Witnessing the horror of the ongoing Donald Trump presidency, I feel the most fervent contempt for those who, in George Will’s wonderful words, “gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.” But once, long ago, when I was in a situation very much like theirs, I did no better.
‘Twas 1980, and I couldn’t make ends meet. My attempts at becoming an internationally adored rock star hadn’t quite panned out, and the world seemed to have changed its mind about my writing, which I’d come to be unable to give away. I lived in one room in a crumbling art hovel on the edge of LA’s Koreatown ordinarily occupied by a friend who’d gone to New York City in hopes of becoming an internationally acclaimed new wave star. I was so close to pennilessness that I didn’t buy myself the Los Angeles Times, but asked my sister to save hers for me. Each day, I would enjoy an edition from the previous week. My falling-apart Austin Marina was the farthest thing from a chick magnet in all of southern California, not that I could afford my insurance payment.
Larry Flynt Publications offered me a job. I would be the articles editor for Hustler’s much more respectable little sister, Chic. I would be paid $25,000 per year, over $70,000 in 2020 money.
The guy who called the shots at LFP, the late Bruce David, was living proof that cocaine could ruin a person’s personality. I’d never heard shriller screaming. At any moment, you thought he might start yanking out handfuls of his own hair — or handfuls of that of someone who’d inaccurately enacted one of his unintelligible editorial directives. Years later, when I saw Downfall, about the last days of Adolf Hilter, I felt as though back in LFP’s conference room on the 37th floor in Century City.
Given how everyone’s blood pressure soared at those meetings, it was a wonder everyone seemed to survive them, albeit slightly ashamed of themselves. None more than I, who never uttered a peep of protest. Instead, I sat as far from Bruce as I could, took care never to make eye contact with him, and tried to will myself into invisibility. He never laid into me, possibly because he didn’t know I was there, and I never defended anyone at whom he was shrieking. I wanted to keep my job, to be able to buy myself sushi for lunch, and to fill the little fuel tank of my new Renault Le Car with unleaded gasoline.
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. I’m in no position to condemn those in the Trump White House who abide his monstrousness.
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