One Hand Jerking (45 page)

The
Los Angeles Times Magazine
featured an article on pornography and HIV which quoted Roger Tansey, former executive director of Aid for AIDS, a West Hollywood based nonprofit organization that provides financial assistance for people with HIV. Referring to performers in gay porn, he said that “They all wear condoms. Gay actors and gay viewers don't see unprotected sex as a fantasy. They see it as watching death on the screen.”

However, veteran gay rights activist Jim Fouratt told me, “I suggest you treat the quote from gay spokesperson Tansey with a huge grain of salt. Either he is stupid, involved in the gay porn industry, or simply ill informed. Let me just say
that in the last several years, a very strong market has evolved for ‘barebacking' specific videos and the re-release of gay porn made prior to the use of condoms and other safe sex guidelines. Much of this demand is created by gay media promotion of barebacking as a ‘freedom of choice' of consenting adults.”

When I was a kid, condoms were called prophylactics, prophylactics were called rubbers, and rubbers were called scumbags. My friends and I would find used scumbags in a vacant lot or an alley between buildings. Once I found a large package of unused prophylactics in my father's sock drawer. It must have held a dozen. There were nine left. Each was tightly rolled, bound by what looked like a miniature cigar band. I selected one, took the band off, and carefully unrolled it.

There was a legend printed right on the condom: “Sold In Drugstores Only For the Prevention of Disease.” What hypocrisy! They were sold for the prevention of
pregnancy
, which is a condition, not a disease. The irony is that now condoms do
not
carry that message and they
are
used for the prevention of disease.

However, the national $170-million-a-year abstinence-only so-called sex education program warns that condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission one-third of the time, despite the fact that studies show that properly used condoms are nearly always effective in blocking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

On January 20, 2005, it was reported that the Roman Catholic Church in Spain supports the use of condoms to prevent AIDS. The very next day, that support was retracted faster than a foreskin in heat, with an explanation that the church still believes artificial contraception is immoral, even while a Mexican Catholic bishop joined the Spanish church's original endorsement, stating that the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS should be tolerated as a “lesser evil.”

As an adolescent, purchasing condoms was a traumatic experience. I'd buy other stuff to avoid being embarrassed. “I'd like a
Batman
comic book, and this candy bar—[
whispering
] and a pack of prophylactics—and a tube of toothpaste, please.” By the late '80s, there were huge
billboards
proclaiming: “If you can't say no, use condoms,” but an executive of the Gannett Outdoor Advertising Company confirmed that they held off putting up those signs until after the Pope's visit to America.

The Catholic Church is faced with an interesting dilemma. On one hand, they are opposed to condoms as an artificial method of birth control. On the other hand, they're well aware that condoms can serve as a protection against AIDS. A group of bishops once argued that any educational program that
included information about condoms should also stress that they are morally incorrect.

A compromise is possible, of course. They could manufacture theologically correct condoms, with teeny tiny pinprick holes in the reservoir tips, just enough to give all those spermatozoa a fighting chance. That's fair enough. But the problem then is that if the semen can get out, the AIDS virus can get in. So, then, it's back to the Vatican drawing board.

Now, theologically correct condoms would still have those teeny tiny pinprick holes in the reservoir tips, but there would also be little feather repellers with the message, “Wrong Way—Do Not Enter—Severe Tire Damage.”

I got a phone call from an old friend: “Hey, congratulations!”

“Thanks. For what?”

“You've been nominated for a Grammy Award.”

This was a big surprise. My album,
The Zen Bastard Rides Again
, had been released in September 2004 by Artemis Records, without fanfare, advertising, reviews or, for that matter, sales. I checked the nominations for Best Comedy Album. There was Triumph the Insult Comic Dog for
Come Poop With Me
; Jon Stewart and the cast of
The Daily Show
for
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
; Ellen DeGeneres for
The Funny Thing Is
. . . ; David Sedaris for
Live At Carnegie Hall
; and Al Franken for
The O'Franken Factor Factor—The Very Best of The O'Franken Factor
.

But not me.

I called my friend back, and learned that my nomination was for Best Album Notes. I didn't even know there was such a category. I had been invited by Shawn Amos at the Shout! Factory label to write a 5,000-word essay, “The Ballad of Lenny the Lawyer,” accompanying a 6-CD anthology,
Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware
.

My competition: the album notes for
The Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964—Concert At Philharmonic Hall
; Peter, Paul & Mary's
Carry It On
;
The Complete Columbia Recordings of Woody Herman and His Orchestra & Wood-choppers (1945-1947)
; and
No Thanks! The '70s Punk Rebellion
.

I didn't expect to win, but if I did, it would be a tribute to Lenny, not me. Actually, people often mistake me for Paul Kantner. In fact, when I returned from the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, a Customs agent looked at my passport
and said, “Hey, you guys made some great music.” And my luggage wasn't searched. I could've smuggled in several buds of prize-winning marijuana.

I once attended the Academy Awards in a borrowed tuxedo with a co-writer on Fox's short-lived
Wilton North Report
, Paul Slansky, who had an extra ticket. His friend Albert Brooks had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor in
Broadcast News
. The ceremony was boring—indeed, Brooks had explained to his shrink that he smoked pot because “it makes boredom more tolerable”—so, after Brooks didn't win, Slansky and I left, got some take-out Kentucky Fried Chicken, and watched the rest of the Oscars on TV.

Now, for the Grammy Awards in February 2005, I couldn't afford to fly to Los Angeles and stay at a hotel. I considered selling my tickets—somebody was auctioning six tickets on eBay at a minimum bid of $4,000 each—but instead I decided to give my tickets to a couple of friends. It turned out, though, that I'm entitled to just one complimentary ticket. Only members of the Recording Academy are entitled to two comps. A ticket for Nancy would cost $550. What a racket. Nobody goes to the Grammys alone. My friend offered to reimburse me. However, my nominee order form advised: “Tickets transferred or re-sold without permission will be revoked and their bearers deemed trespassers.”

At my request, Danny Goldberg, who ran Artemis, asked its publicist to find out the appropriate person I could speak to who could grant me permission to transfer my tickets. She e-mailed me: “I have checked with NARAS and unfortunately, Grammy tickets are not transferable under any circumstances.” So I wrote a letter appealing my case to Neil Portnow, president of the Recording Academy. No reply. My friends will not be going to the Grammys, after all.

As for me, I'll just borrow a tux, get some Chinese take-out and watch the show at home.

Postscript
: Since the tickets would not be mailed but had to be picked up, I realized that, obviously, every nominee and industry mogul and their paid-for guests would not be picking up their tickets individually. I called the Recording Academy and explained that I didn't live in Los Angeles, so would it be all right if a friend picked up my tickets?

The answer was yes. They would mail me a Ticket Release Authorization form to fill out and fax back. “Your authorized third party,” the form stated, “will
be required to present (1) A copy of this authorization and (2) Photo identification (driver's license or passport).” There was also a warning: “Please be prepared to show photo identification for entrance to all Grammy Awards events.”

Michael Risman made the pick-up, “though they let you know,” he told me, “that they do random checking to insure the ticket-holder is the proper party at the gate.” Michael and his wife Rebecca are the friends to whom I was giving the tickets. Rebecca worked at Concord Records, which received several nominations for albums featuring Ray Charles, but she had already left the company.

“We did gain admission to the award show and post party,” she told me. “We entered the grounds of Staples Center, having the tickets checked a few times at a number of barricades. No one flinched. No one asked for ID. We found our way to the entrance by walking on the red (it was really green) carpet. The Ray Charles ‘Genius Loves Company,' my swan song for the company, did very well. The after party was quite a spectacle. One bar was completely made of an ice sculpture about 5 feet high. We've come a long way since the chopped liver molded into a poultry shape.”

The album notes for the Woody Herman CD won the Grammy.

As for me, it was an honor just to be defeated.

In 1970, the War Resisters League in New York organized a demonstration at City Hall Park. I was asked to emcee and to burn a giant blow-up of a tax form. Later, a CBS correspondent interviewed me on camera.

“You've just burned that replica of a tax form,” he said. “Have you paid
your
taxes?”

“Yes,” I replied, “and I would like to confess right here on network television that I'm a mass murderer, because so much of the tax money I pay to the government goes to the Pentagon for just that purpose. I pay taxes, and that money has gone for dropping napalm on children in Vietnam.”

My answer never got on the air.

Three decades later, following the 9/11 attacks, on a radio interview, I talked about “the mass anguish experienced by shell-shocked America and beyond. So much human suffering, for the sake of the
nation's
karma.”

Compared to Ward Churchill, I'm a fucking girlie-man diplomat. When he wrote that the World Trade Center victims were “the equivalent of little Eichmanns”—with the exception of certain politically correct victims—Churchill
was saying the same thing as Osama bin Laden when
he
explained the reason for the attacks.

Defending his position, Churchill says, “It should be emphasized that I applied the ‘little Eichmanns' characterization only to those described as ‘technicians' of the economy. Thus, it was obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food-service workers, firemen and random passersby killed in the 9/11 attack. According to Pentagon logic, they were simply part of the collateral damage. Ugly? Yes. Hurtful? Yes. And that's my point. It's no less ugly, painful or dehuamnizing a description when applied to Iraqis, Palestinians or anyone else. If we ourselves do not want to be treated in this fashion, we must refuse to allow others to be similarly devalued and dehumanized in our name.”

He's playing the Oldie But Goldie card—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—which brings up a phone call I got from a friend of 30 years. She attended Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois at the same tiime Ward Churchill did.

“He's a phony radical from way back,” she said. “He snitched me out to the police in 1970. He came over to my house one time and—the very first pound of pot that I ever bought—I sold him an ounce. I didn't get arrested, but I had to suffer the wrath of my parents. They just went nuts. It's one of the reasons I moved away from Peoria.”

“What do you think was Churchill's motivation?”

“My guess is he's been arrested before, and his fingerprints are probably still in existence. He may have had it expunged. I think obviously they had him on something else. He might've had a felony conviction. And he went around and ratted everybody out. And I wasn't the only one. He was the campus snitch. I'd love for him to be able to say anything he damn well wants. But he's not the authentic article.”

Attention, ad agencies: Here's a method to receive more attention for a product than you would from a 30-second spot, yet pay not a penny to the TV networks. Simply produce a commercial that's so raunchy you know it will be turned down. Then those same networks will play your commercial—for free—on their news programs. Or if they call your bluff and allow the commercial to be aired, then you can be sure that viewers will bring their eyeballs to the water cooler. It's truly a win-win situation.