"The Great
Midwestern Trendkill"
The cardinal sin in "The Hollywood Game", if you will, is to be uncertain and desperate. For all we bit-players who try to pass ourselves off as "wild-catters", the advantage of this scattershot approach is that you have a longer time "to figure things out" without quite so many low-lives prowlin' around an ecosystem that's been built "to feed" on types like you.
Which itself as its advantages and disadvantages.
Enough scalding experiences, if they don't kill you or dissuade you completely, will make you stronger. What is worse, however, is to be emotionally-bound to a parasite because you're too afraid to leave or can't existentially picture anything outside of this needy relationship-- wanting reward without risk but finding yourself pulled down to a more and more degraded level.
So it was, ambling around with my singular hat I found in a yard-sale, a black plastic mesh back and a white foam front that read, in bright green letters, "Almost Famous". Back in the 9th grade it had only attracted negative attention because I was a quirky attention-seeker "who didn't live with confidence", who wore his emotions on his sleeve, and was easily beaten down by the slings and arrows of insult. At that point, coming in with a "Chicago Bulls" t-shirt and a blue Montreal baseball cap would have attracted attention for its notable departure and would have either been seen as another "prank" or a desperate attempt "to conform". You couldn't win for trying, but (crushing) defeat by that point was an inevitability.
One winter, the class took a weekend trip to Chicago. We were expected, no less, to huddle around in little groups and go sifting around the bins of chain-stores in this Midwestern version of "Times Square". Even I was hip enough to realize this was bogus, so put on my "Almost Famous" hat and stalked off down the cold, windy streets of the metropolis where no one knew me "or could hate me". With $5 to my name, I went to "Planet Hollywood" and saw the original "Blues Brothers" suits enshrined behind a glass display with Jake's briefcase where he carried his harmonica.
Satisfied, I visited the rock n' roll McDonald's that was set up like a 1950's style diner.
But it felt empty without someone to share this novelty with. For the sake of my offended manhood, I knocked at the door of "Hooters" before they opened, grinning at the under-aged audacity of it, but the waitresses in their patent orange shorts didn't seem to care.
I sat at the bar on the second floor, one that wrapped around in a circle, another airy bar just like it on the second hemisphere, and found myself infatuated with the glistening stack of shot glasses and polished wood. So many shining, reflective surfaces. I practically pretended that I was waiting around for "someone", as if Leanne the blond or Yvette the brunette,
the seniors and twin stars in my life that I guided my romantic ship by, would take a warm seat next to mine-- though it could be said they were 300 miles away and doubtlessly up to something else. One could imagine a surreal room filled with a golden tinge, where everything and everyone falls into place like a magical formula of
some "John Hughes movie".
That night, we were to attend a formal dinner and visit the legendary "Second City" comedy club afterward.
At the legendary establishment, we were herded through the brick, shadowed foyer-- the wooden floor squeaking beneath our shoes. The air was close and warm, the smell of alcohol and mentholated cigarettes adding to the "edgy" adult feel of it. Artificial fern plants even, in gilded pots, off to the corner. Framed, autographed pictures of legendary performers like John Candy and Dan Akroyd whom
sent their wishes in times a lot more pure than these, the residues and energies of twenty years drenching the woman-scented atmosphere.
Hip, casually-attired waiters in their '20s with piercings, goatees, and tattoos passed by and took our orders for snacks. I settled for the cheese n' crackers basket, which turned out to be a tasty variety of plastic-wrapped goodies and a black plastic tub of something approaching nacho cheese. Good, though. In the darkened theater, it was time to forget my problems and drift away.
However, I was not expecting the deluge of campy, manic intensity that came next. I threw back my head and howled with laughter, convulsing in my seat like a heart-attack victim and completely letting loose. Sometimes I was the only one laughing, and the patrons turned around to see who it was "making so much noise".
My classmates hissed at me to "shut the fuck up!", heaping on all manner of opprobrium and abusive disgust, but I was having too much fun as someone who had gone from the depths of bleakest despair to if he had been inhaling "laughing gas". Maybe it was the hilarity of a convict, doomed and damned, rattling his demented chains in glee, but what else was I supposed to feel?!
But it was "one of those experiences" that taught me "what life could be", like chomping down on a 10,000 calorie jelly doughnut. Looking back, I can't tell if it was a "good" or "bad" thing because it gave me a taste for unearned treats.
It's the same reason why when a horny teenaged boy's unrequited fantasies of eloping with their married French teacher "come true", ultimately they're hiding in the house on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. Especially when the world starts gawking and pointing. . . . .
It's why when you're 13 years old and dancing with a 27 year-old Belgian cook at camp who mistakes you for an older lad in a darkened cafeteria on this "night of passage", how that's all you'll ever need at that age. Asking her if "she wanted to make out on the grass" or even getting a blow-job down by the swimming pool would have certainly added to the dizziness of the night, but would have "profaned it" in a way.
To the extent that we may have desires, but we need "checks" on our gratification so matters don't get so out-of-hand. When the ultimate consequence is to become trapped, emotionally-dependent, and completely at the mercy of others as the scales of justice uphold natural law.
But I had been given an exultant taste of "the promised land", and my will was strong. . . . . if misguided throughout my youth. I lived with audacity but not confidence. Obnoxiousness, but not courage. And oftentimes I confused them and found myself confined to the margins of irrelevance as the world passed by indifferently. I began to take on the sad, long face of a dandy-- Oscar Wilde, perhaps-- who was full of witty epigrams that only he seemed to hear as merchants beat pigs through the street. He was infinitely kind, infinitely considerate. . . . . but very much alone in the perfumed sump of self-indulgence.
One afternoon-- walking my dog, Buckley in one of my "blue moods"-- a rumbling, beat-to-shit car rolled slowly up to the sidewalk. I craned my head, and recognized a kid I remembered from high school. He had been one of the town brats, too dumpy and Jewish to fit in with the lapsed altar boys who were no less rotten and privileged, but now he was here under far-more-humble circumstances I could relate to. . . . . dredged up like a rat.
Or some kind of "reunion" scene out in the middle of the Sahara in "Lawrence of Arabia" where the dunes stood indifferently to the men in cloth. It was "the road to Damascus", "Hollywood Babylon" where he had been living on the outskirts, running a local cable-access t.v. show of comedy like "a flesh-trader".
You had his cast & crew, all volunteers, with the limits of the Western imagination and a bone-gnawin' simpleton sittin' on his ass and squinting into the wind next to a mud-hut.
The
hope was that they'd eventually "be spotted" by talent scouts and hefted onto
"The Hollywood Gravy Train" like a gang of feral losers living on a level lower
than "Faster Pussycat" in the metal documentary, "The Decline of Western
Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years".
It sounded infinitely romantic to me. . . . .
He had relatives in L.A. "who were somewhat connected to that business", but to what capacity I could not guess and I would probably snicker if I knew. He had been thrown out of film school, and in an e-mail piously declared that he had just "come out of rehab". Yet he continued to crack jokes about drugs and alcohol constantly as if "The Cookie Monster" in him was never far away. He had shot some porns, ran around with meth-addicted blonde surf-bunnies "who were mostly trouble" and at one point was living on his grandma's houseboat, a woman who smoked constantly and spoke in a ragged voice of early 1960's burn-out like a confidant of Zsa Zsa Gabor.
What could I say?
He sent me a DVD of his show and for a local cable-access tv show that was trying to do their best impression of "Faster Pussycat", they couldn't even "play their instruments". There was guitar feedback, and the "bonging" of drums before the cymbal stand fell over with a crash.
They weren't fit for the high school gym.
I was too polite and mealy-mouthed to him to say much to this at the time, probably not that much more assertive when I think back to what this website was in its early days. I scribbled out a polite missive via e-mail, and we kept up the polite illusion that "we were really looking out for each other". Out on the trail, if you can't "carry your own weight" they leave you where you lay. Up on the mountain, climbers are not unknown "to cut the ropes" in order to save themselves.
That's about "how it worked" back in high school, where it seemed as if their must always be a substratum of victimized organisms as teachers, administration, and most parents deny what goes on down in those cell-blocks.
Leave it up to the bored son of the bourgeois to think that there was no existential calling "higher" than this dream. However, most seemed unable to conceive as abstractly. You had the 350 pound bambino eating a sandwich and pointing the camera, or George Marino at "Sterling Sound"-- an indifferent technician who mastered the most putrid kind of music that came across his console without complaint, only knowing that he was a top professional who got paid.
And here were the rest of we creative types. . . . . ultimately washed away in the floods of our own impulsive desperation that the world did not toss a nickel to.
Once I did a comedy bit on my page that went as follows:
----------
"The Bard of Richmond Heights"
gets hustled for his life story!
into an independent film, and I took it.
----------
It was posted towards the end of the presentation, and operated on about one level higher than a nice, sit-down restaurant giving you "a doggie bag" with dogs in chef's hats making slurping faces. It was something my unhip mother from New Jersey would gloat over and her son, at the age of nine, would admire for their 1960's "camp value" in a whacked-out "comic book" universe only he could seem to understand, howling with laughter.
But do "the postmodern tap dance" with a hat & cane when you're not pleading with people to throw nickels up on the stage. Or else they'll make your fat ass do "the splits" and laugh as you dislocate your groin and grit your teeth as you beg for death.
Part of a successful act comes with coherence, which is rooted in discipline, timing, and "holding the audience in suspense". Back then, I did not know how to do that as I tap-danced more and more frenetically with no grace.
And you can bet that my cable-access "pal" took advantage.
He was in town, and I wanted to pass along some shirts from my hare-brained and ultimately ill-considered t-shirt business. I was in a tired, miserable state from being strung out on Ritalin and caffeine pills and not getting enough sleep and sent an email giving him my number and to call back later because I needed to rest.
An instant after I sent the message, the phone rang.
He had grabbed the number, but didn't bother to read the message. He said he would be by in 45 minutes like an amped-up "power-player" and I was too pleasant and didn't have "the strength to deny him". He didn't show up for two hours, in fact-- just when I "gave up on him" and was closing my eyes on the couch-- when there was a knock on the door.
We stood in the kitchen myself and my giddy, insincere, obnoxious guest as we traded gossip, war stories, the onus of mountains we had barely climbed if not for "legs of steel", and questionable mail-order bazaars-- whether on the internet, or an actual marketplace-- where you could buy anything dicey under the sun from Japanese animè pornography to rocket launchers. What was made evidently clear was that other than our dreams of Damascus, "Hollywood Babylon", we really didn't have much in common and other than me hiding it, there was some bad blood between us.
It has been an ugly cell-block dynamic back there in high school, where I had been emotionally and psychologically "penetrated" and lived the shivering, shadow existence of something approaching "a jail-house bitch". The class of '99 didn't seem to realize that mysteriously, overnight, I wasn't there anymore. They shrugged, and never thought about it again.
But the accumulated strain of so much weakness, and trying "to overcompensate" by acting like a tough guy, plus how problems flowed into other problems until it was like a cancer of the soul that roiled and rolled in ten places simultaneously like Slinkies toward the edge of a cliff, I had been approaching something "like a nervous breakdown".
This kid had been one of the ring-leaders of those who had been shoveling dirt down into my grave even as I was being "buried alive". And then here, in the present, he had the gall to crack an insulting joke that blew open all the illusions that "I wasn't a social failure" and was an equally-valued member of the community whose input "mattered".
At
that moment, a lot of things clicked. It was like Franz Kafka coming into a
strip club in the Urals and soon sitting at a table with smiling, laughing women
on his arm as he arches his eyebrow in significance, thinking "he's a real
stud". But then he passes out from drink and finds himself waking up in an alley
with his clothes gone and his wallet missing. The door-man pushes him back when
he tries to enter the club, and slams the door in his face. It was so obvious
that he shouldn't have gotten himself in that situation "in the first place",
but who was there to tell him?!
It
was amazing how dim the conscious of the world was out there that just shrugged.
Such were those "rock n' roll rebellion" catalogs that dealt in concert
t-shirts, if not a Mecca of "Grateful Dead" products--tapestries, black-light posters,
and shit-rate lamps, incense, candles, pewter jewelry for the undiscriminating
idiot who never bothered to take "The Road to Damascus" because "it was too
much work" and instead settled for "Stonerville". Funny how as the quality of
the bud gets worse, and the penalties for getting caught get stiffer, how the
nature of the jokes seem only to get dumber and dumber with one downward,
sloping correlation.
It doesn't rally anyone to do anything, but to continue nibbling on the cheese of life with chittering, apathetic victory. It sells "stash safes" where you can hide your contraband from "the pigs", a
truly noble endeavor on the suburban grid of life. . . . . which could be summed
up at Ozzfest a couple of years back when Ozzie Osbourne slurred into the
microphone: "My doctor told me to quit or else I'm going to die. . . . but let me tell you
kids, I'm gonna keep goin'. But whatever you do, don't drink & drive. Go home
nice and safe so we can come back next year AND ALL GET FUCKED UP TOGETHER!".
Then "War Pigs" blasted over the monitor, a bouncing ball practically leading a sing-a-long on the double projection-screen as apocalyptic images of war and destruction made a montage. Verdunne. The Marne. Nazis marching through Paris. Ozzie edited in so he was standing in with General Westmoreland in the Pentagon War Room planning the napalm of Vietnamese women and children. Whatever this trough of all-American festival values, the hogs "didn't even know the difference" as America's putrid "Generation-Next" decked out like gothic, lip-pierced hopelessness.
A man by the fence gripped a program and stepped around in one place, getting more and more agitated. . . . . finally he stepped forward with his arms raised in the air, clenched into fists, and hollered "WAR PIGS!" in catharsis of whatever ailed him.
Don't you see why I need beauty in my life? A nice Jewish girl like Winona to call my own?! It was like that single from "The Cult" from 1989's "Sonic Temple" called "Fire Woman". That tingling guitar bit when the singer squeezes his eyes shut and sings "I can feel her getting close to me" with an ambience as warm and transcendent as the rising sun and a phoenix coming down from the sky. No, I'm not your average fan. I could do a nerdy little robot routine that made sense only to me, sidle up to you like a Space Alien, and say "BEEP! I detect a brainy elfin goddess! Must report to base! BEEP!" but this would degrade us all. . . .
Rhyming Couplet: "Those who would sell out a single principle are morally reprehensible!"
Follow these two wretches to hell:
Michael Goes to Hollywood
-- "I will ponder on your wisdom. . . . ."
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
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