Column number twenty. Christ. Twenty. You know what that is? That’s twenty sleepless nights sweating in front of a typewriter, fueled only by desire and methamphetamines. Twenty nights of dangerous ideas and even more dangerous women. That’s twenty nights of rolled up sleeves, loosened tie, and endless cigarettes. Of flinching at every sound in the room, waiting for a good-looking dame to come waltzing through the door; the kind of dame who makes you forget this crazy world of pimps and muggers, an angel so beautiful that she makes all the other angels commit suicide out of jealousy. Twenty nights of flirting with Lady Truth, a broad who can lift you up by the soul or slam you down by the crotch. Twenty columns. Answered all the questions of the universe, the kind that keep you up at night like a leaky faucet or a guilty conscience. All the important questions. Except one. Who am I?
My parents met on a Tilt-a-Whirl in early September of 1984 and by the end of the ride I was conceived. Into the dangerous world I leapt on Oct. 14, eight months premature. Weighing a fraction of an ounce and measuring four inches long, I lived the first five years of my life in a shoe-box diorama dedicated to ichthyologist and marine biologist Eugenie Clark that my sister made for a fourth grade science class. This is when I developed my grave fears of sea life and cardboard, which continue to haunt me.
After growing too large for the shoe box, I came to realize that there was more to life than plastic toy sharks and Barbies with drawn on goggles. How much more, though? I made it my mission to find out.
For awhile I was on my own – doing odd jobs to support myself and my $800-a-day pug habit. Maybe it was all that time without companionship in the diorama that did it, but I got the pug bug and I got it bad. I’d buy two, three pugs a day. Different leashes for each one, different wardrobes, differing jeweled collars, different ink for each “AARON’S PUG” tattoo I’d put on their bellies. A few days of euphoria, but then I’d crash. Hard. I’d fling the pugs into the Connecticut River, usually during a crew practice, and just crawl up into a ball and weep.
So holding a job was tough. I did stints as a pool boy, chimney sweep, Olympic luger, imam, President of Argentina, taint piercer, and, during one dark night of the soul, Associate Professor of Literature at Vassar. I even spent some time in the clink after stabbing President Reagan in an attempt to impress Full House’s Candace Cameron. “That’s very impressive,” she told me, and we soon wed.
After several days, I grew weary of Candace and her propensity for sitting around all the time watching live video feeds of pandas(1) and reading old On the Offensives,(2) so I flung her into the Connecticut River and moved on with my life. I felt like I suddenly woke up from a deep sleep. I took a look around me and saw that the world was happening, and I was missing it.
The year is 1992, and America is stirring. The energy in the air is palpable. The youth is electrified by a dynamic political upstart named Ross Perot; the nation is reassured by new tough-on-crime tactics caught on camera in Los Angeles; the counterculture finds its “voice of a generation” in a young Sir Mix-A-Lot. It was a turbulent time, but it was the right time for me to jump headfirst into the bloody journalistic fray.
My first column was about the meteoric success of America’s favorite son, John F. Kennedy Jr., titled Breaking the Kennedy Curse. From there I wrote a series of pieces criticizing the fad known at the time as “the Internet.” In harsh terms I warned the nation about investing in such cyber-nonsense and pressed people to use our resources for important products, namely a Robot Ninja Police Force.
Realizing, however, that a Robot Ninja Police Force had limited (but not entirely absent) pornographic potential, I enthusiastically endorsed the World Wide Web and called for the execution of any who opposed it. It was then that the fire in my belly(3) was ignited, and, like Princess Di’s car, there was no stopping me.
So that’s it, I suppose. The rest, as they say, is history. It’s not a life I’d recommend – not unless you have a taste for blood and an irrepressible drive to dance with Death, or bowl with Jesus. Who am I? Your guess is as good as mine. Why am I? That I can answer. Because if I wasn’t, well, your mind would have to blow itself.
(Footnotes)
(1) http://www.sandiegozoo.org/zoo/ex_panda_station.html
(2) http://www.acrowdedfire.com/columns.html
(3) Later discovered to be a tumor.
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