by Mike Edison
Somewhere along the line, Proch and I developed our Post-Darwinian Theory of Publishing Evolution Based on Planet of the Apes. It was simple: the functionaries, that is the production people who spent their days trafficking material between the prepress shop where color proofs were made, our offices, and the printer, were the Gorillas. Since most of the grunts in the art department didn’t know how to read, or at least didn’t practice that sweet science, they were also Gorillas. Editors were Chimpanzees, the educated class, like Cornelius in Planet of the Apes. The more advanced art people, those who could recognize type as something more than just another design element to be pushed around, got to be Chimpanzees, too. Carmine, however, was an Orangutan, the ruling class, like Dr. Zayus. He was an adept who held secret knowledge. Rosenbaum, Ronson, and Stevens thought they were Orangutans, but they weren’t; they were just spoiled Chimps. (Actually, Stevens was more like a Gorilla. Occasionally, lower apes were socially promoted based on good looks.) And of course Ruderman was the Lawgiver. There is never any mistaking the Lawgiver.
I was a good Chimp, and within a year I was promoted to special projects editor and running a handful of start-up books, including Buxom, maybe the silliest magazine of all time, written in an absurd over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder-jiggly-wiggly-major-M-cup-mammary-titty-fetish hep jive blather about bra stuffing, rib cushions, and lady bumps. It was a gas. For this nonsense I was now making thirty-four grand a year and not saving a dime.
I spent cash like water. Instead of a wallet I used ATMs and just took out whatever I needed. Thirty-four thousand dollars seemed like a lot then—after all, the rent for my top-floor apartment in a Harlem brownstone was five hundred a month.
I treated New York City as if it were my personal playground. I was dating a nineteen-year-old Armenian dominatrix who would bring me pita bread and string cheese for breakfast, and a twenty-three-year-old Jewish grad student who wore stockings and garters, listened almost exclusively to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, and harbored aspirations of being a poet; and I was carrying on with one of the Playgirl editors who worked upstairs.
How did women feel about dating a pornographer? Like my parents, they were just happy I was employed.
On an otherwise dreary Monday, Proch announced that we were going to Las Vegas. “Meet me at the Horse Around Bar Friday at three p.m.,” he demanded. He was going to be coming from L.A., where he was trying to sell a script and shmooze some buddies of his who were television writers. We didn’t discuss it again. He just assumed I would be there.
Okay, so we were taking a page out of the Gonzo playbook, and why the fuck not? We were twenty-five years old, and a pointless spur-of-the-moment trip to Vegas was the logical extension of our boozy Frank Sinatra obsession. Vegas was still ridiculously cheap: the flight was ninety-nine dollars, and a room at Circus Circus, home of the Horse Around Bar, was just twenty-five bucks. Ninety-nine-cent shrimp cocktails and $1.99 all-you-can-eat prime rib dinners were the order of the day. You could be a poverty-stricken pornographer stuck in Vegas and still die of gout like a seventeenth-century French nobleman.
At 3:00 p.m. on Friday I was in Vegas at the appointed locus. Proch was in his “experimental drinking” phase and was sitting in front of half a dozen cocktails including a grasshopper, a slippery nipple, a sex on the beach, and a few other trendy girlie drinks. I looked at his mixologist’s nightmare and ordered myself the relatively sobering trinity of a vodka martini, ice cold with three olives, a Bloody Mary, also with olives, and a can of Budweiser. The bill came to $2.90.
The Horse Around is a revolving bar, built like a carousel, that overlooks the floor of Circus Circus, which is in fact a giant perpetual circus with dancing bears, tightrope walkers, scantily clad trapeze artists, fire-breathers, and a guy being shot out of a cannon. Hunter Thompson called it “what the whole hip world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.” Thank God there were no monkeys. That would have been too much. The spinning bar itself was difficult to handle.
The best news (aside from the ridiculously cheap drinks) was that Redd Foxx was performing that night. As a dinosaur on the scene (the “party records” that his act was based on came out back in the 1950s), he had been banished to the Hacienda Hotel, so far down the Strip and away from the bright lights of Caesars and Circus Circus that it was practically in Oaxaca. Foxx and the Hacienda had nothing to do with the New Vegas that was beginning to creep in—only a few years later the city would be entirely family-friendly, but in 1988 such savagery had not yet become completely oppressive. The Strip was still seedy, and the Sands, Sinatra’s place, had not yet been blown up to make room for a roller coaster. There were still hookers and drug dealers everywhere, what any sensible adult would consider “added value.”
When we arrived at the Hacienda, my immediate reaction was to take a shower. The red vinyl booths were greasy, the chips dirty and worn. Even the air was slightly jaundiced. It felt forgotten, its cowboy motif hopelessly dated. It would meet a fate similar to that of the Sands: it was imploded in 1996 with eleven hundred pounds of dynamite to make room for an eye bummer called Mandalay Bay.
But Redd Foxx killed, finishing his set with the classic Ya Gotta Wash Yer Ass (“not your whole ass, just your asshole”) routine. He was filthier than the Hacienda’s all-night coffee shop, and the crowd of low rollers loved it. At the end of the show Redd thanked a few people in the audience, adding, “I wanna say hello to my friend Evel Knievel. Evel, stand up!”
Evel did his best impersonation of someone standing up. After years of grinding his skeletal system into kindling, he was shaped more like a question mark than an exclamation point. But he got our attention, that’s for sure.
If you can define a “hero” by how much your parents hated him, Evel Knievel was the single greatest man who ever lived. Fuck Neil Armstrong—Knievel jumped the fountain at Caesars Palace on a motorcycle! And the results were incredible. He rolled about a mile with half a ton of Harley-Davidson stuck to his head.
Everyone I know had attempted some sort of half-assed Knievel stunt when they were kids. I personally broke my nose and spent a day in the dentist’s chair after going ass over teakettle trying to jump three Big Wheel tricycles on my Raleigh Chopper.
We had to meet Knievel. We had to pay our respects to a True American Original.
He was easy to spot in the crowd, dressed as he was in a perfectly Evel red, white, and blue spangled shirt, tight black jeans, and lizard-skin cowboy boots. He reeked of daredevil.
“Mr. Knievel,” I said, “we’re from High Society magazine. We wanted to say hello. We’re huge fans of yours.”
Evel stopped. He looked deadly serious, but he still carried the captain-of-the-football-team good looks, cleft chin and blues eyes, like a shell-shocked version of Paul Newman.
“High Society,” he drawled. “Great magazine. I love the girls. Meet me at the Shark Club. Tell the guy at the door you’re with me.” And he was off.
Journalists such as we were, we found the Shark Club easily. It was a discotheque off the Strip that catered mostly to locals. Out-of-towners were asked to pay admission, but when we declared that we were “with Evel,” the velvet rope was dropped along with the cover. Knievel’s name commanded respect! (Thinking back, there may have also been a slight look of pity in the doorman’s eye, although I really couldn’t be sure at this late date.) I asked one of the bouncers if he had seen Evel. “Just look for the closest bar,” he harrumphed.
There were five or six bars circling the dance floor, and sure enough, Evel was at the one nearest the door. “What the fuck took you guys so long?” he demanded. It had been ten minutes since we last saw him. We ordered beer and bourbon and got down to drinking seriously.
Knievel was with his “manager,” whom we quickly nicknamed the Operator. A tall, handsome black guy with an incredible line of patter, he was keeping an eye on Evel, who was getting increasingly plastered with each successive round.
“Don’t worry
about a thing,” the Operator kept telling us. “Evel likes you guys. That’s all that matters.”
“Evel likes us,” Proch would intone, trancelike, while he sucked down increasingly bizarre combinations of liquor. “That is all that matters.”
The Operator had worked with Muhammad Ali and had produced Muhammad’s dental hygiene masterpiece, the absolutely mesmerizing album Ali and His Gang vs. Mr. Tooth Decay. (Highlights include an evil Frank Sinatra peddling molar-munching ice cream to children; Ali discussing the benefits of fluoride with Richie Havens; and “The Fight Song,” which features Howard Cosell’s play-by-play of the big match between Ali and his arch enemy, Mr. Tooth Decay. “We’ve got the stuff to run him away from here,” says Ali, “just like I did George Foreman over in Zaire.”) The Operator had also worked with Ali on some ill-founded merchandise schemes, like Ali Champion Brand Shoe Polish.
Knievel was in town for the opening of the Vegas Hard Rock Café, to which he said he had sold his Skycycle, the piece of shit he had banged into the side of the Snake River Canyon, etching forever another chapter of Knievel Heroics. He had a check he kept waving around for some crazy amount, twenty thousand bucks or something, claiming that he sold the Skycycle for a million dollars and that this was only part of the payment. But for some reason he was having trouble cashing it. We kept on drinking. Since no one in Las Vegas ever wants to hear about an uncashed check, I was paying for the drinks (and expensing them to High Society). We were telling dirty jokes, flirting with the bartenders, talking shit, and getting very fucked-up. “Evel,” I said, “we gotta get you in the magazine. We’ll build you a new Skycycle, you can jump over some girls.”
“If you need anything in Vegas,” Evel told me, “just call me. I’m at the Aladdin, room 1234. You can remember that. If I can remember that, you can. I like you guys.” We drank to that. Quite a few times. Eventually Knievel became so drunk he could no longer sign autographs for the fans who would occasionally get the nerve to approach him—he kept getting stuck on the big “E” in “Evel.” The bartender had to take his pen away. I promised I would call him.
The next day, after a horrifying food frenzy at the Circus Circus buffet, we rented a car and floated it over to the Liberace Museum and then to the Fred G. Sanford Junk Shop, where Redd Foxx was selling tons of his stuff to help pay off the IRS.
It was kind of sad to see him in a storefront selling boxes of crap. I don’t want to get too far into the politics of the IRS and foulmouthed black entertainers, but they really did fuck Foxx, swarming on his house like a SWAT team with a vengeance, in front of television news cameras, with Redd cordoned off and watching helplessly in his underwear. I guess that taught somebody a lesson.
But he was very nice to us, and we walked out with some of the junk that the IRS had passed on—a case of twenty-year-old cans of Redd Foxx hair spray, some absolutely hideous ceramic candleholders in the shape of ducks wearing top hats (from the Foxx living room? I could only imagine what the rest of it looked like), and some Redd Foxx: The Man, The Entertainer paperbacks which he signed for us. Then I called Knievel.
Evel sounded paranoid when he answered the phone. “Who’s this?” he demanded.
“The boys from High Society.”
“Who’s with you?”
“It’s just us . . .”
“Are you sure?”
I didn’t quite know what to make of that. I looked around. I didn’t see anyone. I told him I was sure.
“Call me when you get to the Aladdin. I’ll meet you at the bar downstairs.”
When we got to the bar, we called, as instructed. Again: “Who are you with?” “It’s just us.” “Are you sure?” He told us to wait for him.
The Knievel who appeared was not the same man we were with at the Shark Club. He was wearing a blue oxford shirt and half-moon glasses and looked as though he had aged forty years since the night before. The Operator was with him.
Knievel bellied up to the bar and ordered a Budweiser and a shot of bourbon. “What the fuck are you drinking?” he asked me.
“Just beer. I’m driving.”
“Fuck that. Drink bourbon. I saw you last night, Edison. You’re out of your fucking mind, like me. You’re crazy.”
Me, crazy? This is the guy who tried to jump thirteen double-wheeled buses at Wembley and ended up bouncing about thirty feet in the air. This is the guy who thought he could fly a contraption called a “Skycycle” over a canyon. He had broken his neck more times than Mother Teresa had said the Holy Rosary. I ordered some whiskey.
We pitched Evel our idea for him to write a column for High Society, and he loved it. “Do you know,” he told us shrewdly, “why women with big breasts are stupid? Because it takes so much blood to operate their tits that their brains can’t function properly.” Sure, that made sense. “Listen,” he told us, “I’m not a doctor, but I know plenty of them, so you can believe me.
“And you know what I hate? Actors. You know why? Because that’s all they can do . . . act. What I do is real. Fuck George Hamilton. What does he know about being me? All actors are bullshit. I hate fucking George Hamilton. Fuck him.”
After just a few drinks he was visibly drunk. He was still waving his check around, asking the bartender if he could cash it, and trying to pick up every cocktail waitress in the place. His basic technique was to holler, “Hey, do you wanna sleep with me tonight?” The girls failed to rally around for a Touch of Evel, and it quickly became obvious that he had been hanging around the hotel for a while now, working the same material, and everyone was getting a little tired of his routine.
Pretty soon he insisted that I drive him and the Operator to the Mirage, presumably so he could wave the check around at a fresh audience. I had a few in me, but I was game. I very carefully aimed the rent-a-car down the Strip. Knievel rode shotgun. “It is better,” he proclaimed, paraphrasing Teddy Roosevelt, “to do mighty things and win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure and defeat, than to live in that gray twilight of those poor spirits who enjoy neither victory nor defeat, because they don’t have the balls to try either one.”
I managed to get the car back safely to Circus Circus, and the next day we left for New York. When we called him a few days later to get cracking on his column, he was nowhere to be found, and the women who answered the phone numbers he gave us weren’t all that willing to help us, or him.
In those days Proch and I liked to cruise hotel bars for cute tourist chicks (with a zero percent success rate), and one night we ran into the Operator, who had been nice enough after our Vegas jag to send us some of that Muhammad Ali shoe polish. Now our feet looked just like the Champ’s.
“The boys from High Society!” He grinned. He was happy to see us and invited us to join him for a few rounds. The entire time we were drinking, he was riffling through his little black book and trying to find a date, getting up every few minutes to use the pay phone. He must have called about twenty women. He was striking out miserably and getting increasingly desperate. Finally, he just took us to dinner.
He had a car waiting, and we went to this great soul food restaurant way uptown. The dining room was designed like a basketball court— an all hardwood floor with foul lines and a basket at one end—and there was a small jazz combo playing. We ordered fried chicken, collard greens, candied yams, mac and cheese, and biscuits and gravy, and we drank spiked lemonade in Ball jars.
“Evel is very busy. But he likes you boys,” the Operator reminded us.
“That’s all that matters,” added Proch.
Apparently, Evel was working on another canyon jump, but this time Evel was going to get paid not to do it. People would call a national prayer line and try to convince him to call off the stunt and save his own life. Each call would cost a couple of bucks. Eventually Evel would see the light, and America would be spared the tragedy of another dead hero. It sounded like a good plan. I know I would have called.
“He was never going to make it across the canyon the first
time,” the Operator confessed. “We knew he wouldn’t make it after the prototype failed. But he was supposed to land softly in the middle. The fucked-up thing is that Evel can’t swim. He was terrified he was going to drown.”
Finally the Operator connected with one of his girlfriends. He picked up the check and disappeared into the night, leaving us with our fortified lemonades, dreaming of Snake River and knowing in our hearts that Evel liked us. What else could matter?
8
THOSE TITS ARE TAKING FOOD
OUT OF MY CHILDREN’S MOUTHS!
Life as a Chimp was good. But no matter how much savoir faire I may have shown composing the mot juste to accompany Veronica from Santa Monica, it was still knuckle draggery of the lowest order. And I aspired to walk . . . erect! It probably didn’t help my quest to evolve that I was still wading in the muck and mire of the mat world and freelancing for a handful of wrestling magazines, generally considered the La Brea Tar Pits of the literary landscape.
But that giant lumbering doofus Hulk Hogan kept on selling tickets, and the blats needed writers. In my eyes he was still the human equivalent of Big Bird—outsized, yellow, and dumb as a summer squash. I think the Cookie Monster would have taken him in a fair fight. Hell, Ernie and Bert had more genuine pathos than Hogan—but Hogan had just body slammed Andre the Giant at the Silverdome in Detroit in front of the largest crowd of all time. He wasn’t going anywhere for a while.