Big Mike: The Buck Stops Here

The greatest thing I’ve accomplished in this wild, weird world is not reproducing. No lie. The fact that I haven’t spawned brings me more joy than even a Cubs World Series victory would.

Which is amazing when you think of all the guys who’ve ever blathered that the greatest moment of their lives was when they saw Junior pop out of the birth canal. Who knows? Maybe if I’d seen a little Big Mike jump out of one of my wives/girlfriends/acquaintances, I too would be shouting to the world how fantastic it all was.

The truth is, I don’t like kids. The best thing about them is they belong to someone else. I might have considered having kids under certain circumstances. To wit: they’d have to be born adult and they’d have to find a place to live other than my home. I suppose that first condition would make the whole enterprise a non-starter for any potential female partner.

I was talking this over with my pal Anna in LA the other night. She seems wishy-washy on the whole prospect of breeding. Ask her in general if she wants to have kids and she’ll shrug and say, Yeah, I suppose. Ask her specifically if she’d wouldn’t mind carrying a human beachball in her belly this minute and she’ll freeze you with an ugly stare.

After I’d canvassed her, she turned the table and asked if perhaps I regret not planting a seed. I gave her a version of the above screed.

Anna: “Naw, it ain’t kids you don’t like.”

Me: “Oh, yeah?”

Anna: “Yeah. In fact, I think you like kids. I’ve seen you hold kids. I’ve seen them crawl all over you on the floor.”

Me: “Yeah but….”

Anna: “Yeah, nothin’. You like kids.

Me: “But I’m so happy when they go away.”

Anna: “True. But who isn’t? Most sane parents long for the day their kids go away to college. People pay forty or fifty thou a year just so their darlings can live in a dorm room in another state.”

Me: “Hmm. I never thought about it that way.”

Anna: “Right. It’s parents you don’t like.”

Me: “I think you’ve got something there.”

Anna: “Uh huh. The entire species of them. Parenthood turns people into jerks.”

How true. Yesterday, on the way to the Kroger I got stuck behind a car bearing a bumper sticker saying, I’m proud of my Cub Scout. Think of it. These parents have defaced their automobile, probably lowering its resale value in the process, just to tell all humanity how wonderful it is that their son has joined a club that accepts anybody. Not only that, since it’s not humanly possible to resist reading a bumper sticker, they’ve stolen several precious seconds of my life that otherwise might be spent contemplating how the Cubs can get rid of Milton Bradley. It’s a crime, I tell you.

I mean, really. The Cub Scouts? We’ve become so narcissistic about our heirs that we’re waving flags celebrating the fact that our kids spend an hour and a half after school once a week learning how to make breakfast pizzas?

These people may as well have put a bumper sticker on their car saying, I’m proud that my kid doesn’t stay home sitting on his fat ass in front of TV once a week. And they’re not unusual. Everybody brags about how smart/cute/quick/special their kids are. They are — to them. To me — meh.

I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly here but I want to find a bumper sticker that says, Nobody gives a shit about your kid but you. Am I a bad guy?

Maybe not. In a story about America’s new unhealthy preoccupation with its kids, Vanessa Richmond writes in The Tyee: “Some people are starting to (unpopularly) point out that our current interest in kids and parenting is neither normal nor historical. The ‘parenthood’ concept is, in fact, a recent invention, a type of obsession, and even a form of insanity.”

Ain’t it the truth?

Early on in my potent, randy life, I thought I’d get in on the parenting bandwagon eventually. For some odd reason, though, I was deathly afraid of impregnating someone. Why? Maybe it was my plethora of neuroses and phobias. I figured it was hard enough for me to deal with me — now I’m gonna make some innocent kid do it too?

In any case, I never hit the bullseye, although there was a scare or two along the way. Maybe I was just lucky rather than smart.

Either way, I never became a parent. That’s good; I’m filled with enough self-loathing, thank you.

Randolph Street:Highway 61–Road Running

Racehorse–Barnum, Minnesota

Lipstick–Burlington, Iowa

Barnes’–Burdette, Arkansas

Tanners–Forest Lake, Minnesota

White Hat–Port Gibson, Mississippi

Milk–Wisconsin

This is a personal look at Mid-America that I shot between 1976 and 1985.  These were taken along the approximately 1700 miles of US Highway 61 that roughly follows the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Minneapolis, then juts northeast to Duluth and along the western edge of Lake Superior to Thunder Bay, Ontario.  All photographs © Jon Randolph.

Benny Jay: 99 Problems

It’s Monday night bowling and Young Ralph’s taken over the jukebox, paying for forty-something songs and tying up that machine for at least two hours.

He’s got a nice spread too. Hendrix, Michael Jackson and Santana — for the old timers, like me `n Cap — and lots of  rap for the younger guys, like him, J-Dub and Norm.

To me, the rap’s just noise. Then one clicks in — just grabs me by the throat: “If you havin’ girl problems I feel bad for you, son, I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one – hit me….”

I know, I know, we shouldn’t call a woman a bitch, but I can tell from the lyrics I can’t quite hear that something special’s going on with this song. I particularly like the “hit-me” part.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

“Jiggah,” says Norm.

“Who?”

“Jay-Z,” says Young Ralph.

“Oh – I’ve heard of him before….”

J-Dub, Norm and Young Ralph are rapping along: “The year is ninety-four, in my trunk is raw, in my rear view is the mutha-fuckin’ law….”

“How do you know all the words?” I ask them.

They ignore me and keep rapping: “Child, I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a little bit, enough that you won’t illegally search my shit….”

Then they hit the chorus: “I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one – hit me….”

On the way home, the refrain keeps playing in my mind. I go to my room and head for the computer – it’s based on a song by Ice-T from way back when. That one goes: “I got a ho from the east, got a ho from the west, got a ho that likes to jack me off and rub it in my….”

Well, you can figure out the rest of the rhyme.  Call me Old School, but it’s just a little too raw for me.

I go back to Jay-Z’s version. As far as I can tell, he takes Ice-T’s silly song about being a stud and makes it political. I watch a video of him singing it at an inauguration party for Obama staffers. He goes: “Got 99 problems, but a Bush ain’t one – hit me….”

Now I’m all into it – got my curiosity working overtime. Start reading about Jay-Z. A regular rags-to-riches superstar. Born in Brooklyn. Raised in the projects. Sold thirty-something million records. Raked in hundreds of millions of dollars. Owns a fashion line, a record company, part of a NBA basketball team. Married to Beyonce. How do I not know this stuff?  Got three-years probation a few years back for stabbing a record promoter at a hip-hop party at a Time Square night club called the Kit-Kat. Hired a lawyer named Murray Richman to get him out of that one.

Okay, all you hip-hop know-it-alls out there wondering how one man can be so ignorant — bet you didn’t know about Murray Richman.  I go to his website and read: “Murray Richman, otherwise known as `don’t worry’ Murray, is a 62-year-old criminal defense lawyer who’s spent the last four decades keeping some of the most besieged New Yorkers out of the joint….Murray made his name defending the members of New York’s’ criminal establishment, the soldiers and bosses of the Lucchese and Gambino crime families.”

Dang, he must be a good lawyer if he’s got his own nickname. I see why Jay-Z hired him. Hell, if I were charged with knifing a guy at the Kit Kat club in New York City, my first telephone call would be to Murray “Don’t Worry” Richman….

By now it’s close to midnight and I still have the dog to walk (and I wonder why I get no sleep). I fight off the urge to read more about Murray, grab the leash and head for the door.

It’s a nice night – quiet, almost peaceful. The only sound’s the swooshing of cars passing on the rain-drenched streets.

I got 99 Problems playing in my mind. Surprised I never heard it before. I’d have remembered it, too — it’s so catchy and all. How could I have missed it? The computer said it came out in 2004. What was I was listening to back then? Probably the oldies stations — same crap I listen to now. Man, I live in a cave. That’s my problem – well, that and 98 other things. My kids are right – musically speaking, I got to get out more.

Honk!

I look up

“Benny….”

It’s Norm — with J-Dub riding shotgun — heading home from bowling.

“Walkin’ the dog,” Norm yells.

They snap me back from the brainwave I’d been riding. Before I can say anything other than – “yeah” – they’re off.

Man, I was deep in those thoughts – hadn’t talked to anyone since I left the alley. I turn the corner and pick up where I left off: “If you havin’ girl problems, I feel bad for you, son, I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one….”

Big Mike: Why, Why, Why?

The dining room opens up into the living room in our new joint so The Loved One and I, although we don’t share the same evening pastimes, can still pretty much be together as we do our separate things. Last night, she was laying on the sofa clicking through the channels as I sat at the dining room table, my laptop open in front of me, quipping and barbing via IM with my pals Anna in LA and Tim in Chi as I read the day’s news.

The Loved One found something compelling, a program about quasars. Now we might not share terribly many interests but the Universe is one. We’re both suckers for talk about the vastness and inscrutability of, well, out there. Out of the corner of my ear I could hear the voiceover guy say the farthest known quasar is about nine billion light years away. Not even our Prius with a full tank of gas could make that trip.

Toward the end of the program, the voiceover guy came to the conclusion that we may never know precisely what quasars are all about. Suddenly, The Loved One spoke.

She: “What’s the use?”

Me: “Duh, what?”

She: “What’s the use? Why should we even waste our time trying find out about these things?”

Now, The Loved One wasn’t pooh-poohing the idea of inquiry. I know her enough to realize she’s hungry for answers. But my guess is she was doing a quick cost-benefit analysis in her head. She probably figured if we can’t get to the bottom of these quasars in our lifetimes, our grandchildren’s lifetimes or even the lifetimes of the civilizations of the 42nd Century, why not focus our resources on another mystery, like AIDS, cancer or why people listen to Glenn Beck?

I offered a simple response.

Me: “Because we want to know.”

She: “But we’ll never know.”

Me: “That’s fine. Then we’ll always have something to aim for.”

The Loved One is a practical soul so, even though she fell silent, I knew she was stewing over the thousands of years of research we’re going to do on quasars without a payoff. I’m the dreamer. I’ve never cared about a payoff.

I’d be a terrible businessperson. The Loved One is the soberest domestic entrepreneur I know. While she studies the different types of new tires we should put on our car or seeks the best weatherstripping we should apply around our door frames, I’m musing about the buzzing, quivering, excruciatingly minute world that lies beneath, well, everything.

When I was about seven, I got the big serrated knife out of the drawer to cut a slice of bread. I’d been under strict orders never to use that knife but, naturally, I ignored them. Just as naturally, I opened up the tip of my thumb like a ripe peach. While my mother was simultaneously yelling “I told you!” and bandaging my wound, I pondered the cutting I’d just done.

This was about the time I’d learned that the most cutting edge (pun intended) science was that of splitting the atom. I thought, “What’s the big deal? Didn’t I just split about a million atoms when I cut into the loaf of bread (as well as my precious flesh)?”

This conundrum spurred me to look into the atomic universe as much as any non-math, non-physics guy could. I don’t know all the formulas but I do know now that the stuff of existence, what we see and feel, is made of successively tinier building blocks, so much so that atoms are actually super-huge structures when compared to some of the sub-atomic particles discovered at places like Fermilab and CERN. The physical world is nothing more than a grand, infinite Russian nesting doll. Who knows? Maybe the top quark, which the Fermilab gang announced they’d seen in 1995, is comprised of billions or trillions of smaller pieces.

I need to know what those pieces are. Not that I’m going to find any of them, mind you. But I’ll be watching for all the math and physics geeks to do so.

My late sis, Good Old Franny, used to scold me: “You always have to ask why or how. You’re too analytical.” Franny never cared to look into things too deeply. She loved her illusions — she was a sucker for Miss America pageants and she believed politicians were noble souls with high ideals. She was shocked whenever a senator was caught with his pants down. I told her politicians always have their pants down; it’s in their nature. I know because I was driven to ask the how and the why of their makeup. Franny would put her thumb to her nose and wiggle her fingers at me.

Invariably, Franny would say to me, “You ask why like a two-year-old.” She meant it as a harsh criticism. I took it as a compliment.

The Loved One doesn’t criticize that part of me. Much. Still, she has to wonder what the knowledge of the top quark or the nature of quasars have to do with what kind of tires we should put on our car. I figure we balance each other nicely.

All The Bells And Whistles

Niela Miller: Songs of Leaving

This album is as much a document as it is a collection of songs. The reason for its existence owes mostly to the fact that, in 1962, Niela Miller walked into a studio and laid down the song that would inspire hippies for the remainder of the 60s.

Fill in the blanks: Hey _____,  Where’re you goin’ _____? It’s the lyrical link between this song and “Hey Joe.” Miller’s song asks someone named Kid why they’re going into town. She’s concerned that he will go to a pool hall, complain to people that his father keeps him down, and then get into a fight without his father around to protect him. It’s totally square. Miller even sings it like a scolding. Billy Roberts, her boyfriend at the time, stole the song and rewrote it. So no, this isn’t quite the song recorded by the Byrds, Love and the Creation, and others.

A large number of the songs on the record deal with listening to the people that came before you – your mother and your father. On the surface, the tone and content may seem amusing, especially since this woman supposedly planted the seed for a counter-culture.  However, the record is so spooky the call to heed one’s elders feels more like a warning, telling of curses that will inevitably ensnare youth.

She sings about prisons, executions, drownings, abuse and love that overwhelms. This is the stuff that haunts. What makes much of this so compelling is her performance, the shitty equipment at Variety Recording Service and the damaged condition of the acetate, which all give it a Victrola texture. The sound is time itself, already passed. If it was performed intimately by someone sitting in the same room with you, the effect would be radically different. But on this one document, when she sings her homage to Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it sounds like she disappeared into those woods long ago. The haunted characters in the songs are now ghosts themselves and they ask us to take heed. They were once like us. We will all be like them.

by Timothy Imse, October 27, 2009

Benny Jay: You’re Late!

None of this would have happened, if I hadn’t stayed up late to watch “12 Angry Men.”

Big mistake. The movie’s better that I’d expected — how could I’ve gone so long without watching it? — and when it’s over I’m too wired to sleep. So I lie on the couch and read a book by Stephen King.

I don’t crash `til four. Which means I don’t get up `til ten. And I’m so pumped up from Stephen King and “12 Angry Men” that I have to write. I’m pounding away at my computer, oblivious to the world, when my younger daughter yells up the stairs: “We gotta go….”

“What time is it?” I yell back.

“11:40….”

Uh-oh. We have fifty minutes to get to her cross country meet in a Forest Preserve on the other side of town or else — we’re late!

I scramble down the stairs, hop in and out of the shower, throw on clothes, and, shirt still damp, grab a leash and walk the dog in the rain. Yes, it’s raining!

The dog does her thing — God, she takes forever. I run back to the house, yell at my daughter “hurry up!”, fill a bowl with cereal and milk and start to gobble down breakfast as my daughter’s yells at me, “Why do you always eat at the last minute?”

“I’m hungry,” I say. Only it comes out “Ah hun-gee” cause my mouth’s filled with food.

With milk and cereal dribbling down my chin, I dash out of the house and into the car. The dashboard clock says it’s 12:20.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “The clock’s five minutes fast….”

“We’re still late….”

“Actually, we don’t have to be there for another ten minutes. So, technically, we’re still on time….”

“How can we possibly get there in ten minutes?”

She has a point. We’re roughly eight miles away from the Forest Preserve.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “Irving’s a snap on the weekends….”

As soon as I say it, we hit a wall of traffic. I’m talking bumper-to- bumper as far as the eye can see. Then little Devyn calls from the Forest Preserve to say 1.) where are you? and 2.) the coach is really mad.

Great, now I feel guilty. I hate to keep anyone waiting — and yet, I’m always late, so figure that out.

“It’s your fault,” says my daughter.

“How is it my fault?”

“Cause you were writing when you should have been getting us ready….”

“How come I have to get you ready? Isn’t that interesting. When it comes to staying out late with your friends, you’re the grown woman. But when it comes to getting out of the house on time, you’re still a kid and I’m in charge….”

Silence. She has nothing to say, cause, really what can she say. Chalk up another victory for the great debater — Benny Jay!

Dodging and darting through traffic, I reach the Forest Preserve at 12:50. “I’m gonna tell the coach, it’s your fault,” says my daughter.

“Wuss,” I say, as she walks out the door. “That’s okay – I’ll take the hit….”

I park the car and walk into the park. If nothing else, I figure I beat Maggie. One of the great things about Maggie, the mom of another girl on the team, is that she — oh, how to delicately phrase this? — tends to run a little behind.

Oops.  Maggie’s standing by the finish line talking to her brother, Uncle John. Oh, no — I’m even later than Maggie!

“You’re late!” barks out Caldow, the assistant coach.

“I can explain it all,” I tell him. “It’s my daughter’s fault….”

I see the head coach and I fall on my knees and beg for forgiveness. Well, not really, but almost. “Don’t worry,” he says.  Only I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I really blew it. So now I feel even worse.

Anyway, a few hours pass. We win the meet. The rain stops. I’m having fun talking to the other parents. Life’s not so bad.  I’m walking across the field to the port-a potty. And my boots slip on the gravel and I fall. That’s right — I actually fall, landing face first on the ground.

The first thing I think is how ridiculous this must look. So I get up slowly, wincing and limping. I figure folks won’t laugh at me if they think I’m in pain.

Only no one’s even remotely watching me.  It’s like the proverbial tree that falls in the proverbial forest.  No one sees me fall so it’s like I didn’t fall at all. Get it?

Except I did fall and my hands are all scraped up. Oh, brother, what a mess. That’ll teach me to stay up late….

Letter From Milo: Fake Tits

Note from editor: For the last few weeks, we’ve been barraged by phone calls, emails, letters and faxes from outraged readers demanding something — anything — by Milo Samardzija, who’s been on the disabled list since early October. All right, all right, already.  Enjoy this blast from the past, originally posted April 13, 2009….

Every once in a while my brother-in-law sends me porn in an email. It’s usually a bit of fluff that someone sends him and he forwards it to me. Now, I’m not saying my brother-in-law is a pervert – you’d have to ask my sister about that – but he does enjoy a bit of porn on occasion.

The porn he sends me is actually pretty tame stuff. It usually has a humorous bent to it. For example, this past holiday season he forwarded me an attachment that had a Christmas card from the then-President. The subject line of the email read, “Greetings from George and Laura’s Bush.” The picture was of President and Mrs. Bush, full frontal naked, smiling and waving from one of the doorways of the White House.

It was obviously a Photoshop job and not very well done. I looked at it for a few moments before deleting it. The computer I use is accessible to my wife and children and I don’t like leaving anything on it that would offend their tender sensibilities. They have a low enough opinion of me anyway without adding porn freak to their list of grievances.

In my youth I was as intrigued by the nude female form as any sex-deprived young hetero male. In those days opportunities for seeing naked women were rare. Along with my equally horny young friends, we made every effort to satisfy our sexual curiousity. As teenagers, we snuck into burlesque houses in the dying days of the art form (see my earlier post about the Follies Theater on State Street.) We hoarded magazines like Playboy, according them the same respect and awe that a baseball nerd reserves for a Honus Wagner collector card.

A few years later, when social mores loosened, I saw “Deep Throat” starring Linda Lovelace at the Tivoli Theater in Gary, Indiana. A couple of years later I saw “The Devil in Miss Jones,” starring the great Georgina Spelvin at a theater in San Francisco.

When home theater technology became available I rented a couple of VHS tapes at the local video store (pre-Blockbuster days) but found them, on the whole, pretty boring. By that time I had experienced a bit of the real thing and, like most sportsman, I preferred to participate rather than watch from the sidelines.

Years later, when the great Internet explosion occurred, I was pretty much bored with the whole concept of watching other people copulate. I generally paid no mind to the filmed shenanigans of bored housewives, mustachioed UPS drivers, horny cheerleaders, naughty nurses, pizza delivery boys, errant nuns, French maids and doctors with unorthodox bedside manners.

One thing I did notice, however, was the proliferation of fake tits. It seemed that all the ladies in these films were as inflated as Michelin tires, their breasts grotesquely large and sometimes misshapen. They seemed to defy all known laws of physics and gravity.

Fake tits weren’t restricted to porn stars. The popped up everywhere. From Hollywood and Vine to Main Street USA, fake tits became as common as coffee shops. I read an article in a legitimate newspaper that trumpeted the fact that some parents were buying breast implants for their daughters as high school graduation presents. Every once in awhile my dear wife, who works in an industry with a preponderence of women, will tell me that so-and-so just got a boob job. She will say this as casually as if mentioning what were were having for dinner that evening.

“Why would she do that?’ I asked. “I thought she looked pretty good.”

“Well, she’s had three kids.”

“So?”

“Maybe she wants to look better. Improve her self-esteem.”

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know, 50 maybe.”

“Jesus, who’s she trying to fool.”

“I guess she just wants to feel better about herself.”

“If she want to feel better she should get a dog. Dogs always make you feel good.”

“I swear, sometimes you sound like a complete idiot.”

“I love you too, babe.”

Maybe I’m being a boob about this, but I hate fake tits. I hate the mindset behind them, the pathetic attempts by some women to re-engineer their bodies in the hopes that their lives will magically change for the better. That’s a lot to expect from bags of saline solution or petroleum byproducts.

Maybe I’m a dumbass, but why are fake tits considered sexy and false teeth are not? Why are fake tits deemed an asset while a prosthetic leg is considered unfortunate? Why are fake tits considered good for self-esteem while a glass eye is basically good for nothing.

I guess I’ll never figure it out. Ah, well, whoever said, Vanity, thy name is woman, might have been on to something. Wait a minute, the doorbell just rang. I hope it’s FedEx. I recently ordered a Swedish Dick Extender on the Internet and it due to arrive at any time. Gotta run.