Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

by Chuck Klosterman

  Whenever I hear intellectuals talk about sexual icons of the present day, the name mentioned most is Madonna. That seems like a good answer, and it’s the kind of answer Madonna has worked very hard to perpetuate. Earning that title was her only career goal. But Madonna’s not even close to representing contemporary sexuality in any important fashion. She tries way too hard, and it never seems honest. It’s very telling that the two best songs in Madonna’s catalog—“Like a Virgin” and “Like a Prayer”—are titled after similes. Her whole career is a collection of similes: Madonna is like a sexual idol, but that’s just the plot for her self-styled promotional blitz. When she overtly attempted to embody Marilyn Monroe in the video for “Material Girl,” Madonna got the dance steps perfect but completely missed the message: That song suggests that sex is about money, and that sex is about power, and that sex is about getting what you want. Well, fine. That’s how it is with Madonna. But with the original Monroe, sex was about sex. It was completely without guile or intellect. Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the frontman for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you’re necessary, you’re over.

  Madonna is an unsuccessful sexual icon because she desperately wants to be a sexual icon. Pamela Anderson is the perfect sexual icon because she wants to have sex. You think that makes her dumb? Well, maybe you’re right. But how smart are you while you’re having sex? What part of sex is “intellectual”? Certainly none of the good parts.

  There are a lot of interesting moments on my Pam ’n’ Tommy Fuji videotape, several of which are so weird that its authenticity can’t be doubted. Pam and Tommy listen to MC Hammer and Soul Asylum. They try to write a cookbook for dope smokers. Tommy uses the word rad in casual conversation. Pam tells Tommy, “You’re the best fucking husband on the planet,” and they get married with the aid of a spaceman. But if you had a transcript of this film, you’d find that there’s one phrase that appears more often than all others: “Where are we?”

  This question is asked over twenty times, and it’s never answered. They’re on a boat, they look at the horizon, and they say, “Where are we?” And if someone wanted to use Pam as a metaphor for the decline of American morality and the vapidity of modern relationships, they could point out that phrase as an illuminating example of a lost generation. “Where are we, indeed,” such a critic might write in the last paragraph of an essay. But that kind of snarkiness is more negative than necessary, and it misses the point. We don’t need Pam to know where she is; she helps us understand where we are.

  1. It’s possible that The Man Show might be off the air by the time this book is released, mostly because Jimmy Kimmel seems like something of a rising cultural force. Of course, it’s entirely plausible that Comedy Central would replace The Man Show with an innovative new series featuring two guys sitting in a beer garden each week and comparing their wives’ vaginas to that of a Hereford heifer.

  2. Although the fact that he never missed a cut-off man in his entire career somehow makes this seem acceptable.

  3. And—as I mentioned earlier—it’s surprisingly unsexy (it’s sort of like watching that cow get butchered at the end of Apocalypse Now).

  4. However, you gotta give Steve Nash this: On December 11, 2001, Nash scored 39 points against the Portland Trail Blazers on 12 of 16 shooting. He scored 17 points over the final 6:23 of regulation, including two free throws with3.9 seconds remaining that gave Dallas the win. And then he went back to his hotel roomAND PROBABLY HAD SEX WITH ELIZABETH HURLEY. Nice night, dude.

  5. And here’s something you only notice if you’re as obsessive as I am: Kid Rock likes to mention in interviews how he hates Radiohead; in his video for “You Never Met a Motherf**ker Quite Like Me,” he actually wipes his arse with toilet paper that has the word Radiohead embossed on every tissue. On the surface, that might seem like a statement against pretension and elitism, almost as if Rock is saying he’s the anti–Thom Yorke. However, it actually has to do with Mötley Crüe. On page 358 of the Crüe biography The Dirt, Tommy Lee mentions that Pamela threw a massive birthday party for him when he turned thirty-three, and Lee says she “cranked our favorite band, Radiohead, on the sound system.” I have no doubt that Pam has told Kid how she and Tommy used to adore OK Computer, and it drives him crazy. Kid Rock hates Radiohead for the same reason I hate Coldplay (as described on page 4).

  6. Approximate.

  “You’re missing the point,” she said. “What you’re saying makes sense in theory, but not in practice. You’re trying to compare apples and oranges.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” he asked in response. “Apples and oranges aren’t that different, really. I mean, they’re both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They’re both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine, I can’t think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple. If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and—while I was looking away—he replaced that apple with an orange, I doubt I’d even notice. So how is this a metaphor for difference? I could understand if you said, ‘That’s like comparing apples and uranium,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with baby wolverines,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with the early work of Raymond Carver,’ or ‘That’s like comparing apples with hermaphroditic ground sloths.’ Those would all be valid examples of profound disparity. But not apples and oranges. In every meaningful way, they’re virtually identical.”

  “You’re missing the point,” she said again, this time for different reasons.

  7 George Will vs. Nick Hornby 0:86

  Like many U.S. citizens, I spend much of my free time thinking about the future of sports and the future of our children. This is because I care deeply about sports.

  In the spirit of both, I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as “the sport of the future” since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come. But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this country, and that soccer will eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menstruation, animal cruelty, photocopying, and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana. After the U.S. placed eighth in the 2002 World Cup tournament, team forward Clint Mathis said, “If we can turn one more person who wasn’t a soccer fan into a soccer fan, we’ve accomplished something.” Apparently, that’s all that matters to these idiots. They won’t be satisfied until we’re all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth1 is somehow noble. However, I know this will never happen. Not really. Dumb bunnies like Clint Mathis will be wrong forever, and that might be the only thing saving us from ourselves.

  My personal war against the so-called “soccer menace” probably reached its peak in 1993, when I was nearly fired from a college newspaper for suggesting that soccer was the reason thousands of Brazilians are annually killed at Quiet Riot concerts in Rio de Janeiro, a statement that is—admittedly—only half true. A few weeks after the publication of said piece, a petition to have me removed as the newspaper’s sports editor was circulated by a ridiculously vocal campus organization called the Hispanic American Council, prompting an “academic hearing” where I was accused (with absolute seriousness) of libeling Pelé. If memory serves, I think my criticism of soccer and Quiet Riot was somehow taken as latently racist, although—admittedly—I’m not completely positive, as I was intoxicated for most of the monthlong episode. But the bottom line is that I am still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or—at the very least—convinces people to shut up about it).

  According to the Soccer Industry Council of America, soccer is the No. 1 youth participation sport in the U.S. There are more than 3.6 million players under the age of nineteen registered to play, and that number has been expanding at ove
r 8 percent a year since 1990. There’s also been a substantial increase in the number of kids who play past the age of twelve, a statistic that soccer proponents are especially thrilled about. “These are the players that will go on to be fans, referees, coaches, adult volunteers, and players in the future,” observed Virgil Lewis, chairman of the United States Youth Soccer Association.

  Certainly, I can’t argue with Virgil’s math: I have no doubt that battalions of Gatorade-stained children are running around the green wastelands of suburbia, randomly kicking a black-and-white ball in the general direction of tuna netting. However, Lewis’s larger logic is profoundly flawed. There continues to be this blindly optimistic belief that all of the brats playing soccer in 2003 are going to be crazed MSBL fans in 2023, just as it was assumed that eleven-year-old soccer players in 1983 would be watching Bob Costas provide play-by-play for indoor soccer games right now. That will never happen. We will never care about soccer in this country. And it’s not just because soccer is inherently un-American, which is what most soccer haters (Frank Deford, Jim Rome, et al.) tend to insinuate. It’s mostly because soccer is inherently geared toward Outcast Culture.

  On the surface, one might assume that would actually play to soccer’s advantage, as America has plenty of outcasts. Some American outcasts are very popular, such as OutKast.2 But Outcast Culture does not meld with Intimidation Culture, and the latter aesthetic has always been a cornerstone of team sports. An outcast can be intimidating in an individual event—Mike Tyson and John McEnroe are proof—but they rarely thrive in the social environment of a team organism (e.g., Duane Thomas, Pete Maravich, Albert Belle, et al.). Unless you’re Barry Bonds, being an outcast is antithetical to the group concept. But soccer is the one sport that’s an exception to that reality: Soccer unconsciously rewards the outcast, which is why so many adults are fooled into thinking their kids love it. The truth is that most children don’t love soccer; they simply hate the alternatives more. For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game. These are the kids who are afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they’re now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls. Basketball games actually stop to recognize their failure. And football is nothing more than an ironical death sentence; somehow, outcasts find themselves in a situation where the people normally penalized for teasing them are suddenly urged to annihilate them.

  This is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification; it’s the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1–0 or 2–1.3 A normal eleven-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions. Soccer feels “fun” because it’s not terrifying—it’s the only sport where you can’t fuck up. An outcast can succeed simply by not failing, and public failure is every outcast’s deepest fear. For society’s prepubescent pariahs, soccer represents safety.

  However, the demand for such an oasis disappears once an outcast escapes from the imposed slavery of youth athletics; by the time they reach ninth grade, it’s perfectly acceptable to just quit the team and shop at Hot Topic. Most youth soccer players end up joining the debate team before they turn fifteen. Meanwhile, the kind of person who truly loves the notion of sports (and—perhaps sadly—unconsciously needs to have sports in their life) doesn’t want to watch a game that’s designed for losers. They’re never going to care about a sport where announcers inexplicably celebrate the beauty of missed shots and the strategic glory of repetitive stalemates. We want to see domination. We want to see athletes who don’t look like us, and who we could never be. We want to see people who could destroy us, and we want to feel like that desire is normal. But those people don’t exist in soccer; their game is dominated by mono-monikered clones obsessed with falling to their knees and ripping off their clothes. I can’t watch a minute of professional soccer without feeling like I’m looking at a playground of desperate, depressed fourth-graders, all trying to act normal and failing horribly.

  In short, soccer players kind of remind me of “my guys.”

  Now, when I say “my guys,” I don’t mean kids who are actually mine, as I am not father material (or human material, or even Sleestak material). When I say “my guys,” I am referring to a collection of scrappy, rag-tag, mostly unremarkable fourth-and fifth-graders I governed when I was sixteen years old. During the summer in 1988, I worked as a totally unqualified Little League baseball coach. This is noteworthy for one reason and one reason only: I remain the only youth sports instructor in the history of my town who was ever fired, a distinction that has made me both a legend and an antihero (at least among “my guys”). And even though I happened to be coaching the game of baseball that summer, this was the experience that galvanized my hatred for the game of soccer—and particularly my hatred for the ideology that would eventually become the Youth Soccer Phenomenon.

  Between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I applied to coach Pee Wee and Midget baseball in Wyndmere, North Dakota, the tiny farming town (pop. 498) where I lived and breathed and listened to Guns N’ Roses. The competition for this position was not intense: There were twenty-three kids in my class and only fourteen in the grade ahead of me, and almost all of the other boys had to spend the summer working on their family farms. Theoretically, I should have been in the same position. However, I was too clever to farm and too lazy to work, and I simply had no interest in shit like cultivating (or in cultivating shit, for that matter). Instead, I decided to spend my summer coaching Pee Wee and Midget baseball for $250 a month. I had to deliver my job application to the Wyndmere Park Board, and—since this job was always given to local high school boys—one of the questions on the application asked who my role models were. I wrote “Bobby Knight and George Orwell,” and I wasn’t joking. But it really didn’t matter what I wrote, since I was the only applicant. “We’re excited by your enthusiasm,” said the vaguely blonde Park Board president.

  We had practice three times a week. The Pee Wee kids worked out from 9 A.M. to 10 A.M., and this was always a horrifically boring sixty minutes. These were really little kids (like, under four feet tall), and they hit off a batting tee. As long as nobody broke their clavicle or vomited, I viewed practice as a success. Only one kid had any talent (a left-handed shortstop!), but aptitude was pretty much a nonfactor: I played everybody the same amount and generally tried to act like that black dude from Reading Rainbow. I mostly just tried to convince them to stop throwing rocks at birds.

  The Midgets, however, were a different story. Though not vastly dissimilar in age (the Pee Wees were eight-and nine-year-olds and the Midgets were ten and eleven), the Midgets were “my guys,” and I intended to turn them into a war machine. At the Midget level, there was real pitching. There was base stealing. There was bunting. And—at least in my vision—there was hitting and running, double switching, outfield shading, middle-relieving, and a run-manufacturing offensive philosophy modeled after Whitey Herzog’s St. Louis Cardinals. I’m convinced we were the only Midget League team in North Dakota history to have a southpaw closer. I even implemented the concept of physical conditioning to my preseason regime, which immediately raised the eyebrows of some of the less-competitive parents. However, my explanation for making ten-year-olds run wind sprints was always well-founded. “The running is not important, in and of itself,” I told one skeptical mother. “What’s important is that ‘my guys’ realize that success doesn’t come without work.” Weeks later, I would learn that this mother respected my idealism but disliked the way I casually used the phrase “in and of itself.”

  To be honest, I was merely coaching these kids the way I had wanted to be coached when I was in fourth grade. I was a pretty fucking insane ten-year-old. I was the kind of kid who hated authority
—but sports coaches were always an inexplicable exception. For whatever the reason, a coach could tell me anything and I’d just stand there and listen; he could degrade me or question my intelligence or sit me on the bench to prove a point that had absolutely nothing to do with anything I did, and I always assumed it was completely valid. I never cared that much about winning on an emotional level, but winning always made sense to me intellectually; it seemed like the logical thing to want. Mostly, I just wanted the process of winning to be complicated. I was fascinated by anything that made sports more cerebral and less physical; as a consequence, my coaching style became loosely patterned on the life of Wile E. Coyote. We’d practice conventionally from 10:00 to 11:00, but then we’d spend forty-five minutes memorizing a battery of unnecessary third-base signals (I recall that tugging on my “belt” meant “bunt,” because both words start with the letter b). I also assaulted their fifth-grade cerebellums with dozens of strategic hypotheticals: “Let’s assume our opponent has runners on first and third with no outs, and they send the trail runner to second with the count at 0–2,” I would theorize. “What is our objective?” One frail kid with eyeglasses answered pretty much everything; most of the others just discussed their favorite flavors of Big League Chew. I constantly questioned their commitment to excellence.

  Still, four or five of “my guys” were oddly enthusiastic about my Pyramid of Success, and that was enough to kill (or at least scare) most of our early season opponents. But what I kept noticing was that the other fifteen kids on my squad didn’t care if we won or lost. They didn’t seem to care about anything, really, or at least nothing that had an application to baseball. I couldn’t tell what they found more excruciating: when they didn’t get to play (because sitting on the bench was boring), or when they had to play (because that meant another two strikeouts and an hour of praying that no fly balls would be hit in their general direction). In fact, some of “my guys” started complaining to their mothers. And near the end of June, I was told to attend the next Wyndmere Park Board meeting for a “free-form discussion about my coaching style.”