Cheap Eats

For Whom The Bell Tolls

I saw a guy in a black Jaguar in the drive-thru line at the Taco Bell on Phelan Blvd. yesterday. I don’t know why it surprised me. It was the Deadhead Sticker On A Cadillac conundrum, I think. Why should a rich guy be any less enamored of the ________ (fill in the blank) served out the window of Taco Bell than the rest of us proles? Also, that guy didn’t get rich enough to buy that Jag by throwing his money away; and as everyone knows, if nothing else you get more bang for your buck at Taco Bell than at any other fast food outlet. You can feed a family of four for under ten bucks with ________ (fill in the blank) from Taco Bell, provided no one gags on it. . . which they shouldn’t, unless they get one of those damn “Fiesta” burritos, the ones they put rice in. You don’t put rice in a burrito, goddamn it! It should be against the law to do so, if it isn’t already.

*****

For a long time now, I don’t eat at Taco Bell if I can help it. I did more than enough of that when I was young. Even back then, the only time I ever really wanted anything from there was late at night when I was headed home after a long night of partying. I don’t know why that was. But I used to find myself there often enough, sitting in the drive-thru line with a lot of other no doubt similarly bewildered drunks, not even able to remember making the decision to go there in the first place. It was like my car drove itself. I would end up ordering way more than I could ever eat, and often by the time I got home I didn’t want any of it. So I’d throw the bag into the ‘fridge and go to bed. And then a week or so later I would throw it away. Taco Bell stockholders got rich off of all the bean burritos I bought back in those days, and never ate.

*****

The first Taco Bell here was over on 11th Street, across from Gateway. I think it is a Vietnamese seafood place now. That location was pretty popular in high school. It had this faux volcano thing out front, with a smudge pot stuck into the top of it, lit up. We called it the eternal flame. Most kids went there because it was the only place open after midnight where one could go if one was suffering from an onset of the munchies.

I got thrown out of there one night, by some little burrito-making dude, for laughing too much. That’s right. I was in there with a friend of mine, and for some reason everything he said to me was hilarious, and I went into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Weird.

Another night I walked in there at some ungodly hour and caught the little burrito dude making “refried” beans. He had a steam table tray on the counter, into which he had dumped a couple of institutional-sized cans of pinto beans. He had a Black & Decker ½ inch power drill with a paint-stirrer attachment in it. And he was going to town. This is a true story. He was puréeing the beans with a power drill. I found that both repulsive and, at the time, extremely amusing; and I ended up laughing my way out of there again. Since then, except for all the times I was legally intoxicated, I have denied myself the pleasure of eating at Taco Bell. It is my loss, I am sure.

*****

Get Out Of Denver

Requiem For A Lightweight

Since writing about John Denver the other day, I found to my surprise the thought of him kind of stayed with me. This was rather unnerving, and mildly annoying. Especially because, at first, I could not understand why he was haunting me so.

I finally remembered, or thought I remembered, that I had written something more extensive about him around the time of his death.

A two-hour search of the hard drive later, I had confirmed my recollection. The following is a reprint of Denver's "obituary", from a sort of column I wrote at the time. Seems I had a more complicated relationship with John Denver than I let on initially.

********

October 13, 1997

(A rather light, uplifting column had been planned and worked on for this week. . . Alas, that has all been pushed back for now. This is a special edition, conceived and released after we received the truly earth-shattering news this morning that that monolith of soft rock, the champion of mindless back-to-earth sentiment, Jacques Cousteau, soft country, and the environment (with a little "e") had crashed his plane into Monterrey Bay in California Sunday and perished. John Denver is gone, gone . . . "Johnny, we hardly knew ye.")

John Denver meant very little to me during his life, and his music even less. So it would be just a little bit maudlin, and hypocritical, for me to mourn him now that he has passed. However, the one thing we owe each person, the one thing we do almost inadvertently when the news comes that even the least among us has passed on, is to do a tiny assessment or inventory to see if that person had any impact on us personally when he or she lived, and thus we measure to what degree we should then mourn their passing. This sounds, on the surface of it, extremely cold and dispassionate, but thus is the human animal wired together. It is up to his family and close friends (and fans, if he still has any) to bury him and do the crying and serious mourning out there in California or Colorado or Idaho or wherever. For the rest of us of a certain age, we think about it for about five minutes over coffee on a Monday morning, before moving on to more uplifting news about Coffeegate and sexually rapacious drill sergeants and Bosnia and Uganda and everything else. For me though, to my surprise (and to my chagrin), the death of John Denver stayed with me a little longer than that. I thought about it some more in the shower, and then later at work and after. This is a guy who I had no regard for when he was in his heyday twenty-five years ago, and had given little if any thought to since, and yet here his death was kind of sticking with me, much longer than those of supposedly much larger luminaries (just recently, for instance, Jimmy Stewart or Princess Di).

When John Denver died, he was flying an experimental aircraft he had recently purchased. The single-engine Y-shaped Long EZ plane, built by aviation legend Burt Rutan, had a long history of pilot misadventure, crashes, and death. Reports said Denver had done a couple of touch and go practice landings at a Monterrey Peninsula airfield and had then radioed he would be flying for about an hour. Shortly after he turned his plane out to sea, his engined stalled, and the plane plummeted directly into the water. Denver's badly mangled body was recovered sometime later. A rather cryptic note at the end of the report stated that, as was routine with any NTSB investigation of a fatal crash, toxicology reports would be done on the pilot.

"D.W.I., D.W.I.,
National pastime of the average guy,
I measured point four-five
Man, I'm lucky I didn't die." -- "D.W.I.", The LeRoi Brothers

After he became famous and made his money and repaired to his palatial hacienda up in Colorado, one of the main things that kept John Denver in the news over the years was his numerous arrests for driving under the influence. He was only convicted of it twice, but he must have been arrested for it dozens of times. One imagines the Aspen cops and Colorado State Troopers had a sort of weary resignation about it. Denver would be pulled over again on a local highway for extremely erratic driving, and then shortly a call-in would crackle over the police band: "'Country Boy' is all out of his head again. . . I think I'll just drive him home, and save on the paperwork." "Ten-four." As it was, at the time of his death, he was awaiting sentencing on his second conviction.

I had always thought of John Denver, when I thought of him at all, as a sort of bloodless mercenary, who sang his pointless, limpid songs with zero emotion, and who was in it strictly for the money and the fame. I have seen or heard nothing since to change my mind any about this, but I must say when I began hearing of his drunk driving arrests twenty or so years ago, well, it is bad to say but, to my thinking at that time, his DWI's sort of painted him in a more favorable picture for me. It gave him some life in my eyes, and as a person who back then had no qualms about driving under the influence practically all the time, the thought of John Denver careening around the mountain roads of Colorado or Idaho (where he had another home, I think) with a bottle of Black Tower on the dashboard that he would periodically take long pulls out of was comforting to me, I guess you could say. In a sick sort of way, I regarded him as a brother. It makes me wonder, though. Even though he was famous and could and did presumably "get out of it" many times when he was stopped for driving erratically, he was still convicted twice. Take it from someone who, during his serious drinking days, drove around under the influence many times and, purely through luck and Providence, never got caught; I wonder if John Denver just had bad luck or how many times he was driving around those steep switchbacks half out of his mind on gin aside from the times he was caught. Hmmm. Like I said, to my twisted mind back in those days, thinking things like this made me think that John Denver was not such a bad guy, after all.

But he was, of course. He was mewling and maudlin and his songs were formulaic and had all the imagination of a fourth-grader's poetry and musical range that three chords could muster. He cared not one whit about what he sang about, but only the money and the fame and the security it could bring him. He would go do concerts and tours and act like he gave a rat's ass about his legion of adoring (if gullible) fans. All he really cared about, I guess, was getting back to the mountains, where he could booze it up and live a life of self-absorbed stoned leisure.

And now he is gone, and the world is not noticeably any worse off for it. Before I can leave him, though, and put him to rest, there is that issue of why the news of his passing lingered in my mind all day and drove me ultimately to compose this admittedly not 100% flattering eulogy for the man. I think I know why, and a person would have to be of a certain age to really understand it.

John Denver's seminal song for me, I guess you could say, the only one that had any (though little) merit at all and had any impact on me, was "Rocky Mountain High." This song came out when I was in 8th grade. I remember this because some of my friends and I did a poll of the guys who were in eighth grade at Memorial Jr. High at the time and came up with a Top Ten or Top Twenty of popular songs. I cannot remember exactly. I do remember that "Rocky Mountain High" was voted the top song (I think I voted for "Tumbling Dice", by the 'Stones, as a write-in). Now, you would have to go back through Billboard's archives or somewhere to find out what all else we had to choose from back in Fall 1972/Spring 1973. I am pretty sure you could come up with something better than John Denver for the top song, though. I remember thinking even then that "Rocky Mountain High" was a pretty stupid song to be Number One among my peers. But even though I was smart enough even at what? Thirteen years old? Fourteen? To know John Denver was worthless musically, I must in all honesty admit that "Rocky Mountain High" did at least indirectly have a lingering effect on my pubescent life.

What John Denver started, or at least engendered, with "Rocky Mountain High", namely a sort of "back to the mountains, back to nature" craze, was in full flower by a couple of years later.

And as much as I would really, really, really like not to admit it, I fell for this, in all its pretentiousness and vacuity; fell for it hook, line and sinker. Up to that point I had a more or less stylish haircut and wore more or less stylish clothes, but in the summer leading up to my sophomore year I grew my hair long and stringy and traded in all my trendy clothes for flannel shirts and fatigue jackets. I wore my dad's old army boots to school every day. I suppose in retrospect, and to be kind to myself, I could say I was affecting an un-style born of quiet rebellion, but that would be a lie. I had fallen for the mountain man thing. At that time, the leading proponent of this lifestyle, and my personal hero, was Bill Walton, the basketball player. He had come out of a straight-laced program at U.C.L.A. (Coach John Wooden), but when he got to the pros (Portland Trail Blazers, I think) he had turned hippie. He grew his hair long and lived in a cabin somewhere in Oregon and was kind of an iconoclast. Man, that was just too irresistible for me. Here I was, a son of the coastal plain, someone who should (and shortly thereafter would) have been imbued with the myths of my geographical upbringing; namely, you know, the beach and the ocean and all of that. But no, here I was dressing and trying to act like some guy 5,000 feet up in the Rockies, living off of the fat of the land. This is so painful for me to admit to; it was just incredibly pretentious, but there you have it. I used to watch, well, I used to watch "The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams", perhaps one of the stupidest TV shows ever made. I used to watch it just because Grizzly Adams had left society behind (he had been wrongly accused of some heinous crime, I think) and had gone to live in the mountains, cradled by nature all around (and some old fat prospector and a remarkably benign and helpful Indian named Nocona or Kokomo or something). Of course, I did not know at the time, as I found out later, that Dan Haggerty, the"actor" portraying Grizzly Adams, was buying and snorting up vast quantities of cocaine, and apparently losing his hair (he has recently been active on late night infomercials extolling the virtues of some hair-replacement surgery clinic). It would not have mattered anyway, I was so into this mountain man thing.

I was eventually "cured" of this ridiculous mountain-man obsession; cured of it, as we so often are, by a woman. I got a girlfriend, and she engendered in me the desire to alter my hairstyle and my clothes at least to some extent, I think because, as men have known and done since the dawn of time almost, I sensed that in order to get what I wanted from a woman, whether it was intellectual stimulation or stimulation of some other kind, I would have to make a trade, and I gladly made it. I came back to the land of the living, and reality, and I have not until now thought much about those "mountain-man" days at all in the intervening years.

But now that I have, I can still sense how strong the allure of that was, and I am not sure why. I think it is some psychological kink of my own, actually. There is the tendency to want to be outgoing and ebullient. That tendency is absolutely balanced and at times, as we have seen, overwhelmed by the exact opposite impulse, to turn inward and silent and away. . .to do, as another enduring hero from childhood, Bugs Bunny, so often did -- to jump down a hole and then pull it in after me. And that is what my "mountain-man" days were really, an attempt to opt out of the often difficult transition from childhood to young adulthood. And the things started by that stupid song, "Rocky Mountain High", made it easier for me to do this.

And so the passing of John Denver cannot go entirely unnoticed by this now otherwise normally sensible individual. For he influenced my life at a vulnerable time, however indirectly. He was able, through his "music", to engender cultural events that drove me down and down. And so I can say on this day, the day after your death, with all equanimity I can say, "So long, brother. And I hope they bury you very, very deep."

********

And so it goes. John Denver has been gone ten and a half years now. Here's hoping I never think of him, much less mention him in my blog, again.

The Power Of Osmosis

"Country" Boy

The other day I was attempting to drive one of my kids to distraction, so I broke out into a medley of John Denver songs. "That ought to do it," I thought.

What was odd was how many of the lyrics to those songs were still retained somewhere in a dusty corner of my brain. I cannot remember my own cell phone number - really - but I still know all the words to "Country Roads" and "Rocky Mountain High". Crazy. Especially considering Denver and his "music" was always pretty much anathema to me.

My only explanation is I grew up at a time when Top 40 radio was still prevalent, and I probably heard Denver's songs, willingly or unwillingly, close to a gazillion times between about 8th grade and my senior year. Those bland melodies and namby-pamby lyrics are etched into my brain.

I always thought it was funny that a guy with such a scrubbed public image who drew the post-Lawrence Welk crowd to his later concerts in droves was also apparently a vicious drunk, who racked up several DWI's and other alcohol-related public altercations before finally auguring his homemade airplane into the Pacific Ocean about ten years ago, doing himself in for good. One of his arrests came after he registered a 2.0+ on the breathalyzer after being stopped for driving erratically on the roads outside his large Colorado spread. I guess life on the farm wasn't all that laid back, after all.

Or, as a friend of mine e-mailed me the week after Denver bought it, "Crabmeeeaaaaat in the ocean makes me happpppyyyyyyy!!!!"

Baseball, Hot Babes, Crystal Beach, & Chevrolet

A Pretty Good Day For George Bjorkman
(and for a twenty-something Yours Truly, too)

July 14, 1983. When I woke up, I was laying crossways at the foot-end of a double bed in the beach cabin, on my back, uncovered. I had on a pair of Lamar U. gym shorts, once bright red but now faded almost pink – magenta, maybe – with the white piping along the sides and bottoms of the legs fraying and coming loose. The skin along my chest and belly and on the tops of my arms and legs had turned medium to dark brown. I had been out in the sun a lot that summer. After having burned off a few layers of skin early on in the spring, I no longer got sunburned. Rather, each subsequent exposure just turned me darker. And, melanoma be damned, I didn’t use sun block; at times I slathered on a coconut-oil based Coppertone product called Savage Tan, something like that, which not only did not block UV rays, but I am fairly certain was formulated to actively attract them.

Anyway, I lay there, admiring my tan, with the white, four-blade ceiling fan whirring clockwise at medium speed overhead. I could smell the sea breeze coming through the open windows on the south side of the room, and hear the waves washing up on the distant beach, faintly. The daylight was bright and streaming in at an angle from the east. Without a clock or anything to look at, I guessed it was about 10:30 a.m.

I glanced to my right, and saw my girlfriend, Diane, in light-blue panties and an oversized Moose Head baseball T-shirt (mine, actually), sleeping in a semi-fetal position on her side and facing toward me, up near the head of the bed. Poor girl. I would nearly kill her in the bed at nights sometimes. I tended to flop around like a fish in my sleep, especially after a lot of drinking; meanwhile, Diane would reactively move around the bed, sort of like a hermit crab, trying to avoid me. I’d met Diane originally at a friend’s party, and we’d been together for nearly a year. I wondered sometimes how she put up with me.

She was goddamn beautiful, Diane was. She was about 5’ 6”, slender but not skinny. Between blonde and brownish hair, I don’t know what you call it, with (she said) natural streaks in it. Physically, she had most of the right things in pretty much all the right places, and I never could decide which of her many assets I liked the most. Which was a nice problem to have, mind you. Even better than that, she was funny, and intelligent, and could and would party her ass off. She could drink most women (and a lot of men) under the table, without being obnoxious about it. And, she liked hanging around with me. Just about a perfect girl. We partied together, laughed together, made love, talked about Thomas Mann and Kafka and Goethe and Herman Hesse – I’d been bogged down in Dostoevsky for quite awhile by that time, the fuckin’ Karamazov brothers and those guys, and Diane was the one who got me off the Russians and into the Germans, bless her.

One other thing Diane had going for her was she could wake up in the morning, first thing – her eyes all swollen, hair going everywhere, no makeup – and still look, well, very desirable. As I lay there that morning, just looking at her for long moments while she slept, all the while suppressing an almost overwhelming urge to get up and go relieve myself, I wondered idly, if I washed my face and brushed my teeth while I was up, could I come back to the bed and maybe wake her up and interest her in a little early morning fun time? Hmmm… I should probably say, I was a bit of a self-centered prick back then. And kind of still am, really. And always sort of will be, I guess.

But don’t get me started going on about Diane, man; or this thing will never get to where it needs to go.

**********

The 1983 MLB season had begun as one holding reasonable hopes for the serious Houston Astros fan. People forget, but the first half of the 1980’s was similar in some ways to the late 1900’s-early 2000’s for the Astros. That team had actually begun its run in 1979. I’ll never forget it, because I cut the standings out of the newspaper and saved the article for some time – on July 4, 1979, Houston was 52-31, in first place in the NL West, ten-and-a-half games ahead of second place Cincinnati. Like most Astros fans, by then I felt certain the team, which had never won anything up to that point, was having a special year. Of course, they immediately went into a tailspin, losing something like 13 of the next 15 games, letting everyone else in the division back into the race. A race the Reds eventually won, besting Houston by a game-and-a-half at the end.

The team recovered to come within an eyelash of going to the World Series in 1980, and made the playoffs as the “second-half” winner in the fucked up 1981 season, the one split in half by a player’s strike. The Astros fell back some in 1982, but were reloading for another run by the beginning of ’83.

Astros’ kismet being what it is, those early hopes for 1983 were dashed quickly. The team stumbled out of the gate, losing its first nine games. They didn’t even get to .500 until the end of June; but from there they played pretty good baseball, finishing the season in third place in the NL West, six games back of Los Angeles. Coincidentally, starting catcher Alan Ashby went down with an injury around the same time in June that the team finally broke even, and shortly thereafter a minor league backstop named George Bjorkman was called up to help Luis Pujols fill in for Ashby (3rd catcher John Mizerock was sent out when Bjorkman was called up.) It was a move that probably went unnoticed by a lot of Astros fans at the time, certainly by me.

**********

My best friend Rocky and I had worked it so we were both off the same week in July. It really wasn’t that hard to do. He was operating heavy equipment for a large local construction company, and had vacation time coming. I was going offshore, working as a deck hand and racking pipe on a big-ass semi-submersible rig about 100 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Grand Chenier, LA. Two weeks on, two weeks off. Rocky and I had also made arrangements to secure a beach cabin down on Bolivar Peninsula for the week. Well, our girlfriends made the arrangements, actually – we couldn’t arrange shit, then or now. But anyway, Rocky and I set it up so we (and our women, and numerous other acquaintances who drifted through the cabin that week) had nine straight days to look forward to, of nothing but drinking, sitting out in the sun, surf fishing, and sleeping late.

Which we proceeded to do. Our basic itinerary for the week was to wake up about 11:00 a.m. or so, mill around, ice down beer in the coolers, eat breakfast, get the girls moving, then be down on the beach – in lawn chairs, oiled up, stereo blaring – by noon at least. I had these 12-foot long fiberglass rods with big open spinning reels we would wind with 20-pound test line. At the end of the line we tied heavy weights that had little flanges on them, like tiny anchors, and about three feet up from that we’d fix our bait, and about three or four feet up from that, a float. Then we’d wade out to chest deep water, and cast out as far as we could. The idea was the weighted anchor would secure the line in the sand on the bottom, the float would keep the line more or less perpendicular to the surface, and meantime the currents and wave action would keep the bait moving around like it was swimming. We would walk back to the beach, playing out line, and then set the drag and put the rods in these holders I’d made out of heavy rebar with plastic tubing wired to it, which we’d hammered down a couple of feet into the sand. From there, it was Forward Drink! If a small shark or hardhead or, hopefully, speckled trout hit one of our lines, the drag would sing out and we could tend to it. Meantime, we were listening to tunes and slamming down cold ones, while the girls talked about whatever, looked for seashells, went for walks on the beach, etc.

Around 3:30 or 4:00 p.m. we’d be “all in,” and would collect our stuff and go back to the cabin. Next up was a shower, something to eat, and a nice long nap. By the time we awoke again it would be dark out, so we’d load up and go back down to the beach and party some more, build a fire if there was enough wood laying around, and so on. And then, sometime much later, we’d go back to the cabin and go to bed. Good times.

When I woke up that morning at the foot of the bed, I didn’t have that draggy hung over feeling like I did most mornings, because I hadn’t gone back out drinking with the others the night before. I did have a bump on the top of my head, though. The previous day, we’d come back to the cabin mid-afternoon after several hours on the beach. After a tepid shower, I was walking around the living room area in my briefs when one of our other friends who was visiting challenged me to show off some of my karate kicks. I didn’t really know karate at all, but after enough beer I could be persuaded that I did. Some of my “friends” liked to take advantage of this from time to time. So, anyway, after awhile I was well into it and was doing my famous flying Bruce Lee spin and kick move for them, but unfortunately I was doing it through an open doorway, and at the apex of my jump I slammed into the underside of the door frame with the top of my head, and then dropped like a rock to the floor. For entertainment value, it was great, I guess – everyone present laughed like hell. But it gave me a serious headache, and a bump on top of my head which was painful to the touch.

I finally got up out of the bed and walked stiffly to the bathroom, where I off-loaded some of the previous day’s beer, and then washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I crawled back into bed, and “accidentally” woke up Diane. She wanted nothing to do with me, though. She was pissed off at me for kicking her in my sleep the night before. I tried to explain the kicking probably happened during a recurrence of the dream I had intermittently for years, the one where I was playing center field for the Astros in the ‘Dome, and was trying to run down a long drive in the left center gap while simultaneously keeping an eye out for Bob “Bull” Watson, who had got up steam and was careening in my direction from his spot in left field. Diane wasn’t placated, though – “Bob Bull who?” – so I eventually gave up on her and went off looking for something to eat.

**********

Luis Pujols was a nice enough guy, solid defensively, but he never could hit worth a shit. When Alan Ashby went down to injury in late June of 1983, and someone named George Bjorkman was called up from the minors to help out behind the plate, Pujols was chugging along at a .205/.227/.229 clip, actually not too bad for him. One supposes Astros skipper Bob “Flea” Lillis figured, what the hell? So he handed the starting job to Bjorkman upon his arrival. To that point the rookie had zero big league experience.

George Bjorkman went 6’ 2”, 200 lbs. and hit right-handed. Had kind of a modified flat-top haircut. He’d come out of southern California to attend Oral Roberts University and helped lead ORU to its only College World Series appearance, in 1978. That summer, he was drafted in the 4th round by St. Louis. Bjorkman spent the next several years working his way up through the Cardinals’ system. At one point, the Giants had acquired him in the Rule 5 draft, but he was ultimately returned to St. Louis. His breakout year was in 1981 when, at age 25, he led the AAA American Association with 28 home runs. From the comment and statistical record extant, it appears Bjorkman was adequate defensively. Offensively, he was a low average hitter with some power and above average plate discipline. His offense would probably be somewhat more appreciated today than it was in his time.

Bjorkman got to Houston on July 10, and then started the next 13 games at catcher for the Astros. He hit .225/.326/.425 in that stretch, and managed not to mess up too much behind the plate. Ashby returned the last week of July to reclaim his job. Over the next 2 ½ weeks, as Ashby worked himself back in to playing shape, Bjorkman started 5 more games and he caught well, but his hitting began to fall off. He went below the Mendoza line on August 10, and was farmed back out in favor of Mizerock.

Bjorkman was called back up by the Astros on September 1 when the rosters expanded, and got a half dozen more starts behind the plate in the final month of the season, as the Astros – out of the NL West race by then – gave some younger players a look. He hit .304 in those starts (7-for-23) and raised his batting average by 35 points.

Despite the positives at the end of the 1983 season, George Bjorkman never played in the majors again. Spring Training 1984 saw 22-year-old catcher Mark Bailey burst onto the scene for the Astros. Bjorkman, at 27, was past prosepect status, was considered no better than Mizerock or Pujols, the established backups, and he was looked on as a journeyman at best. The Astros sent him to Montreal in late March as the PTBNL in an earlier deal made in February for another 27-year-old journeyman catcher, Tom Wieghaus. Wieghaus appeared in all of six games for the Astros in 1984, going 0-for-10.

Bjorkman moved to the Expos farm system, and was released after 1985. He was last seen at the major league level as a Spring Training NRI by the Cardinals in 1986. However, he failed to make the team.

**********

After I bashed my head on the door frame, and had done my duty as an object of derision for all my closest friends, I went into the other room to lay down for awhile. I was still buzzing from the beach, and my head hurt like hell. So I took a short nap, and it seemed to revitalize me. I woke up with the sudden urge to go watch the Astros game that night. I hadn’t been keeping up with the intricate details of the team that week, needless to say, but I had listened to parts of games here and there over the radio in the midst of us perambulating around the beach. I knew the Expos were in town for a three-game set, and that Nolan Ryan would be pitching on that night. So I asked Rocky, as serious an Astros fan as I was, if he was interested. But The Rock was pretty deep into a terminal trip at the time, in the midst of a serious downward spiral. For one thing, he’d taken to drinking Jack Daniels on the beach at night, mixed with pink grapefruit juice. I’d never seen anyone do that before. He would buy one of those glass half-gallon containers that Tropicana juice used to come in – tall, rectangle-shaped, with a hand grip molded into the side – and he would pour out one-third or more of the juice, and then fill the container back up with Jack Daniels. Shake it up good, and then drink it straight out of the juice bottle the rest of the night. Nasty, nasty.

So, anyway, Rocky wasn’t interested in going. Neither was Diane, really. She humored me in my baseball obsessions, but truth be told, she wasn’t really much of a fan. It was her only serious flaw, as far as I knew. Bottom line, no one wanted to go to the game with me; but my resolve was strong, and I decided to go by myself. I’d made the trip from the beach to the ‘Dome a few times before. If one was used to driving over from Beaumont, the drive from Bolivar wasn’t bad at all – after the ferry, straight up Broadway through Galveston to the causeway, then up 45 to the South Loop, and then in a few miles, the Astrodome. Around a quarter to six that evening, I waved goodbye to my friends, kissed Diane, jumped into the Chevelle, and headed up the beach highway, in the direction of Port Bolivar and the ferry landing.

The drive to Houston was uneventful, and the traffic wasn’t too bad. I had the windows down and the stereo turned up, as usual. As I passed through Dickinson and League City, I thought of some cousins I had living there. I was driving up the infamous “I-45 corridor”, the killing ground for one or several serial killers, from the early 1970’s to the present. 32 bodies recovered in all so far, mostly young women. But I didn’t know from serial killers at the time. I didn’t know a lot of things. I was just heading to the game, man, with hardly a care in the world.

**********

I arrived at the ‘Dome about thirty minutes before game time, and walked right up and bought a ticket for a seat in the mezzanine, first base side. I stopped on the way in to purchase a bucket of popcorn, a large beer (in a waxy Aramark cup), and a game program. The crowd was larger than the usual mid-week ‘Dome crowd of the time, due to Ryan, no doubt. My seat ended up being right in front of some people I knew from Beaumont, which was kind of a long shot, I’d guess. Perhaps, were I the reflective sort back then – and I wasn’t – it would have occurred to me something special might happen that night. Nothing like that registered, though. I sat down, situated my beer and popcorn, and began filling out my scorecard.

By 1983, the Expos had been a good team recently under manager Dick Williams, but then Williams had left in 1981, and successors Jim Fanning and former Astro manager Bill Virdon had seen the team fall off from its 1979-1980 heyday. The 1983 squad, led by Virdon, featured many of the all-time Expo stalwarts – Gary Carter, Andre “Hawk” Dawson, Tim Raines, Steve Rogers – as well as capable baseball vagabonds like Al “Scoop” Oliver and Chris Speier, and some decent starting pitching. But the ‘Spos were destined to be no better than a .500 team that year. Against Nolan Ryan that night, they were sending out righthander Charlie Lea, an unspectacular hurler who was having a good year. He would end up 16-11 with a 3.12 ERA that season.

Filling out the Astros side of the card, I penciled in many familiar names – Puhl, Thon, Garner, Cruz, Doran – but who was this Bjorkman guy? Never heard of him. I briefly thought of Glenn Borgmann, a nondescript backup catcher for the Twins through most of the 1970s, but he’d been retired a few years by then. Bjorkman, hmmm? I resolved to check him out during the course of the game.

A game which moved along smoothly at first. Ryan was pitching well – he would go on to win his eighth straight game that night, raising his record to 9-1 – and Lea was getting the job done. Bjorkman had come up in the bottom of the second (he was hitting eighth), with Bill Doran on second base and two outs, and was intentionally walked by Lea to get to Ryan (who grounded out to end the inning.) The Expos put up a run in the top of the third; but then the home team exploded for five in the bottom half. Jose Cruz drove in two with a triple, and in his second plate appearance Bjorkman got credit for a sacrifice. He bunted Doran to second with Ray Knight on third and one out (the Expos screwed up the play, and Knight was able to score.)

As far as I could tell, Bjorkman was holding his own behind the plate. He was a big guy, but moved around pretty good back there. I was impressed by two blocks he made, on a couple of the 58-foot curveballs Ryan would sometimes let loose with. Ryan was calling his own game, obviously; but he and Bjorkman appeared to communicate pretty well. There weren’t many shakeoffs or meetings between the mound and plate or anything like that.

The Expos got one run back in the top of the fifth on a Tim Wallach home run. In the bottom half, Phil Garner led off for Houston and reached on an error. He was balked to second and, two outs later, Bjorkman came up and drilled a single to right, between the first and second baseman, scoring Garner. The Astros were up, 6-2.

Montreal got another run in the top of the sixth, this time on a Dawson jack to deep left center. In the bottom of the seventh, with two out and no one on, Knight doubled, and Doran followed with an infield single. Runners on first and third, two outs, and Bjorkman, after working the count to his favor, drilled a shot high and deep to straightaway left. A three-run ding-dong. The Astros went up 9-3, and the game was officially out of reach. Ryan sailed through the eighth. Montreal scratched out a run against reliever Bill Dawley in the ninth, but the game was well in hand by then, thanks largely to rookie catcher George Bjorkman, playing in just his third major league game.

Bjorkman’s line for the game? Two official at bats, one run, two hits, five RBIs. (1.000/1.000/2.500). Not bad. Apparently he was a modest guy, too. When asked afterward if the three run blast was his biggest baseball thrill, Bjorkman said no, catching Nolan Ryan was.

It was the best game of Bjorkman’s major league career, by far. And by chance, I had been there to see it. Neither one of us realized any of this at the time, I am sure.

**********

There weren’t many other cars on the ferry with me on my ride back across from Galveston to Bolivar that night. And even less people out on the deck, milling around. Most drivers, after they have made that ferry trip a few dozen times, get jaded and just sit in the car for the duration of the crossing. Not me. I’ve made that trip hundreds of times, but I always get out, and either lean against the steel gate on the bow, watching the waves, or go up onto the walkway around the second level. Not so much to see anything, but to feel something. Or, to see and feel something – the wind blowing through my hair, the unique and indescribable smell of the ocean, the heavy night air, the lights of Galveston receding into the distance. I don’t want to go into a swoon about it or anything, but there is no other feeling like that – the sensation of being out, at night, traveling across the water. Not anywhere I have found, anyway. I sure as hell wouldn’t miss it to sit in a hot car for twenty minutes.

On this night, from my spot on the little walkway down in front of the ferry’s wheelhouse, I could look out across the blackness of Galveston Bay and see a few lights on the point at Port Bolivar, and if I squinted hard enough, or perhaps imagined, I could just make out the outline of the Bolivar lighthouse, a black hulk in the night now, which shone light no more. Looking toward the Gulf, I could see the lights stringing out along the horizon from all the merchant ships, waiting at anchor for their turn to travel up the Ship Channel. A little further out, I could see the blinking lights of a platform rig, almost too faint to be discerned, almost over the curve of the horizon itself. Looking up (it was a clear night), I could see a billion million stars, arranged at various unimaginable distances away from me. Would it have been too much for me to think, just for a brief moment then, that those stars were put up there, in just such an arrangement, just for me? The sheer vastness of it all. . . one might think one would be overwhelmed by it. But seeing the firmament at night like that, and all that was laid out underneath it, surrounded by water, never made me feel small or insignificant. Rather, it always made me feel really big. Alive. Important, vital, somebody. Like a ten-ton manta ray, as Hunter Thompson once said. My chest would fill up with pride. Or was it with love? A feeling of contentment? Or perhaps just an extreme sense of well-being, however temporary; and a sense of thankfulness, too, to God, or Allah or Buddha or Albert Einstein, whoever, for laying it all out there for me on this night, just so.

I don’t know what George Bjorkman was feeling that night. I imagine he felt pretty damn good. Maybe he, the major league baseball player, felt something like I felt; me, a relative nobody standing in the dark on a boat, having deluded himself into thinking he was as bad-ass as King Kong or somebody. Maybe, like me, George Bjorkman, in all his fullness of himself at that moment, had a vague sense, too, that the bright shining moment wouldn’t last forever, and resolved to enjoy it while he could. I sure hope so, but I don’t know. Just a brief moment in the sun is all most of us can ask for. To have it, and to also have a sense of how fleeting that moment will almost surely be, is more than almost any of us could ask for, me and George Bjorkman included.

As I got back into my car that night, and the ferry gate lowered down to meet the dock at the land’s edge, I felt like a million dollars, or whatever today’s equivalent of that would be. I was happy. I had just been exhilarated by the ferry ride. I was coming from watching my team pummel the opposition. And I was on my way to a place I knew had a lot of ice cold beer in it, a lot of good tunes in it, a lot of good times in it. A place where there were people waiting up late for me, including a girl who was so fucking beautiful that, even after a year of seeing her at her worst and her best, she still took my breath away, every single time.

I didn’t know then, even if I had a vague sense of it, how brief that time would be, the time of feeling carefree, and happy, and content. I didn’t know any more that night than George Bjorkman knew, his major league career only having about a month-and-a-half left in it. I am pretty sure Bjorkman, in the glow of his achievement, allowed himself to imagine a full time MLB catching job, and several seasons of productivity before a well-earned retirement. I am sure, in my exhilaration, I allowed myself to imagine a long future of partying, of loving Diane, and of doing whatever the hell I wanted, whenever I wanted. Pretty much, anyway. To paraphrase something Joe Ely once sang, I thought the road went on forever, and the party would never end.

I am sorry that it did end, but I am thankful for the moments that I had. And I’ll bet if you asked George Bjorkman today, he wouldn’t give back the two-plus months with the Astros, or the otherwise run-of-the-mill, mid-week game between two non-contenders on a humid July night in Houston in 1983. Not for a million bucks, he wouldn’t.

But none of that mattered to me at that moment. As I drove off the ferry, clattering across the steel gate that, only moments before, I had leaned against to watch the ocean go by, I impulsively decided to put the top down on the Chevelle. So I did, and then I shoved Lou Reed’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal into the tape deck. Reed’s live version of the Velvet Underground standard “Rock And Roll” was blaring forth by the time I blasted through Port Bolivar, on my way back to Crystal Beach, down the beach highway. Or, as Joni Mitchell put it once, down the free, free way.

“Hey baby, rock and roll
Despite all the amputations
You can dance to a rock and roll station. . . all night”

A Mitt Full Of Shit

from The Heretik

Campaign 2006, Part 1: Talkin' Out The Side Of Your Neck

I saw an interview with Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney last night on FOX News. Apparently Romney, who is a lame duck in Massachusetts, is about to announce that he will be running for President in 2008. At this point one should assume he will be just one of many, many candidates to throw their hat in the ring in the time leading up to the election itself.

Romney has an interesting biography. His father was George Romney, former governor of Michigan and CEO of American Motors in Detroit. For anyone too young to remember, long-defunct American Motors gave us legitimate 1970's muscle cars like the Javelin and AMX, as well as some of the worst looking and running vehicles in the history of the combustion engine; like the AMC Gremlin, or the awesomely designed AMC Pacer.

A side view really doesn't do the Pacer justice, except to emphasize just how low to the ground it was. A man of average height standing next to one would find the top of the roof coming up to midway between his belt and his chest. From above one would notice the car seemed exceptionally wide, and also that it probably had more square inches of exposed window than any other car on the road at that time. I knew a couple of sisters who shared one when we were in school, and they called it their "rolling terrarium."

My best friend in high school, Jimmy S------, lived just down the street from me. All through junior high school, and our freshman year and part of our sophomore year of high school, we had to get up before dawn each morning in order to catch a school bus that came by our stop at 7:00 A.M. but most days somehow only managed to deliver us to our school (about 5 miles away) right around 8:00, about the time the first bell rang.

We would often talk about the day we turned 16, and how we would drive to school instead of having to stand around on a busy street corner with a bunch of other kids at an ungodly hour, waiting for a bus. Instead of listening to a bunch of puerile high school gossip and dumb chatter, we would turn up the stereo really loud and meditate along our way (neither of us were big talkers, especially prior to 8:00 A.M.)

I would turn 16 first, and prior to that my dad had been letting me drive him everywhere (with my 'learner's permit'.) He was real laid back about it, didn't criticize anything I did on the fly or harangue me or anything. Truth is, I was a pretty good driver from the start. If I did anything seriously wrong, he would mention it after we arrived wherever we were going, in even tones.

"You might try squaring off your left turns instead of cutting across the bow of the car in the opposite lane. Just go straight forward for a second before you begin to turn the wheel to the left."

"OK, dad."

"You'll be fine."

He had a friend who sold cars, and we had picked out a 1969 Chevrolet Impala for me. A real tank, with solid chrome bumpers that weighed a couple hundred pounds each. I wouldn't officially get it until my birthday, but I was able to have it repainted (white) and have a stereo installed, AM/FM and an 8-track player, beforehand. In other words, I was all set.

My buddy and I decided I would drive him to school each morning, and then when he got his license and his own sled a few months later, we would take turns driving each other to school and back weekly. It was a good plan, and it worked for awhile. On his 16th birthday, Jimmy got a used AMC Gremlin, metallic green with white racing stripes. He put in an 8-track player as well, and I'll never forget our inaugural commute to school in that glowing green monument to 1970s American engineering and design, Styx blasting on the 8-track, Jimmy and I passing a spliff back and forth. . . either that weed was really strong, or maybe it was just the rewarding feeling of knowing we had achieved a dream and had been delivered from the scheduling idiosyncrasies of our greasy-haired and mostly toothless bus driver. Whichever, I had a buzz all day long that day.

Of course, we were both driving cars that were pretty well used up by the time we got them, so there were problems here and there. I never could get the heater in my Impala to work properly, for one. In this part of the world, that is not a major problem most of the time. But I do remember during the one or two weeks a year when it was really cold driving to school while literally freezing, rubbing my hands together when I could, wiping the inside of the fogged-up windshield with a rag, blowing hoary frost with each breath. . . and I was inside the car.

Jimmy's Gremlin broke down after the initial few months, and basically never ran for more than a week at a time after that. It turns out that aside from being one of the oddest-looking domestic market cars I'd ever seen (it looked like the designer was working on his model, got the front half of the body done, and then set it down to go to lunch or somewhere and never got back to it) , the Gremlin was well-known for running poorly, if at all. My friend nursed that thing along for a year or two, until he finally decided to hit the silk and take his losses. He traded his AMC rolling piece of crap in for a black Grand Am that ran (and looked) much better. Still, I kind of remember that Gremlin with fondness. Of course, I didn't have to own it.

**********

Somehow I have gone far afield here. I do remember Mitt Romney's dad vaguely; George Romney was a fixture in mainstream Republican politics for some time in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognition-wise, he was something akin to what John McCain is now, maybe a bit less well-known nationally. He ran for president in 1968, as a moderate, and had his ass handed to him by Richard Nixon in the Republican primaries. Romney pere was also a devout Mormon who was born in northern Mexico, where his parents had fled after Utah outlawed polygamy. Despite his faith, he was known for getting down and dirty with the auto unions, especially the Mafia-run Teamsters, at contract time and for usually coming away with a deal favorable to the car companies.

His son went to Brigham Young and Harvard and then got into selling investments. Mitt Romney founded an investment firm and got rich, and decided to run for the Senate in Massachusetts in 1994. This was in the middle of the famous Republican takeover of the Congress, the Contract with America, etc. Romney figured his opponent, Ted Kennedy, was a flaming liberal and long-time bogeyman to conservatives everywhere, and would be at his most vulnerable at that point.

In a way, Romney was right. Kennedy rolled over him 58-42, yes; but it was the smallest margin Kennedy had been re-elected by in some time. Romney licked his wounds, and came back to be elected Governor of Massachusetts in 2002. He has been making noise since 2004 about running for president.

Romney has some allure because he is basically unknown and an outsider nationally, and he has also acquired a bit of the aura of an enlightened conservative - not moderate - Republican. I do not know how he got the latter, because he is anti-everything right down the line, and appears to be edging more to the right as he gears up his campaign. Still, I was interested to see his interview on FOX, because I don't know that I'd ever heard him speak about anything before, and I was curious how he would 'come off' on camera as opposed to any prior impressions I had from simply reading about him.

Right away, the interview was a letdown. Romney may be an upstart or an outsider, but he has been around politics long enough to master the "good looking guy with not much substance" approach. The soon-to-be candidate was impeccably dressed and groomed, wearing an expensive suit and power tie; he is youngish-looking for his age (he is actually 59, and I am guessing colors his hair) and clear speaking. The initial visual impression is a strong one, and I suppose Romney and his people are hoping this will cause voters to overlook the fact that the candidate answers reporters questions in the slickest, most condescending, evasive, mealy-mouthed, talking-a lot-but-say-nothing style we have seen in some time. It took about ten seconds to form the impression that the man is not overburdened with deep thoughts or reflection or substance.

When asked about his Mormonism and if that might not affect popularity with voters, Romney seemed to be trying to align himself somehow with the religious right, saying to the reporter, "The full name of my church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, you know?" This was said in a very condescending way. I am surprised the reporter did not reply, equally condescendingly, "You are aware that the religious right considers Mormonism a non-Christian cult, aren't you?" But then, this was FOX News. Too bad.

It is entirely possible my initial impression of Romney is wrong. I hope so, because I have been looking forward to 2008 for awhile now. With Bush gone and no clear heir-apparent type in either party, the campaign and primaries leading up to the general election should be fascinating, with all kinds of new faces bobbing up here and there on both sides, giving our national politics and injection of new people and dare I say new ideas it really, really needs. I hope Mitt Romney and his handlers figure out neither the 'bullshit your way through the primaries' strategy nor the 'outsider come to clean up Washington' strategy will likely work too well this time. I hope Romney comes into this with something to add, rather than just looking for something to take away for himself. By now, none of us should be too picky about where the answers come from or who is the bearer of them, as long as we get them from somewhere. Even after being monumentally turned off by him last night, I guess I still harbor a hope that Mitt Romney will be worthy of playing a part in the great show that the 2008 elections are shaping up to be.

In other words, let's hope Mitt Romney is a Javelin. And not a Gremlin.

Little Hitlers

Chile Sendoff

The Reagan Years were just great. . . they gave us hair bands, Head of the Class, The Hooters, and a half-dozen or so petty little Central and South American despots, perpetually propped up by the U.S. State Department and/or the C.I.A., suddenly finding they were losing their footing and wondering if the U.S. would rush in and save them from their own subjects.

Their doubts were raised by the fact the U.S. had recently given in to international sentiment (and to the idea of universal human rights) and for the first time had let one of its former puppet regimes fall to a popular native uprising, in Nicaragua. This successful revolution happened technically in Carter's administration, but Reagan had assumed power by the time former Nicaraguan leader Anastasio Somoza was blown to smithereens by a car bomb in Paraguay, where he had gone into exile after being overthrown. The reverberations from this assassination were felt by every two-bit military dictator in that part of the Southern Hemisphere, from the leader of the lowliest banana republic to that of one of the large, emerging Second World countries.

If you don't believe me, it was all documented on The Clash's Sandinista! LP (1980), a record that helped make the Reagan era bearable. And of course Reagan himself will be forever remembered for overseeing a scheme around that same time whereby, 'off the books', the U.S. sold arms to our bitterest enemy in order to raise money for the reactionary paramilitary forces challenging the Sandinistas in Nicaragua a few years after the revolution. The infamous Iran-Contra scheme also involved using various South American drug lords as middle men, and was integral in emboldening that particular group of murderous thugs, who then greatly expanded the smuggling of weed and cocaine into the U.S. in the years immediately following Iran-Contra, with incredibly disastrous consequences for the U.S. government and many of its citizens.

Iran-Contra was also responsible for inflicting Marine Lt. Col. Ollie North on the culture for the first time. This may have been the gravest consequence of all. North gained popularity with the faith-and-values set by boldly standing up to Congressional inquisitors and lying and obfuscating his way through the entirety of his testimony in nationally televised hearings. The reverence for the man and his courageous act of lying through his fucking teeth under oath was such that at the time the mere invocation of his name brought some strong, patriotic Americans literally to tears.

Anyway, pretty soon all these brutal South and Central American Presidents for Life/martinets/CIA puppets were falling like dominos all over - Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Omar Torrijos and then Manuel Noriega (who was driven from power partly by really loud recordings from the Guns 'N' Roses oeuvre) in Panama, Jorge Videla in Argentina, "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti. One of the other members of the club, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, held out until 1990. I guess because I associated all the Latin American facism with the 1980's, I just assumed Pinochet was long dead, so I was startled to see he expired just this past Sunday, at the ripe old age of 91. Pinochet had in fact outlived many of his bitterest enemies. Now a debate has started in Chile as to whether he should be remembered as a brave defender against Marxism, or as a bloody fascist who was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of over 3,000 of his fellow Chilean citizens during his repressive reign.

At any rate, hearing of his demise somehow reminded me of another of Pinochet's ruthless and repressive fascist bretheren, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain who himself is, I think we may all safely assume, still dead.

Time Warp

THE BALLAD OF JOHNNY "WAD" HOLMES
February 9, 1998

"Do it, do it, do it 'til you're satisfied
Whatever it is. . ."

It had to happen.

What with Seventies nostalgia in full swing – with everything 70’s now fully metastasized throughout the culture -- it had to come to pass. There is now a niche market for what can only be called XXX porn nostalgia. That is right. It seems the longing for everything Seventies has, in its sweep, brought in with it at least a smattering of folks who pine for the good old days of smut films. Those XXX films are now viewed as artistic, the furtive guys who shot them six at a time in dark warehouses and lofts using junkies and wastrels off of the streets for actors and zero production values are now viewed as auteurs. It just goes to show that anything, anything can be viewed favorably in retrospect, if given the patina of age.

Some make the argument that the '70s films had plots, and the actors were actors, who had nuance and range and were trying to do something artistic between taking off their clothes every five minutes and humping like snakes. These people refer to the current films shown on the Playboy® and Spice® channels as well as those available for rent in the video stores as nothing more than one "cum shot" after another; whereas the 1970’s works were almost Bergman-esque, or at least Fellini-esque, by comparison. Which sounds good on paper. . .

If you went back and actually watched the films, though, I think you would be hard pressed to find any budding Brandos or Newmans or Streeps or Closes (urge here to say budding breasts.). I never was much of a consumer of smut, but like everyone else, I suppose, I came across it from time to time. I know that lo those many years ago I saw at least parts of The Devil And Mrs. Jones and Behind The Green Door, which are considered the classics of the genre, and while I recall several performances that were, well, stimulating, I do not recall anything bordering on what could be characterized as an Academy Award performance. But that is just my view.

Proof that 1970’s smut has “arrived” is that Hollywood is now making mainstream movies about XXX films. Boogie Nights, released last year, is one. I have not seen it, but I have read that the protagonist is based loosely on legendary porn star Johnny "Wad" Holmes, he of The Big 12-Inch. Holmes was, of course, in hundreds of XXX films; along with Marilyn Chambers, he was considered a star of the genre; and, of all the Seventies porn icons, only he and Chambers (and perhaps Linda Lovelace) have had any resonance or staying power in the general culture down through the years.

It is instructive, I think, that Holmes died of AIDS a few years back. And also that the lightweight who was chosen to play him in Boogie Nights, former underwear model and rapper Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, had to wear a prosthetic penis in the sex scenes, just to approximate the breadth and range of a real pro like the legendary Johnny "Wad".

At least Holmes had the honesty to live and die by the rules of XXX, and he only ever used what God gave him. Marky Mark with a fake dick is just that -- fake. Just like Seventies nostalgia. You shoulda' seen the real thing, baby. . .

****

I WANNA BE SEDATED
April 20, 1998

This past week saw the passing of Wendy O. Williams (of Plasmatics fame), not to mention that of Rob Pilatus of Milli Vanilli. Williams was 48, Pilatus 32. They both died by their own hand. And there the similarities end. Say what you want about Williams (and I will say a little bit more here), I will not insult her memory or her life by ever mentioning Pilatus again, and especially in the same sentence with her.

"You wanna play mind-crazed banjo
In the druggy-drag ragtime U.S.A.?
In Parkland International
Hah! Junkiedom U.S.A.

Where procaine proves
The purest rock man groove
'Rat poison,'
The volatile Molatov says,
'Go straight to hell, boys.'"

Some of us are old enough to remember when punk rock came tumbling out of the ruined economy and rigid class system of merry old England c. 1976 and then, about two years after the fact (an eon in punk rock time), washed up on the American shore.

Remember Wire? Killing Joke? Gang Of Four? Or the greatest punk rock band of all, one of the greatest rock bands of all, The Clash? Ah, the good old days.

All the good to great punk bands were English, it seems, and why not? It takes a certain sort of ruined country and blasted hope to produce something like The Sex Pistols. Not too many of the American punk rock bands had much merit to begin with, and who can still remember any of 'em now? The Ramones, okay. New York Dolls? Eeeh. . . too glam, I’m thinking. X? Yeah, X, who made one great LP, Los Angeles. And, oh yeah, The Plasmatics.

I cannot recall a single Plasmatics song, although I remember from hearing many of them at the time that they were mostly unlistenable cacophony and white noise. . . as was most punk rock, at least in its early stages.

The primary attraction of The Plasmatics was visual, and especially the lead singer, Wendy O. Williams, a former stripper and topless dancer who went out and in the great tradition of American garages everywhere, started her a band. The Plasmatics were too vulgar for television, and thus never made it on to The Midnight Special, with Wolfman Jack; or In Concert, with that idiot Don Kirshner. I saw them a couple of times in the flicks we used to go watch at the Gaylynn Theater way back when. . . The ones shown at Friday midnight, which KWIC-108 used to sponsor. Where you lugged in a case of beer in the lining of your coat, and as soon as you sat down, your friends all around started firing up spliffs in great profusion.

Damn! People belittle the Seventies sometimes, but it had some good things, too. Just try that in a theater nowadays and see what happens.

Anyway, what I remember about Wendy O. Williams on stage was a tall, lithe woman with a bleach-blond Mohawk and wearing nothing much more than long black high heel leather boots, a g-string, and black electrical tape placed over her nipples for pasties. This was her attire as she performed, performing various atrocities on her guitar while bleating out unintelligible lyrics. In the background her band, somewhat less scantily-clad, went thrashing about out of synch while doing things like chain-sawing their instruments.

Ah, The Plasmatics. . . great band! I remember someone, possibly my old friend Chris O----, telling me he had purchased a Plasmatics album, and I thought, Why? I could not imagine sitting in a dark room, listening to the music (which was basically unlistenable), with no visuals for reference; and trying to make any sense of it. Comprehending it in a literal sense was totally beside the point, anyway. But then Chris often missed the point, God love him. May he ever rest in peace.

And may Wendy O. Williams rest in peace, as well. I do not know why she chose to put a gun to her head and pull the trigger; possibly there were lingering effects from all the drug abuse and wildness back in those days that stayed with her, long after punk rock and The Plasmatics were long gone. All of us have had to deal, to one degree or another, with the detritus of a wild life long after the wild living and youth was over; and it takes some people longer than others to come to terms with it, if at all.

Wendy O. Williams never made it, dammit, but I do not think any less of her for it. And I will see her again.

I will see her again. In that place where all the punk rockers and hell-raisers are going, when its all over.

Sic transit gloria. Rest In Peace. And keep me a spot warm, baby.

Jones-ing for Willie C.

After another desultory week of watching and listening to amoral Bush and the hoodlums, strongmen, and fixers he has hired to run the country, I hope I can be forgiven for slipping a bit into nostalgia.

I miss Bill Clinton.

There, I said it. I don't miss him so much for specifically political reasons. I miss the person. If I'm going to have to put up with one anyway, I think I'd prefer a president with a real sense of humor over one with a self-interested smirk; I prefer a complicated man with a perhaps fatal taste for the wild side over an overgrown frat boy who had it all handed to him every step of the way.

I dug this up somewhere, and the most interesting thing about it to me is that as late as the summer of 1998, George W. Bush apparently wasn't even on the radar yet as far as the 2000 election goes. Well, it wouldn't be his style to start with everyone else and labor through the whole process of lining himself up as a candidate, would it?. Why do that when you can wait around until your attention wanders in that direction, then call up a bunch of your dad's friends and get them to do the work for you, and pay for it all?

Anyway, from the dustbin:

*****

THE CABLE PIPELINE VOL. I, NO. 30
May 4, 1998

THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY (OR THE LAST TWO-EIGHTHS OF IT)

EVERYBODY'S EVERYTHING. After another dreary week of watching CNN and MSNBC, I am driven once again to comment, against all my better judgment, about the abounding legacy of President Bill Clinton, and all the surrounding hoo-ha thereof.

After watching the aforementioned news networks, and reading this week's Time, which has four consecutive articles in the national news section concerning various aspects and angles of all the investigations going on at this point into the Clinton administration, it occurred to me, once again, that all this was just a bit too much to digest for the average citizen. You know, it seems like the Whitewater investigation (which is still ultimately, after all the tangents and blind alleys he has run down, what Kenneth Starr is supposed to be investigating) began almost as soon as Clinton was sworn in, and here we are, five and a half years and roughly sixty million dollars of public money later, and what do we have to show for it? However one comes down on the question of Kenneth Starr himself, whether one considers him a cheap-jack thug and inept investigator with a hard-on for Bill Clinton, or a human sump pump of taxpayer dollars, or an avenging angel come to rid the country of the single greatest scourge on man since Satan - or, if like most of us, one falls somewhere in between on the question - it is still hard to look around and not wonder just what has been accomplished thus far. What positive results has Kenneth Starr brought us? What started as an investigation into an allegedly shady land deal back in Arkansas way back when, with perhaps (allegedly) peripheral involvement of the President's (then Governor of Arkansas') wife, has mushroomed into what? Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster, David Huaing, Gennifer Flowers, Jim and Susan McDougall, Vernon Jordan, Susan Willey, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Winkin, Blinkin and Nod, and Bullwinkle Moose. And on and on and on.

Starr strikes me as the truest definition in a long time of what a loose cannon really is. The term is a long overused adage by now, and trite, but think of Starr, rolling around wildly on the deck of the ship of state, firing off indiscriminately in whatever direction he happens to be facing at the time, doing irreparable damage in some cases, but with absolutely no regard for that, as long as he gets to keep reading his name in the papers every day, as long as he is assured a spot on the evening news each night, as long as they are holding that plum spot on the faculty of Pepperdine U. for him out in California, with the school financed million-dollar bungalow with the majestic view of the Pacific Ocean. Being a loose cannon is Kenneth Starr's reason for being, actually, and you and I are sanctioning it. Because every dollar Starr has spent so far in the six years he has been investigating the Clintons without coming up with a single indictable offense has been public money. Kenneth Starr's employers, while he has jumped at every hint of impropriety like a bass jumping at a Gig-olo lure and has completely lost his grip on his investigation and himself, are you and I and anyone else left reading down his or her paycheck stub each week or two and seeing the big chunk come out of the middle before one gets to the bottom line of what is "take-home" pay. We pay Kenneth Starr. We employ him; and I for one am ready to say, to continue the angling metaphor for a moment, "Hey, Ken, fish or cut bait. Unless you can come up with something prosecutable in the next three months, you are off the job; and you will have to reimburse us for all the money you wasted along the way indulging your personal distaste for Bill Clinton and his subordinates and friends." Whaddya say, fellow taxpayers? I say we hire a lawyer and start an investigation into Kenneth Starr, and none too soon, either.

Clinton has remained cheery through all this, no doubt at least partly because for some odd reason not even his supporters can really adequately explain (though many pundits, both pro and con, have tried), his poll numbers and popularity have remained high, and even increased in some cases. The conservatives and Clinton-haters are going crazy at this; which almost makes the whole sorry mess worth it to someone like me, who enjoys watching the reactionary Nazi element of the American political spectrum go nuts every time it cannot figure out why the rest of the country will not go along with it's thinking. It is almost as fun as it was watching the left- wing nuts go crazy every time Reagan's numbers went up after he said something particularly ill-advised and patently stupid, which was practically all the time.

I tend to think that, politics aside, Clinton is a lot like Reagan in some, no many ways; and people just liked the both of them, and did not particularly care what all else went on, as long as we did not get steered into some stupid war, and as long as the economy stayed booming. And there you have it. It is tempting to write off the whole mess of Kenneth Starr's administration-long and apparently fruitless investigation as just a low-ball, sleazy (albeit expensive) sideshow to what has otherwise been a pretty great eight years, if you look at it from the narrow view that we have fought no wars and our economy and markets, against long odds, according to a lot of "bears" lurking out there, have just kept booming and booming.

I am personally a little more sanguine about all of this. For what we are reduced to now, and apparently will be for the rest of Clinton's term, is marveling at his ability to again and again face the firing squad of public scrutiny of his most personal and morally ambiguous – to say the least – doings, and to walk away each time unscathed and smiling and more popular than ever before. This is great theater, as they say, but kind of takes us away from the reason why we get together as a country every four years and elect a President in the first place: To get things done, to make changes or to keep things the same, but at any rate to have a vision for where the country is going and to do what is possible to get us there. We do not elect someone to publicly dodge bullets to amuse our most base and prurient interests, which is about the only function Bill Clinton serves nowadays, and it seems all he will do for the next two-and-a-half years, while serving out his lame duck term. And it is a shame. And one cannot blame Kenneth Starr alone for this (although in my personal opinion Mr. Starr deserves to be beaten in the kidneys with sticks, to have lumps pounded on him, and then to be thrown into the bottom of a deep, dark sewer somewhere, left to the fat green flies), or the "moral degeneration" of our society, as it seems to be popular for network commentators to point out lately. Bill Clinton's own dark heart and moral shortcomings are contributing factors to the circus that has now been made of his administration, and why he will never be able to pursue some of his really brighter ideas, like reforming our public health system, or trying to make public education something more than a rat hole we throw money down and a politicized, politically correct mess that has little if anything to do with what should be it's primary focus, educating our children. Because of his personality flaws and peccadilloes, Clinton will not get to do any of this, and because of it, we all lose. And that is the saddest aspect of this whole thing.

And what will the future bring? I mean, what happens after Clinton? I do not think many of the pundits have thought much about this, but I have. Because Clinton has to leave after 2000, regardless, and I for one look at the prospect of a Clinton-less future more or less like a stone junkie dimly views the news on the street that the DEA is about to crack down big time on his neighborhood, and heroin will be extremely hard to come by from now on, and what he does get will be a pale imitation of the stuff from the "good old days." All these Geraldo wannabes and cheap Mike Wallace imitators better brush up their resumes, because once Bill is gone, so too goes the fun.

Think of it. Let's look at our current prospects for the race in 2000. On the democratic side, we have Vice President Al Gore. Earnest, boring, plodding. . .morally a bit shady, we find out, after he was caught fund-raising from his VP desk and (I thought) after he shamelessly used his dead sister as political fodder in his anti-tobacco speech at the 1996 convention. . . but I do not think you will find much sexual contretemps in his past (or present). Dick Gephardt? Well, call me prejudiced, but I never thought a guy with no eyebrows could be much fun (not to mention trusted). Republicans? Newt Gingrich? Give me a break! Lamar Alexander? Pleeease!

Republicans do not have sex, anyway. They are not known for it. They are too interested in policy, I guess. Picture a guy like John Kasich, alone in a darkened room, stroking himself over some position paper on supply-side economics he just read.

Anyway, whatever happens after 2000, no matter who or which side wins, it will be extremely dull as compared to now, and I think all these people who so earnestly want to run Bill Clinton out of the country on a rail ought to think about that a little, before they start constructing little altars to Kenneth Starr in the corners of their living rooms.