by Mike Edison
My girlfriend was all curves and brains—she could have walked off the set of a Russ Meyer movie, but she was also a serious enough egghead. I thought I was being mature by not overthinking our relationship, but what I was actually doing was willfully ignoring the baggage she was carrying from her last failed romance because (A) the sex was great, and (B) she was a charming dinner companion, and I figured that sex and dinner had to be 70 percent of the equation, with the other 30 percent being entirely negotiable. As I like to say, what you lose on the swings, you make up on the merry-go-round.
But I had somehow missed the pitch, even as we had achieved the most intimate level of communication: meaningfully ignoring each other. Which is no joke. You can make love to a hundred people and never achieve the profound intimacy of a Sunday morning’s easy silence in bed or at the breakfast table, only perforated by the occasional “What’s six letters for ‘Yankees iron man’?” She also brought me cans of cold beer in the shower—a nicety that cannot be overstated. But anything that broke the uncommitted relationship cycle of Eat, Drink, Fuck, Sleep, Repeat—aside from the occasional concert or movie date—was going to be a wrench in the works, and when I invited her to come with me to Chicago for a weekend to attend my nephew’s bar mitzvah, it was exactly the wrong play.
She may have made the right decision to skip the bar mitzvah. It was a grotesque, nearly apocalyptic exhibition of twenty-first-century selfie culture, conspicuous consumption, and vacuity—more like a pep rally for a third-world dictator, what with the thundering sound system, massive video screens, and adoring followers being led to the dance floor by hired “motivators,” than the celebration of a teenager’s coming of age in the eyes of God and all that. It all left me feeling quite alone among my family, whose value system and worldview had long ago eclipsed my own.
Relative to the stadium-sized show in Chicago, my own bar mitzvah, in the summer of 1977, was like a DIY punk rock gig. The party was in the synagogue basement, and the band, which played mostly the Top 40 of the day, was led by my algebra teacher, Mr. Stein. Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” was my favorite radio hit that summer, and all the kids who came got a copy of the 45-rpm record to take home.
Mr. Stein was known primarily for his loud, multicolored polyester shirts that looked as if they were spun from pastel-colored puke and for the long scar running down his face. The scar—a souvenir he got teaching math in Newark one year—actually made him look pretty tough. A kid had cut him pretty badly, and the highlight of his algebra class was always when he told the story. Even wearing one of the crazy Hawaiian shirts he favored for his music gigs, he added little cachet to an affair largely decorated with crepe paper.
But behind the cheap décor, I like to think there was at least a small dose of life lessons. Along with those tricks one needed to get through the ceremony without fucking up the haftarah, our rabbi—who drove to the synagogue on a Harley-Davidson®, no less—was intent on teaching moral values and the concept of selfless tzedakah, which is usually translated as “charity” but really means “righteousness, justness, and fairness,” and stresses the moral imperative to help those less fortunate than we are. I remember at one after-school class, the topic was human suffering and what sort of inhumanity humans were capable of. (It was a fairly Christian message, too, now that I think about it.) This was right around the time Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in Utah. Gilmore was a an unrepentant murderer who had demanded that the state execute him instead of keeping him on death row, and it was the center of a huge national debate. Gilmore had also insisted on a firing squad, which only threw more gas on an old-school tabloid pyre of sensationalism, murder, and justice on a biblical scale. Apparently, as the rabbi told us from the newspaper report, Gilmore lived for a full five minutes after taking five .30-30 caliber Silvertip® bullets in the chest from a fusillade of rifles fired by members of local law enforcement who had lined up to volunteer for the job. Did that seem like a long time? “Let’s see,” he proposed. And then he told us all to shut up for five minutes and think about it.
After what seemed like an eternity to a roomful of adenoidal bar mitzvah candidates squirming like earthworms in a bucket, he said, “Okay.” There was an audible relief in the room.
“That was thirty seconds,” he said. “Now go home and think about that.”
And I did. That exercise made a huge impression on me, though at twelve years old I couldn’t necessarily parse all the lessons he was teaching about cruelty and capital punishment, about revenge motives and justice. I went home to tell my father what the rabbi had taught us that day and got the usual brush-off. “Only tell me pleasant things,” he said.
Part of being a bar (or bat) mitzvah is making a speech, and you are encouraged to be original and to speak from the heart about something important to you. Or at least that was the old model. I spoke about what we used to call “ecology,” the strain of tree-hugging that used to be represented by a green flag with the Age of Aquarius–era θ symbol in the corner. I wish someone would tell me exactly when clean water became a liberal value, but in 1976 “ecology” was just a mellow hymnal for moderate hippies, the high sign that you were on board with Woodsy, the cartoon owl in those old public service ads: “Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”
It may have been a bit earnest or preachy coming from a thirteen-year-old, but it was sincere enough, and I am still proud of that speech. I could have ditched the politics and simply thanked my parents and the Academy and made for the receiving line like a mafia bride to collect envelopes and praise, but that’s not who I am. Ironically, one thing that my father never recognized or appreciated was that, even as a kid, I had pretty high expectations for myself. We had that in common.
It had been drilled into me by our biker rabbi that a bar mitzvah was not a graduation; it was an initiation. It wasn’t the end of something, it was a beginning—the celebration of the next phase of life. Of course that message has been largely lost on generations of kids raised by parents so reformed in their Judaism that they can hardly spell it, and the whole shebang has become largely a cash grab—a confirmation party of sorts for Jewish teenagers who feel no obligation to think past themselves, thrown to excess by their parents whose prime directive is to spoil the littler pishers and keep up with the Moscowitzes and Weinsteins who live down the street. I confess to being a little bit intimidated by all the money being spent on my nephew’s hoo-haw, and I asked my brother why he thought a thirteen-year-old needed a twenty-thousand-dollar party. I was told, “Because he did something he didn’t really want to do. That speech was very hard for him.”
But back to the girlfriend. “C’mon,” I offered, “Chicago is our kind of place. We’ll go to the Art Institute. Maybe the symphony is in town. I’ll take you out for a steak. We’ll have hotel sex.”
“ARE YOU CRAZY? I CAN’T MEET YOUR FAMILY!”
Personally, the whole idea of meeting the family ceased to be a panic-strewn event a long time ago, and at least 50 percent less so since my dad died. We were fully formed adults—forty-plus years old—and really, who gave a fuck? Families are nuts, and there isn’t a goddam thing you can do about it. Anyway, they really weren’t so bad—if you weren’t related to them.
But I had crossed some sort of line with her—the one over which her deep anxiety and fear of commitment lurked like zombies in a cornfield—and she pretty much dumped me on the spot. She told me she preferred to “pull the bandage off,” and after two years of a joyous and celebratory romance we never spoke again.
* * *
DO YOU KNOW THE MOVIE 2001: A Space Odyssey? The picture begins millions of years ago in the African desert, and about half an hour in there is what has to be the most famous jump cut in the history of cinema (Breathless notwithstanding), when an ape throws a bleached femur bone skyward, and the bone turns into a spaceship on its way to the moon. That was me dropping out of college for the first time. Like I said, I have always been about evolving.
Almost immediatel
y after leaving New York University, I scored my first magazine gigs—admittedly a sordid beat of sex, drugs, and professional wrestling, with occasional forays into music and politics—but I was getting published, and I was getting paid. And then there was the job I had writing porn novels. This was in the days before affordable video technology, when paperback books were still the favored delivery system for the high-minded perv. I wound up writing twenty-eight of them before I burned out.
I get it—dropping out of college and writing smut was not what my parents had in mind for me. It’s not what I had in mind for me. But since I ditched school, I have always supported myself—sometimes marginally, but always honestly. I have my flaws, but who doesn’t? Am I really a complete disappointment? The human equivalent of a rained-out baseball game, or a Mick Jagger solo record?
There is an old joke: The first female president of the United States is being sworn in on the steps of the Capitol. The first female Jewish president. Her mother is sitting in the audience, beaming. She turns to the person next to her and says, “You see that woman up there? The one with her hand on the Bible? Her brother is a doctor.” Some people are just never satisfied.
Getting hired as the publisher of High Times magazine, what my grandma always called “that dope rag,” was (to continue hammering at the 2001 metaphor) like “Project Jupiter,” a mission that went farther out into space then humans had ever gone before, but one that was ultimately doomed to fail. Nonetheless, it was the apex of my career, and between my salary and the bonus money I got for boosting ad sales, plus the dough I was socking away from a couple of sordid writing gigs I was hustling on the side (a lot of kayfabe letters for Penthouse, which, once upon a time, paid very decent money for fabulized first-person sex tales), I was able to put a down payment on a Manhattan apartment.
My mother was thrilled that I was buying my first home, and she brought me a huge box of nonstick cookware as a housewarming gift. My father wasn’t as impressed. He hated New York City—he thought it was “filthy” and didn’t understand why anyone would want to live there. Dad was unflinching in his opinion that buying an apartment there was not a mitzvah, but a mistake.
After about four years, that job went south—the confluence of my ultimate inability to shepherd a staff of stoners without fomenting revolt, and the crashing of New York’s media economy after the terror attacks of September 11. It was a rough time, with not a lot of publishing jobs available for forty-year-olds with high salary requirements who had already decided how the world was supposed to be run. Jobs were especially not forthcoming for those whose last résumé entries were pot, porn, and professional wrestling. As one potential employer sniffed, “That’s not a résumé, that’s a crime scene.”
I was paying my mortgage with my credit card to avoid completely bleeding out my bank account—a genuinely terrible idea—but somehow I managed to keep things rolling and just kept pressing forward. I got a few cherry gigs writing press releases and liner notes for old-school punk rockers (the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the Ra-mones), but as usual, downtime turned out to be the greatest blessing: I managed to get in the studio and make a new record, the first one with me on vocals and guitar, which led to about forty gigs in France and a new and sizable affection for drinking calvados. I did another tour of Spain, back on drums with my old band. I even worked as a professional wrestler for a hot second, taking a timekeeper’s bell to the face in my ring debut in Strasbourg (it took twenty-seven stitches to sew me up—no kayfabe, totally legit), all of which became the viscous narrative of my first book. Somehow, just being myself and working hard had earned me a spiffy publishing deal. My father would have lost that bet. I should have given him odds.
Right around the same time I landed a good freelance gig doctoring rock bios and memoirs. Apparently, being a musician and an author made me uniquely qualified. I enjoyed it. I was good at it—I worked on books with guys who had played with Frank Zappa, John Lennon, and Bob Dylan, to name but a few—and I was eventually offered a job running the desk. It lasted right up until the Solstice of Suck.
The job was a real plum, editing and polishing classic rock bios and histories, with occasional flights into jazz and country (and punk rock, when I thought I could get away with it). Among my favorites was a prog-rock coffee table book for stoners—a topic that I hardly hold dear, but how much fun was it choosing pictures of men in silver capes huddled over ridiculously complex synthesizer banks, swaddled in purple smoke from the dry ice machine? It was anti-punk and, therefore, punker than punk. Or at least that’s what I told myself at the time.
Within a year I had paid down my credit card bill and had a long-term plan in place (for a change): to hang on to this job and, like at the end of 2001, eventually evolve into the next level of human consciousness, which apparently was some sort of omniscient star child.
The last book I did for them, Reconsidering Yoko Ono, was with one of my favorite writers and artists, Lisa Carver. The idea was inspired as much by Pete Hamill’s book Why Sinatra Matters—which more or less lives in my bathroom—as it was by a genuine desire to see a thoughtful treatment of Yoko as an artist and not simply as the yellow menace that busted up the Beatles. I was thrilled that Lisa was on board with the idea, and the book was eventually excerpted by the New York Times Magazine—a coup of no uncertain magnitude. I said to her at the time that if this were the last book I ever worked on, I’d be very proud. I didn’t mean it literally, though, and I was let go the day it came out. Who knows—maybe it was a conspiracy by paranoid Beatles fans, still up in arms that she led John over to the dark side of the avant-garde. No matter, I was out of a job.
WHEN MY CAT DIED, the world lost a great spirit, and I lost a great friend. Manly, “The World’s Strongest Cat,” was a cat greater than his race. When he entered a room, it was like ten cats came into the room. More than nine lives, he lived a thousand. His spirit was indomitable.
Manly got his nickname a year or so after we began our journey together. He had a boo-boo on his ear, so I took him to see Dr. Ted, who had been our friend and trusted veterinarian since I rescued him (the cat, that is—not the doctor) after he had been abandoned by an East Village bodega. “Well,” Dr. Ted said, “I can lance it, but I’d rather cut his ear and clean it and stitch it. Then it’ll never happen again. I see this all the time. His ear will be a little bent over when we’re done, but…”
But cute as hell! Women swooned over that ear. After I saw it I thought about having it done myself.
Anyway, I was supposed to leave Manly at the doctor’s office in the early morning and pick him up in the evening, but at noon my phone rang.
“Mike, you have to come get your cat.”
“Huh?”
“Well, usually an eyedropper’s worth of anesthesia will do the trick, but Manly wasn’t going for it. We had to shoot him up like a German shepherd. And then he should have been asleep for twenty hours, but the second I got done stitching him he woke up and went for the food. You really need to come get him; he is making the other animals look bad. He is the strongest animal we have ever seen.”
Oh boy, was I ever kvelling!
And he was such a good pal, too, although he was the worst wingman imaginable. He was just too good-looking and charismatic.
About ten years after he was crowned World’s Strongest Cat, Manly became very sick. I thought he was going to die. One day he woke up bleeding from his nose, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. I wrapped him in a blanket and took him to the emergency room. He needed a blood transfusion and a few days’ stay in the hospital, and against the prognosis of everyone there he made a full comeback. While he was in the hospital he had a team of gorgeous female doctors and nurses attending to him, and he was an incredible flirt, batting his one good eye at every pretty girl in the hospital—and they all fell apart when he did, like cookies being dunked in milk.
When he left the hospital, there was a line of knockout animal health-care experts, all showing just a little t
oo much leg and blowing kisses at him like he was Elvis Presley on his way to the army: “Good-bye Manly! Good luck, Manly!” I swear one nurse tried to give him her phone number.
He had lost a lot of weight—seven pounds, which is a lot even for a big cat like Manly—but he put it right back on, like Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. If he had a chance to claim purchase on a stray piece of turkey or roast beef, you would have done well to get out of his way. When it came to victuals, Manly was simply not to be fucked with.
Sometime after that, he had an ugly carbuncle on his side that required surgery. Again, leave the cat in the morning, pick him up in the evening.
As if.
At noon, the phone rang.
“Mike, come get your cat… He’s awake and making fun of the other cats.”
In the background I heard the nurse, who had (unsurprisingly) fallen in love with Manly, say, “Tell Mike he’s doing push-ups now!”
There are more Manly stories. He loved music. When I played the guitar, he plucked at the strings, and when I fooled with the little Casiotone keyboard that I had bought with every intention of learning how to play the piano, he would leap up onto it to show me how it was done. He was a very aggressive, very dedicated avant-gardist, seemingly setting up twelve tone rows willy-nilly and improvising wildly. Finally I begged him, “Why can’t you just play one fucking flatted seventh, or a goddam minor chord for a change?” His reaction was to fling my phone across the room like a supermodel.
Ah, the phone flinging. His favorite trick, right before flinging the keys, the remote control, and my sunglasses.