by Mike Edison
But by far the article I enjoyed writing most for Screw was a comprehensive review of condoms. A firsthand user’s guide, this was the kind of research a young man lives for. I went to Rite Aid and grabbed one package of everything they had in the rubber department, which was a pretty surprising variety of studded, ribbed, lubed, extra-strength, extra-big, extra-lubed, colored, and flavored condoms, something for every taste. Plus, of course, the sheepskin models, which I always thought were pretty icky. My girlfriend was horrified when I came home with a giant sack of condoms and announced that I needed a research assistant. But not as horrified as the young Korean girl at the pharmacy who sold them to me. She looked at me as if I were some kind of monster when I dumped two hundred dollars’ worth of prophylactics on the checkout counter. I just shrugged and told her I was having a party.
The girlfriend survived the extensive field test, although I do remember her laughing at me, probably just to keep from crying, when I modeled an exceptionally scary studded number that I thought had potential. I think I got paid $175 for that story. Plus the condoms, of course.
3
POSSESSION OF HASHISH IS
PUNISHABLE BY DEATH!
I grew up, completely unsupervised, in a New Jersey suburb, just a thirty-minute train ride out of Manhattan. My parents separated, with extreme prejudice, when I was twelve, just in time to facilitate feverish teenage rebellion fantasies and an ugly predisposition toward anything offering even the remotest pleasures of mind expansion and liver damage.
They had no truck being together, my parents. My father was on a down-to-earth nature kick, collecting pricey Native American pottery and wooden ducks. My mother collected designer handbags and increasingly garish pantsuits from Saks Fifth Avenue. Neither of them had any taste. And they had nothing in common, except they hated each other. Well, they had their kids—my younger twin brothers, and me. But they weren’t going to let a few bumps in the road like us get in the way of their shit storm and vitriol. My father put some things in a bag and moved to an apartment one town over.
My mother was left incapable of controlling her rage. Look up “acrimony” in the dictionary, and you’ll see a picture of her, screaming my father’s name and threatening to cosh him over the head with her trendy Prince tennis racket, the one with the oversize sweet spot. And my father really raked her over the coals. What she did for “acrimony,” he did for “parsimony.” Their settlement took years.
As if by magic, pot appeared when I was fourteen, illicit and plentiful and harboring promises of revolution and a better world far beyond my own. I couldn’t wait to try it. I was working as a volunteer at a March of Dimes–sponsored haunted house that was set up in a shopping mall. It was the biggest bunch of potheads ever assembled in the name of charity, a great gig for the nascent stoner. I loved getting high, putting on the faux Alice Cooper makeup, and greeting people with my overwarmed Bela Lugosi impersonation. We had one of those sound effects records with thunderstorms and creaking floors. There were black lights everywhere, lots of skull candles, and a real coffin that people would have sex in after hours.
Sometimes I would get to be a “plant”—a guy who walked in and paid with the regular tour—and at the end, in the execution room, I would get pulled out of the crowd and tossed into the electric chair. The strobe light would stutter and then black out, and my face and hands would glow from the clear glow-in-the dark makeup I was wearing. Someone would light a match and blow it out quickly to get the smell of burned sulfur in the air.
Working at the haunted house, I learned a little about makeup and stagecraft, and how to roll a killer joint. It was 1978, and conveniently, there was a head shop next door. In 1978 there was always a head shop next door.
Drug paraphernalia was at a wonderfully creative peak. There were Power Hitters, soft plastic canisters into which you would insert a lit joint and then squeeze a tornado’s worth of smoke directly into your lungs. The best ones were festooned with ersatz band logos, like “Led Zeplin” or “Arosmith.” The Buzzbee was a tribute to American engineering: it was a Frisbee retrofitted with a pipe in the center so you could take a hit and toss it to the next lucky player. The Concert Kit was first aid for stoners, a self-contained system of rolling papers, lighter, mini-pipe, extra screens, and roach clip. You wouldn’t dream of going to the Bowie show without one.
Roach clips were de rigueur—either an alligator clip, the kind used in home electronics projects, with a large pink feather attached, or a pair of silver hemostats stolen from the local emergency room. And I shouldn’t neglect the fine folks at U.S. Bongs, who were doing lovely things with acrylics that year. Their multicolored, multichambered water pipes (held together with miles of surgical tubing) were a marvel to behold. I longed to own one, but I figured it would be best if I got my own apartment first. A four-foot bong did not qualify as stealth technology, the first line of defense for the toker-in-training.
Fashionwise, patched jeans, rainbow iron-ons, and coke-spoon necklaces were what the well-dressed suburban burnout was sporting that season, and every head shop came equipped with a T-shirt press manned by a pimply-faced Yes fan trying in vain to cultivate a lip brow, as well as a display case of poorly crafted silver jewelry maintained by a flat-chested hippie chick who stank of patchouli and yearned to ride horses.
There was also, always, a collection of High Times magazines.
High Times was amazing, a ticket to a whole new world. One issue had a big tit covered in chocolate splashed on the cover, and featured a detailed story about drugs as aphrodisiacs. Typically, the centerfold unveiled mountains of Acapulco Gold, voluptuous blond hash balls from Nepal, shimmering slopes of Peruvian flake, or miles of Thai Stick. There were ads for “lettuce opium” and cocaine grinders; “peace pipes,” “pinch hitters,” and “snow screens”; The Complete Psilocybin Mushroom Cultivator’s Bible; kits to make hashish from shake weed; Jimmy Carter “Presidential Snorters”; nasal douches; gram scales, high-end stereo components, sex toys, fake IDs, and the “Official Dealer McDope Dealing Game.” I immediately developed a lifelong crush on the JOB rolling papers girl.
How could this even exist, this miracle of lifestyle journalism? I brought home a copy and put it under the mattress along with a few issues of Penthouse I had swiped from my father before he split. Porn and drug mags. Classic contraband. In my case it was prophetic.
I loved smoking pot. All that hoo-ha about opening the Doors of Perception was absolutely true: When you were high on marijuana, the absurdities of authority and hypocritical American morality were laid bare before your bloodshot eyes. Monty Python suddenly made more sense than the evening news. And Chips Ahoy cookies, when mashed into strawberry ice cream, could unlock the pleasure center of your brain. No wonder the government didn’t want anyone getting stoned (except from drugs on their approved schedule, of course).
I got high every day—before school, after school, during school, whatever. There was no problem being stoned around adults; the teachers didn’t care or were too stupid to notice, and my parents were never around. There was never anyone to scrutinize me when I came home, no evenings in front of the TV or “quality time” to kill my buzz. It’s amazing I didn’t contract scurvy when I was seventeen. For four years I survived on the frozen pizza my mother routinely left for my brothers and me to make “family dinner.”
In the mornings, when I did see my mother, it was a nightmare. The yelling was unbearable, damaging, the bitterness and hatred palpable. Most of it was intended for my father, but since he wasn’t there, it was aimed squarely at me, the largest male target within shouting range.
I felt bad for my mom. It couldn’t have been easy with three kids. But the twins were preppy little cream puffs who never crossed the tracks, and I caught the brunt of it. (Years later, they would thank me for clearing the way for them, what with my Scorched Earth Policy. By the time they were old enough to come home drunk from some dimwitted prom, my mother would just groan in defeat.)
It was horrible, some mornings bordering on Mommy Dearest histrionics, with lots of screaming and crying and the occasional swinging of coat hangers. I promise, this is no exaggeration. I think my friends had an idea that it was unpleasant at my house, but they probably had no clue that this kind of anger and ugliness could exist in such a seemingly mundane Jewish home. It was no wonder that the first thing I did when I left the house in the morning was smoke a joint.
I also drank everything in sight and spent a preponderance of time getting wasted in the woods near our house. I snorted speed whenever I could score some—usually Black Beauties that I would cut open and crush into powder. A few times I woke up with my pillow covered in blood from cauterizing my nose with such cheap toxic crap (something I would definitely acquire a taste for). Then I would have to throw out the pillowcase and go to Bamberger’s to try to find a matching one to replace it. Usually, though, I just chucked it, and the invariable result was my mother, even more confused and agitated than normal, screaming, “Where are all my pillowcases?”
There was a lot of pain in that house. Also hideous white carpeting and furniture that was just “for company,” although none ever showed up.
My first hit of acid was a blue microdot. Later it came in different colors—pink, and orange—the legendary Double Barrel Sunshine. I loved it, although I am not sure that fifteen-year-olds have much business stumbling around the schoolyard on LSD.
By the time I was sixteen, I had found a decent group of similarly middle-class Jewish friends who had finally come around to the joys of underage drinking and smoking dope. Now I didn’t have to spend as much time playing pinball at the shopping mall, looking for other delinquents who wanted to get wasted. I could just go over to someone’s house—someone who my parents actually approved of—get ripped, and laugh at their parents’ bad taste. That, too, was liberating.
We had prolific weekend beer-and-pot parties. It was amazing how in those days they would just give high schoolers beer. Here, kid, have a keg. Twenty bucks. Bring it back tomorrow.
After school we would get stoned and rehearse whatever band we had at the time. There were Jason and the Argonauts, the Tastebuds, and the Electric Bowling Trophy, named after a real, honest-to-goodness electric bowling trophy that had become an object of stoned fascination for us. We played Creedence covers, some Stones stuff, Elmore James, and the Who, for block parties and keggers.
We dropped acid and went to Grateful Dead concerts, which, depending on how strong and clean the acid was, could be pretty interesting. Certainly without the drugs it would have been a complete waste of time. But for a sixteen-year-old, a Dead show was definitely a happening, an open-air drug mart and freak fest. I liked it when Jerry Garcia sang slow, pained versions of Dylan songs, and when they got into a heavy, trippy vibe, even if most of Jerry’s guitar solos were strictly for the birds, especially if you had been listening to Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman. And that other guy, Bob Weir, has got to be the Single Most Useless Guy in the History of Rock. He was never any good. But that’s what my acidhead pals were into, and I was extremely enthusiastic about eating those little paper tabs of mindfuck, so I could definitely be counted in for the ride.
I discovered that we could get into the old Lone Star Café in Greenwich Village without ID, and I led the charge to see an incredible cavalcade of blues musicians: John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells (who were still a team), Albert King, and Albert Collins, and at Tramps on Fifteenth Street we would go see (my favorite) Big Joe Turner—the last of the great Kansas City blues shouters—and the sublime, fezzed slide-guitar master from Chicago, J. B. Hutto.
In the afternoons I got stoned and went to the Museum of Modern Art, a paradise of melted clocks and high-minded practical jokes perpetrated by an international drinking society of miscreants who called themselves Dada—their way, I figured, of flipping off the squares. They were my first heroes.
I also had another group of pals who weren’t buying into what they called “that hippie blues shit.” These guys were tougher and weirder. They wore spiked hair and had biker-style chain wallets. They were into pills and punk rock. The Bowling Trophy boys stayed as far away from them as possible—they hated punk rock. These guys were always bringing their guitars and amps over to my basement, where my drums were set up, to attempt Sex Pistols, Clash, and Ramones covers for an audience of ourselves. We took a stab at “Kick Out the Jams” one day, and I made my star turn putting a microphone stand through the drop ceiling. I covered the hole with an old Elton John poster that was lying around. I was starting to get some very big, very bad ideas.
Getting busted for smoking pot out behind the parking lot next to the school was inevitable. And now my mother was sure that I was the Bad Seed. To her suburban brain—easily addled by even the most harmless sort of teen rebellion (she began fibrillating wildly when I got my ear pierced)—I might as well have been caught hot-wiring her Caprice Classic with a dirty syringe. Of course it was my father’s fault. She had never asked for Satan’s Child.
After I got snagged smoking dope and was suspended for a couple of days (which I spent high on Valium I stole from my grandmother’s medicine cabinet), there was a large-scale meeting with a team of guidance counselors, local drug pigs, and the funereal parents of about half a dozen kids who had also been caught in the act. My folks were making a rare “joint” appearance, ha, ha, which hadn’t happened since my bar mitzvah, when under the cosmic weight of Serious Jew Guilt, they put on their game faces (and incredibly bad clothes) and tried not to kill each other in front of their icky gold chain–wearing friends who had ostensibly gathered to watch me become a man. My party looked like a mid-budget 1970s porno film, without the sex.
“We’re here to educate you about the dangers of marijuana,” began one smug, fat fucker, an obese guidance counselor who looked as if he had just finished eating a couple of seventh-graders with all the fixin’s. And then they proceeded to haul out every fear-mongering wife’s tale about weed that has ever been propagated in the name of God and Country.
“Do you know that drug pushers put heroin in the marijuana so they can get your kids hooked on hard drugs?”
Oh, good Lord, was I really going to have to sit still and listen to this bullshit? “That’s simply not true,” I protested. This did not endear me to the gathered group of parents, self-righteous educators, and law-enforcement flunkies, now vibrating as one in a sick-making display of antidrug piety. I thought I was going to throw up. Or get my ass kicked by someone’s mom.
A roly-poly police officer in a wrinkle-free blue uniform filigreed with shiny brass buttons offered this old canard: “Marijuana makes men grow breasts.”
“That’s not true!” I railed. I got the malocchio from every brainwashed parent in the room. I decided to keep my mouth shut before one of the cops shot me.
“Marijuana mutates your DNA.”
“Marijuana makes you impotent.”
“Marijuana leads to a life of crime.”
This was getting tedious. The chief guidance counselor, an unendurably pompous Bill Cosby wannabe with a V-neck sweater and a bow tie (and there is nothing worse than an administrator with a sweater and bow tie), who actually spoke with his nose at a 45-degree angle to the horizon, began his showstopping soliloquy.
“In Arab countries,” he began, “possession of hashish is punishable by death!” Insert music here. “Because they know that marijuana and hashish destroy people’s wills! Their will to fight! That is why Israel won the Six Day War.”
At this point even my father knew he was being pissed on. “No,” he chimed. “That’s because we are the Chosen People!” And he marched out. The Israeli army would have been proud. I certainly was.
But there was so much steam pouring out of my mother’s ears that her head sounded like the lunch whistle at the rock quarry where Fred Flintstone used to work. The rest of the room sat in awestruck silence, jaws on the floor.
Yeah, I was a dead man. It would be a while b
efore I could hang out with any of those kids again. Like never.
But this was by far the coolest thing I have ever seen my father do, although now he claims not to remember it. For a moment there, he was my hero.
Given my high school transcript, now stamped with a scarlet “M for Marijuana,” it was somewhat of a miracle when I was accepted into the New York University film school. But I had done very well on the SATs and was a Merit Scholarship finalist. That, plus a passel of Super-8 garden-tool murder movies I had made (not to mention my role as president of the Film Club, a half-assed dope-smoking consortium I had invented solely for beefing up my high school résumé) were enough for me to eke past the gatekeepers at NYU, which was a damn fine thing because it was the only school I had applied to. If I wasn’t accepted, I was prepared to get a job and move into Manhattan anyway. Anything to get out of that fucking house. Forget all the drugs; my parents were really screwing up my head.
When I got the letter from NYU, my mother was relieved, but typically, she did not share my delight. This woman could find misery and strife in a rainbow. “I wish you would go to school for something you could use,” she would tell me, and sigh with disgust. My father was quick to remind me that “no one ever makes it in the film business.”
For some reason, the dean of the film department took a shine to me, and he would call me up to his office to chat fairly regularly. He told me that he thought I had talent and he wanted to encourage me. I had to be flattered. I don’t think a lot of freshmen were getting face time with the dean. I think he liked that I was a musician—he had played B3 organ behind Otis Redding once, and I was very impressed with that, too. He was also an adherent of Meher Baba, the guru who did not speak for forty-four years and who counted Pete Townshend of the Who as his most famous follower. The dean had suggested that I might find some “answers” in Baba’s writing, but frankly, I found more answers in The Who Sings My Generation.