Pimping My Ride - Only One More to Go!

My dad, who’d worked at an abattoir before Hughes Aircraft, had always urged me to pursue a career in something from which I’d come home smelling nice. I’d briefly considered the perfume counter at a swanky department store, but department stores had always made me strangely claustrophobic. I thought of auditioning to be a cantor at a Reform Jewish synagogue, but remembered I couldn’t sing. I thought too of becoming a busboy at Cantor’s, an infamous deli on Fairfax Avenue at which rock and roll and other colorful types suffered the abuse of LA’s most truculent waitresses because it was open very late, but it would have felt like a step backwards. I’d been a busboy at 17 at Ted’s Rancho Restaurant on Pacific Coat Highway, which was open only until 2. I returned the next night to the corner of Sunset and La Cienega intending to tell the girls that I’d realized pimping wasn’t for me, and had decided to try to follow Temp’Este into aromatherapy.

When I arrived on the corner, though, the girls gave me a standing ovation. I suppose the standing part wasn’t that surprising, in view of there being no seating up there except the bus bench, which the girls seemed to view as off-limits, but the applause certainly was surprising. They all came over to kiss me in turn, and my cheeks were filled with lipstick of many hues. Word of my having been multiply sodomized at the impromptu police and fire department orgies had spread, and several girls expressed that it was the most selfless thing they’d ever heard of a pimp doing. I didn’t deserve the credit they were giving me — I’d acted solely out of fear and self-interest — but we Americans as a race dislike anyone who doesn’t snatch greedily at whatever praise or kudos may come his way, deserved or otherwise. It turned out that all the girls now intended to leave their present pimps when their existing contracts were fulfilled, and to sign with me.

It was chilly, and I was sore from the previous evening, so I said, “This calls for a celebration!” and suggested we all go have a hot dog at Carney’s, the (then-) new restaurant in a railroad car a couple of blocks east on Sunset. I was young and foolish at the time, and not mindful of the fact that, speaking of abattoirs, hot dogs are made of what’s scraped off their floors. I was naïve enough at one point to imagine that Hebrew National franks were somehow more salubrious than other kinds, though their kosherness probably had to do with the cattle whose bits were later scraped off the abattoir floor having been slaughtered in accordance with Jewish dietary law. It has long been known that visitors to the Playboy Mansion are encouraged to address the magazine’s creator as Hef; it is much less well known that those in the innermost of his inner circles address him as Ner.

Several of the girls contented themselves with bowls of chili because eating a hot dog would have made them feel as though on a busman’s holiday. Carney’s didn’t serve alcohol, so Ter’ree offered to share her flask of vodka. I thought that was remarkably selfless, given that I’d twice before seen her get the shakes when insufficiently liquored up, but it was no more remarkable a gesture than her colleagues all declining a sip. One hears often of honor among thieves, but only rarely of collegiality among whores. I won’t pretend I wasn’t touched.

I Hate. Therefore I Am.

Because I don’t find him in the least funny, and because I know him to be a Republican, I hate Adam Sandler. I am deeply unamused by the films of Judd Apatow. I didn’t find "I Love You Man hilarious." I didn’t find "The Hangover" hilarious. I don’t think I so much as smirked during either one of them. On the other hand, The Onion quite reliably makes me guffaw aloud, though, in keeping with today’s theme, I hate how uninterested they are in my writing for them.

I hate not being able to hate without reservation the rampant greed that fueled the economic collapse of almost two years ago. It would be hypocritical for me to decry the greedheads of Wall Street when I personally profited from what they had, you know, wrought. The house I live in now is worth a great deal less than I paid for it two years ago this month, but I’m still way ahead on the deal. I co-bought a house in Santa Rosa, California, at the end of 1998. When I sold it six years later, it was for 85 percent more than Nancy and I had paid. I am living proof that all Jews aren’t good with money, but it is my strong impression that the huge increase in the house’s market value owed to the greedy banks awarding subprime mortgages so wantonly.

I hate WDST, the radio station I listen to in the car because our reception of the New York City NPR station is awful here, and I don’t like the Albany one. Of course, some of the time — when they’re playing something good — I like it too. I could die quite happily having never heard a single Grateful Dead classic again, and I’m not crazy about the station’s taste in new music either; the Jakob Dylan track they’ve been pushing so hard would be the single most boring track I’ve ever heard if I hadn’t heard the One Eskimo track they’re so in love with. At least three over-familiar Pretenders hits I loved at the time, but the time was long ago, seem to be in heavy rotation, and what sort of radio station plays twice in one week the 25-year-old "Low Budget," surely the nadir of The Kinks' career?

I (love to) hate their commercials, in which the proprietors of local small businesses read dreadful scripts stiffly, or the station’s own announcers hype, for instance, the upcoming performance of Peter Tosh’s son at the Bearsville Theatre. Isn’t it enough that we’ve had to endure around 45 of Bob Marley’s sons? Now we have to start hearing from Tosh’s too? Uncle! Uncle! I persist in believing that Jimmy Cliff was twice the artist Marley was, and cite the latter’s iconic stature as as a vivid demonstration of life’s fundamental unfairness as John Grisham's legal fiction being more popular than Scott Turow's.

I hate that I settled my lawsuit against the good folks who insured the local 16-year-old girl who ran me down in the middle of Main Street two months after I moved to New York. I got what my attorney assured me was the best settlement I could hope for, but it isn’t uncommon for the pain in my injured knee to make me forget all else.

I hate requesting a novel like Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay from the library because it made so many Best of the Decade lists, and then not caring for it much, and giving up after 50 pages. I hate reading something like Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith and realizing that on the best day of my life I was probably a tenth as good a writer as she was on her worst.

I hate how, at the end of an unbearably hot summer day, it’s inadvisable to go for a walk when it cools down because when you get home you discover yourself absolutely covered with insect bites. This neck of the woods is inexpressibly gorgeous in the autumn, but what a high price we pay for it in the summer and winter.

I hate that the Obama presidency has been so disappointing, and that we’ll probably get a Republican in 2012. I hate that when I was trying to get an invitation to tour the White House with Claire last summer, our congressman, who used to be in the group Orleans (of "Still the One" fame) couldn’t be troubled to respond to my emails. What was he so busy with, anyway — matters of grave national or even global importance, or something?

[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!]

Shopping With the Poor

I went to the gym slightly earlier today because I’d finished the design project I’d been working on down here in the basement, where it’s dark and gloomy and 15 degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house, and a swell place to hide from the punishing heat-‘n’-humidity.

When I arrived, I had a brief interaction with the tired-looking blonde woman behind the desk who held up the scanner thing for me. She mumbled, “How you doing?” and I mumbled back, “OK.” It wasn’t two o’clock yet and already I’d interacted with a fellow human! When the software recognized the bar code on the little plastic tag on my keychain, the female robot cooed, “Welcome!” in that weirdly hearty way of hers, but I’m not counting that as an interaction.

I spent my traditional 30 minutes on the stationary bicycle, with the resistance set pretty high, while continuing to enjoy David Finkel’s harrowing book about Iraq, The Good Soldiers, if enjoy is the right word. If what I’m reading is difficult or boring, it seems as though I must pedal for hours, but I was past 24 minutes today before even thinking to see how much longer I had to go.

Many of the people at Planet Fitness pretend to be obsessive-compulsive when they finish with a particular machine. They grab a spray bottle and paper towels and scrub away as though surgery’s going to be performed on it. The only part of the stationary bike I touch is the seat (oh, all right, and a couple of the buttons on the keypad). My own neuroses don’t include OCD, so I neither spray nor wipe. Now it can be told.

I proceeded over to one of the pecs machines, which is painful for me because of my titanium right shoulder, and did only two sets of 16 reps rather than my traditional three because my shoulder hated it even more than usual. I went over to Dollar Tree, which I enjoy thinking of as Idolatry, and headed for the book section because last week I there found Anne Lamott’s Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, which absolutely took my breath away, and all for a buck. I dropped three interesting-looking novels that had originally sold for no less than $23.95 each into my green plastic basket, which also came to contain a can of Del Monte’s delicious (if sweetened) mushroom spaghetti sauce, orange juice, and a spray bottle of orange degreaser.

Every day when I go into the kitchen to cook, I remember my second girlfriend, Marie, telling me that only a brief visit to my kitchen high above Sunset Blvd. made clear that I wasn’t able to adequately look after myself. Grease, you see. I am mortified by how greasy my microwave and stovetop are, and have had at ‘em with detergent, ammonia, and vinegar, all to no avail. Hence the orange degreaser, you see.

The cashier, another fellow human with whom I interacted, and all in the course of less than an hour, rang up my purchases and said I owed her $8.49. As Idolatry prides itself on selling everything for a dollar, and I’d bought six items, I thought something was fishy. It turned out I’d been charged $3 for one of the books. She solicited the help of her supervisor, and rang up two more bargain-hunters’ extensive purchases while I waited and waited.

Her supervisor was the ugliest woman in New York, with a personality to match. Do you suppose she smiled at me or uttered even a syllable of apology? Seeing that I’d put my purchase on my debit card, all she said was “shit!” I suppose if you're going to shop where the poor shop, you should expect to be treated with contempt. Her cell phone rang while she was pounding angrily on the keyboard, and she wound up handing me the two bucks and change I was owed without a syllable of apology, vividly reminding me of Ms. Patricia Carwell, the X-ray scanner attendant at Chicago’s Midway Airport whose fervent surliness inspired me to write a letter of complaint in 2008 to both Mayor Daley and the Transportation Security Administration.

I’m back home and in front of my computer now, and anticipate no further tastes of the milk of human kindness this afternoon. But there’s a Netflix DVD in the mailbox with three new (to me) episodes of the sublime Friday Night Lights, so I'll probably live through it, albeit not indefinitely.

[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!]

Arrogance in Humility's Jean Jacket

Capital punishment is the only issue on which I sometimes find myself not agreeing with others on the far, far left. My feeling is that some crimes are so monstrous as to render unthinkable their perpetrators ever enjoying another moment’s pleasure, of which there’s a small chance even in solitary confinement, even in the most unspeakable prison. But I’m aware that sometimes the innocent are convicted, and I would sooner live in a society that errs on the side of executing no innocents.
I’m also all for gun control.

Having said all that, I must confess that there is a situation in modern American life I believe warrants the presence of snipers licensed to kill. I speak, of course, of the athlete who, after doing something terrific — think of Clint Dempsey’s extremely dodgy (because of the England goalkeeper’s sudden spasm of incompetence) World Cup goal — points up at the heavens as though to say, “Thank you, God. Couldn’t have done it without you, big guy.”

I believe that athletes who think God has the slightest interest in whether or not they score a goal should be forbidden to operate motor vehicles or other heavy machinery, or even to reproduce.

I understand the gesture is supposed to be seen as one of humility, one of acknowledging A Higher Power. In my old age, I’ve come to think it imperative to make such an acknowledgment. I address God every night; offering thanks for my many blessings and asking forgiveness for my many failings keeps me aware of both. But I strongly believe that this should be done in private.

My objection to the athlete pointing heavenward isn’t the acknowledgment of God, then, but that it’s inconceivable arrogance masquerading as humility — Look what God and I achieved together! Moreover, in a great many cases, I think the gesture is intended in large part for prospective corporate tenderers of endorsement deals — for Nike, and Gatorade, and Ford. Look how humble and pious I am; my endorsement will boost your sales in the Bible Belt.

Fire when ready, snipers!

[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!]

Johnny Dislikes This

While living in the UK, I kept hearing miraculous tales of how kids like Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys, whose appeal eluded me, were acquiring gigantic audiences via their MySpace pages. By the time I tried to fling myself aboard that bandwagon, it had already passed, though, and I wound up sprawled and bloody in the street — or, as a Brit would have put it, road.

For a very long time, I didn’t get Facebook, but then the guitarist’s wife started a fan club there for the band with which we’d nearly, but not quite, changed the course of popular music in our time, and what a lot of fun it was for a few months — so much, in fact, that I started my own account in earnest. Then, realizing that I might be able to use this whole social networking lark for my own nefarious ends — specifically, inducing people to buy things I’d written, designed, or composed and recorded — I began opening accounts for a variety of alter egos.

With minimal diligence, one of them had soon amassed over 2000 Facebook friends, whereupon I thought: Whoopee! But then, as I passed the 2400 mark, I began getting wacky error messages that I was abusing the friend-adding feature…by requesting new friends! I was still able to transmit requests, but only after proving myself a non-robot or something by typing a couple of words in a little box. It slowed me down a bit, but what a small price, having to type a couple of words, for a friendship that might last a lifetime, or a prospective customer. But then Facebook’s algorithms somehow decided that my rampant abusiveness had to be stopped cold, and I was advised,

Block! You are engaging in behavior that may be considered annoying or abusive by other users. You have been blocked from adding friends because you repeatedly misused this feature. This block will last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. When you are allowed to reuse this feature, please proceed with caution. Further misuse may result in your account being permanently disabled. For further information, please visit our FAQ page.

I have made it a lifelong custom both to avoid reading users’ manuals, to participate in forum discussions, and to refer to FAQ pages. As far as I could see, absent my turning to those potential sources of clarification, I’d been doing precisely what Facebook was conceived to allow one to do — make lots of friends with a click or two and a wink. I reconciled myself to having to be content with the 2400 friends I’d made already. If worse came to worse, I thought, I could always start yet another account.

But then things started getting scary. On Tuesday, when I went to the gym, a couple of steroid abusers I’d seen before but never spoken to came up to me while I was on the stationery bicycle. The more articulate, the gum-chewer, mused, “Nice car you’re driving,” though my 2002 Subaru Forester bears the scars of my 10 months in Madison, Wisconsin, where people will say, “Have a great day!” or, “How’s that bratwurst workin’ for ya?” with a big smile, but then damage the hell out of your car as they back out of their parking spaces, and not leave a note.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’d hate to see anything, you know, like…happen to it,” he said, smirking, pulling his wifebeater down to expose the tiny Facebook tattoo just below his collarbone. The sight of it chilled me, but not nearly as much as the enormous FB I discovered on getting home had been burned on my lawn.

I have decided, in the light of these developments, to revert to making friends as I had until mid-2009. On seeing someone with whom I think I may be on the same wavelength, I will approach them with the utmost shyness, offer them a little bouquet of wildflowers, and mumble, “Will ‘oo be my fwend?” In a real-life setting, most people, whether or not they will admit it, find derhotacization irresistible.

[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!

Whither LeBron?

We’re going to be hearing more and more in the next few weeks about Where LeBron Is Going — LeBron being a terrific professional basketball player and unashamed aspiring billionaire whose contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers has expired. There’s a lot of talk of his signing with the New York Knicks because they have lots of money to offer him and New York is North America’s biggest stage. There’s talk of his signing with the Chicago Bulls because they have lots of money to offer him and are whom Michael Jordan played for with such distinction in his prime. There’s talk of his signing with the Miami Heat because they have lots of money to offer him, and Dwyane Wade — who may not be able to spell Dwayne, but who’s a marvelous point guard — and the best Cuban food in the world, counting Cuba, where the common people, under the jackboot of tyrannical communists, must subsist on boiled plantain skins and cigar butts.

I would very much like to see LeBron stay in Cleveland, as he’s pretty nearly local (like Devo and the Rubber City Rebels, who were briefly popular in Los Angeles during the New Wave scare of the early 1980s, and The Pretenders, whose old hits the Woodstock-based radio station I listen to in the car because I can’t get NPR plays entirely too often, he is from Akron), and I think it’s wonderful when a professional athlete plays his or her whole career with lots of hometown fans in the stands for home games.

At the same time, of cousre, I appreciate that the Cavs have limited financial resources and few and mediocre Cuban restaurants, and that LeBron might want to become iconic in countries in which he's not known from Adam. If so, I’d very much enjoy seeing LeBron go to Hua Hin, Thailand, or Kuching, Malaysia. In the former, I suspect he’d enjoy being shrieked at by the local beauties, who are desperate to marry any foreigner they can get their hands on, every time he steps outside. There’s a surprisingly good Italian restaurant there where Claire and I took most of our meals when we visited in 2008, and a street full of Burmese, Nepalese, and Indian tailors who will kill for the privilege of making LeBron new suits in any style he chooses. He will be a neighbor of the singer Peter Gabriel, whose appeal I have never been able to fathom, and who owns a gigantic house right on the Gulf of Siam. The weather is beastly, but I don’t suppose Akron in August is any day at the beach either.

In Kuching, where the weather is even more oppressive (it’s on that part of Malaysia that shares the island of Borneo with a couple of countries whose names I’ve forgotten), there’s a fantastic sushi bar downstairs in the air-conditioned subterranean mini-mall where anyone staying at the local Hilton spends much of his or her time because it’s simply too hot and humid to go outdoors, at least before the afternoon’s torrential downpour. The sushi goes round and round in little boats on a sort of circular conveyor belt, and what fun it is to glimpse an especially delectable-looking piece heading round the bend toward you, especially in view of how very cheap it is compared to London or even Los Angeles.

When you venture out of the city, you’re apt to encounter locals in Osama bin Laden T-shirts (lots of Muslims, you see), but my understanding is that LeBron isn’t very political, so maybe it won’t bother him.

If he wants to stay closer to home, I’d suggest Nashville. They don’t presently have an NBA team, but I suspect one could be put together quite quickly if LeBron says that’s where he wants to play. I’d love their calling it the Nashville Cats, after the Lovin’ Spoonful song.

The main appeal of the city, of course, would be its iconic status as the epicenter of country music. Becoming country’s first bona fide black superstar might be every bit as stimulating a challenge for LeBron — who I have no reason to believe can sing — than winning an NBA championship, and would almost certainly involve fewer elbows to the nose. Michael Jordan won several NBA championships, and Kobe Bryant may wind up with no fewer, but has either ever recorded a duet with Reba McIntrye or Garth Brooks?

Think about it, Lee.

[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 Bane of Youth Sports

Well, I guess that’s the end of my career as a Little League manager.

I’ve been wanting for decades to manage a youth team, but something always got in the way. In the 70s it was my abuse of various substances, and in the 80s because I was too focused on my career. Just before the 90s began, we had the Loma Prieta earthquake, and it took me the better part of the decade to get over that, and then in the new century I moved to London, where baseball was virtually unheard of, except by a bunch of beer-swilling Aussies who convened every Sunday afternoon on a nearby playing field and “chatter” in the annoying accents of their homeland, and boy, did that not sound right!

I could have coached basketball, of course, except that all I know about it is that I love watching it on TV and used to enjoy playing it at Fairfax High School after my daily run around the track, even though the place was crawling with over-achieving nudniks intent on instructing me in the fine points of the game in spite of the fact that I didn’t want their instruction, and who regularly snickered, “He can’t go left.” I didn’t think I’d be much of a football coach, as I can’t draw up complicated plays or squint very convincingly, and hockey was something people played somewhere else in the solar system, somewhere very far from Playa del Rey.

My first official act as manager of the Southern Dutchess Little League’s Bouquets (the team’s local sponsors, who pay for their uniforms and what-not, get to pick their names, and we were sponsored by Hirsch the Florist, over on Route 52) was to tell them I didn’t give a damn about winning. My view is that the bane of youth sports is that parents, trying to get their kids to make up for their own undistinguished athletic pasts, fill the kids’ heads with pernicious crap like Winning isn’t the best thing, but the only thing. I told the kids that the odds of any of them getting to play baseball for a living were only very slightly better than those of their parents winning the lottery, and that if I had my way, we wouldn’t even keep score, but play entirely for fun.

The next day at practice, I was surrounded in the parking lot by four dads who were sure that their boys were destined to play for the Yankees. I hadn’t been out of my SUV for 10 seconds before they’d blackened both my eyes, broken my nose, broken some ribs, and knocked out two of my front teeth, but I couldn’t allow any of that to deter me.

When I used to play tennis rather than hoops at Fairfax after running, I’d often hear parents screaming bloody murder at their children’s soccer games. Once I even got into a little shouting match with a particularly abusive coach, who asserted that reducing his 10-year-old players to shamed tears was good for their characters. Just after I got the Bouquets job I put a little ad in the Pennysaver for a marksman, and heard from several young Iraq veterans with sniping experience. With my own money, I hired two of them to pick off any adult they observed berating a player or umpire during any of our games. We lost two dads and an uncle that way at our first game, against the Exterminators (sponsored by East Fishkill Pest Control), and you should have heard the league office, according to whom it was a parents’ God-given right to behave like perfect assholes at youth sports, and who did I think I was?

Al Capone was eventually imprisoned for tax evasion, and what really did me in wasn’t the snipers, but my insistence that at the ends of games — when teams traditionally chant, Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate (or, as a team’s smartass invariably puts it, sincerely hate)? [Other team]! [Other team!] Yay!, and then glaringly, begrudgingly touch fists with their counterparts — each of us would embrace each of them as he might a brother, and say, “Way to go, big guy!” One of the dads spread a rumor that I thus was priming my players to march in Beacon’s annual Gay Pride parade, and that was the last straw.

[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!]

Coffee With Tipper Gore

Tipper Gore and I first began seeing each other in the mid-80s after I was the only major music journalist in America to endorse the Parents Music Resource Center. Even though I thought their name needed a lot of work, I — who’d become a dad myself mere months before — honestly believed it perfectly reasonable that potentially objectionable music should be labeled. I wrote a column to that effect in Creem, America’s only rock and roll magazine that billed itself as such, and Tipper wrote me a letter thanking me for my support. I’d have been more impressed if she’d written it by hand on posh official stationery of some sort, rather than printed it out on a primitive mid-80s printer, but was grateful nonetheless.

Thinking they’d publish it in the Letters to the Editor section, the boys at Creem marked up the original, and that rather pissed me off. Would it have taken them more than nine seconds to make a photocopy? My blood really came to a boil after Al was elected vice president three years later, as I imagined that the letter in its pristine form might have been worth countless tens of thousands to a collector. There was no eBay yet, at least that I knew of. I don’t think there was even an Internet.

When Tipper and Al and the kids visited San Francisco for a family vacation in June 1991 (some place for a family vacation, what with homosexuals brazenly sodomizing each other right out in the street, but judge not lest ye be judged, and it wasn’t as though I wasn’t raising my own daughter there, albeit in the sleepy, fog-shrouded Sunset, where nearly everyone was heterosexual and Chinese), Tipper phoned to ask if I might enjoy meeting for “coffee”. I was in a committed relationship with the koala keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, but my thinking was that if she could spend a weekend with Jon Bon Jovi, I could have “coffee” with Tipper Gore. Her nickname notwithstanding, I never saw her leave a server more than 15 percent, and it was commonly closer to 10.

She wasn’t really my type. You have read here many times that, while most of my friends have thought in terms of debauching large-breasted cheerleaders with dimples, I have traditionally wanted my gals pre-debauched-looking, without dimples, but with lavish eyeliner. Tip, as she encouraged me to call her, positively exuded wholesomeness. She reminded me of the sort of girl back at Santa Monica High School who was forever whining at you about your deficient “school spirit.” But she was a little hellion in the sack, and for the next couple of decades, we enjoyed long afternoons of joyful depravity together whenever we could sneak a few hours in each other’s cities.

She confided, during the 2000 presidential campaign, that Al was every bit as boring as he appeared, but good-hearted, and I’d have voted for him if it hadn’t been quite fashionable at the time to vote instead for Ralph Nader. After the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president, Al apparently staved off despair by hurling himself body and soul into researching and writing about climate change, and I began seeing more of the lonely Tip, at least until I relocated to the outskirts of London in mid-2002. She was beside herself with jealousy, though she’d made clear she had no intention of ever leaving Al publicly, and railed at me like a woman scorned in a succession of emails I am considering publishing in an ebook, but not until you’ve bought more of the already-published ones, depicted above. She began seeing an aide to the Undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare — a much younger man — and wrote me emails in which she reveled, to make me jealous, in how he didn’t yet have a single furrow in his forehead, and how virile he was.

I suspect that by now, what with the social problems that our country faces, her handsome young aide’s brow is no longer so pristine, his testes so prolific. I wonder what part he played in her and Al’s breakup. In any event, I wish them the best, every one, even Ralph Nader. I am not now, nor have I ever been, Chinese.

[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!]

More on Middle Initials and Transsexualism

I have probably revealed here many times that I was substantially premature, and spent the first several weeks of my life in an incubator. My mother told me that when I was allowed to come home, I ate quite frantically, as though I’d become accustomed to being fed impatiently. To this day, I eat more quickly than anyone I know. Do you think this anecdote makes me look fat?

What I probably haven’t revealed here is that I was one of a pair of identical twins. My dad was a struggling medical illustrator at the time of my birth, and my mother a reluctant young homemaker, and they didn’t see how they’d be able to keep both me and my brother Joseph, so they took us over to the home of their next door neighbors Wayne and Irma Schultz, who they knew had been trying to conceive, and asked if they’d be interested in one of us. Transracial adoption wasn’t nearly as fashionable in those benighted times as it is today, and Wayne was apparently bitterly opposed to having a Jewish child, but Irma prevailed, and there went Joey, as I probably would have called him in childhood.

We have spoken before about my deep loathing of middle initials when used solely to make the user appear to be of the managerial class, but I don’t think I’ve admitted to a comparable level of annoyance at women (and it’s nearly always women who do it) who call their husbands by the names on their birth certificates, though no one else on earth does. You may, if you’re old enough — and let’s not kid ourselves about your being abundantly old enough — recall that the actress and folk rock singer Cher never referred to her second husband, Mr. Allman, as anything other than Gregory, though he was nothing but Gregg to anyone else on the face of the earth.

A decade or so after that, she gave an interview in which she kept referring to her male co-star in the movie she was making as Nicky, though I have never heard the second worst actor of his generation referred to as anything other than Nicolas (Cage). It was apparently Cher’s intention to suggest that she had very special relationships of the sort you or I could never understand with these guys, and it made my flesh crawl, though all was forgiven when she strutted around with defiant sluttishness in spite of her age on that aircraft carrier in the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Va-va-voom!

I further applaud Cher — who I always thought was trying, whether she knew it or not, to sound like Al Jolson — for supporting her first child’s decision to change sexes. A lot more people than is commonly supposed spend their whole lives feeling trapped in the wrong body, which can’t be a pleasurable feeling. In the wine country, Claire and I knew a transsexual called Gina, a checker at a Safeway in affluent Marin County, who had something like six children, three of them triplets, and clearly adored them. To hear her wife tell it, though, Gina was just trying to be difficult.

I think about her often when I hear New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi refer to outfielder Brett Gardner as “Gardy,” which makes me cringe for its stupidness. But I suppose I should be grateful that we don’t in this country infantilize monosyllabic surnames, as the Brits so love to do. Wattsy, you see, or Jonesy.

Be all of that as it may, I realized I had an identical twin only after I got heavy into Facebook around 18 months ago and Joe sent me a friend request. His profile photo showed him to look a lot like me, but without the artificially blond hair and the deep furrows that care has etched into my once-handsome punim. He’s some sort of middle manager in a corporation, and uses his middle initial — D — in what he blithely admits is an attempt to appear more promotable. When we met for lunch, he turned out to eat very slowly, and all we could surmise is that he’d somehow been less premature than I, though of course we were born mere moments apart.

The S in Harry S Truman didn’t stand for anything. You’d have thought a US president wouldn’t have felt it necessary to try to appear more promotable. But those, of course, were simpler times.

[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!]

Johnny Saves the American Pastime!

In theory, I really do love the World Cup. I love that in the opening rounds, we’ll see such matchups as Serbia against Ghana, Paraguay against Slovakia, the Netherlands against Cameroon, and South Korea against Nigeria; I’d venture to say that a large percentage of the players wouldn’t even have heard before the so-called group draws of many of the countries against which they’ll be playing. I love that the whole world watches, and that it isn’t the richest countries, or those with the largest populations, that commonly win, but the likes of the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Brazil.

What I wish I liked a lot better was actually watching the games.

There’s no question that extraordinary athleticism is required to be a great player of what we call soccer and the rest of the world calls football. You need quickness, agility, balance, stamina — and courage. A great player can do remarkable things with his feet; just watch someone like Lionel Messi of “Argentina” (he’s been a virtual Spaniard for something like a decade, playing for Barcelona) “dribble” through and past half a dozen defenders. Just watch another great player perform a 180-degree bicycle kick, Many of the skills involved closely resemble those required in basketball, but in football there’s no place for lumbering behemoths of the sort you see in the NBA. Tiny men (Messi’s nickname is The Flea) are at no disadvantage whatever to much bigger ones.

But how very boring the game can be to watch. Honduras, say, kicks the ball way the hell down the field, but a Swiss defender intercepts it before a Honduran forward can reach it, and kicks it way the hell down the field, where — you guessed it — a Honduran defender intercepts it and…kicks it back down the field. And so it goes for 20 minutes, for 30, for a whole game. This isn’t to say that there isn’t lots of deft passing, but rather that actual scoring threats are as infrequent as they are thrilling. The rest of the world loves a 1-0 game. Americans nod off in the 32nd minute.

When I would discuss the differences between basketball and football (soccer) with my former British neighbors, they’d scoff at the idea of a 120-116 basketball game. I acknowledge that, just as you might argue that the scoring in the one is too infrequent, you might argue no less persuasively that in the other it’s entirely too commonplace. But I’m here today to assert that there are actually far more moments of great excitement in a basketball game, more more requited (that is, score-changing) feats of athleticism, than in a football game.

I propose to prove this with the help of a team of neutral scientists who will measure how many times in the respective games spectators get thrilled, as indicated by galvanic skin response and other physiological tests. Five bucks says that there are at least twice as many major thrills in the average NBA or even major college basketball game between nearly equal teams as in an international football game.

Teams of neutral scientists may contact me at johnmendelssohn@gmail.com. This is a non-compensated, temporary position.

It’s late on a Saturday night, and I’ve just enjoyed two episodes from the second season of Friday Night Lights, and also have a wonderful idea for baseball, which I used to live and breathe as a child and teenager, but which I now find numbingly boring. In the American League, there are already designated hitters. I propose that both leagues also institute a designated defender — chosen by the other team. I suspect in most cases, a team would elect to require the opposing team to play its most inept fielder at shortstop, the key infield position, and what a lot of laffs would surely ensue!

It’s fun to watch terrific defensive plays, but not so much fun at all to watch moderately difficult ones executed with the day-at-the-office competence that characterizes major league competition. Forcing every team to take the field with its own latter-day Marv Throneberry would solve all that in a hurry. A lot of traditionalists will pooh-pooh the idea, of course, but in an age when the modern ball park resembles nothing so much as a gigantic penny arcade, with endless music and zany mascot cavortings and gaudy video, they haven’t a leg to stand on.

[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!]

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Great Show!

I know, I know. Most of the actors playing 16- and 17-year-olds are obviously closer to 25, and all the young white male characters are apparently coached to speak as though heavily sedated or newly lobotomized. And I’ve never seen so many people with tiny noses in one series (the tiniest of all belonging to the preternaturally pretty Minka Kelly, the daughter of someone who used to be in Aerosmith, of all things!). And it never seems, even though Dillon is supposed to have one of the most successful high school football programs in a football-crazy state, as though there are more than 46 people watching. And in every third or fourth episode like clockwork the staunch rectitude of Coach Taylor — a good and decent man prone to shooting himself in the foot — causes a mass desertion by his players, who then reappear, eyes full of wariness and recrimination, only at the last possible second. But boy, do I love Friday Night Lights — possibly more than I’ve loved a dramatic TV series since NYPD Blue in its David Caruso and Jimmy Smits years.

Watching Season 2 on Netflix this past week, I’m consistently brought closer to tears than any TV show has brought me since Jimmy Smits’ character died in NYPD Blue by Julie’s being a perfect little bitch to Mrs. and Coach Taylor even though they clearly adore her and are doing their damnedest to spare her the pain she seems so intent on bringing on herself. And all the football stuff brings back painful memories of when my own son Jared was playing for Montgomery High in Santa Rosa 10 years ago.

One week I was just a poor old sap constantly being told by sandwich makers at Subway and restroom attendants at Ross Dress for Less that I looked exactly like a character on Seinfeld, by which I was never even a little amused, and none of whose characters I had even the slightest interest in resembling. The next, after Jared scored those three touchdowns against Rosa Parks, there wasn’t a filling station in town that would take my money, nor a Subway, and it was profoundly discombobulating. As I have probably mentioned here, my own high school athletic career was undistinguished; it was as captain of the debate team and male lead in the drama club’s presentation of a “daring” (according to the Santa Monica Evening Outlook) musical adaptation of Judgment at Nuremberg that I had finally been able to escape wallflowerdom. And here I was being treated like a hero or bull stud because of accomplishments not my own!

It got to the point at which Nancy and I couldn’t go to the Sizzler for fear of being besieged by locals wanting either that I personally autograph ATM and supermarket receipts or whatever else they might find in their billfolds or pockets, or take them home for Jared's autograph. I knew he would never get around to it — between his studies, gaining carnal knowledge of an endless parade of coeds in tight cutoff jeans and halter tops that bared their lovely flat young bellies, and being fellated by prospective agents, he hardly had a moment to call his own. And when many of the coeds Jared simply didn’t have time for began offering themselves to me instead, Nancy hit me with a rolling pin and insisted, in that way she had, that we seek out couples counseling, though we couldn’t afford it on the money she was earning as the koala keeper at the San Francisco Zoo.

At the plant, guys who’d previously glared at me menacingly when I tried to seat myself near them in the canteen at lunchtime suddenly wanted to play golf or go bowling with me, or at least buy me a couple of cold ones after work. I think in most cultures, persons with both an X and a Y chromosome are presumed to just love it, but because of the way it tastes, I’ve never been a big drinker of beer. I spent many sleepless nights either worrying that my co-workers perceived me as thinking myself too damned good for them, or being kept awake by the ecstatic howling of whomever Jared happened to be dating that night. Even through three interior walls, I could tell most of it was affected.

I know this will sound awful, but I actually felt some relief along with great sadness when Jared was paralyzed from the waist down in the big game against Oakmont.

Cheap Vodkas of the Heartland

After my chart-busting glam rock combo Christopher Milk broke up, I thought briefly of enrolling in law school, and even more briefly of cooking school, but in the end just spent most of my time standing in the bedroom window of my apartment on Sunset Blvd. smoking Sherman cigaretellos and thinking I ought to write a song called “How Did I Wind Up Here?” After better than four months of this, I allowed our agent to talk me into going back on the road, this time as a solo performer, singing CMilk’s most beloved hits to the accompaniment of my own acoustic guitar.

It was a living, but a lonely, unfulfilling one. I might have had a girl in every port, but appeared only sporadically on the coasts. I developed a fierce loathing for the inoffensive art one finds in budget motel rooms, and for the endless driving I had to do. My agent suggested that I become an alcoholic to get through it, and I became expert on cheap vodkas of the American heartland, my favorite being Volga Boatmen, distilled from asphalt and available in the Tri-State area (Kansas, Montana, and Wisconsin). For good measure, I also became addicted to Benzedrine. You may recall some of the more ghoulish rock magazines began predicting the date on which I would drop dead.

But then, in Albert Lea, Minnesota, at a special concert for the 100th anniversary of the birth there of Eddie Cochran, I met Mariline, a good woman who loved me for who I was, for a change, instead of for my glamorous past associations with David Bowie and Bev Bevan. As part of her campaign to save me from myself, she appointed me de facto stepdaddy of her autistic teenage son Bob, whom I called Bobby because it was more in character. When I had to get back on the road after three wonderful days with them, it like to broke my poor heart, and I hit the bottle harder than ever. I’d phone Mariline every night before I staggered on stage, and she would cry because of my obvious inebriation. It made me feel a heel, which of course only made me thirstier.

I finally collapsed in the middle of a show in Eau Claire. When I woke up, I was in a hospital room, also, presumably, in Eau Claire, and a doctor with male pattern baldness was telling me that if I didn’t change my ways, I might be dead by 75. I felt pretty sorry for myself, and hoped Jesus or somebody might appear to me in a vision, as you often hear about, but it was Mariline who eventually appeared, tearfully, at my bedside. She begged me to imagine how my death would hurt her, Bob, and my tens of thousands of loyal fans, some of the loyalest in the world.

I got clean and sober — for her, and for them. Some folks might have told you it was the AA meetings that done it, but the truth is that it was because I started showering a lot more conscientiously, and avoided both bars and liquor stores, which are called package stores in some parts of the country. Mariline and I even discussed marriage.

Bob, who previously had spent most of his time laboriously writing poetry — remarkably good poetry, mind you, of the sort you’d expect from someone with neurological problems — on an Etch-a-Sketch, came on the road with me while Mariline got her masters in Library Science. I was unable to divine how there was anything especially scientific about library work, but she'd never teased me when I’d drunkenly sing the same song three times in a set, or have my proverbial flag at half mast when I took the stage, so I didn’t tease her none, nor her nun sister.

Bob developed an amphetamine problem of his own — it’s nearly inevitable for anyone doing the sort of touring we were doing together — but it seemed to cure his autism. The doctors told Mariline that her choice was between the boy’s being a productive, not-very-weird member of society — albeit one who gnashed his teeth a lot, and picked at scabs he alone could detect — or reverting to the private, unknowable hell of autism. She told me through tears it was the hardest decision of her life, and I done wrote me a song about it.

I Am the Villain

God knows I’ve had my heart broken. When Mari left me when I was 20, I pretty nearly didn’t live through it. Two years later, when Annie fled home to San Rafael after we’d lived together for a couple of weeks, I pretty nearly didn’t live through it. Five years later, when Patti declared that she loved me, but was no longer in love with me, I pretty nearly didn’t live through it. There are times when I still wonder if I’m completely over that one, and it was a million years ago. But I’m here to tell you that no lover can hope to fracture your heart as your own child can.

I think back to a Friday afternoon in 1999. At exactly the same time she’s become extremely interested in boys, my daughter has comfort-eaten herself into a state of greatly diminished attractiveness to them. We’re sitting side by side in the car I inherited from my mother in the driveway of our home on Pierce Street in Santa Rosa, and my daughter, who’s made a practice of telling me nothing at all about her life in the past several months, can’t help but burst into tears. She reveals that there’s a big dance that night at her high school, and she hasn’t been invited to it. She’s pretty sure she’s the only girl at her high school who’ll miss the dance.

If I could take her pain and endure it for her, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but that’s not an option. I grope instead for a way to give her hope. I point out with the utmost gentleness that she seems to have gained some weight the past few months, and that the boys in her classes would probably would line up to ask her out if she got back in shape. I work out daily at the YMCA around the corner, and invite her to come with me. The look she gives me makes clear that the only part she heard is the one about the boys not being interested in her. I am the villain, the cause of her agony. I feel as though someone’s pulling my heart out without an anesthetic.

We go back a few months farther. Although the main reason Nancy and I have moved all the way up to Santa Rosa (a 100-minute drive from Nancy’s job at the San Francisco Zoo) is to accommodate her, my daughter has effectively stopped having anything to do with us. There’s a dance at her high school (the earlier one, from which I later helped her transfer because she was so miserable) to which everyone comes stag. She doesn’t want me to pick her up at the end because she wants nothing at all to do with me, but her mother apparently decides to stay late at one of the groovy clubs in San Francisco at which she so loves being noticed by much younger men, and my daughter finds herself with no recourse but to phone me for a ride “home.” She doesn’t deign to speak to me as we head back to Pierce Street. She doesn’t speak to Nancy when we arrive.

The next morning, Nancy and I leave a glass of juice and a muffin outside her bedroom door, with a note from me saying I love her. Then we make ourselves scarce so she can leave without having to speak to us. She drinks the juice and eats the muffin. She leaves no note.

This sort of thing is repeated over and over and over again. She’s furious at the world for hurting her, and aims her anger at me. Though her actions very eloquently say, “I hate you,” I continue to adore her, and spend most of the two years between 1999 and 2001 feeling as though I’ve got a knife in my heart.

In 2010, I read some of the writing she’s done for her church newsletter. She speaks of her inability to hold a grudge — against anyone except her dad. She hasn’t spoken to me in eight years, and there is no end in sight.

Definitive Proof That Obama Is a Muslim, Lady Gaga is Transgendered, and That They're Both Communists

People have always looked at me and thought I had it made. Psychologists have demonstrated over and over that the very good-looking are almost universally perceived as more intelligent, more competent, and better in bed, but sometimes it’s a curse. Those on whom God didn’t smile so warmly — those with coarser, less symmetrical features, or stumpy legs, or lank, lifeless hair, or blotchy skin — have always viewed me with naked resentment, and on occasion attacked me with bricks and mortar.

In elementary school, no one wanted me as a square dance partner because they assumed God couldn’t have made me both gorgeous and light on my feet. I ate my lunch alone at the end of the playground that didn’t smell so good for reasons that no one was ever able to ascertain, at least before my promotion to what was then called junior high. There the PE teachers, rabid sadists every one, took delight in making me try to perform gymnastic feats that my congenital inner ear problem made quite impossible.

Later, in high school, the football team used to urinate into my locker because Donna Brisbin, the homecoming queen — who lied so baldly to the local newspapers about the impressive range of activities in which she was involved — had eyes only for me. Worse, Mr. A— D—, the journalism teacher, fell in love with me (I could see it in his very dark eyes) and gave me a B+ rather than the A- I deserved to spite me for having eyes only for Gail Hickey, who wore bright green contact lenses to dazzling effect, and yet somehow didn’t seem affected.

The biggest PR firm in Hollywood dispatched two women employees to try to seduce me in tandem when I wrote for the Los Angeles Times, and I have always liked the idea of a threesome, but not with them, thanks so much, though I’ve been a sucker for false eyelashes and immoderate eyeliner since the heyday of the Ronettes. Be my little baby indeed!

When I went to work for Larry Flynt Publications, a succession of female fellow employees came into my office and offered me the use of their reproductive systems, but I had eyes only for Tomasina L—, who reportedly thought anyone as gorgeous as I must be stuck up and shallow, which of course was only half true, or maybe five-eighths. One night on Sunset Blvd., a woman stopped in the adjoining lane scrawled her phone number backwards (forwards to me, you see) on her passenger window as we waited for the light to change, but she of course wasn’t my type. At that time I imagined leggy New Wave chanteueses in spandex to be my type, but heartbreakingly few of them shared my view.

I was nearly relieved in the early 90s when my looks began to fade, as it meant that people would finally start judging me on the basis of who I was, rather than what I looked like. But during all those years I’d gotten by on my looks, I hadn’t developed much of a personality, and boy, was I sunk! After my first marriage collapsed, my psychotherapist urged me to take a Learning Annex flirting class. There was a young woman there who’d have been on the cover of every magazine in the world if she hadn’t weighed 280 pounds; she had the most gorgeous white skin you’ve ever seen, but exuded self-hatred, and I wound up trying to lower the boom on a little French woman with a wonderfully Gallic nose I found huddled afterwad in a doorway on California Street because her boyfriend had thrown her out for reasons I was never able to claim I knew. In the produce section of Cala Foods, most of whose windows failed to survive the Loma Prieta earthquake some months later, I tried to lower the boom on a New Zealish blonde with a sexy updo. Her name was Kepi, though it sounded a lot more like Kippie in her accent, and we didn’t get along at all well.

Sometimes late at night (well, late for me, who gets up really early these days) I realize I haven’t written anything for the next day, and have to dash something off. On these occasions, I resort to an old literary device called “stream-of-conscousness”. Your indulgence gets mine.

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.

Hypermasculine Me

Somewhere in America, a restaurant is failing, and losing more money every month. It is failing because the food is crap, or rubbish, or looks and tastes like used diapers. This is so because the chef has Lost His/Her passion. The owners have no money left to send the children to college. Indeed, Dad is hoping, though it shames him to do so, that Elder Daughter will consent to a few months of call-girling just so the restaurant’s suppliers won’t stop supplying it.

The world-famous chef with a face that the English press has cruelly, accurately described as resembling a scrotum, but dazzling blue eyes, rides into town. He samples the restaurant’s food and pronounces it…crap. It is unmistakable to him that its chef has lost his/her passion. He tours the kitchen and is appalled by its filthiness. He wouldn’t let a rabid dog throw up in it. The restaurant’s owners want to kill him, and each other, and themselves. There is a commercial break.

WFC says the chef must regain his/her passion, the kitchen must be cleaned, and a new, simpler menu must be devised to replace the existing one, which offers 382 different dishes that the passionless chef either can’t cook very well or hasn’t even heard of. Everyone hates the WFC, whose umbrage at the restaurant is such that he actually bounces up and down as he spews profanity. One of the restaurant’s owners would rather quit the business then endure another moment of the WFC’s verbal abuse.

WFC stops spewing profanity long enough to devise a new, more streamlined menu featuring fresh local ingredients. The chef’s passion begins to come back. In the dead of night, WFC’s team of decorators comes in and makes the restaurant slightly less ugly, or ugly in a slightly more current way. Seeing this transformation, the restaurant’s staff is moved to tears.

The restaurant is relaunched. Local dignitaries and tastemakers are invited. But on this night of nights, this do-or-die night, the kitchen can’t cope. Diners are shown wondering what’s taking so long for their appetizers to arrive. Meals are returned to the kitchen, where the newly re-impassioned chef utters one of WFC's favorite words. WFC’s prodigiously furrowed brow grows even furroweder. It appears as though his heroic efforts are all for naught. This time, he has bitten off more than even he can chew!

But wait. His exhortations to the chef to Take Command finally sink in. The kitchen catches up. In the dining room, local dignitaries are observed enjoying the restaurant’s food more than they’d have dreamed possible. At night’s end, the restaurant’s staff baptizes WFC in grateful tears. At the end of the tunnel, they have glimpsed light. WFC rides off into the sunset, his blue eyes twinkling deep in the furrows.

Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is ever thus. It is thus in the UK, where I saw it first, and where no bleeping takes place when the great man calls his would-be beneficiary a fucking disgrace with bollocks the size of fucking chick peas, and it is thus now in the USA, where, with the sublime, if no less predictable Friday Night Lights, GRKN has made Friday night a wonderful time to stay home in one’s home theatre.

In other news, I’m not the world’s most masculine guy. I grew up playing with Barbie rather than balls and bats. I’m not good with tools and have never driven a motorcycle; I couldn’t be less handy on a bet. I’m really good at divining what certain facial expressions connote. I have no qualms whatever about asking directions, and enjoy wearing women’s clothing. I am soft-spoken and sensitive. But commercials for the impending release of Sex in the City II have begun airing, and I am suddenly feeling hypermasculine and heterosexual, for I tremble with loathing at the mere sight of them.

I watched the first one because Claire was a big fan, and at the end pronounced it six hours (or so it seemed) of absolute torture. I can’t stand Bruce Willis. I would sooner watch twice every action film Bruce has ever made — plus the entire oeuvre of Steven Seagal — than 10 minutes of this.

Anyone up to some hunting, camping, or fishing?

Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Nite at the Old Ball Game

We’ve established here that it doesn’t usually make much sense to be devoted to a particular professional sports team. The players are mercenaries who in most cases come from somewhere else entirely, more and more from abroad. The owners are capitalists trying to maximize their own wealth, and are not above relocating their franchises in the dead of night if they think more riches await them in a different locale.

We shouldn’t be rooting for our “local” teams, but for teams that do something noble.
I’d have rooted in the late 1940s for the baseball teams that signed black players. And I’d root in 2010 for any team that facilitated a gay player’s coming out.

When Gareth Thomas, the celebrated Welsh rugby player, admitted his homosexuality, his teammates — and most fans — embraced him. I’d very much like to see something similar happen in my own country. We’ve become accustomed to such sights as major league baseball teams using pink bats and NBA teams playing in pink pinafores and even NFL teams wearing pink shoes to demonstrate their support of the fight against breast cancer. God forbid, though, that, for instance, a left fielder should give his teammate in center field a congratulatory peck on the cheek after a highlights-show catch, or that a quarterback should embrace for longer than the prescribed eight milliseconds a wide receiver who’s just turned a poorly thrown pass into a long gain or even touchdown.

Yes, I’m being a little flippant. But look: I’ve stopped now.

I applaud everyone’s being so interested in beating breast cancer, as it causes widespread suffering, but so does homophobia. I’d like to see my “local” New York Jets, for instance, have a special Gay Day during the upcoming season, on which same-sex couples holding hands would get a free bobblehead doll or program as they pass through the turnstiles. Naturally, a lot of straight fans would bite the bullet and pretend to be gay only as long as it took to bag the swag, but wouldn’t that still be a step in the right direction?

I know a lot of teams would say in response that they’re all for greater tolerance (especially when it means more tickets sold), but that they wouldn’t feel right compelling their players to appear to endorse something they found immoral. Baloney. I believe the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 should have told the Southerners on their team either to get with the program of supporting Jackie Robinson’s being their second basemen, or get lost, and I believe the professional sports teams of 2010 could and should do likewise. A player can on his own time be as much a redneck homophobe as he chooses, but when he puts on the uniform furnished by his employer, he must be seen to support the employer’s ideals.

On every MLB uniform’s left shoulder, a rainbow flag. I have a dream.

I Done Been on TV!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Getting Scary Out There

It appears now, because it’s so dangerous Out There, that the census is going to take a lot longer to compute than the Department of the Interior originally projected. We enumerators were recently advised that it simply wasn’t good enough to leave three Notices of Visit at a particular address and then admit defeat; we are now required to implore neighbors to inform on the residents of the addresses in question. If none was around, we were to ask passers-by, people walking their dogs, mowing their lawns, or reaping what they’d sowed. We were to remind anyone who balked at violating their neighbors' privacy that the law forbids the disclosure of informers’ identities — and that America doesn’t torture some prisoners and toss others into prison for years without trial, and that we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was about to unleash fearsome weapons of mass destruction, and that it’s imperative we ascertain exactly how many people are living where so every state will have exactly the number of highly principled, eminently competent congresspersons to which it’s entitled.

I will pause to reveal that my three favorite moments in any Miss USA competition are when the contestants stumble, when the contestants give spectacularly inane answers to questions designed to demonstrate how level-headed and well informed they are, and when they’re revealed to have behaved sluttishly in the recent past (this year’s winner, Rima Fakih, won a pole dancing competition in 2007). I always enjoy the sight of Donald Trump’s hair, though I regard him as tied with Gene Simmons for Most Obnoxious Living Americans Other Than Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, or Michele Bachmann.

Six days ago, the head of one of my fellow census enumerators was found mounted on a stake on the corner of [withheld] and [withheld] with a sign, written in blood, attached reading, “I told u I filled out you’re [misspelled expletive deleted] questionnaire.” Police are looking for someone who sends a lot of text messages, and who doesn’t understand the difference between your and you’re, though a few minutes on Facebook or YouTube makes clear that there are only a couple of dozen living Americans who do anymore.

In any event, after the discovery of [withheld’s] head, we were ordered to canvas in groups of at least three, of which at least one was to be a male with either large biceps or tattoos suggesting a taste for mayhem and pockmarks suggesting an adolescence that might dispose him to violence. That worked fine for a couple of days, until it was discovered that a whole trio of enumerators had been waylaid by one of the gangs of heterophobic lesbian folksingers that’s been terrorizing southern Dutchess County since Hilary Clinton was appointed Secretary of State.

So now we’re going out in groups of five, accompanied by a West Point cadet in dress uniform. There’ve been a couple of shootings by locals who mistakenly think we’re there to trample their Second Amendment rights and confiscate their firearms, but neither has been fatal. The problem is that the process has been considerably slowed. I don’t know if I’m supposed to reveal this, but completion of the 2010 Census is now expected no earlier than 2020. Blame it on people’s irrational fear of government.

Incidentally, I’m beginning to have my doubts about Glen Beck. What if he in fact is one of the most brilliant satirists of our age? If you were to insist on condemning him for the paranoiac rage his loony comparisons of Obama to Hitler, for instance, inspire in the very stupid and gullible, are you not morally compelled to condemn Sacha Baron Cohen with comparable fervor for getting roomfuls of rednecks to sing about throwing Jews down wells?

I Want My Country Back

I want to be able to order a vodka smoothie when I get parched without fear of anyone wondering if they ought to organize an intervention.

I want free agency for professional athletes to be rescinded so that a player stays for his whole career with the same team, even if that arrangement renders him a virtual indentured servant. If athletes don’t like it, they can get temporary jobs as census enumerators like the rest of us. I don’t want to live in a world in which no one isn’t talking about with whom LeBron James will now sign.

I want, in the words of Rodney King, for us all to get along. Back in my student days, we campus radicals may have passionately hated the administrators who invited Dow Chemical to recruit on campus, for instance, but that didn’t preclude our going out with them for a couple of cold ones after someone had bailed us out. (We’d been arrested for occupying their offices, and drawing portraits of Eldridge Cleaver on the walls with our own feces.)

I want to live in a country in which teenagers don’t wantonly injure their parents — one in which, however intense their antipathy, they dutifully mumble, “Yes, sir,” or, “No, ma’am,” as in early-‘60s sitcoms. When I was myself a teenager, I (very foolishly) disliked my parents, though I graciously allowed them to feed, shelter, clothe, and educate me. However fervent my disdain, though, I never stopped speaking to them, as my own daughter stopped speaking to me eight years ago.

I’m reminded of her “promotion” (the Santa Rosa Unified School District apparently frowned on the use of “graduation”) from elementary to middle school. The father one of her classmates, Javiera, an enormous, enormously shy chicana, attended, in a laborer’s clothing, but looking proud enough to burst at any second. He’d apparently stopped en route to the modest ceremony to buy one of those brightly colored inflatable balloons so popular in dollar stores. The one he’d picked inappropriately exulted, “Happy birthday!” I don’t suppose he spoke a lot of English, but you should have seen the looks on his and his daughter’s faces as, after the list of promoted students was solemnly intoned, he presented her with his small gift; they could have melted Iceland.

My daughter (and Javiera) started middle school. On her first day, my daughter held my hand as I helped her find her homeroom. I learned later that one of her classmates, who’d apparently become terribly worldly over the course of the preceding summer, had teased her about it, and that my daughter had told her, in different words, to take a hike; she held my hand because she loved me. It might have been the proudest moment of my life.

Within a few months, though, when I’d drive up to Santa Rosa (from San Francisco) on Friday afternoon to collect her, my daughter wouldn’t deign to greet me as she got into the car, wearing the expression of a condemned prisoner about to be marched before a firing squad. We’d be south of Petaluma before she could bring herself to converse with me.

I asked if she saw Javiera at school, and confessed how he spectacle of her dad proudly presenting her with the balloon several months before had nearly brought me to tears. She seemed to take particular delight in informing me that Javiera, she of the straight A’s in elementary school, had become a foul-mouthed little reprobate. I assumed Javiera had done so for self-protection — there’s no sadism like the sadism of middle schoolers — but I imagined her dad being no less hurt by it than I was by Brigitte’s seething surliness.

I want my country back.