Colt McCoy Confesses

A lot of people have been wondering about the mysterious injury that sidelined me in last week's Rose Bowl national college football championship game. After I was tackled by Alabama’s Marcelle Dareus on our fifth offensive play of the game, I was replaced by true freshman Garrett Gilbert, even though I hadn’t been carried off the field on a stretcher, and wasn’t even in apparent agony. It was later explained that I’d sustained a nerve injury that caused numbness and weakness in my throwing arm; You may have heard that in the locker room, I was unable to throw the ball seven yards to my dad (and high school coach), even though he was doing his utmost to encourage me, shouting, “Grow a pair of balls and toss me the fucking ball, you whimpering little mama’s-boy faggot.”

My inability to oblige him actually owed to no nerve injury, or resulting numbness. Rather, it was because I had, in the weeks leading up to the big game, seen my future with increasing clarity, and been terrified by it. I saw myself winning the Rose Bowl game in the closing seconds with a remarkable touchdown pass to Jordan Shipley, and then being carried off the field on my adoring teammates’ shoulders while our cheerleaders hurriedly changed into “something more comfortable” and arranged themselves in a semicircle around my locker. I saw myself going on to play for the Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League, not spectacularly, but well enough to make countless millions on endorsements because corporate America loves bland white Christian quarterbacks who are able to feign aw-shucks humility, and I had the numbers of a couple of highly rated acting coaches.

I would “write” an autobiography (that is, would allow a ghostwriter chosen by my agent to tape several conversations with me) in which I would attribute all my success to my faith in Jesus, and it would make the New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list, peaking at No. 3, behind co-Presidents Palin’s and Limbaugh’s most recent memoirs. I would, in the meantime, have married my extremely blonde college girlfriend Rachel Glandorf, and sired three attractive blond children with alliterative first names, the male first-born of whom would be expected from infancy to become a quarterback in his own right.

Once having retired, ostensibly To Spend More Time With My Family even though me and Rachel haven’t had anything to say to each other since maybe our third date, the various companies for which I’d shilled over the years would continue to pay me megabucks to occasionally play golf with this senator or that foreign tycoon.

None of that sounded very fun to me. What I wanted, and want, is to embody an entirely different constellation of clichés. I am learning the guitar, shaving irregularly and inattentively, and trying to learn to enjoy the taste of Jack Daniels, all with the intention of parlaying my football fame into a recording contract. As a country music superstar. I will write songs harshly condemning those who disdain the time-honored American values that I myself will mock by becoming addicted to amphetamines, drinking too much, and regularly being found unconscious in gutters with pockmarked crack addict African-American prostitutes, many of them transvestites. I will set a really horrible example for American youth, but what fun I’ll have.

Or maybe I’ll marry Jordan. My favorite receiver (no pun intended!) and I have been lovers since sophomore year; Rachel is a beard. We have spoken of moving together to Iowa, where we can legally wed, and where Jordan can work the fields manfully while I bake cornbread and keep the farmhouse tidy. We will coach a local Pop Warner team together, and maybe even be Scoutmasters.

In closing, I would like to reveal that I am not the sanctimonious Christian the University of Texas asked me to pretend to be, but a member of the Church of the Beast. I am called Colt, but my real given name is Occult.

Get over it.

[Hear my life-changing new album Sorry We're Open here! Facebookers: Read more All In Tents and Porpoises essays and subscribe here.]

Whores and I

I have never paid for sex. God knows there’ve been stretches, such as after the crumbling of my first marriage, when I thought that, at 40, I’d lost my looks and would never find another gal to love me. It certainly isn’t that I didn’t consider paying for it, but that I figured I’d wind up feeling a chump, as I had on those few occasions when I’d ventured into strip clubs, or whatever they were actually called. The girls there were invariably slightly misshapen, several had bad skin, and all of them leered accusingly, as though to say, “I hate you, and I hate what I have to do here to feed the child I had at 15, and I’m really a lesbian anyway, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”

When I was a teenager, my dad had offered to introduce me to sex by taking me to a prostitute. I found the prospect terrifying. I had every reason to believe that he would embarrass me terribly, flirting up a storm with her before finally leaving us two lovebirds alone together.

My zookeeper girlfriend Nancy took me to the Mitchell Bros.’ famous San Francisco porn emporium for my 43rd birthday. (It had turned out that I’d only just begun to lose my looks!) She was the only woman patron there, and we got lots of daggers stared at our throats. As we sat down to watch a succession of surgically enhanced young women behave lasciviously on stage, another girl came by offering lap dances. The guy beside me asked for one as Guns N’ Roses’ "One In a Million," in which Mr. Axl Rose condemns “niggers” and “faggots,” began to play. I’d read about the song while researching my ill-fated David Geffen biography, but never actually heard it. I was surprised by what a blatant ripoff of a Stones song (“Sympathy for the Devil,” if memory serves, but it might not) it was, and said something to Nancy along the lines of, “What a piece of shit!” Whereupon the girl on the lap of the guy beside me launched into a passionate defense of the group even as her customer began to moan pre-orgasmically beneath her. I don’t think I’ve ever debated the merits of a particular artist or group of artists in more unusual circumstances.

I have never paid a prostitute for sex, but I briefly dated one, during the days when I would go to the Starwood, the West Hollywood nightclub popular with those who found the atmosphere at the Whisky a Go Go too rarefied, drink black coffee for alertness and vodka for courage, and swagger through the place letting promiscuous young women observe how much like a rock star I looked. When one on whom I lowered the boom late one weeknight confided that she was a call girl, she immediately became very much more attractive; I found exciting the idea of getting free what others had to pay $250 for. But I soon discovered that her company made me feel more, rather than less, lonely, and broke her heart. Of gold. Actually, I think she found me weird, as did so many of the maidens I met at the Starwood. I used big words they didn’t know and hadn’t much interest in cocaine.

In 2001, I wrote a song for the Mistress Chloe album Like a Moth to Its Flame called "The Prostitutes of London," which I later dusted off and rammed manfully into the repertoires of two of the sketch comedy revues I directed while living in the named city. There isn’t a single mention of prostitutes, though, on my forthcoming Sorry We’re Open album.

[From the blog For All in Tents and Porpoises. Enjoy the archive and subscribe at http://johnmendelsohn.blogspot.com]