My First Million!

People who invite me to rank the many decades of my life are commonly surprised to hear of my fondness for the 1980s. It isn’t that I didn’t detest Ronald Reagan, or the whole Greed Is Good thing, but I really enjoyed a lot of the music in the first half of the decade. It seemed as though, in the hands of the synth-pop bands from the UK, melody had returned to its rightful place in pop music’s forefront. Every time Talk Talk’s It’s My Life came on the radio, I nearly swooned. There are few records I’ve ever loved more. I loved as well how the synth-pop bands had influenced Bruce Springsteen, most of whose recorded work had heretofore left me cold, but whose Dancing In the Dark also made me swoon. 

And, most pertinent to today’s sermon, I loved the fashions, however compulsory it’s become in this century to ridicule them. Both the music and the clothes in those lovely days were bright and colourful and unapologetically silly, and who could ask for anything more? Not only that, but I’d hooked up with the pretty, smart, hilarious blonde on whom I’d first laid eyes  eight years before when she accompanied the bass player to my first band’s Warner Bros. audition. I was crazy about her, and she about me. She would look at me and marvel, “How did I get so lucky?” She enjoyed erotic cosplay, or at least acceded to it, read all my writing with interest, and got nearly all my jokes, and for the first four years I felt as though I’d won the lottery. We wed and had a daughter  before we went badly off the tracks. She'd ceased to feel lucky, and I'd come to view her as a spoiled little alcoholic brat. On MTV, which we’d loved in the early days, the synth-pop bands were getting roughly pushed aside by hair metal, which I loathed, but not nearly as much as I’d loathe that which pushed hair metal aside — grunge. 

But we’re getting way off the subject, for which I can hardly blame you, as I’m the one writing. My point is that it’s the job of every generation to ridicule previous generations’ fashions. Believing which, I borrowed £20K at the beginning of the year to open a tattoo removal clinic. Tattoos have been ever so fashionable for ages, but people are running out of skin, and I’m betting it won’t be long before tattoos go the way of bolo ties, shoulder pads, huge perms, and legwarmers for ladies, and multiple facial piercings. We will look at the tattooed in the same pitying, condescending way we look at middle-aged men with grey ponytails and earrings. I thought I'd have earned my first million in a couple of months. 

I have yet to earn my first thousand. One of the clinic’s first, uh, patients was a grey-ponytailed blues dude who’d had a likeness of BB King tattooed on his forehead. Before he’d let us touch him, he wanted to know my two dermatologists’ qualifications. Sharif, the Egyptian one, had dropped out of medical school after a year to fight in the Arab Spring, while the other, Huong, who’d previously worked in a fingernail salon, had learned everything she knew watching YouTube instructional videos. Blues Dude loudly declared that he wasn’t about to entrust his forehead to either of them (though he’d already entrusted it to an artist who’d made BB King look more like Howlin’ Wolf!), and word of his demurral seemed to spread very quickly throughout southwest London, to the point at which I had to let Sharif go. 

Meanwhile, the bank has been braying ever more loudly for the loan payments I’ve been unable to make. When I went in to assure the loan officer with whom I’ve been dealing that tattoos will almost surely be seen as hopelessly passe and uncool by mid-2018, he gave me the dirtiest look in the history of looks, rolled up his sleeves, and showed me that both arms were covered with tats to just above the wrist. He’s given me 60 days. I hired a couple of teenagers to spraypaint Tattoos R For Boring Old Farts all over southwest London, but both were arrested within 48 hours.

As I write this, things aren't looking good. 

I Am Composing a New, More Singable, National Anthem!

God never closes a door without first locking the windows. Sometimes we try in vain to get in through a window already locked, only to realise that God, with so very much on His mind, might have neglected to lock another one a few feet away, For decades I tried to make my living as a songwriter in the traditional way, by having bands that recorded my songs. But I began raking it only at the beginning of the present decade, when I began composing narrocorridos for Mexican and other Spanish-speaking drug lords. 

It all began in Los Angeles in 2013 when my band The Romanovs played a swanky private party in Bel-Air, a neck of the woods favoured by those who have grown too rich for Beverly Hills. In between our second and third sets, a beautifully dressed young Latino in expensive-looking sunglasses (though it was nighttime!) and Paco Rabanne asked if I might be interested in composing some songs in honour of his boss, the head of a Oaxaca-based cocaine cartel. I said that I probably would not, as I would might feel morally compromised promoting drug use, but then he wrote a figure on his business card and handed it to me, and it contained more zeroes than I have ever seen in one place. I explained that, while I’d studied Spanish at Santa Monica High School in the 1960s, I had barely retained sufficient fluency to order lunch from one of the taco trucks that had become so plentiful in Los Angeles, and was relieved when he said I would be teamed with a translator/poet.

It turned out to be great fun. I would write a paragraph about the cartel kingpin, and the translator, Refugio, who encouraged me to call him Oojie, would translate it into rhymed Spanish. It turns out that I still have the first paragraph I sent to him, on my hard drive:

El Magnifico [as the subject of the song enjoyed being called] is a man of extraordinary virility, courage, wisdom, and compassion. 

His penis is the size of a pre-adolescent’s forearm, and his testicles are the size of the navel oranges for which Veracruz is famous. He snickers disdainfully at the attempts of the corrupt and stupid federales to arrest him, and leaves such gigantic tips at the bars and bistros in which he likes to wine and dine beautiful young women with small waists and enormous breasts who find his wealth and virility irresistible that the restaurateurs are able to send their children to Spanish universities. Several such children have become medical researchers, whose work is sure to benefit all of mankind. 

Oojie and I wrote 15 songs for El Magnifico, but all good things must end, and this past February we were advised that El Magnifico “wanted to go in a new direction”, and that our services would no longer be required. I emailed a couple of other cartel kingpins, one in Panama and the other in Honduras, but heard back from neither, and was pretty despondent up until last Friday afternoon, when Amy W—, an assistant to White House press secretary Sarah Fuckabee (oops!) Sanders, contacted me to ask if I might be interested in composing a new national anthem celebrating Donald J. Trump, to be entitled “Play Loud Thy Trumpets, Angels”. Amy thought it might be a very good idea to note in the song that President Trump's penis is the size of a pre-adolescent’s forearm, and his testicles the size of the grapefruits of Mar-a-Lago, that he snickers disdainfully at both Robert Mueller and CNN, and is passionately loved by his people. 

I was one of 123 songwriters invited to compete. The winner would receive $25,000 and the admiration of a country that found The Star Spangled Banner difficult to sing, and lyrically nonsensical. The losers, of course, would be stiffed. 

Intent on winning the competition. I have been listening for inspiration to Russian martial music of the Stalinist era, and already have some melodic ideas I think Ms. Fuckabee (oops) Sanders and others are really going to like. But I’m not saying I don’t welcome your supportive prayers.