Mr. Fish OBSCENITY
This essay appears in Mr. Fish's full-length book, Nobody Left published in June, 2020 by Fantagraphics Books.
While I was being dragged out of my bedroom, away from my open window, down the hallway and through the house by my mother, my fist still clutching the magic marker that I’d used to draw a mustache on myself when I first heard her slippers charging up the stairs like fuzzy mallets, I sort of knew that I wasn’t going to save the world that day. Not only did she not fall for my panicked attempt to mute the severity of my crime by trying to make her laugh with the mustache, but she seemed more determined than ever to make an example of me to the rest of the neighborhood that political agitation through leafleting was not in our family’s values. In fact, the overly flamboyant French accent that I used to confront her with when she burst into my room didn’t fool her into thinking I was somebody else, partly because the phrase, Wee wee, mademoiselle – déjà vu, déjà vu! made absolutely no sense whatsoever and partly, I assumed, because the mustache that I’d drawn on myself, as confirmed by the dining room mirror that I passed on my way into the kitchen, looked much more Zapata than Chevalier. “Senorita! Mi sancho pantza esta muy mal! Y donde, por favor! Qué guapo tamale? Arriba! Arriba!” Slam! went the backdoor and there I stood, no cap for my marker, surrounded by one hundred paper airplanes all bearing the words FUCK YOUR ASS written in a wounded and barking penmanship, the scattered notes a dule of dead doves inspiring to no one.
This was in 1973 and I was seven and had just figured out there was no such thing as obscenity. Listening through the kitchen wall to my mother slam cabinets and yell at the dog in the hell that I’d made of her morning, I decided, too, that there was no such thing as virtue either, neither qualifier able to exist in any true sense without having the other to be measured against, like there was no tall without short or light without dark or me without we.
There was only the cruel profanity of complete freedom.
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I drove out to the Beverly Hills Hotel, an hour and a half in traffic while the oily Tuesday afternoon sun melted into the toxic rainbow sherbet that is the Los Angeles sunset, for the singular purpose of snubbing Ken Starr. I’d been imagining the scene for weeks, the sophisticated crowd, the sound of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five sashaying through the room like a sumptuous Pan Am stewardess, the tap on the shoulder, me turning with my glass of Romanée Conti to see Ken Starr standing there completely scentless and emitting no heat, his face split into the sort of well-rehearsed smile that comes from decades of overachievement and never joy. He extends his hand. I look down at his chubby fingers, the manicured fingernails as shiny as wet cough drops, the soft puff pastry of a palm, the gleam of a watchband roughly approximating the value of Rhode Island. I do the classic gasp-chuckle of sitcom disbelief and turn back around, shaking my head. Starr’s face begins to redden as if he’d just stepped into a freezing wind. I continue with my conversation, my voice elevated just slightly to be heard over the shrill whistle of steam coming out of his ears only moments before his head explodes like a hot coconut. I cover my glass with my hand to prevent bits of him from falling into my drink and lean in further to listen to the heiress finish her story about how she and Henry Kissinger and Mick Jagger bought a dazzle of illegal zebras and, following an all-night cocaine binge with Edie Sedgwick, freed them in Piccadilly Circus on Boxing Day in 1969. Applause. Curtain.
Why would Ken Starr ever want to shake my hand you ask?
Well, as a freelance artist I’ve always had to take in extra laundry to pay my bills and a couple years ago I took in a big stinky load from the Los Angeles Daily Journal, the preeminent law newspaper of Southern California, sometimes referred to as the Hillcrest Country Club of L.A. papers due to the exclusionary nature of its subscription-only availability, its content too hoity-toity to fraternize with other publications at newsstands, its Web content secured behind a pay wall like the sort of pornography that no decent person hoping to remain decent would want to see. My assignment from the Journal was to draw one hundred portraits for the paper’s annual supplement dedicated to recognizing the top lawyers of California and Ken Starr was one of them. So was Gloria Allred, of O.J. Simpson and Amber Frey fame, and so was Harvey Levin, of the People’s Court and TMZ fame, and so was Jerry Brown, of Linda Ronstadt and Governor Moonbeam fame.
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The idea to save the world by writing FUCK YOUR ASS on one hundred pieces of paper, folding them into airplanes and floating them out my bedroom window like dandelion spores came to me over Memorial Day weekend about fifteen minutes after I started horsing around with my older brother, Jeff, in the backseat of my grandmother’s station wagon while it was parked in the street in front of her house. He was trying to wrestle me into a headlock so that he could spit an ice cube down the back of my shirt and I was trying to pin him to the opposing wall of the interior cab with my feet when I accidentally kicked him so hard in the nuts that I swear he blacked out for a full five seconds. Ten minutes later I was handcuffed to the neighbor’s fence with no pants on while my brother, refusing to hand over the key, explained to my grandfather how I, without provocation, had kicked him in the balls. “Here’s an asshole!”
“A jerk,” corrected my grandfather, narrowing his eyes like a marine biologist who had just pointed out someone’s misclassification of a dolphin as a porpoise.
“Huh?” said my brother.
“He’s a jerk, not as asshole.”
“Well, aren’t they the same thing?”
“Yeah,” said my grandfather, “of course they are, but just say jerk. Saying asshole upsets your mother.”
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“We also have a party at the Beverly Hills Hotel when the issue is published,” I was told by the Journal’s editor when the job of rendering one hundred portraits was pitched to me. “We’re going to have all the original drawings put in frames and give them to the lawyers as little presents,” he said, “and you can be at the party – I’m sure they’ll all want to shake your hand!” The whole time he was talking I was trying to figure out how I was going to get the words fucking and asshole into the Starr portrait with the same deft hand that Hirschfeld used to get in his Nina.
Taking the ticket stub from the valet twink and throwing on my jacket, I straightened my tie and walked through the hotel lobby in search of the concierge to help me find the room where I imagined Starr was eating enough cocktail weenies to verge on some infringement of Megan’s Law. Moments later I walked into the Sunset Room and, having had the point of my HB Staedtler pencil up the nose and inside the pupils and along the lips and in between the teeth of every lawyer’s face I saw, suddenly had the uneasy feeling that I was a voyeuristic pervert who had been watching these people through a two-way mirror for six weeks. After all, these were the facial features I’d caressed into being with all the slow and deliberate attention to detail that a cannibal might use to eviscerate his victims into a delectable recipe, only I had done it in reverse. Instead of obliterating life, I had created it, the goriness of the accomplishment no less fiendish than if I’d murdered somebody.
Averting my eyes from having to look at all the familiar faces, I scanned the room for the bar in the hopes of blurring my vision when I felt a tap on my shoulder. “The portraits look great!” said the editor of the Journal, having appeared out of nowhere to shake my hand. “Did you see them?”
“Yeah, on the way in,” I said, referring to the table just outside the entrance where all one hundred framed drawings that I’d done sat near a large sign requesting that each lawyer wait until the end of the evening before retrieving his or her portrait to take home.
“By the way,” I said, “I never asked, how did you guys determine who belonged on the list of top 100? Given the fact that the average person finds lawyers, as a group, somewhat despicable – individually, they find them repulsive – I’m guessing that it wasn’t a contest that had been put to a public vote.”
“It was very unscientific,” he said, appearing uncertain as to whether he should be offended by my characterization of his bread and butter as repulsive. “Me and the other editors got together every morning for a couple months and talked about who should be on the list and who shouldn’t.”
Then he excused himself, leaving me to realize for the first time that I’d been hired to glorify the equivalent of the football team for a high school newspaper and that the primary purpose of the Journal was to publish insular stories that celebrated the victories and chastised the failures and mourned the disappointments and trumpeted the dreams of all the prom kings, prom queens, star athletes, sluts, burnouts, unassuming nerds, chess club geeks and mediocre C-student toiling in the profession, fuck everybody else. And as it was with every school dance that I’d ever attended, I dropped my sense of moral superiority like a glass slipper, letting it shatter on the floor while I took my place against the wall, Clark Kan’t in my glasses, and waited all alone with my hands in my pockets for the room to empty.
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To suddenly realize that jerk and asshole referred to the same thing was a real eye-opener for me. That meant that the obscenity of the word asshole was intrinsic to the word, itself, and not to the thing that it was naming, making it a concept rather than a fact, invented as opposed to revealed. I imagined that the idea that there could exist in language something like an offensive and corresponding inoffensive word was analogous to the idea that there could also exist something like an offensive and inoffensive thought, even an offensive and inoffensive person, which was bullshit to me.
Still, tasked with the chore of picking up the trash of my idealism, flightless bird by flightless bird, I started to realize that some things fly because they exist in a vacuum, not because they’re propelled by some greater purpose.
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I left the hotel at around midnight, just as the clean up staff began to bunch up the soiled tablecloths and remove the chairs and scratch their heads and wonder what they were going to do with all the framed portraits sitting untouched at the entrance to the room, while thirty miles away Ken Starr, having never left his home all evening, continued posing in front of his mirror like a star quarterback preparing to lead assholes everywhere to victory against all the jerks who continued to insist against all reason that they were somehow above all that.
Dwayne Booth, a.k.a. Mr. Fish, lives in Philadelphia, PA. Occasionally, he laughs his head off. His mother has no idea what he's up to. She cries easily. For more information, date him.
View Mr. Fish’s drawing printed in Issue Five