A Fortified look through the Past

I'm officially cheered up with my new favorite web site, Modern Drunkard Magazine.

I came across this gem when attempting to google up some repressed childhood memories through good ol' brand association (in this particular case, Gallo Tavola Red jug wine: good for staining the insides of mothers and coffee mugs alike, at least in my experience). I really just wanted a picture for the dysfunctional family scrapbook I'm compiling. (What do braided rugs, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, a haze of smoke, cheap jug wine and whiskey have in common? My living room growing up!)

I finally found what I was grepping for on Modern Drunkard but it's tough to come up with an appropriately specific query for the product "Tavola Red" when it translates in Italian literally to "red table wine." As you can imagine, that's like looking for "pilser beer": there's gobs of it. Plus Ernest and Julio became yuppie snobs in the 1980s and cut back on a lot of their more, well let's just say 'foundational' stock (thanks a lot, Gordon Gecko).

My vino suppler of choice never wavered from their roots. I speak, naturally, of Mogen David, whose motto, "when nature needs a little boost..." captivated me from the get-go. Well, it should have been their motto. MD did get a little fancy with all the different flavors of 20/20: give me basic grape - no plum supreme or ... well, whatever you have in stock, but I preferred grape. I'd like one day to tour their vineyard, or their chemical processing plant (I think they may be one and the same).

My MD 20/20 phase was short lived, mainly played out in my early 20s in the Navy and then only when we were sufficiently broke to be priced out of clubs and bars. We could always scrape up enough scratch for a cheap room - can't bring the stuff back to the ship! - and a few bottles of Mogen David's fortified fun ('Tuesday' was an especially good vintage, I recall).

The mall arcades and movies took on an enhanced hue with a few swigs of the grape stuff. Since we couldn't afford bars and clubs - would we be drinking purple turpentine otherwise? - we terrorized the mall denizens instead.

I do remember one horrifying Saturday night around 11:45pm when we realized it was almost midnight and we were out of MD. We staggered across a heavily trafficked six lane highway at full stride, racing to beat the buzzer when Virginia's Sunday blue laws ticked into place, and the drug store booze fridge ("best served chilled") was padlocked until Monday. That would have put a real crimp in our Saturday night. We did make the cut but ended up dropping half the six bottles we purchased in our drunken glee (polishing off the others as we stumbled back toward the mall).

Sometimes we mixed it up and substituted 20/20 with Wild Irish Rose (WIR). WIR was an appropriate acronym as that was precisely the sound reverberating through your head the next day after a night ingesting that putrid shit (WWWWIIIIRRRRRRR!). When our first two choices weren't available, we just kept going down the list: Thunderbird, Night train, etc.

For whatever reason, beer was never considered - not enough bang for the buck, so to speak. We'd save beer for clubs, bars, etc.

Ahh, yes - Good times, indeed.

We were stuck without car, money or confidence in anything. Told time and again that our kind was despised by the townies before we ever set foot on dry land there (we jokingly referred to the town as No-fuck, Virginia). On top of that, we had the mark of the beast, the scarlet letter: our bad haircuts with the telltale taper above the collar, marking us as military. This was 1984 in a town where the younger locals grew their hair long precisely to 'clarify' such things. Some of the more creative among us attempted to wear "civilian" wigs, but that just made you look as desperate as we all felt anyway.

Wandering the highways and byways of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in groups of three, four, five with shitty clothes and pasty complexions borne from months in the bowels of floating gray prisons.

No wonder we became wine-o connoisseurs. Sort of a very low rent East Coast Sideways running on an endless loop, with the Military Circle Mall and its surroundings substituting for northern California wine country.

Yes, revisionist history is a fine thing, whether political or personal. Of course. Just like Sideways. Definitely. Memories should be like cars: you get to trade them in on new ones every so often. The depreciation rates, though, will vary.

Shoeless Billy Mays

Originally posted August, 2009

Say it ain't so, Billy ... Coke? Meth, I could see (it's the people's drug, after all, and you were nothing if not a man of the people).  But elitist coke?

Could it be the rat-ah-tat-tat, slam-boom, loud and superfast patter was not nature's gift to you, Mr. Mays?

Man. Bummed.

This is for me like finding out Joe DiMaggio was corking his bat!

If Billy could be seduced by the dark side where does that leave the other pitchmen and women?

Are any of them clean?

ShamWow Vince?   The Snuggie Lady?   The Liberator Catheter 'Cath' Chick?  Billy's partner Anthony?

Do the television advertising executives need to institute mandatory drug testing?  (I mean apart from the ones already in place for legal drugs a particular shill might be hawking.  When the Viva Viagra men's glee club force down those blue pills like they were tic-tacs, that doesn't count.)

This Mays-as-cokehead revelation could be just the beginning.

Next thing ya know, pictures will start popping up in the scandal rags of all our favorite pitch people gallivanting at the annual Infomercial Players Convention in Vegas, caught-on-camera snorting lines off a dead hooker's ass using Liberator Catheters as straws.

And then of course cleaning it all up with the help of some OxiClean and a few ShamWows.

It would end up being like the old Chicago Black Sox Scandal, only now 'as seen on TV.'  'The scandal with sleeves!'

Grainy home movie footage will follow - Paris Hilton-style - going viral on the net:

[Scene: Some Vegas Hotel Suite, final night of the Infomercial Shill Shabang Convention. Vince, Billy, Anthony, Snuggie Lady, and 'Cath' are bent over the king size bed, all wearing multi-color Snuggies and snorting blow through long catheter tubes, the dead hooker sprawled out below them serving as receptacle for their illicit consumption.]

Zoom in.  Assume Les Stroud of Survivorman is operating the camera. What?  Hey, he's got lots of camera experience!  And he knows how to deal with snakes and jaguars and bears, which might come in handy here.

Shamwow Vince is rattling on at hypersonic speed straight into the camera, nude except for his red Snuggie and his headset mike, pacing around all crazy-armed wild-eyed energy and dilated pupils: "Look at that mess. That's blood running out of my nose, mixing with the grey matter oozing from that dead hooker's head there.  It's soaking right into the carpet - that's gonna leave a mess (and evidence). Ya gettin' that camera guy? But with some OxiClean - wanna spray some there Billy? .. and a ShamWow, it sucks it all out - no muss, no fuss, no cops."

Then Vince pulls out his SlapChop and an Eight-ball and proceeds to chop them up a few more lines of Bolivian Marching Powder.  But only after getting into it with Anthony, who wants to use a Smart Chopper for the job instead, claiming it wastes less 'product' and results in a 'finer' drift of snow, free from the 'rock' left behind by the SlapChop.  Toe to toe, fisticuffs at the ready.  Gotta give it to them, even ripped out of their gourd these boys are loyal to the brands they so proudly represent.

The Vince/Anthony tussle resolved (both Choppers would be employed), the gang hunkers down for a few more snorts of coke and - what the hey, it's a party after all - a line or two of the finest Afghani smack.

Vince stands up again suddenly and half struts/half weaves toward the camera - you awake, Les?  His TV rap tattooed to his psyche, ol' Vince can't help but let his buddies know that like all things, this party is time-boxed: "If ya hurry, ya can have a taste - for the next 20 minutes, or until this hooker starts to smell, cause we can't be doing this all day, people."

'Cath' is already agitated by the other pitchmen and their wasteful use of her catheters - why not use a rolled up $20 like normal people?  Vince's sharp tone and clock watching have put her over the edge. "All day?!? We can't be doing this all day?!?   It's only 5am, ya hooker beatin' Eddie Haskell-lookin' shithead! - Now, I gotta go 'Cath'"  Vince doesn't back down from her.  "Not in here ya don't - in the toilet with ya, Cath, ya urinary tract wacked bitch!'

Every once in a while the Snuggie Lady pops her head out of the blue velvet 'Snugcoon' that envelopes her as she lay 'cross the sofa in the corner.  Just as quickly, she grabs another handful of pills from the candy dish and washes them down with a tug from the half gallon bottle of cooking sherry she keeps clenched in her fist.  The others know not to disturb her (or even to glance in her general direction). Oh, no - that wouldn't be wise: she'd been huffing Billy's Orange Glo all afternoon and is in no mood for socializing.

Enough fun and games, time to feed the hooker into the Magikan trash disposal system that Anthony and Billy had brought along for just this purpose. That'll tidy things up just right. Maybe a little 'energy booster' before cleanup - "Hey Liberator Chick, pass over another 'cath'!"

[End Scene]



Of course, this is all just wild speculation about a future that nobody wants. The consequences of falling down that slippery slope from high atop the Infomercial Celebrity Ego Mountain. I can only hope this scene remains firmly in the realm of fiction.

Consider it a forewarning - a cautionary tale, if you will, of the ultimate price paid when putting too much pressure on our heroes and taking away their P.T. Barnum-fueled innocence. For in so doing, our innocence shall be taken as well.

Vince and Billy have been tarnished by scandal, let's hope they don't take the whole ship down with them.

Four Horsemen

So I was just visiting my local pharmacy to pick up the usual monthly supply of happy pills when Nurse Ratched behind the counter apparently decides to test my prescription to make sure it's strong enough by fucking with my head, draining whatever vestige of optimism I had in the tank today (whether organic or brought-to-you-by-Wyeth):

Ratched (seated behind the counter): "What do you want?"

Me: "I'm picking up a prescription refill I called in yesterday."

Ratched: "It's today."

Me: "Excuse me?"

Ratched: "It's today, it's not yesterday."

Me (confused): "Isn't that always the case?"

Ratched: "It wasn't yesterday."

Me: "Huh?"

Ratched: "We don't keep them around."

Me: "I do this every month - can you check the bin?"

Ratched: "It's not there, we don't keep them around.  You'll need to call it back in."

Me: "Can you just check the bin?  If it's not there, I'll wait for the refill."

Ratched: "We're not taking waiters right now."

Me: "What?  Please, just check the bin."

Given the loopy nature of this non sequitur-laced exchange, I looked around expecting to see Milo Minderbinder (or perhaps Charlie Kaufman).  Instead, I found the Lord.

The man behind me was decked out in full-on Jesus attire, complete with long hair, beard, sandals and a dark afghan poncho that stood in nicely for a biblical-grade flowing robe.  He smelled biblical too, or so I imagined since I don't recall any mention of showers or deodorant in the good book.

Mr. J. H. Christ seemed sympathetic to my plight, but not to the point of using his godly powers to smite my adversary.  Maybe turn her into something useful like a pillar of salt or a pint of Cherry Garcia.  Clearly he was more concerned about getting some antibacterial crucifixion cream (damn rusty nails!) or perhaps some anti-psychotic medication to quiet the voices.  Maybe both.  He wouldn't want to antagonize the person standing between him and his meds, even if she might just be Lucifer's bitchy sister.

I turned back to the surreal exchange I was having with Her Satanic Majesty of Pharmacopia.  Before reengaging, I first craned my neck in an attempt to see beyond the glare of the evil eye she was shining my way beneath her obscenely thick, arched eyebrows.  No sign of any pharmacists working in back. Isn't it illegal to leave all these dangerous drugs solely in the hands of  Susie Cash Register here, without licensed supervision?  If I was the squealing type, I'd drop a dime on them to the DEA. 

But I just wanted - no, needed - my particular drugs, so back to the matter at hand.

Perhaps I was asking in the wrong way. Maybe she fancies herself some sort of Soup Nazi derivative (a Pharmaceutical Eva Braun).  Possibly I didn't follow proper protocol.  "No pills for you!  Come back in three days!  Next!"

So in the spirit of the Soup Nazi, I tried another tact: "Effexor, S. Buzzard, quantity 90, ordered 02/25."  No dice. "That was yesterday. It's the 26th."  

My last strategy was to just be annoyingly repetitious until she caved.

"Where is the pharmacist?"  "She's not here right now."   "Yes, when will she be back?"  "Later."   "She's at lunch?"  "She's not here."   "Can you please check the bin?  Please?  Please?"  "It's not there, it would have been put back."  "Okay, but maybe it was put back into the bin.  Can you check it?  Please?  Please?"

I was persistent and finally Little Miss Sunshine meandered the twenty feet down to the bin of prescriptions waiting to be claimed.  Lo and behold, mine was among them, as I had strongly suspected all along.  She seemed stunned.

"It's not supposed to be here.  They're supposed to put them back. You're lucky.  This time."

Now I know perfectly well that being one day tardy doesn't result in a prescription's expulsion from the pick-up bin back into the bottle (I don't even think they are legally allowed to put the stuff back).  I've been a week late lots of times when I called in refills from the road traveling for work.  Maybe with a new crew (I didn't recognize this evil witch), there are some new rules here.  Maybe they do put them back now. Maybe, this one time, something more was at work.

Indeed.  I looked back and Jesus gave me a knowing smile as if to say, "It is accomplished. You're welcome, my son."   Divine intervention?  Oh, God, though - that smell!  Christ needs a bath!

As if on cue, the Lord started convulsing in a fit of gags, coughs, half-heaves, and slobber, pulling out one of the nastiest "handkerchiefs" I've ever seen to mop up the excess "juice" spilling over into his beard.   Something else caught my eye across the front of his dark afghan poncho. Bugs. Lots of them. Little fuckers - like fleas - crawling free-range in his own little patch of Afghanistan.

The Jesus-did-it smile disappeared suddenly and his holy eyes rolled back into his head as he marched up to the counter.  He needed drugs of some sort pretty badly, that much was clear from his tone to her: "Ahh, mmm, Pick up, mmmehrerh, for Sid Marvin, Yes, err, emmmm, no waiting here!! Watch out now!"  I can only imagine what might happen if Sister (Un)Christian gives him any shit (the picture on the right might provide a clue).  She was staring back at him, wordless.  I wasn't waiting around for the big show.

I grabbed my meds quickly and hightailed it out of there.

I half expected to run into the Four Horsemen galloping down the antacid aisle as I hurried toward the front door.  At the very least I figured I'd spot Kirk Cameron and his Left Behind film crew hard at work by the photo counter, working their way toward the pharma apocalyptic epicenter in the back, careful not to step into the fiery pit over which my counter gal ruled with pitchfork in hand.


When I got back home I thought to myself, "Self, we need to change our pharmacy."  God and Satan can do battle there but I'm moving on.

Remember, though: Sid Marvin Saves. Amen.

Teasing Lies of the Marmota Monax

The gusting green glow

of a Spring-like mirage

lets loose a tsunami

through my tingled being,

melting the winter malaise

just a trifle.

This rush of life

wraps me in translucent

fever dreams

for a day of fire

until the beat down

frost of February

blows back into the fore,

coating me icy cream

again into hibernation,

threadbare to rigor

left to carry on the razor wind

howling at my door.

I'm bathed in the white flakes 

of supposed springtime sunshine

at temperatures frostbitten, 

wounded and bloody.

Picturing breeze blown laundry 

hanging from clothes lines drawn now darkly

long faded into the Kodachrome 

of bygone yellowing family albums.

Standing on the precipice 

of winter's ice scarred canyons, 

I reach across to the drifting tide of flowering

just out of reach.

-----

Still, it's but a March

'round the corner to

academic b-ball brackets;

to faux celtic drunk fests

by the Erin shamrock busload;

to the pineapple cactus

vampire bats striking in full swing.

It's but a shiver or three

from here to there,

but a shovel or four

of the white cold power

up my grill.

Meanwhile, chill.

Bee Stung Sensible

She's all frost blonde bee stung lips

and half frivolous shoes,

swaying, tripping, on the nod,

settling into my ghost horizon.

She whispers sour and warm

to my sweet icy edges,

contemplating a tender burn

of steely wool failings.

-----

The subway takes me back downtown,

she follows drifting on a tide

of corporate sweat

from the workaday bodies

stacked like cordwood on the F train.

-----

Cupid creeps stalking his prey

on Bowery north of Houston,

writing Valentine's Day poems

on the back of dead band flyers,

torn off telephone poles

and abandoned holy shrines,

blown haunting down Bleeker

after the spectre of Joey Ramone.

I toast them righteous

with a goblet full of glass,

in the end bloody doomed

to shit out the shards

into tenement toilets

of artists unbowed.

-----

Side stepped sick to my soul

down the alleyways of promise

past a rain tickled insolence

free of ethics and ideals,

I taste sulfur and circumstance

and the cyanide of seekers,

when all along she's merely bleached,

free of stingers and the stung:

tied off,

pushing a hot shot

into her hell bound panic;

surfing plasma,

left to fade.

Ice

Encased in a February

labyrinth of ice,

my spastic crazy chipping

at the melting warmth beyond.

I haunt my flash frozen

nightmarish winter dream,

a ghost of roads not taken,

a spineless spectre of bloodless flesh.

My boyhood filled with climbing trees

and kites strung taut against the sky,

I grew up to something else unsaid;

ground down to something less unseen.

-----

The ambiance of emergency

room chaos pumping out my stomach,

fruit of concrete glassine dances

down back alley homemade drugstores.

I'm out of phase with time and place,

wobbly on the hospital gurney,

until I take my blinders off

of ambulatory sanity

and drop back into luminescent

summers running through the sprinkler,

winters sledding, snow fort battles,

drunken, choking smoke haze household,

boozed and battered fish and chips

and cookie dough raw as the nerve endings

I gnaw on.

And on.

And on.

1983

Father time's goddamn Lunar calendar has shed its skin again and drawn another ring around my trunk, forcing me to symbolically drop into the musical fetal position of my early 20s. Well, very early 20s - 20, 21 to be exact. 1983.  The first year I recall being relatively happy most of the time.

Which is odd because I spent a good deal of '83 on what constituted a floating prison with 5000 other people, 4995 of whom I didn't know or, worse, really didn't want to know. Strangely, it might have been great because I'd finally felt free. Free of what? Of the 20 years that came before it, I guess. It was my first real job, I did it well, and it was interesting if morally abhorrent (thus began the compartmentalization of my ethics).

Maybe it was all the great music I could buy really cheaply there (for some reason, very few others on the ship cared for Nina Hagen, The Jam, Elvis Costello, etc. yet the ship's store always seemed to have cassettes of their albums available, marked down because they presumably couldn't get rid of them).

Maybe it was that I saw a bit of Europe for the first time: Italy, Greece ... well, Italy and Greece, anyway. Qaddafi and troubles in Lebanon put the kibosh on planned visits to Israel, Egypt and Spain that year.

Really, though, I think it was the four months at the beginning of the year I spent at the Navy Intelligence School and Oxymoron Emporium in Denver, Colorado. There wasn't a lot of Navy in Denver (that was Air Force country) and it was more like college than the military, at least from my perspective. Slam dancing Thursday's (New Wave night) at Thirsty's and Friday/Saturday (not New Wave nights, but we slammed anyway) at After The Gold Rush, both 3.2 bars where us under-21 types could drink. I saw Wall of Voodoo live and hung out with other New Wave aficionados for the first time. Good memories.

Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom and The Jam's Snap compilation have been getting extra heavy play on the iPod, my feeble attempt to ignore father time's clock ticking off another year, one more I won't get back. One step closer to the proverbial grave.

These two albums bring me back to a specific year - 1983, in this case - more than any other music that I actually enjoy. There are a great many tunes that dredge up strong memories of the past, specific pinpoints in time; however, in almost all cases, they are songs I at least vaguely dislike and rarely have purchased (except when the memory overpowers the distaste and I need to hear the piece of shit jingle to help get me back to the moment).

Elvis and the Jam bring it all back home.