by Mike Edison
20
I HAVE FUN EVERYWHERE I GO
It just wouldn’t be a Rocket Train tour if I didn’t end up in the emergency room.
It was early, so the hospital in Strasbourg, France, was still pretty calm. Later it would be crawling with broken drunks and football hooligans, but right now there was only a teenager who had skate-boarded headfirst off of his roof. And me. My face was busted wide open from taking a bad bump in my European debut as a professional wrestler.
This was my first return to the ring since I took over Main Event. A twenty-year hiatus! This was Bigger than Big! I ended up flat on my back, being sewn together by a French doctor. At least he was no butcher. The scar might even look good.
Wrestling is one of the few things I can always count on. It is the least self-conscious of all art forms. Wrestling never worries about how silly or absurd it looks. Wrestling does not discriminate. Everyone is invited to the party. It has never let me down.
In many ways, those are the very same reasons why I had initially been so attracted to High Times. Once upon a time, they didn’t give a damn what the Establishment thought, and they never would have been caught pandering. Few other magazines lived so far out on the fringes that their very existence was a big Fuck You to the straitlaced and the square. Abbie Hoffman once said that “sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers.” Unfortunately, High Times turned vegetarian a long time ago.
It was no surprise that the idea to take the pot out of High Times was a dismal failure. No one wanted it. I heard that sales were so low that they were selling ads for cash at fire-sale prices just to meet the payroll. It took only a few issues of that farce before they fired the new publisher and editor, stuffed the magazine full of bright green nuggets, and slapped a banner on the cover screaming THE BUDS ARE BACK!
Eventually they brought Hager back as well, which, after being fired and rehired so many times, makes him something like the Billy Martin of pot. Bloom was put out to pasture and given the traditional outcast’s outpost of “editor at large.” Apparently there was no love lost between those two, either.
It seemed as if they were playing it Safer than Safe. The covers were knocked off, note for note, from covers that had been successful in the past, and they generally featured the subversive floral arrangements of the old school. It probably wouldn’t be long before they dug up old Bob Marley’s corpse for an encore. Except that somewhere along the line they had picked up a taste for dumbed-down stoner populism, like an idiotic “Miss High Times” contest featuring lurid photos of young women posing suggestively with buds and bongs (“Why you should vote for me: I have great boobies”), and they had pumped out a string of inane “sex and pot” issues featuring porn stars on the cover. Which was, frankly, shocking. Aside from defying the rampant pornophobia that had infected High Times so rabidly when I was an inmate there, this was exactly the kind of doper juvenilia that Hager had always railed against, and it ran directly contrary to the Earth Mother goddess worship he preached as his counterculture catechism.
And then, far beyond any previously acceptable level of pothead prurience, even for the most puerile of stoners, out of nowhere appeared a story about a “buttbong”—which is exactly what it sounds like: a dildo-shaped water pipe used to smoke pot out of someone’s butt. In this case, it was an “adult film actress” who had just got back from filming a reefer-mad fuck flick at High Times’s sacred Cannabis Cup event in Amsterdam. The story left nothing to the imagination: “After a quick lube job, she inserted the bong into her ass . . .”
Had Hager really sold his soul to the devil? Surely this was Babylon.
I asked one of my more coherent former coworkers, “How the hell do you guys justify all that porn you’re putting in the magazine? They would’ve put my nuts in a vise.”
“It’s okay if the hippies do it,” he explained to me. “You couldn’t have done it—for the same reason that only a virulent anticommunist like Nixon could go to China.”
Screw may be the sleaziest magazine ever published, but especially by comparison to High Times it was always giddily, Socratically self-aware. With Screw, you knew what you were getting yourself into—we did not lure you in with silver bells on our toes and then, without warning, clop you on the side of the head with a buttbong. When I was asked to become the new editor in chief of Screw, I agreed immediately.
I have often been asked how come I never pursued a gig at Condé Nast or one of the bigger magazine publishers. Henry David Thoreau summed it up well: “Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.” Anyway, I never thought they would have me. The upper stratum of magazine publishing was never too keen on hiring dropouts, especially those who come with rap sheets riddled with first-degree wrestling and pornography offenses. I don’t know why, but they just don’t consider that art. I would love to write for The New Yorker (eventually someone is going have to make the Shouts and Murmurs page funny again), but working there? Doing what? It doesn’t seem like it would be a whole lot of fun. And it’s not likely they’d put me in charge—there or at any of the blue-chip rags that clutter the prime real estate on newsstands and at supermarket checkout counters. In an industry where celebrity access is the coin of the realm, I am probably not the guy you want fronting your business. Publicists have too much power—anger one of their hotshot clients, and you can say goodbye to all of them. Sooner than later I am going to piss someone off, and then what are you going to do?
Editing Screw was license to ill and the culmination of a modern-day Abraham Lincoln story. Far below the dingy confines of the mail room, I had started my career at Screw on the filthiest part of the street, peddling reviews of open-window peep booths and massage parlors. Now I had the big corner office.
After Al Goldstein’s first harassment trial, his self-immolation had continued unabated. He learned nothing from the experience, or from his tidal wave of legal bills. Almost immediately he found himself starring as the defendant in another potentially avoidable harassment case, this time involving an ex-wife whose home phone number he ran repeatedly in the pages of the magazine. For that trick Al spent nine days in jail on Rikers Island and a week undergoing psychiatric evaluation. Soon after, he was thrown off of an airplane for allegedly making lewd remarks to a stewardess, and he was busted for allegedly shoplifting at a Barnes and Noble bookstore. His friends tried to help him, but he was quick to bite their hands. He worked briefly as a “greeter” at the famous Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan, where he had been a regular for years, only to be fired for sleeping in the basement. He spent time in a homeless shelter until the maverick stage magician Penn Jillette came to his rescue and rented him an apartment on Staten Island. Improbably, he got married again, to a woman forty years younger than he. Not surprisingly, it was a disaster, and he ended up sleeping on his new father-in-law’s floor.
All of this was tragic to anyone who knew Al as the larger-than-life porno king who could be as articulate and charming in person as he was offensive on his TV show. But he seemed set on destroying himself. When his business was going down in flames, his reaction was to max out his credit cards on extravagant dinners and wildly expensive but ultimately useless electronic gadgets. While Screw burned, he fiddled, and then continued to set fire to bridges in every direction. It was hard to feel sorry for him.
Meanwhile, Screw’s longtime art director, Kevin Hein, had been approached to become a partner in buying the magazine out of hock and relaunching it, and he asked me if I wanted the editor’s gig. I would be only the second editor in chief in the magazine’s thirty-four-year history.
Kevin is an Orangutan of the First Order. He is a master of cock-in-mouth composites, a regular Kandinsky with cut-and-paste hatchet jobs. Not only did he have the magic touch with the scissors (he was chopping heads long before the advent of Photoshop), he actually enjoyed it. Tell the man that this was the week we were going to turn Tom Cruise’s narrow white ass into a Hollywood dick depot, or strap a dildo on Hillary Clinton and bung it up th
e rump of the Republican du jour, and he would take to it like Chief Wiggum to a jelly doughnut.
He took pleasure not only in the absurdity of the job, but also in the Pranksterish chutzpah in which it was intended. He had learned from the Lawgiver, Al Goldstein, to whom we remained loyal in spirit. After almost two thousand issues of Screw (thirty-five years of weekly publication) Al would not speak to us or acknowledge that Screw could exist without him, but we still subscribed to his original vision and had no desire to radically change the editorial formula, only the business plan.
Unfortunately, Kevin’s partners were gorillas of the worst sort, the kind who resented the other, smarter apes. They were gung ho going in, ready to let Kevin and me lead the magazine, but once the office was set up and the magazine was coming out regularly, they spent all their time fighting over the coconuts.
They had bought Screw for a song, but that song was about all they had. Before they made the deal, I suggested to Kevin that whatever they paid for the magazine, they would need that much again to build a world-class website as well as for publicity and promotion. But they were all in, and there was no money left. The magazine did well right out of the gate, we re-energized the old package, and the circulation leaped from 5,000 per issue, where Al had left it, to 20,000 in almost no time. But once again, as a circular for hookers in a world of free alternative newspapers and a thousand websites all offering the same services, it was never going to go the distance without a radical change in strategy.
This not-so-dynamic duo came on board with great promises—they had been in the smut racket for years and would be behind-the-scenes businessmen, while Kevin ran art and production and worked to restore the magazine to its former glory. But it turned out that their idea of how a magazine is distributed was the old model—it falls off the back of a truck. There was little accountability. They did not want to hear about national distribution (Screw was available only in the New York tri-state area, where the local advertising came from) or expanding the demographic, or going glossy, or the Internet, or any other modern publishing solutions. It was the worst sort of bush-league bullshit. These guys were so dense they didn’t understand why they even needed an editor. They boasted that they owned the magazine, and they never read it, so what was the point? They had no time for foolishness such as a business plan. After six months they still had not hired a full-time ad person or a webmaster. It wasn’t much use trying to get these guys to think beyond cash-on-delivery ads for cut-rate call girls—just as quickly as we had ramped up the circ, they started cutting corners, skimping on the editorial budget and circumcising our roster of freelancers. When asked at a strategy meeting where they’d like to be with the business in a year, Knucklehead No. 1 said, “I wanna make a lot of fucking money,” and the other said, “I wanna get laid.”
We were doomed. I knew it couldn’t possibly last with these clowns running the business, and I stayed as far away from them as possible. But even with our limited resources I was having a blast. I adopted the pseudonym Charlie Mordecai, and every two weeks (we were now biweekly) Kevin and I would conspire to drop a bomb on the newsstands. I looked forward to going to work every day—in fact, some days I’d wake up so inspired and gifted with such felicity of phrase that I could effortlessly cast a cover line that succinctly captured the very gestalt of Screw—MAUREEN DOWD’S FILTHY QUEST FOR COCK was one of those happy riffs—before even getting out of bed, and then I would skip happily all the way to work.
Since her fame will surely fade as quickly as her cheap dye job, allow me to remind you that Mo Dowd is (or maybe was, by now) the superannuated New York Times reporter and author of the shrill hate screed Are Men Necessary? in which she writes, “Deep down all men want the same thing, a virgin in a gingham dress.” Which, of course, is complete bullshit: what all men want are virgins who act like whores. Everyone knows that. Most men don’t even know what gingham is.
Dowd liked to march up and down Broadway sporting the kind of red fuck-me pumps generally preferred by D-list fluffers, carrying her Pulitzer Prize like a bludgeon and screaming Stone Age salvos at anyone who would listen that men just don’t like smart women. “If there’s one thing men fear it’s a woman who uses her critical faculties,” wrote Mo, who likes to use her brain as an albatross to explain why no one with any horse sense at all will walk to the altar with her, and who advises women to dumb it down so they can wangle a man.
Not exactly a credit to her race, her book flattered no one and set new extremes in gender bashing, insulting at once several generations of women’s libbers, post-Donahue males, the Democratic Party, and the vast majority of sentient human beings. Somewhere there are suffragettes rolling in their graves. In our eyes, Dowd was a sexist pig marked for death.
In addition to Dowd, we tore into celebrity frauds (DAVID BLAINE, MASTER OF SHIT: WORLD’S WORST MAGICIAN ALMOST DIES—CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR!), and pretentious hacks (THE KKK TOOK MY BABY AWAY, CAN’T THEY DO SOMETHING ABOUT JOSH NEUMAN?). Courtney Love, Dick Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, and the stars of American Idol all felt our wrath. Madonna was a regular:
FORGIVE ME FATHER, FOR I AM TALENTLESS: The usual gang of idiots is already up in arms at Madonna’s oh-so-shocking stage show, of which the only thing shocking is the palpable lack of imagination. Hasn’t she been prancing around in slut clothes and rosaries since day fucking one? She’s a one-trick pony, about as edgy as chewed bubble gum and as musical as a vending machine. This year’s model features the forty-something soccer mom “singing” from a giant crucifix adorned with disco mirrors. As stage props go, this one looks like it belongs in the Mall of America. Cruddy heavy metal bands with backdrops of pentagrams painted on bed sheets are more threatening. She is tired, pathetic, a bore. Perhaps after she sells out her tour she’ll confess, “I haven’t had a thought in my head since the first time I sucked off Sean Penn, and that idea blew.” We hate her and hope she falls off her stupid cross and breaks something.
But we weren’t always locked into attack mode. One unblushing cover line read YOU LOOK GOOD. HAVE YOU LOST WEIGHT? BUY SCREW. When Ronald Reagan croaked, we gleefully whipped up a gala edition in his honor: SPECIAL ISSUE: REAGAN, MONKEYS, AND PUNK ROCK! It was everything I had ever dreamed of.
In a lighter mood, “Russian Volleyball Sluts,” “Zero Gravity Swingers,” and “Super Horny Sex Women Go Blow Job Crazy” also met with great public approval. That last one seemed to leap off the back of the truck.
Our best work was our patriotic broadside for the 2004 Republican National Convention, which was held in New York City at Madison Square Garden, right up the street from our offices.
JOHN KERRY IS A BIG HOMO!—we screamed on the cover. And then, in a red, white, and blue banner: SCREW SELLS OUT, WELCOME REPUBLICANS!
You had to figure that these out-of-town swine were all big-money pervs, and it was going to be a boom time for our advertisers: chicks with dicks, enema specialists, discipline freaks, cross-dressers, and all the other hard-to-find indulgences that right-wing moralists go for when they hit Sin City.
Inside the magazine we featured a spirited four-page eyepopper called “The Manchurian Cocksucker” that showcased John Kerry fellating George W. Bush under the Yale University Skull and Bones logo (the word balloon in Bush’s mouth read “Mission Accomplished”). Also featured were Arnold Schwarzenegger terminating Ralph Nader’s consumer-friendly, ultraliberal bunghole; fat-ass Bolshevik muckraker Michael Moore spilling his seed in Fox newsboy Bill O’Reilly’s craggly face; one more compromising picture of Our Fearless Leader, President Bush, this time being terrorized, but gently, by ass bandit at large Osama bin Laden; and future secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, her martini-glass tits chilling in the breeze (demurely capped in patriotic, star-spangled pasties), wearing a beauty-pageant sash that read MISS NEGRO CONGENIALITY 1967.
Sometimes it was hard to tell if we had gone too far. We were just trying to have some fun at the expense of, well, everybody. But after a million manufactured
celebrity squack shots, unreality ran high, and it was impossible to tell if we had crossed some sort of line. We were simply too close to the material to be a fair gauge anymore.
One day we asked John Holmstrom—also a Screw contributor—to stop by the office so we could get his opinion. He took one look and said flatly, “You guys are going to jail.” We were delighted—it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to us.
The triage nurse moved me right along. It was only about an hour before I had my face stitched up and was on my way.
Strasbourg, a picture-book Alsatian city where everything looks like it is made from pretzels, was hosting the Wrestling Baby Blast Festival, two nights of garage punk and grappling. An old warehouse had been turned into an Arena of Pain, with a huge rock ’n’ roll stage at one end, a wrestling ring at the other, and a long bar that ran down along the side. Eight-millimeter loops of old Mexican wrestlers were projected on screens that hung from the ceiling joists.
It had been twenty years since I stomped Jeremy in the pages of Main Event, and I was still on a career trajectory that could only lead to someone getting hurt, most likely me. It was exciting.
The first night of this bloody weekender—I was headlining the rock ’n’ roll part of the show with the solo version of my Rocket Train act—I nearly died after an ill-advised stage dive during an impromptu version of “The Crusher.” I wound up crowd-surfing my way back to the stage, strangled by my own mic cord.
Somehow I walked out of there alive, and the next night I was enlisted to act as ring announcer, no little feat, since my French was still pretty much limited to ordering the magret de canard and feigning modesty with pretty girls. No matter, I reasoned, my raison d’être being to interfere in every match and help the heels cheat their way to victory.