I had the Clash’s first album in my bag because I wanted to ask him some questions about the early history of the band. “This is Mick Jones’s favorite album,” I told him.
“I know,” he said. Then he grabbed it out of my hand and said, “You see that picture? That’s in Camden Market in the alleyway outside our rehearsal space.” I was interested because I think I know exactly where it is. “See? You care. I was there with the missus and the kids recently and when I realized how close we were, I dragged them over. It was a bit farther than I thought and the kids were whining because they wanted Pokémon or something like that and I kept saying, ‘Trust me. It’s going to be worth it!’ So we make our way there and I tell everyone to close their eyes. I stood in the exact same spot I’m standing on the album and made the same expression and everything and I said, ‘All right, open your eyes!’ Guess what happened. Dead air. Nothing. The kids said, ‘All right, can we go now?’ and the missus says, ‘All right, Joe, that’s enough, let’s leave, please.’” I laughed and Joe signed the album with the words “Open your eyes! I said to the crowd but NO!” at the top. I think autographs are queer but this is still one of my most prized possessions.
After lunch we went to drink pints at a bar on Seventh and A called Niagara where a mural of him now sits. About one minute after ordering our drinks, a geeky NYU student came up and said, “I’m really sorry, but are you Joe Strummer?” Joe said, “Yup!” and after agreeing to pose for a picture, he suggested they switch shirts and do it again. “I’ll be you and you be me.” Joe then put on the kid’s polo shirt while the kid put on Joe’s leather jacket and sunglasses. Their photo shoot went on for another twenty minutes and I told him I had to go. It was cool Joe was willing to indulge the kid but it also blew our hang. I told you fame was a pain in the ass. We agreed to meet for dinner later on that night.
I was dating an artist named Rose at the time. She was a tall Jew with jet-black hair who only did blow jobs. I told her about the dinner and she said she already knew Joe and had dated Pennie Smith, the guy who shot the London Calling album cover. Great. We all met at Three of Cups on First Avenue and when I walked into the room Joe yelled, “Here he is!” like we were old pals.
The table was a who’s-who of local musicians, including Chris Robinson, the singer of the Black Crowes, whom I sat across from. I was introduced to everyone at the table, including Pennie Smith, who was staring at Rose like she was his dead mother. “Hello, Pen,” she said victoriously.
Joe dominated the table with funny stories and effusive flattery directed at every guest, but Chris started feeling courageous as the night wore on and turned into a very loud Southern gentleman who was unlike the guy I sat down with. “I love me some bah-bee-kyew,” he yelled, unprovoked. “Pig foot, pig toe!” he added, like I was going to say, “Wait, ‘toe.’ Is you crazy? You eat a muthafuckin’ toe?” I didn’t say anything because I don’t give a shit if someone likes food. “Shit,” he said, cocking his head back, “I’ll eat a PIG’S ASS if they cook it right!” I thought this sounded a lot like the Chris Rock bit where he goes, “I’ll eat a PIG’S ASS if they cook it right!” and I said as much. Chris was oblivious but his girlfriend leaned over to me and said, “He gets progressively more black and Southern the drunker he gets.” I was impressed she could be so blunt about her boyfriend while he was sitting right there (to really see Chris black it up, I highly recommend checking out his “Kinky Reggae” tribute to Bob Marley on YouTube). I looked over at Rose and she was chewing her food while staring at Pennie and not saying a word. “You all right?” I asked.
“Mmm hmm,” she responded without looking at me.
While Joe held court, I looked over at Pennie and couldn’t help but notice how cripplingly uncomfortable he was. He barely spoke all night and when he did talk it was quietly into the ear next to him. When Rose got up to go to the bathroom, Pennie waited until the door closed behind her. After it clicked shut he looked at me and said, “Mate, what are you doing? Do you know who that is?”
“Um, Rose?” I answered, confused. Then the woman sitting next to him came over and explained that Rose was a fucking lunatic who had been stalking Pennie for years and I really had to get her out of there. Apparently, she had been sending him endless letters and showing up at his studio unannounced. He hadn’t called the cops but he was thinking seriously about it now. Great. Thanks, Rose.
After our meal, we went upstairs and I dillydallied with Joe for a bit before telling him I had to leave. Joe demanded I stay, which is what he did to absolutely everyone who had to go, including strangers. The end result was this hulking pile of humans surrounding him like an army wherever he went. I shook his hand and took Rose home, where she sucked me off and went to sleep.
I had a Fight Club moment where I went back over our short relationship and realized, yes, she is completely out of her fucking mind. I quit answering her calls, and she eventually stopped leaving messages. When I saw her two years later, we gave each other awkward smiles that hurt my cheeks.
A year after that, Joe Strummer returned from walking his dog and collapsed dead on the living room floor. He didn’t know he had a congenital heart defect, nor did anyone else. He was fifty years old.
I Said, “Jesus Is Gay,” on National Television (2000)
Almost right after setting up our New York office, I was booked on Bill Maher’s show Politically Incorrect. The taping was in March, right in the middle of a bender I was on in Texas with Pinky. We were attending Austin’s South by Southwest music conference and had to leap on a plane at noon to make it to L.A. in time for the show. Guests on the show usually researched all the questions in advance and had all their answers prepared, but we just saw it as another page in the party book. I listened to the questions they gave me to research about as closely as you listened to economics lectures in high school.
When we got to L.A., our buddy David Choe met us at the airport. He’s a painter who started as a graffiti vandal and petty thief and he single-handedly made it cool to be Asian again. He’s handsome but he also looks like a racist cartoon of a Chinaman because he’s always smiling. Choe dresses like a cholo and was driving a beat-up Chevy Nova at the time. “We should go straight there from the airport,” he said after we threw our bags in his shitbox. “It could take forever to get there because of the traffic.”
“I fucking hate L.A.,” Pinky said as we pulled out of the parking lot. “It’s like Waterworld but with cars instead of Jet Skis. I mean, are there even any houses in this city, or do people just pull over and sleep in their cars when they get tired?” He was already dipping into the scotch I didn’t know we had and I asked for some of the same. The stewardesses were pretty stingy and the lack of service had delivered a crippling blow to our mutual buzzes. The beauty of benders, however, is it’s very easy to get them back on track.
After Choe pulled into HBO Studios, I stuffed the scotch bottle down the front of my pants and double-checked our cocaine supply. We weren’t about to risk a no-booze policy at this thing. The staff at the entrance were unable to detect any of our contraband so Choe, Pinky, and I stumbled down the hall and into the greenroom with ease. There are two ways to approach a situation like this: You can be nervous and hope everyone likes you or you can just throw up your hands and treat everyone around you like puppets someone hired to amuse you.
We exploded into the greenroom like a triumvirate of bullies looking for a nerd to wedgie. It was a pretty big room with two long couches and a small kitchen partially separated by a frosted glass partition. It looked like a teachers’ lounge for the most expensive private school in the world. We had cut it a little close timewise, so all the guests were already present and accounted for. None of them seemed to care that the Three Musketeers had arrived. Quietly sitting on the couch was Bishop John Shelby Spong, an incredibly smart but dull religious man who looked like a very tall Montgomery Burns. I’ve never really understood the whole Christian scholar thing. Congratulations, you read one book. Ne
xt to him was Robert Conrad, a sexy tough-guy actor from the sixties best known to later generations for his “I dare you to knock this Duracell battery off my shoulder” ads. He looked like Ned Flanders–meets–Steve McQueen and was there with a new bride who looked like a child. Over by the window, where cell phone reception was apparently better, we had Lisa Ann Walter, a pretty redhead with perfect tits who looked like a young Joy Behar dipped in babe sauce. She was discussing some deal with her agent, which is always weird to see because you’re watching someone discuss a company they work at and the company is themselves.
A nebbishy homosexual with a headset and a clipboard immediately swooped in and introduced me to the other guests. Pinky and David hung back on a couch closer to the door as Pinky plotted how to drink scotch and do coke without getting caught. David’s race lacks the enzymes to do the same, so he just looked at magazines. Everyone gave me a friendly but brief wave and I made a mental note to do everything in my power to get into Lisa Ann’s pants—which I never did.
We still had an hour to kill and everyone seemed preoccupied with the spouse or manager they’d brought along for the ride, so Pinky and I oozed toward the kitchen part of the waiting area, where the partition provided a semblance of privacy. HBO was being broadcast on a giant screen in the middle of the room, which was a great distraction for everyone else’s eyes and ears. I moved over to the fridge, which was completely out of view, and pretended to care about it. “Fancy a swig?” I whispered to Pinky, and he said, “Yes, but I wish we had ice. Warm scotch tastes like gasoline.” Nobody was looking so I took the small coke bag out of my pocket, dipped my key in, and snorted a bump the size of a mouse’s eyeball. It burned like a motherfucker and made the back of my throat taste like nail polish remover. Pinky took my keys and did twice as much as me and then bent over in pain like someone had just stabbed him in the nose. How glamorous. We did this a few times and it was less pleasant each time. Sometimes I think the only thing coke does is make you want more coke. I turned to Pinky and said, “I’m not sure I should be doing this. Cocaine often brings out the worst in me.”
“Me too,” he added, and presented a coke booger so huge and disgusting, it made me dry-heave.
The buzz from Austin was back with a vengeance and we were ready to rock. I zinged Pinky with, “I don’t know what all these Muslim women are complaining about. I love getting stoned,” and he zinged me back with, “Give a man a bump, you have a friend for the night. Teach a man to shoot up, you have a friend for life.” We were on.
Just as we were indulging in our unprecedented wit, the Neb arrived with his clipboard and asked us if we were all right. “Shit!” I thought. “How are we going to explain standing here by a (probably) empty fridge?” Neb smiled and asked us if we wanted a beer. Then he opened the fridge we had been ignoring and made the four shelves of beer evident to our bloodshot eyes. “There’s Beck’s and Budweiser,” he said cheerily with his clipboard to one side. “There’s some weird pumpkin beer in there too if you’re into that. What else? There’s Heineken … drink up!” Each word felt better than when you take off a wet bathing suit and replace it with underwear from the dryer. I almost Frenched him for telling us what lay right beneath our powdered noses.
Lisa Ann was still on the phone, and religious people are boring, so we both gravitated to the handsomely gray-haired Robert Conrad. Pinky is a TV junkie and has been all his life.
Feeling his oats, Pinky strutted up to Conrad and sang the chorus of “Wild Wild West,” a terrible Will Smith title theme song to a terrible Will Smith movie, which was based on the Western TV show that made Conrad famous. Conrad smiled politely and Pinky’s shitfaced face lit up. “Have you heard that song?” he asked way too quickly.
“No,” Conrad replied, unamused.
Then Pinky sniffed the coke snot off his lip and brought his A-game by pulling an old episode of Conrad’s show out of his ass. “Man,” Pinky said, leaning into Conrad with a weird grin, “‘Night of the Vicious Valentine’ … when that crossbow was rigged into the piano and that pompous prick gets shot right as he’s patronizing you? Golden.”
Robert Conrad immediately came to life and leapt up out of his chair to talk about the old days. “You wouldn’t see that today,” he lamented enthusiastically, which was weird because I didn’t know you could do those two things at the same time. “People don’t put the same kind of thought into scripts,” Conrad said. We agreed, though I personally had no idea what anyone was talking about. Conrad led us over to the other end of the room to get down to some real talk. We were now back near the fridge where the cocaining took place. I wondered if he was going to ask us for a bump. Isn’t that how all old movie stars die? Robert didn’t want to take any drugs, but he did take a shine to us and seemed determined to pass on some words of wisdom before he left this earth. David remained on the couch, lost in a magazine, and couldn’t have cared less what he was missing out on.
“Look, guys,” Conrad said while peering back to make sure his child bride couldn’t hear him. “When I was your age I screwed everything that moved. I didn’t care what they looked like.”
I love conversations like this and had a million questions for our new mentor. “But if hot chicks see you fucking dogs you’re done, right?”
Robert Conrad looked at me like I had just pulled my dick out and asked him to count the veins. “What?” he said. Then he came back in, unfazed, with, “Heck no. You have to get every single girl you can. If a woman’s not interested, that’s not your problem. Wait for the next bus.” This was some of the soundest advice I’ve ever received and today, as a much older man, I can only begin to wrap my head around its wisdom. You see, when you’re married, you have nothing to beat off to but your memories. If you’ve only fucked, say, ten women, you have to keep recycling those same memories again and again like a dog-eared porn mag with the staples falling out. However, if you fill up that wank Rolodex with as many business cards as it can hold, Old You will go back in time and kiss Young You on the mouth.
“But you aren’t like that anymore?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he responded. “I found Jesus Christ and I’m madly in love with my wife. Look at her.” He looked back at the stunning young lady before adding, “She’s perfection. Eventually, you have to settle down.”
“When?” I asked.
“How old are you?” he replied. I told him I was thirty and he laughed and slapped me on the back. “You have another good ten years, buddy. Enjoy.” Then he walked off smiling. Three years later he careened into another car while wasted out of his mind and has been fucked-up ever since. Three years after that, I proposed.
By the time we were called out to the show, I couldn’t help but notice I had become completely fucking shithoused. I was too high and felt more out of place than a Japanese break-dancer. Cocaine is a difficult thing to regulate when you’re sneaking it up your nose behind appliances and the odds of your accidentally inhaling a huge chunk are even higher than you. Couple this with the realization I was going to be on national television and I started to panic. My parents were going to be watching this. What the fuck was I doing? You see, people think they’re better when they’re high but they’re actually way worse. You’re High You for about 0.000000001 percent of your life. You’re You You for the other 99.9999999999 percent. Which You do you think you’re going to be more comfortable being?
The people with the headsets shuffled all of us to the right of a big curtain that was just out of the audience’s line of vision. When I heard Bill Maher say, “and the editor of Vice magazine and Viceland.com, Mr. Gavin MuhGuinness, everybody,” I ran out to the stage and proudly showed the crowd how underdressed I was. I had on a V-neck T-shirt covered in beer stains, ratty cords, and my dad’s old Wallabees. I thrust my hands into the air like a champion, which made the crowd cheer even louder, and I could see the inversely proportional enthusiasm on Maher’s face. He could instantly tell I wasn’t there to have a serious discussion. The surprisi
ngly diminutive Bill came over and shook our hands as we sat down on chairs that were positioned in a circle. Video cameras on big cranes swooped around the stage and stared at us like curious robots. There were maybe two thousand people surrounding us in a semicircle but they were at least fifty feet away so the cameras could swivel with ease. As Bill led into the first question I started to feel my teeth grind back and forth. Too much cocaine has a way of making your hands turn cold and clammy, giving you Mink Pricklies. Bill looked at his cue cards and then looked up at us and said, “So JonBenét Ramsey’s parents are writing a book about everything they’ve been through. Do we think this is acceptable, for someone to be profiting off of this story when they’re still a suspect? Gavin, let’s start with you.”
Oh yeah, I seem to remember being warned about this topic. I had some loose ideas about American justice and how ridiculous it is to judge a person’s facial expressions in the aftermath of some horrible event. They’ll say, “The suspect didn’t flinch during the trial and looked at the victim’s parents with a blank stare.” Who cares? It’s a weird situation. Why do you care how they behave? How would you behave? Shit, if I was the bus driver who went off the road and killed all those kids like in that Atom Egoyan movie I’d probably be a catatonic robot during the trial. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be in that situation, so why are you treating him like a kid who chopped down a cherry tree?
That’s what I wanted to say. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in control and what came out of my mouth was, “I don’t know. People talking. Always talking. You know. Who cares? I mean, if I had the bus and killed all the kids I’d be like …” Then I started feigning a seizure on my chair. Bill tapped his card on his knee and quickly moved over to the next question. I resigned to keep my mouth shut until shit cooled down a bit.
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