Destination (15 page)

The Mail-Sex Mama's mama on her brief son-in-law:

“He would be real nasty and sometimes he would be sweet. She liked him when he was sweet. I told her that he's an actor, and how is she going to know when he's acting?”

SHE DIDN' T . She was acting. Her wife-coquette performance blunted her to cues.
She
was a narrow-range actor. She deployed her fading assets. Her default mode was sex.

She was a con. She ran her short con from mail drops. She read lonely hearts and singles mags and made her marks from plaintive pleas for poon. She placed classified ads. She sent out skin pix and dunned dolts for money. Her long con was celebrity marriage and judiciously unplanned pregnancy.

She was a hell-bent harlot. She hailed from New Jersey. She died a month shy of forty-five. She wanted to be an actress. She wanted to marry a movie star.

She married a Jersey guy. They had two kids. She boogied. He watched the kids. She pursued “careers.”

The law nailed her. Bad checks/Jersey/'86. Dope busts in '88 and '89. A widower answered her ads. She married him in Nevada. He gave her a roll of quarters. She split. He never saw her again.

Check beef #2—1994. Jail time and a move on. Arkansas beckons. Ditto the fuzz. Stolen credit cards/'96/a fine and probation. California beckons. She stalks Jerry Lee Lewis. She has a daughter. She claims that Lewis fathered it. Lewis denies it. She declines a blood test.

She has a thing with Marlon Brando's son, Christian. Christian is a killer. He capped a cat named Dag Drollet and did joint time. Jerry Lee Lewis is nicknamed “the Killer.” Little Sleazer plays killers and denies that killers exist.

Thrill to the theme. Preview the prickles of prick-teaser destiny.

The Mail-Sex Mama moved on. She placed classifieds. She kept a journal. She made notes to stalk Sugar Ray Leonard and Gary Busey. She stalked retreads within the realm of reason. She dug the dynamic of diminishing returns.

She looped Little Sleazer. She sent out “Hi, single guy” letters and pix of her twenty years back. Her meshuga marriage moldered as misalliances do. Little Sleazer righteously resented her. She fitfully feared him. She kept an address book. There's sweaty Jimmy Swaggart and paralyzed pussy poo-bah Larry Flynt. There's freewheeling Frankie Valli and some doofus from
The
Dukes of Hazzard.
It's a dizzying D-list descent. It's a hopped-up heap of hopeless hope.

Hope springs infernal.

Right up to May 4, 2001.

The snuff vibed '90s. The Clinton climate, O.J.'s ogrehood,
victimhood visions reprised. It should have been then. The
Victim was younger. She's white trash worthy of Bill C.

Little Sleazer played John List then. List lived in New Jersey. The Mail-Sex Mama was born there. Likewise Little
Sleazer. It's sinister symmetry.

John List killed his family. He wanted to move on. There
ain't no killers. There's just you and me.

Blow jobs ain't sex, but I came on her dress. There ain't no
perjurors or obstructors. There's just you and me.

Dig the decade. Tally the tabloid toll. Pry the precedents
free. O.J. walks. Michael Jackson slimes loose. Little Sleazer
could wiggle. Celebrity deaths and good things both come in
threes.

It's 2002 now. May 4th is ten months gone. Some cases build slow or evaporate. That means there's more or less than you see.

They might indict. They might not. New suspects might bode and retreat.

He's got the kid. He's a single dad. O.J. got the kids. It's a single-dad symphony.

Murder is always wrong. Fuck mitigation madness. Fuck the vicissitudes of victimology. Killers exist. There are too many and precious few. They ain't you or me.

Little Sleazer and O.J. should talk. They could meet at Vitello's or Mezzaluna. O.J. knows the drill. They could share spit. O.J. could cuddle and counsel and instill inspirationally.

Hang in. Act your way out. Pose with your daughter. Lies and circumstance might click your way. You might get lucky.

I've Got the Goods

We want the goods.

Who knows who. Who blows who. Who's got the pull and the gelt.

Who's got the size.

Who's got the habit.

Who's got the appetite.

Family dirt doesn't count. Shared blood means shared secrets and reciprocal pacts not to tell. Friendship entails codes of silence and threat. Don't dish my dirt or I'll dish yours and I'll dip deeper yet.

We're the vigorous vultures of verisimilitude. We feed off the luridly authentic. It makes us feel alive.

We require a dish-dipping disjuncture. Distance on our disillusionment. We can't carve carrion too close to ourselves. It subtracts the Allure from Alive.

Dystopian dish demands a dynamic. Demigods to devirginize. Star-stamped stand-ins for you and me.

The dynamic digs deep. We want our demigods divinely deigned and delivered defiled. We want them to soar above us and
be
us under the skin.

Godlike. Attainable. A confounding contradiction.

Only fools want to fuck movie stars and models. That anoints us a fool nation. We want Rita Hayworth in
Gilda
and Rita with the DTs. We want Rock Hudson in
Giant
and Rock at the Lavender Lounge.

Some savvy publications have exploited this need. They debuted in the early '50s.

The scandal rags.

Confidential/Rave/Whisper/Lowdown/TopSecret/On the Q.T./
Hush-Hush.

Cheezy covers. Tall print. Clashing color schemes. Jarring shades that agitated the eye.

Cheap paper. Typos and misspellings. Back-page ads.

X-ray glasses. Sex guides. Home law school.

The rags raged. The rags ran concurrent with the Red Scare. The rags subverted thought in a subversion-minded era. The rags hit right on cue.

The movie biz was 40 years old. Toga epics and musicals reigned. Film noir redistributed paranoia.

Nightclubs held sway. TV was new. It fed us jingoism and pap. Joe and Jane America lived through the Big War and got sucker punched by Korea. They dug the boom economy and bought the party line. They suffered night sweats. They built bomb shelters. They sniffed the cultural air. They developed an Us-versus-Them thing.

It encompassed the Reds and the Negroes. It indicted the Mob and the foreign unwashed. It bowed to the Glamour World and ceded their right of access.

The Glamour World was a confluence. It publicly cohered in the '50s. The scandal rags linked the divergent strands and mythologized the players. The rags built the world from photo files and innuendo.

Socialites. Film stars. Politicians. Jazz horns and playboys. Mobsters with crossover appeal.

The celebrity matrix. Revised and deconstructed for rube readers of a distinct demographic.

The estranged. The horny. The bereft and aggrieved. The worshipful stargazer ablaze with self-hatred. The chronically optimistic.

The rags were cynically optimistic. The rags were prophetic. The rags presaged the media age and the age of tabloid TV. The rags told us that the Glamour World was Our World hyperbolized and restricted for those with coin and good looks. The rags ran rancorous and riffed off their readers' resentment. The rags ran riot with one rich subtext.

THEY are YOU. YOU could get lucky.

Joe and Jane Reader, rejoice.

The rags ratted out Johnnie Ray's men's-room misadventures. They were sneeringly snide and priapically pro-gay in the pre-pride era. The rags ran Ava Gardner's murky memoirs of miscegenation. It reviled racists and revitalized race-mixer rectitude. The rags roasted rabid Sonny Tufts. Sonny bit showgirls on the thighs. The rags routed showgirls out of harm's way. The rags put Sonny on a choke chain.

Disillusionment is enlightenment. Some pundit popped that platitude and clipped a clear chord in our souls.

The rags boomed for six years. They explicated the Glamour World. They enlightened. They emboldened. They obfuscated. They told trenchant truths and launched and licked libel litigations. They raised rubber and scored skidmarks on square America.

They gave us an alternative American family. They rebutted Ozzie and Harriet. They reinforced rapacious buffoons like Sergeant Bilko. They stamped stereotypes in stereophonic sound. They violated their own validity with loopy lyrics like the ones on this page. Scandal-rag language distanced and seduced. It read as contemporaneous satire. Rag writers moralized. Rag writers attacked Reds. Rag writers rallied behind the restrictions of their time. Rag writers wistfully winked and inferred a more insidious intent.

The rags loved to go after marginal Hollywood characters, like Johnnie Ray, a crooner who, the mags would allege, was involved in homosexual high jinks.
(Culver Pictures)

Scandalanguage. Scopophiliac. Scarifyingly complex and multifaceted in motive.

The scandal-rag family of the '50s is the dysfunctional family of today. Their voyeuristically viewed behavior is the hyper-analyzed behavior of today. The sedate backdrop of the '50s gave it a compensating panache. The hopped-up pace of the '90s depletes its power and underscores the behavior as prosaic.

Dipsomaniacs, hopheads, nymphos, fruits, dykes. Satyrs, Commies, miscegenators, hoods, provocateurs. Car wrecks, bar brawls, paternity suits.

Gang bangs. Three-ways. Toilet-stall assignations. Euphemized for the censors. Scandalanguaged to tell you
exactly
what it meant.

With appropriate pix.

Mug shots. Nightclub snaps. Outtakes from low-rent paparazzi.

Booze bloat. Stretch marks revealed. Loose shirttails and gaping flies outside whorehouses.

THEY are YOU. YOU could get lucky.

The scandal rags gave us the epic of hijinks gone wrong. They titillated. They linked US to THEM. They proudly promulgated the egalitarian spirit. They mocked celebrity culture. They put the “id” in “idiot.” They underscored the “I” in “Idolatry.” They mainlined a message in ellipsis.

Only character counts.

I dug the rags. It started about '56. I was eight years old.

I lived in L.A. I was a fucked-up child of divorce. My dad was a Hollywood bottom-feeder. He used to work for Rita Hayworth. He told me he porked her.

I allegedly met Rita at a hot-dog stand. I was three years old. I allegedly spilled a grape drink in her lap. My dad said there was a dyke bounty out on Rita. He did not explain what that meant.

My dad worked for a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. My dad told me Hollywood tales. My mom disapproved.

She was a drunk. Her boyfriends looked like film noir psychopaths. She sent me to the Lutheran church.

Martin Luther would have been a scandal-rag fave. He talked to himself and talked to God on the john. He kicked papal ass and renounced his celibate vow. He had beady brown eyes like my own.

I dug Luther's story more than the Bible. The prose style was flat. I preferred
Whisper
and
Confidential. That
was literature.

My dad left his copies out. I got the goods. It corrupted my imagination.

My Sunday-school class went to see
The Ten Commandments.
I fidgeted and dozed. Yul Brynner played the Pharaoh. My dad said Yul was a poonhound. He had the goods.

I read a rag piece on Porfirio Rubirosa. “Rubi” was a shitbird. He hailed from the Dominican Republic. His dad was a wheel. Rubi ran guns. Rubi ran a white-slave racket. Rubi wrecked cars and married heiresses.

Rubi lived in the rags. He rarely made the mainstream press. I asked my dad about him. My dad had the goods.

Rubi had a monster shvantz. It caused internal damage. A Rubi conquest called it “Yul Brynner in a turtleneck.”

I put it together. Yul Brynner was bald. I now had the goods.

The rags worked their voodoo on me. They showed me the adult world unvarnished.

Money was everything. Sex was everyone's secret. Sex was taboo. Fucking precipitated childbirth. This implied a wholesome endeavor. I didn't believe it. The rags said otherwise. I caught my mom in bed with a man. It looked like a scandal-rag pic.

The pictures scared me. High-contrast black-and-white on pulp paper. Flashbulb glare as truth.

Every photo reduced beauty. Every photo tagged the price of fame.

THEY are US and THEY will die young.

The rags died slow.

They beat back lawsuits. They pissed off people with pull. They pissed off movie magnates and publicity flacks. The rags outed homosexual actors. Flacks traded dope on minor stars to protect their high-end homos. Rock Hudson remained sacrosanct and un-outed. Some Rock lovers took the Rock's fall.

My dad had the goods on Rock. I had a crush on a 4th grade girl. She slathered the Rock all over her notebook. I told her Rock was queer. She said, “You're just jealous of him.”

Outing minor actors was the rags' bread and butter. Stars rarely got nailed. Rock Hudson remained untouched. (Universal/TheKobal Collection)

The studios built up a slush fund. They targeted
Confidential.
They tied it up in litiginous tape. Maureen O'Hara sued
Confidential.
They said she groped a guy at Grauman's Chinese.

She won her suit.
Confidential
doused the heat on its sinuendo. The other rags followed. Their collective circulation fizzled. They flatlined into the '60s.

The decade was not kind.

Rubi kicked in a car crash. The new Prez had sex shit in his closet. The new Prez was too powerful to fuck over.

'50s sex was a leer and a gulp. The rags capitalized. '60s sex was a wink.

The rags flourished under suppression. Bad juju spawns subversive literature. American culture was reconfiguring. The rags couldn't keep up.

Hootenannies. Folk music. Deep roots on the left. A globalistic message.

Foreign films. Wild stuff that glorified adultery and ennui. Moral turpitude imported from Catholic countries.

JFK in the White House. His implied message: Be cool like me.

Sex spoofs on screen. Beehives and bikinis. The American male as a pussy-whipped shlub. The implied message: Don't sweat it—it's the human condition.

The Twist. Negro music for white stiffs. Interracial dancing on TV.

The rags couldn't compete.

They latched their lenses on foreign film stars. They spilled their sordid stories.

Snore.

They lobbed softballs at JFK and the Rat Pack.

Yawn.

They exposed Dr. Feelgoods and their loose prescription plans.

Snoresville, U.S.A. Joe and Jane America
had
their pills. They didn't want to know from the dangers.

JFK bought it. America bought that jive “Loss of Innocence” line. The Vietnam War raged. The civil-rights struggle mulched the “m” off “miscegenation.” Joe and Jane's kids became freaks. Some geek coined a term: “the Sexual Revolution.”

The rags were passé. Everybody was stoned and fucking. They got their titillation firsthand.

They didn't want the goods. Gossip was uncool.

The rags died.