Sara(h) Smiles, Part 21: Rowe, Rowe, Rowe Your Boat

Naturally, I was only being mischievous, in that endearing way I have, when I suggested the other day that Donald Trump ought to be Sarah’s running mate in 2012. I can’t imagine one as vainglorious as he willingly playing second fiddle to a woman, not even one as hot as Sarah. But I’ve had another idea, and this isn’t a kidding-around one: Mike Rowe, from the Wrangler and Ford commercials — and from the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, which I’ve never watched because I’m squeamish.

Nearly everything about him is perfect. Start with his name — two virile, no-nonsense, all-American monosyllables, in the tradition of George Bush, but better, since “George” is a fairly…squishy sound, whereas Mike is as hard as a Louisville slugger. Mike’s a fearsome heavyweight champion’s (Tyson’s) name, or a hard-boiled detective’s (Hammer’s), or a tough-as-nails former Chicago Bears coach (Ditka’s). George is a curious monkey’s name, or a homosexual crooner’s (Boy).

Rowe is everything his name promises, as far — in his Wrangler jeans, facial crags, and baseball cap — as it’s possible to be from an elitist liberal who thinks he knows more than the average American just because he has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university. He was an Eagle Scout, and has big pectoral muscles, but everything about him mumbles, “Aw, shucks.” He’s somebody the average American working man could easily picture hoisting a couple of cold brewskis with, and the gals already think of him as having a cute butt — an asset too few vice presidential candidates have offered in recent elections — because of the Wrangler commercials. Whether he actually has one is entirely immaterial, in the same way that Burt Reynolds’ having an undersized penis became immaterial after Cosmopolitan presented him to its readership as a sexpot.

I won’t say Rowe’s perfect; the skeletons in his closet include having sung with the Baltimore Opera at one point, and his living nowadays in San Francisco, that cesspool of homosexuality and Pelosi-ism. What I’m hoping is that his having lived there and remained straight (please, Lord, let it be so!) will make him even more attractive to common-sense conservatives, especially if he can be persuaded to manifest a little revulsion at his LGBT neighbors, Stacy and Kim.

(Speaking of the Chicago Bears, I have formulated a theory as to why commentators and coaches so love to say football — why, for instance, they’ll invariably say, “They’re a heck of a football team,” or, “He’s a talented football player, or, “If we can stop their running attack, we think we can win the football game” even though it’s redundant in each case; everyone knows full well that a guy predicting the winner of the Saints vs. Steelers game isn’t talking about lacrosse or synchronized swimming.

The reason you don’t hear comparable self-references in the other major team sports, basketball or baseball, is that football is just such fun to say, its first syllable being close to the sound boys make when trying to evoke the sound of an arrow or throwing star flying through the air and then hitting its target. And at the end of that first syllable, your mouth is poised perfectly to add ball, as it is with neither of the other two sports.)

In other news, Sarah has tweeted (God is that cute, or what? How could she be more adorable?) that Julian Assange, Mr. WikiLeaks, ought to be hunted down like a dog, a moose, or one of those wolves she, as governor of Alaska, had sharpshooters picking off from helicopters. Naturally, the lamestream media have been having a field day wondering where she comes off endorsing the de facto assassination of a foreign national. My only quibble — and I think this may have to do with the fact that Twitter tweets can comprise only a limited number of characters — is that she didn’t urge the assassins to save a bullet or two for that rhymes-with-witch Katie Couric, Jon Stewart, Michael Moore, or Bill Maher. Might as well take 'em all down at once, it seems to me.

Kill, baby, kill!

Green Ambrosia

A National Public Radio news bulletin warning that the pernicious fungal disease downy mildew has been ravaging basil in parts of the country has me thinking about pesto, which I regard, along with aioli and sushi, as one of personkind’s most wonderful culinary achievements.

Having grown up on a diet that vividly communicated both my mother’s distaste for cooking and her feeling that if you found an inexpensive restaurant that didn’t give you food poisoning, you should never risk going to another one, ever, I had never encountered pesto before The Kiddo, who’d stopped taking hallucinogens years before, rhapsodized one night about the remarkable green pizza he’d eaten in Westwood Village. The foregoing was such a long sentence that only now am I able to explain that I refer only to my mother’s aversion to the kitchen because in the era of my childhood an American man was no more likely to cook than to kiss another man full on the lips while fondling his buttocks; it was understood to be women’s work, you see. And the safe, inexpensive restaurant to which I refer, as attentive readers will surely recall, was the Chatam (which seemed to lack an h) on Westwood Blvd., whose pretensions to class included having a menu printed in the Olde English typeface.

Those same attentive readers will note that the Italian restaurant where The Kiddo had savored the amazing green pizza was none other than that in which I and the two other members of the 1930 Four had dined the first night I smoked marijuana, and then scooted on the bill. To my considerable relief, they didn’t seem to recognize me (from around a decade before) when I went back to try the green pizza for myself.

Ambrosia, my friends, in the classical sense. Swoon time. Delicious — and sensual! — beyond imagining.

Culinary scholars (now there’s a job I wish existed, and that I’d prepared for) agree that pesto was originally devised in the vicinity of Genova (English speakers don’t like the v, for reasons unknown to me), so Missus the First, to whom I wasn’t yet wed at the time, and I made a beeline for it in the spring of 1982 when we wandered around Italy. We found a very inexpensive, very pleasant pensione — the eyes of whose proprietress said, “If only (the future) Missus the First weren’t with you, big boy, how dolce a vita we could have,” in an alluring accent — and so stayed and stayed and stayed, eating much of the sauce for which the region is known. My impression was that every ristorante, trattoria, and even tavola calda made a gigantic tub of the stuff every morning, but when I requested it one afternoon on a pizza, the proprietor looked at me as though I’d asked him to step on the pizza before baking it. I can only imagine that he was discombobulated by the great allure of my future bride.

A decade and more later, while living in San Francisco’s utterly charmless Sunset district, my daughter and I, on one of our nocturnal traipses, discovered an eerily Chatamesque restaurant with an Olde English menu ‘way up by 19th Avenue, right across Noriega Street from Fujiyama-ya, with its famous florid Irish waiter, which in turn was two doors from the Bashful Bull snack bar with it famous (literally!) rotting moosehead. In a ‘hood as dreary as the Sunset, you find amusement where you can.

It doesn’t seem fair, does it? One of the prettiest words in the language, sewage, refers to the most disgusting stuff, and does not Downy (or, better, Downi) Mildew sound like a cheerleader so wholesomely gorgeous that even her seemingly asexual algebra teacher has to hurry each morning to the male faculty restroom for a few minutes' privacy after her class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeerers at Mullets

I very nearly got a mullet earlier this year. It would have given a certain kind of person such pleasure to be able to nudge his or her companion and marvel, “Lookee there, dude’s got a mullet! It would have given me even greater pleasure to inspire that behavior in that sort of person — the kind who, in reveling in his or her own hipness, exposes his hopeless lack thereof.

As I have probably written here, I met the uncrowned king of these people in 1997 while passing out flyers for my theatre company at an Absolut-sponsored event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Thinking it would make people more likely to accept my flyers, I took at one point to hollering, “Absolut vodka shown to cause drunkenness in laboratory animals!” Quoth the uncrowned king in sneeringly declining a flyer, “Well, duh!”

Such people love to make fun of others’ bygone fashion choices on the basis of old photographs. They’ll see, for instance, a photograph of a young woman with big hair and shoulder pads of the sort popular in the mid-80s and snicker, “What the hell were you thinking?”

A very cheap shot, that, and stupid. The most exciting thing that fashion — and rock fashion in particular — does is emphatically refute that which proceeded it, and nothing’s more emphatic, and thus exhilarating, than extreme. Thus, it stands to reason that any early or especially zealous adapter of a new style is going to look ridiculous to those clinging in terror to the refuted one. All the hundreds of little Ziggy Stardust clones one saw in the big coastal cities in the early 70s looked preposterous in comparison to, say, Crosby, Stills & Nash — but infinitely cool to one another. And whose was the greater courage, the greater panache — that of the mindless unwashed in their unstyled long hair, patched jeans, and T-shirts, or the glam kids?

This idea applies transracially, of course. Show a modern hip hop kid a photograph of the Jacksons, say, circa 1973, and he’s apt to die laughing at their huge globular hair, as he certainly would at the frilly eyelinered dandies who proliferated in the wake of Prince. Or leave music entirely and think about basketball, in which the now-standard baggy shorts favored by Michael Jordan looked comical in comparison to previous generations'.

“What the hell were you thinking?” would make sense only if there were such a thing as an absolute in fashion, and I’m not sure there is. I doubt anyone could persuasively argue that women’s hair didn’t go through a dreadful stretch in the early ‘50s when short-and-wavy was very voguish, or that the (extremely!) brief maxidress craze of around 1970 wasn’t a crime against humanity, or that nearly everyone doesn’t look better in flared trousers (as they make the legs appear longer, the hips slimmer, and the feet smaller). I am well aware, though, that various New Wave trendsetters circa 1980 vilified such trousers as monstrous because they'd become icons of earlier musical movements.

The most fashionable person, of course, is the one who wear what he or she feels most gorgeous in with confidence in spite of what Vogue or GQ or Esquire or jeerers at mullets say. In this regard, we need to tip our caps to the author Tom Wolfe, who’s been wearing the same self-designed attire for around 50 years now, and always looking fab in entirely his own way.

This is not, of course, to imply that I forgive his mindless condemnation of alternative sexuality.

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

Walking the Dog With Nick and Ruth

So the other night at our weekly get-together, my friends Nick and Ruth and I discussed something that earlier in the day had greatly upset Nick so much he’d declared himself a convert to my alleged misanthropy. The two of them had been walking Agnes and Boo down by the river, as they do daily. It’s Nick’s custom on such occasions, as it used to be mine when I’d join Claire and her rescued greyhound, to nod almost imperceptibly or to grunt, “How you doing?” at fellow dogwalkers or others they encountered, leaving Ruth to do the heavy lifting charm- and sociability-wise. They passed a guy whom they often see walking his Rhodesian ridgebacks, and Nick grunted a soft greeting. A moment later, they heard the guy furiously bellowing, “Dude!” and turned to try to ascertain the provenance of his fury. It turned out he'd been outraged by Nick’s not being very solicitous. He rebuked Nick for making what he described as a sorely inadequate two percent effort. Nick recounted being on the verge of hitting the guy for pointing bellicosely at Ruth while saying, “It isn’t you I’m pissed off at, but him.”

We each had another slice of an unusually delicious Brothers’ grandmother’s pizza — so named, apparently, because it’s inventor’s grandmother used very little cheese, and a great deal of tomatoes and garlic — and considered what Nick should do the next time they encounter the guy, as they almost surely will. I, in that zany way I have, wondered if it might be fun to discombobulate him by whooping, “Dude!” at the sight of him, and offering a hand for him to high-five. Or the two of them could even jump in the air and bump chests or bellies, in the manner of modern football players. Ruth’s idea was that Nick claim the moral high ground by telling the guy, before the guy has a chance to say anything, how sorry he was to have seemed unfriendly.

That seemed a sure winner to me. If the guy rebuffed him, he would be showing himself to be a vengeful asshole. On the other hand, if the guy were gracious and accepted responsibility for the unpleasantness of the earlier exchange, the two of them might well go on to become fast friends. On one level I would dislike that, as I much prefer my friends to no friends other than me, but the nobler part of me (it’s in there somewhere!) would revel in Nick acquiring another potential source of succor and encouragement.

In other news, I watched an ancient video of Eddie Van Halen playing a solo — a real solo, without any accompaniment — yesterday, and thought about the traditional gap between what critics and audiences like. It's my perception that audiences enjoy remarkable displays of virtuosity — in much the same way that sports fans enjoy great catches or long punt returns for touchdowns — while critics generally view such displays as freak shows. I know that I, watching the Van Halen solo, thought it expressed only his delight in his own dexterity. I wish I could play like that, but like to imagine I wouldn’t if I could.

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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The Strange Rigidity of Floppy Disks

In November 1974, during his famous months-long Lost Weekend estrangement from Yoko Ono, John Lennon famously did a lot of drinking at the Troubadour in West Hollywood with Harry Nilsson. On one occasion, they were thrown out for loudly urging the Smothers Bros., on stage at the time, to fuck a cow. On another, a drunken Lennon, having zanily affixed a sanitary napkin to his forehead, asked a waitress who was clearly not enjoying serving him if she knew who he was. “Yes,” she is said to have said, “an asshole with a Kotex on his head.”

Nearly 36 years after the fact, FAITP is able to disclose that the quick-witted waitress, Jacqueline (Jacqui) Ginsberg, now a successful chiropodist in Marin County, California, didn’t actually say that at all. “What I said,” she recalls, “was, ‘Yeah, an asshole.’ I did know who he was — I’d been a huge Beatles nut, though more of a George person — but was too intimidated for long-windedness.”

She wonders if the Kotex addendum was the work of the same unseen press agent responsible for Lennon’s own famous quote from Foyle’s Literary Luncheon in 1964. Following the publication of In His Own Write, a collection of his Thurberish cartoons and pun-filled prose, the then-Beatle was feted by London’s most prestigious bookseller. After lunch, he was supposed to get up and address the assembled literati. He stumbled up to the dais, mumbled, “Uh, thank you all very much. God bless you,” and returned to his seat. In the papers, though, he was reported to have cheekily advised his audience, “You have a lucky face,” as English beggars used to do when someone dropped a coin in their cups.

Months after the incident, attorney Gloria Allred, who’d heard about the incident in Rolling Stone, managed to deduce from interviews with members of the Troubadour staff that it had been Ginsberg who’d let fly the celebrated Kotex quip. She urged her to allow him to file suit against the former Beatle, alleging that he’d caused her emotional distress, “but it just didn’t seem right at the time. If one of us suffered emotional distress, it was John, who obviously wasn’t used to being spoken to as I’d spoken to him, and who was visibly bummed until he sneaked out of the club maybe 15 minutes later after leaving me a $20 tip.”

It was only 15 months later, after discovering she was pregnant by one (or another!) of the club’s bartenders, that Ginsberg reconsidered. She was crestfallen to learn, though, that a statute of limitations precluded her suing for emotional distress more than one year after the precipitant incident. She had her daughter, Pisces, out of wedlock, was disowned by her mortified Jewish parents, and fought alcoholism while trying to establish herself as an astrologist to the country rock stars.

Eventually, she realized, as all rational people ultimately must, that astrology is sheerest poppycock, and got herself a job in the human resources department of a company that manufactured what were called floppy disks even though many of them — the smaller ones — were actually quite rigid. She was wooed by and wed the company’s warehouseman, who’d been more of a Paul person, and from whom she kept her participation in the famous Lennon/Kotex incident secret for years. “I was surprised,” she admits, “by how, well, arousing he found the whole thing when I did finally tell him; our sex life took a real upswing there for about a month.”

Following their divorce, Ginsberg studied chiropody first by mail and then on line before becoming a licensed chiropodist in mid-1993. “Ever since the Troubadour days, when I was on my own for hours at a stretch, I’ve been fascinated by feet.

“Without them, what would we stand on?”

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An End to Shyness

When I was around 16, my friend Dave and I espied a couple of winsome beach bunnies sunbathing on Castle Rock Beach, between Sunset and Topanga Canyon Blvds. Neither of us wanted to look a wuss in the other’s eyes, though the word hadn’t been invented yet, and we went over together to lower the boom on them. To get their attention, we came up with the droll strategy of stepping between them and the sun. When she realized what was going on, the prettier asked why we didn’t run along and find someone nearer our own age.

The embarrassment wasn’t severe — bad enough only to keep me from trying to approach another woman cold for the next 15 years. It wasn’t that I didn’t date, or even eventually lose my virginity over and over again. Rather, it was that I was able, while sober, to choose prospective mates not from the general population, but from the much smaller population of girls and women I knew or could get myself introduced to, or who were nervy enough to do the approaching.

I finally took myself in hand the month I turned 32. I blow dried my hair, put on the boots I’d bought in actual London the autumn before, and drove myself down to Century City, in whose shopping area I knew a great many stylish and other women to while away their lunchtimes. There was, across from the big Broadway department store, a wonderful boutique called Heaven, whose stock and trade might have been described as whimsy. They had T-shirts with droll slogans, and Paper Moon greeting cards featuring the artwork of Robert Blue, among many others, and inflatable furniture, fanciful stationery, gift wrap in which the cool or stylish might conceal gifts to one another. I sauntered in, nonchalant as you please, and saw an attractive slim blonde looking at greeting cards. It’s now or never, I thought, and headed outside to wait for her. As I waited, I talked myself back out of it around 100 times. She won’t like you, a familiar inner voice said. You’re going to make a fool of yourself. Women don’t like being approached by strangers. Don’t you remember what happened that time on the beach?

At the moment I was just about to yank the rug out from under myself, I saw that she’d just finished at the cash register, and would emerge in only a moment. By God, I would throw off the yoke of inhibition I’d worn so long! My mouth felt like the Sahara. My palms thought I was on an airplane in grievous turbulence. And my heart! It was the ten loudest disco bass drums ever, combined. I was amazed that passers-by weren’t turning to gape at me, or covering their hands with their ears. And then, as she emerged, frowning at me, I was amazed to be able to force air through my larynx. “I was hoping,” I told her, “that you might like the idea of our getting acquainted.”

She went for it! She didn’t look thrilled or even flattered — I was soon to discover that she was very much more shy than even I — but murmured, “OK.” Bliss!

She turned out to be a lot younger than I, and young for her age. She lived with her mother, and worked as a receptionist at the escrow company where Mom worked. She was fresh from Coon Rapids, Minnesota, and wanted, of course, to be a model or a singer! She was skinny enough for modeling. A few months later, when in London again, I bought her a pair of black leather-look stretch pants of the sort that were so popular at the time at Flipper’s Roller Disco. The proprietor of the shop warned me that only the slimmest woman would be able to get into them. They were loose on Debbee.

The first time I kissed her, it was, to paraphrase Kim Basinger’s famous reminiscence about Mickey Rourke, like putting my tongue into an ashtray. She tried later to stop smoking “for me”. She claimed she’d succeeded, and I didn’t let on that I knew. She could be heard in Santa Monica when climaxing. She was noisy during the rest of it too. As a recent refugee from the Midwest, she was of course impressed by Rodeo Drive. She’d been romantically linked before me with the Italian owner of a salon there, and shrieked his name one evening during lovemaking. “Dear diary,” I teased her afterward, “tonight she called me Cesare.” She had a cat called Sweet-Sweet. That troubled me slightly.

I had a girlfriend at the time, and had to sneak out to see her. She was heartbreakingly excited when I actually took her out, rather than just stayed in with her. I wasn’t prepared to leave my girlfriend for her, though, not even after she bought herself something special at Trashy Lingerie. I surmised that Cesare was similarly disinclined to leave his wife.

We lost touch a long time ago, after she married another 11-years-older guy, with an Italian surname that started with S, and there’s no trace of her on Facebook. I’d so enjoy knowing how her life has turned out.

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Six Weeks to Lovelier Hair (Or: Ronald's Big One)

I work out daily across the frozen river at Newburgh’s Planet Fitness, which bills itself as the No-Judgement Zone, with judgment misspelled; the idea is that competing gyms will sneer at you or call you a flabboat if you come in bearing little resemblance to Brad Pitt in Troy. Grunting of the sort so popular at the Gold’s in Fishkill, which was full of obvious steroid abusers who wanted everybody on the premises to note the superhuman amounts of weight they were lifting, is forbidden, and everybody makes a huge display of wiping down the various machines after they’re finished, almost as though surgery’s going to be performed with them. Retractor. Scalpel. Lat pulldown machine.

There are no hot mamas at Planet Fitness, no gleaming spandex leotards, no highlighted hair held back by $17.95 scrunchies purchased at accessories boutiques. There are instead a tiny (she comes up to about my ribcage) female bodybuilder whose perpetual glower suggests steroid use of her own, and a great, great many middle-aged women in ill-fitting sweatpants, huffing and puffing valiantly on the treadmills.

I begin my own workout each day with 30 minutes on a stationary bicycle, on which I set the resistance quite high. If I’m enjoying the book I’ve brought with me — and as this is written, I’m enjoying the hell out of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, which I found quite difficult in the beginning — I forget within the first few minutes that I’m even exercising. I probably got through 30 books in this way in 2009.

Often I find myself on a bike beside a guy who gets lots of calls on his cell phone — which has the loudest, most annoying ringtone in the world — and then talks loudly enough into it to make me keep reading the same paragraph over and over. Sometimes I want to strangle him with my bare hands, but then I remember that I’m no steroid abuser.

The gym recently had individual TVs attached to all the so-called cardio machines, the bikes and treadmills and elliptical trainers. I try not to notice that most of my fellow fitness-seekers are watching mind-numbing crapola. I occasionally think of proposing to the gym’s management that they require people on those machines to read books favorably reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, or at least the New Yorker, but in view of their reaction to my pointing out the misspelling of judgment, I think I’d be wasting my breath. I am indeed a frightful snob, but won’t apologize for not wanting to be surrounded by the willingly benighted.

It amused the other day, that on which I wrote about the disinclination of the typical alternative rock group even to think about what it wears on stage, to reflect on the fact that a great many of the guys who spend hours each day at the gym making their bodies look nice would condemn as unmasculine the idea of choosing their attire with care.

I was getting funny looks in the locker room there for a while. My friend Toni had recommended a kind of shampoo and conditioner that comes in pink bottles. But I left them behind in the shower last week, and have had to make do with stuff I bought at Dollar Tree. I am consequently able to offer this tip: it’s a mistake to imagine that the most attractively packaged hair product will be the best one. I am looking forward as I write this to trying out the Target’s-own-brand shampoo and conditioner I bought last week when I noticed it among the Pantene products, with a little note beneath daring me to compare them. They seemed to have the identical ingredients, and the Pantene was very much pricier.

After physical education at Orville Wright Junior High School, we boys were compelled to shower together. It was the first time those of us without brothers had ever seen anyone else’s dick, though of course we were understood not to be noticing. I was amazed, at age 12, to notice while not noticing that Ronald Adams, only months before the shyest boy at Loyola Village School, had a great big one, this before many of us had even entered puberty. To our classmates’ credit, I don’t recall his having been beaten to a pulp.

Would I rather have lovelier hair, or save a few bucks? May I think about it for a few minutes before answering?

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So Sad About Us

I bought tickets for a Herman’s Hermits concert solely because The Who were second on the bill (John Entwistle smashed his bass at the end, and I was there to see it!), and also for a White Front department store extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl that included them. I sat through four interminable sets by Cannonball Adderley at San Francisco’s Winterland (The Who often skipped LA in those days) because the celebrated jazz saxophonist — whose music I didn’t get in the slightest — preceded them on one of those eclectic bills promoter Bill Graham thought was good for rock fans. I sat through the James Cotton Blues Band in a less-than-half-filled Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to see them, and continued to love them even though Keith Moon could barely sit upright that night.

There was a time when the thought of getting to see The Who perform would have thrilled me to the marrow. But this evening, when they star in the Super Bowl halftime show, I’m going to go upstairs to check my email or something.

It hasn’t a thing to do with Mr. Townshend’s alleged improprieties, but with countless tens of millions of younger viewers seeing two guys in their mid-60s and a bunch of unnamed sidemen, rather than the coolest, wackiest, scariest, most exciting rock and roll band ever and imagining they’re getting a pretty good idea of what those of us who worshipped them in their glorious 60s incarnation mean by The Who.

Will the close-cropped, balding, thickened Townshend look foolish as he slashes at his guitar as though sending semaphore signals? Count on it. There was a time when his antics conveyed a sense of inexorable determination, said, “Sure, I look like Walt Disney’s version of Ichabod Crane, but just try to keep me from transforming myself into something gorgeous and heroic in front of your eyes.”

At the Super Bowl, he will evoke a great old home run hitter, appearing at an Old Timer’s reunion; Old Ballplayer's stance and swing may be as similar as physiological deterioration allows, but instead of a screaming line drive, he manages what Vin Scully would call a little looper onto the edge of the outfield grass. Those who saw him in his prime clap in embarrassment. Those who didn’t think, “Old dude’s a joke!”

Will whoever Pete and Roger have hired to drum keep a much steadier beat than Keith Moon could have dreamed of keeping? Almost certainly. Will he be a tenth as much fun to watch? Almost certainly not. Will he be any fun at all to watch? Will Pino Palladino, the bass player, play with half of the departed Entwistle’s virtuosity, exude half The Ox’s ennui? Probably not. What countless tens of millions will be seeing is the superannuated half of a group that should have been dissolved the day the first of them died.

I’m not singling out The Who. When I saw Mick Jagger’s and Aretha Franklin’s performance at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert, I was no less appalled than I’d have expected to be by The Who. Jagger’s still grotesquely skinny, and wizened, and has never been much of a singer, and his frantic gesticulating looks positively desperate. Aretha’s lost the top third of her range.

I’m 103 weeks younger than Pete Townshend. I’m well aware that I’m condemning not just The Who, but my whole generation, but how about a little self-recognition, brothers and sisters? It’s my impression that Joe DiMaggio, whatever his other shortcomings (and they were legion), never participated in one of those old timer events, except maybe to stand up and allow a chorus of adoration to rain down on him. He might have died a miserable old misanthrope, but a miserable old misanthrope with intact dignity. If only my heroes would have maintained some of their own.

Friend-of-a-friend Paul Flattery points out that the “celebratory vibe”-d medley Townshend has put together for the Super Bowl, to be broadcast by CBS, includes “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Riley”, and “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, all used in the title sequences of CBS's CSI series. I think "So Sad About Us" might have been the more appropriate choice.

Lives of the Great Foodies, or At Least My Own

As a child, I ate well only at lunchtime. My classmates would get a single slice of some unspeakable Oscar Meyer lunchmeat, the kind that came in a little puddle of slime, between slices of the world’s worst white bread, as lacking in flavor or texture as in nutrition. I, on the other hand, got huge thick sandwiches with bologna bought from an actual deli and bread from an actual bakery. I think of the love with which my mother made those sandwiches and want to cry.

Breakfast wasn't so good; I wss rarely served a soft-boiled egg (and I got one, with toast, every morning) that didn't seem to contain a little glob of mucus. Nor was dinnertime any more felicitous. My mother, who’d never allowed herself to think she was much good at anything else, reveled in her exemplary housekeeping. Except for the chaotic top of her dresser — which seemed to be a sanctuary for all her refugee laziness — ours always looked like a model home, and was as clean as an operating room. She didn’t think of herself as much of a cook, though, and seemed intent on proving herself right. One night we’d have a (commonly undercooked) baked potato, Birdseye lima beans exactly as flavorful as the bag in which she’d brought them home from Thriftimart, and meatloaf, all too often with an egg in the middle. The next night we’d have a baked potato, Birdseye peas and carrots exactly as flavorful as the Thriftimart bag, and a piece of Van de Kamp’s halibut, commonly undercooked and a little soggy. Then it would be back to the baked potato, Birdseye lima beans, and meatloaf.

The potato, into which I could put a lot of butter and sour cream, usually got me through to dessert, the only part of the meal I — and Mom — really enjoyed. For about a year there, I wasn’t just meek, but roly-poly in the bargain, a glorious combination for a fourth-grade boy with self-esteem issues!

[Yes, it is indeed obscene for me to complain when so many in the world starved in those years. But still...]

I slimmed down somehow and delivered the Westchester News-Advertiser. There was a morale-boosting breakfast for all us paperboys at which sausages were served. I shudder now at the thought of them, but at the time was in epicurean heaven, having never encountered this rare and exotic delicacy in my ultra-secular Jewish household, wherein bacon made occasional appearances, but pork in other guises was unthinkable. Same thing with the luscious pigs-in-blankets offered by the Orville Wright Junior High School cafeteria, and their remarkable submarine sandwiches, with the radioactive chartreuse mustard. Every day at Nutrition (a mid-morning break intended to give young breakfast-skippers a chance to elevate their blood sugar) I gaped in astonishment as a big Mexican kid virtually inhaled one, his spending 35 cents at Nutrition — not even lunch, but Nutrition! — being roughly equivalent to J.P. Morgan ordering four lobsters and chateaubriand for dinner. Such profligacy!

My parents got slightly more adventurous as my mother became increasingly fed up with cooking. We tried Chinese food from the Thriftimart freezer case, and my dad would bring home a pizza pie or submarine sandwiches from a place on La Tijera in Westchester called Andy’s. The former, with everything drowning in cornstarch-thickened glop, was enough to put a less intrepid diner off Asian food forever. The latter, with genuine fresh oregano on the pizza, made me rejoice in having a palate.

The first 15 months or so in my first home in Hollywood, I made myself the same meal — sautéed shrimps, scallions, and mushroom with brown rice and spinach noodles — every night for the first year or so. I never tired of it; I looked forward to it every night. I have improved as a cook since then approximately as much as I have improved as a guitarist. [Judge my guitar-playing for yourself on my sensational new album; product placement!]

I believe that there are absolutes in the world. I believe, for instance, that racism and other forms of intolerance are, at the very least, extremely stupid, and that nearly everyone looks better with hair obscuring his or her forehead. I believe that aioli, sashimi, and dark chocolate with almonds or hazelnuts may be the most delicious edibles in the world, and that Thai cuisine — which I officially discovered in my twenties, though it was branded at the time as Siamese — is incontestably wonderful, though the first meal I ate in actual Thailand, at an open air market in Hua Hin, pretty nearly took my head off. The only hotter meal I’ve ever survived was at the Korean place on La Cienega Blvd. in West Hollywood where ABC Records’ art director would routinely get his staff too drunk to stand upright. I ate something there once that inspired me to sprint into the men’s room, fill a sink with cold water and immerse my whole face in it.

I stopped eating the flesh of dead mammals in the spring of 1978. If you’d been walking on Grant Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown beside me that day, and seen the meat truck guys carrying pig carcasses into the restaurant on the ends of poles with hooked ends, I can’t imagine you wouldn’t have stopped too. I regard beef-, lamb-, and pork-eaters as low-grade cannibals — with the full knowledge that real across-the-board vegetarians are no less disgusted by my own continued consumption of fish, fowl, and seafood.

The most wonderful meal I’ve ever eaten was at Langan’s Brasserie in London with my former friend Frances in 1979. We were both just back from the San Sebastian International Film Festival, where we journalists had been issued little books of vouchers to use at the city’s best restaurants — which is to say, some of Western Europe’s best restaurants. (Tapas: bliss!) I’d grown accustomed to having something breathtaking every night, but the turbot at Langan’s made all else pale in comparison.

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Terror in Paradise

Missus the First and I saw the ads in the Sunday Times Travel section. Hawaii, cheap. If not we, we thought, who? If not now, when? We went. At the airport, native beauties put plastic leis around our necks and cooed, “Aloha”. It was too corny for words. It had be done.

We did this and we did that. We went to the bay with the colorful fish. I snorkeled. We bought macadamia candy. We called our daughter back in the California wine country. It wasn’t as though we could converse with her. She wasn’t even two yet.

We took an Oahu Transit Services bus to view new necks of the woods. A too-friendly guy a few rows in front of us looked like the front man of Jethro Tull. Wild hair, scraggly beard. He was trying to strike up a conversation with anyone who’d have him. We wouldn’t have him. If he’d been female, and looked like Morgan Fairchild, I probably would have chatted up a storm. But I can be fairly English about talking to male strangers who look like Jethro Tull.

It turned out he didn’t need a conversational partner. He was chatting up his own storm on his own. He seemed to fancy himself a James Bond, covert operation type. He seemed benign, and we tuned him out. He stopped seeming so benign. He bragged about how many Mexicans and “niggers” he’d killed for the government. He was getting progressively louder. I turned around and saw that there was a middle-class-looking black couple behind us. They were trying to ignore him.

We stopped at the Turtle Bay resort in Waialua Bay. A bunch of locals who I guessed worked there got off the bus. Another bunch, who’d just finished their shift, got on. This spectacle seemed to distract Jethro Tull, who gave it a rest. First Missus and I, relieved, sighed. One of our new passengers was a young wrestling team type with a big, bright smile.

We got back on State Highway 803. Jethro Tull turned out just to have been warming up before. It turned out, as he told it, that he hadn’t killed only Mexican and niggers, but Hawaiians too, over 100 of them. The locals exchanged looks. Most seemed to decide to try to tune out the crazy haole. The wrestling team kid wasn’t the tuning-out type. He spun out of his seat, stood over Jethro Tull and asked, “Why don’t you shut up?”

Jethrol Tull got up too. Whatever he said wasn’t the right thing. The kid punched him in the face. It must not have been a great punch. Jethro Tull not only stayed upright, but produced a machete.

There were screams. The bus stopped and emptied in about a tenth of a second. The driver may have been the first one off. None of this captain-going-down-with-his-ship jazz for the driver. In retrospect I was ashamed to have hurried off myself; if the kid had been killed, I would have been partially to blame. I could have tried to tackle Jethro Tull from behind. I was thinking only of my own and Missus the First’s safety, mostly the former.

Wrestling Boy, dazed but unbloodied, was somehow out on the edge of the road with the rest of us. A small mob of locals ran out of their roadside homes to find out what had happened. Jethro Tull tried to drive the bus away. He couldn’t figure out even how to make the doors shut. The locals pulled him roughly from the bus and beat him.

One of them saw me taking photographs and made clear he didn’t think it a terrific idea. He neglected to take my film. The police arrived. The one who interviewed me and Missus the First, a haole, was an idiot. He had it in his head that she and I were somehow the culprits. It took him forever to grasp that we’d only been witnesses. Then we couldn’t make him understand that it had actually been the local kid who’d attacked Jethro Tull, rather than the other way around. It occurred to me that Hawaii 5-0 might have been named for the minimum IQ required by the Honolulu Police Department.

When I returned to Hawaii seven years later, it was with my daughter, rather than her mother, and her mother’s successor in my life. We knew to rent a car.


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The Crybabies Room

All these technological breakthroughs! Blu-Ray! 3D! 4G! Duane Eddy’s “40 Miles of Bad Road”! But what does it get you in the end? I have been a guest in the homes of wealthy audiophiles, and privileged to hear some remarkable stereo systems, but I'm quite sure I will go my grave never having enjoyed the sound of music more than on the monophonic radio in my pal Dave’s ’58 Chevy, in we which drove around and around and around during Christmas vacation in our senior year of high school, listening to the best music in the world — the Righteous Bros’ “Lovin’ Feelin”, The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”, The Supremes’ “Come See About Me”, The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”, The Zombies’ “She’s Not There” — while looking for girls (and secretly hoping we wouldn’t find any, as we were too shy to speak to the stuck-up bitches.)

I look forward to watching the forthcoming Super Bowl on a high-definition TV with more square footage than some hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, but have no expectation of enjoying it more than I did the first Super Bowl — the Ice Bowl!— which I watched on a 19-inch black and white TV. I saw Avatar in 3D a few weeks ago, and actually enjoyed it considerably less than I remember enjoying Disney’s Johnny Tremain at the Loyola Theater in the Westchester district of Los Angeles when I was 10.

God, the Loyola, with its 60-foot high neon swan outside, and its glorious Art Deco lobby, and its million square yards of red velvet in the auditorium, in which you were shown to your seat by a uniformed usher with a flashlight! The Loyola, joy of man’s desiring, with its magic show between halves of a double feature! They had what I think was called a crybabies room, soundproofed to muffle the tantrums of ill-behaved kiddies, but teenaged smart alecs had made it entirely their own by the time of my earliest visits. A modern multiplex would be doing well to inspire a thousandth the sense of occasion a place like the Loyola did, and the whole culture is the poorer for it. Keep your digital projection and 3D. Give me red velvet and Art Deco.

Speaking of snide teens shouting what they fancied to be witticisms to the characters on screen from the safety of the Loyola’s crybaby room, a free autographed copy of my life-changing latest album Sorry We’re Open to anyone who can explain why black movie audiences talk back to the actors on screen and white ones don’t?

And while we’re at it, why do black music lovers generally like a lot more bass than whites? I can only guess it’s because the lower frequencies are more ominously masculine, more evocative of natural disasters, that hip hop fan motorists turn up the bass in their lowered ’61 Chevies so high as to threaten the windows of every home or commercial establishment past which they drive. Arriving home from grocery shopping after being stopped at a traffic signal beside one of these characters, I’ve found cracked half of the dozen eggs with which I’d conspired to make a delicious omelette. One of these times, I won’t be surprised if one of my fillings is loosened.

In other entertainment-related news, one of this blog’s devoted fans was kind enough to send me for Xmas the Best of the Dean Martin Show boxed set of DVDs, which turns out to contain some wonderful surprises, my favorite being the show in which Dino’s guests included the beat authors Wm. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and Ginsberg’s lover Peter Orlovsky. In sketches based on Ginsberg’s poem Howl and and Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch, Ginsberg and Orlovsky show themselves to be good sports, real troupers, but Burroughs is self-conscious and wooden. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara makes a surprise appearance, entering from a closet in one scene, Ginsberg is taken aback at first, but plays along, while Orlovsky, presumably offended by McNamara’s role in the escalation of the war in Viet Nam, storms off stage. It isn’t entirely clear if Burroughs even recognizes McNamara, though Bob's defiantly retro center-parted hair and wire-rim spectacles had become nearly iconic by that time. Later in the show, singing "Danny Boy" with his host, Burroughs reveals himself to have had a gorgeous clear tenor and deft way with a musical phrase. Highly recommended!

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The Only Republican I've Ever Liked

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will admit now that between giving up on rock and roll and becoming the worst-selling author of a book about The Kinks (to whose post-60s music I am not flattered to hear my own compared, and about whom I want never to speak or even hear ever again), I briefly supported myself as a kidnapper.

Vacationing in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in the early fall of 1983, my first wife and I signed up for the horseback excursion our hotel offered. During the otherwise pleasant outing, a jowly, pink, wire-rimmed glasses guy whose bloatedness presumably suggested prosperity was snatched from among us with his wife by a quartet of what I supposed might have been called banditos with rotting teeth and intimidating glares. At first, I hoped it was some sort of charade intended to make the experience more vivid, but there was no mistaking the genuineness of Jowlyboy’s terrified whimpering as the banditos’ leader vigorously sodomized him right in front of us.

When they’d gone, our tour leader, who had some typical latino given name that I don’t recall — Miguel, something along those line — explained that, while the Bahía de Banderas tourism office had long been looking into ways of curtailing such abductions, they were still fairly commonplace. He hoped we would enjoy the balance of our ride, and we did.

On getting home to Los Angeles and finding nothing in the mailbox but a lot of form letters from editors thanking me for my interest in their periodicals, but lamenting that what I’d submitted wasn’t quite right for them, I resolved to return to Mexico and try my own hand at kidnapping.

I was lucky enough, within 10 days of essentially becoming a fixture at a Starbucks in Mexico City’s high-crime Iztapalapa district known to be a favorite meeting place of kidnappers, to fall in with a gang of similarly disgruntled fellow American expats. Their leader, or jefe, J. Ronald Feldman, had been a very successful intellectual property lawyer in the Twin Cities until realizing that you go around only once in life, and that his own had been pretty low on excitement. He’d grown a Fu Manchu (or, as he preferred, Sgt. Pepper-era John Lennon) mustache, learned a bit of Spanish, developed what would eventually prove a fatal thirst for artisanal tequila, and established himself as one of Mexico’s top human traffickers.

The Mexican media’s portrayal of him as a brutal sociopath notwithstanding, he was a patient and generous mentor to me, and within six months of my first latte in Iztapalapa, I was leading my own crew. You can imagine my elation on discovering that our first victim, L. Powell Bruton, on whom we descended as he left a swanky restaurant on Av. Presidente Masarik in the Polanco district, was an occasional advisor to Ronald Reagan, a former golf partner of Richard Nixon, and presumably obscenely rich.

The problem was that he was also a good egg, good-humored, brave, not a whiner. A lot of the people I’d snatched as part of the Feldman gang had started out threatening us, saying things like, “You have no idea how much hot water you’ve gotten yourself into, pal,” as though in a Ridley Scott film, and then, when that didn’t work, begging weepily, making real nuisances of themselves (which, of course, was the whole idea). Pow (he explicitly forbade us to call him Mr. Bruton), though, took the whole thing with remarkable grace, saying, “Hey, I understand you fellows are just doing what you think you need to,” even after learning that we would be sending his attorney one of his fingers every extra day we had to wait for the $18.75 million ransom we’d demanded.

He also did his best to help me understand that he’d left very strict instructions for…his people never to negotiate with kidnappers, but I, in that way I sometimes have — in that way I have far, far too often — didn’t take it to heart. Eight days after his snatching, he had only his thumbs left, and we not a nickel in ransom money, but even then he retained his sense of humor. “A heckuva lot of good opposable thumbs are going to do me,” he chuckled at one point while I cursed the non-ringing telephone and motionless fax machine, “now that you’ve left me nothing to oppose them with!” That night, when I finally broke into tears of frustration, he said, “Hey, come on now, John. Nobody’s going to hire me as a typist or piano player, but I can still hitchhike, and in both the USA and UK!” I can honestly tell you he was the only Republican I’ve ever liked.

Within six months, I’d returned to California, swallowed my pride, and myself taken as a job as a typist. Sometimes in this wacky world, people get exactly what’s coming to them.

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Why the Very Famous Stop Going Out

I was in a line for tickets to Disney On Ice at San Francisco’s Cow Palace sometime in the mid-90s when a guy behind me started bellowing, “Joe! Hey, Joe! Over here!” I assumed he’d recognized an acquaintance named Joe, but was mistaken. Whom he’d recognized was San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, at the time enjoying — if that’s the operative word — a status in the Bay Area just between God and Jesus Christ. Joe had apparently imagined he could come see the show with his wife and daughters, and they were indeed able to see it, but only after a mob of security guards rescued them from the frenzied mob that formed in response to the bellowing of the guy behind me.

If you have a lot of fame, you can always be assured of getting a table at a restaurant — and of being harassed while you try to enjoy your meal. Between the countless tens of millions who want more of it and the several thousand who want far less, and not counting the weirdos and Buddhists who want none at all, there might be around half a dozen people in the world who have an amount with which they’re happy.

I was friends with David Bowie when he was a couple of months into his Ziggy Stardust-fueled ascent to the toppermost of the British poppermost. When he and his then-wife took me and Big Patti to dinner in London’s West End, he was the only diner there with flame-colored hair, and was approached, while he tried to enjoy his meal and our company, by an endless succession of wide-eyed fans. Not one of them wasn’t well-mannered, but not one didn’t compel him to put down his soup spoon, glass, or fork. And not one actually wanted his autograph for himself; it was invariably for a sibling or friend. It amused me to see how his fans seemed to imagine that they weren’t intruding if it was on behalf of an unseen other.

I was famous on a small scale myself there for a couple of years, around the time the noted music journalist Bud Scoppa referred to me as The King of LA. It was very much what game theorists might have described as a zero-sum situation. On the one hand, my having managed to woo ‘n’ win Big Patti might have owed, if only subliminally, to my fame. On the other hand, what very hard work! Well-meaning people with whom I had no particular desire to interact were forever coming over and telling me, at best, how much they liked my work, but what do you say after “thanks”? I’d say exactly that, and then holler, in body language, “Off you go then,” and they’d continue to stand there beaming at me, reveling in the fact of our interaction. Over and over and over, when I finally excused myself, I felt as though hurting the feelings of people who’d been nothing but sweet. Be gracious and accommodating with people and they think you want to be BFFs. Be self-protectively brusque and get a reputation as a stuck-up so-and-so. I can well understand why the very famous stop going out.

Not, of course, that you have to actually be famous. For a number of years, it was impossible for me to walk through an airport, say, without somebody stopping me, squinting at me accusatorily, and demanding, “Hey, you are somebody, aincha?”

Become sufficiently famous as an athlete or performing artist, of course, and you become fair game for magazines and Websites in the business of exposing dirty laundry. But American celebrities don’t know how soft they’ve got it compared to their British counterparts. In the UK, which earlier gave us Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens, there are magazines unashamedly devoted to photographs of celebrities’ cellulite, moobs (man boobs, you see), and dark underarms. We tend to think of celebrities who lash out at paparazzi as brats and dickheads, but who among us would be comfortable with barbarically unflattering photographs of us being published above captions like, “The other morning when s/he went out to pick up the morning newspaper, So-and-So was hideous enough to terrify impressionable children.”

I always loathed The Eagles, but I’m not sure I’ll ever write a line better than this, from The Sad Café: “Fortune smiles on some/And lets the rest go free."

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