BOOK CLUB: Pot, Porn, Palin, and Racist Jewish Mothers  

Happy Tuesday Jewcers.

All the doom and gloom has me Drudged-out, and a bit down, and so it's with pleasant anticipation that I welcome Mike Edison who joins us for book club this week to talk of of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.

Mike Edison’s résumé is a twenty years counter-cultural voyage through a slew of notorious magazines, including Screw, High Times, Penthouse, and Hustler. An Ivy League dropout, an accomplished musician, and a one-of-a-kind voice, please welcome Mr. Edison for the week.  -- TR

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It's not like my mother and I are ever going to see eye to eye on anything. For instance, she read about one paragraph of my book and it nearly put her in the hospital.

There are a lot of drugs in my book, although it is not dark at all. It is very celebratory, actually. It is called I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, and it is a memoir, in part about how much fun you can have with  pot and psychedelics and cocaine and bathtub gin and whatnot, but Mom is about as square as you get — I am sure she can't even spell "LSD,"  and this does not tickle her funnybone. (I Have Fun is also rife with tales of pornography and punk rock and professional wrestling, topics which rate about as high on her  favorability index as Ozzy Osborne and Evel Knievel, both old pals of mine who make dysfunctional star-turns in I Have Fun.)

And my mother is also still very bitter about her divorce, even though it happened almost 25 years ago, so it is a very good thing she didn't read Chapter Three, wherein at age fourteen I discover the joys of Double-Barrel Sunshine and describe with candor what assholes my parents were — a no-show dad and the Jewish Joan Crawford. That would have put her in the grave.

But I never thought my mother was a complete moron, at least not until a couple of weeks ago. 

I should make it very clear now, before ya'll start turning on me - I love my mom. She has a heart of gold, and really always truly wanted what was best for her children. She was hard-wired for an anodyne suburban life of birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. I was supposed to graduate from an Ivy League school (I did eventually go to one, but got the hell out after realizing that higher education, along with the fine art market, was the last great rip-off in America), and grow up to give her brilliant, blue-eyed grandchildren to whom she could kvetch with impunity. I guess it was around the time I got caught smoking dope in the schoolyard, right after my father split, that her world went twirling off of its access and began hurtling towards the sun. 

It was tough going there for a while, but these days we get along great, and she is generally very supportive, no matter that she still insists that "writing is not a job" (even though that's how I have been paying my rent pretty much for the last twenty years), and asks me about my band,  presumbably to be polite, but always groaning, and not-so sotto-voce, "I hope it isn't still punk rock." I guess no parent is virtuoso when it comes to hiding their disgust. Did I mention I love her?

Anyway, it was my birthday a couple of weeks ago and Mom wanted to buy me a shirt, which is how we ended up in a Target department store in suburban New Jersey.

On the way out with my new shirt, (a not-too-sporty button-down affair, dark blue with thin gold stripes, the only one we could agree on), we were walking by the rack where they have the tabloids and gossip rags, and there was the National Enquirer, God bless their soul, with the screamer headline, SARAH PALIN'S DARK SECRETS!

Really, who doesn't love the Enquirer?

And then Mom started in with the tongue clicking — the Jewish mother's socio-linguistic equivalent of spitting on the floor.

"They'll say just anything," she bleat contemptuously, which she does very well. 

"Well," I offered, "you have to admit they have an uncanny knack of being right. They were right about Jon Edwards. They were right about Bill Clinton and all of the women he was with."

The Enquirer's Palin story outlined her pregnant teenage daughter's pot-smoking and promiscuity; her (the daughter's) hockey-thug boyfriend, err, fiancé's, selfless dedication to ultra-violence and jailbait; her (Palin's) oldest son's love affair with recreational Vicodin (apparently he had a choice — go to Iraq, or go to jail); and it began to uncoil the smelly, moist details of her (again, Palin's) own dalliance with her husband's business partner. All in all, a very good story.

My mother glowered. "Do not talk to me about politics," she growled, and then clamped her lips tight.

But she couldn't help herself. 

"You aren't going to vote for Obama,"  she finally spewed. "He's a Muslim."

I pondered for a moment how someone so fucking stupid could have spawned me. It is genuinely heartbreaking.

"You can't possibly believe that."

"And I HATE her," she added, indicative of absolutely nothing.

"Who??"

"Michelle Obama."

"Why?? What has she ever done to you??"

A beat, punctuated by more tongue-clicking. 

"I really hope he doesn't win."

My turn: "It's because he is black, isn't it? Just say it — it's because he is black."

My mother is an old Jewish lady who generally doesn't know how to shut the fuck up, and now she has nothing to say. Go figure.

"Just admit it...." Now I am pushing her. I am not a bad child, but she knows that I have a zero-tolerance policy towards intolerance of any kind, and she should know by now that I won't ever listen to this kind of shit without some seriously smarty-pants rebuke. "Say it," I demand of her, "You won't vote for him because he is black."

And I know in my heart of hearts that this is true (it also doesn't help that she is now married to a right-wing nincompoop), and I really want to vomit, which is my version of tongue-clicking.

"You can't vote for McCain," I tried to reason. "You are a WOMAN, a JEW, and a SCHOOLTEACHER, three groups that should NEVER vote for a REPUBLICAN...  Let alone this DODDERING OLD FUCK and MOOSEBURGER BARBIE. I mean, seriously, ON WHAT PLANET IS SHE QUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT??"

Mom started turning purple, so I gave her a pass and didn't launch into my more erudite arguments about her granddaughter's future reproductive rights, and my desire to have a president who didn't hate my pot-smoking, punk-rocking, book-reading, cock-sucking friends.

She looked at me like she was going to cry. Her face was all screwed up. Something was going on in her brain. Maybe, just maybe, she knew that somehow I was right?

I let it lie for a while, because now we were in the car and she was driving me to the train station so I could shuttle back to my elitist hamlet in New York City, and I didn't want her to have an aneurism and drive into oncoming traffic. She was starting to get that look.

* * TO BE CONTINUED * *

Mike Edison's book is I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World.

He will be performing with his band, featuring Jon Spencer, in a very special evening of "Literary Mayhem and Rock'n'Roll," with special guests Jonathan Ames, Rachel Shukert, and Amanda Stern, Thursday, October 16^th, at the incredible Spiegelworld tent at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. 

For info, free MP3s and videos (including the infamous Bong Guitar video) and much more, please visit www.rockettrain.com.

Literary Mayhem! 

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.