MADONNA BOOTS
How & Where & By Means of What Footwear I Lost My Virginity on August 20, 1985
PART ONE
I was fat. Ed was ugly. Chuck was handsome and charming and rich.
The three of us acted as a tight trio at Xavier High School in Manhattan and at home in Brooklyn and, during the summers of 1984 and 85, on the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk in bucolic Sparta, New Jersey, where Chuck’s family owned a beautiful Swiss Chalet summer home.
And there was a girl there in Sparta who we called Madonna Boots.
When we met this young lady, though, nobody knew her as Madonna Boots. Her proper moniker was Melissa. Or close enough.
It was the swelter season of 1984, and we were in the thick of one of those once-an-adolescence (if you’re lucky) pop radio motherlodes that included “Sister Christian”, the theme from Ghostbusters, “Oh, Sherry” by Steve Perry, seemingly endless hit singles from The Cars’ Heartbeat City, Van Halen’s 1984, ZZ Top’s Eliminator, and Sports by Huey Lewis & the News, along with “When Doves Cry” by Prince getting played on album-rock FM stations.
“Borderline” by Madonna was everywhere, too, coming out of car radios and in stores and - much to the chafing endangerment of my dink - on video.
Amidst that soundtrack, Ed, Chuck and I first met Melissa while we were patrolling Lake Mohawk on Chuck’s zippy little speedboat.
She was driving her own boat and she was blonde and chirpy and 5-foot-3 or however tall it is girls in magazines and billboards and on TV are, and she weighed 100 pounds or whatever it is those same girls weigh, and she radiated something like I had only ever soaked up from movies where jocks and nerds spy on such creatures through shower-room peepholes.
So as this vision puttered up alongside us, Chuck, the only one capable (i.e.-worthy) of such forwardness, busted some form of move.
“Nice boat,” I think he said.
That did the trick. Melissa anchored and joined us on board.
We listened to the radio and cracked wise for a bit, and we revealed that we went to school in “The City” and she revealed that she was a cheerleader and she said we should hang out, and over the next series of weekends, we did.
Plus we were boys and she was a girl and, thus, romance, or some hormonal approximation of it, immediately simmered.
Not, of course, for Fat Me or Ugly Ed, though.
No, as is way of the Lord, the blonde cheerleader from the affluent suburbs did what came naturally and took up with the member of our troop who sported a Ralph Lauren wardrobe and a fancy waterfront getaway and an identifiably human physique.
And she fucked him. For real. A few weeks later. Right there on the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk.
That Big Event was Chuck’s first time and Melissa’s fifteenth or ninety-third or seven-hundredth or who-could-possibly-know-however-many (and that included Melissa herself).
Chuck and Melissa did date a bit, per se, but not for long.
What mattered to us was that Chuck got what Ed and I, frothing with vicarious lust, pressured him to, and Melissa got a fresh dose of feeling accomplished in the manner to which she had become prolifically accustomed.
Indeed, Sparta, New Jersey’s premier pom-pom purveyor relished her peripatetic sexual derring-do, and she really, really wanted to make sure you knew all about it.
Melissa also boasted about doing a stretch in a psychiatric facility.
Invariably, Melissa would start talking about her nut-hut stay - and the behavior that, presumably, prompted it - in sober-faced, confessional tones.
But each description rapidly escalated into off-the-rails giddiness and defiant bragging, as though she were saying: “I got caught messing with guys on campus three times last year, and then I got down to eighty pounds and then they took my shoelaces from me in the hospital, and what have you ever done, HUH?”
Some would deem this particularly female strain of adolescent mental illness.
I saw it as my “in.”
On one level, I wanted to know more about how Melissa had obtained help with her head.
I’d been itching to see a psychiatrist at least since Annie Hall aired uncut on ABC in 1978, and certainly since I’d fashioned a noose in the family garage and stood on a ladder with it secured around my neck as a means of relaxing when I was 11.
Truly driving me, though, was what I avoided catching sight of in the shower — an eighth-of-a-ton of hanging blubber slopped onto a weakling frame that was coated with cystic acne, highlighted by free-clinic wire-frame eyewear that crawled with green fungus as a result of resting on my oil-gushing, oversized face-fat.
“What I need,” I once told a friend, “is a girl who’s been blind since birth and has no feeling in her hands, arms, face or midsection. And maybe deaf, too, because I always say stuff that chicks hate.”
In lieu of hunting down any such Juanita-Got-Her-Gun-type, I took a crack at pressing the flesh once with the single looniest individual I’d ever met—in a lifetime, even then, of meeting loony individuals.
Writing was the only thing I was any good at, and I carried on all sorts of letter correspondences with friends and relatives and Howard Stern tape-traders, and even my buddy Mark’s mother, who was really into horror movies.
With this in mind, I scribbled Melissa’s address down and embarked on a bombastic mail campaign to win her scrambled head and polluted heart.
In dispatch after dispatch, I employed loopy language and obscure cultural references and I pondered politics, believing that this would dazzle my intended. And it did, I think.
The first time Melissa wrote back, the envelope included the stick from a Blow-Pop she’d eaten. I didn’t remove that thing from mouth until it simply dissolved and then I just swallowed.
Aside from scrawling countless pages on countless yellow pads (my preferred medium), I was also a big-time practitioner of the lost art of letters-on-tape.
It was a common practice once, wherein you’d talk into a recorder and then mail the cassette to somebody who’d return the gesture.
My taped missives were major undertakings, however, that included sound effects, movie clips, and original comedy bits.
The first tape-letter I sent to Melissa included news about school, a riff on how much I hated the TV show The Facts of Life but how I’d seen every single episode ever broadcast, and some musical selections.
My opening song choice was, cannily, “The Final Cut” by Pink Floyd, which still never now fails to make me wince:
“There’s a kid who had a big hallucination
Making love to girls in magazines
He wonders if you’re sleeping with your newfound faith
Could anybody love him
Or is it just a crazy dream”
Believing those words would be too subtle for Melissa, I bolstered the song’s pleas with the most ragingly controversial practice of the high PMRC-era: subliminal messaging.
Unlike Pink Floyd (again) on The Wall or accused abusers Judas Priest on Stained Class or whoever the mad genius was on the Mr. Ed theme (which, when spun in reverse, plainly states, “Someone sang a song for Satan” and “The source is the devil”) backward-masking proved beyond my lo-fi capabilities.
My solution, then, when I transferred “The Final Cut” onto cassette, was to simultaneously whisper the communiqués I wanted to implant in Melissa’s mind into a microphone so that they’d be barely audible, but still there.
This is what I said:
“I want to have sex with Mike McPadden … I want to have sex with Mike McPadden … I want to have sex with Mike McPadden … I want to have sex with Mike McPadden ….”
Over and over, I chanted that suggestion in a murmur for the duration of the song.
Left at that, such desperation comes off as kind of charming, but subsequent tapes included tunes laced with messages that don’t make me giggle upon reflection. Among them:
“I will go back to the hospital if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … I will go back to the hospital if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … I will go back to the hospital if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden ….”
And:
“My beloved sister Ingrid will die if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … My beloved sister Ingrid will die if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … My beloved sister Ingrid will die if I don’t have sex with Mike McPadden … .”
Proud I may not be of this, but let me assure you that the subliminal-message concerns of Tipper Gore and company may well not have stemmed from nowhere.
My letters and tapes to Melissa eventually gave way to telephone chats (made by me from a pizzeria phone booth using a credit card number pilfered by Ed from somebody’s parents who’d left it out — teenagers, ain’t they just the best?). And, in time, talk turned in the direction toward which I’d been power-steering.
“I thought of you the other day,” Melissa told me. “We were watching that movie Revenge of the Nerds, and that part where the cheerleader has sex with the nerd and it’s really good, and he says that’s because nerds think about sex all the time and jocks just think about sports and so that’s why nerds are better at sex - that made me think, ‘That’s like Mike!’”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s true. Everything in Revenge of the Nerds is true.”
“And Booger reminded me of you, too,” she added.
This sent my ego through the roof of Sal’s Pizza. Booger, as played by Curtis Armstrong, is an unwashed, beer-swilling, slob - but NOT FAT!
The wedge was in place. Clearly. Now I had to get it out of my pants and into Melissa’s.
**************************
The summer of 1985 opened on two significant personal notes. It was the first time in three years that I wasn’t sentenced to summer school (due, mostly, to how easy it had been to cheat in eleventh-grade math). It also marked my introduction to gainful employment.
Courtesy of somebody’s cousin’s Irish-American organized-crime connections, I’d been hired to run elevators in a luxury apartment complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
What a gig that turned out to be.
After a two-hour commute from Flatbush, I manned my car from four in the afternoon until midnight. The only free time was a half-hour meal break at 5:30.
It was strictly verboten to sit, read, listen to music, or engage one’s passengers in conversation.
My days off were Tuesday and Wednesday. Sorry, but it was pretty tough to work for that particular weekend, Loverboy.
One thing kept me going: that Revenge of the Nerds conversation.
Well, that and Madonna.
Good Lord, the Material Prostitute was everywhere that summer, still pumping hits off the Like a Virgin album (”Dress You Up” being the big one come August) and getting married to Sean Penn and turning up in simultaneous issues of Playboy and Penthouse that were literally rushed to New York newsstands in the middle of the night in an attempt to scoop one another.
I know that last part because I stood outside the Kings Highway subway stop’s magazine kiosk at 3am, waiting for the trucks to pull up.
In addition, the influence of Madonna on troubled suburban adolescent females circa 1985 - particularly, it seemed, if they were blonde - cannot be underestimated.
Melissa asked me to describe, in rigorous detail, every Madonna photograph in Playboy and Penthouse. I was happy to oblige. Such talk was, I reasoned, the closest I would ever come to bona fide sexual experience.
The photos were black-and-white art modeling shots that Madonna had posed for in her early, gloriously unshaven twenties. My subsequent erections remain legendary, even in Hell.
Perusing the magazines while on the phone with Melissa, I (sort of) joked: “This is the best birthday present a boy could ever hope for!”
“That’s right,” Melissa said. “You’re birthday’s coming up. How old are you going to be?”
“Seventeen,” I answered.
“SEVENTEEN!” Melissa shrieked back. “And you’re STILL a VIRGIN?!?”
“Um, yeah.”
“God!” Melissa huffed. “That is the most puh-thetic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Oh, I bet I could top that if I really tried…”
“Seventeen and still a virgin,” she marveled. “That is fucking lame. I can’t know anybody who’s that big a loser. I’ll fuck you.”
“Sure, sure… WAIT!”
Somehow, there was some germ of sincerity to this declaration that hit me as … legit.
She really might do me this mitzvah.
Holy FUCK!
“You’ll de-virginize me, huh?” I asked. “Well, you know, I am going to be in Sparta with Chuck and Ed on my birthday.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Melissa said. “I’ll make sure you’re not seventeen and still a virgin, which I still can’t believe is possible. But what present are you going to give me if I do it?”
“You tell me,” I said. “I make big-time elevator operator bucks now.”
“Okay,” Melissa mused, “I will fuck you if … if … [she was thinking] … if you bring me … [really hard] … if you bring me boots like Madonna wore in Desperately Seeking Susan! You know the boots I’m talking about?”
This footwear, I was familiar with.
I had seen Desperately Seeking Susan several times after having made love to the newspaper ad and the Rolling Stone cover featuring Madonna and co-star Rosanna Arquette looking luminously post-lesbian-coital.
So, yes, I knew the boots she was talking about.
“Done,” I said. “You got it. I’ll hit the Village first thing next Tuesday.”
“Good. You can fuck me if you bring me those boots. And then maybe I can be your girlfriend.”
I was dumbstruck. Freaked out. Incredulous. And — fin-fang-foom - head-over-flabby-keister in love.
And yet, really, deep down, I knew the deal.
And I knew, in a general way, where this whole mess would be going.
It stands to reason, then, that I could not get there fast enough.
**********************************
PART 2
The movie was The Bride. It starred Sting, the singer from The Police, of whom I was not a fan, and Jennifer Beals, centerpiece of the Flashdance phenomenon, which I actively despised.
The movie, obviously, was the lady’s choice.
The lady was Melissa and she was sitting right next to me, right there in the Newton Twin Theater, where National Lampoon’s European Vacation was playing next door.
She had on her Madonna boots.
And it was right there in the Newton Twin Theater that Melissa took my hand.
And held it. My hand. Her hand. This was … actually happening.
And it was there that Melissa unbuttoned her neon pink-and-white vertical-striped top a bit and put my hand down the front of it. And inside her bra.
So before I enjoyed my first tongue-intensive kiss, I touched my first tit.
Okay, the first that was not my own.
As a hefty young fella, I tragically did not lack in the shirt for sloth-generated mammary tissue.
That, of course, was the supreme shame of fat boydom: not the gut, not the love(less) handles, not the mid-winter sweats—the tits.
As a chronic masturbator, though, possessing one’s own swinging twosome provided an occasional boon. The most colorful such incident occurred for me one evening in my friend Dino’s bathroom.
Dino’s sister, no petite flower herself, had left a bra drying towel rack. It was size 38C. That seemed about right—for her, definitely but, more importantly, in this hot moment, for me.
In a flash, I put on Dino’s sister’s bra and climbed into the tub and practiced, with my left hand, under-the-cup exploration and even hooking-and-unhooking while, with my right hand, I did what I had most likely already done several times in the previous few hours.
But that was then, back when I had no hope of ever touching anybody else’s tit, and now here I was in the Newton Twin Theater … touching somebody else’s tit.
Melissa just kept looking down toward the floor, down toward her actual Madonna boots, the ones I had purchased and presented to her.
Hard-earned, came those spoils — as did, by extension, the one I was tweaking twixt my thumb and forefinger.
A few days earlier, I traipsed around the West Village on a mission. I carried with me a torn-out magazine ad for Desperately Seeking Susan (likely bearing stains produced by me) and, one by one, presented it to every clerk in every shoe shop on and around 8th Street, pointing at the boots Madonna had on and asking if they sold them.
“I swear to God they’re not for me!” I joked each time.
Expense was no limitation. The wretched elevator gig paid astronomically: $12 an hour! That’s $72 a day, $360 a week. And those were 1985 dollars, remember, plus they were untaxed because I was only 16 and I got to keep half of it (the rest went to my parents, to help fund my trip to the first of the three colleges from which I would fail out).
Alas, even Trash and Vaudeville, the boutique where I believe the boots come from in the movie, had no exact replicas of those high-heeled holy grails. But they did have a pair that came kind of close. And for only $175. And that’s in 1985 dollars.
Sold.
Melissa had opened her gift box in the car before we drove to the theater. She squealed. She loved the boots. They worked. And she remained fixated on them.
After I finished watching the movie and Melissa finished watching her own feet, she wanted to show off her Madonna boots and buy a can of Reddi-Wip to make sucking my cock more palatable. She was a mite more advanced at this business than I was.
We stopped at a 7-Eleven. This was a dream come true for me. Commingling in public with a female, yes—but also going to 7-Eleven.
We didn’t have one anywhere near Brooklyn and, as a kid, I dreamt of these mythical, fluorescent-scorched Shangri-La’s where you could work the soda fountain yourself.
It was with dizzy pride, then, that I watched Melissa strut around the 7-Eleven, flirting with the dudes from her high school behind the counter and, upon handing them the Reddi-Wip canister, boasting: “You know what THAT’s for!”
Everybody laughed. I paid for the non-dairy dessert topping. We then drove back to the township of Sparta, New Jersey, back to the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk.
Melissa parked in her parents’ driveway and led me down a path into the woods. Across the water, Chuck and Ed were … I don’t know, doing something. I ditched them earlier.
We had arrived that morning. Chuck’s father drove us to Jersey, ignorant of the fat kid in the back seat’s agenda.
After lunch, we took the boat out. By dumb coincidence, Melissa was out piloting her family’s vessel at the same time.
She pulled up next to us and—for all my previous year’s efforts, for all my bombast, for all my fevered anticipation—the moment had arrived and I could NOT actually, physically, biologically bear to face Melissa.
I knew her gift-wrapped Madonna Boots were back at the house, and I knew what the exchange rate was for them.
But then the full weight of, well, my full weight cascaded down upon my consciousness. Plus, I remembered to be Catholic.
There was no way to raise my gaze bearing those burdens.
“Hey, there, Shy Boy!” Melissa taunted. “What’s the matter shy boy? You shy? Maybe you’re too shy to go out with me tonight?”
I looked up. Hard.
****************************
The movie and the boots and the Reddi-Wip purchase behind us, Melissa and I sat close, side-by-side, atop a lakefront rock.
She leaned in and kissed me.
Another first.
“Take your pants off,” she said.
Another last.
Off came the 44-inch-waisted, gray-and-black, two-tone Sasson jeans. My RUSH: 2112 shirt, however, was staying on.
Melissa followed suit, but her top did come off.
There she was.
There IT was: Naked Lady.
Live! Nude! Girl!
Right there before my power-popping eyes.
I sat back down on the rock and felt a sharp sting in my fat ass. I pulled out a fishhook. I cracked up. Melissa didn’t.
“Don’t laugh!” she admonished. “This is serious.”
She launched into a spooky sex-trance, talking kind of crazy, and easing me back to apply her plump, pink cheerleader lips to a plump, purple part of me—no Reddi-Wip necessary.
“Oh my fuckin’ God!” she said. “Your dick is fuckin’ huge!”
I didn’t believe her. But I didn’t care, either. Would you?
Melissa hopped on top of the alleged hugeness. It hurt. Me.
I think, by some Satanic instinct, my excited excitedness aimed for the wrong hole. Yowch.
But then—ah. There it was. I think.
Melissa assured me it was “in.” I leaned sideways to peer around my massive belly and, oh, yeah. There it was. Coitus.
Ta-DAH!
Deeper into her wiggy sex trance, Melissa rocked, and rolled, pumped up and down and asked me, “How do you want to come? Fast like a fireball?”
She demonstrated fast-like-a-fireball mode.
“Or slow like a shoe store?”
She demonstrated slow-like-a-shoe-store mode.
I said “Fast!” in part because I was pretty scared and also because I thought she’d be less likely to hear me giggle over the bizarreness of “slow like a shoe store.”
So Melissa did it fast, and I used my thumb on the area I presumed was her clitoris and she said she was coming and then she shook and got off me.
“Finish up,” she said, indicating I should help myself. “I have to go look for my pants.”
I did as instructed. Melissa found her pants and I pulled up mine. As we stood there, she leaned into me, virtually drilled holes into my eyes with hers and asked, “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Then say it,” she said.
“I love you,” I told her, and I wasn’t lying.
Gathering ourselves, I dropped the fishhook that had been in my ass into my wallet. That was my trophy. I grabbed the can of Reddi-Wip and we headed home.
Melissa kissed me goodnight. I told her I loved her again. “Good,” she said.
I sauntered across the bridge back toward Chuck’s house. Halfway through, I stopped, put the Reddi-Wip can in my mouth and sucked out the nitrous oxide. Ah, sweet momentary Whip-It oblivion.
Then I hurled the empty canister as hard as I could up into the air and watched it splash into the waters of Lake Mohawk.
This was atypical behavior for me, a lifelong enemy of the litterbug, but the canister, and the gesture, was symbolic.
It was finished.
***************************************
PART 3
None of us saw Melissa again until it got dark out the next night.
It was August 21st, 1985. My birthday. I was 17. And I was not, thanks to Madonna Boots, that most pathetic thing of which a blonde cheerleader from northern New Jersey had ever heard: “a 17-year-old virgin.”
Melissa had gone to the mall or something that day, and I was eager, to say the least, for another go-round on the Sex Rock.
But, even more so, I dreamt of daring to put my arm around her in front of my friends and maybe act like she and I were possibly… a couple.
After the sun went down, I saw Melissa’s car pull up on the other side of the lake. Now the real celebration could begin.
She got out and waved at Ed, Chuck, and me as the three of us were goofing around on the hill above the boathouse.
“Come over!” I yelled.
She did.
Wow. Things were still going my way. And she wasn’t even wearing her Madonna boots anymore.
Melissa crossed the bridge, kind of sashaying all the way, and I froze. If my arm was going to go around her, she was going to have to put it there.
But she clearly had no interest in my arm. Or any other part of anything attached to me.
Except my best friend.
“I need to talk to Ed,” Melissa said.
“ED!?!” I thought.
Ed? Gawky, awkward, smelly, greasy-headed, Herman Munster Ed?
Ed, my best friend with whom I had bonded over half-assed semi-attempts at suicide while we sold sodas at Xavier High School dances?
Ed, who hated his own face so much he got a Flock of Seagulls haircut to keep most of it constantly covered up?
Melissa needed to talk to THAT Ed?
What did my girlfriend—the woman I loved—want with Ed?
And, more importantly, where was I now watching Ed walk off to with my girlfriend—the woman I loved?
Chuck asked for me: “Where are you two going?”
“Down by the boathouse,” Melissa answered. “Go away for a little while. Both of you. I need to talk to Ed alone.”
This time, it was Chuck and I who did as we were told.
We hobbled up the hill into Chuck’s rec room and I collapsed in an easy chair. Maybe the TV was on, maybe it wasn’t. We were silent.
I just sat, stupefied, contemplating what was no doubt the most scintillating surprise conversation of Ed’s life taking place down by the boathouse.
After a long, miserable while, Chuck finally spoke up.
“I’m going to go down to the boathouse to see what’s going on,” Chuck said.
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t move.
He returned a few minutes later. Not alone. Ed was with him and, in a very real sense, Melissa was with Ed. His arm was around her shoulder, and she was holding his hand, and they were all kinds of smiles.
Some hodgepodge of conversation ensued. Chuck snapped a little at Melissa. Ed laughed. She kissed Ed and took off.
I just curled up where I was and the sweet, merciful, Catholic God whose admonitions I’d failed to heed proved he loved me anyway by pulling the plug.
Right away, I fell into a long, hard, pitch-black sleep.
***********************
Morning came. We had to go back to Brooklyn.
Ed shot me straight.
“Melissa’s my girlfriend now,” he told me. “She said you were not ready for a relationship and that she was secretly in love with me. And I’m in love with her.”
Well, that made them quite the pair, then, didn’t it?
“She wants to say goodbye to you before we leave,” Ed added. “Let’s go.”
I went.
Ed and I walked across the bridge. Melissa came out and talked to us on her dock.
“Mike,” she said. “I’m sorry this happened like this, but, you know, this is how relationships go and I think YOU actually get the best end of the deal because now you know you’re just not ready to have one. And I’ve had a lot of relationships, so I know about relationships.”
If I possessed even the most infinitesimal dollop of athletic ability, she may well have been drop-kicked into the water over that one—relationship expertise and all.
But I didn’t. I just nodded, and said, “Yeah. True. Thanks.”
She kissed Ed.
And with that, we were off.
************************************
The generosity of Chuck’s family knew no limits, and that included regularly taking Ed and me to restaurants.
He and I did not come from restaurant stock.
Brooklyn diners on occasion, yes, and heat-lamp snack bars at department stores during shopping trips to Jersey, for sure, but these folks took us to the type of class joints where Chuck’s mother once taunted him by saying, “Don’t tell me: Charles is going to have the shrimp cocktail and filet mignon!”
This mirrored my own mom’s affectionate ball-bust: “Don’t tell me: Michael’s having the K-Mart burger, Happy Fries and a Coke!”
The barbecue place Chuck’s father stopped at the day after Ed lost his virginity the day after I lost mine certainly offered no filet mignon.
Still, it was the sort of gloriously grotesque, forced fun roadside palace—replete with a blimp-sized cow on the roof and faux ranch gear everywhere else—that I had fantasized about being able to visit someday.
And here was that day.
And there I sat plowing through literal buckets of deep-fried appetizers and endless soda refills. It felt good. Every mouthful made a ripple in the void.
Then Bryan Goddamned Adams came on the sound system.
Make no mistake: I liked that Freddy-Kreuger-complexioned Canuck rocker just fine. But what poured out was his mournful mid-tempo hit “One Night Love Affair.”
He sang:
“One night love affair
Pretendin’ it ain’t there
Oh - and now we’re left with nothin’”
Mercifully, the Build-Your-Own-Burger concoction I ordered arrived mid-way through that toe-tapper.
This enabled me to temporarily quell what was welling within me.
When it comes to anesthetics, it is hard to top a half-pound roast beef-ham-pineapple-brown gravy-barbecue-sauce-mozzarella cheeseburger.
Four inhuman gulps and I was halfway through, with no intention of relenting.
But then REO-Goddamned-Speedwagon came on the sound system.
The song was “I Can’t Find This Feeling Anymore.”
I excused myself and bee-lined for the men’s room.
Indeed, I could not fight that feeling anymore.
Cruelly, the speakers in the john were even louder and more crystal-clear than they’d been outside.
The dulcet tenor of REO frontman Kevin Cronin pummeled me:
“I can’t fight this feeling any longer
And yet I’m still afraid to let it flow
What started out as friendship
Has grown stronger
I only wish I had the strength to let it show”
The tears came hot and fast. I locked myself in a toilet stall and let them happen. They evolved into sobbing.
Huge, heaving, 300-pound-body wracking sobs.
“And I can’t fight this feeling anymore
I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for
It’s time to bring this ship into the shore
And throw away the oars, forever”
And that prompted another feeling I could not fight anymore.
Nausea.
Not because of the clunky treacle of the lyrics—well, actually exactly because of that. I felt sick because those words felt so sickeningly real.
And then came the vomit.
Not hacking, half-coughed, hard-barfed bile, but massive, gushing, volcanic cascades of projectile puke. Brown and pink and slimy and bubbly and everywhere.
Everything I had ever swallowed—literally and figuratively—burst forth from my blubbery bowels, up through my undulating throat and rocketing out the mouth-spout that alternately gasped for air and continued to let the stomach-lining fly.
I kept crying the whole time, too.
How could I not with REO Speedwagon bombarding me? How could anybody?
“My life has been such a whirlwind since I saw you
I’ve been running round in circles in my mind
And it always seems that I’m following you, girl
‘Cause you take me to the places
That alone I’d never find”
Tears, snot, saliva, discharge, the confirmation of my every worst fear I’d ever had, the introduction of fears I hadn’t even come up with on my own.
There it all was.
Flying.
Out of me and into the bowl and onto the seat and all over the walls.
“Cause I can’t fight this feeling anymore
I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for
And if I have to crawl upon the floor
Come crashing through your door
Baby, I can’t fight this feeling anymore!”
Eventually, REO stopped and, a bit after that, I did too.
The stall was coated with countless chunky fluids of my own making. I did the best I could to wipe it clean with toilet paper. I tried to gussy myself up the same way, too.
“Everything okay?” Chuck’s dad asked upon my return.
“Yeah,” I said. “You know me. Eat hard, dump hard.”
He laughed. Chuck laughed. Ed sneered.
We three best friends then exited the Garden State, each of us now imbued with the exact same story (more or less) forever after whenever anyone would ask, “How’d you lose your virginity?”
Back behind us in Sparta, New Jersey, back along the bonny, bonny banks of Lake Mohawk, two shiny Madonna boots rested somewhere, probably deep, in the crowded confines of a blonde cheerleader’s closet.
Butthole Surfers Lyrics & My Own Psyche, Semi-Deciphered
How I Write the Way I Write
Of late, I’ve been doing less of it for your edification and more of it for my own mercenary purposes but, still, writing has served as my full-time occupation now for nearly 20 years.
This inevitable trajectory initially arose in 1988 when the sensible decision makers at SUNY Purchase informed me that I would no longer be a full-time student.
Several years followed, then, wherein I apprenticed as a public school janitor, a Special Ed teacher’s aide, and Wall Street library flunky.
That stretch of relentless glamor culminated (via the library’s printers and copy machines) in the publication of HAPPYLAND #1 on September 13, 1991, the same Friday that Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare in 3-D opened at the Lyric Theater (and one night before I saw Mudhoney play some defunct joint in NYC’s meatpacking district where, the following weekend, I caught 
Nirvana. Grunge enough for ya?).
Enthused HAPPYLAND write-ups from Rick Sullivan’s Gore Gazette and Peter Bagge’s HATE (to which I would later contribute a column on my obsession with hippie songstress Natalie Merchant), along with on-air praise from Gerard Cosloy via WFMU, garnered the ’zine nifty intention just in time for the second issue, which showcases “They Call Him Flipper,” an account of Malt-Liquor-powered interracial 42nd Street misadventure that remains my personal literary “Stairway to Heaven.”
From there, The New York Press allowed me to pollute its newsprint on occasion, and I kicked off a long and fruitful (in every sense) personal and professional association with Allan MacDonell of Hustler magazine.
And then I wrote lots of other stuff—including the ongoing Mr. Skin bliss that’s highlighted in the present issue of Time Out Chicago—all the way up until what you see now.
Hi.
Every so often people ask who my favorite writers are, along with which scribes have most influenced my style and what authors I best enjoy and/or with whom I most closely identify.
The answers to such questions have little to do with my own approach to a blank page.
I read very little fiction, although I feel eternal affection for Mark Twain, James Thurber, and the first ten years or so of Martin Amis.
The writers who truly inspired me to start cranking out words (initially in the form of epic letters to recipients I am now quite sure did not even want them) were critics and essayists—chiefly: Cult Movies author Danny Peary, the Medved Brothers and their various Golden Turkey variations, and rock writer Chuck Eddy whose eruptive prose, when he first hit the Village Voice in the ’80s (gallantly praising Rush), exhilarated me the way I was William S. Burroughs would, but didn’t (and doesn’t). 
Tales of Times Square by Josh Alan Friedman clearly made an apocalyptic impact, as did the aforementioned Gore Gazette and, to a less direct degree, Joe Bob Briggs.
Plus Celebrity Sleuth.
And although (despite my physique for most of my adult life) I’m no comic book guy, I did cop quite a bit from Frank Miller’s 1986 Dark Knight Returns series.
Right now, the writer (of books) whose work I most look forward to is Jimmy McDonough.
More than anything in print, though, when I write what I try to imitate and even produce is sound.
Howard Stern, therefore, is my most direct influence, from his topics to his tone to his New York Jew comedic roots to his actual machine-gun cadence of language.
Sam Kinison’s Louder Than Hell album (and absolutely nothing he did after that) would be another.
Most profoundly, though, what I try to invoke when I write is music, and it’s even some very specific musicians and songs (and even song parts) at that.
As I whack at the keys, I primarily hear Alice Cooper, KISS (including the ‘78 Ace Frehley solo record), Black Sabbath, The Melvins, “Linda Blair” by Redd Kross and, at upbeat intervals, The Monkees and Sweet (the Sex Pistols fall somewhere in the middle, especially in the form of Johnny Rotten’s vocalizing and most especially in the form of “Bodies”).
Singularly, the moments I most often try to replicate is the opening percussiveness Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”, along with the of pregnant blast of silence that occurs at the song’s three-minute, 34-second mark, right before the big man explodes into:
I’m gonna hit the highway like a battering ram
On a silver black phantom bike
When the metal is hot and the engine is hungry
And we’re all about to see the light
Nothing ever grows in this rotten old hole
Everything is stunted and lost
And nothing really rocks
And nothing really rolls
And nothing’s ever worth the cost
You said it, Jim Steinam via Marvin Lee Aday.
But(t) the band whose sound, look, feel, performance strategy and overall aesthetic has always exerted the deepest influence upon me is the Butthole Surfers.
And they have done this most specifically in the form of “Jimi”, the lead track from their 1988 opus (and final hour of flawlessness), Hairway to Steven.
Of course, the 7-minute, 41-second epic didn’t even have a proper name upon first release (the LP’s track listing consisted cartoons instead of words) and I’ve never seen a transcription of its baffling lyrics anywhere.
So, really, when I tell you that I attempt to channel “Jimi” when I write, I mean I do so in purely sonic terms, although the piece’s thundering, plodding, bowel-rupturing, heavily metallic sounds have always conjured palpably iconic images in my head.
What I picture, as the music rumbles, is this behemoth Viking space marauder who carries a mighty hammer reigning down his cosmic wrath on some deserving weakling(s).
And I am now confessing that that is also how I have always seen myself as I write: typing determinedly and carrying a big cosmic hammer.
It’s a ruse. But it’s mine. So that’s me.
Today, 22 years later, I made a sincere effort to copy down the actual words to “Jimi”.
However sloppily inaccurate the results are to whatever the Gibbytronix device is, in fact, pumping out, they really do fit my own delusions, both creative and … otherwise.
JIMI
[Gutteral, growling voice]
I’m soiled
Soil me
Soil everyone
Oh my
Oh
My
GOD!
I have come 10 million miles
And traveled all your earth
And with his hands
The fiery beast may consummate my birth
Locust, flies and disgusting beasts
Shall crack the ocean floor
And have given life to fiery hands
That open up the door
[Growl]
[Growl]
[Growl]
Fire away!
[High-pitched squealing helium voice]
Oh daddy, daddy!
We need help!
My mind is at an end!
[Back to Growling voice]
All hope is lost!
You’re bleeding now!
Your dreams forever flagged!
[Growl] [Growl] [Growl]
What do you know about reality?
I AM REALITY!
What do you know about death?
I AM DEATH!
I don’t know what you can see
[Unintelligible rants, evil laughter]
Who knows the things I’ve seen
The faces I know, the places I’ve been
I’m running now with my [unintelligible-- sort of sounds like "lava lamp"]
[Growl] [Growl] [Growl]
[Back to squealing helium voice]
Oh, daddy! Please!
Don’t touch me on my penis and vagina!
Oh, daddy! Don’t touch me in my bottom!
Please daddy!
[Wailing, followed by laughter]
Crazy, crazy fucking world!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Crazy goddamned world!
[Laughter]
Shit
Hey!
[Growling voice]
What is so funny?
Me or my [unintelligible]?
[Gurgle] slap in the face!
[Helium voice]
Oh nooooo! Oh no!
[Growl voice]
You RANG?
Red Box Double Feature #1: BLOOD CREEK (2009) and ASSASINATION OF A HIGH SCHOOL PRESIDENT (2008)
Like it or leave present reality: The Red Box is the 21st Century Deuce, our modern day equivalent of a row of rundown, lit-up theater marquees advertising the latest and most lurid low-budget exploitation offerings.
And, very much in the spirit of the storied haunts of 42nd Street and Chicago’s Loop and Downtown L.A. and The Block in Baltimore and hundreds of drive-in screens across the landscape in the glory days of grindhouse cinema, The Red Box is open all night and charges only a buck to get in on the action.
And, thus, as I did in days of yore while hopping from the Selwyn across the street to the Harris and then downtown to the Variety and then back up to Cine 42 (and so on), I’m running through my Red Box options two at a time, devising double features of the 
freshest fodder from our various trash film factories.
And, as is always the case, most of these movies will be overwhelmingly lame and largely worthless. But you’ve got to learn to love the sleaze-movie spelunk, not just the maniacs, bloodsucking freaks, holocausting cannibals, and medical deviates you luck into once every 10,000 trips downward.
The first-one two punch is a pretty much a blow right where it stings, but does not swell. But onward we go.
REVIEW: Frank Henenlotter’s BAD BIOLOGY (2009)
BAD BIOLOGY (2009)
DIRECTOR: Frank Henenlotter.
CAST: Charlee Danielson, Anthony Sneed, Mark Wilson, Tina Krause, Jelena Jensen.
SITE: http://www.myspace.com/badbiology
“I was born with seven clits.”
And so, with that clam-dinger of an opening line, Bad Biology kicks off with a metaphorical bang that is followed, in short order, by a more literal one.
After explaining her mutant mons Venus, the speaker, Jennifer—played by Hollywood-worthy pretty Charlee Danielson—picks up an unsuspecting sex partner, mounts him on the floor and puts her poon-of-many-protrusions to work on him. The guy dies, Jennifer immediately whelps out a monstrous infant and, admonishing us not to judge her, takes off in search of more carnal prey. Read More
The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #30-1
Shit is Finished.
That’s all I can stands. I cain’t stands no more. Puked out here is the remainder of my annotated tour of that which was worst, on a communally endured cultural scale, from the previous decade.
As with the preceding five countdowns (100-81, 80-61, 60-51, 50-41, 40-30), my plan was to 
imbue each entry with its own vituperative condemnation, summing up what was unforgivable about each transgression and irrigating my spleen, simultaneously.
But the second half of January 2010 has placed me in a brighter spot than the first half, and I wish to write tributes to the gorgeous likes of Allen Garfield and “Bag” from the first season of Happy Days.
So here’s the rest of the wretchedness, barfed out in one bombastic bifurcation of gargantuan grievance.
Have at, and then let’s get on with things, shall we? Read More
The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #40-31
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. Ten years that felt like a colonic irrigation in reverse. And in the mouth.
We arrive, now, at the Top 40 of the bottom. Power up your hate-bazookas and train them alongside mine at oblivion-begging targets such as Vespa scooters, Vespa scooter drivers, Green Day, Entourage, the Matrix sequels, “alterna-“anything, and Michael Moore vs. The Passion of the Jesus.
What a dreadful decade. What a dreadful species.
Babs and Barry, youse was wrong: that these fecal abominations merely exist means that we ALL got something to be guilty of….
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #50-41
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. Ten years that shook the septic tank. And overflowed it.
All right, we’re halfway to the bottom. Parrr-teeee!
Ten more leaps downward, with nadirs including “foodies,” what’s become of Bill Murray, horror-comedy, Aaron Sorkin, the decimation of the word “douche”, George Clooney, and more.
Always more… ever further … lower … and lower….
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #60-51
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.
Wallow with me once more—won’t you?—through 
an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.
One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.
Come, now. Again. Then rue … forever.
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #80-61
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.
Wallow with me once more—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.
One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.
Come, now. Again. Then rue … forever.
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The 100 Most Heinous Cultural Atrocities of the 2000s: #100-81
January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2010. It was a long ten years. And sucko.
Wallow with me—won’t you?—through an annotated ranking of the lowest of the loathsome, the dankest of the despicable, the most woeful of the worst.
One hundred steps to Hades, spread out over a decade.
Come, now. Rue … forever.
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