“When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your gawd like a soldier.” Rudyard Kipling I’m driving to Hollywood, the cosmic center of the cultural universe, to well… It doesn’t matter why I was heading to Hollywood on this particular morning. It’s really none of your… Okay, fuck it.
Coming soon, on a flat screen near you, I, one of your numbingly countless actors in Los Angeles, will be featured on the hilariously sick “Shameless”. Just one line, but it’s a show stopper. I play a pervert in a raincoat jerking off in front of a yoga class next to a twelve year old girl on a bicycle. Now, before you indignantly scream “How in the hell could you ever volunteer to do something so shocking, so obscene, so humiliating!”
Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!” One of the many advantages of having a brother eight years older than you is you learn things about the world you wouldn’t normally learn until you were at a decently mature age. Like, at least the age of puberty. By the time I was eight, I was light years ahead of my playmates in understanding the adult world: Girls, drinking, dirty jokes.
Cops can be assholes. I know, I know, people will tell you there are good ones. There are. But in my experience, the ratio is one good cop for every ten bad ones. For every cop who lets you off with a warning for speeding, there are the other nine who would just as gladly slam your head against the hood and cuff your hands behind your back.
I remember the date well. June 27, 1974. I was fresh out of college and had moved back home to Pensacola into an old brick and wood building, probably built around the turn of the century. Its exterior was faded red brick, the inside old wood with the faded scent of mold and memories and peeling paint. I loved that house. My roommates were fellow musicians and disc jockeys, so the place was always full of beer, women, music, pot and cockroaches. A lot of the latter.