Letter From Milo: Mr. Gay China

You can imagine my absolute shock when, just the other day, I learned that there were gay people living in China. I had no idea. I thought the only gay people in the world lived in the lower 48 states, with a few owning condo timeshares in some of the ritzier neighborhoods of Paris and London.

The Chinese are pretty tough on their gay population. Just the other day I read that the police broke up a parade that was to celebrate the coronation of Mr. Gay China. It must have been pretty tough picking one guy out of a population of a billion and a half people to represent gay Chinese, especially when, just a few years ago the Chinese government claimed that there were no gay Chinese at all.

The Iranian government also claims there are no gay people in their country. That must be the reason that Iran has terrible food, ugly architecture, no fashion sense, shitty haircuts, and no decent boutiques or antique shops.

I consider myself an extremely intelligent man, but there is one thing about gay people that confuses me. Where did they come from? If I remember correctly, there were no gay people at all in the USA until the early 1970s. They just appeared one day and made themselves at home. I was determined to find out where all the gay people came from, so I called my friend Benny Jay, who’s smart as a whip and asked him.

“Hey, Benny, have you noticed that there are an awful lot of gay people around?”

“Now that you mention it, I have seen a lot of them recently.”

“Well, where the fuck did they all come from?”

“Canada.”

“Canada? Are you sure?”

“Positive. It was all part of that NAFTA deal.”

“Makes sense to me. By the way, do you know anything about this Mr. Gay China?”

“Guy China? Yeah, he’s on my bowling team.”

“No, no. Mr. Gay China. He’s this dude that supposed to be the epitome of Chinese gayness. They were going to have a parade to honor him but the Chinese police broke it up. They broke a few heads, too.”

“They must not have had a parade permit.”

Someone once said that the quality of a civilization can be judged by the way it treats its elderly. A better measuring stick, in my opinion, would be judging a civilization by the way it treats its minorities.

So, what’s the problem with gay people? Why do countries as varied as China, Iran, and, yes, the good ol’ USA, discriminate against gays. As far as I know, gay people do not commit terrorist acts. They rarely agitate for separatist states. Their hygiene standards are above average. They throw great parties. And if they move into your neighborhood that usually means your property values are going up. Other than an aggravating fondness for Broadway show tunes, they are generally good citizens.

I was still confused about the origins of gay people after I got off the phone with Benny Jay. So, I thought I’d call Big Mike, the Barn Boss of this scabby, low-life outfit. Big Mike knows everything. The man’s a walking encyclopedia, an oasis of wisdom in a desert of ignorance. He knows more shit that Professor Irwin Corey.

“Hey, Big Mike, it’s me, Milo.”

“Make it quick, asshole, I ain’t got all day. I’ve got a blog to run.”

“Ok, no problem. Have you noticed that there are a lot of gay people around?

“So what.”

“Well, I was talking to Benny Jay and he said they all came from Canada, part of that NAFTA deal.”

“Benny Jay’s an idiot.”

“I thought so, because I know a gay guy and he’s from Ireland.”

“You know what, Milo?”

“What?”

“You’re an idiot, too.”

“Good talking to you.”

“Always a pleasure.”

Benny Jay: A Team Win

It’s Friday night, and I’m just about the happiest man in America, cause the Bulls are on free TV, as in no cable, which means that even I get to watch `em….

Good game, too. Neck and Neck with Washington into the third quarter.  Best of all, Derrick Rose is lighting it up for the Bulls.

Did I tell you I love Derrick Rose?

Well, it’s true. I’ve been watching him play basketball since his grammar school days at Beasley elementary right here in Chicago at 52nd and State. It’s almost like I coached him myself….

I’ve got company for the game. My older daughter and her friends — Ryan, Anika and Nora. Even my wife makes an appearance.

Don’t want to listen to the play-by-play so I’ve got the TV sound down, and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes on the stereo. It’s in honor of Teddy Pendergrass, who passed away the other day.

Did I tell you I once saw Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes?

Well, I did. Back in the early `80s at Cross Currents, a cozy little club on the north side of town. By then, Teddy had gone off on his own, but they had a front man who sounded just like him. They sang all their hits. Closed with Wake up Everybody, which happens to be playing on the stereo right now.

“Wake up, everybody, no more sleepin’ in bed….”

It’s still one of the greatest songs ever written.

“No more backward thinkin’ — time for thinkin’ ahead….”

Just then, Hinrich — good ol’ Captain Kirk himself — hits a jump shot to put the Bulls up by four….

“The world has change so very much from what it used to be….”

I’m doing this dance I invented — based on the Funky Chicken….

“There is so much hatred, war and poverty….”

My wife leaves the couch.

I watch her go. “Where you going?” I ask.

“To the computer,” she says.

“But the Bulls were winning with you on the couch….”

She smiles like she does when she’s stopped listening to the dumber things I say.

Oh, no — I have this sense of pending doom. As if my wife’s departure from the couch has ignited some cosmic chain of reaction that will hurt the Bulls.

Sure enough, Washington scores a bunch of points in a hurry.

“Okay,” I say to my wife. “I’m not blaming you, but the Bulls were up by four when you left the couch and now they’re down seven….”

She looks up from the computer. “Do you want me to come back to the couch?” she asks.

“Well, yeah,” I say.

“Are you one of those people who are superstitious?” asks Anika.

“Oh, I know people like that,” says Ryan….

“All I’m saying – is that when she was on the couch the Bulls were winning. And since she left the coach they’re losing. It may be just a coincidence, but why take the chance?”

My wife sighs, and returns to the couch. I think this falls under the category of worse in the old wedding-oath clause of for better or worse….

Sure enough, the Bulls surge back. The game goes into two overtimes! It’s tied with ten seconds left and Derrick’s got the ball. He fakes left, turns right, jumps, hangs in the air and throws up a shot that….

Goes in!

Bulls win! Bulls win!

Every one’s whooping it up. I’m on my feet doing the funky chicken, yelling: “Dee Rose! Dee Rose!”

When the jubilation settles, my wife asks: “Can I go back to the computer?”

“Yes,” I say. “You did a great job. You were sensational. Derrick did his part and you did your part — it was a total team win. They couldn’t have won it without you.”

Then I start singing: “The world won’t get no better, if we just let it be — we gotta change it, yeah, just you and me….”

Big Mike: God’s Hand In Haiti

This is the most challenging post I’ve ever written. How can I talk about anything — Sarah Palin, say, or some funny little tiff I had with The Loved One — when an entire city has been wiped out? Port-Au-Prince today stinks to high heaven of death.

There’s a line in Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” wherein he says something along the lines of, I can’t ever enjoy myself as long as one person in the world is suffering.

To survive with our sanity intact, we need to have well-functioning denial mechanisms. Every minute of every day people around the world are being raped, murdered, chopped up with machetes, crushed by tyrants, and so on. We have to pretent none of it exists or else we’d become paralyzed by our own compassion and empathy. But sometimes something so huge happens that we have to take a break from worrying about who’s got the remote or why investment bankers are swimming in bonus cash again.

The Haiti earthquake is one of those huge somethings.

You’d think people would put aside their personal agendas and bullshit myths and rationalizations for just a couple of days while Haitians try to climb out from under their collapsed buildings. Just a little token of respect for human beings who are trying to survive another ten minutes on this Earth.

But no, there’s always an asshole. His name in this case is Pat Robertson. Here’s what he said about Haiti yesterday on his “700 Club” TV show:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the third or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal….’ Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another. Desperately poor. The island of Hispaniola is one island. It is cut down the middle — on one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to god. And out of this tragedy something good may come.

As he puked these words out, a crawl at the bottom of the screen showed a phone number his legion of god-zombies should call to donate money to his organization’s relief efforts.

Robertson clearly was referring to the Haitian slave revolt of 1791, when transplanted Africans threw the French out and formed only the second republic in the Americas. The establishment of Haiti as a nation governed by brown people is a landmark for anybody whose skin is not so pallid as Pat Robertson’s. I would have hoped a good man of god might view that as a rather cheery development but not this particular former serious candidate for President of the United States.

If only Haitians had remained under the yoke of slavery (a system the French, apparently, didn’t need the help of the devil to administer) they’d be as healthy and prosperous as their island neighbors. You know, the Dominican Republic, with one of the highest unemployment rates in the world and more than 42 percent of its population living beneath the poverty line. But, of course, Dominicans are primarily white and Christian so they have to be living better lives than Haitians, even without the earthquake. Oh, and the Dominicans have great resorts, too. That counts for a lot.

Had the Haitian slaves not revolted, this damned earthquake wouldn’t have occurred! So kick open that wallet and send some good green to the 700 Club. It’d be the Christian thing to do, don’t you think? Or don’t you?

All I know is, Robertson had better show where every eff-ing penny of those donations goes. I’m afraid a lot of that money’s gonna go toward the son of a bitch’s next trip to a Dominican resort.

Randolph Street: Hoopla–Lane Tech Vs. Von Steuben

Benny Jay: Creative Accounting

I’m having lunch with Monroe, my friend the blogger, when he breaks the news: “Most web sites have to have one thousand hits before Google or other advertisers pays them five dollars.”

I’m not sure I hear him correctly so I say: “I’m sorry — try that again….”

He speaks a little slower — like you would to a child. “Okay, every time someone comes to your blog that’s a hit — right?”

“Right….”

“You need 1,000 of those hits before you get five dollars….”

Pause.

“So the ratio’s like,  one-thousand to five?” I ask.

“Precisely….”

I think about that for a moment. I don’t like to swear, but….

“Shit,” I say.

“Tell me about it….”

After lunch, first thing I do is call Milo, one of my three co-workers on this great Third City enterprise. “All right, get ready for this,” I tell him. “According to Monroe — who knows a lot about this stuff — we need one thousand hits to make five dollars….”

“Who told you this?” Milo asks.

“Monroe….”

“And he told you one-thousand to five?”

“Yeah….”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yeah….”

“How many hits are we getting now?”

“I dunno – couple hundred a day….”

“Shit….”

“That’s what I said…”

“Well, get cracking,” says Milo. “We make five dollars and we’re in the tall grass….”

“Milo, I can’t live on five dollars a day….”

“That’s why the first thing we do is figure out a way to cut the Barn Boss out of the take,” he says.

“You mean, Big Mike?”

“Yeah – who else?”

“But, Milo — he helped me start this blog….”

“So what. Five dollars divided two ways goes a lot further than five dollars divided three ways….”

“You got a point….

“Randolph, too….”

“Geez, Milo, Jonny’s one of my oldest friends….”

“Fuck him, Benny – don’t go soft on me….”

“Well, I could use the money….

“Now that I think about it, what we really need is a sleazy accountant to doctor the books….”

That gets us talking about the immortal Artie Brisket – the chubby, troll-like man who used to do my taxes. He worked out of the basement of his bungalow in West Rogers Park. The place was overflowing with boxes filled with stacks of musty, old tax returns. Smelled of mildew and dust. You’d sit down there, shivering against a draft, and watching Artie total up numbers on his adding machine.  The man loved that adding machine. He used any excuse to add something up. Worked that keyboard like Herbie Hancock on a piano – fingers flying across the keys. He knew the IRS code inside and out – he was always telling me about how he maneuvered his richer clients into a lower bracket. It’s a miracle all of them didn’t wind up in prison.

As I recall, I met Artie through Milo who met him through this publisher Milo used to write for. As a matter of fact, that publisher still owes Milo money.

We could probably learn a thing or two from that publisher. Maybe we should get him to run this blog….

Big Mike: The Worst Insult

In a two-year period in the late 1960s I became obsessed with two things. In 1967, I discovered the Cubs. A year later, I took up politics.

Before 1968, like most dopey kids, I didn’t know a senator from beatnik. Although I must admit that by that time I certainly could distinguish a then-Senator from a future one.

But in that spectacular year, my head was turned by the Vietnam War, civil rights demonstrations, assassinations and finally, in August, the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago. I may have been the only twelve-year-old on Earth who actually watched every minute of the Convention and its accompanying melees on television. I couldn’t believe that my beloved city was being turned into a battle ground with hippies and Yippies flinging bags of shit at cops and Chicago’s finest removing their badges and nameplates so they could fracture skulls in comfortable anonymity. Even on the Amphitheater floor a young Dan Rather was gut-punched by a goon masquerading as a security man on live television.

One of the most indelible images for me that week was when the author Gore Vidal, the flaming liberal, faced off against William F. Buckley, the flaming conservative, on the topic of the antiwar protesters.

Again on live television with moderator Howard K. Smith of ABC News turning apoplectic, the two appeared on the verge of whacking the crap out of each other. When they began talking over each other, Vidal waved his hand in Buckley’s face and said, “Shut up a minute!” Buckley fidgeted in his chair and leaned toward Vidal, saying, “No I won’t!” Then this:

Vidal: “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.”

Buckley: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamned face — and you’ll stay plastered!” Buckley fumed for a moment and continued, “Let the author of “Myra Breckinridge” go back to his pornography and stop making allusions of Nazism to someone who was in the Infantry in the last war and fought Nazis!” all the while putting his face ever closer to Vidal’s.

I was transfixed. The fact that politics and dissent could inspire such rage appealed to this male-hormone-laced pre-teen. I began to devour everything I could about politicians, protesters and activists. I threw my lot in with the Gore Vidals of the world. I never forgot that televised tiff between the two eminent authors and thinkers.

One of the things that made it so memorable was that, at the time, it was shockingly unique. Of course today, such an exchange would be the equivalent of an air-kiss shared by a couple of Fox News politico-barkers.

Today’s incivility makes the Vidal-Buckley contretemps look quaint. Our modern shit-flinging brand of discourse has even infected such a refined, genteel, delicate flower such as, well, I.

The other day, I tried to start a pissing match in the baseball blog I co-write with my partner Peter Ajemian from Boston. Click on the link if you wish, but be warned — it’s of interest only to those who are completely, utterly and probably psychopathically obsessed with baseball. Even our mutual pal Benny Jay continually reminds us that we’re borderline lunatics in our concern for the minutia surrounding the Cubs and the Red Sox. And he’s a guy who still journals every night before he goes to bed about the crush of his life, the Bulls.

Anyway Peter, who goes by the moniker AJ, wrote a post wherein, I thought, he was twisting some facts. I called him on it and added the snarky comment, “What are you, Glenn Beck? Black is white and up is down?”

AJ fired off a response:

Please do NOT ever again suggest, even half-kiddingly, that I am in any way like Glenn Beck. I view Beck as about the lowest of the low and have ripped him on my other blog. So please find another reference — any other one — to make your point. I realize you were probably “baiting” me but Beck is so repugnant that I feel compelled to say this.

Wow. I had no idea that what I’d considered a throwaway comment would rub such a raw nerve. Yet, I’ve made references to Glenn Beck dozens of times in this and other venues. I wouldn’t exactly equate Glenn Beck with Joseph Goebbels but I suspect they’d enjoy comparing notes over a couple of glasses of lager. Beck embodies all the worst aspects of what passes for thought in American mass media. He, Sarah Palin, Paris Hilton, the Balloon Boy’s parents, and Donald Trump make me wonder why terrorists from all four corners of the globe aren’t flying airplanes into our skyscrapers.

See? There I go again. I won’t say the Gore Vidal-William F. Buckley dust-up started us down this inexorable road to ass-holiness. It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later that daytime talk show guests started tossing chairs and calling each other names that in an earlier day would have earned someone a fat lip.

AJ’s a sweet, sensitive, talented guy. Why did I find it necessary to insult him for the sake of furthering some contrived bickering? I’m afraid I’ve violated one of my own cardinal rules — never fall in with the crowd.

What am I, Glenn Beck?

Benny Jay: Mickey Rourke

All day and into the night, the picture of Mickey Rourke sits on the living room table and looks at me.

It’s a shot from the DVD cover for The Wrestler. I planned to watch it last night – had it in the DVD player and everything. In fact, I was standing in front of the TV, channel changer in hand ready to push the start button, when my wife says: “I’m scared.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Cause, it’s really sad….”

“Sad? I thought it was a dark comedy – like the Coen brothers….”

“No — it’s sad….”

“Why did you tell me to get a sad movie? You know I hate sad movies….”

“I didn’t tell you to get it – you got it….”

“Don’t give me that. For months, you’ve been bugging me: Get The Wrestler, I wanna watch The Wrestler….”

The front door opens and my younger daughter walks in from a baby-sitting job. “Hey, guys,” she says. “Wanna watch Saturday Night Live?”

Phew, saved by the bell….

That was last night. Now it’s daytime, sunshine streaming through the windows. Got a steaming cup of coffee in my hand. Sad doesn’t seem so bad when the sun’s shining.

I consider my options.  I could read the Sunday papers or….

I put on the movie.

“You’re watching a movie,” says my daughter.

“Yeah,” I say.

“In the middle of the day?”

“Shh.…”

“That’s weird….”

“You should watch it with me. It’s sad. You can learn from sad….”

Mickey Rourke plays this washed-up, fifty-something-year-old wrestler, who’s wrestling in these shitty little venues in crummy little towns somewhere in New Jersey. He should quit, but he can’t cause he doesn’t know what else he can do. So on he plows, popping pills and shooting up steroids to cut the pain.

The parts that really get to me are the scenes of him walking about his day. He doesn’t walk so much as trudges with his shoulders bent and his back, chest, ankles, knees and neck screaming in agony.

I don’t know why but it speaks to my current condition. And when I turn off the movie something happens and I become Mickey Rourke. This is not that unusual, by the way. I spent the better part of the 1970s being Peter Falk from Columbo and then Jack Nicholson from Chinatown. I must have smoked a million imaginary cigarettes during my Nicholson phase. It’s a wonder I didn’t get sick….

But, now, I’m Mickey Rourke. I slowly rise from the couch and limp up the stairs to the bathroom. My foot hurts. I knock back a couple of Ibuprofen, look at myself in the mirror and sigh.

Moving gingerly, I put on my sweatshirt, hat and thick winter jacket. I take forever to snap the buttons, then I wearily leash the dog and trudge up the street to Dark Star, the video store.

Got my head down. Every step hurts — I wince as I walk. Every now and then I hack, like I got a cough that won’t quit.

I enter the store and walk to the front. Mike, the owner, is not behind the counter. But his brother is.

“Hey, man,” I say.

“Cold – huh?” he says.

“Yeah.” I plop the movie on the counter.

“Did you like it? he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, conveniently leaving out that I was too scared to watch it at night.

I hack. For a while my wires cross and I start doing Nicholson and I light up an imaginary cigarette.

“See ya’, man,” I say as I head for the door.

Down the street I trudge, hacking, wincing, moving slowly. I climb the steps to my house and fall out the couch. A football game’s playing on the boob tube. I stare at the screen and fall asleep.

When I wake, it’s over — I’m not Mickey Rourke anymore.  Just good old Benny Jay, lounging in the living room on a Sunday afternoon, watching a football game on TV – like every other schlub in America…..