24: Snake-Hipped and Svelte

My star kept rising. No sooner than I’d introduced David Bowie to the readers of Rolling Stone than Warners threw a big party for Faces at one of their big soundstages in Burbank. I’d reviewed their most recent album for Rolling Stone, and said, with rare accuracy, that much of it wasn’t very good. They regarded me with bruised expressions when I made my grand entrance; the very gods cowered before me! Rolling Stone invited me to write a feature article about my own aspirations to rock stardom, newly boosted by the interest of a young go-getter at an actual major label.

My band was taking up more and more of my time, and how I was enjoying it! I felt at last as though part of a gang. We rehearsed in the guitarist’s parents’ garage in West LA, or, very much more glamorously, on the A&M soundstage. We dined together at a place in Westwood where it was said that no man had ever managed to finish their gigantic seafood salad, and this decades before the obesity epidemic. I finished it and ordered dessert, and was nonetheless snake-hipped and svelte. The bass player and I chased skirts together. My egomania clouded my judgment, and I allowed one of our succession of managers to talk me into moving out from behind the drums to stage-center. I went from being a mediocre drummer to a worse lead singer, but after we played the Whisky, someone asked, not sarcastically, at least as far as I could see, if I were a professional dancer. I’d never felt more complimented in my life. But I was about to feel a great, great deal more complimented.

My No. 1 friend had gone to work for the selfsame old-school Hollywood publicist who six months before, at Elton John’s famous debut at the Troubadour, had scurried around in a huge cowboy hat screaming, “Fan-fucking-tastic!” into the face of anyone who looked vaguely like a writer. Said publicist had also come to employ P—, literally the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person, and I began inventing excuses to visit my friend at his office. I made one such visit the week that hot pants hit Hollywood. P— was wearing a pair, and I’m not sure how I lived through it, or even how — after my friend ascertained that she was commuting to work for hours from her mother’s home in Orange County — to offer her the use of my apartment while I went to New York to advise that city’s tastemakers of the glory that was Procol Harum’s new album. While in New York, I was made to feel hot stuff by Lisa Robinson, and worked up the gall, with the help of much vodka, to call P— just to shoot the breeze.

She picked me up at LAX in my Porsche when I got home, and then drove me to West Hollywood. Her bags were all packed, but when we got back to Selma Avenue, I asked her to stay, and to my astonishment she agreed. So now the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person and I were as one, and living together in über-hip Laurel Canyon, Rolling Stone was printing my little autobiography over four pages with photos by Annie Liebovitz, albeit not very good ones, the Porsche still looked really nice, and I had a small fortune in the bank. When I and P— went to Pasadena together to see Badfinger’s local debut — I no doubt smirking smugly, and in new platform boots made for me in London’s Kings Road — we schmoozed afterward with Gus Dudgeon, Elton John’s producer, but, much more important, formerly the Bonzo Dog Band’s. Spencer fucking Davis suggested we have lunch together. The world finally seemed repentant about having made me suffer so as a boy.

I continued in print to play the same character as which I’d first become famous — an acid-tongued curmudgeon with strong, usually negative, opinions about everything. The guitarist in my band noted that I wasn’t loved and respected, but feared. Gene Clark, once of The Byrds, was apparently telling a mutual acquaintance that I was doing my karma irreparable harm. But I wasn't yet a believer in karma.

The Rancid Mist of Permissiveness

The students of Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi, won’t be having a prom this year. For this they can thank the chipmunk-cheeked little brat Constance McMillen, who’d threatened to attend the event in a tuxedo, and with her girlfriend, and the ACLU, who of course peed all over themselves in their haste to chip away at yet another brick in the fabric of American life. But even more than little brat Constance and the American Coalition of Loathsome Undesirables, as I think of them, the poor kids of Itawamba County can thank the permissiveness that’s settled over our culture like a rancid mist the past 40 years or so.

Really, were our lives so awful back before shenanigans of this sort became commonplace? So there weren’t a lot of dark faces on television; was that really such a tragedy? Was The Honeymooners less funny because Art Carney wasn’t whatever they like to be called nowadays? Was I Love Lucy less funny because the Latino guy in it wasn't swarthy, but the light-skinned European type?

A person knew where they stood back then. Nobody cared if you were queer so long as you had the common decency to keep quiet about it, or stuck with one of the traditionally homosexual occupations, like hairdressing, female impersonation, interior decoration, or the theatre, and stayed out of sight of decent, God-fearing neighbors. You didn’t ruin the lives of your classmates in those days by threatening to come crossdressed to the prom with one of your own sex!

Honestly, what did this McMillen brat imagine she and her so-called girlfriend were going to do if the Itawamba County school district hadn’t cancelled the prom altogether to keep her from making a mockery of it? How many glasses of punch can anybody stand around sipping over the course of an evening? Surely she couldn’t have imagined that she and her date were going to dance! Even if the sight of two people of the same sex dancing together hadn’t made the band stop in disgust — or the DJ, if there was no band, run out to the parking lot to puke — do you suppose any of the other kids would have stayed on the dance floor with them? I sure don’t! And who wants to be alone on the dance floor, being glared at by everybody?

I’ll tell you who: homosexual exhibitionists!

But don’t they just stick together these days, the perverts and discontents and so-called persons of color and so-called progressives? Hardly had CNN reported little McMillen’s assault on decency than this apparently homo-run Website called toxic.com started raising money for an unofficial prom, with an anonymous donor (big surprise that he, she, or he/she won’t face the music!) promising to match up to the first $25,000.

Take some small consolation in the fact that Elton John probably wouldn’t walk across one of his living rooms for $50,000, let alone fly to Fulton, Mississippi. The little brats will have to settle for the guy from 'N Sync, or the one from Judas Priest, or some really lame country band from Jackson murdering the hits of Carrie Underwood. And yes, I do indeed recognize that allowing the guy from Judas Priest, a known devil-worshipper, to entertain impressionable children would very much be a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

It really galls me that nobody’s offering a dime in matching funds for all the decent hard-working normal kids in Itawamba County who dropped out of school at 15, long before they’d even had a chance to consider going to any fancy prom, because they’d gotten their first cousins pregnant and had to get a job at the Tast-T-Freez to afford diapers, snuff, formula, and beer, and to pay the rent on the trailer.

I’ll tell you what’s going to happen if we keep encouraging selfish little brats who don’t seem to want to recognize their responsibility to reproduce: we’re going to come to be seriously outnumbered by, for instance, Indians (not the good kind, who run casinos or drink themselves into unconsciousness, but the creepy ones with red dots on their foreheads and a knack for IT), and the unthinkable will become entirely too thinkable. Give these brats their way and I wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetimes we’re in debt to the Chinese or something!

I call on all right-thinking readers to deposit funds into my Paypal account immediately to stem this appalling tide of depravity!

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