The Kid Stays in the JPEG: Chapter Two

The scene: a hot September evening in 1978. Gertrude Stein was cooling her heels in my Hampton beach house, having left Paris after a lover's spat with Alice Toklas over whether a lion or a bear would win in a fight. Ordinarily, I brook no interruptions in my daily routine of "Post, Drink Scotch, Harass the Help, Drink Rum, Post Drunk, Collapse in Corner", but that summer I was happy for the distraction. Y'see, the post well had run dry. That old bastard Writer's Block had taken up a summer rental in my brain, and he was proving harder to evict than a family of Puerto Ricans.

I was in the middle of writing some uninspired horseshit about a recent awards show telecast when I heard a knock at the door. Gertie and I went to answer the door and, you guessed it, there's Toklas in the doorway, right off a red-eye from De Gaulle. Before you can say "Lost Generation", those crazy lesbians start going at it right there on my mud room floor.

I made a beeline to the door. If there's one thing my papa taught me, it's don't go near two expatriate lesbian writers having make-up sex. Besides, I needed a good head-clearing, and my Mexican connection Rodrigo would be starting his evening right about then.

*****

I pulled up to Studio 54 at 1 in the AM. Steve Rubell motioned me to the front of the line and let me in. He pulled me aside as I was walking through. "Watch your back, Gerry. Capote and his crew are here and he's looking for a fight," he whispered to me as he pressed into my pocket the sheath of the 8" buck knife that he kept on his hip for dealing with Bianca Jagger.

This I wasn't ready for. Truman Capote had had it in for me ever since I said he had "soft hands for a man" on Mike Douglas. And this was no ordinary sissy either; he took his grudges seriously. He cruised around town with a scary gang of lit-school dropouts that called themselves the Cold Bloods. It's said that they'd made Tom Wolfe turn his white suit brown after a run-in the year before. It's not that I was afraid - I had pieces of guys bigger than Capote in my stool - but I needed some inspiration fast, and I didn't need any speed bumps along the way.

I found Rodrigo in his "office", as he liked to call the VIP section. Rodrigo insisted on doing all of his business at the club, which was a little strange, but far be it from me to tell the East Coast's largest distributor of peyote how to run things. He motioned me over to his table.

"They tell me you have the block which does not write, yes?" Rodrigo asked.

"You bet your ass I do," I confessed. "You got any magic cactus for me tonight?"

"I've got something better, mi amigo." He pulled out a baggy from his coat pocket that looked like it was filled with lead shavings. "El Escarabajo Loco. It's crushed shells of hallucinogenic rainforest beetles. Acgrandar tu mente."

"Will it make me forget about the lesbians in my foyer?"

I forked over a wad of cash for the whole bag and headed out of the club. Then, just as I was crossing the dancefloor to leave, I hear a high-pitched voice behind me say "I hear I have soft hands, Gerry." I turn around and there's Capote and a dozen Cold Bloods. The gang fans out around me.

"How you wanna do this Truman?" I call out as I see him pull a machete. "Traditional Freemason Killing-of-the-King rites? Tokugawa-era samurai bloodletting? Balinese Dance of Death?" I looked around and saw that the Cold Bloods had formed a ring around us. I knew what he had in mind. "The old Arapaho Indian Stick a Knife in a Guy Until He Dies trial by combat," I muttered to myself.

We squared off: the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's with a machete the size of a Buick, and me with a borrowed knife and a grin. I knew I couldn't take him in a straight mano-a-mano, so I figured I had to bluff him. I showed him my left, unarmed side and he took the bait, bellowing a Danish war cry. I quickly spun on my heel, caught his machete hand and drove Rubell's knife right into his gut.

The Cold Bloods shrieked in a panic and ran to their fallen leader. "Put that in your grass harp and strum it!" I yelled at them as I strode out of the club.

*****

The sunlight was just starting to peek over the ocean as I arrived at the beach house. I was relieved to find that the fat lesbian doorstops had removed themselves from my entry. I fired up the keyboard to edit the awards show post, but even after the night I'd had I still couldn't pin down the funny. It was time for the beetles.

I played around with the baggy for awhile, unsure of how exactly to take it. I'd wanted to get out of 54 so badly I'd neglected to ask Rodrigo about the proper method by which one ingests hallucinogenic jungle insect carapaces. I briefly considered writing a post on that very question, but I was already facing indictment for getting caught in Mexicali with four condoms filled with heroin-soaked cockroaches in my poop-chute, and decided that post might not sit too well with my legal team.

So I laid it out on a mirror and -slurrrrp- up the nostril it went. I sat back and waited a good half-hour for the walls to melt, but nothing was happening. Now I was starting to get angry. I even thought about going back to 54 the next night to give Rodrigo a taste of what I did to Truman. And that's when I heard the growl behind me. I turn around and sure enough, there's the Aztec jaguar-god Tezcatlipoca.

For a moment I feared for my life, but goddamned if that jaguar didn't start throwing out pure comedy dynamite. He rewrote my MTV Awards Night post into a discussion of a singer's posterior, and it wasn't long before the hit counter started lighting up like a hooker's face when a convention's in town. Viva Aztlan.

Where are they all now? The Cold Bloods got Capote to a sawbones and he was back at 54 that very night, snorting China White off David Bowie's thigh. He lost enough blood to forget all about our feud and we remain friends to this day.

Tezcatlipoca went on to become one of the top Hollywood script doctors for the next few years. When Matt Broderick challenged the evil computer to Tic Tac Toe in WarGames, that was pure Jaguar, baby. But try as I might to steer him clear, he got caught up in a Ponzi scheme that involved selling magazines door-to-door and lost everything. I told him "You could just buy a 10-speed, you've got the scratch," but he was so wacked out on toad-licking by then that he barely recognized me. He was last seen in 1987, checking into a Motel 6 in Tarzana with a Cub Scout troop.

The Kid Stays in the JPEG: Chapter One

I was 26 when I opened my first website. I'd been lurking around the fringes of the writing industry for years, and all I had to show for it was two failed marriages and a book of dirty palindromes I wrote in a drunken fog five years prior. I was staring down the barrel of 30 and every chamber was loaded, baby.

So picture the scene: 12:30 on a Friday night, and I'm slinging back mai-tais at Trader Vic's when who should walk in but Salman Rushdie. He and his crew belly up to the bar next to me.

"Gerry, I read your piece in the last issue of Harper's," Rushdie says to me. "I think you should issue a fatwa against your editor."

"Sal baby, you ain't kidding," I replied.

Rushdie starts to tell me a dirty joke involving the prophet Mohammad and a pig when it hits me like a ton of bricks: Max, you old devil, you should be writing comedy. A column or something. The whole thing was starting to come together in my head and I knew I had to get to a word processor before the rum wore off. I excused myself from the bar just as Rushdie was getting to the punchline, and told him he should maybe lay off the blasphemy a little 'til this whole Ayatollah thing blows over.

I banged out that first column in one Turkish coffee-and-methamphetamine-fueled weekend. I spent the next weekend decoding what I'd written, and it was dynamite. I faxed it off to my agent and waited for a sign.

And then the rejection letters came rolling in. Collier's passed, so did Harper's. Cracked told me it "wasn't cerebral enough." Highlights for Kids said it was too Goofus, not enough Gallant. Spin wanted more White Stripes references, and the letter from Mother Jones just read "Fuck off, kike."

I was feeling low. I was sitting on a comedy goldmine and the general store was all out of pickaxes. There was only one thing that could cheer me up: illegal narcotics. And I knew just the man to go to.

*****

I showed up at my old buddy Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Newport Beach bungalow on Sunday morning. I hammered on the door for five minutes before Sammy's haggard face stared at me through the doorjamb.

"Lemme in Coleridge, I need that Green Fairy pronto."

"You're interrupting me Max. I was writing something."

Turned out he'd been knee-deep in some poem called "Xanadu" about Genghis Khan or something. I wasn't about to let him off the hook, so I kicked the door in and started rooting through his liquor cabinet. Sammy, good sport that he is, decided a little absinthe couldn't hurt, and maybe he could finish his train of thought.

Glasses in hand, Sammy and I commenced to getting twisted. I told him about my column and the pencil-neck suits who wouldn't publish it. He asked me why I didn't put it up on the Web.

"Web? That's small potatoes. Sammy baby, these veins have printer's ink flowing through them." (I wasn't lying either. W. Somerset Maugham taught me how to mainline it in one blissful weekend the previous June.)

But Sammy couldn't be phased. He was talking up this blogging thing like it would turn everyone into F. Scott Fitzgerald. And maybe it was the absinthe buzz but this old crank was starting to make sense. Total creative control? Editorial power? Gigabytes of bandwidth?

I left Sammy in a green haze and headed back to my office. I pulled up Blogger, cut-and-paste and that was that. My future was calling me, and baby, you take that call no matter who you have to put on hold.

(Little epilogue to that story: Coleridge wouldn't take my calls for months afterward, claiming he'd completely lost the thread of his epic poem. Eventually he decided that "Xanadu" ended in a raging helicopter battle over the streets of Los Angeles. He sold the rights to Paramount and made a mint with points on the back end.)

*****

Next chapter: Max grapples with the heartbreak of writer's block, and reminisces about a memorable knife fight with Truman Capote.

Bride of Real Business Names

Wankers Country Store - Somebody needs to explain to these Wankers that you don't have to name your country store after your family name, especially if your name is generally associated with masturbation slang.

Dance Force - "ASSEMBLE! Roll call: the deadly cyborg Popandlok! The master of lightning, Electric Slide! And Lambada, the Forbidden Superhero!"

Women Kickin' It Inc - Hmm. Tae-Bo class? Drug rehab for the distaff gender? Soccer hooligans?

Rebel Mini Storage - "What are you storing in there Johnny?" "Whaddaya got?"

Gold Midget Market - In today's risky economic environment, you can't afford to take a gamble on investing in flesh-and-blood midgets when gold midgets will retain their value for years to come. Send away for our free prospectus and informational packet.

Crapitalism

You can go buy a Wicked Machine tee-shirt at Cafepress.com now. My store's at http://www.cafepress.com/wickedmachine. This tee is made of organic cotton fiber; I wanted one made from a 50% tears of angels/50% shards of a thousand broken dreams polyblend, but Cafepress's selection is limited. It's retailing for 20 bucks. Expensive? You bet. Hey, those Guatemalan slave children aren't gonna not pay themselves.