An Asshole's Asshole

In 1980, Bruce D— oversaw Larry Flynt’s three magazines, the fervently vulgar Hustler, the considerably subtler, very much less popular, Chic, and, if memory serves, Bathroom Companion, which published that which…sit down for thisss!…Hustler found distasteful. I was down on my luck, and agreed to come in to be interviewed for the senior editorship of Chic, with the understanding that I would conceive, assign, and edit exposės of prominent American hypocrites, and have nothing whatever to do with the sleaze for which Hustler was infamous.

Bruce’s little office was very dark, and smelled vaguely of singed hair. As his secretary, who I understood to be something like his 19^th in the past three weeks, left me at its threshold, he glowered as though at someone who'd ruined his childhood, though we'd never met. He reviewed the writing samples I’d brought in and demanded why I wasn’t contributing to Hustler. I didn’t say, “Because I find it appalling on every level.” They hired me.

I hadn’t been in my oppressively beige office high above the smog of Century City two hours before I heard screaming from down the hall. I came to understand that Bruce believed that flying into deafening rages without provocation inspired everyone to strive for ever-greater excellence. Someone was forever getting fired, deafeningly.

At our regular editorial meetings, anyone who dared make eye contact with him was apt to get Bruce's incisors imbedded in his or her trachea. Only two people were safe. One, of course, was the seldom-seen Althea Flynt, Larry’s drug-addled former child bride. The other was a Sammy Glick-ish little slimesac named Jack O— who’d somehow managed to brownnose himself into Althea’s favor after being hired to oversee Bathroom Companion because no one else would sink that low. Seated to Bruce’s immediate right, he'd snarl and sputter and seethe right along with him, like a little kid imitating his angry daddy. Everyone would have snickered — and not a few pantsed him (pulled his trousers down in front of everyone) — if not for the fact that it might have drawn Bruce’s attention. The great irony being that Bruce clearly loathed him as much as any of the rest of us did. If there was any pleasure at all in these meetings, is was that of seeing Bruce having to leave Jack's trachea intact.

Naïve country boy from Playa del Rey that I was, I’d never seen anyone in an office ascend so far and so quickly as Jack solely on the basis of shamelessness, nor a bigger monster than Bruce. The scariest thing being that a fair number of my women colleagues were known to find him very sexy. It was said that, without cocaine, he was actually a decent human being. Without Nazism, Adolf Hitler might have been remembered as a painter of landscapes, and affectionate toward dogs. I spent every lunch hour pouring enough alcohol down my throat to make the afternoon endurable.

I was hugely ambivalent about getting fired after three months. I needed the money, but the stress was killing me. (Did I mention that Althea's horny elder sister had taken a shine to me, and that her husband, Larry's Chief of Security, was widely thought to be both pathologically jealous and homicidal?)

Bruce apparently continued to run the show at LFP, to remain its alpha asshole, well into the present century. In 2004, to express his contempt for feminist critics of violent porn, he apparently ordered a three-page pictorial of women being dragged behind farm equipment. Take that, bitches! The year before, he’d featured his own twin sons, then not yet teens, in a parody ad with the hilarious title My Parents Aren't Home, Give It To Me Quick. An asshole’s asshole, our Bruce.

Meanwhile, Jack, whose idea of writing was to get out a thesaurus and organize long parades of synonyms, apparently went onto some success as a screenwriter, which I believe tells you all you need to know about Hollywood. 

I wrote and performed (in San Francisco, London, and Madison, Wisconsin) a one-man theatrical show about my experiences at LFP, which I called Wm. Floggin' Buckley. I played all the characters, obviously, the most fun being Althea, who, at our sole meeting (at which she hoped to see for herself if I were as cute as Marsha had told her), nodded off into her salad in mid-sentence. 

On reflection, I see that Jack might actually have been a bigger asshole than Bruce, who at least was about something other than ambition, even if said something were sadism.

Wm Floggin' Buckley - Part 2

[The script of the one-man show about my brief, very unpleasant tenure at Larry Flynt Publications, which I have performed in San Francisco, London, and Madison, Wisconsin.]

It had once been one of the most elegant and gracious houses in all Los Angeles. But by the late 70s, its owners, who had gambling problems, had begun renting out rooms to students from local art colleges. The next thing they knew, the place was full of former members of Blondie and the Loud family, subjects of a celebrated public television documentary a couple of years before.

The plumbing was a disaster. If the apprentice electrician heroin addict who lived in the south-western upstairs bedroom showered too long – and he'd been known actually to nod off in the shower -- the penniless underground cartoonist, Matt Groening, who lived downstairs would be soaked. Local gangs had spray-painted their names all over the sides of the place.

I shared one of the upstairs bathrooms with Grant Loud. He wasn't loud, but deafening. He threw a Christmas party at which he handed out photocopied lyric sheets so that everyone could sing along to The Little Drummer Boy. Pa rum pum pum pum. Whether anyone actually sang was a matter of conjecture. Grant had turned the actual record up loud enough to be heard not only on the eastern edge of Koreatown, but the western edge of Seoul.

After the police arrived, I realized Elvin McIlhenny was there. When I was the rock critic America most loved to loathe, Elvin had written me fan letters from the Missouri outback. Even though the only thing uglier than his typing was his handwriting, they'd amused me, and we'd remained in touch even after my descent into obscurity. Our relationship foundered only when he moved to LA himself, invited me to lunch, and repeated none of the stupid puns he'd been packing into his letters the past six years fewer than 900 times.

I knew that Hammond Palmer, for whom he was now working as an editor, had opened the original Cuntry-with-no-o chain of topless/bottomless bars in Savannah, Georgia, in 1978. Then, having surmised that both Playboy and Penthouse were too highbrow for the sort of good old boy who was his typical patron, he'd started a magazine of his own – Cuntry, without an o. Forget Playboy's and Penthouse's genteel tits 'n' ass. Hammond had filled his magazine with luridly retouched close-ups of women's labia, racist cartoons, and rabid denunciations of just about everyone in American public life, had it printed on really expensive glossy paper, and earned a quick fortune, whereupon he took to making a spectacle of himself on the national evening news three or four times a month, here appearing at his own obscenity trials in a fig leaf, there publicly urinating on the limousines of prominent political candidates. Finally, for his big piece de resistance, he'd got himself paralyzed in both legs and one arm when a Christian fundamentalist zealot tossed a hand grenade into his own limo.

Elvin asked if I'd be interested in writing something for the sex toys section, which he edited. I'd come to afford bus fare by this time only by redeeming empty aluminum soft drink cans, and said sure. Two days later, he sent me some recent issues. They were even worse than expected, devoted mostly to photographs of female trailer trash, naked except for stiletto heels and the odd boa, exposing their most personal parts and leering at the camera as though to say, "Come on, big boy, bludgeon me into submission with your huge manly thing." The good news was that not all the cartoons were racist or homophobic. Some were just gruesome.

In the letters section, the magazine's readers, all of whom seemed to have the identical prose style, either bragged about their sexual exploits or confessed to the most preposterous imaginable fetishes, both in goose bump-inducing detail. I decided I'd better stick with my soft drink cans.

But then Cuntry's managing editor, Don Hogarth, who sounded like a nice guy, phoned out of the blue to say he had a staff position opening up and that HPP would send one of its limousines if I'd come talk to him about filling it. Just out of curiosity, I asked how much the job paid. 35 thousand 1980 dollars.

How soon can the limousine get here?

[Continues tomorrow! Don't miss a single installment!]

Remembering the Wilton Hilton

After M— and I split up, The Kiddo generously offered to let me stay with him in the Van Nuys house in which he was taking care of a script supervisor friend’s Alaskan Malamutes while she was on location. He taught me some things about cooking I remember to this day, and we chased some skirts together, and it was generally bachelor fun a-go-go. I was doing enough running every night to not have to think twice about polishing off a quart of Alta-Dena’s sublimely delicious coffee ice cream as we watched The Dating Game, which, by this time, had entered its wonderful sluts-on-parade phase; its invariably spandex-encased bachelorettes all seemed to have been recruited from Flipper’s Roller Disco.

But then Ms. King returned from location, and I had to find somewhere else to hang my hat. Mr. d’Andrea, who'd played bass guitar in my band The Pits, said I could inhabit his room in a notorious art hovel on the western edge of LA’s Koreatown (or, for those wanting to sound very much posher, the eastern edge of Hancock Park) while he sought fame and fortune with Mr. Valentine, late of Blondie, in New York.

The house had once been a mansion, but obviously neighborhoods go to hell from the outside in, and the west side of Wilton Avenue at 6th Street was in accelerating decline. The big house on one side was noticeably being devoured by winged pests. On the other, a small army of swarthy foreigners of indeterminate origin (Egyptians, d’Andrea thought, though I detected no trace of pyramids or hieroglyphics) had moved in, causing the whole corner to reek of exotic spices. At the Mayfair supermarket a couple of blocks east, all the fish was labeled in Korean. (I assume the red meat was as well, but I’d stopped eating it two years before.)

Two artists -- a romantic pair -- occupied one of the downstairs bedrooms, and an alcoholic animator/illustrator the other. Upstairs, Grant Loud (of the famous American Family, as seen on PBS) had one of the bedrooms, and his very shy sister Michele another, though she surrendered it soon after I moved in to an electrician heroin addict, a nice guy who commonly supplied the household with fresh shark and swordfish. Several residents had ties to the artist Gary Panter, and thus to Pee Wee Herman. It was said that Matt Groening had lived there, and maybe even conceived The Simpsons there.

The d’Andrea room had a separate outside entrance via a stairway, and a view of the tableau of urban squalor the back yard had been allowed to become. I shared one of the two ballroom-sized upstairs bathrooms with Grant, who commonly got drunk with Tim, the alcoholic animator/illustrator from directly beneath me. The drunker they got, the louder and more obnoxious. D’Andrea, speaking on the phone from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, would urge me to try to be understanding about their need to let off steam, but it has always been my policy to encourage neighbors to annoy me as much as I annoy them, and the only time I ever annoy neighbors is when I urge them to stop annoying me.

I worked briefly for Larry Flynt Publications while living there, senior-editing Hustler’s much more genteel sister publication, Chic. My sexual charisma was peaking in those days, and I brought a few Century City beauties who’d succumbed to it home with me. I don’t think a single one failed to be alarmed by Grant-‘n’-Tim’s drunken braying. We had multiple shouting matches.

They threw a big Xmas party, passing out photocopied lyric sheets so everyone could sing along, tongue firmly in cheek, with Mitch Miller albums of carols, and the crème of the LA New Wave music and fashion scenes turned out in force. I got there late because I’d been at a Chic party down in Venice, where I’d abused multiple substances and drunk too much, but didn’t fail to notice the longing looks a variety of New Wave beauties in Betsey Johnson minidresses were awarding me from across the enormous downstairs living room. I thought I’d have a quick nap to clear my head, and then invite the loveliest of them for a slumber party.

Naturally, I didn’t awake until the following morning.

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

Toil and Trouble - Part I

My friend Handsomeboy, the intellectual thug (he reads Nietzsche in German on the bus on his way to brawls) recently observed that there are few existential ills that hard work can’t cure, or at least mask. I, who have been out of work (the somebody’s-official-employee kind) for all but 11 months of this decade, wholeheartedly believe him to be right. I can subsist for the time being on the money my parents left me, so the hardest part isn’t paying for groceries or shelter or a fast connection to the Internet, but making sense of each day, feeling purposeful in a world that, until a few weeks ago, felt fervently indifferent to everything I do.

For instance, on losing my most recent job in March, I, brave little soldier that I am, immediately undertook to write a commercial Stephen King-ish novel, with lots of characters, thrills ‘n’ chills by the crateful, wit, topicality, and far lovelier prose than King's. I worked hard on it, was pretty pleased with what I’d come up with, and invited around 120 literary agents to consider taking the project to market. Around 45 responded. Of those 45, 39 lamented that the book Didn’t Sound Quite Right for [Them]. The other six, to whom I sent the first 20,000 words, and a synopsis of what was to follow, thanked me for my interest and declined to represent me.[Want to see for yourself? Email me.]

It’s been like this for decades. Since co-winning the PEN Syndicated Fiction Contest in 1986, the only fiction I’ve actually published was what I sneaked into the two music biographies, of Kate Bush and The Pixies, I wrote for a UK publisher earlier this decade. In both cases readers were too incensed by what I said about their heroes (I love around a tenth of La Bush’s work, find around 70 percent of it unlistenably self-indulgent, and loathe The Pixies) to notice how sublime it was.

I’ve had a great many jobs over the years, from assisting a guy who drove around Playa del Rey peddling fruit off the back of a big truck when I was 12, to being one of the first designers hired by Deloitte & Touche San Francisco’s ultradeluxe (and ultra-ill-conceived) Web Division 122 years later. The ones I enjoyed most were assisting the fruit truck guy, taking money from motorists who sought to park at Zuma Beach, parking cars at the Tonga Lei restaurant in Malibu, and designing phone cards and other, you know, collateral for Destiny Telecomm (an elaborate pyramid scheme overseen by a charismatic evangelical) in Oakland in 1996. Those I hated most included washing dishes at the Malibu Pharmacy, busboying at Ted’s Rancho Restaurant in sort-of-Malibu, senior-editing Larry Flynt’s Chic magazine for three months that probably lopped five years off the end of my life (stratospheric stress, you see), and processing words for a big fascist law firm in San Francisco, where I was condescended to, at nearly 40, by 25-year-old recent bar-passers who couldn’t write a grammatical English sentence.

Nor was my most recent job, in New York City, from a year ago tomorrow to the beginning of this past March, a day at the beach, though I mostly loved (honestly!) having to get up early, trudge down to the train station through snow and ice (on which I took more than a few spectacular pratfalls), ride, ride, ride down to Grand Central Station, and then hurry through the armies of fellow employed people to my office a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building, all of which took no less than two hours. The job itself wasn’t much fun — I’ll tell you about it tomorrow — but for 13 hours a day, I didn’t have to confront any agonizing choices about how to make sense of the endless hours that loomed accusingly before me, and was only fleetingly beset by existential doubt ‘n’ dread.

I’ll mention briefly in closing today that I’ve gone back — at my age! — to wanting to be a rock star, toward which end I’ve just made a new album that you’ll just love if you give it half a chance. Smirking emoticon.

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