When I submitted to write for Saturday Night Live last year, I wrote a sketch where Donald Trump was the mayor of Amity in the movie Jaws.
SPOILER ALERT, they didn’t hire me, but I was rereading the sketch today and I still like it. And somehow, it’s gotten a thousand times more current than it was last year. So I figured I’d share it with all you lovely Internet folks:
Greetings friends, frenemies, comedy fans, comedy fanemies, and anyone else who checks their Spam folders on a regular enough basis to have found, opened, and read this e-mail.
As you who had been fans of the late, lamented, and forgotten Hollywood Hotel edition of my Tell Your Friends! show, I thought you might be interested in two free – FREE! – events coming up in the next couple of weeks.
And if you aren’t, here’s a live feed of a Kitten Rescue nursery you can look at instead:
No matter how cool and above-it-all you think you are, I dare you – literally, dare you – to watch for more than three minutes without getting completely sucked into these cats’ lives. Only, watch it with a safety buddy who can pull you out when you start commenting with baby talk.
As for shows:
One is a new FREE MONTHLY SHOW (where I will be buying FREE BEER and SODA for the audience – and it will be soda and beer of the FREEest possible quality) called “LIAM McENEANEY’S RED HOT INDUSTRY SHOWCASE. This happens THIS THURSDAY, June 14th, at 9:30pm, with Aparna Nacherla (Netflix, Corporate), comedy magician El Ropo (The Magic Castle), and The Comedy Store’s own Luke Schwartz (The Improv).
The other show is a FREE SCREENING of Tell Your Friends! The Concert Film! On June 22nd, 2010, I threw a super-sized concert version of my TYF! show in Brooklyn and invited some of my very best comedian friends to perform. Comedians like Reggie Watts, Kurt Braunohler & Kristen Schaal, Christian Finnegan, Rob Paravonian, and Leo Allen. On June 22nd, we’ll commemorate the eighth anniversary by having a little outdoor screening in Highland Park. Learn more by clicking on that picture above.
As for everything else, I still live in H’wood, CA. I’ve officially passed the honeymoon phase, and have transitioned into being a full-time resident. I think it’s tough to explain to people who don’t live here exactly how unglamorous Hollywood life is. As a rule, there aren’t too many celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. In fact, if you see someone you recognize in Hollywood, first be sure that they aren’t the out-of-shape posing-for-money-in-front-of-the-Grauman’s-Chinese-Theater equivalent of that celebrity. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference; if you take their picture, and they try to punch you when you refuse to pay them twenty bucks for it, they’re either a fugazi look-a-like or the real Sean Penn.
I live in a pretty nice section of Hollywood, but if you see a celebrity where I live something has gone drastically wrong in their life. Like, I feel very fortunate that I live in a great apartment in a happening neighborhood exactly where I want to be. But if I saw Adam Sandler shopping at my Ralphs, I’d think, “Poor guy, I hope things pick up for him.”
To be fair, I’ve been told that celebrities shop at my local Gelson’s (for New Yorkers, Gelson’s is a supermarket chain that sits on the quality scale about halfway between D’Agostino’s and Fairway – it’s not that nice, but out here in the land of the goyim…). But I’m actually not tremendously good at recognizing people, in person, that I only know from the TV or movies.
Also, I find that it really grounds me to do all of my grocery shopping at Ralphs at 1:30 in the morning. It’s where you realize that the opening scene of The Big Lebowski is pretty much a documentary:
Sure, Gelson’s caters to the “we might as well close at midnight because our customers are responsible adults whose careers demand they show up at the same time every morning, preferably with a minimum of face tattoos and brightly colored outfits that make them look like what a Marvel supervillain thinks a circus clown should be” crowd.
But what will profit a man doing his grocery shopping at 8:00 so he can be up for his job designing Adult Swim billboards, if it costs him his soul? Not to mention that there’s a tremendous sense of gratitude and equanimity to be gained in surrounding yourself with people who have made way worse life decisions than your own. Be honest: Buying your ten dollar bag of grapes in line behind the second lead from Supergirl will never fill you with an immense and lasting feeling of gratitude for the fact that you decided to say no to trying meth.
Maybe the Gelson’s-at-10pm crowd has “control” over things like “the amount of controlled substances one should ingest at any given time.” But there’s something tremendously bourgeois about the fact that when you hear an announcement over the in-store PA, that’s a voice you can be 100% sure that everyone else is hearing, too.
At 1:30 in the morning, Ralph’s becomes a true egalitarian paradise – nobody is better than anybody else, everybody is equal in the understanding that there’s more to life than conforming to society’s traditional standards of success, or hygiene, or acceptable public behavior. Everybody is gathered together in celebrating all that is freezable, microwaveable, and filled with enough salt to mask the chemical compounds that make up your dinner’s basic ingredients.
Much like worker paradises like the former Soviet Union or the current North Korea, you may find yourself standing in line for far longer than one would expect, living in the civilized West, to buy toilet paper. But the people there have character. They have rich inner lives. They’ve lived, and lived fully, and every minute of every year is written across their faces. Sometimes literally, with the tattoos, and sometimes metaphorically, with everything else.
And that, kids, is how I met your mother.
Reading what Mandy Stadtmiller had to say about me in her new memoir “Unwifeable” (best part of the book) reminded me that I’ve appeared in several other memoirs that I’ve never read. I found one on Amazon, called “Stand Up or Die,” written by Andy de la Tour. Andy was part of the vanguard of British “alternative” standup comedians of the 1980s.
They’re called “alternative,” because American-style solo standup was a big left turn from the British sketch and musical hall tradition that dominated their comedy scene for so long. He came to NYC when I ran my Tell Your Friends! show in the basement of Lolita, and when he told me that he was coming to NYC to get back to his standup roots after a multi-decade absence, I booked him immediately.
Andy wrote “Stand Up or Die” about his months in the New York indie comedy scene, and turned it into a one-man show at the Edinburgh Fringe.
He has some wry and almost complimentary things to say about the New York comedy scene as a whole, and a lot of nice things to say about my show, where I tried to make comedians who were a little more obscure feel as important and wanted as the big names I had like Jim Gaffigan, Janeane Garofalo, Lewis Black.
PS: If you know any other books I’m mentioned in, please message me. I can’t remember any more.
In 2003, I wrote this sketch for my personal blog. An AA group in the Midwest asked permission to perform it. I wish I could have seen that.
Fifteen years ago, back when I had a fairly popular blog (Mark Vonnegut once commented on it!), I published the following goof of a sketch. I had started making fun of a bad sketch group I had watched at an improv theatre, and it quickly turned into a goof on the sort of earnest entertainment-with-a-message groups that would come around to the NYC public schools I attended as a child, in the hopes of making a difference, or at least civilizing us. It’s a thing I enjoy doing quite a bit.
A few months after I published it, I got an e-mail from an AA group in the midwest, asking for permission to perform it. I was as baffled then as I am now. Of course, I gave them permission. I had asked for a video of the sketch, but I guess as the second “A” stands for “Anonymous,” that wouldn’t have been okay.
I would give anything to have seen a live production of “Count Drinkula.” If time travel technology is ever developed and perfected, I’m going to go and sit front row center. Multiple time.
SEVENTEEN YOUNG MEN AND ONE WOMAN, in matching red shirts, take the stage. All have that slightly-manic wide grin that sketch performers wear in the hopes that the audience doesn’t hate them.
THE LEADER OF THE SKETCH GROUP stands in front and addresses the audience.
LEADER: Ladies and gentlemen, we’re Skit Row, and we’re here at your college/community center/rehab clinic to impart a sense of positivity – through comedy!
BLOND WOMAN: Save the negatives for the photo lab.
LEADER: Exactly, Sheila! You know, I think that we’ve all been overcome by temptation in our pasts. Addiction.
TOO CHEERFUL TALL GUY WHO TOOK A LOT OF IMPROV CLASSES AND IS OVERLY PHYSICAL: I might as well face it, I’m addicted to love.
Skit Row laughs.
The Leader laughs for exactly five seconds, then cuts himself off with a “serious” look again.
LEADER: But seriously, battling addiction is no joke. It can turn you into a Dr. Jeckyl –
SHORT FAT GUY : And Mr. Heckyl.
LEADER: Right. That’s why our first sketch is an attempt to educate, and entertain. You might say we’re about to edutain you. It’s called, “Count Drinkula.” We take you now to an alley outside a bar.
LIGHTS DOWN, THEN UP
The Tall Guy weaves across STAGE RIGHT. “How Dry I am” plays in the background.
TALL GUY: Now that was some good booze. Now all I have to do is find my car and drive home.
He peers at nothing.
TALL GUY: Hey Mr. Pink Elephant, who are you looking at?
He takes a swing at thing air and ends up spinning around a couple of times. He falls down and scratches his head.
The Leader, now dressed as DRACULA, steps in STAGE LEFT. “How Dry I Am” plays again.
LEADER (to audience, in bad Bela Lugosi accent): Ah, the children of the night, what beautiful music they make.
(to the Tall Guy)
Blah blah blah. I vant to suck your –
TALL GUY: Hey, I’m not that drunk!
LEADER: Blood. I was going to say blood.
TALL GUY: Who are you?
LEADER: I am Count Drinkula, and I suck the blood of alcoholics.
TALL GUY: It sounds like you have a drinking problem.
DRINKULA: I don’t have a drinking problem. I can drink okay.
TALL GUY: No, I mean it sounds like you’re an alcoholic.
DRINKULA: But I only drink the blood of alcoholics.
TALL GUY: Hey, if you can be a second-hand smoker, why not a second-hand drinker?
DRINKULA: But what can I do?
TALL GUY: Well, you’ve accomplished the first step – admitting that you have a problem. How about an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting?
DRINKULA: Are there meetings for monsters like me?
TALL GUY: Please, there are no monsters n the world – except the Jews.
DRINKULA: Thanks. I think I will find an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
BLACKOUT
Much muffled swearing and scraping of chairs.
Lights up on a circle of a half-dozen chairs. The Leader is standing CENTER STAGE
LEADER: Now, we’re in the basement of a church.
Exeunt.
Enter the BLOND WOMAN, a FAT GUY WRAPPED IN TOILET PAPER, A SKINNY GUY with bolts coming out of his neck scratching himself, and a GUY WH OSAYS HE ISN’T GAY AND THEN HE DOES IMPROV AND ALL HIS CHARACTERS END UP TRYING TO HAVE SEX WITH THE OTHER GUYS ONSTAGE (in a wig and fathered boa), and a couple of other people.
BLOND: Well, I’d like to welcome you to this week’s meeting. We have a guest – where is he?
She makes a big show of looking around, walks offstage and drags the Leader onstage.
BLOND WOMAN: Why don’t we all introduce ourselves?
DRINKULA: My name is Count Drinkula, and I’m – an alcoholic.
ALL: Hi Count Drinkula.
The SKINNY GUY stands.
SKINNY GUY: Me name am Crack-enstein. Me am addicted to crack. And love. Which me am sell for more crack.
ALL: Hi, Crack-enstein.
Skinny Guy sits. The Short Fat Guy stands.
FAT GUY: I’m the Mumm-eats. I’m an overeater. I am wrapped in toilet paper because i’m a mummy – and I tend to be a blogger.
ALL: Hi, Mumm-eats.
He sits. The Gay Guy stands.
THE NOT-GAY-I-SWEAR GUY: I’m a Cher-wolf. Every full moon I turn into Cher.
(doing the worst Cher impression I’ve ever heard)
I’ve got you to walk with me, I’ve got you to talk with me. I’ve got you to hold my hand –
ALL make a big show of putting their hands over their ears.
BLOND WOMAN: Now that’s monstrous!
LEADER: You know, I thought I was a freak because I had a drinking problem. But after hearing THAT, I feel normal.
BLOND WOMAN: Yes, over sixteen million Americans have a degree of a drinking problem.
LEADER: It turns out I’m only a horrible freak because I’m a vampire.
CRACKENSTEIN: That am spirit!
He slaps the LEADER on the back, knocking him down.
LEADER: Thanks. And I have someone else to thank.
He stands up, puts his cape over his face, and runs off.
BLACK OUT
More scraping of chairs as the stage is reset.
LIGHTS UP
The Tall Guy is back, lying Stage Right. The Leader is center stage.
LEADER: Now we’re back outside the bar.
He turns to the Tall Guy.
LEADER: I guess I owe you a debt of gratitude. You really saved my life. Or I guess, unlife. Is there any way I could repay you?
Tall Guy makes a big show of thinking, so does the Leader. At the same time, they both make a show of having “inspiration” strike. They raise their forefingers.
BLACK OUT
Scraping of chairs.
LIGHTS UP
All are sitting in the same positions.
The Leader is standing in the middle of the group.
LEADER:(to the audience) We’re back in the church basement.
(to the group)
I have a newcomer –
He makes a big show of looking around, and runs offstage and drags the Tall Guy back onstage.
CRACKENSTEIN: What am that?
LEADER: That’s a human. And an alcoholic.
BLOND WOMAN: Let’s all introduce ourselves.
ATOM BOMB FALLS ON THE THEATER.
THE END
It seems odd that I have lived long enough that a sentence like, “The Star Trek nerds of the Internet are become outraged,” should seem like news. Because I remember a time, back in the long ago, in the before times, when the Internet was much smaller, and it seemed that fifty percent of the bandwidth used on the Internet Super Highway was engaged in an endless war of Picard v. Kirk.
But we do, we live in a world where your most elderly relatives can, with a click of a mouse, keep tabs on your entire life through Facebook. And as the popular culture spreads through the Internet, just like a deadly virus spreads through a bad B-thriller about the Congo or something, and as Internet nerd culture has engulfed the mainstream, a sentence like this becomes a novelty.
And, so: The Star Trek nerds of the Internet are become outraged. A story broke that, in addition to the upcoming film that he’s announced about the Manson Family murders, Quentin Tarantino has come up with an idea he likes for a next Star Trek movie, and will, in all likelihood, move on to supervise the writing of it, and direct it as well.
Let’s forget for the moment that Quentin Tarantino is notorious for conceiving, enthusiastically announcing, and discarding movies (the joint Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction sequel about the Vega brothers, or the real-time 15-years-later follow up to Kill Bill being the first two that spring immediately to mind).
And let’s forget for a moment that Tarantino seems to be hip-deep in production of this Manson film, which should probably take the focus of his energies for at least the next year. And there’s no knowing what Tarantino, of the famously fleeting attention span, will feel about his Star Trek movie when he actually gets the time to sit down and make it a reality. Or not.
But that’s no fun. So let’s talk about what has this fandom up in arms, which is Quentin Tarantino and Star Trek.
As an aside: The Manson movie is a no-brainer. And not just in the broad, general sense that Tarantino is the ultra-violence and pitch-black humor, Larry Cohen-as-artiste, Grindhouse-on-the-Riviera guy. But because his trademark is switching from moments of dark comedy to acts of brutal violence, often on the whisper-blink of a dropped dime.
Who else could do justice to the story of a failed singer/songwriter, of a burnout who swung into Dennis Wilson’s orbit long enough to have the Beach Boy steal the tune from one of his songs. The tragicomic American success story who finds family, love, and fame as a hippie philosopher king as the head of a sex and murder cult, who found his celebrity as a murderer/criminal in the murder of the wife of a celebrity director (and soon-to-be criminal himself?).
If Oliver Stone’s final draft of Natural Born Killers turns a story of a cross-country thrill-kill spree into a heavy-handed satire of the media’s tendency to make heroes of outlaws, then Charles Manson was Tarantino’s proto-draft, making the same point but in real life. It would make sense that eventually he would circle all the way back in his career.
And so. Tarantino’s characters scurry and scutter like cockroaches in the shadow that pools like blood beneath the green trees and white picket fences world of that dream. In the projectionist/revolutionary-cum-revenge killer of Inglorious Basterds, in the unseen and shadowy mastermind Bill of Kill Bill, in the seedy drifters and petty criminals of Jackie Brown, the late Charlie Manson would have found plenty of happy company in Tarantino’s movies.
All of which makes Tarantino The Auteur of the Bottom of the Double Feature a hell of an odd fit for Star Trek, the JFK Era’s “In ten years’ time we will land a man on the moon” credo made flesh. A director, whose gritty bottom-dwelling characters live in a world governed by the Bob Dylan lyric, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” tackling a TV series star-bound ideals of the Mid-Century Man , whose moral code lies in the refrain repeated throughout its films: “The good of the many outweighs the good of the one.”
Tarantino the filmmaker about compulsion and expulsion, about blood and lust, often spontaneously so. Taking the reins of Star Trek, a series whose hallmark is restraint and, most importantly, the enforcement of the codified rule of laws, both of man and of nature.
Star Trek’s characters may be men and women of action—or in the case of The Next Generation, men and women prone to endlessly debating and discussing, like a Jewish family at the Olive Garden for the first time, examining the menu—but their actions are grounded in sharply-drawn laws, directives, and codes of conduct. By the laws of the Federation of Planets, the directives of Starfleet that govern everything from dress code to protocol on encountering new species and traveling through time. Some of Captain James Kirk’s biggest struggles are the moral ones between what’s “right” for the crew that his captaincy makes him responsible for, and what’s “right” for the beings he encounters, and what’s “right” as defined by the iron-clad laws of the world in which he lives.
Which isn’t to say that Tarantino’s characters are lawless. They live by the outlaw’s code, and it’s only when they step outside that code, when they go back on their word or sin against their fellow bottom-dwellers, for lust or money, that they meet their fate. In Pulp Fiction, Ving Rhames’ mob boss Marcellus Wallace explains at great length the moral and philosophical underpinnings of why Bruce Willis’ boxer Butch must throw his fight. Instead, Butch wins his fight, killing the other boxer in the process, and finds himself facing death and sexual assault in the basement of a redneck pawn shop.
In fact, it’s only after his decision to stop, when he’s on the verge of freedom, to go back and save the mob boss who has marked him for immediate murder because it is the right thing to do by the lights of the world he lives in, that he finally gains everything he lost by going back on his word; freedom to travel, freedom to collect the money he won betting on himself, freedom to be with the woman he loves (and he gets to trade in his crappy old car on rapist Zed’s dope chopper in the bargain).
And yet, at the end of the day, is Captain Kirk and crew so different? Look at Star Trek III: The Search for Spock where Kirk and crew risk everything to save their friend Spock, whose dying body was separated from his mind saving his friends in the previous Star Trek film. They steal a starship, they turn outlaw, they land on the Genesis planet – a place of Godlike power to create life that has been forbidden to man, they destroy a Klingon warship in an act of war that is contrary to every law of Starfleet, all to save their friend who had just recently saved their lives. And then in the subsequent film, they find redemption and restoration to their status quo only after saving the planet Earth from a shadowy alien threat.
In Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino breaks every narrative rule concerning depicting historical events, destroying the entire Nazi High Command in one act of bloody, explosive revenge, ending World War II years early. Cristoph Waltz’s SS colonel Hans Landa could have saved the lives of his superiors, but instead chose to use his knowledge of the forthcoming event to strike his own deal with the United States high command to flee the soon-to-topple Fatherland and land in comfort. Of course, this being a Tarantino movie, and Landa having broken the outlaw’s code, a bloody and permanent punishment is practiced on him in the woods before he can escape.
Whereas, in the classic Trek episode, City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk and Spock end up back in the New York City of the Great Depression, having made a leap of faith through alien time travel technology to rescue his friend Dr. McCoy. Back in the past, he meets, and falls in love with, a woman, Edith Keeler, whom Spock discovers in her alternate timeline founds a pacifist movement that ends up delaying the United States’ entry into WWII, thus allowing the Nazi government to triumph. Deciding that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one, and realizing that he can’t allow his love for this woman to destroy history as we know it, Kirk must stop himself from allowing Dr. McCoy to save Keeler from being killed by a truck.
Breaking this moral code is depicted as an almost impossible choice in the Star Trek universe. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the crew is back in 1986 San Francisco. They have rescued the whales that will talk down the alien satellite that is destroying the Earth. They have their stolen Klingon Bird of Prey ship powered up. And they have a crewman, and friend, being held prisoner by the 20th century military. Mr. Spock, the reliable logical moral arbiter, says that they must go back and rescue him, at the risk of their own mission. Kirk asks if it’s the logical thing to do. Spock says, “It’s the human thing to do.” And the theater I watched this movie in erupted in applause, because goddamn it, he’s right.
In Inglourious Basterds, we have Melanie Laurent’s Jewish projectionist who has seen her family destroyed in the Holocaust, and in City on the Edge of Forever, we have William Shatner’s Captain Kirk who must let his girlfriend die, and they are both given a chance to personal satisfaction at the expense of history’s delicate tapestry. Tarantino is willing to destroy history as a way of creating a helluva twist, while the Star Trek universe is about maintaining the status quo. About personal sacrifice in the service of the common good.
For all of Kirk’s reputation as an intergalactic ladies’ man, his swinging is mostly confined to the bloodless clinch and kiss. Whereas Tarantino is about the twin flames of murder and desire. And yet, for the surface differences, this is where the two come together.
Another classic Star Trek episode: Theodore Sturgeon’s Amok Time. In the Trek universe, First officer Mr. Spock comes from an alien race, the Vulcans, whose entire civilization is built on the suppression of emotion in favor of cold, logical behavior. But once every seven years, they undergo pon farr, a savage blood lust and inevitable death, and once every seven years, unless they are able to mate (been there!) with someone with whom they are in a relationship, they will die.
And here, we find a Tarantino-esque moral dilemma. Spock, who faces an arranged marriage that has been set by his parents since birth, arrives at the planet Vulcan to find that his promised, T’Pau, is in love with another. And if a Vulcan woman does not wish to wed, she may demand a kal-if-fee, a duel between her two loves, to the death. In order to protect the man she truly loves, she demands Spock fight his best friend Kirk in the kal-if-fee. This story is the bloody stuff of the best western murder ballads, and certainly a plotline that could fight into a Tarantino-esque film. And Spock does it. He murders Kirk in the heat of pon farr. Only to find later that Kirk was only heavily-sedated, because nobody was that committed to serial storytelling in the 1960s.
After all, in Pulp Fiction, it’s only after John Travolta’s hitman clearly decides that he is going to sleep with his boss, Marcellus Wallace’s wife, and after she decides to sleep with him, that she accidentally overdoses on heroin and Travolta’s Vincent Vega must save her life or surely be murdered by Wallace in return.
It’s this horror of upending the status quo of the world that the characters live in that many of Tarantino’s films share with the best of Star Trek.
In fact, the famous “Spock with a goatee” evil alternate universe is one that the director would find himself quite at home in. A world where murder is dispensed liberally (if, again, bloodlessly, through the use of a machine) as a means of gaining and keeping command. Where Kirk gives in fully to his animal, sexual passions, keeping mistresses among his crew. It’s telling that the closest this universe has to a “good guy” is dependable Spock-in-a-goatee, who remains logical and intelligent, displaying restraint and a relative respect for the chain of command. In a world where Starfleet acts less as an exploratory and military force and more as a loose-knit aggregation of pirate ships, Spock stands against the horrors of lack of respect for the rule of law.
In other words, it’s a cautionary tale about what happens if society in that universe behaved in the way it does in Quentin Tarantino movies. And if he wanted to set his Star Trek movie in that evil mirror universe, I would be the first in line to buy a ticket.
But as I said, nerds on the Internet are furious about this. And I say, if the Trekkies are going to freak out, then by all means, let them freak out. This is the nature of the passionate fan. Because Star Trek has been around for a long time, because it’s never been a blockbuster in the nature of the Star Wars phenomenon. Not only has that never been Trek’s strength, when Roddenberry and Paramount tried to fit Star Trek into that mold with The Motion(less) Picture, it failed miserably.
Star Wars is a film series that values spectacle over all, with much less concern for interpersonal relationships except in the grandest terms; it’s a world of gigantic oedipal stories told with gigantic mythic archetypes. It’s telling that of all the characters, the most consistently relatable is Han Solo, the cocky pilot who gets in over his head constantly, who fails consistently, and whose heroism lies in overcoming his own limitations.
And the first three movies were set in worlds painted with such broad brushstrokes, that much of the detail and shading happened offscreen. As a young child, how did I know that the lead Ewok’s name was Wikket? It’s never mentioned in The Return of the Jedi, and I certainly was not sitting still studying the closing credits. No, it’s through the tie-in books and toys and spin-off specials and Burger King giveaways that you learn more about this world, names of species and back stories and characters who popped up in the background. If you are of a certain age, and I say the word “Lobot,” you know exactly who I am talking about, even though he spends almost no time on-screen and has no lines.
But Star Trek is all shading and detail, all about character development and relationships. Even the starship Enterprise becomes a leading character, and her heroic death and self-sacrifice in The Search for Spock is shocking and tragic. Kirk and Spock and McCoy are three mid-century manly men in the John Ford western mold. All surface bravado and machismo, under whose cover strong emotions simmer. There’s a bond of brotherly love that dares never show itself except in times of extreme distress and danger, or in the afterglow of a near-death experience, when they can relax and let their guards down. No wonder so much fan-fiction surrounds a hypothetical romantic and sexual relationship between the three, when there is a love that clearly does not speak its name. Even if that love is nothing more risqué than the fraternal bond between the members of a college football team.
The strength of Star Trek lies in its relationships, and not just between the characters, but even more importantly, between the show itself and the fans. Before the Internet broke down the walls between popular and outsider art, there were many examples of music, TV, movies, that were initially designed for mass-market consumption, but was such a product of personal vision that it found itself the object of a niche, or “cult,” audience. A group of fans for whom part of the joy of watching a show, or reading a book, or following a band that wasn’t constantly on the Billboard charts and in rotation on MTV, lay in knowing that it wasn’t popular.
I used to have a joke that the Internet made moot, about how nerds who are nerdy for a thing, enjoy maintaining the status of a “true fan.” That I’d found not only a Star Trek slash fic (gay-themed fan-fiction) site, but one that was written entirely in Klingon, with the only English being, “I do not provide translations. If you cannot read Klingon, you are at the wrong site.” That this kind of nerd was nerdy about the thing that they loved that it turned them into snobs.
Because before the Comic-Cons became so huge that they were an important part of launching film franchises, before “geek culture” and “popular culture” became entwined, the official mass-media popular posture on shows, especially science fiction shows like Star Trek or Doctor Who, would be that this was fringe-dwelling weirdo stuff appreciated only by foul-smelling losers who live in their parents’ basements.
Not like “real” entertainment, TV shows like Miami Vice or The Dukes of Hazzard which ran for years on major networks in prime-time slots, and weren’t cast off onto fuzzy UHF stations from far-flung states in late-night syndication, or even more suspect to population at large, on PBS.
And so you would have to hunt for the shows you liked, which, even if they did play in first-run prime-time, often jumped around the schedule sometimes with no notice. And you would seek out books, and fan clubs, and little fan conventions in run-down hotels. And you would build a community.
When I was a lad of twelve, my dad taped a marathon showing of the British pre-apocalyptic show The Prisoner. I watched the whole thing, enthralled with its clever plotting, smart scripts, and groovy English Mod style. One day at Barnes & Noble bookstore, and it’s funny to think that Barnes & Noble, which was once considered poison for mom and pop bookstores, was choked out of business by Amazon. But one day, I found and paid my own birthday money for a guide book to The Prisoner, entitled The Prisoner Official Companion. It was there that I learned about entire alternate versions of episodes that were shot and never aired, and I learned why there were weird fantasy episodes that were completely out of tune with the rest of the series (long story short: ITV contract with more episodes than series creator/star Patrick McGoohan had good ideas for).
I carried The Official Prisoner Companion around my junior high school for three months, hoping a cute girl would notice and tell me that she thought I was super cool. Shocking twist ending: Never happened. But in the back was a guide to all of the various Prisoner fan groups you could belong to, and so as a 12th birthday present, my parents subscribed me to the cheapest one (six bucks for six months, I think). Every month or so I would receive a hand-Xeroxed, hand-stapled fanzine, with stories and baffling comics written by fellow fans. It was a thrilling peek into a world where people obsessed over all the same things I did.
I owned The Doctor Who Programme Guide, a listing of all of the episodes of the first 20-something years that was already five years out of date by the time I picked it up. And I read it cover to cover many times. I was a lonely kid, yes, but I also got a huge kick out of the paragraph-length breakdowns of the show’s episodes. I would read them over and over, noting which episodes I hadn’t seen, wondering about the episodes that hadn’t been produced, and trying to imagine the episodes that had been lost forever.
And so, when you feel as if you are alone in the dark, loving something as your own, wondering who else could even be paying attention, feeling isolated, it’s as if the show has been made for you personally. And you develop a specific personal emotional attachment to it. You love it, yes, and you also feel an ownership over it.
And then came the Internet.
I’m a native New Yorker. If you’re ever in New York City and you want to find out who grew up there, just talk to them for more than thirty seconds, and they will tell you. I am that guy, and frankly, I make no apologies. And so here’s a story, called Once Upon A Time, Here’s The Way It Would Go:
A little place would open up in your neighborhood. A café, say, or a restaurant. And maybe a local paper would give you a little blurb about what was opening there, and you would decide to give it a chance. And if it was good, the décor charming, the food tasty, the price reasonable, you would spread the word. And maybe it would get to the point where you would have to wait ten, fifteen minutes for a table on the weekend, which is only fair because you like to see a local business that you like stay open.
Then word of mouth would spread to a writer for a travel guide, Fodor’s Guide to New York, or maybe Zagat’s would catch wind and drop in on a good night. Or a friend knows a guy at the New York Times and their reviewer comes by. And there would be a major write up, and then the place would be mobbed and the owners would maybe expand into the next three storefronts to handle the overflow business, and then open a second location in midtown.
And this process would take years, and even though you had lost a neighborhood spot, you had gained the ability to tell everyone you know, “Oh yeah, that place? I used to go there, before it became a tourist trap.” And while it was always sad to let go, it’s the natural cycle with everything that’s beloved, whether it be a bar, or a restaurant, or an entire neighborhood. And so it goes with popular culture.
Only the Internet accelerated this to a destructive pace. Suddenly there were a million New York blogs, and suddenly there were a million local experts touting any and every new thing under the sun. And there came the scenesters, like locusts they came. From all across the country, from all around the world. Young people, the offspring of an affluent generation who told their children that they could be anything they wanted to be, without adding the important addendum, unless you don’t have a natural talent for it, in which case it’s okay to stay closer to home and live an ordinary life. And being a generation that only dared to move to NYC after a decade of sitcoms promising it was tame and bland enough for safe living, and fearful of anything that didn’t come pre-approved, they built their Gaps and their Starbuckses and they swarmed over any and everything that these blogs promised were cool. Venues and bands and entire neighborhoods they consumed.
And look, this isn’t to say that I don’t want the things I love to be appreciated by a wider audience. Because Paramount believed there was a wider audience for Star Trek than NBC was giving it credit for, we have all the movies, and novels, and comic books, and other ancillary media I consumed as a child.
As I said, when I was young I would go to science fiction conventions. At their best, these would be a floor of conference rooms in a somewhat disreputable hotel. The actors would come to speak, to meet their fans, the authors would come to drink and mingle, the vendors would sell their merchandise. For twenty dollars, I got my hot pudgy hands on a second-generation bootleg dub of Heavy Metal, which was at the time unavailable on home video due to music rights. Grainy Star Trek blooper reels would be played. I once met, and shook the hand of Isaac Asimov, who was the keynote speaker at one of the bigger cons.
I’ve stopped going to conventions. They give me panic attacks. The convention floors is packed with packed with young people in costume, having found a way to keep the Halloween party going beyond the full week out of the year it’s allotted in most cities now. The sounds and the music and the lights and the overwhelming melancholy I feel knowing that the world I once knew is gone.
And so, of course, as a Star Trek nerd, I’m going to have mixed feelings about Tarantino taking the reins on the franchise. But he could be good for Trek. He understands, in a way that the best producers and directors of the original franchise films did, the need for action to propel story, for humor to leaven the operatically-tragic moments of tragedy.
And yes, Tarantino is a grindhouse director, but he’s also shown himself to be the master of what Star Trek is at its absolute best – the granite and stone elements of B-movie garbage, chipped and chiseled and shaped into a work of art. Popular, yes, and in its own ways trashy, but still art. Of all the living Great American Directors, he’s the one I would most trust to take something as basic as a show pitched as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” and turn it into something great. Roddenberry did it almost by accident. Maybe Tarantino could do it on purpose.
But that leaves the real question: Why? Why do we keep bringing Star Trek back? Why do we keep making every Star Wars movie a record-breaking blockbuster? Why are the biggest money-making films based on comic books like The Avengers? Not to say that these aren’t great franchises that don’t speak to every new generation.
It’s just that the first Star Wars movie came out forty years ago. The first Avengers comic came out fifty-four years ago. The original TV series that Star Trek is based on went off the air almost fifty years ago now. Doctor Who still follows almost exactly a template that was established almost fifty-five years ago.
So why do we keep circling around these things over and over? Why is our culture incapable of creating new beloved myths? Is it because they still speak to us, or is it because they made us a feel a certain way once upon a time, and we as a people are trying to recapture the magic of that first fandom? When I watch, when I support, these things, am I holding on to something I love, or am I having trouble letting go of who I once was?
Western civilization, as defined by American-style democratic institutions both political and cultural, is facing a crisis point. A significant chunk of the population, scared by a chaotic-seeming present, cling to a certain cultural recidivism. Won’t let go of a mythical past where everything was better, and so a President was elected on the slogan “Make America Great Again.” The idea was to bring back, not so much a better time, but the feeling that believing that such a time had existed gives you.
And while I am certainly not going to sit here and compare Quentin Tarantino to Donald Trump, the question becomes: In order to move forward in our culture, is it necessary to bring everything with us? Luggage filled with nuggets of gold mixed in with blocks of lead? These things are the movies and television and boks I have loved, but sometimes it is time to let the dead bury their own dead, in the words of the prophet, and remember that part of the thrill of popular culture was the thrill of discovering something new. Nurturing it, following it, loving it, and letting it speak to you in the aloneness of the dark.
A fear of the new, of the unknown, of change and trying something new, will eventually lead to a culture like all the formerly hip neighborhoods of New York City, nothing but chain stores and culture that is neither surprising nor scary.
Talking to a friend this week who works at Sirius/XM, and he told me that for the next couple weeks, they’re going to have a free two weeks for anyone who used to have the service. So, if you have a unit in your car or whatever, you can just turn it on and you’ll be able to listen to a bunch of channels.
I say this for two reasons. First of all, I get played on their comedy channels quite a bit, and I’ve gained some new fans as a result, and so it behooves me to not only do them a favor, but to spread the word a little bit and remind people that they can listen to me. And some other great comedians, but mostly me! Me! Me!
Secondly, I was a little skeptical of the service for a long time. Not just before they started playing me (listen to my comedy on Sirius! let them know you want to hear more!) but I grew up, and spent most of my life, in New York City, which was always a terrible radio town. But we had the luxury of being a terrible radio town, because, unless you commuted in from the suburbs, listening to the radio was never really a regular part of your life. Maybe if you lived alone and wanted to play some music and you were tired of your records and tapes you might turn on the radio long enough to remember why you didn’t turn on the radio.
Or you might listen to Top 40 at work so you wouldn’t have to hear the sound of your coworkers sniffing, scratching, and chewing all day every day. Of course office shootings were going to happen in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. before workplaces became so headphone-friendly, you had nothing to do but listen to the 45 minutes your coworker spent discussing where she and her boyfriend were headed for dinner that night. Right?
In any case, New York City when I grew up was all about the morning show. If you drove, it was generally in the morning to work, and if you didn’t listen to Howard, maybe you listened to Imus. Or maybe you listened to R&B or rock or something. But you didn’t listen to the radio for long stretches, and certainly not for pleasure.
The other thing you have to know about the New York City I grew up in was, there were genres for music that people were fans of, and they were fiercely devoted and partisan, and looked down on all other genres of music.
That sounds ridiculous now, someone who is a heavy metal devotee who also doesn’t listen to some rap, or even Morrissey. There are a lot of people like myself, who listen to everything. But this was back before file sharing tore down all the financial barriers to musical fandom. Once upon a time, young people, being a fan of a musical act was a serious financial investment.
If you were sixteens years old, and you were making seven dollars an hour at some horrible fast-food job, and a CD cost $16.98, you bet your ass you thought twice or three times before taking a chance on a band who maybe had a single you heard on the radio (a lot of times, that was the band’s only good song), or a band that you heard from your one glue-sniffing friend might be good.
Or a band whose name you just enjoyed saying over and over (my favorite part of any Husker Dü record is saying Husker Dü and giggling).
I mean sure, Rolling Stone liked Primus enough to write an article about it, you remember that they describe it as a band that “mixes thrash, funk, and progressive rock,” and that that was written by someone who gets free records and concert tickets, and that if you’re going to drop three hours of your life after taxes working for the man, you bet your ass it’s going to be for something that doesn’t sound quite so terrible. (Then you’ll go to college and have that one friend who studies Primus like the monks of the fifth century pored over and illuminated copies of the Bible. Drugs.)
So I never got into country music. New York City in general has always been a Rhythm & Blues town—the reason hip hop was invented up in the Bronx was that it started at parties up in the Bronx, where R&B and disco were the dominant musical styles, MCs, literal masters of ceremony talking over a good groove – and then where I grew up in the middle of Queens was dominated by hard rock and classic rock. Sure, the parents liked a little Motown, but it was all about the long-hair rebel rock.
So if you listened to country, you kept quiet about it. Sure, there was the odd artist who crossed over into the mainstream, your Willie Nelsons and your Dolly Partons, whose greatness could be denied by no man. But generally, country music was for making fun of on Hee Haw, or jokes about how I done broke up with my sister and lost my pickup truck and now I sleep with my good ol’ tick hound named Beau.
I began to change my mind the day I found the Sunday morning country-western show on WKCR, the Columbia University radio station that plays normally endless hours of old jazz. Sundays are the day the students are able to wrestle the station’s programming out of the hands of decades-dead hipsterism and play a broader array of music. And I began to really appreciate country.
Now, of course, I pay $9.99 a month to Spotify, and if I think of a band or a song or a genre, I’m able to call it up and decide I don’t like it in two minutes. And so the passion dissipates, and the tribalism fades.
The point is, my dad and I went down to Tampa last year to watch spring training baseball. To watch the Yankees just trounce the Mets. And my eyes were really opened to how much time the ordinary American spends in their car, and of course you’re going to listen to whatever you can get. Want to know why Evangelical Christians have such a grip on such a large swath of the country? They’re on the radio all day every day, talking and talking and talking.
Want to know why Americans are ready to believe absolutely insane things about Bill and Hillary Clinton? Because conservative talk radio just goes and goes and goes, and has been going for the past 20 years. This is big business. And people spend hours every day, driving to work, driving to the store, driving the kids to soccer, driving driving driving.
So this Sirius/XM was a godsend, because I would have paid a million dollars to not listen to more than two minutes of local Tampa radio (the service came free with the rental car) and we listened to a lot of a station called Willie’s Roadhouse. Willie Nelson and his family program and host 24 hours of old country music, and it is glorious. All these old voices that are household names in households far from where I grew up. I know that a part of it is that it is a culture that is still exotic to me. And it’s partly because so much of this music is so universal, as Ray Charles famously discovered. So turn on your Sirius device and give it a listen. Or start below, i’ve provided a few examples of my favorites:
The great outlaw country singer/songwriter Stonewall Jackson:
The immortal George Jones:
Before Conway Twitty became a Family Guy punchline, he out-Elvised Elvis:
And more Conway Twitty:
THE classic Merle Haggard song:
Loretta Lynn was a gangster before gangster was gangster:
And here’s Dolly, Tammy, and Loretta:
I saw there was a book called Five People You Will Meet In Heaven, that was one of the biggest bestsellers of all time. The author made a buttload of money. And I thought to myself, “I’d like to write one of the biggest bestsellers of all time, too.” So I figured, if people bought that book, they’ll buy five times as many books if I wrote a book about the 25 people you’ll meet in heaven. And here it is below:
25. Your grandparents
And despite the fact that money holds no value up there, you can rest assured that every year you will find that they have sent you a slightly-humorous card with a check for five dollars inside.
24. Your first dog
In Heaven, he will be given an intelligence 1000 times greater than that which he possessed on Earth. Not that he’ll be a genius, but he’ll about as smart as your average human being, or twice as smart as your average Flavor of Love contestant. However, your reunion will be bittersweet; he’ll be so embarrassed by his behaviour as your pet – running when you call, chasing sticks, allowing you to cut off his testicles – that he’ll spend a great deal of time avoiding you. He’ll let your emails go unanswered, send your calls to voice mail, and when you ring his bell one evening, he’ll turn off his lights, duck behind the furniture, and pretend not to be home. When you finally run into each other at a party, it will be awkward.
23. Christopher Hitchens
And man, he does not want to talk about it.
22. That preacher you saw screaming in Times Square in ’87
He will be the single smuggest man in Heaven, and will spend a lot of time saying things like, “I bet those tourists didn’t think it was so funny to take my picture now.” Or “Who’s laughing now, pimp and prostitutes and dealers?” Problem is, just because he’s right doesn’t mean he isn’t completely nuts – the nicest thing you can do is smile, nod, and leave as quickly as possible.
21. William Shakespeare
And despite being heralded as one of the greatest playwrights in the history of the English language, he’s still a professional writer, and so he’ll spend an hour complaining to you about how death has really cut down on the amount of ork he’s being offered, and then will ask if you know anyone in the lit department at CAA.
20. God
And you will find that He is one of those bosses that likes to think of Himself as a “nice guy” who creates a “fun atmosphere” and likes to rope himself into the kind of team-building exercises that gets the occasional angel like Lucifer seeking employment with the competition. And even if He isn’t technically everywhere, it will feel like it, especially since He seems to always be walking up behind you right when you’re about to say something snarky about Him.
19. A surprising amount of personal injury attorneys
But they’re only there to scrub toilets as part of a work-release program from an increasingly-overcrowded Hell.
18. The guy who wrote the Bible
You’ll meet him at a party where he will explain that a lot has been lost in translation from the original Hebrew; for instance the story of Noah was originally about an increasingly-exasperated everyman whose family vacation is cut short by a series of crazy misadventures, culminating in a cruise through the worst storm ever seen. Then he will tell you that he originally envisioned Jack Lemmon in the role, but is now in talks with Steve Martin’s people. Then you will buy him a drink to go away.
17. Jimi Hendrix
He runs a Guitar Center up there, and he will kick you out if you start playing “Stairway.”
16. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He’s a little nuts, really, and very hard to talk to. But you’ll hang with him for the same reason everyone else does; he knows all the good dealers.
15. Galileo
Nice guy, but maybe enjoys a little too much wondering aloud how all his critics are doing “down there.”
14. The Rolling Stones
FOR THREE NIGHTS ONLY! Seriously, those guys will tour anywhere they can get paid.
13. The sculptor Michaelangelo
In one of those ironic twists of fate, he met the actual Biblical David in line in a Starbucks (and yes, there’s a Starbucks up there. There’s a Starbucks everywhere; in Heaven, though, the coffee doesn’t taste burnt). David was going through a breakup, and one thing led to another, and now they live together, even though the real David is a bit hairier and paunchier than Michaelangelo imagined he’d be.
12. A Large Number of Gay People
And if that makes you uncomfortable, don’t worry; odds are good you won’t be able to afford to live or shop in their neighborhood, anyway.
11. Martin Luther King
He’ll tell you that he has a brand-new dream; one that involves waiting for James Earl Ray with a sock full of batteries. Then, when he sees the look on your face, he’ll tell you to relax; it’s just a joke. But you can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s kinda not kidding.
10. Marco Polo
For a world-famous explorer and conqueror of new lands, you’ll find him surprisingly approachable. He’s also surprisingly easy to talk to. Not that you’ll know, because as you begin your first and last conversation with him, a friend of his will approach and addresses him as “Marco!” You will, without even thinking, instinctively reply, “POLO!” It will be worth it.
09. Dr. Jack Kevorkian
In a case of true celestial irony, none of his patients will be there, as suicide is still considered by Heavenly authorities to be a mortal sin.
08. Friedrich Nietszche
The famous German philosopher. Be warned that shortly after his arrival, his friends found him to be “too intense,” and so to “mellow him out a bit” they got him to start smoking weed. You’ll be disappointed to find that now he spends a lot of time sitting on his couch, eating Captain Crunch straight from the box, and lecturing to anyone who will listen that the secret of life can be found in old Bruce Lee movies.
07. Lou Gehrig
Who will be the first to admit that perhaps, on the day when he was forced to retire from baseball because he was dying young of a disease so rare they named it after him, perhaps he was not “the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.”
06. Ernesto “Ché” Guevera
You’ll know him; he’s the guy wearing a t-shirt with a picture of an NYU Freshman on the front.
05. You Remember That Guy from Your Office, the “Funny” One Who Always Busted Out Those “Hilarious” Catch Phrases From His Favorite Movies Like “Yeah Baby!” and “Niiice!” and “My wife!”?
Not him, he was sent directly to Hell. But you will probably get to meet that guy’s wife, because the woman had to have either been deaf or a saint.
04. Graaargh, The Guy Who Invented the Wheel
He’s really bitter; he apparently met a patent attorney (up from Hell for the day on work release) who told him how much money he could have made in royalties if he’d had adequate representation. However, he’s easier to talk to than Raaaaarrrgh, the guy who went down in history as the guy who discovered fire, and then immediately went down in history as the first guy to discover how easily people catch on fire, and then went down in history as the first person who discovered that Saber Tooth Tigers will come running when they smell delicious burning meat. Ironically, Raaaaaarrrrgh is not only his name, but also the noise he made when he made all his discoveries.
03. Bill Gates
Oh, he isn’t dead. He’s just rich enough that he can afford a summer home there.
02. Jesus
But he’ll be kinda stand-offish until he sees you’re not one of “those” fans.
01. You
Surprised? Quite a few people who knew you would be as well. You’ll spend the first few hundred years up there keeping a low profile, just in case it turns out there was some kind of mistake and you weren’t supposed to get in. In time, you’ll be able to relax, make some friends. Eventually, you will find yourself in a post-existential crisis as you find yourself hanging out all day, drinking beer and playing video games, and you’ll realize that you are wasting your afterlife in exactly the same way you wasted your actual life.
At the beginning of 2017, I submitted this as an op-ed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a couple of other places. Although it was rejected by all those, I liked it, and frankly, it has become more prescient with every passing day.
On January 19th, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. To some, he’s seen as a toxic misogynist, or a Russian stooge, or the public face of a resurgent White Nationalist movement. But to those of us from the five boroughs, we know Donald Trump as something far more sinister: a New York City landlord.
Much of the country has no idea what this means, to live under the rule of a New York landlord. And, judging by the number of stories in the real estate section about NYU students whose parents buy their apartments, neither do many New York Times readers. So allow me, as a proud product of The Big Apple, born and raised in the buildings of President Trump’s home borough of Queens, to let you know what to expect from life under a New York City real estate speculator.
To start, for the New York landlord, our health and well-being is of little or no concern. In fact, in some cases, your death is a fantastic business opportunity. The passing of an elderly tenant can turn an $800-a-month rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment into a $3500 three-bedroom (“Yes, that used to be a crawlspace, but it’s been converted into an intimate loft area”) to be shared by five recently graduated liberal arts majors.
Not that he will actively try to kill you. For the most part, the landlord is cheap enough to know that there’s no point in paying someone fifteen grand to kill an old lady when you can just let a broken boiler in mid-February go unfixed for days or even weeks. Dark? Yes, and cold-hearted, too. But that’s New York City real estate. And so, your President will reason, why spend money on accessible health care or Social Security when the free market will do the dirty work for you?
Trump’s campaign promised to fix America’s infrastructure. As someone who spent most of his life trying to get a landlord to effect basic repairs, I am here to tell you that our Property Manager-in-Chief will do the bare minimum, and attempt to spend even less, on upkeep and repairs.
As can any New Yorker who has waited in their living room for days, knowing that the minute they leave, a handyman who is alleged to have been sent to fix their toilet will allege to have been at their door, ringing their bell. This handyman doesn’t exist. Like Santa Claus, he is a fairy tale character designed to soothe and placate a credulous mind.
Any repairs that do get done will be made only after a harassment campaign of weeks or months, each phone call or letter seeing your new landlord get more short-tempered and angry. He knows that if he bullies you long enough, you’ll find that living with a problem is easier than getting him to fix it. When repairs do come, they will be cheap, shoddy, and break again within weeks. If our government can spend the next four years patching together our country’s broken bridges and roads with pieces of other bridges and roads, it will.
As far as national security goes, don’t get your hopes up. Yes, we will see a mass expulsion of immigrants. What New York landlord hasn’t prefaced the making of a quick buck with the eviction of most or all his tenants? Just ask any former resident of the Brooklyn neighborhood where now stands an ugly arena, home to the tumbleweeds that blow through the stands during basketball and hockey games.
And your average New York landlord doesn’t care about building security, especially if he doesn’t live on the property. Especially if he lives in a big gold tower with his name on it that New York City pays half a million dollars a day to protect. Your safety and well-being is going to be the furthest thing from his mind.
Expect your new President to constantly war with his citizens, because any New York landlord’s true enemy is his tenants. He sees every resident of every building as a walking, talking, endlessly-complaining dollar sign. And the more they whine, demanding a livable environment, or clean water, or the right to live like a human being, the lower that dollar value gets.
Remember, our new President is a New York City landlord. And the New York City landlord’s ideal tenant is a $5,000 check that, once a month, appears magically in the middle of an empty, unused living room.
When I was a young man of 20, I was already a veteran comedian, having traveled the “road” and performing at college shows where the audiences ranged from “somewhat positive” (shoutout to Towson University!) to “indifferent, on their way to lunch” (Bristol Community College!) or “openly hostile” (Youngstown State “University!”).
Looking back on my notebooks from that young age is a source of alternating amusement and embarrassment. But occasionally I will unearth something from the pages that make me kind of proud of my post-pubescent self, and this is one of those. It was a parody of the famous poem “Casey At The Bat,” and as you can see, I got two pages in and got interrupted by something. I wish I’d finished it and actually made something of it.
But here it is:
From a piece I wrote, called Three Different Memos To Three Different Neighbors (2006):
MEMO #1 – TO: The Neighbor Who Stole My Doormat
RE: What the Fuck?
Okay, I know it’s been two-and-a-half years, but I honestly still can’t believe it. And so I have to ask; come on guy, you really needed to steal my doormat? My doormat?
And we’re not even talking about an ornamental, expensive doormat – the kind embroidered by a young child in a dark factory in the heart of Taiwan; the kind with the word “WELCOME” woven in over an irresistibly crude caricature of puppies playfully squirming under a doormat of their own, their big eyes staring straight through your soul; the kind that you can only find in an elegant, out-of-the-way specialty store like K-Mart or Target. And I understand that not everyone has the rare combination of both ten seconds and six dollars that it takes to go out and buy one of their own. And if I had owned this kind of extravagantly decorative doormat, I would understand a working man’s need to steal it, to give his family a small taste of the same lavish, luxurious lifestyle that Doukhobors like myself enjoy in our rent-controlled apartments in the heart of Queens.
But that’s not the kind of doormat we’re talking about, is it? The kind of doormat we’re talking about, the kind that you stole under the dark cover of night, is dirty and beige; it’s the kind of doormat that I got not from Wal-Mart, nor even from Kiki’s 99-Cent Emporium, but rather from the relatives of an elderly neighbor who had recently died, shuffling off this mortal coil in housedress and slippers, plastic bags clutched in her hand, a faded babushka on her head and a complaint about the heat left unspoken on her tongue. That’s right; you stole a free, dead woman’s doormat.
To be honest, I’m not even angry so much as I am completely baffled; what, exactly, did you think you were going to do? Just put it down outside of your apartment, the only place you could logically use it, and hope that I wouldn’t go door-to-door through the building hallway looking for it?
In the annals of crime, stealing a neighbor’s doormat falls somewhere between mugging your boss in the elevator on the way up to the office and bursting into a police precinct, waving your shotgun in the air, and declaring that the next person who moves gets it. Which is to say that it falls exactly halfway between being “poorly thought out” and “fucking retarded.”
And if you can’t use a doormat for its intended purpose, what exactly would you do with it? Sell it on eBay? Not that I would put it past you; after all, the person who would steal a used dime-store doormat is the exact same person who has undoubtedly, at several points in their life, had a small, swarthy man named Chico calmly inform them that “you ain’t can’t have the weed if you ain’t don’t gots the cash.”
And so I scoured Craig’s List, searching for the tell-tale ad: “FOR SALE,” I imagined it would say, “Doormat, gently used – NO QUESTIONS ASKED! Serial numbers have been filed off. Am looking for best reasonable offer – cash, food, or even MetroCard swipe into subway.”
Or perhaps this doormat was of some value to you, a value that I myself did not ascertain and could only truly appreciate once it was gone from my life. In my mind’s eye I can see you running through the building, clad in an Indiana Jones leather jacket and fedora, clutching your bleeding, gunshot arm as dark-suited thugs from the Russian mob close in fast. Trapped in a corner, desperate, you wheel around, revealing a Luger held to the head of a dirty beige doormat trembling in the crook of your arm.
“Don’t do anything we’ll both regret,” says a large man who steps from the shadows, a deep scar running down the side of his face, a gloved hand removing a pair of $500 Ray Bans, revealing one eye made of milky-white glass, the other filled with a mixture of hatred and respect.
You shake your head once: “No.” You pant for breath, swallow, then add, “Tell your men to step back and give us safe conduct, Vladimir. Now. Or the only place this doormat lies is inside the entrance of a mausoleum.”
He gives you the once-over; he knows that after what went down in Morocco, where he watched a small, frayed bathroom rug die in his arms, that you’d be just crazy enough to do it. He signals to his men, and they step back, warily placing their guns halfway into their holsters.
“You’ve won this round,” he says. “But I’ll return. Even you can’t watch forever. One day you’ll be napping, or drunk, or out of your house for ten minutes to get some milk from the store. And you’ll leave that doormat alone and unguarded. And when you do, I’ll be there. And I can tell you now, I won’t have to steal it away; it will come with me, and willingly.”
And you know in your heart that he’s right. You may have that doormat for now; hell, you may even love it as much as once I did, but you’ll never own it. The tread-worn beauty that makes it a treasure is also its biggest curse. This doormat was born to roam free, my friend, and no matter what kind of care you take of it, there’s going to be a morning when you awake to find it gone, and with only the memories to sustain you.
Liam McEneaney: Comedian, Writer, Producer 