Bad Craziness at Harvard U: The Harvard Law School Welcomes Hunter S. Thompson
What's Hot, What's Not: Singed Awake by a Close Brush with Fame in the 20th Century
First a word to Hunter: Last night at Harvard, I apologize for not saying hello. At the end of the evening, when the mob of chanting, half-naked cannibals descended over the auditorium chairs and surrounded you, I simply couldn't bear to watch.
I waited outside, knowing that the cannibals, after a few autographs and photos, would most likely lose interest and release you. I formed a plan as I waited. When you emerged with your entourage, I would walk up to you, pull two hits of acid from my coat and say, "Dr. Thompson, let's go out for a drink. A beer or two. I'll show you the real Boston." You would have looked at your entourage and thought about your answer. I would've said to them, "Sorry, boys. I just have two," then looked back at you, smiled and said, "Let's go to the moon." It was a good plan. But I didn't go through with it. There were several reasons why. But let me start from the beginning.
It was dead quiet. Only the cough of a compact car broke the stillness out front of the old Austin Hall. Maybe it was because I was an hour early. I wandered in from the cold and cased the joint. Sneering gargoyles and haughty wigged-men stared from the walls.
I took an aisle seat in the fourth row of the small auditorium. A handful of people were scattered about and all five of them had a cans of Diet Coke in front of them. It worried me.
As I sat there, it occurred to me that no one checked my credentials. The two kids in my row discussed how to fake an ID. Their process was far too complex for me to remember but it involved large amounts of clear packing tape. "Just write FREELANCE WRITER on your business card!" I wanted to yell, but then all six of us would've known I didn't deserve to be there. I wove a thick tapestry of deception to get into the Hunter speaks at Harvard event. Claiming to a be member of the press, I had my name put on a probably non-existent guest list the day before. I carried my little paper National Writers' Union ID and doctored one of my Ziff-Davis Publishing business cards. While a few more people straggled into the auditorium, I considered the probability of being questioned and/or removed.
The two kids at the end of my row eventually got nabbed by the tidy event director. I watched as he checked their Harvard IDs. He looked a year or two younger than I, but walked with a certain authority few of us ever achieve. I waited. I would let him approach me. He glanced at me, smiled slightly and walked away. Power. He had the power and he flattered me by leaving me be, he said it with his steely eyes. Sometimes it pays to be deemed cute, sometimes it pays to be alone. I made my eyes as steely as I could, and gave him the subtle smile the next time he walked by.
The smell of metabolizing booze with a slash of perfume hit the air. Something CK or Bennetton, if that's still hip. The place filled up.
The event director hurried up and down the stairs with heightening urgency and I had something to watch for the next half hour. He reminded me of a leaf-cutting ant as he scurried, shouldering objects twice his body weight and rearranging the furniture. He replaced the wooden desk chair with a soft, dad's-old-office-type-model with wheels. It looked a bit low, but the event director rolled it behind the desk anyway.
The event director selected a student to pick up Hunter. A lacrosse type with a baby face and flushed cheeks who only needed grass stains and a spot on a TV ad for laundry detergent to look familiar. A no-nonsense, middle-aged type in charge of A/V called out to the kid, scrawled a 315- area code phone number on a piece of paper and handed it over. He said, "Call this number if you have any problems with him." I don't think I'd mind that sort of treatment. Unquestioned preparedness. An ice bucket was slid under the desk at the same moment.
"Dr. Thompson will be here in 8-10 minutes," the event director clasped his hands and announced. The audience, if that's what we were, laughed in response. What is that in Gonzo time? somebody asked.
Forty minutes later, Hunter arrived. We could hear him muttering into his remote microphone while someone busily wired him outside the auditorium.
He walked down the stairs like an unwilling celebrity, a caramel-colored drink on the rocks in his hand. Applause. Smiles. Table-top bangs and cheers. Hunter picked his way down to the desk and stood behind it. He glanced back at the soft office chair, glad with it, and sat down. The desk devoured him as this 6-foot man suddenly sank into the unearthly realms of leather-like vinyl. The audience chuckled. Like a dissolving grammar school teacher, he propped his elbows up on the desk and said into the mike, "Class. Class, settle down."
It was twenty degrees out, so he was bundled up to the ears. He wore the standards: the white hat, the yellow-tinted shooting glasses with that protective plastic branch in the center, a patchwork coat that boasted Colorado, fingerless gray gloves and a long, draping scarf. "Holy shit," he said, glancing down at his tightly bundled form. He pulled on his scarf and stood up again. He removed his hat. Hunter turned to face a slight and attractive sound girl with an aimed tape-recorder. Her hair hung kinky and loaded with leave-in conditioner, her face shined with cruelty-free emulsifiers. Barely moving his lips, he asked her, "Have you read my book?"
"What? Um, no," she answered then glanced around the room. A few people giggled.
"Hm. Let's try that again," Hunter said, taking off a glove. He shook the fingerless rag wool at her and reiterated, "Have you read my book?"
"Yes," she amended.
He threw her a glove and it bounced on the tabletop in front of her. She clamped a hand over it and smiled. He removed the other. "From the top," he said to her again. "Have you read my book?"
"Yes."
"Good, glad to hear it," he tossed the other glove to her and sat down.
He began with a request for advice. Last year on election weekend, a nazi of a cop pulled him over for driving under the influence. Black hat, white hat, Hunter said. The cop writes modern westerns and is apparently caught up in the color of his black cop hat. Hunter pointed at white hat. He told us he was in full control of his faculties but scored a .053 on the breathalyzer. Because .053 falls under the legal limit, the offense was labeled a misdemeanor and Hunter was charged a $45 fine. The question at hand was, should he plea or should he fight? He'd already spent between $40-$50,000 on legal fees fighting the case because he felt that one is either above the legal limit or below, and he fell below. He felt there should be no gray area that can damage one's driving record. He concluded with the fact that he was not advocating drunk driving, though someone, who was obviously completely intoxicated, argued with him anyway.
One student bellowed about his multiple drunk driving offenses and how it is truly oppression. I think he referred to the justice system as The Man.
The word, VERITAS, hung on a flame-red banner behind him. HARVARD LAW SCHOOL. VE-RI-TAS. And as the bantering, heckling and advising proceeded, I thought it was all quite simple. Only Hunter knows how his head was on the night in question, more so than the cop. But ultimately and expectedly, the majority told him to fight.
Someone asked how Hunter knew the cop was a nazi. "Well, I knew his father. And his father was a nazi," he replied, "and he was raised in a nest of nazis."
A man wielding a cane he didn't need, banged his table-top and yelled obscenities through the first half of the evening. I wondered if he'd shown the proper credentials. During the course of the evening, he roamed up and down the aisles, passing out rip-off Gonzo merchandise flyers.
"Hey, what is that? What is that you people are reading?" Hunter asked. Someone handed him a flyer. "That's the cover of my book you're selling, isn't it? How about that..." he tucked the flyer into his pocket. "I'll have to throw him in jail."
The man turned to leave after a few more heckles, interruptions, and a little more cane waving. In need of a trouncing, I thought. I thought it would be good to shout, "If you don't stop that I'm going to come up there, tear you into bite size pieces and feed you to this wild mob." But the years of Catholic school broke me of such outbursts. Being bound in sheets soaked in ice-water will do that to a person. Hunter noticed the angry cane man leaving and called after him, "Hey, ah, be careful. There are a lot of freaks out there."
Hunter dug into the ice-bucket under his desk and refreshed his drink. The subject of sleep deprivation was considered. Two years ago, he'd stayed awake for six days and seven nights, he said. "The most important thing is to have a goal. After the third day it's fun." Fatigue hysteria is the scientific term, he asked the room if anyone else had trouble with it. I nodded and he asked, "Ever get arrested because of this, this fatigue hysteria?" I shook my head confidently and decided not to tell him about the fly that swoops incessantly about the room after the first 32 hours.
The conversation meandered and someone asked whether or not there's Better Than Sex II based on this year's election on the way. She called the '92 Clinton/Dole election interesting. "What was so interesting about it?" he asked her and lit a cigarette. She didn't seem to know.
One last question brought us back to Hunter's court case and we were told goodnight by the event director. That's when I witnessed the great rush toward the front of the room and slipped out while I still could.
When the entourage showed up with you as the nucleus, Hunter, I knew I couldn't break through the heavy line of Dockers pants. You were helpless. And so was I. I watched you go up the stairs, the shell of Harvard boys calling to you, "Hunter, this way. No, this way." You seemed disinterested and I felt sorry. The urge to continue with my plan dwindled. I didn't have any acid, haven't since the time I found myself tangled in a snow fence and to my horror realized that Darwin's theory of survival did, in fact, apply to me. I also wondered if you'd consider me a groupie, or worse... a mindless trollop. And then there was that sexual assault thing two years ago. Yeah, you were acquitted but don't you have a few lawyer friends? If that was all a mistake, then I'm twice as sorry. The stinging aura of Polo shirts ushered you up the stairs and I was blinded by the glare from their watches. I wanted to help you, but I only foresaw both of our horrible demises if I tried.
I stepped out into the cold and quickly took a swig from my flask. There were hoards of undercover agents poking around making discretion of utmost importance. Agents with bloodthirsty dogs, packs of Dunhill's and reckless cynical judgments. I'd broken through the lines successfully up until that point, but people always get caught when they relax. I fled to the trusty Millennium Falcon, my '85 Japanese make with 150,000 miles on her, and we tore as best as we could through the one-way neighborhoods, sideways sometimes, with a cold engine.
On my way home, I pulled into the nearest police station and demanded that they breathalyze me. .053, baby. Right on the nose. And I passed the spatial relations test. I say fight it.
####
In Boca Raton, Florida the old folks are squawking. The Today Show ran this crazy Frog story right after a blurb about a plane crash. A wife and child watched their husband and father go down in a ball of fire at an air show. We shot from footage of the crowd, to the fried dough stands, into the cloudless blue sky. We jolted into the raining explosion of the crash, and cut right into the actualizing horror on the face of the young wife. All of this condensed into seconds, a blur of irony and contrasting emotions, followed with Frogs, Frogs, Frogs. Hello my honey, hello my baby, hello my ragtime gal!
If you haven't heard, let me fill you in. The old folks are mighty angry with these fiendish Frogs. Apparently the frogs are everywhere: squatting in driveways, loping across porches, striking flatulent chords by breezeways. Plagues of locusts and frogs were my first thought while I sipped my coffee, they've finally come. But it's much simpler than Armageddon. Not quite as complex as the four horsemen. It's just us again.
We've got several factors at work making Boca Raton into a froggy Las Vegas. Predators, there aren't enough airborne, waterborne and land borne predators to keep the frog pop in check. First the egg shells of the airborne predators started cracking years ago from the DDT's. Rachel Carson told us about that in Silent Spring. And now the penises aren't growing long enough on the alligators from the DDE's, a quasi-estrogen-hormone resulting from degraded residual DDT. The penises are 50% shorter than they used to be. There's a whole lot of, "Honey, it's OK. I hear it happens to a lot of guys," muttered under the reeds and curly mangroves. Little do the gators know what sinister forces are at work in their endocrine systems, little do they know that their "little problem" is never going to go away. And finally, every square inch of Boca Raton is mutating into John Deere Land: cobblestone sidewalks and clever enigmatic landscaping which pretty much resemble the Sands Hotel and the MGM Grand to the Frog Mafia.
So now the frogs are booming and they're making the old folks' lives hell. Those frogs just snap their throats all night long, looking for love and knowing that it's Swingin Singles Night every night in Boca Raton. Every Chem-Lawn yard turns into The Chicken Ranch after 6pm. I heard they've even got chick-frogs in cages wearing bras and swinging their hips to that throat croaking rhythm and blues, their skinny little frog fingers sliding up and down the bars spelling the message loud and clear even for a dumb, old bullfrog drunk on hibachi fumes.
So what do the old folks do? Tossing and turning at night, waiting for the frog orgies to bottom out? The old folks have been calling the cops, yelling shoot them! Kill them! Poison them if you have to!
More poison. That's right. That's exactly what we need! Let's add it to the Chem-Lawn junk leaching though the backyard. It'll be fiiine, they'll tell you. Fiiine. Make us all junkies, junk swimming though our veins as we sit in our uncluttered yards, not a thing stirs, not a bug, not a peep. Just stillness in the junkyard, baby. Stillness and hallucinations to keep us company. That's the big time and I want a one way ticket there! Sign me up! Call the cops and give me a shot of the old frog junk! Free wheelin' in a junk planet, whoo-hoo that's meeee! Man, whoever would've guessed The Today Show would've shown us the light, baby?
####
Fourteen teenage students at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Woburn, Massachusetts overdosed on prescription drugs this past Friday night. The kids swallowed some 200 pills of the prescription muscle relaxant Baclofen, used for multiple sclerosis patients, at a Boys and Girls Club dance. I’m sure you’ve heard about it by now, even Ann Curry on The Today Show had the footage of the teary-eyed classmates getting their first taste of mortality.
The drugs were allegedly stolen from a Woburn man’s doorstep, a man who receives prescription pills through the mail. The Baclofen and some 360 pills of another drug, Hiprex, an anti-infective for urinary tract infections, were stolen. The Hiprex is still unaccounted for.
There are a lot of questions about this incident. In a nation that has outlawed most drug use, except for the caffeine, sugar and naproxen sodium that I’m presently hepped-up on, it is apparent that kids, being resourceful and wily by nature, are finding alternatives.
I keep hearing these stories about kids dying from “huffing,” the term for inhaling house-hold products. Air fresheners and household paints are a hit. Kids everywhere are dropping to their knees on bathroom tiles, heads reeling from Wizard Spring Potpourri and mouths foaming with Dutch Boy’s Yellow Ochre satin finish. Does anyone else find the stingy, pathetic madness in this? It’s like consuming a fistful of tacks or hitting oneself over the head repeatedly with a three-hole punch. It’s like drinking mascara or wolfing down a box of baby wipes. I don’t think it’s even a question of drugs anymore. It’s about something far more frightening and desperate than that.
Massachusetts is considering regulation in the mailing of prescription drugs. Looks like folks will have to stick around the house waiting to sign for these packages and couriers leaving them unattended on a doorstep, sooner or later will be subject to arrest. Mail-order pharmacies are already claiming that this will ultimately inconvenience customers and add more expense to the process.
It’s just like the Jersey Barrier. Thick and meaty cement periphery that lend us protection from ourselves. Perhaps they should start lining everything with those Jersey Barriers, not just roads, but malls and grocery stores and movie theaters. Perhaps those little cloth mittens should be imposed upon us to keep us from scratching ourselves raw, maybe even some of those plastic post-surgical space-dog collars should be forced around the necks of the real tough cases bent on spilling their guts all over the linoleum. I think I’m onto something here, something even Darwin would be terribly embarrassed about.
####
Last week, Hollywood descended upon Malden, a residential town just north of Boston, Massachusetts. Ted Demme, director of the movies Beautiful Girls and The Ref shot segments from his yet untitled film at an abandoned corner bar on Salem Street. The actors filming on site included Denis Leary, Martin Sheen, and Max Perlich. I still haven’t figured out what Colm Meany was doing there.
Friday, May 16th The Groundwork: 12:18pm
I left my office in search of Denis Leary. Originally from Worcester and a graduate of Boston’s comedy scene, I figured that Denis would spend a few minutes with me, but only if I tackled the situation correctly. First, I needed a handle on the layout and the proper channels. I tore down Malden's pot-holed streets toward the movie set in the Millennium Falcon, my metallic light blue, '85 Toyota. Despite the Ryder trucks and Winnebago, I drove right through the set in my Hollywood-induced stupor and found myself in an uncharted domain of Boston proper. Luckily, the sight of Pisa Pizza’s dome reeled me back from a sordid journalistic fantasy about making it so big, I’d be tossed out of LA’s Burgundy Room for throwing up on Keanu Reeves. I burned an unforgivable U-ey into the pavement and made it back to the set. I found a parking space and jumped out of the Falcon. A member of the crew was wandering alone along the street, immediately identifiable by the bright yellow CREW sticker taped to his pants. "Excuse me, sir, you're with the crew?"
He pretended he didn't hear me, but I saw him flinch. "Sir?" He sighed as though this happened to him all the time, chicks flinging themselves mercilessly at his feet begging, pleading to meet the stars. When I told him that I was with a magazine, he asked which one. "Fat City News," I announced from behind my sunglasses. He looked disappointed. He wanted me to say “Time” or “Hustler” or something. He wanted me to bring beer and wear a tube top, it was written in his eyes. He told me to come back after three o'clock.
The Portal: 4:08pm
First stop, Kappy's Liquors on Commercial Street in Malden. I gave a dollar to the Veteran’s Association for Eye Research or something on my way into the liquor store. He was a smart veteran, standing there on a Friday night with his Decorated Hat. He smiled and leaned on the railing beside the entrance with his overstuffed change bucket. The man could have collected for the Veteran’s Right-to-Continue-to-Bear-Arms-Til-They-Haul-Me-to-the-Grave Association and I would have given in order to compensate for the conflict of buying booze matched with the sight of an elderly man that served his once large and pure country. He represented a simpler time when there was a vast difference between good and evil and everybody had a handle on it. Besides, he was dressed up in a suit jacket and tie.
Kappy’s was fresh out of Budweiser longnecks, Denis' preferred brew, so I bought a six of the regular ones. In the car, I put on lipstick and ran a hand through the hair to yank out the knots. I saw a man in the rearview mirror drop a dollar into the Vet’s bucket before I took off for the set.
I administered The Club to the Falcon’s steering wheel, gathered up my jacket, my notebooks (several of different sizes), my tape recorder, camera, pens, and finally the brown paper bag of Bud. Sweet Budweiser which I haven't sipped since I got a job. I slammed the car door and marched toward the set.
And marched, since I had to park far away. And marched past the Winnebago to the stop light. It was suddenly rush hour in Malden on a Friday. Harleys and Geos and beaten down Dodge Caravans rumbled and whizzed all around me as horseshoe-shaped crowds accumulated with their dogs and strollers on two of the four corners. Across the street, huddled behind the Ryder truck, it was supper time for the cast and crew and Denis was there in his black leather jacket, black jeans and shades. He had those shades that the ball players and gangstas are wearing, with the oval lenses that curve around the contours of the cranium. I cast aside my doubts and pressed onward.
Colm Meaney said hello to me as he leaned against the Ryder truck. He played the father who loved Elvis in The Commitments and I recognized his face immediately. He smiled and seemed very personable but I tried to maintain my professional persona. I was not there to sleep with any of them and must not exude that or anything that can be confused with that. I could already feel the risky and treacherous vibrations of this business.
“Hello, how are you?” I asked Colm. At that stressful moment, I appreciated his warm smile and non-threatening demeanor more than I normally would have. He responded in a kindly fashion, but I dropped my gaze toward something that distracted me. Colm was clad in a sparkling electric-blue running suit with white octagons all over it. It crackled with each movement. I averted my eyes, concentrating on my mission. I was suddenly very, very afraid.
Tuning into the conversation Denis held with several of the crew members, I realized it was an intense discussion about whale semen. I was at a complete loss. One does not simply burst into a discussion about semen, do they? I couldn’t just say, “That’s right, buckets of it Denis, Baby.” They all saw but ignored me, prolonging this embarrassing moment. I suddenly realized I was no longer a lady, but attained the status of intoxicated fan. I looked back at Colm. His mouth was silent and expression apologetic. The moments of seminal talk mingled with the smells of strange food and heat rising off of all of that movie equipment. Whipping, yellow -DO NOT CROSS- police tape corralled us together, the sound of plastic forks scraping against styrofoam bowls accompanied the crowd barking from the other side of the street, “DENIS DENIS DENIS WISH ME HAPPY BERTDAY!” “DENIS CONGRATULATE MY DAUGHTA SHE'S GETTIN MAHRRIED!” It was a frenzy and I was trapped. The primal impulse of fight or flight forced its way up my brainstem and retreat was out of the question.
"I’m sorry to interrupt…” I smiled, “Denis, hello. How are you? Can we have a word?" I was as shocked to hear it come out of my mouth as Denis probably was to hear it. He looked at me as though I was a freak. I wanted to say, "Don't look at me as though I'm a freak. You're the one standing around talking about whale jiz," but I thought that would only reveal how tense this maniacal Hollywood stuff was making me. My God, it's all over me, I thought. The urge to run, bathe in antibacterials and flee to a fishing village in Southwestern Portugal clung to my tissues like plaque.
"I'm a writer," I said and as I said it, the words fell to the ground like manure from a disabled cart horse. Denis suddenly froze, his expression turned. I had just fallen from the graces of freak to scum. His plastic fork his only defense, he poised it on the edge of his bowl, prongs aimed toward me. Meanwhile, I was still holding the eighteen pounds of equipment: a camera, notebooks, jacket, etc. and one said six pack in a brown paper bag. I hadn’t considered how to react if he just stared at me, so I kept talking.
"I work for Ziff-Davis and ‘Fat City News,’ Denis, and I understand that you've already done and interview for Ziff-Davis for this month's issue of ‘Internet Underground Magazine,’” I paused, waiting for an acknowledgment but he just stared at me accusingly instead.
"Well, Denis," I kept saying his name because I thought for some remote reason, it would help me. "I know you're busy and I don't mean we should do this right now," I shifted the rapidly increasing weight of all my equipment. "I know this is a bad time, you're about to shoot."
"You're right," he said, "it's a bad time."
"I completely understand, Denis. The reason I'm here is to see if we could possibly catch two minutes at some point. And I don't mean that in some sick journalistic sense of time, I mean two minutes."
"You have to talk to my publicist," he looked around. "I do so much of that stuff now with the Internet, I don't know what I've done." I believed him. He was doing ads for IBM these days and had his own web page. He scanned the area and said, "He's not here yet. Can you hang out a bit?"
I was surprised. Can I hang out? I expected Get the hell out of here and don't come back or I’ll sick the dogs on you. "Sure, for a little bit. I’ll be over there."
While Denis and I talked, the Ryder truck behind me lowered a platform to move some equipment off of it, which I didn't see. "I have a little something for you. Welcome to Malden," I said and handed him the brown paper bag. He looked at the bag as though there was a snake in it. Holding it away from his face, he passed it off quickly to someone standing behind him. I wondered if his publicist really was there and if, as I retreated, I would hear, "Publicist, look in the bag!"
I turned to walk away and almost took a header over the Ryder truck platform. In one miraculous second I righted myself, looked back to the crowd of crew and cast and laughed. Probably not a good idea.
Colm witnessed the entire episode, still smiling. Denis did not thank me for the beer, but the mere fact that he looked in the brown bag so cautiously provided the information I needed.
I went across the street, where the regular people and pitbulls were, and sat on the curb. This would not do, I thought. Not at all. Try as I might to look professional, I still looked and felt like a total loser.
"Three thousand cigarettes a day," an adolescent voice called out from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder to see one of the paparazzi armed with a black and white spray-painted mountain bike and a bad attitude. He sneered when our eyes met, just enough to crinkle his cookie-duster mustache. He swung a leg over his bike and crouched next to it as though ready for a recon assignment. "Three thousand," he said again and motioned as though he was going to tear the tires off the rims of his bike.
"At least," I retorted. My training with the mentally disturbed has taught me to agree. This was getting serious.
"Excuse me," a man tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you think Mistah Leary would mind if we got a pictah of him with my daughtah?"
"A picture?"
"Yeah, just one. With my daughtah." The man was star-struck. He looked like the excitement within was tethered, but the tethers were unraveling.
"I'm not with them," I said.
"You're not?" He didn't believe me.
"No."
"You're not in the movie?" Maybe he thought I was Sandra Bullock. It must have been my clean sunglasses and lipstick. “I just saw you talking to Denis, do you think he'd mind if I went over there?"
"Naah, Denis is cool. I don't think he'd mind a bit."
It was getting unseasonably cold. I was shivering and my fingertips hardened and turned blue. I tried, in desperation, to remember what survivalist Tom Brown had attempted to teach me, what was that again? The cold is my brother? The cold is my brother. Focus. There was a leaf in the middle of the street that had been run over by a car. Look at the leaf, the cold is your brother. I was shivering and would lose consciousness at any moment.
The voice of reason broke into my head and said, "You're not even getting paid for this. You're doing this for free. You're freezing your ass off... for free."
And I'm thinking, "You know, you're right." I looked at my watch and realized that two of my coworkers, Michele and Nicole, were warm and at Bambino’s, an Italian restaurant and lounge about two miles away. They were sitting at the bar with tall drinks in front of them right at that second. In my hypothermic state, they say that delirium follows the blueness, a glass of wine in one of those big globes and a stool under a fizzling broadcast of Inside Edition sounded comforting. "Maybe I'll just go and warm up for a minute."
"Get off the cohnah," a Malden police officer swaggered up to our side of the street. “Everybody off the cohnah. They're going to shoot the sign."
"Shoot the sign?!" Movie-speak was quite jarring against this city scape, I realized my mistake too late.
"Off the cohnah. Off," he waved at us as though we were vermin. Perhaps we were. I thought that was an opportune moment to hit Bambino’s.
Bambino’s Lounge: 6:00pm
Bambino’s sits in wait on the town line of Malden and Medford on Highland Ave. It has an extensive, authentic Italian menu and a set of Yin and Yang bartenders. Yin is pleasant and smiley in his tuxedo vest, always asking if folks need anything and putting dry napkins on the bar. Yang is big and mean and one must ask, nicely, to place an order with him. The conflict of the personalities adds a certain edge and therefore, a certain Malden-esque ambiance to the lounge.
Home of some of the best gnocchi in Boston, Bambino’s Lounge was also the site of one of the greatest robbery twists ever to make history in this part of Massachusetts. About four years ago, a man came in through the back kitchen door intent on robbing the place. He chose seven o'clock on a Friday night as his moment to steal his way through the backdoor, into the kitchen, and try to unload the register. The restaurant loaded with patrons and staff. By the time the police arrived, the thief was found cowering behind the hostess station bleeding and whimpering. The chef, wielding only a large kitchen knife was quoted by the local paper, "You try to rob us, we rob you."
"What the hell happened to you?" Michele asked me, eating the pulp of a lime and dropping the skin on a cocktail napkin. The bartender delivered my wine in its goblet and stood over me. I dug through my wallet, then my pockets. I had a dollar. Michele and Nicole threw singles on the bar for me as the Spaghetti sang “My Way” over the ceiling speakers.
"I'm trying to woo the stars with a buck in my pocket," I said. "Spent my last fiver on the damn six pack."
"Finish your wine and go on back there,” Michele said. “You tell him that I saw him at the freakin Kowloon back in the days when he was pitchin his comedy over buckets of fried wontons. You just walk up to him and just say, 'Kowloon, muthafucka. Kowloon!'"
Kowloon is a Chinese restaurant/karaoke/comedy club north of Boston on Route One in Saugus. It looks like a massive grounded ship that was hit with a restaurant in some sort of catastrophic natural disaster, perhaps the product of a scene much like that of Dorothy's home slamming down into the Lollipop Guild village in The Wizard of Oz, only Asian style. Dredging up those days of drunken Kowloon hecklers and the overwhelming stench of pork fried rice that clings to one’s leather jacket in front of the crew and fellow cast members would be dirty pool. Would that get Denis to hiss, “OK, OK! Shut up about that! Come on over here and we’ll talk over a couple of those beers you brought. Thanks, by the way,” if I approached him this way? Is this what sooner or later renders every journalist to the level of scum?
Salem Street SetThe Restitution: 6:35pm
"Excuse me officer, is this corner still secure?"
"What?"
"This corner, are we not allowed on it?"
"That's right. You're not allowed on it."
"Well, I have a question for Mr. Leary's publicist. Is there anyone here who can point him out?"
"Hold on," he eyed me and the fringe of corner I was standing on, his hands up as if to block me from rushing the set. "That guy over there in the tan vest. You off the cohnah," he reprimanded a man coming out of the corner pizza place with two pizza boxes. "The tan vest," the cop pointed him out again. "He's in charge. The tan vest."
I looked at the officer's gun and felt very mortal for a moment. I wondered if he was really a cop or if he was another star-struck resident who went to the K-mart, picked up a navy blue uniform and stuck a tinfoil badge on his chest. I realized that in order to get to the man inside the authoritative tan vest, I had to cross through the line of the shot. It was not OK to be on the corner, but it was OK to walk through the line of the shot. "I don't want to interfere with the shot. Would you mind asking the man in the tan vest for me, officer? You're official and I'm not."
The officer was glad to help. He crossed into the set and approached the young man in the tan vest, who was sitting behind stacks of amplifiers, discarded sound booms and numerous rolls of duct tape. I watched him explain my situation, roaring trucks and Harleys drowning out the possibility of hearing a word. At the same moment, both the man in the tan vest and the officer leaned over and look at me, so I give the official business wave. The officer turned and approached me with a mixed expression of being titillated by power and suppressed laughter.
"He has nothing to do with you."
"He has nothing to do with me?" I couldn't process that quickly enough.
"Hey, don't shoot the messengah,” the officer said. You’re the one with the gun, I wanted to say, but he continued, “I'm just delivering a message from the tan vest. Now get off the cohnah."
This was insane and the price too high. Hollywood with its toothy maw and leathery wings had descended up on this little town and swooped up all of its inhabitants in its talons. The gunk of Italian leather, sticky photos and designer drug resins washed over the streets as the townspeople heaved great orgasmic cries. And there I was, writhing in the burning core of it. It wasn't worth it. This desperate attempt to get a celebrity interview was granting me a brand new kind of clarity but was costing me dearly. Besides, I’d already gotten a simple and valuable lesson by merely handing the man a paper bag. I thanked the officer for his time, waved officially to the tan vest and stole away in the Falcon. I tore straight into the pulsing heart of Boston. With its yawning Tremont Street prostitutes, erratic drivers and overflowing pubs, the city offered the proper environment in which to digest such a lesson and for that, I was grateful.
####
Heads from every wall point their twisted death grimaces at you as you reach for your beer. Clumps of animal trophy fur spin in the ceiling fans until they finally cling to ceiling in splayed black donuts. Hogs and Heifers is located in the ancient slaughter district of lower Manhattan, adjacent to the rotten waterfront and old boatslips. Seventy years ago, my grandmother bought fresh meat for a Greenwich Village restaurant there. "The streets ran sticky red with blood back then," she once told me, "right down into the water." She's Italian and therefore prone to exaggeration for the sake of a good story, but I believed her when I saw the mile-long conveyers of old hooks still dangling from the concrete walls. And the pavement, still stained brown.
The man behind Hogs and Heifers, Allen Dell, died at the age of 31, as reported by the New York Post this past June 9th, but he leaves behind a rare, graphic honesty in the bar scene.
There is no 'No Smoking' section. It's not tidy. Assorted meats sizzle and spit on an open fire by the bars entrance. Just meat. There are no bowls of Party Mix. There are no quesadillas or foo-foo drink glasses or guises of any kind. Just booze, smoke and carnage. It's as if you're not supposed to like it. You're not supposed to have any sure opinion on it at all. It's supposed to make you feel the same way that first taste of whiskey did: repelled, nauseous but with that spike of unnatural warmth in your guts.
Hogs and Heifers is a renowned slumming hang out. You know Slumming. Dropping heaps of cash in questionable establishments in order to relay the experience to astounded colleges. There appears to be a satisfaction in dabbling in biker bars and greasy spoons, absorbing the atmosphere while maintaining a means of escape. The ever-prevalent dangers of slumming, however, are the many writhing tentacles of the establishments themselves. As a dear friend of mine, a slummer destroyed by his passion for holes-in-the-wall once told me, "From senators to the ice cream men, we’re all thiiiiiiis close (hold up your hand and separate your thumb and forefinger by an inch) to insanity and homelessness."
The Hogs and Heifers bar, like cigar smoke and straight vodka, is rough on the senses. Gritty, hard, warped and dark. Photos of landed sharks, massive fishing hooks U-turning though eye sockets litter the walls along side snap-shots of celebrities hiding out from the trendy, New York Magazine hot spots. You've got your cigar-smoking Nicholson, a tanked Tim Roth, a still-got-it Harrison Ford, and of course, Julia Roberts, dancing on the bar in her bra. You've probably heard about that last one.
The bartender was something out of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. She looked about thirteen under her black cowboy hat, had a tongue-stud the size of a dinner fork and a tattoo of a rose across her stomach. We'd shown up at two on a Sunday afternoon and the bartender matched us shot for shot with a big, fearless grin on her face. First a couple of tequila then some sweet red whiskey shots that she called her specialty. I'm not a big fan of sweet booze so I only did four of those.
A converted meat locker bathroom, with its air-tight solace, is the bar's best feature.
I'm not a particularly good slummer, I have to admit. I feel the tentacles, one at a time, wrap around my neck, torso and appendages, slowly constricting until I can't breathe and can't get up from my barstool. I always succumb, drowning the beast under the floorboards in shots of tequila and creamy Guinness chasers. It wasn't my idea to go to Hogs and Heifers, but one of the boys in the group insisted. I immediately found my barspace and spent a few hours there, listening to the pool balls clack on the torn, bile-stained felt. At the end of every pool game a couple of rough types picked up one end of the pool table and slammed it against the floor to jump-start the peristalsis of the pool balls rolling down from the table's innards. Just the right kind of whump to resuscitate the heart.
Sometime in the afternoon, the juke box screamed to life. The music is all country rock-n-roll stuffs, Dwight Yokum, Lyle, Eagles, CCR with a little of the Spaghetti. There is a strict 'No Dancing' rule at H&H due to the suspension of a cabaret license, according to the bartender. I didn't know there was such a thing. And with the music, I asked her, "How the hell do you enforce it?"
"I scream at them," she said.
The single exception to the dancing rule, as Julia illustrated in her celeb shot scotch-taped to the wall, allows women to hop up on the bar and shake their cans, but only if they surrender their bras to the massive, worm-eaten mound that clings like a tumor to the wall. There's supposedly some kind of animal head beneath the mound of brassieres, a buffalo head, but I couldn't see it. I looked down to see what I had on, and if I was willing to surrender it to the bra-head-mound, but it was a keeper. It's tough to find a good bra these days, something from Victoria's Secret, with a perfect synthesis form and function. I was off the hook.
The rest of the afternoon is a haze. At some point, we were expelled out into the rain and into a roving herd of wharf rats. Last thing I remember hearing was one of the ladies in the bar taunting several navy boys in their whites, "I love a man in uniform, why don' you come over here and climb all over me witchya monkey paws?!"
Rats. I know they carried me quite a distance and I know I had marks all over me the next morning, which I assumed to be bites. I remember a cab somewhere in there. And one of the rats was driving, claws hooked over the hump of the steering wheel and a snub-nosed scowl across his face as he turned an unfriendly eye down toward my empty pockets.
Allen Dell has left something behind for us. The naked jowls of the drink. Sleep well, Compadre.
####
I’m not one for stereotypes or generalizations, but for the love of God, why is it that without fail, without a burp of rhyme, without any stitch of reason, why is it that whenever I have a Mercury Cougar behind my car on the road, it suddenly appears to mount the rear-bumper of my car the way Fritz, the neighbor’s Doberman, used assert himself with every female, spayed or not, canine or not, in the neighborhood? All that was visible through the defogging rear window is a circular, snarling cat insignia, seemingly the size of a grapefruit.
This morning a small trailer unhitched from a van and tore across one of the more treacherous, complex rotaries in New England. Wellington Circle. Articulating the major four+-lane routes of 28 and 16, plus a couple of secondary roads, the Circle binds up in S&M fashion the corrals of Jersey barriers, chain link, and twisted guard rails that still bear the claw-marks of the freshly and unavoidably dead.
Wellington Circle transcends the personality of the average New England rotary. It is an engineering marvel, orchestrating the revolving traffic with the grace of a windmill, despite the occasional accidents that are the result of too much dope or fooling with the radio at the wrong moment. Aside from its size, there is something else that makes Wellington Circle just a little different. A tangible irony, a dementia in its setting. KAPPY’S LIQUORS, with its 20-foot tall, electric-green letters and airplane hangar-esque architecture, calls to those penned up in the congestion with the fervor of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Schiller’s thematic lyrics of universal brotherhood under one God flowing from a glass and aluminum choir. From any point of the Circle, you can see what’s on special. The Circle’s Wellington Flowers, a paved flower shop housing those tongue-jutting stuffed animals one can only win at carnivals, spills produce over pavement and houseplants over two-by-fours. It is country meets city. Howard Johnson’s expels overstuffed patrons out into the rotary like slugs in the morning. Tired and avoiding direct sunlight.
Wellington Circle is a surreal and sanity-threatening experience. It is difficult enough without the occasional accident. This morning, at 8:05, peak rush-hour time, the unleashed trailer pushed congestion and rubber-necking to the maximum. And behind me, there she was. The Great Black Mercury Cougar with the chrome trim and while racing-stripe and the prrr-eeoow-ing cougar glinting on the grill.
The driver, who managed to have the vehicle back just far enough so I could make out the gold stamp on her sunglasses, checked her lipstick, blotted, snapped her gum and sang along with the radio. Tail-gating without reason. Without anger. Without even the old tap on the steering wheel that indicates agitation. Nothing. And this, this is the constant.
I moved up, the Mercury Cougar moved up. That grill remained in my mirror like a mouth. I rushed forward to the second set of lights in Wellington Circle and the Cougar roared right behind me, the black hood of the machine bouncing and hawing with the harsh use of the ABS. Like it was showing me what it had. Inches between us and all the while, the driver sang.
I believe the car is at fault. Not the driver. I don’t even think she noticed the two middle-aged men rupturing their vertebrae, trying to pull the trailer off the curb. Mind-control. The woman was helpless behind the wheel of that Mercury Cougar.
Remember that movie, The Car? Sometime before Steven King’s Christine made her mark, Hollywood cranked out a flick about the devil’s car. A black, unmanned Monte Carlo that wreaked havoc, ran people down like dazed skunks and blew up big dust clouds all over a small town until it was tricked it into driving a cliff.
Perhaps the greatest stunt ever pulled was not that the devil convinced mankind that he didn’t exist. Perhaps it is something that The Car was trying to prophesy. That the devil himself is among us, behind us, breathing down our necks. And he appears to us, to our feeble, material human eyes, just like a Mercury Cougar.
####
I’ve stopped watching the news. Just like that.
And I was once an addict, stooping to the level of Today Show mindcandy every morning for some pre-digested blurbs and blats and glossy advertisements for the new NBC medi-dramas or the new twist on the John Grisham formula. I watched Bryant Gumball cry when he left the show and I rolled around on gurney-cam in ER’s Burbank set. I came home from work every night and switched on the local drowning/double-murder/pet-abduction montage and drank it in like a methadone fix.
I was 'Up' on the news. I knew what was 'Going On'. Then all of a sudden, I stopped watching. And a change in my mentality began to take place. I was less afraid.
This week, I heard something about a shooting in Arkansas from a coworker. Kids with guns. And how the politicians are still blaming violence on the tee-vee. Politicians like the Governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, never mentioned any parents or what they might have been up to. Cuz they’re voters. It’s that damn Leonardo DiCaprio’s (not Jim Carroll, blame the actor, not the writer) fault fer blowin away all them classmates uh his in that them there movie Baskitbawl Diaries. Yeahp, that’s exactly what is was.
The tee-vee is not evil, despite those lilac-painted-mini-van driving folk with KILL YOUR TELEVISION stickers plastered across their bumpers. If I killed my tee-vee, how would I get the Breeders’ Cup? By politician logic, because I watch the Breeders’ Cup, I am a compulsive gambler. I am probably chasing the wolfhounds around the apartment like a lunatic screaming, “Win! DAMN YOU WIN!” I might do that, but for reasons independent of the Breeders’ Cup.
It’s not so bad not knowing what’s going on in the world of tee-vee news, for those of you out there saying that I’m living in a dream world with chocolate trees and talking dogs. There are news resources out there that have a stitch of dignity and intelligence like Jim Lehrer, NPR or CBS Sunday Morning. Granted the alternatives might get a bit hum-drum or hail footage of a shrieking elk during the rut, but they won’t suck me into a consciousness-eroding holding pattern. They don’t instill so much fear.
Fear is marketed by the networks. Reporters actually interviewed one of the kids who’s classmates were gunned down in Arkansas and asked him about his nightmares. I can imagine that interview.
Reporter: So what are these nightmares about?
Spiral-eyed Teen: Death. Destruction. Mayhem. My buddy’s face is a pile of goo.
Fear is slowly becoming the spine on which this society hangs its jagged ribs and bounces on its jagged gait and the media with its microphone pointed at the mouth of a victimized teen is slipping on another sticky vertebrae. The tee-vee snorters blame the tee-vee and the movies and cringe when a pack of teens walk by. They assume that at any second they can be raped and murdered because that’s the way things are today, at least according to the news. No wonder people are snapping and expressing themselves with a 12-gauge.
Yes, there are cannibals, sickos and folks who were ‘always quiet neighbors.’ But this insular, island-called-one, terror-based, sensationalist society seems to leave us no alternative but to lock myself in and watch more news on the tee-vee.
Unless I quit. And I did. And if the boatyard sniper picks me off on my walk to the apartment, well, then I hope the shooter blames a set of old Bond flicks and not just some cheesy cop shows. And I hope he blames his parents and the society that failed him instead of taking sole responsibility for spraying the sidewalk with my contents. At least for the interview, anyway.
####
I almost ran down a Boston City Park Ranger in his brown uniform and rain hat. Luckily, the yellow pant-stripe caught my rolling eye and I pounded the breaks on the Falcon not a moment too soon. That’s when I realized the early morning jaunts into the city had to stop. The jittery punk at Dunkin Donuts had slipped me a decaf and I wasn’t properly equipped to deal with the mayhem of Boston at dawn.
Sleeping at the wheel was the major reason I quit. The other had to do with the purpose of the park ranger blocking the middle of the Berkeley Street. Project Bread’s Walk for Hunger was that Sunday morning and the walkers were already out at 5:30 in the morning. Walkers with sweatshirts tied around their waists and water bottles in their hands. I wasn’t prepared for that, or the strange ironic taste that came with it.
A couple of months before, when I’d started this strange habit of poking around within the confines of 5-6am on Sundays, I noticed a correlation. There was a changing of the guard occurring every Sunday morning just as the sun crept up. Hookers and bakery boys tag-teamed it. Hot pants handed over the reigns to hot bagels. The homeless, insane, the perverted, the doped-up or the broke-and-coming-down abandoned their posts simultaneously and retreated from the delivery and utility joes. As Boston Herald newspaper men and Bell Atlantic telephone crews descended upon the streets, they wiped away the grit as though it had never existed.
A man with a fire hose blasted the sidewalks of Quincy Market and Fanueil Hall. A fire hose with a white, angry waterjet that blows well over 100 feet. Like the ones used in crowd control. Every Sunday. After rolling around in the beer slime and discarded prophylactics, the emergence of these average joes was like insurance that everything was indeed, all right.
The first time I didn’t mean to witness this process. I dropped a friend off at a 5am train at South Station in Boston and just couldn’t go straight home.
It was 5:11 as I wove through the torn yellow CAUTION tape that hung all around Boston’s Tunnel construction sites. I switched off the radio and rolled the car out from the shadow of the Route 93 Expressway overpass to observe the fog. It was a milky, rolling tent roof. Anything beyond three stories dissolved into a hidden place as if to say, It is of no concern of yours. Pale phantoms of steam seeped from the holes in the manhole covers and swept under the car. Whiffs of hot metal and waste clung to the air.
I turned onto State Street. As I rolled down the windows, the screams of seagulls filled my ears. I stopped the car in the middle of the street, blasphemous at any other time of day, and looked up. Hundreds of them eddied up into and out of the dense fog, navigating carelessly in and out of the gray as one connected being. None of them paused. They screamed notes of jagged music never intended for the ears of the sane or sober. They reeled above the vacant, pink-marble offices of sleeping financiers and law men. At that hour, the city was theirs.
My car drifted between the glistening buildings like a toy, the streets empty and wide. Not even idling taxis filled the stands. A few pages of a wet newspaper stuck to a brick wall, the only trace of time or the gambles of every day. Strangely enough, there were no pigeons. Just gulls.
There was a human on Congress Street. The surreal post-plague view of Boston was interrupted by a figure. A kid, about 20, stood in the middle of a gray cement island on Congress in Government Center. He wore khakis and a fleece jacket. It looked wet. In fact, the closer I got, the wetter he looked, like he’d been thrown into a puddle. The closer I got, the more I saw that he was angry.
“Fukkergoddamsonamabitchafukkergoddampieceashit,” he didn’t take a breath, “youassholeihateyousomuchisweartogodillkillyouyougoddam sonamabitch….” His fists clenched and he stared wild-eyed at the opposite side of the street. Across the street, a series of gray cement steps, buildings, and a couple of trees withstood his insults. His black hair stuck up all over his head, his skin was sickly, dopey white. His eyes were pink. I kept driving.
A little further down Congress, a mangy old man reached down to the sidewalk, picked a crushed cigarette butt off the cement and put it to his lips. As he attempted a drag off a long-dead butt, he arched his back. I could see the wriggles of brown tobacco hanging out of the stomped cigarette, but it didn’t matter. Pleasure swept his face, curling the corners of his eyes and mouth. I left him in his moment.
Three women stood at a corner on Tremont where I stopped at a light. Two stood on one side of the street, one on the other, closer to me. They looked damp, cold and tired. They looked me over with the passivity of full-bellied lionesses.
The one standing closest to me had waist-long, curly black hair draped over a short, brown fur coat and a pink spandex skirt that barely wrapped around her thighs. The skirt wore stiff-looking stains. She smiled as she pawed the pavement with the point of a heel.
“Rough night?” I asked her.
“You got no fuckin idea,” she smeared her dark lips together and blotted them on a balled up tissue. “What chu doin out here?”
“Writing,” I told her, embarrassed. I suddenly felt like a freak.
“Write-in?” she burst out laughing. “You hear that? She write-in!”
The two others swayed without a response, resting one tired foot at a time. They tossed their heads sleepily, a reflex. One tall and thin, scratched at a shoulder. The other, short, and about two-hundred pounds bound in skin-tight black cotton, swung a purse.
“You should be home sleepin it off,” she nodded her head, “buhsides, write-in and drivin at the same time?… fuhget it.”
“Right,” I said.
“What chu write-in about?”
“I don’t know yet… I saw a thousand seagulls back there….”
“You’re outta your mind. I hate fuckin seagulls. Rats wit wings.”
I heard an engine. We all turned to look. The short, fat woman waved limply at a man inside a white Iggy’s Bread of the World truck. The man’s face is creased as he passes without a glance.
“Too bad, hon,” the woman next to me called to her plump coworker. She turned back to me, “What the hell culah green you wait-in for?” She thumbed toward the light.
I nodded and rolled the car away. I wasn’t sorry like I thought I’d be. But there was a twinge. I thought of the lamprey sucking on the belly of a shark. I just got something for free. Some write-in.
“WHOOooh!!” I heard a cry and looked in the rearview mirror. The woman’s mouth took the shape of a glossy oval and sounded vaguely like one of those seagulls she hated so much. I saw the two turn on their heels and click down the sidewalk away from the intersection, shaken from their daze. The woman followed on her side of the street without another sound. All three sets of behinds shook as they walked. A patrol car turned the corner, paused to observe the jiggling, then proceeded in another direction.
I circled back toward the Expressway as the fog lifted and noticed that Government Center was different. The young man in the khakis and the bum with the cigarette were gone. They were suddenly replaced by a whooshing street cleaner, its bristles violently scrubbing the asphalt, a Boston Herald truck that squealed around a corner and an unmarked Ford cargo-van at the curb of Quincy Market. A man in a denim jacket slid a tan plastic tray out of the back, jammed with wrapped baked goods.
Most of the seagulls were gone, though a few knob-kneed stragglers remained as a reminder of the previous clashing of worlds. Perched on streetlights and dumpsters, the gulls stared quietly as I passed, not a peep. Some preened, poking at their white breast feathers. I figured the others went east, toward the Harbor.
I passed another Iggy’s Bread of the World truck, a green Boston Globe van, and a BFI Waste Services truck on my way back to 93. Every Sunday after I came back.
But the last time, the day of the Walk for Hunger, things changed. Reality is always far more dangerous than what I ever perceive as reality. The fire hoses were out with a vengeance, blasting away the grime of Saturday night. Cops were everywhere. Signs flapped THIS WAY WALKERS! DO NOT CROSS. USE UNDERPASS!
Shortly before the park ranger incident, I watched a Boston cop boot a straggly old man off a park bench that was on the walker’s route. The cop leaned on his cruiser while the man, wearing a grimy Earth Day T-shirt, rolled up his plastic tarps and flat cardboard boxes and tied his plastic bags together in a string. Kicked off the Hunger Route, the man was.
Sunday mornings in Boston are far more dangerous than I’d ever anticipated. But not because of the hookers or the insane. I could sleep in next Sunday and try not to think about it. But I will, no matter what time I get up. And I will conclude that as no good intention is without a subtle slant of unintentional, tangible humanity, no gritty thing is without it either.
####
Published in National Writers' Union - Boston Local Chapter News and Fat City News, November 1996 - June 1998
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