Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (3 page)

Meijer’s had a denim store called Sagebrush. On the wall was a pair of jeans with a 64-inch waist. If you could fit into them, they were yours free, which was as tangible an example as you’ll ever get that nothing is ever truly “free.”

Meijer’s had two or three fabulous aisles devoted to records, so it was written in the stars that I’d buy my first music there. Sadly, my copy of Beauty and the Beat, the debut Go-Go’s album, turned out to have unfixable skips so I had to return it twice before giving up and deciding to repurchase it at the tacky little Cherry Street Drug Store, which had ordered exactly one copy to sell. My “Somebody’s Baby” purchase had gone off without a hitch however, and as much as I loved albums, I adored 45-RPM singles more. In fact, in lieu of smoking, drinking, taking drugs, or (at first) having sex, I became addicted to singles. I absolutely loved buying three minutes’ worth of perfection and playing it over and over, and I loved analyzing the art of the sleeves: Did the band choose a standard group photo? A black-and-white shot with colorized touches? A still from the video? Or was it one of those super boring generic sleeves that simply announced things like “Elektra,” leaving all the fun to the music itself?

Here come the lists again: I was so transfixed by singles that I began listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 and compulsively recording every song’s title, artist, and position each week. I did this for I am talkin’ years, never suspecting that this latest list lust was seriously unnecessarily—as Casey would announce throughout the show, the rankings were all from Billboard Magazine. Granted, when I realized I could just be purchasing Billboard to find out if Romeo Void was seriously dropping off the charts after one, count ‘em, one big week with “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing),” I also realized Billboard was a trade magazine that cost an impossible amount of money to subscribe to anyway.

But still, so taken was I with these music stars and their terribly popular songs that I kept those lists, dutifully transcribed on college-ruled lined paper, well into high school. If I had something to do on a Saturday—a rarity, as my schedule mostly consisted of drawing, writing stories, watching the 10” black-and-white television I’d found at a rummage sale, or guzzling bottles of Coke while blowing up to a size that Benetton didn’t make—I would literally beg my mother to sit at the kitchen table and copy the songs down for me. Listen, if “Money Changes Everything,” one of her best tunes, was really going to become the lowest-charting release from Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual, I damn well needed to know it and to record this fact for posterity. If Flushing, Michigan, had been a center of volcanic activity and the big one had blown, archaeologists of the future would have found my poor mom perched at our kitchen table on one of our chairs made to look like they’d been formed out of beer barrels, dutifully copying down a Casey Kasem list for me, Pompeii-style.

Between songs, Casey used to repeat parts of the lyrics to some chart entries in his inimitable, radio-friendly, velvety voice, a voice you could not possibly imagine had anything meaningful to say to his ditzy, statuesque wife, Tortellis star Jean, who thanks to her radio-unfriendly voice seemed to be starring in Born Yesterday yesterday, today, and tomorrow. To this day I would swear the late, great Casey once said, “Relax…don’t do it…when you wanna come…Frankie Goes to Hollywood is at number sixteen this week.”

“The list is life” was my motto, and that was way before I saw the Spielberg movie. My lists were a way to commune with fame. Fame was not just something that happened, it was a muscle group that needed to be flexed.

Most people get over being fans. Or rather, they convince themselves they’re over it. I’d tried when I was really little by tearing up all my Charlie’s Angels pinups and posters. It didn’t take, and I found myself excitedly paying to meet lesser Angel Tanya Roberts at a Burbank autograph show 30 years later. Actually, my swearing off fandom didn’t last more than a grade or two. I wound up, by high school, having all four walls and even my ceiling plastered with photos, posters, and magazine covers of ‘80s heartthrobs, as well as random movie stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Most people don’t go as far as I did, and so don’t have as long a journey back when they decide they’re done with fandom. Most have a few posters on their walls (unless their parents were assholes who objected to thirty dozen tack holes in the plaster), then after high school or college (where the posters go from teen idols like Kirk Cameron to deeper, more grown-up and adult stuff like The Beatles) decide there is no fucking way they’re putting up celebrity posters in their first apartments and that’s that. Of course, they haven’t really grown out of anything, they’ve just swapped their stars of choice. As teens, they had teen sex objects upon their walls, but now that they’re getting laid in real life, they instead spend money on “impulse buys” (every single week, like clockwork) of tabloids that keep them posted every time Brad Pitt coughs and it somehow comments on Jennifer Aniston’s value as a woman.

I never got over being a fan and never (seriously) tried. So I never grew out of my teen idols. Instead, I’ve kept up with them, keeping them in league with all of the other stars who’ve come since. It’s easy to keep your childhood idols fresh and relevant. You just go to an a-ha concert in New York City twenty-seven years after their first hit (where a bitchy girl trying to push in front of you announces that you’re “not a fun gay” and then surreptitiously marks up your pale gray jeans with her eyeliner), then head to your Times Square office to work out the details of a Justin Bieber photo shoot (and wash eyeliner off your jeans in the public john), then go home and read on Dlisted.com why Mariah Carey is a human canker sore.

I refer to myself as being a starfucker in honor of my mentor, Jane Jordan Browne, who used the term quite disparagingly, as in, “My old bisexual boyfriend Page was such a starfucker.” I’m not a real starfucker, the kind that will do anything to be in the presence of boldface names at the expense of all other considerations. But I’m secure enough in my sanity that I would, say, pay $100 to meet Air Supply or to pose with decrepit L.A. billboard queen Angelyne, and I would definitely drop thousands on a trip to London to see Madonna take a stab at acting in a play…again.

So what I decided to do with these realizations was to write about being what I call a starfucker in the context of a memoir (a ridiculously flowery term that I, in the same way my mother might, can’t help mockingly say aloud as “mem-wahhhr”). These stories in this book are another form of my list obsession, with as many celebrities name-checked as possible. In the same way we relate to celebrities, maybe you’ll see a bit of yourself in here or will laugh at what might have been had your renouncing of whichever idols you had (Bobby Sherman? The DeFranco Family? NKOTB? Don’t you dare say One Direction unless you have parental approval to read this book…) not taken.

It might even inspire you to return to fandom. It’s good to be a starfucker, even if it’s bad to be a blind follower. A starfucker in the way I use it is someone who sees the ridiculousness of flying across the country strictly to meet Joe Manganiello at a cystic fibrosis event and who can coldly assess everything positive and negative about most stars from a space of undying, irrational affection.

A starfucker sees and is awed by how lucky it is for someone to become a star in the first place. That doesn’t mean stars’ lives are perfect or even better, but to ascend to the ranks of stardom among our own species is something only human beings can experience. My lists were an attempt to round up all that luck and make sense of it.

So is this book.

I’m lucky. (Isn’t that how a Jackie Collins novel begins?)

I live in New York City, in Hell’s Kitchen, right on 42nd Street—which is about as believable as an episode of
Friends
. I’m close to a firehouse, a police station, an emergency clinic, a post office, a Dunkin Donuts with a TV, a strip club, and a gay hotel, which means I can watch first-run episodes of
The Good Wife
with well-heeled bums while munching on antique Old-Fashioned donuts (the newfangled name for “plain,” which somehow are advertised as having more calories than custard-filled ones), set fire to a cop and rest assured she will be extinguished in time to avoid death (you thought it would be a man, sexist), or simply stay in, fire up my Grindr, and watch it explode with horny men of every variety (especially the obnoxious variety) who are all eight inches away and only want white guys—just not
this one
.

But in spite of my good fortune, things haven’t always been so easy.

At pre-school story hour in Flint, Michigan, where I lived for a lukewarm minute after birth and before elementary school, I remember being haunted after a story from the teacher about a prince and princess getting married. Another post-toddler innocently suggested the prince marry
another
prince and was shut down by a little girl notorious for making you watch her pee. She exclaimed, with all the charm of the monster baby from the early-‘70s film
It’s Alive!
, “Boys
can’t
marry boys!” It would be a cold day in hell before I’d ever again accompany her into the junior pissoir and help her lower her green tights for flow and tell.

Even then, hearing that boys couldn’t marry boys triggered something not so deep inside me to feel as policed as when my mom would ask, “Who drank all the Coke?” in reference to the eight-pack of soda she’d bought twenty-four hours earlier. I was a bottomless pit when it came to anything I shouldn’t have.

Another time, when my knock-out of a bored housewife mom picked me up from the same pre-school, she returned to her car to discover the spare tire had been brazenly stolen in broad daylight. We soon left Flint, along with most other white people. This was before political correctness—P.C. B.C.—a time when unfair, fair-skinned people openly blamed every act of criminality on “them.”

“They stole your tire?” people asked.

…and they weren’t talking about the Irish.

I don’t believe my parents thought this way, my dad teaching at a heavily black high school and my mom such a rebel she’d posed like a “hood” in ‘50s family photos, but I know they were eager to trade up from the shoebox home in which we lived, and nearby Flushing was the most logical step. We said good-bye to the little house on Shamrock Lane, a picture of which in
The Flint Journal
twenty years later revealed it to be a burned-out shell of a crack house. Crack hadn’t even invented yet when we’d lived there—that’s progress.

I guess we’d gotten out of there just in time, even if it
had
meant abandoning the brother-sister team who were both my neighbors and my naked playmates—we didn’t just play doctor, we played surgeon.

In Flushing, we settled into a gigantic, two-story home, probably 100 years old, with a creepy attic perfect for our cat to use as a nursery for litter after litter of kittens (cool as hell, always on the prowl for toms, she was a gay man trapped in a female feline’s body), a creepy shed filled with antique farming equipment, and a creepy (to me) acre of land containing a garden, a patch of woods, and way too many garden snakes for a city boy to accept as anything other than a prelude to a re-enactment of the horror movie
Sssssss
, which features sexy Dirk Benedict being unwillingly transformed into a cobra.

I was also unconvinced that the woods did not contain a Bigfoot. This
was
the ‘70s.

So I spent all my time in my room when I wasn’t riding the bus to my new school, Elms Elementary, which sounds like the scene of a massacre in a slasher flick.

These early days must have been trying for me. In kindergarten, my elderly teacher Mrs. Cummings archly noted on my report card:

“Cannot tie his shoes yet or zip his coat.”

I was a late bloomer. I was also wetting my bed, something I did for so long I will never forget the feeling of waking up in a warm swamp of my own sewage.

Why couldn’t I tie my shoes? Why did my bladder betray me like that? I later suspected it was because I knew that boys couldn’t marry boys, but also knew that some boys—at least one of them—wanted to. Or maybe I wanted to at least engage in what the gossip rags called a “trial marriage” with a boy.

I did eventually learn to zip and tie (the latter of which was accomplished on a massive wooden shoe; “How’s Matt doing?” Mrs. Cummings asked her teacher’s aid. “Matt did it!” came the reply. Then, taking away the thrill of accomplishment, “Finally.”) and also learned how not to wet the bed, but I was out of the frying pan and into the fire as far as Mrs. Cummings was concerned…the next marking period brought another barb on my report card in her perfect handwriting: