Everybody Wants Some

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 18^th 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?”

THE BEIJING CARWASH

 

It was the Dance of the Dumb. World class jackasses and jabbering fools covered in string warts and red and white MAGA caps. Many holding signs, most with spelling errors or logical fallacies. Trump’s ever shrinking ‘base’ is not stupid, contrary to popular belief. They simply have bought into The American Dream.

Although they’re in a double-wide now, they think that their birth right is that one day they will be billionaires too, and they want Trump to protect that rarefied air for when they finally make it. From the TV talking head who is on Obamacare, but demands the repeal of Obamacare, to the steelworker in a union job ignoring that Trump made a huge deal for Russian steel imports while in office.

Other, browner people are downwardly mobile. Not the Trump Rubes. They believe they are moving on up, and The Donald will greet them with a toothy smile and round of golf, as they drink from the bidet at Mar-A-Largo…

Some showed up today to hassle the pregnant teenagers, others to hit on them. The thinking being what better place to find a chick who puts out than out front of a Planned Parenthood.

Of course, the girls come for many reasons: The Hoover Maneuver, An Arkansas Omelet, Plan C, Kevorkian’s Kid’s Menu, A Redneck Period, A One-Time Child Support Payment, The Sneaky Frenchman was just one attraction.

I was there for my annual Testicular and Prostate Cancer Screening. I’m not a high-risk candidate, I just like the test. Few people are aware that Planned Parenthood provide Men’s Health Services too. Cancer screenings, vasectomies, and I’m told, erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation treatments. Not all Planned Parenthoods offer this, just the good ones. Let your typical GOP stalwart learn they can get boner pills at Planned Parenthood and the taps of public funding would be wide open.

I walked the gauntlet of God Botherers and potential fake Electoral College delegates spilling out of the buffer zone in front of the building with my eye low, less one of them try to speak to me. No such luck. I got trapped before I even got to the stoop.

   “You know, Steve Jobs, Celine Dion and Pope John Paul II were all almost aborted by their mothers,” a rat faced woman snarled at me. “Every child has the potential for greatness, but we are robbed of that future 17,000 times a day in this country alone”.

   “Hey, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Ethan Hawke weren’t aborted either, so it’s a two-way street,” I said as I tried to push my way past her.

   “An abortion is a violation of the Declaration of Independence. Everyone has the right to life and liberty. LIFE and liberty! It is what our forefathers wanted,” Rat Face’s Uncle/Date said as he helped form a human wall to keep me off the steps to the building.

   “Yeah?” I answered. “Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that Declaration, also invented a plow moldboard that doubled as a speculum so the slave ladies of Monticello could abort his bastard children while they tilled his fields, so I’m think his Bill of Rights might have only applied to white, male landowners…”

The Uncle/Date wasn’t sure what to say. He wanted to agree with me because on the surface it sounded like something he might like, but he also knew if he pissed Rat Face off she wouldn’t let him stop an Denny’s on the way back to the trailer court.

I took advantage of his confusion and dropped the MK3 Concussion Grenade I had been saving for my birthday at their feet. The blast did not do as much damage to them as I had hoped, because they weren’t in an enclosed space, but they scattered back to the buffer zone, and I made it up the steps. After all, Dr. Jellyfinger cannot be kept waiting.

 ETHAN SUCKE

I had to call my old friend Paul Newman the other night because I finally bit the bullet and watched the rest of that turgid documentary, The Last Movie Stars, about Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward. I had originally given up on the 6-part series after Ethan Hawke, the film’s director who inserted himself into every five minutes of the story, dragged out his daughter and had her pretend that Hawke had given her sage relationship advice as he nodded into the camera approvingly.

I was worried that maybe I was just being a little too judgmental because I grew tired of Hawke’s whole ‘trying way too hard to look like he’s not trying at all’ act and the unorganized facial hair 20 years ago, so who better to ask than the man himself? Of course, Newman died by 2001, but I did not let that stop me, after all, Newman was known to fake his own death from time to time just for a laugh, like when he staged a car wreck during the filming of Slap Shot just to put the fear into director George Roy Hill.

“Oh my Christ,” Newman said after we got the traditional ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ and ‘You were told to never call me again’s out of the way. “I just watched it last night,” Newman continued. “If I wasn’t dead, I’d kick that little squirrel-eyed, medium talent right in his twat”.

“It wasn’t that bad,” I lied. It was bad. It was Daybreakers bad.

PN: Listen, that grave robbing, half a pant-load, built his whole documentary on interviews with my friends and co-workers that I paid to have recorded for a book I was going to write. He didn’t even do his own research!

LN: Why didn’t you write that book? Why’d you leave your legacy in the hands of these pikers.

PN: Because I listened to the tapes, and they were all bullshit. I don’t know what I was expecting, but everyone was just saying what I wanted to hear. There was very little poetry or truth in the tapes. I even had them ask my first wife Jackie what she thought about my relationship with Joanne, and she speaks about it in glowing terms. What a load of horse shit. Do you know what I did with those tapes? I set them on fire at the dump. That empty turtleneck dug up the transcripts and recreated them… Although, I must say, I liked George Clooney playing me.

LN: Clooney only did it because Hawke threatened to release a sex tape he made with Uma Thurman on the set of Batman & Robin.

PN: At least something good came out of that piece of nippled bat suited shit. Speaking of heroes, you know, the character of The Green Lantern was based on me?

LN: That was a shitty movie too.

PN: It was a comic book before it was a movie.

LN: If you say so. So, why, do you think, did Hawke make this movie, other than to insert himself into every other frame? Did you consider him a colleague?

PN: Let me tell you the difference between me and Ethan Hawke. When I was younger, you know who people used to mistake me for? Marlon Brando. You know who people mistake Hawke for? Peter Berg…

LN: That’s just mean…

PN: But true.

LN: But surely Hawke is a great actor. He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, after all.

PN: He got that nomination for riding in the wake of Denzel in Training Day and 2002 was a pretty weak year for Best Supporting Actors. Even that Trump Rube Jon Voight got nominated for playing Howard Cosell. Who’s next, Rich Little?

LN: There must be some part of The Last Movie Stars that you liked.

PN: Not really. He even pussy footed around my cheating on Joanne. And her, she was no Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm herself, but you wouldn’t know it from Hawke’s movie.

LN: Why do you think that is?

PN: Ethan Hawke lives in the rarified air of Ben Affleck, Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mick Jagger, that is the ether that surrounds a particular type of asshole entertainer that gets busted tapping the nanny. To his credit, Hawke, like Williams, married the nanny afterwards, maybe that was something he learned on the set of Dead Poets Society, but it certainly wasn’t acting. If you think Ethan Hawke is any good, go watch Dad or The Purge. Never has anyone worked so hard at trying to look like they aren’t working at all and failed so miserably. Need I mention Taking Lives, Staten Island, Fast Food Nation, or Great Expectations? Heck, just watch his crying scene in Dead Poets Society. Case closed.

LN: Well, what about Vince D’Onofrio’s bit? That was interesting.

PN: Real interesting. Reducing one hundred years of Method Acting down to a party trick.

LN: You know, Hawke got D’Onofrio to do the movie by threatening to release a sex tape D’Onofrio made with Richard Gere when the three of them were making Brooklyn’s Finest?

PN: That may be how he got anyone that isn’t related to him to appear in this piece of shit. And yet, not one mention of the time James Dean and I tag teamed Eartha Kitt. What’s up with that?

LN: What else was missing?

PN: All kinds of great stuff, like how I wanted to be a football player when I was a kid, even played in college, but I grew up in Cleveland and was worried that after graduation I have to play for the Browns, so I switched to acting… And not one mention of the fact that that shitheel Robert Forrester, the CEO of Newman’s Own, forced my kids off the board directors at the company and raised his own salary by 50%. It’s a freaking charity! Hawke couldn’t spare two minutes to mention that, but he’s got plenty of time to talk about how my god damn watch was auctioned off for $17.75 million?

 

At this point the conversation strayed off into which garden vegetables and farm implements we would like to see Ethan Hawke violated with, but discretion being the better part of valor, I think we will leave it there. On a positive note, I had kind of given up on watch Joanne Woodward later on in her career, when she started making all those Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, but The Last Movie Stars did remeind me of how great she used to be.

 

For an AM radio station in the late 70’s, WKRP in Cincinnati had a pretty good playlist:

 

They Called It Rock - Nick Lowe

 

Good Squad - Elvis Costello

 

Lies, Shattered, Beast of Burden, Tumblin’ Dice, I’m Moving On – The Rolling Stones

 

Shakedown Street – The Dead (produced by Lowell George)

 

Suction Prints – Capt. Beefheart

 

Born Under A Bad Sign – Albert King

 

Into The Mystic, Caravan – Van Morrison

 

Rock n’ Roll Fantasy – The Kinks

 

Heartbreak Hotel – Les Nesman

 

Lively Up Yourself – Bob Marley

 

Heart of Glass – Blonde

 

Last Dance – Chuck Mangione

 

Alabama Song – The Doors

 

Just What I Needed – The Cars

 

I’m Down – The Beatles

 

I think WRKO in Boston was playing Raydio, McFadden and Whitehead and Kenny Rogers at the time…

 Just Like Sonny, Clint and Arnold Before Him...

Warren ‘Potsie’ Weber from Happy Days, now 72 years old, is running for Mayor of Ojia, California. Anson Williams, cousin of Dr. Henry Heimlich of the Heimlich Maneuver fame, announced his candidacy last month but can’t file the official papers until July 18^th. William is an expert at filing papers, he’s filed for divorce from his wife Jackie Gerkin twice. Williams claims that Ojia is his hometown, although I could have sworn I’ve been to his place in Malibu. Maybe she got the beach house in one of their divorces…

Ojia, a small town of about 8,000 is an hour and half northwest of LA in Ventura County. Williams became a prolific TV director in his post-Happy Days days, working on shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place. In 1987 he opened a chain of Big Al’s diners in the Midwest with former castmate Al Molinaro, but that went tits up

Of course, Anson Williams is no stranger to politics. He played Councilman McKenna on two episodes of Baywatch.

 

Fantasy Football for the 1%

 

Of course, in this case 1% represents not only personal wealth, but how much of their soul is left inside their rotting husks. Charter members of the Lucky Sperm Club like Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch and their COO John Nallen, Sony’s Ken Yoshida and Playstation’s Jim Ryan. Casey Wasserman, Mike Fries, Rupert Murdoch, Bob Chapek and the Mt. Rushmore of Cock Knobbery Musk, Cook, Zuckerberg and Jassy, to name a few.

As the rest of America celebrates our independence from the Velvet Covered Iron Fisting of English Royalty this Fourth of July Weekend, these over-stuffed cream skimmers gather in Sun Valley to wistfully reminisce about the days when you could cut a servant’s tongue out to keep them quiet.

Yes kids, it is time once again for Allen & Co’s Uber Secret Sun Valley Conference, and the company’s third generation CEO, the publicity shy Herby Allen III, has threatened to chop off the hands of anyone dumb enough to write about it. That would be me.

Other deep pockets expected to show up are Idaho’s Governor Brad Little, Spanx founder Sara Blakely, NFL stooge Roger Goodell, United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, Drug Dealer Albert ‘Pfizer’ Bourla, and my dusty old friend John Henry.

And what orgy of the rich and shameless would be complete with the media in attendance? Tom Brokaw is expected. NY Times ink-stained wretch Thomas Friedman, Washing Post’s David Ignatius, CNBC’s Becky Quick, Diane Sawyer, Andrew Ross Sorkin are all on the guest list too.

CNN is also well represented with Erin Burnett, Anderson Cooper and Van Jones all expected to show up to kiss the cock ring of corporate America. And incase you were wondering why a van load of underaged Asian sex workers was just spotted tooling down Rt. 75 south of Ketchum, Bob Kraft is also expected to attend and he’s ready to rumble.

Of course, these are just the people that have been invited, those in actual attendance is a closely guarded secret. Were terrorist to set off a bomb in Idaho this weekend the damage would be… well, sad for their families, but there is an endless production line of shitheels that would gladly step up and take their places.

And why should we care if these dilatants gather not five minutes from where Ernest Hemmingway swallowed his shotgun? Because this is the weekend where the deals get made. Fantasy Football for the 1%. A figurative and literal cock measuring contest. Big fish gobble up little fish, Snow Falcons swooping in to scoop unexpecting fat, full big fish out of the water, Ted Sarandos gobbling up anything that floats to bottom, as Bob Kraft hands out red Trump 2024 Caps and envelops stuffed with Yuan and Bon Jovi tickets.

No need to get into the Who Struck Johnny here, suffice it to say, if a major media deal does not get announced after this weekend, like maybe a Fire Sale where someone picks up Netflix for pennies on the dollar and tried to right the ship, that means even The Lucky Sperm Club are skittish about the future of the economy and we are all fucked, not just that van load of guest workers…

 

America has spoken, and they wanted to know my Top Ten Albums that shaped my teen years, so sure, I’ll play along:

 

10) London Calling – The Clash: Unemployment, racial conflict, social displacement, drug use. Did any band tackle it all with snappy tunes like the Clash? Kids today will need their own Clash in Trumpmerica, that’s for sure. The addition of Topper Headon on drums really brought the band together, briefly.

 

9) Romantic Warrior – Return To Forever: Al DiMeola, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and Chick Corea? Nothing more needs to be said.

 8) Matching Tie and Handkerchief – Monty Python: Classic bits (Bruces, The Cheese Shop, Oscar Wilde and Friends) and Side B was double grooved, so you never knew if you were going to get the side with The Fight of The Century or the side with Taking In The Terrier.

 7) Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – Elton John: I’ll tell you how strong that album was, Harmony wasn’t even released as a single because there was no room after Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Candle in The Wind (or The Dead Blond Song) and Bennie and the Jets.

 

6) Cosmo’s Factory – Creedence: After all the questions about who actually played on Willy and The Poor Boys. The band got together for the last really great album. I had this on 8-Track in my little Peugeot 307 constantly.

 

5) The Fine Art of Surfacing – The Boomtown Rats: This was before Geldof became a saint. Someone’s Looking At You stands as one of the best songs Mutt Lange has ever been standing around next to…

 4) Joe’s Garage Acts 1,2 & 3 – Frank Zappa: Commercial pop, jazz noodling and naughty lyrics all in one package. What more could a teen want?

 

3) Songs in the Key of Life – Stevie Wonder: It was either this or Innervisions. Sir Duke sealed the deal for me.

 2) I’m Everyone I’ve Ever Loved – Martin Mull: A comedy album featuring Chuck Rainey, Frank Foster, Ron Carter among several others. Who does that? Martin Mull, that’s who.

 1) My Aim Is True – Elvis Costello: Contains the greatest line in Rock History, “I said I’m so happy, I could die. She said Drop dead, the left with another guy”. Pretty much sums up my teens.

And yours?