Читать книгу Wake Up and Smell The Beer - Jon Longhi - Страница 7

My friend Roth Forjic is one of the most petulant and condescending people I have ever known. He's gay and loathes children. “Children should be seen and not had,” he always sneers. This attitude is rather interesting considering the fact that he's made his living working full-time as a sperm donor for the past few years. He has ten children on the East Coast. Since he moved to the Bay Area a year and a half ago, Roth has sired seven more. Seventeen in all.

“Yeah, but Roth,” I said, “you worked as a sperm donor back east for three and a half years and you only had ten kids. You've hardly been in town and already you're up to seven. Does the family stock get better with age or what?”

“Well, in Delaware I was working with infertile couples,” he said. “Takes more shots to hit the basket. Plus, I think it might have had something to do with all the Philly cheesesteaks I lived off of back there.”

We used to tease Roth by telling him that someday he'd be on trial for murder. As the verdict would come in he'd look up at the jury and realize they were all his children. Every one of them tall, thin, blonde-haired, their blue eyes a mirror of Roth's own as they point at him and scream, “Guilty!”

In order to donate sperm Roth had to fill out all kinds of questionnaires and take numerous drug tests. One thing he never bothered to tell all the people who screened him was that he was gay. So when he showed up for work and the nurses sent Roth into his little booth to produce his specimen, he quickly realized that the Penthouse and Playboy magazines they provided him with were useless. So he brought in his own copies of Creem and jerked off to pictures of Soundgarden's lead singer.

But now they're forcing Roth into early retirement. No more deliveries. He told me it was because once you have a certain number of kids in a geographic area they won't let you donate anymore because a statistical risk develops that your children might unknowingly commit incest when they grow up.

“Gee, I wonder if this means I'll ever be allowed to have any kids myself?” Roth mused.

Roth was at every cocktail party we went to. He was at every opening, publishing party, and happy hour that came down the social pike. He'd go to the opening of an envelope. Anywhere where liquor was served. Cheap liquor, or even better, free liquor. Roth was the most omnipresent lush I've ever seen belly up to a bar. We called him “the beer genie.” Because you could be out in the middle of the desert, finally alone at last, but as soon as you cracked open a bottle of beer you'd look up and Roth would be standing there at your elbow.

My old roommate Tony loved noise. He wore only black and dreamed of being a machine. He played keyboards and had been in a lot of electronic music bands. Tony went by his techno-tag, T2000. He was in two industrial bands that gigged around the city, Hail Satan and The NAMBLA Boys Choir. During some of their performances he did as many as forty-eight whip-its on stage. T2000 was fashionably obsessed with death and Carl Jung. He was one of those people who never sought a tan.

T2000 owned about five thousand dollars' worth of synthesizers, samplers, and computer music equipment. But what he played on all this stuff couldn't even really be called music. It was shrieking, horrible noises, strange insect sounds that reminded me of the braying of radioactive monsters in old Japanese movies, which were T2000's favorite kind of films. His room was bare and techno, but the shelves were lined with his collection of plastic Godzillas and Ultra Men. T2000 used to sit around for hours smoking pot and making his grotesque noises. He really got off on them. We called T2000 “The Jimi Hendrix of the Synthesizer.” Though he learned huge amounts about music technology he never really managed to put this knowledge to use in a melodic sense. Maybe he was in search of some perfect atonality.

T2000 seemed to love electricity. He always left all the lights on in the house. His music equipment had to be left plugged in and on at all times. T had a paranoid fear that if he turned his instruments off their computer brain would somehow die. Even when he got up and went to work every day he would leave his stereo turned up full blast, the dial tuned to the static between radio stations so that all day long his room would be roaring with this hissing white noise. It sounded like being under a waterfall. Whoever left the house last made sure they turned off all his stuff. We constantly gave T shit for leaving everything on. It was an incredible waste of money and energy. Plus he often left the house with ten high voltage machines and two full powerstrips of electrical equipment plugged into the single wall outlet in his room. We had no fire insurance. When we got the monthly electric bills in excess of $350, T2000 refused to pay any extra. He'd always stall for at least two weeks before writing anyone a check. The roommates began to refer to him as The Man Who Would Not Pay His Bills.

“I don't want to write a check now because I'm stoned,” he'd say.

“But you're always stoned,” we'd point out.

One September, T2000 got a bottle of liquid acid and we watched his IQ drop by thirty points in a matter of weeks. The bottle had a dropper top through which doses could be squeezed. Each drop was enough for a good long trip. But if you squeezed the dropper too hard (like T often did because he was always frying his brains out) instead of drops you'd get a small stream of pure LSD. That bottle fueled some incredible parties. But T2000 would always end up doing too much acid and he'd go completely crazy.

At this one party, T must have done like seven or eight drops. At one point he let the bottle just spray into his mouth. Around one in the morning, T2000 was a screaming demonic presence. After hours of proclaiming his insecurities he changed his tack. He decided he would dose everyone who came to the door. No one would be allowed in unless they stuck out their tongue and let him spray acid on it. Some people gladly obliged, but others ran off down Haight Street, frightened by such a blatant display of drug abuse. As the night went on, T2000 became more obsessed with his new goal. Everyone who got past him would have to have a hit off the bottle of liquid acid. “Show me your tongue!” he kept screaming.

It was then that T2000 began to assume the role of the Evil Doormaster. His demeanor was that of a gatekeeper in Hell. T's face twisted, all snarling and vicious. By 3 a.m. his message had become more simplified. That was when a couple of drunk new wave girls came to the front door. With a jerking motion it flew open and there stood T2000, dressed all in black, his hand jabbing a bottle of LSD in their faces as he screamed, “Tongue! Tongue or Door!”

One night, T2000 started doing imitations of personals ads. He recited in an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent:

“Single gay white male bodybuilder seeks same. I am an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike and you must be buffed to same degree. Want big pects and steroid pumped body. We can cuddle up in front of my home video library of Arnold films for hot muscle man sex. I want to be your Sperminator. Must describe shaved asshole as well as its clenchitude.”

At one point in the evening, I suggested to T that he should start a band with another keyboardist, a duo, and they could call themselves T2000 and One.

Then I was telling T2000 about this documentary called Trekkies. It was about extreme Star Trek fans.

“Some of these people are insane,” I said. “Like they have these daycamps where you can learn to speak Klingon.”

“Oh, I know people like that,” T2000 said. “A couple of them work at the computer company I work at. Like this one guy who always complains when they don't speak Klingon properly on the weekly episodes. We'll be sitting around watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and while one of those wiggly heads is babbling away he'll suddenly look up and say, ‘God, his Klingon is pathetic.’ ”

“My friend Jack is the most accomplished couch potato I've ever known,” Sam Silent said. “We refer to him as The Relaxation Expert. Every Sunday he manages to take relaxation to such a rarefied level of Zen that it becomes an art form. There have been times when he's offered to fill me bong hits if I'd just get up and change the channel on the TV set for him.

“Our smoke alarm is too sensitive for Jack to keep up his preferred chain-smoking habit. So when it goes off we ask him to suck down his next butt outside. But instead of going all the way out Jack will just get up from the couch, walk over to the sliding glass door, open it up and smoke the cigarette there. Now it's the middle of winter, so all the heat instantly blows out with this twenty mile per hour wind that rips cross the living room. And we'll be yelling, “Close the fucking door, Jack!” and he'll just be standing there going, “Fuck you! Fuck you! I live here too. Life ain't about suffering.” But does he pay any extra on the heating bill every month? No, of course not. And Jack will persist in standing there in his own little private trade winds right till he smokes the butt down to the filter. Even if we start throwing pillows and couch cushions at him he'll be so lazy he'll only bother to give us the finger. After he finally closes the door and the thermostat goes back up twenty or thirty degrees to what we call room temperature a certain harmony is restored. We unplug the fire alarm and put it on the back porch. Jack ends up filling two rounds of bong hits because he can't figure out what he wants to watch and gets so lazy he offers to buy everybody a pizza if somebody else will just bother to get up and phone for it.

“Over the course of time, Jack got so good at relaxing that it brought on a cellular entropy never before seen in the human creature. His body parts became slacker till some flab began to drift off as a vapor. Even when we bought a remote, Jack's laziness was such he'd fill me bong hits just to use it for him. He got so listless he'd fill you a bong hit if you'd go take a piss for him. This process went on until one day we walked into the living room and Jack had mellowed out to such a degree that there was nothing left but a gooey puddle of protoplasm soaking into the rug.”

Over the course of the next couple of years, my circle of friends from college moved out here. Besides me and Dada Trash, the other members of this group were Zeke Moon and Roth Forjic. Me, Dada, and Zeke had all played together in different bands and we still had jam sessions on a regular basis. Playing music was kind of an addiction for us. Male bonding at its most hypnotic and transcendental. Back when he was a music journalist and not a gossip columnist, Roth Forjic had given our bands a couple of condescending, yet flattering reviews. But most of all, we kept him around because he was such an entertaining gadfly.

Hundreds of hours were spent jamming and partying with those guys. We went back, like blood, the blood pumping in the music. The music which pumped our hearts. A language of pure sound. Like a mental telepathy we all shared. They were a good crew to ride through the years with.

For a few years there, me, Zeke Moon, and Dada Trash lived together in an apartment at 666 Ashbury, right down from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Sam Silent and Roth Forjic may as well have lived there they were over so often, and eventually Sam Silent did move in. That was where we met T2000. He answered our ad at a roommate referral service that said we were looking for “satanic musicians with a yen for the schizophrenic.” As soon as he finished moving in his twenty-two synthesizers and ton and a half of electronic sound processors, we knew we had picked the right person.

Haight Street seemed like the center of the alternative underground universe and there was nothing we loved better than just wallowing in the spectacle of it all. You could see a good band any night of the week and the punk rock girls walked around in leather lingerie or next to nothing. There was almost a constant quiet hum in the Haight, like a subliminal frequency that let you know this was where it was all happening. The magnetic pole of hipness.

That apartment at 666 hosted endless LSD revelries, all night parties and a drug blur of bands and jam sessions. Right below 666 was a huge basement space that we soundproofed and insulated. This became a righteous music studio, a room that we spent hundreds of hours in. Me, Dada Trash, Zeke, Sam, and T2000 would go on sonic binges that left our ears ringing for days. One night the bunch of us dropped hits of acid while walking into the studio around 10 p.m. and by the time we emerged again around noon the next day everyone was straight and sober. Every drop of LSD and fried brain cells had gone into creating sound. Our jam sessions were like a great turbulent beast that could never be tamed, but every now and then we caught a hell of a ride.

Sometimes at the height of a psychedelic rave-up I could swear that ideas were actually bleeding from the walls of the basement and infecting our songs. 666 had stood there since 1910. It seemed like hundreds of bands must have played in that basement, the wood walls and stone foundation soaking up all those vibrations. So many crazy experiences must have ta ken place in that basement the room was supercharged like a karma battery. And every time we played in there, we fed off that energy.

One night I developed a weird theory about synchronicity and tonality. It was based on certain things observed in various chemical states while we played music. Sometimes during our jams we'd hit a certain note or harmony which had been played in that place years before and suddenly we'd be back in that time. Our band would be united with those long gone musicians by bathing in the same vibration. Like two identical tuning forks touched together, and all life would be frozen in a perfect crystalline moment. As if that harmony existed independently, outside of the turning of clocks, a sound like a single unbroken thread weaving through the wrinkles of past, present, and future. And through the genius of accident, our experiments with musical instruments had stumbled upon an audio form of time travel. I often thought about the frenzied jams and improvisations that must have occurred there during the '60s. LSD, hippies, and feedback were written into the history of the house. It wasn't ghosts but old songs that haunted 666. Old gray melodies faint as brain-damaged memories, still struggling to fill the silence. Playing music was communing with the supernatural world. Part seance, part exorcism. A three-chord ritual, rock and roll is just a form of chanting. Every time we played, it was in homage to our house gods, those songs in the walls, and it gave us great joy to add our voices to the chorus of spirits.

Once Sam Silent went to a barbecue that got pretty way out. The people there looked normal enough, but once they started talking it turned out their thoughts were in outer space. Literally. They believed in UFOs. We're not talking about your garden variety “there may be something out there” skeptic. No, these people were true believers. Sam first thought things were strange when someone said, “Well, this country hasn't been the same since 1947.”

“Yeah, the Roswell Crash changed everything,” Sam joked.

“It certainly did,” the guy replied without batting an eyelid. “The discoveries from Roswell led to all of modern science right down to the Thighmaster.”

And it just got worse from there. Sam kept trying to make little UFO jokes to lighten the mood. He was certain they were kidding. But the people would just stare at him stony faced, as if he'd uttered some blasphemous sacrilege. They didn't think extraterrestrials were a joking matter.

Everyone at the party believed aliens visited the planet on a regular basis. That they manipulated the world's governments in strange interstellar conspiracies. One woman claimed to have sold her earth baby to UFO aliens. “They made me an offer I couldn't refuse,” she said. There was a tattoo of a third eye on her forehead. All the people there were convinced that aliens were mating with human women and had been for centuries. A woman named Unix claimed to have given birth to an alien love child. There was a tattoo of a flying saucer on her upper arm and another of ET on her cleavage so it looked like the creature was peeping up out of her blouse. “He was a great lover,” she said. “But he had to go back to Alpha Centauri. It's a shame that he's light years away and can't see his son.” In fact, many people at the party agreed that having sex with aliens was not necessarily a bad thing. It could even be pleasurable. All this led up to one person saying, “As long as they lubricate the probe, I don't mind.”