Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish

by Shana Liebman

  The rest of the trip was anticlimactic. At the gate, Natasha attracted the attention of an extremely beautiful woman who asked me for advice about how to transport her two cats when she moved to Italy in the spring. (I think I told her to commit suicide.) She watched the cat while I visited the men’s room; I figured black-market resellers of fat cats don’t ply their trade much in Newark Airport.

  On the plane, I squeezed her carrier into the space under the seat in front of me. A few hours into the flight, her eyes had completely glazed over, the sedative having finally penetrated her layers of blubber. All was forgiven. I bent over to whisper to her, “We’re almost there, sweetie” but those airplane seat belts don’t let you bend that far forward, so I ended up whispering it to the 45-year-old tax attorney sitting in front of me. Maybe it made him feel better.

  My sister met me at baggage claim and I told her the story. She laughed carelessly. An hour or so later, we were at my sister’s new apartment. Natasha did a little exploring, found the litter box, and soon she’d settled into the regular business of being an apartment cat: She was sitting commandingly on her old beloved green easy chair, yawning. My sister made the typical cat joke: “Oh, you must be tired! What a busy day you’ve had!”

  But it was true. Natasha had flown across the country, taken drugs, worn S&M gear, met all sorts of new people, including a man with a gun. Two-thirds of the excitement in this cat’s entire life happened today. She better be fucking tired. And my sister better be fucking grateful.

  WORK

  Prime-Time Playa

  By Andy Borowitz

  I FIRST MET WILL SMITH IN 1990, in the basement of Quincy Jones’ house. (For sheer name-dropping efficiency, that sentence deserves some sort of special recognition.) He wore his hair in the fade style that was popular at the time, a fluorescent red tracksuit and a gold necklace that spelled out the words “The Fresh Prince.” It was under that name that he had become a Grammy Award–winning rapper, best known for the novelty hit “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” the only rap single then or since to make reference to “Brady Bunch trousers.” In addition to rapping, in his brief recording career he had acquired two other skills crucial to recording artists: spending all of his money with lightning speed and not realizing that he had to pay taxes. Which is why he was in the basement of Quincy’s house, talking about doing a sitcom, which I was supposed to write.

  A couple of days earlier, Brandon Tartikoff, then the president of NBC Entertainment, had asked me if I had ever heard of the Fresh Prince. I told him that I had heard of Prince. My familiarity with rap music pretty much began and ended with the Beastie Boys, unless you counted Run-D.M.C.’s version of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” or Debbie Harry’s song “Rapture.” (Counting that last one would truly be an act of desperation.) After Brandon explained to me who Will was, I sensed with some relief that up until a few days before, when Quincy had touted Smith to NBC as a potential sitcom star, Brandon had never heard of him either.

  I asked Brandon if he had considered hiring a black writer instead of me. It’s not that I thought people should only write about their own ethnic groups—if I’d felt that way, I never would’ve accepted my first TV job, writing dialogue for Archie Bunker’s Place. No, I was just being a coward. I doubted that I could pull this assignment off, and I worried about the reaction that rap fans might have to the first hip-hop sitcom being created by a Jewish Harvard grad from Shaker Heights. As it happened, Brandon had already talked to the African-American writers about writing the pilot, but they were either unavailable or uninterested. And so my career in hip-hop began, more or less by default.

  It was Quincy who first made me feel as though I might actually be up to this task, or at least wouldn’t hideously humiliate myself trying. Quincy, who was in his late 50s at the time, wasn’t the likeliest candidate to “get” hip-hop either—particularly Will’s brand, which had been pitched mainly to teenyboppers. But Quincy saw a similarity between the bebop artists he came of age with and the rappers his children were listening to. Both beboppers and rappers shared a delight in a secret language that they had created, an outsider language designed to piss off an establishment that couldn’t understand it. Quincy spoke about the duality of the rappers, in whom street bravado coexisted with poetry. As Quincy went on about duality, I noticed that Will had nonchalantly seated himself at Quincy’s baby grand and begun playing the opening measures of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” This project was starting to seem kind of cool.

  I got to work. The concept the network had agreed to involved Will moving in with a bunch of wealthy relatives in Bel-Air (Quincy’s neighborhood). My near-total ignorance of hip-hop slang and culture turned out to be an asset, oddly enough, when creating the characters of Will’s ultra-preppy cousins, Carlton and Hillary, whose cluelessness helped fuel much of Will’s comedy. Having Will define then-current slang terms such as stupid and dope for his Bel-Air relatives was a convenient way to explain those terms to an equally clueless white audience—this was 1990, after all, long before the Pillsbury Doughboy started rapping in commercials. When it came time to write the ending of the pilot, I felt as though it had already been written for me. In the final scene, after Will’s Princeton-educated uncle excoriates him for being a good-for-nothing street kid, Will sits down at his uncle’s baby grand and plays the first few bars of “Für Elise.” Fade out.

  One year after The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air debuted and became a fluky hit, I won the NAACP Image Award for creating it. As I accepted the award onstage at the Wilshire Theater in Los Angeles, I had a sneaking suspicion this moment was going to be the pinnacle of my career in hip-hop. It seemed like a good time to stop.

  My Stalker

  By Mike Albo

  MY NAME IS MIKE ALBO and I’m a D-level celebrity. Well, I’m actually more like a D-minus-level celebrity. A-level celebrities, you know who they are: Madonna, Jessica Alba, George Clooney. B levels are more like Patricia Clarkson, Michael Cunningham or Judge Judy. C levels I would say are Sylvia Myles, a lab technician on CSI, and Trista, the original Bachelor’s bachelorette. Most D levels are porn stars, local newscasters, separated Siamese twins, famous plastic surgeons. So just bring that down a notch and that’s me.

  We’re the amphibians of the disgusting celebrity world that we live in. We lie there in the mud between the dry herbal land of celebrity stardom and the vast, beautiful ocean of obscurity. A through C-level celebrities and even some D-level celebrities like Kathy Griffin get a lot of cool stuff, but D-minus-level celebrities get nothing. No free gift bags, no free Reebok sneakers, no tickets to benefits, no money, no love, nothing. The only thing that you get from being a D-minus celebrity is this vague, desperate hope that someday your life is gonna change. And stalkers.

  It’s late spring in 2001, it’s the last gasp of the dot-com boom and I appear on the cover of Next magazine. For those of you who don’t know, Next is the second most important gay weekly. Which makes it like the Vanity Fair for gay guys below 14th Street in New York. I start getting these calls on my phone from a guy named Larry Acheball. That’s really his name. I was just sitting on the couch one day, deep in my pre-paradigm-shift thoughts (“Sex in the City has only two more seasons!” “Will I ever be sick of Prada?” “When will I get the fame and money I deserve as an American?”) when the phone rings. I don’t pick it up and there’s a message: “Hello, I am trying to reach the performer Mike Albo. This is Larry Acheball from my limousine in New Jersey. I am the manager of Star Search. Please tell him to call me.”

  I swear to you, there is barely a DNA molecule in me that isn’t dying to return his calls. I’m like, “Oh my God, I could be on Star Search!” But something in me, some strange instinct that I usually don’t have, tells me not to call back. But he keeps calling, keeps calling, keeps calling.

  One night I decide to go out somewhere gay (to this day I still think I am going to find my husband in a bar). I drink two Maker’s Marks, get involved in some disappointing sexual
menudo, drunkenly take the F train back to Brooklyn, trudge down the street to my building and then I hear someone call my name: “Mike Albo.”

  It is so clear that I think it’s in my head, so I ignore it. But the minute I walk inside my apartment, the phone rings. Another message: “Yeah, Mike Albo, this is Larry Acheball. I just saw you on the street. I happened to be parked in front of your house in my limousine and I wanted to talk to you about Star Search.”

  The next night I go out again somewhere gay to do something gay and drag myself home drunk again and walk up to my building and… something is hanging off of the gate to the front door. One of those huge Mylar helium balloons with a picture of Holly Hobbie–esque ragamuffin lovers kissing. And someone had written my name all over it: “MIKEEE ALBO” with hearts and underlines.

  I start putting it together—he’s not from Star Search. That’s when he starts sending letters written in that stereotypical stalker scrawl—you know, it’s sort of scribbly and turns to the left (someone should copyright that font, by the way). In the letters he admits that he isn’t from Star Search, and he says he saw my picture in Next magazine. And in the picture, he says, the lips moved and told him that I loved him.

  At first I think, “Whatever, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll just sit here in my semi-obscurity and live with it.” Of course, neither of those facts stop me from going out again, and every time I do, I come home to more and more gifts at my front gate. A white teddy bear. A glittery plastic butterfly. A stuffed tiger with big, longing eyes. A gallon milk jug cut off at the top with mealy, festering carnations in cellophane stuffed into the opening.

  The summer that follows is the worst of my life—I have no money, I’m eating canned food, I’m audited by the IRS and I have a hernia. I spend an entire day at Bellevue registering for hernia surgery and filling out forms to prove I’m “income sensitive.” That night, I’m sitting at home watching network TV (no more frittering away my measly paychecks on restaurants and 12-dollar appletinis) and I decide to cook up some pasta with peanut butter (pad thai!) when I hear a buzz at my door. I don’t answer, but it buzzes again.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who’s me?”

  “Larry for Mike Albo.”

  “He’s not here,” I said, trying to take the gay accent out of my voice.

  I peer outside. There is Larry’s “limousine” in front of my house. It’s a white Honda Civic. He had driven from Jersey in his Honda to come buzz my door. I can’t believe my stalker has more money than me! Why can’t he pick on Regis Philbin or someone with a bodyguard and celebrity health insurance and no hernia!? I wait in the dark for him to leave. When I see his taillights drive off, I creep downstairs. He had stuck a big white sticker on my door, with my name written in scratchy red Magic Marker, and there’s another gift of festering carnations and a card:

  “I have a confession to make. I made up that story about the Star Search program. Several months ago, when your picture appeared on the Next magazine cover, I said to myself, ‘This is my man.’ And I know you love me too.”

  I decide to continue to ignore it and hope he’ll forget about me. Then September 11 happens, which is, of course, horrible and awful, and I think that maybe that will change things for Larry, you know? Like he’ll have something else to worry about. Then some time in October, I get a letter from him that says that he caused the World Trade Center attacks because of his feelings for me, and if I don’t talk to him or come and see him he is gonna collapse a building on my head. So I am like, “OK, time to go to the police.”

  I’m sure you remember what New York was like in October 2001. Everyone was so psychotic and it was the height of the anthrax scare. So I’m walking through Brooklyn, holding my hernia (since my surgery wasn’t until November) and all my stalker letters. I go up to the precinct and say, “I have a stalker.” They make me open the envelopes before I go inside the building. The world is so fucked-up and freaky and I don’t know what’s right and wrong.

  But then in walks this big Sipowicz Jew cop. I tell him the story and he’s like, “Don’t worry, we’ll put the fear of God in him!” He put his beefy, calming hand on my shoulder and I just wanted to fall into his arms like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard.

  The story has a happy ending because Larry actually stopped calling. (He did send me a Christmas card last year. It has a swatch of orange fur in the center with two googly eyes glued onto it.)

  So since you guys control the entertainment industry, I have a favor to ask of you. If you could do one of two things, either just elevate me to D-plus status, or just get me a hotter stalker—just one or the other—I would appreciate it.

  The Professional

  By Jacob Austen

  LATE ONE EVENING IN EARLY 1999, I got an intriguing call from a friend who was an editor/sex adviser for Playboy. He had scheduled an interview with the rock band KISS for the next day and he was hoping a KISS-loving zine writer like myself could help out. The magazine had planned a photo shoot of the band members, posing with naked women in KISS makeup, that was going to run with just a little explanatory text. But at the last minute, the band had contacted the magazine, strongly suggesting that a full interview run alongside the bountiful spread. Though happy to oblige, Playboy was scrambling to get this together at the eleventh hour—which was where I excitedly came in.

  My friend explained that the L.A. office would fax over some general naughty questions for the editor to feed the rockers, but I was to come up with more informed topics of discussion. Although as a fan I was overjoyed, the journalist in me was worried. Considering that most of my work prior to this opportunity had appeared in underground publications, I was a little anxious about the prospect of working as a professional. But what made me downright nervous was the challenge of sitting across from one of my favorite bands and actually being professional.

  Before I tell you what happened, here’s a little history for anyone who is not a KISS veteran. During the band’s original heyday in the 1970s, the New York quartet most famous for their face paint and fire-breathing was made up of two factions: the Gentiles and the Jews. The two goyim were drummer Peter Criss, a.k.a the Cat Man (inexplicably my childhood favorite), and lead guitarist Ace Frehley, the “Space Ace.” Their Gentile-ness was more than the state of their foreskins—they had the basic rock star stuff covered, like abusing substances, crashing cars, going bankrupt. Also, Ace apparently thought Nazis were cool (he reportedly used to party in Nazi uniforms and he designed the KISS logo that is to this day banned in Germany because of the interlocking design of the “SS”). Though these two weren’t the creative force behind the band, they are credited with “keeping it real,” giving a band that was all about artifice an air of credibility.

  The Jewish faction, the two men who still perform as KISS to this day, are ex-vocalist/guitarist Paul “Starchild” Stanley (né Stanley Eisen, whose mother lives next to my aunt Eva on Long Island) and vocalist/bass player Gene “The Demon” Simmons (né Gene Klein, né Chaim Witz, a Haifa-born Israeli immigrant). Their Jewishness comes in part from being menhes (doting fathers without drug or alcohol problems), and in part from their Esau-like hairiness.

  But in all honesty, whenever anyone talks about KISS being a Jewish band they are referring to their acuity with finances. From the outset, the band has been a finely tuned money machine, shameless in its endless stream of merchandising (there’s a KISS Kondom, a KISS Koffeehouse, a KISS Kasket) and its hard-line business tactics—by the ’80s, Stanley and Simmons had taken advantage of their goyish bandmates’ woes by buying out their shares of KISS and replacing them with salaried workers.

  The face of KISS and de facto leader of the band has always been the lizard tongued Simmons. Though not a particularly religious man (he attended Yeshiva as a kid, but only because it was free child care for his single working mother), he is a fiercely proud Jew who has summarized Israel’s War of Independence as “we kicked their ass, end of
story.” Not long after arriving in America, the Hebrew-speaking outsider child used two of NYC’s great Jewish industries, comic books and songwriting, to craft an ultra-extroverted, attention-hungry persona that is far more interested in the spotlight than in using his riches to pull strings behind the scenes, Elders of Zion–style. Thus, when he saw the opportunity in the mid-’90s to re-form the original KISS lineup and once again become the top-grossing rock band on earth, he put the wheels in motion, and the Playboy interview marked the third year of the vastly successful reunion.

  I arrived at the downtown luxury hotel in the late morning, and not surprisingly the hard-partying Frehley was not rousable at that hour. So I—along with the mass of Playboy editors, photographers and audio engineers—was joined by Stanley, shirtless under leather overalls, Simmons, whose coarse blue-black ponytail looked like it was attached to his cap, and Criss, whose sleeveless shirt revealed an elbow-to-shoulder crucifix tattoo.

  The interview went well. Simmons and Stanley had done this so long that they had developed a number of Borscht Belt–esque routines and one-liners (“But that’s getting into semantics, not that I’m anti-semantic”). And I quickly earned my shekels, as far better material was yielded by my queries than by the predictable faxed questions about groupies. The musicians reminisced about how important Playboy was to them as young men, Simmons recalling how the beautiful nudes represented the true American Dream to his adolescent immigrant eyes, and Stanley remembering how when he actually began dating Playboy models he was disappointed in them as people (he later called the magazine and retracted that statement).

  Criss, relishing his rare moment in the spotlight, discussed his desire to be recognized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and nostalgically recalled his youthful antics when he and Jerry Nolan (of the New York Dolls) stalked their drum idol Gene Krupa. Unfortunately, the Cat’s occasions of oratory were limited. Displaying an almost pathological need to be the center of attention, Simmons consistently cut off his disgruntled drummer. Though the future Celebrity Apprentice contestant knew he needed to keep Criss content to keep the lucrative reunion rolling, the following incident was typical of Simmons’ antics during the interview: While Criss attempted to wax poetic, Simmons picked up a Playboy from the table and started bugging his eyes at the centerfold, grunting “Aooga, aooga!” Criss slammed his fist on the table in frustration, but then Simmons floridly declared, “I will let my bandmate address this question,” with a royal wave of the hand. As Criss began speaking again, Simmons gave us a histrionic wink behind his drummer’s back.