Yo, Can We Get Another Pitcher of Cabernet Blush Over Here, or What?

If Gene Simmons were the CEO of a Wall Street bank, I’m pretty sure he’d have been tarred and feathered by now, if not eviscerated. He knows perfectly well that KISS’s music was purest bullshit, I think, but only gloats about how rich it’s made him, and how many gorgeous young women it’s inspired to fellate him. If we don’t count Mel Gibson — and I’m not sure we can, given his ties to Australia — I can’t imagine any reasonable person disputing that Simmons and Donald Trump are the two most obnoxious celebrities in modern American life. So it troubles me to find myself agreeing with him about something — beer. He finds it distasteful, and, after all these years, its appeal continues to elude me too.

I don’t think anyone drinks it because he finds the taste of it pleasurable. I believe, instead, that we drink it because we’ve been acculturated to drink it — to equate its consumption with masculinity.

When I came of age, drinking beer was approximately equivalent to having the words Hopelessly Unhip tattooed on your forehead. Beer was what your dad and his buzzcut pals from work drank after golf on Saturday, or while watching the ball game, and who with any claim to hipness was going to be caught watching a ball game? If you wanted to get a buzz, you smoked pot.

I first tried beer while briefly hanging out with The Kinks, who, being British men, regarded the drinking of a lot of what they knew as lager as a sacred duty. I didn’t much care for the taste. I didn’t care for the taste at all.

The first peers I ever saw drinking the stuff with unashamed enthusiasm were the members of Alice Cooper, with whom my own band shared a bill at the dawn of the 70s. I could hardly believe my eyes. At least two of them were on their way to becoming heavy duty alcoholics.

When my band went on an abortive tour of the Northwest three years later, I made a determined effort to ascertain why our guitarist was so fond of the stuff, and discovered that if you drank a lot more of it at one time than I’d thought to at that point, it made you feel really good for a short while. When I got back to Laurel Canyon, I bought myself a six-pack of Miller High Life from the Canyon Country Store, and horrified my girlfriend — whose dad had been alcoholic — by drinking it in front of her.

After she left me — because I was the asshole of the century back then, not because of the beer — I discovered that, as anesthetics went, it wasn’t nearly as potent as whiskey. I’ve never been able to resolve the question this realization raised. If you’re drinking for the buzz, rather than the taste, why not drink something that delivers a much bigger buzz without making you feel full of carbon dioxide?

At one point, I enjoyed washing down tortilla chips with Dos Equis while playing cards. While living in the UK, I tasted a couple of appealing Scandinavian lagers. I am convinced, though, that there isn’t a beer in the world that can compare in flavorfulness to a nice wine, the problem being that wine is what effete faggots, rather than Real Men, drink, and not just in our culture. In Italy, for instance — a country in which quite reasonable table wine is only slightly more expensive than the water in public fountains — you’ll see working class men guzzling nothing but Birra Peroni, for approximately the same reason that their American counterparts guzzle the beer-flavored soda pop that is Budweiser: through its sponsorship of the national football team, it’s made itself synonymous with masculinity.

It’s well known that Marlboro cigarettes were originally marketed as gender-neutral, and then rebranded as the favored smoke of the hypermasculine. I am considering declaring it my personal mission to make rosé what the male patrons of sports bars order to sip while watching the big game. Watch this space for my decision.

I Made My Bed, and Lie In It

Yesterday I wrote about my unlikely romance with Mel Gibson. I wrote about how our mutual attraction had been such that he’d waived his prejudices against Judaism and homosexuality to live with me in sin. Naturally, it was all a lie; Mel and I are no more than good friends who play racquetball or golf, or go chasing skirts together, whenever he’s in town. I’ve been lying so long I can barely remember what it’s like to tell the truth.

I remember my first lie with great clarity. My mother and father and I were living together in an apartment on Manchester Blvd. in Westchester, a not-very-interesting part of Los Angeles. My dad and I had gone over to visit a neighbor who collected Indian (Native American) artifacts. He gave me an arrowhead that I, at eight, thought fantastically cool and desirable, and for which I thanked him profusely. He laughed and explained that he wasn’t giving it to me, but just showing it to me. I pretended, to minimize my embarrassment, that I’d known that all along. I assured him I was thanking him just for the privilege of being allowed to hold such an exciting item.

It got easier after that. When Chris Dejan, who lived in the same building as the arrowhead collector, annoyed me at school, I told him walking home one afternoon that I had something fantastically cool to show him. I told him to close his eyes and hold out his hands, and then walloped him in the kisser with all my might. It was a coward’s pleasure.

Later, in high school, I deceived Kathy Roberts, Santa Monica High School’s No. 1 object of male desire, into becoming my girlfriend by telling her that I was handsome, self-assured, and would have been the quarterback of the varsity football team but for my congenital sciatica. I proceeded to lie my way into a full scholarship at one of the University of California’s more desirable campuses, telling them I’d done fantastically well on my SATs, and that my family was penniless, and that I would be pleased to quarterback the football team the moment my sciatica dissipated.

I lied my way into the bedrooms of some of the most notable beauties on campus, telling some that I was a member of a very selective fraternity, and telling the hipper ones that I had taught Jimi Hendrix to play the guitar, and would have had Timothy Leary on speed-dial had there been such a thing as speed-dial at the time.
I avoided military service during the Viet Nam war by telling the authorities that I was homosexual, and that I weighed nine pounds too little for my height, according to their own guidelines. I instead opened a gift shop at which I made a small fortune by overcharging anyone who paid with a Diner’s Club card. It has only recently become common knowledge that few people actually look at anything other than the signature box of the credit card receipts they’re given to sign.

I was cast in a succession of high-grossing late-70s action films by telling their producers that I exuded a subtly inexorable brand of masculinity, and bought a mansion in the Hollywood Hills after grossly misrepresenting my income to a starstruck mortgage broker who’d admired my work in Die, Pimp, Die. I stopped getting high-paying roles, though, after my own subtle but inexorable brand of masculinity became less fashionable than the vulgar, overt sort exemplified by Vin Diesel and other weightlifters. I was nonetheless able to live comfortably on the royalties I received for “Lies”, the song I’d composed for The Knickerbockers, later covered by Ms. Linda Ronstadt, albeit not on the album of standards that municipal law required be played thrice from start to finish every night in every chic restaurant in Los Angeles between April 1982 and July 1983

In some key ways, The Knickerbockers had engendered greater disappointment than any group in the history of popular music. “Lies” sounded exactly like The Beatles, but then The Knicks turned out to be fronted by a rotund little saxophonist with a long-discredited coiffure.

The blatant untruths of which this essay is full are intended for entertainment purposes only.

Hypermasculine Me

Somewhere in America, a restaurant is failing, and losing more money every month. It is failing because the food is crap, or rubbish, or looks and tastes like used diapers. This is so because the chef has Lost His/Her passion. The owners have no money left to send the children to college. Indeed, Dad is hoping, though it shames him to do so, that Elder Daughter will consent to a few months of call-girling just so the restaurant’s suppliers won’t stop supplying it.

The world-famous chef with a face that the English press has cruelly, accurately described as resembling a scrotum, but dazzling blue eyes, rides into town. He samples the restaurant’s food and pronounces it…crap. It is unmistakable to him that its chef has lost his/her passion. He tours the kitchen and is appalled by its filthiness. He wouldn’t let a rabid dog throw up in it. The restaurant’s owners want to kill him, and each other, and themselves. There is a commercial break.

WFC says the chef must regain his/her passion, the kitchen must be cleaned, and a new, simpler menu must be devised to replace the existing one, which offers 382 different dishes that the passionless chef either can’t cook very well or hasn’t even heard of. Everyone hates the WFC, whose umbrage at the restaurant is such that he actually bounces up and down as he spews profanity. One of the restaurant’s owners would rather quit the business then endure another moment of the WFC’s verbal abuse.

WFC stops spewing profanity long enough to devise a new, more streamlined menu featuring fresh local ingredients. The chef’s passion begins to come back. In the dead of night, WFC’s team of decorators comes in and makes the restaurant slightly less ugly, or ugly in a slightly more current way. Seeing this transformation, the restaurant’s staff is moved to tears.

The restaurant is relaunched. Local dignitaries and tastemakers are invited. But on this night of nights, this do-or-die night, the kitchen can’t cope. Diners are shown wondering what’s taking so long for their appetizers to arrive. Meals are returned to the kitchen, where the newly re-impassioned chef utters one of WFC's favorite words. WFC’s prodigiously furrowed brow grows even furroweder. It appears as though his heroic efforts are all for naught. This time, he has bitten off more than even he can chew!

But wait. His exhortations to the chef to Take Command finally sink in. The kitchen catches up. In the dining room, local dignitaries are observed enjoying the restaurant’s food more than they’d have dreamed possible. At night’s end, the restaurant’s staff baptizes WFC in grateful tears. At the end of the tunnel, they have glimpsed light. WFC rides off into the sunset, his blue eyes twinkling deep in the furrows.

Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is ever thus. It is thus in the UK, where I saw it first, and where no bleeping takes place when the great man calls his would-be beneficiary a fucking disgrace with bollocks the size of fucking chick peas, and it is thus now in the USA, where, with the sublime, if no less predictable Friday Night Lights, GRKN has made Friday night a wonderful time to stay home in one’s home theatre.

In other news, I’m not the world’s most masculine guy. I grew up playing with Barbie rather than balls and bats. I’m not good with tools and have never driven a motorcycle; I couldn’t be less handy on a bet. I’m really good at divining what certain facial expressions connote. I have no qualms whatever about asking directions, and enjoy wearing women’s clothing. I am soft-spoken and sensitive. But commercials for the impending release of Sex in the City II have begun airing, and I am suddenly feeling hypermasculine and heterosexual, for I tremble with loathing at the mere sight of them.

I watched the first one because Claire was a big fan, and at the end pronounced it six hours (or so it seemed) of absolute torture. I can’t stand Bruce Willis. I would sooner watch twice every action film Bruce has ever made — plus the entire oeuvre of Steven Seagal — than 10 minutes of this.

Anyone up to some hunting, camping, or fishing?