by Mike Edison
The films we watched in health class were classics of the scare genre: Smoking weed led to heroin addiction and death, usually swinging at the end of a rope in a jail cell. Marijuana turned you into a homosexual, a murderer, or at the very least, a terminally unemployed waste product bound for a desolate existence on skid row, wherever that was. Women who smoked pot were of loose moral character and to be shunned. Men who smoked pot grew breasts. For anyone with half a brain, this was obviously the biggest load of bullshit ever foisted upon America’s youth—so ridiculous that eventually my friends and I began borrowing these films from the library to watch while we got stoned.
But such was the timbre of the day. When I was fifteen and got caught smoking weed, my mother’s reaction was, “I should send you away.” Seriously. Her words. I should send you away. Who says that? My father, on the other hand, generally solved these sorts of problems by ignoring them. Not caring made everything so much easier. All of that being said, I would be lying to you if I said I wouldn’t be pretty freaking upset if I caught my teenager getting high. Then again, I wouldn’t be shipping them off to reform school if I did. My instinct would be to tell them the truth.
Of course, times have changed. A couple of months ago I was driving in the car with my mom and Brother No. 1, the Wall Street macher, and Mom asked him, “I hear there is money in marijuana. Is there a marijuana stock I should invest in?”
Naturally, mellow hippie that I am, I blew my top. “You are really going to ask Goldman Sachs over here how you can make money on the marijuana market? Really?? Am I the only one here who sees the irony in this? Do I really have to point out just what kind of hypocrite this makes you? You were going to ‘send me away,’ and now—just because all of a sudden you think there is some money in it—you think it is okay to basically become a pot dealer????”
As you can imagine, this line of patter got me exactly nowhere. “Shut up, Michael. I don’t want to hear your shit,” she told me, not really twigging to the irony after all, and that was that for the moment. I understand she asked him about the pot stocks again later, before deciding to hang on to her Exxon® and Monsanto® preferred.
MY OLD MAN MAY HAVE GIVEN UP on me in 1973—the year I turned nine—but that was also the year of my grand awakening. Never mind the energy crisis or the designated hitter; 1973 was one of the greatest years for pop music, ever. The radio was a vessel for genius, and New York’s finest Top 40 radio station, WABC, formed me.
That year, Stevie Wonder had two of his heaviest Clavinet numbers, “Superstition” and “Higher Ground” (“Master Blaster” and “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” being the others); Al Green had “Here I Am (Come and Take Me)”; Curtis Mayfield was doing “Superfly”; the O’Jays had a number one with “Love Train”; Sly Stone was still a force with “If You Want Me to Stay”; Marvin Gaye shot way above my nine-year-old head with “Let’s Get It On”; and the Temptations ended their psychedelic era with the epic, truly harrowing “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” which plainly scared the shit out of me. Every one of those songs was like a bolt of lightning.
Of course there was also a mega-ton of crud like Gilbert O’Sullivan and Tony Orlando that year. There would always be crappy pop music—name the year, and you can easily find something that will make you want to crawl into a hole. But this was also the year of Bobby Pickett and the Crypt Kickers’ “Monster Mash,” a confection so perfectly concocted it would have been a hit no matter when it dropped, and Diana Ross’s “Touch Me in the Morning,” the topic of which even now torches the imagination.
Mostly I listened on my little clock radio that I had covered in stickers, including a couple of Wacky Packages® (“Vile” soap and “Crust” toothpaste) and one of those stupid labels that people put on their lapels at trade shows that say HELLO, MY NAME IS. I wrote MIKE’S RADIO on it in multicolored balloon letters, the hepcat font for nine-year-olds, as seen in Dynamite magazine. The clock radio had been a present from my parents, presumably to help me wake up and get to school on time. They had no idea it was going to lead me straight down the primrose path.
At this late date it’s probably hard to imagine the Rolling Stones having a real presence in someone’s life, but there they were: In 1973, “Brown Sugar”—their massive riff on slave girls, cunnilingus, and S&M—was still in heavy rotation. There was a real mystique about the Stones. They were far dirtier, nastier, and just plain more dangerous than anything. “Brown Sugar” may seem like some sort of innocuous “classic rock” museum piece now, but it’s a real slab of sexual mayhem. It was information from the edge.
Following the Stones across the 1970s, you could pretty much chart my progress from rock ’n’ roll curiosity seeker to fully developed delinquent. I remember buying Sticky Fingers, the album that “Brown Sugar” came out on, when I was twelve years old. I paid fifty cents for it at a yard sale behind some nice old house on Grandview Avenue (probably the one my mother wanted to move into). Then my friend Eric found a copy of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, which had three LPs in a box, and I thought he got the better deal. But when we got home, Harrison’s boosted Hare Krishna lullabies sounded downright flaccid next to the Stones’ twisted-knife love songs “Bitch” and “Sway,” not to mention “Sister Morphine” and “Dead Flowers”—all of which sounded like pure freaking contraband.
The cover of Sticky Fingers, designed by their friend Andy Warhol, is a close-up photo of the crotch of a pair of jeans, with an actual zipper manufactured right into the LP, designed to be pulled down. This was probably my first clue that somewhere, somebody was getting his cock sucked, and it was awesome.
Their double live LP Love You Live came out in 1977 when I was fourteen, and I remember seeing the photos from that tour—Mick Jagger was riding something that looked an awful lot like a giant inflatable penis. It was a bit of a mixed signal, but all very nasty in the best possible way. By the time Some Girls came out the next year, the Stones were aristocracy, and had been for a while, but the music was sleazier than ever. They gave me the idea that I could become a gentleman outlaw and still harbor perfectly filthy thoughts.
11
BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Our last great shared moment—my father and I—was July 20, 1969, when he woke me up to watch the first man land on the moon. I remember it clear as a bell, sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed, with its soft, blue summer cotton sheets, staring at the black-and-white Philco® television set. The blurry image moved haltingly across the screen, and the crackling audio percolated from the tiny speaker, the first transmission from another world.
I was in love with the space program, agape with the gauzy optimism of exploration, gaga for the gadgetry and gee-whiz of NASA. I still reminisce about the blue NASA jumpsuit I had my picture taken in when I was eight, and about how I wanted to be a space captain and have sex with Barbarella and all of her friends when I was sixteen. After watching the first man land on the moon, my mind was racing with possibilities, because even at the cusp of my fifth birthday, I was a man with a vision. Well, that’s my version of it. Others might say I was a hopeless dreamer.
Looking back, I have come to realize the fundamental difference between how I saw the first moon landing and how my father saw it: He saw expensive hardware and American exceptionalism. I saw adventure. I saw rockets and stars. He wanted to meet the astronauts and ask them what it was like to walk on the moon. I wanted to go there and find out for myself.
THE 1970S WERE A GREAT TIME to grow up. It felt wide open, as if anything could happen. I remember catching a Frisbee® at a David Bowie concert in 1978 during his “Heroes” (aka “Isolar II”) tour, which may or may not sound like a major life event, but it was a very big deal. Rock concerts were happenings, and tossing disks and beach balls through the giant cumulus clouds of marijuana smoke that filled up the arena while everyone was waiting for the lights to go down was an important part of the trip.
For David Bowie in 1978, everyone had really stepped up their act.
Women came dressed to this revival meeting, with tons of glitter makeup, hot pants, platform boots, and tight Diamond Dogs T-shirts faded from the previous tour. A lot of the guys came out sporting the Aladdin Sane lightning-bolt face paint. It was as if Jesus had fallen to Earth.
The girl that asked me to go to the show with her was wearing denim overalls and no shirt. The bib and straps somehow managed to cover her nipples, and her breasts just hung there, flawlessly, like some sort of middle finger in the face of gravity. Even in this crowd, she nearly caused a riot. I have no idea why I was invited. There were four of us, and I was the youngest. She held my hand when we got off the train and made it to our seats on the arena floor.
Anyway, I caught a Frisbee. You always kind of hoped that one would come your way, and that if it did you could be quick enough to catch it. It was a lot more badass than just swatting at a beach ball. But before I could fling it back, the guy next to me said, “Wait a sec,” and then took it from me, flipped it over, and poured a big pile of sparkling white powder on it. We all snorted a line, and then I let it sail. And let me tell you: I can throw a Frisbee with the best of them. It is one of the five things I do really well.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to huck a Frisbee across the arena at Madison Square Garden, but it is truly something else. There is a lot of space, and you can really air it out. With what turned out to be wonderfully pure amphetamine percolating across my brain, and David Bowie about to start the show, it was one of the finest, most crystalline moments of the entire decade. That was me living in the extreme present.
I GOT LUCKY and caught a good wave—the tail end of an era of bewildered enlightenment. Only four years behind me, my brothers got hammered with the dawn of a new dark age.
They graduated high school in 1986. Reagan had been president since they were twelve, and would be until they were twenty. The year they got to college, the so-called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was just opening its doors, a spectacular cultural landgrab and cynical deification of all that had once been dismissed by the establishment as dirty and unholy. The corporate hippies who ran the joint began, innocently enough, by embracing old-school rockers like Elvis and Fats Domino, and it was all terribly quaint. But before you could say Yo! Bum Rush the Show, they were co-opting punk rock and hip-hop, and the message became very clear: As a mode of expression, rebellion was now tragically outdated. Even the new Stones’ records were more about attracting corporate sponsors than sexual partners. Their last big hit, “Start Me Up,” a perfectly nonthreatening midtempo arena rocker, sounded as if it were recorded in a bank. One thing you could say about Mick Jagger, he was always a man of his times.
My brothers and their pals derisively called me “vintage” because they thought I was hopelessly stuck in the 1960s. They were neither freaks nor geeks, and would have made for good background in any of the John Hughes movies of the day. I actually have no idea what their dreams are, or were. As far as I know, when they were in high school they didn’t hang out and play “lawyer” or “investment banker” with their friends. Certainly they weren’t snorting mystery dust off Frisbees at David Bowie concerts.
I was definitely the outlier in this group, but we grew up in the same house. We had the same parents and listened to the same fights. We ate the same shitty frozen kosher turkey breast. So, why are we so different? Because they were too young to remember seeing a grown man do his best impersonation of a nuclear meltdown just because someone ordered a meatball pizza?
My brothers are twins—they spent nine months in the womb with their asses in each other’s faces. One of them is clearly more like my parents—reserved and conservative in his taste—whereas the other was always just a bit more gung ho for thrills (for a while he dated a girl in high school who smoked cigarettes and drove a white Camaro®). But they both became family guys with all the fixin’s. Given our family dysfunction, one has to wonder where they found anything attractive in that lifestyle, but they love their children relentlessly. They might be a little confused about who I am, but there is no meanness about them. And mostly they got along well with my folks, especially my dad. It probably didn’t hurt that, like my parents, they grew up at a time when rebellion had little value as any sort of viable currency.
My mom is also a twin, and she could not be more different from her twin brother, who is pretty much her opposite number: wildly confident and successful, seemingly impervious to any sort of setback. My dad’s sister, ditto, is nothing at all like him. Seven years younger than him, she is the only other person in the family who could be considered a rebel, and she is one of the most admirable people I have the privilege to know. She is the only person I know personally of whom it can be said, “She saved a lot of lives.”
Like my father, she attended an expensive Boston prep school that funneled into an elite university, although when I was a kid I heard rumors that she had been thrown out of college for having a motorcycle, which naturally sent her stock through the roof. I remember seeing a black-and-white photograph of her from those days, maybe 1963. She was wearing a black sweater and posing with a black cat. She had long black hair and looked like Joan and Mimi Baez’s younger, prettier sister—the perfect beatnik chick.
“That story is overblown,” she always told me. “It was my boyfriend’s bike, and it wasn’t supposed to be on campus. That’s it. Not a big deal. I was only a rebel because I wore weird clothes. But I was successful, so no one bothered me. I got A’s in school. I got a good job. I accomplished what they wanted.”
After a very successful career in advertising, she dropped out of the corporate world to run her own adventure travel company, working closely with the indigenous tribal people and nomads of western Africa. Eventually she gave that up to work exclusively on outreach and charity, building schools and water purification facilities, bringing medicine and cattle to Mali, Niger, and Ethiopia, for example.
One afternoon a few years ago she called me on the phone to ask me if I had ever heard of the band Led Zeppelin.
“I think they were popular when I was in high school,” I deadpanned. “Why would you like to know?”
“Oh, I met this man, Robert Plant, in Mali when I was there working. Apparently he is their singer. He was there doing some music, and he wrote me a very generous check for my charity.”
“That was very nice of him,” I said.
About a week later she called me again.
“Have you ever heard of a song called ‘Stairway to Heaven’?”
“I think it was popular when I was in high school,” I deadpanned.
“Oh,” she said, “I thought since he was so nice to give me money for my charity that I should buy one of his records… and it is just lovely!” At which point I dropped the charade and told her the gospel of Led Zeppelin, a band so epic in sound, scope, and popularity that I did not know a single person whose lives they did not touch. I tried to explain the myth and mystique of “Stairway to Heaven,” but she had no idea what I was talking about. She was just thrilled that the guy who sang it was supportive of her relief efforts in Mali. I could not possibly have been more proud of her—that sound you hear is me kvelling, with “Kashmir” playing in the background.
But my father was embarrassed by her. She still wears “weird clothes,” favoring African fabrics and jewelry from her many trips there, and she is still and always stunningly beautiful. She is one of those rare people who enter a room and everyone’s game gets better. But Dad never boasted of her, and on at least one occasion, at a fund-raiser for her charity that he sheepishly attended, he actually pretended not to know her.
“It was our mother who made your father what he was. When we were kids, she wanted everyone to judge her by how perfect her children were. She made us put on little outfits and bring everyone drinks. That’s where your father got it. You were an embarrassment to him. When he told you off at the end, he knew exactly what he was doing. He was determined to destroy you.”
I had to say, even for m
y father, that seemed a bit harsh.
“Your success was not the kind that he admired. The magazines you worked on were an embarrassment to him. He hated your freedom,” she told me, echoing a common sentiment among people who knew both my father and me. “When you took off with your band, going someplace just because you wanted to? He despised you for that.
“I was rigid, just like him,” she confessed. “It took me forever to learn that everyone is perfect.
“He yelled at me for not coming to see him when he was sick. But he never told me he was sick. He never told me he had cancer, and he lived with it for years. I never knew. But then he told me not to come see him, because he didn’t want anyone to ever see him not wearing a blue blazer and gray pants. It was nonsense, but wearing that outfit was his source of authority.”
It was a costume, of course: his blazer, slacks, and bow tie, the logical prêt-à-porter for a kayfabe superhero whose power emanated from a canny ability to prove superiority through studied but clearly affluent understatement. Sartorially, at least, he was topping from the bottom.
Proof of his dominion came when he showed up to Brother No. 2’s wedding in his “perfect preppy” outfit. My mother was nearly apoplectic, spitting that “a man should wear a suit at a wedding.”
12
MOM
A few years after my father died, a funny thing happened: My mother died.
Okay, that’s not funny, but as any writer will tell you, genuine irony is a rare bird indeed, and that’s what we’re talking about here. This story has a happy ending.