My daughter hasn’t spoken to me in eight years, and may never speak to me again, but I believe nonetheless that I’ve done better at parenting than any other job I’ve had. So at the beginning of March, as I observed the first anniversary of my most recent banishment from actual employment, I began to look into adoption.

Naturally, I’d have preferred a white child, preferably one with blue eyes, but the only blue-eyed white kids a single man can adopt nowadays are Romanians, and I remembered too well the nightmare my former semi-sister-in-law’s (hereinafter, my fossil) adoption of Romanian twin boys turned into. They seemed quite sweet at the airport, but she’d hardly gotten them home before they started trying to burn her house down and behead her in her sleep. The child psychologist to whom she took them didn’t speak Romanian, but speculated they might have anger issues owing to having been abandoned by their birth mother and raised by sadists.

The medications that were prescribed for them calmed them down considerably, but then the elder, Virgillu, reached adolescence, and the first thing he did was seduce my fossil’s female mail carrier. They eloped to Mexico together, my fossil’s mail wasn’t delivered for weeks, she fell behind on her mortgage payments, the bank foreclosed, and she and the twin left behind wound up living in her Honda Accord, for which she was unable to afford gas because the only place Alexandreu would eat was Red Lobster, which may seem cheap if you go there once in a blue moon for a special occasion, but which takes a real bite out of a high school teacher’s paycheck if she has to go there every night.

Heartened by the realization that some of our most noted entertainers — Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga — had all adopted children of African origin — and yes, yes, I know that if you go back far enough, we’re all of African origin — I was all set to fly over to see what Maui, from which Maddie had gotten hers, could offer in the way of orphans when Haiti, in the USA’s own watery back yard, was devastated by the January 12 earthquake, and my broker texted to urge me to get down to Port-au-Prince sharpish.

At first, I regretted my decision, as all the decent hotels left standing were full of journalists. But then I realized that for the money I’d been planning to spend adopting a Mauian kid, I could get five or six little Haitians. I went for it with hardly a moment’s hesitation, getting five boys. Fearing they might be ridiculed at school by children whose parents had voted against John Kerry because he speaks French, I gave them new American names — Jamaal, Rashid, Jamir, Rayshawn, and Kayshawn — on the plane home. Waiting for the airport bus at JFK, I realized that Rayshawn and Kayshawn sounded nearly identical enough to cause confusion and resentment, and decided that the former could retain his original name of Antoine, though now spelled Antawn.

Back home in Beacon, my friends and family greeted us with naked skepticism. How on earth, as an unemployable old person, did I suppose I was going to feed, clothe, and educate five young men, the youngest of whom wouldn’t reach 18 for 11 more years? I explained that I viewed the adoption as an investment. I would to enroll the boys in a basketball academy as soon as I got them squared away in elementary school; the chances of at least one of them making it either to the NBA, in which the minimum salary is now $25 million per season, or one of the better-paying European leagues struck me as pretty good. Failing that, I felt that the odds favored at least one of them becoming a major league middle infielder, as Haitians share a genetic gene pool with Dominicans, and can you name a single MBL team lacking a Dominican shortstop in 2010? Well, all right: Derek Jeter, but that’s only because of his endorsement deal with Ford, which I understand spends a great, great deal of money keeping him in the Yankees’ starting lineup.

As I write this, everything’s going much as I’d hoped. Jamaal, the second eldest of the boys, can already dunk at 13, and Jamir, who I’m not supposed to know encourages his little classmates to call him Jimmy, has been shown to have the highest IQ in the history of the Beacon School District. When we play Scrabble, the boys try implacably to sneak Kreyol words past me, and sometimes I let them, having found out the hard way how important it is to try to meet your kids halfway.

[Many of my books are now available for download from Amazon. They include The Total Babe & Other Wine Country Yarns, Lentils on the Moon (aka A Message From Jesus in Braille, aka A History of the Jews in the Hudson Valley, Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual, Third World USA, The Mona Lisa's Brother, and, for baseball nuts, Foul Balls and Alpha Males. You need neither a Kindle nor an iPad to enjoy 'em; simply download (free) Kindle software for either Mac or Windows, and enjoy them on your laptop or other computer!]

The Worst Humiliatin of My Professional Life

I walked right into it, and had no one to blame but myself.

After the dissolution of my second serious performing band, The Pits (whose lamentable name derived from my song You’re the Pits, inspired by Cole Porter’s You’re the Top), I contacted Rolling Stone, which was pretty pleased about my willingness to write for them again. I suggested a profile of a gloriously original young comedian I’d first seen on Saturday Night Live, Andy Kaufman. They liked my piece, and published it. I felt pretty self-confident again.

Listening back to my interview with Andy, it occurred to me, when I heard that he was about to join the cast of the popular sitcom Taxi, that I might be able to wring a second piece out of it. I sent it to Oui, at the time a slightly hipper version of Playboy, for slightly younger readers. Finally I heard back from Oui editor Peter Something, who said he’d rather see the magazine go out of business than publish my little piece. I thought that was a little harsh.

A few months went by. Rolling Stone ceased to be fond of me, and no one else seemed in any great hurry to publish my work, but I was years away from realizing that I’m a better graphic designer than writer, and that I enjoy the work more, so I kept writing to editors. Things were very different in those days before email. If you were a freelance writer who hoped to write for a particular magazine, you schlepped down to the photocopy shop with a mittful of your clippings, copied ‘em, mailed the copies to an editor, waited to hear from him or her, didn’t hear from him or her, phoned him or her, and was advised that he or she was in a meeting, but would get back to you. A guy from Oui, of all places, finally invited me to come in and talk about what I might write for him. I was thrilled to the marrow.

When I turned up, though, Mr. Ed Dwyer’s secretary advised me that the great man had decided to go to lunch with several of his fellow editors. When I told her we had an appointment, she frowned at me and phoned him at the restaurant. If I wanted, I could come find him there.

I should have asked her to give him a note inviting him to eat my shorts, but boy, was I desperate, and boy, did I want to write for Oui, so I trundled sighingly over to the restaurant, where I discovered that Mr. Ed Dwyer and his colleagues — among them the sneering Peter Something — were a bunch of giggling preppie potheads. Over 30 years after the fact, I kick myself for shaking Something’s hand rather than unzipping my Chemin de Fer leather-look jeans and peeing all over his salad.

Ethan, Meet Alyssa

I was flabbergasted to discover that, according to the Social Security Administration, the third most popular name for newborn girls in the year of my daughter’s birth wasn’t Ashley, but Jennifer. At least 80 percent of my daughter’s female classmates in elementary school were Ashleys. I’m amused to note that in the UK, Ashley is a boy’s name, as it was in Gone With the Wind.

Having resided half a decade in said UK, I am able to tell you that lots (loads!) of extremely popular names there virtually never make it across the Atlantic. When I was trying to recruit theatrical casts in London, I received headshots and resumes from veritable armies of Tamsyns, Gemmas, and Natashas, but when was the last time you heard of one here? Likewise, you can go years here without encountering a Nigel or a Simon, but the UK’s crawling with ‘em.

To what may we attribute Jacob having been the No. 1 name for American baby boys in 2009? Cleveland Browns quarterback Jake Delholmme’s career hasn’t been nearly spectacular enough to have inspired fathers to want to name their sons after him. The only Jacobs who come to what’s left of my own personal mind are Javits, a prominent Jewish politician in New York a million years ago, and Dylan, Bob’s boy, and the latter spells it with a k instead of a c. (If it were I, it would be Jakov, though I suppose schoolyard thugs might pronounce it Jackoff.) I would be able to understand the resurgence of William, which was No. 4 in the year of my own birth, and No. 5 last year, if it were spelled will.i.am, a la the guy in Blackeyed Peas, but it ain’t. Brad, George, Tom, and Johnny, as in Pitt, Clooney, Cruise, and Depp, the era’s biggest male movie stars, are nowhere to be seen on the list of most popular boys’ names.

Schoolyard thugs find a way to make miserable the lives of the meek whatever their names may be.

That the yuppies are reproducing in droves now is evident from the relative popularity of such names as Ethan, Noah (No. 9), Aiden (No. 12), and Logan (No. 17) for boys, and Isabella (No. 2), Madison (No. 7), Addison (No. 12), and Alyssa (No. 19) for girls.

Addison? Madison? WTF? As a past resident of a Midwestern city with the latter name, I can say with a high degree of confidence you wouldn’t want to name your daughter after it, or even to spend longer in it than it takes for you to fill your fuel tank. How’s that bratwurst workin’ for ya?

I’ve never understood the gentile practice of naming a boy after his father. What colossal narcissism! What appalling lack of imagination! And have I railed lately against the use of middle initials? I can understand if you’ve got the same name as 125,000 other people, like Juan Lopez. For everyone else, though, a middle initial suggests an attempt to sound more important. That’s one thing I liked about the Democratic presidents between Johnson and Obama; you can’t get less pretentious than Bill and Jimmy.

It occurred to me the other afternoon that if I were to have children now, I would very much enjoy giving them names like Jamal, Tayshawn and Sheniqu’a. This represents a dramatic sea change from the era of my daughter’s birth, when I hoped to name her Nimrod (as in the Biblical hunter) if she were a boy. Why should Jacob, Joshua, and Noah be popular and Nimrod not?

One thing strikes me as pretty fishy about the Social Security accounting. Latinos make up 12.5 percent of the population, but there isn’t a single latino name on either of the lists — no Jose, no Maria, no Refugio or Raquel? Are we to believe that latino parents are striving so hard for assimilation as to be naming their kids Aiden and Alyssa?

I was always amused by the prospect of the halls of the nation’s convalescent hospitals being lined one day with ancient women called Debbie and Heather, Lisa and Tiffani, Ashley and Jennifer. But this year’s list suggests that the names of 2090’s dementia sufferers will in many cases be identical to 1970’s; Emma, Emily, Abigail, and Grace were all among last year’s most popular girls’ names. Gertrude and Edna stubbornly refuse to make comebacks.

The Great Silence and How It Began

Avid readers of this journal — and there isn’t any other kind — know that my daughter, the person I’ve loved most and best in this world, hasn’t spoken to me since March 2002. In the early days of our estrangement, people would reflexively say, “Well, she’s only 17 [and then 18, and then 19, and then 20], and will come around when she grows up a little.” Now that she’s in her mid-twenties, and has grown up a little, she's writing in her church newsletter about how she’s a great believer in forgiveness, except when it comes to her dad, and people are more inclined to wonder aloud what I could have done to make her so very angry.

Well, now it can be told. A couple of months after her 16th birthday, before which her mother and I had allowed her only to attend well-chaperoned parties, she began dating Matt, a senior at the high school at which she herself was a sophomore. I saw a lot of my younger self in him, and not a little James Dean. He tried to conceal his shyness under a veneer of toughness, and did a lot of what psychologists have come to call acting out. He was regularly suspended from school for fighting. He had no driver’s license because he’d shown up drunk for his driving test, and been arrested.

At the same time, I could well understand my daughter’s attraction to him. He was good-looking and athletic (I found out later that he’d been a very promising gymnast before becoming addicted to marihuana), and carried himself in a way that made other boys want to follow him into battle. He had unmistakable native intelligence, though it embarrassed him when I noticed.

Lacking a driver’s license, he had asked a buddy to drive him over to meet me the first evening and then take my daughter to see one of those explosion-filled Nicolas Cage movies teenage boys seem to like. I wasn’t comfortable, though, with the idea of my daughter alone in a souped-up ’61 Impala with two Auto Shop toughs, and so insisted, in spite of her seething, on driving them myself. She only got angrier when Matt sat in front with me because be thought he’d feel like an idiot riding with her in the back “like a couple of rich assholes with a chauffeur”. He asked if it were all right to smoke in the car, and I was afraid that my saying no might jeopardize our growing bond, but he just shrugged and said, “That’s cool. I can wait.”

He and my daughter began seeing a lot of each other. Apparently at her request, they took the bus several afternoons a week to walk around Spring Lake chatting. Like any father, I’d hoped she’d marry an anesthesiologist or an attorney specializing in intellectual property issues, or, better yet, be one herself, but if an auto mechanic made her happy, it made me happy too.

But then one afternoon maybe seven weeks after the Nicolas Cage movie, Matt phoned my office to say he needed to see me. I had Jeannie cancel my 3:00 o’clock to accommodate him. He was a mess. It appeared as though he hadn’t slept well in days, or shaved. He reeked of cigarettes, apparently having showered no more often than shaved. He gnawed on one of his fingernails, though, as with anyone who works on cars, there was a lot of black gunk beneath it. He said my daughter was “really nice and cute and all,” but that it was me with whom he was really in love.

I was of course terribly flattered, but made very clear to him that I’m straight, and could never be more than a confidant or mentor to him. He glared at me accusingly for a long moment, and then ran from my office in tears. My daughter apparently stopped hearing from him, but refused to discuss it with me. A couple of weeks later, The Great Silence began.

NRFU Diary - Day 3

I wouldn’t have imagined it possible, but it got even worse yesterday. But that particular cloud had a thin silver lining.

It turned out that Ellen wasn’t the only attention junkie in our group of 15; several other women had only been hiding their neediness lights beneath bushel baskets. As the day progressed — glacially, except not quite that fast — at least four of them seemed to be trying to come up with more intricate hypothetical situations we could ponder and ponder and ponder. Eddie, the boorish fat latino, continued to blurt things about his Extensive Experience in the Field at random moments in between doing the most hideous doodling I’ve ever seen. And we’re not talking about demure blurting, but sharp, canine blurting that on at least three occasions rudely shattered the trance I’d managed to go into.

Then it got worse. They decided it wasn’t enough to dream up ridiculously intricate hypothetical situations in which we census...enumerators might be at a momentary loss as to which little box to put a X (not a check!) with our No. 2 pencils. They began cracking jokes too, not a one of them far below my own lofty standard of excellence.
One of the few pleasures of being ancient is coming to understand how we age, and how very little we really change. One member of our group, a dour, rotund little woman of late middle age, is forever finding in our many workbooks and manuals exactly the arcane bits of knowledge our instructor needs to make a definitive ruling on some tricky issue. She is absolutely joyless and nearly inaudible as she advises the instructor of her discovery, and every time she does it I picture her at seven being praised as Daddy’s Perfect Girl because she never raises her voice above a murmur and can spell words you’re not supposed to be able to spell until middle school, or name all 50 state capitals.

So here’s the thin silver lining. Being around these people raises my self-esteem. I’m (silently, except here, in the privacy of my own rantings) arrogant, but not boorish or needy. Where others are forever desperately cracking stupid jokes, or blurting, or posing complicated questions just for the joy of having the instructor’s attention, the worst I do is mutter, “Oh, for crying out loud!” or even, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” occasionally when, for instance, Ellen yet again derails the train, if you will, to complain about the clumsiness of the prose in one of our manuals. I dare to imagine that I look pretty good in comparison.

The Can o' Biscuits and Why They Flopped

The Can o’ Biscuits were late getting out of Rotterdam because after the show at the De Doelen concert hall, Des disappeared, and the band coach wasn’t very well going to leave with one of the band missing. After nearly an hour’s frantic searching, the band’s road manager finally determined that he was on the crew bus, sulking about Jerome, the lead singer, having “forgotten” to introduce him during “Hammerlocks and Bagel”. After introducing Shlomo from Tel Aviv, the guitar player, and then Pedro, the drummer, Jerome had given the signal that the band should blast into the final chorus of their famous klezmer-flavored hit. Now, though, Jerome was claiming that it had been just an oversight, one engendered by his exhaustion — the band had played seven shows in six days, which won’t sound like much to the lay reader who doesn’t factor in the endless driving between cities, the inevitable breakdowns on desolate stretches of the motorway, and learning to sleep every night in a different bed, galaxies from hearth ‘n’ home.

Des wasn’t having a word of it, though, his belief being that Jerome had been trying to get back at him for taking back to his own Hôtel du Congrès room a chick they’d both had their eyes on at the Brussels show.

When the band formed years before in the basement of Pedro’s parents’ home in Angola, Wisconsin, one of the first things they’d all agreed on was that they wouldn’t refer to women as chicks. It was such a corny old word, chicks, one a lounge singer in white patent loafers and a matching belt might use in between trying to sound like Frank Sinatra. Shlomo from Tel Aviv had wondered if girls were OK, but they agreed it was demeaning to refer to a female over 45 as a girl, and they weren’t likely, at their age, to attract many fans much younger than that.

Pedro’s parents had died 18 and 21 years before, respectively, Papa of congestive heart disease, Mama of vertigo, but Pedro still thought of the house as theirs, and for that reason spent most of his upstairs time in his small bedroom, which was lined with Bob Marley and Lindsay Lohan posters even though Pedro shared Jerome’s belief that Marley had been inferior to Jimmy Cliff in all things except popularity.

There’d been a lot of resistance to the Biscuits from the record companies their first couple of decades, during which they did little but rehearse and play the occasional birthday party. The general consensus was that young audiences, who were America’s most avid music consumers, wouldn’t warm to a debut album by a group already in their mid-forties. The band’s manager countered that their ages were irrelevant. What was the big deal about their being wrinkled or balding when lots of very popular younger groups were downright ugly? Had the recalcitrant record company executives ever gotten a load of the Dave Mathews Band, for instance? Not exactly Calvin Klein underwear models, they!

If young consumers were going to be put off by the sight of their male pattern baldness, beer bellies, and, in Pedro’s case, premature liver spotting, they simply wouldn’t allow photographs, and for live shows would hire someone to light them dimly and really flatteringly. By the time they finally decided to release their own stuff on the Internet, they were all of them over 60, though only poor Shlomo from Tel Aviv looked it.

The Belgian chick Des and Jerome both had their eyes on had turned out to be 54, and a grandmother, and there’s nothing especially euphonious about the way a native Flemish speaker makes English sound, though it isn’t quite as hard on the ears as a native speaker of Swiss German. The thought of having a 54-year-old lover becomes very much less dispiriting as one grows older; while it might inspire an 18-year-old to pretend to stick his finger down his own throat, it might make a 70-year-old stand up straighter than he has in years, and to take greater pains with his personal hygiene.

Arriving in Munich, Des announced he was leaving the band to spend more time with his family. His wife had actually left him seven years before, and they hadn’t had any kids, but no one had to know that.

25: Anything for Art!

My band’s latest manager arranged for us to perform in Reno, at a club next door to a laundromat on the town’s outskirts. Three and a half years before, I’d been much impressed when, performing at a White Front department store-sponsored concert at the Hollywood Bowl, Pete Townshend had hurled a mic stand like a spear at a stagehand who’d displeased him in some way. I tried to include a little tantrum in my own every performance, but the little club in Reno was the wrong place for it. I made a big display of wreaking an awful vengeance on a mic stand that refused to stay upright, with the result that when we finished our performance, the club’s manager pulled a gun and told us to pay the fuck up. We reached the following compromise: we wouldn’t pay for the mic stand, and he wouldn’t give us a dime for having driven up from LA. Anything for art!

I managed to persuade Procol Harum’s young producer, later famous, to produce us too. I think he agreed mostly so he and his little family could spend a mouth in the sunshine. His first official act was to demoralize us completely — to tell us, at the end of the first night, that he despaired of getting anything listenable out of us. It didn’t even occur to me to try to strangle him. Against all odds, a young executive at Warners with quirky taste was eager to sign us, to the profound horror of everyone else at the company. At our live audition at the Paradise Ballroom, I spent most of the performance trying to make it appear as though I was on my belly intentionally, and not because I’d become hopelessly entangled in microphone and guitar cords.

We opened for Foghat at the Whisky. P— overheard two girls talking about us between songs. They agreed that I had nothing going for me but my looks; I wasn’t sure, when I heard that, if I felt bad. Folk rock heartthrob Neil Young came to jeer at us because I’d jeered at his Harvest album in Rolling Stone. I introduced Rod Stewart even though he wasn’t really there, and hugely pissed off the club’s management when a waitress got knocked over in the resulting stampede to the corner in which I’d said he was seated.

P— and I went to Europe. My photograph appeared every week at the top of the column I wrote in the UK for the snappily entitled music paper Disc & Music Echo. In Selfridges, a quartet of teenaged girls recognized me and squealed, as though at David Cassidy. My friend Bev Bevan, earlier of The Move, introduced me to the work of Monty Python, and I nearly died laughing. We went to dinner with the Bowies, and were seen in a whole new light by the previously snooty staff of the trendy hotel in which we stayed in a room with a round bed. While P— shopped on a drizzly afternoon, I played pinball in an arcade in Soho while the latest Slade No. 1 thundered over the PA system. I thought I might be in rock and roll heaven.

Our record came out. It featured some glorious orchestral guitar arrangements, but was otherwise woeful, in no small part because of my own dreadful singing. When Rolling Stone said it was the worst music that anyone had ever made, many gleefully agreed I’d gotten what was coming to me.

I was taking a lot of speed. It made me feel really positive and confident, and then really horrible when I ran out. I kept getting famouser and famouser. The Porsche kept running and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person continued to love me, but there could be no mistaking that there was something severely wrong with me. I got home from San Francisco, where I’d been treated like a bona fide rock star while doing radio interviews, to the stylish home in Laurel Canyon I shared with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in person, went downstairs to the bedroom, and wept. Everything seemed so boring and futile.

24: Snake-Hipped and Svelte

My star kept rising. No sooner than I’d introduced David Bowie to the readers of Rolling Stone than Warners threw a big party for Faces at one of their big soundstages in Burbank. I’d reviewed their most recent album for Rolling Stone, and said, with rare accuracy, that much of it wasn’t very good. They regarded me with bruised expressions when I made my grand entrance; the very gods cowered before me! Rolling Stone invited me to write a feature article about my own aspirations to rock stardom, newly boosted by the interest of a young go-getter at an actual major label.

My band was taking up more and more of my time, and how I was enjoying it! I felt at last as though part of a gang. We rehearsed in the guitarist’s parents’ garage in West LA, or, very much more glamorously, on the A&M soundstage. We dined together at a place in Westwood where it was said that no man had ever managed to finish their gigantic seafood salad, and this decades before the obesity epidemic. I finished it and ordered dessert, and was nonetheless snake-hipped and svelte. The bass player and I chased skirts together. My egomania clouded my judgment, and I allowed one of our succession of managers to talk me into moving out from behind the drums to stage-center. I went from being a mediocre drummer to a worse lead singer, but after we played the Whisky, someone asked, not sarcastically, at least as far as I could see, if I were a professional dancer. I’d never felt more complimented in my life. But I was about to feel a great, great deal more complimented.

My No. 1 friend had gone to work for the selfsame old-school Hollywood publicist who six months before, at Elton John’s famous debut at the Troubadour, had scurried around in a huge cowboy hat screaming, “Fan-fucking-tastic!” into the face of anyone who looked vaguely like a writer. Said publicist had also come to employ P—, literally the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person, and I began inventing excuses to visit my friend at his office. I made one such visit the week that hot pants hit Hollywood. P— was wearing a pair, and I’m not sure how I lived through it, or even how — after my friend ascertained that she was commuting to work for hours from her mother’s home in Orange County — to offer her the use of my apartment while I went to New York to advise that city’s tastemakers of the glory that was Procol Harum’s new album. While in New York, I was made to feel hot stuff by Lisa Robinson, and worked up the gall, with the help of much vodka, to call P— just to shoot the breeze.

She picked me up at LAX in my Porsche when I got home, and then drove me to West Hollywood. Her bags were all packed, but when we got back to Selma Avenue, I asked her to stay, and to my astonishment she agreed. So now the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person and I were as one, and living together in über-hip Laurel Canyon, Rolling Stone was printing my little autobiography over four pages with photos by Annie Liebovitz, albeit not very good ones, the Porsche still looked really nice, and I had a small fortune in the bank. When I and P— went to Pasadena together to see Badfinger’s local debut — I no doubt smirking smugly, and in new platform boots made for me in London’s Kings Road — we schmoozed afterward with Gus Dudgeon, Elton John’s producer, but, much more important, formerly the Bonzo Dog Band’s. Spencer fucking Davis suggested we have lunch together. The world finally seemed repentant about having made me suffer so as a boy.

I continued in print to play the same character as which I’d first become famous — an acid-tongued curmudgeon with strong, usually negative, opinions about everything. The guitarist in my band noted that I wasn’t loved and respected, but feared. Gene Clark, once of The Byrds, was apparently telling a mutual acquaintance that I was doing my karma irreparable harm. But I wasn't yet a believer in karma.

Sophomore Year

When finally, at the beginning of my sophomore year, I actually Went Away to College (that is, moved into an on-campus dormitory around nine miles from my parents’ front door), it was with the utmost trepidation. My parents hadn’t been big on vacations, and I might have spent half a dozen nights in my 19-1/2 years not in my own bed.

One of the first things I heard out of the mouth of one of my fellow residents of Sproul Hall’s fifth floor was that if I didn’t cut my hair — which I’d encouraged to grow (marginally) long over the summer — I could be assured that my new neighbors would cut it for me. Just what the nervous new boy needed to hear!

At first sight of my roommate, my heart sank. He was so very not-groovy, so hopelessly square, so…ancient. I think he was 24, a folk dance enthusiast (he’d probably have said “buff”), studying engineering or something comparably unsexy — and one of the nicest people I’d ever met. He invited me to join him and his friends at dinner, but fat chance of my allowing myself to be seen with folk dance buffs with plastic pocket protectors — I who’d smoked marijuana, and lost my virginity, and thus had my reputation as the living embodiment of cool to think of!

I made it my custom to go down to dinner at a few minutes before five every afternoon so I could be first in line. I’d eat really quickly (something at which I’ve always been terrific, mind you) and get back up to my room before anyone could see me eating alone. Lonely, lonely, lonely, and back to the ancestral home like a shot every Friday afternoon.

It all changed when I was able to persuade the dorm president to hire my little combo, The 1930 Four (earlier the winners of the Battle of the Bands sponsored by the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, and semifinalists in an ongoing similar competition on KHJ-TV’s Boss City), to provide the entertainment at a Friday night dance. Between sets, a leggy, Cher-haired freshman dance major who’d apparently glimpsed me dashing ashamedly from the dining room came over to ask if I’d teach her to play the drums. I’d have figured out a way to teach her Urdu if she’d asked.

The film stock of my life changed, going from black and white to Technicolor; there were twice as many girls in the world who liked me as previously imagined! I was high as a kite on the fourth of July. And then flat on the back in the hospital with strep throat. By the time I recovered, I’d missed literally half the quarter. This was particularly disastrous in Music 101, in which they’d spent the weeks of my hospitalization working on ear training. In Italian, the artist futurely known as Russell Mael and I exchanged cool appraising stares at each other's long hair, but never spoke.

There were maybe a dozen boys on campus that year with long-for-the-time hair; the moral watchdogs of the fifth floor hadn’t followed through on their threat. At the sight of my former future Air Force officers in their stupid fucking uniforms saluting each other, I’d snicker with relief at having escaped. I bought a Mr. Zigzag pin at the local head shop to wear on the blue denim jacket there was no getting me out of, and exchanged knowing nods with others newly arrived at enlightenment.

In the free speech area in the shadow of the Student Union, black militant students who idolized the Black Panthers grew ever more strident. It became impossible to eat lunch without hearing a bellowed list of nonnegotiable demands. As the school year progressed, the per capita usage of hallucinogenic drugs in my dormitory must have been the highest anywhere south of the Haight Ashbury. There wasn’t a time of day or night when fewer than half a dozen kids could be observed marveling slack-jawed at the ceiling of the main lounge. I didn't try it for fear of discovering myself queer, as the manager of my band had supposedly done just before they flung me out for gross incompetence.

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The Narcissism of Altruism

My fourth life partner, N— came from a big, loving, attractive, largely blond Anglo-Swedish family from New Jersey that put me in mind of Diane Keaton’s character’s family in Annie Hall, except none of N—‘s family was a lunatic. They all welcomed me warmly, and it made me terribly uncomfortable; couldn’t they see who and what I was? Their all being so generous and accommodating with one another was utterly alien to me, and I reacted as I have traditionally reacted since junior high school — by being acerbic. The more forbearing they were in response, the more acerbic I got. It was as though I was daring them to continue to pretend to like me.

(That, of course is par for the course for us damaged types. Because we believe ourselves deep down to be undeserving of love, someone loving us has the effect of making us fearful — surely the love will be cruelly snatched away when The Other realizes whom he or she is dealing with. In an extremely maladaptive way, we try to prevent this by beating them to the punch. Our taking control and making them cease to love us will be less hurtful than their ceasing to love us on their own.)

Anyway, I appointed myself N—‘s family’s authenticity monitor. When N—’s elder brother’s wife and N—‘s elder sister would laugh far too loudly at each other’s jokes — would try far too hard, in my eyes, to appear to be reveling in the pleasure of each other’s company — I would sneer and say something scabrous, which the family, scrupulously gracious, would usually pretend to find darned amusing too.

How not-amusing they’d found it became clear after N— and I called it a day after 11 years and I, against all odds. became quite good friends with her elder brother, one of the sweetest people on earth. We began playing a lot of racquetball, and a bit of basketball, and even had a couple of dinners together. But then I discovered that his wife S—, having apparently found my mordant sense of humor just barely endurable all those years, had forbade him to invite me over.

Fair enough. But then, in September 2007, my mother died, and S— was quick to convey her condolences, and her doing so pissed me off. She wanted no part of me in life, but if I my mother died, I could count on her doing The Right Thing? It seemed to me that she was trying to inscribe her great graciousness all over my loss.

A former friend of mine used to do something in the same vein. At any party, he’d make a point of making the most alienated, awkward-seeming person on the premises feel irresistibly charming. It was an extremely kind thing to do, but I began after a while to wonder how much narcissism was involved. Look how selfless and wonderful I’m being.

Or maybe that’s my own deep insecurity speaking. Two things would have kept me from a similar course of action. Less salubriously, it’s with the glamorous and desirable I want to be seen, not those as awkward as myself! But another fear, which I don’t think my friend shared, was that the person would fall in love with me, and then I’d be in a position to hurt her terribly when I revealed that all I’d found attractive was her need of me. Over the course of our friendship, I saw my friend make more women than I could count fall in love with him, and most of them wound up getting at least slightly bruised.

While working for Dada Entertainment last winter, I suggested as a promotional idea distributing Dada-branded blankets to midtown Manhattan’s homeless. Another friend of mine was appalled, believing that any such contribution should be anonymous. It seemed to me, though, that the whole thing being in large part a brazen publicity ploy wouldn’t make the blankets any less warm. Why shouldn’t the company enjoy greater brand-awareness as a result of an act both self-serving as altruistic?

My distaste for S—‘s having done The Right Thing after my mother’s death used to feel irreconcilable with my finding unobjectionable putting Dada’s logo on blankets for the homeless. Now, though, I realize why it isn’t: in the second case, no bones are being made about the self-serving part.

I'd like, as always, to hear your thoughts.

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Razing the Salad Bar

On relocating to New York’s Hudson Valley in mid-2008, I was delighted to discover that two of the giants of American technology and popular culture in the 20th century were born right here in Vacationland. Frank Lloyd Wright, with his cousins Orville and Wilbur, invented the aeroplane and the prairies, and the oceans white with foam. Orson Welles was famous for his hit movie — you know, the one with the sled — and briefly batted leadoff for the old Brooklyn Dodgers before they broke every right-thinking Brooklynite’s heart by moving to Atlantis for a few bucks and a bottomless bowl of nachos. Serves them right the continent got lost!

But I was most thrilled to learn that my own favorite recording artist, Frank Sinatra, whom listeners younger than 80 will remember for his duet with Bono — not the one who was married to Cher, but the one who saved Africa — was also born right here in Dutchess County, down the street in Beacon, in fact, from Orson Welles, with whom he wasn’t childhood friends because Orson went in for such stereotypically masculine pursuits as fly fishing and strip mining, while his younger, smaller-boned neighbor preferred to spend his time foxtrotting to the timeless melodies of, for instance, George and Ira Gershwin, who are not known even to have visited Beacon, but whose affection for cheese, Monterey Jack in George’s case, grated Parmesan in Bono’s, is well documented.

Frank got his first break singing with Lawrence Welk, himself a former accordionist for the Poughkeepsie Pups back in the dead ball era and later discoverer of the Lennon Sisters, of whom John was not a member for obvious reasons. Their version of the Bob Marley classic "No Woman, No Cry" topped charts throughout the state in the fall of 1946 in spite of its suggestive syncopation, which was denounced by everyone from the Archbishop of Dutchess County to the Archbishop of Canterbury to best-selling author and shortstop Geoff Chaucer, whose own tastes ran more to Maytag blue, and who spelled Geoff the weird old way, which probably made sense in light of his living in the 14th century.

Sinatra’s fame grew to the point at which he was offered a part in the Denzel Washington vehicle The Manchurian Candidate. He recorded a duet with his overly made up daughter Nancy that raised more than a few eyebrows, was the subject of an unflattering autobiography by Sammy Davis Jr, petulantly cozied up to Nancy Reagan and her husband What’s-His-Face after John F Kennedy declined to name him Secretary of Cruel and Unusual Punishment, wondered if this sentence would ever end, and married the tempestuous Ava Gardner, about whom no laudatory comment could be derogatory. The union produced no offspring, but a couple of on, and an album – recorded across the river in Newburgh in 1953 with local favorite Pete Seeger on Hawaiian guitar. Many critics regard it to this day.

By the time of his death in Los Angeles in 1998 of something fatal, Sinatra had established himself as Beacon’s favorite musical son, this without ever having recorded or even sung "The Beer Barrel Polka", a song for which Billie Holiday, among others, didn’t consider herself too good. It’s instructive to remember that during the lifetimes of many current inmates of Dutchess County convalescent hospitals, the clarinet, so prominent on many versions of the song, was considered quite sexy.

My original intention when I moved here was to open a papal supplies store on Maine Street, but I soon came to understand that there are relatively few Catholics in the region, and that those with delusions of grandeur are more likely to imagine themselves Pete Seeger than whatever the current, you know, pontiff calls himself.

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Abrasive Desktops: The Intellectual LIfe of a College Town

You might suppose that living in a college town, as I did in 2007 and 2008, in Madison, Wisconsin, would have been intellectually stimulating. You might imagine, for instance, that in such atmosphere, one would want to have one of Proust’s novels or Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul on his person, pack animals being illegal within the city limits, to whip out as a sort of intellectual evidence of insurance. But no such thing was the case. Madison’s streets were clogged with pimply underclassmen in ill-fitting red sweatshirts wantonly braying the words awesome and like and gross at the slightest provocation, eating hot dogs on a stick with no apparent regard for their moral and nutritional indefensibility, and generally inspiring the observer to question his or her own earlier reservations about the potentially cataclysmic consequences of global warning.

But what of those charged with molding their young minds? Well, there were a few low-level professors on view at the local extremely overpriced organic food store buying ethical drinking water from New Zealand and the like, but for the most part they were in their ivory towers shopping on line for tweed sports jackets with fake leather elbow patches. And you should have seen the men!

It has always intrigued this observer that a great dread of wearing out the elbows in one’s sports jacket seems to go hand with scholarship. Do academics have abrasive desktops or something?

Oh, occasionally you’d see them at the opera or the ballet or some other pretentious highbrow event. But you could tell from their pursed lips and furrowed brows, puffed cheeks and implacable sighing that they didn’t enjoy this stuff any more than you or I, and the last time you and I went to La Boheme, or whatever it’s called, you made your own nose bleed so we’d have an excuse to take a powder and I fell asleep.

When all us salt-of-the-earth types had made our excuses and dashed for the parking lot, do you suppose the show continued? Of course it didn’t. The cast breathed a mass sigh of relief and got on the phone to its agents while Mr. or Ms. Associate Professor and their spouses sat around sipping sherry and talking about how art is wasted on the rabble.

Noting my disdain for college students, some will surely have dismissed me by now as an old stick-in-the-mud, but the fact was that I hated college students most when I was one myself, years ago back in California, a state not known, as Wisconsin is, for its cheese, but how to explain Sonoma jack?

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Snowmageddon

You don’t miss your water, William Bell observed in his 1961 debut single for Stax, ‘til your well runs dry. If he’d been here in the Hudson Valley the past several days, he might have put it slightly differently. You don’t miss your Internet connection until so much snow has fallen that huge tree branches begin to snap under their weight, pulling power cords down with them, plunging the whole region into chaos, and cruelly thwarting those who’d intended to make a new entry in their Web journals every weekday of the year. Damn you, nature!

Lacking electricity yesterday, I had to compose the day’s little essay by hand, and how old-fashioned and weird it felt! I kept reaching down for my little electric space heater, which just snickered at me. Downstairs it was heading toward noon, at which Claire traditionally enjoys a sandwich and soup while watching on TV one of those programs on which members of the American underclass shriek at each other for being unfaithful or shiftless-and-no-account, and the host, who apparently used to be one of the big guys in charge of keeping guests of The Jerry Springer Show from tearing each other limb from limb, browbeats them for being rotten parents and so on. Noontime just isn’t the same without it. What a feeling of helplessness.

We walked the greyhound on the road leading down to the recycling center. It was incredibly bleak, but the camaraderie in the air reminded me of when power was finally restored to Lower Nob Hill in San Francisco a couple of nights after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Everybody on the street seemed to be trying to dig his or her car out, and was cheerful and gregarious in spite of his exertions, marveling at the storm’s ferocity, shaking his head at the fantastic unreliability of our local utility company, Central Hudson — whose secret motto I have long believed to be You’re just the customer. Fuck you.

Once home, bored to death and shivering, I could think of nothing more diverting than to try to make myself useful, and dug out a narrow path for between the garage and the street, a distance of maybe 25 yards. It was grueling, but when I finally reached Wolcott Avenue, what a rare sense of accomplishment! Too bad, that a state of emergency had been declared in Beacon, and only emergency vehicles were allowed on the road.

I’d phoned the ever-generous, ever-gracious Names (that is, Naomi and James) just to find out if their neck of the woods was blacked out too. Not only was it not, but they kindly offered the use of their downstairs apartment, which they commonly rent out to tourists until our power could be restored. We loaded our laptops and contact lens solution and a change of clothes, attached the greyhound’s leash, and headed through the snow to Brett Street. On several occasions, groaning beneath the weight of our suitcase and my own laptop, I found myself thigh-high in snow, and I have long legs. On Center Street, we had to pick our way through a thicket of downed power lines. It took as long to trudge up to the converted gymnasium that Names call home as it might have to drive down to New York City. They gave us a nice dinner and invited us to watch a DVD with them, but the day’s exertions had made me weary, and we were in bed by 10.

This morning began with deliberations about to how to spend the day. Having failed to get on line at Names’, we thought we’d go to the nearest Panera and take advantage of their free Wi-Fi while having lunch. For that, of course, we’d need the car, so I trudged home, blissfully unburdened by suitcase or laptop, while Claire walked her greyhound. I unlocked the front door, flicked the light switch, and, as the lights came on, felt for a moment — a very fleeting one — that I might have judged Central Hudson too harshly.

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This Twilight World in Which I'm Trapped

I used to love listening to a Teri (she’ll spell it her way, and I’ll spell it mine) Gross Fresh Air interview every Friday afternoon on the way up to Santa Rosa to pick up my daughter after school. Often, if I’d enjoyed a particular interview, I’d listen to its early evening re-broadcast, and would be amazed to remember exactly what I was driving past as Teri was posing a particular question or her guest responding to it.

I’ve realized in the past week how often I do the same thing with my own work. There’s a verse in my song "House Arrest", about suicidal depression, that I vividly remember coming to me while I waited for Claire in a little plaza in downtown San Sebastian, Spain, in 2004.

In this twilight world in which I’m trapped
There’s no settling in. I can’t adapt.
My gifts are worthless, best left wrapped...

About a year before that, when we took a tourist-oriented coach trip to Stonehenge and its environs, we were collected in front of a hotel in London’s Oxford Street. I’d had the idea a few days before to make a new song I was working on (I always write the music first, and then the lyrics) about domestic violence, sung from the perspective of a battered woman. En route down to Victoria Station, where we were to collect others for the tour, we traversed a particular roundabout, and this verse came to me whole:

I say the wrong thing and I get slapped
There is no right thing that I can say. I feel trapped.
This territory’s unmapped.

The clarity with which I can remember this (not failing, by the way, to note that both these moments involved the use of the easily rhymed trapped) makes me ponder the possibility of divine intervention in creativity. And yes my tongue’s indeed in cheek about “divine”, but I genuinely did feel myself a conduit at that moment those lines came to me, just as I had, I now remember, almost 30 years before, when I wrote the chorus of may well be my best song.

Then the memory of feelings dared and secrets shared
Returns each morning that I wake up all alone
Now I find myself a little scared but nonetheless prepared
to love again.

I’ve been working recently on the second, much-improved second version of Anthems of Self-Loathing, the album that will contain both "House Arrest" and the domestic abuse song, "Quake". I first composed and recorded the whole thing in 2006, but was displeased with the results, and so set about starting over from scratch during the lonely 10 months I spent in the Midwest after my 2007 repatriation from the United Kingdom. Retooling arrangements for existing songs, I came up with two new ones. When I listened to them the other day in my little studio in the Hudson Valley for the first time in months, they took me right back to the awful loneliness that threatened to swallow me whole in Wisconsin, where the few friends I made were musicians who were either on the road or married or both, and thus not very accessible, and where I felt even more than usual that there was no place for me in the world. I spent many a melancholy evening alone in the studio apartment I’d rented trying to lose myself in my work.

Working on my most recent album, your reluctance to buy which hasn’t gone unnoticed, I went for the first time in my illustrious songwriting career with my original lyrical impulses, however wacky. While composing the melody for a song that wound up being about the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, "Nights of Cinnamon", for instance, I found myself singing, “Days of sulfur, nights of cinnamon,” just to have something to sing. In days gone by, I’d have reworked that. But in 2009, inspired by news of the death of Frank McCourt, whose books I enjoyed so much, I went through the door at which instinct had pointed, with results that I can’t imagine anyone failing to find remarkable. Or maybe I’m just saying that because it’s been Snowmageddon around here the past 48 hours, and I was mortified not to have posted a new essay yesterday (my first unintentional miss in 2010!), and can’t allow it to happen anew!

Crystal Bowersox and the Goblet of Fire

The most heartbreaking moment of American Idol this week so far has been when brave Lacey Brown, sent home last year just before the Final 24 were chosen, sang dreadfully, and had to keep from bursting into tears while all four judges defecated on her performance. Is it not for such moments of rare courage that a lot of people watch the program, rather than for the mostly very boring singing?

How not to hope that someone named Crystal Bowersox, with dreadlocks, won’t win? Well, it’s actually much easier than I’d have imagined. She’s aloof and unsmiling, our Crystal, and exudes a sense of imagining herself too hip for the show, and it isn’t endearing. I’m reminded of the great discomfort Paul Simon used to affect at awards shows at which he knew he was going to be given armfuls of awards; sure, he’d accept the damn things, but only with the most palpable reluctance. If you’re going to play the game, play it with grace. When La Bowersox performed a song by the unspeakable Alanis Morisette, it contained a lame harmonica passage apparently intended to demonstrate that she may be in American Idol, but is not of it; no way!

Lily Scott, who looks like my wife, is quirkily jazzy, very distinct, altogether terrific, and surely doomed by having nothing to do with the WhitneyMariahLeona tradition of technique-based divastry. Haeley Vaughan, with the biggest mouth I’ve ever seen — she could swallow Ryan Seacrest’s head, whole — might make the Final 12 on the basis of being an oddity: a black girl country singer. But the record shows clearly that anatomically quirky contestants can go only so far, as witness neckless Melinda Doolittle from Season 17, or whenever it was.

Several years ago, while I was living in the UK, the BBC tried to challenge Pop Idol (later to metamorphose into The X Factor) with a show called Fame Academy. The second season was won by a little lesbian from the hinterlands called Alex Park, who seemed, whenever she opened her mouth, to be singing to save the life of someone she loved; she broke your heart with every song. American Idol contestant Siobhan Magnus has that same quality, and breathtaking range, and will of course get nowhere near the final because America, far more skittish than the UK, will find her frightening, just as it found Adam Lambert last year. We as a people would much sooner read John Grisham than Scott Turow, though the former isn’t fit to install updates of the latter’s text processing software.

This year’s male crop is pretty undistinguished, lacking a single jaw-dropper in the Adam Lambert class, and I’m speaking solely of singing ability, rather than panache. The human mountain Michael Lynche phrases engagingly. Casey James, who will spend the rest of his career trying to live down having eagerly exposed his pigeon-chestedness for Victoria Beckham and the leering Kara at his first audition, is a reasonable rock dude in the tradition of Bo Bice, over whom America ultimately chose Carrie Underwood back in Season 18, or whenever it was. I’d like to see the very ethnic Andrew Garcia make it into the last couple of weeks, but I suspect his gang-tattooed neck will ultimately terrify America, which, presented last year with a choice between the incandescent Lambert and the soporifically bland What’s-His-Name, chose the latter. The smart money’s on Jermaine Sellers, whose own neck tattoo is offset by his self-identification as a church singer.

You read it here first: this year’s winner will be the blandly gorgeous, unmemorably virtuosic Michelle Delamor, who is everything Lily Scott is not, and the rest of the world will snicker at us anew.

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Raising Twins the Ethnomethodological Way

We already had our daughter, Missus the First and I, and were increasingly at one another’s throats, so the last thing we had in mind was to have two more children, but apparently one of my spermatozoons found one of her eggs in the wake of our last-ever lovemaking, and nine months later we welcomed the twins Moishe and Brandon to our household, in which we agreed to maintain an atmosphere of civility, if not mutual admiration, at least until they were college-age.

My favorite course in college was Dr. Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, one of the most provocative precepts of which was that much can be learned interesting things about the way we interact with one another using what he called such “cuckoo” techniques as responding in conversations according to a predetermined schedule of affirmation and denial. For instance, we were encouraged, over dinner, to be gracious twice in a row, and then obnoxious, regardless of what had actually been said to us. It was with Dr. Garfinkel in mind that I laid plans for the twins’ upbringing. Beginning at age three, I would be cruelly hypercritical to one for six months, and unflaggingly supportive of the other. Then, for the next six months, I’d treat each as I’d treated his brother.

This idea quickly went out the window, though. From the first week we got them home, Brandon was the more aggressive, the more typically masculine. If he didn’t like the temperature of his formula, he would fling it at one of our heads, and snatch Moishe’s away. He had a good arm, and I dared hope he might be the quarterback I’d never been, the alpha male. Mush, as we called Moishe, promised to become a bully magnet. I decided for once in my life to bet on the front-runner. At the sight of Brandon, I would whoop, "There’s my strong, brave, handsome, little man"! I would pretend not to notice Mush.

By third grade, Brandon was already the captain of his school’s touch football team, having beaten out two sixth-graders for the starting position, and Mush wasn’t yet speaking. He still sucked his thumb, though I coated it in ant poison each day before he left for school, and had bitten his nails down to the quick. He was commonly beaten senseless on the playground. At MTF’s insistence, I asked Brandon to look after his brother, but winked as I did so. I didn’t want him to take a chance of injuring his throwing arm.

Mush finally began speaking — with a stammer that made the bullies’ ears perk up — in seventh grade. We’d done a lot of research on line and realized he was probably autistic. The high school into which students at the boy’ middle school were promoted after completing ninth grade negotiated with the middle school to enroll Brandon immediately. They needed a quarterback. Between beatings, Mush became an accomplished short story writer, and won the school’s creative writing contest two years running. His prize was a $50 Borders gift certificate one year, and a $25 gift certificate the next, after the recession forced across-the-board budget cutbacks. Brandon, meanwhile, was given a new Subaru Forester, just to ensure he didn’t miss practice in case the bus drivers went on strike or there was a blizzard. The Forester had all-wheel drive.

When Brandon got the cheerleading captain, Kristi Dugan, pregnant, a bunch of parents chipped in to enable her to exercise her legal reproductive freedom. She overdosed on her dad’s antidepressants the night before her…procedure was scheduled, but it was kept from Brandon for fear of an adverse effect on his performance in the big game against Smidgenville. It wasn’t Kristi’s overdose that slowed him down — he’d already moved on to homecoming princess Krystelle Brisbin — but that he tore his anterior cruciate ligament. Smidgenville went on to beat “us” for the first time since 1997, and Brandon, who’d thrown two interceptions and no touchdowns before his injury, was advised that even if he regained the ability to walk, he’d better think twice about doing so on Maine Street, or even Vermont or New Hampshire Streets, in daylight for a decade or two. We take our high school football seriously here.

Mush went on to write a succession of often macabre psychological thrillers, most having to do in one way or another with the psychological abuse of children. All but the first made the New York Times bestseller list, and the third and fifth were made into very popular, even critically acclaimed movies. He bought himself an estate overlooking the Hudson, married Kristi Dugan — who acknowledged that some would surely find the idea creepy, but pointed out that there weren’t two more dissimilar twins anywhere in the world than her former boyfriend and new husband — and was elected to Congress on the new Asperger’s ticket.

I like to imagine that I made a substantial contribution to his success.

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My Hostage Crisis

A lot of people don’t know this about me, but a couple of years ago, while living in Wisconsin, I got fatally sick of government intruding into my life, even though George Bush and Dick Cheney, good guys by any reasonable measure, were its kingpins at the time, and decided to kill myself and a bunch of bureaucrats in hope of other lovers of freedom around the country following my example, and my daughter never feeling the jackboot of oppression on the back of her head.

Leave it to me to have second thoughts. I got all my weapons and ammunition together, my whole arsenal, printed out my manifesto, cleared the history in my various Web browsers so none would blame what I was about to do on my healthy, perfectly normal interest in heterosexual pornography, and headed for the local IRS office, only to remember when I found its parking lot deserted that it was Presidents Day. I pretty nearly fainted from embarrassment, hurried home, and forgot the whole idea until my next electric bill arrived. Once more I felt the jackboot of oppression pushing my face back into the muck.

This time I ensured that I hadn’t chosen a federal holiday, and headed for the Department of Motor Vehicles. I’d been driving with an international driver’s license, and it was about to run out. I figured if I lost my nerve, I could always leave my arsenal in the trunk and renew it. I found, as I took a number from the little machine at the entrance, that I hadn’t lost my nerve. I was No. 82, and they were now serving No. 31. How like the jack-booted oppressor to waste everyone’s time so cavalierly! I asked the security guard, whose florid complexion, watery blue eyes, and bulging gut left little doubt that he was a native Midwesterner, if he had any idea how long I might have to wait. He didn’t understand the question, and didn’t understand the question, and finally snorted, “Do I look like a friggin’ mathematician or something? In my world, the use of friggin’ is a capital offense (if less offensive than frickin’, but we may be splitting hairs here), and I hastened his reunion with his creator.

There was pandemonium, of course. Within minutes, the building was surrounded by police. No. 47, who’d saved up for a special Green Bay Packers license plate for which he’d come in to apply, said I’d better prepare a list of demands. We could hear helicopters overhead. I don’t know how they got my cell phone number so fast, but they did, and someone phoned me to ascertain my demands. “Believe me now?” No. 47 asked, sneering. I shot him and told the guy on the phone I hadn’t decided yet. He suggested that, while thinking, I release all the women and children hostages. I hadn’t to that point regarded those cowering on the floor as hostages, but realized it wasn’t a bad idea.

There wasn’t a child in sight. Maybe they were all at school. I let the women go. No. 53 said to someone whose number I couldn’t see that I was really a dunce, having gotten nothing in return for the hostages. I shot both of them and used the automatic callback function on my phone to call the police guy I’d just been talking to. I said if he wanted more hostages, he’d have to be prepared to give me something. You’d never heard so many sirens. He asked what I wanted for 10 more hostages. I said for the jackboot of oppression to be lifted off the back of my head. He said, “You got it!”

I didn’t feel much different, but didn’t want to appear a welcher. I freed the nine hostages of color and a guy who said he had a dental appointment that he’d be charged for even if he didn’t turn up because he hadn’t canceled 24 hours in advance. The police guy offered to send someone in to negotiate with me face to face in exchange for five more hostages. I said three. We settled on four.

The hostage negotiator they sent in reminded me of Ricky Abbott from my class at Santa Monica High School — an alpha male you hoped would like you, rather than wanted to poison. Every time he looked around as though to ensure that none of his superiors had somehow sneaked to within hearing distance, and then said, “I’m going to be honest with you now,” I knew he was going to play me, but hardly cared. I was so flattered by his whole we’re-in-this-together manner that when, in response to my asking him to promise I wouldn’t prosecuted if I surrendered immediately, he sighed and said, “I honestly can’t to that, big guy,” I said, “Oh, what the heck?” and surrendered anyway. As noted, I knew he really wasn’t my new best-friend-forever, but it still hurt when, after they got the cuffs on me, he seemed to lose all interest in our friendship. I was sentenced to four to 10 at the ominously named but not really that bad Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island, where I learned a useful, but not marketable skill.

You get what you can in this cruel, rotten world.

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My Mariah Medley and Why It Failed

When I was an American Idol contestant a couple of seasons ago, the hard part wasn’t the singing — having extraordinary vocal ability is something you’re born with, and I was born with enough for triplets — but coming up with autobiographical information that would make America root for me. The production assistant I was assigned, Staci, made no secret of her frustration when, after inviting me to tell her something sad about my life, I recounted my parents not getting along well, and leaving adolescence having never known a whole day’s peace. She rolled her eyes, began sending a text message, and said, “What else you got?” I told her how excruciating arthritis in my right shoulder had compelled me to have it surgically replaced some years before. She rolled her eyes and said, “What else you got?” I told her I’d been estranged for years from the person I’d loved most and best in my life, my daughter. She looked up from her cell phone for the first time and said, “Tell me more.” When I was through recounting my terrible job of hiding how much it hurt when my daughter treated me as the booby prize and her mother, who’d insisted on divorce when our daughter wasn’t yet three, as the grand prize, she actually closed her cell phone entirely and said she thought we might have something to work with.

“You’ve entered the competition not only because you love singing,” Stacee thought aloud, looking at the ceiling, tapping her pen against her teeth, “but because you think that winning might make your estranged daughter love you again, right?” Her expression made unmistakable that I was supposed to answer yes. “Yes,” I said. “Exactly right!”

“Awesome,” she said, yawning as she scribbled a note to herself. She flipped to another page on her clipboard and called the next name on her list.

I wasn't surprised to be in one of the roomfuls of Hollywood Week contestants that got good news. I hadn’t imagined them able to say no to my Mariah medley, which had inspired Simon to muse, “You know, I think you’re even better than you know.” I replied, “Oh, I doubt it. No one’s that good.” But there was a twinkle in my eye when I said it, and I winked at him for good measure. “Cheeky,” he noted, approvingly. A very special look passed between us.

Now the 51 of us hoping to become the Final 24 who would sing for America’s votes — and be paid, if only nominally, to perform on the annual finalists’ tour — were herded into another big room to wait to be summoned for an announcement of the judges’ decision. Production assistants circulated among us, urging us to try to look like passengers on a newly hijacked jetliner — that distraught, that apprehensive. They turned the thermostat up very high to make us sweat, and then very low to make us shiver. We weren’t allowed to use the restroom. Two contestants who shared a joke and laughed nervously were told either to get with the program or go home.

It appeared, as the long day dragged on and on, as though I'd been forgotten. There were only nine of us left, and then six, and then only four — I, another guy, and two girls — with only two slots still open, one for each sex. We compared the various tragedies our various production assistants had helped us develop. The other guy, a rock dude with long hair and generic vocal gruffness, had a four-year-old son with a slight stammer. He’d been urged to say the boy had a serious neurological condition he wouldn’t be able to afford to have treated unless he won the competition. The mother of one of the girls, a generic soul mama with gigantic eyes and very glossy straightened hair, had been an unwed teenager who’d run away a couple of years after her birth; the young soul mama had grown up with her grandparents. The producers had told her to say her parents had been killed by a drunk driver while walking home from church.

Finally, there was a blandly pretty young blonde who shared my enthusiasm for Mariah, but of course didn’t have anything like my chops. She’d led a charmed blandly pretty blonde life, and could think of nothing sadder than that her younger brother had asthma. The producers suggested he be dying of lung cancer — oh, the cruel irony in view of his never having taken even a puff of a cigarette! She had learned that she intended, if she won, to give all the money she would make over the course of her career to medical research in hope of sparing anyone else the premature loss of a younger sibling.

I was pretty sure I was doomed, and blamed Stacee, whom I saw again just before I went in to hear the judges' verdict. She told me to be sure to point out, quaveringly, that this was my last hope of realizing my most cherished dream. Randy affirmed that I was by far the best singer they’d heard that season, and that he’d bet his children’s college money that superstardom awaited me, but that they'd had to pick Mr. Gruffvoice because of his sadder back-story.

Naturally, they showed none of that when the show was actually broadcast.

My Sexual Peccadillos - Part One

I can’t work out why, evolutionarily, women are far less prone to fetish than men. That many women would admit to preferring a prospective lover with a flat stomach and ripped pecs probably has to do, on the level of instinct, with his probably being a mightier protector and provider. Similarly, the common male obsession with big tits is probably to do with their offering bountiful nourishment for offspring. But the incidence of female arousal by the sight or even thought of cufflinks, let’s say, is infinitesimal in comparison to the corresponding incidence of male interest in high heels or garter belts.

I’ve got enough fetishes for four or five of me. High heels. Nylons (preferably seamed, with reinforced heel and toe). Garter belts, or better yet, open-bottomed girdles or corsets with garters. Opera-length gloves (like stockings for arms, I’ve always thought). False eyelashes. Extravagant eye makeup, pale foundation, and red lips. Early-60s-style bouffant hair. Big earrings, preferably diamante. Va va voom!

Big tits I can take or leave.

I have only a very sketchy idea of where most of this came from. Some of it, like the bouffant hair fixation, is obviously to do with my having become sexual at the height of that wonderfully unlikely style’s popularity. As for high heels, it's indisputable not only that they make a woman much taller — and I do love an Amazon — but also make her feet appear smaller, elongate her legs, and tilt her into a position widely recognized by zoologists as signaling availability in multiple animal species, with both breasts and ass protruding. Va va voom!

There was nothing I didn’t love about…making out with my first girlfriend in the back of the car I borrowed from my dad in the hills high above Broad Beach in northernmost Malibu. There was nothing I loved more about it than sliding my hand under her skirt and touching the glorious area above her stocking tops. I also greatly enjoyed unhooking the four garters.

In public, I will notice high heels from great distances, and make excuses to get a closer look at the women wearing them. I’ve had a couple of very short-term romances with young women whose taste in footwear were their most (and in one case only) attractive feature.

In Harold Robbins’ The Carpetbaggers, of which my parents had a paperback copy I wasn’t supposed to know about, there’s a passage in which a male character is so crazed with lust that he can’t wait for a female character to remove her stockings before, you know, he plunges his rigid manhood into her overflowing honeypot. Just before capitulating to her own passion, she murmurs something about how only a tramp makes loves with her stockings on. God, how that passage inflamed me as a 15-year-old! Inspired by it, shaped by it, I have always encouraged my lovers to leave their stockings on — as well, if at all possible, as their high heels, garter belts, gloves, false eyelashes, and big diamante earrings. There’s something about making love to an elegant woman, dressed to the nines, whom I’ve taken the time to relieve only of her outermost layer, that so works for me.

And wigs! I have heard it said that unfamiliar pussy is a universal male need, that we have it in our DNA to want to shoot our seed into as many prospective producers of offspring as possible. A wig, especially one of a radically different color, makes this need satisfiable even within the bounds of monogamy.

My avid fetishism hasn’t served to endear me to that most forbearing of communities, my gals. Even those who’ve embraced with considerable delight the whole notion of costumed sex in the beginning have come over time to find my expectations onerous. My offer of reciprocation, of wearing special things of my own — a leopard-print posing brief — has always been moot, as women care more about technique and gentleness. A woeful conundrum!

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Beaches

Between the ages of three and 19, I seldom lived farther than walking distance of a beach. From eight to 15, it was Dockweiler Beach in Playa del Rey, popularly known among my peers as D&W. Being shy and reclusive, I commonly went alone, but in the summer following my graduation from junior high school, was able to hitch my wagon to the star that was Mr. Jack Keene. As late as April, Jack had been approximately as invisible as I to the rest of Orville Wright Junior High School, a taciturn non-athlete, non-surfer with tragic skin. But then he played and sang a couple of Elvis songs at the big annual talent show, this in an era when there were still a few American households lacking guitars, and overnight became one of the school’s most luminous stars.

We were reclining on our beach towels there at D&W, admiring some of the local beauties, when Jack leaned closer to me, lowered his voice, and said, “You’re showing.” In that moment, I gained a whole new sense of myself.

I have many happy memories of being under the influence of hallucinogenics on beaches at the end of that decade. On one occasion, after I and my pal Ward and his girlfriend Christa weren’t hacked to death by bow-and-arrow boys straight out of Deliverance while frolicking naked in a natural pool up in Tuna Canyon, I found the Sunday LA Times comics section on what had been my local beach from 15 through 19. A Grin and Bear It cartoon depicted the overseer of a Roman slave ship instructing his shackled charges, straining at their oars, “I want you all to turn to your right and say, ‘Howdy, neighbor!’ I don’t think I stopped laughing for two hours.

Some weeks earlier, I’d had the bright idea of taking LSD for the first time just before driving home from San Francisco, again with Ward and Christa. When we stopped at Gaviota Beach, just north of Santa Barbara, to play Frisbee, it amused me to describe what we were doing in newspaper headlines. Drug-Addled Hippies Invade Historic Gaviota! made me shriek with laughter, but not as much as Rug-Paddled Nipples Evade Hysterical Tapioca. It went on like that at considerable length, with each new permutation rendering me even more hysterical with laughter; one of the great wonders of my early adulthood is that I didn’t wind up in a Santa Barbara County Department of Mental Health straitjacket.

My final year in college, I took a class for which I had to write a sociological analysis of informal volleyball competition on Santa Monica Beach. I fell in love with Ms. Annie Sokoloff the week I’d intended to do my research, though, and wound up fabricating every syllable of it — and passing! And sometimes I think I’ve been nothing but a failure as a writer of fiction!

While traveling in Italy 13 years later, (then future) Missus the First and I made a point of visiting Rimini after learning it was the hometown of Federico Fellini. Second ugliest beach I’ve ever been on, the first, by a very wide margin, being Ocean Beach, on the western edge of San Francisco’s dismal Sunset district. The weather’s always rotten, the water’s always freezing. The dingy gray sand looks as though from ashtrays.

Speaking of ugly, if no longer of beaches, how long will we continue to stand for the waste matter that passes through sewers having a really lovely word (sewage), while the journals into which we pour heart and soul are referred to as "blogs"? I call on all persons of conscience to repudiate this word, surely the least euphonious in the English language!

From this moment forth, we will speak of For All In Tents only as my Web journal. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

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