I Have Fun Everywhere I Go Page 2

  It took about two seconds for the guy with the shotgun to appear.

  It’s funny how on LSD things can sometimes appear so clear. Like what William Burroughs said about “the naked lunch,” that moment when you can see exactly what’s at the end of your fork. In this case it was just about the ugliest mutherfucker I have ever laid eyes on, covered in scars and sweat and leveling a sawed-off shotgun at our heads, demanding to know what the fuck we wanted.

  “It’s cool,” I offered. “We’re waiting for our friend.” I think I was pretty calm. Just a simple misunderstanding between some harmless college-boy acidheads and a heavily armed smack dealer. For a guy who was about to get his head blown off, Jim was surprisingly relaxed. Probably happened to him all the time back in St. Louis.

  At that moment Jeremy opened the door. “Ah, here’s our friend now!” When Jeremy saw what was going on, his eyes popped out of his head, just like in a Tex Avery cartoon, but he managed to play it smooth. “They’re just coming up to see me,” he explained matter-of-factly. It was a big moment. I could feel my balls climbing up into my stomach. The guy lowered the shotgun. “Damn!” he said. “You can’t be hanging around here. I’m doin’ business!” And he disappeared. My balls descended, joyfully.

  “Holy fucking shit—” I stammered. “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Are you okay?” Jeremy was just as freaked as I was.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Jim said good-naturedly. Apparently, he had been busy traveling the astral plane and missed all the excitement.

  Jeremy’s place was no more relaxed than the street had been. He had also seen Backlund on TV, and his reaction to this aberration (there is no crying in wrestling) was to throw everything not nailed down out the window, beginning with buckets of paint left over from eighty years of dirtbag tenants. He had the twelve-inch single of “Rapper’s Delight” on his turntable with the repeat switch on, the perfect soundtrack for druggy urban frustration.

  After that, throwing things out of Jeremy’s window became a regular pastime for us. TV sets were a hot commodity, and Jeremy used to collect them, picking them up off the street when they were left out for trash and carting them up to his place to be hurled en masse at a later date.

  Perhaps throwing televisions out of windows sounds trite to you? Do not underestimate the sound a nineteen-inch RCA Colortrak makes after being tossed down a six-story air shaft. Some things, no matter how many times they have been done—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, fried chicken, and the Missionary Position leap to mind—still provide near-universal satisfaction when done right.

  ________

  Inspired by the warm and fuzzy feeling fully realized only when watching a human bunny slipper like Hot Stuff getting his neck broken by an artiste like the Masked Superstar—not to mention the psychedelic bliss of sharing a near-death experience at gunpoint—I invited Jim to join the new band I was masterminding, which we eventually called Sharky’s Machine, an homage to the preposterous Burt Reynolds cop flick.

  Sharky’s Machine was an experiment—pure, without regard to result. I had never even written a song before, and after years of bashing away at the drums, I had just bought my first guitar (a copper-top ’59 Danelectro, single cutaway, the one with two pickups and concentric knobs, 130 bucks at We Buy Guitars) and was bending a handful of roughhewn blues riffs into compact blasts of high-energy rock ’n’ roll and then working them out on the drum kit, where I was most dangerous. My idea was something approaching a hard-core thrash band— filtered through the wildly distorting refractors of Captain Beefheart, the Stooges, and the Troggs.

  Jim shocked everyone with how great a singer he could be, especially for a first-timer—crooning, hollering, getting the Iggyisms and the Jaggerisms just right, howling very deep-felt lyrics far too complex for a Sunday-afternoon punk rock band, digging into some incredibly soulful stuff, and shredding himself into a bloody mess in the process.

  I conscripted Alec to play guitar, for no other reason than that he lived upstairs and owned a really big amplifier and was game, which at the time seemed to trump any real need for conventional rock ’n’ roll chops or sense of swing. What I didn’t realize was that he was a savant, a pundit on almost everything, a difficult guy to be around for any length of time. Alec is a nice guy, an intelligent guy, and can be very funny; he’s just completely off the beam. After he graduated from NYU and became a cabdriver, he was quoted in The New York Times as saying that the only way to make cabs safe was to “put the passenger up front and the driver in the back with a shotgun.”

  But he was very enthusiastic about the project, and besides, I figured it wouldn’t last, so who cared? I never thought this would exist past a couple of gigs and maybe some recording. How could it? We used to haul our gear to CBGB in shopping carts we stole from a supermarket on La Guardia Place.

  Tonia, our bass player, ditto, was an unqualified rookie who could barely tune her instrument, but very sweet, and very earnest about wanting to be in a band (eventually she learned to ride herd over what could have easily turned into a relentless din)—and the only person we could find willing to put up with this group of musical misfits.

  Sharky’s Machine was a fucked-up mess right out of the gate. One of our first shows was at our NYU dorm, and it resulted in a swarm of security guards trying to turn off our shrieking amplifiers while Jim taunted the crowd. Tonia, who weighed about 110 pounds in her Doc Martens, got pulled into a melee with some Neidermeir-like asshole whose girlfriend had been on earlier, playing “Für Elise” on the flute. When I tried to break it up, he sucker punched me in the head.

  This was the beginning of a nasty trend of violence surrounding the group. In this case it was a bunch of frat-boy pussies and business-school dickweeds. Later it would be a New Jersey biker gang (who adored us), various soundmen (not so much), and audience members who had been savagely attacked by Jim (with, in one inspired moment, the jagged end of a broken bowling trophy). Pro wrestling–inspired riff bashing and avant noise explorations like “The Devastating Samoan Drop” were more likely to inspire a hail of bottles than a shower of daisies. When we opened for the Ramones at Vassar College, shit started flying at us on the very first note. Someone even threw his shoes.

  Yet somehow we managed to do pretty well on the European club circuit, eventually warming up for hot handers like the Mekons, Soundgarden, and Mudhoney. It happened this fast: we had just finished playing our set at the gloriously illegal No Se No dance hall lounge on Rivington Street, opening for art-damaged hippie producer Kramer and his band Shockabilly:

  KRAMER: Hey, you guys are great. Do you want to make a record for my new label?

  US: Uh, sure.

  KRAMER: Do you guys want to go on tour in Europe, starting in Amsterdam in the fall?

  US: Uh, sure.

  My father once came to a Sharky’s Machine show—probably the only one we ever played where you actually could sit down and order a drink at a table. I thought it would be a good opportunity for the old man to see what his firstborn was up to. I was very proud of the band and extremely focused on being a Holy Terror behind the kit. I was delighted when Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll compared my drumming to airraid sirens.

  The show was at the famed Folk City on Third Street, famous because Bob Dylan got his start there. We were on before Sonic Youth. At the end of our set, there was the usual dustup when I kicked over the drum kit, breaking a few chairs and some tables (not to mention a guitar, two mic stands, and several audience members), but that was our thing, and some minor-league rock mag even named it “show of the year.” Later Dad would offer me his review: “I’ve seen your band, I’ve seen the way you throw your equipment around, and frankly, I don’t call it music.” A few years later he would add, “If you were that good, don’t you think you would have made it by now?”

  Living as we did on the front lines of the new rock’n’wrestling connection, Jim and I also began a fanzine, a photocopied cut-and-paste (the old-fashioned way: with scis
sors and Scotch tape) “post-scientific” journal for the punk rock and piledriver set—called The Foreign Object.

  In its perfectly unevolved state—laid out, such as it was, on folded 8½-by-11 paper, typed on a battered Smith Corona electric, hand-lettered with Sharpies, and illustrated with photos snipped from “bona fide” wrestling magazines—The Foreign Object looked as if it were put together by a couple of highly delusional mental patients. We wrote elaborate fantasies about dining with wrestlers at four-star restaurants and top-secret conspiracies involving the WWF and the military-industrial complex, and we created bizarre formulas calibrated to unlock objective numerical indexes of wrestlers graded on a twisted scale of “charisma and brutality.” Post-scientific, indeed. We were leaders in the deification of Vince McMahon, who was bending the medium with a bizarre cable talk show for wrestlers, cohosted with a lisping British poof named Lord Alfred Hayes. Vince was bringing the oeuvre to new levels of absurdity with segments dedicated to wrestlers cooking, dancing, and performing Johnny Carson–esque sketch comedy. The Canadian eye-gouge king Butcher Vachon was married on the show (mazel tov, Butcher!), beginning a long string of in-the-ring romances that invariably led to some sort of donnybrook, busted-up buffet, or other comic outrage. Even in “real life,” wrestling was getting pretty far-out.

  Not to be outdone by our roll-your-own entry into the publishing racket—and he was always a great one not to be outdone—Jeremy got an internship at a legitimate national newsstand wrestling magazine, Wrestling’s Main Event. While other journalism students were chasing their tails trying to get in the door at New York or The Village Voice, Jeremy went down-market and made a Big Score.

  We now had one of our own safely installed inside the fortified walls of Wrestling. How much longer could it be until we ruled the world?

  It wasn’t long before Jeremy parlayed his internship into an actual job and was working full-time as an associate editor at WME, putting his spin on everything. Soon I was writing for them under a fistful of pseudonyms and cranking out three or four stories a month. The takeover had begun.

  And I was now an officially published writer.

  As in a good New Jersey street brawl, it was “anything goes” in the pages of Main Event. We didn’t go as far out into the realm of the absurd as we did with The Foreign Object (now defunct since we had gone legit), but we definitely pushed the boundaries of objective reality. For unloading post-scientific fantasies on what I imagine was a thundering herd of dumbfounded wrestling fans, I was paid seventy-five bucks a pop. But if you were to believe the world we painted, we spent our time on Lear jets drinking champagne with the Champ and going undercover to top-secret Soviet training camps that specialized in banned techniques—that is, when we weren’t hopscotching the Orient in search of the Forbidden City of Professional Wrestling.

  2

  I KNOW IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE,

  BUT THERE ARE STILL PURITANS

  WORKING IN THIS BUSINESS

  Bobo the Porn-Writing Clown was not a real clown; he was just a stoned clod in sore need of a makeover. He maintained a robust Bozoesque coif—a comfortably wide landing strip down the middle, and giant tufts of hair sticking out from the sides of his basketball-shaped head—and he insisted on wearing OshKosh B’gosh overalls, inappropriate for anyone past puberty who doesn’t spend his mornings squeezing the milk out of cow tits. That his shoes did not explode was an unfortunate oversight.

  By this time I had dropped out of NYU and had moved in with my girlfriend in a sixth-floor walk-up on Avenue B, while I entertained the idea of becoming a professional writer, whatever that meant.

  Bobo moved in to the apartment below ours and invited me over to get stoned with him. My girlfriend would have nothing to do with Bobo, but being a good neighbor, naturally I accepted. He had an ancient pipe that he had been using since junior high school, one of those short little metal things that gets too hot to hold after just a few minutes. Jammed with the resin of the years and badly in need of a new screen, smoking it was like trying to inhale pot through a billiard ball.

  He asked me what I did. I gave him the short answer, viz., my career as a college dropout and part-time post-scientific wrestling journalist. He claimed to be some kind of a writer, too.

  Watching this guy spill beer all over himself while he burned his fingers trying to get stoned, I wouldn’t have guessed he could have composed a lucid “wish you were here” postcard to his folks without setting it on fire, let alone write a book, but he showed me an entire shelf of sleazy paperbacks he had written. I was flabbergasted. There were about forty of them, titles like Hard Hat Lover, Black Dicks for Debbie, Teenage Bootlicker, Mother Daughter Rapists . . .

  Mother Daugher Rapists? It was part of an incest series, which included other evergreens such as Daddy Knows Best and Mom ’n’ Sis ’n’ Me Make Three.

  In the name of All That Is Holy, what had I stumbled upon? Black Dicks for Debbie? Just what kind of clown was I dealing with?

  I was no prude. I was, after all, a Worldly Film School Dropout. But I certainly had never seen any pocket novels for incest fetishists, let alone met anyone who took pride in their authorship.

  There were bondage books, transvestite books, “young debs,” hot slave-girl horrors, tri-sexuals . . . Tri-sexuals? I didn’t even know what that meant.

  I cleaned the pipe with a paper clip and passed it back to Bobo, who gave it another go, this time more successfully (he looked at me as something of a miracle worker), while I continued to marvel at this licentious trove of literary wonder. High-Heeled Husband. A Bra for Bobby. Spank My Pussy. Hot for Chicken . . .

  There was certainly something for everyone. I thumbed through a few of them, not quite knowing what to expect. Except for the shockingly crude covers—and the ad on the back cover for the Weekend Orgy Kit—they looked like, well, real books.

  “Did you ever think about writing smut?”

  “You actually write these things?”

  “Yeah, like one a week. I know they’re looking for people. You should give them a call.”

  The mind reeled. I had nothing against pornography, but I had never really given it much thought. Mostly I found it boring and just kind of dumb. I only occasionally looked at Playboy or Penthouse. I can be a pretty shameless onanist, even without pictures.

  As for the writing, one reason I floundered at NYU was because I always had trouble mustering eight pages of academic blather about the “Myth of the Western” or “Revisionism in the Noir Cycle,” which, in retrospect, is kind of pathetic, since all that was expected was to cough up a load of hackneyed egghead bullshit, and I usually excelled at such bullshit.

  But writing for Main Event had taught me how to focus in thousand-word blasts. I was learning how to tell a story, learning which colors I could lift from Raymond Chandler, what tattoos I could swipe from Richard Brautigan, and what grammatical excesses to leave far behind. As freewheeling and loosey-goosey as it might have been, I was finding my voice. Mainly I had gained an enormous amount of confidence. Main Event had evolved into something of a writer’s laboratory, and the results were far more successful than my overpriced private university. I looked at Bobo, now completely stoned and playing with the hooks on his overalls. I was pretty sure I could make the leap from men in tights to cheerleaders in chains.

  “Can you type?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  That job interview went well. After affirming that I was indeed a forty-five-words-per-minute man, I was seated in front of a battered IBM Selectric, the detritus of someone’s failed business but in those dark days before the Mac Classic, still at the apex of writing machines.

  “Set it up, boy-girl, and then bring the camera in close. Give me like a thousand words.”

  I wasn’t really expecting to be auditioned on the spot, but I was up to the challenge. I put my paws on the keys and began banging away, determined to unleash a torrent of such unrivaled smut that I would be hired on the spot and quickly declared the g
reatest eroticist since Ovid.

  I did as I was told. Jack and Jill were on the couch, lingering over a kiss. And then, like a hooker in heat, Jill goes for the ol’ okeydoke and they’re off to the races. The IBM typeball clicked and clattered. Sparks were flying. It sounded like an elevated train tearing across the South Side of Chicago. Who knew that I had it in me? She sucked, he groaned, she pulled up her skirt, her wet dum-de-dum, his hard blah blah blah . . . and Shazam! Twenty minutes later I pulled my sordid little vignette out of the typewriter. The roller mechanism whirred contentedly.

  The editor who had interviewed me so efficiently gave it a good once-over.

  “When can you start?”

  Hooray! I was a pornographer! I couldn’t wait to tell my folks.

  First, though, I had to learn the rules. The editor spelled them out for me.

  “We like plots. The books should read like books, preferably with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And nothing that couldn’t really happen—no extraterrestrials having sex with Earth girls or anything like that. It has to be plausibly real. In the S and M books, nothing that leaves a scar, no wounds that don’t heal. And no one dies. We like happy endings.”

  “Is that it?”

  “No. No shit eating.” He took a contemplative beat. “I know it’s hard to believe, but there are still puritans working in this business.”

  Each book was 180 pages. Ten chapters per book, and each chapter was about four thousand words, but we counted them by lines. There were something like five hundred lines per chapter. A good tip was never underestimate the dramatic impact of a one-or two-word paragraph.

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t stop!”

  “Glubglubglubglub . . .”

  “Mmmmmmmmmmmmffffff!!!”

  Because that’s what it looked like ripping down a page, and if you hit the carriage return often enough, you’d get to the end of the chapter in quick time. And that’s what this was all about—grinding out these books at record speed. They had nothing against good writing, as long as it didn’t get in the way.