by Mike Edison
And so we trudged over to the town doctor’s office—apparently her son had taken the horse and buggy for the day, so she wasn’t making house calls. She smelled a little bit like oatmeal, as old people sometimes do, but she was really quite nice. She took one look at the melon at the end of my arm and said, “Your hand is broken. You should go to the hospital.” I had my second opinion.
“Okay,” El Bratto acquiesced. “We’ll go to the hospital. But first we are going to have a barbecue.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Let’s go . . .”
“Sharky,” he reasoned, “your hand is already broken. It is not going to get any more broken if we have lunch first. It would be una lástima to waste such a nice day. Look, we have some nice chorizo, and hamburguesas. Have some wine, have some beer, smoke a joint, have some more pills, you’ll feel better. We’ll go when the sun goes down. We’re gonna be at the hospital for a while, we should eat first.”
There was a certain irrefutable Spanish logic to this.
When we got to the hospital that evening, the X-rays showed what I knew all along: Tab A was no longer inserted in Tab B, and they had to put Sharky back together again.
Here’s one thing you should never do: call a doctor bad names when he is trying to forcefully pop your bones back into place without the benefit of anesthesia.
This guy’s specialty was medieval quackery. He made some pretense of shooting my hand up with a dismal numbing agent—water, I think—and, without waiting for it to take effect, had his Nurse Ratched of an assistant grab my elbow while he yanked at the other end and tried to push the bone back into place. It was like some kind of sick tug-of-war, with Yours Truly starring as the rope. I would have been howling if I had not taken the NY Yankees cap off my head and gagged myself with it.
“Pensaba que todos los norteamericanos eran duros, como los vaqueros en las películas.” He pushed me.
“Oye, carcinero, yo pensaba que todos los españoles eran simpáticos, como en las películas.”
With that, he gave my arm a tug that would have ripped the knickers off the Statue of Liberty, and my knuckle popped into place with an audible ca-chak! I thought I was having one of those mythical acid flashbacks they used to warn you about in seventh-grade health class. I guess I should have just been grateful that he didn’t start bleeding me with leeches.
They wrapped my hand in a cast that might as well have been fashioned from a roll of toilet paper and a few packs of Big Bambu and sent me on my way with some Advil. Advil? I was fucking furious, but they would not give me anything stronger.
“Sharky,” El Bratto offered, “you should not have called him ‘butcher.’ He didn’t like that.”
There was only one thing to do: take El Bratto, who had hung out with me for six hours in the hospital, out to dinner. I, of course, am never much motivated by food or drink, but I would pretend to have an appetite so as not to offend him.
I began by waving off the usual table wine and ordering the good Rioja reserva. In the States it would have been at least forty dollars a bottle in a restaurant, but in this family-owned mesón in the hills of a mining town, it was about ten bucks, twice what the boss had paid for it.
In Asturias, the region of Spain we were in, besides wine, the thing to drink is sidra, unpasteurized hard apple cider, with about half the alcohol content of beer. So we got a case of that, too. The main thing about the sidra is it needs to be aerated. When you pour it, the mouth of the bottle should be a minimum foot and a half away from the glass. It’s not that easy to hit the glass without splattering the stuff everywhere. Locals and professional waiter types can hold the bottle over their heads and the glass behind their backs, down by their knees, and not miss a drop. But it’s a trick you have to learn by practice, so working through a case of cider involves quite a bit of splashing around. It is just another one of those things that makes Spain so special. It’s as if they want you to make a mess.
We sharpened our teeth on a cazuela de mariscos, a seafood salad of octopus, shrimp, calamari, and whatever else was lurking about that day, and some paté de cabracho, made from, so I have been led to believe, nothing but the finest red scorpion fish. It is delicious. For dinner we each had the cachopo, another typical plato asturiano, which is basically a ham and cheese sandwich, except instead of bread, they use a couple of thick steaks.
After that, I was understandably beginning to feel a bit peckish, so I ordered the especialidad de la casa, the famous paletilla de cordero, the ingredients for which are the hindquarters of a lamb, and fire. It comes on a giant slab of wood, looks like it was prepared by cavemen, and is frighteningly toothsome. Not to mention, messy. We had the usual round of flan, apple liqueur, and carajillos before going back to the house to smoke the rest of the hash and drink whatever bourbon and beer was left over from the barbecue. Then, purely out of spite, I threw the Advil away and cleaned out El Bratto’s medicine cabinet. I slept well that night, but goddammit, I should have been in Bilbao. In twenty years, that was the first gig I had ever missed.
I was supposed to be in Toulouse the next night, and I was not going to miss another show. Rock ’n’ roll is the best job of all time. You don’t get to call in sick. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do exactly, but I was formulating a plan: if I could find a length of pipe just the right size and could somehow attach it to the underside of my cast, I could use it as a bottleneck slide and play guitar sitting down, sort of like a makeshift lap steel. It had just the right elements of Rube Goldberg and Hound Dog Taylor, and I thought it could work. Toulouse was going to be my end-of-tour party. I had started there, and I needed the circle to be unbroken. It was a free show at a bar, as much a fete for me as for everyone who had been so supportive and had encouraged me to come over and make a racket. There was no way I was not going to play.
Also, I had a date with a big breast. Well, a duck breast, actually, the highly prized magret de canard, a thick slab of meat as rich and satisfying as any strip steak you’ll find in New York or Kansas City. The ducks in France are well fed and content. The restaurant had been booked for weeks, and I would have hated to disappoint the chef, who lives to see the delight I take snarfling his handiwork.
I called ahead and explained that I was flying on only one wing and that we were going to have to recruit a few musicians to back me up and also figure out how to jerry-rig my busted hand so I could at least make a go of it. One of the guys from Dig It! was so concerned that I get the right piece of heavy metal to strap to my arm that he took his sink apart, nearly flooding his apartment, until we found the perfect length of copper pipe.
The show was a smash, if a bit sloppy. The place was packed, and there were people out on the street who could not fit in the bar to see the spectacle of a one-armed man attempting to reinvent the slide guitar. Frankly, it hurt like hell, and I have no idea what further damage I was doing to myself, but it was an experiment in sound and orthopedics (orthophonics?) that no one there is likely to forget. Everyone was very appreciative that I did not bail simply on account of a few shattered bones. I played half a dozen songs sawing away at the two-string fuzz monster and the six-string Earth guitar, before going a cappella for a few drunken field hollers and then bringing on some friends to end the tour with an old-fashioned version of “Louie Louie,” with all the dirty words left intact and plenty of mangled French patois.
After the show we drank to this and that until it was time to go. I went straight to the airport from the club in a car filled with shitfaced Rocket Train fans.
By that time I was clearly out of my senses and capable of pretty much any kind of savagery. Someone should have alerted Homeland Security—especially since when x-rayed, the briefcase I carry the theremin in looks like nothing less than what it is: a series of small packages (echo machine, various fuzz boxes, etc.) wired to a primitive radio receiver. I saw it on the screen and I wanted to arrest and torture me.
When I got to New York, I went to a proper doctor, a New York do
ctor with a wall full of expensive-looking diplomas and a Jewish-sounding last name. He took one look at my mangled paw, marveled at the free-form engineering masterpiece that was my cast, and snorted, “Who was in charge there, Frank Gehry?”
It is important to have a surgeon with a sense of humor. He immediately cleared his schedule and told me not to go anywhere, he was going to operate that afternoon. One more day healing in the position it was in and he would have to rebreak my hand before resetting it.
God bless him, he shot me up with so much anesthesia I couldn’t feel my face, let alone my hand. It took two hours to insert three steel pins in me, reconstructing the mess at the end of my arm until my fingers and hands lined up in a way that looked less like modern art and more like something that belonged on a human being. He sent me home with a jar of real painkillers. I promptly went to a sushi bar and washed them down with a bottle of sake, the most recent version of the Edison Cure. Like I say, you’ve got to be flexible.
I had worked for so many magazines that were meant to be read with one hand, it was only fitting that I was now going to have to write with just one. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a whole lot of work.
I was done with Heeb. After four issues, Jennifer had decided to move on. She was sick of the headaches and the hangers-on, and in the first year she had pretty much accomplished all that she had set out to do with the magazine, which was basically to see if it could be done against the odds. Having achieved that, she did not want to be tied to it forever.
She left the book in the hands of Josh Neuman, one of the associate editors. Josh shouldn’t have been in line for such a responsible position, but he was the only one who could afford to do a full-time job with paltry compensation—Jennifer had been eking by on an honorarium and a part-time job, but the magazine was not making enough money to actually pay salaries—and he became the new editor by default. He asked me if I would be the editorial director, second on the masthead, and help him shape the book, since he had almost no magazine experience beyond being a Heeb sycophant. I agreed. I would still have plenty of time to pursue other gigs, and Heeb was an excellent reference. I loved working with Jennifer; she set the bar high and got great work out of me. I still felt loyal to the magazine, even though she was gone.
Armed with an inheritance and plenty of free time, Josh had made the improbable evolutionary leap from Junior Chimp to Lawgiver, but he still desperately needed an Orangutan on board, someone who knew what the fuck they were doing.
As it turned out, Josh may have asked me to be his editorial director, but he sure as hell didn’t want any editorial directing. All he wanted from me was to doctor the rough-and-tumble features he had solicited and make him look good.
Josh broke every single rule of being a good e-in-c: he put himself on a pedestal and didn’t return calls or e-mails from writers or freelancers. He didn’t respect his staff. He was inflexible and did not accept criticism. He panicked at every deadline and acted like a bully. He certainly did not encourage creativity, and became married to every idea he had.
It’s important to have the balls to throw out your first idea and look at things from different angles. You can always come back to it, but if you fall in love too quickly, it gums up the works and nothing ever evolves. It takes patience and a nurturing spirit, and you can’t be afraid of being trumped by someone else in the room. Magazines need strong leaders, but just like being in a rock ’n’ roll band, it is a cooperative process. Josh was clueless. Jennifer had never acted like the Lawgiver, even though it was her magazine. She didn’t have to. Everyone respected her, and she listened to her team. She made everyone feel important.
Even though Jennifer was no longer working on the magazine (she went on to write for a far more successful Jewish publication, The New York Times), she was still on the Heeb masthead as founder and was supposed to be acting as an adviser. Orangutan Emeritus. But it didn’t take long before she refused to have anything to do with Josh, whose ego-tripping was out of control. I sometimes wondered whether his main reason for running Heeb was so he might have a shot at fucking Jewess comedian Sarah Silverman—an admirable goal, but not one that was likely to be achieved by acting like an insane person. It was kind of like John Hinckley trying to score with that Foster girl.
The last straw was the despicable cover story about Jesus Christ that Josh insisted was going to stand as a monument to his genius. I was appalled.
Generally speaking, when I say that something has crossed the lines of taste and civility—or rather, that something is such an egregious example of bad taste that my sensibilities are chafed—flags go up, the band stops playing, and everyone stands around with their mouths agape, worried that whatever it is must be really bad and we are all going straight to Hell.
I took one look at the photo spread called “Crimes of Passion” and said, “You Have Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me.” I could not have been more serious. The Holy Virgin Mother with pierced tits? Oy fucking vey. I wanted no part of this.
Mostly, I was offended by the story because it wasn’t funny.
Allow me to recap: I have proudly penned some of the most pernicious trash ever foisted on the reading public. I wear the stench of the most noxious publications in the history of American letters like a red badge of courage. Thanks to me, an entire generation of college students knows how to score a bargain blow job from a crack whore. I took great pride in chronicling the smelly sex lives of the homeless. I lauded Omar’s Anal Adventures—seven volumes of them!—with a glee usually reserved for children’s birthday parties. I have scrawled, sans souci, prurient tales of incest and cherry-popping too rough even for circulation among the United States’ maximum-security prison population. I have championed race-baiting and misogynist wrestlers, and I have peddled to America’s youth magazines loaded to the teeth with illegal drugs. Not limited to spreading filth in the free press, I was a willing participant in GG Allin’s scum-rock porno freak show. I think I carry a fair amount of gravitas in this department. There is not much that shocks me. So when I call “cut,” people usually listen.
The Heeb photo spread—an “irreverent” portrayal of Christ’s last moments on Earth—was humorless, void of parody or satire, dull, and a careless waste of all the “smart capital” Jennifer had built into Heeb as a hip and progressive magazine. As well executed as it may have been, the photo spread carried no philosophy, no message, no irony, no meaningful text, just a thick-tongued reaction to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie, which wasn’t even out yet and which no one had even seen. We were getting dangerously into Giuliani territory: prior restraint, mob rules, bandwagon hopping, and all sorts of free speech issues that the editor of Heeb should feel a duty to defend.
If Josh wanted to go after Mel Gibson (preferably after seeing the film), he could have nailed him to a cross and shoved up his ass one of those silly hats the pope is always wearing. He could have shown Mel tea bagging Woody Allen or popping a Steven Spielberg–shaped gingerbread man into an Easy Bake oven. He could have had Mel singing “Edelweiss” while peeing on Whoopi Goldberg, or he could have portrayed Jerry Seinfeld buggering Braveheart with a marble rye. Anything, as long as it showed some sense of humor.
And when did Jesus and the Virgin Mother become the targets of such vitriol? We were supposed to be mocking intolerance, ignorance, and bigotry, not faith.
Before turning Heeb into his vanity project, Josh taught philosophy at a local college, so he should have known a thing or two about “context.” We were a Jewish magazine. We didn’t poop on Jesus’ mom. That was a job for the Brooklyn Museum.
Of course Mel is a venal anti-Semite and deserves no less than a fourteen-pound matzo-ball suppository. His movie isn’t much more than a gory, hate-filled propaganda reel. All Josh was doing was giving Mel some legitimacy by getting in the muck with him. Spoof him— brutally, caustically, venomously—and show him that you are smarter than he is. Measure your response with humor. What could be more Jewish? Follow the sooth te
achings of Rabbi Dave Insurgent and liberate yourself.
Josh desperately wanted to be seen as “cutting edge,” and for his efforts, Heeb earned a sharply worded rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, admittedly not a group known for its sense of humor, but now Heeb was skirting dangerously close to embracing the same intolerant ideology with which it wanted to do battle. Josh would brag that he wanted Heeb to be a big-tent pop culture magazine, albeit a Jewish one, but on his first issue he flew straight into a black hole of racism and fear and painted himself into a corner as a knee-jerking twat. It was infantile.
A lot of people were surprised that I quit a relatively high-profile gig on principle—Heeb was such a media darling—but fuck it, I have my standards, and anyway, I was all grown up and really had no business playing in the sandbox with spoiled children.
Eventually Jennifer cashed out and sold the magazine to Josh, but by that time she had also had enough of his bullshit, and they communicated only through their lawyers. The magazine continued, but with little spark.
For a while I worked for index, a gorgeously produced art and culture magazine. It was oversize and printed beautifully on thick matte paper. Every issue was rife with high-end fashion ads: Armani, Gucci, and Marc Jacobs were in every issue. Tom Ford used us to road test his most controversial images. It was a different world from High Times, which was always infected with ads for cut-rate gardening tools and dehydrated urine samples that you could use to pass a drug test.
The magazine was run by artist Peter Halley, one of the wildly smartest people I have ever met. In addition to being an incredibly successful painter—he came up in the 1980s East Village New York art scene with a highly conceptual string of “neo-geo” minimalist paintings and constructions—he ran the painting department at Yale University and was a well-regarded critical thinker, much influenced by Michel Foucault. He ran index out of his painting studio, a large loft in West Chelsea, something like Andy Warhol’s old Factory, but without the sex and drugs. Which should have been the first clue that something was seriously amiss. But I needed a job, and the magazine was magnificent.