by Camden Joy
Dear CMJ,
The Rolling Stones were on Saturday Night Live and they played some stuff from Some Girls and Mick kissed Ron (or Keith) with his tongue but I didn’t catch it because that same night I was attending my first rock show (the Rotters) in an outdoor bandshell (more a dip in the grass) in chilly Isla Vista near beachy UCSB and they did mostly covers by the Sex Pistols (not dead yet) and Devo (who were unknown back then outside the Hollywood club circuit) except they did play one original I remember at least called “Sit on My Face, Stevie Nicks” (I could still sing the heavenly chorus for you, if you’d like) and they called each other names of Roy Lichtenstein paintings like “BLAM!BLAM!” and “Grrrrrr!” and one of them (the guitarist) went to elementary school with my oldest brother and meanly made fun of his clothes (I didn’t know this until later) and the vocalist looked (come to think of it) a lot like Eric Bogosian and had this long-legged short-skirted girlfriend beside the stage and he pogoed through the tiny crowd (first time I’d seen pogoing) and I thought the Rotters were all I ever wanted to see of the future of music but I was twelve, did you ever listen to me, of course not, they broke up and went away.
Dear CMJ,
I had this bass teacher in eighth grade, bass guitar. Heaven only knows where he came from. He taught out of the one music store in our town. He had poor hygiene, bad manners, no aptitude for teaching. He also had a band—“Engine Machine”—which was on the verge of “happening.” The first half of each bass lesson would be spent struggling to recall if I’d been assigned any homework the previous week. It seemed likely, but my teacher was too stoned to be sure. I thought he was ludicrous—did my parents know they were funding this fraud? I changed the subject, brought up Engine Machine. We spent the last half of each lesson discussing his band. He’d brag about the groupies, the fawning photographers, the blown-away soundmen, the jam-packed gigs, the adoring clubowners, the A&R meetings. After three months I think I had learned maybe two things, the C-major scale and how to tune the bass guitar. One week I informed my parents I didn’t need to go anymore, that was it, I was an accomplished musician, the end. They called the music store and canceled the lessons. As for Engine Machine, I checked the bins at the record store but never saw their release. There was this record by Engine Dynamite, but I think that was someone else, so I never bought it.
Dear CMJ,
The life of our party is a French emigre named Claude Bessy, who as Kick-Boy Face made the pronouncements that made us what we are today. He was a brilliant polemicist, humorist, editor, songwriter. He’s in The Decline of Western Civilization, you can see him there. Everyone who wrote for him deserved Nobel Prizes for Literature, this was Top Ranking Jeffrey, Craig Lee, and a ton of other now-dead people. His magazine was a trash-papered inky combustible rag named Slash—it’s lost to us now—there were financial problems or something, he pursued the girl he loved across to England, he could not be reached for comment. It vanished, he vanished, everything went.
SURVIVING SINATRA
RECENTLY A ROOMFUL OF PEOPLE were almost killed by Frank Sinatra.
The scene was a Turkish kabob house in lower Manhattan. This is my neighborhood hang-out; the sort of place where only the employees are permitted to smoke, and the walls are amply coated in grease. I go there because so do a lot of others, Muslim cabbies on their breaks, fashion students from Kyoto, elegant immigrants from Teheran, techno gals in floor-length flares and techno boys in ball caps with bent-down brims.
So there we all were the other day, eating grilled lamb and deep-fried balls of chick peas off styrofoam plates with plastic forks and knives, when suddenly we heard a new sound—a television! Now many of you have already seen televisions, and most of us had too, but the surprise of it in my local kabob-ery was that thus far we’d only heard Turkish radio. So with all due respect we turned to look at it, as tradition tells you to do whenever anyone switches on a television in your presence.
There was a black and white movie. There was a man twitching on a train. There was a woman wearing pearls and a great deal of mascara, hairspray, and lipstick. There was Janet Leigh. And there was Frank Sinatra.
There are moments in a crowd when America makes so much sense, when you want to scream BRING ME YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUNGRY, AND LET’S ALL DIG FRANK SINATRA. I mean to say, this was one such moment.
So all of us fell silent, as again custom holds is the courteous thing to do when a television plays in a public setting, and through the steam of onions browning in olive oil we watched The Manchurian Candidate.
Now I have always wondered why you can never go into a place and hear my favorite Sinatra albums, his sad albums like No One Cares or In the Wee Small Hours, and instead you only hear songs like “New York, New York.” Well, there’s a reason, and it’s the same reason restaurants have to be careful when his movies are on TV—it’s a possible Health Code Violation: you can die from Sinatra.
In the movie, Sinatra is coming apart. He sets a cigarette between his lips, and it falls into his scotch and water. He looks around, embarrassed. Only Janet Leigh is watching. He tries to light a match, drops it, manages to light one—but his hands shake too badly and the match goes out. He asks Janet Leigh whether she minds if he smokes and their eyes meet and they fall in love. She tells him she doesn’t mind at all, please do. He tries to light one up again, looks like he’s going to vomit, bursts out of his chair, knocks over his drink, and runs.
There in the Turkish kabob house, our mouths were full of babaghannush and hummus and chopped beef and baby lamb . . . but all of us had stopped chewing. We were too struck by what we were seeing: a man we all recognized—that famous widow’s peak, that trim waist, those eyebrows drifting up there on his forehead like lost rainclouds—was on the television about to break down.
People will tell you Sinatra and Elvis Presley were similiar talents in that they both sang and acted well; but the fact is, there’s no picture Elvis ever shot which didn’t obligate him to do songs, whereas Sinatra made most of his movies without singing. In fact, in the movie we were all watching, he was about as far from bursting into song as anybody can be.
Sinatra has tried to flee the woman but she follows him. She is clever and gorgeous. Her eyes are dark as Turkish coffee and her voice like baklava. She asks him where his home is. He can’t look at her. He seems to be thinking: She doesn’t know what she’s doing. His voice catches on every syllable as he tells her he’s in the army. His eyelids flutter. He sucks on the cigarette she has lit for him. Some part of him is dying to get out of the conversation but that part of him is losing the battle. Softly he asks Janet Leigh for her name, in such a way that it’s clear her name is the one thing he’s always had to know. But he’s even more confused by her answer. He sighs, apparently at everything—the magnitude of life, of conversations, the sheer difficulty of what names we should call one another.
We all know people who hate Frank Sinatra for all sorts of reasons, mostly for how he treats other human beings in so-called real life, and they dismiss the undeniable beauty of his talent because of his undeniably sick soul. I wonder if these people had been in the Turkish kabob house with us what they would think seeing this scene, in which Janet Leigh, acting entirely on our behalf, reaches out to save this fragile bird-boned boy. As with his best albums, Sinatra doesn’t seem to be going from any script. There aren’t printed-up lyrics and dialogue for this kind of thing. This isn’t acting; it’s the real stuff. He is standing before us, letting his feelings utterly overwhelm him. It’s scary. Perhaps Frank Sinatra is a bad person but he defines the word “presence.” In this scene, he says almost nothing, he exhales and sweats and looks away, and yet Janet Leigh, who does all the talking, seems barely alive by comparison.
It’s time I mention what else was happening in our Turkish kabob house and that was that all of us—employees, bike messengers, cabbies—felt Sinatra’s confusion so completely that we ourselves were about to cry . . . we would have been crying, that is, if our th
roats weren’t clogged up with Turkish cuisine. Sinatra can barely talk. We could barely breathe.
On the television, Janet Leigh starts to tell Sinatra who she is, then she stops, instead tells him her address, tells him the apartment number, her phone number. She gently asks him if he can remember it. His larynx closes up as he tells her, yes. You aren’t sure how to take this response because he still can’t look at her. Janet Leigh repeats the phone number and he turns even further from her, shakes his head slightly, closes his eyes in weariness.
In that moment, finally, after attentively watching this, the whole group of us in the kabob-ery began to cough. Most everyone was choking back tears but by this time many of us were choking on shish kebab too, great wads of barbecued meat stuck somewhere mid-swallow. We were gagging into napkins, downing our sodas, poking ourselves in the ribs, crossing our hands at our throats. The look of serious injury was on everybody’s face and then, abruptly, just like that, it was gone. We were okay, we would be fine. We looked up at the television. Sinatra, our would-be killer, was breathing easier too.
OBSERVING MURDER
MELVIN TOFF TOLD ME HE used to hate the sport of boxing for its pretensions to valor, grace, art, its “history” of “pageantry.” Then he confirmed what a glorious sewer, what an unapologetically sick practice, it had become in recent times, and called it cool. By the time we’d met, Melvin had taught himself all the most famous tragedies of the ring, not just the date and place but the purse involved, the amount each boxer was supposed to’ve made. He held that, “the value of each man is determined by the amount he would accept to receive a public beating.” He recounted vivid descriptions of brain-deadening blows which made millions, Jerry Quarry’s subdural hematomas, nerve damage to the brainstem of Frank “The Animal” Fletcher, gliding contusions inside Sugar Ray Leonard’s brain. Through Melvin’s eyes, boxing’s noble past was just a fast-forward collapse of noses, heads, spirits.
May 1995, Melvin and I pulled into Las Vegas; he intent on watching grown men slug one another, me intent on gambling most our money away. At the 21 table, my cocktail waitress had a ponytail, acne; I worked to turn her into an old love—someone I’d lost—without success. She was just another in the long line of somebodies I’d never get to know. She sized up my sad situation, inquired, “Is there anything more I can do for you?”—she drew a slow breath, reemphasized—“Anything at all?”
I could conceive of requesting only that she become someone else; instead I shook my head, “Of course not.”
The highlight of our visit was to be the battering of L.A.’s gorgeous golden boy De La Hoya as he went after the belt that belonged to brawling Rafael Ruelas. But first, on the undercard, Gabriel Ruelas, Rafael’s elder brother, defending his title against some tiny long-haired Colombian who wouldn’t fall down. The Colombian’s name: Jimmy Garcia. Though completely outpunched from second one, Garcia stood and stood, shaking off referees and physicians that he might accept more blows to the face and ribs. The flags, pennants, the streamers dripped red, the colorful floor slogans grew ruined from Garcia’s blood. After eleven rounds they called it. Garcia went over to his corner where, finally, he sat. I was relieved. He appeared disappointed. A moment passed, and Garcia lost consciousness. Melvin was thrilled. EMTS loaded Garcia onto a waiting ambulance. The next fight promptly began. For the next two weeks, Gabriel Ruelas prayed at Jimmy Garcia’s hospital bedside, but it achieved little. He succumbed to his brain injuries on the anniversary of Marie’s birth—May 19.
It was our second murder together, the first being Peter Tosh. Tosh always seemed a friend, keeping in close touch (via car stereo) until the bad luck day Melvin and I dashed through a motel in Gallup for a bucket of ice and afterwards, just like that, found his murder awaiting us at the top of the news hour. Our fault? Melvin Toff’s tenderness boiled away, never to return. His solution was to joke: Someone had, like, exploded Peter Tosh’s consciousness, man, literally blown his mind, had reshaped his head laterally, he’d got hisself kilt, a bepistoled individual had done to him what Listerine does to bad breath and now Tosh’s career was down the drain, he was all over, as in—hee hee—all over the drapes and carpets, &c. None of his jokes were effective, of course. I immediately flipped my Tosh tapes over, scanning their other sides; where, for example, on the back of my copy of Bush Doctor, I found Melvin had hometaped me some Warren Zevon.
I know it seems like a big deal leaping Tosh to Zevon in nothing flat, but I stink oh-so-bad at grieving. And I admit, devouring them in this order, with Tosh first as the palate cleanser, it took forever before I tasted “the thing” about Zevon; namely, that he oozed disloyalty, a Bel Air whistleblower who took enigmatic pride in running down the old order (himself right along with it), a self-loathing traitor to his Linda Ronstadt class. His characters, initially sympathetic, unveiled their true ugliness in a wink, gave themselves away with an inopportune sigh. So his sessions were in truth subversive (although they sounded SoCal bland, miked and mixed so that you could almost hear the coke-nosed engineers as they blithely unwrapped still more reels of overpriced two-inch recording tape).
Melvin always challenged me as to why there had been no musical yet about boxing, imagining librettos recounting Oliver McCall’s inner turmoil during the Lennox Lewis title bout or the aria potential of Golota’s castrato-inducing Bowe low-blows. He loved to point out how boxing and music are two such similar sports: the potential for ugliness, the standalone arrogance of each. Where else are your bare privates made so public, except (perhaps) when performing live sex acts for money?
The truth is, sensitive singer/songwriter types no longer lose sleep over what transpires in the boxing ring. The last such tune, the one that killed pugilistic anthems rather as The Searchers killed Westerns, was probably Warren Zevon’s “Boom Boom Mancini,” one of Melvin Toff’s favorites, in which Zevon’s infamous chilliness hits a fate-obsessed apex. At the outdoor arena of Caesar’s Palace (where thirteen years later we cheered the death of Jimmy Garcia), Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini had hammered blood clots loose in the head of Duk Koo Kim. It was the most vile thing any Mancini had performed, Melvin liked to hiss, since no-relation Henry directed the Pink Panther Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.
The sinister Cochise-on-the-warpath tribal blues of Zevon’s “Boom Boom Mancini,” said Melvin Toff, is the unresolvable drama of darkness eternally in our midst. Mancini is a hero troubled by nothing, least of all a conscience. “Hurry home early,” drily encourages the singer, perhaps quoting a boxing advertisement, “Hurry on home. Boom Boom Mancini is fighting Bobby Chacon.” To back up this advice Zevon spends two verses applauding Mancini’s ferocity. Then, out of nowhere, at the bridge, Mancini meets Death, in the form of the deceased former champion Kim. Mancini shrugs. We suddenly understand that this is where such courage always lands us; the true glory of boxing is callousness.
Bobby Chacon was our local favorite, former champion featherweight, former champion junior lightweight, the badass from Oroville. People I knew drove more than two hours into Reno that January night, 1984, to watch the ring fill with ghosts. The match would, it was widely believed, be well-attended by the spirit world. Not only was the expectation that Mancini would be distracted by a vision of his murder victim but Chacon was to be visited by his first wife, who’d killed herself two years prior rather than watch the man she loved continue to box (common lore had it she appeared still to enjoy popping up at such events now and again). And there was the small matter of the soul of Chacon’s unborn child which sat ringside in the belly of his second wife.
They near-rioted, chucked magazines and shoes, ice cubes and beer cans, they, the near-capacity crowd of 11,104, when referee Richard Steele stepped in, a minute seventeen into round three, before Chacon could even drop, before any of the planned-for ghosts showed up at all. Even the heavyweight champion, Larry Holmes, rarely a great enthusaist for things supernatural, complained it was too soon. “I had to almost kill Leon Spinks before Steele would stop
it.”
But Chacon was so grateful he thanked the referee for intervening. “You said you were my friend but if you were my friend,” Chacon challenged Mancini afterwards, “why’d you have to beat me up so bad?” Chacon seemed to forget momentarily that this was Boom Boom Mancini, after all, and he could stagger anybody, friends or enemies, with successive jabs, whack their chins and cut their eyes, drop them with unseen left hooks which connected like thrown concrete, because he was Boom Boom Mancini . . . just as Holmes also hadn’t remembered the terrifically bad manners of bragging about nearly killing a man in the ring within earshot of a boxer who actually had. Warren Zevon remembered for both of them—but his “Boom Boom Mancini” is about something else, not the boxer or the sport but the futility of forgiveness. This singer won’t grant absolution, which is fine by Boom Boom Mancini; he knows better than to seek it. The value of a life has become exactly what Melvin Toff calculated; the price one accepts to be beaten in public.