A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Cintra Wilson
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their taste; they also like Ronnie James Dio and Styx and Quiet Riot and all of the questionable schlock metal nobody listened to except other very, very stoned people.
That video made me realize that cock rock was once very alive and is now very dead, and rock 'n' roll has lost its supply of frightfully charismatic young front men. Mick, Bowie, Iggy, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan-- hell, Steve Tyler, if you even dare mention Aerosmith in that fearful lineup: they’re all old, old, old, and it’s a shame that most folks my age never had a chance to see those grand old gentlemen of rock when they were at their blow-dried, blow-snorted, blow-jobbed ultimate peak. The late sixties/early seventies is one era that will never really be able to repeat itself. It was an ignorant, selfish, sexist, self-destructive time. You could never repeat any of the backstage action featured in Cocksucker Blues. Even the lowest slag-level of coke-and-cum-famished groupies have more self-respect than that now. That was an era with no boundaries whatsoever, and Mick navigated the ungainly sea of IV drug accidents and weepy orgies and omnipresent starstruck coke-gabbling morons better than any other lacquer-pantsed Glam King of yore. It is amazing that Mick was ever Mick, looking at him now, and it is doubly amazing that he wasn’t found dead in a hotel room with needles in his feet and the remains of some horrible sex act stuck to his person years ago.
No white man could get away with that much genital focus these days. There was nothing reasonable about Mick at his gangly big-haired best, when he was wearing spangled body socks with extra codpiece sections for his legendary cod and long chiffon scarves and numerous cloth belts; when Lady Bianca was pouting around the dressing room, smoking petulantly in Halston dresses. He was completely without irony; there was something powerfully airtight, autonomous and surreal about his ability to generate enormous sexual charism which made men and women of the sixties and seventies want to immolate themselves against the fiery wall of his cocksmanship. He was, perhaps, the most sexually sought-after human on the planet at one point; a male Helen of Troy. The entire band was cadaverous from sweating off eight pounds a night and eating nothing but heroin; they were blown into wraiths from all that attention, all that masturbation aimed at them, the whole writhing mass of hippy culture imploding into death and debasement right in their hotel rooms. The Stones were a massive gale force that blew sideways the clothes and cash of anyone who came near, and Mick was the dervish at the epicenter, and it is hard to tell if he meant it that way or not, but he certainly survived it, even if his puckering chest and bloated features make him look like he's been shrunken by witch doctors in some form of unholy brine.
A lot of men followed in the wake of Mick, but none quite matched his porn-star mystique. However, I was thrilled while reading through the box of NKOTB fan mail to find the following letter, written to lead singer Steve Tyler.
EXAMPLE #5: The Classic Groupie Nymphomaniac
This letter, in my opinion, is perhaps the healthiest and best of them all, in that it leaps correctly and gleefully to the only foreseeable outcome/ best-case scenario of the groupie/star relationship, i.e., a near anonymous root job.
Dear Steven Tyler,
I am a big fan of you guys. I love your music. It sounds great. But personally I am madly in love with you. I know that you are married but I just can't help myself. You are just so damn sexy and cute. I get turned on by just hearing your voice. I just love the way you sing. I am obsessed with your eyes and hair. Especially your lips. You just send chills up and down my spine. Every time I see your videos on MTV I just go nuts. I just wish that you were not married. Because I would just kill to go out with you and have a love affair. You look like the type of guy who can make love really, really good. You look great in fishnet tights. I just love to see a man's body sculpture in tights. You have the cutest little ass that I've ever seen. Especially the cute dimples on the side. That's another way I can tell that you make love really good. I can just picture it now. The two of us in my bedroom on my King size bed, and me lying flat on my back with my legs spread wide while you're pumping me to death. That would be so nice. Might I remind you that I have big tits and a nice ass too. I'm thinking about getting a tattoo put on my tit that says Steven Tyler. I'm sure that you wouldn't mind. I just wish that you could see me. I look much younger than my age. I'm 19 and people always think that I am about 14 or 15.
It doesn't matter to me how old you are. Age is nothing but a number. And you will always be hot and sexy. Older men are the best lovers to me anyways. They just know what to do. They make me feel good all over. It's just amazing how they please. I would just love to have you over one day. You would love my bedroom. It's like a jeanie's room. My beed has sexy see thru curtains around it and you have to find your way in. But its easy. All you have to do is find the opening and just climb right in. Then we'll have fun all night long. I'll tease you for a while then I'll please you. I'm not gonna tell you who I am right now. I'll let that be a mystery. But think about what I said and I'll write back to you again and maybe reveal my name to you. I love you sweetheart.
Your secret admirer
I was at a rock show recently; a friend of ours got signed to a major label with his tight-black-shirt-and-hair-in-the-face alternative goth, wanna-be-cock-rock boy band. Their black limousine was waiting with sinister promise out in front of the East Village venue, and hottie girls with long blonde hair and silver boots were waiting for our friend to get offstage so they could casually smother him with girlish attentions. The lead singer was kind of a cross between David Byrne and Perry Farrell with just a skosh of Iggy, all of the boys were exceptionally cute, and the music was loud, but the night was distinctly boring. It was funny was how unexciting it all was. One of the band boys got offstage and told me with guilt and horror that he thought he might have smoked too much pot. The twentysomething audience was barely drinking; they were worried about getting up in the morning and carefully monitoring their substance intake and responsibly choosing the right condoms.
There was a woman older than me in the club hanging out with her dad; you could tell by the relaxed and vacant look on his face that he had been used to way more intense party scenes than that polite little evening of hard rock, which was just pleasantly middle-aged enough for him to deal with after the abject chaos of 1971. Nothing actually happened in the nineties. Partying backstage with 'N Sync or the Backstreet Boys probably involved playing Tomb Raider II and drinking bottled water; it can’t possibly have been like snorting a nine-inch rail of Methedrine and dripping candle wax all over the naked bodies of Van Halen in their heyday. All our unctuous songs of love on the radio are like the American dollar now, which is only paper, not having been backed up with gold for generations. There is no actual cock behind the rock anymore.
But there is one bold, fiery, tumescent approximation.
Chick porn, thy name is Ricky Martin. Love him or hate him, Ricky wears see-thru sweaters and has hips like a lazy susan. He runs his fingers seductively through his own hair, with his eyes rapturously closed and his moistened mouth barely parted, like Rita Hayworth. He is often seen wet, shirtless, openmouthed-kissing, and driving sports cars. Ricky is an emblem of virility and energy and soap-opera good-guy ethics, while being a near-perfect fusion of male cliché sexual images: one part Cary Grant self-amused privilege to one part James Bond eyebrow-raised-at-the-way-these-girls-seem-to-tumble-into-my-lap to two parts Julio Iglesias-cum Ricardo Montalban-cum-Medellin-drug-cartel Latino mega-suave to three parts Elvis good-natured nuclear cock power, all shrink-wrapped into one silk-'n'-leather Milano-pimp outfit. He is a multicultural young Elvis for the new millennium, with hotter blood: Ricky, an ethnic minority, has actual traces of humanity. He's a little smarter than the old Elvis; he's already lived through the whiplash agony/ecstasy of flash-in-the-pan-ism as a boy who grew too many underarm hairs to remain in Menudo, so he has a sense of self-preservation and a healthy arrogance: he's not going to need shock levels of Demerol and pork to bolster his comfort level in the end. He appears to be a limitless, unstoppable font of self-enjoyment, professing an Internal Path and a Great Love of Music and all that other stuff. He has cracked the mystical code that makes the young girls cry.
Ricky has also claimed the abandoned scepter of John Travolta's Saturday-Night-Feverishness by pulling off a look that has up to now been regarded as either totally homosexual or ethnically slimy and stereotypically sexist: i.e., “Get a load of Sergio Valente at the bar over there, ohmigod, who does he think he is?” He has resuscitated obvious male sexiness from the way