I hang with Paradise City until around 3:30 A.M.. Part of me thinks that I should really try to party with them all night, because perhaps that’s when things will truly get insane. Maybe there will be a transcendent moment, complete with speedballs and hookers and an albino musk ox. But the larger part of me is tired and drunk and stoned, so I go to bed (luckily, I have my own room). The next morning, I see Dischner in the lobby and ask him how the rest of the night went; he tells me nothing really happened. I ask the same question when I run into Bobby Young, and he spends ten minutes telling me how the girls who came back to the hotel were nothing but “brain-dead cock teases.” He thought the evening sucked.
But not Randy.
Trask is sitting at the wheel of his truck, ready to drive us home on three hours rest. His version of the night is quite different. “It was a madhouse,” he tells me unspecifically, neither lying nor telling the truth. “You should have stayed up with us, Chuck. It was unbelievable. I’m serious. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
I nod. I agree. One way or the other, we all use our illusions. And I’m sure Axl would completely approve.
(an interlude to be named later)
As America’s best-loved semipro freelance conversationalist, I am often queried about my brazen humorousity. “How is it possible,” I am asked, “that you are able to extemporaneously lecture so effortlessly on such a myriad of complex topics? What is the key to your incisive, witty repertoire?”
It’s a valid question.
Certainly, there is a formula to being relentlessly dynamic. There’s a shockingly simple equation to being über-interesting, and it works with every subject imaginable.
The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible—but remarkably specific—“cultural accusation” (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary). Here are a few examples…
When talking about sports: “I mean, come on—you just know that Rodney Rogers is sitting in the locker room before every game reading Nietzsche, and he’s totally thinking to himself, ‘If Ron Artest tries to step to me one more time, I’m gonna slap jack his brisket, Philly style.’”
When talking about music: “Oh, let’s face it—we all know that if Rivers Cuomo makes one more album about the Cubism didactic, he might as well just give up completely and turn Weezer into a hobo-core three-piece.”
When talking about film: “Everybody in this room has seen Peter Bogdanovich at his worst, and everybody in this room already suspects that he probably sits in his gazebo and beats off to Pet Sounds five nights a week, so I think it’s safe to assume this whole era of the ‘Scarecrow Thriller’ is as dead as the diplodocus.”
When talking about politics: “That crazy Condoleeza Rice—who does she think she’s fooling with all that neo-Ventura, post-Dickensian welfare state pseudo-shit? If that’s supposed to be the future, she may as well stick the Q like the salt queen that she is.”
Do you understand? Do you see the forest through the trees? Do you not see what I am no longer not saying to you? If so—congratulations! Prepare to have sex constantly.
6 Ten Seconds to Love 0:71
“Merry Christmas, Juggalo.”
This is what he scrawled on the card, a little one-flap piece of construction paper featuring a picture of a Clydesdale standing next to a snow-capped conifer. It was attached to a Fuji videotape and handed to me in my favorite bar. I immediately knew what it was. “Thanks, Ninja,” I replied to the dashing twenty-four-year-old doctor who gave it to me. “You are my stone cold elf.” My doctor friend returned to his dart game; I proceeded to have four more drinks while listening to Dean Martin on the jukebox before getting into my car and driving home, traversing the empty, frozen streets of downtown Fargo. Winter nights in urban North Dakota are fascinating, because they resemble overcast summer afternoons: The painfully white snow has such a high albedo that it reflects the glow from streetlights with a remarkable intensity. You can drive without headlights at midnight, which is exactly what I did. It was beautiful. “I love Christmas,” I thought to myself when I arrived home from Duffy’s Tavern, just drunk enough to wrap myself in a terry-cloth robe and watch Pamela Anderson perform oral sex on Tommy Lee.
Every holiday season, I rewatch my illegally dubbed Pamela-Tommy sex tape. It’s sort of my version of It’s a Wonderful Life. There is no thrill in seeing it anymore, and certainly no prurient rush: It is probably the least arousing videotape I own, with the possible exception of Walking with Dinosaurs. However, it’s also the only “important” videotape I own, and it’s important because it shows how unsexy oral sex can represent what we want as a society (or maybe what we’re afraid to want). Everyone is willing to classify Pamela Anderson as a bimbo and a whore and an idealized version of why half the women in America loathe their bodies, and all of that might be true—but what nobody seems willing to admit is that she’s the most crucial woman of her generation, partially because we hate to think about what Pam Anderson’s heaving bosom means to our culture.
People freak out whenever you attempt to compare Anderson to Marilyn Monroe. In fact, I used to freak out when others have made that comparison, even though I had no idea why. I was unironically watching the E! network a few years back, and some forgettable bozo kept insisting that Pamela was a Marilyn for the nineties (this was either a retrospective on Baywatch or a promotional special for V.I.P., but I can’t remember which). Somehow, this bozo’s assertion made me vaguely angry, which is how I used to react whenever someone claimed Metallica was my generation’s Led Zeppelin.
My desire to protect Marilyn Monroe is inexplicable; I have no idea why I would feel territorial about the legacy of a woman who died ten years before I was born. Marilyn died young and lonely, so (I suppose) it’s impossible not to feel a certain sense of compassion for her—but it’s also hard to imagine anyone who benefited more from an early death. James Dean comes close, but it’s entirely possible he might have made a handful of good films in his forties, and beyond; it’s unlikely Monroe could have had any long-term career. Film revisionists have taken to insisting she was an underrated actress (mostly because of Some Like It Hot, Bus Stop, and Niagara), but it’s actually the other way around: So many people have retrospectively declared her acting to be “underrated” that she’s become overrated, simply because she didn’t make enough important films to vindicate her advocates’ claims.
However, Monroe was the most significant female figure of the middle twentieth century (cinematically or otherwise), and that had almost nothing to do with acting. Both physically and philosophically, Norma Jean was the incarnation of the early fifties sexual archetype. And ironically, that’s why that forgettable bozo on E! was right when he compared Monroe to Pamela Anderson, even though he’d never be able to explain why. Pam is the contemporary Marilyn Monroe, inadvertently illustrating which aspects of human desire can evolve (and which aspects never will).
I can’t seem to find a definitive source for Anderson’s physical dimensions. The numbers once ran at 36–24–34, but those obviously changed after her 1999 breast reduction. Her height is listed as either five-foot-seven or five-foot-five (although—oddly—never five-foot-six), and her weight is generally placed at 107 pounds. She has what women refer to as an “impossible body,” a claim that’s only partially contradicted by the fact that her body actually exists. There are scientists (goofball sociobiologists, mostly, and also Desmond Morris) who argue that men are visually (and one assumes unconsciously) attracted to the “two-thirds ratio” in nature, which is why the cliché dimensions for ideal women somehow became 36–24–36. Man’s affinity for this ratio supposedly shows up in everything he creates—architecture, auto chassis, the circumference of an Absolut vodka bottle in relation to its height, etc., etc., etc. This is an interesting theory, especially since it would seem to explain why male artists in the sixteenth century were attracted to obese women (one could argue that they were interested in the same 2/3 body ratio and simply inverted the modern-day proportions). Of course, this is a very male-o-centric theory to advocate: Guys would love to somehow prove they want to have sex with Pamela Anderson because of math.