Monster Children

ME: ...I’m not sure how to put it. I get songs stuck in my head. Not exactly songs but three-second riffs. They play back over and over and over like a skipping record. Like right now I’ve got The Cruel Sea song “I Feel,” the part where it goes “I feel/Like nobody knows or cares how/I feel/Like I’m going to be kind of sick now/I feel...”, then it goes back to the beginning and plays in a loop over and over and fucking over!

DR. ROGER STEEN, ADDICTION SPECIALIST ($190/HR): How long has this been going on?

ME: Since as long as I can remember. Kindergarten. Nursery rhymes. Hanna-Barbera cartoons. “Here he comes, here comes Speed Racer.” “They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning.” The opening tune from “Good Times” tortured me through most of junior high.

DR. STEEN: Have you discussed this with anyone?

ME: No. I mean, yes, jokingly, like in a ‘shitty top 40 songs that got stuck in your head’ kinda way. You know, we all get songs stuck in our head, Doc, I know that. But for the last ten years or so, they’ve been non-stop. And LOUDER. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night to take a pee and BOOM, the disc starts playing, and I’m up for hours.

DR. STEEN: Have you tried mind-calming exercises? Counting sheep, this kind of thing.

ME: I don’t think you’re hearing me, Doc. This is my counting sheep. My nervous tick. All my life, whenever I get into an uncomfortable social situation, the song starts playing on a loop, like a security blanket. It’s not a bad thing. Or, it wasn’t a bad thing in P.E. in 11th grade. But for fuck’s sake it tortures me now. It starts with a song I like and then it persists and persists and persists. Fucking Bright Eyes! “Cleanse Song,” that bit “So I muffled my scream on an Oxnard beach/Full of fever dreams that scare you sober/Into saltless dinners” lodged into my head in Sao Paulo, Christmas 2007 and stayed well into March, New York, with relapses over the last four years. “Amateurs, dilettantes, hacks, cowboys, clones/The streets groan with little Caesars, Napoleons and cunts/With their building blocks and their tiny plastic phones/Counting on their fingers, with crumbs down their fronts,” that Nick Cave song—it’s been fucking hounding me for five years. Last week it was the Sunnyboys, week before that it was Iron and Wine. Doc, I know exactly what serial killers mean when they talk about hearing voices. It’s like I’ve got a long residency hotel in my brain, and the guests all overstay their welcome. In fact I’d even say my pot addiction and now my drinking and even that whole Internet porn thing was really just a subconscious effort to turn off the FUCKING RADIO!

I pause. Stand. Address the empty theater.

ME: See, just this very conversation, just this whole, ‘Doc, you gotta help me’ scene has done it. In my head, right this second, Mick Jagger: “Dear doctor, please help me, I’m damaged/There’s a pain where there once was a heart...” And I know he ain’t leaving any time soon.

Middle age surprises. Crack-addicted friends with bad chips on their shoulders in 1992 have since made peace with themselves, started families, replaced missing teeth, and become altogether wonderful people. Great womanizers who cavalierly juggled supermodels in their twenties now find themselves alone, with suspicious suntans and too many Chrome Hearts rings on their fingers.

In my early-thirties, terminally single, I found it hard to get through dinners with happily married couples with young children. Their comfort and stability reminded me of all that I lacked, and my free-spirited, peripatetic lifestyle did vice versa. Now I’m on the other side of this. My single friends describe in gloating detail their sexual conquests.

Most fascinating is the whole “older I get, better I was” epidemic, especially when it comes to surfing. At Waikiki Beach a couple years back, I met a haole surf instructor who spoke in thick pidgin and advertised himself as an ex-pro.

“What years?” I asked.

“Late ‘80s, brah.”

“Which tour?”

“ASP and PSAA.”

I competed on the ASP and PSAA tours from 1986 to 1991 and I’d never seen this guy before.

A minor surf and skate pro from the ‘80s claims on his website to have “inspired the Dogtown scene and helped spark the SoCal surf/skate/snow culture.”

I have watched one of my contemporaries’ bios change throughout the decades. In the ’90s he was a “former East Coast surfing champion.” In the ‘00s he became a “former U.S. Champion.” Recently he has graduated to “former Top 16 ranked pro.”

—I did not deliver a pizza to John McEnroe in 1986 but rather John McEnroe’s wife, Tatum O’Neill, who invited me in, offered me cocaine and beer, and gave me a blowjob in the Jacuzzi.

—I grew up not in the Valley but Venice Beach. My father is serving a life sentence for murdering my mother. I was raised by Kent Sherwood, Jay Adams’s stepdad. I teethed on Cadillac Wheels, catamaraned down Bay Street with Uncle Tony Alva, lost my virginity, age 11, to the ‘Malibu Grinder’ in that famous gangbang the Colony crew still talk and high-five about.

—Jello Biafra, my godfather, hurled me off the stage at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go at a Dead Kennedys/Cramps show in 1980. I was 12. After crowd surfing through “Chemical Warfare,” Connie Jacobs, with pink Mohawk and pink pubic hair (how do I know this? she showed me), burned a mi vida loca tattoo into the back of my neck.

—Madonna and I not only ate sushi and smoked a joint and had rough sex in the alley behind Femme Nu in Waikiki after the Rolling Stone shoot (see below), but also she brought me along on her ‘Like A Virgin’ tour, and paid me handsomely to dazzle with my Gene Simmons-like tongue, much to the chagrin of Jellybean Benitez.

—Tom Curren still has a tough time looking me in the eye after the three times in a row I beat him in WSA quarterfinal heats.

—During that scandalous and prolific stint between my second Palme d’or and my hang gliding accident, I was not snorting methylenedioxypyrovalerone as Vanity Fair erroneously reported. I was doing tai chi and eating raw food.

—And while we’re on the subject, yes, she was a senior at Beverly Hills High, but no, she wasn’t seventeen, she was sixteen-and-a-half.

—Brad Pitt, alls I can say is I apologize, the whole thing went down before you entered the picture.

Guy tells his girlfriend he wants to part ways. Girl has a hard time accepting this. In a ploy to get guy back, she offers to help him clean his apartment. On a Saturday morning, Starbucks iced coffees in hand, Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs” blaring on the stereo, he in sweats, she in mini skirt and an extra squirt of perfume, they dust, vacuum, scrub windows. She remembers their 4th of July in Montauk, his annoying niece who could never pronounce her name properly, the white roses he sent her on her birthday (“red’s just way too obvious,” he insisted with that crooked smile). Warm sunlight. Beaming optimism. With a box of his dusty LPs in her arms, her foot suddenly skids across the hardwood floor, as if on a banana peel. “FUCK!” she shouts, the records tumbling everywhere, her ACL severely wrenched. Under her shoe she finds a soiled condom. The new girl.

Of all my great achievements (trick-or-treating OJ Simpson's house; five stitches to the chin after failed Evel Knievel-inspired launch over three Tonka trucks on Huffy BMXer; 7th place Meadow Oaks Summer School Hot Dog Eating Contest; tiles at Marina Dog Bowl; Tae Kwon Do yellow belt; stage dive Dead Kennedys Whiskey; cocaine seizure behind the wheel of powder blue '66 Karmann Ghia; back-to-back pizza deliveries to John McEnroe and Charlie Sheen in '86; premature ejaculation with Alexis from Heidi Fleiss' stable ($800/hr, non-refundable); sushi with Madonna circa Like A Virgin; Mile High Club Pan Am Flt 104 JFK-DeGaulle; stalking, cornering, revelling in for maybe a year then killing perfectly good love, repeatedly; front row The Who reunion tour; on-time alimony payments seven months and counting; et al), this might be the sweetest...