by Mike Edison
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A few weeks after I got the news about GG, the phone started ringing ominously again. Dave Insurgent had committed suicide, just days after his girlfriend was murdered and his father had killed his mother in a freak accident. It was too crazy. None of it made any sense. I wept like a baby.
It was summer in Madrid, and hot. Most of Spain, including the other Pleasure Fuckers, had taken off for vacation. Without a lot of money to travel or a family with a beach house to crash in, I was sweating it out in the city. It wasn’t so bad—at least it was quiet. But that also meant that there was no one around to whom I could eulogize my friend. So I got drunk by myself on the cheap Spanish brandy that had been haunting the back of the cupboard. It was a hangover in a bottle, a bad mistake, but it got me through the night.
Since he had gotten out of the hospital after taking that beating, Dave had not been quite the same. I hardly ever saw him. I bumped into him a couple of times, but he was always in a rush. He’d still call occasionally to tell me to turn on the TV to check out The Joe Franklin Show that night, and we’d have an entirely unironic laugh about how hard Joe was and make plans to hang out, but never would.
After he recuperated at home with his parents, Dave had started using drugs again. For a while he was trying to make a go of it with his new band House of God, but Reagan Youth fans weren’t that eager to sign on to his confused attempt at ironic hard rock and hippie heavy metal. He was a believer, though, always a believer, and he followed his own star. I thought he had gone off the deep end with the new band, but I had to respect him for being true to whatever muse he was chasing, even if it was hopelessly naïve. Dave’s newfound love of the Grateful Dead was a recipe for punk rock disaster, but he never gave up trying to foment an awakening. He wanted to jar the country out of its apolitical slumber, yet in his own state of druggy free fall, he forgot why the first attempts at Hippie Takeover had failed: drugs ask great questions but don’t necessarily provide a lot of answers. Even tripping on Owsley’s finest, Revolution takes a lot of work, a virtue for which most idealistic hippies, or punks, will never be famous.
But it wasn’t Dave’s trippy idealism that did him in—the plain fact was that he had become a stone-cold junkie.
He was a nice Jewish boy with parents who doted on him and struggled to make sure that he had every advantage they had been stripped of by the Second World War. His father, Ronald Rubinstein, had grown up a fairly well-off Jew in Poland who would spend summers in Vienna visiting relatives. He was able to escape the Nazis, but heading east instead of west, he was snagged by the Russians and found himself toiling in a labor camp until the end of the war. Not knowing who in his family had survived, he then traveled to Palestine—what would soon become Israel—to be with other displaced Jews. It was there he learned that some of his cousins had made it to America.
In New York, Dave’s dad focused on reclaiming the good life he had enjoyed growing up in Poland. He had a job as a lithographer for The New York Times and later owned an antique shop in Manhattan. He didn’t get married until his late forties, when on a trip to Israel, he met Giza, also in her forties. They moved to New York, tied the knot right away, and had their only son.
By the time Dave was a teenager, his parents were nearing sixty, blowing any normal generation gap ridiculously out of proportion. They were more like grandparents, and Dave’s friends used to make fun of Ronald for wearing Bermuda shorts with black socks and garters.
Where Ronald and Giza saw the Holocaust and their experience as an inspiration to work hard, and to provide their son with a good education and every opportunity that America offered, Dave saw their values as just so much middle-class bullshit—no matter what the cause, his parents had been conditioned to think that way, programmed by Big Brother, brainwashed.
After his recuperation, Dave had apparently enjoyed enough teenage rebellion to last a lifetime and had reconciled with his folks. But he couldn’t stay off dope, and he began dating Tiffany B., a twenty-two-year-old prostitute from Louisiana who would turn tricks to keep them in drugs. He told his friends that he was happier than he had been in a long time. He was crazy about Tiffany. She didn’t judge him. She was great in bed.
One night Dave and Tiffany were hanging out on Allen Street. She was looking for a quickie so they could get some money to score some junk. She got in the car with a john who was cruising the block, and they took off. When she didn’t come back, Dave called the cops. They told him to get lost. A few days later the driver was pulled over because his rear license plates were dangling. Tiffany’s body was in the trunk. The John was Joel Rifkin, and Tiffany was his seventeenth and final victim.
As if this wasn’t unthinkable enough, two weeks later, Dave’s dad ran over his mother with his car. He was backing out of the driveway. She was bent over, pulling some weeds out of the sidewalk, and he didn’t see her. She died in the hospital that same day.
Friends who saw Dave at his mother’s funeral say that he was in agony and would not leave his mother’s side, even when the casket was lowered into the ground. One person said that Dave wanted to jump in with her.
It was another two weeks later when Dave, worn down by years of drug abuse and unable to cope with the loss of the two women who loved him unconditionally, ate a bottle of sleeping pills. He was buried next to his mother.
Jewish law prohibits suicides from being buried in sacred ground, but Dave’s death was called an accidental overdose. Allegedly he left a note, but his father refused to read or acknowledge it. There is no doubt in the mind of anyone who knew Dave at the time that he took his own life.
When I eventually got all the details of Dave’s death and the events leading up to it, I felt as if someone had sucked all the air out of my lungs. GG’s and Dave’s deaths both made me deeply homesick for New York—suddenly I felt very detached from my old reality. I didn’t even know whom to call about Dave. By the time I got the first call, he would have been in the ground. I didn’t know anyone in his close circle anymore; since college, our friendship had existed in its own space.
I cried and drank and paced and wondered what to make of all this. Was there blame to be handed out?
Fuck. GG was a smart guy, and he had a death wish. Dave was an intelligent man, trying to liberate the masses, but he needed help, he was an addict. Still, he must have known that fucking around with heroin dealers was not a wise career move. Having his head caved in should have been fair warning.
What a colossal waste. Dave and I were the same age, our birthdays only a month apart. I suppose his death should have made me confront my own mortality, but I believe we control our own destinies. I finished the bottle of brandy instead and woke up in a heap.
I mourned deeply and quietly, and I said a prayer for my friend. Sometimes when I see Joe Franklin on TV, I get a little misty. Everyone just assumes that I’m nuts.
Living in Spain is a powerful balm. The days slink by punctuated by the baited semicolons of long siestas and the open ellipses of endless marcha, and after a while I was able to put Dave’s story into a place where I felt I could guard his memory and still remain “liberated,” as he would have said. Dave would have been the first one to rail against knee-jerk reactions to cautionary drug stories, and I was with him all the way.
For my birthday party that year, I re-created the piñata from the cover of the Raunch Hands album. I found a toy store that had a bunny-head piñata and loaded it up with hash joints, mini-bottles of booze, and some of Malasaña’s finest marching powder, along with the kind of crap one usually finds in a piñata: toys, candy, squirt guns, confetti, etc. When it was busted open, about twenty people dove head-first in a pile to retrieve the goodies. It was silly and celebratory, and it was the best thirtieth birthday party a fellow could ever have.
I had also finally gotten a good handle on my Spanish and didn’t feel so much like an outsider.
The best way to learn a language, of course, is in bed, and I was lucky to have met a drea
mboat of a girl who didn’t speak a lick of English.
I didn’t quite catch it the first time she said “quítame mi sujetador”—it means “take off my bra”—but I didn’t have to be asked “¿Tienes un profiláctico?” twice before I was knocking over the bottle of wine on the night table, scuttling for the condoms. I was well on my way.
Unfortunately, once I got to prattling, she dumped me in a hurry. After many happy months of pillow talk that consisted mostly of pointing and smiling, when we actually started speaking, she discovered that we had absolutely nothing in common and gave me the high hat.
For a while I dated a Latin professor who had a fetish for the Ramones. She taught by day and punk rocked at night. She was like a superhero. We used to play Scrabble in Spanish, which was perfect for me because there was no shame in losing. Naturally, when I finally won a game (just lucky—I pulled oxígeno on the first turn), I got to gloat to all the citizens of Malasaña the glory of my victory, the Greatest Upset in Scrabble History.
After that I hooked up with a twenty-year-old stunner of a heavy metal chick who had a thing for Americans, but after busting me for listening to Frank Sinatra, she tossed me for a long-haired punk with a nose ring and full-sleeve tattoos.
Meanwhile, Mariconda had met a totally sweet, normal girl, Susana, whom he had every intention of marrying. He was more centered than I had ever seen him.
Chandler had reappeared, still under the dark shadows of profound alcoholism and La Gatita Mala, and was planning to move back to New York to make a go of it and marry her. Later, sadly, it would become clear that she was just riding him for entrée to the States, but that would still make three married Raunch Hands. And me. Damn. I thought I was the catch in this bunch.
In lieu of holiday romance, Party Horse had come to visit me for Christmas and we had jetted off to Morocco on another spur-of-the-moment adventure.
We were sitting in the Agapo getting hammered. It was late. The sun was threatening to come up, and in the midst of some drunken shit talk he declared that we were “going to Fez to get a fez.”
“You have your passport and sunglasses?” He was in fine form. “Good. That’s all you need. Let’s go to the airport.” And off we went. Africa, after all, was only an hour away.
A fez, of course, is the lid of choice for your Freemason, Shriner, or retro lounge act. Jeff and Akbar from Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic always wore fezzes. It was an important part of my shtick, as well. After all, the Grand Wizard of Wrestling, not to mention Sun Ra, was quite fond of them.
Fez, the city, where the hat obviously comes from, is in the heart of Morocco, well off the beaten path. Tourists go to Marrakech, a hippie mecca, and Casablanca, a resort that flourishes in the cinematic glow of Humphrey Bogart. It seems like the only westerners who go to Fez are on assignment for the National Geographic Society.
The old part of Fez is the medina, a walled city built in the eighth century. Inside the walls are shops and businesses and palaces and mosques, all spiraling upward in a gorgeous, towering cochlea of Arab culture. The streets are only a few feet wide and, without a guide, impossible to navigate. They say it is the largest contiguous car-free area in the world. But if you are not careful, you can be run over by a goat.
We flew to Tangier, at the northern tip of Morocco, where, it’s true, everyone works for the CIA and speaks eleven languages. There was no way we were going to be able to find our way across northern Africa on our own, so we took the advice in the guidebook I bought at the airport and hired a driver to take us on our hundred-and-eighty-mile journey to buy some sporty headgear.
We were about twenty miles outside of Fez when we got pulled over by some sort of highway control who wanted to see our papers. Not content with American passports, they took a peek in the trunk, where we had stashed our battery of duty-free liquor. When we left Spain, we didn’t know much about Moroccan culture, but we were betting we weren’t going to be served any cocktails in the heart of a Muslim country. We bet right. Four bottles of vodka lighter, the highway cops let us continue on our way. The driver just shrugged. That was the cost of traveling on the king’s roads.
The next day, we entered the medina with a hired guide who took us to an old, bearded vendor to buy our fezzes, a couple of maroon-colored numbers with swanky tassels. At this point Party Horse declared unceremoniously that we had gotten what we had come for and that now we had to leave.
Somehow we managed to rent a car, a 1950s Renault with the gearshift built into the dashboard, and got back on the road, heading for Tangier. Having conquered the medina, we were filled with just so much self-confidence.
This time there were no larcenous cops to check our papers, probably a good thing, since we had nothing to buy them off with except our sunglasses and a couple of funny hats. After a few hours of driving through the green, sprawling hills of the Moroccan countryside, we stopped at a roadside café for some lunch.
We ate beautiful grilled vegetables and couscous, dominated by confident, oversize artichokes, served with ripe olives and harissa, a chili paste that packed the wallop of a bazooka. We drank cold peppermint tea.
Suddenly Party Horse excused himself and hurried across the street. Something had caught his eye. I had no idea what he was doing, but pretty soon there were people following him into a storefront. A crowd was gathering, and I thought I had better investigate.
He was sitting in a barber’s chair, getting a haircut. The entire town, about thirty people, had come to watch.
After he was shorn, and had paid and thanked everyone and shaken every single person’s hand, I had to inquire about the sudden urge, while traipsing across Africa, to clean up his coiffure.
“I thought it was a bar,” he confessed. “I saw a chair and a counter with some bottles on it and a guy wearing a nice shirt. I got excited and went in to order a drink. After I realized what was happening, I was too embarrassed to say anything, so I just let him go. He did a nice job, don’t you think?” I agreed, and got my hair cut there, too.
Back in Tangier, after leaving the rent-a-car on the street to be stolen (since it was easier than returning it), we hired a taxi to take us by the casbah to have some dinner. But first Party Horse insisted that we ride some camels. He had seen them on the beach, and now he was determined not to leave Africa without having his picture taken on one. To confound matters, after a few drinks at the American hotel— where every spy in the world seemingly gathered for happy hour—and a few smoldering hits of hash oil from a pipe I had fashioned out of a banana, he was now speaking in Arabic.
“Jamál!” he had declared to our cabdriver, whose English was perfect. “I must ride jamál!” Somehow Party Horse had divined that jamál was the Arabic word for “camel.”
Unbelievably, the cabdriver understood. “No problem,” he told us. “I take you to jamál.” He aimed the cab toward the center of Tangier.
“No, I said jamál! Take me to jamál! I want to ride jamál!”
“Yes, yes, my friend, I take you to jamál! No problem!”
“Then why the fuck are we going inside the city? Don’t try and rip me off. The beach is that way. That’s where the fucking camel is.”
“Camel? Ahhh. Camel. The word for camel is jamel,” he explained. “You ask for jamál. Jamál is young boy.”
After living in Spain for almost two years, I made my first return trip to the States, a weeklong jaunt to go to my brother’s wedding, but also for a much-needed reality check. It was great to be back, to see friends and family in New York, great to eat decent pizza. I loaded up on dirty-water hot dogs and bagels, and bathed in Budweiser.
I did not expect to get zapped with culture shock, but after being away from the States for so long, even the money seemed exotic.
Snorting coke through a hundred-dollar bill was a nice treat. Nothing else in the world smells like American money, and I relished the musky bouquet of capitalism with the giddiness of a tipsy oenophile presented with a bottle of ’84 Haut-Médoc. As a
cocaine delivery system, Spanish money is also quite sexy (ditto the old Dutch twenty-five-guilder note), but filthy Yankee lucre has its own pimped-out-Tony-Montana-rock-star-New-World voodoo that will never be beaten by a European banknote sporting a picture of a prune-faced monarch.
At dinner one night my dad asked me uninterestedly how my band was doing, and I told him, “Pretty good. But it’s not like we’re ever going to be the Rolling Stones or anything.” I thought about that for a second, and asked him if he knew who the Rolling Stones were.
“Yes,” he sniffed. “They are a successful rock group.”
Between road trips and recording sessions with the Fuckers, I was still pushing my pen around and had finally broken into the upper stratum of sleaze scribbling for Hustler. The world of adult publishing is a small one, and a couple of editors I had known in New York were now in Los Angeles working for Larry Flynt Publications, home to Hustler. They invited me to start pitching story ideas.
As I look back from the haughty technological perch on which we now reside, my first article for Hustler seems hopelessly quaint. It was for their Sexplay department, an article explaining that e-mail could be anonymous and that you could use the Internet to meet potential dates. In 1993, the Internet was just beginning to bubble into the common consciousness, and this sort of sexual subterfuge was seen as wildly subversive. Who would ever have thought it was possible to meet women without leaving the house?