Suckered by The Strand

I recently went to The Strand book store to spend a gift certificate I got for Christmas. The Strand is one of New York’s finest book stores, really a rare store filled with all kinds of book at discounted prices. I spent hours there many weekends when I first moved back to New York. I don’t make it there as often now, but I always ask for a Strand gift card for Christmas and often get one.

On my most recent visit I noticed a novel for sale on one of the many tables dedicated to discounted fiction. The novel is “Daughter of Fortune” by Isabel Allende. Reading its back cover, I found it interesting. The novel is about an orphan who goes to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. It promises intrigue, violence, and history of the old American West. The price was right too and I added it to my purchases.

When I got home and began putting away my books, I removed the Strand’s price tag on the Allende novel only to find that the price tag had been strategically placed to cover up an “Oprah’s Book Club” symbol!

I’ve been Oprah-ed by one of my favorite book stores!

Oprah Winfrey is TV’s most successful phony. She’s exploited the tragedies and private grief of myriad citizens while claiming to help them. There is not a sincere bone in her corpulent body. To read a book soiled with her logo is to join the sad herd of stultified hausfraus who hang on her every scripted, insipid word.

The Strand knows that its clientele are more intelligent than to count themselves among Oprah Winfrey’s legions of slack-jawed buffoons. I am confident that they knew the Oprah label would repel more of its customers than it would attract, and so they cunningly placed their price tag to completely conceal this mark of the TV beast.

I will still read Isabel Allende’s novel. But if I am to read this book in public, I must somehow obscure the Oprah label. Perhaps I should create a sticker of my own that will reclaim good books from the cultural slag heap that is Oprah’s book club. “Scumbag Book Club – Polite New Yorker Approved,” may soon grace the covers of our finest books.

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I told people I was taking a year off from drinking. That year is now over but I’m not going back.

Quitting drinking was something in the back of my mind for a long time. I even took extended breaks from drinking for months at a time here and there, though sometimes book-ending these periods with serious benders. I pulled off these periods of not drinking just fine. It was the drinking life that gave me trouble.

I found a book I had read about when it was published called "Drinking, A Love Story," by Caroline Knapp. It’s a very good book despite some of its mushy emotional female content. Knapp points out that if you are someone who thinks and worries about drinking a lot, that’s a sure-fire sign that you should quit. That idea really stuck with me, because so many times I found myself doing my own form of alcohol calculus (if I have only four beers and then maybe have a soda so I’m not too drunk; if I start with a mixed drink and then switch to beer I’ll be OK) that continually left me short-changed. In Knapp’s book she recommends Pete Hamill’s "A Drinking Life," which is a brilliant memoir about growing up in New York. Drinking features prominently in Hamill’s book, but it’s a great New York memoir first, and not really a book about drinking at all. He does detail his decision to quit drinking, though, and mentions that he saw himself as acting out his life instead of living it.

Knapp’s and Hamill’s books were filled with a lot of things I recognized and encouraged me to give up the ghost on the drinking life.

I’d like to say that there was a big clarifying event that forced my hand and made me swear off booze, but the truth is I got tired of it. I got tired of waking up with a big headache, a lot less money and the painful fear that I had done or said something stupid enough to lose friends in the process. I got tired of waking up angry over the crappy state I was in and having no one to be angry at but myself. There were plenty of times when I drank a lot and didn’t overdo it and had a great time and patted myself on the back for that, but those times were being outnumbered by the times when I set out to pace myself and ended up in the zone where you’re on a great drunken roll and you just have to have that next sweet drink, and eventually you’re too drunk and you hate yourself for it.

I would be the worst kind of hypocrite to denounce drinking altogether. I dedicated too many hours to the fine art of consuming alcohol to stab that old friend in the back like that. There have been too many good times spent with the stuff, too many good memories forged with beer and whiskey to look upon them as anything but old friends. But sometimes friends outlive their usefulness.

Drinking is only as good as the help it gives you to do the other things you want to do, to have the real adventures and the real good times. It’s not the drinking that really makes for the good time; it’s the courage to meet women, the fun of joking and speaking very frankly with your friends, to blast through the social awkwardness that might cripple us. If drinking is still a help and a healthy supplement to life itself, then great. But for me it turned from a stepping stone to a stumbling block. I spent too much time worrying about drinking to make it fun anymore.

I have generally kept quiet about quitting drinking, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. Being defined by your drinking is a dead end, but so is being defined by your not drinking. It’s true I don’t go to bars much anymore on my own, but I won’t refuse to go to if I’m invited to hang out with friends there. I understand that my friends aren’t trying to force me to drink, they simply want to hang out and bars are the usual way to do that. It would be the most arrogant, self-centered crap to ask all of my friends to rearrange their lives on my account.

One thing I will absolutely not do is join Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program. I know many good people who are involved with these groups and joining them is certainly preferable to drinking yourself to death, but the 12-step program is back-door religion. It tells its followers that they are powerless and can find salvation only in the inane catch phrases and prayers of its program. By some measures it is a cult. Your own free will is your highest power; anyone who tells you otherwise is only feeding you another form of poison.

So far I’ve made out fine without any prayers, group hugs or other nonsense. For me, quitting drinking was pretty easy. Instead of drinking something with alcohol in it I drink something without alcohol in it. I always was a big soda drinker, and I’ve resigned myself to enjoying that vice if nothing else. I’m the only person I know who sneaks non-alcoholic beverages into concerts.

I could tell you that drinking soda is just as much fun as drinking beer or bourbon, and that if you quit drinking you’ll be high on life, but that would be bullshit. But a lot of people have the attitude that I once had that life would be impossible without drinking, and that’s bullshit too.

Snowdumb

New York City’s most recent blizzard may be the sixth biggest snowfall the city has ever received, but its likely the worst response on record to a blizzard by people paid to clean it up and keep things running.

More than 48 hours after snow stopped falling, many streets have not been plowed or have not been plowed sufficiently. Mounds of snow normally removed by now still remain. Sidewalks in busy areas of Manhattan (which always gets better service than the outer boroughs) are still wastelands of snow.

The city sanitation department said that they are short staffed, but another city official said that New York has the same number of workers assigned to snow removal as per usual. This could be a work slowdown ploy by sanitation workers and their union to pressure the city to restore budget cuts. Budget cuts and the intensity of the storm certainly play a role in the city’s feeble response, but after two days the city should be in much better shape than this.

Numerous city busses became stuck on unplowed roads—and we’re not talking about obscure roads or small alleys, busses were stranded on First Avenue.

Some subways became prisons. One A train was stuck in Queens for about 10 hours (I’ve been arrested twice and my total time in a holding cell for both arrests didn’t total 10 hours). Other rail lines had horror stories as well. When I arrived at the 207^th St. A train station Monday morning, the stairs had not been shoveled. The Internet was alight camera phone-photos taken by incredulous commuters of snow inside train stations.

When I arrived home from work earlier tonight, cars trying to drive down my street were blocked by Parks Department vehicles. Parks Department employees milled aimlessly with shovels, ignoring the cars honking their horns trying to get down the street.

We are still cooling off under mountains of snow. When the city government collectively shits the bed at a time of disaster, heads must roll.

More Christmas, Less Christianity

It’s the holidays and ’tis the season to celebrate our lives and spread joy to those in it.

While my respect for humanity has not diminished, I have come to appreciate other human beings less. This is especially true when people are in thrall to both senseless spending and senseless charity.

Let’s embrace the celebratory feast of the harvest season and marvel at surviving another year. If you have food in your stomach and a roof over your head on Christmas, you’re doing better than a lot of people. Be happy about that. Buy generous presents for those that you love, but don’t be gaudy about it.

We can do without the mind-numbing consumer nihilism or the hackneyed love fest foisted upon us by delusional Christianity. Both are sad sides to the same coin. Mindless altruism is no less a detriment of character than mindless consumerism.

Grab Christmas by the throat. Open that egg nog, breath deep the evergreen, and station yourself strategically under some mistletoe. Let’s resolve to mulch our enemies along with our Christmas trees.

Here’s to more Christmas and less Christianity. Merry Christmas.

Taking a Leak on Secrecy

Critics of WikiLeaks act as if the Web site is out to flush democracy—and with all the “leaks” and document “dumps” I am overwhelmed by the fantastical bathroom imagery long overdue in our discourse on government—but really miss the scandals that should-have-been.

The latest disclosures by the gadfly Web site have made things tough for the State Department under Hilary Clinton. Certainly we’ve been damaged diplomatically, but certainly less so than by the Iraq war, extraordinary rendition from friendly countries and decades of myopic foreign policy.

Where WikiLeaks really blundered was in its first big release of documents concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It released the names of informers, interpreters and others working for the U.S., thus endangering their lives and making things more difficult for the lives of our military. When human rights groups criticized WikiLeaks for this, founder Julian Assange blamed them for not helping his organization sort through what he had. If you don’t know what you’re publishing, why are you publishing it?

And have the latest leaks been that dramatic or informative? That the government of Afghanistan is horrendously corrupt is not exactly news to anyone who’s opened a newspaper in the last eight years. I’m not surprised that we’re launching missiles from drones in Yemen, and your average Yemeni Al Qaeda sympathizer isn’t either. The revelations about their government lying about it may create some terrorist sympathizers there, but it won’t turn anyone who wasn’t leaning in that direction to begin with.

The usual litany of plastic patriots is calling these leaks an act of treason. In order for something to legally be considered treasonous, I believe that Congress has to legally declare war, something it hasn’t had the courage to do since 1941. Also, since WikiLeaks’ founder is Australian and the Web site’s server is now hosted by a Swiss company, their offenses, whatever they are, are not treasonous. I understand the outrage over disclosing secrets that can endanger American lives, but find it hard to take seriously coming from people who had no problem sending our military into two theaters of war without proper supplies, or on a hunt for weapons in Iraq that weren’t there.

And for all its faults, and assuming the worst about its founder and its intentions, having information public is better than not in a democracy. We the people should always err on the side of free speech and free access to information. However bad too much information can sometimes seem, it’s always better than the alternative.

Prohibition Is ‘Loko’

Here in New York, while our infrastructure crumbles, our city and state governments go broke, schools fail, crime increases, and unemployment remains high, our political leaders busied themselves engaged in modern-day prohibition and forced an alcoholic beverage off the shelves.

Store owners have until Dec. 10 to sell whatever Four Loko they have left. The beverage, which contains generous helpings of alcohol and caffeine, has been called “blackout in a can,” by drinking aficionados and moralizing politicians. Several other states have moved to ban the drink and others like it.

Without getting into the argument against the ban on alcohol for people under 21, the more recent problem of young people harming themselves with these drinks could be solved by enforcement of already existing laws. Also, now that it has been outlawed, stores are going to sell out of Four Loko fast, and more kids will be encouraged to drink it to see what the fuss is about.

Somewhere people are hard at work thinking of the next legal way for people to annihilate their brain cells, because people will buy products that get them drunk and/or high. They always have, always will. You can outlaw anything you want; people are going to find new ways to fuck themselves up. Have faith in the powers of human invention and the drive to escape reality. A year or two from now, the government will ban something new.

Also, doesn’t it occur to anyone in government that Americans have the right to be drunken idiots? It’s our right to poison ourselves slowly with tobacco, alcohol or (in my case) caffeine. So long as it’s not poisonous or fraudulently labeled, the government should not interfere with our right to drink disgusting drinks until we puke ourselves.

Do not give one inch on anything. If it’s legal today, make sure it stays legal. Yesterday it was clove cigarettes. Today it’s Four Loko and similar drinks. Tomorrow it will be double cheeseburgers. They’ll pry a bottle of Diet Pepsi from my cold, dead fingers.

Smart Phones Do Not Make Smarter People

Bowing to the demands of the modern age, which accelerates in its adaption of new technologies at an exponential rate, I recently became one of the last of my friends to upgrade to a “smart” phone.

I am not at all what technology experts call an “early adopter” of technology. I would have been fine to do without a cell phone, except that everyone insisted on using them and I got tired of looking like some kind of crack head bum in search of a working pay phone.

The term “early adopter” refers to people so obsessed by technology that they will wait in line for six hours to spend too much on a piece of technology that will be obsolete in two weeks. Were you one of the first on your block to own an iPhone? Congratulations, you’re an idiot. The iPhones are becoming obsolete faster than they can make them, and one of the newer versions was plagued with problems.

I had planned on holding out for at least another year before buying a smart phone. I thought that maybe the prices would go down some more or technology would improve somehow just enough to make the added expense negligible. But I relented under peer pressure and an attractive brochure in the mail.

Improved technology has created a convenient universe of irresponsibility. The convenience of communication has devalued that communication. It no longer matters for many people to be on time for meetings or events. They figure that if they send you a text message around the time they were supposed to meet you, it is the same as showing up. Since technology exists for our convenience, people think everyone and everything else exists for their convenience also. Cell phones and Internet-capable hand-held devices have only further discouraged people from planning ahead, which is not a good thing. If anything, we as a society do not spend nearly enough time on thinking ahead.

Texting is one of the most despicable forms of communication available today, and is used with great fervor by the younger generation (the younger generation today includes anyone who graduated high school after 1995). I absolutely refuse to use the shorthand that is so common among texters (e.g.: - r u going 2 bed? – OMG, me 2!), as this is the language of cretins and pre-pubescent girls. And as someone who prides himself on decent writing, I want to use proper capitalization and punctuation at all times, things that texting on a regular cell phone makes very difficult to do at all and impossible to do quickly. I was content to do without texting, but too many people insist upon doing it, and I had to get an unlimited texting plan lest my phone bill be too high.

The smart phone should enable me to send text messages without losing my mind. So far, instead of making errors by not hitting the right button the requisite number of times, I’m making errors by hitting the wrong buttons on the very small screen keyboard. Technology is always finding new ways of improving your life while at the same time annoying the shit out of you.

The Answer to Bullying: Ass-Kicking Gays

A recent spate of suicides by gay teenagers has our media and our left-leaning political leaders up in arms about gays being bullied.

When I was a freshman in high school, someone threw a grape at me in the school cafeteria. The grape hit me in the face and I picked it up to throw it back. A much larger senior stood up and said he had thrown it at me. Without thinking, I threw it back at him, which was his excuse to charge at me. I got my skinny freshman ass kicked, and it sucked. But that didn’t matter. I showed everyone I was willing to take on someone bigger and stronger, and no one ever picked a fight with me in high school ever again.

Middle school and high school are like prison. You have to show your fellow inmates you’ll fight back, or you’ll forever be stepped on. It doesn’t matter if you lose; it matters that you fight back. Verbally or physically, people need to stand up for themselves.

Bullying has been with us forever, it was going strong when I was growing up and will be with us generations from now. The answer to bullying is to make sure we have kids who are confident in themselves and think independently. Let’s spend more resources raising kids who think for themselves and fight back.

We don’t need to wear purple, wave rainbow flags, or weep about how special and beautiful everyone is. Too much of our culture already celebrates the effeminate and the weak. We don’t want children who are mindlessly accepting any more than we want children who are mindlessly hateful. And we don’t want to tarnish our freedoms by passing more unconstitutional hate crime laws.

The truth is not everyone is special and lovable. There are plenty of useless people in the world who don’t deserve our sympathy. What we need to stop this allegedly epidemic bullying of gays are more badass gays.

And so I present to you some proud members of the LGBT—now called the LGBTQA(WTF)—community who will serve as better role models for our homosexual youth.

1. Gary Floyd: If you think it’s tough being openly gay today, try being a gay, communist punk rocker in Texas 25 years ago. As the lead singer of The Dicks, Floyd denounced police, homophobes and other things that annoyed him without apology. The Dick’s song ‘Saturday Night at the Bookstore’ is a frustrated gay rant that is one of the angriest and most punk of punk rock songs. Another openly gay punk band from that same era was The Big Boys, also from Texas. Big Boys singer Randy “Biscuit” Turner, who passed away in 2005, was also a noted skateboarder.

2. Pat Patterson: Lots of gays have survived bullying and the disapproving stares of the general public, how many have survived an alley fight match with Sergeant Slaughter? Pat Patterson’s homosexuality was considered an open secret in the wrestling world for many years, and he continues to work in wrestling today as a talent scout and producer. Chris Kanyon more recently made news when he came out of the closet. Like body building and lots if not all other sports, pro-wrestling has long catered to homophobic fans at the same time it has had a consistent gay following.

3. Bob Mould: Bob Mould is where wrestling and punk rock converge. As the singer and guitar player for the punk band Hüsker Dü, Mould allegedly kicked anyone in the head who spit on him (spitting on your favorite punk rock band was a big tradition back in the 1970s and early 1980s). He later went on to be a writer for World Championship Wrestling.

4. G.G. Allin: I know, I know, G.G. Allin was a bisexual and a violent drug addict who threw poop at people. But so what? Who was going to bully a naked man covered in his own blood and feces? G.G. Allin would punch you in the face at his show and then let you perform fellatio on him afterwards. Even at his worst, Allin’s music beats anything by Clay Aiken.

5. Wanda Sykes: the world of sports provides us with plenty of tough lesbians. Wanda Sykes stands out as an outstanding comedienne. And surviving in comedy, especially when performing at a lot of black comedy clubs where hecklers are notoriously merciless, is tough.

6. Christopher Marlowe: Marlowe was one of the bravest writers ever. He lived in the time of William Shakespeare and some conspiracy theorists claim he is the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays. He was gay and an atheist when both could get you killed legally. Marlowe worked as a spy, was accused of blasphemy and was murdered mysteriously. What poets and playwrights today have half that courage?

7. Rob Halford: Lead singer of Judas Priest, Halford is one of the gods of heavy metal. “I don’t know why so few people caught on,” he said after coming out of the closet in the 1990s, “I was always dressed like one of the Village People.”

U.N.Diplomatic in New York

September in New York brings many things: cooler weather, the start of the school year, the football season. It’s also the time of the United Nations General Assembly, which brings diplomats and heads of state from all over the world.

The U.N. General Assembly is a useless exercise in pompous self congratulation that brings few results beyond tying up traffic on the East Side of Manhattan and costing New York taxpayers millions. It brings New York incompetent diplomats we don’t need to listen to their leaders give speeches few will listen to and fewer care about.

Having worked at J.F.K. airport for two years, I can tell you first hand that diplomats are some of the most arrogant and obnoxious people you will ever meet if you’re unlucky enough. Many of them have diplomatic immunity, meaning they can not only get away with serious crimes like murder and assault, but they can park wherever they like and never pay a parking ticket or have their cars towed. They are rude and boorish, and they’re getting worse.

There are countries that owe the city millions in unpaid parking tickets and fines. Mayor Giuliani raised a stink about this a few years ago, but got nowhere with this.

And what has the United Nations really accomplished? The U.N. can only do what its most powerful member nations allow it to do. Can you name anything that the U.N. has done that individual countries could not have done on their own?

If these privileged ambassadors and self-important diplomatic staff would leave their bubble and live life like the rest of us, they would see ordinary people of many different nations getting along in ways they could never figure out.

People from many different nationalities manage to get along and get by in New York City, not because we like each other, but because we’ve got shit to do.

The common struggle to survive in a tough environment creates an unspoken understanding among working people. Your average immigrant in New York would make much better use of free parking than any diplomat, and has a much better work ethic and character too.

If the United Nations wants to remain in New York, the U.N. staff should start abiding by the same rules as the rest of us. Let them surrender their diplomatic immunity, pay their parking tickets and accept the rule of law as it applies to anyone else. It would be the diplomatic thing to do.

Save the Korans (Or Not)

We can all rest easy now that the leader of a small Florida church has been dissuaded from burning a copy of the Koran by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The government had warned that the incident would be a recruiting boom to Al Qaeda and put the lives of our troops in danger.

This sad spectacle is the latest in a ridiculous cultural war that obscures real issues of government policy. It also points out a sad double standard in the new politics of taking offense. If carried out consistently, the Obama administration will have time for little else but begging Americans not to be offensive. Good luck with that.

The President goes out of his way to preach religious pluralism and insists Americans not equate the relatively small numbers of murderous fundamentalists with all Muslims, yet our Secretary of Defense has to go begging because the Islamic world thinks a small-time religious fanatic in Florida is representative of the entire Christian world? Has the Secretary of Defense placed a call to the crazy church in Kansas that sends its small band of followers to picket military funerals, praising each service member’s death as divine retribution for America’s acceptance of gays? That’s pretty offensive too. Luckily, we have the Patriot Guard (lesson: the key to dealing with offensive speech is more free speech).

If one reactionary minister can endanger the lives of our troops with a silly offensive stunt, our problem is not the reactionary minister. The same First Amendment that allows misguided Muslims to build an Islamic center a few blocks from where thousands were murdered in the name of Islam also allows malevolent Christians to burn Korans. If Muslims around the world can’t get that concept through their kufi-clad heads, then they are the problem, not the random leeches sucking publicity from the latest mosque controversy.

Since there’s now a precedent for the Obama administration to personally appeal to people who plan to offend Muslims, I thought I might get in on the act. Not to be outdone, I sent the following message to the White House through its official Web site:

“Since a reactionary pastor in Florida earned a phone call from Secretary Gates with his threat to burn a copy of the Koran, I hereby declare my intention to defecate on a copy of the Koran on Sept. 11, 2011 unless President Obama calls me and kindly asks me not to. Thank you.”

I included my phone number so the President can call me. My email was also a part of the online form. I really hope the President phones me; I only have one copy of the Koran and I’d rather not poop on it.

And while our cabinet members are busy making sure private citizens don’t do anything to offend Muslims, do you think they might get around to wrapping up a nine-year war that has killed thousands more Americans and still hasn’t found Osama Bin Laden?

If everything that happens in this country that offends Muslims required cabinet-level action, our government would have melted down a long time ago. The fundamentalists who would take offense enough to a Koran burning to become violent are already radicalized and nothing our government does will ever appease them. We won’t win the war against Islamic extremists by making ourselves less offensive to Islamic extremists.

Gotham as Ghost Town

The second half of August is when a lot of things slow down in New York. Working in the financial district, the city can seem like a ghost town this time of year. Absent is the usually high-octane bustle and constant presence of crowds that characterizes daily life in the city for most of the year.

One friend remarked that Labor Day weekend is the best weekend to enjoy New York. Everything is still open but lots of people are out of town, so everything is less crowded and therefore more enjoyable.

I thought I was going to get out of the city more often this summer. Getting out of New York is very necessary to preserve your sanity, especially during the summer. I managed to get out of town a few times this summer, but not as often as I would have liked.

New York City is one of the worst places for it to be hot. The concrete and asphalt absorb and reflect the heat. Tall buildings trap car exhaust and other pollution, and there are millions of other people around contributing to the stifling misery.

And sadly, New York is in the midst of another heat wave. I don’t know what measure meteorologists use to declare a heat wave, but for me it’s two consecutive days where the temperature reaches or exceeds 86°F. The hot weather is not my friend.

If you enjoy sweat pouring down every part of your body while you share a concrete oven with 8 million of your closest friends, then New York City in the summer is for you.

A SCREWed Life

Growing up in New York, SCREW magazine publisher Al Goldstein came to represent pornography, vulgarity and New York City itself. I recently finished reading his book ‘I, Goldstein, My SCREWed Life’ and I highly recommend it.

Goldstein presented himself as a stereotypical New Yorker. He was loud, boisterous and crude. He was an overweight, cigar-smoking slob who was infamous for launching tirades against airlines, health clubs, ex-wives and former employees, among others. He was feted by Howard Stern and fellated by Seka. His TV show, “Midnight Blue,” spurred millions of copycats and helped pave the way for porn’s permanent place on cable television.

One of the things I remember about him best from those days was his sterling defense of pornography. “Sex is a positive, happy thing,” I remember him saying. “What’s wrong with looking at pictures of vaginas in my newspaper?” Beyond the obvious First Amendment argument, Goldstein’s argument in favor of consuming porn was the best one. Sex is a natural thing, so why be ashamed of it? If it weren’t for people having sex, none of us would be here*. When I was a shy ten-year-old kid who loved tits, Goldstein was a hero. He was “sex positive” long before the term was invented. He was among the first to recognize and rail against the unholy marriage of radical feminists and evangelical Christians in their quest to use the law to suppress free speech in the name of protecting women from dirty movies and magazines.

Anyone who has looked at pornographic materials in the last 40 years (which is anyone who isn’t blind or living in a horribly repressive society) owes a debt of gratitude to Al Goldstein. One of the reasons we can enjoy the abundant pornography we take for granted today is because Goldstein, SCREW co-editor Jim Buckley and others (like the more famous Larry Flynt) fought for our rights years ago, often at great financial and personal cost. Goldstein and Buckley faced up to six years in jail for publishing a newspaper (yes, this happened in America).

And for all of Goldstein’s vulgarity, please note that the pornography and vision of sex he presented to America was a more real and vastly superior brand compared with what is popular today. I’ll take the realistic-looking women from the pages of SCREW over the silicone and botox filled automatons of today.

Goldstein was no angel, and he makes no effort to hide his many vices and excesses in his memoir. He even quotes from a book written by a former staffer that depicts him as a giant mouth whose personality is overtaken by a tremendous appetite.

Ten years ago, when I saw Penn & Teller at the Beacon Theater, I thought I was the shit because I had a slightly better seat than Al Goldstein. He was one row behind me. He was dressed in shorts, hiking boots, and a red, white and blue sequined jacket. Of course, I went home alone and he was with a hot girl who was maybe a third his age. Six years later, Goldstein had been personally bankrupted by lawsuits and criminal charges of harassment. He was destitute and in poor health.

A few years ago, I made a flyer to advertise a show that my band was playing and the flyer featured a photo of Goldstein giving the world the middle finger. I emailed him a copy of the flyer and he said it was wonderful. That’s one of the best endorsements our band has ever had.

Last I heard, Goldstein was living in an apartment in Far Rockaway. If his doctors let him eat it, I’d like to treat him to a delicious pastrami sandwich at Katz’s.

*I understand that today there is a small minority of people who were conceived by in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and lesbians with turkey basters (I have considered trying to make a career out of being an inexpensive sperm donor for lesbians). These people’s lives are just as valuable as anyone’s, but I refuse to live in a world where the majority of people were not created through good, old-fashioned fucking.