One Hand Jerking (23 page)

In December 2003, Zuccarini pleaded guilty and agreed to a prison term of 30 to 37 months. In a culture permeated by corporations misleading potential customers, he is among the sleaziest. He registered 15 variations of the popular children's cartoon site,
cartoonnetwork.com
, and 41 variations on the name of teen pop star and Madonna-kisser Britney Spears. A child who typed
cartoonjoe.com
instead of
joecartoon.com
would wind up at an explicit sex site. Zuccarini was charged with “enticing children to pornography.”

“Although this man's method of making a bunch of money is abhorrent,” said porn star Jenna Jameson, “I fail to see how he is responsible for enticing children into pornography. Why not charge the teachers and parents for not properly beating their children into correctly spelling ‘Barney'? Hell, why not charge the child too? The man is scum . . . that's for sure, but should he be charged as enticing children into porn? No. False advertising, yes. I'm tired of people using the umbrella of ‘It's for the children' to cover everything they find morally reprehensible.”

There's an irony here that must be acknowledged. Somewhere a child has a homework assignment to write a composition about President Bush (our misleader-in-chief)
but, instead of typing
whitehouse.gov
, this child types white-house. com—the very same porn site where Jenna's statement appeared.

As a friend of Lenny Bruce as well as the editor of his autobiogaphy,
How to Talk Dirty Dirty and Influence People
, I would've preferred this little story to have been included in the book from Lenny's point of view rather than mine, but anyway. . . .

I remember sitting in an office with a few
Playboy
attorneys. They were anxious to avoid libel, so they kept changing the name of any person in the original manuscript who might bring suit. For example, Lenny had mentioned an individual called Blow Job Betty, and the lawyers were afraid she would sue.

“You must be kidding,” I said. “Do you really believe anybody would come out and
admit
that she was known as Blow Job Betty?”

The book ended with a montage of Lenny's life experiences, cultural icons, folklore and urban myths:

“My friend Paul Krassner once asked me what I've been influenced by in my work.

“I have been influenced by my father telling me that my back would become crooked because of my maniacal desire to masturbate; by reading ‘Gloriosky, Zero' in
Annie Rooney
; by listening to Uncle Don and Clifford Brown; by smelling the burnt shell powder at Anzio and Salerno; torching for my ex-wife; giving money to Moondog as he played the upturned pails around the corner from Hanson's at 51st and Broadway; getting hot looking at
Popeye
and
Toots and Caspar
and
Chris Crustie
years ago; hearing stories about a pill they can put in the gas tank with water but ‘the big companies' won't let it out—the same big companies that have the tire that lasts forever—and the Viper's favorite fantasy: ‘Marijuana could be legal, but the big liquor companies won't let it happen'; Harry James has cancer on his lip; Dinah Shore has a colored baby; Irving Berlin didn't write all those songs, he's got a guy locked in the closet; colored people have a special odor.

“It was an absurd question. I am influenced by every second of my waking hour.”

The lawyers edited Harry James and Dinah Shore out of that paragraph, but for some unfathomable reason, Irving Berlin remained. There was one incident which they decided to omit entirely from the book. Lenny had been working at Le Bistro, a night club in Atlantic City. During his performance, he asked for a cigarette from anyone in the audience. Basketball star Wilt Chamberlain happened to be there. He lit a cigarette and handed it up.

“Did you see
that
?” Lenny whispered into the microphone. “He nigger-lipped it. . . .”

Lenny and I had an unspoken agreement that there would be nothing in the book about his use of drugs. When I first met him, he would shoot up in the hotel bathroom with the door closed, but now he just sat on his bed and casually fixed up while we were talking. That's what we had been doing one time when Lenny nodded out, the needle still stuck in his arm.

Suddenly the phone rang and startled him. His arm flailed, and the hypodermic came flying across the room, hitting the wall like a dart just a few feet from the easy chair in which I sat uneasily. Lenny picked up the phone. It was Blow Job Betty, calling from the lobby. She came up on the elevator and went down on Lenny. In front of me.

Lenny had introduced us. “This is Paul, he's interviewing me.” At one point, while she was giving him head, Lenny and I made eye contact. He looked at me quizzically, and his eyes said, “I'm not usually an exhibitionist.”

My eyes replied, “And I'm not usually a voyeur.”

A little later, Lenny said to her, “I really wanna fuck you now.”

Blow Job Betty gestured toward me and said, “In front of
him
?”

“Okay, Paul,” said Lenny, “I guess the interview is over now.”

In retrospect, I understand the mindset of Bill Clinton when he testified under oath that he “never had sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” The president had simply made the same distinction between intercourse and oral sex that Blow Job Betty had made.

Incidentally, those
Playboy
lawyers insisted on changing Blow Job Betty's name to Go Down Gussie.

“I hope there actually
is
somebody out there named Go Down Gussie,” I told them, “and I hope that
she
sues
Playboy
for invasion of privacy.”

About 20 years ago,
People
magazine published a special feature on '60s activists. A full page photo showed Ken Kesey, Wavy Gravy and me, all sitting on top of “Furthur,” the psychedelic relic of a bus that Tom Wolfe had chronicled in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. We were told that
People
planned to put this photo on the cover, so I carefully held onto my crotch, a sort of private joke to keep myself pure.

However, the cover went to Michael Jackson. And
he
was holding onto
his
crotch. Our gesture was exactly the same, except that there was a glove on his hand. The magazine's motivation differed from mine—this shot of Jackson in the midst of performing was pragmatically selected out of hundreds in order to sell copies—but still, I had been beaten at my own game with a splash of irony.

I had a flashback of that incident when Roseanne Barr—just like baseball players do all the time—grabbed
her
crotch and spat on the ground after screeching
The Star Spangled Banner
before the game. If I had ingested LSD for the occasion, I would've been positive this was merely a hallucination. More recently, I had that same kind of flashback when rapper Nelly clutched
his
crotch while performing at the Super Bowl half-time festivites.

That gesture served as the warm-up act for the instantly infamous revelation of Janet Jackson's right breast by Justin Timberlake as the culmination of their sexed-up duet. Never before in media history had the mainstream audience been fed and re-fed an image so many times.

Reuters reported that a woman in Tennessee has filed a class action suit against Jackson, Timberlake, CBS, MTV and Viacom, claiming that millions of people are owed monetary damages for being involuntarily exposed to lewd conduct.

Nevertheless, according to the search engine Lycos, Jackson's internationally seen flash of flesh has become the most searched for event in the history of the Internet. Previously, the attacks on September 11th were the most sought after topic in a one day period.

The biggest spike in TiVo activity during the Super Bowl game occurred at the end of the half-time show. Someone in almost every single one of the 20,000 TiVo households that were tracked during the game rewound and replayed that segment at least once.

The Daily Show
presented the titillating image over and over and over again, each one from a different news or entertainment program, as Jon Stewart described the varieties of pixilation that had been used to cover up Jackson's apocalyptic nipple.

Comedian Tom Dreesen, speaking at a Southern California Sports Broadcasters luncheon, commented that “Timberlake should have gone for two.” And on the
Tonight
show, Jay Leno said that Timberlake “is now qualified to run for political office.”

A correspondent for
The Economist
observed that George Bush missed the earth-shaking moment because he turned off the game after the first half and went to bed, that John Kerry expressed how delighted he was that the New England Patriots won, and that Howard Dean said it was no big deal to him because as a docter he had seen
countless
breasts, so therefore with those three the whole thing had an aura of Sleepy, Happy and Doc.

Chicago Tribune
columnist Clarence Page conducted an exclusive interview with Janet Jackson's bra. It began:

Q. “Thank you for agreeing to open up to our audience.”

A. “You're welcome. I need the exposure.”

At one point, the bra stated, “If you're looking for something to hide from the kids, how about the commercial for Cialis, the potency drug with its warnings about four hour erections? What do you say when your child asks, ‘Daddy, what's erectile dysfunction?'”

And the correct answer could well be, “Something that would please super-feminist Andrea Dworkin.” After all, the
New Republic
once published an article, “The New Porn Wars” by Jean Bethke Elshtain, which stated, “Dworkin has written that it is acceptable for women to have sex with men as long as the man's penis isn't erect.”

No wonder Clint Eastwood's little daughter in the film
Tightrope
wanted to know, “Daddy, what's a hard-on?”

As a result of Timberlake's snatching off half of Jackson's red bra along with part of her black leather bustier, more than 200,000 complaints were filed with the Federal Communications Commission. Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, has launched an investigation, as if to divert attention from the facts indicating that his father Colin had lied to the UN about the necessity for invading Iraq.

Janet Jackson also lied when she told the press that the bare tit action had
not been planned by her and was simply a spontaneous happening. If that were true, though, she could have sued Justin Timberlake for sexual molestation. I mean, there were certainly enough witnesses.

When I was a kid, I heard a song on the radio called “Paradise.” There would be a line—for example, “And then she holds my hand”—always followed by humming. The song was banned because of what might be going on
during
those wordless segments. And that was just the beginning.

In the '50s, Rosemary Clooney's rendition of “Mambo Italiano” was banned because it it didn't meet the ABC radio network's “standards for good taste.” They also banned Billie Holiday's version of Cole Porter's “Love for Sale.”

In the '60s, the Rolling Stones were not permitted to sing “Let's Spend the Night Together” on the
Ed Sullivan Show
unless they desexualized it and sang “Let's spend some time together.”

In the '70s, radio stations across the country banned Loretta Lynn's song, “The Pill,” and Jesse Jackson unsuccessfully called for a ban of disco music because he felt it promoted promiscuity and drug use.

In the '80s, Tipper Gore and twenty wives of Washington politicians formed the Parents Music Resource Center because they were afraid of lyrics. And even though they were able to pressure the music industry into putting warning labels on album covers, they still couldn't stop the songs.

In the '90s, hip-hop had become an easy target of censorship, with every new rapper perceived by the establishment as an enemy combatant.

In 2004, when Vice President Dick Cheney told Vermont Senator Frank Leahy, “Go fuck yourself,” the
Washington Post,
unlike other daily newspapers, published that physically impossible suggestion without resorting to asterisks or dashes. But, had a radio or TV news report failed to bleep the F-word, a stiff fine for indecency would surely have been levied.

In May, singer Avril Lavigne's performance was cut short by MTV producers after she flipped the bird—gesturing to the camera with her middle finger—
in response to interviewer Damien Fahey asking her what she thought about the labels that media critics apply to her.

An Indianapolis radio station owned by Emmis Communications used its so-called “dump button,” an electronic delay device, to prevent the words
urinate
,
damn
and
orgy
from being heard by listeners during its broadcast of Rush Limbaugh's show.

Last year, KBOO in Portland, Oregon was fined $8,000 for broadcasting the hip-hop song, “Your Revolution” by Sarah Jones, that included the words
blow job
. KBOO spent $25,000 fighting the complaint, and Jones sued the FCC, which reversed its decision, based on evidence that Jones was invited to perform the song in high schools and junior highs.

This year, you won't be hearing Elton John's song, “The Bitch Is Back.”

The reality TV show,
Elimidate
, in a pre-emptive strike, has eliminated from its shows in syndication, words such as
ass
and
bitch
, as have courtroom programs.

Bare asses shot at a nudist camp on the Fox network's
Simple Life 2
were covered by large happy faces. Not so with the forced display of pixilated buttocks by a pyramid of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called this abuse, as opposed to torture. What a relief.