and I’ll be your server.” You just choose a boxed set, if you will, from a big refrigerator and then go up to the till, where a not-so-bright young thing snarls if you ask for an extra eyedropperful of soy sauce. 

We sat down, Taylor in Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses to keep people from recognising her, and began mixing soy sauce and wasabi in little plastic tubs. I asked if I should address her as Tay, She giggled winsomely and confided that her closest friends actually call her ‘Lor, with an apostrophe. I was reminded of my old friend Hugh M. Hefner, with whom I used to play backgammon and kiss absurdly gorgeous young blonde women. Most people seemed to call him Hef, but he told me that those nearest and dearest to him called him Ner, apostrophe optional. I told ‘Lor that I had briefly conspired to call The Romanovs, my 2015 Los Angeles band Sailor Twit. She smirked obilgingly. 

\

As seldom-Trumpers, we agreed that the prospect of her old antagonist, recently rebranded as Ye, becoming president and Herschel Walker vice president was thrilling. I admitted to ‘Lor that I find her music pretty insipid, and that, as a lapsed music critic, I recognise many critics having put her recent More Slanders About Past Boyfriends album on their Albums of the Year list not because they liked it, or had even heard it, but because they didn’t want to seem hopelessly out of step with the general public. She wasn’t very pleased, and summoned one of her aides over for a whispered little conference, at the conclusions of which ‘Lor said, “Harsh words coming from someone who’s been writing and recording since 1971, and whose new stuff is lucky to get 20 listeners on Soundcloud.” 

Touché, I said, rakishly, and we moved onto the collapse of the United Kingdom, as most recently evidenced by ambulance drivers and nurses going out on a strike and millions having to skip meals to be able to afford to heat their homes, on which their mortgages have skyrocketed. “I do find the accent adorable, though,” she said. I of course knew, through her confessional/accusatory songs, that she has dated Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellan, Andrew Lloyd Pierce, Ricky Gervais, Jeremy Corbyn, and, during a brief fling with bisexuality, Home Secretary Cruella Braverman.

“Time’s up!” one of ‘Lor’s aids chirped eagerly, and the next thing I knew I was alone with my thoughts and the nine pieces of sushi Taylor Swift’s fame hadn’t allowed her time to consume.  

 My first few months inside, my OCD served me well. All I would listen to — and, by extension, all I would allow my cellmates to listen to — were Miles, Mingus, Monk, Mahler, and Eminem. My cellmates kept requesting transfers, so I’d have the whole cell to myself for as long as four days at a time. One of my new cellmates, formerly a guitarist in a Brazilian bistro in Bermondsey, suggested we form a yacht rock duo with him playing and me singing. Bossa nova and yacht rock can be nearly indistinguishable in the wrong hands. 

When the warden hosted a big muckety-muck from the Department of Corrections, he would have me and Justin entertain. But then my vocal cords were injured in the big inadequate blankets riot of my second winter inside, and I had to think of another way not to be subjected to erotic indignities in the showers and other areas where there were no, or out-of-service, closed-circuit TV cameras. Noting my lovely mocha skin, soulful brown eyes, and soft, melodic speaking voice, one of the other members of the Floral Arrangement club suggested I apply for the prison sissy position that would open up when RL-6881 got paroled, and I thought to myself, “Why not?” The warden was worryingly enthusiastic about my decision, and supplied me with the Agent Provocateur for Men catalogue from which I ordered my first outfits.   

I was an immediate hit with both fellow inmates and the prison staff. The first week of every month, I would service the warden and the highest-ranking correctional officers. The second would be the Aryan Brotherhood, and the third the Crips, Bloods, and Mexican Mafia. The prisoners of colour were my favourite. Their hygiene was far superior to the others’ and they never showed up empty-handed. Sometimes my cell would become almost impassable with bouquets, making my cellmates openly resentful to the point of threatening me, but I had many protectors among the three groups I serviced —Lt. “Lefty” Latham from the correctional officers, Feekle Inbrede from the Aryans, and LaShu’juandray Cooper from the Blips, as the African-American inmates called themselves after the Bloods and Crips realised they had common oppressors, and merged. 

Everything was fine until the Blips and Mexicans demanded an additional week with me at the end of every month because they outnumbered the guards and Aryans combined by around six to one. In the resulting riot, which made the blankets brouhaha look in comparison like a slapping contest at a parochial girls’ school, one of the prison’s three Sons of Isis, who spent most of their time in solitary confinement, tried to behead me. I survived, obviously, but with an unsightly neck scar that allowed that little tramp Rodolfo Gomez to overtake me as the prison’s No. 1 object of desire. 

In recognition of past services rendered, even if with the utmost reluctance, the warden arranged for me to be paroled prematurely, whereupon I became the social media influencer and composer as which you know me.

[I’ve written a whole novel in this vein. Advise by private message if you’d like to read it.]