MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents"
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MAIN EVENT. A Good Place to Get Started --- a.k.a "Table of Contents" |
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Helping Create the NEXT GENERATION of the Web: GENERATOR 21: The World's Magazine
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I was the older guy who would spring for the cocktails, tell a few good stories, and smile back at you with those Dino "bedroom eyes."
In my case, green rather than blue.
I could afford to pay for the cab home and had enough class not to hit on your chick.
I've always been pretty much a Literary Hermit, but it's easy for people seeing me in a pub, with the latest woman I won't connect with, to assume otherwise. Thus, seeing me in those venues, a few kids assumed that --- like Dean Martin --- I could be considered an icon of the Swinging Lifestyle. Not.
Why?
I was, once, you know. I've seen pictures.
Now, in my dotage, after being considered "Mr. Swinging Lifestyle," I come to find out that there was a time when I could have been part of All That.
BUT NOBODY TOLD ME.
My friends let my days of Unknowing Handsome pass into these days of dotage --- and left me sitting in a room pounding on a manual typewriter, then an electric typewriter, then a computer and suddenly --- Oops! --- my youth was A MEMORY and my chance at being A Player was gone.
I should shoot every one of my friends.
In another lifetime, I was living in San Francisco, CA, and vaguely associated with the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online. The G21 was there, too. But I was more a political fixture than a publisher. Somehow, because I was single, an afficionado of single-malt Scotches and great martinis ("....Shaken not stirred.") and had a storied-history, certain of the 20-something crowd determined that I was a representative of "the Swinging Lifestyle."
NOW to go somewhere else, to change the channel for a second, I'm upset --- angry, disgruntled, mad-as-hell --- with my old friends from the past.
Because, in this country that celebrates youth and beauty, none of them told me about the days when I was actually a handsome man.
FEED THE HUNGRY. You can help someone else in this world and IT WON'T COST YOU A DIME. If you simply remember to drop by The Hunger Site every day that you surf and click a simple button ONE LESS PERSON WILL GO HUNGRY. The food is distributed by the United Nations World Food Programme and paid for through the sponsorship of companies that care. Do your part.
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We went to the Marin version of A Clean Well-Lighted Place, one of the three wondrous bookstores in the Bay Area. (The Ess Eff version is another, and City Lights the third. I avoided City Lights like the plague because it always depressed me. Why would a writer be depressed by a wonderful bookstore,you might ask. It's like this: whenever I went to City Lights I would see all of the great books I want to, but have not, read. The effect this invariably has on me is to make feel that my own writing is futile, since it has all already been said. I wonder why I bother to write, or anyone does.)
When Ms. Wanna Swing and I returned to Ess Eff she invited me back to her apartment. I thought, being the reticent type I am, that this would be too forward for a first date and suggested we go to a club instead. She took me to a dance club in the Castro that she liked. But she didn't dance. Later on, she dissed me publically on the Bay Guardian BBS because I didn't jump her bones. That was what was so significant about this encounter.
This was the second time that a young woman had been offended because I didn't boff her. (Please recall now that I have been chaste these past eight years.) I couldn't undertstand it. Being castigated for being a couze-hound or a cad I understand. Being dissed for being a perfect gentleman makes no sense to me.
To paraphrase Cher for the umpteenth time, you can take everything I understand about women and put it on the head of a pin and still have room for the Lord's Prayer.
The second significant event was a gift from my pal, Terry. He gave me a black sharkskin jacket so that I could truly play the part of Lounge Lizard. I loved that jacket. I savored many a great martini wearing it, and always kept a swizzle stick from some swank establishment tucked away in one of its pockets. It was during the time of my Lounge Lizard jacket that Matt Stowell and I went on our pilgrimage in search of San Francisco' s best martini. (The jury is still out.)
Thanks to the Rat Pack, I believe, there is no more quintessentially American myth than that of the Swinging Lifestyle. And no one epitomized it better than the late Dean Martin.
The irony in that, as Shirley MacLaine has shared with us, is that Dino most often opted for a good game of golf or staying at home watching television rather than another night of roistering.... But all our myths are based on the appearance rather than the substance. Most of those young people who considered me a Swinger failed to notice that in order to produce the magazine I did, and all the other writing, I must perforce spend many more evenings sitting at home, alone in a little room pounding a keyboard, than sitting near a piano holding a martini glass.
© 1999, GENERATOR 21.
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