My Year of Sleaze

Accustomed, as I am, to maybe a couple of hundred at most endorsing anything I do on Facebook, I was pleasantly shocked to see that over 1800 had LIKEd the photograph I recently posted of me with my former girlfriend The Nib at Xmas in 1975, I in the same lime green satin bowling shirt I’d worn to my high school reunion, and she, as the Festive Holiday Season prescribes, in red, and an understandably skeptical expression.

I welcomed 1975 in the Rainbow Bar & Grill, where boys hoping to be mistaken for rock stars and gullible girls would grope one another in preparation for hurrying back to one another’s squalid digs in the hinterlands. “Fuck you, 1974, and good riddance,” I said, holding my glass aloft. During the referenced 12 months, my musical career had gone nowhere, Rolling Stone had cruelly spurned the big Rodney Bingenheimer feature article in which I’d imagined myself to do a really good Tom Wolfe imitation, and Patti Armageddon [not her real name] had broken my heart.

The first several months of 1975 were more of the same, except with a lot of promiscuity thrown in. I would go to the Starwood, the West Hollywood nightclub at which acts of insufficient prestige for the Whisky or the Troubadour would perform to audiences made up largely of persons on their way to the Rainbow. I would guzzle a great deal of vodka for courage, and some coffee to keep me lively, and try to persuade some platform-shoed maiden from a suburb I’d heard of in weather reports, but never actually glimpsed, to come home with me. A fair number did.

To perform the new songs I'd been writing, I put together a little group, the most notable member of which was a sensational, if unendurably truculent, R&B drummer from the Palm Springs ghetto (who’d have guessed there was one?). A future member of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers came to audition, listened for a few minutes, made the face of one who has just smelled something unpleasant, and went home without playing a note, but someone at a record company gave us money to record a demo. A prominent manager, scoffing, described it as sounding like Neil Diamond singing Dr. Hook. I’d intended Scott Walker singing Cole Porter, with a big, brash beat.

One night at the Starwood I came upon one of those record biz publicists to whom I’d formerly been ritually awful when I was The King of LA, and amazed him by being cordial. He offered me a job writing a little newsmagazine in my characteristic hilariously cynical style that might make ABC Records appear something other than hopelessly clueless.

My mentor pulled the plug when he discovered that I intended to make the third issue a celebration of Immorality in the Music Business, and to load it with photos appropriated from bondage magazines and of a pompous female executive who’d rubbed me the wrong way, both with the caption, “Stomach-turning scenes like this are all too common in today’s record industry!” At the time, all I knew about bondage was that I really liked the outfits.

[You won't want to miss a syllable of my account of the rest of 1975, coming tomorrow, right here!]

Brandy and Nimbleness (A People Person - Part 3)

He had a bottle of cheap brandy. I hadn’t any better offers, and so accepted a long pull. It felt like fire going down, and then, when it got, a moment later, to my brain, like heaven, or at least morphine.

His name was Roy. His loneliness was as evident as a vainer man’s aftershave. Ordinarily I sprint from such persons, but there was something irresistibly plaintive in his expression, and I had to wait for tiphanee anyway. It soon came out that we had something important in common. Years before, while working at Studio Instrument Rentals in Hollywood, delivering and retrieving rented musical equipment, he had met Tom Petty, whose music he kept hearing — and detesting — years after the fact. “He won’t back down?” he marveled. “The guy’s four feet tall, weighs 82 pounds, has a handshake like overcooked linguine, and he won’t friggin’ back down? From who — a nine-year-old girl?”

“Whom,” I said, because I can rarely help myself, and am particularly helpless with a bit of brandy in me.

“Whatever,” he said impatiently. “At the time his so-called hits were first released, I managed to tolerate most of them. I mean, he sucked, but I’d take him over Guns N’ friggin’ Roses's screeching, for instance, or friggin’ Madonna or even Springsteen in his mumbly friggin’ folkie mode; now that’s friggin’ unlistenable. But now it’s years later, and I’d like to go 72 friggin’ hours, thank you very much, without hearing ‘I Won’t Back Down” or ‘Free Falling,’ or any of them, for that matter.”

(Little did I realize at the time that I myself would find the whimpering little ferretface’s music inescapable in 2010. I hear it on my car radio. I hear it virtually daily at the gym. I hear it when I take my car in for an oil change. I hear it being played by the bands the Egyptian restaurant around the corner, down the hill, hires to play on weekend evenings in the summer. I understand that its inescapability owes to radio programmers and others believing that, bland as it is, the Petty ouevre doesn’t particularly offend anyone, but its blandness offends the devil out of me.)

By the time I was halfway through telling him that I shared his feeling, there were grateful tears in my new friend’s sack-lunch-colored eyes. He began trying to make plans for joint activities, asking if I liked fishing, or bowling, or going to Bulls or Bears games. I told him that, living in San Francisco, I was much more interested in the Warriors or 49ers. He observed that I was a long way from home, and wondered what I was doing in Naperville, of all places. When I told him I’d come to meet a young woman, his Adam’s apple seemed to become twice its former size, and bounced like an overinflated basketball. He stammered, “Well, I’d better be getting home,” and tried to jump to his feet, but he’d had too much brandy for nimbleness.

My worst fears were confirmed. He was tiphanee. As I looked around to try to ascertain if anyone were watching, or if I could strangle him with impunity, he blurted that it was loneliness that had inspired his deceit. When I relaxed my hold on him, he pointed out that I’d been no less deceitful than he. I realized he was right.

I couldn’t figure out, in my agitated state, what he would have wanted with a 16-year-old boy who resembled a member of a boy group. When it dawned on me that he must be homosexual, I was of course filled with revulsion, and then dread. What if he suddenly decided that he found me attractive, and I liked his doing so?
Panicked at the thought, my first thought was to strangle him, but then I reconsidered, and we wound up living together in Naperville (I dared not show my face in San Francisco!) for seven years, during the first of which I discovered that it’s possible for two men to have sex without any ickiness. We might be together even now if he hadn’t run off with one of the former members of New Kids on the Block, one whose identity I am not, of course, at liberty to disclose.

I Done Been on TV!

The really troubling thing isn’t that there are now officially more imitations of the Jerry Springer show than anyone could hope to count — shows on which the poor, illiterate, and/or obese scream at one another hysterically about suspected infidelities they’re ultimately shown, via DNA or lie detector tests, to have or not have committed, while a studio audience of cretins brays and hoots and wets itself in moral outrage. No, the most terrifying thing is that there’s an apparently endless supply of poor, illiterate, and obese persons eager to suffer such humiliation in exchange for the ability to say, “I done been on TV!”

These are unmistakably the same people who do most of the commenting on Facebook and YouTube. We knew before that they can’t spell, and are hopelessly confused by apostrophes, but now they reveal themselves to be lots better with apostrophes than with biology. While I was cooking the lasagna I will serve James and Naomi this evening, I was watching Maury, which I wish were called Maury!, the daily morning geek show hosted by the eminent journalist Maury Povich. In the time it took me just to boil the noodles, I think I must have seen no fewer than 15 ugly confrontations. My favorite pitted a balding, blue-eyed man against a fat white woman with cornrows he’d met on line. She claimed he was the father of her daughter, while he, accompanied by the mother of his two sons, explained no such thing was possible. Was it not obvious that he “shot out” only boys? And he and Cornrows had done it only once, and he’d pulled most of the way out!

Maury, who’s 70 now (as are not a few of your and my fave rock stars, and then some!) put on his reading glasses, smirked the smirk that the hosts of these shows are taught before they're allowed on the air, and revealed that a DNA test conducted by one of the show’s sponsors confirmed that Balding was indeed the little girl’s dad, at which the audience leapt to its feet squealing exultantly, going nyah-nyah-na-nyah-nyah, and thumbs-downing the poor devil.

They do exactly the same when what Maury announces the result of a lie detector test. I’ve yet to see a single person on one of these shows point out that in 1998’s United States v. Scheffer, the Supreme Court ruled that "there is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable". I suspect people are warned by the shows’ producers that their segments won’t be broadcast if they don’t play along.

After Balding’s exposure, there was a succession of fat black people, the most interesting of whom accused each another of sexual relations with their babydaddies’ stepsisters, and I was struck by the audience’s lofty morality. At the sound of the word cheating from Maury’s mouth, they absolutely howl. And should he utter threesome, for instance, they get absolutely apoplectic with outrage.

A blonde woman with a Tom Petty underbite came on next to accuse her fiancé, a blue-eyed numbskull in a backward baseball cap, of having cheated on her with “a ho on rollerblades.” Both seemed to be products of intensive inbreeding. The numbskull, who is officially able to cast exactly as many votes for President, say, as the head of Harvard’s political science department, was revealed, by lie detector, to have done the ho, and the audience would have gnawed his fingers and nose if it could have. And tomorrow there will be countless dozens more like him.

Sometimes I get so a-scared living in what Sarah Palin calls this great nation of ours.