Laundry List of Bad Ideas

When you've been at this sort of business for as long as I have (I just worked it out?I've now spent approximately 42 percent of my life writing these stories every single goddamn week), sometimes the brain can run dry for a while. You hit a stumbling block. Sometimes a big one. This is particularly troublesome when your job?what you're paid to do?is to write autobiography.

First, I should clarify that I'm not complaining about this situation. It was a fine gig to fall into, especially at the time I did?and I've been lucky enough to find things to write about for some 15 straight years now. Only once?and this was at another paper?was I reduced to describing everything that was on my desk at that time. (It was a tight deadline that week.)

Second, I'm not even finding myself confronted by one of those aforementioned stumbling blocks at present. It's been a reasonably productive week, as weeks go. But those dry spells do crop up. Sometimes, as we all know, weeks and months can go by in which absolutely nothing happens. We go to work, we do our jobs, we come home, eat something and go to sleep. No stubbed toes, no alien abductions, no friends or relatives stampeded by bulls, no great moral victories or defeats, nothing.

I've been lucky, in times like that, to have Morgan around. While there are times when I become convinced that I've told all the stories I'm capable of telling, she'll dredge something out of me that I hadn't thought about in years?some forgotten story. We'll be sitting at a bar, and after the second round begins to take hold, we'll start sharing stories. There's probably no other way I could remember them other than to tell them aloud.

If the story turns out to be an okay one, she'll sometimes ask if I've written it yet. Sometimes I haven't, in which case I'll make a note of it and be all set for the next week.

(She doesn't, by the way, ask me that about every story. Most of the stories I end up telling just aren't worth a damn. Sometimes weeks go by where I don't tell any amusing and erudite and witty tales at all.)

Given that I know what's expected of me, I've prepared a contingency plan for just this inevitability. A little backup I call the idea list. Or, if I'm feeling pretentious, The Idea List. It's not a very clever name, but it works for me. I always know what I'm talking about when I think of that name.

I find that I keep a lot of lists as I get older. Grocery lists, lists of things I need to take care of. If I don't, I'll never remember them. It's a perpetually running list, actually, which I keep on a folded piece of paper tucked into my cigarette pack (whoa, Nellie?now there's a story!).

The idea list, however, is different. The idea list is my list of story ideas for those times when I'm dry. If I get a notion I just don't have time to follow up on right then and there, well, I put it on the list. Later, if I can't think of anything else to do, I look at the list, and choose. When it's done, it comes off the list. Sometimes it comes off the list earlier than that?if, say, the window of opportunity in which such a story would have been relevant has passed, or if I realize that it was never that good an idea to begin with.

As it stands now, this list isn't too long. There are a few people I'd like to talk to one of these days: a coffee cart guy I know; a musician from New Orleans; Gary Graver (a film director who moved from working with Orson Welles into the hardcore porn business); and character actor Tracey Walter. I've always liked that Tracey Walter. I even have a contact number for him. I hope I don't make the same mistake with him that I made with Anthony Zerbe, though. I had a contact number for him, too. It wasn't until the day before I was going to pick up the phone that I found out that Zerbe had died a month earlier. That was a pisser.

I also have the name and contact info for a local phone prankster here on the list?but once again it seems I've waited too long, and he's since become way too popular.

Sometimes I think I'm just lazy.

There are also a few column ideas here, too?stories I've never told before. Not that I'm aware of, at least. Like the time I was sent on a camping trip into the deepest wilds of northern Wisconsin with a church group. Bad things always happened to me on those trips?but never anything bad enough to get me sent home early. This one I'm thinking of here, I ended up fasting for three days. It wasn't a religious thing. Lord knows it wasn't a test of my faith. And so far as I know, the food was just fine. I was just real paranoid about shitting in the woods. I simply had no interest in doing that, and so the best way I could think of to avoid doing that was by simply not eating. It worked, too.

Then there was the time in Philly I had to do a 72-hour mobile electroencephalogram. That meant I had to go about my business for three days?walk the streets, go to work?with 30 electrodes stuck to my scalp, all the wires trailing down my back to a tape recorder I had strapped to my waist. Nobody bothered me much for those three days.

Speaking of Philly, I've always wanted to do a story about Lee's Fish & Steak?a little takeout place directly across the street from my apartment there. An old Korean couple?the Lees?ran the place with their kids. Neat thing about Lee's was that everything they served was deep fried. They fried anything and everything?chicken, shrimp, fish, beef, eggrolls, vegetables, everything. And they served it all up in styrofoam cartons. Once a month or more, as I could afford it, I'd order a mountain of fried delicacies from Lee's, bring it back to my place, plop myself down in front of the television and have a feast. Those were some of the good times. Better still, the Lees seemed to like me for some reason, even though they spoke no English (you ordered by number). They even gave me a t-shirt once.

I'm also thinking of doing something one of these days about my various deformities. Beyond the eyes and the brain and the spirit, my body also features a number of simple physical oddities. I could be a 10-in-one all by myself without lifting a finger. There's my Vomer tooth, for one. I just found out about that.

When I was two, my mom told me not too long ago, a dentist took some x-rays and discovered that I had a tooth growing out of the roof of my mouth. It wasn't visible, and I can't feel it, but it's up there. He wanted to operate immediately, of course. My mom asked if the tooth presented a danger?if it would grow into my brain or anything, or if it would cause me any discomfort or pain. When he told her that it probably wouldn't, she put the kibosh on the operation. No need to go digging around up there if it wasn't necessary. I'm glad she did, too. I talk funny enough as it is already?and kind of like the idea of having a Vomer tooth.

There are some real news stories in there, too?like the surveillance cameras on the Lower East Side, over by the river. A reliable source tells me that these cameras are powerful enough to peer into apartment windows in Queens. This setup, I'm told, has left certain members of the NYPD with enormous collections of "surveillance porn."

?Or the motorcycle artist who found himself on the Angels' bad side, simply by being a loudmouthed jackass.

?Or the voodoo man from Nebraska I've been wanting to talk to for several years now. Or the woman who says she was Klaus Kinski's translator. She was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement about this arrangement, thus allowing Kinski to claim he wrote his now-infamous memoirs in English. Or Abe Vigoda. Or Tom Laughlin, though chances are good he'll not be around too much longer.

There are so many other possibilities?the drug dealer I know who has a PhD (or should that be the PhD who's now a drug dealer? Doesn't much matter?he'll never talk). Or the guy at the Sanitation Dept. who's in charge of dead animal pickup. Or a railroad cop?"bull," as the hobos knew him?such people still exist.

Funny thing about all this, though, is that I've been keeping that list up and alive for some seven years now, and not once?not once?have I ever used anything from it. I probably should one of these days?thinking about them now, some of those ideas are pretty damn good.

If any of these stories do appear at some point in the future with my name attached to them, though, rest assured that it must've been a pretty slow goddamn week.