THE MINDER

For three years, you were a minder, travelling with celebrities, generally second tier rock stars trying to get their degenerate asses together so they could drag them around for a twenty-seven city reunion tour, and put some money in their pocket. You have to swear on a bible and sign a NDA—non-disclosure agreement. This was before Get Him To The Greek. Before VH1 revived its ratings with Celebrity Relapse. You confess, at a low point in your career, you participated in the very thing you are mocking. It was a copycat show—some producer’s idea. The pitch was basically “Celebrity Colitis.” But of course there was a different title. For some reason you’re blanking on it now. There was no way to negotiate your name off the credits. Not your proudest moment. But you were living in San Francisco, creative jobs were tricky to get. And you got one. You liked to think this was because you were The Best Man For The Job. In retrospect, it was probably because there were no other applicants. Your only question, in the interview, was, “Is colitis contagious?” The doctor/producer’s answer was, admittedly, problematic. “Only if you want it to be…”

He later went on to be a fitness guru, with his own line of “adrenaline fun shakes.” Made from actual sheep adrenals.

That was then. Whatever you chose to do with them, on Desoxyn you had eight hours of feeling sharp and optimistic (four of them involving that extra-sensitive erection). Which didn’t always matter. Speed could, in the beginning, give you sudden and darting tadpole-like speed peristalsis. Which was why you did not find out that what you thought was Desoxyn was actually stool softeners until the Armenians you sold some to came to your apartment and shit on the floor. “You want to clean that up with your girlfriend’s tongue? Then get us some real uppers, Jew load.” And yes, you’d think Jew load would be the offending issue. But the truth is, even when the guy said that—you remember even now—you weren’t offended. Not by the Jew stuff. You just felt really, really sad you didn’t have a girlfriend. (Self-obsession is a byproduct of speed, like the wallpaper-curling ammonia stink.) Not that, if you did have a girlfriend, you would want her to have to use her tongue in some unnatural and demeaning fashion, least of all for cleaning purposes. In fact, considering what the Armenian wanted to do with her it was good that you did not have a girlfriend. But still… As Swami Satchidinanda says “No thought contains all truth.” And yet it would be nice to have a girlfriend.

Speed made solitude crowded. You weren’t what you would call lonely. You just had to have sex with something, if only an oven mitt, a table leg, a sandwich. Masturbation, on speed, took on triathlon proportions. (Truckers’ Leather!) Week-long
sessions left you with a brush-burned Johnson, a sore wrist. Somewhere Sartre talks about the nothingness of pleasureless intensity. Or maybe it was the pleasure of intense nothingness. Or something. It all made sense on speed. It only made sense on speed, since that’s how Sartre wrote. Like the apocryphal story of Saint Genet—intended as a five page preface to Genet’s work, bloated to an amp-fueled whale of a tome on crank.