When it comes to rock music, the surname “Smith” almost always makes me reach for my bird-flipper, as it’s most commonly associated with Patti (with an “I”), Robert (with a fright wig), and fuckin’ Morrissey (with no dick up his ass where at least one really ought to be).

Now I’m not going to declare that the Patti Smith Group or the Cure or the Smiths as quote-unquote “BAD” music, per se.

It’s just not for me.

Because it’s Chick Music.

And Chick Music is just fine.

For chicks.

Like celebrity gossip, astrology and the pre-coital claim “I don’t even think I CAN get pregnant,” stuff like Patti Smith, The Cure, and Morrissey is, you know… for Chicks.

Into that ghetto, I’d also cattle-car Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, Gang of Four, New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen—or, as I call them, Chicko and the Bunny Non-Men—and pretty much the entirety of ’80s European new wave, maybe most especially Depeche Mode.

Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode. That’s what I say.

But then I also say that KMFDM is also, very much, Chick Music.

Sorry, ladies.

Of any gender.

I write now though, to single out music that most definitely did not deserve the Chick Music pass—or any other kind of pass—but to which I not only acquiesced … I actually maybe pretended not to despise it.

Because a lady and/or ladies might have been present.

And if music be the food of love, I’ll lie for a mouthful every time.

I’ll rattle these off in backwards chronological order, roughly descending from least to most pathetic.

If you’re me.

**********

Wintertime 1996

Gerard Cosloy was playing at The Cooler, a basement club in New York’s Meat Packing District.

Gerard was one of my heroes: founder of the record label Matador, publisher of the landmark music-hating music zine Conflict, and an unvarnished New York media curmudgeon who endlessly offended terribly sensitive whom I enjoyed seeing offended.

Gerard also played guitar in a band called Envelope.

Envelope was some of the most deadly awful shit you could ever hope to not hear.

So at least, at the Cooler this one night, it was just going to be Gerard solo.

To accompany me, I asked this Nordic pixie-type with sawed-off Tomahawk Missile warheads in her Bratmobile t-shirt named AHH-NA. Her name was spelled A-N-A, but she pronounced it like that: AHH-NA.

We got to The Cooler, and it turned out that AHH-NA was plenty well acquainted with Gerard Cosloy. They talked like old pals, while I got schnockered.

When Gerard hit the stage, AHH-NA seemed enraptured by his guitar playing, which was caterwauling nonsense that managed to somehow be, at once, flailing, chaotic, and petrifyingly boring.

Regardless, I told AHH-NA that I dug the G-Man’s way with an axe, too.

From there, I bloviated about how much I loved the bands on Gerard’s Matadorlabel—and that was true in the case of Unsane and Flipper, and it was as blatant a lie as could exist in regards to Liz Phair, Pavement, and Yo La Tengo

That prompted AHH-NA to announce that REM was her favorite band of all time, and I didn’t make fun of her.

In fact, I said: “Cool.”

That was right before I passed out, though. Which I took as proof that alcohol loved me.

Some point later, I woke up. AHH-NA and Gerard were long gone, and I rode the subway home by my lonesome.

A couple of days later, AHH-NA left me a voicemail asking if I wanted to go to a photography exhibit that Friday with her.

AND Gerard Cosloy.

I hope they didn’t have  very much fun.

***

SPRING 1993

Sue was a funny, charmingly dorky redhead from New Zealand with boobs the size of basketballs who liked the way I belted “Fox on the Run” along with the Downtown Beirut jukebox.

My one and only crack at Kiwi casaba, then, occured during our date to a keg party on the Pratt campus.

“I had the BEST day!” Sue beamed on the way in. “I bought an omnidirectional microphone from Radio Shack this morning and used it to bootleg a radio station concert. Then I just kept the tape and brought the mike back for a refund.”

“Ah!” I said, admiring her grift. “Who was playing?”

“TOAD THE WET SPROCKET!” she exclaimed. “They’re my favorite!”

Now… does anyone here remember Toad the Wet Sprocket?

They had a limp trickle of lite-rock radio hits in the 90s that doesn’t even qualify as Chick Music.

Your great-grandmother who’s a nun would call “pussy music.”

But it’s not EVEN pussy music, either.

It’s pussy-FART music.

Queef pop.

“Righteous!” I said, straight-faced. “TOAD THE WET SPROCKET! All right!”

My friend who was DJing happened by and asked if we had any requests.

“Got any TOAD THE WET SPROCKET?” I said, in a real haw-haw tone that I was hoping would work both ways.

“Uh… no,” he said. “I sure don’t.”

“How about the Cranberries?” Sue piped in. “Or, ooh, Jesus Jones!”

And, alas, my palms and Sue’s regulation NBA hoop-sinker appendages never the twain did dunk.

***

SUMMER 1987

The first girl I ever called up and asked out on a date was named Ann Butler.

I was eighteen and terrified and I had just gone through freshman year at art school where I’d had nary a nibble of female interest.

Ann had long, dark hair and skin the color of Liquid Paper and she dressed in all black and she smoked a lot of cigarettes and she told me that her saddest childhood memory was the day she lost her favorite rubber spider.

Plus, each one of her breasts should have been licensed with the FAA as a full-size replica of the Hindenburg.

So you can imagine the degree of psychopathic preoccupation I bore for Ann Butler.

She and I went to see my friend’s hardcore combo at a little Brooklyn bar, and it was kind of too loud to talk, which was fine, and I drove Ann home afterward and I asked her if I could ask her out again.

“Uh… yeah,” she said. “Okay.”

I figured on a movie for round two. The splatter horror hit Street Trash was playing at midnight on Saturday or maybe she’d want to see some European flick in the Village or I could even try to blow her mind with a triple bill on 42^nd Street, but when I offered her those options, she said: “How about we go to the Alpine on Sunday afternoon?”

Okay. That was cool. Except for it being completely un- fuckin’-cool.

The Alpine was the local theater in our Bay Ridge neighborhood, and Sunday afternoon hardly made for prime “let’s go park and make out afterward” time.

“Ah, sure…” I said. “How about Back to the Beach with Frankie and Annette? Pee-Wee Herman’s in it, too. He sings ‘Surfin’ Bird’!”

“I think Can’t Buy Me Love looks pretty good,” Ann said.

Can’t Buy Me Love was a PG-13 teen comedy about a nerdy dude who pays a hot chick to pretend to be his girlfriend. Now, I’m all for high school prostitution—both in and out of the movies—but Can’t Buy Me Love had and air of Fox Kids Club meets John Hughes about it, and I was neutral on Fox Kids Club, but I really fuckin’ hated John Hughes. And I still do.

“Sounds great!” I chirped.

Walking up to the Alpine, we ran out of conversation kind of quick, until I said something disparaging about the film St. Elmo’s Fire.

“I LOVE St. Elmo’s Fire!” Ann gushed. “I even bought the soundtrack on both album AND cassette!”

Remember my earlier reference to the Hindenburg? That great airship’s fiery demise roughly equated what I suddenly felt in my heart, mind, and libido.

The movie St. Elmo’s Fire is ungodly abomination enough, but what, I wondered, could possibly be on that soundtrack that possessed her acquire it in every available format this voluptuous, clove-puffing vision in Wednesday Addams braids to?

Was it “Man in Motion” by John Paar?

Was it “Love Theme From St. Elmo’s Fire” by David Foster?

Was it “Love Theme From St. Elmo’s Fire (Reprise)” by David Foster?

What did it matter?

What the fuck kind of bait-and-switch shit had I just been subjected to?

Here’s this chick who looked, as my friend Fischel Bocephus put it, “like Russ Meyer had cast Lemora the Lady Dracula” and I’m all prepared to pretend I can tolerate Clan of Xymox or Love and Rockets or Gene Loves Jezebel or whatever, and instead she’s dropping John fuckin’ Paar on me?

And it not even the John Paar of “Naughty Naughty” (which is actually a great song)—it’s the John Paar of “I’ll be where the eagle’s flyin’/HIGHER AND HI-YUH!”

We went to see Can’t Buy Me Love and I hated it and I hated my life and eventually Ann went off to her college and I went back to mine and I wrote her a lot of annoying, unwanted, and unans

wered letters as though she was the person I was hoping she was to begin with and she, of course, never was at all, and we all know there’s two ways for that to end:

A) in a restraining order, or

B) Mr. Creepo gets over his fear of beer and starts getting laid and eventually gets on with his life.

I mean, there was a suicide attempt and a mental hospital stay in there, too, but, anyway, my record’s clean.

And so is my record collection—it’s clean of any presence of St. Elmo’s Fuckin’ Fire.

(Please allow me to reiterate: “Naughty Naughty” really is a killer jam)

***

FALL 1985

Between the ages of ten and 14, I loved punk rock. And, for that, I was certainly in the right place, New York City, at the right time, 1978 to 1982.

Then, in Fall of 82, I departed Brooklyn to attend high school across the river in Manhattan, where class warfare played out along music lines.

Outer borough mopes brandished buttons and sneaker scribblings in homage to Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and Led Zeppelin.

The kids wearing Sex Pistols and Dead Kennedys t-shirts tended to be from upper Manhattan or tony Long Island suburbs.

It was a trick though.

The burnouts from Brooklyn and Staten Island actually did listen to heavy metal and arena rock.

But every fancy hair-cutted stool at Xavier High School who drew Black Flag bars on his notebook or slapped a UK Subs sticker on his locker was, in fact, listening to Spandau Ballet, the Human League, Bananarama, Wham (UK), Depeche fuckin’ Mode and, most repugnantly, U2.

Somehow, punk rock had become equivocated with New Wave. And not good, fun, hard-rock-fueled skinny-tie American New Wave, but foofy-coifed, ruffle-collared, de-gonad’ed, synthesizer-secreted Euro-fruit New Wave.

Or, like I said before: Chick Music.

I gazed upon this array of ostensibly heterosexual adolescent males in torn jeans and combat boots grooving to Duran Duran and its various splinter groups on their Walkmen and I pledged my soul to whatever the opposite of that might be.

That opposite turned out to be Pink Floyd and Rush and, eventually, heavy metal and then, even further into the future, punk again.

But come the fall of 1985, at the beginning of my senior year, I had long stood angrily and outspokenly opposed to New Wave and all of its trappings, be they in the form of music, movies, and/or “Frankie Say Relax” t-shirts.

So there I was in my local VHS rental place, Video Stop on Avenue L, when in walked these two with half-shaved heads, clunky shoes, and multiple piercings in each ear. Two girls. They were laughing and giggling and using lunchboxes for purses. And they were right about my age, maybe a year or so younger.

And they were fat, too. Just like me.

The Asian one wore a gigantic oversized sweater that hung down past her knees. The blonde one wore—indeed—a “Frankie Say Relax” t-shirt.

They sped over to the exact titles I expected them to—arthouse fare like Diva and The Hunger and Starstruck and Smithereens—and they jabbered about how cool those movies were. They even gushed at length about Liquid Sky, a film I had made my personal enemy.

Yet as they were doing this—these two arty, confrontational, way-the-fuck-out-of-place weirdies in my stupid Flatbush neighborhood—I realized: “Oh, shit! These girls… are my people!”

Two overweight, teenaged freaky-deakies had somehow found one another in the blue collar, blank-brained tundra of mid-80s South Brooklyn and they were right there, right next to me, not knowing how much I knew about all the movies they loved but how many other movies I could turn them on to and how we could and should and must all be friends and maybe even one or two or all three of us could fall in love and talk about how, really, the leap between the face-paint worn by KISS and the eyeliner employed by Hayzee Fantazee really wasn’t so far removed from one another after all.

How I wanted to explode some form of those words to them.

But… I couldn’t.

So I attempted visual coaxing.

And NOT subtly.

I reached for a copy of Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert movie, the existence of which I had decried from the moment of its release until probably one minute prior to entering Video Stop.

With the Stop Making Sense box in my mitt, I commenced strutting around the store, desperately aiming the cover toward the girls’ lines of sight.

“Look!” I thought. “Just look! Over here! Big Boy waving around the Talking Heads! Woo-HOO! Talk to me! Say something! Say anything! SAVE ME!”

Alas, nobody’s life got saved that particular night, Sugar Bear.

The girls ended up renting Liquid Sky and disappearing. I put Stop Making Sense back and wiped my hand on my jeans. I had never seen those young ladies before and I never saw them again.

Except about a million times a minute in my brain for the next who knows how long.

And then again when I wrote this.

And then again maybe forever.

***

So what’s the moral to all these tales of woe?

Gentlemen, just always be an upfront asshole about music.

Because chicks dig it when you do.

Part THREE in a Series of THREE (or So) in conjunction with my new book, IF YOU LIKE METALLICA….

Click HERE to read the three (or so) stories in Part One

Click HERE to read the story in Part Two

*******

6.66 Some Head’s Not Gonna Roll

McBeardo loves all comers. Make no mistake.

But allow me to declare with neither pride nor shame, but as mere fact that, for all my libertine free-swingin’—including those periods before, during, and after my hard stint in the crotch-rock battalion Gays in the Military—that I just don’t gaze upon the simple form of another man, naked or otherwise, and think, “Yeeeeaahhhh… stubble and pectorals and teste-sweat… that’s for ME!”

That stated, much of my life has been spent in raging envy over the instantaneous and/or anonymous orgasm exchange opportunities availed to those penis bearers whose primary motivation is acquiring more bare penis.

Lo, the Urban Homosexual, Genus: Male.

Come July 1993, I wasn’t lacking for opposite sex fluid-exchangers.

The magic potion for being able to approach females proved to be served by the pitcher at Downtown Beirut and, more and more often for me, peddled in plastic packets from behind the pinball machine at the Full Moon Saloon on Eighth Avenue.

Still, I couldn’t just walk into a bar laden with ladies, drop trou, and leave spermily satiated several sucktastic moments later.

Such easy access remained the sole domain of The GAY and, psycho-emotive biology be damned, I wanted in on those boys’ never-ending free blowjob party.

If it was dark enough—how would my wang even know? And if I was drunk enough—why would my wang even care? That’s what I (and my wang) figured.

Thus the momentous occasion arrived when, fortifying myself with a succession of 40-ounce Colt 45’s, I set out one evening to finally make that leap, loin-first. Past midnight on a Saturday, I walked toward Manhattan’s hilariously and then-accurately named Meat-Packing
District.

The Vault, a bondage club I could get into for free with my fancy Screw magazine writer credentials, was in the area, and I knew those dark, tranny-hooker-lined streets housed countless rawhide nelly arenas behind mammoth steel doors that would give Leatherface the whim-whams.

Blaring from my Walkman for this journey: Judas Priest.

Who else?

Patrolling those dark 11th Avenue sidewalks in headphones, a Priest mix rang in my ears with thematic song-by-song specificity:

• “Breakin’ the Law”

• “Exciter”

• “Turning Circles”

• “You Say Yes”

• “Jawbreaker”

• “The Ripper”

• “Sin After Sin”

• “Pain and Pleasure”

• “Troubleshooter”

• “Rapid Fire”

• “Delivering the Goods”

Most pointedly, the playlist concluded with 1977’s “Here Come the Tears.”

And so, Judas Priest ablaze on cassette, I guzzled the rest of my malt liquor, steeled myself and approached one door into and out of which spilled prospective nameless orifi.

And then I froze. The door was closed. I couldn’t bear to open it.

So I just stood for a moment.

Then another.

Then enough to have to rewind the Judas Pries tape.

Finally, just as I lurched forward, the door burst open, wide, and it hit me.

The MUSK of MAN.

My nervous system had been assaulted infinite times by jackhammer wafts of men in sexual frenzy at Live Nude Girl peeps shows, but here there were no girls—live, nude, or otherwise—to offset the olfactory affront.

This MUSK was man, ALL Man, NUDE Man, AROUSED Nude Man, and nothing but—b-u-t-t—Aroused Nude Man.

The frying-pan-to-the-proboscis effect was rippling… musclebound… RECTAL…. and testorized to the point that I swear I felt the fumage pry openmy very nostrils and, already all lubed up, slide deeper than anything else every had up inside my sinus cavities.

My sniffer, alas, seemed to be directly connected to my nether regions and a total systemic disconnect overrode the operation.

I withered in the fumy bath of Man Musk and sauntered off, forced to accept that not even the might of Judas Priest could overpower my addiction to my own carnal wiring.

And, there, came the tears.

HAIL BENT FOR LEATHER!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

The above was composed for the June 2012 Chicago book release event for my authoritative tome If You Like Metallica (Backbeat Books).

The shindig went down at Salon Tress.

In addition to stupefyingly great readings by the other participants Rachel McPadden, Katie Rife, Nithin Kalvakota,Dan Gleason, Gregory Jacobsen, Bob Goblin—as well as high metal air guitar virtuosity by Nordic Thunder and Cannonball Mavin—I read the preceding composition.

Part Two in a Series of Three (or So)

Click HERE to read the three (or so) stories in Part One

******

5.5. NAY, PALM DEATH!

Aside repeatedly catching Blind Fury with Rutger Hauer at various 42^nd Street grindhouses, Summer 1990 sucked and blew and sucked-blew.

During one particularly grievous nadir, a failed effort to rekindle a shattered romance prompted me to seek solace where any free, white, and healthy 21-year-old might: in the peep shows alongside all those grindhouses where I’d been watching Rutger Hauer.

It was ridiculously late, like 3:30 in the morning on a Thursday.

That meant almost all the LIVE! NUDE! GIRLS! had vamoosed until the next day’s first commuter rush, and I only had limited funds left anyway after squiring my ex out for drinks and rejection, in that exact order.

So my plan was to cozy up in a Peepland video booth for visual succor by way of German piss lesbians.

During busy day-parts, Peepland’s sound system normally blared techno or salsa or whatever the present New York disco radio outlet was.

At this juncture, though, the mop jockey set it on one of the shitbag Classic Rock stations and then, suddenly, louder than life and/or a million little deaths, the air quaked with Crosby, Stills, and Nash singing “Our House/ Is a very, very, very fine house!”

I couldn’t whack off with that song playing.

I’d love to meet the man who could, because THERE, ladies and gentlemen, would be a true pervert.

But even beyond “Our House”’s lilting harpsichord and airy harmonies and Graham Nash’s lovely invocation of the hippie cottage he set up with Joni Mitchell (BLECCCH!!!), I was in a vile public masturbatorium at a godless hour to get relief from the assurance overwhelming me that NO woman, anywhere, would ever set up house with me.

Not even Joni Mitchell.

In a flash, I put on my Walkman headphones and cranked Big Black’s Hammer Party cassette. All the way to ten. It was good.

It made for a solid soundtrack to a groovy hate self-fuck.

Frantic.

Deafening.

Obliterating.

But, still, I needed more.

With my one free hand, I tossed Big Black and put in Napalm Death’s Mentally Murdered tape.

More frantic.

More deafening.

Even more obliterating.

While the happy frauleins on-screen simultaneously relieved themselves and quenched their thirsts, Napalm Death pummeled my ear-drums to the very direst pits of my anti-soul and, before my last 40-seconds-for-a-dollar ran out, I was done.

Zipping up, I realized I hit upon a bold new formula for giddy self-annihilation, however (unfortunately) temporary.

Death metal plus illegal foreign pornography consumed outside the home equals cosmic numbness equals peace. Or some dead version of peace, anyway, which is what I was after.

The porn peeps would always be there (I thought).

Napalm Death had proven effective in creating an atmosphere of thunderous homi/suicidal rapture unto orgasm.

Still, I wondered if I could go further.

And that’s how I got into Deicide.

HAIL GLEN BENTON’S SCARIFICATION!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

The above was composed for the June 2012 Chicago book release event for my authoritative tome If You Like Metallica (Backbeat Books).

The shindig went down at Salon Tress. In addition to stupefyingly great readings by the other participants Rachel McPadden, Katie Rife, Nithin Kalvakota,Dan Gleason, Gregory Jacobsen, Bob Goblin—as well as high metal air guitar virtuosity by Nordic Thunder and Cannonball Mavin—I read the preceding composition.

Still to come: SOME HEAD’S NOT GONNA ROLL!

The shindig went down at Salon Tress. In addition to stupefyingly great readings by the other participants Rachel McPadden, Katie Rife, Nithin Kalvakota, Dan Gleason, Gregory Jacobsen, Bob Goblin—as well as reality metal air guitar virtuosity by Nordic Thunder and Cannonball Mavin—I read the following compositions.

HAIL SATAN!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

1. Rosemary’s Brooklyn Baby

The film Rosemary’s Baby debuted in theaters on June 12, 1968. I was a mere womb banger at the time, waiting to debut myself two months and nine days later.

The woman brewing me in utero, Moms McBeardo, was a stick-skinny blonde with wide blue eyes who already bore resemblance to Mia Farrow, the Rosemary of Rosemary’s Baby.

Since Moms was hugely pregnant when the movie came out, fri ends and strangers alike commented on how much she looked like Mia. Her choice to sport a boy’s haircut, as Ms. Farrow famously did on screen, and don psychedelic print maternity frocks of the day only further drove home the doppelgangerism— AND THEN SHE FLIPPED HER PIXIE-CUT EVERY TIME PEOPLE POINTED OUT THE RESEMBLANCE!

This is akin to a knuckledhead who used to drink at a bar I frequented called Dowtown Beirut. He was fat guy with a huge jet-black pompadour, who’d wear giant wraparound sunglasses, and he’d order drinks with a southern accent and then say, “Thankyu vurrrry muchhh.” Every so often, you’d be sitting there, and all of a sudden you’d hear this goofball explode, “DON’T CALL ME ELVIS!”

This characteristic of Moms’s, however, is telling. She certainly passed it on to me. By age four, I was a full-blown fanatic of Dracula and Frankenstein and their ilk and it large part it was because they TERRIFIED me. I’d stock my bedroom with scary posters and fright masks, then I’d lie awake, petrified at the reality I MADE of being stuck alone in a den of monstrosities.

And that’s not even counting the fact that, from infancy onward, an image of Satan hung on my wall. He was getting his horned skull stomped by St. Michael the Archangel, but still….

And who placed that picture there? Who else? My own blessed mother.

HAIL LIL’ SATAN!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

2. One Tin Boner
During a 1977 folk mass at my fantastically cool Uncle Freddie’s church in Cedar Grove, New Jersey the congregation sang “One Tin Soldier”. It was the theme song from the drive-in masterpiece Billy Jack and had since become massive pop radio hit. The words say there won’t be any trumpet blowin’, but the church actually had a trumpet blower that day.

Prior to that, the name group that performed “One Tin Soldier” always freaked me out Coven and with good reason: they were called Coven and they were the actual first Satanic rock band!

I’ve long lamented the ’70s brand of post-Vatican II Catholicism in which I was raised. Gone was the blood-and-thunder Son of a Vengeful God Jesus; now the Savior was like this Divine Flower Child who just loved the little children of the world. And in place of black-clad priests swinging incense and chanting in Latin, we now had groovy nuns strumming acoustic guitars under felt banners of fish and rainbows.

Some Garden State usurper snuck a taste of the Old One True Faith into the liturgy that day though, by way of a band whose debut album is titled Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls—again, a position with which the Church of Rome would hardly be at odds.

“One Tin Soldier” lays out a thoroughly Biblical tale of greed-driven genocide in the name of hypocritical righteousness.

“Go ahead and hate your neighbor/Go ahead and cheat a friend/Do it in the name of Heaven/You can justify it in the end…”

The gravity of the words never struck  me until, at age eight, I read the lyrics off the mimeographed hymnal.

Eight years old or not, that’s some heavy shit, man.

The song condemns humanity wholesale as evil and irredeemable. It damns us. It really, really damns us. Just like the Church used to. It felt so damned good to be damned DAMNED that morning.

Years later, I’d try to revive that feeling of giddy perdition while making love to a photo of Coven singer Jinx Dawson in the gatefold of that Witchcraft album.

The Nordic blonde sorceress and Indiana native is splayed out nude as a human altar during a Satanic black mass. Many a sacrifice have I made to Jinx Dawson’s graven image.

Just recently, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a photo of me with an interview regarding IF YOU LIKE METALLICA. I’m wearing a Coven t-shirt in it, emblazoned with that very naked black mass photo.

Jinx herself wrote to me on Facebook:

“My Dearest Mike: I was so aroused to see thee wearing that irreverent Coven t-shirt. Thou art truly most wicked!”

So all’s well that’s ends well in a puddle at your feet. And then in a sock.

HAIL JINX! HAIL BILLY! HAIL THE KIDS AT THE FREEDOM SCHOOL!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

3. KISS Your Pants

KISS scared the piss out of me on The Midnight Special in 1978. Not instantaneously—I didn’t just explode urine on the spot as I watched Gene Simmons spit blood and Wolfman Jack go, “All right, babies! Yeah! Spittin’ blood, babies! Allriiight! Breathing fiiii-yah! Yeah! Ahwoooo!”—but I immediately turned the TV off and went to bed, praying to not think about KISS. I awoke in the morning with soaked pajamas.

Until then, KISS existed on my radar only tangentially. My pot-smoking, longhaired uncles, on whom I relied for access to the rock world, laughed them off as clowns and it only the most unappealingly unwashed kids I knew would write “K-I-S-S” on their gym sneakers.

Summer 1978 brought with it a KISS onslaught, however. While my focus remained primarily on the Grease soundtrack and Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell—the title of which I kept hoping my mother wouldn’t catch on to—I now felt myself drawn to the spook-show Kabuki supervillains whose Destroyer album blared through the very air itself

wherever you went and who were now peddling dolls during cartoons on TV and about to star in their own Hanna-Barbera-produced TV movie.

One afternoon I amassed enough skee-ball tickets at the Fun City arcade in Keansburg, New Jersey to get something better than a back-scratcher (which means the points must have numbered in the millions).

Trading in my torn-off bounty for prizes, I asked the lady at the counter for the requisite 500-year-old Bazooka bubblegum and some plastic spider rings that immediately sliced into your finger and then, before I could stop myself, I said, “And a pack of KISS cards!”

What had I just done?

Frozen and excited at the same time, I hauled my loot to the dunes along Raritan Bay, opened the cards and looked at them one by one. Loving them. Loathing them. I actually said out loud: “I hate KISS. But, secretly, I like them.” Then I buried the cards in the sand, making sure the spot would be easy to remember, as it now housed evil.

Afterward, I walked up along the shoreline and wrote “KISS STINKS” in the wet sand and watched the tide wash the words away.

Like a prayer.

Fuck you, Madonna.

HAIL THE DEMON! THE STAR CHILD! THE SPACE ACE! THE CATMAN!

HAIL THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

4. Stairway to My Sweet Satan

The music of Led Zeppelin scared me as a kid, but the adolescent hoodlums bedecked in Led Zeppelin baseball jerseys scared me way worse.

Zeppelin seemed like the natural teenage soundtrack to stolen car joyrides and stray cat back alley executions by fire—dirtbag music for the sort of dirtbag who’d stuff you in a bag and bury in the dirt—sixty-six-point-six feet under.

“Stairway to Heaven,” however, loomed inevitable.

In 1982, I was thirteen. I wasn’t cool. “Stairway to Heaven” was cool. In large part, because it was terrifying.

Shortly before my eighth grade graduation, the Daily News reported that various reverse record-spinners had cracked a backward message in “Stairway to Heaven” that stated: “Here’s to my sweet Satan/ the one who’s little path would make me sad/He will give those with him six-six-six/said Satan.”

For a spell, then, this expose put me off “Stairway to Heaven.” Alas, there came the Our Lady Help of Christians graduation dance.

An OLHC alumnus in a Panama Red t-shirt spun platters that included hits of the day, but tilted heavy toward the 8-Track collection everybody’s seed-and-stem-flecked older brother. Just before midnight (of course), the DJ announced that we had come to the last song: “Stairway to Heaven.”

I had just been shaking my non-moneymaker to “I Love Rock-N-Roll” with a quiet classmate named Ann Martin. This presented an opportunity for us to slow dance. No passing that up.

Alas, I found a solution: I waltzed to “Stairway to Heaven” with Ann Martin while, in my head, I rapid-fired off round after round of “Hail Mary”’s. When it got to the “there’s two paths you can go by” part—where the backward message was located—I upped the volume of my inner paens to the Blessed Mother so high as to drown out whatever coded bedazzlement might have been trying to violate my psyche and imperil my mortal soul.

Maybe it worked. I suppose, one day, I’ll find out. For sure.

HAIL OUR LADY HELP OF CHRISTIANS VS. SATAN!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

4.4. Say You Love Satan—With Lasers

Throughout my high school years, the Hayden Planetarium drew ganja-zonked denim wearers en masse to its various weekend night laser shows. I saw them all: Laser Floyd, Laser Zeppelin, Laser Rush, Laser Van Halen, Laser Who, even Laser The Police.

The one, and only one, I passed on, however, was Laser Sabbath. I truly believed that if anything could conjure the Dark Lord

in the ungodly flesh it was the collective loose-joint-unhinged consciousness gathered in cabal before the alchemical technology of light-beams shaped like Pentagrams.

I was so terrified of Laser Sabbath, in fact, I couldn’t even listen to the radio commercial for it. I’d hear this bottomless-pit-deep voice announce, “Ron Delsner and the Hayden Planetarium Present….” And I’d have to shut it off, pray, and then down to my basement lair so I could watch and re-watch Faces of Death just before masturbating to Traci Lords videos, relieved and confident in the knowledge that I dodged undying hellfire.

Until the next dodge.

HAIL SATAN, MOST PARTICULARLY IN TRACI LORDS FORM!

BUY  IF YOU LIKE METALLICA…!!

“LIKE” HEAVY METAL MOVIES ON FACEBOOK!!!

******

Next up: making love to German piss lesbians accompanied by Napalm Death, and the might of Judas Priest vs. The Musk of Naked Man.

Long time, no nothin’.

Here’s the deal, hombres y mamis: although you’ve no doubt been enamored with my fineness in print by way of The Factsheet Five Zine Reader, Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth, The Official Heavy Metal Book of Lists, Mr. Skin’s Skincyclopedia, and Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide (along with some bizarre anthology the name of which I can’t remember that reprinted my Devil in Miss Jones 5 screenplay), several books either existing now or on the way also bear Hard and Heavy McBeardness

Two such efforts will even have my very own name on the byline!

If You Like Metallica… by Mike McPadden (Hal Leonard Books) launches June 1. Get ready for a shill-acking campaign nonpareil. Even if the merest flicker of a thought about Lars Ulrich curdle your body-milk, remember that this book is me—McBEARDO! #1!—writing finger-loose and fancy free about metal, punk, classic rock, stoner doom, industrial, and nipple rings in a Ride the Lightning t-shirt circa 1986. YOU will ride the lightning… in your pants!

Heavy Metal Movies by Mike McPadden. I’m writing this definitive thrashterpiece for the mighty Bazillion Points. It a leviathan in progress, to be delivered from Ian Christe and Company to your grabby mitts in spring 2013. “Like” HEAVY METAL MOVIES on Facebook and love me, love me, love me as I labor on this giant.

And then one that’s not my book, but one to which I am proud to have contributed:

The Official Book of Sex, Drugs, and Rock-N-Roll Lists (Soft Skull Press) by Judy McGuire features my chapter-length contribution on the best Rock-N-Roll Porno Movies.

And then… when all the crust is settled, I’m going to expand Madonna Boots into a full-blown memoir/manifesto regarding Teenage Romance.

What’s keeping all of you out there busy? HAH?!

Bone up here now and be there then.

***

You won’t believe the eye.

Nine minutes into Bloodsucking Freaks (1976), a giddy dwarf on stage in a theater hacksaws through the wrist off a screaming nude blonde. He removes her hand, kisses it and holds it aloft in triumph.

The well-dressed audience in attendance applauds.

“Now the eye, Ralphus!” instructs the saturnine Master of Ceremonies, and the dwarf reaches into the weeping victim’s ocular cavity, plucks out her meaty, dripping peeper, and pops it into his mouth. Then he chews it up and swallows it—right on camera.

Again, the hoity-toity audience applauds.

As stated: you won’t believe it.

But there it is.

And so a line is drawn in Bloodsucking Freaks that the movie itself repeatedly crosses by way of chains, chainsaws, whips, thumbscrews, starvation, brainwashing, brain-siphoning, and an unholy host other atrocious demonstrations of man’s inhumanity to man (or, more specifically, man’s in humanity to naked woman) beyond what even the most grossout-hardened and/or legitimately perverse filmgoer could conceive.

Believe me. I tried. As a sixteen-year-old horror fanatic in 1985, when I first saw Bloodsucking Freaks on VHS, the movie surpassed my darkest hopes and even my most uncomfortable fantasies, besting the only occasionally shared contents of our collective psychological sub-cellars that one would normally pass off as a “sick joke.”

Bloodsucking Freaks is sick, and it’s funny, but unlike the best-known products of the studio it launched—New York’s unequal parts despicable and dismissible Troma Entertainment–this movie is no joke.

Our hero, as it were, is Sardu (Seamus O’Brien), an elegant, highly histrionic older gentleman in warlock garb who runs The Theater of the Macabre in Manhattan’s Soho district, then a burgeoning enclave of artists and performers on the cutting edge (pun, here, intended). Ralphus (Luis Dejesus) is his midget assistant and constant companion.

To secure performers for their nightly extravaganzas, Sardu runs a white-slavery ring. Virginal young women get delivered in crates, kept nude and unfed in a basement cage, and then are procured as needed for grotesque sexual tortures, both on stage and off.

Sardu and Ralphus use these bedraggled slaves as furniture and, in one rib-tickler of a scene, as a dartboard. While gentlemanly quaffing steins of beer, they toss darts at a target painted on one girl’s anus. Then they play backgammon using severed fingers.

Among the theater’s human resource suppliers is The Doctor (Ernie Pysher), a mad dentist who we watch yank out a woman’s teeth with pliers and then drill a hole into her head, into which he inserts a straw and sucks out what the goop inside.

Between such sensory-overloading set pieces, Bloodsucking Freaks’ plot hinges on Sardu kidnapping snooty critic theater Creasy Silo (Allan Delay) and famous ballerina Natasha D’Natalie (Viju Krem). The dancer’s boyfriend, NFL superstar Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster), and the NYPD’s Sergeant John Tucci (Dan Fauci) pursue her disappearance into the pits of Sardu’s diabolical dominion.

Writer-director Joel M. Reed cites plasma-sopped exploitation pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore (1970) as Bloodsucking Freaks’ jumping-off point.

He has also pointed out the gangbusters business that “Prince of Puke” John Waters’ Pink Flamingoes (1972) had been doing throughout the decade.

To make an impact in that cinematic milieu of taboo-shattering box office triumphs, Reed deigned to push further and pummel harder than anyone ever had before—or (almost) since.

As mentioned, Bloodsucking Freaks is no easy parody (the immediate, damnable bastion of horror filmmakers who doubt their ability to make an effective horror film—later Troma providing numerous execrable examples), but it is loaded with guffaws, and even studded with satire.

Creasy Silo is based on notoriously nitpicky New York Post theater reviewer Clive Barnes, Tom Maverick is a send-up of New York Jets phenomenon Joe Namath, and Natasha D’Natalie is a stand-in for ballet star Natalia Makarova, then the toast of Manhattan.

There’s also a moment when Sardu is negotiating a slave girl deal by phone with a kinky weirdo who’s plainly supposed to be Henry Kissinger. Bloodsucking Freaks is audacious enough that, were it to be made today, he’d be selling Barack Obama live ingredients for a cannibal cookout.

Aside from Reed’s odd skills on display here in crafting a well-paced, consistently effective film (they’re odd because if you ever see his handful of lesser-known works, you’ll understand how this one was a fluke), the performances elevate Bloodsucking Freaks further still from mere geek show to something unforgettable.

Delay, Fauci, and McMaster (who appeared on the ABC soap Edge of Night) are great, as is Krem, a real-life fashion model who convincingly pulls off her deadly pas-de-deux.

And then there’s Sardu and Ralphus.

Seamus O’Brien gives one of the great high camp performances in all of cinema. It’s impossible to watch Bloodsucking Freaks and not believe that this lanky, crystal-eyed, effete weirdo doesn’t exist, that once the cameras shut off that somehow this ghoul just took off his sorcerer robe and went home.

O’Brien starred in the long-running Off Broadway institution The Fantasticks throughout the filming of Bloodsucking Freaks. His only other movie credit is The Happy Hooker (1975). After Sardu, whatever body of berserk work might have lain ahead of him got snuffed out during a knife fight with a burglar in 1977. Remarkably, O’Brien was only 41 when he died.

As with Chaka the monkey boy on TV’s Land of the Lost, the one instantly identifiable character in Bloodsucking Freaks is homicidal half-pint Ralphus. Luis De Jesus danced as

a space alien in funk group Parliament Funkadelic’s lavish concert productions and, later, donned an Ewok costume for Return of the Jedi (1983).

His most celebrated non-Ralphus film role, however, is playing the title character opposite porn star Vanessa Del Rio in the 1971 hardcore loop, The Anal Dwarf.

The media hubbub of the past decade surrounding so-called “torture porn horror” on the order of Saw, Hostel, and Human Centipede has always begged one question: where were all these tight-asses and tsk-tskers for the previous three decades since the dawn of Bloodsucking Freaks?

Granted, Saw and Hostel come from Hollywood and played at multiplexes, but Bloodsucking Freaks has always been around.

Troma released it to grindhouses and drive-ins twice, first in 1976 under the title The Incredible Torture Show (T.I.T.S., get it?) and then again as Bloodsucking Freaks in 1984. For the rerelease, the militant feminist group Women Against Pornography demonstrated outside the 42^nd Street theater where it played. They were tipped off well in advance by Troma’s publicity department. Pickets sell tickets.

Bloodsucking Freaks then lived on as a teenage VCR litmus test in the ’80s, often paired with the shockumentary Faces of Death, and as an arthouse midnight movie. England banned it outright, listing the film high among the verboten “Video Nasties” (a controversy kicked off by Faces of Death in the first place).

In the 1990s, Bloodsucking Freaks turned up again in a popular bootleg video series of Caliugla cash-ins. Amidst a renaming frenzy that saw Nero and Poppea (1982) issued as Caligula Reincarnated as Nero, and Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) as Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler, Bloodsucking Freaks came out under the moniker, The Heritage of Caligula: An Orgy of Sick Minds.

That is my favorite title of anything, ever.

I am a fan of the Saw series and the first Hostel (Human Centipede is a just an amusing concept tailor-made for the present cultural reign of Internet nerds; the movie isn’t even necessary), but they each address issues beyond the mere carnage on screen. So, too, do the recent spate of almost unbearably intense and cruel horror films from France—in particular, Inside (2007) and Martyrs (2007).

Not so Bloodsucking Freaks. Yes, there is one chilling moment, when the cop decides to go dirty, that conjures the dread of the kindly gas station attendant turning out to be Leatherface’s cohort in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

And perhaps there is something deeper to be read in the upper-crust decadents of New York Society traveling to a dank art colony for polite consumption of murder and dismemberment.

The theatergoers in the movie think Sardu’s heinous spectacles are all fake. We know that they’re real—except we know that we’re watching a movie that we know is fake, so what’s “real” isn’t really real. But maybe we’re reacting like it is. Or maybe not.

Regardless, the power of Bloodsucking Freaks is in its own joy of relentless bombastictransgression. A movie where Ralphus gets head from an actual decapitated noggin should only close, as this one does, with a parting shot of a naked nubile biting into a severed penis placed in a hot dog bun.

With relish.

The events described hereafter take place two years after what went down in that first piece.

A few key pieces of information: A) Madonna Boots is the nickname of the blonde cheerleader from New Jersey to whom I lost my virginity, and B) between 1985 and 1987, I managed to drop about 150 pounds off my delicate frame, roughly cutting my overall bulk in half.

It didn’t help. As you can find out below.

***************

The last time I saw Madonna Boots was on November 27, 1987. It was the day after Thanksgiving.

Bootsy, as she liked to be called, was a freshman at Montclair State University in New Jersey. I was in my third semester at the State University of New York at Purchase, a public arts academy in endlessly dull Westchester County, just north of New York City.

I ran the college radio station, which got me a lot of free records and an abusable telephone.

While not going to class and not getting laid, I phoned Madonna Boots at school as the holiday season started. Things had gotten that bad. Since arriving at college, I had not so much as accidentally bumped knees with a female. No dates. No kissing. No hand-holding. Nothing.

For that, I lost 150 pounds?

The lone “almost” exception was Dottie Woodward, known around campus as The Girl From Mars. What a nutbar. A charmer of a nutbar, though.

Dottie was a ballet major who looked a ’50s advertising drawing of a spunky, strawberry-blonde scamp. She talked kooky and she liked the Monkees and my Hawaiian shirts and we both had the complete Weird Al Yankovic discography and we immediately hit it off. Just not enough (for me).

People assumed Dottie and I were a couple for the first few months of school, which both delighted and depressed me: on the one hand, it meant I was perceived as human enough to have a girlfriend; but in reality, she wasn’t actually my Girlfriend From Mars, so the fact of my subhumanism remained unevolved.

One night, Dottie was drunk and I was not. I was sitting in my dorm room, drawing heinously offensive posters to promote my WPUR program and talking to my friend Springo.

Dottie sashayed in and sat on my lap.

I freaked. Bad. But not outwardly. I just barely kept it together enough to not jump up and go hide in a corner. Here was the very first moment in my entire 18 years that a girl was expressing genuine attraction to me. Ho. Lee. Shit.

“I’m tired,” Dottie said. “Let’s go lie down.” She led me to the bed and we got under my garish Marimekko comforter. We kept talking to Springo. Dottie snuggled into me.

Then, a whole bunch of bozos I knew came by my room to hang out. I’d spent the previous few years of my adolescence in dire isolation and tragic loneliness; why did I have to be Captain Popularity now?

Dottie seemed extremely comfortable. One by one, my chatty pals gave me a thumb’s up or a wink and then took off. Somebody even dragged Springo out, too. And then it was upon The Girl From Mars and me.

Silence. Darkness. Warmth. Sex.

Only not.

I froze. Dottie who, again, didn’t come by her outer-space moniker accidentally, was even wackier when she drank. She babbled a little bit, wrapped an arm around me, put her head on my chest, and fell asleep.

I stayed awake.

All night.

I just lay stiff (yes, in every sense), with this adorable, appropriate, happy-to-be-there ballerina pressed up against me. I prayed for her to wake up and kiss me. It was biologically impossible for me to make any sort of first move. That’s when fate intervened, in the manner to which I had become accustomed.

This being 1986, the walls surrounding my bed contained a velvet Elvis painting, Freddy Krueger pin-ups, and a shrine to Howard Stern. The main eye-catcher, though, was a massive, four-foot-by-six-foot French poster for the Italian gore-fest Suspiria. Real chick-bait.

From the day I first taped that monstrosity up, the poster never so much as slipped an millimeter—until about 4:30 am on the one (and only) night I had a girl in my bed at SUNY Purchase. Yes: Suspiria came crashing down on Dottie Woodward and me.

It woke Dottie up, whereupon she tried to act cool for a minute, and then left.

Ah, well. At least I could get some sleep. Someday I’d be dead so, drifting off, I took some comfort in that.

From there, Dottie immediately got over whatever motivated her to climb into bed with me. And on she moved. I did. too … to nowhere and nobody.

It was that track record that prompted me to call Madonna Boots just before Thanksgiving.

“What do yewwww want?” was how Boots replied when I told her who was calling.

“I just wanted to say hi. I’m the president of the campus radio station, so I get free use of the phone.”

That was not true—I used the phone freely, but the school had to pay for whatever bills I ran up, which I attributed to the station’s AM-signal delivery system into the dorms. They believed it.

“Yeah. Whatever. Your school is for losers. Montclair State is awesome. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Ha! Of course not! You fat again?”

“No.”
“Why are you calling me?” Bootsy said.

“I’m going to be in the city the day after Thanksgiving,” I told her. “We should get together. We can catch up.”

“You drink? You get high?” she asked.

“No. I mean, sometimes I do. But not a lot.”

“You’re a fuckin’ loser. You should freebase. It’s the best way to do coke.”

“I did ’shrooms last semester. It was fun. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I have a guy I see. He’s 25. I have threeways with him and his friends. One time I did him and four other guys at once. It was awesome. You ever do stuff like that?”

Before I could answer (and probably lie), she cut me off: “Of course not. You’re a loser. One guy was black. You think you have a big dick? This guy was like King Kong!”

The specifics of Bootsy’s sex-and-drug adventures weren’t a turn-on, but the escalation of her recklessness was. It meant she might break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar one more time.

“What are we going to do in the city?” she asked me. “You gonna take me out? You gonna take me do a movie and buy me dinner and get me something nice?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m a class act.”

“Jesus Christ. All right. Meet me at the bus station. Bring money.”

When Friday finally came, I stood at the New Jersey Transit Gate in the Port Authority terminal and heard, “Ewww. You lost all that weight and your skin didn’t clear up?”

Welcome back, Madonna Boots.

***

We walked up 42nd Street. The Deuce.

In 1987, Times Square was still the heart of New York City vice and 42nd Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was its main cum-clogged artery.

The Deuce pumped sex and death and every joy and horror between them round the clock—all day and night, every day and night, all the way up until it didn’t.

As crack, AIDS, and—deadliest of all—home video ascended in the second half of the ’80s, the end was at hand (and gland) for the Deuce. But there was still some awesomely repugnant life left there as Madonna Boots and I traversed eastward up the big four-two.

I had been going to double and triple features at the trashpit movie palaces on 42nd Street since my first few weeks in high school. But for any number of reasons, I only ever went alone. I preferred it that way. Still, I have to say it was a kick sharing the Deuce with Madonna Boots that day.

The last time—the only other time, in fact (at that point)—I walked 42nd Street with a female was 11 years earlier. I was eight. My mother took me into the city for a Broadway show and then announced that she was going to show me “the worst place in the world.”

I was already delirious from the sidewalk-to-sky wallpapering of pornography in Times Square, so I experienced whatever the prepubescent equivalent of a mainline speedball was when Moms marched me up the actual Deuce, saying, “Don’t look at anyone in the face. But just look around at this. Isn’t it a shame?”

Hookers. Most of them mostly nude. Pimps. Real, scary crazies saying and doing real scary craziness. And naked lady pictures! Better than Playboy! Out in the open! Everywhere you looked!

Every few feet there were theaters showing horror movies, too, and a lot of karate stuff. One movie place had a crazy display of African revolutionaries under its marquee, with a video loop playing of people getting shot and cut up in the jungle.

It was, indeed, the worst place in the world and the best thing I had ever experienced.

Now I was treating Madonna Boots to this pustular funhouse, starting with lunch at Howard Johnson’s. She didn’t complain about the fried clam platter. She complained about me, though.

“You have to, like, be a loser, don’t you?” she said. “I bet you go to those peep shows!”

“I don’t!” I said. “I kind of want to, but I never had the nerve. I just go the regular movies on 42nd Street.”

The “regular” movies on 42nd Street, of course, being Make Them Die Slowly, Blood Sucking Freaks, Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Trap Them and Kill Them, and Mad Monkey Kung Fu.

“You even have one girlfriend since me?”

“Yeah, I went out with this girl last summer.”

“She broke up with you, though, right? Right.”

Right.

After lunch, we had one movie option and one movie option only: Flowers in the Attic, an adaptation of a Gothic horror romance novel that was immensely popular with teenage girls in the 1980s.

Largely forgotten now, Flowers and its follow-up books by V.C. Andrews (Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns—get the drift?) were very much their era’s equivalent of the 21st century Twilight craze.

But whereas Twilight’s kick is sexual abstinence, the Flowers books were powered by passionate incest.

I could respect that.

Flowers in the Attic was playing on the Deuce proper at the extra bizarro, extra dangerous Anco theater back up by the bus station. I wasn’t taking anything remotely blonde and female as Madonna Boots into the Anco, though, so we settled on the massive National Theater on the northeast corner of Broadway.

The movie sucked, even by Madonna Boots’ standards, and she liked The Bride with Sting and Jennifer Beals (and my fingers on her left nipple as we watched it. It was our very first date. And my very first everything).

In her disappointment, however, she offered one killer idea toward salvaging the day’s entertainment:

“Let’s go to one of them peep shows!”

My heart sang. Victory!

***********

The peep show we picked wasn’t just any peep show, either. It was Peepland. Smack in the middle of the Deuce. The former site of Hubert’s Flea Circus, an arcade with a freak museum and a live sideshow that included, back in the early 1960s, a canary-voiced warbler calling himself Larry Love who would later hit it big as Tiny Tim. In the 80s, Peepland specialized in bestiality videos.

I had studied years for this moment.

Above Peepland’s entrance was a 20-foot-tall eye shaped like a keyhole, flanked on either side by a 25-cent piece twice the size of a tractor-trailer tire. Therein was the promise: Beyond this door, you could peep in upon the infinite, all for the price of a 12-and-a-half pieces of Bazooka bubblegum.

Madonna Boots took my hand, out of fear, as we approached. Ironically, I swelled with confidence and felt absolutely bulletproof as I led our way inside, as though the hundred-pound, five-foot-maybe-nothing golden-haired wisp attached to me were a suit of armor and bejeweled crown at the same time.

As long as there was a girl with me, I wasn’t in Peepland because I had to be. I was there just, you know, for kicks. That gave me one up—the only one that mattered—on everybody else in the joint, who appeared to just be blurs of business suits peppered with darktown strutters in tattered army coats speeding in and out of wall after wall of narrow red doors.

It was bright inside. So bright. Flashy. Whirling. Hot. Neon quarters spun along the upper walls while neon hussy legs kicked. Mirrors lined every available surface, giving the glare something to glare off on and back out onto itself. It was like an orgy on circus train crashed into casino where an orgy was going on.

At the back, above a staircase, blinking arrow pointed downward. It beckoned to where there were

LIVE!

NUDE!

GIRLS!

We followed the scorching pink road.

Downstairs was even brighter than upstairs, accompanied by noise. Loud noise. Crazy noise. Pop radio station Z-100 blared from a stadium-worthy sound system, above which came sing-song siren wails:

“Come AWWWWWWWNNNN, Fellas!”

“Let’s GOOOOOO, Fellas!”

“Get INSIIIIIIIDE, Fellas!”

Those Live Nude Girls on the other side of all these doors were calling us fellas.

What a quaint term.

One mammoth fella sat in a little banker’s booth at the foot of the stairs. He had his own bellowing chant:

“TOKENS! Get your TOKENS! Don’t be muffuckin’ standin’ around! TOKENS! Get yo muffuckin’ TOKENS!”

Bootsy dug her fingers into my fist. She wasn’t scared anymore. She was … tickled.

We approached Grand Moff Token.

“How many?” he grunted.

I handed him a five.

“You want five dollars in tokens?”

“I-I don’t…”

“Take two dollars in tokens. Tip the girls with the rest. Go! Next! TOKENS!”

I took the eight coins and three singles and tried to figure out what to do next.

The bottom level of Peepland housed a circular floor-to-ceiling structure in the middle, and two semi-circular structures along the walls. Each of the round structures was lined with doors, in and out of which men popped. The women, I deduced, were on the other side.

Boots and I stepped into one of the doors and closed it. It was a booth the size of an upright coffin with a plastic guard covering a window at eye level. Below it glowed a slot for putting in tokens. I put them in. The shade whirred up and there they were.

LIVE!

NUDE!

GIRLS!

And there we were.

Peepland was like an aquarium, but there was no glass between you and the exotic creatures on display. Once that window raised, you had open-air air access to a half-dozen unclothed women, some of whom were being molested through windows by other customers, others of whom were sitting on the floor smoking and reading the Daily News.

Madonna Boots and I stood side-by-side, a-gawk.

A Puerto Rican face filled the window.

“Tipping?”

“No,” I said.

The face vanished.

A new face appeared.

“Tipping?”

The window shade buzzed and slid back down.

“Put more tokens in!” Bootsy demanded.

I did. The window went back up.

The first Puerto Rican face came back.

“You gotta tip, baby.”

I gave her a dollar.

“It’s two dollars, baby. Then you can touch. Top or bottom.”

“You can TOUCH them?” Madonna Boots squealed.

Puerto Rican Face laughed, walked away, and yelled to her cohorts, “There’s a GIRL in here!”

This time the Live Nude Girls gawked back at us, pointing and giggling.

A live nude black chick eyeballed Boots and said, “Are you a lesbian, baby?”

Boots surged past me, stuck her entire blonde head through the open window and sarcastically roared, “Yeah! And I’m hot for YEEEEWWWWW!!!!”

She pulled back in right in time for the plastic guard to roll back down.

“Fucking bitch,” she huffed. “Callin’ me a lesbian.”

I couldn’t believe it!

***

Mutually seeking to end the day and, with it, our entire relationship, on a high note, I walked Madonna Boots back to the Port Authority.

Upon departing, we didn’t hug. Madonna Boots just said, “Do something about your skin.”

She was always looking out for me, that one.

I walked off, newly armed—and permanently disabled—with the knowledge that for three dollars, you could grope live nude girl boobs and butts 24 hours a day at Peepland.  And it was probably like that at all the live peeps.

There were more than a dozen peep shows on 42nd Street alone, and nearly as many on each block of Times Square, plus all along 8th Avenue from Penn Station on 34th up to the high 40s. How many live nude girls worked at Peepland at any given time. I saw about six, and that was just one of three stages, so it must be about 20s.

So how many live nude boobs and butts, given unlimited financial restrictions, could a “fella” grope in one continuous pillaging of midtown Manhattan?

My plan was to go to Tad’s Steaks, get a groovy $2.99 leather-and-lard dinner, and do this math. Nature interrupted. I suddenly had to take a sick shit.

More than runaway teen prostitutes, more than kiddie-porn chickenhawks, more than dope pushers and 50-cent blowjob crack ladies—and way, way more than buses—the Port Authority Bus Terminal was known for the depravity of its men’s rooms.

Under the most refined of circumstances, any area where a man is allowed to openly apply his mitts to his dick will become complicated. Hence the invention (and necessity) of the now requisite guards between urinals (or, as comedian Jim Norton refers to them, “fun blockers”).

The Port Authority in the 1980s was the least refined of circumstances. Literally.

Alas, the Port Authority provided the only public restroom facilities in all of midtown Manhattan, so when you filled your bladder, you took your chances. But bladder, schmadder, I was in full colonic tumult and would have to venture into—yeee-gads—a Port Authority toilet stall. This was a first (and how I wish I could say it was a last).

I went into the closest facility and the stink hit like rotating sledgehammers to each nostrol. Anus and Clorox. Ancient and rotten. Just underneath, the instant-headache of amyl-nitrate poppers. Everywhere.

Eyes forward and feets not failin’ me now, I darted for the bowls. Fuck. Each stall was occupado. I had to wait. Commotion by the urinals caught my eye. 

One oily Third World reveler bubbled with glee as he manually engaged his foot-long neighbor. He gave me the repeated head tilt and cocked eyebrow that said, “Come on, join the fun. Plenty of illegal cab driver palm here for everyone.”

I looked down at the floor as a means of politely refusing the invitation. But then I looked back at the happy ball-handler doing his thing—and, even moreso, the other guy’s thing—because, come on, that’s something to look at.

Finally, a stall opened up. I hopped inside, shut the door, and peered into the commode and, there, gazed down unto a living history of man’s inhumanity to porcelain stacked pandemic-birthingly high above the rim.

Shit. Piss. Puke. Blood. Piss with bloody shit in it. Semen (with sperm and without). Condoms. Needles. Puke full of condoms and needles. Condoms and needles full of shitty piss-blood semen-puke.

Regardless, I had to contribute to the long and storied history of biohazardous defeat before me. Thusly did I carefully roll down my torn-jeans-and-longjohns combo squatted as far as I could about the pestilential pile and leaned forward enough to let fly my shit-pipe.

And let fly I did, spraying a diarrhetic topping upon that septic sundae that would have made any previous contributor proud, envious and/or hungry, depending on what particular circumstance let him to be utilizing a Port Authority toilet.

Relieved and eager to move on, I confidently wiped myself and tossed the soiled TP wads atop the mess where they stuck like Velcro-stripped balls in those dart games you’d get for Christmas in the ’70s.

And then, through sheer force of habit, I made one mistake I’d keep playing back in my mind in slow motion, desperately trying to will the action into reverse, but to no avail: I flushed.

What do you think happens when you flush a Port Authority toilet that’s been stuffed solid with a thousand different ingredients for biological warfare?

That is what happened.

The toilet contents heaved momentarily and then erupted skyward. I caught all the shrapnel full-on—solid, liquid and gas. Some of it even dripped down inside my combat boots.

I just laughed.

That was all there was do.

I had myself a fine guffaw, left the stall, gave a nod and a smile to the swarthy onanist society along the wall and went to Tad’s Steaks as scheduled.

From my table, I looked hard into the giant eye above Peepland. I had taken a peek that day into a universe of limitless possibilities. All it required was an adequate supply of the right kind of tokens.

I could get that.

And/or I’d die trying.

Either way worked.

6. LIFE ON THE FLIPSIDE
NBC, 1988

Twenty-three years after its single episode’s single airing, I think about Life on the Flipside almost every day. There’s no sane reason for this to be happening but, at some point, regularly, I flash back to my parents’ basement during the dark summer of 1988, watching NBC burn off this DOA pilot.

I hate that and I hate it.

Flipside, as the show was originally titled, was announced by Don Johnson’s production company as a sitcom vehicle for Ringo Starr, who was then the opposite-of-hot off his commercial campaign for Sun Country Wine Coolers.

The finished version, Life on the Flipside, seems very much created by and for individuals would declare Ringo to be their favorite Beatle.

Only Ringo’s not in it. Which, for sure, was for the best.

Now I love Ringo. Not only is he a Beatle, he’s The Funny Beatle, and he crafted one of the funniest, most godlike come-backs I’ve ever heard: when someone said, “How do you respond to people who claim you’re not a very good drummer,” Ringo replied, “I tell them I was the drummer in the Beatles.”

However, declaring Ringo to be your favorite Beatle is not unlike declaring Shemp to be your favorite Stooge.

It simply strains credulity, making one question the sincerity of the statement from even among the most likable and admirable of committed Stoogephiles, while also confirming, permanently, a desperation to be cute among the most construction-boot-to-the-bicuspids-inviting Stooge-fan fakers.

(Beatles-ranking-wise, the correct answer, of course, is that Ringo is the second best, with George and Paul tied for first.)

Life on the Flipside focuses on middle-aged rock star Tripper Day—yes, read it and puke—who doubles as a single dad when not selling out hockey arenas.

The anti-Ringo stepping in for Ringo here is British cipher Trevor Eve. Who? I don’t know either.

As Tripper, he looks to have pilfered his producer’s Miami Vice wardrobe and then rubbed his face all of Don’s johnson in hope that the pube-burns would visually approximate stubble.

Tripper’s kids’ name are exactly as clever an endearing as his own: vaguely Italian teen Sonny Day (Frank Whalley), blonde pubescent Better Bea Day (Traci Lind) and wee lil’ Shea Day (Jarret Lennon), named for his pop’s stadium show after which was conceived. Haw haw.

Support color comes in the behemoth form of roadie/guru Mr. Smith, played by Dennis Burkley, a staple of 70s and 80s TV sitcoms anytime a fat biker type was needed. Mr. Burkley boasts his own transcendent rocksploitation history, as well: he stars as psycho bassist-turned-rapist “Pig” in David F. Friedman’s trash classic Bummer!

But that was Bummer and this is Life on the Flipside.

Bummer.

Intended as the decadent cherry alight atop this bowel-cake is Michael Des Barres as evil, weasely manager/promoter Elliot Weedle.

I said it in 1988, and before, and I’ll say it now, and again: Why on fucking fuck do I know who Michael Des Barres is?

How has this glossy glop of negative matter functioned as a rock star for forty years while neither rocking nor being a star?

Why did his ex-wife become his wife in the first place? I’m talking about Pamela Des Barres, a backstage groupie who’s famous for doing to countless rock superstars every night what Rod Stewart was rumored to have done that one time that led to quite the stomach-pumping and all manner of nasty talk that only went away once the myth morphed into Bon Jovi.

I know Michael Des Barres was in a failed band called Detective. I know he sang lead in the fake punk band Scum of the Earth on WKRP in Cincinnati (one credit I can heartily get behind). I know he took over for Robert Palmer in 1986 when the Power Station went on tour.

And I am properly disgusted with myself for knowing these things.

But I ask you: WHY do I—or you, or anybody—know who Michael Des Barres is.

Well … we do. And he was in Life on the Flipside.

As to why I think about this ditched pilot episode daily, I have even less than an idea than I do regarding Mr. Des Barres.

It has to do, a lot, I think, with the slimy little kid playing Shea Day.

I am quite fond of children in general and I never like to point out anyone’s unattractive qualities (let alone a six-year-old), but sunken-eyed, oil-mop-topped moppet Jarret Lennon (think of the first Chris Partridge, only more … from hunger) did a lot of TV in the late 80s.

Seeing this poor tyke always got me clamping my jaw tight and thinking: “Gosh … if this is what his post-toddler-hood looks like, I shudder to contemplate the puberty that awaits him.”

Life on the Flipside showcases young Mr. Lennon front and center during a tantrum scene where he rips into his old man and punctuates the tirade by running off after yelling: “David Bowie puts on a better live show than you!”

Flabbergasted, our man Tripper Day then seeks council from burly redneck Mr. Jones, explaining, “He said David Bowie puts on a better live show than me!”

Mr. Jones waits a side-splitting comic beat and then drawls, “David Bowie DOES put on a better live show’n you!”

I hate that exchange beyond description. It spooks me. As noted, I think about it daily. I hate it for simply being, and I hate that I’ve for so long had to hate it.

In fact, I hate it so much, I can only love it.

Of further note regarding Life on the Flipside is that another of its producers was Amy Heckerling, director of Clueless and Fast Times of Ridgemont High, and that it was co-scripted by highly hilarious and deranged funnyman Ron Zimmerman, now the 60ish boy-toy of Cher.

Also, Traci Lind aka Better Bea Day, grew up to show off her Better B-cups in a couple of movies and even, in The Road to Wellville, her own Flipside.

Now, go:

7. DELTA HOUSE
ABC, 1979

Mad magazine saved my life when I was six years old. I exaggerate not here, as my earliest memories of suicidal depression date from kindergarten onward.

Then, at a 1974 flea market, I scored a shopping bag full of old Mads for a quarter and got a respite from that relentless post-toddler fatalism.

Pops McBeardo, my Vietnam vet Green Beret father, did not approve. To Pops, Mad was the product of irreverent “punks” created to subvert children and belch in the face of authority.

He was correct, of course. We just differed (then and now) as to whether that was (and is) a bad thing.

Even more contentious was my second signal that perhaps soldiering on past first grade might hold some promise: Saturday Night Live.

Pint-sized insomniac that I was, I caught the original broadcast of the third episode and instantly got hooked. Need I even point out that John Belushi was my immediate favorite?

As my childhood dribbled on, I grew more depressed and despondent and hostile and, therefore, more dependent on Mad and SNL for relief.

Pops, in turn, blamed these sources of aid and comfort for making me the way I was.

It rushed to a volcanic head in the summer of 1978, as I turned 10, and National Lampoon’s Animal House erupted among us.

My experience with National Lampoon, to that point, was a couple of freaked out flip-throughs in the magazine section at the Route 35 Shop Rite in Hazlet, New Jersey.

Quick enough, I learned to go directly to the “Foto Funnies”, mentally photograph the black-and-white boobs therein, and put it back on the top rack. I’d get there. In time.

A movie, though, with my comedy hero. Where the boobs would be in color. And moving around. I could hardly stand to wait a second, let alone the better part of a decade. So as each of my older relatives and teenage day-camp counselors saw Animal House, I quizzed them for details, even keeping a notebook, where I more or less accurately construed the plot and all the major gag points.

Imagine my stupefied ecstasy, then, when out of nowhere, I saw a promo for Delta House. Suddenly, there would be a sitcom version of Animal House with most of the original cast and even an interesting Belushi stand-in: Josh Mostel, son of Zero, of whom I was a lifelong fan (which is as powerful a testament as any to my 1970s New York City incubation).

The trick would be getting past Pops when Delta House premiered one Thursday, but that was easy enough. We had a tiny black-and-white Zenith in the basement. I volunteered to walk our Akita after dinner and, once I got back, slipped downstairs while he fussed over the dog, threw a blanket on top of the TV and myself, and inserted my transistor radio earplug into the side of the set.

The show came on. There they were! D-Day! Flounder! Hoover! Dean Freakin’ Wormer! A groovy pseudo-’60s frat rock theme song! Bluto’s brother, “Blotto”! The Delta House itself!

And then, Christ … that fucking bullshit show fucking sucked.

Keep in mind that I was ten and Delta House was essentially bringing my dreams to life (minus the boobs, of course): here was the Animal House gang in my house every week. And, still, I knew that each and every episode was, as Michael Jackson once said of what coated the walls of his jailhouse restroom facilities, “doo-doo feces.”

Delta House was (way) more feeble-minded than The Brady Bunch and driven by (way) more ludicrous plot devices than Gilligan’s Island, minus the charm of those program’s joke-world contrivances—plus the fact that they were created for kids.

And I was a kid, so I knew stupid and queer when I saw it. Blotto, for example, showing feats of strength by bench-pressing a TV while Flounder sat on it—for ten uninterrupted minutes—defined stupid and queer. Most unforgivably, it was unfunny and stupid and queer.

In fact, the rival networks’ Animal House rip-offs—Co-Ed Fever, which aired once on CBS and NBC’s Brothers and Sisters—were infinitely more amusing than Delta House. And they were appalling.

Still, I faked it. I raved about Delta House at school. I repeated the routine of sneaking to the basement to watch even after ABC switched it to Saturday nights. From January to April 1979, I lied and lived with the lying.

Then Delta House was gone, the victim of an inevitable ratings Waterloo, and forgotten by the world but not, of course, by me. In hindsight, I started to wonder if perhaps, as with my early viewing of SCTV, Delta House operated on a comedic plane beyond what my fifth-grade sensibilities could entirely process.

After all, Blotto bench-pressing Flounder, in the meta-world of Mellonville where it would appear as an impossibly idiotic sitcomification of a taboo-shattering R-rated comedy, would be brilliantly hilarious. Perhaps it was just a case of abstract thinking capabilities not yet on full-firing capability.

Reading If You Don’t Buy This Book, We’ll Kill This Dog, National Lampoon publisher Matty Simmons’ memoir, only fueled my hind-sighted hopefulness. He points out there that the pilot was written by the original Animal House team and that Nat Lamp all-stars on the order John Hughes, Ted Mann and Tod Carroll scripted subsequent episodes.

Simmons claims the show simply fell victim to network standards and that it went out with a sterling reputation. “People were thanking us for bringing physical comedy back to television,” he writes.

Sometime in the early 2000s, I came across a bootleg DVD of the entire run of Delta House episodes at a horror convention. At last, I’d find peace.

Need I even tell you how much more dire Delta House is than I remembered it?

It is. And it’s worse than you can even imagine, too.

It’s incalculably inferior to Fast Times, the pallid CBS version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High that cropped up momentarily in 1986 and even more congealed by brain death than the (actually, kind of amazing) Fox network Revenge of the Nerds pilot.

To watch Delta House is to see cocaine vomited onto your TV screen from the inside. It is beyond amateurish and beyond inept to the point of causing stress. One can only wonder: at the moment that some studio fiend looked up from his desktop snow-bank to deem this bilge air-worthy, were there no adults in charge of Hollywood and, by larger extent, the world?

Still, Delta House never reaches a nadir of incompetence that breaks through to any manner or pleasure, perverse or otherwise. It’s too fatally boring.

Allow me to run down:

• Episodes focus mostly on the largely silent D-Day as he does … nothing.

• The characters mug, rarely speak and just sort of saunter around the set.

• The cheapest of laugh tracks punctuates the inactivity in staggered, but fairly constant bursts.

• Slapstick set-ups seem to occur, but not really (let alone do they have any payoffs).

• Dean Wormer growls.

• Skinny, very ’70s California blonde Michelle Pfeiffer—a highly different creature from the “bombshell” figures of the show’s 1962 setting—wanders past playing a character called, naturally, “The Bombshell”.

• … and then it’s over.

That’s it. Fifteen times. Delta House.

And so Delta House, to its core, is an entirely unlovely and unlovable thing. But, as with so much other fecal deluges polluting my personal history and always-on consciousness, fondness for it exists because, as described above, it is “mine.”

It felt like they made Delta House for me. They failed. I tried to cover for them. I tried to justify the lies as time marched on. Eventually, I came to grips with the barbaric reality.

Time wounds all heels.

My obsessive/compulsive association with “boob” and “tube” likely commenced in utero and it flourishes to this very keystroke, albeit not in the guise it took most deeply in my formative years: that of the half-hour situation comedy.

Aside from the Sunday night Fox cartoons (and, if I’m around, The Office), I presently view no primetime network funny fare except by happenstance.

This just sort of occurred over the past decade or so ago.  And if you’d known me up to say, the Seinfeld finale, you’d recognize this as an apocalyptic change of habit.

As for my favorite sitcoms, meaning the ones I think are genuinely good and funny, there are few surprises: the aforementioned Seinfeld, The Abbot & Costello Show (from which Seinfeld was conceived), All in the Family, Bosom Buddies, Bewitched, Addams Family, Munsters, The Partridge Family, Hogan’s Heroes, Green Acres—all your expected answers.

For much of my life I had a complicated relationship with The Brady Bunch.

As a kid, I genuinely thought the show was stupid and unfunny, but I could not NOT watch it twice every day, three times if I was home sick from school (as the Bunch aired at 9am, 5pm and 6pm on channel 5 on weekdays throughout the 70s, and then for a solid hour on Saturday afternoons).

Around the time that the Lunachicks released “Jan Brady”, I surrendered to simply, non-ironically loving the story of the lovely lady (and her bohunk second hubby with SUCH a delish secret!).

The lowest-profile sitcom that I will forever champion is It’s Your Move, which pitted Jason Bateman against the future next-door-neighbor from Married With Children (who was dating Jason’s mom, played by Caren Kaye of My Tutor) in a stunningly inventive battle to ruin one another’s entire universes week in and week out.

It ran one season, 1984-85, and I’m often nicely surprised by how many people remember it, in particular the brilliant “Dregs of Humanity” episode (and no, no, nooooo, I ain’t no Arrested Development fan).

Small Wonder, of course, is a meisterwürk of genius in a league by itself that would require a hundred doctoral dissertations to properly begin to analytically appreciate.

One severely obscure show that I’d love to see now is No Soap Radio, an attempt at Monty Python-style surrealism that aired for a few weeks after Bosom Buddies in 1982. Clips exist online. They’re pretty dopey, but No Soap was, and remains, one of the goddamndest things ever broadcast when everybody only had about six channels from which to choose.

Another two in the running got eliminated by being, respectively, a little bit too legitimately funny and a little bit too actually shitty—Silver Spoons and Out of This World, in that order.

Today, though, I come to … not quite celebrate, but rather illuminate a dire near-dozen sitcoms to which I have been and, to varying degrees remain, profoundly attached.

None of them are good. Each of them is perfect. And their presence in my skull, and soul, is great. And deep.

Let the countdown commence:

10. MALIBU, CA
Syndicated, 1998-2000
All I ever called this show was “The Kids on the Beach.” It’s a perfect summation and, had they gone with my utilitarian title, instead of a mere two seasons, Malibu, CA might have run as long as perhaps three, maybe even three-and-a-half. But probably not.

Modeled on the TNBC prototypes (Saved by the Bell, California Dreams and the forgotten plea for racial homogeny, City Guys), Malibu crashed the morning-programming bash about a half-decade past the party getting called on account of everyone growing their final pubic hair.

The premise was teenage fraternal twin brothers move from New York City to the titular coastline to help run their pop’s surfside malt shop.

Local color included neo-Spicoli Murray (Brandon Brooks) who riffed on the drug-free stoner surf-dude archetype by adding proto-emo eye makeup.

There was also, notably, balloon-bosomed beach bunny Traycee, played by child pageant queen turned Playboy centerfold Priscilla Taylor. It’s really easy to find pictures of her boobies (I especially like the look of genuine distress in her faux-lesbo pose at right).

“The Kids on the Beach” aired early Sunday mornings in New York and mine were the only eyes ever laid upon it. I was in my 30s by then. And sober.

I don’t suppose I could have in any way been more opposite at that point than a “Kid on the Beach”, but somebody, somewhere would have to someday pay proper homage to Murray’s guy-liner.

*******************************

9. THE UGILY FAMILY
ABC, 1980
One of the profound annual joys of my childhood was when TV networks used their summer schedules to air pilot episodes of series on which they had passed.

(Look, I got whatever non-misery I could wherever I could back then.)

NBC sporadically assembled four sitcom episodes into anthology “movies”, while ABC normally had regular slots for pilots throughout the swelter season. One-hour pilots aired on Mondays as “specials” while half-hour editions typically followed reruns of hit shows or, in 1982, on Saturday nights. That was where I came across The Ugily Family.

Actually, I first “came across” TUF the previous Sunday, while flipping through the Daily News’s weekly TV supplement and being struck by a photo of Al Molinaro surrounded by a wife and kids that made him look like — (let’s see… who’s a good circa-82 gorge-o to invoke here?… ah!)—Susan Anton by comparison. Being as kind as possible, one might describe these peoples’ appearance as “ethnic.”

Compounding the shock of the image was the title of the show, which I plainly read (as it was no doubt intended) to be “THE UGLY FAMILY.”

This I had to see!

Happy Days was still going strong in ’80, so it seemed odd that Al might attempt a spin-off. Had he learned nothing (like the rest of us) from Mr. T & Tina, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita’s legendary 1976 Hindenburg for which he walked away from Arnold’s?

And it was not likely that there’d be a “Mr. Miyagi”-style big-screen role for the once-and-forever Murray the Cop several years hence, either.

More than that though, the prospect floored me that this group of actors was volunteering to be labeled, perhaps forever if the show took off, as THE UGLY FAMILY.

Puberty loomed for me in ’80, and the preadolescent uglies had set upon me fast, ferociously and for what I was sure would be forever.

So I wanted no part of announcing my own hideousness to humanity any more than I had to by merely facing the world every day.

Alas, as I settled in front of the tube on hazy July Saturday at 8pm, like all the cool kids do, I learned that “You-JEE-Lee” was the correct pronunciation: “The You-JEE-Lee Family.”

Like the aforementioned Malibu, CA, the Ugily premise was standard fish-out-of-water—or more specifically, baccala-out-of-New-Brunswick—with our oily, kinky-haired heroes relocating from New Jersey to Southern California.

Once there, the Ugilies met their human-surfboard neighbors, the Bings, headed by iron-jawed ’70s television staples Lyle Waggoner and Elaine Joyce.

Kids today will never know the pleasures of such third-tier TV celebrities like those titans: too faded to be asked back for another Love Boat shot, just right to sit it on The Match Game (albeit most likely the daytime edition). That’s their loss—the stars and the kids alike.

Daughter Susan Ugily (Susan Elliot) physically brought to mind Rhea Perlman, but crossed with diarrhea. She fretted about how she’d fare in an upcoming “disco sand-dancing” competition. This being a sitcom, Susan won the contest. And another disco sand-dancing lie was perpetuated upon the public.

The Ugily Family aired just that once and I’ve never met anyone else who saw it. I’ve asked. Believe me.

*****************************************

8. ALL THAT GLITTERS
Syndicated, 1977

My desperation to experience life beyond what was limited to kids  initially manifested itself in my refusing to sleep at night. Ever. As a result, I grew up intimately knowledgeable of Tom Snyder, David Susskind and, best of all, Joe Franklin.

My favorites, of course, were the countless movies of every stripe that ran across the dial until the near-dawn “Star Spangled Banner” sign-off. Channel 9, for one, ran a horror movie every night at 3am and, perhaps not coincidentally, was also New York’s lone TV outlet that broadcast 24 hours straight under the banner “9 All Night.”

For a while, in the wake of the brief Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman phenomenon (a show I watched religiously, frantically trying to understand—and failing, as an eight-year-old should have), oddball “sophisticated” sitcoms ran in late-night syndication.

None was odder—nor could conceivably have blown harder—than All That Glitters, a semi-sci-fi satire from Marty Hartman creator Norman Lear.

The show looked and played like a standard five-nights-a-week soap opera centered on a corporation, but its gimmick was that the gender roles were reversed: women moved and shook society while menfolk did household stuff and got that masters’ snatches wet.

Linda Gray, just prior to being Sue Ellen on Dallas, played TV’s first shemale on All That Glitters. I think the title was even a reference to her cock.

Now you’re picturing Linda Gray’s cock, aren’t you? Yes. You are. Is it nice? Did you give Linda Gray a nice cock in your mind? What about her balls? If not, make it a nice cock-and-balls. Why not? Shemale Linda Gray is your mental image, so give her a huge, succulent plantain-and-apple-sack now. Go ahead. She’s yours forever!

I hated All That Glitters. I still hate it. Yet I loved it. It felt like … mine.

The fact is that I forced myself to watch All That Glitters in the hope that its “sexually subversive” premise would result in something actually sexual on-screen.

That quixotic drive—to somehow, someway be there when, for some reason, TV went berserk and presented bona fide nudity—fueled, without exaggerating, 40-percent of my childhood undertakings.

I just realized that my dream came true, of course, with Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl, but we were all decades past Skinemax at the point, so … feh.

All That Glitters only served to further harden a cynical little boy into a man who didn’t even drop his chicken wing when a tit finally popped out on regular TV.

For shame, Norman Lear.

Ah, well. At least we got Linda Gray’s cock-and-balls out the deal.

Now.

*****************************************

TUNE IN NEXT TIME!

When the countdown continues later this week, you’ll  get down with the clowns of Delta House, and sell your soul for a single season of A Year at the Top!