I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  “Well, then I certainly want to go, too,” I told her. “We’ve been through this together.”

  “I only have two tickets,” she told me. “You said you didn’t want to go.”

  “You said you didn’t want to go. And I supported that. I thought we were going to go away? What happened to that?”

  “I changed my mind,” she told me in the smug tone of a child who was holding all the marbles for the very first time. “I never made you any promises. There are no promises in life. We have nothing in writing.”

  I wanted to puke, but I was empty. I had already given her everything I had, emotionally, financially, spiritually, every which way. I was drained. When we started out together, I knew she was a comer, but she had no idea of her own self-worth. Her old boyfriends, she had confided to me, never made her feel attractive. They never even told her that she was pretty. I had actually met a couple of them, and they were controlling creeps. One of them had even made her cat crazy by trying to toilet train him, and it took a lot of love to sort that cat out, too. Ours, she delighted in saying, was the first healthy relationship she had ever had, and she had finally broken through the wall of low self-esteem. She told me that I made her feel special, as if she could do anything. Finally, she said, she knew who she was.

  _____ was graduating with honors. She was in the very top tier of her class, a Law Review editor, and she had been recruited by a powerful white-shoe litigator whose pedigree would insure a stellar career. I was so proud of her. Her future looked bright indeed. Unfortunately, I wasn’t part of her plans.

  The day of her graduation, a day we should have been enjoying together, basking in the First Rays of the New Rising Sun, was one of the saddest of my life. I watched her get dressed to go out. She was so beautiful, and for a change, she was very happy. She didn’t seem to notice that I was gray with depression.

  “I’ll meet you afterward,” I suggested meekly. “I’m sure there will be a party, and your parents will want to go out . . .”

  “You can’t come,” she told me flatly. “Don’t you get it? If anyone finds out that I live with a guy who works for High Times, they’ll think I’m a pothead. It could hurt my career.”

  Fucking hypocrite. Never mind that she was smoking more dope than I was and that I was buying it for her because she had no dough. When I was first named publisher of High Times, she had been so happy for me and had boasted to her friends about my cool new job. Through my tribulations there, she encouraged me as best she could, although her enthusiasm had been on the wane as she got deeper into school. I assumed it was just a product of her topsy-turvy brain waves and an ungodly workload. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that she had sold me out for a corporate lifestyle.

  “Look,” she told me as she finished putting on her lipstick. She always wore a muted red, “crystal amethyst” I think it was called. It was the perfect color for her, and it always drove me nuts. I was heartsick watching her get all dolled up to go receive her accolades.

  “You’ve done so much for me, but I can do it on my own now. I mean, thanks, but I don’t need you anymore.”

  The one inarguably good thing in my life at the time was the Raunch Hands, who had started playing again, sporadically re-forming to do garage-rock festivals. The year before, we had played Cavestomp! in New York. This year we were jetting to the Las Vegas Shakedown, with two dozen other bands of our ilk. This was soon after _____ moved out. When I realized that she had a piece of coal where her heart used to be, I encouraged her to follow her dark muse. I believe I said, “You go. The cats stay.” She didn’t even pretend to care. It didn’t take long to realize that I got the best of that deal.

  Cliff Mott and I left for Vegas the night before the Shakedown began so we could check out Little Richard and Chuck Berry, who were appearing at Caesars Palace, just a hop, skip, and a spectacularly failed jump from where my old pal Evel Knievel had smashed his skeleton into kindling.

  Chuck’s part of the show, typically, sucked. For the first couple of songs I thought the band was out of tune. They sounded awful. And then I realized that Chuck kept changing the key, leaving a very confused pickup band struggling to keep up with his whims, which seemingly had no good musical reason other than to be difficult. To make matters worse, he kept stopping songs to look at his watch.

  Little Richard was another story. His band was a well-oiled rock ’n’ roll machine: two drummers, two bass players, two guitar players, full horn section, and Little Richard’s grand piano front and center. He strolled onto the stage to a hard-pumping vamp, wearing what is best described as a purple chiffon shower curtain. His hair was about three feet high, and he had on more eye makeup than GG Allin and Alice Cooper combined. He looked awesome. With the help of a couple of younger, more masculine bandmates he stood on top of the piano and signaled for the music to stop. He had something very important he wanted to share with the audience.

  “WHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!” he squealed. “I AM THE BEE-YOO-TEE-FUL LITTLE RICHARD!!!” He gave the band the signal that it was okay to continue, hopped off the piano, and began banging away at a positively pugilistic version of “Bama Lama Bama Loo.” It was strong stuff.

  After that he slid through a set of greatest hits, whooping and hollering and only occasionally stopping to proclaim his greatness or make some sort of vital non sequitur. “Look at my hands!” he screamed. “Aren’t they bee-yoo-tee-ful?? Can you believe I once had to wash dishes? Me?? The Georgia Peach??!! WHOOOOOOOO!!!” or “I am drinking Gatorade because I want to be like Michael Jordan! Isn’t he lovely? I want to be just like him!” I think someone might have wanted to mention to Richard the high probability of that ship having already sailed, but there was no stopping him, and thank God for that. Rock ’n’ roll cures all ills.

  Indeed, the Raunch Hands’ Las Vegas vacation was turning into exactly the prescription for what ailed me. Another good shock to my metastasis of brokenhearted gloom was a chance rendezvous with a girl I knew from Los Angeles, an old Raunch Hands fan in town for the Shakedown and also on the rebound from a bad breakup. She had driven out with a couple of girlfriends with whom she was sharing a room. I convinced her that was no way to spend a weekend in Vegas, and certainly no way to get over the guy who had dumped her, and quickly installed her into my suite at the Rio so the healing could begin.

  In the morning we repaired to the patio to drink Bloody Marys with all the other lunatic musicians and fans. It was quite a scene, truly la dolce vita: fifty or sixty tattooed punks slurping frozen drinks and smoking dope in the kidney bean–shaped pool out behind the casino while a flock of scantily clad cocktail waitresses fluttered around them taking orders and hustling for tips.

  We were playing the next night, and Mariconda arrived just as I was buying a solid rock of an eight ball from an enterprising cabdriver who was convinced that I should buy a bag of Vicodin from him as well. It was sound advice. You should always listen to the cabdrivers in Las Vegas. They know. Mariconda and I smashed up the coke with a Bible the Gideons had thoughtfully left in my room just for that purpose, and we were off to the races, ready to throw the fireball.

  The Raunch Hands show was a triumph. Chandler, especially, was devastating. He sang like a champion and commanded the action as if he had something to prove. And he did—even in the depths of alcoholism he is a man who knows his own self-worth, and he did not come to Vegas to fuck around. He looked positively arch in aviator Ray-Bans and a New York Police Department VICE SQUAD T-shirt, which came in handy later when a couple of Las Vegas cops knocked on the door of his hotel room. There was a full-tilt fiesta in progress, and everyone dove to cover up whatever ordnance they were smoking or snorting, but when Chandler opened the door and the Vegas cops saw him in his NYPD blue, he gave them his best version of a fraternal wink and nod. They went for it hook, line, and sinker and didn’t bust up the party.

  After that, he disappeared. It probably didn’t help that in the lobby of our hotel was Three Mikes’ Discount Liquors, open tw
enty-four hours a day. We sent out a search team for him but came up empty. (I’m sure it didn’t help that our search team was assembled from a coterie of drunk and wired musicians who had been up for three days.) But when we got to the airport two days later, we found him passed out by the gate, under a chair, the very apotheosis of a professional rock musician.

  Still, he was a mess. Breakfasting on speed-rack vodka didn’t help. He did the right thing and moved to Maine, near where he was from, to enter a rehab program. His friends were behind him one hundred percent. It’s just amazing that more of us didn’t need to join him.

  My last night in Vegas I went to see Tom Jones with my new roommate and one of her girlfriends, who had just gotten out of jail for armed robbery. The conditions of her parole prohibit me from telling you any more—I’m not even sure she was allowed to be in Las Vegas. You can file that adventure, too, under Top Secret Action.

  When I got back home and the glow of Vegas finally wore off, I realized how crappy things still were. Nothing had changed. _____ was gone. The only thing she had left behind was her guitar amplifier, with a note saying she would come get it later. I gave it to some kids down the street who were starting a band.

  And I was still getting the shit beaten out of me at work. But no matter how bad it was or how much I wanted to anesthetize myself, I still had to show up in the morning and do my job. You can’t let the bastards get you down, and I took my responsibility as publisher very seriously, as did my employers. No matter how much bullshit I was getting from Hager and his editorial rabble, I had received a raise every year I was there. Circulation was up twenty-five percent. Advertising pages were up every quarter over the last. Michael Kennedy asked me what the secret was, and there was no secret: every day I challenged myself to put something better in the bottle. I was never satisfied. And I didn’t freak out whenever there was a problem.

  Of course, there were always problems.

  Every magazine office was under pressure at deadline time. The stress could be incredible. The industry was rife with legends of people sleeping in the office when it was time to close the book. Advertisers dropped out without warning. New ones came in at the last minute. Stories changed constantly. There were production glitches. And then, just when you got the book out the door and you thought it was safe to go into the water again, there could be problems on press, although not every magazine had to go scrounging for 180,000 packs of missing rolling papers like I once had to. (They were to be polybagged with the book as a giveaway—the manufacturer who had promised 200,000 packs of papers sent only 20,000 and by way of explanation offered a coy “oops.” I had to renegotiate the entire deal in an hour, but the book got out on time.) It was all part of putting out a magazine. We did it every month. You just had to roll with it. Panic is for amateurs.

  For someone who had been working at a magazine for more than ten years, it was amazing how little Wanda, now back to her default position as the Evil Accountant, actually knew about publishing. There was no solution for which she could not find a problem.

  With the increase in ad sales, our production costs went up proportionately—more ads meant more prepress work and more pages. But it also meant more revenue. There is a formula we followed—we’d project how many ads were going to be in each issue and then make the map based on an ad-to-edit ratio of about 40–60. If it got close to 50–50, we’d add pages. You always needed to place ads against editorial, preferably on right-hand pages, which advertisers coveted. When I started at High Times, we were running a 108-page book, plus covers. We were now up to 128 pages, and not only was the revenue up accordingly, it was a better product. The Plop Quotient was high— when you dropped it onto a table, the plop! of the slick cover resonated nicely.

  Wanda the Evil Accountant was not impressed. Our conversations went something like this:

  WANDA THE EVIL ACCOUNTANT: Mike, this month our production bill is $8,000 more than last month.

  ME: Yes, we added pages to make room for $36,000 worth of new ads.

  WANDA THE EVIL ACCOUNTANT: But our production costs went up $8,000.

  ME: Yes, because we have $36,000 of new business. We’re $28,000 to the good. If these advertisers stay in, that’s $336,000 of new business on the year. And I expect it to climb; there is a lot of momentum.

  WANDA THE EVIL ACCOUNTANT: But our production costs are up.

  And so on.

  The anniversary issue was everything I said it would be—the biggest issue ever, an all-time record in advertising. When I tossed it on my desk, it plopped like a London broil.

  Mary McEvoy told me to watch my back. “You’re a threat to these people,” she warned me. “You work too hard. They’re afraid that you make them look bad. They had it a lot easier before you came in.”

  But by then it was too late. Michael informed me that my position as publisher was untenable. “They don’t respect your authority, Mike,” he told me. “We’re going to have to make a change.”

  I had done everything I was asked to and delivered everything I had promised, but I had failed to win the hearts and minds of my staff. I could not possibly have done worse in that department. It didn’t help that I was strapped with a shrew like the Marketing Witch and an agent provocateur like Hager, but the fault lies squarely on my shoulders. My management style was inappropriate for this team. That I had a management style was inappropriate for this team.

  The worst part was the humiliation of having to carpetbag my stuff down the hall from my corner office, and the absolute glee of certain staff members who thought they had won some kind of war. There was a new publisher coming in; the announcement would be made in a few days. His name was Ski, short for a polysyllabic train wreck of a Polish surname, and he was a good friend of the Marketing Witch. Oh, joy. After that meeting I heard her in the hall braying to anyone within earshot of how she had finally brought me down. I didn’t say a word. It was enough to know that her karma was fucked forever.

  But Michael Kennedy made it very clear that I was not being fired. They didn’t want me to leave. In fact, not only did they want me to stay, but they wanted me to write my own ticket and come up with a new job description, maybe get back to doing some stories. And they wanted to pay me a bonus for the job I had done as publisher, well known to all the citizens of Gotham as the key to a Happy Monkey.

  I’m a pretty good negotiator, and when I took the job as publisher, we had made a handshake agreement that if I increased revenue and hit my goals, I would be compensated above my salary. The publisher was the final word in advertising, but since I was not a salesman and not entitled to a commission, I would have to get my piece at the end of the day. Michael and his colleagues were good to their word, and they cut me a check for six thousand dollars. Not enough to change my lifestyle, and about half of what it should have been, but unprecedented in High Times history, and it went a long way toward reestablishing some goodwill between the Trans High Corporation and myself. That year, including some Penthouse Letters I had written to goose my lack of a real sex life, I banked almost ninety thousand.

  I would have liked to just walk away, but I wasn’t going to tank a good paying job until I had something else lined up. I was not thrilled that I would have to come to work every day and face a gang that had worked hard to neuter me, but I was enjoying having some money for a change. Pretty soon I was going to put a down payment on an apartment. But none of it mattered. There was one more thing I had to do: make the High Times movie.

  How could it possibly fail?

  17

  THE HOLY TRIFECTA OF SLEAZE

  When I sleep at night, sometimes it is hard to tell if my dreams are coming from inside my brain or if I am more like a radio antenna, picking up images and transmissions from space. At least in space no one can hear you scream. Whatever Mick Jagger was taking so that he couldn’t feel the pain no more, I wanted some of that.

  I was looking at failure on either side of me and trying to cut a swath down the middle with an inc
reasingly toxic mélange of drugs and madness. It was self-medication at its very worst, binging with Party Horse on cocaine, vodka, beer, and whatever else we could get our hands on. And we all know what that leads to: doomed Las Vegas weddings with overweight Elvis impersonators and blind North African road trips in search of silly hats and hash oil.

  I was grappling with bouts of mania, confusion, desperation, and loneliness; depression, reckless irresponsibility, and a profound inability to confront reality; intellectual disorder and malaise; drug-induced euphoria, dementia, and hysteria; frenzy, lunacy, and pyromania; obsession, regression, repression, and pronounced procrastination, not to mention frequent borderline-psychotic episodes of mumbling under my breath and laughing out of context. But I still had to go to work every day. Ironically, my job insured that I kept one hand on the wheel at all times.

  Out of the line of fire, at least I didn’t feel as if I was constantly dodging bullets at the office. Still, I had few friends there. Holmstrom had finally had enough and officially resigned after thirteen years as a full-time staffer. There was little joy in Mudville.

  My new job was Director of Editorial and Marketing, an absurd title that was supposed to encompass a broad area of responsibility that included marketing and promotion as well as special editorial projects designed to help leverage ad sales and create synergy between the magazine and our website. Or at least that’s what I told my employers.

  It was not a bad gig in theory, never mind that in the history of magazine publishing the words “editorial” and “marketing” had never appeared together in a job title. And I was now free to do some writing. I was planning a trip to Mississippi to try to find out if bluesman Robert Johnson had been smoking the local homegrown on the night, as legend has it, that he made his pact with Satan. Marijuana grew wild in the Mississippi Delta, and I knew there was an untold story there. I was going to find it.*