The Man For Women Only: B. John Michaels Will Be Your Sex Object

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Getting off on Third Eye Blind

Originally published in New York Press in April 2000. Unexpurgated so I (and you) can relive its bitter joy. What would I say about 3eb today, 13 years later? "Always/Think we'll get more time"? by Jessica Willis There is a handsome man stumbling over a dirty snowbank on the edge of Tyler St. He has pale blue eyes and dirty cowlicked hair. The Just Been Fucked look, some would say. It’s a fair assessment, but a larger measure of his handsomeness is that he is sporting what I would call Lush Hair–a dark, pungent cock’s comb that says he sleeps where he lays and doesn’t care if he comes or prays, as the song goes. He, the former Johnny Bender of Bumlake High, the dark star in a long coat, should be naked and smoking in a motel room right now, his hangover assuaged with coos and quim, but now, this weekday, he’s on the tall side of 30 and the short side of his preferred midday blood alcohol content: a beautiful loser without a ride in a town where rides are hard currency. He might very well be a derelict, a bum in the old language. He looks almost homeless. There is a liquor store, inevitably named Cappy’s, or Crappy’s, across the street. That’s where he’s going. A lonesome day for this handsome man. He finally gets over the snowdrift and the traffic is slow enough for me to observe what he does next. He doesn’t do anything. I pass by; eventually he lurches between the cars and is gone. Handsome men don’t know what they are, and no one knows what to do about them, so they wincingly endure and use the cliches at hand, to pass time and try to make some sense: they "don’t fit in"; they "walk with the mighty"; they "lie like dogs" with the tired, pretty young women who are still willing. They are neither the tough guy nor the fey boy. They give head and they cry with equal amounts of gusto. They might be good-looking, but they don’t necessarily look good. They are not the male equivalent of a beautiful girl. They act as mortal as they can. They do not feel blessed. They feel deep. What’s that Devo line–half a goon and half a god? The handsome man walks on, looking for handsome things. Walk on baby, walk on…on and on, Stephan Jenkins begs a "hottie" in one of his songs. He’s singing about one of his damaged women, but I’d like to think he is singing about himself. Stephan Jenkins of Third Eye Blind: the unapologetic frontman in a climate where frontmen are treated with derision and arid awe, a full-time handsome man. A man handsome enough to make me crumple in front of my stereo, lyrics sheet in hand, when Blue, Third Eye Blind’s second record, is played in the apartment for the first time. You want to absorb and memorize every inch of Jenkins’ lyrics. He effortlessly plunders what was the last secure realm of the crazy, moneyed female: conversational psychobabble. And not only that, he makes this hollow crisis management rock. Really hard. He even makes it fertile and interesting. During our recent conversation(on Valentine’s Day, naturally), Jenkins described "Wounded"–unarguably the best song on Blue–as a "sexy song about sexual assault." He’s not joking or being disingenuous; "Wounded" is four minutes of the gunkiest, most freewheeling arena nosebleed rock this side of Montrose, topped with a strenuous vocal catharsis that would make Bikini Kill’s Hanna go red: "The guy who put his hands on you/Has got nothing to do with me," he reassures a violated female over a misleading strummy intro. By the end of the track, he’s hooting up and down the scales like a girl uninterrupted: "rock on baby, rock on/you say you can’t grow." Much of the hugeness of Third Eye Blind’s sound on Blue (and on its self-titled first album, the sleeper of 1997 that gave the world that heinously tuneful doot doot doot single) is provided by the not-quite-handsome men who surround Jenkins: Brad Hargreaves’ tumultuous drumming, bassist Arion Salazar’s arrangements, the driving, alpha-male landscapes of lead guitarist Kevin Cadogan. But it’s Jenkins’ limelight, all the way. Perhaps this is why Cadogan left the band right after a gig at Sundance in January. According to an anonymous source at Elektra, Cadogan’s departure came after "a unanimous decision" within the band, since destructive "creative differences" had been evident during the recording of Blue. Cadogan has since been replaced by Tony Fredianelli, Third Eye Blind’s original guitarist, who left the lineup in 1996, before the band was signed. Of the return of his once and future guitarist, Jenkins says breezily, "We’re a closed society. We hire from within." If there’s pre-divorce tension between Cadogan and his bandmates on Blue, I can’t quite hear it. I wish I could, because a touch of genuine, unintentional sonic angst would have made this perfectly damn good record into a rough jewel. For reasons I can’t quite name, the notion of trying to rock Sundance gives me the heebie-jeebies. Then again, I am not a confident, handsome man who has caressed Charlize Theron’s hair. More things about Jenkins:sometimes he ends statements in question form? Like this? In that Newspeak that seems to have been borne straight out of the halls of Choate or Pencey Prep? For example: "The girl in "Wounded"–it’s very personal?" Any elaboration would "ferret her out, and that’s not okay"? My question to him had been,"Who was she?" Because there’s a she embossed all over Third Eye Blind’s narrative; an unnamed and gloriously screwed she who often finds herself waffling, thrusting and ODing under the long shadow of Jenkins, who has more than just a knack for slipping graphic, clumsy references to sex and death into what could be just another good ’n’ forgettable breakthrough hit. She is the wan, intelligent presence who makes Jenkins into a handsome, pained man. Without her, he would be museless, or, at worst, a good-looking 6-foot-2 jock with an acid tongue. He’s got her though, and she’s got him, and Jenkins is definitely the most cleansed when the ending is an unhappy one. "When I walk out of a tragedy, like Lear," he says, "I feel good. The demons were exorcised. I’m like, ‘Drinks for everybody!’" Occasionally, Jenkins serenades this she, and it’s bedroom bard-dom at its most ugly beautiful: "I lift your head while they change the hospital sheets/I would never lie to you," he blurts to his burnt-out babe in "The Background," an excellent power ballad from the first album that cops Jimmy Page’s mincing "Over the Hills and Far Away" intro. And occasionally he’s bragging about the skills all over the FM–Blue’s "1000 Julys" is flanged and phased-out gratuitous Apocalypse rockdom about making some girl come. "She goes down on me" was the cutest, clearest line in "Semi-Charmed Life" (doot doot doot), and this worried a lot of talk show folks when special guest Third Eye Blind refused to change the line into something more like "Let’s spend some time together." One of his favorite words might be "fucking," used adjectivally, flatly and casual, as in, "Some days I feel like a giant, like a demon, and some days I’m invisible and fucking flawed, and neither one is true." His literary heroes (he graduated UC Berkeley in ’88 with a lit major) are Kerouac, Sam Shepard, Wordsworth, Tennessee Williams and "their sons," Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. "Guy writers," he says with a chuckle. He refers to Shakespeare as a "guy." His Valentine’s Day plans included rehearsal and a radio interview thing. No date? "No date," he replied, like this is a foolish question. I wanted to ask, "No Charlize?" But I don’t know how to pronounce her name. He is happy to talk about the trustfund cutie on Prozac who inspired the shouty "Losing a Whole Year," the first track on the debut album, which begins with an alt-rock sledgehammer riff and the line, "I remember you and me used to spend/The whole goddamned day in bed," and disintegrates into a "routine deceit" by the end of the song. "She’d say she was trying to be down. I think she’s a painter now. She sounded like money," he adds, quoting his own lyric. "It was funny and fragile, her desire for grit." Next. We return to "Wounded." It has been my favorite song for what seems like forever, and Jenkins likes it too. A manifesto for the bloodied, damaged and unbowed, which becomes evident when he eagerly sings a stanza for me, a cappella, in a reedy, breathless voice. Anybody could go around singing this. In the Third Eye Blind merchandise catalog, included in the Blue CD case, there are "Wounded" baseball caps for sale. "Boom, I’m out there." He’s talking about visiting the "Wounded" girl, who apparently went to NYU. He seems to be warming to the idea of discussing the story. "I visit her one semester, and she’s dressed all sexy. Suede miniskirt. Big butt, big tits, big legs, long strides." Then the bad thing happened to her. "The next time I see her, she’s got her hair in a bun, loose clothes, and she’s protected and angry." But time happened, the bruises she feels will heal, to paraphrase the song, and eventually she shows skin again, and goes back to sexiness and her long strides. "That’s where I get the line ‘you walkin’ down shakin’ that ass again, and then you walk on baby, walk on,’" he says. I would say this is a happy ending. It is during this moment in the song that the music and the words hit a triumphant climax, spurred by Jenkins’ perfectly timed "Ow!" Chiming, sustained power chord to fade. Don’t tell me you can’t get your hands in the air. David Lee Plath. Sylvia Lee Roth. I can’t think of a more chic, more durable morph: the star who has a few trials by fire in his back pocket, the in-jokey nut who has the balls to thank Klonipin by brand name on his first record, crossed with a man who likes a big blast of anything with a summertime hottie walking on and on like a cherry on top of it all.

So Cool

Originally published in the New York Press, July 31st, 2001

by Jessica Willis
The summer of ’87, scored in 10 seconds of guitar tablature: a couple of deafening
power chords, arcing into an harmonic shimmy, and landsliding down again. A barely there pause and then, riding on a torchy hi-hat beat and a few more implosive chords, hair metal was spurred to its apex.

"In the still of the night I hear the wolf howl, honay!" Let the loitering outside
the L’il Peach looking for someone to buy us a case of Miller Genny games
begin, motherfuckers.

Whitesnake’s "Still of the Night" was well over six minutes long and pretentious
enough to whiff of Zeppelin, but lead vocalist David Coverdale was more mercenary
than any spreadsheet Page and Plant’s people could ever hope to scribble
up. After firing guitarist John Sykes, the tasty young god responsible for laying
down that unbelievably hollow and huge sound on the album, Coverdale snatched
up a poseur metal lineup that aimed to satisfy both the chinless geek boy and
the booby teen queen: bassist Rudy Sarzo from Quiet Riot, drummer Tommy Aldridge
from Thin Lizzy and guitarists Vivian Campbell (Dio) and the hideously pretty
Adrian Vandenberg, who looked like an Aryan with a Farrah ’do. It was all
cheekbones and gorgeous hair and instrumental breaks and it was the shit, man,
we ate it up like good blotter.

Not that anything else was going on that summer, except for the Crüe show at the Centrum,and Whitesnake was opening, it was gonna rule. But until then, it was too hot
to do anything, so we would stay inside and watch Whitesnake on MTV. Of course
it was the "Still of the Night" video, played in ceaseless rotation,
that completely numbed, titillated and belittled us. There was Tawny Kitaen,
the sixth Whitesnake, Coverdale’s bitch, video co-poseur, hollow and blowzy
and bored and beautiful like Sykes’ power chords; the girl none of us could
ever be or have, condemned to have auburn tendrils of her profuse hair stuck
in her lipgloss for eternity, always two steps away in her stiletto snakeskin
heels.

Coverdale made sure there was something for all of us to be wistful about that summer. I remember Fat Gino, sweating on his vinyl couch one listless afternoon, pulling absently at his pathetic thatch of straightened, coarse, dyed black hair, and staring at the spotlit, sunkissed image of Adrian Vandenberg on the screen. Fat Gino had tears in his eyes. Tears of longing and respect. "This is so cool,
man," he whispered. "This is so fuckin’ cool."

My Life in Furs: Hate Me If It Makes You Feel Good

I've been looking for this nasty nugget for a good long time. Here it is--my errant farewell to NYC.
Originally published in the New York Press, January 18th, 2000

by Jessica Willis

She sits in a wingback chair in the front room, stocking feet thoughtfully digging into the shag carpet, and over her shoulder, out the picture window, I can see the wood and wire cages, rows and rows of them, clustered on the lawn. The smell of mink–gamy, deeply organic, vaguely unpleasant–permeates the house.

We go outside to the stalls, where there are about 1800 mink, divided into long rows in their wood and wire cages by their color and gender. Currently, she breeds three different kinds of mink: ranch (black), sapphire (smoky blue) and violet (light lilac purple). Each cage is roughly the size and depth of a dresser drawer, and has frozen water in a dish on a sill outside a hole, which is ostensibly big enough for the mink’s head. There is a constant stream of dark feces falling out of the bottom of all of the cages’ wire floors, landing in identical dark, reeking pyramids below.

I peer inside the grilled peephole at the top of one of the cages and make eye contact with a sapphire male. Beady red eyes and needle teeth return my glare.

"Don’t put your finger near the cage," she warns. "You won’t get it back."

Naturally, when faced with this unpleasant, bloodthirsty mammal cooped up in a cage, I react with hostility and a bitter joy–the former because I know the mink would, if given the chance, hurl himself through the air and fasten his incisors to my jugular; the latter because I am human and relatively unfettered, and I have money for his hide while he does not, at this time, have money for mine.

His coat gleams. I mean, the way only living fur can shine–it flashes amethyst, peach and platinum, like the freshly shaved and oiled calves of a Brazilian virgin. Exactly. The male bares its teeth, wider now, tiny pink tongue panting, eyes little raging candy buttons. It only takes about 30 of him and his closest friends to make a full-length coat.

"When the animal rights people snuck in, they just let the minks out of their cages?" I ask.

"Isn’t that enough? We had a thousand minks running around here," she says. "We lost about 200 of them. They got squashed by cars. We had no insurance, and we took a heck of a hit. It was a tragedy."

This year, she estimates, a single sapphire male pelt could sell for $40 to $50 on the open market, where she sells her skins once or twice a year to the fur wholesalers of the world, which is a marked improvement from past years ($28-$35 per skin in 1998). In a market that fluctuates wildly–not only with the strength of the economies of the foreign nations like Russia, China, Korea and Greece, which make up the majority of the American fur industry’s business, but also with the whims of the tiny population of Americans who can and do buy fur–life as a mink rancher is anything but rock steady. "Every year is different," she says. "One year is better, then the next year we don’t even make our livelihood. It doesn’t even pay. We just went through one of those years, but this year should be better. Have you ever lived off one or two paychecks a year? I swear, mink farmers are the best money managers in the world."

The sapphire male squirms in its small cage and shits some more. Fuck you, you little creep, I think happily. You’re a little devil animal, useful to no one, save for your skin. Unfortunately, you’ve been born wearing the pubic thatch of the gods. He gets my drift and hurls himself against the wire peephole.

"Am I right or am I wrong?" she says.

Give it up, I say, because I can say so. Die for us.

Hitler, and the whole lot of luckless assholes like him, was reincarnated as a mink, left to crap and breed and whelp in a stall-crammed slaver-ship tight next to his equally karmically ruined brethren. And then, after taking in their last coat-glossing meal of fish and chicken entrails, "harvest" time comes, an event that she explains tenderly and defensively: The minks are gassed with carbon monoxide on the premises, and their deaths come upon them "humanely and quickly."

She thinks about this for a moment.

"As a matter of fact, we probably take better care of our animals than a lot of people take care of their children. They’re worth nothing to us if they don’t flourish."

Rewind now to a prepubescent girl splayed down on her Sears canopy bed. Easy to picture her, isn’t it, a fresh Vogue pinned down under her chin, pages rolled open to a spread of some dead doll clad in fox and not much else, or maybe it’s pictures of Bert Stern’s disintegrated Monroe she’s marveling at: How the star is flawed naked and scarred, and how achingly right she is in a perfect fur, laughing hard-faced like Sacher-Masoch’s auntie.

And the girl has her palms way down her pants now. Obviously I am not making this up. She wants fur. The golden fleece is growing an ace black pubis like MM’s and, more importantly, obtaining a wardrobe to match–a closet of furs that would make a Jewess newlywed smudge her eyeliner.

There’s a jaundiced rabbit fur coat in her mother’s room. She pauses there, chin on Vogue, not really humping her hand anymore, wondering if she can sneak the coat out of the walk-in closet. Her mother (in the den now, watching Days) wore it constantly, over halter tops and turtlenecks when she was young, big-legged and beehived. She hardly ever wore it now, which, to the soiled mores of the prepubescent girl, was license to steal the fur and put it in her own room. Elsewhere in the young dark mind, the girl knew her time was running out and that she, at 13 years of age, was quickly expending her first, and most arable, sexual peak. She needed that fucking rabbit.

"I wore it the night Georgie Jessel undressed me with his eyes," her mother sighed whenever her daughter mentioned borrowing the coat. Her mother’s way of saying no.

She got her chance, though, a few nights later, when her mother went out. She found the Polaroid, snapped on some fresh flashcubes, set up the tripod in the living room and stripped down to nothing but her Candie’s wedgies, gold barrette and the fur. Mouth hanging adenoidally open, nose chafed red from a recent cold, the thick collar drifting off her shoulders, she was ready for her maturity. She turned her back to the camera and then suddenly looked over one bare shoulder and the picture was taken.

She wasn’t alone. With a babysitter in the den, who was talking on the phone, struggling to correct her orthodontic headgear and watching tv at the same time, the girl’s sulky best friend Michelle walked into the living room, pushed the Polaroid’s shutter and was out the door before the print spat out of the camera and hit the floor. Michelle lived across the street and could be counted on for some things. She helped in the chrysalis of me.

Before I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life enveloped in someone else’s luxurious, preserved skin, I thought nothing. I harmed nothing. And then I harmed something and became a woman. A lucre queen, loinclothed, cock- and gift-hungry, with fuck oder kaput as my mantra.

And then I knew how real women lived: gorgeous, rich, superior, capable and inches from danger and death. As Adam’s rib. In fur.

Go on, say it, you Teva-heads: I’m old, weary and louche in my ratty vintage rabbit hoodie, since, as you say (and I’m paraphrasing your anti-fur propaganda lit here), wearing fur makes women look old and dated. Propaganda like this seems to omit the fact that nothing, short of edema and a shopping cart jammed with Fanta cans and broken radios, makes a woman look old and dated. Fur makes a woman look fierce, like she’s been around, and I don’t care if that thing cost $50 or $15,000, she had to get way the hell around in order to end up with that on her back. As many times as it takes. And every woman in fur knows this. And every woman in fur wishes you knew that she knew.

A few weeks ago, on one of the first cold nights of the season, I was making haste down Ave. A, which is right in the clammy little heart of the p.c. nest. For if the pro-choice, anti-death penalty, anti-fur guerrillas target midtown for their soapboxing, they all friggin’ live and lurk on A. It’s late, or early, I’m just back from London, 4 a.m., and I’ve got the rabbit jacket on and I’m walking with my friend. We’re eager to get home because although we’ve seen each other, we haven’t touched each other in a long time.

And a busted woodie station wagon chortles up to a red light. Wan-faced guy in a snug knit cap yells out the open passenger window as I pass: How many dead animals did it take to make that coat?

Reflexively I yell fuck you, and I give the car’s windshield the finger. Nothing happens after that. We keep walking, they drive on, and we’re mutually satisfied.

Or not. I could have yelled something better. I have to stand up for the old lunching ladies and stout Jersey wives who get harangued and defaced every cold afternoon in midtown. I am not old, and I yell back.

I could have squashed my nose against the glass and yelled, "Don’t you think I know the covenant of wearing fur?" or, "I’ve made gentle love in this coat. Doesn’t that soften the hate that went into making it?" or "Anti-fur? What kind of fur are you anti?"

Maybe fuck you is better. Because, really–fuck you. The ashen PETA wannabe sitting on her milk crate, buffeting the freezing wind with her gore placards on Astor Pl. who whines stock footage every time I walk by: same thing. Dusky-looking broke kid standing in my way on St. Marks, who got p.c. brainwashed lord knows where (in line at Miami customs? At the bodega?) tells me I’m "disgusting" because I’m wearing "real fur": I’d use more syllables but I don’t want to overtax you, so fuck you too, fatty. I am wearing a rabbit jacket with a skull and crossbones shaved into the back, simmering happily in 15-degree weather with little or nothing on underneath, and you’re wearing blubber.

Wearing fur makes me angry, obviously. It makes you angry, too. But I’ve got it better. I’m angry and unstoppably warm. Everyone wants to feel me, but somehow can’t. Talk about luxury. I am also wearing the oldest, most traditional, most lush and intimate thing in the world, and it’s the only fashion statement that gets a rise out of people, and this is a big deal if you have intentionally been dressing like an asshole for many years, as I have. Forget leather and vinyl and nipples as jewelry.

I try to look into the eyes of all my naysayers. Wouldn’t it be funny if they looked like the animals they’re trying to save? But they don’t. Nobody can look as alert and pissed as a mink in a peephole. No, the animal saviors are tired, faded like an old tape.

"We know who they are," the mink rancher says. Her husband is sitting on the couch across the room in a colorless tracksuit, barefoot, attentive.

"Oh yeah," she continues. "Because we caught a few of them in that break-in. We have sat back and not said anything. A lot of [the activists] are young, well-educated people from wealthy families."

Young, well-educated and wealthy–taken separately, these attributes don’t amount to much, but when put together, you have a seething mass of good lawyers, pimples and ethics twisted by liberal arts and the sonorous, keening cry of campus collective: Take back the night, and all the good shit that goes with it. The cheap luxe vices like butts and booze can pass under the p.c. radar with only a minimum of squawk, but what about the less dangerous but far more expensive and showy luxury vices like furs and firearms?

Fossilized in the coming age? That remains to be seen. But for me, the answer lies in this sheared beaver coat I’m wearing. It’s one of the show pieces in the deeply carpeted and mirrored front room, which the rancher has nicknamed the Funhouse. The rancher retails a few pieces here, in varying species, and all of them are exemplary.

Now, if mink is bad, ooh, beaver is a sin. I mean, imagine clubbing Bucky’s head to a pulp, for chrissakes. But would I club Bucky for a bit of heaven, like what I’ve got right here? Hell yeah. Nothing feels like beaver. Dense, graphite blacky brown, soft like a horse’s nose.

"I tried on a beaver many years ago," I say, swiveling around to see all of it.

The rancher is watching me, leaning against the doorjamb. "You can still remember it. You can still dream about it," she says gently.

Then she says something about how the beavers shit in the water supply and cause diseases. Then she pads into the other room without another word. It is understood between us that diseased beaver shit in our drinking water is reason enough to kill many beavers and claim their fur.

"Yo, that jacket is buttah!" Now, the black ladies, they seem to still get it. They yell this at me sometimes, when I’m wearing the rabbit. To them, and maybe to me, wearing fur means arrival. Fur means Lil’ Kim and Aretha–snarling divas who know that nary an ounce of blood, acid or insult is going to get hurled anywhere near their profuse sprays of chinchilla and dyed sable.

Fur also means that I have a lineage, draped down from my great-great-grandparents who came here from Lithuania with furs, pajamas and a few pots and pans, and it means my beautiful dark-skinned grandmother with mischievous blue eyes can decide it is now, this winter, this afternoon, that she will bestow upon me her never-worn three-quarter-length ranch mink.

It was mine all along, she said. Talk about arrival. I put it on, and it was me.