I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  When I got the news about him, I felt as though my head was going to split open. How was a twenty-five-year-old acidhead pornographer supposed to parse that sort of drug violence? I cried.

  Everyone who plays with drugs knows there are consequences, from hangovers that can be squashed pretty easily, to the chronic stoner malady of lost keys (my rule has always been that if you are too stoned to find the keys, then good, because you are obviously too stoned to drive), to cocaine psychosis and bad trips. Dave had a helluva ride the night we went to see Black Sabbath and dropped some acid that we had been told was “very mild.” It was not. It was of the brain-scrambling variety, and all those strobe lights flashing in the form of a giant crucifix to the dark grind of “Iron Man” and “Electric Funeral” had been too much for him to handle—for anyone with a central nervous system, really—but he was the only one petrified that we were all going to be punished by God for our heavy metal indulgence. I just laughed my ass off.

  Getting his brain tossed for real, however, was not on the agenda— at least not until he developed a heroin habit and started playing grab-ass with some people who were very serious about their business, and then all bets were off. It was certainly a harsh reality check, but so distant from any lifestyle that I would ever embrace that it did not jar me out of my own bad habits, which were basically full-bore hedonism. There were those mornings when I’d wake up next to my girlfriend in a room littered with empty coke bindles and rolled-up dollar bills, strewn with jazz records and special jellies, and peppered with a seething maelstrom of liquor bottles and spent birth control. But it was all in the name of fun, and so, ultimately, harmless. I am not stupid, but no matter what I saw happening around me, I was still very much convinced of my own immortality. I was crushed by what had happened to my friend, but he was living on another planet, and I wasn’t going there. Eventually I got a call from Dave. He was in good spirits and cracked a joke about Joe Franklin or the Grand Wizard or Liberace—one of our favorite things—but it rang hollow. He didn’t seem quite right. It worried me when he tried to shrug the whole thing off, but then again, maybe he was just being brave. It was hard to tell.

  Back at Smut Central, the locomotive that was my career kept on rolling. I had been promoted to Orangutan and was now editor in chief of Live!

  Live! was originally a Cheri spin-off featuring “live nude girls,” but now the orders from the Lawgiver were to make it more outrageous and go after Hustler.

  I don’t think Hustler was too worried. The jewel of the Flynt Empire, it had a giant staff, infinitely deep pockets, and a mad genius publisher who wanted to push the envelope beyond any established limit and was willing to take a bullet for it. Their photography made Architectural Digest look like a supermarket circular. They had their own soundstage. Even the paper they used made you want to cream. They were, truly, the Industrial Light and Magic of Poon. We were two editors, Proch and I, and one aristocrat of an art director, who, although talented at pasting wide-open beavers into centerfolds, did not want to dally with lowbrow literature like ours, no matter how much fun we were having. He wore tasseled loafers and aspired to work for an ad agency.

  Looking back, our magazine was pretty corny, but it was as good spirited and as well executed as it could have been, given our limited resources. I littered the pages with cartoons and gag panels and really tried to make it a high-energy porn experience. We “discovered” a female recording engineer who insisted on recording bands naked (as usual, we shot everything close); we threw a blue smock and a handlebar mustache on one perplexed staffer, gave him a pair of scissors, and coronated him as the Pussy Barber of Beverly Hills, putting him in a photo shoot and claiming that he “coifed all the quim on the Coast.”

  One innovation I brought to Drake was the use of violator dots on the cover. A “violator dot” is the black dot or box that would cover the naughty bits in an advertisement, anything from boobies to crotch shots or insertion, like the black bars that go over someone’s eyes when you want to hide his identity.

  Traditionally, covers were shot with the models either wearing lingerie or covering their nipples and nether regions. But because they were so contrived, most covers looked static and dull. My idea was to take shots from the regular set, girls all hotted-up and in full repose, and conceal the parts we couldn’t show with starbursts or creative type, so that basically we were putting full nudity on the cover and just being clever about it. We were right on the edge, and my bosses were extremely unsure about the new tack. Although I’m sure my Live! covers had nothing to do with any sort of revolution, these days you see it all the time. It was bound to happen. It’s pretty much the Wild West out there, and you can show just about anything short of a money shot, as long as you Photoshop it to just this side of a crime.

  We also started printing real letters, holding a mirror up to the psychoses of a porn-loving public. Generally speaking, the stuff that came in the mail was more akin to arts and crafts at the state funny farm than anything resembling adult correspondence. We just photocopied it and ran it “as is.”

  The pages looked as if they were lifted from a textbook in abnormal psychology: letters from prisoners written in crayon; lunatic ravings addressed to centerfold girls care of the magazine, almost always featuring a rural route as the return address; incredibly detailed confessions of adoration (“I love the way you cut your nails” . . . “I love the dimples on your toes” . . . “The freckle behind your left knee is making me crazy”); equally detailed expressions of what physical acts the writers might like to perform, along with their precise measurements. Apparently, the men of the Illinois state correctional facility, if they are to be taken at their word, are so massively endowed they should be setting world records left and right. One regular writer began every letter with the declarative “I AM A BLACK MAN!” And there was always a preponderance of mash notes sent from military bases, all of them so less than literate that you’d shudder when considering that this was the United States’ first line of defense.

  For some reason, people like to tear out the pages of the magazine and send them along with their notes. Often, everything from subhuman doodles of penises to gooey marriage proposals is scribbled on the pages with Magic Markers. Sometimes the photos are torn up—there are a lot of broken hearts out there.

  My all-time favorite letter was just a list of one man’s possessions: I got a truck, Ford . . . I got a TV, 26 inches . . . I got a tool belt . . . There was no explanation, just a lonely soul taking inventory. Years later I read this letter over a soundtrack of jungle drums as part of a found-poetry art project.

  But with a skeleton staff and zero budget (we were stuck using everyone else’s leftover girl sets, so no matter what we did, it was always going to look second-rate) and a stifling, self-realized corporate culture that put the kibosh on any risk taking, it was never going to break out and become a big title.

  Every day I went to work, and it was more of the same: Rosenbaum freaking out about some girl he met and soliciting me for lifestyle advice. “Hey, Edison. My balls are sticking to my thigh. Do you think I should switch to boxers?” Ruderman continued prowling the halls, barking non sequiturs: “You call those tits, Mr. Ronson? Those tits are taking food out of the mouths of my children. You can do better.” After work we were at the bar. Every so often something would happen to keep my complacency at bay.

  Like the night I got stabbed in a White Castle.

  The intelligent person will want to know what the hell I was doing in a White Castle in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn at four in the morning, which in 1988 was no safe haven for Ivy League dropouts.

  I was hungry.

  For those somehow not already initiated into the cult of White Castle, allow me to explain. A White Castle is a prefabricated white tile building, the sort of modern architectural wonder that became popular in America after being spotlighted at the 1939 World’s Fair. Except for the low-rent turrets and the blue gothic lettering of the logo, a W
hite Castle looks like a men’s room turned inside out. But within lives a world of culinary pleasure that can be found nowhere else.

  Charles Mingus once said, “If God made anything better, he was saving it for himself.” He wasn’t talking about food, but you get the idea. A White Castle burger is about three square inches of grade-A beef perforated with exactly five holes. White Castle orthodoxy maintains that the holes are for a better-cooked burger and that they actually cost the company more to produce this way. (“The holes are extra!” boasts a classic White Castle promo piece.) This slice of heaven is cooked on an open steam grill, smothered in suet and onions, then nestled into a formfitting square bun, manna, that has also been lurking on the grill, absorbing all the ambient goodness. The result is like a slightly soggy meat petit four. It is poetry written in grease. The double cheeseburger is so exceptional in texture and taste, so hedonistic by any contemporary societal standard, that it should be outlawed. In the Church of Sharky we use them as communion wafers.

  That night, Rhea had dragged me to some lame-o loft party in Bed-Stuy thrown by one of the out-of-luck actresses who worked at her bar. I hadn’t had a chance to have dinner, but I was told there would be food there, and knowing that my girlfriend would never lie to me, I had no reason to worry. When we got there, I was offered some organic carrot sticks.

  That’s the kind of shit that makes me crazy. Come to a party at my house and you are going to be fed—and well: my miniature porcini risotto cakes will make you weep. So unless you are tripping on acid and have mistaken me for a gerbil, do not invite me to your house and offer me a fucking carrot stick. I don’t give a goddam if it was grown by Gandalf the Great on the sunny side of Magic Mountain, don’t do it. At least there was some vodka there, which, in lieu of dinner, I drank like a parched hog.

  By the time these veggie-munching thespians were ready to break up their fruity little fiesta, I was hearing voices in my head. That happens sometimes. In this case they were telling me that there was a White Castle nearby. I was being summoned.

  You cannot ignore that call. I was with Rhea and a friend of hers, and we had hired a car service to get us back to Manhattan. Bed-Stuy was a crazy, dangerous neighborhood, and if you had any concern for your personal well-being, you did not wander there late at night. I implored the driver to find the White Castle with all possible haste.

  The Bed-Stuy Castle lit up the ghetto like a porcelain angel. I hopped out of the car, ran into the restaurant, and got in line before the bulletproof screen that protected the young artist working the spatula. The girls waited in the car. They wanted little to do with this mission, and if they had really been on their game, they would have talked me the fuck out of my quest. Nothing good was going to come out of a drunk white boy trying to score a sack of old-fashioned hamburgers in that neighborhood at that time of night.

  I ordered my food. In those days, I always went with some combination of eight burgers, which, after years of 4:00 a.m. Castle runs, I had established as the Human Vomit Threshold. Eight Castles were the ticket to gastronomic nirvana, but one toke over the HVT and you’d be ralphing in a wire basket and have to start all over from scratch. I believe I went for two double cheeseburgers, two cheeseburgers, and two “Castles,” the basic unit of currency. I did the math again in my head to make sure. Eight. Plus fries, natch. I paid the man and moved to the pickup line.

  My order appeared in a huge paper bag. I grabbed it and was about to trot back out to the car and the ensuing prandial orgy when I was shoved back against the wall, hard. The guy doing the shoving was not fucking around. He had a blade in his hand, now flashing quickly toward my mouth. He jabbed me in the face, catching the bottom of my upper lip and pulling the weapon back, spraying my blood all over both of us. He stuck his hand in my pocket—I was in shock, frozen— grabbed all the money I had on me, about sixty bucks, and pushed his way out through the door.

  I did what anyone would do. I chased him down and punched him as hard as I could in the head with my free hand—in the other I was still holding on to my sack of White Castles, which I had now paid almost seventy dollars for and was not about to give up. He looked at me, confused. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to do that, after all.

  The girls—horrified into sobriety by the sight of a drunk Jew running out of a White Castle, spurting blood like a fountain and pounding Bed-Stuy’s Most Wanted with a series of sloppy roundhouse fists—began screaming holy bloody hell. Rhea’s voice cut through the din in my head. “He’s got a knife!” This was not a fight I was going to win, and I backed off. But hitting him felt good. My money isn’t free.

  The girls were not happy. They took me over to the police station, but there wasn’t a lot to do there. They were never going to catch the crackhead who cut me. I ate one of the double-cheesers, spraying more blood with each bite and doing nothing to help keep the knife wound clean of infection. The girls looked as if they were going to be sick, so I sent them home. There was an ambulance waiting outside, on its way back to the hospital. I needed to be sewn up, and the cops told me in no uncertain terms to get in.

  I took the burgers with me.

  Luckily, most of the damage had been done on the inside of my mouth. I took about fifteen stitches between my gums and top lip, and the doctor did a tremendous job. Years later there is still a decent ridge of scar tissue there, but just a hairline on the outside.

  I made it to work on Monday, in pain and with my face so swollen that you would have thought I was storing golf balls for winter. I looked like a combination of Elvis, circa August 1976, and Screwy Squirrel, circa always. At some point Carmine pulled me aside and told me I should stay out of White Castles in bad neighborhoods. Oh, how I wanted to thank him for that gem, but I kept my mouth shut. It hurt too much to talk, anyway.

  The wisdom of my White Castle run aside, I was still a higher primate, and making the dough (for the time) to prove it: I was up to forty thousand a year now, double the salary I had been hired at two years before, but it was starting to be a grind. The Happiness Boys were burned out, and I was sick of supposedly “senior” editors acting like retards whenever a porn star or stripper came into the office. It was embarrassing. And Proch was drifting, spending all his time writing his own stuff and jamming magazine work in at the last minute, like a kid doing his homework in homeroom. I was told to fire him. It sucked, but it was inevitable. I’d been covering for him out of loyalty to a drinking buddy, but everyone knew he was making little effort. It’s not as if he didn’t see the axe coming, he just didn’t care.

  I was beginning to wonder if this was really what I wanted. I loved my girlfriend, but more and more I felt sucked into the vortex—work, drink, fuck, sleep, repeat. It wasn’t bad, but being “content” is just a nice way to say “dying slowly,” and I was starting to get that wanderlust again.

  The great thing about playing the drums is that you get to hit things with wooden sticks, yet no one yells at you. With some extra dough I made writing Scream Queens, a Celebrity Skin spin-off about topless horror-movie starlets, I bought a new set of drums, silver sparkle Ludwig Super Classics. After work I’d rush home to Harlem to get stoned and bang on them, pretty much what I used to do after school when I was fourteen. It was cheaper than therapy.

  That’s how it went for a while until on an otherwise ordinary day at the shop, scribbling girl copy and trying to distill reason from a photo set of two girls getting it on in a Laundromat, my old pals the Raunch Hands called, with the kind of empathy unique to those of us doomed to sabotage our own lives.

  The Raunch Hands were a proto-garage band of amphetamine-crazy juiceheads who once upon a time had chewed up the competition and seemed headed for great things. I had known them since my first days at NYU. The guitar player, Mike Mariconda, was also an NYU student, and we used to drop acid together and listen to Trout Mask Replica.

  The band got started in 1984 and was quickly signed to a label, but it got caught in the gears of a record-company merger and was dropped befo
re it made the big time. They had their day in the sun with a few good records, crisscrossing the country, and they had even played at Radio City Music Hall. Those days were over, though. Like Ric Flair used to say, “You show me someone with potential and I’ll show you a future champ who’s now working the graveyard shift at 7-Eleven.” But they still drank more, took more speed, and fucked more girls than anyone I had ever known, and they had hung on to a sizable following of like-minded enthusiasts overseas, where quality and charisma tended to trump passing trends.

  They had asked me to join twice in the past two years—they were apparently brutal on drummers—but every time they called, I was still riding the novel confluence of having a girlfriend and a job at the same time. I suppose I should have been grateful—it would be a long time before the stars would line up like that again—but I was getting bored with all that happiness.

  They promised delights that most mortals will only dream of— exotic drugs and super women, Top Secret Action that would make my hijinks in Berlin pale by comparison. It was time to come in from the cold, they told me. We would get right to work on a new album and then go to Japan, where we would be greeted with flagons of rice wine and offered sexual delights previously known only to emperors and kings. Then we would skyrocket across Europe, through France— where the women wore frilly underthings and lived to pleasure touring American musicians—and Spain, where bronze-skinned women yearned for New World pleasures. We would drink our way through Belgium, lay waste to Germany, and smoke everything in Holland. I carefully considered what they had to say. Then I went into Carmine’s office and quit my job.