by Mike Edison
Somehow I convinced my friend Ron that we needed to go see Hogan get gored by “Macho Man” Randy Savage inside a steel cage at Madison Square Garden, and he had bought four tickets—for him and his girl, and me and a date to be named later.
The week before the show, with still no name on my dance card, I went downtown to see local champs the A-Bones play. Their gigs were always a party, and I figured maybe I’d have some luck there. Before the show started, I was bemoaning to their singer Billy Miller that I could not find a young woman to accompany me to the Steel Cage Match, even with its promise of two half-naked men ripping each other’s flesh across four walls of chain-link fence. You could imagine his shock. He offered me this:
“We do a dance contest thing toward the end of the set, and we usually give away a record or something. Why don’t we make it Win a Date with Mike Edison to Go See Wrestling?”
So this was what I had been reduced to: a dive-bar door prize being auctioned off to whichever local tosspot could manage to do the Twist for two minutes and fifty seconds without falling on her ass. Truly, this was the nadir of my romantic life. Had I no pride? I made my outrage clear and protested noisily until Billy bought me off with a couple of beers.
Actually, there were plenty of chicks there, and my prospects looked good. Everyone was drinking and having a good time. It was a distinct possibility that some cute girl could win me and not even know it until it was too late. In fact, I was counting on it.
When it was dance contest time, Billy announced the prize, and while I sheepishly beamed from the side of the stage, every woman in the place fled the dance floor, leaving two brutish guys in leather jackets pumping their fists. To add insult to injury, they weren’t even interested in me, they just wanted to see the cage match. Bastards.
However, an incredibly attractive girl came up to me afterward and said she would love to go see wrestling with me, but there was no way in hell she was going to dance for it.
Rhea was a living doll. She was sass-mouthed and whip smart. She wore her long brown hair in girlish bangs. When I met her, she was wearing a clingy rayon shirt—“the fabric of the future,” she assured me. She worked in a bar and could finish the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. I was bonkers for her. And I was over the moon to have a real girlfriend for a change. It just wasn’t dignified for a professional porn monger to be running around chasing skirt like a horny teenager.
Not to mention that Rhea made a great gun moll. We went to the Jersey Shore on vacation—one night pretending we were a square married couple and staying at a fluffy bed-and-breakfast, and the next, pretending we were married, although not to each other, and staying in a sleazy motel with a water bed and mirrors on the ceiling.
It was a great time to be in New York City with little real responsibility. We got dolled up and went to jazz clubs, slurping dirty martinis until the music was a blur. We got loaded and went to see our friends’ sleazy punk rock bands, invariably winding up in Chinatown at five in the morning, eating razor clams in black bean sauce for breakfast at Wo Hop. We went to see Frank Sinatra at Radio City Music Hall, and he forgot the words to “My Way.” I was starting to get the idea that anything could happen.
The Lismar Lounge on First Avenue was part of an East Village that doesn’t exist anymore. To give you an idea of just how noisome and unholy a place this was, it was the only club GG Allin was actually invited to play twice.
Upstairs was a dark, divy bar and downstairs was an indestructible, musty cave where bands played. Off to one side was another dank room where you could get a little relief from the racket and, if you were drunk enough and willing, wind up making out with a stranger. For the High Times Christmas party, which I had managed to get invited to via my Screw connections, it had been set up with rows of chairs, two by two across, like a commercial jetliner. If you sat down, a pretty girl playing a coffee-tea-or-me flight attendant would bring you a balloon filled with laughing gas.
There was tons of pot being smoked, and probably about half the people there were tripping. Someone offered me a hit of acid, but I thought it would be impolite to accept and not drop it on the spot. To me, that was just common LSD courtesy. As I got to know the extended High Times crew and their stoner sycophants, I realized that a lot of this supposedly sharing family of unreconstructed freaks were just self-centered drug sponges who wouldn’t share the burning embers of a shake-weed roach with you unless they could confirm that there was a bushel of free pot in the next room, and they wouldn’t think it at all gauche to take a few tabs of free party-favor blotter and stuff it in their pockets, wrapped in the cellophane from a cigarette pack, for later.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that High Times always had a lot of terminally unemployed squatter types hovering for a free taste of some centerfold weed, or whatever other holiday treats were being dispensed. Tonight there were space cakes, LSD, magic mushrooms, and joints being tossed around like candy corn on Halloween, plus the nitrous tanks, all of which, when dangled like a carrot, would taunt the deep-seated druggy avarice in even the most mellow stoner.
John Holmstrom was neither greedy nor mellow. John was the founder of Punk magazine, one of the greatest, funniest magazines ever. He was also the executive editor of High Times.
Most people don’t know about the seemingly incongruous blood bond between Punk and High Times, and a lot of that has to do with the more rainbow-hued editors at High Times who were always looking to polarize punks and hippies and rewrite their own history. The truth was that High Times had always embraced punk rock—it was the first national magazine to put the Sex Pistols on the cover. More recently, the magazine had been cast as some sort of One Love Fuck Fest for the retrograde dopers who thought Jerry Garcia was still a relevant force. But John was proof that once upon a time, the Revolution was real.
John started Punk with Legs McNeil in 1976 and was responsible for miles of trendsetting artwork—the great caricature covers, the comics that littered the magazine, and the charismatically hand-lettered interviews that went on for pages, featuring every punk rock superstar (Dead Boys, Ramones, et al.) and proto-punk legend (New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, etc.) extant. Punk was Great and Stupid and Big because the people who created it were having the time of their lives.
The Punk interview style was a complete departure from the false idol worship that dominated the slick rock mags of the day. Punk was transparent. The wall between “star” and “fan” had been torn down, and what was left could be as shrewd as it was gleefully retarded. If the phone rang or the dog ran into the room during the interview, that could make the final cut. Sometimes the interviews were unabashedly confrontational, sometimes they read like pranks, but the coolest bands were always in on the joke. Punk was also keen on shooting outrageous fumetti—photo funnies—the most ambitious and gorgeous being “Mutant Monster Beach Party,” starring Andy Warhol, John Cale, Joey Ramone, Lester Bangs, Debbie Harry, Peter Wolf, and Edith Massey. It was a masterpiece, the very apogee of trash culture and, as such, a thing of great power and beauty.
High Times was founded by Tom Forçade, a big-time pot smuggler who was always more of a radical than a paisley peacenik. “There are only two kinds of dealers,” Forçade used to say. “Those who need fork-lifts and those who don’t.” He fell into the first category.
In 1969 he helped start the Underground Press Syndicate, a left-wing wire service providing news to college and renegade papers that didn’t trust the Establishment media. Forçade had worked with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s and was rumored to be knocking knees with its terrorist wing, the Weathermen. By 1970 he emerged as a Yippie.
The Yippies knew well that “if you threw a brick at a politician, you would be put in jail, but if you threw a pie at him, you would be put on the evening news.” Forçade made the news in 1970 when he testified on behalf of the Underground Press Syndicate before a congressional commission on pornography. Dressed as a priest with a wide-brimmed Quaker top
hat (one of his favorite gimmicks), he accused the commission of running “a blatant McCarthyesque witch hunt.” When one bureaucrat objected, Forçade let loose “the only obscenity is censorship!” and nailed him with a cream pie.
Forçade often said that he “never met a drug he didn’t like,” but he loved marijuana. He started High Times in 1974 with twelve thousand dollars made from a smuggling run, and in no time they were selling hundreds of thousands of issues a month, all the more romantic since he was running the operation out of a secret flophouse while avoiding a subpoena in a drug case.
High Times was unabashedly based on Playboy, right down to the Boy-oh-Boy centerfold. Like Hefner, whom he admired, Forçade had found an audience that shared his new-world outlook and was clamoring for attention. High Times was the fast train to a hip and hedonistic lifestyle. An infamous paranoiac who imagined CIA plots swirling around him—and in reality, the FBI had been keeping tabs on him for years—Forçade also suffered from severe bipolar disorder and profound seasonal mood swings. His demons would eventually become more than he could bear, and in 1979 he took his own life.
Part of Forçade’s genius was that—contrary to the strident hippies who surrounded him—he identified punk rock as a significant youth movement. Despite vociferous protests from staffers, High Times put Johnny Rotten on the cover. The same issue featured an editorial by Patti Smith. A few years later, after Forçade’s death, Joey Ramone joined the fray with his own opinion page.
So the legend goes, Tom came into the Punk office, put his big ol’ cowboy boots up on Holmstrom’s desk, and drawled in his radical twang, “Son, how’d you like to be famous?” In short shrift John found himself on a plane to Atlanta to see the Sex Pistols.
The Pistols U.S. tour was a disaster, yet it wouldn’t have worked any other way. Avoiding music and media capitals New York and Los Angeles for hostile redneck bars in Oklahoma and Texas—where they played under a hail of bottles flung by redneck shit-kickers come to stomp the punk menace—they finally self-destructed at the San Francisco hippie palace Winterland, in what is often cited as the worst rock concert in history. During the tour, Forçade was alternately rumored to have kidnapped Sid Vicious or simply to have lured him away with the promise of a Big Bag of Smack so Forçade could use him as a bargaining chip for a film of the tour he was planning to make. John wrote the Sex Pistols tour story for Punk, which Forçade would continue to back with money he was hauling in from High Times.
I was a huge fan of Punk, and I was still under the spell of High Times, cast back in my hazy adolescence. As a longtime student of the lifestyle they promoted, I was exceedingly interested in joining their organization.
You cannot imagine how flattered I was when Holmstrom recognized me from my photo in Main Event! He was a huge wrestling fan and was into my whole “bad-guy editor” shtick. We immediately agreed that I should write a column for High Times.
Although I hadn’t gotten into the porn racket to position myself as any kind of literary outlaw, it made perfect sense to me that if I was in the skin trade, writing for a dope magazine was not going to hurt any cachet that I might have been cultivating as a New Bohemian Action Journalist.
Now I was on the drug beat. My column was called Shoot the Tube, a free-form affair about politics and television. I loved writing it, loved working with John, loved stopping by the High Times office and getting stoned with the editors (except John, who wasn’t a pothead). It all felt so illicit.
John illustrated one of my first columns, a riff on a presidential address about (what else?) the drug plague threatening our children. As evidence that no one was safe, George Bush (the First) had brought with him a bag of crack cocaine that was purchased just blocks from Capitol Hill. He held it up for the cameras, his face twisted into a horrible WASPy scowl that said “I smell poo.” I suppose the nation at large was horrified, but I thought it was the most idiotic thing I had ever seen. If he had really wanted to score some coke that badly, surely someone in the White House could have hooked him up.
The conceit of the story was that I was watching Bush’s show-and-tell in a bar with an old wrestler pal who was now retired and considering going into politics—a scenario that turned out to be prophetic when Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota. (N.B.: He was big on feather boas and glitter, too, and it didn’t seem to hurt his career.) To illustrate the story, John drew a terrific comic of me slugging mugs of beer with my imaginary rassling friend, with the president on TV in the background. The guy who did the Ramones’ covers was now drawing pictures of me! And in a magazine I used to have to hide from my parents! My star was definitely rising, although it was of such a pathetically low wattage that no one else seemed to notice.
I made some mistakes when I first started writing for High Times. Early on I declared, “the Simpsons are not funny.” It was after their first Christmas pilot, which, I think we can all agree, did not even hint at what the show would become within a few seasons. Now I’m as big a fan as anyone, but the early shows were so clunky they couldn’t even qualify as diamonds in the rough. I mean, really, the series didn’t fully take off until the animation tightened up and they stopped writing Bart as cute-stuff on a skateboard and Homer grew into his role as the Great God of Duff-Powered Dysfunction instead of just aping Walter Matthau.
Okay, so I fucked up. I’m still eating that one.
One of the columns I was most proud of was about Dan Rather, who, early on in his career, arranged to be shot up with heroin in a Texas cop house for a story he was working on, so he would know what it felt like to be high on dope when he was writing about it. In an interview with Ladies’ Home Journal, he confirmed the experience and added somewhat cryptically, “I can say to you with confidence, I know a fair amount about LSD.”
Well, I went to town with that and encouraged all journalists who wrote about the dangers of drugs to go out and get wasted on the subject matter of their choice. I figured they just might like it, and change their tune.
After the column came out, High Times got a call from a syndicated call-in radio show who wanted to have me as a guest. It was the beginning of my career as a media whore. I did the show on the phone, and it was broadcast nationwide. I figured they were impressed with my courageous style of offbeat reportage and wanted to congratulate me on my brave point of view. Of course, when I got on the radio, I was attacked mercilessly as the scourge of youth, a devil worshipper, and one caller accused me of killing his daughter, who had died of an overdose. It was brutal, but I learned one more important lesson: always be prepared, write your sound bites ahead of time, and stay on point. When the Republicans figured that out, they began to dominate American politics.
The phone rang and it was bad news. Dave Insurgent was in the hospital. He had been beaten, savagely, after a drug deal gone wrong. They clobbered him with a bat. He was in bad shape.
I had not seen Dave in a while, not since we had worked on another student film together. Maybe it had been a year. But that was normal— we’d go great lengths of time with only the occasional phone call to discuss the homeless person claiming to be a child star who was featured as a guest on The Joe Franklin Show that night.
Dave was taking a film class at the New School in Greenwich Village, and he was intent on capturing his vision of a modern-day Babylon run by a right-wing government, depicting religion as pure crowd control—a loosely hewn spin-off of the ideologies he had been spouting with Reagan Youth. I was cast as Satan, manifest as a riot cop. I had a truncheon, a crash helmet, even a plastic shield. High-quality stuff. I have to admit it was fun to wear, especially when he had me beating up on Birkenstocked pacifist protesters. We filmed in a vacant lot on Avenue C. The old Hispanic ladies, watching la policía beat up a longhair, were not amused, and they yelled at us the entire time.
The costumes were an extension of Dave’s new fetish for ridiculous stage gear. After two terms of Reagan, he had changed the name of his band to House of God, and carrying on in his overblown, i
ronic bombast (predating Spinal Tap by years), he began wearing supremely expensive stage costumes bought at a religious supply store. Where he once goose-stepped, he now offered benedictions over the mosh pit, dressed like the pope, with a three-foot-tall miter and gold-adorned robes. He looked like a cross between an extra in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and a seriously misguided heavy metal star. Pushing the gag over the top, he insisted on writing absurdly pompous, multipart songs, like “In the Beginning (Parts I, II, and III),” ostensibly designed to mock seventies prog rock excess, although I have a sneaking suspicion he really enjoyed it for its own sake. Whatever the case, it was a wildly costly joke that very few people besides Dave would ever understand. I thought it was hilarious, but it would probably have been enough for us to get stoned and talk about it. Bringing it to the stage in front of an audience of perplexed punk rockers who wanted to hear Reagan Youth songs may have been taking it too far. But that’s one thing I loved about Dave. He was certain of what he thought was funny.
Unfortunately, some very ugly drug dealers did not share Dave’s sense of humor, and they had left him for dead. Somewhere along the line he had developed a nasty heroin habit. I knew that he was snorting junk sometimes, I knew a lot of people who did, but I never saw him strung out.
Dave was also dealing, moving large quantities of weed. Those papal vestments didn’t grow on trees, after all. However, he was a lousy drug dealer, and, breaking one of the cardinal rules of the game, was doing the drugs he was supposed to be peddling. To make matters worse, he had copped a completely cavalier attitude toward his suppliers, allegedly telling them “you’ll get paid when you get paid”—a recipe for disaster. Dave was in the hospital for weeks. After that he moved back with his folks to recuperate. This was a far cry from the relative bliss of Dave’s Disco Bar.