by Mike Edison
Al could never control his vitriol, and it could turn personal and ugly very quickly. He is incapable of being calm, he needs a fight, he needs friction to survive. Pissing off Al is a terrible thing to do unless you want to find yourself featured in the pages of Screw and on television, the target of a Fuck-You on Midnight Blue. In this case, he was dropping the bomb on a young woman he had unceremoniously fired on the phone after she fucked up a rental car reservation. Al left several repulsive phone messages for her, calling her, among other things, a “smelly cunt” and a “lowlife scumbag.” She also found herself an unwilling media star in the Goldstein empire, starring in a Midnight Blue segment called “The Losers of My Life,” which also showcased a couple of Al’s ex-wives who now own beautiful houses thanks to him. Al was charged with twelve misdemeanor counts of harassment and aggravated harassment.
He had definitely fucked himself. His assistant wasn’t the kind of public persona who had to sit back and take this shit. Unfortunately for her, though, no one was buying her babe-in-the-woods routine, either. Before she took the job, she had been warned repeatedly by Chip and by Kevin, Screw’s longtime art director, that Al was a foulmouthed monster and a human minefield, that they ran a smut factory, that transvestite hookers came running in and out of the place all the time, that they filmed an X-rated TV show in the office next door. On the stand, when she tried to play coy and only reluctantly admitted that she knew “it was geared toward adults,” there were audible guffaws from the jury.
Al might even have had a chance if he didn’t take to featuring District Attorney Charles Hynes, whose office was trying this case, in Screw every week. Al mailed him copies, personally.
“Did you or did you not,” the prosecutor asked Al at the beginning of the trial, “write an editorial advising hijackers to crash their 767s into the office of the DA?”
Al went beserk and started screaming, “That is speech! I will not be silenced!” He got what he wanted when Judge Danny Chun ordered the bailiffs to take him away in handcuffs. By the end of the trial, Al was showing up tanked to the gills on Valium and Lord knows what else, wearing mock prison stripes with a cartoon ball and chain around his ankle.
The next issue of Screw featured Hynes “sucking Chink cock”— another classic Screw cut-and-paste job that left nothing to the imagination—and Al began telling anyone who would listen that Judge Chun “makes a nice lo mein but puts too much starch in my shirts.” Even Howard Stern, King of the Loudmouths, told Al to cool it with the Chinese food and laundry jokes when he had him on his show during the trial.
Yet Al was winning the support of the press pool, which was growing daily. He fawned over a New York Times reporter who had written a glowing profile of Al, telling him, “I want to thank you . . . I’d like to fuck you in the ass, you small-cocked Jew faggot.” The reporter was delighted by the attention. Al charmed female reporters with promises of expert cunnilingus and condominiums in Florida. No less than Jimmy Breslin, perhaps the greatest writer in the history of New York newspapers, took it upon himself to remind a crowd of ink-stained wretches that Al is there “for you.”
Al’s main line of defense was that, yes, he was an asshole, but not a criminal. The jury, after deliberating for days, finally delivered a verdict: they agreed, he was an asshole.
The technical differences among them remain elusive at best, but Al was found guilty of six charges of harassment and not guilty of the other six. He was facing two years. He told reporters that he would like to be sentenced to “community service at Nathan’s,” the famous Coney Island hot dog joint.
Al’s legal bills were towering. And Screw, now more of an anti-Hynes tract than a magazine, was officially out of gas. Midnight Blue was yanked off the air, as he wasn’t paying his bills to the cable company. His New York apartment was gone. His place in Los Angeles, gone. The Amsterdam flat just a resin-soaked memory. His Florida mansion—fifteen rooms built around a giant statue of a hand giving the middle finger, the last great symbol of New York Jew Largesse— would eventually be sold to keep Al drowning in pints of Häagen-Dazs, his preferred method of treating the diabetes he suffered from.
Al’s conviction was later overturned. But by then he was living in the office, where he slept among boxes upon boxes of brand-new sneakers, hermetically sealed humidors, piles of books and unopened CDs, a flat-screen TV the size of a bedsheet, and a phalanx of vacuum cleaners waiting for dinner parties.
Even more shocking, after years of working his gut as a pillar of who-gives-a-fuck hedonism, Al decided to give up girth as a gimmick and had his stomach stapled. He dropped a hundred pounds in no time, but it had no effect on his mouth. He continued to rage a verbal shit storm against his son—so vile that when a good-hearted rabbi heard Al ranting on late-night radio, he took it upon himself to go to the Screw office and beg him to find forgiveness and make peace with his child. Still wearing the stitches of his surgery, Al greeted the rabbi shirtless, with pus dripping from the sutures.
Soon after that, the New York marshals came and locked up the office. Al owed months of back rent. Screw was bankrupt and taken into trust by the state of New York, which was now, by default, in the porn business.
Meanwhile, the news out of High Times was no less bizarre.
The Stick of Butter was gone; he, too, had failed miserably. Bobby Black told me that the Stick had rarely come out of his office, apparently terrified of the inmates at the magazine. If there was a production problem, Butter Boy would send Bobby an e-mail even though the production office was only about ten feet away.
It did not help that Hager, left to his own devices, had continued to turn back the clocks to the Summer of Love. No surprise, Modern America had little interest in his jingly-jangly Renaissance fair of a magazine. Circulation would eventually drop to a mere hundred thousand, probably the lowest it had been in thirty years, 60 percent down from when I was steering the ship. It had to be one of the most colossal negative turnarounds in the history of magazine publishing. He was relieved of his office as well.
In fact, along with Butter Boy, most of the editorial staff was cut loose, although somehow Bloom dodged that bullet—he was probably out shopping for cookies when the purge came.
There was a new editor and publisher, and they had a Master Plan for Renewed Success: they were going to take the pot out of the magazine.
Far from being a panacea for the sins of the past, this seemed like sure evidence of drug-induced insanity. Take the weed out? Why not take the tits out of Playboy while they were at it?
The whole world had finally gone topsy-turvy. The new editor and publisher was Richard Stratton, a Forçade crony who had done eight years for pot smuggling and later produced several well-received documentaries. Calling the current version of High Times nothing more than a “pamphlet for potaholics,” he set a mandate for reform and hired John Mailer (son of Norman), formerly one of People magazine’s most sexy personalities, to be his executive editor. Their idea was to turn High Times into a lifestyle magazine “celebrating freedom.”
“I don’t believe we should be throwing that in people’s faces,” John Mailer sniffed to The New York Times, referring to the very product that had been featured on almost every High Times cover in the last twenty years. This should have disqualified him for the job on the spot. Showing his own premium blend of bravado and naïveté, Stratton also vowed, “The ads for fake pot have to go.”
Conspiracy theories abounded. Why would they do this? Why would Michael Kennedy and the High Times owners knowingly crash their business?
But Stratton and Mailer were resolute, talking about the new audience they were going to attract and the new advertising dollars that would follow. It was hard to figure. I never thought of Michael Kennedy as the kind of guy who would trade the family cow for a bag of magic beans.
If you told me that I’d be spending my summer vacation studiously attending Bible meetings with the Jews for Jesus, I probably would have carved out your eyes with a rusty mezu
zah and filled the holes with hot deli mustard. But it was my own choice. I wanted to be there. I needed to hear their message.
I was not looking to be saved. I was on a deep undercover assignment for Heeb, the upstart Jewish culture magazine for which I had also covered the Goldstein trial. My new job was to rip the sheet off of these creepy messianics and expose them as the dangerous religious cranks I knew them to be.
Heeb was the brainchild of Jennifer Bleyer, a brilliant Columbia grad who had once published a fanzine called Mazel Tov Cocktail. She started Heeb on a whim by dashing off her idea for a Jewish counterculture mag to Stephen Spielberg’s Joshua Venture, a foundation set up to fund creative Jewish social projects. Somebody there liked it: they came back with a check for sixty thousand dollars to start the magazine. I had seen an ad looking for contributors to Heeb, and I replied immediately.
The name Heeb itself was just goofy and irreverent enough to create a swirl of media attention, and it was a hit right out of the gate, getting a ton of ink and coverage on everything from CNN to Howard Stern. Jennifer was the real deal, fearless and idealistic.
I loved writing for Heeb. Jennifer had assembled a very bright staff of lefty intellectuals and like-minded save-the-world types. She even had an editor from The New York Times Magazine look at my Goldstein story (“Appetite for Destruction”), and it came back with a few insightful comments and a thumbs-up. It was incredibly rewarding and encouraging to be edited by someone at such a high level of the game. It was nice to be doing some real journalism for a change—it had been a while since I wrote anything that didn’t involve a giant bag of pot or a horny housewife.
My Jews for Jesus opus began in a New York City subway station on a brutally hot summer day, when I let one of their slack-jawed zombies “broadside” me with some of their icky pamphlets. One of them featured a picture of a Jewish star and a pig, proclaiming that “Jesus is so powerful that he can make us pigs kosher to God.” As if special dispensation for a bacon cheeseburger would add souls to their flock.
As directed, I called the number on the pamphlet and asked for Tuvya Zuretski, whose real name, I later discovered, is Lloyd Carlson.
Before we go any further, let me say that I am okay with Jesus. I don’t agree with everything He said, but when have I ever agreed with everything Anyone has said unless I was bombed and thought it might get me some action? His message seems sound to me. Kindness. Peace on Earth. He stood up for whores and lepers. He looked like a rock star. And rumor has it, he turned water into wine, a damn fine trick in anyone’s book. I figure he has precious little to do with the Moral Majority, the Ku Klux Klan, the Spanish Inquisition, Miracle Whip, or the intolerant Bible-thumpers that play Republican politics like a high-stakes game of Smear the Queer. Blaming Jesus for that crew would be like blaming the Grateful Dead for having fans who smell bad.
The Jews for Jesus are not Jews at all. They are Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, part of a large group of “Messianic Hebrews”— zealous missionaries peddling cut-rate salvation—trying to “complete the Jews,” which is one of the conditions for End of Days and the Second Coming of Christ. There are more than four hundred of these groups in the United States, mostly funded by the Southern Baptist Convention, but Jews for Jesus is the only one with a catchy name brand, as well known for its cheap alliteration as it is for its oxymoronic controversy.
The lies these people tell are mind-boggling in the extreme. Their meetings are awash in gore and idiocy. The worst of this Holy Roller yammering is a particularly foul view of the Holocaust as some sort of blood sacrifice so that the Jews could atone for their sins. This was somehow linked with a lesson in How to Destroy Satan, an ill-founded tale based on the metaphor of killing a snake. “You have to crush its head,” they told me. “You can’t just cut it in half. If you cut it in half, do you know what happens? You get two snakes.” I’m no herpetologist, but I knew there was something specious in this reasoning. “It’s true,” I was assured. “They’re just like worms.”
Adam and Eve, of course, is a story to be believed without qualification. “Well,” I offered, “last night I was watching Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and it got me to thinking about evolution . . .”
This is not what they wanted to hear. Monkey talk would not be tolerated.
“Science only has theories, and they are always changing,” they explained to me gently. “You need proof. The Bible was written four thousand years ago and it hasn’t changed.” And there you have it, friends. QED. Case closed. So, was I ready to accept Jesus as my savior?
Not even an All-You-Can-Eat Pigs-in-a-Blanket Buffet and the promise of condomless sex with a disease-free shiksa porn star would have gotten me to go back into that theological kook house. I may be a cheap Jew, but salvation is one thing I am not going to be buying wholesale.
19
HOWLIN’ WOLF VS. THE ALIENS
The emergency room in a Spanish hospital is no place to spend a Saturday night.
My first Rocket Train solo tour of Europe ended in disaster, with my hand twisted like a failed experiment in abstract expressionism— broken, dislocated, and throbbing like an earthworm at the end of a fishing hook.
The tour started as a lark. Some friends in Toulouse, France, who put out a fanzine called Dig It! wanted me to bring my new band over for some shows, but there was no way I could afford to bring the whole Rocket Train at the time. I jokingly said I’d come by myself and busk in the Paris metro. It seemed like a good way to kill time between jobs.
Somehow, this idea made sense to them. They told me to bring just a guitar; they’d book me into small bars. “Everyone knows you from the Raunch Hands and the Pleasure Fuckers. Do five small gigs, and you’ll make enough to pay for the plane fare and have a great time.”
By the time I arrived in Paris, I had a full-scale outer-space blues revue simmering: Mike Edison’s Interstellar Roadhouse. I based the show around my two-string super-fuzz diddley-bo guitar and the theremin, now officially referred to as the Rocket Tone Generator. I belted away at Delta blues, spirituals, and greasy R & B, showering the whole mess in a patina of bargain-basement psychedelia and neo-futurist psychobabble. “When wars are fought with guitars,” I spumed between blasts of outer-space noise and high, whining riffs on the slide guitar, “I shall be the New Electric Samurai!!!”
The idea of playing a few bars just for kicks quickly turned into a ten-date tour that took me as far south as Valencia. My old friend El Bratto—last seen high on acid and treading water in the Mediterranean—was booking the Spanish part of the tour. He’s a nice guy but a bit of a bobo, and he got the dates screwed up so I wound up scheduled to play two towns on the same night. Seeing as they were both potentially good gigs—the Raunch Hands always did well in both towns—I figured what the hell, we’ll rock Gijón, which was an earlier show anyway, and then we’ll haul ass over to Oviedo, an hour down the road, and do some damage there. It was a colossal mistake.
Leaving Gijón sucked. It was the perfect Rocket Train audience at the Louie Louie café, a relatively sophisticated bunch who got off on old R & B and blues as much as the punk rock spirit, and totally fell for the outer-space blues routine. I wanted to stick around, I was having a great night. I could have found a wife in that crowd.
Some nights it was tough. A lot of crowds, especially younger audiences, just want to be blown away with volume and speed. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but ultimately I was working a one-man blues show, no matter how far-out it got. There were still plenty of fireworks and high-energy rhythms—one magazine called it “Howlin’ Wolf meets War of the Worlds”—but it was definitely not for children looking for a sugar fix.
Unfortunately, the crowd in Oviedo was made up of teenagers who were already shitfaced by the time I got there, and they were expecting me to lead some kind of mosh pit. To make matters worse, in accordance with the traditions of the laziest Spanish pueblos, they hadn’t even bothered to set up the sound system.
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nbsp; When I did show up and tried to get things happening, they didn’t have the right kind of plugs, and someone had to go look for an adapter while someone else tried to find a mic stand. I ended up duct-taping the mic to the back of a chair. It was a mess. I should have just gotten in the van and gone back to Gijón.
By the time I played, I was fairly drunk, but the crowd was completely fucking blotto and already starting to slam dance before I even played a note. There’s not a lot to do in that town, and this was their big night to blow off steam.
I worked my ass off, skipping the weirder part of the show and jumping on tables and playing versions of “Pills” and “Subway Train” and whatever else I thought might work. Eventually I won them over, but it was a sick gig. It was wrong. What started out as a winning night had turned into a nightmare, and I was thoroughly pissed off and drowning my anger with Pantagruelian doses of Jim Beam. It wasn’t long before I was completely out of my skull, and trying to show off for the last pretty girl in the bar, I attempted a cartwheel out front in the street. Another bad idea. I crumbled like stale coffee cake, crushing the fingers of my left hand when I landed. I could hear the knuckle, the one that ties my palm to my little finger, pop like the cork in a bottle of cava.
I knew the tour was over right then. I managed to make it back to El Bratto’s house, where he gave me some kind of Spanish dummy pill. He figured I’d sleep it off and we’d make the show in Bilbao the next night. Thankfully, it was the end of the run and after Bilbao, there was only one more show.
I woke up the next day, and my hand was swollen like a cantaloupe. El Bratto took one look and said, “Cheezis, Sharky, your hand is broken!” Yeah, no shit. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I can’t play tonight. “I didn’t believe you, I didn’t really think you’d miss a gig.” Seriously. I have to go to the hospital. Now. “Nahh, you don’t want to do that. The hospital is no fun. I have a friend who is a doctor. I will call her.”