Chapter One
Slouching Toward Red Lobster
Cats was very, very, very bad. Cats was a lot worse than I'dexpected. I'd seen Phantom years ago, and knew all Ineeded to know about Starlight Express and Joseph andthe Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, so I was not acomplete stranger to the fiendishly vapid world of AndrewLloyd Webber. But nothing I'd ever read or heard aboutthe show could have prepared me for the epic suckiness ofCats. Put it this way: Phantom sucked. But Cats reallysucked.
One of the things that fascinated me about Cats was the wayI'd managed to keep it from penetrating my consciousnessfor the previous fourteen years. Yes, I'd been walking past theWinter Garden Theatre at 50th and Broadway since 1982without once even dreaming of venturing inside; and yes, I'dheard the song "Memory"; and yes, I'd heard about all the TonysCats had won; and yes, I'd seen all those garish subway posters;and yes, I'd been jostled by those armies of tourists streaming outof the theater at rush hour as I myself tried to hustle throughmidtown. But all those years that Cats had been playing, I'dsomehow avoided even finding out whatthe show was about. Wandering past the Winter Garden allthose years was like wandering past those dimly lit S&M bars inGreenwich Village: I really didn't need to know the details.
Now my blissful ignorance had been shattered. So withoutany further ado, let me share the wealth. For the benefit of thetwo or three other people in this society who don't know whatCats is about, here's the answer: It's about a bunch of cats. Thecats jump around in a postnuclear junkyard for some two and ahalf hours, bumping and grinding to that curiously Mesozoic popmusic for which Andrew Lloyd Webber is famous--the kind of full-tilttruckin' that sounds like the theme from "The Mod Squad."There's an Elvis impersonator cat, and a cat that looks like CyndiLauper, and a cat that looks like Phyllis Diller. All the other castmembers look like Jon Bon Jovi with two weeks of facial growth.
Sure, Cats is allegedly based upon the works of T. S. Eliot,but from what I could tell, the show had about as much to dowith the author of "The Waste Land" as those old Steve Reevesmovies had to do with Euripides. Cats is what Grease would looklike if all the cast members dressed up like KISS. To give you anidea of how bad Cats is, think of a musical where you're actuallyglad to hear "Memory" reprised a third time because all theother songs are so awful. Think of a musical where thesongs are so bad that "Memory" starts to sound like "Ol'Man River" by comparison. That's how bad Cats is.
The most disappointing thing about my maiden voyage on thissea of sappiness was the behavior of the crowd. In all honesty, Ihad long assumed that everyone who enjoyed Cats was, in somesense of the word, a bozo. But I'd always assumed that theywere happy, festive bozos. Nothing could have prepared me forthe utterly blase reception Cats received when I attended amatinee in late March. The crowd was your typical Saturdayafternoon assemblage: implacable Japanese tourists, platoonsof gawking midwestern huckleberries, legions of Farrah Fawcettlookalikes. Based on their fulsome demeanors, I would have expectedthem to give the performers a boisterous reception when urged to getdown and boogie.
But the day I saw Cats, the crowd just kind of sat there andzoned out. Not unlike Broadway dancers and singers whosometimes, if not always, phoned it in, the audience wasphoning it in. The only way I could rationalize such lack of passionwas this: Cats had been playing for fourteen years,and this was a room filled with people who had found somethingbetter to do with their time for the previous 5,600 performances.So it wasn't like Cats was something they'd been dying to see,like the Taj Mahal or the Blarney Stone or that crevice betweenSharon Stone's legs. Mostly, they acted likeRVers who were simply checking names off a list: "Ohio, NewJersey, Wisconsin--okay, Reba, we've done the Dairy States."
I came home from Cats feeling totally dejected. In the backof my mind, I'd expected the show to fall into that vast categoryoccupied by everything from bingo to Benny Hill.You know: so bad, it's good. But Cats was just plain bad. Reallybad. About as bad as bad could get. Revisiting the horror in mymind later that evening, I consoled myself withthe assurance that surely this would be the lowest point of myadventure, that nothing I subsequently experienced couldpossibly be in even the same league as Cats.
Then I cued up the Michael Bolton record.
So much for that theory.
For years, I'd been vaguely aware of Michael Bolton'sexistence, just as I'd been vaguely aware that there was anebola virus plague in Africa. Horrible tragedies, yes, but they hadnothing to do with me. All that changed when I purchased a copyof The Classics. When you work up the gumption to put a recordlike The Classics on your CD player, it's not much different fromdeliberately inoculating yourself with rabies. With hisheart-on-my-sleeve appeals to every emotion no decent human beingshould even dream of possessing, Michael Bolton is the onlyperson in history who has figured out a way to make "Yesterday"sound worse than the original. He's Mandy Patinkin squared. Hissacrilegious version of Sam Cooke's "Bring It on Home to Me" isa premeditated act of cultural ghoulism, a crime of musicalgenocide tantamount to a Jerry Vale rerecording of the SexPistols' "Anarchy in the UK" And having to sit there, and listenwhile this Kmart Joe Cocker mutilates "You Send Me" is likesitting through a performance of King Lear with Don Knotts inthe title role. Which leads to the inevitable question: If it's a crimeto deface the Statue of Liberty or to spraypaint swastikas onMount Rushmore or to burn the American flag, why isn't it acrime for Michael Bolton to butcher Irving Berlin's "WhiteChristmas"?
To round out Day One in my personal cultural bathosphere, Ipicked up. Nicholas Evans's international best-seller TheHorse Whisperer. As was the case with Cats and MichaelBolton, the result was horrifying. In Evans's megahypednovel, a tyke loses her leg in a riding accident, then goes outwest with her yuppie-scum mother seeking to persuade asagebrush psychotherapist to cure, her totally psychotic horse.With lines like "What wanton liars love makes of us" and "It wasthe last night of their blinkered idyll," The Horse Whisperer isone of those cloying upscale/downscale books where the momhas an attitude, the kid has an attitude, and even the goddamnhorse has an attitude.
In fact, the only mildly attractive character in the entire bookis Tom Booker, the old horseshit whisperer himself. Booker is akind of cowpoke philosopher who always knows the right thingsto whisper into a horse's ears, but seems to have trouble when itcomes to whispering into a woman's ears. Maybe that's becausehorses don't understand the phrase "cornhole." And, oh yes, Tomthe Horse Whisperer is a quiet loner from the great state ofMontana. Of course, I was reading about this ten-gallon,equestophilic Billy Bob Freud right about the time theUnabomber was being brought to justice and the FBI wasbesieging those madcap Freemen out in the Great State ofMontana.
Nice timing, Nicky.
In the days and weeks that followed, I gradually realized thatmainstream American culture was infinitely more idiotic than Ihad ever suspected. Take movies. Over the years, I'd come tobelieve that a special ring of hell had been reserved for LomeMichaels for promoting the careers of Joe Piscopo, JamesBelushi, and others of their ilk. But nothing those dimwits haddone on film had even vaguely prepared me for the prepaleolithicworld of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. The whole time I waswatching Billy Madison and Tommy Boy I kept saying tomyself, "I know that these people are alumni of `Saturday NightLive,' so I know that if I sit here long enough, they will eventuallydo or say something that will make me laugh. Heck, they'repros."
Oh, foolish, foolish man! Hours and hours later, I was still inmy chair, comatose, watching these Gen-X Ostrogoths ruin myday, my week, my civilization. Here's Sandler setting a bag ofpoop on fire. Here's Farley getting covered in cow shit. Andhere's Bo Derek, co-starring. What a sad commentaryon our society that we have produced movies so bad thatyou feel sorry Bo Derek has to be in them. Which just goes toshow: No matter how famous you are when you're young, if youdon't play your cards right, you're eventually going to end up in amovie with Adam Sandler.
Was all this a surprise to me? Yes, I can truly say that thescale of horrendousness proudly displayed in these motionpictures was awe-inspiring. Sure, I'd known that these movieswere out there, but not until I'd actually sat all the way through acouple of them did I have any idea how satanically cretinous theywere. Until I saw Billy Madison and Tommy Boy, I'd alwaysthought that the three scariest words in the English languagewere "Starring Dan Aykroyd." Now I knew better. Beingintroduced to Joe Piscopo and Dan Aykroyd and only laterlearning of the existence of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley islike going to school and learning about the Black Plague, only tofind out many years later that there's something called theBlacker Plague.
And I don't even want to talk about Pauly Shore.
On some of the outings I lined up for my trek through thecultural undergrowth, I honestly suspected that someone hadphoned ahead to ensure that the staff would maximize mydiscomfort. Typical was the night I dragged my family overto the local Red Lobster for our first-ever visit to the garishestablishment. Red Lobster, I quickly learned, was a chaingeared toward people who think of themselves as just a little bittoo upscale for Roy Rogers. Even while waiting in the anteroomof the bogus sea shanty I could detect a certain aura ofproletarian snootiness because of the way people were looking atme and my son. While Gordon, age ten, and I had turned up innondescript T-shirts and shorts, the Red Lobsterpatrons were bedecked in their best windbreakers andtheir very finest polyester trousers.
"Next time, show some respect," their expressions suggested."After all, you're eating at Red Lobster. This ain't some goddamnWendy's."
The Red Lobster menu consisted almost entirely of battercunningly fused with marginally aquatic foodstuffs andconfigured into clever geometric structures. I immediately beganto suspect that the kitchen at Red Lobster consisted of onegigantic vat of grease in which plastic cookie molds resemblingvarious types of food were inserted to create a structuralresemblance to the specific item ordered. This was the only wayto determine whether you were eating Buffalo wings orcrabcakes. Technically, my dinner--The Admiral's Feast--was adazzling assortment of butterfly shrimp, fish filet, scallops, andsome mysterious crablike entity. But in reality, everything tastedexactly like Kentucky Fried Chicken. Even the French fries.
Red Lobster was a consummate bad experience. It wasn'tjust the Huey Lewis & the News ambience, it wasn't just theabsence of mozzarella sticks from the menu that day, it wasn'tjust the party of twenty-nine seated next to us complaining aboutthe service, it wasn't just the Turtles singing "HappyTogether" overhead, it wasn't just the absence of root beerfrom the menu that day, it wasn't just the titular head of the partyof twenty-nine incessantly referring to different members of hisentourage as "landlubbers," and it wasn't even the way thosesocial-climbing townies gave my son and me the once-over aswe came through the door. No, it was definitely the food. Thefood tasted like baked, microwaved, reheated, overcooked,deep-fried loin of grease.
Admiral's Feast, my ass.
* * *
After my stomach lining had recovered from this dismalgastronomic sortie, I decided to immerse myself further in someof the most beloved books of the past decade. A good place tostart was The Celestine Prophecy. This enormously popularbook deals with the discovery of an ancient manuscript thatpredicted a revolution in human behavior at the dawn of the nextmillennium. The manuscript, purportedly written in sixth-centuryB.C. Aramaic, had been discovered in the rain forests of Peruand contained nine insights. One of the insights involved using aperson's psychic energy field to connect with the flora and faunaall around us. The book had sold several million copies,presumably to that unnerving subset of Americans who exerciseto Shirley MacLaine videos, are unaware of Dionne Warwick'spre-psychic career, voted for Jerry Brown in the 1992Democratic primaries, and worship Baal.
I'm as open to suggestions about how to utilize my psychicenergy as the next guy, but I do have a few caveats here. Forone, I'm getting a bit fed up with the whole Vanquished Chicthing. Basically, anything that has to do with the Hopis, theEtruscans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, or the Incas gets right up mynose for the pure and simple reason that they lost. Throughoutmy life, I've adopted a basic rule of thumb that any wisdomimputed to the denizens of Atlantis, Kathmandu, or MachuPicchu must be viewed with extreme skepticism, because ifthese folks were so goddamn smart, how come they didn't hangaround longer? Look at it this way: Pizarro invades Peru onSunday, and by Tuesday night he's conquered a nation of 12million people. How do you lose your entire continent to a couplehundred grungy conquistadors when the odds are that heavily inyour favor? The obvious explanation: The Incas were a race of 12 millionpre-Columbian Greg Normans.
Gradually, my passion for peerlessly disorienting experiencescaused me to experience a strange new emotion. Technicallyspeaking, there is no English phrase or idiom to describe thefeeling to which I refer, so here I will take the liberty of coiningthe term scheissenbedauern. This word, which literally means"shit regret," describes the disappointment one feels whenexposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one had hopedit would be. A perfect example is Neil Diamond's recent album,Tennessee Moon.
"Hollywood don't do what it once could do," Neil sings on thetitle track, so he packs up his "dusty bags," grabs "an old guitar,"and hits "that Blue Highway," rambling back to that "oldTennessee Moon" where he once "fell in love to an old HankWilliams song." Yes, when Neil hears that "lonesome whistlemoan," he says, "So long, Big City," because he's "longing forthose country roads," and knows it's time to "take a swing downsouth" to "see if that "girl Annie still remembers me."
Let us ignore for a moment the implausible elements in thissong, most importantly the fact that Neil Diamond hails fromFlatbush. Let us also ignore the fact that The Country Recordhas been a cliche since Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline, thatthe record contains the obligatory phoned-in Waylon Jenningsduet, and that Neil Diamond, a man who makes Burl Ives soundlike Joey Ramone, does not come across in an entirelyconvincing fashion on the John Lee Hooker-type track where hesings "I'm gonna be rockin' tonight." This is a line that remindsme of the time Senator Al D'Amato got dressed up as "a narc" andwent up to Harlem to register a "bust." Man, did some shit go downthat day!
Despite this abundant evidence of dire lameness, TennesseeMoon did not even approach Michael Bolton's The Classics forsheer acreage of horseshit per square foot if only because NeilDiamond at his worst still sounds better than Michael Bolton athis best. The reason? At least Neil wrote the atrocious songsthat he was slaughtering.
Yet, much to my consternation, I found this terriblydisappointing. At a certain level, I had now begun to hope thateverything I encountered would suck in a megasucky way, andwas honestly disappointed when some proved merely cruddy.Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, I wanted to gaze directly intothe abyss, to stare at the horror. But as the days passed, as Iventured deeper and deeper into the heartland of hootiness, Igrew crestfallen at the failure of certain monstrously popularcultural figures to achieve the bathetic levels I craved. DeanKoontz's Intensity was sadistic, depraved, and revolting, but thebook could not hold a candle to The Horse Whisperer'sMephistophelian inaneness. Slam Dunk Ernest, a direct-to-videofilm about a lovable moron, was predictably idiotic, but because ithad one good joke (Ernest, the unlikely basketball hero, changeshis name to Ernest Abdul Mustafa), it could not rival the horrorsof Billy Madison and Tommy Boy.
Garth Brooks--Glen Campbell under an assumed name--wasa perfect example of the scheissenbedauernphenomenon. Every Garth Brooks song I encountered was aredneck anthem about truckers, drivin' rain, country fairs, burningbridges, that damn old rodeo, ashes on the water. In the typicalBrooks song, "Mama's in the graveyard, Papa's in the pen,"there's a fire burning bright, "this old highway is like a womansometimes," and some old cowboy's "heading back fromsomewhere he never should have been."
Garth is always sayin' a little prayer tonight, payin' his dues,shipping his saddle to Dad. But Jehoshaphat, he wouldn't trade asingle day, because love is like a highway, it's one big party, andlet's face it: He drew a bull no man could ride. So all that's left todo is whisper a prayer in the fury of the storm and hope youdon't miss The Dance.
It goes without saying that folks call Garth a maverickheck,there "must be rebel blood running through (his) veins." Butsometimes you've just got to go against the grain, "buck thesystem," even though "the deck is stacked against you." In short,Brooks's music was the musical equivalent of a Pat Buchananstump speech, market-researched baloney where the lyrics wereso generic you started to suspect he was using Microsoft'sDrugstore Cowboy for Windows 95 (not available in a Macintoshformat) to write them.
But even though songs like "We Shall Be Free" blatantlyripped off Sly & the Family Stone--fulfilling the dictum that blackmusic is always ten years ahead of the curve, and country andwestern twenty years behind it--and even though Brooksrecycled more riffs than Ray Davies, and even though Brookswas so bland he made Gordon Lightfoot sound like the Red HotChili Peppers, these records didn't actually make you puke. Thiswas about the highest tribute I could pay to most contemporarycountry-and-western music.
On the other hand, it didn't make me do anything. Somebodyonce said that when you turn on the radio, Genesis is whatcomes out. That's exactly the way I felt about Garth Brooks.
So, all right, he chomped, but he didn't chomp royal. Hechomped in the same off-the-shelf way most millionaires inhyperthyroid cowboy hats chomped. But he didn't bite the bigone. And for some reason, this bothered me. When I wentslumming like this, I wanted to cruise the bad slums. I wantedto hit Watts, the South Bronx, North Philly. From the culturalslumming point of view, Garth Brooks was little more than aslightly rundown neighborhood in Yonkers.
As the weeks passed, I grew fatigued with the numbingmediocrity of so many new experiences I had honestly hopedwould be utterly appalling. The Radio City Easter Show was nolamer than any dozen of other spectacles I have seen ontelevision over the years. I rented my first Steven Seagal movie(Under Siege II) and was dismayed to find that it was perfectlywatchable. Neither "Jenny Jones" nor "Baywatch" was as rottenas I expected them to be, and Reader's Digest was merelyboring, not unreadable. I'd been on the lookout for things thatreally stunk out the joint, yet somehow, I still felt that the HolyGrail of Horridness lay just outside my reach. What I reallyneeded to find in order to purge myself forever of thisunwholesome fascination with the cultural tar pits ofAmerica was to set out on a sacred quest, to travel to a shrine ofsuckiness, to bathe myself in the very Ganges of ghastliness.
It was time to make that pilgrimage to Atlantic City.
Entering Atlantic City by car is like entering Venice by dogcart--you simply must take the bus to get there. But whenyou get off the bus, after three hours of deadening chitchat witha battalion of cadaverous low rollers, you will immediately noticethat Atlantic City does not resemble Venice. Atlantic City is avast series of interlocking slums abutted by a narrow strip ofclownish, high-rise buildings erected by people like DonaldTrump. Venice is not. Even I, who have never been to Venice,know that.
Figuring that I should go first class all the way, I checkedinto the Taj Mahal, where my luggage was scooped up by a mandressed like Ali Baba. We deposited my bags, then I returned tothe main floor, where I spent the next twenty-four hoursgambling. I had never gambled before in my life, and did notknow any of the rules. This was unfortunate because shortlyafter I arrived at the blackjack table, the young woman sittingdirectly to my left diplomatically informed me that I was "fuckingthe deck."
Fucking the deck, she explained, is the process whereby aneophyte or incompetent gambler disrupts the ordinarydistribution of cards by making anomalous or stupid decisions. Inmy case, I stood on sixteen with the dealer showing a seven.According to orthodox blackjack procedure, you must alwaysask for another card when the dealer is showing a seven andyou are holding sixteen, because you must always assume thatthe dealer has a concealed ten, ace, or face card.
But I had a funny feeling that my sixteen was good enoughto win. Which it was. One by one, all the other players at thetable went bust, as did the dealer. But now I was persona nongrata, because I should have said "hit," and gone bust with theten, whereupon the person sitting next to me would have gonebust with a nine, but the three other players farther down thetable would have beaten the dealer. In short, it's not enough towin, you have to win according to the system. Thus, there wasno joy in Mudville when the dealer paid me, because I hadaltered the platonic sequence of cards that the Lord intended,effectively fucking the deck.
I spent a good portion of the day fucking the deck at varioustables, then around Happy Hour I ran into the young womanwho had first pointed out my failings as a blackjack player. Overcoffee, she explained the rules of blackjack. But she alsoexplained the appeal of the game, pointing out that she didn'tgamble because of the money, but because it was "Freudian."
I like the table camaraderie," she noted. "You have to becareful not to disrupt the table camaraderie."
"How can you make sure that you don't disrupt the tablecamaraderie?" I inquired.
"Don't fuck the deck," she replied. "And if you do fuck thedeck, try as hard as possible to unfuck it."
"How do you unfuck the deck?" I asked, not mentioning thatI'd been accused of doing precisely that at least three other timesduring the day.
"It's a long story."
Up until this point, I was $120 ahead of the game by usingmy unconventional betting technique of standing when I felt likestanding and hitting when I felt like hitting. But as soon as Istarted gambling the right way, I lost all my money. Before Iknew it, I was $139 in the hole. For the life of me, I could notfigure out what the attraction of this place was. The entire citywas filled with doddering seniors, like the world's largest skittlesleague. Everyone had that bad South Philadelphia hair and thatbad North Philadelphia attitude. The women in neo-Sumerianminiskirts who served you drinks all looked like Hittitelinebackers. Everywhere you turned, a lounge lizardess whothought she was both Martha and the Vandellas was singing"Proud Mary," complete with Tina's extended verbal intro.Everybody at the blackjack table hated you because you'dfucked the deck. And you were down $139. At long last, Irealized that I had come to the end of my journey. I had finallytaken the ferry across the River Styx.
And wouldn't you know that when I disembarked fromCharon's bleak craft, a Borscht Belt comedian would be waitingfor me on the fatal shore? Yes, that very night, I was comped aticket to a presentation of Freddy Roman's All-Star Revue,Catskills on the Boardwalk. As the show opened,I was seated at a folding table parallel to the stage, right acrossfrom a man wearing a Medieval Tournament T-shirt and aPhillies cap, who seemed to be having some sort of an emotionalmeltdown. Glancing around, I noticed that I was `forty-five yearsyounger than anyone else in the room. And I was forty-five.
Finally, Freddy Roman, who is either a failed HennyYoungman or a successful Buddy Hackett, came out and told ajoke about Bob Dole's hometown.
"In Russell, Kansas, it's so quiet, the town hooker is avirgin," he quipped.
The words weren't even out of his mouth before the crowdwas in stitches.
Next, a Puerto Rican Wayne Newton sound-and-lookalikesallied forth to sing "Hello, Young Lovers" and "Unforgettable,"backed by a band with more ponytails than the Cali cartel. Now,the crowd was wafted aloft on a rippling sea of ecstasy. If PerryComo himself had been there, they, couldn't have been happier.
Next, a female comic dressed like George Bums wanderedout and did a routine that included the line "When I was a youngman, the Dead Sea was only sick."
The crowd got a lump in its throat just thinking aboutGeorge.
Then a portly comic in a beret made a bunch of fart sounds.
The crowd completely lost it.
I hauled myself back to the $5 blackjack table, made a fewbets, stood on the wrong card, fucked the deck. Most of thepeople at the table were quite civil, but a middle-aged man sittingin the last chair was livid.
"Must be using some new kind of counting system," hesneered, digging into his Croesian $45 stake and placing anotherbet. "Who needs this?"
That's when I realized it was time to go back to my old wayof life. I'd been harangued for three hours on a bus by theDaughters of Rayon--a regiment of chronic losers who insistedthat they always came out ahead when they visited Atlantic City.I'd been forced repeatedly to tip men dressed like Sinbad. I'd hadto sit in stunned disbelief across from a yabbering buffoon whilea female George Bums impersonator told jokes like "Men I askedGod what He thought of me in Oh, God, He said I was tooyoung for the part." And now, for the fifth time in a single day I'dbeen accused of disrupting table camaraderie by fucking thedeck. So there I sat at a $5 blackjack table in a glorified SouthJersey slum, being dissed by a guy with a bad suit and a badmustache and bad hair and a bad job and a bad family and a badattitude, and it was all my fault that life hadn't turned out the wayhe planned. In short, I was getting the high hat from a low roller.
* * *
When I was coming of age in the late 1960s, most of mygeneration was involved in a heroic effort to depose DeanMartin, Desi Arnaz, Joey Bishop, and all the other cultural iconswho ruled American society with an iron fist. This was anintellectual insurrection from which I defected by my twenty-firstbirthday. One reason I threw in the towel so quickly wasbecause I knew that we couldn't win, that for every RockHudson we polished off, ten Rocky Balboas would spring up inhis place. A month of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals,Michael Bolton records, and Adam Sandler movies certainlyhelped jog my memory, but it was the two days in Atlantic Citythat confirmed what I'd suspected about America ever since Iwas a callow youth.
Somebody fucked the deck.
Continues...
Excerpted from Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoonby Joe Queenan Copyright © 1999 by Joe Queenan. Excerpted by permission.
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