Growing up in the Baby Boomer era, I had a clear notion of the Cold War and the arms race, thanks in part to my regular viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The episodes featuring the Russian-accented spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale would show the two reprobate schemers trying to steal United States military secrets and pilfer jet fuel under the command of their Fearless Leader. Serving the country of Pottsylvania, a stand-in for Russia, they were meddling on American soil and willing to risk their lives to serve their wicked homeland. Boris and Natasha's skullduggery made it clear that the United States and the Soviet Union were rivals fighting for world dominance. Not just The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, but other cartoons and dramas featured American military might, especially in the skies and beyond. Over and over, the TV of my youth showed me who the Goalkeepers of Dominance were: highly decorated military officers.
One such officer was astronaut Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie. Major Nelson was living the American Dream, and a sign of his success was his discovery of the most beautiful woman in the world in the form of Jeannie, played by my first crush, the blonde goddess Barbara Eden. I was not surprised that Major Nelson found Jeannie because television had taught me that men of advanced military and scientific aptitude were the Alphas.
Not just television, but my father, an infantryman in the Army and eventual engineer, taught me this as well. In fact, without my father's gumption and resourcefulness, I would have never made it to this world. In the army at the time, my father used a cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor sedan to steal my future mother from another army suitor, John Shalikashvili, who would later become a United States General and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. My father and Shalikashvili were both stationed in Anchorage and both had met my eighteen-year-old mother in a tavern. Their battle for her sole romantic affection took a Christmas hiatus when Shalikashvili returned to his home in Peoria, Illinois, and my father returned to see his family in Hollywood, Florida. Wanting to beat Shalikashvili to my mother, my father decided to head back to Anchorage a couple of days early. The problem was that the Lukas fuel filter in the Morris Minor wasn't working and the auto parts store still didn't have a replacement. In a moment of ingenuity, my father, who would later become a top engineer at IBM, used his only prophylactic and a paperclip as a temporary fuel filter replacement. While not a perfect repair job, the makeshift contraption did serve as a spring to help keep the fuel pump from staying stuck in the "open" or "closed" position. Somehow my father made it to Seattle, where he ferried to Alaska and reunited with my mother, beating Shalikashvili by forty-eight hours. Nine months later, on the 28th of October, 1961, I was born.
After observing United States General Shalikashvili lose in the reproduction arms race to my father, I had my second lesson about competition for reproductive dominance when I was five years old. I had made my first bachelor pad, a treehouse on the grounds of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. One day, I persuaded Tammy Whitmire to climb up the tree's wooden slats by luring her with a box of Sun-Maid raisins. I flashed the red raisin box featuring the Sun-Maid holding a huge tray of grapes. Atop the raisin goddess' head was a red bonnet and her whole body was surrounded by a yellow light marked with white triangles so that she appeared to be angelic. Tammy was climbing toward me when another boy, Zane Johnson, in a nearby tree, jutted his head out of a leafy cluster and shouted that he had something better than my stupid raisins. He had Captain Kangaroo Cookies, which he flashed and touted in the voice of a used car salesman.
When I saw the cookies, my heart sank. I was Mick Jagger in 1964 standing backstage preparing to do my set with The Rolling Stones while watching James Brown do his famous dance in which he throws down the cape and mimics his death before resurrecting to give his spectacular encore. People close to Jagger saw a look of defeat in his eyes. He knew he could not compare to the legend James Brown and any attempt to go on stage after The King of Soul would be an exercise in humiliation and futility. That is exactly how I felt as I compared my box of raisins next to Zane's cookies.
I already knew what was going to happen next. Upon hearing Zane's invitation, the girl stopped halfway up my tree and greedily eyed the boy's cookies as if they were gold bullion. She then gave a little snarl of contempt at my raisins before descending my tree, racing to the other treehouse, and climbing its little wood slats like a pro. Shortly after, Tammy and Zane feasted on their double-fudge, cream-centered cookie sandwiches. When they were done eating, they licked their lips and gloated at me, the lone loser, stuck with my pathetic little box of raisins.
As I watched them nestle together, I reclined in my treehouse and cried myself to sleep, probably in the same fashion Mick Jagger wept after watching James Brown perform his legendary dance, only to be awakened hours later when my body was covered by red fire ants that, presumably attracted to the raisins, had swarmed my perch. My entire body felt like it had been lashed by stinging nettles and I ran to my apartment where my mother drowned the red ants by giving me a scalding bath. As I nursed my welts, I looked at my pain as indicative of the anguish that comes from losing a girl to another male whose lures of attraction are vastly superior to mine. In the arms race between Sun-Maid Raisins and Captain Kangaroo Cookies, the cookies had won. That day the connection between alpha status and reproductive success had been implanted deep inside my lizard brain.
From that defeat at the hands of Zane Johnson, I knew I would have to reinvent myself as a superhero. Depending on my mood, I was Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner, The Incredible Hulk, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, The Mighty Thor, or Captain America. I was a busy five-year-old with a long list of women who needed to be saved by my superpowers. There was Tisha Sterling from Village of the Giants, Yvette Vickers from Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, Tina Louise and Dawn Wells from Gilligan's Island, Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie and Raquel Welch from Fantastic Voyage.
Being a full-time hero was exhausting and left me with a voracious appetite. I ate huge platters of Oscar Mayer liverwurst sandwiches on Wonder Bread, cold meatloaf sandwiches drowning in ketchup, grilled cheese sandwiches dripping in butter, Rice Krispy Squares, Hostess berry pies, and tall glasses of milk sweetened with Ovaltine.
When I wasn't honing my superhero powers, I was a rock star. Every Friday at Katherine R. Smith Elementary during Show and Tell, I was Micky Dolenz from The Monkees. I wore my corduroy flared emerald green "Monkees pants" and joined my friends to do a performance of The Monkees' "Theme Song" in front of Mrs. Gilarde's kindergarten class. We were so confident we did not use musical instruments but relied solely on the power of our vocals. The ear-piercing screams from the girls partially consoled me for that day nearly a year earlier when I had lost Tammy Whitmire to the Captain Kangaroo cookies of Zane Smith. Already it was abundantly clear that I had a memory like an elephant's, and the scars of wounded masculinity I suffered that day in my treehouse afflicted me with an addiction to girls' adulation, which I enjoyed during my Monkees performances. On Show and Tell days, I'd come home giddy and intoxicated from the cries of girls ringing inside my head, and fatigued by the rigors of being a five-year-old celebrity, I found all I could do was collapse on my bed and fall into a deep sleep.
To build my self-esteem for the ladies during my adolescence, I became an Olympic Weightlifter and bodybuilder during the 70s. I was in an arms race against the other boys at school for alpha status, so I was susceptible to marketing panaceas, products that promised to make me physically superior and give me the edge over my competition with a magic bullet. To illustrate, one evening I was in my room reading a muscle magazine. I finished an article on "progressive resistance training." The idea of "progressive resistance" comforted me. I saw the world as divided into two groups of people. Those who are progressing toward something and those who are stuck and going nowhere. I liked to see myself as being part of the first group and as someone discriminating enough to avoid those who belonged in the second category.
After finishing the article, I looked at the adverts for protein powders and exercise equipment. One ad for the Bullworker, an isometric device, captured my imagination. The Bullworker was a three-foot rod made of plastic and steel. At the ends were green plastic handles. Along each side of the rod were cables. When you pulled one of the cables they fanned out like a bow. A muscular bodybuilder with ripped pecs was posing with the device. The price tag was a steep $45 in 1976.
I walked into the living room where my father was drinking beer and watching a football game as the Raiders' quarterback Ken Stabler marched the offense down the field. I showed him the Bullworker ad.
"What do you think?"
My father hadn't changed from his days as an infantryman in the army. He had short dark hair, a strong jawline, and a tattoo of his first name Michael on his right biceps muscle. He shrugged at the magazine and said, "You want to work out and get some big muscles? Pull some weeds, mow the lawn, clean the rain gutters, and chop some kindling. That should do it."
"Dad, it's not funny. I'm serious. This would make a good supplement to my gym workouts."
My father studied the ad, put the magazine down, and said, "It's essentially worthless. You're paying for slick marketing. But if you want to waste your allowance money on it, I suppose it's your choice."
"But I'm short on cash."
"Then save up. If you really want this, make some sacrifices. But make sure you want it. Do your research. My guess is the more you look into this thing, the less you'll want it."
"Why do you say that?"
"Haven't you ever heard of Sturgeon's Law?"
"No."
"Ninety-nine percent of everything in this world is bullshit. And that includes this and just about any ad in a magazine. Remember that martial arts program you spent twenty dollars on? It ended up being a pamphlet with stick figures doing various attacks. It was bullshit. Perform your due diligence, son. It will save you money."
"What is due diligence?"
"Making a comprehensive assessment of the potential benefits and liabilities of a product or service. Perform your due diligence and you'll reject ninety-nine percent of everything. You hear me, boy?"
"Yes, Dad."
Not interested in watching the Oakland Raiders crush the Cleveland Browns, I returned to my room, opened another bodybuilding magazine, and looked at the array of supplements and exercise equipment with promises of "making greater gains than you could ever dream of." In spite of my father's lecture, I found myself enticed by these bodybuilding elixirs.
The very idea of a panacea was a dangerous thing, yet we could not free ourselves from it. Exercise and fitness became a way of getting an advantage over others. I learned this as a child. Both of my grandmothers watched Jack Lalanne in the 60s. As a kid, I thought, "Wow, man, this authority figure wearing a sleeveless jumpsuit with Peter Pan slippers is telling my grandmothers that if you want to be a winner in society, you need your ritual of daily exercise." I might have drank the Kool-Aid right there if not for the lame outfits that made Lalanne look like a precursor to Lorenzo Lamas from Solid Gold. In spite of Lalanne's sartorial gaucherie, he championed a fitness craze in the 60s and 70s. This included the proliferation of a vibrating contraption often called the "jiggler machine." It was little more than a pulsating belt that massaged your waist or glutes and was supposed "to melt the fat away." As a thirteen-year-old Junior Olympic weightlifter training at Walt's Gym in Hayward, California, I used to scoff at the adults who "worked out" with the jiggler machine. It was clear to me then that these machines were useless, and watching these adults, lizard-eyed and gelatinous, waste two hours happily conversing with each other while vibrating under their delusions, made me suspect that if they were so gullible as to believe in the vibrating massager, then they were willing to succumb to just about anything from the fever swamp of some grifter's imagination. Nothing has happened in the ensuing decades to dissuade me from my conclusion.
I wish I could brag about how smart I am and how my superior critical thinking skills spared me from violating the precepts of common sense and good judgment, but alas I am one of the worst offenders. I was just as duped by the slick marketing of phony products as the next person. Much of the 70s could be characterized as shameless ostentation and fakery. I attended my junior high school dances in Angels Flight big bell-bottom polyester pants, paisley Dacron shirts, platform shoes, and pukka shell necklaces. In the summers, I would bare my tanned chest underneath a fishnet tank top with more pukka shells and gold necklaces.
Showing little care for my personality or soul, I focused on bodybuilding so my muscles would complement my flamboyant outfits. I was not content with being muscular from the neck down. Even my face had to have a powerful jawline and high cheekbones to enhance my muscular physique.
Much of my influence in curating an image came from my mother's Cosmopolitan magazines. One section that caught my attention was a brief profile called Bachelor of the Month, featuring some single rich man who had a sufficient amount of swagger, wanderlust, international travel, and high-cheekbone architecture. While my cheekbones may have been sufficient in my own world, I found that they were lacking when compared to the likes of Robert Conrad and Jan-Michael Vincent. And then there were my bodybuilding heroes Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank Zane, and Mike Mentzer. It seemed that they had not only used their champion bodybuilding efforts to attain exceptional muscular density but had applied their training excellence to willing a chiseled look to their faces so that their jawline and pronounced cheekbones were part of their total body image.
Whereas I could use weight resistance and diet to progress toward shaping my body the way I wanted to, I couldn't do much about the shape of my face. The irony is that people said my cheekbones were high, but being afflicted with body dysmorphia, or what is sometimes called Manorexia, the idea that I never looked good enough, I attempted to exaggerate the bulge of my cheekbones and jawline by sucking in my cheeks. What started as an occasional way to enhance my facial drama became an obsession so I was doing it all day at school. I had learned to talk while sucking or biting on my cheeks, granted with a compromised articulation, but it was worth muddling my speaking skills if I could curate the Jan-Michael Vincent look.
This look came with a price. For one, I'd often come home from school and the insides of my cheeks were raw. There would even be times when I'd accidentally take a bite out of my cheek flesh. The second problem was being teased. Many of my friends and associates at school would see me approaching with my exaggerated bodybuilding walk with chest out and back muscles flexed, causing my arms to be far from my sides, and they'd mock my muscle-flexing, cheek-sucking countenance.
It was clear that for all the serious time and investment I had put into presenting myself as a formidable and attractive presence, I had become a joke, a character worthy of ridicule for a TV sitcom.
Unbridled fakery was part of the 70s zeitgeist. Ritz Crackers celebrated their Mock Apple Pie recipe by boasting that you didn't need apples to present an apple pie to your friends and family. You could make a mock version with Ritz Crackers. The broader message was that we lived in an age when authenticity should be in the back seat and false representations should sit in the front. I was a disciple of this philosophy.
Perhaps the High Priest of Fakery during my teenage years a man I used to know as Camaro Frankenpimp. This would have been the summer of 1977. It seems I spent every Saturday during that summer at Cull Canyon Lake engaged in dangerous unbridled tanning. These were the days before people worried about skin damage and skin cancer, so I doused my flesh with zero-sun protection Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil, which smelled of coconuts and bananas. The aroma intoxicated me. Whenever I think of the arousal of my youth, I always remember the smell of that tanning oil.
On one such Saturday, I saw a man who captured my curiosity. Not knowing his real name, I thought of him as Camaro Frankenpimp. In his late twenties and owner of a black 1976 Chevrolet Camaro with white racing stripes, Camaro Frankenpimp had wavy brown hair, a thick perfectly manicured mustache, an even brown tan showcased by wearing nothing but blue Speedo men's briefs, and a gold chain and white Pukka shell bead necklaces, which dangled over his hairy chest. He always had a white Frisbee, a portable beverage cooler with the Playboy logo on it, and a boombox. He'd play the top hits from Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Fleetwood Mac, K.C. and The Sunshine Band, and The Floaters. He'd always meet girls and persuade them to play Frisbee with him.
Hearing him go through his spiel every day, it soon became clear he was following a well-rehearsed script. He asked the girls the same questions in the same order and he told them the same details about his personal life in the same sequence. Every Saturday I heard the following: Camaro Frankenpimp paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned a chain of clothing stores in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father's stores since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Camaro Frankenpimp would throw in the words "Parsons Estates" as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.
Camaro Frankenpimp checked every box to be a cliché of the smug male. It was as if he had gone to Smarmy Male University, had studied for years at mastering his playboy moves, and had graduated with honors.
This would be no exaggeration. I know for a fact that Camaro Frankenpimp had studied Eric Weber's best-selling book How to Pick Up Girls! I was well aware of Eric Weber's notorious pick-up book because a high school classmate had brought a copy to school, and I could tell Camaro Frankenpimp was using the book's lines verbatim. The gist of that notorious book was that a man should shamelessly pursue any woman he wants with whatever crass means are at his disposal, that he should never accept a woman's refusal, and that relentlessly stalking a woman was the ultimate strategy to being an effective womanizer.
Every Saturday Camaro Frankenpimp seemed to have gotten cozy with a new beautiful woman. He and at least one woman would play Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the man-made beach's imported sand.
It soon became apparent that Camaro Frankenpimp was conforming to a male ideal from Playboy magazine. I know this because my father, like a lot of ex-military men of his age, had a subscription to Playboy, and I read every issue religiously, not just ogling at the photos, but studying the articles for clues on what it would take to be a real man. A lot of those Playboy articles I read as a kid are still emblazoned in my mind. Here are a couple of examples: I read an article about how Americans eat sausages with a knife and fork whereas Europeans eat sausages the proper way, holding them in their hands while dipping the whole sausages in puddles of mustard. The writer wanted to persuade the American reader to adopt the "more civilized" European method.
Here's another example from when I was fifteen: I was reading about my astrological sign, Scorpio, in which the author claimed that Scorpio men, unlike any other men, are endowed with a glandular secretion of potent musk and honeysuckle and this unique scent drives women crazy.
But most of all, I remember Playboy's self-congratulatory tone evidenced in the caption: "What sort of man reads Playboy?" The answer varied every month, but it was essentially the same thing: The Playboy reader was manly, self-assured, successful, rich, independent, charismatic, cosmopolitan, forward-thinking, and a bit rebellious. Women flocked to him of course. And the message was if you're not like this paradigm of unbridled masculinity, then start reading Playboy and join the club, because you're missing out, loser.
So now at Cull Canyon, I could observe the consummate playboy in the flesh.
In Christianity, Jesus comes to earth to bear witness to the truth.
In the Playboy Religion, the light takes form in the manifestation of a cocksure Billy Goat who drives shiny convertible sports cars shaped like phallic missiles.
At Cull Canyon Lake in the summer of 1977, I had found a High Priest of Predatory Males hitting on women with his adherence to the doctrines of Playboy magazine and the best-selling How to Meet Girls!
On one such afternoon, I saw Camaro Frankenpimp in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study the Camaro's methods. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents' dog-eared copy of Xaviera Hollander's best-selling memoir The Happy Hooker.
That's when I heard Camaro Frankenpimp give out an alarming howl.
"Oh my God," one of the bikini-clad girls said. "You stepped on a bee."
I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.
The bee sting's effects were immediate. Camaro Frankenpimp began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.
"No big deal," he said. "Just a little bee sting."
He was fighting the pain because the sort of man who reads Playboy is not a whiner in the face of small setbacks.
"Are you sure you're okay?" one of the girls asked as the man's body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.
"I'm fine. Really, I am."
He wasn't letting the bee sting stop him because the sort of man who reads Playboy remains tough in the face of any challenge.
"I think you should sit down," one of the girls said.
"No, we can still play. I'm fine. Don't worry about me."
He wasn't going to let the two girls see him in pain because the sort of man who reads Playboy is a warrior who never shares his wounds with anyone.
By now, Camaro's foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.
An ambulance came soon after. Camaro Frankenpimp was in the throes of anaphylactic shock.
I never learned if he died or recovered, but the incident burned in my memory Camaro Frankenpimp as a man who was all pose and no substance, all persona and no authenticity. He was a fake warrior adhering to a fake template and therefore he was fated to perish.
The High Priest of Fakery’s rise and fall should have been a cautionary tale sufficient to push me away from unbridled vanity. However, I marched forward. I amassed bigger and bigger muscles and my obsession finally reached dividends in 1979 when at the age of seventeen I got hired to be a bouncer at Maverick's Disco in San Ramon, California. Not only did I make ten cents over the minimum wage at three dollars an hour, but I also got free soft drinks and got to bear witness to enough polyester pantsuits and feathered hairdos held with so much hairspray as to present a fire hazard violation. One of the great feats of this job, or so I thought, was that I was killing two birds with one stone. I was making money while walking around the teenage disco and doing the required lat flex, and at the same time, I was socializing with a never-ending parade of beautiful women. But as I would later learn while studying Abnormal Psychology in college, there is this thing called the anhedonic response in which the brain becomes so numb to repeated stimulation that a state of anhedonia kicks in, the condition of not being able to experience happiness or pleasure. When I think of anhedonia, I think of the time I stopped enjoying my favorite cartoon The Flintstones. I noticed that as Fred and his best friend Barney Rubble were driving their caveman car on a highway, the background, a series of trees, boulders, and buildings, began to repeat over and over. Seeing the wraparound background ruined the show's illusion of reality because recognizing this time-saving measure was like going behind closed doors to see how they make the sausage. Watching The Flintstones was never the same again. I had a similar experience at Maverick's Disco. Every night, I watched the customers come into the club with expressions of high expectations of excitement, glamor, and romantic connection, but at closing, I saw those same faces glazed over, tired, and disappointed with the whole enterprise. And yet the next weekend, I saw those same faces repeat the cycle. My life at the disco had become the wraparound background used for The Flintstones, and this was a sign that I needed to quit. I didn't only need to quit the disco job. I had to quit my way of life, a sort of stagnation or form of imprisonment.
But quitting the life of self-obsession is hard to shake. Like a bad case of herpes, the gaucherie of the Disco Age never left me. This was evident in my early thirties. After teaching part-time at a half dozen colleges in the Bay Area for two years in the late 1980s, I got a full-time job teaching writing at a university in the desert of Central California. One of the administrators in Oakland who wrote me a letter of recommendation for the job told me, half-jokingly, at my going-away party that it was now my duty to be "The Light in the Desert."
But unfortunately, I was a burned-out lightbulb who had lost my way due to several reasons. One was that this was the first time I ever had money, which was dangerous. Having a relatively generous paycheck combined with the low cost of living in Central California, including a luxury apartment that cost a tiny fraction of my salary, gave me a false sense of wealth and encouraged me to spend beyond my means. This included the purchase of a car I didn't need, a 1991 white Acura Integra, and buying ostentatious clothing from various catalogs. Italian loafers with tassels, see-through puffy pirate shirts, and skimpy zebra-striped bathing trunks. I'm just scratching the surface of sartorial debauchery.
As I look back, it terrifies me that I did not have an internal editor to tell me to control my conspicuous consumption. Just as a writer who writes to show off with ornate prose embarrasses himself without the intervention of a tough editor, my life had become a book of florid pretentious prose, and I was in desperate need of pushing the brake pedal before I crashed.
My reckless money management and vulgarian fashion became apparent one evening when I stopped to get gas after coming home from a Basque restaurant. The ATM at the gas pump gave me my bank receipt and showed that my checking account had under a thousand dollars. Not even having a thousand dollars in the bank seized me with horror. It occurred to me just then that my Acura Integra was not only a car I didn't need, but it also compelled me to spend even more money on an upgraded stereo system and various car cleaning supplies to protect my car from dust, sun, and water sprinklers, which were known to pit car paint.
As I was putting the gas nozzle back in the holder, I noticed a giant tarantula lazily crawling over my Italian loafer. I was so full of Basque food I just stared down at the tarantula impassively as it made its way over my shoe and walked toward the nearby field. Staring indolently at the tarantula, I said to myself, "I am single with no children and no expenses to speak of, yet I am barely living paycheck to paycheck. What is wrong with me?"
What was wrong with me was obvious. I was spending all my money on myself to look like a dandy with pointed loafers with no socks, Z. Cavaricci black pleated pants, and a moss green gossamer pirate shirt. Strutting around like a peacock was not only a sign of excessive self-regard. It was an advertisement for my impoverishment and a complete disconnection from reality. For all of my accomplishments, I was still that insecure teenage boy from the Disco Age hiding behind a wardrobe of flamboyant clothes, a relentless disciple of the High Priest of Fakery, doomed to a life of spiritual and emotional impoverishment.
