I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (13 page)

The true tragedy behind the Jacobean drama of
Scarface
is that no matter how much money Montana makes, no matter how palatial his estate is—Versace to the nth degree—no matter how white and distant Michelle Pfeiffer is as a wife, he will never break through that glass ceiling to the truly elite society that he half despises yet longs for, because he is not "legit." His money is dirty, a veiled allusion to his race (okay, I won't go there again, Pacino is the shit), and therefore his royalty is ignored by the playa-hatin', wack royalty, represented by the blue-haired socialites who cower at Montana's meltdown at the fancy restaurant near the end of the film. The King ends up alone in his ridiculous bathtub, too large to fill without the water getting cold, and self-destructs in cinematic seconds due to his own drug-induced paranoia. He has done himself in through a process of internalized denial of his own worth, a ticking time bomb set off by the race and class values of '80s America. He would be the only one strong enough to bring himself down, and so he does. Even though it seems as if he's the victim of numerous hit men outside his bedroom door, it's really that he cashed himself in, that he couldn't truly believe in his own credo: "The world is yours."

My hope for the hip-hop Kings and Queens of our age is that they really can believe that the world is theirs, that there's an unstoppable force within them that goes beyond the hype and the posturing, that the coronation will not be televised. But that doesn't mean anyone's about to abdicate, y'all.

kevyn aucoin

N
ew York reminds me so much of you. Coming into town, I would always stare out the window of the cab, looking at the streets, loving them, knowing you were here, wondering what you were doing that moment. Then I would recall the smell of lemons, that perfume you gave me last time I saw you, before you died.

I wish you were still here, because the new Patty Griffin album is beautiful, especially the song, "Top of the World." Listening to it makes me miss you, and I can't stop thinking about whether you get the latest music in heaven. Does it drift up to meet you? Do you hear it? Maybe you even get it before it comes out. Maybe God gives you a heads-up, like when Patty was writing the song, and you got to hear it come right out of her that first time.

Tori Amos has two more records out, and they are amazing. She was your favorite, I know, and she loved you. She covered "Rattlesnakes," which is my favorite Lloyd Cole song, and it makes me cry hard, because your life wasn't long enough for you to hear it, but I'm
just hanging on to the hope that iTunes are available up above, and the afterlife is rife with iPods. What's on your playlist?

You loved women more than most men, or even women, and you were such a good uncle to your niece. You were forever concerned about her transition to womanhood, whether she would make it in the harsh world of today. You would have been excited because in D.C. there were a million women marching for their right to reproductive choice. The press said that it was just a few hundred thousand, but we are many millions, and because women are everywhere all the time and we were all there. All the many women you loved, all around me. It was funny being surrounded by women while all the time I had you, this big, tall, handsome man, on my mind.

You had done wondrous things with all of their faces; their beauty reflected your beauty. That was what you did here on earth. As passionately as people make love, you made beauty, and not just with the powder and rouge and lipsticks but with your faith, your joy, your understanding. It wasn't makeup, it was love, and that was clear.

Can you see me? I am beautiful, which I never thought was true, but you made me see it, and then that insight faded away, but now I see it again, I can't get away from it. Thank you for that. The women at the march were beautiful because they were there, and they were all focused on one thing: the right to be themselves.

I got into it with a Mennonite, but, you know, I'm straight-up thug, and you can't take me anywhere but Knuckletown. I said, "Step up, come on. Bring it!!!!! Ezekiel!!!!!" He was making his wife and kids hold up blown-up pictures of fetuses that had been torn up, all
bloody. Does Kinko's let them print up that shit? I know I shouldn't get physical, but it was early in the morning and I was ready to roll and the counterprotesters made me mad. They're small and insignificant, and the pain is small yet consistent, like a mosquito bite, and if you scratch it it will bleed. So I'm a little bloody but still looking good, thanks to you, thanks to me, thanks to womanhood. It was the largest march on Washington in history, and I wore heels.

Late in the afternoon, I saw Air Force One in the sky, flying low, really ominously, over the protesters, the biggest mosquito of all. I'm not sure what the president was trying to say, maybe that some bugs are never going to get slapped or zapped. There's no no-pest strip sticky enough to catch that shit. Police cars swirled all over the ground, surrounding the crowd, lights and sirens going full blast. Did you see any of that?

Are there lots of soldiers up in heaven? Are they cute? Is it fun? I hope so, because I know that their last few days here on earth weren't. I was just missing you. I always do.

ann coulter

P
eople get so pissed off at Ann Coulter. I hadn't seen her before, but when her name is mentioned in my circles muthafuckas go off. I realized I needed to do some research. Generally, I'll read anything and agree somewhat with anybody, even extreme or stupid points of
view, because anyone who can get it together to write a book is kind of cool. And the worse the author is, the more I enjoy it. It never fails to capture me in a web of desire. I got that "You got me at 'Hello'" feeling when reading the foreword for
Slander
, written by high-ass junkie pill popper Rush Limbaugh. I can't believe he was able to put sentences together while on all those fucking drugs, which explains his chaotic and disturbing point of view, and therefore makes him an incredible idiot savant.

I dove into Ann's writing, which was a cross between bizarre accusations about liberal politicians and psychobabble hyperbolic lies that make no sense. The conservative men love her because she is a loyal slave to the status quo. She is Cunta Kinte. As well as betraying her gender, as a notoriously antifeminist woman hater, she is also racist, homophobic, without compassion, inhumane, arrogant, dishonest, contradictory, not funny, has an arguing technique that compares closely to "I know you are but what am I?," wears red leather miniskirts and is just plain fucking wrong. I can't even quote her because everything she says is too awful for me to write.

All this and she isn't even hot. If you're going to be wrong, at least be hot. I'm guilty of some of the biases that Ann has, only in reverse. My prejudice against and hatred of the establishment, the judicial system, antiabortionists, racism, misogyny, the joining together of church and state can have me spiraling downward out of control, and maybe my facts could be discounted and I could be called a liar as well. But I don't give a shit, because at least I'm hot. I know, I may not be pretty in the traditional way, but playas line up around the block to
make some time with me, even when they aren't getting it right then and there. The line is just for the wristband, yo. The hotness is not about age, looks, body type, race; it's about honesty, knowing who you are and being who you are, without trying to front yourself as being better than you really are. It's about the down-deep authenticity of self, then looking it, living it, loving it.

If Ann were hot, then I could excuse some of her behavior. She only goes to the safe end of her sex appeal, ever so slightly flossing a North Beach leather mini with her long legs and crazy anorexic body. If she had some integrity, she would go get some straight-up phat silicone titties, and part her blond hair in the middle, take a pair of Velcro rollers and make those stripper forehead curls that make the boys say, "Whassup, Shorty!!" If she had blonder, bigger hair, that certainly would add credibility to her conservative politics and her upper-class, robotic bigot never-had-any-shit-come-down-on-me-like-a-hard-rain-so-why-should-I-care-about-anyone-but-me values. She can't spit her ignorant angry rhymes successfully with that beige lawyer lipstick. Ann needs to get some Revlon Cherries in the Snow, the ho's lipstick of choice. She's a ho in sheep's clothing, and it's about time she told the truth, the ho truth, and nothing but the truth.

There's nothing wrong with docking cock for the things you believe in, but don't play the thinking man's bombshell with me. Because Ann doesn't think, and she's nowhere near being the bomb, I just wish that she'd detonate and explode. But the only way that she could blow up is to face the '70s porn movie dick-sucking Muzak and
own up to her politico prostitution. I'm a ho for the people and I love that, and I'm proud because I embrace my ho side and never try to pretend like I know everything about everything because I don't. I don't have to front because I actually care about people. I believe in equality for everyone. All I ask for is that. But that's not possible in the America we live in today for a million reasons, Ann being one of them. She won't put 'em on the glass, so she's not qualified to throw stones.

bill o'reilly

I
hope that karma really does exist. Sometimes I believe that it does, especially in the case of Bill O'Reilly. The sex harassment suit against O'Reilly and FOX News is the ultimate liberal Schadenfreude, delighting in the misfortune of others. I often wonder why there is no equivalent term in English. There should be, considering it's a great American pastime.

I don't fault O'Reilly for being a nasty man. I have no business pointing fingers, considering how many fingers have been in me. If I got slapped with a $60 million lawsuit every time I tried to lay a falafel on somebody, I don't know where I'd be but I'm sure it would involve washing dishes.

Many are shocked at the dollar amount. They say that because the
figure is so high, the case is all about extortion. I don't think that $60 million is nearly enough, because a woman's sense of safety, sexual and otherwise, is far more valuable than that, and is something that can never be replaced or paid back.

There is no real retribution for transgressive acts, just whatever the justice system metes out. Consider that $60 million is not only consolation for having had to deal with this upsetting situation where Bill O'Reilly is calling you up at all hours and ejaculating, then afterward talking about how good he was on the
Tonight
show with Jay Leno, but also the absolute invasion of privacy involved in filing suit against the media monolith FOX. Look at the alleged rape victim in the Kobe Bryant case. Even though her identity was to be kept secret from the public, every lurid fact of her life was documented in the tabloid pages. To come out and accuse a cultural lightning rod like Bill O'Reilly is tantamount to social suicide.

Andrea Mackriss, O'Reilly's accuser, became a household name, just like Monica Lewinsky. No matter how progressive we would like to think we are, we forever blame the victim, forcing them into a life of infamy where they design handbags and endure jokes about dress stains for the rest of their lives. Sixty million dollars doesn't even begin to cover it. For the rest of us, it's an expensive laugh charged against the account of one who can't possibly afford it. Bill O'Reilly will never lose his job, or his reputation. He might spin it, how a regular Joe like him can be victimized by a crazy broad, weaving it carefully into the FOX mythology of hate, a cautionary tale about the hysteria and greed of women.

What I find truly sinister about the whole mess is the way that he said, "If a woman ever breathed a word I'll make her pay so dearly she'd wish that she'd never been born." That is intolerable, and what I find truly evil. When we act irresponsibly, we must be willing to be accountable for it, or at least hope to get away with it without people finding out about it, and certainly without threatening the victim into silence. The proper course of action would have been for him to keep kissing as much ass as possible, getting Mackriss higher and higher paying jobs, lighting a lot of candles and scanning the night sky for shooting stars.

He also said, "It'd be her word against mine and who are they going to believe? Me or some unstable woman making outrageous accusations." Why would anyone
not
believe her? Would she go to all this trouble to make these accusations, knowing full well the breadth of the FOX empire and the power they have to effectively destroy her life if she wasn't telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Why do we
not
believe hysterical women? Hysterical women are always right. It's brave for Andrea Mackriss to defend herself, and wondrous to have all the details.

I love seeing the other side of Bill O'Reilly. His bravado in the lusty retelling of his sexual adventures, the fond nostalgia he displayed when telling Mackriss about getting a massage in Thailand and showing "the little brown woman" his penis and how she was amazed, are human and endearing. I find I can't demonize him as easily as I did when he was just that cantankerous pundit spewing conservative propaganda. His vanity and naughty antics make him sweeter to me.
They cut the bitter taste of his politics and arrogant manner. It's so complex, all that I now feel about Bill. I hate him for his bullying threats, especially the bizarre one about Al Franken, and for how FOX deals with those who might stand in their way. I hate him for refusing to take the blame, thinking that he would never be held accountable, that he could write his own moral code and live without guilt or remorse of any kind just because of his power and fame. Strangely, I love him more now, too, because he is just a man, with desires and fantasies and vulnerabilities. I can identify with him. I have a vibrator, too! He also has to deal with the public scrutiny of his private life, probably not as probing and violating as what his accuser went through but perhaps for him personally unendurable. He comes off as such a brittle guy, and something like this could likely shatter him. He's cracked enough as it is, so this case was like a car bomb blowing up outside the FOX studio, having built up such a Great Wall of Hate among liberals and most other thinking people. Who knows when the whole structure will crash down all around him—his vanity, his cell phone, his vibrator, his passion for exfoliation, his vibrator—and Middle Eastern food scattered and lost in the rubble? I feel for him, but I doubly feel for Andrea Mackriss.