I wrote a story in NegCap #4 called “Dead to Me,” wherein I explained how I take the expression almost literally. I had a short list of people whose transgressions had caused their premature deaths, as well as a few people that I have known who simply vanished, so they went missing and are presumed dead to me. Quite often when I am writing for the zine, I find myself working on something not because I want to see it published, but because I want to see where it takes me mentally, which explains why I always go off on tangents and include as much detail as I can. This also explains why so many things that start out well never see the light of day—I stopped it because I didn’t like where the story was taking me.
The original intent of the piece was as simple and straightforward as anything I had done: wanting to present my case for why some people that I know turned out to be total assholes that I hate and instead of wishing for them to die, I act like it’s already happened. On some level it’s wish-fulfillment and on another level, I feel like my side of the argument has now become, for better or worse, part of the public record. As I was writing it, however, I was forced to sift through my feelings about all of these people and situations and I had to live through all the hurt and anguish all over again. Now that the story is done, it feels like it’s just that, a story. It’s absolutely true, but like all good stories, it shouldn’t end with a funeral because that’s a real downer.
I started writing this follow-up story because I wanted to demonstrate my evolution as a person and because I wanted to kick dirt on the graves of some of the dead. The title comes from my wife’s old boss, Chitra, who was born and raised in India. She loved American culture but could never quite get the hang of some of our expressions. When discussing a financial matter that had already been resolved, she would often say the title and even though what she says means the same thing as the common expression, it’s much funnier her way.
Look at me! I am on paragraph five and I’m ready to start the actual story. This must be a record. In the original piece I started with the story of my fellow zine publisher Marc Parker and how I befriended him, trusted him, sent him free, expensive asthma medications (he did a zine for asthmatics) and was generally a very nice guy to him. In return, Marc repeatedly violated my trust, lied to me, used false personae to elicit comments from me about mutual friends and was a total scumbag to me. He actually printed in his zine that he was “dead to me,” which I found hilarious and flattering. It made me feel like I was famous for a second and the fact that he really knew that I hated his fucking guts was awesome. I had told him in an e-mail that he was dead to me and the reason he felt compelled to mention it was because, in the zine with the mention of his being dead, he had paid me many compliments for my kindness and generosity. Since our falling out occurred between printings, later editions (like the one anonymously mailed to me from Marc’s home town) contained his note about his death.
Since that printing, Marc has since explicitly admitted that he was the phony “Ben Joseph” who had sent me chapbooks in that name in trade for my zine. So to give you an idea of what a fucking douche this guy is, he pretended to be a guy named Ben in order to trade with me and convince me that he was a real person, all so he could get me to talk shit about other people, which I am happy to do anyway. That motherfucker is still dead and will probably stay dead. If he wrote me a sincere apology, explained how he was an immature little twat and that I deserved better treatment, I might piss on him if he was on fire, but then again, I might not. He must have been flattered by my attention because he linked to my story about him from his web page, but I’ll just keep moving the page around so his link doesn’t work but it does link to something that will make people sick.
After Marco Homo, I was talking about a girlfriend that I had in college who was a gorgeous bitch named Adrienne. She cheated on me with a retarded wigger and when I found out, she was dead to me. I rarely saw her after we broke up and that may be because I made it very clear in my circle of friends that she was dead to me and I have to assume that anyone who had been thinking about making a move on her gave up those plans. I would say in a general sense, I was a much more of an overtly vicious person when I was in college. I now relegate my viciousness to these pages and the occasional message board, which has made me a lot happier, and, consequently, with less of a pressing need to vent. I now find that I choose to avoid conflict when possible because other people always get hurt. People have always told me that I am good verbal fighter but that I don’t play fair. The only people who fight fair are people who lose and that’s not me. If you want to win a fight, you have to use everything at your disposal. Damn, paragraph seven and I’m already off on a tangent.
A few months after our break-up, I moved to Manhattan and Adrienne transferred to another college and that was the end of it. In 2006, I was reading about the movie V for Vendetta and there was a story about how the cinematographer had had a fatal heart attack just after the movie wrapped and I actually knew his name. He was the same guy who had done Aliens, The Princess Bride, Willow and Thelma and Louise and I was actually sad for a minute. Normally when showbiz types die, I really don’t give a shit. Even actors whose work I enjoy don’t move me in death, except Fred MacMurray, maybe. But when this guy died, I really thought the world had lost someone who was a real talent. He also had the same name as my ex-girlfriend, which reminded me of her.
Two minutes later, I found someone who sounded like her on Myspace but the picture was of a dog and her profile said she was bi. I sent her an e-mail and asked her if she had gone to my college when I was there. She wrote back a few minutes later saying that yes, she did go to my school back then and that she knew exactly who I was. From there, we started talking again. The first thing I told her was that I had written unflattering things about her and if she wanted to respond to them, I would listen. She read what I wrote and had no comment about any of it. She admits that at the time, she was using sex to try to get love, but she had never been faithful to anyone. It made me realize that she wasn’t disrespecting me to make me look like an asshole, she was just really needy and fucked guys that she liked who paid attention to her. I was just one of many guys in that line, but I guess I had been at the head of the line for so long that I hadn’t noticed the group of guys gathering behind me, waiting for a shot. Last time I said that when you are dating a gorgeous bitch that everyone else wants a turn on your ride and I really nailed that right on the head.
The best thing that she told me was that when she first arrived at SUNY Purchase she had evaluated all of the guys and decided that the two hottest guys on campus were me and this flaming douche named Christian Hand. I won’t even bother to disparage him, but his name always made me think of a hired assassin for the church. Now she’s in a unionized same-sex relationship, admittedly very overweight and working as a film executive at a major Hollywood studio in LA. She’s thinking that if she wants to have a kid, she and her partner will use Mr. Hand as the donor daddy. Even better than all that, she said she only had sex with him once, it was one of the worst experiences of her life and afterwards, she didn’t talk to him for years. The worst thing that she said to me was the following stream of invective, and let me quote to get it just right, “Yeah, you were a prick back then. Arrogant, cold, cruel, elitist, obnoxious and at times downright vicious. You elicited a gang mentality in those around you, and you and your crew would gang up to humiliate and torture those you deemed unworthy. Although I deserved your wrath, the ‘let’s rally behind Jøsh to hate Adrienne’ was a bit over the top and just another example of your disdain and cruelty to others. But I’m a pretty tough broad, so despite my astute observation, I hold no real judgment upon you. ;)”
You can’t argue with the truth, unless you’re a Republican. So why would I bother trying to find her, talk to her, maybe even do the unthinkable, bring her back to life? She put it best on one of the 4 comments on my sad little Myspace page, “If you and I are talking, albeit briefly and without any real depth, do I still qualify as being dead to you?” Zinged with my own zinger! I was instantly reminded of all the things I used to like about Adrienne and suddenly, she had returned to life. We started talking about work and relationships and what we had done with our lives. I had assumed that she dropped out because of the trauma of our break-up, but it turns out that after our break-up, she was kicked out of school for bad grades. I had nothing to do with it, but I can bask in the schadenfreude, can’t I?
We traded e-mails for a few weeks and then she asked me for my AIM name. The conversations online were more immediate, but more fleeting. She was just as funny and sharp as I remembered, and just as opinionated. The fact that she was in a long-term relationship with another chick made me feel like our relationship could never head in that direction, so it was totally harmless for both of us. I would never cheat on my wife, thanks for offering, but I also don’t ever want anyone to think I’m available because I am very happily married. Within those parameters, we are now comfortably chatting whenever either of us has ten minutes to chat. We strongly disagree on so many things (she hates Macs and wants to remake the classic film Near Dark, just as examples) that it’s wiser to stick to other topics, but I like her and think she is a good person. She is also no longer the raging slut that she was and I am no longer the leader of a pack of droogs hunting for a bit of the old psychological ultraviolence.
In June of 2006 my wife and I went to LA to see my sister’s new baby, attend my mom’s 60th birthday party, visit my in-laws, and catch up with old friends. Before we left, I made plans to meet up with Adrienne as well as my first high school girlfriend, Andrea. As a very brief aside, in the process of working on my high school reunion, I found Andrea and the coincidences of our circumstance were quite interesting. My wife is originally from a very small town outside LA and she currently works as a consultant in intellectual property litigation. She is always hired by attorneys or the courts, who need her to write an expert’s report that will be used as evidence. Andrea works as a partner in a law firm, specializing in intellectual property litigation, and she currently lives about a half mile from my in-laws, in the same town where my wife grew up, 3,000 miles away from where I grew up. As V once said, “There are no coincidences, only the illusion of coincidence.”
A few weeks before the trip, Adrienne offered me VIP tickets to Universal Studios, including special passes that let you cut the lines on all the rides. She also said that since her office was on the lot, and five minutes from my hotel, we could get lunch together. To make a very long, convoluted story short, we never got together. I was very disappointed, not only because I really had made a huge effort to make it happen, but more because she hadn’t made a similar effort. At the time, she was going through a very rough period because she had a huge project that had been in the works for years, it was about to get the green light, and the week we rolled into town, the whole thing turned to shit and will probably never get made now. To me, work is always secondary to my life, it’s just a means to an end, not an end undo itself, but truly successful people sacrifice an awful lot to make it, and Adrienne is nothing if not successful. My philosophy is one that most people come to much later in life, but it’s basically summed up with the statement, “When I am old, I am not going to remember all the days I worked late, but I will remember all the times I enjoyed life with my family, so I want to do that more often.”
After we came home, I told her that I was hurt and pissed off at her for not making the effort, but we were able to work it out without anyone dying. I don’t want to give the impression that I am needy or insecure, because I am not. I just don’t like when I make plans and people flake and I will never chase anyone to be my friend. As my favorite HBO hooker once shouted to a John as she dismissed his advances, “Your dick ain’t special.”
I am sure that sooner or later I will meet up with Adrienne again and we’ll talk about our lives like old friends, which, I guess we are now. I like talking to her, I wish her well and talking to her has made me feel absolved of any hurt that I caused, because I did apologize and I did mean it. She has also called herself the c-word on a few occasions and admits to cheating in an attempt to use sex to get love, but she was a kid, too, and everyone has their issues. In addition, I really was a mean, vicious person back then and there are a few other people who are probably entitled to an apology from me as well, but fuck them. If they find me, they can ask, but I am not going to look for you. I get enough agita day to day, bro.
I spent a few paragraphs talking about my ex-friend, who I will call “A.” She wasn’t a bad person, in fact, she was a very sweet and caring person. Her problem was that she didn’t really respect boundaries. She was a very sexual person and she often tried to seduce me with almost no success. After I met my wife, she tried to seduce us both, after previously complaining about how a mutual friend had given her herpes. Ironically enough, it was this same herpes-laden mutual friend that I made a short film about that mocks him—the same one who made me the star of his senior student film that I spent weeks on but to this day I still haven’t seen it. For the sake of argument, let’s call this guy Cocksucker McDouchebreath, or Cocky, as we called him. So Cocky gave A herpes, but Cocky also had a passionate fling with Adrienne (wait, there’s still more) but he was polite enough to warn her in advance because he was madly in love with her and worshipped her. Cocky was one of those insanely arrogant film students that Quentin Tarantino would have been if he had no talent and had never had any success. Let’s say he just got stuck at the video store, but he knew he was so supertalented. That’s my boy Cocky, and even though he has no idea, unless that guy gives me a DVD of my performance in his movie (an actual pre-cursor to The Truman Show where I discover that my entire family life is a terrible sitcom that is going to be canceled) he is fucking dead to me, too. There is still one more connection that I didn’t hear about it until very recently, Adrienne also told me she had a very odd, purely sexual relationship with a guy named Jeff. She said she would go to his room, put on a Cure CD, and fuck. We also filmed Cocky’s student film at Jeff’s house and it was this same Jeff who helped me shoot the cover for NegCap#2, but he is also dead to me because he stole the dolls I was using for the cover art and returned them five years later in very shitty condition. You might think that my school was small based on how incestuous these relationships seem, but there were thousands of people enrolled and I didn’t know more than half of them.
Oh, I forgot about A. While writing this story, she found me on Myspace, sent me a friendly e-mail, I replied, but two months later, not a word back. As I was completing this issue she found me on Facebook and we are “friends” again. Also, while writing this story, I heard from a guy that I went to college with who found me and A from the web version of the original story. One of the things that soured the relationship with A was when she asked me to hold a gun for a mutual friend named Jason Dirt. I called him Jason, most people called him Dirt, but I was willing to call him Dirt when buying E from him for a few months in the mid-90s. This guy who e-mailed me was looking for A and also said that Jason Dirt had died of a heroin overdose shortly after I stopped talking to him. I stopped talking to him because he got shadier and weirder as the days wore on. I am guessing he was already a junkie who was dealing to support his own habit, so no need to beat that horse that has already died.
For an update on the Junkie, that’s going to take a whole story, so please see, “Return of the Junkie”( e-mail me for a free PDF)
The next person in my story was a former friend that I called the “Brooklyn new-wave Romeo who was a little too into cocaine,” Jay. He was never dead to me, he just kind of drifted away from me and all of his other friends. He was supposed to be the best man at my wedding but he blew all of his money on drugs instead and it caused a rift that helped push him away from everyone. He also became a very unreliable person.
My best friend Peter was also very close with Jay and Peter had also lost touch with him as well. I discovered this web site at my office and asked Peter if there was anyone we had lost touch with that he might want to find. We both thought Jay would be a good candidate, assuming he was no longer living with his parents. I looked him up and Peter encouraged me to call. When I did, I spoke to a woman who said that not only wasn’t Jay there, she wouldn’t tell me where he was and hung up on me. I called her back and said I was a very old friend of his, I had found the number online and if she could just pass on my name and number to Jay, he would call me and I would never bother her again. Three minutes later, Jay called me back.
Turns out, his girlfriend has worse credit than him (this is jaw-droppingly astonishing to anyone who knows Jay) so she had him put his name down on her account with the phone company. She worked as a shot girl at the Hustler Club, a high end strip club in Manhattan. He said that dancers were hot, but the shot girls were the cream of the crop because they didn’t have to get naked, but dudes would pay top dollar to drink body shots off them. I asked if they had any openings for a dude like me, but alas, they have a “no balls allowed” sexist policy about the shot girl position. Bastards.
I talked to him for a good half hour before I passed the phone to Peter. Afterwards, we were both a little giddy. On the phone, he confessed that he had never had as much fun as he had had hanging out with us since we drifted apart and it bummed me out. I mean, I lost a close friend to drugs and apathy, but I still wasn’t angry at all. I actually just wanted to stop wasting time and hang out with him again, with altered expectations. He’s a fun guy to hang around with, but I wouldn’t ask him to babysit my son or give me a ride to the airport.
Peter called me soon after and said that he had also been talking to Jay a lot and wanted to ask me for a favor. I would do anything for Peter, especially if it involved sleeping with his wife, but this one was easy. In the original story, I mention Jay’s full name and his predilection toward coke in the same sentence, which was one of very few hits his name would get when googled. Jay had said that it made him look bad when he was trying to get ahead in life, so I removed the reference. I tend to abhor any form of censorship to an almost ridiculous degree, but there’s a difference between omitting unnecessary and hurtful words and not saying something you mean for fear of reprisal. When I am writing for the zine, I am absolutely fearless. This is not because I am some kind of hero, it’s because I tend to write by myself in front of the computer in a world of my own creation. I send it out into the world as unfiltered and unfettered as possible and if there’s collateral damage, tough titty.
A few weeks later, we had a poker game at my friend Chris’s apartment and it was like no time had passed. We were immediate friends again, talking about our past, making jokes, playing cards and catching up. He is still working in lighting, but now he has a new band he is working with. I heard one of their songs recently and his singing is actually pretty good. The music didn’t really grab me, but it’s a genre that I don’t generally get into, so it’s good for what it is, just not for me.
Since then, we have played poker a few more times, I have spoken to Jay a few times, we exchange e-mails and we are always trying to get more poker games going. He still hasn’t met my kids, but that probably means less to him than it does to me and I am sure on some level, kids freak him out. Of all the people in my circle of friends, I always seemed least likely to marry and have kids and now that we are all pushing 40, it still seems odd that I was the first one married and to have two kids. These days he is dating a pretty young social worker who seems to have him on a short leash, which is hilarious. I think after plowing through every fucked up stripper in New York, he finally realized that they don’t have much to say when the fucking is done, so he is dating a human being, not just a hot chick.
I cannot even imagine a scenario where I would speak to Bonaduce ever again. That guy is deader than the dinosaurs to me, but it’s funny how from time to time I hear something about him, and it’s always so awesomely sad. For those of you who didn’t read the original story (it’s available for free online at www.negcap.com/NC4/karoshi.html) Bonaduce hired me to be his right hand man, then later fired me from my job at the NYPress because I told a co-worker that he was immature, which then caused some kind of tumult in the office. In my last issue I said that I would never talk about him ever again unless he did something stupid, and sure enough, in his final issue, he took yet another smack at me, which was pretty fucking stupid. So now, a bit of blowback, cocksucker. On the NG someone asked Bonaduce if we were friends and he said, “Josh and I were friendly for a bit. Then, apparently, the first issue of his zine came out and I was so jealous of his brilliance that I could no longer be his friend. But, I guess that’s what happens when you make the mistake of befriending your fans: they get hurt when you fail to recognize the genius they so desperately believe they possess.” The critical thing that he failed to mention is how on a few occasions he got freelance writing jobs and then subcontracted the heavy lifting to me. First he got a gig with Reactor Clothing and sent me the entire assignment, asking me which parts interested me. I took half the job off his hands and I wrote some really funny shit. He paid me and used my words, though I am sure he took all the credit and paid me a fraction of what he was paid. Then he got another gig for Killer Loop glasses, I busted my ass to write funny stuff and after I submitted it to him, he lost the gig, so all that work was for nothing. Then he got another gig to write a zine-like publication that was to contain some humor mixed with drink recipes to be distributed in bars. He wanted me to work on that one but when he told me the client was a cigarette company, I told him that I was not a sellout. He replied that he had three stories in consideration at Details magazine and bragged that being a sellout paid very well, thank you very much. In fact, here’s a quote from his e-mail about it, while we were discussing a different job, “On a related note, I’ve attached the Kamel Kocktail 1st Draft. I’m curious as to your opinion of it—have I whored it out too much??” Yes, Bonaduce, you have whored yourself out too much. Odd that you would seek the opinion of someone you say is not fit to shine your shoes, yet you have no problem turning in my work as your own or using me as a sounding board for new material. Do you do that with all of your ‘fans,’ as you so derisively called me?
Bonaduce, or as you may know him, Jeff Koyen of suburban New Jersey and the dead zine Crank, eventually wormed his way up to the top of the masthead at the NYPress. I am sure on some level that made him feel vindicated in throwing me overboard, since ditching me was just another step toward the top and it was either him or me. Every year, the Press did a list of the most loathsome New Yorkers, which has become a ritualistic attempt on the part of a marginal publication to get some wider media attention, like a baby who shits himself to get mommy to come take a look at the mess. To most people, negative attention is better than no attention. In 2005, Howard Stern placed at #7 on the list because his employer had paid Howard’s FCC fines. I have always said that I am huge fan of Howard Stern and imagine my surprise when I was listening one day and suddenly Howard says that he had Jeff Koyen on the phone to talk about the list.
The clip is great because you can hear his Bonaduce-like speech impediment for yourself and you can hear him get another beatdown that he so richly deserves. Howard complains that for many years he has been given many awards by the NYPress, including the best radio personality in NY, but there seems to be an about-face now, with the paper lumping Stern in with shitbags like Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley. Bonaduce says that those awards were given by the readers, not the editors, so clearly, the readers have better taste than the editors do.
Howard then proceeds to tear Jeff limb from limb, verbally. Jeff’s position was that since Howard’s company paid the FCC fines, Howard has not done enough to advance the cause of free speech and is therefore a pussy. The thing that Jeff doesn’t seem to realize is that Howard didn’t pay, he didn’t want to pay, but that radio is a business. And the people that own the business that Howard works for were having their new station acquisitions held up and their licenses threatened and was basically being shaken down by the FCC for money. Rather than leave their company’s growth in limbo indefinitely while fighting the case, they capitulated as part of the cost of doing business. It’s no different than when a mobster asks for protection money from your business, but it’s not to protect you from others, it’s to protect you from the mobster. So you can be all brave and noble and righteous, but it’s not going to mean much when your business has been burned to the ground, or when your kids are followed home from school or when you get a dead cat in a bag left on your doorstep.
Jeff also slams Howard for his support of Giuliani and Bloomberg, while Howard replies that both mayors had a long history of supporting him, his show and his right to speak freely, but Jeff doesn’t seem to hear it, calling both men “monsters.” Howard correctly reminds Jeff that he is no position to be so high and mighty while a significant portion of his paper is supported by paid ads from straight, gay and transsexual prostitutes. Jeff seems incredulous that anyone could fault him for what he himself calls “hooker ads,” but this is something that I talked about at length in “Karoshi.” This spins the conversation out of control until Howard gets so sick of Jeff that he abruptly ends the conversation, tells Jeff to “drop dead” and then calls him “a jerk.” I hope you can picture me on the subway with my iPod listening to Howard and laughing my fucking ass off the first time I heard it.
After the call, the entire crew cuts Jeff into little tiny pieces and I tell you, it’s a classic that I think everyone should hear a few times, so look for the MP3 of the call on the web version of this story.
After the call Howard says that the real reason they wrote negative shit about him was because of his support of Giuliani and Bloomberg, not because of the FCC. He also noted, as I have, that it was more about getting some attention and publicity for a paper that has been dying on the vine for years. Each issue had fewer and fewer ad pages and the paper’s owner finally sold it.
Not too long after, Bonaduce got into another strange altercation with his new bosses. My source for this is either Bonaduce himself or news reports filed at the time. The Press was doing a cover story called, “52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope,” while Pope John Paul was hospitalized. It was written by Matt Taibbi not Jeff, but Jeff he was the editor-in-chief.
I am a devout atheist and regularly goof on religion and its adherents, and as long it’s funny, it’s cool with me to bash whomever you like. Here is a small sample of those 52 things, and honestly, these are the funny ones. Google it if you want to see the whole list, it’s out there.
“47. Upon death, Pope’s face frozen in sickening smile, eyes wide open, teeth exposed, like a baboon.
46. Beetles eating Pope’s dead brains.
45. Pope departs Earth at a time when Hitch is top-grossing movie in the world.
39. Can’t move. Can’t reach penis.
30. Michael Jackson too broke to buy Pope’s bones.
20. Hall and Oates mulling comeback. [Yay! - Ed.]
17. In his last days, the Pope was in tremendous pain. (This one is funny, I’ll give them that.)
9. Bush on the tragic event: ‘Our thoughts and prayers go out to this great man and all of his many children.’
8. Bush continued: ‘He touched all of us in places no one else could reach.’
1. Throw a marble at the dead Pope’s head. Bonk!”
There was some significant fallout from the story. The Daily News reported it thusly: “Press publisher Chris Rohland sent Koyen packing, abruptly ending his two-year reign at the weekly handout. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called [the Pope story]’s sick attempt at humor, ‘The most disgusting thing I’ve seen in 30 years of public life.’ Polish-American Congressional official Frank Milewski called it ‘hate speech.’ Advertisers weren’t happy, either. The weekly received bad publicity from coast to coast. ‘You can assume it [Koyen’s suspension] had something to do with that,’ Rohland told the Daily News’ Paul Colford. ‘But it brought a lot of things to a head. I wanted to take the paper in a different direction, and Jeff hasn’t been buying into that.’ The 36-year-old Koyen told me that Rohland summoned him to a 10am meeting at the New York Press’ Seventh Ave. offices and promptly suspended him for two weeks without pay. ‘Instead, I quit,’ said Koyen, who blasted Rohland as ‘a spineless alt-weekly weenie’ on the Web site Gawker.com.”
You may have missed the real issue, which was even more convoluted. It wasn’t even the Pope story that got him in the real shit. Originally, the cover of the paper was supposed to have a mock NY Post cover proclaiming the (false at the time) death of the Pope. The paper’s lawyers said they couldn’t run it because Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Post, would sue the shit out of them. The owners spiked the mock cover and instead, they went with a picture of the Pope with the caption, “There’s Nothing Funny About This Man Dying. Or Is There?” Next to his editorial, Jeff wrote a trite first person account about buying and taking ecstasy in a club in Brooklyn, right next to the spiked mock cover of the Post. Just a nice little “fuck you” to the boss, the lawyers and everyone you work with, right, Bonaduce?
A congressman from Brooklyn was so outraged that he suggested that citizens take the free paper from the bins on the street and throw them in the garbage in protest. Bonaduce suddenly realized he had a brave 1st Amendment fight to gear up for and went on the F-List talk show circuit (radio stations and Scarborough Country). I wish I could link to it on YouTube, but no one gives a shit about pissing on Bonaduce’s grave except me. It had nothing to do with free speech, it had to do with deliberately defying your employer’s explicit wishes, which had been clearly stated. So rather than take the suspension, badass Bonaduce tells his boss to take that job and shove it, then whines to Gawker about how his ex-bosses are a bunch of “weenies,” which I guess is a tough name to call someone where he’s from. Well, cocksucker, how does it feel to get shoved out the door over a pile of bullshit and lose what you had built up over a period of time? Was it humbling for you when people stopped calling and no one offered you a golden gig somewhere else? Are you still bitter that Details has no interest in your freelance writing? GQ? Not even Paper? Shit! You were editor-in-chief of the second largest alt-weekly in NYC, though maybe Dan’s Papers and the Big Apple paper are bigger than the Press now.
I didn’t hear anything about Bonaduce for a while, but one day last year I was at the gym, reading the NY Post, and I ran across a piece about visiting graves in Prague. I didn’t get it at all, it was like one of those pieces where the author acts like he’s your best buddy and he’s going to give you the insider’s view of some great culture in a foreign land. Instead the author came across like a douche trying to sound like a hip local instead of the ugly American he was. I thought it was pretty bad, but I have low expectations at the gym and have actually read an AARP newsletter once, so you understand I don’t yearn for the full literary experience whilst sweating all over myself. Of course, the article was by Bonaduce himself, and I was so jealous of his talent and his accomplishments that I started to weep openly on the recumbent bike. I didn’t care who saw me, all I knew was that my hero, my bright star, my golden god, was shining down on me, all the way from a centuries-old boneyard in Prague. I could see him in my mind’s eye, his gay calf tattoo of a Crank logo shining in the sun, his eyeless sockets facing down into hell, his battered and beaten body hanging out of a rotting oak coffin. Oh, it is fucking beautiful. Now stay dead, you cocksucker. Unless you want me to start quoting all of your letters in my next issue. I still have every e-mail, going all the way back to the mid-90s and you don’t remember all the shit you said, but I can easily refresh your alcohol-addled memory.
The reason I really wanted to write this piece (and it does usually take me this long to get to the original reason for everything, even in my own head) was to somewhat more directly beat a horse that had literally died, namely a phony dickhead named Jeff Chapman. Don’t ever let it be said that I have a line I will not cross. The more you get angry, the more I know I’m right. Now a lot of people in zines knew Jeff, or at least were familiar with him and his work, but he did all of his writing under the stupidest, lamest pen-name I have ever heard, Ninjalicious. My issues with him have absolutely nothing to do with his zine, Infiltration, because I was a fan of the zine, and of Jeff’s writing, and that has not changed. But the person, I can’t even say the “man” because he was not much of a man, was about as two-faced and insincere as a person could possibly be.
I was an active member of the alt.zines newsgroup (NG) before blogs, before the explosion of the web, back when people just wanted content to read and had ideas to share. It was a vicious and insular community, with various anonymous people appointing themselves as authorities, gatekeepers and referees. To me, the whole point of the internet is that it is truly democratic in the sense that anyone can be whatever they want, say whatever they want, and repercussions are kept to a minimum. On alt.zines, there were no factions at war, everyone was just tearing each other down and me being a person who never shies away from a verbal fight, I staked out my positions and joined right in. From time to time, someone would say something noble or righteous about how the group ought to be a place for newbies and old hands to share information and insight, post reviews, share techniques, and for everyone involved to help everyone else make better zines. Then that poster would be called a sellout asshole and the flame war would begin again.
As crazy as it sounds, I really do encourage people to do their own zines and I always have. It’s not just because they make my zine look better by comparison, it’s because I started my zine because no one would publish me and I found an audience in spite of that fact. For anyone who feels like their voice is being ignored, doing a zine can be very cathartic, even if it’s a bad zine. It’s not a good feeling to be coming up on 30 (or 40) knowing that you have very little to show for all of your years of experience except lines on your face and miles on your car. This issue will be the fifth bomb that I drop on the world with more to come and it’s still just as gratifying now as it was then, though the payoff is much weaker and the market’s nearly gone, I still do it because I want to and because people that like me want me to keep going.
One of the friendliest and most outgoing people on the group was Jeff (I really hated calling him Ninj and privately, I never buy into people’s fake names, it’s just fucking gay, sorry). We traded zines and many e-mails and then became friends. He wanted to create a web site for the zine community which would serve as a repository for good essays, links to distros and the best discussion threads from the NG. He asked me if I would contribute to the site, in fact, he wanted me to be the co-founder, and I said I would be happy to help. I wrote a long essay about how and why I got involved in zining and then I solicited a few other people to write similar pieces.
Jeff launched the site (it’s still alive at http://members.tripod.com/altzines, but I haven’t touched it in years) with my blessing and then we talked about what we could do to steer the NG toward something useful. We thought it would be a good idea to suggest one zine to the group, have everyone get a copy, and then have people really dissect it, figuring out what was good and bad and what could be learned from it. We asked for volunteers but no one wanted to have strangers tear their babies apart, so Jeff asked if I would do it. I said that I would but I didn’t want to go first, so we chose Travelling Shoes. That experiment was a success in that it got people to talk concretely about a zine that was current and below most people’s radar.
When it came time to dissect my zine (NegCap #1), Jeff started the discussion by posting a very long, positive review of the issue. I don’t want to quote it all because even I am sick of reading my good press, so I’ll just single out some choice nuggets.
“The premiere issue of Negative Capability is the only full-sized, glossy-colour-covered perzine I’ve encountered. Every feature in the 54-page zine is by and about publisher Josh Saitz. The back cover is a parody ad that I’d love to have in poster size; other than that, no ads in this first issue. I paid a whopping $3.95 Canadian and didn’t feel ripped off, so I guess you could say I got a lot out of it. In my humble opinion, Josh has an excellent sense of humor and a lot of interesting stories to tell. I’ll continue to feel this zine is worth $3.95, if Josh can attempt to share with the human race some of the empathy he seems to have reserved for animals, and manage to come across as being slightly less contemptuous of his readers.”
It only took a few replies before the thread devolved into a discussion of cruelty to animals and my startling lack of empathy for human beings, but nothing really meaningful came out of it. I was kind of disappointed because I really thought people would talk about the contents of the zine in a critical way, not about me as a person, but my expectations are out of whack with reality. [As a brief aside, I just stopped writing to see if the Infiltration web site was still up, and it is, but in a strange coincidence today (Aug. 23) is the two-year anniversary of Jeff’s death, and August 23rd Music is also the publisher of the song I am listening to at this moment, which is the name of Robyn Hitchcock’s publishing company. It must mean something. I have apophenia and that doesn’t mean that I like to use words that no one knows the meaning of. It means that I see patterns or connections in seemingly random things, whether they exist or not.]
The cover price was $3, but in Canada it was priced at $3.95 Canadian, something Jeff mentioned in every single breath about my zine, when that pricing was not only out of my control, but even that price was still below my costs, something that he knew from our personal conversations. Each issue cost me about $1.80 to make and every copy sold would earn me $1.50, so you do the math and figure out when I’d break even. Later in the thread, when someone was defending me by saying that as long as I was being funny, there was nothing to get upset about, to which Jeff responded, “When I’m offended by someone writing that they wish others would be raped and get AIDS, I don’t think it’s because I’m thinking about my weaknesses. I think it’s because I realize that to wish such fates on anyone is incredibly cruel.”
Now, let’s expose Jeff as a hypocrite. A few weeks after my ZOTF discussion, the next zine up was Broken Pencil, a Canadian review zine. In Jeff’s estimation, there were “8 Awful Things About Broken Pencil” and #3 on his list was about their thoughtless reviews, “This is probably my biggest problem with BP. The reviewers, including the two editors, don’t seem to take their work seriously. The reviews all feel carelessly whipped off just in time to meet the deadline to me. [...] Many reviews are dismissive, simply saying ‘I didn’t get this’ or ‘not my thing’, but without explaining why. And any reviewer who would conclude a zine review with the word ‘whatever’ should be shot.”
The meanness and cruelty that Jeff was referring to was in NegCap #1. In “How to Cope with Assholes,” I wrote that I witnessed a man who intentionally drove his car over about a dozen pigeons, killing a few and mortally wounding many others, just to get around some traffic. I suggested that he deserved to get AIDS and bleed into his kids’ cereal. Now that’s prison rules, but that’s how I felt at the time. If you can be wantonly cruel to innocents without remorse, the world doesn’t need you or your genes being perpetuated. I stand by that statement, but Jeff calls me “incredibly cruel.” Yet, just weeks later, he says that anyone who would dare conclude a zine review with the word “whatever” ought to be shot. Now I am not saying that killing innocent animals is nearly as bad as giving a zine a half-assed review because we all know that reviewing zines is way more important, but what I am saying is, Jeff is a fucking hypocrite for calling me cruel for doing something that he himself has done, i.e. used a literary device called hyperbole where you exaggerate something for effect. It would even be forgivable if Jeff had been consistent in his personal correspondences with me, but whenever I talked to him privately, it was like his tongue couldn’t wait to burrow itself into my ass.
I called him out on it privately and he said something like, “Mine was obviously a joke and you obviously mean it.” To me, a joke is something that’s, oh, what’s the word? Oh yeah, funny. Shooting someone with a gun for a half-assed zine review isn’t that funny, while having AIDS and bleeding into your kids’ cereal has a certain pathos and humor to it. Privately, Jeff also told me that my zine was one of his favorites (or “favourites,” as he said) and that he couldn’t wait to see my second issue. The whole thread is still out there if you’re interested.
My favorite review was from Kris Kane, one of the many people who really got what I was trying to do and he said, “I looked at the cover of Negative Capability #1 and thought, “Jeez, it’s another PopSmear,” [See “Karoshi, Book 2” on page 32] because the production values are zine-atypically high. Imagine my surprise when I started reading it and found out Josh is so dedicated to doing his one-man rant / personal zine that he’s footing enormous print bills because he wants to do a professional job. We piss and moan about the cost of doing 48 page digest sized photocopied zines, and this guy is blasting out 54 page full-size glossies, paying out of his own pocket. No ads. Amazing.
“Josh comes off like a cuddly cobra. The guy is alternately sweet and sour, nice and vicious, endearingly vulnerable and hilariously vicious. Reading this zine is a lot like hanging out with your new friend Josh on a slow, rainy Saturday and listening to him just go off on everyone and everything he loves, hates, and isn’t sure about yet as he shows you around his apartment. The lack of a cohesive theme is really refreshing. It’s a lot like flipping through a few dozen judgmental, funny, brutally honest channels on cable and finding a bunch of shows you hope to catch again next time they’re on.
“Josh is a dichotomy, but the balance is believable and candid. To paraphrase Whitman in his defense (which would probably make Josh want to stab me in the throat), if he contradicts himself, fine, then he contradicts himself. His id is large. He comes right out and says a lot of things most people would have qualms about admitting they even think. A lot of it is hyperbole, a lot of it is over the top, and that’s why it’s funny. I wrote him shortly after reading it, saying, ‘If you weren’t so funny, I’d be afraid of you,’ and that’s about right. Thank god for humor.
“I sort of see Ninj’s points about it being so hate-fueled, but I guess it doesn’t bother me as much because I’m a pretty cranky s.o.b. myself a lot of the time, and I think a lot of it is just Josh venting. I’m also sort of reassured by the fact that Josh isn’t hiding behind a persona—that’s him, saying he thinks the retarded are a waste of space—and even though I think his honest response to that criticism would be, ‘Hey, it’s just a joke,’ it might just be a cathartic ‘look at the fucked up stuff I’ve been thinking’ thing, too. Josh is brave to throw his unedited self out there like that, for sure.”
Obviously, Kris liked my zine enough to want be my friend, and I still consider him a friend, even though we haven’t spoken in years. If I keep publishing my own positive reviews I am going to end up like Jeff Somers from the Inner Swine, pantsless and drunk somewhere, ranting about how “the man” keeps fucking me over. Just mentioning the Inner Swine means that Jeff will have to reprint this entire section, with ordering information, according to Law of Jeff.
My wife and I love the city of Toronto and usually spend a week there each winter. When I finished my second issue, we planned a trip to Toronto and I asked Jeff [aka Ninj] (who lived in a suburb just outside the city) if he had any places of interest that my wife and I should check out. He sent me a list of buildings that were worth “infiltrating,” which was his fancy word for trespassing, but that wasn’t really what I wanted. He asked me where we were staying and when I told him, he asked if I wanted to meet him. In my experience, meeting other zine publishers and fans is always a mixed bag. There are a few people that I consider close friends who I met because they discovered my zine or I discovered theirs and traded. But the largest group of people are those who insist on meeting me in person only to scare me into not meeting another zine person for months. I spent a weekend with Kris Kane of Retard and after that, we barely had anything to say to each other. I invited a fan over to smoke weed and talk about zines once and that guy scared my wife so much that she locked herself in the bathroom. But Jeff seemed like such a nice guy, such a Canadian, that I couldn’t turn him down.
We met at a bookstore on Queen Street in Toronto and I gave him copies of my new issue and he in turn gave me a huge pile of his many back issues. We hung out drinking hot beverages for a few hours and whenever I left to get a drink, or pee, or whatever, he would open my zine and start skimming through it like a kid opening a Christmas present. Whenever I would return to the table, he would tell me that some aspect of it was bigger, better, brighter, whatever, than the first issue. Now, granted, he could just be the kind of guy who says nice things to people but doesn’t mean them. Or he could be one of those guys who means what he says to your face but if you ever asked him about it in front of the other guys, he would just deny, deny, deny. There is no doubt in my mind that not only did he think #2 was much better than #1 but that he thought my progress as a writer and designer were impressive. He even said that because it was so good, I would not keep on zining for much longer. I would get a bunch of ads from record companies and become the next above-ground zine, like Film Threat or Bitch. I assured him that as long as I was planning to run nude photos of famous people and to wish cancer on strangers, there was no way I would get advertising or get too big to be a zine.
On the NG, when #2 came out, it once again provoked a fierce debate. Some people praised me, some heaped even more scorn on me, but that’s what happens and I took it like a man. The thing that was really bothering me was that many of the NG stalwarts, all of whom had received free copies of #2 from me and privately told me that they loved it, were suddenly silent. In response to a very positive review from Asha Anderson, I wrote, “The only thing pissing me off today is the fact that a few people on the newsgroup have gotten free ones and said privately that they think it is a great leap forward in design and writing, but now they’re all silent. Please, Ninj, stopping pelting little kids with rocks and tell the folks what you think. And while I’ve got Ninj’s attention, I have a nice idea. Since Ninj was kind enough to nominate me for the Zine of the Fortnight experiment, I would like to resurrect it and for the first round nominate Infiltration #11 as the next Zine of the Fortnight. Everyone interested in a fun and lively debate can send $2 to Infiltration.”
As a brief bit of background, in previous posts, I was lambasting a punk fucktard named Dan Halligan because he had called me a liar. Now I have to give Dan a little leeway because he’s really not that bright, but in this case, he was just talking out of his ass when he called me a liar and I challenged him to produce a single lie from any of my zines or any of my posts and he could not. I am as honest as a person can be in these pages and I can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune just like the next guy, but I am not a liar. So, when I very sincerely asked Ninj to say something, anything, about my zine, I really thought he would jump in. Instead, he said, “First of all, LIAR, I don’t think Negative Capability #2 is a great leap forward in design and writing. I found the design to be stronger in a few areas (cover, most titles) and weaker in a few others (TofC, background image in Manifesto). I preferred the articles in the sophomore issue, but I think this was mainly because they had more interesting subjects, not necessarily because the writing has leapt anywhere.”
So I thought Jeff was a friend and I am getting assaulted from all sides on the NG and I beg him to jump in and say what he’s said privately, and instead of doing that, he calls me a liar (the one thing that was making me berzerker insane) and then says the exact opposite of what he had said to me in person. I responded as you might expect, but I was actually kind of soft on Jeff, I think. I said, “And after everything I’ve posted on the subject of being called a liar, I think it’s really fucked up that you’re calling me a liar,” and Jeff responded, privately, “I was just joking about the ‘liar’ thing, Josh. Putting the word in all caps was as close as I could some to indicating that I was just making a silly reference to the other thread, because I really hate smileys. As far as I know, you’ve never lied about anything. Jeff (aka Ninj)” Whenever he wrote to me, he signed off as Jeff, because when I had asked him why he used the pseudonym, he admitted it was lame, but said that it had been given to him early in his life and it just kind of stuck, like dogshit on my shoe, which brings us back to Jeff. It was a huge relief to me that he had retracted calling me a liar but I have never heard of caps being used to indicate sarcasm, otherwise half this zine would be me screaming at you in all caps.
I wrote to Jeff privately and said that I thought it was actually even more fucked up that after he called me a liar, he directly contradicted himself vis à vis his comments about my zine. I didn’t have to call him a liar, but I did call him two-faced. I always thought that he really did like me, but didn’t want the other kids to think that he did, so in public he had to keep taking shots at me as if to say that he wasn’t on my payroll. I told him that when we met in that book store that he had specifically said that the design was a great leap forward (I thought it was an odd compliment, so I remembered it) but then on the NG he said that the zine hadn’t leapt anywhere. He responded that he didn’t remember meeting me but that it was possible he had said that on first glance. Didn’t remember meeting me? He gave me his home phone number and address, told me that he lived with his family (maybe because he was ill, I don’t know, he never said) and lots of other personal things. This was a guy who used a pen name in all of his dealings yet he gives his home address to me, a guy who does a mean and “hate-fuelled zine.” It is such bullshit.
I am sure that some long-time readers are seeing through everything I am saying and coming to a different conclusion. “Perhaps everyone was just saying nice things to you privately because they were afraid of your wrath,” you think. Maybe Ninj hated my zine but didn’t want to piss me off by saying it to me personally. That’s not a good theory and here’s why: if someone was afraid of pissing me off in a private e-mail, why would they then piss me off in a public place, and therefore have to face my public retribution?
The reason we became friends in the first place was because he liked my zine and I liked his. I told people publicly that I liked his zine and he told people that I was mean-spirited and cruel. Then he privately asked me and Kris Kane to help him make an alt.zines web site. We had a lot of conversations about what it should include and all three of us wrote our own superhero origin story and posted it to the site. We archived the more useful threads from the NG, edited them for clarity, and posted them, too.
After we launched the site and started telling people about it, we started revising the official alt.zines FAQ. Most NGs have a FAQ that gives a history of the group, explains the common terminology and acronyms and gives newbies a place to start so they don’t post something that’s been asked and answered a hundred times. During the revision process, each of us took a turn making changes, additions and corrections. The one thing that I had an issue with was the FAQ’s blatant endorsement of piracy. I am not on my high horse judging others because they can’t afford software, I just think that it’s really stupid and immature to encourage people to steal in an official document. When I graduated from college, my family and friends gave me about $2,000 in cash, which was astonishing to me. All I could afford was a Mac Classic with a 9" monochrome screen, 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive and with the money I had left over, I bought a copy of QuarkXPress 3.1 for $500. It was incredibly painful for me to do and there were lots of other things I could have spent the money on, but I wanted to look professional and I wanted to own the software that I had spent years learning. I asked Jeff repeatedly to take out the line about “the best software being whichever one you can steal” and he said that he would. When the FAQ finally came out, this is what it said, and I am quoting, “QuarkXPress costs about $600 (US)—or less, with competitive upgrades—and is the layout program of choice for high-end publishers, printers and service bureaus. XPress is probably the program to get, as long as you don’t have to pay for it. In my opinion, whichever program you can get for free is probably the one to get, however Josh Saitz advises that ‘stealing is wrong.’"
I think everyone knows that stealing is wrong and they do it anyway. My point was, and still is, that telling people to steal in a document that represents you to the world is a bad idea, it makes zine publishers seem like skeevy people. If people want to pirate the software, I certainly can’t stop them nor would I want to, but I also don’t want my name on a document that says you should get the best program, the one that every professional uses, as long as you don’t have to pay for it. If you can’t afford Quark, maybe you should just use something else. In every draft of the FAQ, it was written exactly as I quoted and his concession to me on the topic was the addendum with my name at the end, which is even more insulting. I have no problem disobeying laws if I know that they are wrong, but I do have a problem with people who create content saying that it’s ok to rip off other people who create content, simple as that.
We never had a falling out and I never bothered to say all of this stuff to him when he was alive because it wasn’t worth the effort. His zine made trespassing into some kind of calling so the fact that he also encouraged software piracy was at least ideologically consistent. He had his own agenda, roped me into it for a short time and then we parted ways. It was one of the main reasons I completely gave up on the NG and its members. The people whose zines I liked had long ago given up the fight, morphed into some half-assed web site or just disappeared entirely, never to be heard from again.
So Jeff’s dead now. Does that change anything that he did? Does that undo the damage done? Does that make me a bad person for saying this stuff? I don’t give a shit. I was talking about this very subject with another zine publisher right after Jeff died and I told him then what I am telling you now. At the time my friend said that it would be really brave to respond to his obituary posting on the NG with a scathing indictment, but he also said that it would be wrong to incite people when they were emotionally vulnerable. He was right, so I kept my comments to myself and let everyone talk about how sweet and charming and talented Jeff was. Unfortunately, death does not wash away all the sin. Nothing does. Jeff can never make it right, he can never admit how he really felt and he can never take back all the shit he said to me or about me that hurt my feelings and pissed me off. The only thing that can make this right in my mind would be for me to dig him up like the dead horse he is and beat him again, which I have done. Consider us even, Ninj. See you in hell.