a small sip of success

Trapped in this high-surveillance technofascist morass of forced social interconnectedness, a sentient man feels a thousand fish hooks plunged into his flesh, tugging him in all directions. The conscious individual has lost control over almost every aspect of his life besides how he chooses to feel about being controlled.

I have no control over the government. No control over their laws. No control over the taxes they bleed from me. Very little freedom from others and how they define me. Can’t even control my own body. Can’t force it to stay healthy. Can’t stop my inevitable death.

But I can control the words that I put onto a blank page. And so I take that limited domain of power more seriously than I take my own life.

For me, writing is an act of self-mutilation. I approach the page as if it’s a battlefield, and I expect to get hurt. I leave thin red sticky paper cuts up and down my torso. I hit those computer keys like I’m knocking teeth out of my mouth.

If you look real close on the page, you can see strands of my muscle tissue. Tendon fibers. Brain cells. Blood platelets. Bone splinters. Mucosal smears. Skin flakes.

But you won’t see any dollar signs.

I never liked the moldy-cardboard smell of money. I’m not mesmerized by wealth or celebrity or people with power. I don’t care how much cash you have, only how well you can occupy five minutes of my time.

And yet the dollar bill controls me. Like the desperate plebs in The Magic Christian, I find myself diving into a vat of boiling excrement to grope for the crinkled bank notes which buy me food and shelter. I grit my teeth, swallow my pride like a fat wad of luminous-green phlegm, and do things I really don’t like to do.

Like work a day job.

Despite the turd-blizzard of controversy that ANSWER Me! had generated, there I am at age thirty-four, still milking my gonads dry for a boss who is dumber…and richer…than me.

And at night, I write as if I’m gasping for air.

I write about things which seem obvious to me and to no one else.

Sometimes the truth can be right in front of your eyes, and it’ll take a reprobate like me to come along and prop up your eyelids with toothpicks.

In the 1990s, a media-narcotized American public lived under an illusion of universal white guilt and universal black innocence.

Which would be swell, if there didn’t exist pesky, niggling things such as FACTS to disrupt our Jubilant Mahogany Gospel Extravaganza. If our bronze-skinned brethren weren’t committing most of the hate crimes. If they weren’t perpetratin’ more than half of the nation’s racially motivated killings. Or ninety percent of interracial crime. Or ninety-nine percent of interracial rape.

No race is innocent. The African Moors enslaved whites. The African Carthaginians enslaved whites. Throughout the Middle Ages, African Moslems enslaved whites. Even today, Africans enslave untold thousands of brother Africans on Mother Africa’s soil, and our credulous media stooges fail to guilt-trip a single knee-grow.

In 1998, when three white Texas males tied a black man to the back of their truck and dragged him to death, it became a colossal media whoop-whoop-dee-doo. Newspapers and broadcasters repeatedly called it "the grisliest hate crime of the post-Civil Rights era" as if they’d been fed the line from on high. But these same media outlets were hush-mouthed about the fact that around the same time, three American Indians in North Dakota tied a white man to the back of their truck, dragging him until he had no ears and his face was shredded like tomato pulp. They also failed to report that around the same time, a black man in Illinois tied a white woman to the back of his truck and dragged her tree miles until the honky bitch was dead. In both cases, authorities said the crimes were racially motivated. Yet the media was silent.

Not me. When others are afraid to tell the truth, I won’t shut the fuck up about it.

I’ve never antagonized a black person because of their race. And yet again and again, Negro-Americans have called me racist names which would Afrotize your nose hairs.

I’ve never owned a slave. Neither, at the zenith of American slavery, did ninety-four percent of Southern whites. Most Euro-Americans arrived in the colonies as indentured servants and convict laborers. There is pervasive evidence that at least as many whites as blacks were forcibly sent to America. That they were kidnapped, chained, and shipped on vessels which boasted middle-passage death rates rivaling those for African slave ships. That they were separated from their families, sold on auction blocks, beaten, whipped, and branded. Many historical accounts say they were treated worse than black slaves. Data suggests that they were so thoroughly abused, half of them never lived to see freedom. And for a thousand years prior to that, their ancestors had been serfs, which is just a nicer word for "slaves."

Those in power want you to believe that all American whites are responsible for the savageries heaped upon American blacks. Even more deviously, the chimerical cinematic dreamscapes they concoct would lead you to believe that poor whites—the former white slaves and current wage slaves—are guiltier than the former slaveowners and current CEOs.

The blame for nearly every American social problem is shoveled onto the relatively powerless clump of souls variously referred to as rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, and poor white trash. The major media foment the impression that it’s fine to use such slurs, when to call someone a nigger or a bitch or a faggot is a stinking blasphemy, regardless of whether the nigger, bitch, or faggot in question may have more wealth and influence than a trailer park fulla rednecks.

The white poor are America’s Shit Magnets, scapegoated for things which really aren’t their fault. And this is why I identify with them.

As the descendants of serfs, white slaves, sharecroppers, factory workers, and military conscripts, rednecks know what it’s like to be controlled. Even their image is controlled by others. And yet against overwhelming odds, they rebel. In the redneck, I see the last American individualist, the last true American.

Po’ white trash are the last social group which hasn’t capitulated to the forces of urbanization and greed. American blacks, whose ancestors were sold into slavery due to the profit motive, are now flagrantly materialistic, equating gaudy ostentation with social status, parading tokens of wealth with the fetishistic fervor of cargo cults. Even the Injuns have their casinos. But white trash are America’s laughingstocks because they are deemed too stupid to buzz around the Big Green Money Hive.

They are also the final holdouts against the rolling wave of compulsory globalization and smiley-faced totalitarianism. While scrotally tattooed leftists may shout "Fight the Power!" all they really seem to want is heavier rotation for their fave cutting-edge videos on MTV. The rednecks, at least, seem like they mean business. Their rebel yell is aimed right at the source: multinational corporations, tax-free foundations, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the media puppets who parrot the press releases of the insanely powerful. Pauperized whites seem to be the only group serious enough to declare war on the government. Serious enough to worry the government. Everyone else is just looking for free popcorn and a big-screen TV.

Blue-collar rage had always burbled through ANSWER Me!, all the way back to the first issue’s opening editorial where I called myself "a dangerous motherfucker—white trash with brains."

Through my writing, I seek to reconcile the two worlds which my shapely thighs straddle—a white working-class background and a bohemian tradition which sees nothing of value in that background. Bohemia seems populated not so much by the talented as by the affluent. I envision white trash as a raging bull stampeding through an effete art-world china shop, shattering every boozhwah trinket in sight.

In ANSWER Me! #4, I announce that my next project will be called Truckstud, a one-shot zine celebrating white-trash talismans such as Bigfoot, crystal meth, and trucker music. I move to a low-rent cracker ‘hood in Portland because it jibes with my genetics better than melanomic acid-bummer Hollywood.

Soon after I arrive in Puddletown, a pair of UC Berkeley intellectualoids tell me they’re compiling an anthology about white trash and want me to contribute. I offer to donate Truckstud’s opening essay, whose kernel is an analysis of the widely divergent ways the media handles the terms "nigger" and "redneck." I initially call the piece "The White Trash Manifesto" but change it to "White Niggers Have Feelings, Too." My payment is to be a few free copies of the book.

When I hand the Berkeley Bobbsey Twins my article, they say it needs heavy editing. They add that their book company’s editor, a gent of Italian extraction, objects to my descriptions of wops and demands that those passages be expunged.

I yank "White Niggers" back with the protective ferocity of a mother who doesn’t want her baby to be circumcised.

DON’T touch my words. That’s like stepping on my blue suede shoes. It’s a no-fly zone. A literary Bermuda Triangle. People who dare go there invariably wind up missing.

I ask the Bobbsey Twins to tell their editor that I hope for the Leaning Tower of Pisa to fall on his oily Dago head.

"White Niggers" will have a second life, though.

Darius James is the author of Negrophobia and That’s Blaxploitation! Last time I checked, he was a black man, although as one mutual friend put it, his marblemouthed inflection makes him sound like Richard Pryor imitating a white guy. And yet, this undeniable Negro isn’t nearly as offended by my writing as the zine-world Caspers who are certain I’m a racist. Darius wrote an affidavit on ANSWER Me!’s behalf for the Bellingham obscenity trial. He compares the mag to the old National Lampoon and says I remind him of a melanin-deficient H. Rap Brown.

I mail him a copy of "White Niggers," and he urges me to write a book proposal for Truckstud—which I’m now calling Redneck—and send it to his editor at St. Martin’s Press.

And so I do.

Tick…tick…tick…nothing.

I continue working as a print-shop slave in Beaverton, Oregon. Two months later, I reach my breaking point with the bossman. No amount of money can compensate for being condescended to by a fat mustachioed baldie with his plaid golf shirts and the personality of a brick. With no cash and no prospects, I quit my job. I’d rather starve than eat the remaining scraps of my dignity.

Within hours—life is often magical this way—I receive an e-mailing which states that St. Martin’s Press wants to publish my Redneck book. They offer me a cool fifteen thousand cucumbers, which is a much phatter wallet than I’ve ever toted at one time before.

My friend Donna Gaines advises me to hire an agent, because book companies tend to swindle authors who face The Machine without an intercessor. She introduces me to her own agent, the mother of a semi-famous bulimic Brat Pack actress. The agent’s long gray hair falls onto a tasteful Navajo poncho which shrouds her zaftig frame. She could pass for a Native American squaw, but she’s Jewish, which is startling when you consider that she’s a fixture in New York’s publishing demimonde. The Mighty Squaw is my foot in the door of big-dough corporate publishing, and editors cower in the shadow of her vaguely witchlike presence.

The Mighty Squaw schleps "White Niggers" around to the major New York pulp houses. Four of them take the bait. This very weird world becomes a trifle weirder with four big-money publishers bidding over Jim Goad’s skimpy book proposal and the "strength" of a chapter called "White Niggers Have Feelings, Too."

I am whisked into the Big Apple before I can pinch myself to see if it’s all real. My sortie into Babylon is to include four meetings in two days.

A combination of nervous apprehension and pounding Nor’easter storms causes me to get only five minutes of sleep the night before my first round of meetings. In the morning, propped up on a gas tank’s worth of java, I hail a cab uptown with the Mighty Squaw to Simon & Schuster’s corporate headquarters, a literary Mount Olympus so tonily haute-monde, you need a pass to get on the elevator.

We alight on the fourteenth floor. I trudge onto soft, deep carpet in my work boots. I meet people with big pearly Chiclet teeth and impressive sweaters, flashing those orthodontically enhanced smiles at me for proposing to write a book attacking everything they represent. I sense they’re eyeing me as an authentic specimen of something wonderfully exotic and possibly bankable. I feel like Jim Goad the White Trash Wonder Chimp, dancing a mountain jig to the delight of my patrician sponsors.

But at least the editor who’s bidding on my book seems to understand what I’m trying to say. He’s a gracious, intelligent, bespectacled North Carolinian who’s endured his share of barbs about inbreeding and sheep-fucking at the cocktail-clinking literary soirees he’s forced to attend.

At day’s end, he fires a preemptive strike at the Mighty Squaw: $100,000 for two books about rednecks, the first a rabid political tract, the second a graphics-intensive "White Trash Encyclopedia." He says he envisions me as "redneck poster boy" and that I’ll have to do heavy publicity to promote the books. He promises to do a whopping initial print run and put me on all the major talk shows.

A hundred thousand greenbacks. That’s a whole lotta cabbage. Six figures. And the Mighty Squaw says that if these books sell well, my next contract will be for seven figures. That would make me a millionaire. My working-class ballsac is being tickled with the golden feather of wealth and fame. Which is fine, so long as I can write what I want and say what I want.

I make it very clear, with a murderous glint in my eye, that I don’t like being edited. And then I take the deal.

Envious Lobsters of Zineland, spiteful that I’m crawling out of the boiling crock pot we all inhabit, brand me a sellout. I am no longer relevant or cutting-edge or underground. The $100,000 figure is bandied about as if it’s fact. Those who always refused to believe I came from a working-class background are POSITIVE I received six figures. It becomes another situation where I wish I’m guilty of what they’re accusing me.

My fellow hominids are such a money-conscious lot. When I show people the book, they weigh it in their palm, look at the title, squint, and say, "Redneck, er, Mafioso…hmmm…"

The first question is never,

"What’s the book about?"

Instead, they ask,

"How much money did you get for this?"

Critics point to the advance money as proof that I have no place writing about the white poor.

Balding megalomaniac Garth Brooks can sell as many records as McDonald’s sells hamburgers and still get away with claiming he has "Friends in Low Places."

Elephantine funny lady Roseanne, rich enough to afford liposuction for all the world’s fatties, calls herself white trash, and no one has a problem with it.

Talk-show swiveling Negress Oprah Winfrey can own half the planet and still pretend as if she has ties to the ghetto. So can any one of umpteen millionaire gangsta rappers.

Astronomically wealthy ofay Hollywood limo-libs can produce "gritty" urban poverty sagas dripping with negritude like gravy off chitlins, and it’s taken at face value.

But me, I get an advance of fifty Gs, and suddenly I’m entirely disconnected from the white working class.

In The Redneck Manifesto, I define white trash economically rather than behaviorally. But people who overlooked (or are too doltish to understand) what I was saying about economics and freedom, those whose sense of history begins with The Brady Bunch and whose idea of literature are the photo captions in People magazine’s Star Tracks, those who view "being" white trash as nothing deeper than a fashion choice, accuse me of not being a "real" redneck.

Granted, I’ve never eaten possum. Never picked cotton. Never plucked a parsnip from the parched red clay. Never read a Stephen King novel. Never styled my hair in a mullet hairdo. Never tossed a cow chip. I don’t have a Southern accent. Don’t greet people with a warm "howdy." I’m not missing any teeth.

But I am descended from peasant, not bourgeois, stock. My ancestors were convict laborers and indentured servants, not slaveowners. Grandpa Goad toiled in a rock quarry. Grammy Goad cooked for lumberjacks. Dad was a plumber. Mom was a waitress. Before my book contract, I consistently worked low-paying day jobs. I know of no one on either side of my family tree who ever owned a business. No one besides me who went to college. No one who could be considered middle-class, much less rich.

Anyone who disbelieves me is welcome to stroll past the brick row homes of Wyncliffe Avenue in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania (where I grew up), and tell me it isn’t a working-class neighborhood. They are then encouraged to visit Paschall Avenue in Philly (where mom grew up) and the town of Windsor, Vermont (where dad grew up), and witness the torrential affluence which spawned me. Otherwise, shut your fucking mouth before I split open your lip like a sliced earthworm.

The only thing the advance money means to me is the possibility that one day I’ll be able to buy my way out of the labyrinth of labor and debt in which I’m stuck. Maybe I’ll never have to work for a boss anymore. I dream of a wood-burning shack away from the city. Freedom from taking orders. That’s all. Not shiny toys.

The Nice Southern Editor, bless his corn-fed ventricles, allows me to write exactly the book I want to write. He doesn’t edit a word, which may be laziness on his part, or faith in my "vision," or fear that I’ll slay him and his family if he deletes anything. He doesn’t even take the scalpel to my often gratuitous use of the word "nigger." The only passage the proofreading department questions is my depiction of Spike Lee as an "ebony midget." Someone circles that phrase and queries, "OK for legal?" I write back, "Yes—if anything, the midgets should sue."

The book is released to deafening critical huzzahs. It hovers near the top of The New York Times best-seller list for almost two years. I become a wealthy, pipe-puffing man of letters who retires to a sprawling Montana ranch amid fuzzy bunnies and tawny sunsets.

No, wait, that’s someone else’s story. I’m the Shit Magnet. The Success Repellent. You know there has to be a Sisyphusian element of shattered dreams and hope deferred in my humble yarn.

While I’m writing The Redneck Manifesto, a zine crony of mine asks me to scribble a brief spiel about what success means to me. My li’l treatise contains these prophetic passages:

There’s nothing about success which I won’t find a way to ruin….For better or worse, my life was meant to resemble an endlessly re-looped videotape of a car crashing into a brick wall. My success is merely a setup for failure on a massive scale.

The first flicker of trouble occurs early one morning after I’ve been up all night writing. I receive an unexpected call from Simon & Schuster’s grand dame of publicity, a woman whose macawlike Heeb-girl squawking instantly clashes with my terse goy-boy cantankerousness. We form an immediate dislike of one another across three thousand miles of phone lines. There is nothing overtly hostile in our conversation, only an ominous emotional undertow. I can feel the frost forming on the company’s enthusiasm. I envision my once-bright literary future being blackened by a giant, sun-eclipsing corporate flying saucer.

This Yenta of Hoopla tells the Nice Southern Editor she thinks I’m a "loose cannon." She has a lot of power, so she decides to flex that power and kill almost all publicity for the book. When Simon & Schuster’s catalogue comes out announcing upcoming titles, The Redneck Manifesto has the least planned publicity of any of them. Books about planting azalea seeds feature twenty-city tours for their authors—me, I just have local Portland publicity and perhaps some phone interviews.

The publicity department fails to arrange a single live bookstore appearance for me. No television spots like I’d been promised. When they hedge and say I’ll need to have my rough edges sanded by an acting coach before they think of unleashing me on the boob tube, I balk. No, I won’t be coached. You get me uncut, or you don’t get me at all.

I’m personally invited by a clerk at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, the nation’s largest bookstore, to speak there when The Redneck Manifesto is released. Powell’s, which hosts self-congratulatory "anti-censorship" festivals every fall, had removed ANSWER Me! #4 from their store after only four hours on the shelves and a handful of complaints. These Fearless Foes of Censorship also buried their heads in the sand during the whole ANSWER Me! obscenity trial. But now that I’m suddenly "legit," they’re proud to host me? I cordially tell Powell’s to munch on my feces.

The Mighty Squaw, apparently not used to working with writers who esteem principles more than lucre, screams at me over the phone regarding my spate of Prima Donnaism. After she realizes I’m not about to knuckle under, she hangs up on me.

The fucking cunt got paid ten grand for doing little more than taking a cab ride with me, and she’s yelling at me? The aging babushka should be sucking my toe jam clean! Whose interests is she representing—mine or the book company’s? She should be yelling at them for killing the publicity they promised, not at me for refusing to speak at a hypocritical bookstore!

I type a message to the Mighty Squaw and fax it. The message reads something like:

For all my alleged "attitude," I never screamed at you or hung up the phone on you like you have with me. You’re fired.

The company had promised me an initial print run of somewhere around a million copies and an extensive publicity blitz; instead, they print five thousand copies and put me on a one-day phone-in radio junket featuring predominantly backwater markets.

After a week…then a month…then the entire summer of ’97…it becomes apparent that not only isn’t the book lighting up the sales charts, it isn’t even getting reviewed anywhere. ANSWER Me! had gotten ink in Time, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Details, and countless other big-name pulp outlets. The Redneck Manifesto is lucky to be mentioned in literary nonentities such as Grid, Our Town, The Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and PDXS. After a while, even the Nice Southern Editor concedes that there seems to be some sort of publicity blackout. I never had trouble getting press until I hooked up with one of the world’s biggest publicity machines. As of this writing, the ANSWER Me! compilation book, released by a tiny, flea-infested, deodorant-shunning Bolshevik collective in Frisco, has sold more than twice as many copies as The Redneck Manifesto.

Through the summer of ’97, while the Manifesto is flopping, I squabble with Simon & Schuster about the second book in my contract. When I had originally given the Nice Southern Editor my outline for the Manifesto, the last chapter was to be a hands-on trek into America’s backwoods to glean oral testimony from disgruntled Bubbas. The Nice Southern Editor said I should save that idea, expand its breadth, and turn it into the second book in my contract rather than The White Trash Encyclopedia. Given that green light, I poured all of the research that would have gone in the encyclopedia into The Redneck Manifesto. After completing the Manifesto, I took a three-week coast-to-coast road trip as location-spotting for the second book.

In the summer of ’97, I write a proposal for White Trash USA on $1 a Day. Its premise is that I’ll take a three-month bus pass, $99 in cash, and head into rural America for ninety-nine days, living on my wits and the kindness of strangers. This is the idea that my editor and I had agreed would be the second book.

A month after I send the proposal, he says that Simon & Schuster’s high-muckety-mucks have nixed White Trash USA and still want me to do The White Trash Encyclopedia.

But you told me the second book would be the travel book, so I wrote everything I had to say about white-trash history in the Manifesto!

The Nice Southern Editor says the book company won’t budge.

Well, neither will I.

Feeling a bit hoodwinked, I mull over book concepts I’d actually like to write. I dash off a second proposal, this one for a comprehensive encyclopedia of racism I call Wide World of Narrow-mindedness, which basically would be ANSWER Me!’s long-promised "race issue" turned into a book format.

On the day of Debbie’s cancer surgery, the Nice Southern Editor tells me he thinks the company will accept the proposal, and that I should start working on Wide World.

A month later, he tells me they shit-canned the idea and still want The White Trash Encyclopedia.

I craft a third proposal, this one for a novel called The Magic Nightstick about a delusional cop who works in a Portland suburb that is so safe, he starts imagining crime to keep himself amused.

Two months later, the Nice Southern Editor tells me they shot down that idea, too, but that I could still write The White Trash Encyclopedia and collect that $37,500 that’s in my contract.

This is a point in my life when I literally do not have $5 to my name at any given time and am besieged by debts. There are phases when I’m actually hungry and can’t afford food. I’m that destitute.

The Nice Southern Editor gently asks me to at least try and write a proposal for The White Trash Encyclopedia.

I’m penniless, so I figure I’ll give it a shot.

As I wearily sit down to type out the proposal, the strangest thing happens—I find myself unable to type, as if my fingers are gripped with rigor mortis. Deep down in my solar plexus, beneath the coal-black rock layers of hatred, cruelty, and earth-melting sociopathy, there it is:

My soul.

I write about hypocrisy and fury and extremes of human experience, not poofy pop-cult catalogues. Things such as white-trash encyclopedias were precisely what I was attacking in The Redneck Manifesto. For me to write a white-trash encyclopedia would be like asking Andrea Dworkin to star spread-eagled in a porno. Or like asking Louis Farrakhan to do a book of nigger jokes.

I call the Nice Southern Editor and tell him I can’t write the book they want me to write. Not won’t—CAN’T.

The Nice Southern Editor, nice as ever, says he understands. "Jim, most people in this business are whores," he confides. "I’m a whore, too. But you’re not a whore."

Well, not entirely. In fact, I’d do things for money which most folks wouldn’t do. I’d dig up my father’s corpse and fist-fuck it on live satellite TV. I’d sell lead-based paint chips to ghetto children and tell them it’s candy.

But I wouldn’t write a sentence I didn’t mean.

I turn down thirty-seven thousand semolians at a time when I’m not sure where my next meal is coming from. And I know in my heart that they could have offered me thirty-seven million, and I would have said no. And I never have second thoughts, never feel that maybe I should have taken the money and made the best of it. I’m not about to roll over and play dead just for another doggie treat.

I don’t know of any weenie-gobbling shmendricks that ever accused me of selling out who’ve actually walked away from big bucks like I did. I don’t even fault people who are --sellouts—it’s just not who I am. I don’t mind if you’re different than me, you soulless, rapacious, money-grubbing, Federal Reserve-fellating android.

Yes, I realize that my canoe veers dangerously close to crashing into the Iceberg of Self-Righteousness. For what is Jim Goad profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Yea, verily, t’would have been noble if I’d been sorely tempted by the moolah and bravely pushed it aside.

But I wasn’t even tempted. This was an involuntary reaction. It’s as if I didn’t have any choice. It isn’t about ethics, it’s about instinct. It isn’t virtue, it’s compulsion. The Muse has me by the balls. I couldn’t have written that book in the same way that I couldn’t commandeer a flying sleigh with eight tiny reindeer.

In ANSWER Me! #2, I wrote that people who refuse money are masochists. Either I was wrong, or you can give me forty lashes.

The only major publicity I do for The Redneck Manifesto comes in January 1998 on ABC-TV’s late-night gabfest Politically Incorrect, and no thanks to my book company—one of the show’s writers was a fan of mine. I go on national television at a time when I’m applying (and getting rejected) for a job as a cabdriver.

ABC flies me from Portland to LA, applies some makeup to my shaved head, hair-transplant nubs, and big-banana schnozz, and out I leap into the sweat-inducing spotlights. My co-panelists are hooknosed thespian Michael Rapaport, light-skin’ded hip-hopping rotundo Heavy D, and the vapid, rectally dilated shrieking Medusa named Karen Finley. The Redneck Manifesto had actually made a veiled reference to Finley in a passage about performance artists who shove yams up their asses.

The producers ask me what title I want flashed under my name when the camera shows me in close-up, and I say "HATEMONGER." Surprisingly, they oblige.

I give an underwhelming, lackluster performance. I’m stiff, gaunt, ham-colored, smirking awkwardly, and generally charmless. My bald skull looks like a protruding penis head. I guess I’m not good at being fabulous. I’m out of my mind emotionally, having been bowled for weeks with grief over Debbie’s cancer and our divorce.

Elfin anteater host Bill Maher calls me a "scary-looking redneck," which draws chuckles from the audience. But if he’d dubbed Heavy D an "intimidating junglebunny," Maher would have been fired and possibly sued. So much for claims of political incorrectness.

The censors bleep out just about everything that I say, which isn’t much. The first topic of discussion is Bill Clinton’s blow jobs from Monica Lewinsky, which had just become a huge story. I say that as punishment, Clinton should be forced to go down on Monica. Maher notes that Lewinsky had been offered $2 million to pose nude for Penthouse. I say that for $2 million, I’d blow the president. And I probably would.

But I wouldn’t write a sentence I didn’t mean.

For all my vaunted obnoxiousness, I’m the only panelist who doesn’t step on the others' sentences. Maher mentions my book and asks me why I think people should be sensitive to rednecks. When I start to say that they’re poor people descended from indentured servants and serfs, Maher blurts out, "SERFS!? That was Robin Hood times!" I begin to explain that Russian serfdom outlasted American slavery by fifty years, but the panelists begin barking over one another like poodles in estrus, uneducated media cheese doodles screaming in five-second sound bites, and the topic soon drifts.

A few hours later, some LA friends stop by my plush, ABC-provided hotel suite, and we watch the show’s airing. They politely compliment my appearance, although we all know I sucked. After they leave, I find myself unable to sleep. At about 3 AM I throw on my engineer boots, hit Sunset Strip, and walk the lonely half-dozen miles up to the Hollywood apartment building where I’d spent seven years with Debbie. The streets are empty but for hookers, police cruisers, and the late-night LA haze taking the form of ghosts. I glide past a newsstand that had carried ANSWER Me! since its first issue. I stare at our old building and remember all the screaming, the laughing, and the laundry-doing. I remember slaving over ANSWER Me! when nobody knew who we were.

There are no laugh tracks or applause signs or pancake makeup or jokes about presidential humjobs. It’s just me and a cutlery set of emotions stabbing into my heart. This is a real experience. TV was all cellophane and Styrofoam.

The mainstream is no place for me. I want to flee back into the boonies. I remember how my brief golf-cart ride on Easy Street started and ended. I’d given the big FUCK YOU to the small-time Italian book editor and his chichi white-trash anthology. Then I gave it to my Beaverton boss and his print-shop job. Then to the publicity bitch. To the acting coach. To the big bookstore. To my high-powered New York agent and her promise of seven figures. And then I fled Simon & Schuster as if they were Sodom & Gomorrah. I’d taken a small sip of success, decided I didn’t like the taste, and started chug-a-lugging trouble again.

Maybe you think I’m self-destructive. But I did these things to save what I like about myself from being destroyed. Success has always demanded of me things I don’t want to give away.

Most people will play-act in order to get what they want. But all I want is freedom from ever having to play-act.

I’d rather be hungry than phony.