Read Online American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas - Free Book Online

hate her! She’s so annoying!”
    â€œShe gets prettier as she gets older.”
    â€œYeah. What do you think that’s from?” Monica said. “Plastic surgery. She’s probably had everything done but her nose.”
    T he only place where I’d ever seen a cigar inserted in related fashion was in grandly decadent movie producer Robert Evans’s mink-rugged bedroom. And even in Bob’s inner chamber of horrifying pleasure, it wasn’t in real life; it was in a photograph up on the wall: a voluptuous young woman, one of Bob’s collectible queen bees, stark naked, on her hands and knees, an English bowler on her head and a lighted cigar sticking out of her magnificent upraised behind. I had no idea whether Evans, or the photographer, Helmut Newton, finished smoking the cigar after the picture was taken, or if the young woman finished smoking it in her own special way.
    I did know that as far as the Clinton-inserted cigar was concerned—now the most famous cigar in world history, more famous than JFK’s, more famous than all of Winston’s—I’d heard no one raise the basic policy-wonk questions: Was it a Cuban cigar and therefore an Oval Office violation of the president’s own Cuban embargo? Was it good battle judgment for the president to have a cigar in the Oval Office even as the big guns were blazing in America’s war on big tobacco? No one wanted to know about the cigar, and the truth was, there were reasons to pretend it didn’t exist, reasons that went deeper than parental need to avoid Pay-Per-View, Howard Stern dialogue at the dinner table.
    We were the free-speech generation of the sixties, the generation of free love and communal sex, of one-night stands and no guilt, of bedroom experimentation and athletics, of laughing condescendingly at our poor parents, copulating away once a week, doing the old in-out, in-out, in the same boring missionary position. Dad grunted a few times and came too fast; mom lay there staring at the ceiling, doing her duty and thinking about tomorrow’s discount on pork chops at the A&P; and foreplay consisted of a few sticky kisses and a dab of the K-Y jelly that was kept in the nightstand (mom applied it).
    All that was true . . . many years ago. But now we were moms and dads ourselves and it scared the freaking bejesus out of us that our kids would act the same wild and crazy way we had acted in bed. We were shaping a better America, and our definition didn’t include the things we had done in our youth: Wesson oil parties and body painting and stunt sex and drugs. We had gotten off in a thousand kinky ways, rubbing our privates red-raw, and we didn’t want our kids acting like that in a better America. We loved our kids and wanted the best for them: We wanted them to be not like us, but like our parents, like grandpa and grandma sitting watching the sunset after fifty years of mostly monogamous marriage, talking about that long-ago, misty senior prom as they sipped their warming his and hers mugs of tea and honey.
    We had read Bukowski and Kerouac and Henry Miller when we were our kids’ age, but now we wanted them to read Tom Clancy and Tom Brokaw, or if they really wanted to go out there, then maybe Stephen King. Nothing too graphic, nothing too sexual, nothing that would jangle our kids’ ganglia and innards so they’d wind up like some of us, on Prozac and hostage to shrinks.
    We had seen movies like
A Clockwork Orange
and
El Topo
and
Mean Streets
, movies that had purposely diddled with our heads, and we sure didn’t want our kids’ heads diddled with like that. Some of our generation, who became our most important movie critics, like Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
and Kenneth Turan of the
Los Angeles Times
,
crusaded
against movies with foul language, movies that were “vulgar” and “dispiriting,” campaigning for Jane Austen and Dickens and