Dave spanked his spike on my vividly violet vein. “You swear this is no shit?”
“This is no shit, Dave, I swear to you.”
Dave bit the bait and shook his head and let my shit sift into his system. He shot me up with his shit and watched me shift up to the stars.
I went into orgasmic orbit. I spun past Sputnik and jived with Jesus himself. I jumped back to Earth and jumped out of the chair like a jacked-up jungle bunny.
I fly on methamphetamine moored in male hormones and a multivitamin mix. Here’s why scandal sheets fly:
People are ambivalently amped up on celebrities. They wildly worship them. They aim their adolescent adulation at them and get bupkis back. It’s depressingly disassociative. It’s idiotic idolatry. Fan magazines fan the flames of fatuous fancy and reinforce the fact that your favorite stars will never fuck you. Scandal rags rip that reinforcement and deliriously deconstruct and deidolize the idols who ignore you. It’s revisionistic revenge. It reduces your unrequited lovers to your own low level of erratic erotics. It rips the rich and regal and guns them into the gutter beside you. It fractiously frees you to love them as one of your own.
I was flying on high-grade meth and a high-faluting head full of Hush-Hush homilies. I hit Hollywood hopped-up to dish dirt and dig my way out of debt.
Every bartender, bouncer, B-girl, busboy, and B-movie bimbo in town has his hand out to Hush-Hush or whispers to Whisper or tattles their tails off to Tattle. I tripped a path through my tipsters and said, “How’s tricks?” I locked in the following lowdown:
Howard Hughes had a hard-on for a high-yellow hooker named Dusky Deelite. Rin Tin Tin ripped Lassie into renal distress at a recent kiddie roundup. Mickey Cohen can’t afford to keep Candy Barr. Candy’s starring in stag flux and moving a mountain of Mary Jane. Mickey’s tapped out and tapping his old legbreakers for loans. Johnny Stompanato stood Mickey up at the Statler and stiffed him on a long-term debt. Lana Turner was lamenting the loss of Lex Barker. Stompanato stomped into her life. He bullies her and beguiles her into long bouts of bury the brisket. Lana now lisps, “Lex who?”
Bob Mitchum mauled a mulatto mama at a niggertown niteclub. Porfirio Rubirosa pulled out his pud at a Bel-Air bash for Bill Bendix. Rock Hudson humps prodigiously pretty call-service boys. He gets them from a sweaty swish carhop at Delores’s Drive-In. Lenny Bruce is handing up hopheads to the Sheriff’s Narco Squad.
The Rin Tin Tin riff rated zero. The Mitchum mishigaas might be milkable and make for a good miscegenation piece. Stompanato was stale stuff–Confidential cornholed him three months back. I’d played up Porfirio’s pud and Howard Hughes’s hooker hungries already. Ben Luboff wouldn’t bite for that batch.
But he’d bite for the boffo bit on Rock Hudson.
Ben wanted to ram Rock out of the closet. He wanted to push him past the Pink Curtain and parade him around in a purple peignoir. Every scandal scribe wanted to skewer and scupper the Rock. He was the hunky height of the homo heap. Hush-Hush, Whisper, Rave–we all got cloyingly close to the clasp on the closet door. But pugnacious publicists grabbed at our greed, bought our stories back, and heaped us with heat on their other homo clients. The Rock remained ramrod erect–just past the Purple Passage.
Ben Luboff hogged a back booth at Googie’s twenty hours a day. Tipsters trucked in and tossed him tidbits. I bopped back to his booth and blew out a blast of bravado.
“I owe your brother two Gs. Take care of it and slip me an item for the May issue, and I’ll give you the Rock.”
Ben belched bicarbonate of soda. Bubbles bipped off his lips. He looked disturbingly drawn and dyspeptic. The dirt drought had drained him dry.
He nudged me a napkin. I pulled out my pen and wrote down my rap on Rock and the sweaty swish. Ben Scripto scrawled his own napkin note. We noodled our notes across the table simultaneously.
His read:
“Don Jordan (top welterweight contender) running string of wetback maids as hookers out of the Luau.”