Some Came Running

Encounters with Great Recordings of the 20th Century, #5: A Tribe Called Quest, "Midnight Marauders"

Now that Rolling Stone magazine is in the news again, and again for a not-great reason, it seems an opportune time for me to own up to something in a more cohesive way than I've done in the past, which has been in dribs and drabs on social media. As most of you are aware, this week sees the publication of a literally jaw-dropping interview with RS founder or co-founder and longtime publisher and editor Jann Wenner. Ace interlocuter David Marchese did the honors for The New York Times Magazine, and it's clear in one of the exchanges, in which Wenner opines that Black and female musical artists of his era were simply not articulate enough for him to bother interviewing back in the day, that Wenner is blithely stepping straight into a trap that Marchese hadn't even set for him. 

Wenner's glib, smug, not-even-confession sits alongside other gobsmacking glib, smug shrugging-offs of various journalistic malpractices. This doesn't speak well of Rolling Stone's ostensible legacy, and here one is semi-obliged to mumble about how that's a shame becuase Rolling Stone did publish a lot of great writing and that is certainly true. But it's because of Wenner that the existence of RS will always have been at the very least a mixed blessing and if he wants to drag the rag's rep through the mud by freely admitting that he actually let his interview subjects edit their Q&As before they went to press, that's entirely on him.

I did a bit of writing for Rolling Stone in the early 1990s. When I visited the office, I always slumped, and tried to steer clear of the boss man, because I figured that having made his allowance for the great David Fricke, he didn't want to see any other unusually tall people in the office. (And indeed, aside from David, there weren't any on staff as far as I could tell.) A couple of great things about RS when Wenner ran the place: it paid well, and it paid on time. Always. For a freelancer, that's huge. 

I was a journeyman front-of-the-book writer who never broke into features despite the encouragement of editors like Barbara O'Dair and Bob Love. I did obits on the likes of Albert Goldman, Michael Clarke, and Harry Nilsson (who should have been memorialized by Dawn Eden, who did the last interview with the man and who I tapped as a source for the piece). I contributed capsules to packages like "The Hundred Greatest Rock Videos of All Time." I interviewed Yoko Ono for her Off-Broadway musical, New York Rock, a misbegotten project in which one might nevertheless see the seeds of Rent. And, for editor Anthony De Curtis, I did one record review. And here my tale of woe begins.

I haven't yet read Joe Hagan's Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, but I've dipped into it more than once for research purposes and it appears to be lively, dishy, entertaining, well-researched, comprehensive, and right-minded. Hip-hop is mentioned precisely once in the book, and early on, in the prologue. Like so: "Success would blunt Wenner's feel for the culture and sow the seeds of his decline. He missed the rise of MTV and hip-hop, and later the Internet, cultural revolutions he experienced like a well-heeled uncle squinting toward Manhattan from a ski-slope in Sun Valley, where he began wintering in the 1990s." Oh that reminds me, another piece I did for Rolling Stone was based arounf the premise of Rock Stars Give You Advice on How To Buy A Computer, with Henry Rollins averring, "Even if you think the computer you're buying has plenty of memory, you're going to need MORE" and stuff like that.  One can infer, from the new Wenner interviw and also from a lot of other things, that Wenner had not just a blind spot as far as hip-hop went but was probably openly hostile to it. Nevertheless, the music editors at the magazine made good-faith efforts to cover it even when they themselves weren't entirely enthusiastic about it. Remember, these were the days before Tom Petty enlisted Rick Rubin as a producer, the days when Petty would vehemently drawl, when asked about sampling, "It's stealing." 

Long story short, record reviews editor De Curtis, a good critic (albeit one of old-school taste) and a kind, pleasant guy, assigned me to review Midnight Marauders, the third studio album by A Tribe Called Quest. I don't recollect the conversation, I can't remember if he offered me a choice of records to write up. I do remember having been enthusiastic about Peoples' Instinctive Travels and the thing that was getting called "Alternative Hip-Hop" in general (especially De La Soul's Three Feet High And Rising). I felt these records were encouraging in a larger cultural sense in a time when I, a Delicate White Person In His Early Thirties, was increasingly discomfited by what he saw as aberrant elements emerging in hip-hop, as in the anti-semitism expressed by Professor Griff of Public Enemy or the unapologetic misogyny of some of the raps on Ice Cube's Amerikkka's Most Wanted. Put another way, I took the whole "D.A.I.S.Y. Age" business far too much to heart. 

My really dumb two-star review of Midnight Marauders now sits behind a paywall, and I'm not going to pony up to read it in its entirety again. Nor am I going to go fetch my DVD-ROMs or whatever they are of "The Complete ," which probably don't even work on my current computer anymore anyway. All I need is to read the lede of the review to cringe: "'Can you envision/A brother who ain't dissin'?' asked A Tribe Called Quest's Q-Tip on the rap group's  1990 debut album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, a breakthrough in what became known as Afrocentric hip-hop. It was a refreshing idea then, and Quest pulled it off with panache; their raps were gently wry, while their jazzy jams proved that dope beats don't need sledgehammer impact to kick ass." You see where this is going: straight to hippieville, really. Which is putting it kindly. De Curtis might as well have asked David Van Driessen, the wet-noodle teacher on Beavis and Butthead, to write up the record. In my eagerness to tsk-tsk the group for what I took as untoward aggression, I failed to hear what the beats and rhymes were actually doing, which I won't try to describe here (I've done enough damage!) but will say I have come to understand as being legitimately great. Instead of appreciating that at the time, I instead wrote the thing that I have come to hate, as both a critic and a reader. That is, A Concern Troll Review.

As I mentioned, the review is behind a paywall now, but during the early days of Rolling Stone Digitizing Its Content, it was not behind a paywall, and about eight or nine years ago, every coupld of months or so a bunch of folks would find it on the RS site, just sitting there, and would find me on Twitter to tell me what an imbecile I was. It was a lot of work, composing individual apology tweets saying I Was Wrong and that Indeed Midnight Marauders Is A Great And Landmark Hip-Hop Album. From hereon in, this post will serve as my all-purpose mea culpa. In the words of maestro Lou Reed, "Shows just how wrong you can be."  

Deb

So I guess it was in the middle of autumn in 1979 that my friend Bob told me that he had a date with this pretty interesting freshman girl at New York University, and that I ought to take her out some time myself. I didn’t quite understand why, if this girl was so interesting, that Bob wanted to fob her off on me, but eventually I figured it out. It had nothing to do with her.

Debra was from Orefield, Pennsylvania, and she bunked at Weinstein Hall, which was one of only three dormitories at NYU back then. She had a lot of gumption to make that move, but she took to the city pretty well. I had been visiting Manhattan for a couple of years, mainly to see bands, but Debra was the person from whom I learned more of the day-to-day life in New York.

We went to a lot of movies. I think our first date was to see Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun. Knowing precisely nothing of post-World War II Germany, there was a lot of it we didn’t get, but it still made a strong impression, and taught us not to use gas stoves to light cigarettes.

This was back when the current IFC Center, which now has like, what, seven houses, was a single-screen theater called the Waverly. We saw a midnight show of Eraserhead there, and afterwards she said to me, “That reminds me, I have to do my laundry.”

She was kind of eccentric. She mainly dressed in black pleated skirts and white blouses, with a black Danskin beneath. For a long time it was kind of a uniform. Once as a joke (or was it?) she smashed a Perrier bottle, put the shards in a candy dish, and poured Jujubes on top of the shards, and put the dish on a coffee table. When she was a teenager in Orefield she had a schnauzer that she named Gandalf. She used to make sheets of stationery from the wrappings of Wrigley chewing gum and write enigmatic, sometimes petulant and sometimes passionate love letters on them. Once when we were stoned she watched me playing Pac-Man and when I ate the big dot that turned all my pursuers blue, she said plaintively, “Look how unhappy they are.”

So this was what you’d call a formative relationship, and one in which we were as shitty to each other as we were crazy about each other, as is not uncommon in one’s late teens/early twenties.

I remember the black mittens her mother had made for her, which she wore on our winter walks from Weinstein Hall to Chinatown, where she fiended after any dish that had snow peas in it. I didn’t take her for a nice dinner on Valentine’s Day 1980; instead we went to Irving Plaza to see The Feelies, with the Bush Tetras and DNA opening. This was the Tetras’ second show (we were under the impression at the time that it was a debut, but that had happened a few days prior) and also the DNA show where a naked woman stumbled on to the stage from the wings and bassist Tim Wright just spider-walked around her while Arto Lindsay howled and skronked and Ikue Mori didn’t even look up from her drum kit. During the Feelies’ set Glenn Mercer broke a string during the solo to “Moscow Night” and Debra and I both gasped and then marveled how he transposed it to a string above and completed the sentence, so to speak.

This was a time before film and music tastes began to be perceived as somehow gender-segregated, so I was hardly surprised that Debra liked The Contortions, The Buzzcocks, and The Psychedelic Furs. Okay she also had Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, which I couldn’t stand and which I got an earful of on the Jersey side, too, as it was a favorite of my college paper colleague Sue Merchant, later Susan Walsh. Down the hall from her at Weinstein was a guy named Andy, a sweet, soft-spoken, Velvet Underground worshipping, alarmingly thin fellow with lanky hair who once convinced Debra to sing “Femme Fatale” with him backing her on guitar. (Andy Bienan, as it happens, who later was to cowrite Boys Don’t Cry with Kimberley Peirce, and who now teaches screenwriting at Columbia, and is lately a good friend I don’t see often enough.)

We broke up around May of 1980, after which followed like maybe a whole year of on-off, which was not uncommon at this time. I remember coming into town on Election Day that year, and for some reason we went on a movie marathon. We started uptown with Godard’s Sauve Qui Peut, which ruled. Then she said to me “I’ve never seen a porno movie. Let’s see a porno movie.” So we went to some truly gnarly dive on Eighth Avenue and saw a terribly undistinguished triple-XXX movie of the pimply-derriere variety, which was weird. Then we went down to Anthology and saw a very faded print of Dreyer’s Vampyr with burned-in Swedish subtitles, which was maybe the only way you could see it back in the day. It was an amazing day in some respects, but I also remember having a splitting headache at the end of it.

She moved to D.C. around 1982, after which we only stayed intermittently in touch. She became, among other things, a mom, and some time after that found happiness in a midlife marriage. (As I, too, have done.) We reconnected via Facebook, as one does, or as one did, and exchanged cordial notes. A couple of weeks ago I learned that she had gone into hospice, suffering from lung cancer. She couldn’t speak, so I sent her a card telling her how much our time had meant to me, and she sent a note back. A little after that, while I was in Venice, she died, age 61. I was lucky to have known her.

Debra Pearl Buhay-Hockenberry-Salsi, 1961-2022. Photo used by permission.

What keeps authors awake at night

Writing a book and having it published by a prominent house is a generally pleasant experience, to put it mildly. Having your book get a warm reception from reviewers and readers, which my book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas mostly has, is also nice. Selling well is…well I don’t want to repeat myself. My first Author’s Statement comes in January and since my editor has already told me that the book “exceeded expectations” I’m looking forward to good news, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The downside of this multi-level experience is knowing where you screwed up and temporarily having limited means to do anything about it. A few errors made it into the first printings of Made Men; they all ought to be fixed by now, as we go into (I think) a third printing. But having made them  in the first place stings, especially when I think of the people involved in the movie, who’ll be reading, and who’ll spot them, and whose confidence in me as a chronicler of their work will be at least slightly undermined. (And yes, I do appreciate how they let down the lay reader as well.)

How do these things happen? Actually, it’s too easy. Mostly through a combination of simple human  error coupled with over-confidence. And what you come up with after you’ve read something over and over again, and are kind of semi-automatically going back to the text for what you think is a thorough tidying up, when in fact what you’re actually doing is a robotic (as in mechanical, not as in laser-focused) pantomime of proof-reading. Your eyes see, but you don’t think through what you’re seeing. An error that’s been in place for some time starts to register as “right’ just because you’ve scanned it so many times and come to accept it as a reality.

One of the Made Men reviewers on Amazon slammed me for two errors that they found early in the book: my misidentifying The King of Comedy as a 1984 film when in fact it was released in 1982, and my placing “Smooth Criminal” on Michael Jackson’s Thriller album as opposed to his Bad album, on which it actually appears, and whose title track was made into a video by Martin Scorsese from a Richard Price story and script. This was a bit of a “gotcha” moment for me, in the privacy of my imagination at least, because it tipped me off that the reviewer was basing his slam on the bound uncorrected galley proofs, which are announced in a circle on the front cover as uncorrected galley proofs for a reason — they’re not corrected. So this guy had definitely not made an “Authorized Amazon Purchase,” phooey [author mimes spitting at the floor]. Because for the final version, the release year of King of Comedy was changed to the correct one. Except, uh-oh, the Thriller error remained intact.

Later on in the book, writing about movies with pop song soundtracks, I compare Mean Streets and American Graffiti and glibly state “While both acknowledged as classics today, neither Mean Streets nor American Graffiti were box-office blockbusters.” While Graffiti was a little slow out of the gate — it became what used to be called a “sleeper hit,” something that the subsequent mutations of the film exhibition industry made a practical near-impossibility — it of course was a box-office blockbuster, the third highest-grossing film of the year. You like to think that you check every factual assertion you make, but you don’t. That’s why fact-checkers were invented. But fact-checkers are thin on the ground these days. I’m not making excuses. The point is, the “facts” you don’t check, because you think you know, will bite you on the ass every time. 

People like to bat around that F. Scott Fitzgerald observation (did he even really say this? I’m not so certain anymore, and who can really state with certainty that he did?) that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” As it happens, then, maybe having a “first-rate intelligence” has more in common with being an idiot than was heretofore believed. Because, you know, here I am, writing about Scorsese’s video for “Bad,” writing about Joe Pesci’s appearance in the Michael Jackson film Moonwalker, which is largely tied in with Bad, and I’m nevertheless identifying “Smooth Criminal” as having appeared on Thriller. And later on, there I am talking about how American Graffiti was sufficiently popular to inspire the sitcom Happy Days, and then I state it wasn’t a box-office blockbuster.

These goofs have been fixed, but it’s embarrassing to have them in a first edition, and those are not the only ones. At one point I cite the girl-group The Ronettes when I mean the girl-group The Crystals. I misspell “Bufalino” as “Buffalino.” For a little while after the book went into hardcover all I could see were the errors, and I started to hate the book. I had to pull myself back to something I told myself after I submitted the manuscript, which was that absolute perfection was an unlikely outcome. I still would have liked to come a lot closer to that than I did with the first printing.

Oh, and there’s another side to this: what did not make it in. I recently got an e-mail from a reader who was rather perturbed that I did not cite the obvious antecedent to Goodfellas’ “meet the gang” Steadicam shot, that is, a similar characters-address-the-camera bit in Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni. The thing is, I had. In my manuscript of the book’s fourth chapter, a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie (a favorite with some readers, a source of “I already know what happens in the movie” complaint for some others), I wrote this:

Liotta’s voiceover accompanies an elaborate tracking shot.  The inspiration here is the opening (post credits) shot of Federico Fellini’s 1953 I Vitelloni, which moves across a boardwalk restaurant and introduces three of its main characters, in less than a minute. But Scorsese goes bigger than Fellini, giving us 10 characters in less time,  in a Steadicam shot that goes on for a little more than 60 seconds.

In the finished book, the passage goes “Liotta’s voice accompanies an involved Steadicam shot. There’s an overtly theatrical feel somehow…” etc. That sentence about the theatrical feel kicks off a new paragraph in the manuscript featuring the citation of the Fellini film. I’ve gone over the notes and drafts and PDFs of various versions and I still can’t suss out how the passage got dropped. It should be restored some time in the future.

What have we learned here? As I embark on a new book, I’ve made some new rules for myself that I’m not going to mention here because that sort of revelations tends to solicit reactions such as “you mean you DIDN’T do [X]?” and or solicit suggestions as to what I ought to do, which I think should be confined to my immediate circle of project collaborators, no offense. Mainly I have a new appreciation of something I thought I already knew, which has to do with how you can never be too careful, and what you owe to the reader. I have been told many times over by readers how much they enjoyed the book and how much they got out of it, so I know to some extent in the larger scheme of things they haven’t been let down. But I also know that I can’t snicker at another author writing that Max von Sydow played the role of Death in The Seventh Seal as vigorously as I once might have.

"Shutter Island"

 A particularly Murnau-esque image from Scorsese's film. 

A lot of people don’t like Shutter Island. I get that. It’s excessive, lurid, and even those who’d argue the excess is part of the point will perhaps admit it does duty above and beyond in that respect. Mystery mavens will tell you the film’s plot is laughably obvious. It’s arguable that the film conjures up tropes of the atrocities of 20^th century history far too glibly.

I praised the movie when it was released in February of 2010, but these days when it comes up on social media I don’t offer too full-throated a defense of the movie, if any at all. And if the movie comes up in conversation with friendly acquaintances, and one of them proclaims “Well that sucked,” or something along those lines, I just zip my mouth tight and shrug.

Almost all my adult life I had been a hard drinker. When my family moved from Dumont to Lake Hopatcong in the mid-‘70s, when I was between my sophomore and junior years in high school, I was terribly irritated to be consigned to the sticks, but I wound up doing well there. I was a social pariah in Dumont, something to do with my brash personality, but at Jefferson Township High School I found friends, quite a few of them, and many of them are friends to this day. There were social hierarchies there but they didn’t seem to be taken quite as seriously in the more cosmopolitan realms of Bergen County. The jocks and the self-described “band f*gs” kind of got along, and they drank together at a bar called Rudy’s that sat at the top of one of the mountains separating Hopatcong from Milton. It was there that I did not learn how to drink. I remember trying to do a “flaming shot” of Green Chartreuse and spilling it, pretty little flames dancing on the linoleum. The proprietors were pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. Of course they were serving sixteen-year-olds without even making a show of carding them.

In any event. Once I began writing for a living almost a decade later, I had your standard issue perspective on the position of alcohol in the life of a scribe. One friend would refer to what he considered my “interesting relationship” to spirits, which he did not take as alcoholism.

Whether I had been an actual alcoholic during the better part of the relationship is, at least from this perspective, neither here nor there. But the relationship took a decisive turn when I lost my office job (at the website spun off from Premiere magazine, a job I should not have accepted in the first place, but that is, again, neither here nor there) and was obliged, for the first time since the mid-1990s, to work as a freelancer.

This was in 2008. My ticket to Cannes was already bought, and I started the blog you are reading now. I got a lot of sympathy and not a lot of work. For the third time, neither here nor there in the larger scheme of things. I drank like more of a fish than I ever had,  I got fatter than I’d ever been, I was invited to play a fat monster in a Steven Soderbergh movie.

Some time in 2009 it occurred to me that because I felt I had to have a lot of alcohol every single day, I might have a problem. This was pretty plain to my wife Claire as well. My routine was something like this: I’d get out of bed a little before noon. (My wife, on her way to her office job, would cheerily repeat a little mantra she’d formulated, reminding me to perform a few actions, including showering and putting on fresh clothing.) I’d do a little work. I’d wonder if I should go to Hanley’s for lunch. And whether, when there, I’d just have one drink. There was a pretty lively afternoon crew at Hanley’s, including a carpenter who had inexplicably cut off a part of his finger recently. The bartender was a goddess with the buy back. Some time after five, I’d ooze on back to my house, and try to arrange myself as if I had not spent the afternoon getting utterly hammered. It was kind of tedious for me, and really sad for my wife. I had long past burned my way through my Premiere severance and was in the process of obliterating our shared savings.

I tried some of them there "meetings." (I like how Paul Williams describes his sober path in the book Trust and Gratitude: “The path I took to get here is the oldest and best hope for any alcoholic of addict who seeks help.” He does not refer to it by name and I’m going to follow his example.) They did not work for me. I literally walked out of one muttering to myself that I was entirely entitled to my resentments. Claire asked me to go speak to a counselor at the New York office of Hazelden. We had an amiable chat. I told him that I did not care much for the chair of one of these meetings; I suspected that he ran the numbers game in our neighborhood (he didn’t). “So you’re concerned that he doesn’t walk the walk,” the Hazelden counselor asked with what I did not recognize at the time as exquisite sarcasm. “Exactly,” I said.

That was in the summer. I drank through the fall and the winter. I white-knuckled a week at my in-laws’ place. There was a bottle of Maker’s Mark in a cabinet under their microwave and I contrived to drain just a little of it for myself one day while everyone was out shopping or something. (The bottle is still there, and it’s at the same level I left it.) When we came home after New Year’s, I had given up all pretense. Every day when I woke up I  immediately contrived to get my first drink. My most cherished time was Happy Hour at Blue Ruin, a still-extant dive (and I mean that in the nicest way) on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Two-for-one from four to eight. That’s a lot of Wild Turkey 100 Proof with a Stella pint for relatively little money. I’d sit in the bad lighting with a bunch of poor creepy guys like myself and play Stooges songs on the jukebox. And drink.

In late January Claire left town, to tour the country in a production of Gravity Radio, a music/theater piece by Mikel Rouse, who also was the primary performer. Claire was the newscaster whose stories, which she chose from the real news every day, punctuated Mikel’s “radio” songs.

The cat being away, I played. I don’t want to get too specific, and anyway, as the Rutles once sang, “Do I have to spell it out?”

I don’t even remember just what I was doing for work at that specific moment in time, but one of my clients was the MSNBC website, which ran all sorts of original editorial at the time, and paid okay for said editorial. My editor there called me up the morning of January 27. Would I be interested, he asked, in doing the video junket for the new Scorsese movie, Shutter Island? I would be interviewing Leonardo Di Caprio and Ben Kingsley, but not the director. This despite the fact that Scorsese was someone I’d interviewed not infrequently back when Premiere magazine was still a magazine. A magazine where I ruled the roost to the extent that once, two fact checkers quit because my boss wouldn’t fire me for yelling at them all the time.

I was not keen — I try not to appear on camera if I can help it, honest — but then Dave, for that was my editor’s name, said the labor paid five hundred dollars. That was good, because at the time of our conversation I had more or less no money. I had no substances. I had little alcohol:  A can of Sapporo Premium Beer — one of those fluted 22 ounce jobs. So, you know, who cared who I interviewed, or didn’t interview?

After the phone call, I drained that fluted can and went about trying to make myself presentable. And coherent. The screening was on the early evening of the 28^th, which was the next day, and the junket was on the morning of the 29^th.

While I was an avid Scorsese person, I had not been following the making of the film; I had other things going on. So I went in relatively clean. And I was knocked this way and that for a while — a lot of the time it seemed that Scorsese was aiming for a high-toned variant of a Hammer film. Which was fine with me, provisionally.

Almost two hours into the movie, there’s a flashback involving the film’s central character, "Teddy Daniels", played by DiCaprio. It’s from a time when he was an officer of the law, married, with two children. At this point, unbeknownst to him, his wife, who’s severely depressed, has drowned those two children and has laid them out on the back lawn. It’s been shown that throughout his marriage Teddy has ignored, or at least been ignorant of, his wife’s mental illness. In the scene prior, Teddy has hallucinated a conversation with his wife and one of his dead children. Now, in the flashback, he is returning to a beautiful house of stone. “I’m back,” he bellows, seeing no one in the house and  expecting that Dolores (Michelle Williams) will hear him outside. He takes off his jacket, folds it over his arm. “We got him just outside of Oklahoma.” He takes off his hat and puts that and the jacket on a chair. “We must have stopped ten places between here and Tulsa, I could sleep for a week.” He moves over to the kitchen sink.

Now the audience already is aware of what has happened to the children, and of the state Dolores is in. If you’ve been able to achieve any kind of emotional connection to the movie by this point, it weighs heavily.

Teddy opens a cabinet, pulls a bottle of whiskey out of it, says “Dolores?” and pours a not-all-that stiff belt into a glass. He downs it and shows his teeth, temporarily satisfied. It wasn’t that big of a drink. But it was something that he put in front of everything else. He looks behind him and yells “Dolores” again.

This was my white light moment. My moment of clarity. I do not exaggerate when I profess that it hit me like a thunderbolt. In an instant. This is me. And this is what is going to happen: I am going to lose my marriage (by destroying it) and I am going to lose my mind (by destroying it) and I am going to die.

I looked at my watch and did a little math. If I did not drink between now and six-thirty the next evening, I could go to one of those meetings and proclaim that I was an alcoholic, and I could ask for help.

The next day I got to the junket site early. It was the Hotel Parker Meridian and the junketeers were offered a stupendous breakfast buffet and I sure did appreciate it. I was herded into a waiting area to do my first interview, with Di Caprio. A journalist of my acquaintance noticed me with some surprise. You don’t usually do these kinds of things, he noticed. “Have you got a one-on-one with Scorsese?”

“No,” I said glumly. “Essentially I’m Tyrone Power near the end of Nightmare Alley.”

“I don’t know that movie,” he said.

That night, at the meeting, the guy I thought ran the numbers took one look at me, ashen in my overcoat, and said “Tis the season.” That was January 29, 2010. I haven’t had a drink since then. Thanks to everyone who helped.

 

Forty Years On

             After a college search that can most charitably be described as haphazard, I matriculated at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey and began attending, and also not attending, classes there in the fall of 1977. I was excited to try out at the college newspaper, The Beacon, winner of multiple awards and stuff. I convinced the arts editor, Michael Reardon, a gangly Joyce nut from North Bergen, to let me interview The Ramones, who were playing at Dover’s Show Place, near my home in Lake Hopatcong, some time soon. I pulled off the interview (it was backstage at the Show Place where I actually asked the immortal question, “Where do you guys get the ideas for your songs?” to which Johnny Ramone gave the immortal answer “Oh, you know, the usual. We watch movies, read comic books, take long walks.”) and transcribed it and Michael added an intro that waxed highly skeptical on the Ramones and punk rock in general. I objected, but not too strenuously, as I wanted to continue writing for the arts section of the award-winning paper, and I did so, making an ass out of myself pretty frequently (I once mocked the size of Mel Lewis’ drum kit). Michael’s pal Joel Lewis took note of what an idiot I was and gave me frequent correction. (Joel, a superb poet, became friendlier with me over the years and we are still chums.)

            Another fellow hanging about in the Beacon office was a guy with blonde shaggy hair and a walrus mustache; aviator glasses and denim shirts were also prominent in his presentation. He had no discernible function there except to needle the paper’s editor-in-chief, Stewart Wolpin, his on-and-off roommate of several years. His name was Don Markle.

            Don had an unusual sense of humor. In the early summer of 1976, he and another roommate of Stewart’s conspired to have Stewart killed by the United States Secret Service. President Gerald Ford was scheduled to come to Paterson for a dedication of the Great Falls there as a National Historic Site. Don and Stewart and Joe (for that is the third roommate’s name) shared an apartment on Front Street in Paterson and President Ford’s motorcade was scheduled to pass right in front of their house. At the time Stewart was employed as a Good Humor truck driver, and he had a uniform and everything. The idea was that Joe and Don would spike Stewart’s morning orange juice with vodka. This would discombobulate him. They would then Krazy-Glue a fake gun into his hand. Then spin him around several times, as if he were being prepared to take a swing at a piñata. They would push him out the front door as President Ford’s motorcade was passing. Stewart would then be taken down in a hail of gunfire.

            The plan did not come off. There was a torrential downpour on the morning of the dedication. The conspirators were enervated by this development. The motorcade proceeded nonetheless, and the fellows, with umbrellas, stepped outside to watch it. President Ford braved the rain with open sun roof and waved to the boys as he passed.

            Don had plenty of other ideas, though. When the refrigerator in the Front Street apartment crapped out, he thought it would be salutary to float it on the Passaic river (right behind the house!) in the direction of the Great Falls of Paterson, and film its transit and eventual descent; this footage would form the basis of a horror feature he would call Blue Water, White Kelvinator. Then there was Stewart’s campaign for Student Government Association President, a Marxian farrago which had the candidate, egged on by Don, distributing citrus fruits decorated with a ribbon reading “Orange You Gonna Vote For Wolpin” and so on. Once Don got to know me, he decided I had “potential” with respect to SGA campaign stoogedom and began to concoct a campaign heavy on Darth Vader imagery. 

            I will not speak here of his Nazi Christmas Carols (except to cite one title, “Oh Little Town of Düsseldorf”).

            It was probably not, in many respects, a conventionally beneficial thing to have Don Markle as one’s first and most significant collegiate mentor, but that is how it turned out for me. He was really great at not doing anything—I didn’t even know if he was enrolled at the college or not. One day in the Beacon offices I had said something funny enough to solicit his notice, and then, to the mild chagrin of the older crowd he hung with, I was included in what proved to be formative activities. These included White Castle runs and sojourns at Paterson’s Plaza Theater, a husk of a onetime movie palace, where the gang would take in a double feature of, say, Horror High and Dracula’s Dog. Well before Harry and Michael Medved published The Fifty Worst Movies Of All Time, Don was exceptionally conversant with what I would come to call by Michael Weldon’s term, that is, Psychotronic Cinema. He was particularly besotted with They Saved Hitler’s Brain, which we would never see together.

            Don also introduced me to weed. First time I smoked a joint, I think, I was deposited back at the Beacon offices where I stared mutely at a typewriter for maybe three hours. That was pretty much how my thing with weed turned out overall.

            He also offered attractive solutions to various existential crises. As I grappled unsuccessfully with the fact that some boring science class was a required course, and I needed to both attend and pass it, Don shrugged the whole thing off and suggested I accompany him to Gregory Battcock’s Film Appreciation class over at the art building and watch Triumph of the Will or some spectacularly tedious Warhol film that Battcock, an esteemed critic and intimate of artist, would pull from his personal collection and screen to annoy the presumptive “easy A” students.

             “We’re not in the class though, won’t he kick us out?”

             “Oh, Greg doesn’t care,” and that was that. Greg did not care.

            It was decided that in the fall of 1978, Don, Stewart, and I, and whoever else in our circle cared to pony up, would rent a large place in Paterson together. (Don, experiencing poor cash flow on account of unemployment issues, had been shacking up in his ancestral home for a while, but hoped to be liquid by this point.) Various Markle-initiated social rituals, such as Spaghetti Feast (with Meat Spheres), would be reinstated. I was delighted by my inclusion in this scheme.

            On the third weekend of April 1978, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, with the Erasers and the Ghosts, were playing three nights at CBGB. I very much wanted to go, and I mentioned to Don that week that it might be a fun trip. Don took a contemplative draw off his pipe (did I mention he smoked a pipe, for God’s sake?) and said “As much as I’m interested in punk rock as a sociological phenomenon”—and it’s only been in recent years that I’ve begun to marvel at the fact that guys only three or four years older than myself were so affronted by “punk rock” that they could only consider it as a “sociological phenomenon”— “I can’t. I’ve got to go to Lakewood and be a Jew with Stewart.” By which he meant he was accompanying Stewart to the latter’s ancestral home to observe Passover. I don’t think Don was interested in this as a sociological phenomenon; it was more he was providing companionship for a buddy who was ambivalent about a family obligation. But nobody at that time would put it in terms so corny. Jesus.

            Long story short, in part because I want to spare friends the embarrassment of revealing how stupid they were about dealing with automobile mishaps at the time. They set out with two cars, one of them broke down, a professional tow was considered too expensive, a makeshift tow line was contrived, and it did not hold. They were obliged to pull over on a poorly lit road near Lakewood and re-contrive the makeshift tow line. A pickup truck driven by an intoxicated person plowed into them. Stewart managed to leap to safety and Don was killed.

            All sorts of things happened after that, including of course a wake and funeral. Don’s family insisted on an open casket, despite the fact that Don’s arm had very nearly been severed in the vehicular assault. The funeral director was a regular Bonasera—he used all his skills, etc.—but you could still see an absence. It was upsetting. 

            There was another wrinkle. Stewart, the aforementioned Joe, Don, and a fourth party had, some time before, established an entity called Tormentors Incorporated, intended to promote all-around japery in Passaic County and also, I think to produce some kind of humor magazine. Don and the boys drew up a charter that stipulated that as the founding members died off, their wakes/funerals would feature pie fights, and they would be buried wearing clown wigs. They actually went to the trouble of notarizing said charter. The idea at the time, of course, was that all the members would kick the bucket in old age, after having amassed substantial humor-magazine fortunes.

            Given the circumstances, a pie fight at the wake was out of the question. But after some discussion we resolved to somehow bury Don with a clown wig in his casket, if not on his head. With the help of a sympathetic campus clergyman (thanks Father Bob, and why are the sympathetic clergymen in stories such as these invariably named Father Bob?) we managed to secrete this item in Don’s casket right before it was sealed. (It may well have been the same clown wig in which Stewart was to have been killed by Secret Service agents. Incredible irony.)

            What can I tell you. We were a bunch of young adults who did not know what had hit us and did not know what to do about it. At one of the post-funeral gatherings, I was introduced to a fellow who had been at The Beacon and was part of Markle’s crew; he had decamped for NYU to get a degree in film production. He was a legend for that (in Passaic County New Jersey, achieving legendhood is not particularly difficult) but also for a specific ability, which I queried him about.

            “I hear you can recite all the dialogue in King Kong from memory.”

            He looked at me like I had grown a second head. “I can, but I’m not going to do it at a funeral.” Point taken.

            Despite the awkward meeting this fellow became my second collegiate mentor, and eventually we peered, if that’s a verb; we formed a band together and had lots of other adventures and we remain close. Stewart and I did get a place together in Paterson, in the fall of 1978. We were kicked out of that place less than a month after moving in, by the owner of the house, who inhabited the upstairs apartment and was not amused at my playing the first album by Art Bears at what I thought was a reasonable volume. We moved to a shittier place on the top floor of a house about ten blocks up. It was a time of no money, lots of frozen ravioli, and dope-enhanced evenings at the Plaza, just down the street from the new place. I saw Suspiria for the first time there—the projectionist skipped an entire reel (the one before the maggot infestation) and no one knew the difference.

            Despite Don’s inability to manage my campaign, on account of his being dead, I ran for SGA President in 1979, in Don’s memory I suppose. I won, in large part because I was the only person on the ballot. I resigned the position, which I was fucking up royally (I did manage to hire an excellent secretary for the organization however) on the night John Lennon was shot, albeit before the event took place. Ah, memories.

            Gregory Battcock, for whom I became a TA after I actually signed up for his class, died on Christmas in 1980, stabbed to death. Lee Lipsenthal, who I met shortly after moving into the apartment on Jasper Avenue, and who also thought I was an idiot on our first night out, died in 2011, of esophageal cancer. Michael Reardon, who became a professor at Passaic Community College, died in 2012, age 53.

            Today a couple of the guys and I went out to Jersey and paid our respects to Don, revisited the cuisine of our youth, and checked out the would-be location of the climax of Blue Water, White Kelvinator. It was a good day.

 

 This was waiting for me in the mail when I got home: 

My Friend Brett Smiley

Brett Smiley in London, circa 1974. Photograph by Gered Mankowitz. ©BOWSTIR Ltd. 2016/Mankowitz.com.

Brett Smiley in Brooklyn, August 2013. 

At Brett Smiley's wake on the evening of January 13, a week after he died in his Carroll Gardens apartment (thank God), his people had set up a small TV display, and were playing DVD-Rs of some of his performances in the early aughts, backed by a band that featured his childhood pal Errol Bulut on lead guitar. They were taped at places like Pianos, the Lower East Side back room, and some joint on Chrystie Street where there's a sliding glass door leading to the sidewalk behind the stage. As we watched, another friend, a musician himself, observed of Brett, "He's really on point here." He was/is; singing voice strong, his right hand steady and straight across the strings of his black Ovation Celebrity. He sang some songs from his much-hyped but abortive 1974 debut album Breathlessly Brett, which was finally released to what they call "cult acclaim" in 2003, and a bunch of newer tunes. solid if not world-shaking stuff. The exception being the anti-anthemic "I Ain't So Cool Anymore," in which a onetime cock-of-the-walk looks back on some ruins. "I went to the doctor and he looked at my blood/a Fifty-five Scotch and a forty-five slug/He said you ain't/so cool/anymore." Of course the fact that the character/singer/Brett could still stand up and sing the song suggested that there was some cool in reserve. And anyway, yeah, he and his band were delivering. We asked Errol when the performances dated from; he said 2005, 2006. 

I first met Brett in 2010. Something had clearly gone wrong, or maybe I should say further wrong, in the interim. 

Brett and I made our acquaintance a short while after I had taken my last drink. The correspondence was not coincidental. We had a shared interest in staying away from drink and drugs, and in short order, a mutual friend—a well-intentioned but somewhat brash and pushy fellow in certain respects—suggested it would be a capital idea were I to "work" with Brett on more actively promoting that interest. I did not consider myself competent to do so in any way, shape, or form, but Brett was actually rather eager for me to help him out, so there I was. 

Even though he could be very chatty, I was not the recipient of the raconteur material Brett could lavish on wide-eyed interlocutors from various and sundry fanzines as they tracked him down over the years. The story of how at a performing arts high school in Los Angeles he was in a woodshop class with Michael Jackson, and how he and Jackson were partnered on making a chessboard and how they got a D on the project—I only heard about that the other night, at Brett’s wake. I had seen the Breathlessly Brett CD at Other Music when it had came out, and I knew of Nina Antonia’s book The Prettiest Star: Whatever Happened to Brett Smiley, but I never put together my Brett with Brett Smiley, not until about seven months after we’d really started to get to know each other, and someone said, “Oh you’ve never seen Brett’s infamous British talk show debut?” I had not. Eventually Brett had mentioned the book, and I looked at the clip from the Russell Harty Show in 1974 on YouTube. "Well, that was interesting," I said, discussing it a little later. He looked at me as if he was expecting me to follow up with "What the hell did you go and do to yourself," but I did not, so he said, "You know, I was never really into glam rock." And I said something like "Pshaw. You were into rock, and you were into dressing up. Of course you were into glam rock." As a Broadway baby, though, he was more enamored of traditional "quality" vocalizing than the contorted, strained post-Anthony-Newley-isms of David Bowie's Stardust period. Nor did he have much use for Varispeed Munchkinized backing vocals. A bit of a classicist, as his "Over The Rainbow" on Breathlessly Brett testifies. 

By spring and early summer of 2012 we'd developed a bit of a routine: early morning at the place where we got coffee, then off with one or two other coffee-drinkers to Court Street Grocers, where we'd get a proper breakfast. When Brett was in an up mood, he could get awfully garrulous. "Eat your sandwich, Brett," I'd have to say to him periodically. I once timed him. Ninety minutes for one Breakfast Sandwich. It was unbelievable. I don't remember what he was talking about. 

There had been one time when we were chatting, about stuff he was going to do—there was always stuff he was going to do—and he mentioned that he'd recently found some demos he'd made in the late '70s, that Del Shannon had produced. "Ooh, Del Shannon," I said, as one will. Yes, Brett replied, Del Shannon. This time in Del's life had not been good, he continued, laying out some observations on Shannon's drinking, and some struggles involving sexuality. "Hold on, hold on," I interjected. "Del Shannon was gay? Wow, all of a sudden so much makes sense..."

Couple months later and we're doing the Breakfast With Brett Club and somehow the subject comes up again, out of my mouth. And Brett looks at me like I'm nuts. 

"Del Shannon wasn't gay." His somewhat nasal speaking voice crackled a bit when he was mildly agitated. "Who told you Del Shannon was gay?"

I sputtered, as one will. Okay, as I will. "Dude, you did."

He rolled his eyes. "Oh forget it. Del Shannon wasn't gay." He paused reflectively and looked at me again. "Everyone experiments." 

He had me there. 

If I were going to write a memorial of Proustian length I would make it about Brett's Roommate Situation, because I could, but I'll limit myself to one anecdote, which I file under "Brett Smiley's Iron Will." Sometime wintery time in 2011, I think, Brett had acquired a roommate, a sort-of musician who looked like an aged prototype for Father John Misty and/or one of the Deliverance rapists. I did not really warm to him, and kept my distance. One day Brett told me the fellow had found a turntable out on the street, brought it back to the apartment and worked on it a bit, and now, when they weren't sniping at each other over nothing, they were enjoying Classic Rock (Beatles, etc.) On Vinyl. Groovy. Eventually Brett decided this guy had got to go, and he asked that I come by the apartment on the day of the move and help the guy take his stuff down from the fourth-floor walkup, and make sure nothing untoward happened during this fellow's departure. "Sure," I said.

"There's one thing though."

"What's that?"

"I'm keeping that turntable." 

So I spent about ninety minutes reasoning with Brett as to why if this guy wanted to take the turntable out with him, he was entirely entitled, and that this kind of self-centered thinking went against several important principles and that insisting on keeping the turntable would hinder Brett's SPIRITUAL GROWTH. And Brett was very calm and very receptive and said, "Everything you are saying is absolutely one hundred percent right."

"But?"

"But I want to keep the turntable."

How could you not love this guy? Really. 

Anyway. The time came when the beardo was pretty much all packed, and he didn't even mention the turntable, so that was the end of that. "Don't gloat," I said to Brett. "Oh I won't," he said. 

For all that steel, he could not get it together to do what he had done on those stages a relatively mere half-decade before. I will not go into the shambolic gigs I and his good roommates would escort him to and from. Suffice it to say that if you think the bottom of the barrel in New York rock-and-roll is sitting in the Continental at 2 a.m. enduring some seventh-billed band while trying to shake off the cocaine and Jagermeister sweats, you ought to consider yourself lucky. The poor guy. A couple of years ago I acquired a snazzy new Gibson guitar of storied model number and I showed it off to him one day. "It's heavy," he said as he lifted it. He played a verse and a chorus of "I Ain't So Cool Anymore." Without swagger. It was pretty heartbreaking. His body was dealing with a huge variety of ailments—various outlets have named hepatitis and HIV. I don't want to be indiscreet but honestly that was the tip of the iceberg. He was pretty funny about it sometimes. There was this outpatient facility he went to that he called "HIV Romper Room." Addicts in recovery like to say that drinking and drugs had made their lives unmanageable, but the thing about Brett that I often got was that he'd never had any schooling on managing his own life in the first place. And by the time I met him, he was in such crummy shape physically that I don't think there was a single day that he wasn't in some kind of pain. I took him to the hospital at least once for every year I knew him. After which I'd buy him a Vonnegut book (that was his favorite author) and encourage him to stay in the hospital for as long as he could. He needed full time care, I always thought, but the intersection of America's highly frayed social safety net and the aforementioned Iron Will meant this was not possible.

What stories he told me in these down times weren't of past rock and roll glories, but of lost loves and fuckups. He was gratified that I knew of Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, with whom he costarred in a '70s softcore pastiche of Cinderella (which I have on DVD but have never had the heart, or lack of it, to watch), and who died of a heroin overdose in 2002. A tale of a particularly harrowing arrest in Broward County—he still had a warrant outstanding in Florida in recent years, and we were both rather flummoxed about what he could do about it—was how I learned that he had actually had a bit part in American Gigolo, because he associated his part in the picture with his time in jail. 

That's Brett at far left, number 1. Richard Gere, far right, is number 5. 

Once or twice in our travels, Brett and I ran into a female friend of mine, someone not in our shared circle. She told me recently that, his haggardness and slightly distracted mien notwithstanding, she could see a "flare" of his still-present charisma emanating from him. Indeed. But even that started to go out once he injured himself in a way that further damaged his appearance, and at that time, a few months before the August 2013 photo was taken, I began to worry even more about what life was going to bring to Brett. At his wake, Brett's brother-in-law, the writer Richard Pyle,  observed that throughout his life, Brett had experienced "all the luck in the world." ALL OF IT, he emphasized—the good and the bad. In the past couple of years the luck had been a lot of bad. It was absolutely a mercy that when his terribly, terribly frail body went out on him for the very last time, he was at home, not out on the street, out on the subway, out in some bad company. It's a shame, though, that he was alone. I miss him terribly. He drove his poor sister Brenda completely crazy over so many years, and at his funeral, she quoted Hamlet—yes, Act Five, Scene Two. "Now cracks a noble heart/good night, sweet prince." And yes, exactly, I feel exactly the same goddamn way.

  Brett Smiley, again by Gered Mankowitz, ©BOWSTIR Ltd. 2016/Mankowitz.com

UPDATE: With respect to Cheryl Smith's cause of death, see Paulina Victoria's comment below. My citation derived from a recollection of a conversation with Brett. The Wikipedia entry cites complications from liver disease and hepatitis. I don't want to be the cause of more confusion so I've struck (as of January 20 2016) the information in this post.

Personal thanks to Gered Mankowitz for allowing me to use his beautiful images, and supplying me with the materials.

America, Fuck No

Florence (tourists not pictured).

My trip to the Venice Film Festival was, as it happens, my first time in Italy. It was difficult, in a way, not to see it as somehow tying in with the parting from this world of my mother earlier this year. My mom was Italian—maiden name Petrosino, out of Naples—and had done a not-insubstantial bit of traveling in Italy late in life, and had always wished for me to visit the country some day. When she died, I took the goofy Tower of Pisa keychain she had bought on one of her trips and made it my own. So the offer of a trip to Venice coming when it did held some portent/significance for me. 

My Lovely Wife joined me in the mid-point of my work in Venice, and after that was done, we traveled to Florence. We were already half-overwhelmed by what we had seen in Venice—the Tintorettos at San Rocco, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, St. Mark's Square, all that—and were further awed by the gorgeousness of Florence. Both places were spectacular enough that one could easily—okay, almost easily—ignore or at least see past their being clotted with tourists. The tourists in Venice were actually mildly amusing, acting as if the place were a giant theme park with art substituting for rides; hence, the Guggenheim Collection was received by most with a detached respect, as in, "Okay, so this is the 'modern' part I guess." In Florence they were a bit more challenging because they made it difficult to get around. Our hotel was so centrally located it was like, "Leave the courtyard and turn left" and boom, you're on the Ponte Vecchio. Convenient but a little daunting. A cab driver later told us things were even worse, crowding-wise, in July, and we just couldn't see it. 

Getting around and observing local protocol in a suitably respectful way were sources of some anxiety for the both of us, but nothing crippling. On our first morning there, on our way to a guided tour of the once-secret Medici cabinets in the Palazzo Vecchio, Claire stopped at a cash machine, and as she finished with it, a little old Italian lady, white-haired and short, but still relatively upright in posture, in her late seventies maybe, just said to Claire our of nowhere, "I don't like those machines." She was smiling as she said this, so Claire asked her, "No?" The little old lady said, "I don't a-trust them. When I need money, I go to a bank!" And she smiled and we all laughed and Claire and I wished her a good day. 

The next day, we were getting gelato at a place almost next to our hotel—and good God did we eat a LOT of gelato on this trip—and who comes down the narrow sidewalk but, what do you know, that same little old lady. She says hello, and we say hello, and she points to a building across the street. "I used to live there," she says, and we ask her how long, and she answers, and we ask where she lives now, and she points further up the street, and we say so nice to hear that, and have a good day, and so on, and off she goes and off we go. 

Later in the afternoon Claire remarked on how it was kind of funny that we ran into and had words with the same woman two afternoons in a row. "It's kind of like something out of a movie," she said. 

"Yeah," I said. And I smirked. "You ever notice in Mario Bava movies, he frequently uses old ladies as portents of some horrible doom...?"

"I don't know as many Mario Bava movies as you do," Claire said, elbowing me in the ribs. "I was thinking something more like a Nora Ephron picture."

"Well, we'll see," I said. 

The next day we saw the Boboli Gardens and did a little shopping. In years of old, when shopping in Europe, I would go for the obscure-music and unavailable-in-the-U.S. DVD options; during this jaunt, at lunch, Claire and I discussed whether I ought to buy a (Jesus) 400-Euro pair of shoes. It was determined...wait for it...that I would. But I would do it alone, so that Claire might not be further tempted by a far more expensive handbag in that same shop. Instead, Claire would go to a more modest dress shop around the corner while I procured the footwear, and we'd meet in the bookshop between the two places. 

I got the shoes. It was exciting. I learned that when you spend that much money on a pair of shoes, you get a free shoehorn. I think that's what I learned, anyway. I wore the shoes out—aside from being striking, they are remarkably comfortable—and went to the bookstore, and was kind of not too excited by it right off the bat. (I'll admit it: my main interest in the place was in seeing whether it had a DVD section, and it didn't.) So I thought I'd just go and join Claire at the dress shop. 

As I came out of the bookstore, I saw some flurry of activity on the narrow sidewalk. An American man, a little older than me, short, with white hair—imagine Dustin Hoffman portraying Bernie Madoff during Madoff's "up" years—was brandishing a selfie stick with a phone on it, not trying to take a picture of himself but of someone else. And he was laughing, not very nicely, and shouting, as Americans do at foreigners when they believe that saying words more loudly will make the person who doesn't speak their language miraculously understand those words. He was saying, "Come on! Why won't you let me take your picture?! Mamma mia!!!!?" And he said those last words with a gesticulation of his free hand, a stereotypical "mangia!" gesture commonly employed on '60s sitcoms and such to connote Dago-ness. And running away from him with a terrified look on her face  was, yes, "our" little old lady. 

She was gone before I could catch her eye, as if there would have been anything for me to do had I caught her eye. The American's friend, a dumpy fellow of the same age in a purple polo shirt, possibly put off by his companion's behavior, said to him, "You know, it's probably some religious objection," and sure, why not, because it was Saturday. I stood there and seethed. I likely don't need to tell you all the things I would have liked to have done, or said, or done and said. But I kept my mouth shut and went over to the dress store and met Claire, who'd gotten two nice dresses.

I didn't want to tell her the story but I kind of had to. "That makes me really sad," she said, as I knew she would. We got to the intersection where the bookstore was and there were our two American friends still, probably discussing how it would be great to privatize the Boboli Gardens and maybe turn it into a golf course. We hoped that we might find our little old lady one last time and maybe buy her a gelato as a means of apologizing for our boorish countrymen. But we did not. And that was the end of the movie, a movie by neither Mario Bava nor Nora Ephron. 

Jar Jar Binks, Todd Hanson, David Foster Wallace, and me

Remember this guy?

In the early spring of 2001 I got a call from Tom Bissell, who was then an editor at Henry Holt. I had been referred to Tom by David Foster Wallace. Tom had this great idea for an essay collection, and Henry Holt had agreed to publish the collection, but there was a hitch: he couldn’t be the editor of record on the book because he worked full time, more or less, at Holt. Yeah, I didn’t quite get it either. The other thing was that because of the book’s subject, he, and his superiors at Holt, thought it would be a good idea to get A Known Film Critic to be the editor. Tom asked some writer friends for recommendations and Dave Wallace was kind enough to recommend me. This in spite of the fact that the last piece we’d worked together on at Premiere, in 1998, had left Dave so infuriated with Premiere and Hachette and magazines and everything (and to my mind this infuriation was justified on his part) that he’d made it clear he’d never do anything for Premiere again. If I ever went to another magazine, at another company, he’d be happy to work with me again—our personal relations had, gratefully, survived the debacle—but not Premiere, not Hachette. (Readers aware of the current disposition of Little, Brown may detect some small possible present irony here.)

Tom’s book was, or was to be, an essay collection about the lasting cultural impact of the Star Wars movies. Our first meeting, at this Mexican place that had been Sullivan’s in the Ed Sullivan Theater building, saw us getting in synch almost immediately. He had a pretty good list of literary folk he thought would be game, I was in charge of pursuing film critic and filmmaker types, and we banged our heads together wondering who or what we were missing. I wondered whether the book could accommodate graphic treatments; wouldn’t it be great, I said, to have a Tom Tomorrow strip, or better still, something by The Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder, in the book. Etc. And we both said at the same time, “We should get someone from The Onion to do something.”

The Onion had just moved its headquarters to New York. Tom and I were both in awe of the publication, not just because it was awesome but precisely because it had come out of what many metropolitan types refer to as “nowhere” and it as a result also seemed extremely mysterious to us. Was the publication, we wondered, so contemptuous of the mainstream of publishing that any approach from representatives of Henry Holt would be laughed out of their office.

Well, no. “Their head writer is an insane Star Wars guy, it turns out,” Bissell reported to me soon after. “Went to opening night of The Phantom Menace in an Obi-Wan Kenobi costume.”

“Holy shit,” I said. So this head writer, Todd Hanson, wanted to write an essay about the crushing, overwhelming disappointment he felt upon actually seeing The Phantom Menace. Well, yes. This was a good idea. 

The book began to come together over the summer. The first commissioned piece we actually received was from Jonathan Lethem. Titled “13, 1977, 21,” it was the account of how he saw Star Wars: A New Hope, as it is now called, 21 times in the summer of 1977, the summer it opened, which was also the summer his mom died of brain cancer. It was a tender, gently devastating, typically Lethem-sharp piece. Bissell and I knew it was going to be the opening essay of the book. Very serendipitous, we thought.

9/11 caused us—me, Tom, Henry Holt—to rethink whether we were gonna go on with the book at all. We were, but a handful of commissioned writers who hadn’t turned in pieces yet dropped out. This was unfortunate but understandable. By early 2002 we had much  of the book in place. The editor was reserving a page’s worth of space in the introduction into which I’d cram some thoughts about Attack of the Clones once I saw it in May. All was well. Except I didn’t have the essay from The Onion guy yet. 

I had only spoken to Todd once or twice since we first made the agreement but now I had to get after him a little harder. Over a couple of weeks we seemed to make good progress with respect to how he was feeling about the writing, and then we hit a bit of a wall. He finally fessed up. “The thing is, it’s really long right now. It’s like, ridiculously long.”

 “Well why don’t you let me see it and I’ll be the judge of that.” It didn’t go quite that easy, but he did send it, and I did read it.

He was right: it was long. It was also wonderful. It was fucking wonderful. It was laugh-out-loud funny—of course it was—it was genuinely literary, it was filled with thoroughly trenchant insights on pop culture and American culture and American life, and it was poignant, and, oh, it was laugh-out-loud funny. I loved it and I told him so.

“I don’t know, man, I don’t know,” was something like his reply. And now I didn’t know how to make Todd feel my sincerity. One way, it occurred to me, was by socializing. We began to hang out a bit; one of Todd's best friends lived in my Carroll Gardens neighborhood, so we’d meet for a bit of a smoke-up at his pal’s, and then go over to Finn, this bar nearby, and get completely shit-faced. A couple of younger regulars there who were friends of mine were blown away that I was bringing the head writer for The Onion to our local, and they got shit-faced with us in an eager-apostle-type style. It was fun. Todd eventually opened up to me about his doubts: writing something for a book, he thought, was a really big deal, and his friends agreed with this notion, and some of them advised him that submitting a 20,000 word essay when you’d been asked to submit something between 2,000 and 5,000 words was bad form—it looked greedy and undisciplined and unprofessional, and it would screw up his chances to do essay writing elsewhere, and so on.

“Your friends are idiots,” I said to Todd, as I would. “And also: You know who always went WILDLY over the fucking word count whenever I worked with him? David Foster Wallace.” Todd knew that Bissell and I knew Wallace and looked at him as a kind of guardian angel of the project and were hoping to get a blurb from him when the book was in galleys. (As to why Wallace didn’t do a piece—of course we asked—he, like the Tom Tomorrow guy,  just wasn’t that into Star Wars. He’d seen the first one  just once. Dubbed into French. Because he was in France at the time, whenever it was. Didn’t make an impression. “Definitely count on me if you do a book on the Lord of the Rings movies, though,” he said. )

Now might be a good time to admit that there was a certain way in which I was acting in enlightened or unenlightened self-interest, depending on how you want to read it.  I have to admit here to what some might see as not 100 percent enlightened self interest. Until I got Todd’s piece, the book was a little more than a bit under the 60,000 word MS total that was specified in my contract. Todd’s essay, at its submission length, put it slightly over 60,000, so a big weight was off my mind. BUT. I reiterate: Todd’s piece was brilliant, I didn’t want to cut a word of it.

It still holds up. Because it is, I think, one of the best expressions of indignation at American Pop Culture that also critiques indignation at American Pop Culture and celebrates a specific aspect of American Pop Culture: the essay’s title, after all, is “A Big Dumb Movie About Space Wizards.” One of its animating themes is an Ahab-like anger at the very notion of the character Jar-Jar Binks, who, at around the midpoint of the essay, is redubbed He Who Shall Not Be Named/HWSNBN. (“An UberBarney with the Voice from Beyond Elmo” is one of my favorite descriptions of the misbegotten character.) One of its most welcome features is a lightly-worn and entirely non-academic/unpretentious erudition that has nothing to do with the defensive crouch that’s become too common in critical writing about pop culture in today’s Internet this-is-water.

My enthusiasm possibly failed to really convince Todd, but he was eventually mollified. It would have been very poetic had the essay, which ended up being the last I signed off on, ended up being the lat piece in the book, but it was more like whatever you call the ante-penultimate (if you don’t count the acknowledgements). In early June of 2002 the book was in galleys and I sent a copy to Wallace in the hope of getting a blurb. Also of course because I figured he’d be curious about what Bissell and I had come up with. Dave read it pretty much right away and called to tell me, yes, he liked it, but alas, no, he wasn’t gonna blurb it. I imagined that he put himself through his customary ethical torture before making the decision—he sounded genuinely regretful—but the combination of his relative alienation from the book’s subject matter combined with the Professional Complications Inherent In Bestowing A Blurb If You Are David Foster Wallace made a polite demurral his only option. I wasn’t going to argue or beg. After we got over that hump, he said, “The nearly-last piece, the one by the Onion guy, Hanson? That was fantastic. Best thing in the book.”

“I’ll make sure to tell him that,” I said. And I did, and that very nearly made Todd positively happy about having done the piece as he had done it. Todd never got to meet up with Dave, which is a shame, and he, like a lot of people, took it pretty hard when Dave took his own life in September of 2008. Todd told me, one night when we hung out and got soused near the end of that year, that Wallace and Thomas Disch had been his two favorite living authors—Disch had killed himself on the Fourth of July of that same year. Great writers killing themselves becoming a Thing—we didn’t see much hope in that, at the time.

Why am I writing this and subsequently posting it? Good question. Possible answers: 

1) To prove, Ana Marie Cox and Andrew Sullivan notwithstanding, that blogging’s not dead. Whoo-fucking-hoo. 

2) There was that whole thing on social media recently, when the all-female Ghostbusters was announced with dismal sexist dudes complaining in all earnest that an all-female Ghostbusters is just wrong, and treating Ghostbusters as a sacred text, and of course the whole pushback on this from Responsible Professionals deploring the social media sexism. But it occurred to me that these ostensibly deplorable expressions of opinion are an entirely organic feature of the “everyone’s a critic culture” that Jeff Jarvis once found so entirely salutary. And that the perception of something like Ghostbusters as something sacrosanct is not entirely unrelated to a certain tendency in pop culture writing, an anti-intellectualism that insists on aggressively expressing a distaste for “difficult” art and demanding to be taken seriously for its myriad of perceptions concerning every single television show, etc., etc. These observations were leading me, thought-wise, down a path I had trod before (“generations have trod, have trod, have trod”) and I was largely set to penning Yet Another Ineffectual Indictment Of The Usual Fucking Subjects. And I thought, why not, as an alternative to the same old thing, think about a piece of writing about pop culture that I actually admire? (One that, among many its other advantages, say, doesn’t use rape as a metaphor, as in “George Lucas raped my childhood.”)

3) This impulse dissolved, cinematically even, into memories of David Foster Wallace, on account of the movie The End Of The Tour, which premiered at Sundance and garnered very favorable reviews, many of them waxing enthusiastic on the theme “Who Would Have Thought That Jason Segel Could Bring David Foster Wallace To Life Like That?” And already you see some resentment on my part, no? Yes. I suppose on some level I ought to feel gratified that the movie is, apparently, a sensitive and well-made one. I know James Ponsoldt is a good filmmaker. We have more than a few mutual friends. I’m also friendly with a lot of people at the company that produced the movie (although the producers themselves are not known to me). On the other hand I’m also friendly with at least one person who’s part of Wallace’s estate. Various reports about End of the Tour have stated that Wallace’s estate tried to block the movie from being made. As far as I know that’s untrue. What the estate did do, and is entirely within its rights and even obligations in so doing, is state that it did not authorize the movie, which is based on a book by David Lipsky. The people who were closest to Dave—and those are, as it happen, the people who make up the entity that is called his “estate”—are acutely aware that had Dave not killed himself in 2008, Lipsky’s book would not have come into being; had Lipsky’s book not come into being, it would not have had motion picture rights to be sold; had motion picture rights not been sold, David Margulies could not have written a screenplay based on the book; etcetera, etcetera. All leading up to the logical conclusion that had David Foster Wallace not killed himself, Jason Segel would not have been able to sit down at a video shoot at “Variety Studio” (“presented by Dockers”) and say things like “I was really lucky to have three really good friends who had read Infinite Jest read it again with me.” I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that if you consider yourself a David Foster Wallace “fan” and you can’t understand why for some people this particular course of events might really hurt some people, then maybe you might want to read some more of Wallace’s work, and a little more carefully. Even allowing the idea that The End of the Tour might indeed be an objectively conscientious and sensitive work, I can’t even look at Jason Segel for more than ten seconds at a time right now. (And I wasn’t even THAT CLOSE to Wallace, I know.) And I can’t think about The End of the Tour without having the Captain Beefheart lyric come into my head. You know the one, from “Sue Egypt” on Doc At The Radar Station: “I think of all those people that ride on my bones.”

4) So I thought rather than go nuts about all that, I’d write something, you  know, fond. 

"My Life In Pornography," Part 1: "A Girl's Best Friend"

From the end credits of A Girl's Best Friend, Henri Pachard, 1981

My Life In Pornography is the title of a memoir I completed in the summer of 2012. Its first section, titled "A Girl's Best Friend," about the making of the motion picture of that title, is now published on Thought Catalog. You may read it here. 

The book, which I'd been messing around with in some form or other since the early 2000s, has five parts. The second part, titled " 'Goin' Through The Motions' " is about my relationship with Susan Merchant, later Susan Walsh, and contains a misadventure at a live sex show. Susan, a fine writer and a dear friend, disappeared in 1996; iterations of her story have been told on two different television series, Unsolved Mysteries and Investigation Discovery. The third part is called "Meet Dick Filth" and recounts a trip to Las Vegas with David Foster Wallace, Evan Wright, and Nathaniel Welch to cover the AVN Awards in 1998, and the editorial challenges that ensued a little thereafter. Part Four is "The Connoisseur," about my participation in the motion picture The Girlfriend Experience. It is a different—less jovial—account than the "set diary" published by MUBI in 2009, a piece that had originally been commissioned for GQ by Dan Fierman and ultimately rejected by editor-in-chief Jim Nelson. The fifth and final section is called "Documentation" and wraps everything else in a manner that one reader complained was "too postmodern," but I like it and I'm keeping it as it is until some actual editor talks me out of it, or something. 

Why publish this section now? Well, after seeing the New York Times feature on the DVD label/film distributor Vinegar Syndrome titled "Smut, Refreshed For A New Generation," and  then learning of Williamsburg venue Nitehawk Cinema's "Nighthawk Naughties" series of midnight shows, which kicked off with a screening of Radley Metzger's 1976 The Opening of Misty Beethoven (from which my Erotic Connoisseur quotes a line in GFE), I thought, "Well I've had a pretty good retro-porn tale on tap for a few years now, why just leave it lying around?" Obviously I am also hoping to generate some interest from editors and publishers. But mainly of course I'm doing it for YOU, my readers...well, yeah, actually why else, right? I hope you enjoy it and I do hope the opportunity to get the whole thing out there in dead tree form and/or otherwise arises soon. 

Heroin and creativity

Art Pepper, the jazz saxophonist, wrote, with his wife Laurie Pepper, one of the great books about art and addiction, his memoir Straight Life. After describing his childhood, and his discovery of music, and his development as a musician in the Central Avenue "scene" of the 1940s, and his stint in the Army, Pepper writes, with great frankness, of the sexual compulsions he struggled with as a rising star in jazz. Then he writes about the first time he got high on heroin, and how, in a flash, he realized he had "found God."

"I loved myself, everything about myself, " Pepper writes. "I loved my talent. I had lost the sour taste of the filthy alcohol and the feeling of the bennies and the strips that put chills up and down my spine. I looked at myself in the mirror and I looked at Sheila"—Sheila Harris, the singer who was getting Pepper high—"and I looked at the few remaining lines of heroin and I took the dollar bill and horned the rest of them down. I said, 'This is it. This is the only answer for me. If this is what it takes, then this is what I'm going to do, whatever dues I have to pay...' And then I knew that I would get busted and I knew that I would go to prison and that I wouldn't be weak; I wouldn't be an informer like all the phonies, the no-account, the nonreal, the zero people that roam around, the scum that slither out from under rocks, the people that destroyed music, that destroyed this country, that destroyed the world, the rotten, fucking, lousy people that for their own little ends—the black power people, the sickening, stinking motherfuckers that play on the fact that they're black, and all this fucking shit that happened later on—the rotten, no-account, filthy women that have no feling for anything; they have no love for anyone; they don't know what love is; they are shallow hulls of nothingness—the whole group of rotten people that have nothing to offer, that are nothing, never will be anything, never were intending to be anything." 

In Pepper's unstuck-in-time rant of resentment (the actual scene is set in 1950, but his voice goes ahead to his stint in prison, and speaks to a number of attitudes he was still coming to terms with as he was composing the book) will of course remind one of Lou Reed's song "Heroin," in which the protagonist,  asserting his intention to "nullify [his] life," sneers at "you sweet girls with your sweet talk," and celebrates the fact that "when the smack begins to flow/then I really don't care anymore/abouts all the Jim-Jims in this town/and everybody puttin' everybody else down/and all the politicians making crazy sounds/and all the dead bodies piled up in mounds." The key phrase is "really don't care" and the key word is "really." The ecstasy of heroin, if ecstasy it in fact is, is the ecstasy of genuine indifference. You REALLY just don't care. And really not caring can seem like an exceptional blessing to people of exceptional sensitivity. Hell, to people of average sensitivity, even. Who knows. 

Arguably, indifference does not enhance creativity; it shuts out creativity. True indifference creates the craving for more true indifference, because giving a shit about anything, you've figured out once you've properly numbed yourself, is just too fucking painful as it turns out. Who needs it? I turn to Pepper again: "All I can say is, at that moment I saw that I'd found peace of mind. Synthetically produced, but after what I'd been through and all the things I'd done, to trade that misery for total happiness—that was it, you know, that was it. I realized it. I realized that from that moment on I would be, if you want to use the word, a junkie. That's the word they still use. That is what I became at that moment. That's what I practiced; and that's what I still am. And that's what I will die as—a junkie." 

And Pepper did die, in 1982, a junkie who had been up and down and up again and who created some great music along the way; and he created that music, it's pretty clear, in spite of being a junkie. Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section, with Paul Chambers and Red Garland, a milestone of hard bop recorded in 1957, made by a strung-out Pepper who hadn't picked up a sax in six months and whose instrument had old dried cork stuck in its neck. And so on. The book has plenty of such stories, and it ends on a particularly good one, in which Pepper recounts being challenged to a cutting session by the great altoist Sonny Stitt on a bandstand in San Francisco. Stitt, Pepper writes, "did everything that could be done on a saxaphone, everything you could play, as much as Charlie Parker could have played if he'd been there. Then he stopped. And he looked at me. Gave me one of those looks. 'All right suckah, your turn.'"

"And it's my job; it's my gig," Pepper writes. "I was strung out. I was hooked. I was having a hassle with my wife, Diane, who'd threatened to kill herself in our hotel room next door. I had marks on my arm. I thought there were narcs in the club, and all of a sudden I realized it was me. He'd done all those things, and now I had to put up or shut up or get off or forget it or quit or kill myself or do something." He concludes: "I forgot everything, and everything came out. I played way over my head. I played completely different than he did. I searched and found my own way, and what I said reached the people. I played myself, and I knew I was right, and the people loved it, and they felt it. I blew and I blew, and when I finally finished I was shaking all over; my heart was pounding; I was soaked in sweat, and the people were screaming, the people were clapping, and I looked at Sonny, but I just kind of nodded, and he went, 'All right.' And that was it. That's what it's all about." 

"I was given a gift. I was given a gift in a lot of ways," Pepper writes at the beginning of this section of the book. "I'm one of those people, I knew it was there. All I had to do was reach for it, just do it." Heroin creates nothing; rather, it obliterates, among other things, the inclination to reach for anything, except more heroin.

I only tried the drug once myself. It was 1993 or 4 or so.  I was hanging out at Sally's Hideaway, the old drag bar on 43rd Street, the old ballroom of the Carter Hotel—it was later transformed into The City, the nightclub where that schmuck Sean Combs got into his gun trouble, and I don't know what it is now—and I was in the company of a charming preoperative transsexual who went by the name of Christina Piaget, and she was undergoing some sort of personal paroxysm of self-disgust that ended with her spoken resolve to never do heroin again, and handing over to me a small glassine envelope containing the substance, and then quitting the venue. Soon as she was out of sight I scurried to the first available lavatory stall and hoovered it up, and I have to say that my direct experience of it was pretty much as Pepper describes. Although my articulation of delight was decidedly more banal: more along the lines of "Wow, this is the greatest thing ever!" And of course my subsequent resolve was a different: "Good thing I don't know where Christina got this, because if I did I'd be in a cab on my way there now and I'd never come back." And for a good decade and change after, I got a lot of venal self-congratulatory personal mileage out of the fact that I hadn't been "stupid" enough to become addicted to heroin. It's kind of funny. But not really.