Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  Unaware that one is not supposed to draw attention away from Simmons when addressing him, I broke this commandment by occasional jesting with Mr. Stanley. So the bassist started working little insults into his answers, at one point referring to a faction of their fans as pathetic obsessives, pointing at me and adding, “like this fellow here.” I’m pretty sure he compared me to the fan who got Simmons’ face tattooed on his ass, with that infamous tongue emerging from his rectum.

  At this point, the Playboy editor read the next question on his list: a request for Simmons to pitch his dream porno movie. After some initial hesitation in which he compared skin flicks to the passivity of sports spectatorship (he couldn’t comprehend observing rather than participating), he gave in.

  “Young girl out of Chicago, dysfunctional family, goes off to boarding school, has her first sexual experience in the back of a Chevy… she’s a very hot-looking girl and she’s only had a kind of a physical effect on people; every time they see her body, they think ‘look at them, they’re lifted, separated and pointed in my general direction, thank you Jesus…’ She decides because of that that she is going to disavow her physical attributes and go the other way, and so she becomes spiritual, she becomes a nun in training…”

  Criss (of the massive crucifix tattoo) was shaking his head with a look of disgust. “I don’t like this story. I don’t like the Jesus crack, and I don’t like this story.…”

  The Playboy editor, somehow mistaking this palpable tension for playful banter, pressed on, “So she’s a nun…”

  “This offends Peter,” Simmons apologetically offered.

  “But the nun is unobtainable,” the editor insisted, pleading for Simmons to continue. “That’s part of the appeal, I’m with you on the nuns.…”

  Thus Mr. Simmons found himself at a crossroads. With his multimillion-dollar empire rebuilt, it was crucial to keep his employees happy, yet here was Playboy magazine pleading with him to continue with this story.

  “Needless to say, some of the things we’ve heard about in newspapers occur…” and he continued the pitch by segueing into a molesting priest joke. Quickly changing the subject, Stanley stepped in with a Jewish joke. (“Why did the rabbi like watching the porno movie run backwards? He liked the part at the end where she handed him the money.”) This led to the Playboy editor boasting about a recent article in his magazine on “kosher sex.”

  “Am I the only Catholic in this room?” a furious Criss injected, pointing an accusatory finger at the soundman to his left. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” the curly haired slacker sheepishly replied.

  “You’re Jewish! You’re Jewish! You’re Jewish!” he continued around the table, eventually getting to the Protestant editor to my right, the first to reply in the negative. Pointing his cat claw my way he snarled, “You’re Jewish?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  And here is where the magic happened.

  “Hmm…” the artist formally known as Chaim Witz said, lifting an eyebrow and looking at me with pleasurable disdain. Then he offered what he perceived as the ultimate put-down. “You could pass for a Gentile. You don’t have the Jew thing.”

  At that instant I knew I was experiencing one of the greatest moments of my life. If it had only been my childhood hero angrily calling me a Jew, it would have been enough. But the glorious absurdity of one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest icons, the leader of my favorite band, my Jew-Rock idol, attempting to cut me down like a marauding moyel was so surreal, surprising and bizarre that it made me palpably giddy. Somehow, despite every molecule in my body commanding me to unleash gales of joyful laughter, I managed to stay stone-faced. That was the moment I knew I was a professional.

  The Money Was Good

  By Robbie Chafitz

  I WAS AN ELF ONCE… FOR MONEY. Actually I was an elf twice for money. I was also a purple dinosaur, a juggler, a clown, a fire-eater, a human statue, a superhero, Santa Claus, Charlie Chaplin, a ballet dancer, a leprechaun, Dracula, Uncle Sam and a mime. After high school, I freelanced for a special events company in Washington, D.C., and performed at hundreds of birthday parties, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings and strip mall openings. I won’t lie, it was fun for a while and the money was good. But by the age of 26, a college graduate with aspirations for bigger and better things, the dressing up was getting old. Not to mention that the run-ins with old girlfriends while dressed as the Easter Bunny were beginning to take a toll on my self-esteem. I had to make a change, so I left the States.

  I took a job teaching U.S. film production, English, and American football at the Moscow International Film School in Russia. For the equivalent of three dollars a month, I explained to eager Russian students that one page of script equaled one minute of screen time, that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, and how to count to “ten Mississippi” before rushing the quarterback. To supplement my income I got a job setting up the audio-visual equipment at the Moscow International Press Center. One of my responsibilities was to make sure that the microcassette recorders placed on the podium by the journalists weren’t indeed bombs. How did I do this? I had to pick them up and shake them. If they didn’t blow my arm off they could remain on the podium. As I explained earlier, I had done worse things for money.

  After a very long year in Russia, I returned home broke and had to move in with my folks for a short time. Determined not to go back to my character work, I picked up a temp job at a mail-order supply house processing the returns of a novelty Bill Clinton watch (the arms kept falling off). Knowing I was looking to make some extra money, a friend of the family asked me if I would like to wait tables at her bar on Wednesday nights. I had no waiting experience but how hard could it be? The only requirement was that I show up wearing black pants, a tuxedo shirt and bow tie. This probably would have raised the suspicion of an average person, but I was used to costume requests so I didn’t think twice.

  Wednesday night at the Rabbit’s Foot in Frederick, Maryland, is Ladies’ Night. It is the one night of the week that this all-American redneck bar invites the women of the town to take a long-needed break from being objectified. It’s the one night of the week that the bar says, “Hey, sweet thing, sit back and relax and allow us to entertain you with half-naked men who will dance upon the stage for you.” I was not a stripper, thank God. I was a server. A server dressed in a tuxedo. I was the only server, I might add, whose tuxedo was vintage 1920s, with a real satin finish, made up of hand-stitched trousers and a bib front/back buttoning shirt with a removable starched collar. It was pretty safe to say that mine was the only tuxedo in the bar that wasn’t 100 percent polyester, didn’t have an adjustable elastic waistband and had never been worn to a junior-high-school dance.

  It wasn’t long before the male strippers hit the stage and the “ladies” went wild, and I mean wild-animal wild. They ripped at the men’s shirts, yelled and screamed lewd sexual comments and touched themselves and each other. The best way to describe the clientele is that they most likely had spent their day in Jerry Springer’s greenroom.

  I wasn’t there for more than a half hour when I learned that I was overdressed. I was told by the management, Bob, to remove my shirt and to affix my bowtie around my neck. I guess Bob didn’t care that my shirt was Savile cut and my trousers were hand-stitched. I spent the next ten minutes finding a safe place to hang my priceless tuxedo jacket and another ten trying to minimize my body hair.

  Now, I had been in Russia for a year and had not been exposed to the sun for quite some time. So while my fellow servers, mostly off-duty firemen and construction workers with shaved chests and tattooed forearms, titillated the women with their tan sweaty physiques, my pale body glowed in the dark like a ghoulish night-light. I was the server apologizing for my chest hair falling into the ladies’ Sex on the Beaches.

  One of my tables was a bachelorette party. Their first order was a round of drinks affectionately called a blow job. I placed the order with the bartender, who swi
ftly filled my tray with a dozen tiny shot glasses. “You know how to serve these?” he asked. “Uh, left to right,” I bluffed. Shaking his head like a man who knows another man is about to do something he is not prepared to do, he reluctantly explained the proper serving technique for a blow job shot.

  When I returned to the table, the ladies were already lined up to receive their drinks, which is to say, they were on their knees. I proceeded to sit in a chair and place each shot between my legs as each woman, placing her hands behind her back, lowered her head into my crotch, grabbed the shot glass with her mouth and swallowed. My job was to simulate an orgasm for each of the women. Yes, really.

  By the third round of shots, I thought I had finally gotten the hang of it until one of the women, kneeling before me, looked up and said, “Hmmm, let me guess, you’re either Jewish or gay.”

  My guess was that up until now, neither Jews nor gays had ever been seen at the Rabbit’s Foot. “Just Jewish,” I answered, cautiously. I didn’t want to start a mass panic. “Yeah, I could tell,” she said proudly as she wrapped her lips around the shot glass and gulped. Reacting in false ecstasy, I caught my reflection in one of the many mirrors lining the walls. Now I knew what she was talking about. As the other topless men proudly humped poles and shook their asses in the patrons’ faces, I, with my pale hairy chest and unconvincing smile, looked like I had strolled in from the Grossman Bar Mitzvah and accidentally misplaced my shirt.

  The night wore on and I was groped, squeezed, licked, rubbed up against and well-tipped. Yes, I was very well-tipped. I was making about 70 dollars an hour, although I had other duties in addition to serving drinks. I had to appear onstage with the other servers and hold a large chocolate phallus for a birthday girl to enthusiastically deep-throat for the amusement of the entire bar. All together, everyone! “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, choke on that big black cock, Lisa, happy birthday to you!” We then surrounded the birthday girl and grinded our pelvises in her face as we poured champagne on her head. They don’t call it Ladies’ Night for nothing.

  I wish I could say that I drove home that night, to my parents’ house, swearing I’d never do that again, but there I was for the next few Wednesday nights, shirtless, faking orgasms and presenting big black penises for women to fellate. It was like having an alter ego; mail-order-supply returns processor by day, male topless waiter by night.

  All was going well until I was moved from my mail-order temp job to a new temp job at a software company. I was going to fill in for one of the account executive’s assistants for a week. On my first day at the new company, I was called into the office of the account executive to get briefed on my assignment when my two worlds finally collided. There I was, sitting across from a very well-dressed professional woman with pictures of her family on her desk, and she was sitting across from the guy whose lap she had slurped shots from the night before.

  A week later, I was dressed as a Venetian gondolier at the Italian Embassy.

  A Field Guide to the North American Bigfoot

  By Ben Greenman

  1. Alert.

  2. Tired.

  3. Thinking of going swimming.

  4. Worrying that he is overdrawn.

  5. Plotting to avenge himself on his mortal enemy, Alan, who has, over the years, stolen two of Bigfoot’s girlfriends, framed Bigfoot for a crime he didn’t commit (a minor shoplifting infraction, admittedly, but it’s the principle of the thing) and played innumerable pranks that resulted in Bigfoot’s humiliation, including one in sophomore year of college in which he dumped an entire pepper shaker into Bigfoot’s milk carton and laughed when Bigfoot had to spit out the peppered milk. Bigfoot hadn’t had a real enemy since Kenny Labovitz in the eighth grade, and their relationship was as much about formative competition as anything. Bigfoot didn’t want to compete with Alan. He didn’t want Alan anywhere near him. Alan Tresser. What a jerk.

  6. Itchy.

  7. Hungry.

  8. Enthusiastic.

  9. Thinking of Clara—Ah! Clara. What a pity that she had nothing to her name and so was forced to factor in wealth when she felt around in her heart for her real emotions concerning this man, or that one. If only her father had given up his dream of sculpting “the intersection of time and tempo,” or “the smallest available unit of rhythm,” or whatever it was that he was on about in those masses of knotted metal. “It’s a miracle that one of those things hasn’t fallen on him and hurt him,” Bigfoot said of Clara’s father. “Anyway, don’t you people love miracles? Water, wine: that kind of thing. Your dad had plenty of water tonight, if you know what I mean.” Bigfoot instantly regretted his remark, for her father was a kind man, almost as tall as Bigfoot, though with a stoop when he stood, and he did not put his eyes wide and scream like a child that night that Clara brought Bigfoot home. In fact, he was cordial, gave Bigfoot a firm handshake, let him sit at the table with the rest of them, and the only sign that there was anything amiss came later, when he pulled Clara aside in the hallway and dipped once, quickly, to her ear where he whispered, “Honey, maybe he’s not right for you.” In the car on the way back, Bigfoot mocked Clara’s father. He could do the voice perfectly; it was light and too sweet like a bad dinner wine. “Not right for you, not right for you,” Bigfoot said, in singsong. That night Clara wouldn’t share his bed, and the next week, she told Bigfoot that she was seeing a man named Paul. “He’s a lawyer,” she said. “You don’t know him. But he makes me happy.” Bigfoot stepped backward to protect what was left of his dignity. In his heart he experienced a mild pain.

  10. Experiencing mild pain.

  11. Experiencing moderate pain.

  12. Experiencing severe pain.

  13. Wondering how much more he can take. First, there was the kid in the shoe department in the sporting goods store who said he’d go downstairs and check the stockroom when he knew full well that there were no shoes big enough to fit Bigfoot’s big feet. Then there was the sleek, impossibly thin woman, probably a model, who asked Bigfoot if he knew where she could get a good wax. Bigfoot didn’t know what she was talking about. Some days Bigfoot felt like he didn’t understand people at all. Then there was the envelope that he found slipped under his door. It was addressed to him, but it had not ended up in his mailbox. This happened a few times a week; the mailman delivered his letters and packages to Mrs. Biedermeyer in 3B. This infuriated Bigfoot. The names weren’t even slightly similar, except for the fact that they both started with the same letter. And Bigfoot almost never got Mrs. Biedermeyer’s mail, although when he did he always made a point of bringing it by, and Mrs. Biedermeyer always made a point of telling him about how her son was doing, out in San Diego, in the videography business. Bigfoot picked up the envelope that had been slipped under his door, opened it, and learned to his horror that Clara was scheduled to marry Alan Tresser on September 8 in a small ceremony in St. Joseph’s Church in the center of town. Bigfoot had introduced them, of course, a few years before, when he was still trying to reconcile with Clara, who was dating Paul. Bigfoot and Clara were eating lunch—Clara had said that dinner was too intense—and Alan Tresser was sitting at the very next table. He had come over and pretended that he and Bigfoot were old friends. Bigfoot, trying to save face, had agreed with him. “Very old friends,” he had said, not sure who he was insulting. Alan had given Clara the eye, but Bigfoot wasn’t surprised. Most men gave her the eye. A few months later, when Bigfoot heard that they were dating, he almost kicked in a door. Now, they were getting married, and he was invited. “This really is the final straw,” Bigfoot thought as he went down to the street, got into his car, drove the two hours to the Berkshires, and rampaged in the woods for the better part of the evening. One young hiker scrambled to avoid Bigfoot, slipped on a rock, and got a deep cut on his shin. That should have made Bigfoot feel better, but it didn’t. The young hiker wasn’t Alan Tresser.

  14. Sweaty.

  15. Congested

  16. Afraid to reply to the weddi
ng invitation one way or another. If he did not accept, could he ever hope to speak to Clara again? But if he accepted, that would be a thousand times worse. He would be standing out on the lawn all by himself, or with a date whose name he could not remember from one minute to the next, and he would be making small talk about the bride and groom. “She looked lovely,” one old woman would say. “So pink.” Bigfoot would not answer, secretly convinced that he should tear off the old woman’s head and push the headless corpse down the rolling hill in front of the church where, just moments before, Clara had turned and lifted her chin and, beaming, given herself to Alan Tresser. A church! This was a concession on Alan’s part, as well as a concession that Bigfoot, during his time with Clara, would never have made. Was that the answer all along? Now what would happen? When Bigfoot and Alan Tresser had run into each other at lunch, Alan Tresser was working as the regional sales manager for an automotive magazine. Was that enough to give Clara a good life? And what was a good life, anyway? Certainly not one with too much Alan Tresser in it. Bigfoot was sitting at his breakfast table dragging his claw through the dregs of some oatmeal. “I wish I were dead,” Bigfoot said to no one in particular. The lifespan of a Bigfoot was 300 years. Bigfoot had at least 80 to go.