First Tango in Paris

Because remembering is exquisitely, um...uncomfortable.

Me during my Prince “phase”. Photo by Emma Porter

It was like that scene from Sexy Beast where Ben Kingsley just demands, repeatedly, that Ray Winstone “do the job”. Just without the overt threats. That is, periodically, over the years, the dearly departed Adam Parfrey, son of character actor great Woody Parfrey, would ask/inquire about my readiness to do a memoir. But Parfrey was smoother. A lot smoother.

“You should really do a memoir.” Or, later, “maybe it’s time for you to do that memoir,” this latter one moving as it was from the theoretical memoir to the assumed memoir and occasioned by some wild story or another I had told him.

But still I demurred.

“No one wants to buy what I’m selling, man,” I laughed. Even though that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.

“You’d be surprised,” he’d say and then months later, or maybe a year, he’d take another swing at it. He started sending me some of the memoirs that his publishing company Feral House had done, most notably Harley Flanagan’s Hard-Core: Life of My Own. But Harley had just been pictured in full-page New York Post glory, tied to a chair, stab wound in his leg, flipping off…well, the world.

There’d be no similar PR bump for just about anything I did that wasn’t so huge it’d overshadow just about anything I’d be writing about. That is to say, whatever it would be that got me in the New York Post, unlike Harley who was innocent? Yeah…I probably did that shit.

“I mean all of the massively degenerate things I’ve done with my penis!!! WHO wants to hear about that?!? WHO?!?!?!”

That wasn’t it either though and when Parfrey died, unexpectedly and untimely, I stopped thinking about the memoir but I didn’t stop thinking/feeling that somehow I had failed him. This was a familiar sensation. He had asked me to contribute something to his Apocalypse Culture series and I had a doozy. A bestiality survivor’s group.

That is, people who had been raped where the rapists used animals to rape the victims. In this instance girl children whose fathers had the family dog rape them when they got tired of doing it themselves. This whole horrid circus occurred in the trailer where one of the survivors lived. Her father would invite his friends over to watch. It was, and remains, horrific, and cut especially deep given that I am a father. Of, exclusively, daughters.

So I refused to write about it. I would use the word “couldn’t” but I could have. Parfrey was persuasive and tried to convince me that it was somehow necessary but I didn’t want it in my head, in the world, or more specifically for me to be wedded to it. So, yeah, I wouldn’t. Even though I felt like I should. Tough guy that I am.

But with Parfrey passed, I believed I was free.

“We gotta get you on that memoir.” It was Christina Ward. From Feral House. Over the years I had actually written other stuff for them most notably the foreword to a bio on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

“Memoir?” Playing stupid had always worked before.

“Yeah, you got to get that memoir done. I’ll be in San Francisco. You can meet me for dinner and we’ll talk about it.” Christina wasn’t fucking around and on meeting her, given that she is about my height, she was also not to be fucked around with. So I met her for dinner and I finally spilled.

“It’s all the fucking.”

She put her fork down. We had a small table outside. It was a chill San Francisco night but COVID concerns had us outside and sitting by a heat lamp. Around which those waiting for tables had gathered. Suddenly, not listening. No, not at all.

“The fucking?”

“Yeah, no one wants to read about the fucking, not the people I was fucking, not the husbands and boyfriends of people I was fucking and definitely, and most specifically, none of my daughters, I imagine, are anything but disgusted by even seeing those words ‘father’ and ‘fucking’ in the same sentence.”

“We don’t care about the fucking.”

“I mean all of the massively degenerate things I’ve done with my penis!!! WHO wants to hear about that?!? WHO?!?!?!”

“Not me.”

“The orgies, the threesomes!!! Did I mention the time I was having sex in the middle of Blockbuster Video?!!? Or, or…the thing with the Secretary of State’s daughter…or…”

“Wait…what?”

“Hunh?”

“Look…your perspective on…other things, I think, would be pretty compelling.”

“I don’t have to talk about the threesome with the Nobel Prize winner’s kid?”

“What?!?”

“Nothing.”

“No. You were in New York when punk hit. Then hardcore. Then all of the people you’ve dealt with in publishing. You’re a fascinating guy.”

While it’s likely that flattery does, indeed, get you everywhere, she was starting to make sense. Andy Warhol, Charles Manson, Allen Ginsberg, Lydia Lunch, Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Ian MacKaye, Anton LaVey from the Church of Satan, Henry Rollins, the guys who tried to rape me when I was 13, the guys I saw raping other people, almost murdering a guy who tried to rape a friend of mine, dirt bags, juice heads, junkies, murderers, serial killers, creeps and fuck ups all.

This, and an unquenchable thirst to revenge myself on the world. Yeah. I was seeing this.

Like Bukowski once said “no one who was ever worth a damn” got to write “in peace.”

“I imagine it could be a really uplifting thing.” Christina didn’t really say that part but it makes me laugh to imagine that she did. Because, had she said it, she’d have been totally correct.

But uplifting for me is very different from uplifting for you.

So I started writing. At night. Five in the morning. Whenever. Like Bukowski once said “no one who was ever worth a damn” got to write “in peace.”

And I laughed all the way through. Sort of like I did with A Long Screw. But again, me laughing is not a guarantee that you’d find it funny. Or that it’s not small-minded, mean-spirited or purposelessly vengeful.

Of course, unless you’re Proust no one wants to hear all 60 years of this kind of shit so there had to be boundaries?

“Just write up to where you started OXBOW.”

This made a lot of sense. OXBOW’s first record, Fuckfest, was originally intended to be a suicide note. A paean to a world where everyone gets fucked over, fucked out of, and fucked under anything that was good and lasting. In other words, it made sense to stop the book before things got really dark.

Or less so. Four daughters later is the world ready for me in a sweater with leather patches on the elbows and a pipe punning my way to groans instead of laughs? Time will tell.

But forthwith…A Walk Across Dirty Water And Into Murderer’s Row. The first part of the title lifted from a Whipping Boy song (“Four Stations” off of The Sound of No Hands Clapping). The latter half? Maybe the guys who have tried to murder me.

Anyway, it’s not out until 2023 but if you wanted to pre-order it now, boy howdy, you’d make Christina happy. So happy she might pull the trigger on the next fucking memoir. You know…the next fucking memoir.

Here all week, folks.