Whiz Kid

After Mt. Vernon, Madison was a revelation. Surrounded by three beautiful lakes, the campus was an oasis of cool, the nucleus of a progressive city also the state capital. The population could not have been more diverse. Music and the arts thrived. There were myriad places to go. Bars galore. The drinking age was 18.

Once again, you’d done little to prepare for the move and so had to settle on a dumpy apartment with designated roommates: a Polish factory worker’s son from Milwaukee, Arthur and an exchange student from Thailand, whose name you couldn’t spell even if you remembered it. Though you had nothing in common with either of them, they were both diligent students, reserved in temperament, hardworking to their core. You hardly saw them, wouldn’t know they existed if not for the occasional aroma of Thai cooking or Arthur’s booming laugh. Once in a while you shared a beer. But making friends with your roommates was not a priority. You were only interested in two things: writing and women. Drinking seemed a foregone conclusion.

You expanded your proverbial horizons, joining the two campus newspapers as well as helping to create one of your own, a music-focused magazine called the Mad City Music Mirror. You saw your name in print every week and often received letters about things you had written. An audience! Your career as a professional writer had officially begun. Reviewing albums and concerts and films. Someday you would be a journalist for Rolling Stone. It was the perfect job, allowing you to write perilous prose, drink with abandon, and meet scores of beautiful and scandalous women. Highlights from this period included reviewing two up and coming bands, The Replacements and Violent Femmes. If not for your glowing praise, who knows whether either group would have succeeded? Such was your hubris.

In reality, you mostly reviewed local talent, including a hair band called Whiz Kid. Whiz Kid played Lover Boy and Head East covers for drunken sorority girls and the men who loved them. For two bucks a head one got three sets of music. Like any novice, you rejoiced in ripping them a new one. You were not up on that stage but you had a typewriter, which was mightier than any guitar. You poked fun at their cheesy name, ridiculed the matching spandex outfits and blow-dried big hair. Employing every bit of your modest skills, laughing out loud as you wrote. When the story got published you put it with all the others, in a scrapbook showcasing your diabolical wit.

Needless to say, Whiz Kid did not share your sense of humor.

Soon after the article came out, you stumbled into the lead singer at a club. The man knew who you were and he was plenty upset. He asked why you had so cruelly laid into his band. Was being a dick part of your job description? Your inebriated reply: No disrespect, brother, but playing covers by Lover Boy is what sealed your fate.

The vocalist did not punch you. Instead he hit back with something you would never forget. The reason his band played shitty music, he said, was in order to get gigs, so he could make rent and support his wife and new baby. None of the bars in town hired original talent unless they had a following. Whiz kid was unknown. Therefore, he had to sing Working for the Weekend because that’s what 19-year-olds paid money to see.

You had no defense. Because you had no clue the very real life this man had been leading. Struck by his truth, you were ashamed. From that moment forward, you abandoned your desire to be a professional critic. Whiz Kid had been working for the weekend, literally every weekend, in order to survive. You had no right criticizing them for doing so. Your cruel review served no discernible purpose. Save for hurting a group of people.

In light of this revelation, you pivoted. Deciding to be a copywriter, a form you were already familiar with given it was your father’s vocation. You wouldn’t even have to change your major, communication arts. You studied radio, television and film, took an advanced course in screen writing as well as continued writing for all the newspapers. No one could call you lazy. At night, between hunting down women and getting your drink on, you also began writing the great American novel. As well as an award-winning copywriter, you were going to be the next Jay McInerney. You’d found your North Star: the hard drinking writer. You would romanticize and hold onto this identity for decades.

In addition to liquor, women were key to your newfound persona. Chasing them down became pastime. Disenchanted by uptight female students, you developed a fondness for blue-collar girls. The former required too much effort. You’d once dated a sorority girl and spent weeks of nights trying to get past first base with her, which never happened. Cocktail waitresses had no such inhibitions. They seemed to want what you wanted, a few rum and Cokes, MTV, and sex on the carpet. You could leave at 4AM, without drama. Maybe you’d see them again. If not, it didn’t matter. Here was a contract you could get behind.

Juice

The summer after you finished high school. Having recently moved into a small apartment, stressed out by her own demons as well as yours, your mother indicated you find someplace else to live. She’d found evidence of your partying in the basement and could not take it anymore. Never mind you were still a minor in the eyes of the law. You had to go. Jesse was already camped at your father’s townhouse so that was not an option. Naturally, you chose living with a small time drug dealer you’d met in the park. You could not legally sign a lease but “Juice” had been more than happy to take $500 dollars under the table. It was a win-win. He’d even given you the flat’s lone bedroom, preferring the living room because “it was bigger.” Far from the threatening stereotype of a drug dealer, Juice was about as odd a character as you’d ever met. African American, he was also albino, which made him whiter than you. He had pink eyes. And he had lots of drugs, which in turn attracted lots of women.

Your mother met Juice only once but you will never forget her stunned expression, upon seeing this pink-skinned, black man whose apartment you now shared. Akin to a spit take, like something from the popular TV show, Laugh In or more appropriately, The Odd Couple. But mom was a bohemian and Juice was on his best behavior. The arrangement was allowed to continue. Not that she could have prevented it anyway. For the record, your father wasn’t made aware of your exotic roommate, only that you had one.

Those two and a half months became one long weekend. An array of females came to see Juice for pot or acid, often staying to tryst with you. Or they came specifically to fool around with you but later stayed to cop from Juice. Thus, you both shared a symbiotic relationship. Many things could have gone terribly wrong that summer, and arguably should have. Yet, from what you recalled it had been a total blast.

The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing

Continued from previous post…

Even though it was only a few blocks from your father’s house, the next day you both drove his car to the coast. The Missing Persons song on the radio was accurate: Nobody walks in LA. Surely, the beach would provide a better experience than the previous evening. After all, this was sunny California! Girls would be everywhere. You’d have your pick. After trudging across a massive expanse of empty and hot sand, you dropped your towels a short distance from a group of teens playing volleyball. Their hair nearly white from the sun, they seemed like exotic creatures. You dared not approach. You lit up a joint, hoping maybe one of them would notice and invite you over. Didn’t happen. You decided to go for a swim, feeling foolish when you discovered how cold the ocean actually was. Nobody swam. Nobody walked. You didn’t understand California at all.

The whole trip was like that. You felt naïve and alone. Jesse’s up and down moods made it worse. You had hoped the West Coast was where you’d finally fit in, where everything would click. By the week’s end you couldn’t wait to go back to a frozen Chicago, the devil you knew.

You would return to LA many times, first to visit your father, and then for work, shooting commercials. Even then, with a great job and an expense account, a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, you still felt inadequate and uncomfortable.

Refusing to accept such miserable feelings you chased the life you weren’t having. By then you were drinking and snorting cocaine. Many nights you sat in your opulent room, doing lines and watching pornographic movies on cable. Sometimes you’d go to the hotel bar and get loaded, fantasizing about the bombshells and starlets you would meet there. This too, never happened. Even the expensive hookers left you alone. What the hell were you doing so wrong?

The teen-dream photograph beguiles you today because everything about it belied the truth then. In fact, you had trouble sleeping. You got drunk and high almost every night, and hung out with a crowd your father had correctly labeled as losers. You looked like a winner in that photograph. Yet, under the studly veneer was rotting milquetoast.

Ironically, as a child it had been the other way around: you were a smart inquisitive kid trapped in a soft, unappealing body. Getting both aspects right has been a lifelong struggle. Unable to reconcile the two you began dividing yourself. You were either the smart kid who enjoyed learning or the defiant teenager who got high all the time. The chasm grew wider with each passing month. By senior year in high school, you were two different people, with distinct and offsetting personalities: the double life of an alcoholic.

This was not to say you didn’t enjoy life or were depressed. You did and you weren’t. But you would constantly appease one personality at the expense of the other. Neither side ever developed completely or properly.

Though you eventually would lose the weight that insecure fat kid was always close by, rendering you sensitive and shy. The vulnerability was not lost on your peers, who found myriad ways to exclude you or take advantage. When you finally started getting noticed by girls, nothing ever clicked. You were as scared to be with them as turned on. They could tell, you just knew it. Oh, how you wanted them to think you were cool. But you had no idea what they wanted from you.

You could hold your own in school, got good grades, impressing your teachers. But to your peers it was a different story. Your long hair and concert tee shirts said one thing your report cards another. The smart kids could smell the cigarettes and marijuana on your denim jacket and deemed you a stoner, seldom inviting you to their parties. God forbid you showed interest in your education to the burnouts.

And so it went. Desperately trying to belong to one group or the other, never finding your place in either. You were like one of those hapless characters in Dr. Seuss’s story, The Sneetches. Were you a star belly or a plain belly? You had no idea.

You were not allowed to attend high school graduation because you’d been caught wearing shorts on the last day of school. You weren’t the only senior to have defied this rule but were unique in telling the Principal to fuck off when he busted you. Deeply upset, your mother viewed the ban as further proof of your increasingly reckless behavior. For your father it came as a relief of sorts; he wouldn’t have to drop anything more important in order to attend.

Are You A Sociopath? (1)

“What’s the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath?” You ask Mia, upon sitting down.

“Is this a joke?” she replies.

“I was wondering the whole ride up,” you say. “On a lark, I even tried asking Siri. She told me where the nearest bike path was.”

You take off your skullcap tossing it beside you on the couch. Rub your shaved head. This is what a psychopath looks like. Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Shining.

“Well, first of all, we don’t use those terms anymore,” Mia says. “Not clinically. We prefer calling it antisocial personality disorder.” 

“Well, I definitely have that going on.” You smile. The topic actually has no bearing on your mood, which is upbeat.

“Basically,” Mia continues, “a psychopath does not have a conscience while a sociopath has a glimmer of one, albeit damaged.”

“So,” you wonder aloud, “a sociopath knows he’s doing something wrong but does it anyway. And the psychopath has no moral compass whatever?”

Mia nods. “Do you think you’re a sociopath?” she picks up her coffee mug, keeping her eyes on you while taking a sip.

“Compared to a psychopath!” You lean forward. “I know when I’m doing bad things but yet I do them anyway. The drinking. Infidelity. Driving by myself in the carpool lane.”

Mia laughs. The reaction you were looking for. You think this is how a patient flirts with his shrink. Playing cat and mouse around a dicey topic. But Mia’s too smart for that. She won’t abide such banter unless it’s leading somewhere relevant. She calls it deflecting.

“Addictions are different than psychosis,” she says. “The disease overrides morality. You know that. Besides, you have a moral compass and you’re working on fixing it. What you do here, in AA, a sociopath wouldn’t bother doing.”

“I suppose you’re right, Mia. But sometimes I wonder…”

To be continued…

Fats (1)

You refuse to go gently into that good night, like so many men and women do, slipping into middle age as if it was an oversize pair of jeans.

One hour every day, you work up a sweat. Running, swimming, biking or lifting weights it doesn’t matter. As long as you do something that makes your arms and legs burn, tightening the flesh against gravity. Haunted by memories of obesity. Driven by them.

As a boy, your friends had relentlessly tormented you about your weight. They’d nicknamed you “Fats.” Called you that in front of your peers. In front of your parents and theirs. Worst of all they called you “Fats” in front of females.

Your father once offered you five dollars for every pound of fat you could lose. The ploy didn’t work. It only saddened you knowing he felt that way about his son. At the time, your mother suggested Atkins –a trendy but notorious diet that took away pounds but left you feeling dizzy and weak. You got thinner but one morning fell down a flight of stairs. It was then you decided that the gym was preferable to avoiding carbohydrates, a measure you still practice today.

To be continued…