by Mike Edison
I actually liked him, he was a good guy, nice and sincere, even if he was a harsh reminder of just how far out of the galaxy LSD could take you. When we had almost made it back to the bus, Peace Pole Guy pulled up alongside us in his RV. The sun was up by now, and it was quickly approaching the brutal midday heat.
“You guys want some ice cream?”
“Huh?” It was like a million degrees out there.
“We raided a supermarket and we’ve got tons of ice cream and it’s melting. Try some. It’s delicious.”
And that’s how we found ourselves, stoned and beautiful, in the middle of the desert eating strawberry ice cream. It really doesn’t get much better than that.
_______
After our odyssey in the desert, dropping out of NYU was easy.
I called my mother from a pay phone on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, across from Original Ray’s Pizza. She cried, and blamed my father. Then I called my father. He wished me good luck in my future endeavors. Then I went and got a job as a liquor delivery boy.
That gig lasted about two weeks, during which there was just one too many rickety old alcoholic queens letting his ratty bathrobe fall open so I could get a good look at his withered hose, as if I might go for it.
I took any number of shit jobs. Telemarketing, loading trucks, whatever—the three hundred bucks or so I was raking in from Main Event every month certainly wasn’t kicking a rock star lifestyle. But I was a lot happier out of school; at least I felt more in control of my environment. I certainly didn’t have to answer to anyone.
And then Bobo the Porn-Writing Clown showed up, opening the door to a career in the skin trade.
With my newfound fortune and fame as “Anonymous,” author of America’s filthiest pocket novels—and as an ambitious Screw correspondent—I was able to really live it up.
I spent a lot of time drinking at the Dugout, a classic old man’s bar, which was dirt cheap. Bob the bartender gave us a buyback on seventy-five-cent mugs of beer every third round without fail. The building on Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street was razed (along with the Variety Photoplay next door, the last real downtown porno movie house) to make room for an appalling cookie-cutter condominium, but you can see it in the beginning of Taxi Driver. It’s where Robert De Niro first picks up Jodie Foster.
One of the relics who drank there knew I was a writer of sorts, and he would rib me on the dregs of my chosen profession. He was from Lowell, Massachusetts, and claimed to have known Jack Kerouac. “He was a drunk,” he bellowed from his perch at the end of the bar. “His wife used to hide his shoes so he couldn’t go to the bar. He didn’t believe a word he wrote. He was an asshole. He voted for Eishenhower. Writers,” he never failed to add, dredging wisdom from his mug of half beer and half tomato juice, “are all full of shit.”
4
TOP SECRET ACTION
One benefit of being a gun-for-hire porn writer is that I could take off and the job would be waiting for me when I got back. No one ever missed me. No matter how deft I was at twirling these ripping yarns of young lust and sodomy, the porn business just kept on truckin’ without the benefit of my viscous prose. This was an industry that never valued art over craft. No one ever wanted it “good,” they just wanted it Tuesday.
A year after signing on with Kramer, the new Sharky’s Machine record was finally out and we were stumbling around Amsterdam looking for one of those funny coffee shops we had heard so much about.
We had a few hours to kill, just enough time to get good and stoned and then catch the train to Brussels for our first show, opening up for Soul Asylum, who along with Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, were part of the great Minneapolis renaissance that threatened to take over rock for about ten minutes in the late eighties. But none of us had the vaguest idea of what we were doing or even what we were looking for. After walking around the Amsterdam Centrum for an hour, the four hundred drinks I had on the flight had finally worn off, and we had to get something to eat before I keeled over and drowned in one of the canals that crisscross the city. We ducked into the first friendly looking café we found.
I suppose we should have twigged right away, what with the Rasta tricolors flying everywhere and Peter Tosh on the hi-fi, but it didn’t register in any of our jet-lagged, untutored American brains.
There was a little sandwich bar and a coffee machine. That’s all I needed. I asked for a menu. At least everyone spoke English.
Expecting to see a list of sandwich combos, fruit drinks, perhaps my old friend the frozen pizza skulking around waiting to be snacked on, I opened the menu and hallelujah! A stately pleasure dome I did decree—Kubla Khan, meet Cheech and Chong!
The menu was peppered with a dozen varieties of hashish, with samples attached in mini-ziplocks. There was Katama Gold, Zero Zero, Special Abraxas, Sticky Fingers. There may have been some Thai Stick. Moroccan brick hash, gold pollen, Lebanese, Afghani—some in balls, some in narrow strips, some in puffy, turdlike patties—and at the bottom was a sample of the “Nederlander Homegrown,” the only weed offered that day. It was bright green and stank wonderfully. One gram cost just a few guilders, about two bucks.
Years later there would be a multitude of brain-battering herb, superstrains of mind-boggling marijuana harvested locally in massive grow rooms that would rival the International Space Station in cost and technology, but in 1987 it didn’t seem as if anybody there wanted to smoke the weed—it was all about the sweet and sticky hash. But we loved our reefer, and at that price, we were going to have a good old-fashioned pot party. And some milk shakes and sandwiches and coffee, please. Oh, all right, we’ll try some of the Moroccan Black, some of that Nepalese Blonde that I used to gawk at in High Times, and perhaps we should try one of those space cakes?
Defying all odds, we floated out of there with our navigational systems intact, managed to find the train station, and caught the train to Brussels.
Our party in Belgium collected us as we spilled out of the train. You could have seen us coming a mile away. Four stoned Yanks with guitars. They should have locked us up. “Had a nice time in Amsterdam, yes? Good. Now we try some Belgian beer.” That was another little continental wonder that no one had bothered to tell me about.
Keep in mind that in those unenlightened times, pretty much the only imported beer you would ever see in the States was Heineken or Beck’s, perhaps the odd bottle of St. Pauli Girl or Grolsch. Certainly there was none of that crazy Pink Elephant stuff that rang the bell at thirteen-percent alcohol and made you want to take your pants off over your head. This Europe thing was really starting to work for me.
The venue was an old theater, just gorgeous, the kind of place we would hardly be allowed in back in the States. When we got there, Soul Asylum was just finishing their sound check.
While we were beside ourselves with glee, half drunk and high like baboons, the Soul Asylum boys were a study in road burn. It was the first show of our tour, and it was their last. They had been on the road for months, and they just wanted to go home to Minneapolis, listen to their Prince records on the banks of Lake Minnetonka, and watch ice hockey, or whatever it is that one does in Minnesota. They just rolled their eyes at the four rookies in Sharky’s Machine.
To make matters matters worse, Motörhead was playing down the street. There were about six people in the audience that night. I would have gone to see Motörhead, too. But the thing of it was, the people who did come actually came to see us. They had our record. They liked it. They got it.
Somehow the Sharky magic worked in Europe, where being a bunch of misfits was actually an asset that set us apart from the idiots who all looked and sounded the same, wrapped in off-the-rack rock clichés. We didn’t have the most fans, but the people who came out to see Sharky’s Machine were oddly loyal. They felt that they could adopt us as their own; and given a chance to play in front of an appreciative crowd who weren’t trying to bluntly pigeonhole us into being a punk band or a thrash band or a fucked-up blues ba
nd, we could really shine. After Brussels, the gigs were fantastic, almost all well attended and successful. It was an unbelievable adventure. In every town there was something new, some strange German sausage or artisanal beer, a new way to roll a joint with seven rolling papers and a block of hash the size of a tangerine. Everyone was extraordinarily kind to us. We got wasted every night, wandering around medieval cities and waking up in strange places.
I was having the time of my life. We never worked from set lists, and I would holler out the songs from behind the drums, twirling sticks, throwing bombs, putting on a Muppet show with Jim, who onstage was a like a level-4 hurricane.
Unfortunately, offstage, he moved about as fast as the Great Pyramid of Cheops, lugging around a gigantic fake-leather suitcase that he had come to college with, the clunkiest, most unwieldy piece of shit ever taken on tour with a rock ’n’ roll band, all the more confusing since he never seemed to have any clean clothes. I think it was filled with books. But that was Jim.
Alec also had some baggage. He never learned to make friends with the soundman, which is rule number one if you want to put on a great show. Every night, before the sound check even started, Alec would warn the poor guy behind the board, “DON’T TELL ME TO TURN MY AMP DOWN.” We’d be in the club for about five seconds and already there would be a confrontation.
Volume is a wonderful thing, and we took pride in being loud. When we were playing at the top of our ability and really cranking, the whole thing could sound like a jet plane taking off in the club. We never had the luxury of carrying our own tech guy, but once we got going, and the sound guy understood what we were up to, it really wasn’t all that complex. Most of them were professionals and had been mixing live bands every night of their adult lives. A lot of them don’t want to blow the ceiling off of their clubs. And every band turns up their gear after the sound check; it’s the oldest trick there is. But you had to give these guys a little room and work with them and get a balance onstage, or you’d end up sounding like crap. And you could forget about the monitor mix. Piss off the soundman, and you were doomed.
Tonia was great at leveling the vibe, and generally everything went okay. Alec meant well. He cared. He wanted to sound mighty. But a twenty-minute sound check could turn into an hour’s worth of group therapy.
There was another slight snafu. At one of our shows we met our Dutch record company—a teenager who worked out of his parents’ basement. Nice kid—had a small business licensing American records for the European market. He told me that he had cut a deal with Kramer for Let’s Be Friends and had sent him a bunch of dough for the privilege of licensing it and releasing it on his label. That was news to us.
This was my first experience in dealing with a record company, and since we were all pals, I thought everything was on the up-and-up. We had no contract, but as far as I was concerned, we had no secrets, either, and it was such a small operation anyway, it wasn’t like we were going to get caught in the cogs of some conglomerate. Dutch record boy was as furious as I was that the accounting for the European release had somehow fallen through the cracks.
The next day we were doing an interview, and I had a few choice words to say about Mr. Kramer. It took Kramer only twenty-four hours after that to track us down and get me on the phone at a sound check. He sounded miffed.
“Do you really think you could call me a ‘ratfucker’ on Dutch National Radio and get away with it?” he screamed. “Fuck you guys, you’re off the label!”
But at that point it didn’t matter. We had just played to a sold-out bacchanal of a gig at the Ecstasy club in Berlin, and the freak who ran the place was insisting that he release our next project on his label, LSD Records. Sounded good to me.
“Speedy Gonzalez,” as he called himself, was in love with Sharky’s Machine and had gone to great lengths to prove his affection. He had been working his ass off for weeks before we got there. The Ecstasy club was packed; there were people outside who couldn’t get in. We were on the radio. There were Sharky’s Machine posters all over town. We had never had that kind of reception or response.
One of the bartenders asked me, “Sharky, do you need any special kind of women?”
Oh, this was too good to be true.
As it turned out, I didn’t need him to pimp for me. There were lots of beautiful, tall German women at our show and at the party afterward. They all wore tons of eyeliner and looked like Nico. That night there was lots of what Speedy always called “Top Secret Action.” It is still too soon to talk about it.
Two months after we had blundered into that coffee shop in Amsterdam, I arrived home wearing the shimmerless halo common to anyone suffering from brain damage and exhaustion on a molecular level. Necessity demanded innovation, and the Edison Cure, an ever-changing Rx for rock ’n’ roll overdose, was born: I slept for a few days, ate a few steaks and a boatload of green vegetables (what is it with Europeans and their aversion to food that photosynthesizes?), listened to some restorative John Coltrane records, got some sunshine, went to a museum, and washed out my eyes with modern art. In a few days I was back in the New York Groove.
Once again I was making ends meet cataloging sexual peccadilloes and submission holds, living large as a low-budget bon vivant. For a short while I joined the Lunachicks, an all-girl glam-horror band who would eventually become stars in an alternate universe of rock ’n’ roll shock and awe, but at the time they were just getting started, blossoming nicely into their Babysitters on Acid phase.
Perhaps you remember the old horror story that was incessantly and oh so seriously repeated when I was a kid? A couple, out on a date, calls home to see if everything is all right. The teenager in charge responds, “Sure, everything is fine. The baby is almost done.” And this is why drugs are bad: when you are high, you mistake toddlers for turkeys. And yet never forget to preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Glammed-up dolls that they were, the Lunachicks had a strict dress code. I know a lot of guys who get all nervous and fidgety when it comes to putting on eye makeup and a feather boa or two, as if a couple of coats of Max Factor were going to turn them into Capezio-wearing queers with a fetish for poodles and leather pants. But I can dig it. If it was good enough for Elvis, it was good enough for me. Anyway, I’ve got a macho streak a mile wide, and there’s not really much chance of me going offside on the play. If you have ever seen me tucking into a plate of ribs like a pit bull going at it with a chew rag, you might reconsider Darwin. It is downright paleo. Why would I fear a little eyeliner? As it turns out, the girls loved it. I’d put on a little glitter, and suddenly bombshells who dressed like Bettie Page wanted to come home with me so we could take turns tying each other up.
I played one or two shows with the ’Chicks, and then we all agreed that I wasn’t woman enough for the gig. Anyway, I was just a fill-in until they found someone more gender appropriate. And Sharky’s Machine was busy playing and working on new material while we waited for Speedy Gonzalez to come through with some dough to make a new record. Everything was groovy.
Except that I had finally burned out on writing porn novels. My trick bag was empty. Every word weighed a ton. See Mike write. See Mike write porn. Porn, porn, porn. I felt as if I were being sucked dry by a select genus of horny leeches thriving on the salacious lexicon of lowbrow literature. You try recasting “He plunged his pulsating meat puppet between the quivering layers of her moist scissor cake” for the eight thousandth time. It made me want to drink drain cleaner or stab myself in the throat with a salad fork. Anything to break up the monotony of another 180 pages of artless crud. It had gotten so bad that I had even done a “search and replace” for the names in a long suck-and-fuck scene I had written months before. Instead of Tony and Maria knocking boots, all of a sudden it was David and Michelle. I had finally hit rock bottom: I was plagiarizing myself.
It was a relief to deep-six the pulp fiction. But with the landscape unfettered by tales of nymphomaniac cheerleaders (and the men who loved them), I had a
clear view of a bleak future. Twenty-two years old and already in the grip of a deeply existential blues. “Former porn writer” looked even worse on the résumé than “porn writer.” Where was I going?
Not into outer space, that was for sure. That dream had exploded when the space shuttle Challenger came crying out of the sky with a schoolteacher on board and NASA immediately jettisoned their next civilian-in-the-sky initiative, the Journalist in Space program, which I had enthusiastically applied for.
Like all boys of my generation, I had lived vicariously through the adventures of the Skylab astronauts. What could be a greater fashion statement than a bright orange NASA jumpsuit, with Velcro on the feet so you wouldn’t float around the cabin and bang into the science officer? This was surely the first step toward moon colonies and space stations staffed by bosomy space kittens dressed in tinfoil hot pants and antigravity go-go boots. Interstellar sex with Barbarella and all of her friends? That was the Sacred Covenant of Technology. That was the Future of Man.
The application for the NASA Journalist in Space program came in a really swell folder decorated with a graphic of a fountain pen soaring through the solar system, and I filled it out earnestly. Clearly, I was the right man for the job. I was, after all, a pornographer and a wrestling beat writer. Yes, it would have taken a little vision from the slide-rule boys down at Cape Canaveral, but as far as I was concerned, that was exactly the kind of pioneering spirit that made America great. Walter Cronkite was too old, and Peter Jennings, the prohibitive favorite, was Canadian. Unfortunately, I’ll never know how close I came to making the short list.
With my career as an astronaut on hold, I had few choices. I began to consider the last refuge of a scoundrel: going back to school.