by Mike Edison
At the time it wasn’t even possible to e-mail Hustler. I was using my primitive laptop to send my stories via phone line—I had an external modem the size of a humidor and some clunky software that took an hour to send just a few pages to their fax machine. I should have charged them by the foot: a three-thousand-word story would birth fourteen feet of filth, printed out on an inky scroll of old-fashioned thermal fax paper.
My best work for Hustler was a story about enterprising twins who ran an amphetamine lab and a brothel near the meatpacking district in Hamburg, Germany. It was the perfect setup: drop-dead gorgeous sisters who sold sex, meat, and speed to truckers.
Of course the story was cooked. It was a composite: I knew about the whorehouses, I often ate at steak houses in that part of Hamburg, I had extensive knowledge of the drugs, and I knew some very sexy, very ambitious twins. I simply nudged the truth along a little bit and put them all in the same place.
I also wrote some very regrettable stuff for Barely Legal, a Hustler spin-off that specialized in young-girl fantasy fodder. Barely Legal was a runaway hit, one of the most successful new porn titles in years, and it spawned a slew of imitators, including my old book Live!, which had been repackaged (again) as Live Young Girls.
When Barely Legal started, it had a sort of a tongue-in-cheek cheerleader fetish vibe. Later, it began to look more like Predator Monthly. Live Young Girls catered to sickos right out of the gate. Even for me, they had gone too far. Porn-star-looking sex bombs in tight sweaters and Catholic schoolgirl uniforms is one thing; underage-looking waifs posing with stuffed animals and candy canes is just wrong.
The last piece I wrote for Hustler was about Malasaña, which I painted lovingly as the wildest town in Europe, a mecca for sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll; a modern-day Sodom for Six-String Hedonists and Big Beat Fanatics. It featured a detailed portrait of a local promoter, an unscrupulous fat Basque man who skimmed money from bands to buy drugs and whores. It was a very good story. And true.
When El Bratto and I had the bright idea to eat the acid and go swimming, we had the beach all to ourselves. The sun was only just poking its nose over the horizon. Now, midmorning, when we were finally ready to come in out of the water, the sun was screaming, and the beach was filled with families—half of them horrified and hiding their children from the psychedelic drug monsters now wading toward them, the other half just pointing and laughing and having a good goddam hee-haw at our expense. We must have looked like a couple of idiots, completely naked (except for our sunglasses) and very confused. It had been a long night. After almost three years, three hundred gigs, and thirty thousand miles under our wheels, I had finally decided to quit the Pleasure Fuckers.
Climbing out of the Mediterranean Sea in Málaga, Pablo Picasso’s hometown, I could see where he learned to draw. Everyone seemed to have both eyes on the same side of their heads. When they moved, their bodies clattered into shimmering cubist fractals. Or maybe it was just the drugs. They were good, and strong.
I probably should have just kept swimming out to sea. I was surely the only man any of these Malagueños had ever seen who had been ritually circumcised. Perhaps I was just being paranoid? Maybe they’d think I had been bitten by a shark? No way, José. They’d take one look at the results of my bris and peg me for a Jew in a New York second. Back in Madrid, I had been a source of curiosity and excitement to a small group of adventurous young women eager to experience the wonders of ancient Jewry through the magic that is me. But who knew what the people here, still living in the shadow of the Spanish Inquisition, would think when they saw the Creature from Temple Beth Shalom emerging from the water, drugged to the gills on LSD? I didn’t want to wait around for my reviews. Or la policía. Now, where the fuck were my pants?
The Pleasure Fuckers had been slotted to play the headline spot at a giant music festival in the desert, but after a torturous evening of waiting, night had turned into day and we were still not on.
There were thousands of people there, and we were scheduled to go on around 3:00 a.m., a good time to be hitting in front of a Spanish festival crowd. Everyone would be peaking, the ecstasy heads, the speed freaks, even the drunks would still be on form. But at four o’clock, we were still about three bands away. The tribulations of playing in Spain. That’s when I realized it was going to be a long night. By the time we finally took the stage, at 6:00 a.m., the crowd had thinned and everyone was crashing. We played a short set. I don’t remember it being any fun.
It was a dismal end to an event that had kicked off with Turmix pilfering drink tickets from his bandmates. Sick of his bullshit, I could have quit right then. It had already been in the back of my mind.
When we arrived in Málaga after driving through the desert all day from Madrid, the guy in charge had given the band some drink tickets so we could get started while they were still setting up the backstage with kegs of beer. He foolishly gave them to Turmix—ten of them. Turmix gave the four other Pleasure Fuckers one each, and held on to the rest.
This was just petty nonsense, but it was the last straw. Turmix had been shaving money off of gigs for years. He booked the gigs and was generally entitled to a percentage, although I don’t know anyone who takes money from his own band. The problem was that he was taking money he had not earned, overpaying himself and underpaying the group. When I first found this out, I went ballistic. I was told, Relax, he always did this. As if that made it okay. And on and on it went. He borrowed sixty deutsche marks from a promoter in Hamburg so he could get a red-light blow job and never paid it back. After that, we couldn’t get booked there. Thanks to Fat Boy’s fifteen-second hooker fantasy and his misconceptions about his right to other people’s money, we were shit out of luck in one of the best cities in Germany.
There had been a somewhat tepid move to keep Turmix on a short leash, but inertia takes on a whole new meaning when you are dealing with a three-hundred-pound man who named himself after a blender. We were on a good roll, and no one wanted to blow it by getting rid of our gimmick.
Now, at the end of the night in Málaga, I just wanted to go to the beach house where the bands were staying and fall facedown for a dose of nature’s sweet restorer, sleep, the one thing I did not get a lot of during my career as a Pleasure Fucker.
But at the beach house there were more people than beds, and I was holding a short straw. Someone must have not done the math. Oh, wait. Turmix and his wife had barricaded themselves in a big room that had seven beds in it. After drinking forty-seven pints of vodka and orange soda, he must have confused it for the honeymoon suite at the Fontainebleau.
I was fed up. But there was no use stomping around and waking up the innocents who were passed out everywhere—except for the snoring, it was a lot like Jonestown. As a few more disgusted musicians straggled in to try to find a piece of floor to curl up on, my friend El Bratto and I decided to make the best of it, drop the blotters that someone had gifted us earlier, and jump into the sea and enjoy the morning.
It was lovely. There are those who say the Mediterranean is the toilet bowl of Europe, but I disagree. It is more like the bidet. And I have always had great luck with Spanish LSD, or tripis, as they call it. (As in “trippy.”) That morning on the beach, before the madding crowd of cubist sunbirds arrived, I had hallucinated dozens of tiny dinosaurs burrowing in the sand. I had the same experience on my sixteenth birthday when I dropped some acid and went to see Johnny Winter in Asbury Park. I figure it must have had something to do with the way the sun hits the water.
The fireworks erupted in the van about halfway back to Madrid.
It is well known to one and all that I hate the Beatles. They ruined rock ’n’ roll. The day Bob Dylan got them stoned for the first time was one of the blackest days in history.
This is another line of thought that hasn’t done much to make me popular. The Beatles are sacred cows that no one is ever supposed to criticize. I’d be better off talking shit about Jesus at the pope’s Christmas party.
&nbs
p; But let’s face it: Sgt. Pepper was a deathblow to rock ’n’ roll. Will you still need me, will you still feed me? Please. The whole thing sounds like sickly geriatrics singing the sound track for a children’s movie—one that was thankfully never made.
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”? If I wanted to listen to warmed-over show tunes, I’d go out and get a copy of Thoroughly Modern Millie. This is exactly the kind of goop that legitimized art rock and paved the way for every crappy progressive 1970s concept record that followed. I can draw a straight line from the Beatles to Genesis and Yes faster than Paul McCartney could scarf up a batch of freshly baked pot brownies.
They have their moments, but for every “Helter Skelter,” “Taxman,” or “Yer Blues,” there is “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “Octopus’s Garden,” or some other lilting, unlistenable crud that does nothing but mock the listener for buying into this sham. “Hey Jude” is the most tedious piece of shit ever perpetrated on teenage ears. It sounds like a bunch of drunks singing along with the town retard while he practices his piano lesson.
Before they bought into all of that flower power crap, when they were still playing in Hamburg at the Star Club, boozing and taking amphetamines—drugs that were designed for rock ’n’ roll—and delivering three sets a night of Little Richard and Larry Williams covers (before soft-pedaled bubblegum like “Love Me Do” and “Eight Days a Week” took over the show), then you really had something. You can hear a faint trace of that excitement on recordings of their first American tour. That is, when you can hear the band over the screaming fans, who clearly weren’t there to actually listen to the “music.” When the Beatles came to New York, Shea Stadium was filled with thirteen-year-old girls. That should tell you something right there.
It is amazing how many otherwise irreverent intellects go ape shit when I start in with this line of patter. Reactionaries. If Dave Insurgent were around, he’d have cuffed them on the head and told them to liberate themselves.
So, naturally, I keep on saying it. While I was living in Spain, I put these elevated thoughts into an article for Ruta 66, by far the best music mag in Spain. They got more mail for that single article than they had ever received in ten years of publishing—bags and bags of hate mail from sappy Beatles fans whose feelings I had hurt. The editors were delighted. And I just love working as a heel. They invited me to write whatever I wanted. For my next act I reviewed one of my own shows with the Pleasure Fuckers, and you can bet I gave the drummer raves. Naturally, this signaled another whole round of hate mail. “Who the fuck does he think he is??” Even the other Pleasure Fuckers thought I was being a bit cheeky.
Which brings us back to the Pleasure Fuckers’ van, now leaving Málaga. Turmix sure looked well rested riding shotgun—he was too fat to sit anywhere else. And he knew I was plenty steamed. Burbling under the surface of my lysergic glow was still the bitterness that there was a thief among us.
I am not sure why I had put up with this for so long, except that the other Pleasure Fuckers were willing to shrug it off, and as a group, as a gang, we needed each other. When the formula worked, we were like an iron fist. The band had become a lifestyle, and from the Canary Islands to Croatia, from Paris to Prague it had been a spectacular ride.
But we had gone about as far as we were going to go, and I was ready to get off the bus, for good. Turmix, taunting me by playing the Beatles on the dashboard stereo, only expedited the matter. And not just any Beatles—a murky-sounding bootleg of White Album outtakes. It was like a bad dream.
I admit it, I broke my own rule and reacted. But I had lost my sense of humor for Fatty. All it took to push me over the edge was a poorly recorded demo version of “Rocky Raccoon.” When we stopped on the highway to get gas, I ripped the cassette from the player and chucked it into the car wash across the street. The sound of it being crushed by one of those big black roller things that squeegee windshields was the best music I had heard in years.
12
HOW TO MAKE
YOUR MONKEY HAPPY
I arrived back in New York with a thousand dollars in my pocket, recompense for my most recent story for Hustler. I started in Madrid with a thousand bucks, so I figured I could land just about anywhere in the world with that much money and make a go of it. New York City was never easy, but I’m made of some pretty stern stuff. The first thing I did was get a chocolate egg cream at the Gem Spa—a much-redacted version of the Edison Cure—and then, newly fortified, I trucked over to Midnight Records and talked my way back into my old job.
For the first few nights I crashed with Chandler and his bride, La Gatita Mala, who had gotten spliced in a civil ceremony in an East Village community garden and were now house-sitting an artist’s loft on Avenue B. But there was something seriously wrong there. Chandler’s drinking was completely out of control. He was slamming bourbon during the day and not making a whole lot of sense. Instead of wearing the glow of newly wedded bliss, he was wearing the stench of a sunlight drunk. And his shrew of a wife offered no support—she had her own money and was throwing it around at trendy bars, places where Chandler would never dream of going. She had hooked up with a horrid posse of leather pants–wearing idiots, all of them blinded by the Bright Lights of the Big City. Every night she ditched her husband to go out on a spree with these spoiled rich kids who slurped overpriced Cosmopolitans and gobbled designer drugs and then spent the next day bragging about their hangovers and the supermodels they had seen at Bowery Bar. They were awful.
I hated her because she knew what she was getting into with Chandler and just didn’t seem to care. Eventually her dopey friends drifted on to the next trendy scene, and she began to get the message that no one wanted her here. If you are going to live in New York, it requires a little bit of humility and restraint, which she never had. We exist on top of each other here, and you have to be aware of your surroundings and treat people with respect. This is a town that eschews solipsists. Eventually she just up and went back to Spain, leaving her husband high and not so dry.
Chandler’s drinking, which was legend, was beginning to kill him. People loved him and couldn’t bear to see him spiraling downward so rapidly. He was a leader among a scene and greatly admired, but no one could help him, except of course himself. It soon became apparent that it was time, too, for him to get the fuck out. He moved to Austin, where Mariconda and Susana had relocated and were doing great.
Mariconda had a good gig cutting video for the local news, and he was sporadically producing local bands. Susana was on her way to a good job at a university research lab. While the rest of us had our heads buried in the recreational, she had actually studied practical chemistry in college. And they had a kid.
The night Mariconda’s daughter was born, he called me, yammering away as if he had been up all night tweaking on industrial-strength speed. “Sharky, we spent our whole lives, all our time with the Raunch Hands on the road, running around, looking for the next big high, for something stronger to really blow our minds. Seeing my daughter being born was like the best drug I ever took.” It was an oddly warm sentiment from a man whose idea of fun is to break a guitar over someone’s head.
Chandler lay low in Austin, stumbling through oddball jobs on car lots and construction sites, leaving a trail of bottles wherever he went. For a while, again, we didn’t hear a whole lot from him.
George’s marriage to Tomoko, sadly, had also skidded off the road. We all should have figured that this was not a marriage made in heaven— the sixty-dollar-a-gram snot dripping out of Party Horse’s nose back at the Elvis Presley Wedding Chapel was probably a fair indicator.
I don’t know how I was the only Raunch Hand who had avoided getting hitched, but given their one-in-three success rate—good numbers in baseball, but pretty fucking dismal in the love-and-marriage department—perhaps I was being prudent. Hey, I wanted to fall in love. I’m a very romantic fellow, and I wear it on my sleeve, but I know I’m no day at the beach, either. I am an action man
and I need an action woman. Preferably one with a colossal superbrain. Anyway, before anything was going to happen, I needed an apartment and probably a job that paid more than ten bucks an hour. The women in New York can be sticklers about that stuff. For now at least, Edison Preferred was in the basement with few takers.
As it turned out, I knew a guy who was looking for a roommate in a ridiculously cheap apartment, an illegal rent-controlled sublet on Seventh Street and Avenue A. My share of the rent would be three hundred dollars, pocket change by New York standards.
You pays your money and you takes your choice. I would be living with a part-time male go-go dancer who—aside from occasional stints shaking his bony ass onstage with a handful of local bands for whom he had become a combination mascot/fetish item—was terminally unemployed.
Unable to gain acceptance in the American workforce, Go-Go Boy had plenty of time to spruce the place up and had gone for Modern American Squalor. Two years’ worth of recycling was lovingly stacked up in the kitchen in picturesque disarray—hundreds of beer cans in happy blue plastic bags and enough copies of The New York Times to heat a midsize prison camp through a Siberian winter. The bathroom doubled as a laboratory, cultivating some of North America’s most exotic mold spores, which prospered in a damp, wet environment, unfettered by chemical cleaning agents. As for decor, Go-Go Boy drew his inspiration from the urinals at CBGB.
I had known Go-Go Boy for years. Everyone did. He was a fixture on the local scene, and actually a smart and funny guy. He had gone to Columbia and had written his dissertation on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St., positing that the sixties were only truly over when Mick Jagger sang “I can’t even feel the pain no more.”
I liked him, but the living situation was like Papillon meets Glen or Glenda. When I came in and turned on the light (a bare 60-watt bulb that usually had a pair of Go-Go Boy’s sweaty panties hanging over it to dry), I would be knocked over by a herd of cockroaches stampeding for cover. Their exodus, punctuated by the percussive clicking of their little Cenozoic bodies on the filthy linoleum floor, was louder than the F train. At least I no longer had to clip my toenails—the roaches nibbled on them for me at night. Between the wildlife, the fauna, and Go-Go Boy, who was more often than not passed out drunk on the dirt heap of a couch, decked out in orange high-tops, fishnets, and hot pants, it was not the kind of place I could bring a date up to for a nightcap. Romance would have to wait.