Control Freaked

CoNtl*ol Freaisd

Also by the author Son of a Meech (with Martin Waxman) Zen and Now (with Larry Horowitz and Eve Drobot)

CoNtrol freaked Mai*K BresliN

INSOMNIAC PRESS

Copyright © 2000 by Mark Breslin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge St., Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5. Edited by Mike O'Connor Copy edited by Lloyd Davis Cover designed by Terry Lau/Beehive Interior designed by Mike O'Connor Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Breslin, Mark Control freaked ISBN 1-895837-69-3 1. Breslin, Mark. 2. Yuk Yuk's (Toronto, Ont.). 3. Comedians - Canada - Biography. I. Title. PN2308.B737A3 2000

792.7'028'092

COO-930470-3

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and Department of Canadian Heritage through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press, 192 Spadina Avenue, Suite 403, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5T 2C2 www.insomniacpress.com

iNtlWuctlOlM This is a work of friction. Although the material is autobiographical, names, dates and places have been changed for the usual reasons. Liberties have also been taken with certain stories to emphasize the humor or to make a point. At least, this is what my lawyer has advised me to say. His name is Wayne. He worries a lot. I can't say I blame him.

MB.

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ONS

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1 just came back from a trip to find that someone had

stolen my framed picture of Kato Kaelin — that's right — the Kato Kaelin and myself, and replaced Kato's image with a color Xerox of a naked granny with enormous droopy breasts. That picture of Kato meant a lot to me — in fact, it's the only photo in my entire apartment. No pictures of family, or friends, no girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, nothing except the most famous non-celebrity of the age and yours truly smiling blankly for the camera. My favorite photo of all time! And now it's gone! Who could do such a thing to me? I've let a variety of — um — creative types stay at my place while I travel, and they've all denied stealing it, even under strict interrogation. So now I've had to replace the photo with a snapshot of myself and Ron Jeremy, and although Ron is an icon, he's just no Kato. And I have no clue who the septuagenerian peeler might be. 9

I'm usually more careful about my personal space. For the past fourteen years I have lived in a loft space on top of a retail building in the heart of Yorkville, Toronto's tony shopping area. It's a strange way to live but it suits me: as soon as I walk out my front door I am swarmed by tourists, shoppers and nightclubbers. They're my kind of people: rootless nihilists with a good credit rating. Many of my friends like to live in renovated sections of the city's older neighborhoods: tree-lined streets with small graceful porches and the sounds of young children playing with their big happy dogs. Sorry. Not for me. If it were possible, I'd like to live in a store. A big department store that never closed where I could endlessly entertain myself watching people buy things they couldn't afford. If I wanted to listen to music, I'd just head over to the stereo department and put on my favorite tunes. If I were hungry, the cafeteria would always have an omelette warming on the grill for me. And when I was ready to go to sleep, the security guards would rope off an area of the furniture department and turn off the lights. No kids. No dogs. No neighborhoods. Paradise. As it happens, my living situation is pretty close to the fantasy. I don't live in a store, but my building is a kind of mini-mall where I am the only resident. On the ground floor bejewelled tourists patronize a selection of ritzy boutiques, but one flight up is a doctor's office crammed with Central American immigrants and their families. The juxtaposition is surreal. The good doctor works hard bringing relief to these people, often staying past midnight and seeing patients without an appointment.

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This means she goes to heaven, while I, a mere mortal, have to pass by a noxious viral stew to get to my front door. Kids of every age mill about the landing, screaming either from pain or fear. This is hardly the best marketing campaign for someone as family-phobic as myself. What's the best prophylactic in the world? Live above a pediatrician. Behind the front door to my apartment, however, all is calm. You climb a steep flight of stairs and at the top, on a shelf below a big mirror, are a pair of priceless 1928 Art Deco marble bookends from Belgium. They hold only one slim volume: Final Exit, Derek Humphrey's how-to book on suicide. A single spotlight highlights the tableau, making sure you don't miss it. Only a few feet away another single spotlight picks out a gorgeous, disturbing oil painting of Sonny Rollins, the great bebop sax player. It's an amazing painting of a proud and intense black man with a saxophone walking away from a swirling angry fire. Close up, letters that spell out "the bridge" (one of his most famous albums) are glued to his left, but from a distance these letters look like buildings, so that he appears to be walking away from a city in flames. Whether you see the canvas as an artist struggling with his demons (and Rollins has been both a pimp and a drug addict), or a vision of the apocalypse, it's a suitably strong statement for an entranceway. But don't ask me about the man's music. I hate jazz. 1 My kitchen table is strewn with business stuff, news

1. But not as much as I detest hip-hop. My idea of hell is to be trapped in a room with Rosie Perez and her music collection. 11

clippings, my computer, current projects.2 You'll find anything but food items, and it is the only messy place in the apartment. I have never, ever cooked a meal in my life, so my stove sits unused, the burners removed and replaced by potted plants. I also have never used my dishwasher — every week my cleaning lady washes out the three or four mugs or tumblers from which I drink my pop or tea. A large lesbian artist's watercolor of a woman's fat ass dominates the room, further discouraging any thought of fine dining. It was a present from an exgirlfriend who is not a lesbian yet, but is at the Gee-Isn'tDrew-Barrymore-Cute stage. There are eleven clocks placed all around the apartment, each one stopped at precisely 12:30. Why? The time that JFK was shot — Dallas time, of course. On the coffee table sits a Lisa Jenks rubbed'ebony and silvercovered dish. When you pick up the top, you see the hundreds of Tylenol tablets that are piled within. Each January 1 I put 500 Tylenols in the dish. At the end of the year, I calculate the percentage I've consumed, giving me an accurate index of how much of a headache life has been that calendar year. There are flowers everywhere, mostly hot pink roses and purple irises. When I am going through a crisis, I buy only white flowers, a tacit signal to my friends who visit to be gentle with me. 2. My latest are a touring show of singing Mongoloids called "Up With People With Downs" and a musical based on Karla Homolka. "Hey," I told a group of timid backers, "it's Evita meets Sweeney Todd." The main theme song would be sung to the tune of 'My Sharona': 'Oooh, she's a slut And she likes to call me mister. She's a total fucking slut And she likes to fist her sister. She's! My! Homolka!!'" 12

A large bondage photograph of a thin, well-dressed model is on the living-room wall, in front of two blackand-white zebra-striped ultrasuede chaise lounges. The huge cobalt-blue Deco rug is a reproduction of a '30s Eileen Gray. I had admired the piece for years, but when I found out the original hung on the walls of a mental institution on the French Riviera, I bought it immediately. Two sculptures flank the room, one a wooden Buddha from the Phillippines with a huge stylized lingam growing out of its head; the other a bronze from South India — a deity with four arms dancing with serpents in a wheel of fire — my kind of chick. The bedroom is more muted but boasts The Biggest Bed in the World. This is what the salesman told me: "You just can't buy a bigger bed." The sheets are only available from select stores in suburban Nevada. "Yep, three could fit mighty easily in this bed," said the salesman, with a leer. But I didn't buy it for threesomes, I bought it for myself. I'm a terrible sleeper, I roll and stretch like an exercise video made by a failed supermodel on crack. I need space to fully experience my nightmares in all their Technicolor Dolby sensurround terror. You want home theater? Just sleep with me. I dare you. The bedroom also boasts specially constructed blackout curtains, so that I never know what time of day or night it is. This is important because not only am I a light sleeper, but because of my vampiric lifestyle — I never go to sleep until five or six in the morning, and I never get up until two the next day. The tiniest shaft of light, the smallest sound, can rouse me, and then it takes me forever to fall back asleep. So I have a white noise generator going full blast while I sleep, not to mention 13

emergency ear plugs on the nightstand in case of power failure. I'm such a light sleeper that I once had to rouse a girlfriend when on vacation: there was a crease in the sheets and my foot felt the interruption of smoothness, which kept me awake. Now my travel agent keeps a list of all hotels and the thread count of their bed linens. Off the bedroom is my ridiculously oversized master closet with its ridiculously oversized clothes collection. I have a hungry closet, and it needs to be fed a steady diet of wools, silks and cottons. My clothing is arranged by color, a thousand garments hung white all the way to black, as if my closet were organized by a renegade Afrikaner eugenicist. I love clothes. I'm not just a clothes horse; I'm a clothes stallion. Some people collect Dali, but I'd rather collect Gigli. Clothing is art, costume, tribal signifier. Clothes represent the skin of a new ego. Why change myself when I can just change my shirt? I'm not a spiritual man, but I would swear on a stack of Byblos. People wonder how I can stand to live alone, but I've lived this way all my adult life. Anyway, I'm not totally alone — I have a cat, a beautiful calico named Christie. I always name my cats after supermodels, which contributes to the TriBeCa-in-Toronto feel of my loft. Cats and supermodels have many similarities: for one, their heads are always in the bowl. It's also fun to say things like, "Look at Cindy lick her own asshole!" and "Come on, Naomi, time for your deworming." My last cat, Gia, died after way too many pills and late nights, but she packed more into her eight years on the planet than most felines do in twelve. She got cancer, but I couldn't put her down, opting to go the chemo route instead. She lost all her beautiful white fur, so I wrapped a red paisley handkerchief around her little head and 14

pretended she was Bruce Weber on a shoot in the Maldives. Sex with Gia was infrequent at best — she was usually too much into the catnip to do more than lick and purr — but Christie and I have a kind of sex life together. Here's how she likes it: I put a porno on my big-screen TV, and freeze the image at a lovely female crotch shot. Then I smear a little cat food over the image of the giant vagina in front of me and invite Christie over to take her licks. Meanwhile, I touch myself. Voila! Virtual bestiality! I'm only going a little bit farther than most of us. Pet owners are all guilty of a little Ultra-Low-Bandwith Bestiality anyway. Petting, stroking, rubbing, licking — it's a slippery slope. My friend Zack trained his white Manx to lapdance — first, he'd slip some custom-made silver-plated toe rings over her cute little paws (for a little white trash verisimilitude), then he'd put on a bit of classic ZZ Top and the wicked feline would go to work. Meanwhile, Zack would smoke a doob, throw his head back and grin. "Watch the claws, baby, watch the claws," he'd murmur. My mother was right. You'll never be lonely if you have a pet around the house.3

I once had a girlfriend who left me because I took her out for dinner and to the theater every night. She became bored with all the fun and wanted to stay home like "normal" people to cook and clean. Stay home? This sounded like hell to me. You can't premiere a new outfit at home. You can't smirk at all the people who predicted your 3. The sexuality of purring felines dates back to antiquity, when the Egyptians used them as the first vibrators. This clearly explains the riddle of the Sphinx. 15

failure at home. You can't talk behind someone's back at home. Certainly not if you live alone. No, home is where you go to satisfy three specific, critical needs. Home is where you go if you're sick, tired or you want to have sex. But I've learned I'm in the minority. Some time ago, my assistant begged to stay at my place while I was away on business. Who could blame her? My loft is only steps away from my office. Plus, my place is full of great toys anybody would want: big-screen TV, fireplace, sundeck, hot tub, sauna room. But I found out she left halfway through my absence. She wanted cutlery.

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Let me go back just a bit.

My first comedy performance: I couldn't have been more than two, and my mother was proud, as usual, to show off my limited abilities to the world. She was especially proud of her baby boy's toilet training — the way he would stand on a box at the edge of the toilet and let the stream confidently find its way to the center of the bowl. "Not one drop," she would cackle to anyone who would listen. "Not one drop on the floor!" My Aunt Ruth was over and my mother couldn't resist putting me on display. "Make number one, Marky. Show Auntie Ruthie..." I stood at the edge of the toilet and, grinning from ear to ear, turned at the very last second to aim my stream all over the wall as my mother screamed and my Auntie Ruthie and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

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Shortly afterwards, my father sat me on his knee and patiently taught me the alphabet; by the time I was three and a half, I was reading the newspaper to him. Not long after that, I went with my family to a fancy restaurant for dinner. The waiter laughed at me when I requested a menu and, condescendingly, he gave me one. But he stopped laughing when I ordered from it. "Hmmm... duck a 1'orange... that sounds good..." The waiter was dumbfounded, but my parents decided to play with him further. "Go ahead, Marky, read it all." Which, to his amazement, I did. Now the buzz had spread through the entire restaurant. The owner came out to see the Golden Child and I repeated the trick, loudly, for all the customers to hear. When I was finished, they all applauded. "May I take the young boy and show him our wonderful kitchen?" the restaurateur asked my parents. I went for the grand tour, and when I returned, all eyes were upon me. "Well," asked the proud restaurateur, "what do you think of our kitchen?" Every customer was smiling in cozy anticipation of my response. I replied loudly, in a clear voice, for all to hear: "IT'S FILTHY IN THERE!!!"

A few months later, my mother took me to Eaton's and forced me to sit on Santa's lap. I didn't want to go — it would be crowded with all the children I couldn't stand, but I miserably went along with the program because I knew my parents liked the highly-decorated, magical 20

store windows, and I needed to keep them happy if they were to continue to give me things. We waited in line for hours with a bunch of screaming brats until I finally got my audience with the fat jerk himself. Bored, angry, I sat on his knee, listened to his tired ho-ho-hos, and yelled out mid-sentence, "DON'T TOUCH ME THERE!!!"

When I was four and a half, operatives from the U.S. government tried to buy me from my parents. At nursery school my highly-evolved verbal skills and constant peeing on other children during nap time attracted a lot of attention from the teachers. They asked my parents if I could be "evaluated" by a psychological testing company, and my parents, ever curious about their superbaby, agreed. Six weeks and a million wooden blocks later, they announced their findings: my scores were off the map. Now, this testing company was a branch of an American firm located in Virginia, near ... the Pentagon. Some men in very dark suits came to visit our house that winter. They wanted to send me to a special school where I would be around other brilliantly sociopathic youngsters. "There would be no cost," said the Men In Black. My mother wouldn't hear of it. "We know there would be some expenses involved, say, $20,000?" countered the Men In Black. My father got up to show them out. "Fifty thousand, that's as high as we can go... " My father closed the door firmly behind them. And then I enrolled in kindergarten.

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I didn't enjoy kindergarten. The previous summer, I had gone through a bad love affair with an older woman — I know, how cliche — and I was still reeling from it. My parents and I were on vacation in Crystal Beach, staying in some boring motel, and as usual, there was nothing for me to do. But at night, I discovered, there was a dance hall called the Swing Inn where all the teenagers would hang out and dance. I dragged my mother to it and we stood at the perimeter of the room, the ultimate wallflowers, watching the teens jitterbug and jive. Then one night, I saw her. Seventeen, poodle skirt, bobby socks, long, thick, wavy dark hair — a teenage Babylonian priestess on the shores of Lake Erie. She was with a bunch of people, but I walked up to her with my mother and asked her to dance. Her friends laughed, of course, but she didn't. The deejay put on "Palisades Park" and we headed out to the middle of the dance floor. I was a great dancer at four, a lot better than I am now, and the crowd parted to give us room. By the time the song was over, the entire place burst into applause. Her name was Rita. Now I made my mother take me to the Swing Inn every night. Rita and I would dance to all the hits, and I found her boyfriend getting angry. One evening he took me aside. "Look, you shouldn't spend so much time with Rita. She's my girlfriend, okay?" "But I'm only four," I protested. He forbade Rita from dancing with me, so she started seeing me on the sly during the day. My mother was happy about this — it was like having a free babysitter. But our relationship began to change, to become more overtly sexual. We would sit on a secluded bench, and I would try to kiss her. 22

"Mark, no, you can't. This isn't right." "Why," I shot back, "Is it because I'm four7. Take me home. Take me home right now." But there was no denying her feelings. Rita was falling for me, and I knew it. One day, feeling emboldened by this, I put my hand up her blouse and cupped a teenage breast. "C'mon, Rita," I murmured. "I've only seen my mommy's." She tried to stop me, but I was too hot. I mashed my little lips on hers hard, breaking her resolve. Her mouth parted and my tiny pink tongue slipped between her teeth. "Let's run away, Rita. Let's go to India." I saw her every day, and every day I gave her the love letter I'd written the night before while my parents were busy watching TV. Sometimes, she'd let me kiss her for hours; sometimes, even more. Then her boyfriend found the letters, and after an argument with her I can only imagine ("You've been twotiming me with a... a... a /our-^ear-oW?"), came to our motel room and confronted my father with the evidence. The two of them scoured the beach, and found us watching the waves. My father grabbed me, and we immediately packed and checked out of the motel. It was the last summer vacation I ever took with my family, and I never saw Rita again.

Maybe it was the music. Maybe I grew up listening to the wrong music. I never had any exposure to cartoons or children's music, and I'm grateful for that. Even then I knew that kid culture was bad for you. My friend Janie was an intelligent, sophisticated lady until she had two children and became a 23

moron. One evening I went over to her house and heard Sharon, Lois & Bram playing at top volume. "Where are the kids?" I asked. u Oh, they've been in bed for hours." "Then why are you playing this stuff?" "Ssshhhh... here's the good part... 'And the fox is in the tree... and the tree is in the yard... and the yard is in the...'" In children's culture, animals act like people. In the real world, people act like animals. Luckily I escaped that anthropomorphic crap. In 1957, when I was five, my sister Zelda landed a job at the record department of Eaton's, and brought home every rock'n'roll record she could shoplift. While other children were being tortured with songs about flying elephants, fairies and friendly ghosts, I listened to Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis all day long, a little boy being raised to the soundtrack of seduction and sex. My favourite record of this period was "Bony Moronie," sung by Larry Williams, which was basically a song about the pleasures of fucking an anorexic. Williams's career was cut short by a prison sentence for pimping and drug dealing, which proved me to be an ace judge of character even at the age of five.

I never wanted a childhood, but I did have a lifelong adolescence. Each day I would rush home after kindergarten to watch Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Away from the prying eyes of my parents, who of course hated the music, I would straddle the huge tufted arm of the rose damask sofa and rub my little crotch against it as those Philadelphia girls would swing their poodle skirts to 24

reveal a flash of knee. Many years later, I had a job interview at Dick Clark's office in L.A. and it was all I could do to suppress a monumental erection during the interview. I didn't get the job. My childhood passion for Top 40 music continued. Every night I did my homework listening to the radio, and each Thursday after school I would walk the half mile to the record store to pick up that week's edition of the rock chart. Then, at home, I would skip dinner and make up my own version of the Top 40, according to how I thought they should be ranked. I am proud to say that, in the many years I did this, not once did I accept payola or take any sponsorship monies. Even then, I had my integrity. My favorite group of all were the Beach Boys.1 Even as a kid, I recognized the longing behind the harmonies, their beautiful, swooping sound meant to suggest deeply uncomfortable insecurities. I liked the way they'd release a record about how much fun they were having, and then put a melancholy ballad on the flip side to show how ephemeral it all was. I desperately envied their blithe spirit, but a close inspection of their faux-preppy image, their Polaroid smiles and their leisure-class surf culture could only mean one thing: a cry for help. They were faking it, and I knew it, and I thought that, if I listened to them enough, I could fake it, too. In the past few years Brian Wilson has been universally recognized as a musical genius, but he's rarely been heralded as a social critic. Yet I think he had the guts to write the truth, unvarnished and uncensored, about the society we live in. And that 1. This was a more radical position in 1965 than it is now. The Beach Boys were hardly considered cool, and I suffered considerable social ostracism for my enthusiasm. But when it came to pop music, 1 was a contrarian all the way. During the heated Beatles/Stones debate, I wore a homemade button that said, "I Love The Troggs." 25

truth is this: there is absolutely no better life than to be a rich, blond, California teenager. This was true in 1965, and it is still true as we inhabit the new millennium.

My favorite music personality of my preteen years was not a singer, but a producer: Phil Spector. I followed his every move in the teen magazines, and considered the moody, eccentric iconoclast my personal hero. Spector created the "Wall of Sound," which I found stirring and inspirational, but to me his real accomplishment was having beautiful black girls sing to him, a runty depressed Jewboy. Even at eleven I could imagine his feelings of triumph and revenge as the lead singer of the Ronettes, beautiful beneath her jet black bouffant, sang to him through the glass window of the studio.

For every kiss you give me, I'll give you three. This was always my favorite couplet of my favorite pop song. It sets a high standard for romance, one I've adhered to since I was very young. Now, when it comes to love, I demand at least a two-hundred-percent return on investment. And Spector? He married the singer, and then, whacked out on paranoia, drugs and disappointment, placed her under virtual house arrest until she escaped years later. As a kid, this was my hero.

Developmental psychologists have convinced us that we are who we are primarily due to parental influences, but the effects of pop culture may mean more than we like to 26

admit. Children spend more time watching TV than watching their parents, so perhaps Daddy ranks just behind Barney in relevance and intimacy. And as television becomes more interactive, the Oedipal drama will become, literally, the Oedipal drama, this time around with commercial breaks and a credit roll. There's been a lot of excited talk about the fusion of virtual reality and sex, but what happens when virtuality meets parenthood? What real flesh-and-blood mother will be able to compete with Virtual Mom, broadcasting on Channel 428 with perfect patience and evanescent thinness? Me, I was glued to the set between the ages of six and twelve, then got bored with it and never went back. I'm certain, just as I'm certain about the music I listened to, that what I watched had a powerful mythic effect on me. I'm certain of this, not because of any studies I've read, but because of the relationship I've had over the past three decades with Tuesday Weld. When I was a child my favorite TV show was an obscure gem called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It was an unusually literate, well-cast sitcom that was quite successful in its three-year run. But for me, Dobie Gillis was more than just a great show. I developed what some might call an unwholesome attachment to the show and its characters, and now, as I look back, I can see how Dobie Gillis became an eerie template for my adult life. Each show would begin with Dobie, played with finesse by Dwayne Hickman, sitting on campus in front of Rodin's The Thinker, as he made some philosophical point about happiness or love. The rest of the show would elaborate on the theme. But Dobie wasn't exactly a student at the college. He worked at his father's grocery store and audited classes when he could. People liked 27

Dobie, but in a patronizing way. He was an outsider trying to break in, usually to no avail. His best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, was a loyal but slovenly beatnik, an untouchable only Dobie would dare to like. Dobie had no money, and although "cute" he lacked the leading'inan looks of his antagonists on the show. They always showed up in tennis sweaters, looking like they didn't have a care in the world, while, in true sitcom fashion, everything for Dobie was a problem. The central emotion in Dobie's sitcom universe was a simmering dissatisfaction, and his refusal to accept his place in his socioeconomic and sexual cosmology eerily presages my own. I loved the show, but it was just another TV show until Dobie's love interest came onscreen: Thalia Menninger, a blond, rich, ur-shiksa played to perfection by Tuesday Weld. It was a small part, because she was Dobie's love interest only in his own mind. His fantasy girl, polite, friendly, but ultimately inaccessible, she became the object of melancholic longing until that longing became the object itself. She was onscreen for four minutes a week, tops, but I lived for those four minutes a week as Dobie and I fused into a simulacrum of need. I was nine years old. Later, I entered puberty and moved into the wealthiest neighborhood in Toronto — both at the same time — activating the time-release program I had digested six years earlier. One look at the beautiful head cheerleader and I knew what I had to do. I adopted the Dobie persona, surrounded myself with outsider friends, and began the long and fruitless task of bashing my way in, while Thalia Menninger and her successors loomed softly, politely, just out of reach. 28

Later, much later, I was obsessed with gaining the affections of an actress I worked with. I did everything to woo her, to win her, but all my striving resulted only in a solid friendship. I tried my best for three years — the length of the series — and then gave up, but I could never figure out why she, and specifically she, had such an intense effect on me. Then one night I watched her TV show and afterwards threw an old Dobie Gillis tape into the VCR. I sat bolt upright at the connection. She looked like Tuesday Weld, right? No, not really, just a bit around the nose. But the voice... the voices were identical, the same gorgeous ennui, the same sine-wave purr, the same singsong voice of babydoll lamentation. I was thirty-seven years old. We hear a lot about concern for children and the images they consume in our mediascape. Children are inundated with sexual and racial stereotypes, not to mention the glorification of slaughter which passes for entertainment. Now there's a "V-chip" that parents can use to restrict violent images from their children until they are mature enough to learn to hate on their own. But maybe we need an "L-chip" as well, for images of love and romance, which can be just as dangerous and confusing — unless, of course, your name is Thalia Menninger, in which case I know exactly what to do.

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1 may as well tell you now, so that there's no confusion

about it: I am admittedly and unequivocally pro-abortion. It's not that I necessarily believe it's a woman's right to choose, however; I just hate kids. Especially babies. Most people regard them as warm, innocent bundles of joy, but I see newborns as smelly ectoplasmic blobs that steal my focus. Celebrities are always yammering on about how family is more important than success, but, as usual, they're lying. Money is irreplaceable. When it's gone, it's gone. But you can always go out and make a new family. I have absolutely no interest in having a family; in fact, my idea of the perfect girl is a barren orphan. They say that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage; but I think they go together like a horse and bit. Then, once you do marry, the boredom becomes so horrible you have kids who sap every last bit of energy and cash out of you, only to tell you sixteen years later that 33

they hate your guts. Then they spend a lifetime in therapy dealing with the guilt, just like you did. And so on. When you think about it, abortion seems like a mercy killing for all those involved.

I should have been aborted. My birth was a health hazard to my mother, who was forty-four when I was conceived, and medical technology in 1952 was primitive. I always would bug my parents about whether I had been an "accident," but they would vehemently deny it. I needn't have been concerned. Control freaks don't have "accidents." They have "experiments." No, I think I was born because my mother, a career housewife, panicked at the thought of an empty nest. What would she do? What would she talk about with my father? My two older sisters (by nineteen and twentythree years!) were both engaged so my folks would need some diversions. Television had not yet been invented, but if it had, I would have been vacuumed out of my mother's womb in time for them to watch Milton Berle. My life's work was clear from the start: I am here to alleviate boredom.1 My mother hated boredom. She had been a child actress in the Yiddish theater and never really left the stage — a wonderful but hysterical drama queen who came by 1. But when I was eleven, I turned the tables on them: for a good two years, I refused to consider my parents as such, but fantasized that they were my backup band. At first, I called them, with precocious Jungian insight, "The Shadows," after Cliff Richard's combo. When my friends would come over, I would introduce them to my parents this way: "David, I'd like you to meet...The Shadows!!!" They put up with this until I got into "DiscoTex... and his Sex-O-Lettes!!!" and they made me stop, even after I promoted them to the "FABULOUS Sex-OLettes." 34

the role naturally. She stopped performing onstage at an early age, but for the rest of her life she was always "on," acting the grande dame, playing every gesture, her every word huge and rife with suffering and melodrama. In fact, she played everything so big that for years I suspected my mother was a gay man in drag. This only added to the Tennessee Williams feeling in my house: the world exploding in the '60s while my mother sat in our silent, musty living room where it was always 1928, daydreaming about when she was young and popular, at least two generations removed from my concerns. My mother's father was from New York City, where he ran a Yiddish theater. He boldly saw a need for one in Toronto, and moved there with his family. Three years later, his theater, the National, was firebombed by the Jewish mafia, and he had to work for his competitors.2 It must have been humiliating, but the important thing was that he was still "in the theater." After the '30s, when Yiddish had peaked as a language, my mother's family's fortunes went into slow decline, and my grandfather had to work as a capmaker, his family taking on a Chekhovian cast. He died early, at fifty-six. I never got to meet my showbiz zeyde. My bubbe, however, I do remember... a bit. She was a severe-looking matron ("A handsome woman!" my mother would correct) who would bring me huge bags of sweets when I was a little boy. "Vant some ken-deh?" she would ask in her Austrian accent. And I would run to her, hug her, and get my "ken-deh." When I was four, she died. My mother, speaking very slowly, deliberately, broke the news to me. 2. Where is the Bureau of Competition when you really need them? 35

"Markeleh, I have very bad news to tell you... Bubbe died... Do you know what... that means?" "No more ken-den?"

My father and my mother "met cute." He was ten years her senior, but when he bought a theater ticket from her he was so smitten he kept returning to the box office night after night until she would go out with him. My father came from a family that was very religious, quiet and respected — and wealthy, at least until the Depression. Unlike most Jews, he grew up on a farm, near Whitby, Ontario, which my grandparents bought to hide their draft-age sons. I'm proud to come from a line of smart cowards. My grandfather was a real patriarch — he married young, had a family with many children, his wife died, and twenty years later he did the same thing all over again. He didn't work much, just read the Torah and screwed his wives. I never met my paternal grandfather, but I must say I like his style. There's a gigantic picture of him, beard down to his pippik, in the Beth Tzedek Museum, dedicated to his spirituality and leadership. My father was a quiet, respectful, kind man — but, like me, stricken with a touch of wanderlust. In the '20s and '30s, he traveled along dirt roads in the cruel Canadian winter for weeks at a time to negotiate with the distributors of the work shirts ("GUARANTEED TO LAST!" screamed the label) his factory made.-5 He told me his work forced him to travel, but with two screaming 3. When I saw Kurt Cobain's death photo I was struck by the trademark collar style on his faded old flannel shirt. Was it one of my father's brand? 36

infants at home, I think he needed to go just to preserve his sanity. I also think he liked the wide-open, rural spaces of the Canadian prairie which reminded him of his boyhood on the farm. My father was fifty-five when I was born, so I only knew him as an older man, but I like to think he had a wild side. He knew too many Bronfmans during Prohibition for me to believe there were only flannel shirts in his car on those long trips out west. And I found out that, before he married my mother, he and his brother Ben kept a couple of sisters in a flat downtown. My Uncle Ben must have been a real rebel. He married a shiksa and kept it a secret for years. When the truth came out, the family excommunicated him, daubed white paint over him in all the family photos, and said the prayer for the dead. Ail except my father, who loved his brother more than any abstract religious concept. When the family tried to squeeze Ben out of his job in the family factory, my father, who was in charge, held his ground. Ben stayed, but my father had fallen from grace and was no longer the family's golden boy. When I asked him about all this stuff, my father would get flustered and change the subject. Unfortunately, the only part of himself my father let me see was the silent, saddened man behind the newspaper. I was always furious that my father had compromised his life to necessity, to diplomacy, to my mother. She was his life — my father had no friends, but was totally uxorious. He was married to his true love for fifty-eight years, until his death, and not once did I hear him raise his voice to my mother, not even on those many occasions when she threw a princess fit and deserved it. But as a young child I loved spending time with my father. He would take me to his factory, then for lunch at 37

the diner where all the garmentos ate — a white-haired, sixty-year-old gentleman and his bold, precocious five-yearold son who would dance and lip-synch to the jukebox. He retired early after a bout of stomach cancer, but started a new business at seventy, buying nursing homes in rural Ontario. It was always fun traveling with my dad to these places because the patients were often older than he was. Sometimes a new nurse, not recognizing him, would try to restrain and force him into the ward as he screamed, "No, no, no, I'm the owner, you idiot!!!"4 It was in these nursing homes that I first performed stand-up comedy. "Mark, please, go into the ward and talk to the patients," my father would beg me. "It's been a long time since they've seen a young person." But when I walked into the ward, I would be confronted with a dozen beds filled with toothless, moaning bodies, and I was terrified of speaking to any of them directly. Instead I stood in the center of the room and told them jokes I'd heard at school. I rarely got laughs, but if none of them shrieked "BEDPAN!!!" during a performance I considered it a rousing success. Once, halfway through my "routine," a ninety-year-old man stopped breathing, and all the nurses rushed into the ward. I stood there, frozen. "What should I do?" I asked. "Keep going. Distract the others," said the nurse. I completed my routine as the nurses administered CPR, pumping wildly on the man's chest. Finally, they gave up, and covered the patient in a white sheet just as I was finishing my "act." It was the first time I "killed" in front of any audience. 4. A phrase I've used at Yuk-Yuk's many, many times. 38

Finally, the nursing homes weren't worth the trouble, and my father sold them, retiring to our basement to paint drab wintry landscapes with shoe polish. "Anyone can paint using paint," he informed me. He got stomach cancer in his fifties and beat it, dying at ninety-one, healthy up to the end. We bickered during my adolescence, but grew closer as time passed. We never played ball, went to hockey games or hugged much, but I knew he loved me. After he died, I had to clean out his dresser drawers and found, in between each carefully folded and laundered shirt, one of my newspaper clippings, so that every day when he picked out a fresh shirt he would be reminded of my success.

I have two older sisters, Maxine and Zelda — twentythree and nineteen years older than me, giving me a (very rare) Triple Oedipal Complex. Nobody in the world ever, ever treated me better than Maxine. When I was a tiny child, she would spend her last dollar to take me places, although she would miscalculate my level of interest. When I was five, she blew her salary on the best seats to the circus. Of course, even then, I hated clowns and jugglers and animal acts. I spent the entire show in the washroom, fascinated by the old-style trough urinals at Maple Leaf Gardens. Even after she got married and had a child she doted on me, taking me on summer vacations to cottage country. Her husband Jerry is a wonderful, childlike man who was, appropriately, in the toy business until he retired. He sings songs to himself under his breath and builds elaborate models of pioneer dwellings out of matchsticks. They had a son when I was five, so my nephew is almost my age. The three of them can always be 39

seen at blues concerts, where the musicians often dedicate songs to my sister. Since the lyrics usually contain references to "jellyroll" and "lemon juice" this could be most disturbing. But performers love her. She's a real rarity — a great, enthusiastic audience. To a guy like me, that's important. Growing up, nobody appreciated me like my sister Maxine. Zelda's more complicated. She grew up with prebeatnik bohemian inclinations, which must have been hard in the mid '40s. Legend has it that she wore only black, wrote poetry and went to Europe just after the war to survey the damage — which are things nice Jewish girls did not do in those days. Although no glamor queen, she married a man so ridiculously handsome that even today, at seventy, he turns heads. As a child in the late '50s I used to love to visit them in their glamorous penthouse. Jazz would be playing on the hi-fi, martinis stirred, controversial books (Lolita, Last Exit to Brooklyn, all of Henry Miller) would be left out in the open, while they discussed which exotic restaurant (French? Chinese? Greek?) they would go to that night. My brother-in-law Bill had been an accountant at Paramount in L.A. and brought back some pretty sophisticated habits with him, including sports cars and nighclubbing, and had found in provincial, middle-class Jewish Toronto, a wife who could match, and even surpass, his tastes for the intelligent good life. It was a halcyon moment in time, destined to shatter. They had two boys, in quick succession, and moved to the suburbs. Bill became more conservative and my sister seemed, for the first time in her life, to be lost, rudderless. Literally, she was losing her balance. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She was dropping things, unable to walk easily, susceptible to great fatigue. Experts are 40

stymied by MS, and can't make much headway in finding a cure. They suspect it's caused by a virus which lays dormant until activated by some environmental factors. Perhaps, but knowing my sister as I do suggests psychological factors may also be involved. I'm no doctor, but I'm convinced that physical illness is often, if not always, the body's way of acting out emotional needs. After the birth of her second child, my sister went into a post-natal funk that I think was really the first indicator of the disease. You can either think that a hormonal sea-change precipitated her illness, or you can look further, deeper, darker. I suspect my sister subconsciously manifested the disease to remove herself from what she saw as the inevitable slide from chic demimondaine into suburban hausfrau. It's as if, terrified by the prospect of quotidien motherhood, PTA meetings, carpools and barbecues, even sickness seemed better. She would not co-operate, would not play the game, would extract herself from her subdivision nightmare at any price. Zelda got worse and worse and my parents grew more frantic. She didn't have the strength to look after her kids, let alone herself. So my parents did an amazing thing: they sold our family house and we all moved in together, into a place large enough for the seven of us. I was fifteen years old, my nephews eight and six. My parents were busy looking after Zelda and the kids, too busy to pay attention to my prosaic teenage concerns. I was miserable because I couldn't get a date, but Zelda couldn't get up the stairs. Her behavior became erratic and violent as she became more ill. One horrible night she used her cane to smash as many windows and chandeliers and glassware as she could — Krystallnacht in Forest Hill. She fell one day, winding 41

up in a wheelchair she would never leave. My mother, now in her third generation of parenting, had a heart attack. My father hid behind thicker and thicker newspapers. Zelda's oldest son ran away from home — to Hamilton. I gave him the money to run. I should have gone with him. But I didn't. I stayed, and tried to pretend none of this was happening. I put on a stoical face by day, but at night, I often cried myself to sleep for the women I could not rescue. It was a low point in my life, but looking back on it now I can see it as the crucible of my fierce independence. I took that independence and finally moved out, at twenty-one. I have lived alone ever since. Not long after I moved out, my mother had a second heart attack. Now she was in a wheelchair, too, and when I'd come over for birthdays and see my mother and sister wheeled to the table for cake wearing their party hats, it was just too much. "This place looks just like Ronald McDonald House!" I'd laugh before going into the bathroom to cry. Finally, it didn't work anymore. Zelda was put into a convalescent home and, after my father died, my mother was inducted into a "chronic care facility" where she developed a sitdown comedy act of some notable bitterness. "Hey, mom, that's a nice dress you're wearing!" "Thank you. I do have a nice dress... and I have a DEAD HUSBAND!"

My brother-in-law Bill still shleps Zelda out on weekends — no easy task — and although her body is not very useful to her, she's become an activist at the hospital,

42

lobbying for patients' rights. But the MS virus that ripped through my sister's body ripped through all of us, as individuals, and as a family. No one emerged unscathed, especially my nephews, who are like brothers to me now. People often ask me why I made comedy my life. I think it's because of my mother, who had a wonderful, neurotic sense of humor. When I was growing up, the sound of her laughter was everywhere. After my sister got sick, my mother never laughed again. I missed the sound, and when I would tell my jokes to the audience, I could close my eyes and make believe their roar of laughter belonged to my mother, and that my sister was well again.

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>iro4

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l-/ach day I wake up miserable that I didn't have the luck

to be born black, native, or a woman. Because then I'd have an excuse each time I was passed over for a job, rejected by a potential lover, or ignored by the critical community. No, I have to face the grimmest of facts. If people don't like me, it must be my own fault. Unless, of course, I've been acting like a Jew again. But first, let me state that I have not been inside a synagogue to pray in over thirty years. I don't keep kosher, most of my girlfriends have been Gentile, I've never been to Israel, and I rarely eat delicatessen. Yet, every neurotransmitter in my brain broadcasts allJew radio all the time, flooding my consciousness with the reassuring propaganda of cultural identity. It's ubiquitous, a constant subtext of ancestry, tradition and prerogative. But on my radio station K-JEW we don't play the usual hits of Zionism and pastrami, but a more esoteric playlist. Jews always rhapsodize Marx, Freud and Einstein, but I get just as excited by Jack Ruby, David Berkowitz or Barry Manilow. 47

In my stage act, I used to be introduced as a "mean, fucked-up little Jew," which would send shivers through the audience, confused by the intro's politics. Then I would brag about how much money I was making, welcoming the audience members not just as customers, but as cover charges. If a customer walked out on my performance, I'd run outside, screaming after them, "Go on, get lost, the Jew has your money!!!" I was trying to present a burlesque of anti-Semitism, but I must admit that I'm actually proud of the very things anti-Semites have accused us of for years. Acquisitiveness? Proud of it! Ambition? Proud of it! Eccentric? Proud of it! But here's the best part of being a Jew: you don't have to believe in Jesus! Jesus may or may not be what Christians have claimed him to be for millennia, but the fact that a tiny tribe of overachievers could thumb their hooked and prominent noses and exclaim "Naaaah... BOGUS!!!" should be motivation for contrarians of all faiths. To be a Jew means the impossibility of unanimity, the hung jury, the wild gene, the constant threat of mutation. Jews are trouble, and smaller minds don't like trouble. For years, anti-Semites have postulated the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy, but they're wrong. We're just not that organized. And even if we were, some Jew would come along and wreck it. I grew up with blatant anti-Semitism, especially in the old, working-class neighborhood of my childhood. I was beaten up regularly, locked in a school locker, burned with a cigarette at a bus stop, all to the accompaniment of racial slurs. Of course, there were other Jewish kids in the neighborhood, but none gave off my pampered aura. I was used to the goons and rednecks that permeated my district, but sometimes the prejudice came from a place I could never have foreseen. 48

When I was in Grade 9, in 1965, I joined a group at Oakwood Collegiate called SUPA (Student Union for Peace Action), which guaranteed that an RCMP file would follow me for the rest of my life. How could I know their money came from Chinese Maoists? I was thirteen years old! And although I was pretty certain that the U.S. troop buildup in Vietnam was wrong, I was very certain about the pretty blond shiksa named Marta who sat behind me in homeroom. See, I'd skipped a grade, which made me seem even tinier than I was, and I was awkward, although not shy, around girls I liked. Marta, the ice queen, with her hair in a perfect '60s flip, would not pay any attention to me, but was always flirting with the various jocks and tough guys smoking cigarettes on St. Clair Avenue after classes. 1 knew even then that I had no hope of competing for her affections on cool-guy turf. My only hope was to present an exotic alternative. But how to be exotic in 1965, standing four-foot-ten? I tried out for various clubs, but no one really wanted me. Then, one day after school, I wandered into a meeting of the UN club, which was in heated debate. A radical faction was trying to get the club to condemn U.S. policy in the Far East. I supported them, which seemed like the fun thing to do. When they marched out of the meeting, I went with them. I had a small, new group of nuts for friends. My new buddies accepted me with open arms, and though they were older and taller, no one seemed to care. I became their mascot, parroting their Marxist rhetoric in my high squeaky voice. I went to all their parties, all their protest meetings, and soon the word leaked out among my classmates that I was a member of this highly controversial group. Now I wasn't simply a weird little 49

guy, I was a dangerous weird little guy, and I was hopeful Marta would notice the difference — which, with the obliviousness of those blessed with beauty, she did not. Then, one day, I went to a protest outside the American Embassy. I was hanging out with various members of my group, proudly dressed in our school colors, when suddenly the mood turned ugly. Words turned to shouts, shouts to screams, and someone got the idea to pick up a big stone, which was hurled at a uniformed policeman. Bullseye! Suddenly there were more cops than I could count, wrestling us to the ground. Then a bigger disturbance occurred a few yards away, and the cops left me to pursue bigger game. I quietly slipped away from the fracas, went home, and nervously stared out my bedroom window for the rest of the night, waiting for an arrest that did not come. But back at school after the weekend, the principal, who must have seen our school jackets on the evening news, made a grave speech about the incident, and pointed us out — well, at least, he pointed in my general direction, which was in the vicinity of the goateed, fellow-traveling, union song—singing idealists who were my friends. Now we were notorious, and everyone whispered as we walked down the halls, which only turned me on. Buoyed by these events, I became wildly and hysterically overconfident, waving at students and teachers I hardly knew. I took my seat in homeroom and, with all my newfound swagger, turned around to face the Goddess — Marta, my angel — and, for the first time ever, I casually asked her how her weekend went. Marta looked at me with her ice-blue eyes, ran a delicate hand through her golden hair and said: "Turn around, ya dirty Jew." 50

How things have changed. Or have they? Throughout my career, critics have blasted me with words like "greedy," "manipulative," "aggressive," "paranoid," "vulgar," and "effeminate." I just returned from the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., and I can't tell you how many times these same words crop up in Nazi pamphlets about the Jews. Since the Holocaust, however, anti-Semitism has taken on a more genteel tone, with the new message: It's OK to be a Jew as long as you don't act like one. Jewishness is acceptable as long as it's kept within the gates of the Bagel-Land theme park. Blacks face this same issue. We eagerly consume black cultural products but run from the real ghetto culture that nurtured them. Jews and blacks have been traditional allies. Both have known open discrimination, both seek justice and retribution. But now the coalition is deteriorating in a surreal one-doummanship of suffering. (And this is a game I admit I play too, if a bit mischievously. When my black friends announce with pride that the ancient Egyptians were black, I ask them who built the pyramids. Does that mean that blacks were — slave owners? And that their slaves were Jewish? I keep threatening to write a musical based on the the biblical Exodus in which the black Egyptians oppress the Jews, who sing Negro spirituals to express their plight. But I'd probably get lynched.) Meanwhile, blacks tell us that there is no comparison in the suffering of our peoples. Blacks, unlike Jews, are a visible minority, which means they can be hated merely on sight. But then I start thinking about this, every time I look at about Barbra Streisand or Richard Lewis or Elliott Gould, and I am forced to conclude that Jews, too, are a visible minority, if only in profile. 51

And perhaps in psychological profile as well. Jews tend to play to the back of the house. Images and deeds are writ large,as befits a community that has wandered the globe for millennia. If you feel you're bound to move on, you need to leave a lasting impression. Some people feel Israel has changed all this, but not all Jews are equally enthusiastic Zionists. Now, I understand the need for Israel. Every retail chain needs a flagship. Though it may lose money, it's good for market share. So Israel is like the Holt's on Bloor, but with live ammo. I like Israel's feistiness, innovation, passion and paranoia,1 but I still feel that Jews have a destiny to influence other countries' agendas in a positive, revolutionary way. I know that Israel is a young country, but its cultural productivity has been negligible compared with diaspora accomplishment over the past fifty years. Do you think that Kafka could have initiated the modern age picking oranges with kibbuznik pals? No, art is history as told by its victims. My parents were vaguely anti-Zionist, which was unusual for the time. My father was uncomfortable with its socialist roots and my mother heard that the people were rude, which in my house was a political crime. We had the usual hypocritical rules of faux orthodoxy: two sets of dishes, but paper plates for lobster and bacon. My father could pray in Hebrew at a near-rabbinical level, but only went to synagogue on high holidays, once a year. Our Passover seders were lavish and full of family prayer, but always seemed to end just as hockey playoffs were starting. I went to Hebrew school for two extra hours a day, five days

1. Of course Jews are paranoid. Circumcision's real purpose is to teach the infant Jew that paranoia is justified, that even your friends and family want to cut off your dick — a lesson we Jews internalize as "to be forewarned is to be foreskinned." 52

a week, for five years, and retained virtually nothing.2 Yet we were Jews, proud Jews, and I knew this because we played the Jew Game. Here's how the Jew Game works. Whenever you are Jewish and among other Jews, it is important to always identify any Jews you might come across in the public domain. If you are watching a movie and a Jewish actor comes onscreen, whoever whispers, "He's Jewish, you know," gets the point. This is why Jews always stay to the end of a movie: the producing and writing credits yield a bonanza of "I told you so" chits. Nobel prize announcements, especially in the sciences, are also fertile Jew-finding territory. You get extra points for "outing" Jews with changed names or impossibly Wasp-y looks, but I'm unsure of how the judges might rule on half-Jews. In my house, we played a version of The Game. Each day, precisely at five, The Toronto Star would arrive and I'd immediately remove the entertainment section and devour it on the living-room floor. Meanwhile, my parents would sit on the couch with the obituary section. There my mother would read out the names of Jews Who Had Died — and in Toronto in the fifties, my parents knew most of these people. The information was invariably accompanied by a sigh, a headshake and my father asking, "Cancer?" Then my father would take the newspaper and scribble some calculations for awhile and then ANNOUNCE THE RATIO of Jewish to Gentile deaths to see if we were WINNING OR LOSING. It was

y

2

I hated Hebrew school. My teacher, the ill-named Mrs. Wise, was a battleaxe of a Holocaust survivor who paced the class wielding a sharpened ruler. When you misbehaved, she would crack the ruler hard on your arm or back, show her Auschwitz tatto and shriek, "Because of THIS!!!" 53

rumored he kept a scorecard somewhere in his night table, although I never saw it. So you might imagine that when I brought home my first girlfriend, who was Gentile, the reaction was anything but positive. It was my second year in university, and I was a late bloomer, weird and awkward, but Suzanne was kind, pretty and enthusiastic. You might think my parents would have been relieved that someone would be interested in me, but after meeting her they told me she could never set foot in the house again. I was mortified. This was a deal-breaker. I left home, vowing never to return. My friend's parents, Jewish but liberal to the core, let me stay at their place. The gambit worked — a compromise was reached, a peculiarly Jewish compromise: Suzanne could come over, but she could not eat with us. Not even off the paper plates. My parents had told me all my life that all Gentiles hated Jews, but Suzanne's mother welcomed me into her house with open arms. The only racial hatred I saw was from my own parents, and this marked the beginning of my final break with them. A few years later I moved out of the house and began a shiksathon which has continued almost uninterrupted to this day.3 The issue reared its head a decade later when my nephew became engaged to a black woman. There was no way any rational person could object: she was attractive, the essence of sobriety and good judgment, and had a more stable career than he did. But no matter. She was visibly not one of the chosen people, and various members of my family did not react kindly to the news. In fact, we held the wedding in Barbados so that family and friends 3. Unlike some Jewish males. I have nothing mean to say about Jewish women. I only feel sorry for them that their mothers raised them to believe the role of wife was better than the role of mistress. Pity. 54

could avoid the ceremony and still save face. People could say, "It's too far" or "I don't fly well" instead of "She has too much damn pigment." My mother, who boycotted the event, told me this gem: "You know, personally, I don't care. But there are people out there... they're racists!" She was too old and cranky to savor the Orwellian irony of what she said, but karma always triumphs. She never really accepted my nephew's wife, and died just weeks before she was to have seen her only great-grandchild. By this time she had become so obsessed by the miscegenation issue that she grilled me from her nursinghome bed on the melanin levels of each of my girlfriends. Once I told her I was dating a Mexican girl from L.A. who was flying in to spend New Year's with me. "Hmmmm... Mexicans... what color are they?" she asked. "Deep beige," I told her.

So maybe you can understand why I'm repulsed by the identity politics I've seen spring up all around me. I grew up with identity politics, and I've seen how destructive they can be. Pride is one thing, but it always seems to lead to intolerance, separatism and uniformity. Yet old tribal habits die hard. Twice a week I'm so rushed I have a quick lunch in the mini-mall food court. Usually there's a lone figure hanging around my favorite burger stand. He's not homeless, but a cerebral palsy sufferer, which causes him to make loud screeching noises as he contorts his face to be understood. I know I should take some time to pay him some attention, but it's usually early for me, and I want to just read the papers and slowly, quietly, enter the day. So for the past four years I've ignored him, which hasn't been easy. 55

But just the other day, I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt with Hebrew lettering on it, a souvenir of the Maccabee Games, which are the Jewish Olympics. He caught me staring at his T-shirt, and slowly and painfully shuffled over to me, and with great difficulty reached under his T-shirt and pulled out a gold mogen david on a chain. He pointed to my newspaper and I realized he wanted me to read him the news, which I now do whenever I see him. Radio station K-JEW, broadcasting at 50,000 watts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

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vyh, and have I mentioned that I'm mentally ill?

I've spent a large part of my life under the care of psychiatrists and psychologists, sometimes not even by court order. My last encounter with psychoanalysis ended when I realized I could never accept help from a man who wears Wallabees. Some would call this "resistance." They're damn right. Therapy is considered a success if your anger turns to sadness. No, thanks. I have spent months and years in therapy and I'm happy to report it's been an absolute success: I haven't changed a bit. A story is told about the radical psychotherapist R. D. Laing. He was lecturing in his native Scotland to a group of medical students when one raised his hand and asked about the progress made by a catatonic patient. "She's doing great," said Laing in his thick, gorgeous burr. 59

"But sir, catatonics aren't supposed to improve..." "I said she's doing great," insisted Laing. "But, sir, how did you treat her?" "Treat her?" snorted the eminent shrink, "I got her a job as an artist's model."

I don't believe in the power of therapy, but I certainly believe in the power of illness. Just like my blind friend who has superhuman hearing, my craziness has opened up worlds of possibility, establishing causal links out of random, analogical data. Sometimes when I walk in the park I encounter some Aqualung in a raincoat muttering loudly at the world — stuff about justice and betrayal and the CIA and Madonna and black helicopters, stuff in the water, the new Nick Nolte movie, and knowing too damn much. I always nod to these guys, because I think they're at least 70 percent right. Clinically, this is called paranoia. Actually, I have the worst kind of paranoia, which is the belief that no one at all is after you. I'm certain there exists a conspiracy to ignore me, which is why my behavior gets louder, which in turn feeds the conspiracy, and so on. I've always had a paranoid streak. In fact, the day of my bar-mitzvah, I had a strong premonition I'd be assassinated. It was only a few years after the Kennedy killing, and I could hear the voices of the radio commentators as I made my way through the ballroom to the head table: "... now; Bresliris making his way though the crowd... "... A lot of family and friends have turned out today to see him... "He's waving to his Aunt Lil... now he's turning past the sweet table to make his approach to the podium, and... wait a 60

minute... what's going on... it boles like... oh no!!! "Ohmigod, Breslin's been shot... "There was a puff of smoke from behind the chopped liver knoll... "Now his mother is climbing onto the back of his Uncle Harv... "There's pandemonium here... I repeat, Breslin's been shot... " My best day, and still I spent it in terror.

I also have heard the term "narcissistic disorder" a lot, usually from disenchanted girlfriends. Clinical narcissism means that you are convinced that the entire world revolves around your every whim. This is supposed to be a mental disorder, but I think it's evidence you have a good agent. Many of my friends, who could no longer bear the burden of the gift of depression, have turned to Pharmaceuticals for help. Now they pop Prozac or Zoloft or any of the other antidepressants that sound like Ukrainian hors d'oeuvres. They are no longer depressed, but they can no longer get it up. Amazingly, this does not depress them, which I think is evidence of real mental illness. Personally, I'd rather have a good cry and a big stiffie any day. I feel badly for those people who can't handle their own mood swings. The wild highs and lows are gone, replaced by a brisk efficiency of spirit. Now, you may be a productive member of society, a happy camper, but one who will never again know the terror of ecstasy. The pain is gone, along with a thousand forbidden dreams that are yours and yours alone. Your work improves, you're a better husband and 61

father, you have nice patio furniture. If Lenny Bruce had taken Prozac, he'd have juggled for a living.

There was a controversy a few years back at a campus pub in which a single protester tried to shut down a comedy series that operated once a week. Did he find the material sexist or racist? No. He objected to the name of the series. It was called "The Loonie Bin," a reference to the price of admission — a Canadian one-dollar coin — as well as a pun on the "zaniness" of comedians. It turned out this guy's brother was an incarcerated mentally-ill person, and he felt the name of the series insulted the mentally-ill. I thought the opposite. Comics actually revere the mentally ill, because comedians worship mental freedom unbound by logic and tradition. The thought processes used in creating a joke are remarkably similar to some kinds of madness — a process that goes A-B-C-Green instead of A-B-C-D. If Robin Williams acted in real life the way he does on a movie set he'd be a candidate for lock-up. One night, after performing a particularly manic set of stand-up at the Ottawa Yuk-Yuk's, I was approached by a well-dressed middle-aged woman. "I found what you did tonight very interesting, very challenging, and I'd like to do some work with you sometime... " She handed me her business card. "Agent or manager?" I asked. "Neither," she said. I looked at the card. She was a psychotherapist. But in my business the words "He's nuts" sell tickets and are a sign of respect. I'm fortunate tto have chosen 62

the profession I did. Like Laing's catatonic, it's a matter of making your stand in the right place.

Of course, madness is not always so romantic. Often it's just creepy and disgusting. One afternoon I was hanging out with my friend Zach. Zach had a friend, Irv, who was a doctrinaire Marxist with an unfortunate lisp. He'd go to demonstrations and shout, "WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERTH?" One afternoon, Zach insisted we drop in on Irv. "You've gotta see his place, man." Irv answered the door of his tenement apartment in the tattiest bathrobe you've ever seen. "Excuse the mess," he said. The "mess" was a two-foot-high, wall-to-wall pile of girlie mags, with a few dozen empty jars of lube strewn about like raisins in a box of Raisin Bran. I picked my way around the tiny place looking for somewhere to sit. There was a mattress on the floor, covered in a beige sheet with stains from every possible orifice. Then, next to the bed, where a nice flokati rug would normally have been, was a catbox piled high with turds. "Have a seat," said Irv. I looked around, pointlessly. "Umm, where's your cat?" "Don't have one," said Irv.

Luckily I'm crazy in a productive way, although I didn't always realize this. In high school, showing increasing signs of dementia — I mean creativity — I had a long series of meetings with the school psychologist, 63

who concluded that I needed to bond better with my father. The shrink and my dad met, and my father was advised to shoot pool with me. It worked. My dad and I indeed bonded because we were both in total agreement that THE SHRINK WAS A FUCKING IDIOT!!! (We also agreed on the uselessness of the game of pool; endless hours trapped inside the monotony of Newtonian mechanics. Now, if someone were to invent Einsteinian Billiards, where the balls moved according to the theories of curved space, and you walked out of the pool hall younger than when you came in, now that would be a game worth playing.) By university I could no longer handle my darkness, and I went into a severe tailspin. I had zero energy and hallucinated that there were insects everywhere. (Metaphorically speaking, of course, I was correct.) One day I went to the audio room of the library, put on Leonard Cohen's first album and played it a few dozen times nonstop. When everyone else was gone I locked the door, opened the windows and methodically began throwing records — hundreds of records — at the students below. When the campus police broke in, they found me soaked to the waist in my own tears. To avoid prosecution, I agreed to seek help. They found a psychiatrist they thought I would relate to — he specialized in working with Holocaust survivors (!) — and I began therapy. I went for tests. I drove them nuts. "What do you see here?" they asked me, holding up a Rohrschach. "Ink," I replied. "It's messy but symmetrical." Another test revolved around constructing stories about drawings with mysterious, open-ended interpretations — say, two men at a bar, one holding a gun. 64

"What do you see here, Mark?" "Hmmm... it's obvious. That's F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he's really mad at the way Hemingway insulted him in front of Gertrude Stein." The psychiatrist put me in group therapy. I had to resign. I knew two-thirds of the people there — my cousin, a teacher, my babysitter when I was a kid. We went back to one-on-one discussion. And something started to bother me about the shrink, and not just his thinly veiled disgust for my snot-nosed answers. I told my parents and the school officials that there was something not quite right about Mr. Therapist, and of course they accused me of being paranoid. Nevertheless, the school year ended, I kept up my protests, and I quietly resigned from therapy. Many years later, I picked up the newspaper and was shocked to see a picture of my old shrink, now eighty, under the headline, "PSYCHIATRIST ADMITS TO MOLESTING PATIENTS." It seems that part of his therapy was the release of repressed memories by introducing the doctor's locomotive into the patient's anal tunnel. A few days after his bad press, he committed suicide.

I've been so involved with psychiatry over the course of my life that when someone asks me, "So are you seeing anybody?" I just assume they mean a therapist. Meanwhile, I'll do anything to avoid going to an actual medical doctor. I just hate dealing with issues concerning my body. In fact, if not for sex and Thai food, I'd be content to be a brain in a jar, connected by cables to plasma and electricity. I'd be a prime candidate for having 65

my head cryogenically frozen, like Walt Disney or Timothy Leary — I'd barely notice the difference. But by the time you're forty everyone has either legal problems or medical problems. And my medical problems revolve around my Achilles heel — my bladder stones. Most of the time they're just a nuisance, sometimes they're painful, but eventually they cause a blockage and it's hospital time. Five words you don't want to hear from your doctor are "First, we take a wire..." Which they do, and more. I scream, blurt out where the Jews are hiding and then black out. I convalesce by urinating radioactive, Level 3 biohazard piss into old T-shirts stuffed between my legs, as I muse about the glamor of my life. "Will I pee today?" becomes existential topic number one, and I get miserable, even suicidal. Worst of all, this health crisis threatens to change the way I feel about my favorite body part, my penis. I worry that my bladder surgery has threatened my positive penis image. Instead of seeing it as a symbol of my manhood, a thing of beauty and a vehicle for cosmic connection, I now prosaically regard it as a Urine Delivery Device. Now, I really, really like my penis. Unlike the rest of my body, it's muscular, elegant and beautifully defined. If I could let it hang out of my pants in public, I'd have no problem meeting women at all — no one would notice my extra weight or my short stature or my crooked nose, all they would say is, "Wow! Do you ever have a great penis!" Then I could act really shy and hope they would love me for the real me. But because my penis is a hidden treasure, few women get to see it, and by that time they like me anyway. It's a waste of a perfectly good penis, just one of the many ways in which society discriminates against men. I guess what I'm saying is this: I'm not built in 66

proportion. You can't see my best feature, but the fact that I'm five-foot-three is all too evident. And it's rough for a man to be short. Nobody takes you seriously. If you don't constantly and visibly assert your strength, people will take advantage. It's tough to act like the leading man in your own life movie if you look like a character actor. People treat you as if you bumped off the lead to get the better part. But as a child I was beaten up a lot, stuffed in a locker, or simply shunned. I'm not about to let that happen again. Call me Napoleonic if you must (and as despots go, he was a pretty fair leader) I will not allow my anatomy to rule my destiny. As you can imagine, gym class was a horror for me. Since I was a show-off academically, gym class was the one time I was at the mercy of all my dumb, well-coordinated classmates. They made my life miserable. Whatever the game was, I was always "It." The gym itself was a torture chamber filled with medievally-inspired instruments of pain and humiliation: pommel horses, parallel bars, hanging rings, climbing racks; I was ready to confess as soon as I put on my shorts. Even the locker room was hell: jerks lying about their Saturday-night conquests when I knew they'd been playing Scrabble with their parents. Then, after class, the mandatory showers with people I'd never choose to be naked with in a million years. All in all, a lot like I would imagine prison to be. Except with even less sensitive guards. Gym teachers! What unsavory planet were these guys from? The Planet of the Apes? Gym teachers are one step up, barely, from security guards. If you're young and considering a career, let me suggest that any job which involves blowing a whistle is by definition low on status. I still have 67

nightmares of macrocephalic grunters blowing that stupid whistle and exhorting me to "hustle," which would be modified in mid-semester to "try" and finally, by term's end, to "just show up." I always had the same Gandhiesque response: I'd sit in my T-shirt and shorts in the corner of the gym, arms and legs crossed, civildisobedience style, and dare the gym staff to assault me — which, to their credit, they never did. But I couldn't be allowed to get away with it, even though I hardly inspired others to follow my lead — for everyone else, gym class was their favorite part of the day. So one year, I failed gym. As ludicrous as this sounds, I needed the credit to pass, so I had to go to summer school for gyml If you could imagine four hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks spent with the worst physical specimens in the city, you'd still be way off on the SurrealO-Meter. They had fatties playing rugger, shrimps shooting hoops and, my personal favorite, kids with handto-eye coordination problems playing the longest games of handball in the Western hemisphere. Now I refuse to exercise at all. A friend once loaned me a treadmill but I gave it back — the metaphor disturbed me. I joined a yoga class but disliked the philosophy of peace and inner contentment. "It'll make you less brittle," a pal said. "I want to be brittle," I shot back. I do walk a lot — but only because driving's too much exercise: standing in line for your license, getting insurance, parking, pumping gas, all that steering, forget it.1

1. I've owned only one car in my life: a classic '71 Rolls in two-tone cream and copper. When the electric locks broke and it cost me $8,000 to replace them, I sold it. 68

My gym experiences have left me with a lifelong intolerance for sports. When some doofus asks me "Hey, who's winning the game?" I always snarl, "I am." How can people love these silly games so much? Baseball is ridiculous; it's the Valium of sport. Hockey is worse in its pointlessness: rich guys with bad haircuts go up the ice; they go down the ice; they go back up the ice; a guy blows a whistle, and they stop; then it starts all over again, until finally they leave the ice to endorse crap and beat their wives. A girlfriend once took me to a hockey game. To her horror, I brought a book. I'm sorry, but the only reason to chase a piece of rubber around is if it slips off. Football is laughable, as anachronistic as a Fitzgerald novel, and homoerotic without the guts to admit it. If I'm after beefcake, I'll watch Jeff Stryker. Soccer is interesting only for the riots, and reminds me of the Gypsy Kings playing until your ears bleed. Jogging? Excuse me. I'm a Jew. I run when I'm chased. In fact, the only sport I like is tennis, the sport of rich people and lesbians, two groups I really admire. I don't ski. I don't skate. I don't toboggan. In winter, I'm barely ambulatory. I still curse out my ancestors for settling in a country that has the bad taste to have seasons. For another twenty-five bucks Great-Great Grandfather Shmuel could have stayed on the train until he saw palm trees, and by now I'd have a cultural excuse for my laziness and a great tan. I asked relatives why we settled in the harsh Canadian climate and they said it was because the climate was reminiscent of the old country. But why anyone would want to feel nostalgic about Lithuanian pogroms escapes my logic. I don't water ski. I don't parasail. I don't surf. Mainly because I don't swim: I have a phobia about bodies of 69

water, and me in them. I've spent countless hours trying to figure out why, but it may be simply that none of my family ever swam and that I interpreted their reticence as fear. At any rate, not swimming was one of the defining characteristics of my childhood. When I was eight, my parents sent me to day camp, a fancy place with horseback riding and rich kids, but I still didn't want to go. I would have been happy to spend the summer reading and going to movies, but Ruben and Matilda were determined I was going to be normal, learn to get along, etc. — you know the drill When I got there, I told my counselor I was afraid of the water and did not swim. He let me sit on the sidelines for a few days during "compulsory" swim, but then had second thoughts about my special status. One morning he ordered me into the pool... my worst nightmare. I protested loudly when he told me I would float, and then he threw me in. I sank like a stone. I was pulled out, spitting water, crying, furious, and marched off to the camp owner's office, where I created such a stink that they called my parents. Realizing there might be a lawsuit, the avuncular camp owners told me I no longer had to swim, but could do anything else I liked. What I really wanted was to quit, especially since the other children now resented me as a sissy — a badge I now wear proudly. But Ruben and Matilda wouldn't hear of it, so I was forced to endure my summer out of doors and out of friends. But I did have one friend at the camp, an old, burly, bitter Israeli named Avrum. He ran the print shop, a tiny, stifling sweatbox where he arranged hot lead type for menus and activity sheets. I loved it in there, an oasis of words, metal and order amid the stench of trees, lakes and 70

Boondoggle Hour. So when the camp owners suggested I write the camp newsletter, I jumped at the chance. But Avrum, ur-slacker that he was, whined that he was already overworked, so a compromise was reached. We would publish only one newsletter, on Parents' Day, the last day of the season. Now, as the camp journalist, I had a role. Every day I would wander around the camp, notebook in hand, interviewing campers and counselors about the joys of camp life. And, like Avrum, the more I got to know my fellow campers, the more I hated them. So I hatched a plot, one that Avrum was only too happy to help me with. I kept two notebooks: one with the self-congratulatory pap that the camp owners would approve; the other a list of the inevitable accidents and mini-scandals that are part of camp life. The day before Parents' Day I submitted my false copy and got a pat on the head. That night Avrum worked overtime to get me the revenge I deserved. Early the next morning I stood at the camp gates and gave out the broadsheets to each car that drove through. I believe the stories read "Seven Throw Up from Tainted Meat," "Counselor and C.I.T Caught Having Sex" and my personal favorite, "Swimming Instructor Throws Boy, 8, in Pool, Almost Drowns." By the time I saw the camp owners running down the driveway, it was too late — hundreds of newsletters had been given out to parents, who were starting to ask a lot of noisy questions. At this point my own parents arrived, blissfully unaware of the commotion their son had caused. The camp owners ran up to them, screaming, apoplectic, waving the broadsheet, threatening to sue. My parents hustled me into their car and sped back to the city. I was worried about the following summer, but I 71

needn't have been. Two weeks after the debacle Mrs. Camp Owner had a heart attack and sold the place to developers. I was free. The next few summers, my wonderful sister Maxine brought me with her to cottage country, where I happily spent my time indoors, reading teen magazines, proud and crazy and defiantly unfit.

72

XIS

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v_xn a sweltering Sunday night in August 1994, I was

onstage at the Yuk-Yuk's in Niagara Falls. Closing the show, I told the audience to tip the wait staff, drive home carefully and come back soon. The exit music began, I walked offstage, shook some hands and got into a limo waiting to take me back to Toronto. A normal evening, except... nobody knew it that night, but after 3,000 performances over a fifteen-year span, I was hanging up my microphone for good. Frankly, I was exhausted. For fifteen years in show business I had been working two distinct, but interlocking careers: show and business. Something had to give, and, surprising even myself, I chose business. This was not the obvious choice. I loved performing. I craved the attention. I loved the high of it. I loved the immediacy — you wrote a joke at three and told it at nine. The act you performed, which changed only slightly night to night, was a tight little world over which you could have absolute control. Business was something else. 75

Business took time. It involved other people. It was always in flux — maddeningly so. But jumping up and down like a madman onstage, which had been so charming at twenty-five, began to look a bit pathetic at forty. So I moved on. I never thought of myself as a "businessman." The description doesn't really fit. Businessmen are supposed to be the pillars of society. But I'm the guy at the bottom of the pillar with a hacksaw, sawing away madly, a big grin on my face. I certainly don't feel I have much in common with those guys in "business class" on airplanes, the ones with the four-piece suits: jacket, vest, pants and Robert Ludlum novel. I do wear a suit, I admit, but I think it's important to always march in the uniform of the enemy if you want to get behind their lines. Meanwhile I had founded a company that has remained first in its field, with sales of 15 million dollars annually; a company that employs over 500 people and is a major contributor to the cultural life of this country. But I pinch myself sometimes. I grew up believing that business is a soul-destroying, conformist, penny-pinching activity. I still believe this. Entrepreneurship, however, is a different story. Looking back on my youth, I realize I was always entrepreneurial. When I was four, I canvassed my neighborhood with a Velveeta box with a slit in it and a sign that said "Help the Poor." Of course, the money went directly into my pocket, at least until my parents found out. Undaunted, I crawled inside an appliance carton with an encyclopedia and invited the world to have their questions answered for a quarter by the "Electronic Brain." A few years later, I became more sophisticated and opened up a dozen lemonade stands around my 76

house. At the end of the day, I'd make my rounds and split the money with the neighbor kids I "hired." If one of them refused to give me my cut, I'd pour the remaining lemonade on his head and run like hell. My first real job was at the Canadian National Exhibition, when I was fifteen, selling papier-mache fedoras with "your name on free" to rubes from the sticks who actually believed that the hats, which would melt in the rain, were "genuine Bill Cosby hats" or whoever else was headlining that night. I can still remember the pitch: "Hey, hey, hey, get your hats here! Hats for brats! Hats for cats! Your name on free! Happy hippie hats! Who wants a happy hippie hat?" I would call it out for twelve hours a day, a prisoner inside a Dr. Seuss book. But my real business education was at Lichtman's, the magazine and newspaper store where I worked my way through school. It was owned by my colorful cousin Moe, a Damon Runyon-esque character who'd made a small fortune as a publisher of scandal sheets and other borderline ventures. Moe was uneducated, gruff and never seen without a drooly cigar in his mouth. He would pace around the store like a bantam rooster, barking out indecipherable orders to an uncomprehending staff, fussing, arranging and rearranging stock and getting in the way of all the customers. It was the store's pride to carry every conceivable obscure publication, so the store would always be packed with prominent journalists and intellectuals, whom Moe loved to torture. "You still readin' that shit?" he'd ask a buyer of Dissent before shoving a girlie magazine an inch from the customer's face. Once, during a packed lunch hour, a woman came in with a young child, who tore about the store until she ran smack into a pillar. The child wailed. 77

"You think you got problems?" Moe demanded of the toddler. "The Atlanta papers didn't come in, the British distributor's gonna cut me off, I need a bypass..." The girl's mother looked on, astonished. Moe put me in charge one summer of his fledgling distribution company. He got the rights to The Wall Street Journal, and every morning I'd deliver the papers on consignment to a list of selected stores. Then, at the end of the month, I went to collect the cash. It was the first month, so there were more returns than sales — a lot more. I walked back into the packed store at noon hour. Moe was behind the counter. "Well, college boy, how'd we do?" "Ummm... considering it was our first month, not bad, Moe." "Yeah... well... what's not bad?" "Thirty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents," I said, putting the bills and coins on the counter in front of him. "Thirty-seven fifty-two... Thirty-seven fifty-two??? YOU MEAN TO TELL ME WE ONLY SOLD THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS' WORTH IN A FUCKING MONTH???" By now every customer in the place was staring at him. "AWWWWW... FUCK IT!!!! FUCK IT!!! FUCK IT!!!" he screamed and proceeded to rain every last bill and coin upon the heads of every customer in the place. Still, the place was packed night and day. When I would tell these stories to my parents, my mother told me I could quit if I wanted to. "Are you kidding?" I responded. "I wouldn't leave for anything." I loved the guy, and I suspect the customers did, too. He broke a lot of "rules" about business, but he had the one 78

thing that can't be bought or taught: authenticity. Even when he was offensive, he was never phony. He cared passionately about life and wasn't afraid to let it show; he treated media stars with the same disdain as everyone else, and I loved him for it. When I graduated from college and got my first full-time job, I would still gravitate to the store just to get the contact high from hanging around him. When I started my business I tried to let a little bit of cousin Moe seep into the mix, and although my business is now "a Canadian institution," I still try. When I attended York University, I didn't study business, as one might assume. I took English Literature, which prepared me to work for any taxi company in the world. Luckily, upon graduation, I got a summer job at Harbourfront in Toronto in its first year of operation. I was promoted to a programmer within a few months and stayed at the place for a few years. My job was to book rock bands, jazz groups, theater companies, dancers and comedians. It was the comedians I loved the best. When I was fired from the job in 1976 ("You have no relevance here," said the new director of operations) my good friend Joel Axler suggested we continue our comedy obsession and start a comedy night somewhere. We were enamored with comics like Paul Mandell, a Bob Dylan lookalike who would read his divorce papers onstage, and Paul K. Willis, whose surreal duo, La Troupe Grotesque, was thirty years ahead of its time. At no time did we even think of making money. We just wanted to meet girls and do a little cultural terrorism. A friend's brother was running a folk club in the basement of the Church Street Community Centre. We tried putting the comics on with the foIkies, but they hated one another. The community center would let us 79

rent the room on Wednesdays, the slowest night of the week, but it rented for thirty-eight bucks a night. Where was I going to get that kind of dough? Then I figured the show might be worth a buck, and that would cover the costs. The lead performer got a quarter of the door; if we packed the place to the max, we'd have our weekly drug and dessert money.1 I figured I could subsidize the venture with my unemployment insurance of $110 a week. In those days, you could actually live on that kind of cash. So I Xeroxed some flyers for my "Yuk-Yuk Kabaret" every Wednesday night at the Church Street Community Centre. It was a staggeringly ugly room — long, narrow, dank — the perfect place to launch our punk comedy revolution. It was an immediate hit, with impoverished poets jammed next to Rosedale matrons in mink coats listening to guys like Rick Moranis, Larry Horowitz and Nip 'N' Tuck Ttubrag (a lot better than it sounds). I emceed the evening, swearing every other word and reaming out the audience for the way they looked and thought. Everything was a mess, but the laughs were huge. The stage was open to anyone. But if they didn't get any response, we took that as a license to remove them from the stage by any means necessary, the more humiliating the better. One night the audience had to endure a fourteenyear-old in a yellow leisure suit, his excruciating impressions matched only by his cloying need for approval. The crowd was bored, coughing, talking, doing their taxes — something had to be done. When the kid started doing Jimmy Stewart, I reached my breaking point. I gave Joel the signal. He grabbed the hook from stage left, looped it 1. When all my starving artist friends went to draft beer halls after the show, Joel and I would spend our last nickels to order dessert and tea at the Courtyard Cafe, a couple of broke Forest Hill swells. 80

around the kid's preening neck and, to great applause, yanked a teenage Jim Carrey off my stage.2 A few years later Jim was back at Yuk-Yuk's in Yorkville and his genius flowered. But at the time, who knew? After eighteen months of this madness I was ready to go full time. I needed money, a lot more than thirty-eight dollars, but luckily I had a friend who understood business and help me raise it. Every Sunday morning we'd take potential investors to the Underground Railroad restaurant, because they had the cheapest brunch around, and harass them until they wrote out a thousand-dollar check. Twenty-two brunches and ten pounds heavier, I had enough money to open. My friend had found a great location in the fancy Yorkville area of Toronto — three boutiques, but you just had to knock out the walls, and we fought with the city for months until they would let us do so. Our contractor was a German hippie who worked for next to nothing, if you didn't mind waiting out the weeks while he was busy evading trial for selling heroin to schoolchildren. We had no money left for decor, so we just painted the entire room Goth black. Ten months overdue, with forty cents in the bank, we opened in March 1978. Every critic in the country predicted failure. We proved them all wrong. By this time I had thought a bit about the marketplace, and I knew there was a void in the comedy world for Baby Boomers who wanted their laughs the way they wanted their music — loud, unsentimental and full of crunch. Yes, every third customer walked out in the early days, but the other two came back again and again. I was merciless to the walkouts: "FUCK OFF! GO BACK TO OSHAWA!!!" I would shout, to general 2. Jim laughs about this now — I hope. 81

hysteria. Then I would taunt them in my singsong, playground voice: "THE JEW HAS YOUR MONEY! THE JEW HAS YOUR MONEY/" I was notorious for grabbing women's purses from the front row and pulling out the contents as I did a running commentary. I would sexualize every trivial action, harangue macho Italians into "admitting" they had gay bondage fantasies. This was in 1978, before Kinison, before "Dice," before Stern. The attitude prevailed offstage as well. Hecklers were dealt with ruthlessly: waitresses would spit in their coffee. A sign above the door read "WARNING: SOME LANGUAGE MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SMALLMINDED IDIOTS FROM OHIO" — we didn't get many bus tours, anyway. Anatomically-correct gingerbread men were served until old man Lottman saw them being prepared at his bakery, and freaked. Complaint letters, and there were many, were stamped "Eat Shit and Die — The Yuk-Yuk's Management" and mailed back, postage due, to their senders. We didn't even have a liquor license — everyone came high, anyway. Free speech prevailed, and nobody took advantage of that more than me. Every night I went nuts and shrieked out my "act" as if I were the bastard son of Pearl Williams and S0ren Kierkegaard running an EST meeting for Tourette's casualties. I'd never had so much fun in my life, and I probably never will. The act spilled off the stage and into real life. My idea of a good time in those days was to go to the fanciest restaurant in town and fake a heart attack into a plateful of chocolate mousse. My concept of self-promotion was outrageous and bizarre. There was a catalogue of performers published by the actors' union. My first year, I took a photo of a black comedian I knew from New York, and reset it with my 82

own name at the bottom. Producers, thumbing through the book looking for black actors to audition, would call me up. I'd show up at the call along with a few dozen black actors. When I was called into the audition room, the producers would inevitably choke out "But... but... you're... white... " I would whirl around and shriek, "HEY! I LIKE TO THINK I LIVE IN A COUNTRY WHERE COLOR DOESN'T MATTER!!!" at them, slam the script on their desk and storm out.

As time passed, with the help of numerous partners and advisors, my crazy idea turned into a real business. The time for comedy clubs was white-hot and we were opening them at a great pace: three or four a year. By the late '80s, I looked proudly at what I had done: I had a string of clubs from Halifax to Maui, booking allCanadian comedy. Yuk-Yuk's had launched such stars as Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, Norm MacDonald, Harland Williams and countless others. I'd created hundreds of full-time jobs and had done it all without a penny of government assistance. My friends thought I deserved an Order of Canada; instead I got a witch hunt. I was awakened in Vancouver early one morning in June 1992. A reporter from CITY-TV was calling all the way from Toronto. "Mr. Breslin, can you comment on the impending antitrust suit from the Bureau of Competition?" Before 9 A.M. I can barely comment on my own name, so I wisely demurred. But the reporter was right. The inquisition had begun. No good deed shall go unpunished, they say. Now, I always thought that antitrust suits are there to protect the 83

public from the most excessive ravages of capitalism: the oil barons, Bill Gates, the cable industry, the airlines. I was trying to understand how I fit in with that lofty crowd when I lived in an apartment and didn't own a car. No matter to the government flunkies: they couldn't get a case against the real villains, the family compacts who still control the Canadian economy, so Yuk-Yuk's looked like an easy target. We were being investigated for "abuse of dominant position," which sounds like something that happens in nightclubs in the meat-packing district of Mathattan. Monopoly? I should be so lucky. We had competition in all of the major cities we operated in. But we operated as a chain, and our competitors did not, so we looked like some kind of monopoly. Meanwhile, every day I would wake up and flip on the Weather Channel, which has the monopoly on dedicated TV weather services, which is carried on cable, another monopoly granted by the feds. Then I'd pick up the phone, enriching yet another monopoly, to get some hockey tickets for a visiting friend. He'll be traveling by train — oops, another monopoly — to see the game, which is not a monopoly, but, like most sports leagues, a legal cartel. Leaving the house, I'd go pick up my favorite cologne, which is only available at one store in the city because they've purchased its exclusive rights. Arriving at my office, I would open my mail (delivered by a monopoly called a Crown corporation) and see my lawyer's bill. Sickened, I might decide to flee the country. Hmmm... I wonder which of our national airline I should choose... The hypocrisy of all of this only fueled my rage. Eighty percent of the comedians supported our business, and wrote letters on our behalf, but it was an awful time to go 84

to work and be funny when you've got a clandestine civil war going on inside your company. I'm paranoid at the best of times, let alone when my phone is tapped by the feds.3 And the press were no help. They love you when you're the underdog but whip you once you make it. Especially in Canada, where tall poppies need to be cut down for that all-important "level playing field." Many people seemed to forget who cleared the trees for that field, who laid the sod, who spent long, hard hours painting the lines and erecting the goalposts. Level playing field, my ass! I didn't see much concern from my critics in the media about the concentration of power in television, in radio, or in the newspapers from which they so hypocritically drew their paychecks. Critics, who laughably proclaim their "objectivity," are fundamentally in the persecution business, and usually decide whom to persecute based on their own personal whims, biases and fears. I say we take a page from the Argentinian experience: put 'em all in Varsity Arena and bring out the electrodes. But slowly the tide began to turn. We wouldn't back down. We'd always cut tough deals, but we knew we didn't do anything wrong. And on principle, we were nauseated that the government would interfere in the inner workings of a colony of artists. That's the slippery slope to more censorship. The noted civil liberties lawyer Clayton Ruby agreed and took the case. After three agonizing years he mopped it up in a matter of weeks. We signed a piece of paper saying we wouldn't do things we hadn't done in the first place, both sides claimed victory and life went on. But it's a bitter irony when a government accuses someone of economic bullying and 3. To drive the wiretappers nuts, I would call my friend the hypochondriac and ask him, "How are you?" He would go on for hours. 85

then draws out an investigation with money it prints itself, while the so-called "bully" is slowly bankrupted into submission. Now who exactly is the bully? Unfortunately, the publicity from the investigation left a lot of people with the impression that my success was undeserved. I admit I brought some of this confusion on myself — I was an arrogant target who wasn't afraid to make enemies. Call me a control freak if you like; anyone in business knows that the real control freaks — the government, the press, those who traffic in the ingrained prejudices of outmoded traditions — are obscenely powerful; the only solution is to beat them at their own game. I built my company in a go-go era, and in those days if you weren't busy building an empire, you were busy losing one. Anyway, I have a hard and fast rule: you can't blame anyone for anything they did in the '80s or wore in the '70s. Now things in my business have settled down. I've triumphed in that peculiarly Canadian way — by outlasting my enemies. This is thebackhanded compliment I hear constantly: "He's a survivor" Longevity. Stability. This is a country that admires a pension. And so my style has evolved: I'm now a diplomat, a fixer, a soother. My partners do the screaming. I guess this is what success is all about. Or is it? As I think about it, success is a more complicated thing, not entirely measured by good press, profits,4 or awards. When you're in the business of 4. I'm hardly anti-profits; without money, you can't really play. People say the best things in life are free, but I find the best things in life usually start at four figures, as I'm sure Charlie Sheen would agree. Money lets you bring a special level of fashion and comfort to your life. When I'm particularly flush, I hire a calligrapher to write out my cheques for that extra commitment to style, and, when I go to a concert I buy four tickets: two for me and my date, and the two seats directly behind them, to accommodate the masseurs I've hired to rub our tired necks. 86-

marketing creative disrespect, public opinion may not be an accurate measure of accomplishment anyway. Since the '80s, though, I've noticed that people have become obsessed with success. The product has become irrelevant. And this is driving down the quality of our lives, as well as the things in it that we supposedly enjoy. I remember decades ago when a chocolate bar was a nickel and tasted great. Now it's a dollar and it tastes like soap. So I, a chocolate fanatic, have to buy a three-dollar chocolate bar from Belgium to satisfy my desire. Then, as I walk down the street, eating my overpriced treat, a young boy asks me if he can have a bite. When he pops it into his mouth, his face registers his disappointment. "What's the matter?" I ask. "It doesn't taste like 'real' chocolate," he tells me, the kind he buys at the corner store. The fake replaces the real, and the world becomes crap. Meanwhile, you're selling a lot of crappy chocolate, and the world congratulates you for your "success." But what about failure? Motivational speakers exhort the business community to "make friends with failure," but I think that's just sophistry. They're really talking about fear of failure, which is a different thing entirely. They think failure's useful because you can learn from it and do something successfully the next time around. But I've had as much failure as success in my life, 5 and I've learned this: to survive, to thrive in the world, you have to learn to appreciatefailure, to savor failure, to get to know failure's exotic taste for its own sake. Failure is the anchovy paste of life's experiences: bitter, tart, unique. It isn't easy to get used to, but I didn't like Schubert at first, 5. Here's a short list: Sing Sing Karaoke Bar; the second season of the Ralph Benmergui show; my new wave band, theBi-Polar Bears; YukYuk's in Montreal, Maui, Bermuda; Shelley, Sharon and Carol-Ann. 87

or Morrissey either. Failure is the romance of the doomed love affair, the freedom of the missed connection, the thrill of the drunken bender: I've fallen, I can't get up, and I rather like the view. I do a fair amount of speaking to business groups, but this is not a message they want to hear. Rueful lamentation does not play well to middle management. But the usual message of motivational speakers — that "You! Can! Do! Anything!" — is wrong. My message is "Oh! No! You! Can't!" — you have to find the one great thing that you can do. Look at me: Yuk-Yuk's is an idea so good that not even I could wreck it. Entrepreneurship involves nonconformity, although sometimes you wouldn't know it. When I speak at these business conferences I occasionally worry. I look around at the room and gaze into the eyes of all the young, hopeful entrepreneurs'to-be. They seem polite and alltoo-eager-to-please, and I wonder if these are the qualities most needed for success. I wish I could see some signs of madness, of anger, of an overwhelming sex drive, something to give them the rocket fuel necessary to make their dreams come true. "I know you want a list of rules," I tell them, "but there are none. No one can help you, least of all me. "In fact," I continue, "I doubt that I would have attended such a conference when I was starting out. I would have been in my basement, experimenting with new ideas and building up a head of steam-driven anger to take on the world." Working up a steam of my own, I challenge them directly, saying that anyone in the room who really wanted to succeed might as well go home right now and start working on things that very minute, at which point four people from different parts of the room get right out 88

of their chairs and walk towards the exits — in agreement, in disgust, or to go to the bathroom, I'm not sure which.

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Lately I've been traveling around the country talking to young people like yourselves about drugs. I tell them stories about drugs, stories in graphic detail, tragic stories of what happens when people do not use drugs. My good friend, the late Sam Kinison, is a classic story of the tragedy of drug abstention. A longtime drug user, and proud of it, Sam was in one of his bouts of drying out when he got in his car and drove from L.A. to Las Vegas for a gig. Unfortunately, Sam never made it. A car hopped the median on the highway, plowed into his 'Vette, and killed Sam almost instantly. But if Sam had stuck to his habits, he never would have made it into his car that night. He would have been partying his brains out, and would have missed his rendezvous with fate. He'd be with us today, stoned and having fun. That's why, when I speak to young people like yourselves, I use this story to illustrate the dangers of recreational abstinence. So I say to you, "Do the drugs, kids. Do the drugs." 93

It would be hypocritical to do otherwise. The booze ads are everywhere you look, but I never drink. Maybe half a lite beer on the hottest day of the year at a swim-up bar. Make that half an American beer, the alcohol content just barely surpassing the swill in my hot tub. Nicotine, via cigarettes, is even more pointless. It kills you. There's nothing wrong with that — culling the population is critical to preserving our pension plans. But it kills you without any compensatory insights, which makes it a loser's choice. So if booze and cigarettes kill you, why are they semisanctioned? Simple. They kill you slowly, over many years, keeping you in the marketplace as a consumer of the product, as well as many others. As you die you pay taxes, build roads, push paper and do all the other chores necessary to build the GNP. This is why heroin and other hard drugs scare the government: one miscalculation and you're not consuming anything anymore, except maybe perennials at the gravesite. Many people feel that soft drugs such as pot and hashish should be legalized. But I disagree. It would ruin the high. Breaking silly drug laws acts as a gateway for young people like yourselves to break other, more significant laws, contributing to a healthy questioning of authority and a gentle anarchy. So, do the drugs.

Personally, I've sampled most of the legal and illegal Pharmaceuticals in the Western world — for scientific purposes, of course. I was a late bloomer for a '60s kid. I didn't smoke grass until my mid-twenties, but then I made up for lost time. I remember vividly losing my pot virginity. I was at a friend's loft, a joint was being passed around, and I finally inhaled, being a militant non94

smoker. I watched as my three friends on the couch became a talk show. I tried frantically to change the channel. The room began to spin. I lay down and a buddy brought me a wet kitchen sponge for my forehead. I thought the sponge was a piece of bread and tried to eat it. My friends were in hysterics by now. Stupidly, I got in my car and drove home to my parents'. I drove north on Spadina until I hit the Spadina Circle and, driving four miles per hour, went around at least six times before I got up the courage to get back onto the straightaway. Miraculously, I got home in one piece. There was a Sara Lee cherry cheesecake defrosting in the fridge. I ate the whole thing. The next morning, my mother asked me about the cheesecake. I told her I had some friends over and we'd polished it off. "With one fork?" asked my mother.

Psychedelics are fun and good value for the money.1 In Victoria, British Columbia, Zack and I ate psyllocybin mushrooms before attending high formal tea at the Empress Hotel. We arrived, just as we were peaking, to see four hundred dowagers eating scones and jam. But as we watched the old ladies, resplendent in white pancake makeup and crimson rouge, eating the scones which they covered in white clotted cream and raspberry preserves, we could not tell whether the ladies were eating the scones, or the scones were eating the ladies. Such was our delirium. We ran from the nightmare and settled for doughnuts under a big tree. 1. The three best values on a cost/pleasure ratio are Vaseline, LSD and newspapers. 95

I'm pretty twitchy to begin with, so for me, speed would be redundant. I've never understood the thrill of cocaine, but I do like looking in the mirror. Heroin made me throw up, I'm glad to say, or I might be living in a cardboard box. Even ecstasy hardly lived up to its name. I spent a long evening grinding my teeth listening to Rickie Lee Jones sounding like nails scraped on a blackboard while I plotted to kill my best friend. Hardly a love drug. But no reason to throw anyone in jail — right, my young friends? And don't let them tell you about drugs and the cost to society. Society is the real drug. Civilization is far more numbing than any number of pills or joints. Sometimes when I walk around the city, looking at the gray landscape, listening to the cacophony of bullshit, I begin to think that what we call drugs might actually be the antidote. Of course the ghettos are rife with drugs: who'd want to deal with that environment straight? I assure you, if I grew up in the ghetto, I'd be smoking crack right now, and if you had any sensitivity, so would you. Vast amounts of research money are spent trying to determine why people do drugs, so let me save us all some tax dollars right now. People do drugs because drugs make you feel good. Some confused people become frightened of feeling good all the time, so they seek refuge in a twelve-step program. But then they only get hooked on the meetings, the coffee and the "higher power." I'd like to design an eleven-step progam someday. In my program, you'd go through all the moral and spiritual changes, but you would be free to do the drugs.

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We talk a lot about the evils of addiction, but personally I don't trust anyone without a vice. Addictions can be bad when life-threatening, but in smaller doses dependency can teach humility. Addictions can give meaning and structure to our lives. And, because they warp our personalities and destroy our psychic symmetry, they can make us more unique, more dramatic, more exciting. Many of my girlfriends have been moderate alcoholics. Without a booze problem they were simply waitresses or stock traders, but a bottle a day made their lives an epic of cosmic transcendence. Me? I'm a romantic. I prefer my friends to be noble, tragic and with one toe in the grave. So do the drugs, kids, do the drugs. And thank you for your attention.

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NS/8S

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A few years ago (okay, more than a few) Flare magazine

put me on their list of Bachelors of the Year! "Great," I thought. "All this time every woman I've known has attacked me for my refusal to commit, and now they've given me an award for it!" I felt vindicated. Finally, my singlehood was being recognized. Even when in love, I never think of myself as part of a couple. A couple of what? A couple of miserable, compromised individualists, no doubt. Even on stage, as a stand-up comic, I worked alone. My refusal to buy into the myth of Romantic Completion has led to many unhappy moments among those I have cared about, especially me. I believe in Eros, I practice Compassion, but when a friend tells me he's in love I can only speak the truth. "It's a virus," I say. "Stay out of bed and eventually it will pass." Some women will interrupt and claim I have a fear of commitment. Not so. I'm actually afraid of breaking my 101

existing commitments to adventure and debauchery, commitments I take very seriously. Some men will interrupt and extol the virtues of a "life partner," which sounds to me like a nightmare visit from the mafia. Anyway, a "partner" is the last thing I want. I was thinking more along the lines of franchisees, silent investors and area reps. There are no appropriate labels for what I'm looking for in a relationship, mainly because I'm never looking for a relationship. Wife, lover, co-vivant, significant other, better half, other half, The Alimony Artist Formerly Known as Mrs. Breslin, and so on; none of this appeals to me. The only word that hints at some romance is "coconspirator," which at least suggests the intrigue of a lastreel shootout or a grand jury hearing. I never liked the word "girlfriend," it made me feel seventeen; then I realized that emotionally I am seventeen, so it's all right. And often, so is she, which makes it doubly all right. A steady girlfriend is as close as I like to get with anybody. I don't like to talk to anyone every day; all that quotidian yammer ruins the magic. Meanwhile, every single pop song and Hollywood trifle elevates simple primate pair-bonding into a religious experience — "One! Person! For the Rest! Of! Your Life!" and I start rooting for the pagans. Yes, you can plumb the depths of intimacy with your designated soulmate, and the effects will be stirring, but you can also hydroplane across an ocean of conquests and understand the merit of quantity. "You're going to die alone!" I often hear, usually just before the slamming of a door. Sorry. We all die alone. Unless you have the misfortune to fly on EgyptAir, death is not a team sport. Although I've always chosen my girlfriends well — no 102

bitches, no golddiggers, no lawyers — it takes a real effort not to split the first time they mix blues and browns. Because no matter how pretty, how kind, how gentle, how smart, how sexy my "girlfriend" might be, I can't help but think, "Hey, who is she to stand in the way of my unhappiness?" It's always such a precarious balance: giving my best to a special someone without compromising my carefully cultivated negativity. Little wonder it often feels more honest to hover at the apex of my own seraglio, with honeys sequestered all across the country like an alcoholic with his stash of bottles hidden from here to Vancouver. Forever on the move, Boxcar Breslin singin' the hits. So marriage is just not an option. "You get married, your life becomes an orgy of chores," a recently separated male friend told me. He's right. Marriage is a job, and I already have a job. With divorce rates now hovering at over 50 percent,1 you'd think most people would think about alternatives. But in just the last month I was an usher at five weddings. What can I say? Always a pallbearer, never a corpse. I'm not saying I would never get married. I would just want to wait until everything was just right; say, until the onset of Alzheimer's. Actually, an Alzheimer marriage could be quite practical. After exchanging confused Do I?'s, the couple could look forward to being with a new mate each day. Or, I might be inclined to marry one of those gorgeous Brazilian she-males, but only after joining a ritzy, elitist country club and a venerable old synagogue. Then, after a 1. Divorce is still far too stigmatized. I can't understand how two people can be together for years, move on, and still have their relationship deemed a flop. I use the Broadway Standard: if your involvement lasts as long as the average Broadway musical, it was a hit. 103

big public ceremony in which I unveil my beautiful Brazilian she-male bride to the world, I'd proudly bring my she-male wife to my country club and synagogue, where the membership would wave politely at us with gloved hands and the certain knowledge that their tender world is gone, gone, gone.

Of course, if you get married, you're expected to stay faithful. Now, I think monogamy is a lot like world peace: always worth working towards, but unlikely to be achieved within our lifetime. The one good thing I will say about monogamy is that it's efficient: you don't have to lie, sneak about, have more than one phone number, or hide your restaurant chits — all of which use up precious time, time that could be better spent playing power games and scoring weed. But effiency isn't everything — I'm a guy who needs constant stimulation in every facet of his life. It's all my parents' fault, of course. When I was an infant my parents hung not one mobile over my crib to look at, but six. Spaceships, animals, cartoon characters — I never developed a steady relationship with one mobile, I divided my hopped-up attention on all of them. So when it comes to relationships, I'm a bit of a Maoist: I believe in permanent revolution. And the utter Zero Tolerance inflexibility of monogamy makes me hate it on principle.2 Never. Ever. Cheat. Ever... I hate absolutes. If a brain surgeon can be happy with a 92 percent success rate, why can't a mate? Even murderers can claim extenuating circumstances like war and self-defense. Lately, I've been pleading millennial 2. Not all men cheat, says a female friend, rather desperately. That's true, I tell her. Only the interesting ones. 104

tension, but this excuse is fast becoming dated. But at least if there were an occasional loophole, men would have some hope. That's why, if monogamy is to survive, it has to be reformed. I could live with a system that made it tough, but not impossible, to stray. For instance, to ensure the survival of a good marriage, you see other women, but only those who have the same name as your wife. This means that that someday the door will be open to someone extra, although the wait could be a long one for another Henrietta or Hermione.-5 Or, the government could hold a lottery when you're twenty-one and assign you just one name that you would be allowed to have sex with, with NO RELATIONSHIP PENALTIES WHATSOEVER!!! This would create a kind of legal sexual currency that people could use, barter, or sell on the open market. Let's say a welfare mother drew the name "John" in Conjugal Lotto — she could sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars to a rich, horny housewife with the misfortune to have pulled the name "Lance." People would have more sex, less guilt, and more wealth would be redistributed, always a good thing. Another plan to reform monogamy is to negotiate relationships on the basis of geographical exclusivity. You might have North American rights to your husband, but not the conjugal license in Europe or Australia. And Cuba, Bangkok and Recife would most likely evolve as sexual free ports that would be excluded from any standard marriage contract. I'm no radical. I'm not looking to get rid of monogamy, just reform it. If the marriage vows were to 3. I tried this, and one glorious year I celebrated a Lisa bonanza during which time I simultaneously dated a royal flush of girls with that ubiquitous nomenclature. 105

read "to honor, to cherish and to only fuck strippers who'll do it for free," maybe I'd let myself get dragged to the altar. In fact, the only vow I could comfortably make is the vow to be more discreet than Clinton. That's about it. Saint Bill, of course, has made it cool to be an adulterer, which will be the most important legacy of his presidency. See, he got away with it. All over the world, you can hear husbands in hotel rooms rationalizing, "Well, if it's good enough for the President of the United States... " Clinton, meanwhile, is a hero to guys like myself: slippery, eely cads with a hard'wired rationale. Some folks think he's unfit to govern, but I disagree: anyone who can get his wife to be cuckolded in front of a billion people is exactly the kind of guy to negotiate trade deals with the Chinese. Some think he's a sex addict. Why? Because he's had sex with ten or twelve women a year? I don't call twelve women a year a sex addiction — I call it a good start. But if you read the Starr Report, it becomes clear he should be praised for his sensitive, caring seductions. In fact, I followed Clinton's techniques on my own intern at the CBC, and they worked beautifully.4 Meanwhile, what about Monica, the Jewish Princess who didn't swallow? Although she's done more for beret sales than any other slut since Patty Hearst, what's with the cum on the dress? Why not take it to the drycleaner? She kept it on purpose. As a souvenir! All this time she's probably been burying her face in the stained frock to relive the experience, the whiff of presidential seed transporting her to the memory of her pleasure. Now the court has the dress and poor Monica can't get off. Will she ever lead a normal life? How can she go out 4. I had to make a few changes, as the CBC is a non-smoking environment. 106

with her parents to a wedding or a bar-mitzvah? " ...and this is my daughter, Monica, the one who had to go and gag on the president's put?... oh... I see you've already met... " How will Monica have a social life after all of this? Dating won't be fun, and sex? Near impossible. I'd sure hate to be next guy in her life: "Well, was I good?... As good as... the President7" The President, of course, wasn't being impeached for fucking, but for fucking and lying about it, which is precisely what a gentleman does if he cheats on his wife. Even under oath, lying is the way to go. I would lie about sex to a jury. What gentleman wouldn't? And what civilized person wouldn't look the other way? Clinton is again a trail-blazer here. He's not only reforming monogamy, but honesty, too. Now men everywhere have a built-in code in which they neither have to lie nor tell the truth. When a man tells his wife, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss " it clearly means, "Yep, I got a hummer." And women everywhere can choose to proceed or not proceed down the one-way path that any further discussion would engender. Honesty, in government or in personal relationships, is a pointless goal. I think you can measure the sophistication of a society by its ability to accommodate, not eliminate, vice. No, marriage clearly isn't for me. I just don't want to know anybody that well. I have only a finite capacity for intimacy and I like to spread it around. But that's not the only reason I cannot surrender to the Cake of No Return. Between the middle two fingers of my left hand there is a thick membrane of skin — a web — that extends to the first knuckle. My "website" is a dominant trait among 107

males on my father's side — he had it, my uncles had it, and it's kind of cool in an eerie sort of way. When you look at it next to a strong light you can see through it, all veins and sinew, in an aqueous orange glow. Spooky and unique. But it's no accident the web is on my weddingband finger; it's a sign that I am not intended to enter into any union lightly. To wear a simple wedding ring would require surgery, discomfort, even some hospitalization. This is why I consider my web my own spiritual hymen. Here, if nowhere else, I am a virgin.

Meanwhile, most of the friends I grew up with have settled into the reassuring rhythms and habits of unholy matrimonies, while I still find myself at the carnival, checking my hair in the funhouse mirror, going on all the rides even though I know I probably will vomit. Dating is an absurd pastime. It's usually like auditioning for a part you don't want in a script you don't like. But I do it anyway. And even after thousands of dates, I've never been on a "bad" one. If things get dull, I have enough material to fill an entire dinner — appetizer through dessert. In fact, when my speaking career is sluggish, I just look at the date as if it's a gig for a very small crowd. Sometimes I actually want to see my date again, which begins the masochistic carousel of half-truths and hidden agendas that characterize intimacy in the modern age. Luckily, I like women; there is no gender war in my life. In fact, I've lately been taking the time to get in touch with my own feminine side, although I must tell you, she's a real bitch. Not all my male friends have it this easy, and storm 108

clouds of resentment have moved onto their horizon. They've joined "men's groups," cells of disaffected masculinity, to gripe about about a world gone wrong, a world gone soft. You've seen the pictures: middle managers in the woods, daubed with war paint, howling at the moon. Here in Canada, however, the harsh realities of the climate dictate that the howling be done in the comfort of a pine-paneled rec room, chests smeared with chip dip, with a slide of the moon projected onto a screen usually reserved for family viewings of the annual trip to Peggy's Cove. The goal for these New Masculinists, according to poet Robert Bly, is to be "the wild and hairy man at the bottom of the lake." There you have it: Jimmy Hoffahas become the ideal of masculinity. Their female counterparts, no less ridiculous, follow a book called The Rules, which is to relationships what The Prince is to political ethics. The strategies in this book to trap a man can work — blackmail often does — but men need only remember one rule: There Is Always Someone Wonderful on the Next Block. "Whaddya gonna do, date forever?" hissed one of my frustated paramours. Sounds like an option to me.

When I was in my very early twenties I used to get fixed up with high school girls from the north end of the city. These suburban princesses always came loaded with great hair, nice teeth and a set of overprotective parents from Galicia. When you showed up for a date, you were always invited in, and you always marveled at how two Fellini-faced Eurogeeks could sire such a beauty. These girls were like some kind of Nazi breeding experiment gone horribly right. 109-

Before you went out, tea would be served, along with some dry, wrinkly pastry that resembled the person who served it to you. Questions were asked about school, synagogue and family, and you answered these questions in the dull, unthreatening way that makes people like you. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous older brother would be out on the street, taking notes about your car. Finally, you escaped from the split'level nightmare into the nightmare of the date itself. Her father would always give you a last melancholic look as you left the house, but he needn't have worried. These girls were so tightly wound that there would be no sex, at least not without a hymenectomy first. So I had to make this interesting, any way I could. Which is why I began to wear the priest outfit. I would arrive early in the evening, decked out in a black suit, white clerical collar and sober shoes. When Shelly or Maria or Lani or any of the other Jewish preppy equivalents would answer the door, their shock would register seismically along the Gaza Strip that runs the length of north Bathurst Street. "Hello, Shelly (or Maria or Lani)" I would earnestly intone for my gape-mouthed date, "I'm Mark." "I... I... I... "she would reply. "Vy don't you invite your nice boy in for a glass tea," I'd hear the mother call out, from beyond the sightline of the door. "Ummm... no, we're late. Gotta go," she would say, slamming the door before Mr. and Mrs. Splitlevelsky saw the goy devil with their pride and joy. Once in my car I explained that, although born Jewish, I had conducted a serious theological search, decided that Catholicism was the true path, and accepted 110

Jesus as my personal savior. "But that doesn't mean I don't like to have a good time," "I... I... I..." she would say, fixated yet repelled by the clerical collar. I would pull the car up at the Bagel King on Eglinton Avenue, at that time the chosen hangout of the chosen people. I just knew she'd have a few friends there. I just knew they would spread the word at school: Shelly (or Maria or Lani) was dating a priest! Oy! Gross! Seriously! We'd be given a booth and, sometime just after the french fries arrived, I would lunge at my date and begin necking furiously with her, in full view of her shocked friends. "I'm sorry," I would gasp. "It's just that... since I've become Catholic... I find Jewish girls so hot... I can't control myself..." I don't think I need to add there were no second dates. A variation on the gambit was called the Cousin from Cleveland, which I adopted only a few years later. In my neghborhood there were four major synagogues, and every Sunday evening each one would host a major wedding or bar-mitzvah party. We're talking a five-course dinner, sixpiece orchestra, and hundreds of guests. At about 7 P.M. each Sunday I would put on my best dark suit and troll the shules for free food, dancing and dates. When you go to one of these fancy synagogue parties, there's a table outside the ballroom containing place cards, each one with the guest's name and his table number. Inevitably a guest, usually an out-of-towner, can't make it, and his card sits there through most of the evening. My trick was this: I would arrive late — just after the melon appetizer, but before the chicken teriyaki — ill

grab the no-show's card, and assume his identity for the evening. I had to be careful, of course. Weddings were preferable, because you could always be on the groom's side if the table were the bride's, and vice versa. With a little creativity, I could concoct a new character for the night. If I were feeling really ballsy I would walk up to the head table, grab the microphone and make a stirring, if generic, toast to the lucky couple. And here's the best part: not only did I have a sumptuous meal, but most often a single girl cousin would be placed at the table in hopes that a little romance might bloom. My job was to connect with this girl, dance with her and get her to go for a nightcap. Then I would reveal my scam. Most of the girls would scream and tear out of the bar, but a select few would stay. And those, of course, were the ones worth knowing.

Freud spent a lot of time trying to figure out what women want.5 But what about men? What do they want? Ladies, let me save you some time. They don't want to be friends. When a man asks you out, he's not looking for a buddy. He already has buddies, and if he's past his twenties, he also has assorted family obligations, work problems, maybe even a medical or legal issue in the works. He doesn't have much free time, or energy. I have accumulated more friends than I can possibly give proper attention to. It always makes me feel guilty. When a date tells me she wants to be "just friends" it makes me so angry I could bite a rock. Don't women 5. I think it's lots of shoes. 112

understand how insulting this can be? And this happens to me all the time. I'm comfortable with my feminine side, so women often want to be with me for the sheer pleasure of my company. The nerve! Over the years I've become suspicious and impatient with many a prospective girlfriend's motives, and now, to avoid disappointment, I'll only date someone if she's easy or fabulous. I've been hustled for friendship so often I now respect a woman only if she sleeps with me on the first or second date. This was certainly not always the case. When I was younger, I'd let things drag out forever until I got the message, humiliating myself horribly in the process. Stupidly, I never gave up hope, even when a greater man would have withdrawn. And this led to my countless adventures with me in the role of hapless puppy dog, the most ridiculous example being Ginni. I was in third year of college, recuperating from a bad love affair and a medium-sized breakdown, when I met her. She was cool, older, an actress, divorced with a child. Need I add that she was a rare beauty, thin as a slice of carpaccio? We became friends and I'd hang out in her on-campus apartment after class. Looking back on it now, of course, I see how wrong she was for me: she was humorless and needed a father figure for her daughter. Still, I was smitten. A semester passed and still no love from Ginni. I told her I was going to Europe for ten weeks during break. "Boy, would I love to go to Europe," she said. It was impossible. She was broke and had no one to take care of her daughter. Then one day she was full of radiant smiles. Her mother had given her some money to go away for two weeks and had agreed to watch her little girl. She asked me when I would be in Paris, and I told 113

her. Great. She'd meet me there. On the day before I left on my trip, we had dinner. Ginni got serious and told me, "You know, I'm really looking forward to going away, but I'm also really looking forward to spending time with you, maybe letting our friendship grow in new directions." She took my hand for the first time ever. I nearly choked on my pasta. Eight weeks later I was at the airport in Paris, waiting for the jumbo jet that would bring my Ginni to me. I'd taken care of all the details, including two rooms in a small but charming hotel on the Left Bank. Hey, why push it? We'd be together for two whole weeks. Ginni hugged me as I met her at baggage claim, and we were just about to get in a cab, when a male voice interrupted us. "Ginni!" This was Tim, whom Ginni had met on the plane. Introductions were offered, and Tim asked if we minded if he shared our cab to the city center. No problem. In the cab, Tim asked if we knew any good cheap hotels in Paris. I volunteered that our hotel had a great rep, and there were a dozen more on the same street if he didn't like it. Hey, I'm a friendly, secure, stupid guy. We got to the hotel and Ginni checked in, and as luck would have it, a room was available on our floor. I saw them get settled and went off sightseeing while Ginni slept off her jet lag. "See you at six!" I said. A nasty rain blew in that afternoon, so I returned to the hotel at four. Restless, I went to check on Ginni. No response. I walked absentmindedly down the hall past Tim's room, just in time to hear him grunting loudly through the cheap walls, which were thin enough that I could hear 114

my love Ginni screaming his name. But this isn't the end of the story. That night, Tim joined us for dinner and Ginni announced they had been brought together miraculously by the fates. Tim really hoped I'd join them in their sightseeing over the next few days. Any other young man would have plunged the fork tine into his eyeball, but I just said it would be my pleasure. I wanted to be with Ginni, at any cost. Then, a few days later, we went traveling through the French countryside, always booking two hotel rooms, one for me, and one for my two friends. But this isn't the end of the story. We took the train to Barcelona. As dusk settled on the Ramblas, we suddenly heard an urgent female voice. "Tim!" A gorgeous sylph in a diaphanous hippie blouse ran over. I could see her nipples. She was a traveler who knew Tim from some previous trip, and she introduced herself as Diana. It turned out she had just arrived in the city in her beat-up old Jeep and had nowhere to stay. Neither did we, but first dinner was in order. We found a great little place where paella was served, along with vast amounts of sangria, which everyone drank except me. Diana, who sat opposite me, was now looking deeply and meaningfully into my eyes as the booze made her less inhibited. I felt something on my crotch. It was her bare foot. "All right," I thought, "maybe there's a happy ending here." We all piled into Diana's car after dinner. "Let's not get a hotel room. I've got sleeping bags in the trunk — two of them. She winked in my direction as I did the math. Tim, only slightly less drunk than Diana, drove the 115

car through the pitch of the Catalonian forest while Diana and I necked furiously in the back seat. This was getting good, real good. Finally we found a clearing, on a hill. I noticed a foul smell, but the others, too drunk to notice, insisted we pitch camp. We laid out the tiny sleeping bags near each other, Ginni and Tim in one, and Diana and me in another. Just minutes later, as I was kissing Diana, she murmured, "Ulvoh" and threw up her seafood paella and sangria all over me. Then she passed out, dead drunk. Meanwhile Ginni and Tim were having a great time. So here I was, utterly sober, covered in puke, listening to my true love get boned by her cowboy stud puppet, while next to me lay a hippie goddess snoring loudly enough to rouse JFK from the dead. Somehow I got a little sleep, and when I was awakened by first light I noticed where the smell was coming from. We had accidentally camped out in the city dump of Barcelona. Our "hill" was a mound of tin cans, broken bottles, old mattresses and other assorted detritus. I woke everyone up and we somehow drove back to the city and found a hotel. A bad night. But all was not lost: Diana and I were sharing a room while Ginni and Tim had the room next door. I put Diana to bed and let her sleep off her wicked hangover. "I'll be back around six," I whispered. She smiled, nodded, fell asleep. I went to a bullfight, but I couldn't stomach it. I killed some more time, but I was getting tired and wanted to go back to the hotel for a nap. My plan was to curl up for a few hours with Diana before we had dinner, and then have sex, or maybe just skip dinner and proceed directly to sex. But when I got back to the room, Diana was gone. 116

Then I heard the familiar sounds of Ginni and Tim going at it. Jeez, don't these two ever stop? Then I heard — but no, it couldn't be — Diana's unmistakable trill as well. In a daze I knocked on their door. Hippiechick answered, naked. The other two were on the bed in some obscure position you only see in soft-core. Well, I thought, when in Barcelona — I started to take off my shirt. "Ummmm... Mark... what are you doing?" asked Diana dreamily. "Joining you." They all looked around at each other with a mixture of embarrassment and concern. "We kind of discussed this earlier," said Ginni, "and you know we really really like you, but... Diana completed the sentence. ...we just want to be friends." But this is not the end of the story. For the next five days, Ginni, Tim, Diana and I traveled through the Spanish countryside, always reserving two rooms, one for me, and one for Ginni, Tim and Diana. End of story.

Again, my pal Zach has a better system. He meets a girl, has sex with her, and if he likes her, dates her. After getting to know her better, if he still likes her, then he has anal sex with her. This seems so sane, so rational. Let's face it: you don't need a companion to see a movie. Conversation with most people you haven't slept with is awkward and stilted. And after you're a teenager, the very notion of new friendship is kind of pointless. Really, why bother knowing people at all? At this 117

point, I've refined my interests into three areas: sex, money and art. All my relationships revolve around some mutual interest in one of these three things. So if a woman isn't going to sleep with me, fine — but she'd better know a lot about show business or have some fascinating insights on Guy Debord. But, of course, you can't force the issue. "No means No," women say, and they're right. But for men, "No" means "No Weekends in the Bahamas" and that's equally correct. I am allowing myself a trace of bitterness here because I want to live in a world without boundaries and can't help resenting those who need restrictions and definitions and limits. Ultimately, I quest for the infinite, for the romance effusion, the liquefaction of ego, if only for a few nights. A goodnight handshake will not do; I've been to the moon, dear, and I know the difference.

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iiave you ever noticed how an open handcuff looks like the Sanskrit symbol for Om? Now there's an observation Jerry Seinfeld missed. Hey, you write about what you know. A woman once whispered to me that she wanted to tie me up and then ignore me, but it sounded like something a William Morris agent might do. I don't like pain, but I've been in show business long enough to eroticize the frustration. Masters and slaves? Most people wouldn't want to live in a world like that, but then again, most people cross with the lights. So if I like a little metal in the bedroom, then God bless Pittsburgh. Guys like me are keeping the Industrial Northeast solvent. They say that the best sex is between two people who love each other, but a woman must have started that rumor. Actually, the best sex is between two psychotics with a strong sense of self-loathing. Love and romance have little to do with it, unless you finance Nora Ephron films. Personally, I can live without romance, but I can't live without sex. 121

I'm picky about it, though. I once left an orgy because the participants just weren't that well read. ("What do you think of Kundera?" I shouted at a bosomy waitress at the bottom of a noisy clusterfuck. But she just gave me a thumbs up, mistaking my question for another, unrelated one.) I'm too paranoid to enjoy threesomes much — I'm always sure the other two are plotting against me. Prostitutes? Never. No way. Why should I spend my hardearned money on hookers when I can spend it on drugs? Don't even mention water sports to me — I once gave a girlfriend an enema and had to replace the broadloom. Supposedly, men and women see sex differently. Women seem to have a lot of good reasons to have sex. Men need no reason at all. They're like a walking Nike ad, they just do it. But give men some credit. A man would never bite into a piece of chocolate and say, "this is better than sex."1 Talking to women, I gather they are are less interested in sex for sex's sake than men. This phenomenon can be termed "The Lust Gap," and I think it's responsible for many of the skirmishes in the gender wars. Women have taken the high road for eons, upbraiding men for their indiscriminate sperm spillage. But their real sexual agenda is far more nefarious: women choke off the sex supply to inflate their own worth. If there were any justice, women as a gender would be brought before a high court and charged with antitrust violations far more serious than those of AT&T, Microsoft — or me. To listen to the way women talk, most guys want sex all the time. But that's not so true for me. I'd have sex only twelve times a year if it could be a mind-bending 1. Although it is interesting that the finest chocolates in the world, Godiva, are named after a naked woman. 122

oceanic melt. Besides, I'm fussy. It takes a lot to get me interested, and even more to keep me there. All the planets have to line up in alphabetical order and recite the Kama Sutra in Danish before I'll commit to a romp. If it isn't theater or therapy, why bother? And one-night stands don't work for me. The first few times I'm with a woman I consider it research, not pleasure. Then, somewhere around the fourth or fifth conjoin, the universe relaxes, my kundalini rises, nuclear fusion occurs, and I show her the Limousine Trick.

Unfortunately, my last girlfriend left me before we could do anything interesting. We slept together for a few weekends, intimate enough for dirty talk but shy of any full-blown coprophiliac fantasies. I thought it was going well, but then I got the flu. I had to miss a weekend. The girl sent me flowers, but the next week she blew me off. "Hey, you got sick. I found someone else," she said. I was shocked to find myself in the Universe of Sexual Darwinism, a free-market Tory world where no one dares get sick. But what could I expect? After all, she sold real estate. I shed no tears. My showbiz lifestyle always ensures me access to a selection of first-class flakes. My lawyer recently introduced me to an unusual woman. She makes her living at phone sex, but also has a thriving mail-order business selling her used, week-old, soiled panties through the mail. I asked her if there were any hazards involved with this. "Yeast infections," she deadpanned. On our first date, we had afternoon tea at the Four Seasons Hotel, and she handed me her "kit," containing a 123

naked picture of herself, an audiotape of her talking dirty and a pair of used red panties, packaged in a Ziploc baggie, like a piece of evidence at a murder trial. Not long ago I went on a unique date. We met at a tattoo parlor and I sat in a cubicle and watched my companion strip off her pants and get her clitoral hood pierced. She screamed, she cried, and then we went to the new Robert Altman movie. But we didn't have sex — any climax would have been an anticlimax. Actually, I appreciate unusual vaginas. I once dated a girl who was taking a strong hormone to combat her endometriosis. A side effect was that her clitoris swelled to the size of a thumbtip, and it was so sensitive that, to have sex, she merely had to raise her skirt while I sat at the other side of the room and fluttered my eyelids. The air currents gave her orgasm after powerful orgasm. Another girl I used to see had three sets of vaginal lips. Amazing! It was like making love to a Georgia O'Keefe painting in glorious 3-D. And I can't say enough good things about ladies who squirt. Wonderful! You get sex and a floor show.

A high percentage of women I date become lesbians after we break up. I don't know why I seem to be a way station on the road to Sapphic pleasure, but I guess it's either my gentle, sensitive nature or the way I convince them to lick the centerfolds of my wank magazines. Don't get me wrong. I like lesbians, especially the ones who really know how to share. In fact, one of my best-ever relationships was with Sheila, a lesbian folksinger who went hetero just for me. But beware. When you break up, your lesbo ex may be extra-resentful. 124

It took a few months, but Sheila called me to bury the hatchet and be friends. In fact, she said, she'd written songs for a new album and would be premiering them at a "womyn's coffeehouse" that weekend. Would I like to come? She was a beautiful singer, and besides, I missed her, so I said yes. When I got there, I was the only male in the room, although a lot of the women there could have passed. She got up onstage and spoke into the mike: "I just finished a relationship... WITH A MAN!" The audience booed and hissed. "It was awful, and I wrote these songs about it... " She began to sing. "You walk into the room "Like a rooster on the make... " The "womyn" booed and hissed some more. This went on for nine songs. I didn't dare leave, fearing I'd be identified as the subject of the songs. " ... I hate your ego "I hate your cock... " Luckily, the album was never released.

Usually I've been lucky at keeping friendships with ex-girlfriends, although the transition isn't always smooth. After I broke up with Susan, a Jodie Foster lookalike, I was nauseous from grief for a year afterward. Her hold on me was so strong I had to resort to unusual methods to mourn her absence and purify my soul. So I flew to the Sonoran desert and bought an earthenware pot from an old Navajo woman. Then I rented a Corvette convertible and drove deep into the desert, and in the silence of the dunes stripped off my clothes and burned 125

my favorite picture of Jodie in the clay jar as I danced and wept, danced and wept. Then I flew home and became her friend. Even now, twenty years later, Susan has a hold on me that is guaranteed to make any new girlfriend enraged with jealousy. In many ways Susan plays the role of Love of My Life, perhaps because ours was a transgressive, taboo love. I was twenty-six, and she was fifteen. Fifteen? Who am I, Donovan? Jerry Lee Lewis?2 Most of the time this would be wrong, but I'm not interested in what's right or wrong most of the time; I'm interested in the exceptional — the specific times when the rules must be broken. Because Susan was unlike any fifteen-year-old you've ever met. Possessed of pharmaceutical-grade beauty, she carried herself with the sophistication of a fashion model in her early twenties. And her mind. What a mind! When someone had the temerity to diss our relationship she would silence them with a wicked quip worthy of Dorothy Parker, followed by a toss of her long golden hair. And then launch into a detailed commentary on Norman Mailer's new book. Fifteen! She was so beautiful that creepy Yorkville Eurotrash would beg me to let them sketch her nose. Her nose! She had dimples in her nose! She was perfect and she was fifteen and everywhere we went people would get upset and then drool with envy, when they got over the shock of it. It was 1978,1 had just opened Yuk-Yuk's, comedy was white-hot, and I was in the first blush of notoriety. Everyone was for me, against me, had an opinion about me, but I didn't care because I was going home with my teenage genius girlfriend with the candy-striped sundress and the 2. Hey, I didn't do anything that any third-rate drummer in a fourthrate rock band didn't do. But at least I did it for love. 126

cashmere pubic bone. My romance with Susan continued off and on for over a decade before ripening into a mutually protective friendship. Now we never miss a chance to gossip, to shmooze, or attend the opening of the latest Roman Polanski flick. Society frowns upon this age discrepancy, but I like it for its erotic frisson. Feminists find it threatening, but nature is fair, if cruel: women lose their sexual value at about the same rate that men lose their sexual stamina. Younger women look better, have more energy, keep me culturally current, shave their pussies, and don't have a biological clock with a loud ugly tick. "But what about Susan Sarandon?" whines every lady careerist over forty. "She's soooooo beautiful!" Good. You go fuck Susan Sarandon. I'll be with Pamela Lee, making a video. One of the big feminist lies these days is that relationships should be based on equal power. I'd like to take these ladies to my favorite S/M bar. Then they'd learn a thing or two about power. In my relationship with Susan, I was older, richer — I was even her boss for awhile. But in the end it was me who did most of the crying. I think there are lots of good relationships that involve massive discontinuities of power. Nothing bores me more than having "so much in common" with someone I'm seeing. No. No! NO! Give me outlaw sex — sex with young girls, married women, the fabulously wealthy, welfare babes, trailer trash, the ill-bred, the homeless, the tattooed — interracial, intergenerational, interdenominational, intergalactic, alien sex. Give me someone 1 can learn something from! Then again, sometimes the girl next door fools you. A few years ago, I was dating Linda, a vivacious grad 127-

student. One night, as we were lazing in postcoital stupor, she asked me how many women I had slept with. "You first," I asked her. She blushed. "Ummm... okay... eighty-two." "Eighty-two?" I asked, "That's... specific." "I counted recently." "But... eighty-two? You don't seem the type... " "Well, I lived in Europe for five years, and I mean I really lived" I needled her about it for about a week, and then came the night of her parents' anniversary party. I went to some friends who ran a sportswear company and had them make up a custom hockey sweater. I breezed into the party with an enormous "83" on my chest. My girlfriend blushed the whole night, while her parents thought I was quite the hockey fan.

Linda probably thought she was shocking me with her numerous sexual conquests, but I am unshockable, because for the past eleven years I have carried on an onagain-off-again affair with a six-foot Amazon tit-queen named Crystal. At least, "Crystal" is one of her many identities. One solution to monogamy is to find a girlfriend with a multiple personality disorder. Who will it be tonight? Candi, the big-breasted, lisping, glitter-stripper from Dallas? Renee, the sophisticated leg-teasing secretary? Nicole, the good-natured Cockney barkeep? The Punk, a leather-clad copfucker with an angry strap-on? No matter what, this much is for sure. No one will make a sitcom out of my life. I am not a Touchstone Picture. I met Crystal when she was a young wannabe rocker 128-

just off the bus from Calgary. I was dating her godmother, Annette, a sophisticated but shallow real-estate developer who was traveling around the world. She would write me long letters about her voyages and beg me to meet her for a romantic tryst in Hawaii. I agreed, and after flying ten hours with the Melbourne rugby team who launched into "10,000 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" just as my Walkman ran out of batteries, I was ready for some lovin'. But it was not to be. Annette had found religion on her travels and wanted our union to be of the spiritual kind. I wanted pussy, but instead I was left with my feng shuiing in the breeze. Disappointed with my base manly desires, Annette trotted out her other options. "The Jacksons were on the island last week and Tito asked me out," she sniffed. "Tito?" I laughed. "He isn't even a fucking A-list Jackson." I kicked her out of the Maui Intercontinental on her spiritual ass, but not before she told me her "wild" goddaughter was coming to Toronto, and would I "please, please, take care of her before she gets into any trouble." Crystal showed up at my club that summer in perfect Boy George drag and blew me in the washroom to say hi. "Cum on the hat! Cum on the hat!" she squealed. We started having sex regularly. One time she brought over a video of hooting, hollering soccer louts, on a loop. She put it on and made me screw her doggy-style. "I like to play to a crowd," she said. On another occasion, she dragged me to an X-ray clinic where her cousin operated an ultrasound device. She put it over her crotch while we humped on the gurney so that we could see sex from the inside on the TV monitor. We had every kind of sex, including a creepy, proto-Goth fantasy of hers in which she extracted a syringe of blood from her neck, and had me squirt it all over her when she climaxed. Sometimes, though, we'd just spend a quiet evening at home, Crystal 129

reading aloud from the gamier passages of American Psycho while I took her from behind. Crystal was not just a woman who ran with the wolves — she was their official pace car. After a while, I could go no further with the demented teenager. She was working as a dominatrix, whipping and trussing up bankers while dressed in a rubber catsuit and pigtails. I was afraid of where she was going, so I carefully withdrew from her orbit. But I found myself missing her. Then came the call. She was leaving town, pregnant. Before I even had a chance to ask, she reassured me that the child wasn't mine — the father was a doorman at a dance club. "What's his name?" I asked. She didn't know. I tried to convince her to have an abortion, but she wouldn't hear of it. She was going back to Calgary to have her baby. Nine months later I got a letter. Mother and daughter were doing fine. Daughter was formally adopted by Crystal's parents because Crystal was deemed unfit to mother, but since she lived with her parents, everything was copacetic. Oh, and would I be in Calgary soon? As it happened, I was recovering from another doomed love affair. This time the current girl of my dreams announced her engagement to another man at her sister's wedding, a wedding I attended under the mistaken impression that I was her date. The next day, I passed a kidney stone. Or maybe it was a piece of my heart. At any rate, it just so happened I was going to Calgary later that month to promote my first book, Zen and Now. Crystal always showed up in my life at the right time. We got together again and she promised to visit me in Toronto. A few months later, she showed up, which was 130

good, and announced her intention to stay, which was not. I knew she was too wild, too dangerous, to let her get close, so I broke up with her again. But this time, despite my sincere offers of friendship, she felt I was going to abandon her forever. Finally, things cooled down and we went about our respective lives —that is, until my thirtyfifth birthday. It was a beautiful May evening, and I walked the five miles to my club, singing the entire Abbey Road album as the sun set. People looked at me strangely during Ringo's extended drum solo between "Golden Slumbers" and "The End," but I didn't care. When I walked into the club, out of breath, the woman at the box office told me some weird girl had been calling all day, crying, looking for me. So far, a normal day. I told her to get me if she called again. Ten minutes later, I was on the phone listening to a shrieking, incomprehensible Crystal. I calmed her down, and through her sobs, I heard this shocker: Annette had come to town and looked her up. She had found out about Crystal's pregnancy and wanted to know about the father. Somehow my name came up, and Crystal told her about our affair. Annette browbeat her and got her to admit it, and that's why she called me, to get to me before Annette did, to tell me before Annette did. "Tell me what?" I asked slowly, a real queasy, greasy feeling starting at the base of my stomach. "That you're the father of my child!" Crystal cried. I felt woozy, angry, in need of a lawyer. I worked out the timing in my head — impossible. Crystal reassured me she wanted nothing from me, that her parents' only concern was to keep their little girl. My lawyer — my new best friend — told me to admit nothing, assume nothing and wait. 131

I waited, and nothing happened. Every so often she'd mail me a snapshot of her little girl, but it made no impression on me at all. Then one day, returning from Calgary, she showed me a new photo, one that made my hair stand on end. The girl was now seven, and yes, the resemblance was unmistakable. I did a lot of soul searching, and flew out to Calgary to meet my alleged daughter. I found her to be a wiry little firecracker with a wicked sense of humor. The next month we all had DNA tests. It was my idea. While we waited for the results I went to watch Crystal work. She had gotten into stripping — now there's a surprise — and was bringing the same flair to her work that she brought to the rest of her life. She went by the name of Lucy Furr. Among her choice bits was a number in which she dressed as Jackie Kennedy. Until that evening, I had no idea how much fun you could have with a pink pillbox hat. She finished her act that night with her signature piece: she squirted herself from head to toe with vanilla pudding, so that it looked like she was center square in a frathouse gangbang. This act required audience participation, and while a group of drunken bricklayers drizzled the last drops of white custard onto the crotch of my child's mother, I wondered if gun shops in Calgary stayed open past midnight.3 And then, three days later, the tests came back negative. I was not a father after all. I was surprised, somewhat disappointed and more than a little relieved. 3. Strippers, like children, often say the darndest things. One night Crystal and I were watching a porn movie, and when a new actress appeared onscreen, she sat bolt upright. "Hey," she exclaimed, looking at the pneumatic sex bomb, "she owes me twenty bucks!" 132

Crystal mumbled her surprise, and dropped the subject. To this day she maintains that I'm the father, DNA be damned. The little girl is now twelve and looks like a tall version of me, so I don't know what to think. But I always smile at the memory of the wild times I've had with Crystal. Once, she joined me when I was performing in Thunder Bay. She had just had her breasts enlarged — for the third time — and wanted me to "road test" them. We took a lot of filthy Polaroids of her and then mailed them to some accountant whose name we got out of the phone book. The pictures were sent to his home with a big red lip print on the back of the envelope, which we assumed would arouse his wife's curiosity. We laughed ourselves silly at the thought of the guy's wife opening the envelope and the entreaties Mr. Accountant would make to his suspicious spouse when he got home from work. "Please, honey, I have no idea who she is," he would say. "Oh, sure, like a total stranger's gonna send you this stuff," Mrs. Accountant would answer, packing her bags. Of course I kept a few pictures as souvenirs. A few years later, after a big fight with Crystal, I submitted one to a major men's magazine. Naturally, it got published. You might think I loved Crystal only for her wild side, but that's not true. When she cares for someone it is absolute, without limit; a poetic selfless friendship. Most recently Crystal was driving across the country accompanied by her friend Monica, a cystic fibrosis patient who needed a double lung transplant that could only be done in Toronto. Monica, a waif-like beauty, was hooked up to an enormous oxygen canister, and Crystal would carry her from place to place, never complaining. 133

The plan was for Crystal to make enough money lap dancing to pay for Monica's stay in Toronto while she waited for a suitable donor. Crystal seemed focused, positive, with a renewed sense of purpose, but it was shortlived. Monica quickly deteriorated and went home to the Maritimes to die. Crystal drove two days nonstop to Nova Scotia and, at the end, pulled the plug on Monica's respirator. It was Monica's secret pact with Crystal. After the funeral, Crystal went into a downward spiral, drinking heavily and scaring all her customers. She slowly crawled back from her tragedy, but the loss of innocence was enormous. Her big throaty laugh became hollow, and her eyes, always ready to pick a fight or a fuck, dimmed. She spun out her fantasies on the barroom pole, the men still whooped, the boys still whistled, but she was far, far away. I got an idea I thought would pull her out of her trough. I had the notion that a poetry-writing, fortunetelling, postmodern stripper kind of like Annie Sprinkle crossed with Angelyne just might touch the hearts and minds of Toronto's intelligentsia. I would manage her, get her to the right parties, politicize her act. I explained my idea to her, touching on reference points from fertility goddesses to temple whores to conceptual art punks. When I finished she stared at me. "Fertility goddesses? Temple whores? Conceptualists? What are you talking about? I'm just a pig." Crystal disappeared from my life soon afterward and made a new life for herself in Texas. We talk on the phone these days and I'm glad to say she's her old self again. She recently lost her waitressing job after she pulled down her pants and farted at a customer she didn't like. Now she lives quietly and happy, making her living smuggling Viagra dupes across the border at Nogales. 134

Meanwhile, outside of my libertarian enclave, a rigid puritanism grips the land. My friends who are university professors cower with their doors open every time they meet with a female student. They are not allowed to comment on a student's dress, let alone explore the glories of consensual pedagogical Eros. But luckily I live outside the mainstream of tight-assed, pleasure-denying JudeoChristian rule-suckers. For instance, I can't count the number of times I've taken home one of my waitresses and shaved her pussy. Some would call this harassment, but believe me, I never ask twice — they can hardly believe me the first time. Shaving the women who work for you may not be an orthodox way to do business, but it's by no means mandatory. It's just a little club, like a company baseball team or an office pool. A little while ago I had a moral dilemma. A new waitress had heard about the shaving ritual and asked if she could take part. The problem was, I wasn't attracted to her. I let her know, gently but firmly, how I felt. But she didn't take it well. She got kind of petulant about it, always bugging me at work, wearing a disposable razor around her neck, that sort of thing. Finally, I had no choice. She was sexually harrassing me. I had to fire her. The puritanical left and right wish these desires would go away, but they won't. The pursuit of pleasure is a biological adaptation designed to keep the species alive. It's a force stronger than any religion, any law. Lenny Bruce once said if you put a man on a desert island, he'll do it with mud. I say if you put a man on a desert island, he'll do it with Lenny Bruce. But I've never been interested in that. I rented some gay porn once to see if I could get excited by it, but no, I kept fantasizing they were women. It was no more a turn135

on than the Weather Channel for me, and all those sailor costumes looked ridiculous. So you can imagine my shock when I was "outed" by a Montreal entertainment paper a few years ago. There it was, in black and white, for all to see: " ...Breslin, who is gay..." I'm not homophobic but I am worried about the damage a false rumor might do to my social life. So my lawyer got them to retract it and give me some column space. I wrote: ... I am not gay, or bisexual, and have never had a single homosexual encounter. In fact I consider myself to be militant/)' heterosexual, and at the age of forty still find myself restless and frisky. Yet, you seemed content to print a rumor designed, I suppose, to embarrass me. If I were gay I would shout it from the rooftops, I would be proud of it, but I'm heterosexual, so I'm proud of that. My private life, gay or straight, is no one's business but my own, but someday some grad student will try to analyze my career refracted through that lens, so let's at least get it right. That, of course, would involve research. It's so much easier if you are a sloppy journalist to see a forty'year'old single man, fussy in appearance and manner, short, unmacho, with many good friends in the gay community and make the prejudicial assumptions. I have been battling this all my life. When I was teenager I remember sitting around the school cafeteria reading Vogue magazine while the other, "normal" boys read Sports Illustrated. "Fag," they would call me, and laugh. Then I would point out to them that "the fag" was 136

looking at pictures of beautiful women in revealing dresses while they were hunched over photos of beefy, brawny guys bent way, way over in tight uniforms. So they would beat me up. Some things never change. I think it's sad that people can't feel free to express their private life publicly without fear of disapproval, or worse. Many gay people I know live "in the closet," trying, and often succeeding, to pass as "straight." It's extremely rare, on the other hand, to find a straight person masquerading as gay, but that's what I did one year. As usual, it involved a woman. Her name was Chloe. She looked like a Czech lingerie model, and it was love at first sight. She showed up at my office to pitch a TV special. The idea was good, but I would have gone to those dinner meetings if the project were a Martin Buber bio-pic. It became clear we were hot for each other, and we found a strong intellectual bond. There was just one problem: she lived with a man. It didn't matter. She slept with me anyway, and then went home to her guy. One night, after six weeks of this, she burst into tears in bed. "This is no good," she sobbed. "I'm married." At this point in my life, I might have pulled the plug on our affair. Except that I really liked her, and we had a good working relationship on our TV show, which was by now in preproduction. So we carried on without change for awhile, although I did notice that Chloe was beginning to act distracted. Finally, she showed up at my place one afternoon,all smiles. "I've decided I can't go on lying to my husband," she declared. "Every time I see you I have to invent an excuse, and it's driving me crazy. So I figure I should replace all 137

those little lies with one simple untruth... " I could never have guessed the next part. " ...so I just told him you were gay." "What?" "Shhhh... listen. Now I can come over here as much as I want. He'll never bug me about it. And — this is the best part — now I can integrate you into the rest of my life." "Meaning...?" "Well, I've invited you for dinner on Friday. Just you, me and Don." So I went for dinner that Friday night, and I must say, that Don could really cook! It was really a beautiful moment: me, my lover, my lover's husband, all sharing a fine, fine Pinot. And life went on — me so horny, she so horny, Don so clueless. Then Chloe upped the stakes. "Pack a bag. We're going away for the weekend." "How you going to slip this past Don?" I asked. "He's going with us." So the three of us went on a theater weekend in nearby Stratford, me getting one hotel room, Chloe and Don sharing another. Late at night, after Don was asleep, Chloe would tiptoe to my room and we'd silently go at it. Then she'd sneak back to Don at daybreak. All the merriment continued for months. Our TV project was nearing completion. Then, one night, Chloe interrupted the flow. "Don's getting suspicious. Do something." I knew Don and Chloe were having a party the following week, so I devised a suitable plan. I was friends with a girl, Lisa, who was a Playboy centerfold, and who had a boyfriend to match — a real hunk named Derek. I called him "Dreck" behind his back. Lisa was away on a 138

shoot for a month, so I called him up and asked him if he'd like to go to a party with me. Derek was a real social climber, so he jumped at the chance. When I walked into the crowded party with a dropdead gorgeous male model, all heads swung around. I put my arm around him in a gesture of camaraderie and leaned into his ear to whisper the names of our hosts. But to our hosts, standing far away, it looked as if I was smooching my date. There wasn't much argument after that night. Don worked on bonding with me, feeling all liberal and hip. Then, one evening, after Don had cooked us a wonderful veal casserole, Chloe excused herself to go to bed. I was ready to leave when Don asked me to stay for awhile. "Listen... you know, I've been thinking... about how different it must be... for you... " "What do you mean, Don?" "Well, being gay. I mean, what's it like?" I offered a few cliches. "But what's it like, Mark? Can you... show me?" "Look, Don," I improvised, "the guy you saw me with at your party, he's like my steady. We're a monogamous couple... just like you and Chloe... " Don looked crestfallen, embarrassed. " ...but I know someone, if you're interested, someone you should meet... " I was thinking, of course, of my friend Sal, a leading figure in the gay biker community. " ...he'd be happy to act as your guide," I said, letting a hint of Eddie Haskell creep into my voice. "Please," said Don. I called Sal, but it was too late. The pressure of our deception had gotten to Chloe, and she imploded, 139

confessing all — or almost all — to Don, who ran to India in shame and sorrow. The only thing Chloe hadn't told Don was that I was straight. "But if I'm gay, why would I have slept with you?" "I told him you made an exception for me because my bum is so tiny, like a young boy's." Only a few weeks later she was gone from my life, shacked up with the cameraman from our TV special. So who really knows anything about sex? Istvan, that's who. Istvan, the fifty-ish Hungarian cabbie who told me the secret of seduction one rainy Toronto night. "You look a woman right in the eye and say, 'I really vant to fuck you... for forty bucks.'" "And this works?" I asked him, stupefied. "Not all the time," he said. "But enough." "And why forty bucks?" I queried. "Not too little, not too much," said Istvan, and he drove me home. I guess Istvan hadn't read about this AIDS thing, which I suspect would reduce the number of strangers who might fuck you for forty bucks. Or maybe it wouldn't. Although it's true that there isn't much worth dying for, there isn't that much worth living for, either. My list is pretty short, and great sex is near the top, near red meat and the '63 Aston-Martin. Sometimes risks are worth taking, because I know if I died tomorrow, the only things I'd miss are the things that killed me in the first place.

I'd sure miss the Limousine Trick. A lot of people have had sex in a limousine, but like everything else in life there's a good way and a better way. Here's the better way. 140

When you rent your limo, make sure it has doubledark one-way windows so there is no chance that anyone can see in, but you can see out. Then get the driver to park outside a rock concert. As the crowd pours out, they will naturally converge on the limo, assuming it contains their favorite star. Meanwhile, your date will be on the seat, on her hands and knees, with her face up against the side window as you enter her from behind. The faces of the assembled multitude will be separated from your date's by only an inch of one-way glass while they scream inanities like "Rock on!" or "It's Bono, man!" If you like, you can withdraw and ejaculate all over the window as a particularly inane girl from the suburbs tries to peer in. Then it's "Home, James" for the two of you for some hot chocolate and Saturday Night Live. So if you're in my city some weekend evening and you see a big white limo parked suspiciously on a crowded street, come on over and wave hello. I'll be waving back, I promise you.

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1 he night my mother died, I went to the movies. No, not to see Porky's or Ace Ventura. It was a Wim Wenders film about angels trapped on earth. But thanks for thinking so little of me. I always go to the movies. I try to see one a day, like a vitamin, and I always emerge feeling better, more refreshed. I don't care that much what the movie is, and I will enjoy equally a dumb shoot-'em-up or the latest arthouse-shot-on-Super-8-subtitled-German-NeoExpressionist-transsexual-claymation-drama. I don't really care. I just like sitting in the dark with strangers. My movie habits are a bit eccentric. Every Thursday, when the weekly entertainment papers come out, I rush home and use an orange felt pen to highlight the films I want to see that week. Then I rip out the page and carry it with me wherever I go, so if I'm caught with a few spare hours between meetings I can quickly choose a flick and cross it off my list. I prefer to see two or three movies in a row, increasing the odds that I might actually enjoy one. 145

I can never tell what I'm going to like because I see things so perversely. For instance,Philadelphiawas supposed to be a breakthrough film about the tragedy of AIDS, but I saw it as the story of a Republican who gets sick and becomes a Democrat. I was at the world premiere of The Crying Game, but when the lead dropped her pants to show her cock, I gasped, "Ohmigod! She's wearing a strap-on!" Titanic was so long and boring that I found myself rooting for the iceberg. I prefer to go to the movies alone, although I have a select few companions who are good movie company — which means they will not talk during the film, and they won't get mad when, eight minutes into the picture, I slip them a small piece of paper revealing the "twist" ending, which I almost always get right. At least I don't still indulge in my old practice: riding in a convertible and shouting out the ending of a thriller to the lineup waiting in the cold. A lot of people used to want to kick me in the head for that one. I always bypass the "refreshment" stand, as I've developed an aversion to popcorn. I hate popcorn. It's the world's most overrated treat. I always smuggle in my own food, which makes it taste even better. Gourmet chocolates, a fine ham sandwich, pocketfuls of fries, sushi in a book bag, the all-day breakfast, I've done it all. I've never been caught, and if I were, I'd stand up in the crowded theater, not to scream "FIRE," but to yell, "I CAN'T EAT ANYTHING YOU SELL HERE!!! IT'S TOXIC!!! I DON'T WANT MY COLON SHELLACKED WITH HOT GOLDEN TOPPING, THANK YOU!!!" I sit in an aisle seat nearest to the far wall, midway down from the back of the house. This gives me the best 146

vantage point to watch the movie while I simultaneously watch the audience watching the movie. Sometimes I return to a movie a second time, just to watch the audience, like any serious postmodern voyeur would. I saw Pulp Fiction five times, like many other fans, but I watched the movie three times, the audience twice. In this order: movie, movie, audience, movie, audience. As soon as the movie's over, I like to rush out, skipping the end credits completely. I need to be first out of the theater every single time. It's the competitive spirit that drives me forward! Thanks, Mom and Dad! Anyway, who cares about the credits? Only in show business would anybody care which particular dweeb carried which particular light. My shirt is a Versace. I don't need to know the name of the chief needle threader to enjoy it. In fact, I think the fashion business has the right idea. They've narrowed the credits down to just two: the label, and the tag that says, "Inspected by -#47," who symbolically' represents all of the people who worked on the piece. The very best time to go to the movies is Christmas Eve, when anyone with even a tenuous family connection is at home. My viewing companions on December 24th are not simply lonely, they are the Hardcore Lonely, each gender represented by its own inevitable archetype. The man, frozen in profile, could be a picture entitled Old Masturbator] his female equivalent, Plain Girl with Walkman, Acne. They all sit alone, as do I. I enjoy renting videos, but because I see all the major movies in first run, I'm limited to straight-to-video releases, which is kind of like smoking from a bong filled with twigs and seeds. Usually these films take the form of "erotic thrillers" that are neither erotic nor thrilling. The words "kiss" and "kill" feature prominently in these titles, 147

as in Kiss and Kill or Killer's Kiss or Kiss for a Killer or Kill Me a Kisser; the variations on these two words are the most distinguishing feature of these films. These movies don't quite stimulate me, so I usually bulk up on magazines to read while I watch the movie. You'd really have to be an idiot to miss the plot points in these flicks. But sometimes, as I try to pass the night away, even my mixed-media bifocals aren't enough, and I have to throw on a new CD as well, to ratchet up the cacaphony. That's when I get even more restless for more information flow and I get on the telephone, making late-night calls to faraway places. So there I am, watching the video, flipping through the magazine, listening to the music, and talking to my faraway friend, when I think, "Hey... where's my PowerBook?" You'd think with my obsessive love of movies, I'd gravitate towards working in the movie business, but I've been on film sets, and it's not that much fun. The pace on a set turns me into a hyperactive child all over again, tortured by the cornucopia of delays. About ten years ago, I did write a movie that was produced, and even that wasn't a good experience. It turned out to be The Worst Movie Ever Made. If you don't believe me, go to a video store and ask for Mr. Nice Guy starring Mike MacDonald. "I'm sorry," the clerk will say, "it doesn't ring a bell..." "It's The Worst Movie Ever Made," you reply. "Oh, Mr. Nice Guy, of course. Yes, over there, next to the Ed Wood section... " My involvement in The Worst Movie Ever Made started out innocently enough. At a party, I met a filmschool graduate who was a big fan of the brilliant comedian Mike MacDonald. He thought Mike should star in his own film, and would I be interested in 148

developing a screenplay? I checked into the neophyte producer's background and found he came from a wealthy family, so I signed on for the job. Then, in consultation with Mike, the producer and some other writers, I handed in a script that was a gagheavy Mel Brooks-style fable about a hitman in love. It wasn't a work of genius, but it had a loopy, low-budget charm. Then the producer decided he would also direct. At this point,! heard a story about the producer/director. His father owned a bunch of shopping centers, and he wanted his son to eventually run them. But his son had more artistic inclinations, so the father wisely made him a deal: he would sell a shopping center and provide the financing for one movie. If the movie was a hit, fine; the son could continue working in film. If not, the father would accept the loss, the son would go to law school, and he would never talk about making a movie again. Once the producer was also the director, there were no checks against his inexperience. Reports came back to me from the set that he was constantly rewriting, throwing out jokes and chunks of plot indiscriminately. Just when I was about to try to step in again, his father saw a rough cut, closed down the production and announced his intention to direct the remaining scenes of The Worst Movie Ever Made. I might have gotten involved again, but my own father had just died and I was in no mood for confrontations. The cast and crew, meanwhile, had lobbied the producer's father, and production resumed. Months later, I got a call from the producer/director inviting me to a test screening. The first few scenes bore a vague resemblance to the script I had written, but then 149

it veered into truly uncharted territory. When the alien spaceship appeared, I looked blankly at the producer, who was seated next to me, smiling proudly. "Shhhh... you'll love it," he said. The producer/director must have had incriminating photos of a distributor with a sheep, because The Worst Movie Ever Made actually opened for a week at a small midtown cinema. I went one afternoon, expecting the worst. When I arrived at the twinplex, the marquee for the first movie gave the showtimes; the sign for my movie said "ABSOLUTELY NO REFUNDS." I asked the cashier for a ticket. She peered out from behind her cats-eye glasses and sneered, "Are you sure?" pointing at the "No Refunds" sign. I bought my ticket and entered the darkened theater, which I presumed would be nearly empty. I was wrong — it was packed. My heart jumped. Maybe this would be a cult hit, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! The movie started, and then, almost immediately, people started leaving. They weren't storming out angrily, but casually strolling out, smiles on their faces. I went to the lobby to survey the exodus, and then realized: these were all the bit actors in the movie. They had come to see themselves and, satisfied with that, left. The movie was that bad. In fact, the week it was released on video, I spent evenings at my local video store, offering five bucks to anyone who wanted to rent the movie, if they would just put it back on the shelf, please. Meanwhile, in television, the dreams are smaller, and so are the disappointments. Every comic wants his own sitcom, and now they get them, but how many are really watchable? Even when these sitcoms work, they celebrate a certain kind of ordinariness, and even the exceptions 150

aren't worth running home for. The only TV I like is the stuff that shows up late at night or on cable: talk shows, game shows, tabloid news, infotainment, even the Weather Channel — at least there's some level of unpredictability, some na'ive charm, and less of that selfimportant smugness that infects network television. People who work in television think something is important only if it appears on the tube. They may be right. My cousin once sneered about her younger sister's romance with a respected comedian, "Forty-two years old and he doesn't even have a series!" The boy genius I once worked for at Fox was quoted as saying, "Sometimes I just have to leave the city and get back to nature. But then I see all this incredible beauty and I think, 'How can I put this on TV?'" I remain less impressed with the medium that brought us M;y Mother the Car. As I've said on many occasions to talented performers whose shows have just tanked, "What do you expect? It's television." Lately, some critics have been advancing the theory that television is getting better while movies are getting worse. They're wrong. Television is only getting better because there's so much more of it. The ratio of good shows to bad is still the same. Movies will always be the class act of show business because movies are literally larger than life. But the television image is cramped, pinched into a human scale. Movies demand commitment — getting off your butt, hiring a sitter, paying a cover charge. TV is easy, free, couch-potato territory. As movies improve technically, they become more dreamlike. As video improves it becomes harsher, more real. Movies have stories, a character arc, a beginning, a middle, an end. TV shows have characters that never change, and like unwanted family, are always there at the same time, every single week... and 151

how can you respect a medium that considers Phil Donahue an intellectual? Television dates badly, but film, as Reagan once said, is forever. My expensive, big-screen, stereophonic television sits in a corner of my bedroom, ready to receive a hundred channels of disposable, ubiquitous, powerful and irrelevant programming. I watched it once this year, the night I passed a kidney stone and couldn't go to the video store. But TV can be fun to work in. The pace is fast, and if you're lucky enough to work on a live show, which is like doing crystal meth in a Skinner box, the experience can be exhilarating. My friends thought I was crazy to accept the job executive producing the second season of Friday Night with Ralph Benmergui. I might as well paint a big bull's-eye on my back, they said; it was a suicide mission. Nobody liked the show, or the host. But I liked and respected Ralph — he was just doing the right show on the wrong network. The CBC has never been my favorite playground. Many years ago, on a show called Evening Out, I framed an episode of arts criticism with a sequence in a restaurant in which my mother and Chesty Morgan, the busty stripper, discussed bra sizes. I didn't work for the CBC again for fifteen years. I took the job — not for the money, or the credit, but because it looked like it would be fun. And I went for broke. I hired a studio band that wore diapers and whose bandleader had a Zippy-the-Pinhead hairdo; I brought on a blind movie critic; we ran our own lousy ratings along the bottom of the screen; I put hockey hero Doug Gilmour in drag; and we lowered a cage containing an intellectual dressed as Lenin, who spewed Marxist dogma at the startled panelists. I threw out the moose-and-beaver backdrop and replaced it with a giant wall-size reproduction of a 152

Renaissance hermaphrodite. To no one's surprise, the show was canceled. I probably won't get to work for the CBC for another fifteen years, but at least I have the respect of hermaphrodites from sea to shining sea. You might think that things are looser in Hollywood, but they're not. Comedy is big business there, right beneath detailing and breast implant surgery. Mischief isn't a top priority. My first job in Los Angeles, as a writer/performer on Evening at the Improv in 1980, proved the point. I was scheduled for one performance on the show, and thanks to my opening line, no one ever saw it. Two weeks after the "tragic" death of John Belushi, my opening zinger was, "Good evening. I just flew in from a date with Cathy Evelyn Smith (the woman who shot him up) and boy, are my arms tired!" The Hollywood hometown audience turned white, and as I neatly segued into an extended fantasy about slicing my penis off with a sardine tin lid, I noticed the floor director cue the cameramen to stop tape. I got the job in the first place because the show, partially financed with Canadian tax-credit money, had to hire a quota of Canadians. The producers had come to see me audition at my home club in Toronto, and took me out for dinner afterwards. The producers, a couple of fat boors, each had a cool blonde trophy wife as silky as the producers were gross.1 "I notice that your comedy has a poetic side," cooed Trophy Wife One. "Who would you say was your main influence?" "Proust," I joked. "Proust?" queried Producer One, spitting out a chunk 1. This equation can be expressed by the formula g(P)=s(W). 153

of dinner roll. "He in New York or L.A.?" "No, you idiot," interjected Producer Two. "Lenny Proust." This scene was only a foreshadowing of the ignorance to follow. I had also been hired to write some blackouts for the series — an easy job, twenty-five punchlines for a nice pay check. But because of my Belushi gaffe, they didn't want my controversial ass anywhere near the production, so they told me to stay in my fancy hotel and send the stuff in. A week passed, and I sent in my best work. A day later I got the call. "We can't use this stuff!" "Why not? I didn't swear, use four-letter words— " "No, but every joke is about death, or dismemberment, necrophilia, cancer... What's wrong with you?" I wanted to inform him that I was mentally ill, but I resisted. "Okay, okay, I'll send you some tamer stuff. You'll have it by tomorrow." I worked all night, creating about fifty bits. In the morning, I separated them into two piles; one pile contained the worst collection of generic, bland, mindless, hoary jokes; the other was made up of the second-worst collection of generic, bland, mindless, hoary jokes. I threw the first pile in the garbage can, and sent the second pile in a cab to the production office. Only hours later, the call came. "ARE YOU NUTS??? We can't air this stuff!!! It's even creepier and kinkier than the last batch!" "Wait a minute, I sent you the wrong pages. I've got the stuff you want right here in my briefcase," I said, pulling the worst writing of the century out of the trash can. 154

"I'll send it right over." Which I did. Then I sat on the bed and waited to be fired. Sure enough, a few hours later, the phone rang. "Mark, now this is what we've been waiting for!"

I had a far better experience with American TV when I worked on Joan Rivers's talk show a decade later. The job offer came from out of nowhere. In fact, when Joan called me at Yuk-Yuk's about the producer's position, I thought it was a practical joke. "Okay, it's a great Joan Rivers impression," I barked at her. "Now who are you and what do you want?" But it was her. I was flown to L.A. the next week for a meeting at her tony Bel-Air mansion. I arrived eager and early for the meeting, and was ushered into her sunroom by a tall, liveried butler. At precisely the appointed hour, she walked into the room, all elegance and facial bandages. "What happened to you?" I gasped. "Oh, acid peel, the price of beauty. I want to look good for the new show." We chatted about comedy and her upcoming series on Fox. I knew I was being sized up for a job. "Let me get my assistant in here for you to meet," she said, and a young woman with a bandaged ear came in the room. "What happened to you?" I asked. "I always wanted my right ear put back," she said. We all continued talking, and then her manager dropped by, a well-groomed fellow with a splint on his nose. "Somebody deck you?" I inquired. 155

"No, just a little nose job," he replied. "Hey," I wondered out loud, "what's going on here? Have I stumbled into some kind of cult?" Joan demurred, "Actually, if we have a good year, a very good year, I treat my top people to one item of plastic surgery. Anything they like." Unfortunately, it turned out to be not such a good year. The show was canceled and I never got to find out if she'd been kidding. When I started at Fox, I shared a windowless closet with cartons of potato chips, but I didn't care. I loved the adventure. I'd book wonderful but unknown comics onto the show, and I was allowed a huge amount of autonomy. TV Guide praised my work in a review of the show. Six months later, I was promoted to producer, with a huge office and a picture-perfect view of the Hollywood sign. The departing producer, who looked like George Hamilton, wore sunglasses indoors, walked around the office swinging a tennis racquet and had his aftershave exclusively blended for him in Milan. He had booked a little-known band called The Beatles onto The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964. He'd never been without a job since. I had four assistants, six interns, eleven go-fers and a few dozen toadies to make sure my tea was exactly the way I wanted it and that my drycleaning was picked up every day at three. Everyone I dealt with was beautiful or rich or both, and two-thirds of them were having sex with each other. When the show was canceled, Fox gave me a settlement so huge I lived in Maui for six months. I've produced a lot of TV in Canada — mostly variety shows revolving around stand-up comedy — but I must admit it's even more exciting to be on TV, especially when you can test the limits of such a conservative 156

medium. In 1980 I did a shot on The Alan Thicke Show dressed as a cheerleader in a leather bondage mask. (My parents are always buying me the same birthday presents. Clothes. Always clothes.) The producers tried to censor me but Alan, who respected my warped humor, overruled them. The next year the producer told me if it had been up to him I wouldn't be on the show. "I have to think about the little old lady in Saskatoon," he whined self-righteously. "Yeah, well you've become the little old lady in Saskatoon," I told him, and went on set to do my job.

Sometimes I just get censored off the air. The Insurance Companies of Canada underwrote a series of documentaries entitled Profiles of Success. Each show was an interview between the host, director Arthur Hiller, and a self-made businessperson. Maybe I was just cranky that day, or maybe I objected to the program's simplistic right-wing political agenda, but when I got on set I just wasn't very cooperative. The interview went something like this: "So, Mark, would you say that your success is due to the positive business climate currently in the country?" "Oh, Arthur, I wouldn't know anything about that. I've always been a committed revolutionary Marxist, and my success is just another example of the last decadent stages of bankrupt capitalism." "Wha — do you — I mean, surely you don't deny that hard work played a major part in your success— " "No, actually I have a talent for scamming other people to do the dirty work for me." "But you must have had a business plan— " 157

"No, actually, I smoked a ton of dope and just went for it."

The interview was never aired.

On The Shirley Show, a daytime talkfest, I was part of a panel discussion on "offensive humor." When I defended Sam Kinison and Andrew "Dice" Clay, a lady panelist from the Mayor of Toronto's office denounced me, saying my act was racist and sexist. Sensing correctly that this dry and brittle woman would never go near a nightclub, I asked, "And when did you last catch my act?" "Well, ummm... I've never actually seen it... but I've heard— " I went in for the kill. "Judging without having the experience yourself... why, that's... Prejudice." I laughed and the audience whooped and applauded. "Anytime you want some tickets," I continued, "just let me know." This only made her angrier. "I WOULDN'T CROSS THE STREET TO SAVE YOUR LIFE!" she screamed. "Well," I said, flicking a piece of lint off my cashmere jacket, "I guess that rules out a blowjob." The exchange was never aired.

On the first Yuk-Yuk's TV series, in 1991, I appeared in a sketch called "Shooting the Prime Minister." At first, the sketch seemed harmless — a guide to photographing then'RM. Brian Mulroney. But as the sketch progressed, as I was revealed to be on a rooftop wearing a balaclava, 158

it was clear that I might be illustrating the best way to assasinate him. ("Get him clear in your sight... now, squeeze out a shot.") It was aired, but hosts of call-in shows all over the country demanded the series be canceled on account of my bit of treason. As usual, they had misjudged the mood of the country. "Mulroney should be shot!" was the general consensus of the callers, and the controversy died there, except for the tax audits and antitrust investigations I coincidentally had to endure just afterward. But, hey, what do you expect? It's television.

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really must start taking better care of my pornography collection. Frankly, it's a mess. I've got the lesbian videos mixed in with the anals, the bondage stuff is all out of order and my VCR ate my copy of Candy Stripers— the rare, uncut version with the fisting scene. Some people are disgusted by pornography, but I think that sex between two people who don't love each other is the most natural thing in the world. To admit that you use, or actually enjoy, pornography, is to enter a Gulag of social isolation. Pornography means masturbation, and masturbation implies loneliness. Some women claim that pornography is evil because it oppresses women, which it may do, but so do advertising, office jobs, and motherhood. I think the real reason many women are so opposed to pornography is that it helps gives men the option of aloneness. Pornography is asocial, quite literally, and this threatens the female agenda of child-bearing and monogamy. When feminists criticize pornography because they 163

think it will "lead" to rape and violence against women, I wonder if they've ever watched any porn videos. The fantasy is never about rape; on the contrary, the fantasy is invariably about the woman who initiates sex. These movies celebrate women who are in control of their sex drives and are the aggressors; women who crave fast and easy sex; women who act like... men. Pornography does not lead to rape. It leads to a mercifully reduced social life, less useless dating and a healthier prostate. I know what I'm talking about. I've liked porn from a very early age. After I cut my masturbatory teeth on American Bandstand, I would watch the bad European spy movies the CBC would run late on Friday nights. The plots were ludicrous, the acting worse, but there were always at least two seduction scenes involving women named Greta or Inga. My parents would be fast asleep, but I'd be downstairs on the couch, furiously rubbing my preteen gonads into the upholstery. Let's hear it for the public broadcaster! Over the decades I've watched hundreds of videos and looked at tons of magazines. I'm a bit of a collector and I frequently loan out the best stuff to dozens of friends, especially old girlfriends, which keeps a sexual link between us. Everyone agrees I have excellent taste in orgasm software, which is what pornography is all about. You might say I'm trying to put the sewer back in the word connoisseur. Yes, I must confess, when it comes to cum, I'm a bit of a snob. People sneer at porn stars, but I revere them. To me they're true athletes, literally risking their lives in unusual feats of physical grace, power and stamina. In the near future, when viruses will make sex all but impossible, 164

pornography will cross over to the near mainstream and porn actors will be given the same respect — even awe — that, say, champion kickboxers enjoy. As the line blurs between "respectable" and erotic entertainment, courses in the semiotics of porn will be taught in universities, leading to a thousand doctoral theses with titles like "Seymore Butts's debt to John Grierson" and "Henri Pachard: the toilet as altar."1 Small and then large corporations will embrace the marketing bonanza of a focused male demographic and pay big money to see their products and logos splashed — I mean displayed — all over the porn screen. Even niche markets will be exploited, as we see foot fetishists courted by Nike, orgiasts wooed to Holiday Inn — and, though kiddie porn may be illegal, a can of Coke2 may be placed discreetly in the shot where the moppet gets it up the keister. Actually, I do worry about the kids when it comes to porn — the kids of porn stars, that is. "Your mommy sucks cocks!" Johnny will one day hear at recess. "She does not!!!" he will protest. "Yeah, well, watch this tape!!!" And Johnny will take home the tape and pop it into the VCR, creating Oedipal problems guaranteed to provide Dr. Bernstein with appointments for years to come.

1. Pornographic eros has crept into the mainstream in countless ways, the recent eroticization of the navel via piercing is a subconscious reference to a generation raised seeing staples in their centerfolds. 2. Sometimes actual products can be seen in amateur porn productions. The effect of seeing a clothing logo or well-known brand of corn flakes in this context is jarring, even... obscene. 165

Maybe it isn't even the porn I like, but the tech itself. I wonder if the naked female images aren't just a Trojan horse designed to create an erotic bond between humans and television. After watching all these pornvids, I have begun to eroticize the TV itself-, the girls are now beside the point. The quality of the TV image has become incredibly important to me — I get very upset when traveling if I find that the hotel TVs have no color control, leaving me no choice when I pop in the tape but to watch orange people, fucking. This ruins it for me, so on the road I resort to the more primitive technology of magazines. I grew up with these mags and feel sorry for today's youngsters who only know pornography through videos. A still image leaves room for individual interpretation and fantasy; a video forces the director's vision upon us. Sometimes, though, availability will dictate that I go even further down the sextech scale, in the following descending order: softcore, lingerie catalogues, fashion magazines, 8by-10's of actresses,3 Kotex boxes and, if I'm really desperate, the Sealy Posturepedic billboard at the corner of Bathurst and Sultana. I don't care for most sex aids, especially when used without a partner. I recently tried a 3-D video system, but the coordination of goggles, lubricant and the Plastic! Lifelike! Vagina!4 was too complicated for me to enjoy. Anyway, it gave me a headache. More promising are the Virtual I — glasses that simulate an eighty-foot screen 3.1 don't think I'm spilling the beans by revealing the 8-by-10 trick. It is a well-known fact that casting directors have been cutting the mouths out of actors' headshots, and sticking their dicks in the holes to masturbate. It is one of the reasons I stopped going to auditions. 4. The rubber vagina I bought wound up in the trash can. One night I looked down at the limbless torso I was fucking and I felt like Jeffrey Dahmer. 166

directly in front of you. Six weeks ago I walked into Jenna Jameson's cunt. I have not been seen or heard from since. Of course, the Internet is changing the way we look at pornography, but I think it's highly overrated. The first problem is you get Vaseline all over the mouse. And if that's not bad enough, the 'Net unfairly favors the ambidextrous. Point. Click. Stroke. Wank. Who can coordinate? Sure, there's content you can't find at your local Adults Only Video, but just try downloading one of those pissing films you find on the 'Net. The image is crappy, it uses up most of your memory, it takes forever. A lot has been said in favor of chat groups, but I must dissent. I'm interested in fast women, not fast typists. And if you really think trolling newsgroups like alt.sex.,binariesllolital hardcore!snuffff will reveal any forbidden treasures, let me give you the RCMP's direct line just to save time. The authorities are very concerned about kiddie porn on the 'Net, as well they should be. I stumbled onto some, and I was shocked — shocked — to see so many photos of so many ugly rec rooms.5 Of course kiddie porn is awful. Those kids are exploited, underpaid, they get no residuals and they're pretty much pushed out of the business by the time they hit puberty, victims of a cold-hearted, pandemic ageism. I spoke of this problem with a friend of mine, a highranking official with the NDP and he just shook his head sagely and said, "Union. They need to be unionized." And I can just see it now: The International Brotherhood of 5. The Starr Report, of course, showed how intertwined the news, the Internet and pornography have become. And I remember that during the summer of the Bernardo trial, with the atrocities in the news daily, not even the hookers would wear pigtails. 167

Lolitas. Bargaining for shorter hours and smaller cocks. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hardcore, but if you put the speculum in me on camera, you have to take me to Disneyland. It's in the agreement, look it up." I don't want to consider how terrible this would all be, how the price structure would collapse, how many jobs would be lost to third-world labor, etc. No, these kids don't need a union. These kids need agents. Tougher, yes, but sometimes you have to just trust the free market.

A girlfriend, a sensitive type, once begged me to show her some porn. I warned her she wouldn't like it, but she insisted. She watched, shocked, and then ran into the bathroom and hurled. We didn't have sex for six weeks. Another girlfriend fell asleep during her initiation, while watching The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue — a classic, no less. All men's sexuality is fetishistic, but this may not be as true for women. Women are turned on by narrative, by the tactile; men can be seduced by the simple structure of flesh itself. Women want a story, or a touch. For men, an innovative camera angle may be enough, if not a red silk scarf or a white cotton sock. And porn is polygamous by nature, otherwise men would be content with just one great tape. I've taken this to the logical, if unfortunate, conclusion. Now when I watch a porn video, I find myself fantasizing about other porn videos, a victim of rampant unchecked postmodernism. My outspoken support of pornography has gotten me into a lot of trouble and cost me at least one good job. A few years ago, I landed the nightshift at the leading phone-in radio talk show in Toronto. After about twentyfive shows, mostly themed, I decided to do a show on 168

pornography — a three-hour extravaganza which lined up people on both sides of the issue and engendered lively discussion and a lot of interesting calls. But when I talked about my own experiences with the subject, things got too hot for the puritans who owned the station. "What if," I mused, "tonight, after work, I go home and have a beer and start feeling that familiar yet mysterious twinge between my thighs? It's after 3 A.M. there's no one to call, I've got the itch, but I'm too tired to think up my own fantasies. I need help." I continued: "But in my closet there's a fresh new video, still in the box, full of erotic possibility, which a group of friendly and all-too-willing sex addicts in Canoga Park, California, have designed for my enjoyment. Who does it hurt if I pop in the tape and rub myself till my eyes cross and my toes curl? Who does it hurt?" I was on a roll. "And you know what ladies and gentlemen? That's exactly what I intend to do as soon as I get home. I'm in the mood for self-love... " I was fired the next day. Told I was sick and creepy. That I'd never work for them again. My only regret was that I forgot my own code and neglected to turn my dismissal into a media opportunity. My advisors pressured me to avoid the controversy because in reality they too were embarrassed by the issue and just wanted to wish it away. Porn embarasses everybody, which is another reason I like it. Religious types hate and fear pornography, as well they should. Pornography is Genesis told from the point of view of the snake. But I like and approve of the implicit democracy and equality in porn. Every social encounter, every single human interaction, will result in sex. Man and woman, black and white, rich and poor, pizza delivery boy 169

and heiress, all opposites will be fused and redeemed as we shed our social selves and embrace the animal within. The truth is, I'd love to make a porno movie. I'd like to do a XXX version of JFK. I'd call it J. Fucking K., and it would be about a fictional president's sex life in the early '60s. The film's highlights would include a JFK-Marilyn Monroe butt-bang; LB] getting his first presidential blowjob from a stewardess aboard Air Force One ("Hey, y'know, this job ain't so bad..."); Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby's double penetration of a sexy Cubana in the book depository tower; and a previously frigid Jackie strapping one on and giving her slain hubby a wicked brainfuck in the motorcade limo, shot camcorder-style by Abe Zapruder — played, I hope, by John "Buttman" Stagliano. There's another strong reason I adore pornography, one that has nothing to do with its ecstatic benefits. I like it as a reminder of what show business is truly all about. Although the adult entertainment industry financially outperforms mainstream show business, the two worlds are kept absolutely separate. When a porn star crosses over to "real" showbiz, it is such a rare event as to be newsworthy, as in the case of Traci Lords or Ginger Lynn Allen. This has created a porno world that is an exact mirror image of the "respectable" world of mainstream show business. The porno world has its own star system, pitch meetings, casting calls, merciless reviewers, scandals, awards shows, box office grosses and so on. It's an hilarious running commentary on "respectable" show business, where the participants only get screwed ooffcamera. Most people in "legitimate" media affect a marked disdain for the "whores" involved in these films because, as we all know, writers, actors, agents and 170

producers in Hollywood never prostitute themselves for fame or fortune. Thus marginalized, the pornography industry has turned into a satiric force of some note, consistently bringing a welcome degradation to Hollywood puffery. Not more than a few months after the unexplainable success of Forrest Gump, the porn industry was flooding the market with parodies such as Forrest Hump, Foreskin Gump, and Forrest Rump. (A coprophiliac version, Forrest Dump, is said to exist, but I've never seen it. "Shit happens?") Occasionally this satire becomes overtly political, in the tradition of writing by Terry Southern or Paul Krassner, but alas, not often enough. Nevertheless, the constant and unrelenting disrespect leveled at Hollywood "product" and its sentimentality and mediocrity is a welcome and rare transgressive treat. On some level, pornography is always funny. When I see it in the stores, I can't help but laugh. The hysterical and operatic presentation of what is the simplest and basest of human instincts just makes me howl. And so much to choose from — each tiny variation in the sexual cornucopia becomes a microniche market. Never mind Leg Show magazine; have you seen the bimonthly Big Toe? Or its sister publication, Clippings, the magazine for the toenail enthusiast? I laughed hardest in a porn store in New York City when I found the video The Best of Shitlickers. Its existence begged many questions for those with a Talmudic bent of mind. If this was the best of the series, how many videos were actually produced? And what aesthetic criteria were used to determine what constituted greatness? And just who were the judges, anyway? A panel of experts with years in the field? Youthful consumers as 171

yet unjaded with the passionless and generic entries? Perhaps a readers' poll was conducted, in the great democratic spirit of America. The box cover was fascinating and hilarious. Like so many other, more "normal," omnibus videos, there were five ovals containing stills from the five segments on the tape. But wait — one still, in the center of the box, was larger, more prominent, than the others. The best of the best, so to speak. It showed a close-up of a man's rump, with a long brown turd squeezed out, just about to graze the upturned tongue of the blonde actress below him. She was looking directly at the camera, as if to say either, "I know this is a piece of rubber, and you know this is just a piece of rubber, but isn't it great we can all pretend?" or, 'This turd is real and I am a crackhead and am so far gone I don't even have a gram of shame left." I'm not sure which. In any case, this tableau raised more questions. Did the young actress win this honor on her own merits, or did she somehow influence the voting procedures? And now that she's obviously earned the respect of everyone in the shitlicking industry, would her price rise accordingly? Would she become more difficult to work with, more demanding, with a rider in her contract that might include Metamucil and Listerine? The same store had a copy of the rare European masterpiece, Punished for Sucking the Dog, which manages to combine incest, bestiality and S/M, showing great ambition on the filmmaker's part. He's probably riding high on his laurels somewhere in Denmark, in major demand, going to all the best parties — at least until some young buck comes along and eclipses his work with Punished for Sucking the Dead Dog. But that's showbiz, folks. Lately, the big trend is for any porn that includes the 172

word "anal," which suggests that success in sex is much like the real estate business: location, location and location. You can put the word "anal" in front of anything and it will sell: Anal Intruder, Anal Nurses, Anal Logical Positivists. Sometimes, I bring a thick black magic marker to the pornshop and surreptitiously scrawl a "B" before each title, to give it an extra satirical spin: Banal Intruder, Banal Nurses, and my favorites, Banal Generation and Banal Aristocrats.6 Recently I saw an ad for a series called Lactamania, which features women who can squirt milk from their breasts. This doesn't turn me on — I must have been bottle-fed. But what struck me about the ad was that the first tape was spelled Lacta-mania, while the sequels were spelled Lacto-mania. What made them change it? Had some other porn entrepreneur tied up the copyright to Lacta-mania7. Did some bright young marketing student prove "Lacto" would sell more units than "Lacta"? Was there a change in management? More interestingly, did they simply make a mistake on the box for the sequel and then continue the series hoping no one would notice? Have they no respect for their audience's intelligence? Certainly, "Lacta" makes more sense; women lactate, they don't "lactote." Yet "o-mania" is the usual suffix used to denote excess. Most linguists agree that root words take preferences over suffixes in new word formations, so maybe this is the sign of a major cultural shift. Or maybe I have too much free time.

6. Another new trend in porn is mother/daughter teams, proving that the Appalachian doesn't fall far from the tree. 173

Pornography can also be utilized for creative practical jokes, due to its public disapproval. When I fly, I try to buy a Hustler magazine and a pack of gum before take-off. Then I excise the centerfold from the magazine and withdraw the chewed gum from my mouth, using it to carefully affix the centerfold to the back of the seat in front of me. Then I turn on my microcasette recorder and document the reactions from the stewardesses and other cabin members. When I get to my hotel, I cut out the vaginas from the rest of the magazine and distribute them randomly throughout the Gideon Bible. A few years ago, I was in Montreal working at the Just for Laughs festival. My friend Zack helped me with my performance there, so I wanted to give him a little thank you gift Instead I gave him a present he'd never forget: I went to a porn shop in East Montreal and found a ridiculous video titled Hitler Sucks, complete with a box cover showing porn stars in Nazi uniforms and the title screaming from the box in huge type. I wrapped it carefully in aluminum foil and put it in my carry-on bag. As we were waiting in line for security clearance, I pulled the "gift" out of my bag and handed it to my buddy. "Here," I said, "Just a little something for the extra help. Open it on the plane." He thanked me and, not thinking, put it in his carry-on bag. I went through first. Then my friend put his bag through the X-ray machine, which couldn't scan my "gift." "What's in the box?" asked the security guard. "It's —" He didn't know, and I was now deliberately out of earshot. They started ripping through all the tinfoil, in plain view of the dozens of impatient passengers waiting in line. When the wrapping was off, everyone could see the 174

offending video, my pal was crimson, and I was laughing maniacally on the other side of the checkpoint. The video, incidentally, was predictably terrible.

So with all this interest in the subject, I jumped at the chance to fly to Las Vegas to attend the 1998 Adult Video News Awards ceremony, the "Oscars of Porn" memorialized in the film Boogie Nights. I met my friend Zack there for a surreal holiday I'll never forget. First, I needed an identity — no one in porn uses their real name. So I went to the printer and had a hundred business cards to hand out during the convention. They read: ONTARIO PORNOGRAPHY CORPORATION MIKE HARRIS PRESIDENT The afternoon of the gala, I went the Sands Expo, for the adult software display. There was a huge lineup to get in, and after a twenty-minute wait, I entered the convention hall. As far as the eye could see, there were booths set up by production companies to hawk their product, usually staffed by porn stars halfheartedly wiggling their asses and signing autographs on demand. Off-screen the girls aren't nearly as attractive — I was looking at at a sea of bad skin and fake tits. I spotted a new porn starlet who could use a better manager — her name tag read "Sonny Boner," and it had only been one day since Sonny Bono's fatal skiing accident. I noticed a booth covered with stills from a foot fetish company — dozens of photos of female feet crammed whole into men's 175

open mouths. A sign above the booth read: We Support the Free Speech Coalition. Or at least, in this case, the freedom to mumble. The big night: Zack and I put on our tuxes and joined 3,000 industry heavies in celebration of the five-billiondollar-a-year take. We were seated way, way back at Table 199, next to a distributor from Mississippi and his date, who looked relatively chaste in a red pantsuit, and displaying moderate cleavage. I asked her what she did. "I'm a dancer," she answered and then spent the rest of the evening answering calls on her Star Microtac, which led me to assume she was a pretty good dancer. I asked a bearded man his line of work. "Ah'm a buildin' contractor from Dallas, Texas." "Ummm, I see, but what's your connection with this event?" Proudly: "And ah'm also the president of the Danyel Cheeks Fan Club!!!" The room was filled with combinations of couples not usually found in nature. The girls were much more attractive in ballroom lighting; the most beautiful woman in the room was a sultry Hungarian squired by a greasy biker who looked like a pre-Hazelden David Crosby. In general, the European starlets were classier and prettier than their American counterparts, which proves just how bad the economy is in Eastern Europe.7 There were a lot of weird gowns that looked like they'd been purchased in the Caesar's Palace tuck shop. Nothing fit, of course, because designers usually don't create for 77DD chests. The awards show started with a video retrospective 7. I don't care for European porno because I can't tell what the girl is saying. Is it "Ass-fuck my stinky German shithole" or "I must remember to pick up my drycleaning?" Who can tell? 176

shown on the giant screens placed around the ballroom. The tribute to deceased porn stars was marked by clips of facial cumshots featuring the dead performers. Around the room you could hear the audience murmur their sorrows at the passing of such great talent. The awards show was hosted by the fine comedian Robert Schimmel, but the best comedy was inadvertent. "I — sniffff — loved that gangbang!" tearfully exclaimed the newly crowned Starlet of the Year, Stephanie Swift. Other winners thanked their parents or God for their victories in Best Oral Video or Best Double Penetration Scene. Some were articulate in their thanks, but most were bimbos who couldn't read from a scrap of paper. They appeared to be stoned. God, I hope they were stoned. The entertainment portions of the show were funnier than the outfits. The show opened with a song-and-dance number, except no one could sing and no one could dance. Top-heavy platinum blondes tripped over each other in unwitting Chaplinesque homage. Later, a top porn star did a solo turn with a rock number she'd written herself. She couldn't sing a note. Hey, baby, I thought, don't quit your blow job. Gold-braided waiters served dessert and coffee as Al Goldstein from Screw magazine delivered a hilarious, ribald speech all about "cocks" and "cunts." More tiramisu, sir? Just before the Best Picture award was presented, two cute porn cupcakes launched into the final group production number. "Calling all girls," they sang. "Calling all sexy girls." It was a maddeningly catchy song, better than it should have been, and I couldn't get it out of my head for days. After the gala I had a photo op with Al Goldstein. "If you ever need to know how to lick a clit, gimme a call," he offered. 177

"Why?" I shot back. "You got one?" He didn't laugh. I flew back to Los Angeles and, seeking balance, immediately went to the movie Kundun, about the Dalai Lama, but I kept confusing the Buddhist monks with the Vegas porn stars in my head: "Calling all monks... Calling all sexy monks... " Cheesy as the awards show may have been, at least the participants had spirit, which is more than you can say about the cadavers at the Geminis or the Genies. I felt more at home at the porn awards, in fact, than I ever have at any Canadian awards show, and not just because I prefer Buttbangers 8 to Rita and Friends. It's because I recognize that stand-up comedy's outlaw relationship to mainstream Canadian culture is similar to pom's relationship to mainstream Hollywood culture — refreshingly vulgar, honest and direct. There was only one disappointment after all: in spite of the sexed-up nature of the evening, it wasn't the turnon I'd hoped for. Half-naked sexpots were everywhere, but their sexuality was detached, abstracted, businesslike, and neither Zach nor I experienced even a twinge of desire. Then, about four months later, a video documentary of the event was released. I brought it home, popped it into the VCR and jerked off like a mad monkey, three times in a row.

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B iJelieve it or not, people always tell me I should consider a career in politics. Hah! I can't imagine a more hideous idea. I live, not by any ideology, but by the Four Pillars of Apathy: hide, avoid, shrug, mock. I have no political affiliations — there's nothing about my lifestyle that's "conservative," but I don't like the idea of bigger government, either. I suppose you could say I'm a Warhol Republican: I'm pro-business and pro-orgy. And why would anyone want to serve humanity, anyway? "Humanity" made a star of Jerry Springer and a hit of the Macarena. I've found, sadly, that most people are disloyal numbnuts who aren't worth the DNA they're imprinted on — so you can imagine my feelings of community obligation are limited to the few hundred souls I really care about. But in these days of mob rule and bullshit populism, even justifiable snobbery is considered heretical. Anyone can reject authority — in fact, it's mandatory in our culture — but to reject your peers, well, that's really asking for trouble. 181

Democracy provides us only the illusion of choice, like the dozens of brands of vanilla ice cream in our supermarket's freezer. Like television, consensus only homogenizes the truth until it turns runny and tasteless. Anything most people can agree on usually isn't anything worth agreeing about. I almost never vote. The differences between candidates are marginal, unless you're very poor, very rich or fiercely patriotic, and I am none of these. I suppose I should be more of a nationalist,1 but once you're on the Internet, nationhood seems so twentieth-century. Franchising, MTV, free trade: all conspire to homogenize the differences between cultures. Even culture itself, once it's been fed into the Cuisinart of the global marketplace, no longer corresponds to a particular place. Put on some new music, and often you won't be able to tell its country, let alone city, of origin. The power of nations is dripping away, replaced by consumer loyalties. I can't wait for the day this transformation is complete. You should be able to become a worldwide citizen of any corporation you choose, pledge allegiance to it, fight for it, pay taxes to it and be paid in merchandise which you can use to barter with citizens of other companies. If we're all going to be part of the New World Order, at least let's get in on the deal. Nevertheless, each day I wake up and give thanks that I live in the third- or fourth-greatest country in the world. I'm not exactly sure which country would earn first place — maybe Holland or New Zealand — but Canada usually rates an honorable mention from most critics, and that's good enough for me. In fact, "good enough for me" could 1. I am an economic nationalist. Ninety-five percent of the comics I hire are Canadian. 182

be Canada's national motto, replacing "from sea to shining sea," which is vague and could easily apply to Costa Rica or Malta. You can't accuse this country of excessive vision. Joe Clark will be his party's standard bearer as we rush into the excitement of the new millennium. Yes! Bold New Ideas For The Future! Canada! Home of the Workhorse! Let's face it, if The Great Gatsby had been written in Canada, the light at the end of Daisy's dock would have been yellow, for caution. Not that the U.S.A. is any better. There are parts of that country that soar (Santa Fe, the Upper West Side, Miss November's bedroom) but places like Arkansas and the editorial offices of the National Enquirer really bring down the national average. Still, you can't be too cocky about Americans. They have a complex and vibrant attitude towards life, and we can learn a lot from them. As my friend Jerry and I agreed over dinner one night in Palm Springs, at a steakhouse where the meal hung over the plate, "One thing you have to give Americans credit for, they have a real respect for quantity." Lately I've come to the conclusion that Canada would be a better country if it were a bit more like the U.S., and that America would be better if it could be more like Canada. We could develop some healthy aggression, and they could learn to use a little restraint. I think baseball provides the ultimate metaphor for the two countries. One of the key tenets of baseball, the American national pastime, is that the tie goes to the runner. In other words, all other things being equal, action, any action, wins out. That's as potent a metaphor for a revolutionary capitalist society as you'll ever find. If baseball were a Canadian sport, the tie would go to the baseman, who would then •

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call a Royal Commission on the dispute, and it would linger there in debate while Americans moved in and bought the stadium, the players and the merchandising rights. No wonder Quebec wants to leave. It wants to make its own merchandising deals. Well, maybe they should leave. The province does have its charms — certainly Montreal is the only city in Canada where you could set a great love story. You couldn't do it in, say, Sudbury: "...the Sudbury moon shone brightly as Gord and Peggy met at midnight underneath the Big Nickel..." But I've never understood the big deal about French culture. Is it really worth saving? When I was a child, I was made to behave at the dinner table with the warning, "Quiet, or we'll send you to France." Later, in my early twenties, I made a number of trips there to find out if the warning was justified, and it was. Paris, the city of love, was full of hate, especially towards outsiders; everyone wore a haughty, dyspeptic scowl and had escargot bits stuck in their teeth. Worse, no one would admit that the glory days of French culture were long gone. The art scene had moved to New York, fashion to Milan, affordable wines were better in California, and their much-vaunted cuisine was just a stew of cholesterol. I've never cared for French food — it's all sauce. A chef once told me that those legendary French sauces were developed to hide the taste of meat that had gone rancid through lack of sanitation. The metaphor is all yours to construct. Now the Quebecers want their own country, and have dragged all Canadians into this endless, empty debate. Politics may not be my beat, but I do know this: the world's economy is becoming progressively more global, and trade is being conducted in fewer languages. And French isn't one of them. If Quebec separates and allies 184

itself with its linguistic brethren, the new country will be reduced to exporting poutine to Guadeloupe. But I support Quebec's right to self-determination. Because soon after they separate, they'll be so broke that a canny investor will be able to pick up their assets at panicinduced, fire-sale prices — ten cents on the dollar , tops. My solution to the constitutional crisis is swift and simple: everybody learns Italian immediately. If we're going to be bilingual, let's at least pick a country we can enjoy. The best clothes, the best food, the best cars. Ciao, bellal These are not ideas that make me popular at the Glendon College alumni reunions.2 I also notice that my ideas win me fewer invitations to dinner parties. I'm a picky eater so I don't really care, and all that nauseating blather would ruin my appetite anyway, so I really have nothing to lose. I just have to espouse my contrarian positions, if only to break the monotony. These are just a few of the ideas I have advocated between the beef Wellington and the cherries jubilee: Abortion. When everyone agreed that abortion should remain legal, I had to take it further. I suggested it shouldn't only be a woman's right to choose, it should also be the man's as well. If a human being is an equal partnership between sperm and egg, I reasoned, then man and woman should each have veto power over new life. Also, it should be easy, really easy to get abortions: streetcorner kiosks set up like Fotomats would do the trick. Better yet, since teen pregnancy is such an issue, why not 2. My old college, a bilingual institution. I spent long years in language labs repeating French phrases until my brain was the consistency of brie. The only thing I learned was how to be boring in a second language. 185

teach the abortionist's craft in high school instead of shop or auto repair? That way, Johnny can help out his sweetheart when he knocks her up. Every time I walk past these abortion protesters they shove these fetus Polaroids at me. "Look," they say. "Hands! Feet! A sort-efface! How could you hurt such a thing?" But to me, they don't look human at all. When I look at those squishy little curled-up bionoids, all I think about is some cocktail sauce and a small-pronged fork. And speaking of which, why do we throw away such a perfectly good nutritional resource as the terminated fetus? It's permissible in some societies to eat the afterbirth — why not the pre-birth7. Are we going to get aggressive on world hunger or not? And what about the business applications here? Are you listening, Burger King? Are you listening, McDonald's? Could anything be worse than the McRib? Capital punishment. It's wrong for the state to take a life. Two wrongs don't make a right. What if the prisoner really is innocent? I agree. I've always been committed to the principle of non-violence. I say, make capital punishment illegal, but replace it with slavery. There's never been a successful empire created without a cheap labor pool, and how else can we compete with Third World nations whose workforces get paid three cents a day? It's far more humane, I would venture, to deprive an individual of his basic human rights than to fry him up like a smelt on a camping trip. Gay rights. Everyone knows how pro-gay I can be, but sometimes knee-jerk approval gets pretty boring. When one gay couple at a dinner told the story of how they were 186

refused spousal benefits, the whole table clucked in unison. To everyone's shock, I said I didn't think they should get their spousal benefits. Because, I advanced, any spousal benefits, heterosexual or homosexual, discriminate against my rights as a single person. Why should I have to subsidize anyone, of any sexual orientation, because of their need for a roommate? Squeegee kids. Leave 'em alone. They charge a buck to clean your whole windshield. Have you any idea what you can get for a twenty? These kids represent great value. The CBC. Everyone endlessly debates the fate of the CBC, and with good reason — its programming, with a few notable exceptions, is timid, chintzy and focused towards an audience made up of the poor, the elderly or people living in rural areas. I've always thought the ultimate CBC series would be about a family of fiddlers in Cape Breton Island who practice child abuse on skates. Whoops — I've just given them their next hit. But I wouldn't dismantle the CBC, as some freemarketers would. I'd beam it into prisons, to numb the volatile population there. Taxes. First, raise them. That's right. I want my taxes to go up, because right now the premier of Ontario has instituted a massive tax cut for the middle class, and I've benefitted to the tune of about twenty bucks a week. The result: the streets are full of desperate homeless people, and I have enough to maybe buy a new shirt at the end of the year. Progress? I don't think so. Second, soak the rich. The NDP wants to do that, but the NDP thinks that anybody making a hundred thousand 187

dollars is wealthy. Have they ever tried to live in Toronto? No, I'd ream the people at the very top of the pyramid, leaving those who make a lousy half-mil a year to enjoy their hard-earned lifestyle. Street crime. I've found a way to walk around the seedier parts of the city in total safety, and I like to share it at social functions. I've taken a tiny portable radio and welded a small aerial to it, making it look like some kind of CIA gadget. I put on my good black suit and shades, and whenever I'm about to be attacked by thugs, I pull out the unit, open the aerial, turn it to the pretuned static, and coldly intone, "Sector 9. Begin civilian sweep. All units, Sector 9." The thugs never fail to scatter to prey on victims who don't seem to be part of a fascist plot to incarcerate troublesome citizens without trial. Prostitution. If more women knew how to fuck properly, I once informed the premier and his horrified guests, prostitution would be largely eliminated. Men's magazines, I went on, should be allowed to print prices and availabilities of all their models. In fact, since every woman has her price, those prices should be listed wherever sexy models are displayed: lingerie catalogues, rock videos, even a discreet price tag hanging from a waitress's uniform. The price doesn't even have to be cash; it could represent the potential sex partner's favorite trade — i.e. vacations, walks along the beach, a house and kids, meaningful conversation. Heidi Fleiss is sent to jail, like some criminal. Heidi Fleiss does not belong in jail. Heidi Fleiss should be teaching marketing at Harvard. The homeless. Here's a ploy to guarantee you never get 188

invited back for supper. At any gathering, someone will whine about the homeless. These are the same people who walk past those with outstretched hands every day. What to do about the homeless? What to DO about the homeless? What to do about the homeless? I sit silently through this banal litany, and then quietly utter one word — landfill — then return to my veal chop. AIDS. A slow, painful death is nothing to joke about. And the fact that AIDS has killed the sexual revolution, too, makes it particularly galling. But when I hear that the disease is killing "the most talented" of our citizens, I wince. Every year Entertainment Weekly runs a list of AIDS deaths in show business, and you know what? By and large, they're B-list talents. Ray Sharkey? Brad Davis? Liberace? Rock Hudson?3 What kind of mammoth cultural loss is this? Sometimes you can't be sure if AIDS is a virus or a particularly astute critic. Terrorism. I should probably be afraid of terrorists, I told a meeting of the Canadian Peace Council, but I'm not because... they're Arabs. And they'll always get caught because they always... look like Arabs!!! If these terrorists really wanted to pass incognito — with, say, suits that fit, some hair dye, mogen davidss around their necks — then I might worry. "What does worry me, though, is when terrorism and AIDS get together — Shiite Suicide Fuckers, kamikaze Arab chicks who inject themselves with the virus and come over here and screw us to death... " I continued, as I was violently ejected from the Peace Council. You may think I can afford to be so flip because I live 3. The late, great Peter Allen is an exception to this rule. 189

in a world of relative privilege, and maybe that's true. But I've noticed that, when I meet someone of real privilege, they're always the most concerned about the future of the world because they have the most to protect. The way I see it, though, Western civilization is in an irredeemable, irrecoupable, downward Spenglerian slide, and nothing will ever reverse our fortunes. Countries are dying, replaced with the New Medievalism of multinational fiefdoms. The quality of life is deteriorating rapidly for rich and poor alike; privilege won't mean much when we're all wearing gas masks and having cybersex to avoid this week's plague. Cancer stalks us all, the desperate attempt of our DNA to adapt to an already mutated world. I don't know what to think: I've already partied like it's 1999, and I don't know what to do next.

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I1 was feeling empty, lost, without a compass; the world seemed a hostile place filled with evil temptation; I had no idea what was right and what was wrong. Then, suddenly, a shaft of bright light appeared to me, and its wisdom was unmistakable: I had found atheism. Some may deride my lack of faith, but I feel sorry for those who can't take godlessness into their hearts. I don't proselytize, but when such a glorious emptiness fills your soul it's only natural to want to share it. I was brought up with only a vague skepticism, but now that I am born again I can fully, totally, embrace the wonder of a universe free from an all-powerful, all-loving deity. Unfortunately, rampant spirituality is everywhere these days. Sometimes I'll be standing on a street corner and some loser in a bad suit will be raving about the glories of the Lord. In the interests of equal time, I too begin to shout, "Don't listen to this guy! He's full of shit! Reject God before it's too late!!!" He waves his Bible at me. I whip out my wallet, thick with charge cards, and 193

give out 2-for-l passes to my nightclub. A large crowd gathers around me. I have won more converts. The man selling religion has the right to his beliefs, no matter how odious they may be. I even believe prayer should be allowed in schools, but so should heckling. I used to get kicked out of Hebrew school all the time for farting during opening prayer. Now, whenever Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door, I belch the names of the Devil at them in rapid succession, "SATAN! LUCIFER! BEELZE-BURRRRRP!" They flee in terror, the air reeking of cola and pizza. Nope, I don't believe in a Supreme Being, although I do very much admire The Supremes, especially their earlier work. But I consider myself more, much more, than a religious atheist. I'm a secular atheist as well. I don't believe in anything. Many religious atheists become "humanists" but the more humans I meet, the less attractive humanism becomes. What about romance? Unfortunately, I'm all too aware that the line, " ...and they lived happily ever after... " really ends, " ...until he got bowel cancer and she started to drink." Justice? O.J. walked, Rodney King was beaten, John died, Ringo lives, need I continue? It isn't easy to believe in nothing. It's hard work. "If nothing is true, everything is permitted," wrote Dostoyevsky, and let me tell you, it's a long list — I've barely worked through the B's. It's no wonder so many people find refuge in the sanctuary of faith. Still, I'm constantly amazed by all the intelligent true believers I meet: hard-headed business types who never miss a Sunday in church; clever and creative writers who call their psychics on every little decision; brilliant actresses who talk about astrology without a trace of irony; or 194

famous actors who get into Scientology, the crack cocaine of religions — Astrology! Psychics! Reincarnation! Phew! If you believe in that kind of stuff, congratulations; you've found your inner imbecile. Even alien abduction makes more sense. Established religions are no better. Christianity? Jesus gets put down. Then he rises up again. Big deal, so does everyone in Chumbawumba. Hinduism? Nope. I enjoy a good steak when I engage in theological discussions. Buddhism? Sorry, fat man, desire's the whole point of existence — or haven't you looked in the mirror lately? Judaism? As I mentioned before, I love the culture, but the whole monotheism thing is a deal breaker. "You're not going to deny the existence of God, are you?" a rabbi asked me before launching into a variety of ontological proofs. "It's not whether I believe in God," I replied, "it's whether he beleives in me." Or anybody, for that matter. Maybe he traded up, got a better deal with another universe. Better distribution. Back-end gross points. A bigger Winnebago. In any case, I can't get him on the line. In other words, life may be divine, but it's hardly Divine. I've combed the world's religions and philosophies, looking for a coherent ethical and moral system, but all I've found is lies and liars. With one exception. And that's comedy. Comedy is a perfect belief system for the contrarian, the cynic, the loner, the agnostic. It is a philosophy of constant doubt, a practice of applied skepticism. But comedy is more than the sum of its negativities. Its power of negative thinking transforms its practitioner into an 195

empowered, holy jerk. The wonderful fool who dares to toy with logic and reason is a saint in the service of a force that kicks certainty in the balls, adding mystery and cheating death in each tiny moment. With this view of comedy in mind, you can bet that my taste in humor runs to the apocalyptic, and I have endured enormous criticism throughout my career for my support of edgy, twisted and vulgar material. It's not as if I invented "sick" humor. That honor must go to the French aristocrat who, shackled to the guillotine, looked up at his executioner and asked, "Are you sure this thing is safe?" His joke redeemed him from his powerlessness, although he still got his head chopped off. His mischief was more powerful than his fear, which is why good comedy is heroic. Comedy is a battle. A battle for freedom; mental freedom, the freedom to confront the ugliest impulse in yourself, in humanity, and redeem it through the power of a joke. Jokes are like tiny rips in the social paradigm through which phony rhetoric can leak. "Comedy is not always pretty," Steve Martin used to say. Jokes can be a civilized way to express anger, at least compared to firing bullets from a bell tower into the crowd below. We talk about safe sex; why not safe rage? Most people regard comedy the way they look at nature: as a sweet, benign force, an oasis of calm; rolling gentle hills and a sweet breeze. But when I think of nature I think of destructive fury: hurricanes and floods, tornadoes and quakes. My view of comedy is no less violent, and I respect and marvel at its destructive power. So when Sam Kinison played Vancouver I was amused to see the picket signs belonging to a group calling itself "Feminists for Healthy Humor." Healthy humor? Now there's a party. What's next? You 196

might as well wish for a sober orgy. But the protest group was on to something: there is a relationship between humor and health. There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, told about the editor Norman Cousins, who was in his hospital bed, dying of cancer. In desperation, he asked to see comedy movies and, after days of viewing, he went into remission. Scientists have shown that laughing releases endorphins that can have a profound effect on the immune systems. Now many hospitals have "laugh rooms" where patients can choose from a wide variety of books and videos for their enjoyment, although I suspect that the Best of Hustler Cartoons is conspicuous in its absence. The recent Robin Williams movie Patch Adams tells the true story of the founder of the Gesundheit Institute, who wore a funny red nose to cheer up his patients. His motives were pure, I'm certain, but when I'm sick, forget the cutesy slapstick — I want a visit from Richard Belzer, who'll call my tumor "babe" and make smutty innuendos at the nurses. Even if you aren't ill, you can feel the goodness that laughter brings. Laughter works as a massage; you can feel the undulations of your diaphragm as your internal organs get a workout. But some massage goes deeper than others, and it's the deep, transformational session that interests me the most. A really good, effective massage hurts. After you step off the massage table, you feel much better, but you had to wince to get there. I think comedy works the same way. The maximum release (of laughter, of guilt, of regret) comes from the jokes that go deepest and hurt the most. And usually those jokes are centered on topics like sex, power, fear and similar lower chakra1 obsessions. Each of these chakras (solar 1. An energy center within the body. 197

plexus, heart, throat, brain, etc.), corresponds to its own color, sound and smell, so why can't each energy center have its own humor, as well as its own distinctive laugh? That's why I called my club, with naive insight, YukYuk's: because it was the particular sound released by the belly when it rolls with laughter. I'm not interested in tiny chuckles, or titters, or little guffaws; I want to provide the roar — the big, explosive laugh — and if a comedian has to embrace the vulgar or insult the fat lady in the front row, so be it.2 It's not that I'm unappreciative of more cerebral comedy — I adore Seinfeld, New Yorker cartoons, Spalding Gray, and of course, the greatest of them all, Woody Allen.3 But I think an evening in a comedy club should provide a full body-and-soul massage and leave no chakra unattended. I can't stand comedy snobs who say things like, "A good comedian doesn't have to work dirty to be funny." I think the opposite is true: a good comedian doesn't have to work clean to be funny. In fact, funny is funny, whether the subject is airline food, pet behavior or anal sex. Contrary to popular belief, I never advise comedians to talk dirty. I just take the view that strong language is a spice. If you use too much, you can't taste the food; too little, and you're at The Olive Garden. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that the biggest comedy stars to emerge from Yuk-Yuk's — Howie Mandel, Jim Carrey, Harland Williams — all have a certain robust crudeness in common. Something else they share, and I mean this as a compliment, is that they 2. In fact, Yuk-Yuk's first slogan was "Big laughs for people with big problems." We later changed it to the deadpan "More fun than shopping." 3. The Soon-Yi romance has turned a lot of people against Woody, but to me he's only more of a hero for pursuing his forbidden dreams. 198

embrace the infantile. We yammer on a lot about our inner child, forgetting that children are often disrespectful, rude, noisy and a pain in the ass. When a child is obsessed with poop, it's a long, boring day; when a grown man is similarly obsessed, it's a hundred-milliondollar box office. Regression is funny. Watching an adult male act like a seventeen-year-old boy is hilarious if only because we recognize our own unrestrained id at play. There's another reason I enjoy this kind of "politically incorrect" humor: most comedians have a target for their humor, and that target usually involves vanity. Of course, most vanities are obvious and not controversial — the vanities of the rich, the powerful, the beautiful, the wouldbe-beautiful. These are easy targets. But when comedians make fun of the poor, the weak, the minority group, the diseased — or best of all — a poor, weak, diseased minority group, the self-righteous spring into action, picketing my club or petitioning the CRTC. But they don't get it. The real joke's on them — literally. The comic's not "attacking" cripples or fat people or women. The comic is really going after bigger game: the self-righteous, who traffic in the greatest vanity of all: their smug beliefs in the perfectibility of mankind and their own self-appointed role in the process. The shock comic cuts off their self-importance at the root. "I'm a selfish, intolerant little shit," he says, "and ultimately, so are you." It may be a reductive message, but not an antidemocratic one. Sure, there are comedians who simply pander to prejudice, but I've learned that audiences are smart, at least smart enough to know the level of irony in the comic's voice. When Andrew "Dice" Clay delivers his act in a ridiculous greaser's jacket and Fonzie haircut, he's signaling the audience that his opinions are not to be 199

taken seriously. The same material delivered in a business suit, or khakis and button-down shirt, would have a more sinister feel. Just by calling himself a comedian, the performer is saying, "Look, I exaggerate, I lie, don't take what I say seriously. I am not in any way telling you how to act towards others. Enjoy the irony." Actually, if any group should be offended by "Dice" it's Italian-Americans from New Jersey. But irony aside, humor hurts. If it doesn't hurt me, it hurts you. And a good comic won't shy away from causing a little pain. When I'm approached by a customer who is offended by a joke, I look them straight in the eye and say, "Then toughen up." If you're offended by a joke, how can you exist in the real world where hatred is all around you? I think humor has a homeopathic nature: a tiny bit of poison becomes the cure itself. Comedians who have the gift of intolerance onstage are often benign narcissists offstage. In a weird twist, most "offensive" comics like Sam Kinison, "Dice" Clay, Joan Rivers, Don Rickles and Howard Stern are generous and civilized, even courtly, in real life; meanwhile, the lovable cuddly comics turn out to be the real pricks. So before you call a comedian racist or sexist for the crime of describing the world as it is rather than as it should be, consider the roots of that kind of humor. These jokes derive from the past when European city folk laughed at their country bumpkin cousins for their lack of sophistication, just as the country folk derided the city slickers for their fancy ways. "We laugh when men act like machines," wrote the Swedish philosopher Bergson, meaning that when people engage in predictable, stereotypical behavior, it's going to be funny. But most racial humor is out of date, anyway, as pop 200

culture finishes off the racial uniqueness begun by assimilation. I wonder if this is always a good thing. Race is now so touchy a topic that comedians just avoid it altogether, pretending instead that minority groups don't even exist. Is this progress? Or what about this: our most successful new programs at Yuk-Yuk's these days are our all-black and all-Jewish shows, for mostly all-black and all-Jewish audiences. Welcome back to the ghetto! I'm always suspicious of the do-gooders who want to keep race a silent topic in comedy, anyway. When I was writing for An Evening at the Imf)rot>, about a decade ago, one comic came to rehearsal with a joke that ended " .. .by a busload of Japanese tourists!!!" The censor stopped the comic. 'That's racist," he said. The comic and censor huddled, and a minute later, the comedian walked away, all smiles. I asked the censor what happened. "I told him to change the line to ' ...a busload of Samoan tourists,'" he said. "But isn't that insulting to Samoans," I asked, naively. "Yes," he replied, "but they have no lobby group." The debate wheezes on. Last year I was at a showbiz luncheon where some tweedy old Brit in a bowtie told me he wanted to throw me off the Bloor Street viaduct for sponsoring Howard Stern's radio show in Toronto. I politely informed him I was proud to play my part in replacing his worn-out Limey footlights-and-buggery aesthetic with the energy of new money and disrespect. "But," he sputtered, "he called the French ' pe eke rhe ads'!" "And just what is the proper term for a people about to choose a future that will reduce them to penury and colonialism?" I asked. "Sometimes you have to call a peckerhead a peckerhead!" 201

And that's as good of a definition of a comedian's job as I can come up with: tell the truth. The ugly truth. If you're right, people will laugh. If you're wrong, brave the shitstorm and try again. Subtlety may be irrelevant, a wasted gesture in a world long ago leached of subtlety. Rock music taught us to damn the niceties. Stern's riff was as meaty, simple and incisive as Keith Richards's guitar opening to "Satisfaction." For the past three years I've been working with Humber College to establish a comedy program designed to teach funny people to be funnier. But right off the bat, I let the students know that comedy isn't just a craft, it's a way of life, that being a comedian isn't something you do, it's something you are. If you do it right, with passion and commitment, you do it every time you order coffee in a restaurant, chat with a stranger on a bus or wait for death by lethal injection. You don't need a stage, or even an act, to be a comedian — the opportunities are in each and every moment. Never mind the paycheck, I tell them. Real comedy is more than entertainment. It's a calling, a religion, and you are one of its apostles. In many pagan cosmologies, there's a near-deity called the Trickster. He takes many forms: coyote, raven, rabbit, shaman. But in all of them, he always represents the Disorder Principle: he is a lech, a cheat, a scoundrel, yet he somehow makes the world a better place. Comedians also work at the level of the Disorder Principle: a joke is a lie that reveals a greater truth. For the comedian/trickster, moral and ethical systems are just fictions to obscure truth and inhibit play. His calling is to use the power of chaos to challenge the puritanical behavior that chokes off our life force and compromises our freedom. Sam Kinison was probably the best-known 202

trickster/comedian of recent times — a great troublemaker, always pointing out what was important in life: energy, pleasure, independence. He was a pleasure to know, and an inspiration — not just onstage, but offstage as well. Here's my favorite Kinison story. Sam had just landed a breakthrough film role that demanded he fly to rural Montana for the shoot. His agents, aware of his reputation for partying too hard to show up, sent a junior agent to his house in the Hollywood Hills the morning of the plane trip. Sam answered the door in his bathrobe and invited the freshscrubbed agent in. "Come on in. I'll just be a moment." In Montana, the producers met the plane from L.A., but Sam was nowhere to be found. They called the agency, who dispatched another agent over to Sam's house. He found Sam and the first agent in a hot tub, grinning from ear to ear, high as kites, surrounded by naked blonde mud wrestlers from the Tropicana.4

Tricksters don't have to be famous: they're all around us. Car salesmen, English teachers, cabbies, and stockbrokers are among the funniest people I know. Truly funny people are rare, but they're not always found in comedy clubs. Again, I think of my friend Zack. I still remember the afternoon we went to see Trudeau, thirty years ago. Trudeaumania was in full flush, and it was a beautiful summer day. Thousands had gathered at Nathan 4- What a welcome alternative to all the cowardly yuppie careerists who call comedy their profession these days! You can see them at comedy festivals like Aspen and Montreal handing out business cards and networking when they should be causing havoc. 203

Phillips Square to shake hands with the dynamic new leader, ourselves among them. But when Trudeau passed by our place in line, Zack scrunched up a five-dollar bill in his palm, passing it to the charismatic Prime Minister, whispering, "keep it" as Trudeau passed, stunned. I live for these sorts of gestures. I love tricks, put-ons, pranks, scams, and practical jokes. I never was able to match Zack's perfect Zen-like gesture, but I've had my share of trickster adventures. In the late seventies, Zack and I were at a cocktail bar when we noticed that the waitress was a dead ringer for Margaret Trudeau. I asked her if anyone ever remarked about the resemblance, and she replied wearily, "About a dozen times a day..." She told me she was an actress and a model just trying to make a living in this crazy town. Hmmm, I thought, and the wheels began to move. "How would you like to get some real attention?" I asked. So we devised a hoax to make the media think I was "involved" with the Prime Minister's wife. (Not too much of a stretch in those days.) Three days before the scam, my assistant called Noodles, at the time a trendy restaurant known as a Maggie T. hangout. "Mr. Breslin wants a very private table for Thursday at seven. Because of the identity of his guest, absolute privacy must be assured," my assistant haughtily instructed. "And who will his guest be?" asked the restaurant, salivating with curiosity. "That will be self-evident," said my assistant brilliantly, hanging up the phone.

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Hoax day. The lookalike spent her afternoon in hair and makeup, and when she emerged, the resemblance wasn't uncanny, it was perfect. I hired a limo, and had an actor friend pose as RCMP security, complete with dark sack suit and mirrored shades. I arrived at the restaurant early, all nervous, as I was given the best table in the place, high up in the balcony. Then the "RCMP agent" walked in and barked orders at the maitre d' about security and surveillance and demanded to see where my table was. The entire restaurant was starting to buzz. Then seemingly satisfied, the "agent" ran out to the limo and escorted "Mrs. Trudeau" into the place. The restaurant went wild. People were gasping, pointing, craning their necks in that repulsive way that happens whenever famous people are within sighting distance. Meanwhile, the actress looked fucking fantastic. She was brought to my table, we kissed deeply, and were immediately brought a very expensive bottle of champagne. "Compliments of the house," the idiot fawned, nearly bowing and scraping. Leaving nothing to chance, I had arranged for four of my friends to have dinner at the restaurant that night. About fifteen minutes after "Mrs.Trudeau's" arrival, they hit the bank of pay phones in the basement to call all the papers, TV and radio stations. And then we waited for the media onslaught. And we waited. And nothing happened, except for a dinner with exquisite service in the company of an exceptionally pretty woman. Finally, the "RCMP agent" waved to us at the door that the limo was about to leave, 205

so I paid the bill, and we walked out the door, disappointed that our plan had failed. But when we got outside... PANDEMONIUM. There must have been a thousand people on the street, reporters were everywhere, TV cameras, flashbulbs popping. I hustled my actress into the waiting limo, and we sped off laughing into the night. When I got home later that evening, I got a call from Canadian Press. "Mark, do you want to tell me what you were doing out with Margaret Trudeau this evening?" "Look," I said, holier-than-thou, "I don't want to use my personal relationships for publicity purposes." And then I hung up, assuming the media storm would erupt the next morning. Except — nothing. As luck would have it, Maggie was in New York the previous night, where paparazzi found her at Studio 54 dancing away with her lawyer. The pictures made all the papers, and rendered my stunt irrelevant.

My prank didn't quite work, but at least it didn't backfire, like my childhood telephone caper. When I was twelve I amused myself by playing practical jokes over the phone with my friend Sheldon. Sheldon was sixteen, mentally slow, and was one of a long list of dullards I would befriend and then bend to my sway. (Although Robert was my best acolyte. In Hebrew school I arranged it so that every time I tugged on my earlobe he would stand up and shriek at the class, "All the girls can suck their dicks!!!" He was so stupid he couldn't get the line right, even after dozens of times. Finally, we were 206

separated, but he continued to break into my classroom to bellow the fractured command. Eventually the line became his entire life — he would scream it anywhere, everywhere. They put him in a "special school" and I never saw him again.) Sheldon's hobby was to "shockle," a Yiddish word which means shake, but in his case it meant sitting on his front porch rocking vigorously back and forth loudly humming "Ghost Riders in The Sky." For hours. Sometimes he would stop rocking, claw his fingers into his thick black hair, and burst into "Swanee River" showing a gift for the lost art of the medley. One afternoon after school, Sheldon and I were making crank calls, when we decided to goof on a local radio promotion of the day. In this promotion, a deejay would call a randomly selected number and play a tiny sound bite of a song on the charts. Sheldon and I combed though the phone book and found a name we thought hysterical: Mrs. Mary McGillicuddy. I dialed the number, and it was answered by the voice of an elderly lady. "Is this the Mary McGillicuddy residence?" I asked in my best twelve year old basso profundo radio voice. "Oooooh, yes..." "Mary McGillicuddy, this is Mike Berlin at radio station C calling. I'm going to play you a few bars of a song on our charts. If you can guess the name of the song, you'll win $1,000! Are you ready Mary McGillicuddy?" "Ooooh, my, yes!" "Alright, Mary McGillicuddy, for $1,000, what is this song?" I passed the phone over to Sheldon, who sang a horrible chunk of "She Loves You," a song that was EVERYWHERE that year. "Alright, Mary," I said, getting intimate before the kill, "what is that song? 207

"Is it...is it..." "Take your time, Mary." "... Is it...'She Loves You'?" "'She Loves You'? 'She Loves You' is correct! You've just won ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS! What do you say to that?" "Ohhh! Ohmigod! I'm so happy, I'm...ohh...(cough) ...ohh... (choke)...ohh... (gag)..." The phone seemed to drop as I heard a variety of bodily noises and sound flurries. Then a second female voice came on the line "Who is this?" she asked. "It's Mike Berlin from radio station C . Mary's just won ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS! "This is Mrs. McGillicuddy's nurse. She's just had an attack." "Then tell her her check is IN THE MAIL!" I said, hanging up. We had a good laugh, but the next day, something was bugging me, and I called Mary McGillicuddy again. "Is this the McGillicuddy residence?" I inquired, once again Mike Berlin. But it was the nurse who answered. "Yes, but I'm sorry. Mrs. McGillicuddy passed away yesterday."

And then every once in a while, you play the trickster and it works, perfectly and with great elegance. When I was sixteen, I moved into a ritzy Jewish suburb called Forest Hill, and attended a high school there that was unlike any place I'd ever known. A week after I arrived, the prom queen flew her entire class to Jamaica for her 208

Sweet Sixteen. When they returned, a cashmere sweater was waiting for each of them. The student parking lot was full of Corvettes, Porsches and Cadillacs. The school teams always ranked dead last because nobody wanted to muss their hair. It was like Beverly Hills 90210, except it was 1968 and therefore better, a halcyon place in a palmy time. I loved the place and desperately wanted to belong. I didn't. Thinking I could solve my endemic nerdiness by increasing my exposure, I immediately threw myself into the social life of the school, and when in grade twelve I ran for school president on a campaign of "student power," a trendy idea at the time. Needless to say, my platform upset the school administration and its student leader lackeys, and although I waged a great fight, the other candidate squeaked in. I was crushed. I put so much of myself into this election there was no way I could simply accept defeat. During summer break I hatched a plan designed to humiliate the school. The next year I would secretly run a phony candidate for president, a character so bland and bourgeois that his victory would show up the conservatism of the entire school. This plan would take a full year to work, and I put everything I had into it. I called a meeting of my closest friends and allies and enlisted their support. The plan went like this: My allies would each run for class president. Then, if they won, we could form form a secret slate and control all of the committees chosen by that council, especially the election committee. Phase one clicked in beautifully. We had our majority. Now the school newspaper, election committee, and the budget committee were all chaired by people in on the hoax. The next step was to build up the candidate, named 209

"Dave Levitt," a name that everyone thought sounded like a model student at Forest Hill Collegiate. Dave Levitt became famous that year, through the editorials I ghostwrote in the school newspaper, speaking out fearlessly for more money for school dances, the athletic directorate (a group of smug jocks I particularly despised), and stirring up anger against the "Breslin-controlled council." When it came time for the election, he was so popular that only a timid kid in first year dared to run against him. And guess who this kid's campaign manager was? Me, of course, which guaranteed Dave Levitt a lot of support. We broke into the school records office one morning to place a phony student file in the school's data bank. Where there was a place for a picture, we put a dab of glue and let it dry, so anyone examining the file would think the picture had dropped off and was lost in the filing cabinet. The day of the candidates' speeches, the head of the election committee, in on the prank, got up in assembly and seriously explained that Dave couldn't be there that day, that he had a car accident the night before, having "swerved to avoid hitting two children playing on Marwood Avenue after getting ice cream for his postermaking party." Gasps filled the auditorium. A few girls began to sob — "No! Not Dave!" — and his speech, a ringing indictment of the corruption of the student council under my influence, was read by a bland, popular student we'd nicknamed "Oswald." He got a standing ovation in absentia, and then the students voted. But by this time the administration smelled something. That morning, we blitzed the locker area with pamphlets, but the students mostly dropped them on the floor. The principal called up Dave Levitt in homeroom to complain, but he wasn't there. Or anywhere else. But by 210

the time they figured it out, it was too late. Dave Levitt had won in a landslide, and the results were broadcast over the P.A. The next morning, I locked myself in the announcement booth for the school's morning radio show and preempted the usual broadcast to tell students and teachers about what had really happened. Then I put on the Beatles' "Nowhere Man" and waited until the school prefects broke down the door. I was whisked off to the principal's office where a band of angry teachers waited menacingly. I was told that I was in serious trouble: that I was guilty of fraud, breaking and entering, and that the college I had been accepted into would be notified. Did I have anything to say for myself? Well, I began, it was important to realize that no one got hurt. And, I continued, that the students had been taught about the fragility of democracies. The teachers began to soften a little. And, I continued, no real harm had been done. It wasn't as if I had called every TV, print, and radio reporter, who would have loved to ruin the reputation of my high school filled with its rich spoiled brats. The lynch mob got the point. I took the last few weeks off school, and breezed into my chosen college the next fall. Now, of course, times have changed,and you only have to buy a semi-automatic weapon to air your grievances to your high school tormentors. But I can't get behind that. The miserable events at Columbine show the necessity of leavening anger with humor. Thirty years ago, during the semester of my prank, I began to understand the power of comedy; now I realize that it can save lives, too. So all hail the trickster, hallelujah.

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W Vv hen I was only four years old, my appendix ruptured, sending its poisonous and deadly contents into my bloodstream, nearly killing me. This condition, known as peritonitis, is what killed Rudolph Valentino. It's one of the many things we have in common. I'd been sick, as usual, for weeks, complaining about my tummy ache to the deaf ears of my parents, who by now were used to my nonstop hypochondria, designed to keep me indoors on my favorite sofa. But this time, I wasn't crying wolf, and I had the puce complexion and high fever to prove it. Finally, my mother called an ambulance and I was rushed to the hospital, where my appendix was removed and I spent the next ten days having my blood filtered. When I was released, I was told I had been "only an hour away from death," a phrase I heard regularly throughout my childhood. Death's been on my mind a lot lately. Four of my clients' lives ended apruptly this year: three suicides and a hit and run. Dave gave himself a fatal overdose after his 215

longtime companion bolted for another man. Marty jumped from his ninth-story balcony after he came home from a tour and found that his girlfriend had moved out. Rob got drunk one night and fell down a flight of stairs, injuring his head. He started talking gibberish and wandering the streets aimlessly. A few weeks later, he mutilated himself and fell on a knife. He was dead by the time the cops came. Justin was on tour in a tiny town in rural Alberta. After the show he went Rollerblading at night in a deserted industrial park. A pickup truck driven by some drunken redneck knocked him forty feet; he was dead on impact. Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in the middle of a Jim Carroll song. But I'm no stranger to this stuff. When I was nineteen I was dating a bright, intense redhead named Donna. The night of Bob Dylan's first comeback tour, I got a phone call after the concert: Donna had jumped in front of a subway train. She was buried in a white coffin, and we were all too numb to cry. That night, friends tried to console me with an Italian dinner. I remember ordering zabaglione, the rich frothy dessert made with sweet Marsala wine. I have not ordered it since that night, more than twenty-five years ago. I cannot order zabaglione and I cannot look at a lunchbox, either. When I was eight, my best friend was a wonderful, clever and polite little boy named Henry, the only boy in my grade who was shorter than me. Every day at lunch, Henry and I had a ritual: we would exchange the food our mothers had packed for us in each other's lunchbox; that way we'd have the benefit of two separate cooks and wouldn't get bored. The fun part was how fast we could make the switch — we'd gotten it down to under five seconds with practice. 216

Henry's parents were divorced, which was rare in 1960, and his mother, feeling more than a little guilty, tried to be both mom and dad to him and his older brother. One weekend, she took them camping, which she knew nothing about. Their portable stove tipped over, and my friend Henry was burned to death, along with his mother. His older brother survived, but was in the hospital for two years receiving painful skin grafts. I was devastated when I heard the news, but worse, I had to continue to endure the specter of Henry's death while the government held a very public inquiry into the safety of camping stoves. Laws were changed, regulations were enacted, but I had to relive the death of my best friend on the front page of the newspaper for months afterward. I buried my lunchbox in the backyard and from that day on I brought my lunch to school in a brown paper bag.

Coping with death may be the hardest thing we ever do, and we usually do it badly. Never mind sex education in the schools; what we really need is death education. When my father died, I noted all the stupid things people stammered out at the funeral, like "Nice to see you," "How's business," or the perennial "Are you seeing anyone special?" My father was very old, and when he was rushed to the hospital and put on life support we thought it was all over. I was unconsolable, but then he rallied, and a week later he was joking around, eating properly, and it looked like the crisis had passed. I was scheduled to open and perform in my new Yuk-Yuk's in Rochester, New York, but I wanted to delay the opening. 217

"I'm fine," my father said. "Go make money." They were the last words he ever said to me. My Rochester opening was a smash, and I was particularly "on" that night. While the headliner, the fine comedian Mike MacDonald, was onstage, a waitress approached me. "There's a phone call for you." I told her I was busy doing a show, that I would take it later. "No, I think you should take it now." It was my sister with the bad news. My father was gone. Now I had to go back onstage and finish up the show, leave the audience laughing and in good spirits, and not let anyone know that my father had just died. When I got offstage to the wide smiles of my partners, I told them what had happened and they drove me back to Toronto in time for the funeral. Funerals are carried out with the precision of a military operation. Every detail is worked out to give the grieving family the smoothest possible experience on the toughest possible day. The immediate family is held in a small anteroom while the rest of the mourners gather in the actual sanctuary. I was nervous and upset, of course, and began drinking pitcher after pitcher of the water provided in the small room. Finally, we were led into the larger room where the casket sat, and listened to the rabbi give a short but respectful speech about my father's life. Then my mother, sisters and I were led out a side door and immediately seated in the first waiting limousine. Other mourners got into the next available limousines or got into their own cars for the thirty-minute drive to the cemetery. 218

As I've mentioned before, I have a weak bladder, and all the water I drank was now putting a lot of pressure on me. I told my sisters, who were sobbing gently, and they told me to "hold it in." I knew I couldn't. We couldn't stop anywhere without the entire hundred-car procession being rerouted. Finally we arrived at the cemetery, and I thought by now I was going to burst. My mother had the best idea: tell the motorcycle cop escort, who would surely know what to do. "No problem," he said, as if he dealt with the issue of incontinence on a daily basis. "Just go into the cemetery and find a tree while I keep everyone waiting." A good, practical idea. Except that it was a windy day. A very windy day. And as I finally released my stream of urine, a big gust of wind came up, so that I was pissing all over myself and the grave of one Mr. Julius Weinrib, 1921-1979, devoted husband, loving father, and new participant in the golden showers cult. Sorry, Mr. Weinrib. When the mourners poured through the gates I had dimespots all over my clothes. Luckily, everyone thought they were from tears. People who believe in reincarnation are lucky — they just have to wait long enough, and they'll see the person again. But reincarnation makes no sense to me. For one thing, where are the billions of new people coming from? And if Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics says that there is always energy loss from friction, wouldn't you have to come back as something lower! Am I, then, condemned to return as a lounge act? I know some things are in the realm of the unexplainable — Andie McDowell's career, for instance — but I need some physical evidence to overwhelm my innate skepticism. No, I think when you go, you're gone, and that's it. 219

This is terrible news for anyone, but for a narcissist, the cessation of consciousness bears a double whammy: you're not even the center of your own attention anymore. I'm not afraid of dying as much as I'm afraid of being found in an embarassing situation — like, say, Michael Hutchence, found with a belt around his neck, pants around his ankles and goo upon the floor. Autoerotic axphyxiation,11 they called it, but what will they say to his young child when he asks his mother the question, "How did Daddy die?" "Well, my son, he hung himself till he came." "But couldn't you make him cum, Mommy?" "Yes, but..." "Couldn't you make Daddy cum good enough?" "That is not the point. " "Why did Daddy love his belt more than he loved you, Mommy?"

"ENOUGH!!!" I think a lot about my own funeral: I wonder who'll show up, and what will they say? This is a very common fantasy, although I've gone the extra step: I've already hired writers. And even though I'm single I will insist upon being buried in a double plot — when I travel, I always book a suite. As I've mentioned earlier, I'm a light sleeper, and I really need the room. I don't expect to rest in peace. When I die, I'll probably get the recognition I crave; there'll be retrospectives and compilations and this book will be reprinted in hardcover. Maybe I'll even get one of 1. Boy, if ever an activity called out for a spotter. 220

those state funerals with a horse-drawn carriage and a flag draped over the coffin. But I think you should have the right to choose the flag you want. It's not that I don't appreciate my country, it's just that the red and white color scheme doesn't really go with anything. I would prefer the Ecuadoran ensign with its lovely jewel tones and planetary logo. I've spent many nights tortured by the question of what to put on my tombstone, but I think I've settled on INTERESTING SPACE AVAILABLE INQUIRE WITHIN. or MARK BRESLIN 1952-20_ www.deadj ew.com Thoughts about death stalk me all the time, and now that I'm forty-seven years of age I look at life through an hourglass in which there are more grains of sand at the bottom than at the top. But perhaps it was always this way. When I was six, while other boys were playing table hockey, I was watching the Miss America pageant on TV with my parents. Midway through the broadcast, huge hot tears started rolling down my face. "Marky, what's the matter, tattelah7" my mother asked. "I hate it, I hate it, it isn't fair!" I sniffed. "This is as beautiful as these girls will ever be. They're going to get older and then they're going to get ugly and then they're going to die!" Yes, the power of negative thinking — the sweet shades of angst, bitterness, melancholy, each as subtle and distinct as a Calvin Klein beige, that is the beating heart 221

of my energetic gloom. I've never been one for false hope. People say it's always darkest before the dawn, but actually it's darkest just after they put out your eyes. Not to mention the bitterest tragedy of all: when people hate you, they scream it at the top of their lungs; when they love you, they whisper it in your ear, barely audible. People: you can't live with 'em, you can't bury 'em in a crawlspace. When I was a kid I went to a diner with my friend Bobby. We sat at the counter, ready to order our chocolate milkshakes, but the waiter refused to serve me. I asked him why. He leaned over the counter, stuck his puss an inch away from mine and, in a thick European accent, said, "I don't like your face." I was only twelve. It only gets worse. You realize the world is not your friend. The world is a conspiracy of betrayals. You are not easily liked. You get bad press. You develop an unsavory reputation. Somebody loves you, but it's the wrong person. More and more people don't like your face. You realize that all the wrong people read Nietzsche, that all the wrong people are nudists, that Libertarians all dress exactly alike. "At least I don't live in Bosnia/Cambodia/South Central/Thornhill," you tell yourself, and you feel better for about a millisecond. Then the pizza arrives, and you don't have to think at all. You hate pizza. You are not happy.

Me? I'm not happy. I've rarely been happy. I don't expect to be happy. I don't even want to be happy. If you were to approach a random number of people in a crowded room and ask them what they wanted out of life, I'm sure most would reply something like "I just want 222

to be happy." But if you pressed the issue and asked them to be specific, you'd get a blank stare or even an angry glance. And if you asked them further why they would seek a emotional state correlated with Down's Syndrome, you might even get punched in the face. Of course, most people don't enjoy it when you interrupt the tape loop of their very existence, but it can be fun to try. Some time ago, for a full year, instead of asking friends, acquaintances and business contacts "How are you," I substituted the more subversive, "And are you enjoying your burden today?" Sometimes when I go into the local McDonald's, I like to say, "I'll have the usual, thanks!" After the stunned teenager fumbles for the manual, I tip her with a perfectly smooth stone from my most recent day at the beach. But I'm roughest on myself. Every day, when I wake up, I ask myself two questions. "Why do anything?" followed by "Does love redeem pain?" — unanswerable questions that keep me between the sheets for a very long time. I'm amazed that there are people who can wake up, bound out of bed, whistle at the birds and then go off to a horrible job and come back home to an equally mindnumbing relationship. And then do it all over again the next day. This is why I suspect that happiness is genetic. Scientists now think that there's a gene for breast cancer, one for homosexuality, so why not one for happiness? A study was recently concluded on identical twins who were separated at birth and placed inadvertently in radically different surroundings. The study found that, thirty years later, each twin had the same emotional make-up, regardless of whether he or she was raised in a nurturing or a dysfunctional environment. And a University of Illinois 223

psychologist, one Dr. Edward Diener, recently concluded a study that found that people have an emotional set-point that may well be genetically endowed. This is why people talk of having fun versus being happy. Happiness is ontological, a state of existence; you either are or are not happy. Fun, on the other hand, is an experience that can be acheived, much like a possession can be attained. So they're absolutely right when they say money can't buy happiness. But it can purchase an awful lot of fun. Personally, I'd rather have fun than be happy. Happiness is a fickle gift, beyond anyone's power, but fun you can control

This is not meant to imply that I detest happy people. No, I think I know what happiness is, and happy people are blessed. When you drive on Highway 403 and take the King Street exit to Hamilton, there are sixteen stoplights along the one-way thoroughfare into downtown. If you are traveling at precisely the right speed, and if you hit the first light at precisely the right time, you can glide all the way downtown without having to stop for one red light. I have tried hundreds of times, and succeeded only twice, but I know that that effortless coast is how happy people feel. This is the way that happy people feel. Unfortunately, the corollary is that most of us are damned, and the damned don't glide through life with the blithe effortlessness of apple sauce. The damned cough up blood, get stuck at every stoplight, and lose their Visa card on a regular basis. Fun, however, is available to those of us so deep into the vortex that the possibility of sunlight seems remote. But what is fun, anyway? Most people have a dreary 224

notion of it: going to some noisy dance club, getting plastered on shooters with names that would embarrass the dead, hustling secretaries to the annoying beat of bad Latino hip-hop. I avoid any place where the music is louder than my sport jacket. And when any woman in a too-tight dress starts to sway her plumpish hips to the opening bars of "Mambo #5" and says, "I love to dance," it's time for me to leave. But real fun, true fun is a more metaphysical thing, and I think of it this way: when you die, your life is supposed to flash before your eyes; a thousand choice moments edited with the pace of a great rock video. Fun is all the things you do over the course of your lifetime to make sure your reel holds your interest. That reel is our life's work. It certainly is my life's work, and it had better be good. I want to die laughing.

And then late one night, I'm in bed watching videos when a bright flickery light bathes my sundeck. Must be one of the new police helicopters, I think, and I go outside to investigate. Stepping into the light, I look around and find myself somewhere else, somewhere strange. The room I'm in is octagonal, with machines and computers everywhere. An antiseptic smell has replaced my usual cologne and my clothes have scorch marks along the edges. Before I even have time to panic, a portal opens and dozens, maybe a hundred, of them scurry in. Now I panic. They have the exact shape of humans, but their skin is translucent, like uncooked shrimp. And they talk out of a slit in their armpit. "Don't be afraid," says the chief mollusk, out of his blowhole. He turns to a slightly larger alien. 225

"Zorb, give it to him." I brace for some kind of impact, but one of the creatures comes from the middle of the crowd, and shyly hands me a photo. It's me and Kato. "Sorry we had to take it, but it was just so valuable." "You've been watching me!" I protest. "Of course," says Zorb, so close to me now that I wish I could throw a carton of Certs down his armpit. "Your thoughts are huge up here. A forty share, at least. Only Kato is bigger." "Kato is bigger," say the assembled aliens in a unison monotone. "You must stay with us!" I protest, but I am interrupted by the crowd. "No, no, stay, stay," they shout, arms raised skyward. The stench is unbelievable. "I have to go back," I protest. "I've got a meeting with the CBC! They've got money this week— " Zorb smiles. "This is where you belong. We've been mindsurfing you for a long time. Look what we have for you." He waves a translucent, veiny hand, and about twenty aliens squish forward. They appear to be female, which bothers me even more. The chosen twenty bow their heads and Zorb leads them to a purple light; they pass through it, and a miraculous transformation occurs: now they have skin, and golden hair, and their armpits are sealed up. They lift their heads, and I am surrounded by twenty perfect women, twenty identical copies, twenty indistinguishable impeccable beauties. Twenty Thalia Menningers. 226

They lead me by their flawless arms into another room, a precise replica of my Yorkville loft, exact in every way. I replace the Kato photograph inside its empty frame as all the gorgeous, perfect Tuesday Welds approach me, giggling, cooing, joking and laughing. And then I disappear.

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AetaowledgeweNts Many people have tried to convince me not to write this book, but I'd like to thank those who gave me their support. Early drafts of this material were read by many friends and colleagues who gave me general encouragement when I needed it the most. I thank them all, but I am especially grateful to those who gave me notes or comments that focused my thinking: Barri Cohen, Jack Blum, Sharon Corder, Robert and Michelle Cait, Carolyn Dunn, Lome and Linda Frohman, Simon Fraser, Robyn Payne, Alan Watt, Gary and Suzanne Hoffman, Robyn Payne, Michelle Lee, and especially Shari Cappe, who was the first to get excited about the project, and never stopped gently pushing me to complete it. Eve Drobot and Jack Kapica took a first stab at an early edit which was invaluable; Joe Kertes from the Humber Comedy Workshop helped in many ways, both editorially and comercially, as did Martin Waxman. Super-agent Bruce Westwood gave me a much appreciated and perfectly timed show of support., and I also thank the wonderful poet Jill Battson, who helped me find my publisher, the courageous Mike O'Connor, who I thank a thousand times. My high school pals Joel Axler, Bram Cadsby, and Laurie Miller all contributed extensive ideas, many of which found their way into the final manuscript. I also thank the beautiful and patient Karina Lemke for her beauty and her patience. My assistants, Katheryne Barrick, and subsequently Rebecca Oibbins, deserve praise for the hours of collating, mailing and hand-holding which they have perfected. And let's not forget Dr. Ed Phillips and his staff for giving me back my smile, and all the comedians at Yuk-Yuk's for giving me something to smile about. Not enough could ever be said about the support of my business partner, Jeff Silverman. Without him, I would not have found the freedom or time to write. Ditto the Yuk-Yuk's brain trust, which includes Wayne Laski on legals, Jae Gold on accounts, Evan Adelman and Ed Smeall on talent, and everyone else on drums. I also thank my business associates and partners all across the country, who have endured my prima donna crap for so many years. I promise never to stop. Toronto January, 2000