of a surrealist clown, a time traveler with really bad taste.
Like one night in the Haight when we walked down to the grocery store. Dada wore a fuzzy white yak hair jacket, wraparound neon orange shades, powder blue crotch-hugging polyester pants, and a pair of pink suede clogs with six-inch platforms. While we were walking down the sidewalk an old black woman did a double-take and said, “Man, you some kind of pimp who just got out of the joint after being in since the '60s?”
“No! He's Bootsy Collins!” I said.
Another time back east the two of us were at a Residents show in New Jersey. Everyone in the crowd was a stereotypical late-blooming punk rocker, or dressed down in basic black. Dada, on the other hand, looked like some glow-in-the-dark used car salesman. He wore a fluorescent orange and yellow polyester leisure suit with white bowling shoes.
“Have you noticed?” he asked me at one point.
“Noticed what?” I asked.
“Nobody's caught my look yet,” Dada said proudly. “I'm still the first person to be into the retro-'70s look.”
“Buddy,” I said, “nobody's ever going to catch your look.”
But I was wrong. A few years later there was a '70s revival. I guess it's just a matter of time before everything comes back.
Dada knew that, which was why he was stockpiling the '70s. It was all part of his master plan. Back in the '80s we were sure that the president, Ronald Reagan, was going to blow up the world any minute, and Dada Trash had already formulated a contingency plan for the day after. He would warehouse the largest stockpile of '70s clothing known to man, a motherlode of polyester. Then, after World War III, he'd sell it to the survivors. Not only would he get rich in the new economy, but he'd also control the fashion trends of the post-apocalyptic world. “After they drop the bomb, the '70s will return forever,” Dada concluded.
By then Dada's artwork had passed beyond the mere tangible materialistic uses of trash and into the refuse of ideas. “Some of the stinkiest garbage on this planet exists in people's minds,” he said. Dada became fascinated with trash culture, disposable media, lowbrow trends and fads. “The main product of a consumerist society is garbage,” he reasoned. By then, a lot of his art wasn't even an object, but an idea or event. Sometimes he just set things in motion and watched where they went. Dada brought his sense of play to this conceptual stage of his career and all reality became his palette.
For example, Dada Trash used to play bass in a '70s cover band called 1-800-GET-DOWN. They did a great psychedelic version of the theme song from Charlie's Angels. The band was known for elaborate staging that highlighted the members' bizarre collections of vintage polyester clothing and elevator shoes. 1-800-GET-DOWN turned out to be enormously popular but just when it seemed like they were going to make it really big, the lead singer's ego got out of control and he broke up the band.
Afterwards, Dada Trash realized that what he had liked best about the music industry was making the press kits, those bulky brown mailing envelopes full of publicity photos, newspaper articles, and demo tapes that groups send out to clubs and record labels to try and get gigs. Dada Trash loved to put those together. So even though he wasn't in a band anymore he kept making press kits as a kind of conceptual art project. He still had a lot of weird outfits left over from 1-800-GET-DOWN and he would mix and match these on his friends as they posed for group photos. Dada recorded the demos on his four-track and used different distortion devices to change the sound of his singing voice.
One of my favorite press kits was for Billy Buttfuck and the Bacon Strips. They were a gay country and western band that sang about family values. One of their songs started out with Billy drawling in a thick Texas accent, “It's time to fry, boys…” The promo also claimed that Billy switched into cowgirl drag for his medley of tunes from Annie Get Your Gun.
Another great one was the press kit for Lee Harvey Osmond and the KGBeeGees. They were a group of Oliver Stone impersonators who did Bee Gees covers while dressed in outfits that used to belong to Donny Osmond. Dada even wrote a fake newspaper review that raved about their album “P.C. TV and the Single Gun Theory”.
Dada Trash also had this press kit for a lesbian band of Elvis impersonators called Butch Van Dyke and the Beaver Patrol. They could also perform as a Stray Cats imitation/ cover band. The funny thing was that all the dykes in the band promo photos were actually Dada Trash and my friends Roth Forjic, Sam Silent, and Zeke Moon in reverse drag as dudes.
These bands proved to be enormously popular (much more so than my friend's real band had ever been) and Dada's answering machine was soon clogged with calls from ecstatic club owners who couldn't wait to have them appear. But of course they never did. Some club owners were still so eager have some of them appear, especially the KGBeeGees, that they kept calling up and pestering Dada Trash. He finally had to pretend to be the bands' manager and tell the promoters that the groups had suddenly been killed in a plane crash or their yachts had disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle or something. This did nothing but elevate their fame.
To top it all off, a couple months ago I saw the group photo of Billy Buttfuck and the Bacon Strips up in the hallway by the bathrooms in Slim's. It was framed and hanging next to pictures of all the other famous groups that had played the club. When I asked the doorman about it he said they were the best act that had ever played there. Dada Trash had evolved from a garbage artist into a reality artist.
2
My friend Roth Forjic is one of the most petulant and condescending people I have ever known. He's gay and loathes children. “Children should be seen and not had,” he always sneers. This attitude is rather interesting considering the fact that he's made his living working full-time as a sperm donor for the past few years. He has ten children on the East Coast. Since he moved to the Bay Area a year and a half ago, Roth has sired seven more. Seventeen in all.
“Yeah, but Roth,” I said, “you worked as a sperm donor back east for three and a half years and you only had ten kids. You've hardly been in town and already you're up to seven. Does the family stock get better with age or what?”
“Well, in Delaware I was working with infertile couples,” he said. “Takes more shots to hit the basket. Plus, I think it might have had something to do with all the Philly cheesesteaks I lived off of back there.”
We used to tease Roth by telling him that someday he'd be on trial for murder. As the verdict would come in he'd look up at the jury and realize they were all his children. Every one of them tall, thin, blonde-haired, their blue eyes a mirror of Roth's own as they point at him and scream, “Guilty!”
In order to donate sperm Roth had to fill out all kinds of questionnaires and take numerous drug tests. One thing he never bothered to tell all the people who screened him was that he was gay. So when he showed up for work and the nurses sent Roth into his little booth to produce his specimen, he quickly realized that the Penthouse and Playboy magazines they provided him with were useless. So he brought in his own copies of Creem and jerked off to pictures of Soundgarden's lead singer.
But now they're forcing Roth into early retirement. No more deliveries. He told me it was because once you have a certain number of kids in a geographic area they won't let you donate anymore because a statistical risk develops that your children might unknowingly commit incest when they grow up.
“Gee, I wonder if this means I'll ever be allowed to have any kids myself?” Roth mused.
Roth was at every cocktail party we went to. He was at every opening, publishing party, and happy hour that came down
