The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Palin camp may get SNL time to respond to Fey sketches. Wahlberg camp still mum on their demands. Plus: Dexter, Brothers and Sisters and Gwen Ifill reacts to Queen Latifah.
Thing is, I didn't do drugs. Stimulants, okay: caffeine, booze. But not one bong hit or acid tab or peyote button; never once did I geez or trip or snort Bolivian marching powder. You'd never find me pulling a Leo DiCaprio circa Basketball Diaries, ballsy Leo eradicating his heartthrob image giving mouth-whoopee in a grotty pay toilet for a taste of the white rock. Or that scene in Trainspotting — Ewan McGregor shitting in a bucket and screaming bug-eyed as a freak-o plastic baby crawled across the ceiling — it mesmerized me because I could draw no correlation to my own life. I may as well have been watching two bulb-headed aliens screw; that would've left me with the same disassociated outerspace feeling, as if a metal plate in my skull were pulling in video signals from another planet.
Why didn't I get into them? Nancy Reagan had nothing to do with it; the barrel of that particular dogmatic revolver wasn't aimed at my generation.
The more likely truth is, I'm the sort of asshole who gets stuck in ruts.
Take this example: my father came home after a hard day at the drill press with his hair
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stinking of burnt steel, grabbed barley pops from the Amana and, because he wasn't in the mood to drink alone, and since I was sixteen with a scraggly beard, handed one off to me. Labatt 50: coal miner's beer. Bluest of blue-collar brands. So I'm thirty-one, work in a cube and still drink it.
What I'm saying is, it was a matter of circumstance. If my Dad had come home from the carnival's Pop-A-Shot booth and split a joint with me, I'm sure I'd be sparking spliffs and tripping to the psychedelic cover art of a Molly Hatchet album these days.
All told, I'm pretty damn fortunate.
Which made my situation two months ago all the more implausible. I found myself in the bathroom of my shitty efficiency with a needle jutting out of my sun-starved ass. It was full of yellow fluid that could've been rendered hog fat or vitamin-rich piss but was in actuality a cocktail of testosterone ethenate and Equipoise.
I hit the plunger. Three cc's of dubious-quality narcotics saturated my fatty tissues. Sweaty and tweaked out, I wandered my kitchen wondering if I'd die. What a treat I'd make for the boys in blue who found me: rigid and pasty with my skivs wadded 'round my ankles and a ginormous honkin' needle flagpoled from my keister.
Can you envision a more ignoble death?
Remember "The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac," the one-page comic book ad for those Charles Atlas Isotonic exercise courses? It starred Mac, the ninety-seven-pound weakling who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach.
Bully: Listen here, I'd smash your face, only you're so skinny you might dry up and blow away!
Mac: The big bully! I'll get even someday!
Girl: Oh, don't let it bother you, little boy.
Mac: Darn it!
Well, I was sick and tired of being a scarecrow, same as Mac. And while I wasn't going to run around the gym decking guys — "Here's something I owe you!" — nor did I wish to be cowed in any man's presence anymore.
Unlike Mac, I wasn't a believer in an isotonic exercise regimen.
I am now halfway through my rookie steroid cycle. I'm
But I've got . . . tits.
on a dog's breakfast of pills and injectibles. Testosterone levels: off the charts.
But I've got . . . tits.
Soft, sorta floppy. Left one a touch bigger than the right. Tits. A pendulous set of man-cans. I bought a bunch of tight, white undershirts to flatten them down: girdles for the bosomy gent.
Most alarmingly, of course, are my nuts. What nuts? I'm considering hiring a crisis negotiator to talk them down from my abdominal wall, where I assume they've retreated. Atrophied so badly, they're two BB's from a kid's Red Ryder gun rattling around in there.
You know how amputees suffer from phantom-limb syndrome? I'm plagued by phantom-testicle syndrome — every so often I'll reach between my legs searching for those apricot-sized lumps only to find nothing. I'll be rooting around, gasping, freaked out and thinking that like a vestigial tail they've shriveled away. Only once I've located a token raisin through that wrinkled turkey wattle am I able to breathe again.
Why keep it up, you ask? I told you: I'm the sort of asshole who gets stuck in ruts.
