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Cock Rock for the

Twelve-and-Under:

Little Girls and the

Unhealthy Way They Love

Mother Nature determines what is poisonous to the soul and body, and sometimes it is easy to avoid that which is baneful and unclean: e.g., we naturally have no desire to eat fetid corpses or drink motor oil. What nature does not provide–in the way of an instinctual deterrent, societal and karmic law– it handles by providing terrible disfiguring diseases, jail sentences, and vast financial punishments. Without these, we would all naturally swerve towards being illiterate and obese sex-crazed criminals, engaging in heroin-addled blood orgies from the time we turn six years old, chain-smoking and eating nothing but bacon and cans of whipped cream and Starburst fruit chews. Our knee-jerk tastes, as a species, tend to swing toward the disease causing, as opposed to the healthful.

In a similar way, the collective emotional palate of mankind at this phase of evolution is too skanky and immature to be able to readily recognize and avoid the fever-blistered hue of Unhealthy Love. When one is an infant, one can happily stick sand and garbage and house keys in one’s mouth and feel an enormous sense of loss when they are taken away and replaced by a nourishing biscuit. The unfortunate human animal continues to hysterically refuse to advance past the crack-and-glue-huffing exhilarations of Obsessive Lustful Desire and to replace them with more benign forms of realistic love and/or intimacy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the unhealthy love of rock stars by little girls.

Aside from softcore romance novels and the emotional smut of movies like Titanic and My Best Friend's Wedding, nobody's ever been quite able to deliberately and successfully devise a hardcore pornography for women. Playgirl magazine attempted to invent it in the seventies, utilizing the primitive theory that women got as sweaty and overstimulated by brazen, naked pictures of the opposite sex as men, and introduced a magazine with a hairy, brick-jawed brute in the centerfold, earnestly displaying his semi-engorged “Hollywood Loaf.” Of course, the magazine was totally laughable and not particularly erotic to women, and Playgirl ended up being patronized more or less exclusively by gay men. The pop sensation machine has found the answer, however, to the age-old marketing conundrum of What Makes Girls Randy, and now all media outlets are saturated with bedroom-haired, cologne-marinated, undergraduate-age dancing boys.

Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of teen sensations is now a multi-national Moloch, and such phenomena as Menudo, New Kids on the Block, 'N-Sync, the Spice Girls, and the Back-street Boys represent a whole vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e., the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.

Twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York City and screamed for teen-masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys in the summer of '99, and a few days earlier, another twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that screaming hysteria to have died along with the Beatles.

Pre-teen girls want two things: a crazed amount of unwarranted, worshipful attention, and something ridiculously exciting and magical to happen to them suddenly, which would enable them to turn sneering and tall toward their ignorant parents and various preteen enemies and have them all shudder with the recognition that they were critically, mortally wrong in underestimating the preteen girl, and that they will now Pay. The idea of this kind of powerful social revenge is so tantalizing, it is basically in itself a version of prepubescent sex. This fantasy usually extends itself into a whole obsessive scenario involving one or more of the members of a boy band, in which the following takes place:

1. First, the teen pop phenomenon receives the incredibly special fan letter from the preteen girl and immediately recognizes the special trueness of her love and her unique qualities. The icon falls in love with the girl from her amazing letter and school photo.

2. The icon writes the girl back and makes arrangements to visit on the sly, in his private plane. (It is amazing the way the plane shows up in almost every young girl's whack-off fantasy scenario. It's practically a Jungian archetypal phenomenon.)

3. The pop star then spirits the girl away from her horrible parents (who die, tragically and bizarrely, soon afterward, leaving the girl with no governing mechanism whatsoever) and establishes an indelible love-contract with her, which involves performing songs about her, songs from poems that she’s written, and even possibly discovering the girl’s uncanny singing and tambourine talents. The girl and boy star then live happily ever after, deeply in love, modeling together on the cover of all magazines, and they can buy everything they want, forever, and nobody can tell them what to do.

All little girls know they will be kind and magnanimous and well-loved when they are famous; all little girls are kind princesses and just queens. As it is with most celebrities, after the advent of their fame has camouflaged what an utterly unwholesome canker on the gums of existence they are and finally proven them Right in Every Way, they will gradually allow themselves to unbuckle their latent kindnesses and show the inferior people how a Truly Special Person behaves. There is a hidden assumption in all people, but little girls especially, that once all of their dreams come true, they won't need to improve their character or personality in any way—they will have been perfect all along, and everyone around them was too fucking dumb to have noticed it before.

When I was growing up and in the prepubescent emotional stage that is the primary feeding ground of rock-icon phenomena, we had the Monkees (despite the fact that the show had long been canceled and was already in syndicated reruns by the time I was hip to it). The Monkees were great; they were goofy and moronic and they wore ponchos, and they existed outside of worldly angst and the hazards of physical romance. A date with the Monkees would consist of jumping out of an oversized box of Fruit Loops and playing freeze tag with wigs in a penny arcade. My six-year-old friends and I kissed pillows named Davy and Mickey (Mike was too mature, Peter too doglike and retarded).

We just LOVED the Monkees. We never imagined them without pants, but if we did, they had the same hairless nether-mound GI Joe had in lieu of an actual unit. We talked about marrying a monkey vs. marrying Speed Race, or marrying half-Mickey-half-Davy—it was all the same. This amorphous non-sexuality was factory-built into the Monkees along with the string you pulled on their chests to hear “Last Train to Clarksville,” and is the crucial difference between prefab-musical-teen-crush-bands-assembled-by-teams-of-marketing-experts then and now. Now, instead of castrating the stars, like the TV spin surgeons did to the Monkees, band creators imbue these quasi-musical teens with frightening levels of artificially generated erotic power.

Children moaning in trained vibrato and writhing in sexual anguish have always been a big attention-getter for old talent-contest shows like Star Search and other questionable TV experiences. On The Mickey Mouse Club, back in the fifties, fresh-faced little teen vixens like Darlene and Annette once sang unabashedly doltish ballads about puppy love written by fifty- year-old men. The Little Rascals dressed as adult hipsters and sang each other speakeasy songs of cheap drunken courtship, winking and wiggling. Now children barely out of training pants are wearing asymmetrical Victor Costa ballgowns and belting out how “Their Man is Gone” in the smoky tones of world-weary, dope-sick B-girls who’ve been beaten like donkeys for loving too intensely. Naturally, most of this can be blamed on the parents; over-zealous soccer and ice-rink moms have nothing on the white-sweatered harridans who seek entertainment-industry success through their unblemished tykes. No bog-banshee wailing for untimely death in an Irish family could send more Freon up the spine than a Backstage Mother howling darkly at her toddler in showgirl makeup, “Pretty FEET! Make PRETTY FEET for the agents, Missy!”

The recent rash of female pop singers have already figured out that crawling around in their panties on MTV is the best thing they can do for record sales. As singers proceed to get younger and more naked, child versions of lingerie bands like Vanity 6 are sure to ensue: undulating eleven-year-old boys and girls wearing Cuban-heeled fetish nylons and tiny athletic-support cups will be filling an arena near you, running microphones suggestively over their undeveloped chests, grabbing their unfinished nether parts, flipping their hair, pouting, feigning sadomasochism with the mike stand. Oversexed R&B tykes like Immature and Tevin Campbell have already been down this catwalk – they were boys who were not old enough to drive, who frothed crowds of grown women into surging jungles of wrongful lust. Somehow, to the wanton fan of any age, a charismatic stage presence means that the performer is possessed of a mature, diabolically super-charged mega-sexuality, and the fan responds to the performer as such, even if he is barely over four feet tall.

New Kids on the Block had a frighteningly sexual, Jesus-like sway over the female species. At the peak of their success, I remember, I read an actual newspaper column about how a three-and-a-half-year-old girl who had been displaying nothing but autistic-like behavior for her entire life was watching a New Kids concert with her older siblings, then suddenly snapped into lucidity, grabbed her mother by the arm, and drawled out her first words, her maiden voyage into the English language, a fiery demand: “I want Joe!” --Joe, of course, being Joe McIntyre, the youngest and shortest of the New Kids. In the early nineties, he was probably singlehandedly responsible for more kundalini-firehammers of sexual explosion in the twelve-and-unders than Elvis and David Cassidy and Mickey Dolenz combined. All of the New Kids, at one time, had to suffer being regarded as Emissaries of the Divine or worse.

I was once given a box of actual fan letters, left behind by a vacating fan-mail-distributing service, that were written to New Kids on the Block. These things were gut-freezingly weird and evil: they weren’t just stacks upon stacks of love pleas from little girls, but bold propositions from forty- year-old women who had been sucked into the most terrifying brand of slavering fanhood by their preteen daughters. You could just see these desolate single mothers with posters of Donnie Wahlberg’s shiny naked chest on their walls over the breakfast table, arguing viciously with their fifth-grade daughters over which of the New Kids was “more fine.” Receiving countless amounts of these letters is the type of thing would screw up nearly any boy under the age of twenty that I’ve ever known, forever—and just to prove it, I've supplied some prime examples from the collection that provide a fairly good overview of the bulk of fan mail in general.

EXAMPLE #1: The Pink-Faced Teenybopper Letter

This letter, written to Donnie Wahlberg of New Kids on the Block, typifies a “normal,” “healthy” fan letter. There were at least two hundred more of these, with minor variations, in the box.

All spelling and grammar in this and the following examples were left exactly as I found them. All small i's in this letter were dotted with a circle.

Donnie,

hello!

My name is______and I am 17 years old! With this letter I have written 1,450 times “I Love You”!!

Because I really do baby!! Not because you are rich and famous, but because you are Donnie Wahlberg!! You could be pour and not famous and I would still want you!! I got over 600 posters of only you and I love them all! I think you are so cool! I love the way you walk, talk, sing, dance, well i might as well say I love everything about you!! The other guys are alright too, but you are number one in my heart and soul!! I got everything there is on you!!

[Etc.]

I just want to say that you are the best and don't forget it!!

Well bye!!

Love ya lots

Your #1 Fan

EXAMPLE #2: The Bored-Slutty-Young-Mom Letter

This next letter, also to Donnie Wahlberg, represents another cross section of fans whom I still consider “healthy,” if somewhat squalid and pitiable:

Hey

This will be the first of many letters. I am 26. + I also have two sons, one 8 ½ and the other 4. My 8 ½ bought a NKOTB tape. I admit I have heard your music before, I liked it but honestly did not think much of it. I saw you on that Disney special. I must admit, I really thought you were really tough looking. I have seen your tattoo it's a killer. I have two, one one my left breast a rose on a vine. A butterfly on my back. I like to dance and stay in shape. Really only flaw I can tell is that I am short 5'2”. But dynamite comes in small packages they say.

My music tastes tend to run wild. I like Patsy Cline, Tchaikovsky, but I also like Warrant, Great White, Bobby Brown + especially Def Leppard. I am not a blockhead, but I wouldn't mind having a block's head. Get me. I know I am five years older. But you know the song older women. Baby lets just say, I'm clean + don't believe in screwing around, I'm to safe. One thing I hate is condoms. But I use them until I am definitely sure. I like the real thing. I wrote to you on kind of a dare, I just wanted to see if you would write back. I have a bet with a friend, its between me+her+now you, I will have you, just one night if you can take it. I'm giving myself a year. If you do write the letter it will stay between you and I. It's stupid putting things in the paper. I am no teenager, but I know what goes where and believe me I can show you.

X

EXAMPLE #3: The Drowning Teen

Stop reading, all ye faint of heart. Herein begins the real squirminess. If you are a would-be teen idol, I hope you regard this letter with the same trembling and apprehension that Ebenezer Scrooge does when shown the tombstone of Tiny Tim.

Jonathan,

Hi, my name is______. I know you don't know me, but I really want you to pay attention to this letter. I really really need for you to know how I feel. Right now, I'll bet I can say that I'm your number one fan, and mean it. I'll also bet that I can talk to any New Kids fan out there, and none of them love you half as much as I do. Well anyway, about three or four years ago I was a very happy person. Until I saw your cute little face on the cover of a tape that one of my friends had. Well ever since then, my life has been turned upside down. I mean, all I do anymore is think of you. I'm always miserable. I'm never happy. My grades have slipped rapidly, and every night I lie in my bed and cry. I asked my mom why the Lord made people so miserable. She told me he didn't, but he would only give you what he thought would make you happy in the end. She told me that I'd never get to meet you, because you won't make me happy. But I know that's not true. I know you'd make me happy. Very happy. I mean, you wouldn't even have to try. It would make me happy to wait on you hand and foot. I don't care if I never get anything else in my life, but I really really need you. Just to be a friend to you would bring lots and lots of joy to me. I mean since I've known of you, I can't picture myself with anyone else. I have no social life anymore. I can't seem to get you out of my mind long enough to even consider liking anyone else. My mom takes me to a shrink but he's no help. He can't help me get to meet you. I really wish I could express just how badly I feel. But I've never been good with words. Or even writing them for that matter, I just want to take you into my arms and hold you and protect you from life's heartache and pain. I know you're probably never unhappy. I guess that's just just what I want you to do for me. Sometimes I sit and think “Why am I hear.” I feel as if my only purpose in life is to sit around and be miserable. I told my mom that I really want you to know my pain. She said he wouldn't care. But I don't think that's true. I think you'd care. Wouldn't you? I wish I could spend just one day with you. I know that's a lot to ask, but I've waited so long. When is it my turn? When do I getta be happy? When do I get to meet you. Sometimes I think that if I don't get my turn soon, that I'm just gonna give up. I'm gonna kill myself. The only reason I haven't already done it is because of my love for you. People always tell me to hold on to my dreams, and that they'll come true. Well to tell you the truth, I'm sick of hearing that. Of course I'm gonna hold on to my dreams. And I have been for a long time. But nothing's happened so far. I feel as though there's nothing for me in this world. And you're the only person who can change that. I mean just to spend one day with you. My best friend told me that I'd be even worse off than I am now if I met you, but again I know that's not true. Well I guess I shouldn't listen to what people say. I don't know. I'm just really confused about this.

Well I gotta go. I'll write again.

With Love,

X

(The signature is accompanied by a disturbing salivating cartoon head, with a talky-balloon that says “I Love You.”)

EXAMPLE #4; This Woman is Out of Her Fucking Mind

This is a genuinely unhealthy letter. On a fan scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the first letter example and 10 being John Hinkely, this letter is about a 7.5. I should explain that at the time these letters were written, the Gulf War was going on and the New Kids performed at the American Music Awards. Donnie Wahlberg shocked and outraged most of the flag-waving dolts in Middle America by brazenly wearing a WAR SUCKS T-shirt and sporadically grabbing his cock. People were really livid.

My Dear Dear Jordan,

I went over and visited with my friend today. She was very kind and understanding. I took over the book Our Story [presumably the NKOTB authorized biography] for her to read. She is very strict and disciplined so I wasn't sure she'd want to see it. But she was just thrilled to see it. She wanted to know right away which one Jordan was. I told her the best looking one, of course. She narrowed it down right away to you +Joe, then decided Joe was younger than the 20 I told her you were. Now I see no contest between you and Joe. Joe is cute. You, on the other hand, are “Drop Dead Gorgeous!” I'm glad she isn't making any quick judgements.

Sometimes I think she has direct lines to God. She sometimes just knows things ahead of time. She wanted to know how my job hunting is coming along. This is just not like me to be picking up and moving across country. She said that normally she would have been devastated by my thinking about something like that. She said that she is totally at peace with it. Of course, she has been right here with me watching my children be abused by their father. Her own husband, our doctor, had to report the sexual abuse of my 9 yr old. Then together we had to watch the law protect him (her father) and destroy the files. They have suffered through this as much as I have (Me—nothing—my little girls are the victims here.) I can do nothing to protect them. Yes—moving across the country seems right. Well, God has given me the will. He's put you in my path for desire and inspiration. Now He just has to provide a way.

I read in one of the teen magazines an article on the making of the “No More Games” video. It will be great to have another video. I can't wait.

Oh, Jordan, I've lost 60 lbs now. I feel so good. We are going to the Y to work out at noon every other day. I need to lose another 40 lbs. My mom said that she doesn't want me to get anorexic. I wouldn't be the best I could be if I were anorexic. Besides, I finally feel that God is totally in charge of my life. I get scared and on really shaky ground at times, in fact, all too often, but things are just so different. No, things aren't different. I am different. I am different because you sneaked up when I wasn't looking and grabbed my heart. I was not ready for this. I'd have never been ready for you. I have to meet you.

Dreams have a way of shattering for me. There are times I just don't think that you are real. Well, dream or real, I love you. I wish I could know you better. I can't believe how you make me feel. You said at the end of the Fantasy special that you like to make people happy. Well happiness was not part of my vocabulary or life until you entered my life. Now I'm smiling and laughing all the time. I see you on TV or the videos or my posters and my heart just flutters. I feel all warm and wonderful inside. I've never experienced this before. I really cannot believe what you do to me. (for me).

We are somewhat recovering from the Music Awards. My 7 yr old is smack dab in love with Donnie again. My nine-yr – ignores it completely and surrounds herself with Joe + plunges into her books. She loves to read. My 12 yr old and 19 yr old are not so quick to recover. ________ is angry. She wants him out of the group and said she won't even buy any tapes of the groups he produces. Her brother backs her up. I'm working on them though. She adores Danny and I told her she shouldn't take it out on any of the other groups any more than she should blame Danny. Then I also explained about Donnie having a real problem with the criticism. If your friend has a problem you don't just give them the boot. They are trying to understand, but I guess he is really going to have to re-earn their respect. You guys are in such a tough position. I look at my little gal's joy over Donnie and I can't help but like him despite his outspoken, harsh nature at times. My point is that we are recovering and still loving you. Donnie disappointed me, but you, Jordan, have never been a disappointment to me. I love you and “I'll Be Loving You, (Forever)”

Much Love,

X

S.W.A.K.

(Heart drawn around the name “Jordan,” surrounded by smaller hearts.)

As you can see, the deep, widespread, and dangerous hysteria a seemingly inconsequential boy band can spread is absolutely staggering, and all the more depressing since the driving push behind the whole teen music deal is grotesque wealth.

It is a swell deal: all a savvy promoter with the naked greed of a pederast Svengali needs to do is find some mildly talented teens all lousy with fresh libido and stuck in some lame section of America, promise them a bucking, eight-second ride on the Magic Bull of Fame,, and he or she can forge a sensational golden windfall as long as the kid stays on. After all that happens successfully, the stars might figure out that they are giving 90% of their salary away to some carpet-chested cigar aficionado who tells them what they can and can't wear all the time, and decide they’d like to try their hand at “going solo,” a career move which has only really worked, so far, for the perpetually drunk Mr. Whitney, ex-New Edition R&B guy Bobby Brown, and now for Ricky Martin, ex-Menudo boy. The managers of the new breed of band coming out must have a whole clause in the contracts that says when the boys are too old and fat for the metallic plastic jumpsuits, and have squandered all 10 percent they owned of their careers, they are not allowed to appeal to any human tendencies in the manager and beg them for more cash to get back on their feet. There ought to be a Child-Corruption Czar in government, maybe. Somebody who can keep the pop machine honest, if not clean.

When Malcolm McLaren, the coolest of all the evil music producers. When Malcolm McLaren did his puppet-master thing back in the punk era toothsome filth like the Sex Pistols and BowWowWow, he gave the world the impression that everything going on in his sphere was a collaborative group art project. He was a good chef about the whole thing; he knew how to throw together different talent elements while retaining the individual flavor and charm of the players. Even if he managed them poorly or tried to stick his hand up their blouse every now and then, he didn’t quite eat their souls (Well, Malcolm may have been partially responsible for the debacle that was Sid, but Sid was old enough to know better.) The saddest part about the whole thing is how little true flavor any of these new young lover-boy bands have; they're wholly inoffensive. They don't stand for anything, they don't question The System, they don't introduce anything challenging or new, even in the world of fashion; they're as instantly pleasing and comestible and forgettable as a bag of Funyuns, and they all taste the same.

All of the frightful Pop Warner intramural seduction squads that are passing for music groups nowadays are really just dim approximations of an important event that happened long ago that kids today don’t really know about. I don’t really know much about it either. It is a historical event, and it is commonly referred to as “Mick Jagger. “I didn’t realize until viewing the video Cocksucker Blues by photographer Robert Frank what a king hell phenomenon young Mick was. By the time I was in seventh grade and alive enough to notice Mr. Jagger, he looked like a squeak-toy version of Don Knotts, and his laughably antique rock tours were sponsored by Pepsi and peopled by fat computer guys with baseball hats and Calvin Klein eyewear. In my junior high, only the back-parking-lot “loadies” with the feathered hair and bootleg cords had any appreciation for the Stones at all, and then even they mostly cared about the older albums. The loadies were baked all the time, so nobody trusted their taste; they also like Ronnie James Dio and Styx and Quiet Riot and all of the questionable schlock metal nobody listened to except other very, very stoned people.

That video made me realize that cock rock was once very alive and is now very dead, and rock 'n' roll has lost its supply of frightfully charismatic young front men. Mick, Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan-- hell, Steve Tyler, if you even dare mention Aerosmith in that fearful lineup: they’re all old, old, old, and it’s a shame that most folks my age never had a chance to see those grand old gentlemen of rock when they were at their blow-dried, blow-snorted, blow-jobbed ultimate peak. The late sixties/early seventies is one era that will never really be able to repeat itself. It was an ignorant, selfish, sexist, self-destructive time. You could never repeat any of the backstage action featured in Cocksucker Blues. Even the lowest slag-level of coke-and-cum-famished groupies have more self-respect than that now. That was an era with no boundaries whatsoever, and Mick navigated the ungainly sea of IV drug accidents and weepy orgies and omnipresent starstruck coke-gabbling morons better than any other lacquer-pantsed Glam King of yore. It is amazing that Mick was ever Mick, looking at him now, and it is doubly amazing that he wasn’t found dead in a hotel room with needles in his feet and the remains of some horrible sex act stuck to his person years ago.

No white man could get away with that much genital focus these days. There was nothing reasonable about Mick at his gangly big-haired best, when he was wearing spangled body socks with extra codpiece sections for his legendary cod and long chiffon scarves and numerous cloth belts; when Lady Bianca was pouting around the dressing room, smoking petulantly in Halston dresses. He was completely without irony; there was something powerfully airtight, autonomous and surreal about his ability to generate enormous sexual charism which made men and women of the sixties and seventies want to immolate themselves against the fiery wall of his cocksmanship. He was, perhaps, the most sexually sought-after human on the planet at one point; a male Helen of Troy. The entire band was cadaverous from sweating off eight pounds a night and eating nothing but heroin; they were blown into wraiths from all that attention, all that masturbation aimed at them, the whole writhing mass of hippy culture imploding into death and debasement right in their hotel rooms. The Stones were a massive gale force that blew sideways the clothes and cash of anyone who came near, and Mick was the dervish at the epicenter, and it is hard to tell if he meant it that way or not, but he certainly survived it, even if his puckering chest and bloated features make him look like he's been shrunken by witch doctors in some form of unholy brine.

A lot of men followed in the wake of Mick, but none quite matched his porn-star mystique. However, I was thrilled while reading through the box of NKOTB fan mail to find the following letter, written to lead singer Steve Tyler.

EXAMPLE #5: The Classic Groupie Nymphomaniac

This letter, in my opinion, is perhaps the healthiest and best of them all, in that it leaps correctly and gleefully to the only foreseeable outcome/ best-case scenario of the groupie/star relationship, i.e., a near anonymous root job.

Dear Steven Tyler,

I am a big fan of you guys. I love your music. It sounds great. But personally I am madly in love with you. I know that you are married but I just can't help myself. You are just so damn sexy and cute. I get turned on by just hearing your voice. I just love the way you sing. I am obsessed with your eyes and hair. Especially your lips. You just send chills up and down my spine. Every time I see your videos on MTV I just go nuts. I just wish that you were not married. Because I would just kill to go out with you and have a love affair. You look like the type of guy who can make love really, really good. You look great in fishnet tights. I just love to see a man's body sculpture in tights. You have the cutest little ass that I've ever seen. Especially the cute dimples on the side. That's another way I can tell that you make love really good. I can just picture it now. The two of us in my bedroom on my King size bed, and me lying flat on my back with my legs spread wide while you're pumping me to death. That would be so nice. Might I remind you that I have big tits and a nice ass too. I'm thinking about getting a tattoo put on my tit that says Steven Tyler. I'm sure that you wouldn't mind. I just wish that you could see me. I look much younger than my age. I'm 19 and people always think that I am about 14 or 15.

It doesn't matter to me how old you are. Age is nothing but a number. And you will always be hot and sexy. Older men are the best lovers to me anyways. They just know what to do. They make me feel good all over. It's just amazing how they please. I would just love to have you over one day. You would love my bedroom. It's like a jeanie's room. My beed has sexy see thru curtains around it and you have to find your way in. But its easy. All you have to do is find the opening and just climb right in. Then we'll have fun all night long. I'll tease you for a while then I'll please you. I'm not gonna tell you who I am right now. I'll let that be a mystery. But think about what I said and I'll write back to you again and maybe reveal my name to you. I love you sweetheart.

Your secret admirer

I was at a rock show recently; a friend of ours got signed to a major label with his tight-black-shirt-and-hair-in-the-face alternative goth, wanna-be-cock-rock boy band. Their black limousine was waiting with sinister promise out in front of the East Village venue, and hottie girls with long blonde hair and silver boots were waiting for our friend to get offstage so they could casually smother him with girlish attentions. The lead singer was kind of a cross between David Byrne and Perry Farrell with just a skosh of Iggy, all of the boys were exceptionally cute, and the music was loud, but the night was distinctly boring. It was funny was how unexciting it all was. One of the band boys got offstage and told me with guilt and horror that he thought he might have smoked too much pot. The twentysomething audience was barely drinking; they were worried about getting up in the morning and carefully monitoring their substance intake and responsibly choosing the right condoms.

There was a woman older than me in the club hanging out with her dad; you could tell by the relaxed and vacant look on his face that he had been used to way more intense party scenes than that polite little evening of hard rock, which was just pleasantly middle-aged enough for him to deal with after the abject chaos of 1971. Nothing actually happened in the nineties. Partying backstage with 'N Sync or the Backstreet Boys probably involved playing Tomb Raider II and drinking bottled water; it can’t possibly have been like snorting a nine-inch rail of Methedrine and dripping candle wax all over the naked bodies of Van Halen in their heyday. All our unctuous songs of love on the radio are like the American dollar now, which is only paper, not having been backed up with gold for generations. There is no actual cock behind the rock anymore.

But there is one bold, fiery, tumescent approximation.

Chick porn, thy name is Ricky Martin. Love him or hate him, Ricky wears see-thru sweaters and has hips like a lazy susan. He runs his fingers seductively through his own hair, with his eyes rapturously closed and his moistened mouth barely parted, like Rita Hayworth. He is often seen wet, shirtless, openmouthed-kissing, and driving sports cars. Ricky is an emblem of virility and energy and soap-opera good-guy ethics, while being a near-perfect fusion of male cliché sexual images: one part Cary Grant self-amused privilege to one part James Bond eyebrow-raised-at-the-way-these-girls-seem-to-tumble-into-my-lap to two parts Julio Iglesias-cum Ricardo Montalban-cum-Medellin-drug-cartel Latino mega-suave to three parts Elvis good-natured nuclear cock power, all shrink-wrapped into one silk-'n'-leather Milano-pimp outfit. He is a multicultural young Elvis for the new millennium, with hotter blood: Ricky, an ethnic minority, has actual traces of humanity. He's a little smarter than the old Elvis; he's already lived through the whiplash agony/ecstasy of flash-in-the-pan-ism as a boy who grew too many underarm hairs to remain in Menudo, so he has a sense of self-preservation and a healthy arrogance: he's not going to need shock levels of Demerol and pork to bolster his comfort level in the end. He appears to be a limitless, unstoppable font of self-enjoyment, professing an Internal Path and a Great Love of Music and all that other stuff. He has cracked the mystical code that makes the young girls cry.

Ricky has also claimed the abandoned scepter of John Travolta's Saturday-Night-Feverishness by pulling off a look that has up to now been regarded as either totally homosexual or ethnically slimy and stereotypically sexist: i.e., “Get a load of Sergio Valente at the bar over there, ohmigod, who does he think he is?” He has resuscitated obvious male sexiness from the way it disgraced itself in the seventies, when it wore open Qiana shirts and gold chains and pants so tight you could see all the veins in its schlong. Ricky has brought the sacred man-fire back to the pop stars in a way that those weepy, drum-beating-in-the-woods, encounter group guys have been trying to bring it back to their own soft gutless bellies for the last decade or so, and he deserves some kinda credit.

However...

I was all set to speak tirelessly of Ricky's golden legitimacy and flawless panty-heat, but I caught a little throwaway interview with him. Normally, when Ricky speaks, he's all chocolaty corporate cheerleading—for example, when he picked up his World Music Award in Monaco: “To all you leaders,” he said, presumably meaning World Leaders, “you should take the music industry as an example—it's all about creating, not destroying.” Idiotic, but heartfelt. Maybe forgivable. But later, he gave two spontaneous answers that made me think the Golden Ricky might be more hollow than solid.

A love-struck fan-girl interviewer asked him: “Who is your favorite singer and biggest influence?”

“Journey. Steve Perry,” said Ricky without a beat of hesitation. Oooch.

“Who is the most important person in the world to you, and why?” asked the interviewer.

Ricky then got an unfunny paranoid shrapnel gleam in his big puddly eyes and started mumbling about how he always wanted to invite “his enemies” to dinner, because he wanted to keep them very close, even closer than his friends. The Wheel in the Sky Keeps on Turnin'. Wo-oh-oah.

I wonder if I’ll ever see it in my lifetime: a whole generation of naked people too high to say no to anything, with some super-legitimate, undeniable Mick-like Rock Lord at the center of it all, driving it all like a many-limbed Magic Bus. But when it does happen, I’ll probably disapprove.