I was on my way to the bank to cash my weekly stipend from
Nickelodeon that prevented me from discussing publicly the indignities of
working with Ariana Grande and laughing all the way. After all, Nickelodeon had
only offered Jennette McCurdy a one-time buy-out on her NDA for $300,000. As
long as I stayed healthy, these checks should roll up to almost tripled that
over time, and I like Ariana.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Dan Schneider, the
genius who gave us Good Burger, Kenan & Kel, Drake & Josh, Fireballs
& An Uninvited Backrub and pretty much everything else of note on the Paramount
children’s network. As a personal favor to former child actor and president of
Paramount’s Pre-Pubescent Division Brian Robbins, Schneider was referred to not
by name, but as ‘The Begetter’, in most court filings.
I was crossing the parking lot to the bank, deserted except
for a small group of homeless writers recently displaced when their shows were
all cancelled for no good reason by Netflix, when I first noticed the panel van
stalking me. Actually, it wasn’t a small group of writers, there were ink-stained
wretches from First kill, On The Verge, Archive 81, The Baby-Sitters Club,
Gentefield, Cooking with Paris, Another Life, Bone, Raising Dion, Pretty Smart,
The Midnight Gospel and Q-Force. Upon further review, maybe homelessness was
too good for these pikers.
I wouldn’t have even noticed the creepy van if it didn’t
squeak like a dog’s chew toy as it approached, the sure sign of a ball joint
about to snap from one too many trips down a dirt road filled with runaway
teens. It reminded me of the old panel van Pete Rose used to drive when he
would cruise the parking lot at Veterans Stadium looking for teenaged girls to
drag into the marsh that surrounded what was then the largest stadium in the
National League. 62,623 seats. A guy had to have options, by gum…
The van doors popped open and two masked men jumped out.
“Sissies,” I thought. “Covid’s been over for months. What’s with the masks?”
Each grabbed an arm and tossed me into the back.
“The Begetter wants
to talk with you,” one of them mumbled, hoping a wouldn’t recognize his voice
from Zoey 101. The gaggle of former show runners barely looked up from their
Adult Friend Finder and Deadline apps on their phones. I landed face first in
the shag carpet.
Schneider put his foot on my neck as the two goons climbed
back into the van and shut the doors. “What part of Non-Discloser Agreement don’t
you understand,” the Begetter said, applying more pressure to my neck and then
allowing me to sit up.
I suddenly flashed back to high school when Baba Ram Dass
tricked my buddy Gunny into his rusted-out van with promises of psilocybin and
cold Budweiser. That van, with its custom cabinetry, shag carpeting and huge Radio
Shack speakers rigged up just behind the driver’s seat so Dass could blast
bands like The Telescopes and Silver Apples at ungodly volumes, sat under a
tree in front of an ashram and hadn’t moved in the past two years. ‘The
mindless noodling of Dead Meadow seems to make more sense when your ears a
bleed, just a little,’ Dass yelled over the din as he rolled a joint in the
driver’s seat.
Everyone knows the Hindus have the best drugs. Hinduism was
basically built on tripping. You ever wonder why the cow is so sacred in India?
Sure, they produce milk and really slow transportation, but also, ‘Shrooms grow
on cow shit, by gum...
Now-a-days most your sects of Hinduism have abstained
completely from drug use, but back in the day, when folks like Baba Ram Dass
were the face of faith, your typical devotee made Courtney Love look like Nancy
Reagan.
So, when Baba Ram Dass started an ashram not too far from my
mother’s house in Cohasset, it was only natural that we inquisitive high school
kids might end up there every once and a while, or whenever a case of beer and
joint at the beach got boring.
Ram Dass, whose real name was Dick Alpert, was a rich Jewish
kid from Boston, son of the president of the New Haven railroad and a founder
of Brandeis University, so he fit right in in Cohasset, except for the fact
that he was Jewish, but he had just converted to Hinduism, which meant he could
now own land in the very restricted south shore community, just not join the
country club.
After all, back before the Golf Pro got himself shot on the
18th Green for abusing the help, the Cohasset Country Club had
standards. They wouldn’t even let Joe Kennedy join, although they appreciated
his penchant for rum running and white slave trading, he was a catholic and
some things just aren’t done. Kennedy ended up over the bridge in Hyannis Port,
where the help live, and Cohasset was able to keep its DUI stats down for
another few decades.
Dick ‘Baba Ram Dass’ Alpert had been teaching at Harvard but
got tossed out with his buddy Timothy Leary for cram feeding co-eds acid and
shipping them off to the coast just south of Cambridge for sexual
experimentation and forced labor in his Cohasset ashram’s gardens. But hell, it
was the 60’s, most of that stuff wasn’t even illegal, and if a case ever did
make it to court, most of his victims were so addled on LSD they made poor
witnesses.
When Leary and Ram Dass were first given the boot from the crimson
halls of academia they started a small sex farm in Millbrook, New York, but
then Leary got busted smuggling pot and 12-year-olds up from Mexico and Ram
Dass scurried off to the sleepy little fishing town of Cohasset.
Ram Dass’ ashram was an intoxicating place to hang out at,
for many reasons. The drugs and booze,
of course, but also the human circus that stumbled the manicured ground at all
hours of the day or night. Intellectuals,
theologians, and mystics looking for a free meal, mingling with the fishermen
and landscapers there for the cheap peyote, and filthy, stinking hippie chicks
who thought Leslie Van Houten and Squeaky Fromme had the right idea; most of
them jabbering wild cocaine fueled screeds that sounded like bad Tarantino.
Ram Dass would often wander amongst these people, barefooted
in a while robe, banging on a tamboura like a demented Tracy Partridge, and he
was loved for it.
The ashram had a side hustle of breading and selling illegal
Northern Long-eared Bats to locals interested in curbing the mosquito population
in their yards and Barn Owls for those facing problems with the invasive mice
and voles in the area.
Later in life Dass had told me he gave up the illegal pet
framing, the acid and most other drugs, and sex after he got hustled out of all
his money by a bottle blond housewife who claimed to have stigmata and now he simply
chewed mescaline to maintain his health, and even though most of teeth had
fallen out, he was able to gum it into a paste that got the job done.
But on the day when he was able to cut my old friend Gunny
away from the herd and get the poor boy into his rusted-out van with the shag
carpet, Dass was tripping balls as they say.
As Gunny danced that limbo between passing out from the
booze and synthetic adrenaline inspired hyper-activity, Baba Ram Dass lifted
his robes and started pulling at his flaccid cock like a lawn mower’s rip cord,
hoping to startle the thing back to life. Like most religious figures, Baba Ram
Dass was a bisexual pedophile plagued by guilt induced erectile disfunction.
Baba Ram Dass also had alopecia and wore a merkin, that is,
a pubic wig. They are worn for any number of decorative or erotic reason, and
it would be ungentlemanly to speculate why Dass wore one here, but it was no
ordinary mons pubis cover. It was custom made by the same guy that would later
design the merkin for Lucy Lawless’ character in Spartacus: Blood and Sand and
was incredibly lifelike.
As you may be aware, the problem with Barn Owls is they are
stealthy, foul beast, quick on the wing with an almost total absence of fear.
Their necks can rotate 360 degrees and they can spot their prey from more than
a mile off. So, it was no surprise when one of the ashram’s stud Owls mistook Ram
Dass’ merkin for a Roborovski Dwarf Hamster and crashed through the van’s
greasy vent window to attack, ripping the holy man’s nuts off and surely saving
my old friend Gunny from an ignominious fate.
I assumed there were no Barn Owls at hand in the bank
parking lot, and if I were to get out of this pickle it would be up to me.
Fortunately, I had been nursing a twelve-dollar Ashton Symmetry cigar from the
Dominican and when I let it fall from my mouth hitting the untreated looped
yarn shag carpet, causing a fire ball to erupted, which engulfed ‘The Begetter’
and his two helpers as I kicked open the door and rolled to safety.
One of the homeless TV writers asked me, ‘Hey, is that Dan
Schneider?’ as the legendary producer Richard Pryor-ed it down the road. “You
think he’d take a look at my spec script for Sam & Kat reunion show once he
stops smoldering?”
