Red Lobster, White Trash, & The Blue Lagoon

CHAPTER ONE

Slouching Toward Red Lobster

    'Cats' was very, very, very bad. 'Cats' was a lot worse than I'd expected. I'd seen 'Phantom' years ago, and knew all I needed to know about 'Starlight Express' and 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat', so I was not a complete stranger to the fiendishly vapid world of Andrew Lloyd Webber. But nothing I'd ever read or heard about the show could have prepared me for the epic suckiness of 'Cats.' Put it this way: Phantom sucked. But 'Cats' really sucked.

    One of the things that fascinated me about 'Cats' was the way I'd managed to keep it from penetrating my consciousness for the previous fourteen years. Yes, I'd been walking past the Winter Garden Theatre at 50th and Broadway since 1982 without once even dreaming of venturing inside; and yes, I'd heard the song "Memory"; and yes, I'd heard about all the Tonys 'Cats' had won; and yes, I'd seen all those garish subway posters; and yes, I'd been jostled by those armies of tourists streaming out of the theater at rush hour as I myself tried to hustle through midtown. But all those years that 'Cats' had been playing, I'd somehow avoided even finding out what the show was about. Wandering past the Winter Garden all those years was like wandering past those dimly lit S&M bars in Greenwich Village: I really didn't need to know the details.

    Now my blissful ignorance had been shattered. So without any further ado, let me share the wealth. For the benefit of the two or three other people in this society who don't know what 'Cats' is about, here's the answer: It's about a bunch of cats. The cats jump around in a postnuclear junkyard for some two and a half hours, bumping and grinding to that curiously Mesozoic pop music for which Andrew Lloyd Webber is famous--the kind of full-tilt truckin' that sounds like the theme from "The Mod Squad." There's an Elvis impersonator cat, and a cat that looks like Cyndi Lauper, and a cat that looks like Phyllis Diller. All the other cast members 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 do with the author of "The Waste Land" as those old Steve Reeves movies had to do with Euripides. 'Cats' is what 'Grease' would look like if all the cast members dressed up like KISS. To give you an idea of how bad 'Cats' is, think of a musical where you're actually glad to hear "Memory" reprised a third time because all the other songs are so awful. Think of a musical where the songs 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 this sea of sappiness was the behavior of the crowd. In all honesty, I had long assumed that everyone who enjoyed 'Cats' was, in some sense of the word, a bozo. But I'd always assumed that they were happy, festive bozos. Nothing could have prepared me for the utterly blase reception 'Cats' received when I attended a matinee in late March. The crowd was your typical Saturday afternoon assemblage: implacable Japanese tourists, platoons of gawking midwestern huckleberries, legions of Farrah Fawcett lookalikes. Based on their fulsome demeanors, I would have expected them to give the performers a boisterous reception when urged to get down and boogie.

    But the day I saw 'Cats', the crowd just kind of sat there and zoned out. Not unlike Broadway dancers and singers who sometimes, if not always, phoned it in, the audience was phoning it in. The only way I could rationalize such lack of passion was this: 'Cats' had been playing for fourteen years, and this was a room filled with people who had found something better 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 between Sharon Stone's legs. Mostly, they acted like RVers who were simply checking names off a list: "Ohio, New Jersey, Wisconsin--okay, Reba, we've done the Dairy States."

    I came home from 'Cats' feeling totally dejected. In the back of my mind, I'd expected the show to fall into that vast category occupied by everything from bingo to Benny Hill. You know: so bad, it's good. But 'Cats' was just plain bad. Really bad. About as bad as bad could get. Revisiting the horror in my mind later that evening, I consoled myself with the assurance that surely this would be the lowest point of my adventure, that nothing I subsequently experienced could possibly 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's existence, just as I'd been vaguely aware that there was an ebola virus plague in Africa. Horrible tragedies, yes, but they had nothing to do with me. All that changed when I purchased a copy of 'The Classics' When you work up the gumption to put a record like 'The Classics' on your CD player, it's not much different from deliberately inoculating yourself with rabies. With his heart-on-my-sleeve appeals to every emotion no decent human being should even dream of possessing, Michael Bolton is the only person in history who has figured out a way to make "Yesterday" sound worse than the original. He's Mandy Patinkin squared. His sacrilegious version of Sam Cooke's "Bring It on Home to Me" is a premeditated act of cultural ghoulism, a crime of musical genocide tantamount to a Jerry Vale rerecording of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" And having to sit there, and listen while this Kmart Joe Cocker mutilates "You Send Me" is like sitting through a performance of 'King Lear' with Don Knotts in the title role. Which leads to the inevitable question: If it's a crime to deface the Statue of Liberty or to spraypaint swastikas on Mount Rushmore or to burn the American flag, why isn't it a crime for Michael Bolton to butcher Irving Berlin's "White Christmas"?

    To round out Day One in my personal cultural bathosphere, I picked up. Nicholas Evans's international best-seller "The Horse Whisperer." As was the case with 'Cats' and Michael Bolton, the result was horrifying. In Evans's megahyped novel, a tyke loses her leg in a riding accident, then goes out west with her yuppie-scum mother seeking to persuade a sagebrush psychotherapist to cure, her totally psychotic horse. With lines like "What wanton liars love makes of us" and "It was the last night of their blinkered idyll," 'The Horse Whisperer' is one of those cloying upscale/downscale books where the mom has an attitude, the kid has an attitude, and even the goddamn horse has an attitude.

    In fact, the only mildly attractive character in the entire book is Tom Booker, the old horseshit whisperer himself. Booker is a kind of cowpoke philosopher who always knows the right things to whisper into a horse's ears, but seems to have trouble when it comes to whispering into a woman's ears. Maybe that's because horses don't understand the phrase "cornhole." And, oh yes, Tom the Horse Whisperer is a quiet loner from the great state of Montana. Of course, I was reading about this ten-gallon, equestophilic Billy Bob Freud right about the time the Unabomber was being brought to justice and the FBI was besieging those madcap Freemen out in the Great State of Montana.

    Nice timing, Nicky.

    In the days and weeks that followed, I gradually realized that mainstream American culture was infinitely more idiotic than I had ever suspected. Take movies. Over the years, I'd come to believe that a special ring of hell had been reserved for Lome Michaels for promoting the careers of Joe Piscopo, James Belushi, and others of their ilk. But nothing those dimwits had done on film had even vaguely prepared me for the prepaleolithic world of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. The whole time I was watching Billy Madison and Tommy Boy I kept saying to myself, "I know that these people are alumni of `Saturday Night Live,' so I know that if I sit here long enough, they will eventually do or say something that will make me laugh. Heck, they're pros."

    Oh, foolish, foolish man! Hours and hours later, I was still in my chair, comatose, watching these Gen-X Ostrogoths ruin my day, my week, my civilization. Here's Sandler setting a bag of poop on fire. Here's Farley getting covered in cow shit. And here's Bo Derek, co-starring. What a sad commentary on our society that we have produced movies so bad that you feel sorry Bo Derek has to be in them. Which just goes to show: No matter how famous you are when you're young, if you don't play your cards right, you're eventually going to end up in a movie with Adam Sandler.

    Was all this a surprise to me? Yes, I can truly say that the scale of horrendousness proudly displayed in these motion pictures was awe-inspiring. Sure, I'd known that these movies were out there, but not until I'd actually sat all the way through a couple of them did I have any idea how satanically cretinous they were. Until I saw Billy Madison and Tommy Boy, I'd always thought that the three scariest words in the English language were "Starring Dan Aykroyd." Now I knew better. Being introduced to Joe Piscopo and Dan Aykroyd and only later learning of the existence of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley is like going to school and learning about the Black Plague, only to find out many years later that there's something called the Blacker Plague.

    And I don't even want to talk about Pauly Shore.

    On some of the outings I lined up for my trek through the cultural undergrowth, I honestly suspected that someone had phoned ahead to ensure that the staff would maximize my discomfort. Typical was the night I dragged my family over to the local Red Lobster for our first-ever visit to the garish establishment. Red Lobster, I quickly learned, was a chain geared toward people who think of themselves as just a little bit too upscale for Roy Rogers. Even while waiting in the anteroom of the bogus sea shanty I could detect a certain aura of proletarian snootiness because of the way people were looking at me and my son. While Gordon, age ten, and I had turned up in nondescript T-shirts and shorts, the Red Lobster patrons were bedecked in their best windbreakers and their very finest polyester trousers.

    "Next time, show some respect," their expressions suggested. "After all, you're eating at Red Lobster. This ain't some goddamn Wendy's."

    The Red Lobster menu consisted almost entirely of batter cunningly fused with marginally aquatic foodstuffs and configured into clever geometric structures. I immediately began to suspect that the kitchen at Red Lobster consisted of one gigantic vat of grease in which plastic cookie molds resembling various types of food were inserted to create a structural resemblance to the specific item ordered. This was the only way to determine whether you were eating Buffalo wings or crabcakes. Technically, my dinner--The Admiral's Feast--was a dazzling assortment of butterfly shrimp, fish filet, scallops, and some mysterious crablike entity. But in reality, everything tasted exactly like Kentucky Fried Chicken. Even the French fries.

    Red Lobster was a consummate bad experience. It wasn't just the Huey Lewis & the News ambience, it wasn't just the absence of mozzarella sticks from the menu that day, it wasn't just the party of twenty-nine seated next to us complaining about the service, it wasn't just the Turtles singing "Happy Together" overhead, it wasn't just the absence of root beer from the menu that day, it wasn't just the titular head of the party of twenty-nine incessantly referring to different members of his entourage as "landlubbers," and it wasn't even the way those social-climbing townies gave my son and me the once-over as we came through the door. No, it was definitely the food. The food tasted like baked, microwaved, reheated, overcooked, deep-fried loin of grease.

    Admiral's Feast, my ass.

* * *

    After my stomach lining had recovered from this dismal gastronomic sortie, I decided to immerse myself further in some of the most beloved books of the past decade. A good place to start was "The Celestine Prophecy." This enormously popular book deals with the discovery of an ancient manuscript that predicted a revolution in human behavior at the dawn of the next millennium. The manuscript, purportedly written in sixth-century B.C. Aramaic, had been discovered in the rain forests of Peru and contained nine insights. One of the insights involved using a person's psychic energy field to connect with the flora and fauna all around us. The book had sold several million copies, presumably to that unnerving subset of Americans who exercise to Shirley MacLaine videos, are unaware of Dionne Warwick's pre-psychic career, voted for Jerry Brown in the 1992 Democratic primaries, and worship Baal.

    I'm as open to suggestions about how to utilize my psychic energy as the next guy, but I do have a few caveats here. For one, I'm getting a bit fed up with the whole Vanquished Chic thing. Basically, anything that has to do with the Hopis, the Etruscans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, or the Incas gets right up my nose for the pure and simple reason that they lost. Throughout my life, I've adopted a basic rule of thumb that any wisdom imputed to the denizens of Atlantis, Kathmandu, or Machu Picchu must be viewed with extreme skepticism, because if these folks were so goddamn smart, how come they didn't hang around longer? Look at it this way: Pizarro invades Peru on Sunday, and by Tuesday night he's conquered a nation of 12 million people. How do you lose your entire continent to a couple hundred grungy conquistadors when the odds are that heavily in your favor? The obvious explanation: The Incas were a race of 12 million pre-Columbian Greg Normans.

    Gradually, my passion for peerlessly disorienting experiences caused me to experience a strange new emotion. Technically speaking, there is no English phrase or idiom to describe the feeling to which I refer, so here I will take the liberty of coining the term scheissenbedauern. This word, which literally means "shit regret," describes the disappointment one feels when exposed to something that is not nearly as bad as one had hoped it 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 the title track, so he packs up his "dusty bags," grabs "an old guitar," and hits "that Blue Highway," rambling back to that "old Tennessee Moon" where he once "fell in love to an old Hank Williams song." Yes, when Neil hears that "lonesome whistle moan," he says, "So long, Big City," because he's "longing for those country roads," and knows it's time to "take a swing down south" to "see if that "girl Annie still remembers me."

    Let us ignore for a moment the implausible elements in this song, most importantly the fact that Neil Diamond hails from Flatbush. Let us also ignore the fact that The Country Record has been a cliche since Dylan recorded 'Nashville Skyline', that the record contains the obligatory phoned-in Waylon Jennings duet, and that Neil Diamond, a man who makes Burl Ives sound like Joey Ramone, does not come across in an entirely convincing fashion on the John Lee Hooker-type track where he sings "I'm gonna be rockin' tonight." This is a line that reminds me of the time Senator Al D'Amato got dressed up as "a narc" and went up to Harlem to register a "bust." Man, did some shit go down that day!

    Despite this abundant evidence of dire lameness, Tennessee Moon did not even approach Michael Bolton's 'The Classics' for sheer acreage of horseshit per square foot if only because Neil Diamond at his worst still sounds better than Michael Bolton at his best. The reason? At least Neil wrote the atrocious songs that he was slaughtering.

    Yet, much to my consternation, I found this terribly disappointing. At a certain level, I had now begun to hope that everything I encountered would suck in a megasucky way, and was honestly disappointed when some proved merely cruddy. Like Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness", I wanted to gaze directly into the abyss, to stare at the horror. But as the days passed, as I ventured deeper and deeper into the heartland of hootiness, I grew crestfallen at the failure of certain monstrously popular cultural figures to achieve the bathetic levels I craved. Dean Koontz's Intensity was sadistic, depraved, and revolting, but the book could not hold a candle to "The Horse Whisperer's" Mephistophelian inaneness. 'Slam Dunk Ernest', a direct-to-video film about a lovable moron, was predictably idiotic, but because it had one good joke (Ernest, the unlikely basketball hero, changes his name to Ernest Abdul Mustafa), it could not rival the horrors of Billy Madison and Tommy Boy.

    Garth Brooks--Glen Campbell under an assumed name--was a perfect example of the scheissenbedauern phenomenon. Every Garth Brooks song I encountered was a redneck anthem about truckers, drivin' rain, country fairs, burning bridges, that damn old rodeo, ashes on the water. In the typical Brooks song, "Mama's in the graveyard, Papa's in the pen," there's a fire burning bright, "this old highway is like a woman sometimes," and some old cowboy's "heading back from somewhere 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 a single day, because love is like a highway, it's one big party, and let's face it: He drew a bull no man could ride. So all that's left to do is whisper a prayer in the fury of the storm and hope you don't miss The Dance.

    It goes without saying that folks call Garth a maverickheck, there "must be rebel blood running through (his) veins." But sometimes you've just got to go against the grain, "buck the system," even though "the deck is stacked against you." In short, Brooks's music was the musical equivalent of a Pat Buchanan stump speech, market-researched baloney where the lyrics were so generic you started to suspect he was using Microsoft's Drugstore Cowboy for Windows 95 (not available in a Macintosh format) to write them.

    But even though songs like "We Shall Be Free" blatantly ripped off Sly & the Family Stone--fulfilling the dictum that black music is always ten years ahead of the curve, and country and western twenty years behind it--and even though Brooks recycled more riffs than Ray Davies, and even though Brooks was so bland he made Gordon Lightfoot sound like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, these records didn't actually make you puke. This was about the highest tribute I could pay to most contemporary country-and-western music.

    On the other hand, it didn't make me do anything. Somebody once said that when you turn on the radio, Genesis is what comes out. That's exactly the way I felt about Garth Brooks.

    So, all right, he chomped, but he didn't chomp royal. He chomped in the same off-the-shelf way most millionaires in hyperthyroid cowboy hats chomped. But he didn't bite the big one. And for some reason, this bothered me. When I went slumming like this, I wanted to cruise the bad slums. I wanted to hit Watts, the South Bronx, North Philly. From the cultural slumming point of view, Garth Brooks was little more than a slightly rundown neighborhood in Yonkers.

    As the weeks passed, I grew fatigued with the numbing mediocrity of so many new experiences I had honestly hoped would be utterly appalling. The Radio City Easter Show was no lamer than any dozen of other spectacles I have seen on television over the years. I rented my first Steven Seagal movie (Under Siege II) and was dismayed to find that it was perfectly watchable. Neither "Jenny Jones" nor "Baywatch" was as rotten as I expected them to be, and 'Reader's Digest' was merely boring, not unreadable. I'd been on the lookout for things that really stunk out the joint, yet somehow, I still felt that the Holy Grail of Horridness lay just outside my reach. What I really needed to find in order to purge myself forever of this unwholesome fascination with the cultural tar pits of America was to set out on a sacred quest, to travel to a shrine of suckiness, 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 dog cart--you simply must take the bus to get there. But when you get off the bus, after three hours of deadening chitchat with a battalion of cadaverous low rollers, you will immediately notice that Atlantic City does not resemble Venice. Atlantic City is a vast series of interlocking slums abutted by a narrow strip of clownish, high-rise buildings erected by people like Donald Trump. Venice is not. Even I, who have never been to Venice, know that.

    Figuring that I should go first class all the way, I checked into the Taj Mahal, where my luggage was scooped up by a man dressed like Ali Baba. We deposited my bags, then I returned to the main floor, where I spent the next twenty-four hours gambling. I had never gambled before in my life, and did not know any of the rules. This was unfortunate because shortly after I arrived at the blackjack table, the young woman sitting directly to my left diplomatically informed me that I was "fucking the deck."

    Fucking the deck, she explained, is the process whereby a neophyte or incompetent gambler disrupts the ordinary distribution of cards by making anomalous or stupid decisions. In my case, I stood on sixteen with the dealer showing a seven. According to orthodox blackjack procedure, you must always ask for another card when the dealer is showing a seven and you are holding sixteen, because you must always assume that the dealer has a concealed ten, ace, or face card.

    But I had a funny feeling that my sixteen was good enough to win. Which it was. One by one, all the other players at the table went bust, as did the dealer. But now I was persona non grata, because I should have said "hit," and gone bust with the ten, whereupon the person sitting next to me would have gone bust with a nine, but the three other players farther down the table would have beaten the dealer. In short, it's not enough to win, you have to win according to the system. Thus, there was no joy in Mudville when the dealer paid me, because I had altered 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 various tables, then around Happy Hour I ran into the young woman who had first pointed out my failings as a blackjack player. Over coffee, she explained the rules of blackjack. But she also explained the appeal of the game, pointing out that she didn't gamble because of the money, but because it was "Freudian."

    I like the table camaraderie," she noted. "You have to be careful not to disrupt the table camaraderie."

    "How can you make sure that you don't disrupt the table camaraderie?" I inquired.

    "Don't fuck the deck," she replied. "And if you do fuck the deck, try as hard as possible to unfuck it."

    "How do you unfuck the deck?" I asked, not mentioning that I'd been accused of doing precisely that at least three other times during the day.

    "It's a long story."

    Up until this point, I was $120 ahead of the game by using my unconventional betting technique of standing when I felt like standing and hitting when I felt like hitting. But as soon as I started gambling the right way, I lost all my money. Before I knew it, I was $139 in the hole. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the attraction of this place was. The entire city was filled with doddering seniors, like the world's largest skittles league. Everyone had that bad South Philadelphia hair and that bad North Philadelphia attitude. The women in neo-Sumerian miniskirts who served you drinks all looked like Hittite linebackers. Everywhere you turned, a lounge lizardess who thought 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'd fucked the deck. And you were down $139. At long last, I realized that I had come to the end of my journey. I had finally taken the ferry across the River Styx.

    And wouldn't you know that when I disembarked from Charon's bleak craft, a Borscht Belt comedian would be waiting for me on the fatal shore? Yes, that very night, I was comped a ticket 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 across from a man wearing a Medieval Tournament T-shirt and a Phillies cap, who seemed to be having some sort of an emotional meltdown. Glancing around, I noticed that I was `forty-five years younger than anyone else in the room. And I was forty-five.

    Finally, Freddy Roman, who is either a failed Henny Youngman or a successful Buddy Hackett, came out and told a joke about Bob Dole's hometown.

    "In Russell, Kansas, it's so quiet, the town hooker is a virgin," he quipped.

    The words weren't even out of his mouth before the crowd was in stitches.

    Next, a Puerto Rican Wayne Newton sound-and-lookalike sallied 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 Perry Como himself had been there, they, couldn't have been happier.

    Next, a female comic dressed like George Bums wandered out and did a routine that included the line "When I was a young man, the Dead Sea was only sick."

    The crowd got a lump in its throat just thinking about George.

    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 few bets, stood on the wrong card, fucked the deck. Most of the people at the table were quite civil, but a middle-aged man sitting in the last chair was livid.

    "Must be using some new kind of counting system," he sneered, digging into his Croesian $45 stake and placing another bet. "Who needs this?"

    That's when I realized it was time to go back to my old way of life. I'd been harangued for three hours on a bus by the Daughters of Rayon--a regiment of chronic losers who insisted that they always came out ahead when they visited Atlantic City. I'd been forced repeatedly to tip men dressed like Sinbad. I'd had to sit in stunned disbelief across from a yabbering buffoon while a female George Bums impersonator told jokes like "Men I asked God what He thought of me in Oh, God, He said I was too young for the part." And now, for the fifth time in a single day I'd been accused of disrupting table camaraderie by fucking the deck. So there I sat at a $5 blackjack table in a glorified South Jersey slum, being dissed by a guy with a bad suit and a bad mustache and bad hair and a bad job and a bad family and a bad attitude, and it was all my fault that life hadn't turned out the way he 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 my generation was involved in a heroic effort to depose Dean Martin, Desi Arnaz, Joey Bishop, and all the other cultural icons who ruled American society with an iron fist. This was an intellectual insurrection from which I defected by my twenty-first birthday. One reason I threw in the towel so quickly was because I knew that we couldn't win, that for every Rock Hudson we polished off, ten Rocky Balboas would spring up in his place. A month of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, Michael Bolton records, and Adam Sandler movies certainly helped jog my memory, but it was the two days in Atlantic City that confirmed what I'd suspected about America ever since I was a callow youth.

    Somebody fucked the deck.