I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

by Mike Edison

  My main job remained director of editorial and marketing, still not a bad gig, since no one had ever figured out what that meant exactly. I made it up as I went along. I went to New Orleans for Jazz Fest wearing a High Times press badge, a triumphant return ten years after my whirlwind tour with Wally Wang. It was a good trip—I gobbled some mushrooms on a party boat, ate alligator pie for breakfast, and spent my afternoons in the Gospel Tent.

  I wrote a few record reviews, mostly of stuff I needed free copies of; scribbled an obituary for Frank Sinatra (“beyond hopeless romantics giddy with bone-dry martinis and spurned lovers drowning in last-call whiskey shots with the bartender, Frank resonated with macho in the styles of Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop, who started their careers by reinventing Sinatra’s signature crooning and spanking it with fistfuls of blotter acid and electric guitars”); and composed a snarky denunciation of prog rock, which to me seemed like easy pickin’s, but got Ski all up in arms because it skewered the bloops and bleeps of the synthesizer dorks he so cherished.

  I produced a High Times CD of jam bands and worked on licensing a Spanish-language version of the magazine, which was a dismal failure. No one at High Times could figure out why we would possibly want to publish a magazine in Spain. And I worked on the award shows, writing press releases and generally trying to drum up some interest in the mainstream press.

  This year’s Stony Awards were more like an experiment in social entropy than any sort of Happening. I was standing in the lobby of the theater trying to get a handle on things when David Peel, the folksinging guerrilla and Potluck star (his 1972 album The Pope Smokes Dope was produced by John Lennon), burst in off the street with his scraggly troupe of grimy Greenwich Village relics, strumming and singing his signature song-cum-chant, “Have a Marijuana.” It was a din of dysfunction, disruptive, and frankly disgusting, a live-action diorama depicting all at once everything that is wrong with hippies, folk music, and reefer.

  Guest of honor Dan Hedaya (who, among other things, played Richard Nixon in the pothead political farce Dick, and Alicia Silverstone’s father in Clueless) got one look at these animals and headed straight for the door. Hastily exiting the theater and turning the corner, he nearly knocked over his fellow thespian, would-be Potluck star Jason Mewes, who was whiter than the ghost of Hamlet’s father and puking violently in the street. This did nothing to ameliorate Dan’s fears that he never should have accepted the invitation to the Stonys in the first place. I have never seen a man so horrified. Against all odds, Dave Allocca, truly a magician, managed to wrangle them together for a human-looking picture, which made the paper the next day. It helps to hire people who know what the fuck they are doing.

  Around this time I was starting to think that a comedy was the wrong line of thinking, and we should have made a disaster flick. I’d often heard tales of the Curse of Tom Forçade: that the chaos that always seemed to cast its spell on High Times was his phantom spirit rattling the cages. John Holmstrom used to say that High Times was Forçade’s last great prank: he never intended it to be a legacy, and now everyone was suffering for what the founder intended as a grand practical joke.

  There was a TV camera there that night, a local crew looking for an interview with one of the semi-luminaries who was probably backstage huffing some centerfold weed. They asked Hager, who was running the show, if he could find someone for them to talk to, but he had no idea where anyone was. True to form, he melted down and started yelling at me. Except this time it was in front of a TV crew.

  “You’re my publicist!” he screamed, like a spoiled heiress. “Do your job!”

  I was livid. The television crew was mortified. If they had decided to have some fun and push “record,” we would have had a Hindenburg-size PR disaster on our hands. I can only hazard that they were too shocked at Hager’s behavior to tape this episode and fire it off immediately to America’s Most Embarrassing Home Videos.

  That was the tipping point. Right then I knew I was going to have to find a new job. I never even understood where this animosity came from. What ever happened to the archetype of the “laid-back stoner”? I was sick of taking it on the chin from this asshole. I did what I had to do so the TV people got what they needed, and then I got the fuck out of there and went across the street to the Mars Bar to steel myself with several fistfuls of bourbon.

  I was fired soon after that. But not before Ski was let go. My take-no-prisoners approach to publishing had made the company a boatload, but at the expense of the idyllic editorial dystopia that somehow trumped the bottom line. Ski’s laissez-faire approach to shepherding the magazine kept everyone happily grazing on the greenery, but business drooped like a drunkard’s dick. He was not invited to stay.

  The new publisher—this would be the third in the four years since I came on board—made his entrance dressed in pale yellow slacks and a pale yellow V-neck sweater, what I imagine he thought passed as white-boy hip-hop chic. He claimed to be some kind of marketing whiz. He looked like a stick of butter.

  The Stick of Butter wasted little time in calling me into his office. Wanda the Evil Accountant was there. I knew what was happening. You can smell these things from a mile away.

  I was plenty pissed off—but not for being fired. I would have fired me, too. Had I not been handcuffed coming in, I would have chopped a few heads and staffed up with people loyal to me. As it was, I was number two on the masthead, and he wanted his own guy in there. That made good Machiavellian sense. Unfortunately, he was a classless turd who had the idea that he could treat me like an idiot. That’s why I was pissed off.

  “Mike, this isn’t personal.”

  “I know it’s not personal. How could it be personal? You don’t know me.”

  “Mike, frankly, for what you’re making, I could hire two college kids . . .” I loved this logic—they keep giving me raises and bonuses, then fire me because I’m making too much. And then to suggest that a couple of unformed children could possibly replace a professional who had been successfully mining the underbelly of magazine publishing for fifteen years? Whatever. But that’s not what set me off.

  The Stick of Butter pushed a heap of legal documents at me. “Mike, I would appreciate it if you signed these papers.” Now that was crazy. Did he really think I was going to sign something handed to me by the hostile publisher of a dope magazine without reviewing it carefully? I used to be the hostile publisher of a dope magazine. I knew all too well the kind of shit we tried to pull.

  “Are you fucking out of your mind? You really want me to sign something without reading it? Get me Michael Kennedy on the phone right fucking now. Michael has been my lawyer for the last four years, and he would have had my head on a plate if I even thought about signing something without reading it. Don’t tell me it’s not personal and then try to fuck me. Do you always fuck strangers? Are you some kind of whore? Get me Michael Kennedy on the phone right fucking now.”

  Wanda the Evil Accountant nodded toward the phone. What I said made sense.

  While Margarine Man called Michael, I took a look-see at the papers. They were trying to cheap out on a severance package, which was typical Wanda parsimony. She hated paying anyone, even though accounts payable was her job. It was no wonder she was miserable all the time.

  A meeting was set with Michael for later in the week, and I was politely asked to pack and get the fuck out of the office. On the way home I stopped in a cliché and got shitfaced.

  A few days later at Michael’s office, I was, once again, clean, shaved, and sober, just like the first time I had met him.

  “Michael, with all due respect, this severance package is unacceptable.”

  He was gracious but hesitant. He ducked and weaved and said there wasn’t anything he could do about it, which of course was bullshit. Michael did not become a successful lawyer because he was a pushover.

  “Michael, you are the one who taught me that everything is negotiable—and never to take the first offer.”

  He rope-a-doped som
e more.

  “I really don’t know what we can do for you . . .”

  “Michael, look, you told me I had job security.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “On October 13, in the tenth-floor conference room, at around three-thirty in the afternoon. Michael, you also taught me to always take notes.”

  He sat back and sighed. After 9/11 the entire publishing industry had fallen into serious trouble, and Michael had made a special trip to the office to talk about it with the staff. There were going to be hard times ahead, he warned, but he also told me that if I continued to bring value to the company, as I had, my job would always be safe.

  A few days later he called back with a new offer, which I accepted. The guys at High Times might not dig it, but sometimes it pays to get up in the morning and put on a suit.

  Whether it was vanity or intellectual laziness or fear of being exposed as having run out of ideas, or some combination of future phobia and refusal to accept the present, refusal to grow up, and refusal to accept that most of the innovations of the counterculture—from hippie fashions to rock ’n’ roll to organic food—had been co-opted by the mainstream, Hager had doomed High Times to the ignominy of insignificance. In a postmodern world, it was shocking that High Times was unable to reference anything but its own history. Instead of embracing success, the staff was threatened by it. They could always sell magazines to potheads and closet farmers, but when it came to inserting themselves vertically into American culture, they were soft. No one took them seriously. It made me profoundly sad.

  I was sick of having my heart broken. It was time to get out of town for a while and blow all the bad shit out of my head. I flew to Spain, to Las Fallas, a festival where they set a town on fire and everyone drops acid and watches it burn. Living well, after all, is always the best revenge.

  18

  NARCISSISM AND DOOM

  1. Sex magazines

  2. Beer magazine

  3. Pot magazine

  That’s not a résumé, that’s a crime scene. I didn’t even bother to list my years working the wrestling beat. I was in enough trouble already— why gild the lily?

  Once again, I needed a job. I still had Screw magazine on speed dial, so I gave them a shout. They might be in the market for a smut peddler with a pedigree.

  My old gun-toting pal Chip from Drake days was now the managing editor and in charge of hiring writers—Al Goldstein mostly sat in his office and ordered overpriced electronic gadgets from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. I figured if Chip saw me floating in the gutter, he might buy me a bottle of wine.

  It was no charity—he desperately needed someone to review the mountainous pile of pud pullers that were threatening to take over the office. He had been writing the reviews himself, and it had finally begun to hurt. Man of Steel that I am, I took the gig immediately and began writing under the name Lord Zeppelin.

  It is harder than you might imagine to find someone to critique porn movies, at least someone sentient, who still had his sight after years of chronic self-abuse. I occasionally reviewed these clarion calls to auto-stimulation back in the Cheri days, but it was never my favorite part of the job. Mostly the stuff I had to watch wasn’t all that interesting. I was working in a den of filth every day, and all I really wanted to watch was The Sorrow and the Pity, anything just to bring me closer to the planed edge of reality. But if this is what it would take to pay the bills, I was game.

  Pornography is an illusion painted as reality, more fantastic than any James Bond movie or Star Wars. The sex in these movies doesn’t exist. You could be the best-looking cable repairman in the world, carrying twelve inches of salty lunch meat in your shorts, but there is no way on God’s Green Earth that you are ever going to end up having your mind—or anything else—blown by a raven-haired, double-breasted mattress thrasher with bee-stung lips, welcoming thighs, and a dewy pudenda who answers the door in a diaphanous kimono and nine-inch heels, caressing a bottle of baby oil. You have a better chance of becoming a Jedi knight and destroying the Death Star.

  What’s really scary about the porn movie business is just how geeky the fans who watch this crud really are. It may not be surprising that hard-core porn fans often suffer from a lack of social skills, but what you probably don’t realize is that they could go toe-to-toe with Comic Book Guy or a dozen tribble-loving Trekkies in their knowledge of their hobby and its mind-melting minutiae. Fucking by its very nature is a repetitive business, but you can bet that porn fans, real porn fans—not guys who “look” at it once in a while—can pontificate endlessly on the Rubik’s Cube of multi-partner variations with Kama Sutra–like authority, and discuss the subtleties of double penetration with the verbal alacrity of Gael Greene deconstructing dinner at Le Cirque.

  Thankfully, the Screw style does not cater to such gentility. Reviewing seven volumes’ worth of Omar’s Anal Adventures for our special Black History Month issue, Herr Zeppelin effused, “Omar spunks so much spizzle in this jizz-fest you’d think he had a jar of Hellman’s hidden in his ass!”

  While I was toiling under the weight of a pseudonym as heavy as Lord Zeppelin, progress on Potluck—I was still involved in the project as a producer, and still tight with Vic and the filmmakers, who encouraged my involvement—continued to be rained on by the dark clouds at High Times. The Stick of Butter wanted nothing to do with it and, conspiring with Hager and his cabal of cotton-mouthed cohorts, finally gave the production an official vote of No Confidence. The message resonated: if High Times wasn’t going to get behind its own film, you can bet your last jazz cigarette that no major distributor was going to, either.

  Bloom continued to advocate for High Times to support the film, but he had dropped the ball and ended up getting exactly none of the bands he had promised for the sound track. Without a killer soundtrack, a stoner movie was like pancakes without syrup—hard to swallow.

  No matter how stoned you were, Potluck was never going to be a great movie, there was just too much gone wrong with it, but it had a fun, easygoing vibe and won some minor accolades on the festival circuit. At the New York International Independent Film and Video Arts Festival it took the audience award for Best Feature, and in Atlantic City it scored the jury prize for Best Comedy.

  I was even invited to speak at a screening of Potluck at the NYU film school, and there was an article about me in the school paper with the headline DROPOUT PRODUCES POT FILM. I was quoted as saying, “Education is the biggest sham in America. I encourage everyone to drop out of NYU.” The kids ate that shit up with a spoon (although I don’t think any of them actually took my advice). Sixteen years after Dave Insurgent and I were laughed out of our production class for pitching punk-rock zombies and the Great Spliff of Knowledge, I was being bombarded with questions from a roomful of future Spielbergs who wanted to know the secret of my success (and what was up with the fake weed in High Times?).

  But the reviews were brutal. The Village Voice said, “The movie’s egregious buzzkills—hazy plot, jarring non sequiturs, pointless pothead-celebrity cameos—defy even herbally-enhanced viewing.” The Toronto Star offered, “First-time Australian Director Alison Thompson . . . really doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing.” After a brief theatrical release, the film went straight to DVD.

  As a movie producer, I had a bright future behind me.

  The two hundred bucks a week I was getting from Al Goldstein and Screw to keep America up to date on the state of the video squack market was just about paying for my beer and helping to fund an Internet dating habit I was slowly developing. But my savings account was wilting like the last rose of summer. Unfortunately, the market for thirty-something editors was not blossoming in the post-9/11 zeitgeist. A lot of magazines had purged their staffs, and senior editors who survived the cuts were holding on to their jobs with the same sanguine sense of propriety that a pit bull takes to a pork chop. It was a lousy time to be in the magazine racket.

  My mom let me know that she was appalled that I wa
s back in the skin trade by clucking her tongue and sighing heavily, which is how Jewish mothers signal displeasure to their children. As a tribe, they would make an excellent subject for a treatise on sociolinguistics. But she was unambiguous in her offer of support: after harping about how I should find a new career (“Maybe you can teach English?”), she told me to call her if I needed anything, that I could count on her.

  Both my parents had remarried and were a lot happier, but my mom was wearing it especially well. She’s a neurotic Jewish mother who had her heart torn out when her world began twirling violently off its axis— she didn’t sign on to be a single mom, she was looking forward to a life of bar mitzvahs and baby showers. I should have been married by now and giving her brilliant grandchildren with sparkling blue eyes for her to dandle on her knee. For the first time she was being genuinely supportive. I welcomed it and it was the beginning of a much-repaired, healthy relationship.

  My father, however, was always somehow able to make me feel as though the dismal American economy was somehow my fault.

  At least Grandma was happy that I wasn’t working for “that dope rag” anymore. Sex magazines were much better (I was always honest with Grandma about what I did, she deserved no less)—at least sex might lead to children.

  Mostly Grandma wanted to know if I was seeing anyone, and did I ever speak to “whatshername, that lawyer you were living with.” I wasn’t, and I didn’t. Grandma suggested that I try the Internet.

  Being the booby prize in a drunken dance contest was far preferable to trolling cyberspace for hard-luck cases, especially on the advice of my eighty-five-year-old grandma. But the old trout made some sense.

  My first foray into the cesspool of Internet dating was a little reconnaissance on a Jewish dating site—I figured I owed Grandma at least that much for all the pills I swiped from her when I was a teenager.