I have never, intentionally at least, snorted a condom up my nose. I have yet to ingest a Tide Pod, though it can’t be worse than the sea urchin I ate in Laguna Beach in 1987. I got on a plane, flew two states away and still couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth. Eating Tide Pods, you can at least wash some socks in there.
For those of us from the generation that thinks it invented deep-throating, snorting latex and laundry products doesn’t seem like much of a “thing.” I predict this will be the short life of condom snorting: This Week, condoms; Week Two, ribbed condoms (to paraphrase the 1970s ads, “It’s like thousands of tiny fingers urging your nostrils to let go!”); Week Three, snorting condoms stuffed with crushed Tide Pods, flakka and zombie saliva; Week Four, youth goes back to leading meaningful protests against gun violence, strangled education funding and the other failures my generation dumped on them.
This Condom Challenge is virtually a non-thing. It was a minor YouTube fad in 2013. Its current comeback is thanks to a presentation by a Texas “education specialist” aimed at alerting parents to the dangers facing today’s youth, a presentation that I’ll bet didn’t include guns.
And Tide Pods? Who knows what to say, except: This age we’re living in? It ain’t the age of reason. The center will not hold. Reality is dead. America’s mood today seems to be “If we can put a Trump in the White House, we might as well shove a pterodactyl dick up our collective ass.” Anything goes.
My generation had its nutty sensations. Sniffing model glue, for example. My first “high” came from firing a roll of caps in my Mattel Tommy Gun and inhaling the smoke through the barrel. I felt sick for days, but it wasn’t the sort of problem you took to your parents, who had enough to worry about without their kids sucking on gun barrels.
Anyone remember Fizzies? They were quarter-sized tablets (invented by the makers of Bromo-Seltzer) that turned a glass of tap water into a delicious soda pop. Or at least something the same color as a delicious soda pop. The rumor about Fizzies was that, if you put one on your tongue, its effervescence would eat a hole through said tongue, turning it into a moist version of a vending machine slot.
The point is the human brain has a built-in distortion device. Whatever the accepted purpose of an item or idea, it is in our nature to see how it can be bent and perverted. We are the animal that plays.
Consider the fuzztone, the original electric-guitar distortion device, which buzzed its way through the Yardbirds’ hits, the Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Jimi Hendrix’s musical space odysseys. It was born in Owen Bradley’s Nashville studio in 1961, when Marty Robbins was recording “Don’t Worry.” For the solo, guitarist Grady Martin recorded his six-string bass directly into the mixing board. Because of a faulty circuit, the sound came out distorted and buzzy, and they all LIKED IT THAT WAY. The song became a hit, and the Gibson guitar company’s electronics designer Seth Lover created a pedal to replicate that mistake: Gibson’s Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone.
That wasn’t too much of a new thing. Memphis and Chicago blues musicians, raw rocker Link Wray, and others were already turning their guitars and amps up to distort in ways never intended by their manufacturers. Fullerton’s Leo Fender designed his products for clean-toned country musicians. Likewise, another Seth Lover creation, the humbucking pickup, was designed to cut the 60-cycle hum that plagued electric guitars, but guitarists found they could make humbuckers crunch and scream when dimed, assuring that Lover’s retirement years in Garden Grove were spent alongside neighbors blaring heavy-metal music from their garages.
That electrical abuse was only an extension of what jazz musicians had been doing with saxes and trumpets, pushing them into expressions never imagined by classically trained players. The saxophone itself was a brazen musical interloper when Adolphe Sax unveiled it in the 1840s. And so on through human history.
Which leads us to Deep Throat. The movie was an international sensation in 1972. People assumed the actors were boldly going where no dick had gone before. That’s doubtful: If it is human nature to monkey with things, and you see monkeys at the zoo putting wads of bubble gum up their bums, you can bet our ancient relatives were of a similar mind. Long before we had tools to build our world with, we had fingers, lips, holes and appendages, and it’s hard to imagine that every possible permutation hadn’t been attempted back in our cave-dwelling nights.
But in the ’70s, throating hit the big time. Movie stars and vice presidents saw the movie. As with the Twist, everyone was doing it. Despite fellatio being a felony in California and other states, young women were soon gagging from their earnest efforts at drive-in theaters across the nation. (If it’s any consolation, ladies, the men who reciprocated back then are waxing nostalgic about it while dying of throat cancer now.)
Do you know what the longest-running movie in OC history was? It wasn’t The Sound of Music. It was Deep Throat, which ran for nearly two years at Newport Beach’s Pussycat Theater. When the theater debuted with Deep Throat, it was immediately charged with obscenity. The theater won the expensive court fight, but the city attorney said he’d refile with every new film it screened. So the theater basically said, “Screw you” and showed Deep Throat to tourists until “Newport Beach” and “throat job” became synonymous.
There was the joke, of course, that Dick Nixon had seen Deep Throat three times, but he just couldn’t get it down Pat.
It was cosmic justice when Nixon was toppled from the presidency by a whistleblower code-named Deep Throat. It would be ultra-cosmic justice if Donald Trump is ultimately brought down by a tech analyst named Tide Pods.
The Pussycat Theater was where the once and present Balboa Theatre stands. Like the apparently bedamned Fox in Fullerton, they seem fated to be empty sarcophagi of the life that one lived in them.
And now Don the Beachcomber. The fabled tiki redoubt appears to be drifting away this month. (Please see Taylor Hamby’s fine Yesternow article from last week.) There is still talk it might be saved, but the interior has already been denuded of most of its tropical raiment.
I don’t know the story, so here’s a fable instead: In Merry Olde England, a man once bought a hill with a castle atop it. When the hill wasn’t as magical as hoped, the man raised the rent 25 percent on the castle and portended a further increase. The castle’s queen was already depleting her larder to keep the castle solvent. So the queen took her furnishings and tapestries and moved on, and today a Wimpy Burger sits atop the hill.
A lot of the love Don got in recent years was thanks to the great and largely rootsy shows that promoters Christopher Burkhardt and Ed Boswell put on there, both as partners and singly. The one nice glimmer is that the two have managed to move their shows to other venues, most with their own pedigrees, such as Santa Ana’s Yost Theater (built 105 years ago) and Original Mike’s (a mere 99 years old), as well as the Broken Drum bar at the Pike in Long Beach (where Big Sandy, et al. play a Viva Las Vegas preparty April 14). You’ll find info here and here.
