something that came to mind after the book was done

There’s No Sex Allowed in THIS Newspaper!

When I was making up stories for The Sun, a supermarket tabloid which, at the time was the equivalent of The Weekly World News (but since has backed off a little and added some other forms of lies), I wanted to write about sex. I wrote “Sex In Space. They’ve Already Tried It!”
I made up a fictitious company in England that was a combination airline and Love Boat and was planning a sex resort on the moon. The spacecraft that got you there was the Sex Shuttle. I made up a spokesperson. I made up his quote, “After all, when was the last time anybody invented a new way to make love?”
The early tests, using single astronauts went well, the only problem being how to deal with the results of male auto-erotic performances in a weightless spacecraft, a floating disposal problem, you might say.
The first “coupled flight” was a great success. The spokesperson said, “Just imagine what it must be like to make love floating in the air?” I made that up too. He went on to explain his marketing plans for gays (disposable income) and old folks (no worries about arthritis).
Unfortunately, the boss shot it down. He told me he didn’t want sex stories. Although he didn’t go into great detail, being the brusque guy he was, it was obvious he didn’t want to offend his readers. It was ok for me to write “Grandma Turns Pet Dog Inside Out Looking for Lost Lottery Ticket.” Just no sex. Normal logic in these cases doesn’t really apply.
I surmised that many of his readers were fundamentalists and therefore opposed to sex but welcoming to violence. It’s one thing to write about celebrities sleeping around as long as it doesn’t include exactly what the sex is. The fact that it’s a celebrity having the sex is enough. Anyway, that paper didn’t have celebrity stories, just goofy made up stuff.
The editor’s decision to cut me off from writing about sex prevented an avalanche of potential. That’s why you won’t find ANY sex in my new book “Rabid Nun Infects Entire Convent and Other Sensational Stories From a Tabloid Writer.” It’s a tell-all about that bizarre world of faux journalism.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that I was never privy to the sexual secrets of the stars because I made up all the people in every story, with the exception of Gay-Darlene Bidart, my own personal love witch and the Dear Abby of Latin America at the time. She was in dozens of newspapers, offering not advice but spells. She wouldn’t tell you what to do about your problem, she would tell you to burn x number of candles, or take a lock of his hair and put it in a box under your pillow, or some shit like that.
She was a wonderful mixture of witchcraft and performance, having a masters in theater from Yale. Originally from Honduras, she had deep roots in “good” witchcraft. She was also married to a millionaire warlock named Sol who made his money in construction.
La Bruja had a book out at the time, on body reading, telling your fortune by reading, kneading, sniffing and otherwise poking around your nearly naked body. You never knew when she was serious and when she was making a fool out of you. Yes, I had a body reading in her 34th floor apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She got everything right about me. Could be she was just a good judge of character, but……
Anyway, I was writing a story for the tab on a tribe in South America who had never seen the outside world and were found dancing around a nude statue of Elvis Presley and chanting something that sounded like “Viva Las Vegas.
I wrote, ““We asked them where they had gotten the statue,” said Rex Vosa, one of the men who found them, “and they told us their ancestors had made it. We asked them how long it had been in their village and they told us it had been there for centuries.” I made up Rex Vosa. I usually made up “experts” in my stories, but I hadn’t talked to The Love Witch since she had given me a potion to put on my big toe, a spell which, she assured me would find me love and get me laid. So after telling her that it only got me a blow job, I asked her about her theories on Elvis and the tribe. After she stopped laughing she paused and told me, “I have a theory about that. Elvis possessed tremendous sexual energy. It could be that, unknown to us, he was able to project his sexual energy anyplace in the world and reproduce himself. Do you know what I mean?
“He could have had the ability to lie in bed and project a map of the world on the ceiling and just point to anyplace in the world and reproduce himself. Remember, it was his sexual nature, his sexy wiggles and the way he carried off that macho sensuality that made him famous. It was a rare thing.”
She nearly said it without laughing.
But other than La Bruja del Amor, everybody else in my stories was made up. This means I can’t be Joe Esterhaz for you and tell you what Sharon Stone did to get parts, or reveal if Tom Cruise was ever Twink-of-the-Month for some Bob Crane type. Or tell you a single thing about the current state of Lindsey Lohan’s tits.
If I were writing for the tabloid today would anything I made up be more unbelievable than anything Michael Jackson has done?
I did anticipate the reality TV trend. I was working as a producer/reporter for the old Evening/PM Magazine in Baltimore. I had done “reality” stories like the series on a bunch of goobers who tried to break the world’s record for eating raw eggs (drinking them from beer mugs, actually).
I had sent another sex-related story to the tabloid editor at the same time I sent the “Sex In Space” story. It was a game show with real sex. It was kind of like The Dating Game except the woman choosing between three men asked them sex questions and then after picking the winner, the show would tape them having sex and would show it the following week when they would be judged, like in the Olympics.
This seemed far-fetched when I wrote it 15 years ago, but not to me. When I saw the movie “Network,” I was not surprised, nor did I think it was exaggerated. I worked in TV. I knew what those people (we people) were (are) like. As soon as the Repuglicans are thrown out of office and the FCC loosens up again, it would not surprise me one bit, if we see my pervy vision come to life.
Hey, I might produce that one myself. Oh, wait I think they already did it. They just stopped short of the good parts.
The point is, the more you try to keep ahead of reality the closer reality gets to your sickest imagination. One story in the book is “Cult Uses Human Heads For Bowling Balls.” That was me at my worst or best, depending on your point of view. When I was rewriting my original stories for the book, I had to stop in the middle of re-writing that one because it creeped me out just like it did when I first wrote it.
Well, a few weeks ago I ran across a story on the web. It read, “A man who allegedly decapitated a 17-year-old boy with a tomahawk in a suburban back yard later was said to have played with the teenager's head, rolling it in a paddock as if it were a bowling ball…Mr. Jones said Mr. Roughan laughed as he ‘bowled the head up the hill, like it was a bowling ball’…A chilling videotape showing police interviewing one of two men charged with the murder of transient teen Morgan Jay Shepherd was played in Brisbane Magistrates Court yesterday." That was from The Advertiser, an Australian Newspaper.
See? Truth catches up with the worst things you can ever think of.
Back when I was writing these things, I would get up, drink coffee, sit at the keyboard in my underwear and smoke a bowl, and then allow either the funniest or the most horrifying (or both) stories come out of my head, through my fingers and onto the page.
Well, I’m in Portland, Oregon instead of Baltimore, Maryland. And I’m not broke. And I’m not lonely. I’m not roommates with a guy (I’m married now), and I burned myself out on these stories. But I am in my underwear, and I do have that same writing aid. Should I?
Nah.