Twist & Shout.
December 15, 2024
Madly dancing with your mother and brother, Meet the Beatles circles the turntable, its iconic sleeve lying on a bronze carpet next to the stereo. You’re not sure the song, Twist and Shout? The memory is faded. Like home movies before smartphones. Technicolor. Monophonic. Giddy.
Your mom is pretty, with super short hair like Mia Farrow or Twiggy. You and Jess wore it long like Beatles. You know this more from photographs than the memory itself. You wish it were more vivid, less fleeting. Five years old, you had no idea a revolution was sweeping the country. Who killed the Kennedy’s? Viet Nam. You only remember dancing. That it was giddy. Your father wasn’t there. Fleeting.
*
15 pounds overweight, maybe 20, pigeon-toed, a mop of brown hair you seldom combed, you have a favorite sweatshirt and loose fitting cords, from the Husky Collection at Sears. You didn’t care about appearances, not yet. You even tolerated correctional shoes. You were happy, in this brief lull, which constituted your childhood.
The impact your parent’s divorce had on you would come soon enough, in waves and aftershocks. For now you saw your father on weekends and that seemed good enough, special even, with its inappropriate Saturday night movies and boozy football parties on Sunday. Your mother was both easy and difficult to be around. She saw many doctors, went to group therapy. But she knew how to cook like a French chef and you knew how to eat. Her bouts with depression, fits of madness, you did not see it then. Or chose not to. Whatever she had done to scare your father away.
Yet, you were inquisitive in other ways, always wanting to know why. You liked to talk with adults and easily made them laugh. You got Woody Allen. You had a superb vocabulary and received high marks at school. Less physical and more sensitive than the average boy, you preferred nature to the man-made and pursued hobbies over sports. You collected rocks, raised guppies and caught butterflies, managed to find numerous species darting and flitting amid the small backyards on your block.
Your father was Jewish and your mother Catholic. But neither practiced their faith, nor pretended to, and so neither did you. Your folks were frantically creating the “Me” generation. Religion played no part. The only time you entered church or temple was for confirmations or a bat mitzvah. Like any kid, you couldn’t wait to leave. God wasn’t good or bad. God wasn’t anything.
You lived off Lincoln Park, in what was then called Newtown, only then it was an old feeling place, with rows of decaying apartments and two-flats, their facades crumbling and peeling, yellow and grey bricks stacked up from the sidewalks. Some had front yards, more just plots, comprised mostly of crabgrass and pissed-upon Junipers, or courtyards, hard packed with dust and rubble. After a vigorous rain, you found night crawlers there by the hundreds, collecting them for fishing or merely regarding them in awe. Hard ground saturated, they came from below to mate, sticking to one another like spaghetti. In a decade, gay people would transform the neighborhood, seeking community, and after them would come everyone else. But for now it was an uneasy mix of Latinos, Asians and a handful of others, like you. Bohemians. Nicer was just east, a two-block sliver of grand homes, opulent apartment buildings and modern high-rises facing Lake Michigan. Living so close, you took advantage of the park by the lake and caught perch from its shore, bringing stringers home to fillet and cook in hot oil. The lake was vast, like an ocean.
West of you was trouble, turf battled over by Latin Eagles, Latin Kings, and a hillbilly gang called the Simon City Royals. Most every garage was tagged with graffito. It got worse every block. When the Cubs nearly did something right in 1969, Wrigleyville was a war zone. Latino gangsters literally stood on the sidewalks taunting fans or worse. If there wasn’t a game there was no reason to be there. If and when you ventured that direction, to catch a bus or visit the arcade, you stashed lunch money in your sock and a few bills in your pocket to pay off the muggers.
You’d accumulated a hodge-podge of friends, misfits like you, who hid in books and hobbies, and still others more doomed by their circumstances. Some would join gangs or defy them, always fighting or fleeing. Together you were a group of electrons in an unstable atom. Catching fish in the lake. Avoiding being caught in an alley. God only knows what glue held you together. Comic books. Films. Music. But soon came liquor, pills and weed; those false prophets that caused you so much pain while pretending to soften it. And through it all, those alluring and delirious creatures from distant, unobtainable shores, sirens that beckoned you to this day: Women.
Still out to lunch. Here’s why.
June 27, 2021
Been over a month since I posted anything here. 45 days to be exact. In 15 years, this is by far the longest stretch between posts. I gave it a rest because, well, I’m not in advertising business anymore. Is anyone? So, even though the name of this blog was always meant to be ironic, it’s still misleading.
For the last 15 months, I’ve been working as a counselor at a treatment center for people with substance use disorders. I literally started on the same day the world shut down for Covid: March 15, 2020. I haven’t “worked from home” a single day during the pandemic! It’s necessary work and it makes me feel good doing it. Helping others. Me. Who’d a thunk it?
Reason number two I stopped posting is I’ve also been super caught up in my hobby keeping aquatic life. Nerdy. All encompassing. Awesome. If you’re interested check out my You Tube Channel: Lush & Salty Aquariums
Reason number 3 I stopped posting is more complicated. It’s not that I stopped writing. I do that all the time. A writer writes. But not all of it requires or deserves publishing. I’ll leave it at that.
I don’t know if anyone gives a shit whether I post another word. For the record then. Postaer-ity.
Until next time…
Out to Lunch!
May 14, 2021
Literally & Figuratively…
Whiz Kid
April 10, 2021
After Mt. Vernon, Madison was a revelation. Surrounded by three beautiful lakes, the campus was an oasis of cool, the nucleus of a progressive city also the state capital. The population could not have been more diverse. Music and the arts thrived. There were myriad places to go. Bars galore. The drinking age was 18.
Once again, you’d done little to prepare for the move and so had to settle on a dumpy apartment with designated roommates: a Polish factory worker’s son from Milwaukee, Arthur and an exchange student from Thailand, whose name you couldn’t spell even if you remembered it. Though you had nothing in common with either of them, they were both diligent students, reserved in temperament, hardworking to their core. You hardly saw them, wouldn’t know they existed if not for the occasional aroma of Thai cooking or Arthur’s booming laugh. Once in a while you shared a beer. But making friends with your roommates was not a priority. You were only interested in two things: writing and women. Drinking seemed a foregone conclusion.
You expanded your proverbial horizons, joining the two campus newspapers as well as helping to create one of your own, a music-focused magazine called the Mad City Music Mirror. You saw your name in print every week and often received letters about things you had written. An audience! Your career as a professional writer had officially begun. Reviewing albums and concerts and films. Someday you would be a journalist for Rolling Stone. It was the perfect job, allowing you to write perilous prose, drink with abandon, and meet scores of beautiful and scandalous women. Highlights from this period included reviewing two up and coming bands, The Replacements and Violent Femmes. If not for your glowing praise, who knows whether either group would have succeeded? Such was your hubris.
In reality, you mostly reviewed local talent, including a hair band called Whiz Kid. Whiz Kid played Lover Boy and Head East covers for drunken sorority girls and the men who loved them. For two bucks a head one got three sets of music. Like any novice, you rejoiced in ripping them a new one. You were not up on that stage but you had a typewriter, which was mightier than any guitar. You poked fun at their cheesy name, ridiculed the matching spandex outfits and blow-dried big hair. Employing every bit of your modest skills, laughing out loud as you wrote. When the story got published you put it with all the others, in a scrapbook showcasing your diabolical wit.
Needless to say, Whiz Kid did not share your sense of humor.
Soon after the article came out, you stumbled into the lead singer at a club. The man knew who you were and he was plenty upset. He asked why you had so cruelly laid into his band. Was being a dick part of your job description? Your inebriated reply: No disrespect, brother, but playing covers by Lover Boy is what sealed your fate.
The vocalist did not punch you. Instead he hit back with something you would never forget. The reason his band played shitty music, he said, was in order to get gigs, so he could make rent and support his wife and new baby. None of the bars in town hired original talent unless they had a following. Whiz kid was unknown. Therefore, he had to sing Working for the Weekend because that’s what 19-year-olds paid money to see.
You had no defense. Because you had no clue the very real life this man had been leading. Struck by his truth, you were ashamed. From that moment forward, you abandoned your desire to be a professional critic. Whiz Kid had been working for the weekend, literally every weekend, in order to survive. You had no right criticizing them for doing so. Your cruel review served no discernible purpose. Save for hurting a group of people.
In light of this revelation, you pivoted. Deciding to be a copywriter, a form you were already familiar with given it was your father’s vocation. You wouldn’t even have to change your major, communication arts. You studied radio, television and film, took an advanced course in screen writing as well as continued writing for all the newspapers. No one could call you lazy. At night, between hunting down women and getting your drink on, you also began writing the great American novel. As well as an award-winning copywriter, you were going to be the next Jay McInerney. You’d found your North Star: the hard drinking writer. You would romanticize and hold onto this identity for decades.
In addition to liquor, women were key to your newfound persona. Chasing them down became pastime. Disenchanted by uptight female students, you developed a fondness for blue-collar girls. The former required too much effort. You’d once dated a sorority girl and spent weeks of nights trying to get past first base with her, which never happened. Cocktail waitresses had no such inhibitions. They seemed to want what you wanted, a few rum and Cokes, MTV, and sex on the carpet. You could leave at 4AM, without drama. Maybe you’d see them again. If not, it didn’t matter. Here was a contract you could get behind.
Iowa
March 20, 2021
Distracted that hot summer, you’d done the minimum to prepare for college in the fall. At the last minute you ended up accepting the lone invitation you’d been lucky enough to receive: from a miniscule liberal arts school in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. It had fewer students than your apartment had tenants. Sure, why not?
Arrived at Cornell you firmly believed it was the real you who showed up: the intellectual poet, able to drink and fuck all night and write about it the next day. Students and professors alike would be captivated by your artistic soul. You’d have a diverse peer group, one that would appreciate you in all your complicated glory.
You almost pulled it off.
Not surprisingly, you adored collegiate academics, taking to literature and philosophy like a fish to water. Math sucked but you’d always hated that subject anyway. Besides, you were going to be a successful writer. You’d pay an accountant to count all your money.
You wrote sordid poetry, reveling in how it provoked your less sophisticated classmates. You were a provocateur, like Bukowski. Now here was a role you could relish.
Despite coming from the big city, you enjoyed the smallness of the school as well as the town. In Mt. Vernon there were only two bars, one for the students and the other for locals, mostly farmers who wore their dirty tractor caps with pride. Having had ample experience navigating dichotomies, it was easy sliding from one base to the other. In many ways, you preferred the local atmosphere, basking in its authenticity, developing a growing appreciation for real women who worked for a living as opposed to the entitled girls who didn’t.
Alas, the good vibes would be short lived. Turns out many of the students were not as keen about your iconoclast personae as you were. Rather than changing your game, you glommed onto a pair of likeminded outsiders: a super rich Mexican named Ricardo and a fellow Chicagoan, Billy from the tough streets of Bridgeport.
In your eyes, you were The Three Amigos! The Three Musketeers! Others undoubtedly saw you as The Three Stooges. But so what? As a trio, you reveled in the virtue of your minority status. Applying it to captivate the virtue of others. The Three Amigos created a makeshift gambling empire, taking bets on horse races tallied from the newspaper. Drunk and high, The Three Musketeers stole a car in Iowa City and for good measure rolled it straight into a pond in the center of campus.
These acts endeared you to no one. But it was your seduction of a pretty coed that ultimately caused you the most grief. A tiny campus, word spread fast that you’d taken advantage of this poor girl. Soon, you were blackballed from parties. A footballer threatened you, claiming he’d kick your ass if he ever saw you with her again. Not an issue as women no longer wanted anything to do with you. In your dorm’s bathroom someone composed unflattering graffiti about you, highlighted by an equally demeaning portrait. You had long hippie hair, a sleazy mustache and an earing. Behind you was the skyline of Chicago, lest anyone be confused.
Clearly, you’d overstayed your welcome.
Next year, you would attend the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a far bigger, famously liberal, more edgy environment, where your kind, whatever that was, could flourish.
The Happy Soul Industry
The Last Generation
Gods of Advertising 
