by Mike Edison
SPEAKING OF THE BODICE RIPPERS, the kind of literary junk food my mom read, I want to tell you a story about what I like to call “the cocaine penis.”
I read a lot back then, as always. Anything that was in the house I gave a look-see. There wasn’t really a lot to explore aside from the books in the bedroom (not counting my father’s not-so-well-hidden copy of The Joy of Sex, one of the early editions with the drawings of hippies with massive, tangled forests of pubic hair). A few stray books were pushed into a corner downstairs—stuff obviously left over from previous lives that no one had the heart to throw out: a couple of art books that my father had bought in college and my mother’s childhood copy of Alice in Wonderland, which I claimed as my own more or less the same day I discovered marijuana. I still have it.
Anyway, about the cocaine penis. I’m pretty sure it was in Arthur Hailey’s book The Moneychangers, which I found sitting on the kitchen table, waiting to be taken back to the library. Driven by teenage intellectual ennui and prurient curiosity, I just picked it up and started thumbing through it, and that’s when I stumbled upon the cocaine penis—and my literary life was forever changed.
It was the single most lurid scene I have ever read, anywhere, still to this day, and this coming from a guy who went on to write literally dozens of pornographic novels and hundreds of sex scenes (first-time lesbian housewife confessions were my specialty in the early 1990s). For a thirteen-year-old boy, this shit was just beyond.
I suppose I owe it to myself (and to you, dear reader, who will want every gooey detail) to go out and find a copy of this mind-warping bit of perversion, but working from my memory—where it is pretty well engraved—the gist is that one of those master-of-the-universe-type banking hotshots, the kind of financier who lives in a virtual cloud city far away from us mortals, was having a high time with his high-paid hooker, splayed on his arena-sized rotating bed. And just when it seemed like he couldn’t possibly be having a better time, he whips out a vial of cocaine and somehow fashions a sparkly line of the stuff on his erect penis. I have no recollection of what happened next—which orifice he stuck it in, or how this brought him pleasure, since cocaine is basically a numbing agent. Perhaps it was for her benefit? My eyes got all screwy just reading the words. My brain reeled. I couldn’t believe that somewhere in my mother’s mind, for the rest of her entire life, was a giant, tumescent penis, filigreed with a sparkling line of freshly ground disco dust.
Relative to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, at least there was some heat in this thing. But more significantly, this was my first clue that it was all a charade—everyone had dark secrets and dirty thoughts, stuff they couldn’t or wouldn’t do in public, but incubated in their heads.
Later I would pay tribute to the cocaine penis’s singular squalor by including a similar scene in every single one of the twenty-eight pornographic novels I wrote in the 1980s. If you ever find yourself reading a cheap sex novel from the era, no matter what name is given to the author, and stumble upon a scene with someone putting cocaine on their erection, it is probably my work.
But I digress.
To most people who knew my father, at least casually or professionally, he was considered a genuinely nice guy. But this is my story. I have no doubt that if he wrote this book, I would be the villain.
DAD HAD BEEN SICKER than anyone short of his wife or his doctor had known. He had multiple myeloma—a cancer of plasma cells that is considered treatable but ultimately incurable—and he had it for many years. I didn’t know about it until about two years after he died, when I began research for this book. When I asked my brothers if they knew how Dad died, they didn’t. I got vague answers. An infection? Something with his lungs?
The cancer was a well-guarded secret, even after his death, which is its own kind of wrong: Adult children have a right to know their parents’ medical history. One of the first questions the doctor asks is if there is any history of cancer in the family, and for a long time we were all giving the wrong answer.
If he wanted to kayfabe his health, honestly, I respect that. You never heard the slightest hint of “woe-is-me” from him. Stoicism is a very admirable trait. Some might even say he was brave.
His wife finally told me the truth, adding, “You know your father, he had to be perfect. He didn’t want anyone to see him as anything besides perfect.” In the end, his lungs had become infected, and that’s what killed him. The radiation treatments he had begun receiving to fight the cancer had punished his immune system to the point where he couldn’t fight back.
Perhaps it was a lack of theology or spirituality, or just simply his obsession with success, but my Dad saw mortality as a glitch in his gimmick and as a weakness in other people. Thinking that he could outrun it did him no good in the end.
I don’t know much about dying, but I figure if you know it’s breathing down your neck, it might be a good time to make your peace with God and, maybe, your loved ones—at the very least, yourself—because that has got to beat hands-down twirling off into the unknown pissed off and leaving a legacy of hurt. At that point the kayfabe is all over. No more gimmick. It’s as real as it fucking gets.
When my father was admitted to the hospital for what turned out to be his final visit, Brother No. 1 told him, “You need to let Michael know. He’ll want to come see you,” to which Dad responded, “No, he needs to call me, and don’t you tell him that I said that, either.”
“You don’t want me to let him know that you are in the hospital?”
“No. If he cared, he would call me.”
At that point, Brother No. 1 stuck up for me. “You do understand why he hasn’t called, don’t you? Because the last time we were all together you told him in front of the entire family to shut the fuck up, no one gives a shit what he thinks, and that he isn’t as smart as he thinks he is. You also called him fat. You can’t really blame him.” With that, he went rogue and called me to tell me the story, prefacing it with “you can’t tell Dad I called you, he told me not to.”
Even now, I find it hard to believe my father was in a hospital dying, and he actually made an effort to keep it a secret from me. If Brother No. 1 had taken his marching orders from the old man, it was very possible I would have never seen him again. I suppose I could have stayed away, all things considered, but I was still holding out for some sort of approval—a star in the sky, any goddam thing. I needed a signal. At forty-something years old, it still hurt too much to give up on our relationship, no matter how slashing and caustic his comments had become. This was not the moment to terminate our relationship for the rest of eternity; this was our opportunity to come together and heal. We still had time.
So I called Dad to say, “Hi, I was thinking of coming to visit on Father’s Day with Brother No. 1.” Without missing a beat—lacking any sign of emotional cacophony or hurt feelings or former fights—he beamed, “Oh, that would be great, I would love to see you,” and in fact he had a case of Stags’ Leap Cabernet—did I know what that was? It was a gift from one of his fabulously rich friends, and he would love to share it with me. “Sure,” I say, “that would be great.” Everything was ducky.
I met my brother at the airport and we went straight over to the hospital to see the old man. This was the day before the Great Deathbed Litany. When we got to the hospital, he seemed happy enough to see me, but I hardly had a chance to give him a kiss and say hello, or get a grip on the dizzying lattice of IV tubes and wires spraying in all directions from under his toothpaste-green hospital gown, and just how freaking gaunt he was—his face was the color of sour milk, and he looked like he had lost fifty pounds since the last time I saw him—before he began with his specialty, the small talk. Innocently enough—or so it seemed—he started a conversation about the current spate of so-called sex scandals, based on a story in the New York Times, which was lying open on the bedside tray.
This was right in my wheelhouse, and I offered the opinion that all sex scandals were not created equal: Some behavior was perh
aps immoral, but certainly not illegal; other “scandals” were not really scandalous at all—just sensational, say between two unmarried and consenting adults, but one is a celebrity or there is a large age difference. But who was I to judge?
Mostly people just hate hypocrites. If you were that guy in the US Senate screaming the loudest about family values and demanding to see Bill Clinton’s head on a pike when he got caught dallying with the intern, it might have been best if you didn’t get snagged with your own dick in the cookie jar. And when the closeted, self-loathing hate-mongers who cherry-picked their litany of lunacy from Leviticus got caught cruising men’s rooms in Midwest airports, well, it seemed pretty obvious, to me at least, that America was at some sort of pathological odds with its Puritan underpinning, simultaneously fearing sex and running toward it. The filthiest thing I have ever read, after all, was a book that my mom had taken out of a small-town library.
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” I was told. “Anyway, no one wants your opinion.”
This struck me as somewhat odd, since he had clearly asked me, “Michael, what do you think?” just before trampling all over what I have to consider a thoughtful and studied response. If this were the kind of bullshit that he wanted to perpetrate from his hospital bed within mere moments of my arrival, maybe I should have realized he was just warming up for the main event.
Anyway, that kind of put the kibosh on the whole conversation, since no one else had anything to add after that. There was an awkward silence before he said, “I have that great case of wine back at the house. Stags’ Leap. It is very expensive.” Then he turned to my brother and said, “I want you to have it.”
I’m just standing there like our old friend Kaw-Liga, the cigar-store Indian, with really nothing to say, when he turns to me and says, “I have an old watch for you, if you want it. It’s a Timex®.”
Once upon a time, I learned that when someone offers you a gift, the only gracious response is to accept it. The giving of gifts, like changing for dinner, is one of those niceties that separates us from the animals. More than that, I have learned that the proper accepting of gifts is what really constitutes a high level of menschdom. Just ask Emily Post: One must never betray one’s disappointment with a gift—that is indefensibly rude. Feign enthusiasm, and if the gift is a real turd, like an ugly sweater or some old watch that no one wants, you must still say, “I can’t wait to use it.” Giving and receiving are both gestures whose niceties can be elevated with a bit of disingenuous ardor. And so I said, “Oh, of course! I would love that! In fact, I could really use a new watch. So thank you, thank you very much. That’s really great,” or words to that effect, only to be cut off at the knees with “if you aren’t going to use it, don’t take it.”
Oy fucking vey, I just can’t win with this guy. But I reiterate my enthusiasm, even though we both know that I just got the booby prize—the mule that was standing behind Curtain Number Three—while my brother was going to walk away with twelve bottles of extremely potable if not exceptional wine. And the next day Dad’s wife shows up with the watch, and it is, as advertised, an old Timex. But again I take the high road and say what a great watch it is, even though, the moment I get home, it goes straight into my sock drawer to be forgotten.
MY FATHER ALWAYS “WORKED BABYFACE”—which is wrestling parlance for playing the good guy. (The bad guys are called “heels.”) But Dad was also adroit at executing what’s known as a “heel turn,” pivoting from good guy to bad guy, 180 degrees, on a dime. For better or worse, I was probably the only person to ever see it, aside from those lucky family members who got a front-row seat.
That bit in the hospital with the wine and the watch, and baiting me by asking my opinion only to tell me to shut up, was classic stuff. It was a lot like the shtick of the great 1980s heel, the Million Dollar Man, who riled up the audience with stunts like, say, promising a small boy five hundred dollars if he could bounce a basketball fifteen times in a row, only to kick the ball out from under the boy after the fourteenth bounce. He got a lot of “heat,” as we say, in that people wanted to kill him. It was a good gimmick in that a lot of tickets were sold to folks who wanted to see him get his ass kicked. But it must have been just my good fortune, getting to see this side of my father. Everyone else, as far as I can tell, got the charming, generous, affable version.
The Dale Carnegie thing is no joke—fifteen million people have read it, and for good reason. It works. How to Win Friends and Influence People promises to make you more popular, increase your earnings, make you a better executive, and win people over to your way of thinking. It is a panacea for avoiding conflict and keeping relations smooth, with dozens of bullet points, bromides, and easily mastered psychological sleights of hand, all aimed at making people like you. Warren Buffett and Charles Manson swore by it.
The problem with the Dale Carnegie school, of course, is that it’s pure kayfabe. It works great if you’re a sales guy. It is a solid course for ambitious executives, Rotary Club leaders, and apparently cult murderers, but it has nothing to do with forming deep or long-lasting relationships—which I guess suited the old man just fine.
Tellingly, in his last moments, my father’s best friend in the world—aside from his wife, whose love and loyalty were unflinching, so much that she didn’t even throw a flag on the play during his unnecessarily rough Final Beat Down—seemed to be his auto mechanic, a young-looking thirtysomething whom he described to me as “just a really terrific young man.” Transient, short-term friendships with people who worked for him had been a constant in the old man’s life. The only relationships I ever saw him maintain were either those in which he was in some sort of financial control, or those in which he was in awe of someone else’s net worth.
In the relationship department, I am far wealthier than my dad ever was. I am incredibly fortunate to have a large number of close friends, as well as an ever-expanding circle of people whom I am humbled and flattered to know and who intersect with my life in all sorts of interesting ways. Our varying degrees of intimacy and fraternity and disparate strangeness grow and change and ebb and flow, but they have, across decades, endured the crap that life is so expert at serving. Many of my relationships come from the exact choices that Dad had promised would only incubate a life below the poverty line, and which apparently made me such a complete disappointment: I chose to be a writer and a musician and an artist—trades that have fostered many joyous, deeply shared experiences, indelible bonds, and healthy rivalries, and that continue to inject every day with new possibilities and a powerful sense of belonging. Friends, I have heard it said, are like the family you get to choose yourself. Obviously there are circles within circles, and wide variances of personal tastes, to say the least. Some of my friends like stripes, and some like polka dots, but I am pretty sure they all dig the Ramones.
* * *
FOR ALL OF HIS SUCCESS in “winning” friends and influencing people, I did see my father’s highly polished affability and small talk backfire at least once.
I was visiting him up on Cape Cod, where he had a house for a while. I had just turned thirty-five and had a terrific job and a swell girlfriend whom I brought with me on that trip, because no matter what—or, at least, that’s what I thought back then—a place to stay on Cape Cod was a pretty good deal and should have boosted my net worth in her eyes. As it was, she was appalled.
The house was appointed with the usual chazerai—expensive books of local photography, framed nautical charts, etc.—all new and clean and with no real provenance and very little vibe, but just enough money spent to signal reserved and appropriate good taste. Like his other home, not a stitch was out of place, from the highly curated throw pillows to the remote control for the TV, which had its own little nest.
It was a weird place to visit. I felt neither like a guest nor family. There were a lot of rules. I was told I had to shave every day (??), always wear a shirt, and no bare feet in the house ever—directives that were clear
manifestations of his fear of, I don’t know, beach bums? Beatniks? Then why have a house near the beach and invite your kids up for summer vacation?
What he didn’t see coming was that his wife had invited one of her kids to visit at the same time, and he made his entrance in cutoff shorts, no shirt, no shoes, looking a lot like one of the hopped-up hodads in Beach Blanket Bingo.
We were all treated equally that week, just some of us more equally than others. Me, I was a clean-shaven man for the duration, padding around the house in socks like Grandma Fucking Moses. No effort was made to buy the other guy a razor, a shirt, or some footwear.
Meanwhile, my father just poured compliments all over this guy. Everything he did was wickedly exciting (he was going on and on about some home electronics project), while I was subtly put down with indifference the entire weekend. It was about par for the course. I guess I had gotten used to it, but the girlfriend was plainly disgusted.
“How do you stand it? Listening to his crap?”
“It isn’t so bad,” I protested.
“What the fuck are you talking about? He treats everyone around him like his best pal. Everyone is awesome, except for you. He was more interested in where the waiter at dinner last night went to school than in anything you had had to say. And home electronics? I mean, seriously.”
I realized then that my stock was plummeting. I looked weak.
The real shpilkes began one early evening when we were rolling out of his driveway, Dad and his wife in the front seat, girlfriend and me in the back, when he pulled up next to the couple in the house next door who were busy taking out the garbage. Ostensibly he just wanted to say hi to his neighbors, which is what people did up there. Island etiquette and all that. Everyone spent so much time waving to one another I’m surprised there wasn’t an outbreak of carpal tunnel syndrome.
That he didn’t see any problem with slow-rolling up to strangers in his SUV and asking them where they lived, that maybe it would not be seen as a friendly gesture, was the first problem. That they happened to be an African American couple in a notoriously white New England enclave did not help.