Why We Suck (12 page)

    After Sully split, Eagle said he guessed we could get through all four buildings in less than five hours if we worked like slaves on cocaine and didn't take cigarette breaks. And that's just what we did. Every night at five Sully would list off the areas where there may have been a large coffee spill or a water leak or an ink explosion and we would don our bowling shirts, grab our mops and buckets and run a full tornado sweep so swift and thorough it would have made Mr. Clean crap his tidy whitey pants. We were out on the town chasing tail and downing booze by ten-thirty almost every night. It was a dream gig.

    After a few weeks we got so good we COULD take cigarette breaks-during which we started to take notice of all the office-type swag there was just piled up and lying around. It's amazing what you can convince yourself you absolutely need to have in order to survive-especially when it's stuff you have survived without up until that particular point in your life. Staplers, number two pencils, paperweights, letter openers, boxes of number two pencils, plastic coffee cups, paper clips, boxes of boxes of number two pencils, toner bottles, Sanka packets, Cremora jars, big boxes of boxes with boxes of number two pencils in them-you name it we took it. Hey-they were the big corporate giants and we were the struggling artists. We needed to write and draw and staple and sip Sanka with fake cream powder in it. At one point Reagan actually stole a rolling steel chair with some great swivel action in its legs. The rest of us decided that might be pushing the envelope a bit-although we had already pushed the envelope literally and figuratively by stealing thousands of envelopes over the course of our first month on the job.

    One night during week five, Adam and I were in the editor in chief's office when he noticed something on top of the big guy's desk-a neat pile of typed pages.

    Lookit this, he said.

    What? I replied as I speed-polished a bookcase.

    It's a bunch a poems.

    What kinda poems? I said, waxing a coffee table by wrapping two towels around my forearms, spraying a shitload of Lemon Pledge on the table and flailing back and forth like a wounded trout in an Igloo cooler.

    John Ashbery, he said.

    (Now let me take a second to explain who John Ashbery was and is-an incredibly celebrated American poet who has won every available award, including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and, well-name one more important award and he probably has two of them. His work is dense with intellect and verbal dexterity. He will go down as one of the greatest poets in the history of the written word.)

    He sucks, Adam said.

    Yeah-I know, I agreed.

    This must be some stuff this editor guy's thinking of puttin' in the magazine.

    Yeah, I mumbled.

    So.

    So what?

    We should get rid of this shit and put some of your stuff here instead, Adam said without even a hint of doubt.

    Whaddaya nuts?

    Listen ta me-this guy comes in tomorrow'n reads yer stuff-yer stuff is revolutionary, man-this editor guy's gonna read it and he's gonna flip out'n he's gonna publish it'n yer gonna be famous'n we're gonna be bangin' chicks from Harvard'n shit.

    (Now, as dumb as that plan sounds please remember-we were both nineteen years old. We WERE dumb. Young, dumb and full of come. And bad poetry. I had been writing it for only about a year and a half and at the time, of course, I thought it was Groundbreaking and Important and Needed To Be Heard. Needless to say-I took the bait.)

    You know two or three of your poems by heart? Adam asked.

    (Of course I did. I couldn't remember the Our Father or The Latin Mass or any part of The Declaration of Independence or The Gettysburg Address beyond their titles, we the people and four score and seven years ago-but my own poems and Rolling Stone lyrics and the starting lineup of every Boston Bruin or Boston Red Sox team since I was about five years old? Those were all on the tip of my tongue.)

    Let's go, I said assertively.

    So Adam and I tore up John Ashbery's poems and tossed them into the trash and sat down at the desk of the editor's secretary and typed up two of my poems. This is what they were:

    

    
ONOMATOPOEM

    

    

    
FUCK

    

    

    We decided not to put my name on them-just to make the whole process an even bigger mystery. Then we tenderly stapled them together and placed them gingerly in the center of the editor's desk. Stared down at them for a long, long beat-imagining the great fortune they were about to bring our way. We literally shook hands and smiled at each other. Then, as a fitting gesture of trust and solidarity-we left the stapler behind.

    Returning to our tornado sweep cleaning, we finished by ten-fifteen, hit the bars at ten-thirty and chased tail and planned plans and laughed and smoked and dreamed and laughed and went to bed and got up to rehearse with The Workshop and eagerly returned to work the following afternoon at five p.m.

    It was almost five past five when the editor in chief of The Atlantic Monthly pulled me aside as I was once again donning my bowling slash janitor shirt down in the working-class bowels of the building. He said Adam had pointed me out as the source of the poems left atop his desk. He then congratulated me on owning-and I quote-"the most original young raw voice in poetry I have come across in almost a decade."

    Wow.

    Adam and I smiled beaming broad smiles as the editor and his posse of publishing elites led me upstairs where we shared flutes full of champagne and plans for my first book.

    One month later "Onomatopoem" and "Fuck" made their debut in the magazine and three weeks after that I signed the deal to publish my first book of poetry with Harper Collins. It was called Slap and was nominated for Best New Book by The American Poetry Bank.

    Which doesn't exist.

    Because I just made up that happy ending to this little story of how I became a published poet.

    What really happened was:

    As I tugged on my shirt the day after we planted my poems, Sully entered the locker room for our daily dose of spills, blotches, wet patches and stains to clean up. The first words out of his mouth were "Who's the genius who left the crazy poems on the editor in chief's desk?" He looked around for half a second before spotting my upraised arm, which had been eagerly in the air since he had uttered the word "genius." I was more than ready for my moment in the spotlight. "Okay, asshole-turn in yer shirt. Yer officially shitcanned." Then he immediately continued reading off various dirty locations that needed special attention from the rest of the crew that night.

    The dream was over so quickly I didn't even have a chance to ask a follow-up question. Sully headed out the back door and the guys all said how sucky my situation was and then they went off in search of dust and filth.

    Within a few days I was working the switchboard of a swanky downtown hotel on the night shift and furiously spending the overnight hours writing more poetry. Why? So I could get better at it.

    I was always one of those people who never took no for an answer. Whether it was girls or work or sports or acting, when someone told me I wasn't good enough I found another way to prove them wrong.

    About three months after Sully made me turn in my bowling shirt, two things happened-out of pure spite I'd become a much better poet and ended up getting two poems published in another, more cutting-edge poetry magazine called Ploughshares. I was the youngest writer in that particular issue and one of the youngest they ever featured.

    The other thing that happened was Adam, Chris and Reagan got shitcanned after Sully caught them trying to smuggle a whole desk out a brownstone side door.

    I never tried to get my poems published again after that-I'd proven I could pull it off. I still write them for my wife and most of the time just for my private files and I love doing so, but in my heart of hearts I know the only reason I can claim to be a published poet today is because of Sully With The Bushmill's Bottle Nose. And the reason I became a successful comic is because of all the club owners who told me I was too edgy and the reason I became a working actor is due to all the acting teachers who said I didn't do what they told me to do and all of the casting directors who wouldn't cast me.

    Every time I hear the word "no" I think "yes."

    Every time someone says it's against the rules I wonder why the rules exist.

    I don't run home with my tail between my legs-I bang down the door to find out what's on the other side.

    And that comes from growing up with parents who made it clear that-within reason-you can be whatever you want to be in America but no one is just going to hand you anything, you have to go out and get it.

    The harder you work, the luckier you get-that's one of the things my dad taught me.

    You learn more with your mouth shut and your ears open than you do the other way around-he said that too.

    Most people who are older than you are also a helluva lot smarter. That was another one of his faves.

    No one owes you anything and being born into a free society means you get to say whatever the hell you want but it doesn't mean anyone has to listen.

    Which is why I walk around now just wishing I could grab every other mouthy, misbehaved, spoiled and rotten little urchin I come across in airports and restaurants and just when I'm walking down the street-kids who are throwing snit fits in public as their disinterested or seemingly powerless parents stand off to the side and let the rest of us listen to the whining-I just once wanna grab them HARD by the flesh on their twiggy upper arms, that soft flesh that really really hurts-and I mean grab them bruise-inducing, five-finger-indentation-left-behind hard-and whisper Clint Eastwood-style right in their dirty little ear: Listen up and listen fast, punk, 'cause I'm only sayin' this one goddam time: yer gonna shut the fuck up right now and start doing what yer dumbass mom and dad say from here on in or a special van is gonna pull up one day and just pluck you right off the goddam street and drop your ass on a plane to Iraq where you will be dropped out of the sky with nuthin' but a parachute and a bag of white rice-no cash, no toys, no more SpongeBob SquareAss-ya follow?

    I'd like to see how far their overinflated self-esteem plummets after that. Hopefully? Like a big rock in a backyard kiddie pool.

    

    Parents need to take back the control. Now. Half-assed moms and self-centered fathers should stop blaming everyone else and head back into the house. I'm not talking about two-income families where existing without both parents holding down jobs is an impossibility. I'm talking about houses where both parents had kids because it was almost a fashion accessory and then once the kids arrived, it became a constant battle over who changed how many diapers and whose turn is it to get up with the baby. Here's the bottom line: kids want their moms-almost all the time. You feel tired and unable to do anything else because the kids are a full-time job? Welcome to reality, asshole.

    From caveman times to calendar date 2009-someone has to feed them and someone has to go get the food to feed them with. That's it. We-as fat loud lazy Americans-wanna watch our TV shows and drive our new cars and play golf and watch Internet porn and e-mail our girlfriends and text our BFFs and blah blah blah but BIRDS are still building nests and digging up worms and flying them back to the nest and dropping them into the mouths of the baby birds.

    THAT'S HOW FAR WE HAVE EVOLVED-not even two inches.

    You only get one chance to raise your children right and it's been said a million zillion trillion times but they grow up in less than a heartbeat and all the damage is done. We all get up in arms when another secretly planted webcam captures another Dominican or other illegal immigrant nanny suddenly up and slapping an innocent American baby but-quite frankly-what the fuck else did you expect? You want an underpaid stranger you've met maybe twice who barely speaks broken English to have never mind love but even an iota of empathy or a caring bone in her hand for a kid you don't have the time or desire to take care of yourself? They don't have nannies in the deepest dark areas of Africa-they have aunts and uncles and actual neighbors-the same thing I had growing up. That's what families and friends are for. Your dog is more likely to take care of your kid than a Third World worker in an entry-level position is. But in America we expect everyone to do the dirty work we find ourselves to be so far above-including wiping the fat asses of our own fat kids.

    Kids have become a stepping-stone-especially daughters. The trash cans of Hollywood are lined with the litter of ex-teenage stars whose mothers wanted their own failed dreams to be fulfilled by pimping out their progeny. Lindsay Lohan's well-documented fall into drugs and drunk driving have proven one thing and one thing only to her party-hopping, publicity-mad mom: time for her and the other daughter Ali to get their own reality show! Dad just got out of jail so he has no say in the matter! Britney Spears melts down for over fifteen months on international TV and in wall-to-wall, seemingly moment-by-moment magazine coverage and what does her mom do? Write a book about being a great parent! Then her other daughter-who is sixteen-announces she's pregnant. Time to cancel the book tour? Hell no-let's make it happen right away because Britney's in the nuthouse and the heat is on! The only book I wanna read that's written by Britney Spears's mom is the one titled "How To Get One Daughter's Pussy Onto The Internet And The Other Daughter Loaded Up With Semen Before She's Even Old Enough To Drive!" Foreword By Family Friend Dr. Phil!

    What would you guess-honestly speaking-the girls of the Kardashian family have in store for them? The oldest one has spread her legs and fondled her breasts in Playboy and one of them has gone down on and banged a rapper on a sex video that SHE HERSELF made available for sale and now their cosmetically enhanced biological mom and their ex-javelin throwing stepdad-who apparently went to the same plastic surgeon who fucked up Kenny Rogers's face-have the older girls and two sweet 1 young innocent little ones tramping around in a reality show called Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

    On one episode, mom and the three oldest girls agree to do a beachside photo shoot for a bikini line being sold by Girls Gone Wild impresario Joe Francis-who calls to make the offer from a jail where he is serving time for giving alcohol to underage girls and getting them to expose themselves and perform sex acts on each other while he videotaped them. Mom sells the girls on the bikini shoot by saying Joe Francis is guaranteeing the ad will be on a giant billboard on the Sunset Strip in the very city where the Kardashian family lives! Yay!

    Here's another headline-the mother has a stripper pole in her bedroom and lets the girls practice their moves on it! Double yay!

    I mean-this is so insane in terms of parents without brains, borders or any INKLING of common sense that all I can say is it's a dead certain lock the daughters will eventually never talk to their asshole mother again after a certain point-either because they simply have come to realize the entire planet finds them to be a joke or because they finally impaled mom and Bruce against a master bedroom wall with one of his old Olympic javelins.

    It's five girls total so I'm gonna go out on a limb and offer up this fantasy Mix 'n' Match questionnaire-pretend it's eight years from now and try to peg the drug they will ultimately become addicted to and the occupation they are qualified to perform with the Kardashian daughter's name:

    

    The annals of kids unleashed into the monster Hollywood machine who came out clean and still working on the adult side has two names on its list: Jodie Foster and Ron Howard. Case closed.

    You wanna argue about it? Two words: Dana Plato. Two more words: Brad Renfro.

    River Phoenix, Judy Garland, Mason Reese, Gary Coleman-I could go on forever.

    Drew Barrymore.

    I know she's clean now. But think about it-you only know her to be okay over maybe the last couple years or so, correct?

    Right. Well guess what?

    She just turned thirty-three.

    Which means she's been high or coming down from a high or seeking another form of a high most of the time since right after E.T. came out.

    Which was in 1982.

    And she probably STILL doesn't talk to her mother.

    Jennifer Aniston-as far as we know-fine. But still-as far as we know-doesn't talk to her mother.

    Brooke Shields. Fine. A mother in her own right. But spent a big chunk of her lifetime not talking to her mother.

    Enough with the girls? Danny Bonaduce.

    Attempted suicide while shooting a reality show called Breaking Bonaduce . He would've actually killed himself until he came to realize the ratings would probably spike through the roof.

    More boys? The OTHER black kid from the Gary Coleman sitcom. See? Don't even really know his name, do you? Gary Coleman's older brother? Come on. Think.

    He was Willis. As in What You Talkin' 'Bout, Willis. Think for another second. His real name?

    Ready?

    Todd Bridges.

    In Todd's IMDb biography, one section about the beginning of his career reads:

    "It all began one day while watching Redd Foxx display his comic genius on the hit sitcom Sanford and Son. Todd, then six . . . exclaimed excitedly to his mother 'I want to do that!' "

    Which is when his mother should have said "No problem, sweetie pie-once you turn forty-goddam-seven! Now turn that shit off and go do your homework!"

    Instead she took him out of school and started carting him around to commercial auditions and his dad became his agent and they both became his pimps and blah blubbedy blah blah big hit show magazine covers Tiger Beat "omigod we love you!" groupies early promiscuity pot booze blow smack no hit show hates himself and his parents "omigod you look like shit! Look, it's that guy who used to be on that show!" shoplifting guntoting crackwhacking armed assault drink drive rehab.

    Want some more boys?

    The entire male side of the Culkin clan.

    Macaulay and Rory and their failed actor dad/manager/pimp/money-whore Kit.

    Kit ran Macaulay's career into the ground in the brief span of three and a half years-from the breakthrough hit Home Alone in 1990 to the box-office triple flip-flop of Richie Rich, The Pagemaster and The Good Son, which all came out and died one after the other during 1993 and 1994.

    His father had fought and won numerous battles over his kid's fees, his own fees and "creative control" over the films themselves. If ya wanna real glimpse into this guy's ego Google his website-it's got a giant list of his acting credits and his books and blah bitcheddyass blah.

    After his career sputtered out Macaulay Culkin took legal action in order to be officially separated from his parents and was declared an emancipated minor. The nonfamous kids in the family-needing food and shelter, of course, and with no money to call their own-didn't.

    Ya gettin' my drift here?

    If I had taken my parents to court and asked for a legal separation from them and won? I'd have had to ask the judge to put me and my money in jail for as long as my parents remained alive because my father would have kicked my ass up and down the streets of Main South Worcester, Mass., shouting "I'll emancipate your skinny minor ass right now!"

    In the case of Hannah Montana, whose real name is-let's face it, Hannah Montana at this point-we have a kid hellbound for a five-star career crash PLUS they have discovered that Hannah Montana backpacks made in China with pictures of Hannah painted on the back have lead paint in them and so if kids ingest the paint-they can die. First off-if kids are licking their Hannah Montana backpacks-let 'em go. Give 'em up. It's like a test run for future morons. Secondly-is there any way we can get Hannah to lick a few?

    Lindsay Lohan's mom should not be repimping a second daughter while cell phone pix of her first daughter blowing some coke-addled ex-boyfriend are still circulating on the Internet. Lindsay's response? She doesn't remember. Which is evidence enough to signify why-whatever substances she was under the influence of at the time of the bj-she went into rehab. Could this happen to anyone's daughter? Sure. But unless she's famous the pictures don't get to travel all the way around the world. Lindsay's mom should be locked up WITH the dad, who now claims the reality show about second daughter/cokehead-in-waiting Ali was HIS idea and Mom even stole the title from HIM. Plus-HE was supposed to co-star. Come to think of it-let's make this a pay-per-view event-Lindsay's Ma vs. Lindsay's Pa in an alcohol and ego-fueled full-on cage match. Call it "Whose Fault Is It, Really?" And let the two vapid, empty, chemically enthralled siblings take the money and run.

    Every other kid actor whose name you can think of and almost all of the ones whose names are escaping you can be qualified by one of three words: dead, addicted or well on their way to both. Okay-so it was nine words. Shoot me. Better yet-shoot their parents.

    I've met a few of these people-Bonaduce seems like a nice guy and has a terrific sense of humor but he went through a real rough patch-for thirty-five fucking years. That's what fame does to a kid. He was paid to be the wiseass on The Partridge Family and the entire world was laughing with him not at him and then BAM! the show gets canceled, his balls drop, his voice gets deeper, his cock starts talking to him and he's not famous anymore.

    The ball and cock part happen to every teenaged boy but imagine what it's like when you're not making money for your parents anymore.

    Everyone loves the kid who looks to be eleven but acts as if he or she is twenty-eight years old. Yay-Dakota Fanning! She's oh so cute and sooo precocious!

    Yeah-okay. Reserve the rehab spot right now. Book her next nine movies AND a three-month stay at Promises in Malibu during the exact same phone call. She's eleven and a half but can drink like she's thirty. Delete her mom's number from her cell phone. Better yet-delete her mom.

    Here's the right answer when your child points at the TV and says "I wanna do that!":

    

    

    

    

    Forget what you want or what you didn't get to do or how much money you can manufacture or all your best-laid plans or your dreams of stardom or wanting your kid to like you.

    No no no no no.

    Embrace the power of no in all its iterations:

    No Nada Nein Nyet Fuck no Shit no No fucking way Not now Not ever Never ever What did I just motherfucking say? Not as long as I live Not over my dead body Not even if hell freezes over.

    These are the acceptable answers.

    Here is a small sampling of the questions that get an automatic, loud, fast, no negotiation involved no:

        Can I be on TV?

        Can I get a tattoo?

        Can I get my hair cut like Lindsay Lohan?