I Have Fun Everywhere I Go
Page 16
We were in love with Spain. Every night the parties just got better and better. The food was spectacular. Drugs seemed to fall from the sky. Everyone was warm and friendly. The women were drop-dead gorgeous. Mariconda suggested that we move there. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
10
FIRST-TIME LESBIAN
HOUSEWIFE CONFESSIONS
The decision to relocate to Spain was never debated. We were going. Resistance was futile. We had no idea where we would live or if we could actually make a living playing music. One fact was irrefutable: none of us spoke Spanish. And yet, caught up in the whirl of undying optimism that somehow rock ’n’ roll would solve all of our problems, none of this mattered. According to Mariconda’s master plan, when the Raunch Hands got back to New York from this tour, we’d get right back in the studio to make the next record, and then we’d get back on the road to support it. And then, like Christopher Columbus through the looking glass, when we landed in Madrid, we would park the van and colonize. I am sure that if we had stopped to think about it for more than ten seconds, we never would have left New York.
The title of our new record, Fuck Me Stupid, was inspired by the Billy Wilder film Kiss Me, Stupid, starring Dean Martin as himself. A thinly veiled avalanche of double entendres wrapped around the story of a prostitute and two mentally ill songwriters, when it was released in 1964, it was decried as the filthiest movie of all time. Christian groups and decency fascists worked hard to shut it down, and Wilder came close to being run out of town on a rail. Along with The Big Combo, an overheated noir about a hate-filled mob boss, and the first twenty minutes of Full Metal Jacket, which we understood to be a primer on how to deal with saxophone players, it was our favorite.
The cover of Fuck Me Stupid was built around a piñata that we had stuffed copiously with drugs and booze—dozens of trumpet-shaped joints, plastic mini-Baggies stuffed with white powder, and lots of tiny liquor bottles, the kind you get on airplanes.
It was a ridiculously expensive prop. We blindfolded our sexbomb of a model and told her to have at it with a baseball bat. Wally Wang took the photos. On the back cover of the record the piñata is shown busted open, the contraband spilling out of its guts. Things were looking good. We were ready to move.
And then George the Bass Player began speaking in riddles. “Do you really think this is such a good idea? What are we going to do when we get there? Where will we live? How will we make money?” It was as if George had been Born Again and had accepted Common Sense as his Savior. Somehow, somewhere, he had gotten it into his head this crazy notion that sending a band of druggy boozehounds to the capital of European nightlife armed only with their sodden wits and some battered musical gear might not be the most sovereign plan on the table. The rest of us were baffled. Why would he even think about looking over the edge of the cliff before leaping? That was not how we did things. But his mind was made up; he was not going to move to another country on a whim. He would do the tour, and then he was going back home.
What had happened was that George had gone and got himself married—to Tomoko, the bass player of the Supersnazz—whom he had been pursuing since our tour of Japan.
I have no idea how George managed to import Tomoko to New York. She was as sweet as pie, but the language barrier was fraught with crater-size deficits. I can only guess that they spoke some sort of secret bass player’s jive to each other, developed after years of wondering why their guitars had only four strings.
That summer in New York was a blur of drugs, whirlwind romance, and first-time lesbian housewife confessions, the last of which I was scribbling for my old colleagues at Drake to help make ends meet.
You can imagine the setups: the ladies had the notion to take sexy pictures of each other to give to their husbands for Valentine’s Day, but once they slipped into the lingerie, well, one thing led to the next, and before you knew it, the tickle fight was on. Or the girls got together one afternoon to look at the porn videos their husbands thought were secret. “What do they see in this stuff anyway?” By the time they got through the first bottle of Chardonnay, they had discovered a whole new side to themselves. And so on.
When I wasn’t fabulizing tales of desperate housewives’ girl-on-girl action, I was babysitting Party Horse, who had just broken up with his girlfriend and whose remedy for everything was to snort ten Cadillacs’ worth of blow.
Party Horse was a Wall Street dropout who had made scads of dough and was now on permanent vacation. He was one of us, but on a bigger budget. Given his endless supply of funds, we hit the danger zone pretty quickly. He’d drop a couple of eight balls on the kitchen counter and we’d be off to the races.
I always won the Who Can Stay Awake the Longest contest, but after seventy-two hours it was a joke. By that time our conversations had deteriorated into a swamp of cokehead neologisms:
ME: Squee bop.
PARTY HORSE: Squiddly boodly bop.
ME: Spivity spiva wang?
PARTY HORSE: Ugga bugga!
It was Party Horse’s idea to fly George and Tomoko to Las Vegas to get married. We were hanging out with them at Flannery’s bar on Fourteenth Street, Friday night around closing time, 4:00 a.m. Tomoko was heading back to Tokyo that Sunday. She had been in New York for a few months now, and Party Horse wanted to know why they hadn’t got married while she was here. George shrugged and said they couldn’t find a good deal to Las Vegas. I don’t know how serious he was, but when I saw the light go off over Party Horse’s head, I knew we were in trouble.
“Let’s go right now. Let’s get you guys married. I’ll take care of everything. It’ll be my wedding present to you. I’ll get on the phone, and we’ll be on the next flight. Tomoko, what airport is your flight leaving from Sunday, and what time do you have to be there?”
I have no idea how George explained this harebrained scheme to Tomoko, but before I knew it, they were in a cab to Brooklyn, back to his place to pack her stuff quickly. She was going to make the return flight from Vegas to New York to Tokyo without going back to George’s apartment.
Somehow we all met at the ticket counter at JFK, Party Horse waving his Amex card around like a magic wand, and were on a plane to Vegas in about an hour.
When we landed, we got a room at the Flamingo, and I got out the phone book and found the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel. They were booked that afternoon until three o’clock. We took the first open slot and were instructed to stop on the way at city hall to get the marriage license.
While we waited for George and Tomoko to take care of business, which took about fifteen seconds, I read the Nevada state wedding regulations. I was glad to see that people under the age of sixteen who wanted to get married needed a note from their parents. There should have been one about requiring more than thirty seconds’ notice before flying across the country to get spliced in an insane last-minute wedding funded by a lunatic millionaire who had been awake for three days, wired on dummy dust, and half drowned in gin and beer.
The Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel looked like the mutated off-spring of a Baptist church and a House of Pancakes welded onto a drive-thru hamburger joint. When we got there, there was a ceremony in progress. A large Hispanic family (“large” in both senses—there were many of them, and they were conspicuously obese) was celebrating the nuptials of someone’s daughter. It was all very strange. I didn’t take them for Elvis fans—all the women were wearing shiny off-the-rack bridesmaids’ dresses with puffy sleeves, and the men were wearing powder blue tuxedos. Except for the Elvis impersonator, also conspicuously overweight, it looked like a normal wedding, unless of course they were practicing a level of self-conscious irony too subtle for me to detect. In a town of Quickie-Mart weddings, I had no idea why they chose this place. Maybe it was the bargain rates. Maybe they just wanted a fat singer who wouldn’t make the bride self-conscious about her own expansive figure.
When it was our turn, we consulted with the minister about what kind of wedding would be best for Ge
orge and Tomoko.
“Our Basic Wedding is fifty dollars,” the minister explained. “The Elvis Wedding is another fifty, and that is what most people go for.”
“What does the Elvis wedding include?”
“Well, Elvis here,” he said, motioning to the tub in the white jumpsuit who was sitting on a bench reading a take-out menu, “will sing you three songs of your choice.”
Party Horse was having none of it. “For twenty bucks couldn’t he just take some Darvon and leave us alone?”
The minister didn’t laugh. “You’ll need rings,” he said, clearing his throat. “These are our top-of-the line. They’re twenty-five dollars each, and I think you will agree that they are very weddinglike.” We agreed. They were very weddinglike. “They usually last a few years, and then you can get new ones.” We took two.
I made some noise about being an ordained minister myself—back in the better days at Drake, Proch and I had been ordained by the Ministry of Salvation Church, Inc., a mail-order ministry that charged five bucks for a divinity degree—figuring I should somehow help officiate the proceedings. The minister shut me down, and fast. “What, are you a rabbi?” Mutherfucker had me nailed. And there was no way he was going to share his gig. “Do you have a license in the state of Nevada?” he asked me, solicitously. We both knew the answer. “No? What a shame. You can watch.”
So there we were, Tomoko in a miniskirt and T-shirt, George in a Schott Perfecto leather jacket, motorcycle boots (his dress boots, I suppose), and baseball cap, with Party Horse and me standing behind them to witness this Holy Union.
The preacher went on about the blessings of matrimony and then asked George and Tomoko to face each other and hold hands while Leo sang a song.
Leo was the black guy you got if you didn’t want to cough up the dough for Elvis. He was at the back of the chapel, sitting behind a cheap Casio keyboard that was propped up on a wood-veneer stand to make it look like a real organ.
“Some say love, it is an ocean . . .”
When Leo began warbling “The Rose,” something snapped. I couldn’t help it, I started laughing uncontrollably.
Usually I cry at weddings. It’s true. I am very sentimental. I will weep openly at a particularly moving long-distance commercial. Grand Displays of True Love always get me choked up. But Leo had gone too far. I had the same reaction to him that Ted Nugent had the first time he heard reggae: my brain just rejected it.
I could see George shaking, trying not to start laughing, too. Forget about Party Horse; he looked as if he was about to shit his pants. He was turning beet red, and white, coke-flaked snot was dripping out of his nose. Poor Tomoko. I am sure that as a little girl growing up in the Japanese countryside, she did not picture her wedding day this way. Come to think of it, I am not even sure she knew she was getting married, at least not for real. One second she was in New York, the next she was watching Party Horse haggle with a fat hillbilly and having Leo serenade her with Bette Midler’s greatest hits.
At some point the minister pronounced them man and wife and we got the hell out of there and headed back up to the Strip to celebrate. We went to the Mirage, the last place I had seen Evel Knievel, and knocked back a few sugary frozen drinks in what had to be the most disappointing wedding reception since Butcher Vachon’s new bride got clobbered with a cream pie on Vince McMahon’s talk show. Actually, that was the honeymoon, too, since the newlyweds had to be back at the airport in a couple of hours to get Tomoko back to New York so she wouldn’t miss her flight to Japan. It was all so horribly romantic that I went back to the hotel and puked.
After a summer doing research with Party Horse for a thesis on Toxicology and Sleep Deprivation in Humans, I needed to get back on the road with the Raunch Hands, just to calm down. This was the trip that was going to land us in Spain, and spirits were running high.
Thankfully we had jettisoned Dan the sax player and had hired Pete “The Other White Meat” Linzell for blowing duty. I love Pete. He’s a bit of a pastry puff, soft around the middle and always the last guy in the van, but he plays ace saxophone and has a great stage persona, laying back until it’s his time to shine, and even then, he never tries to up-stage the singer. Everyone really liked working with him.
We were lucky to have a day off in Paris, and Pete and I were staying with a girl we knew who wanted to take us around and show us the sights a little bit. Pete wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. Not my first choice for a day off in Paris, but I let them talk me into it, and I ended up having a really good time. The Eiffel Tower, by the way, is brown. I think everyone expects it to be silver or gold, like the pencil sharpener your aunt brought you back from Paris when you were in sixth grade, but it is painted a decidedly fudgy-looking brown. Someone ought to write them a letter.
While we were there, Pete bought a black souvenir baseball cap with Paris written on it in Day-Glo pink script. The i was a little Eiffel Tower. It was without a doubt the gayest thing I had ever seen in my life, and Pete’s shit-eating grin wasn’t making it any more palatable. “Wait’ll Mariconda sees this.” He beamed.
“Pete,” I warned him, “Mariconda sent the last sax player home in tears.”
And sure enough, there was steam coming out of Mariconda’s ears when Pete wore it onstage and refused to take it off. Chandler, taking a page from the Dave Insurgent playbook, declared it “harder than hard.” It was nice to see a sax player who could razz the guitar player, especially since in the tough-guy department he was more like a Hershey bar than a crowbar. That took some balls.
It was another great tour, forty-five shows in seven countries in fifty-five days. At some point our drug collection had sprawled out of control and we were holding a baggie filled with fistfuls of multicolored, unidentifiable pills. Clearly, these were the uppers, downers, screamers, and laughers that had destroyed the best minds of our generation, but which was which? There was only one way to tell. Mariconda and I began some research of our own. By the end of the tour I felt like one of the “replicants” in Blade Runner. A month later, when someone asked me how the tour was, all I could do was intone, like Rutger Hauer at the end of the film, a moment before his brain finally stops functioning, “I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”
After the last gig in Hamburg, the three Spain-bound Mikes raced off. Mariconda was off to Holland to produce some band or another, and Chandler was going back to Paris to rendezvous with his new girlfriend, a huge-breasted dental assistant who was undeniably attractive but who would turn out to have the soul of a dragon—even her mother called her La Gatita Mala, “the Bad Kitten.” I was also going to stop in France for a few days, to take this year’s version of the Edison Cure, hosted by the Charming Promoter Girl, who lived in the southeast of France, not far from Perigueux. After our various adventures, we would reunite in Madrid and begin The Next Phase.
The Charming Promoter Girl lived in a little village perched on a steep hill, surrounded by a six-hundred-year-old wall. It was like a fairy tale. “You must come to visit me,” she had insisted. “My little town is so sad.” It’s true, there was nothing happening there, which is why she got into promoting rock shows a few towns over, where there were enough young people to make a go of it. But where she lived was perfectly isolated and calm. It may have been lonely living there, but I think she liked the dark romance of medieval melancholia. She would put on a gig a couple of times a month and spend the rest of the time reading comic books and tending to the garden behind her little house that lived in the shadows of knights and castles. She was as petite as she was charming, but the night we met, she saved me from getting my ass kicked by a drunk who had been getting in my face after a gig. It was some asshole who had too much to drink, trying to be a Big Man and fuck with the band—I reckon there’s not much else for the Huguenots to do these days—and I tried to walk away. But there was no easy escape, as the bar was crowded and he was determined to knock my block off. The Charming Promoter Girl just sidled between us and, using some so
rt of feminine magic, dismissed him. And then she took me home with her.
It was a good place to take the Cure. It seemed to be raining all the time, and everything shimmered with storybook antiquity. Every day we walked down the hill to have lunch in a stone bistro. We ate roughhewn country pâté and thick onion soup with confit du carnard and drank hearty red table wine. Then we’d climb back up the hill and through the wall, explore the ruins, take a hot bath, and spend the evenings cooking and snuggling in front of a fire while listening to the Duke Ellington cassettes I had been storing at the bottom of my bag for use as an end-of-tour brain salve. Like a lot of French intellectuals, she was enchanted by American detective novels from the 1940s, so one day we took a trip to a decent bookstore and I showed her my favorites. After a week I no longer felt like an android in a science fiction movie.
When I got to Madrid, job one was to find an apartment and then figure out how to pay for it. I had about a thousand U.S. dollars in my pocket.
For the first few nights I crashed at various Pleasure Fuckers’ houses in the center of town in a neighborhood called Malasaña. (The name sounds pretty grim—mala means “bad” in Spanish—but it is actually named after Manuela Malasaña, a teenage heroine in the Spanish uprising against Napoleon’s troops in 1808.)