My first contact with Dr. Life came just last week, while I was sitting in an airplane in Austin, Texas. I was on a quick stopover, from Dallas to Phoenix, and I needed a break from the book I was reading — Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke. So I grabbed the inflight magazine from the pocket of the back of the chair in front of me, and I started flipping through it.

And somewhere in the middle there stood Dr. Life…bigger than life.

Take a look at him! He’s 67 years old! I mean shit, that motherfucker is buff.

Ripped.

Shredded.

And almost 70!

This must be some sort of Photoshop trick, I thought to myself. So I put my readers back on and took a very close look at Dr. Life’s neck area, looking for some sort of tell-tale sign that this was some sort of hoax.

But it’s not.

Cause I checked it all out.

Dr. Life pimps this deal called “Cenegenics”, and if you’re an older dude wanting to look young again, Dr. Life promises me Cenegenics is the way to go.

What a brilliant marketing concept. Let’s sell medicine to middle-aged suckers so they can be 23 again. That’s never been done before.

But there I was, looking both ways before secretly tearing the ad from the magazine and, all stealthy like, folding…and then placing it into my book as its new bookmark.

And god damn me if I wasn’t on the phone Monday morning to the Cenegenics folks in Las Vegas.

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, but don’t tell anyone, ok? I used to be a jock. A pretty good one, too. I got all sorts of attention as a school boy, so I had a choice to go to several large universities on an athletic scholarship. I was a pretty good jock, too, in as much as I never really paid attention during class while on my “free ride”, cause coach always told me “C’s get degrees!”, and I thought I was better than almost everyone else I went to school with, and I never had to wait at the bookstore line for my books cause a really nice lady from the athletic department handed them at the bookstore while all the other suckers waited in line for theirs — after actually having to pay for them! — and I parked where ever I wanted and I got my monthly check from the school for my meals and my apartment and, for the most part, pretty much wasted 6 years of a 4 free, four year education.

In the end? A 2.01 GPA from the Liberal Arts College of the #1 ranked “party school” by Playboy Magazine.

Like I said: as a jock, I excelled.

And as a very good jock, I took steroids.

Steroids rule. But don’t go thinking that cause you’re on roids you’re a better athlete. Steroids rule cause they speed up the recovery process of your body while you beat the shit out of it. You can beat the shit out of yourself Monday, and then again Tuesday, and Wednesday, Thursday, then Friday, too. Why take off the weekend? Work out some more! Cause you’re ready to go.

Meanwhile, the dopes that don’t get it have to take a whole bunch of time off cause they’re sore, and they ache, or maybe they got hurt.

Not me!

It’s a lot like running a race, and you’re up against a guy that’s maybe a bit faster than you, but you have to run against him with your legs in shackles.

And since almost everyone’s on ‘roids, it’s not really cheating if everyone’s cheating…right?

Here’s another cool thing about ‘roiding…I never got sick. I dunno if it was just me, but I’d be walking around school during the fall and spring — when it seemed everyone had a cold or the flu.

Not me!

My girlfriend liked them too, cause I’d get raging boners that never went away, and the whole thing about testicular / penis atrophy?

Not me! (OK, roll your eyes and make your jokes now).

And why am I bringing this all up?

Cause Dr. Life pimps “testosterone replacement therapy” as a big part of Cenegenics. That’s a fancy way of saying you’re on roids. Dr. Life also pimps human growth hormone, too — which is some serious shit, and something I never fucked around with…mainly cause all the dudes I knew who did it ended up looking like Andre The Giant.

Wow!

Cenegenics!

I placed a call to Dr. Life, but instead I got one of his lackeys — a Dr. Patel. We had a nice chat. He asked me why I was interested in Cenegenics, and I wanted to say something like duh! Are you kidding me? Who doesn’t wanna look and feel and fuck like they’re 24 again? but instead I tried to sound all serious and told him a bunch of nonsense that pretty much equated to duh! Are you kidding me? Who doesn’t wanna look and feel and fuck like they’re 24 again? — just way fancier.

There’s Cenegenics Institutes all over the US, but none in LA. Which meant I’d have to travel to Vegas for my super intense, super-duper 7 hour physical. A physical that’s gonna cost $2995. Then, Dr. Patel told me there would be a monthly maintenance program as part of Cenegenics, and after some empty rhetoric, he finally threw a number at me: $800 a month.

Ball park.

Like all “ballpark figures”, it’s probably higher — and never lower.

Eight hundred a month for super-duper vitamins and ‘roids.

My brother said, “why don’t you just go buy a Corvette, douche bag? Cause three grand down and eight hundred a month is the same thing.”

Of course he’s right. But still, there’s a small kernel of mid-age crisis swimming around my brain, and I’m always fighting it, and it’s no fun.

No sir, not at all.

Or, as Mr. Horse would say, “No sir, I don’t like it. Not one bit!”

So I’ll just stick to my daily routine — a jog around Silverlake and with my very average, very cheap Costco / Walgreen’s brand vitamins therapy — which currently includes saw palmetto for my prostate and an aspirin and some fish oil for my heart — and I’ll skip the testosterone replacement therapy program, cause, let’s face it, testosterone is probably the root of at least 1/3 of all the Evil in the world.

Besides, what’s cooler than a 45 year old dude running around LA in a brand new red Corvette?

Just do me a favor if you happen to pull up next to me at a red light — call me Billy Life.

Cheap and easy.

No, I’m not describing my last few girlfriends.

No, this doesn’t describe me. (Although “reasonably priced and easy” is fair).

Cheap and easy certainly covers my blog lately, and I’m not even gonna apologize for it. In fact, how about a big “fuck you” instead?

I’m kidding of course. I’d never tell my readers to fuck off, even if I only have a dozen or so of them. But I just can’t write decent stuff all the time, so all the You Tube videos and Super Fun e-Mails and stuff like that, well…it’s just filler…you know?

Kinda like an old b-side.

I’d like to think my b-sides are at least worth a look. I also know my b-sides don’t stand up to the great ones — “Hound Dog”, “We Will Rock You”, “Revolution”, as well as some of Prince’s and The Smith’s immediately come to mind — but hey, they ain’t all that bad, right?

I’d like to think they’re almost as good as “We Will Rock You”…but certainly they’ll never be as good as anything the Beatles or Elvis ever pulled off.

I will tell you I took a whole week off from Porno Land, and during that time I went home (to Phoenix) and during my stay there I jumped on a plane and went to Dallas, where I hung out for a few days.

I used to live in Dallas a long time ago. I lived in a neighborhood called “Oak Lawn”, which was totally gay.

The neighborhood.

Not me.

Cause No Way Am I Gay.

Isn’t it funny how gay dudes have impeccable taste and can make their front yards sing like an Angel? I lived in a two story duplex above a gay couple who had two miniature greyhounds named Fendi and Fiat, and I loved having them as neighbors. My front yard was immaculate no matter what time of year, and often they’d have me down for dinner and drinks and not one time did they ever try to convert me.

How about that!

We became friendly enough to where they’d invite me out for drinks with all their gay pals, and all the gay men thought I was gay, too, and they’d sit around and talk about their lives, and I’d listen, mostly. I kinda felt like Undercover Hetero Spy on a secret mission to discover something about them: do they spit or swallow? Do they fight like we do? Is there a pitcher and a catcher? Do they split the bills 50/50, or is one of them The Bread Winner?

About the only thing I discovered is that most of them worked terribly long hours and never asked for overtime pay, cause if their workplace ever discovered they were gay, they might have a shot at keeping their jobs: Big Boss Man certainly wouldn’t fire a guy who clocked an average of 60 hours a week and never asked for a dime of overtime pay…even if he was a fucking faggot and sucked a bunch of dick, right?

While I was living about my gay pals I was dating a stripper named Serena. Serena was the very first sex worker I ever dated. Who knew then that someday all I’d ever date would be sex workers?

But that’s another blog.

Anyways, Serena danced at a place called “The Purple Orchid”, which was near S.M.U. and my gay neighborhood. I was working as a stock broker during this phase of my life, and I wasn’t a very good stock broker.

Not at all.

I think, looking back at it now, I wasn’t a very good stock broker cause I have a conscience, and in order to be great at that business you can’t give a fuck about anyone’s money except your own. All the time. I mean I’d sell 10,000 shares of some shitty OTC stock to some poor soul I cold called two weeks before, and then I’d have nightmares he was gonna lose all his money, which would have been my fault entirely.

Thankfully my best friend owned the firm. He threw me some accounts to service, and he’d give me some money when I was totally broke and couldn’t close a lead, and eventually he let me recruit new brokers for him — which paid a salary instead of commissions — and I taught them how to pass The Series 7 test, which is a super dumb, multi-choice exam our fine Government requires all brokers to pass…with a 70% or better.

No wonder we’re in the mess we’re in.

Anyways, all the brokers in my firm loved The Strip Joints in Dallas. Even the ones who were married. In fact, I think the married ones loved the strippers more than the single brokers. And isn’t it funny that most of the all stock brokers in Dallas loved strippers? Cause it seemed that stock brokers in general came swooping down into the strip joints after the market closed.

I can’t adequately describe the strip joint scene in Dallas except to say it’s totally different than any other city I’ve ever lived, which includes Phoenix, San Francisco, Chicago, and now, Los Angeles. I’ve traveled to other cities and frequented their strip joints, too, and again…nothing compares to Dallas.

(I’d like to briefly mention Tampa Bay’s own “Mons Venus” which was, hands down, the filthiest, nastiest, greatest place God ever invented in the whole wide Universe, and certainly worth a cross-country plane flight to visit).

(While I’m at it, how about The Champagne Room Gloryhole I’ve recently discovered in a strip joint in Southern California!?! The picture I took is Tricia Oaks, right in the middle of it, ready to do the nasty).

The strip joints in Dallas were more of an earned rite than a Lonely Hearts Club, which is really what all strip joints are…but damn, Dallas strip joints were fucking fun. After a hard day cold calling and closing leads we’d haul ass to Caligula’s (mostly) and drink and eat (yep…we’d eat, and the food was good) and we’d pay for each other’s lap dances and then we’d treat ourselves to some, too.

The first porn star I ever met I met at Caligula’s. It was Keisha, and I was so excited to meet a girl whose movies I’d pleasure myself to that I (gladly) paid $10 for a Polaroid of her in my lap, as well as buying a whole bunch of lap dances, too. I think it was a Saturday night, cause I distinctly remember having her sign the bill of my ball cap — “to Billy, I’d love to eat your cum!” — cause I would never have worn a ball cap during the week, cause all we ever wore during the week was our custom-made business suits and limited-edition ties and polished black Johnson & Murphy’s, and if you didn’t have a limited edition Mont Blanc pen in your front pocket then you really weren’t much of a broker.

If you bought your suit off the rack, you weren’t much of a broker, either.

If you didn’t buy limited-edition ties, you weren’t much of a broker, either.

My boss/pal bought me a Mont Blanc as a present; I could never bring myself to spend $300 on a pen. Besides, I’d much rather give a stripper $300 to dance an hour in my lap while enjoying a Shiner Bock. He also gave me a lot of his old suits, and since we were the same size, mine were kinda custom made, too.

I always hated the limited-edition ties they’d wear; I’d get The Beatles ties or the Jerry Garcia ones, even though I hate hippies very much, although I like listening to the Grateful Dead…but you would have never caught me at a Dead show, cause every single hippie ever to don tie-dye and sandals and dropped acid at a “show” sucks a whole bunch of Donkey Dick. I hate everything a Dead Show stands for, even though I’ll listen to “…from The Mars Hotel” or maybe “Greatest Hits” at my apartment.

Last week, as I drove through Dallas with a friend, all these memories dusted themselves off and ran through my brain in one fell swoop, and I never really mentioned any of them to her while we drove around.

Serena. My old place. And the porch I used to sit on while suffering through the very first anxiety attacks of my life.

Such fond memories!

I couldn’t fuck Serena hard enough, and that’s when I was at the height of my fucking skillz. My fucking skillz weren’t as strong as my Numchuck skillz, or my bow hunting skillz, or my computer hacking skillz…cause we all know girls only want boyfriends who have great skillz.

Which is to say I was never really a great fucker. But I’d try, and after blasting twice (or, on a good night, three times) Serena would always want more, and I just couldn’t deliver.

“Billy, are you gay?” she asked one night, very frustrated I wasn’t good for Round 4.

“No way!” I said. “Why?”

“Cause I wanna fuck again and you don’t!”

“Yea, well…you’ve drained my balls, Honey Bunny. I’m all done for right now.”

She looked at me and didn’t say anything for a second or two, and then she asked, “Honestly, Billy, I think you’re gay cause you hang out with those fags who live below you! Sure you aren’t!?”

I thought about it for a second, and then I said something like, “well, I like my neighbors cause they’re very well-read, they have great taste, they’re great conversationalists, and they decorate their house really well, and they can cook way better than me. And they always have expensive beer in the fridge.”

Serena just looked at me and laughed. We broke up soon after that, and I did run into her, almost ten years later, while I was living in San Francisco and trying to be a writer. We rode the cable cars and I showed her City Lights (we went in) and Adam & Eve’s (we didn’t go in) and China Town and North Beach and we ate and drank and caught up on our lives.

And we didn’t fuck.

And that’s the last time I ever saw her.

This niggah gots a Louis Vuitton Oldsmobile with some fucked up shoes on it.

The grille’s a bitch, too. Same goes for the driver’s side front end, yo — but I only dropped $450 for it.

That’s four-fiddy to you, foolio.

The rims and tires are nothin’ but stock, yo.

Cause it ain’t nothin’ but a G Thang, baby.

Wow!

You guys have something to say! I just made comments available hours ago…and here you are, leaving comments! Just check out yesterday’s blog about watermelon being the new Viagra!

And they’re good!

You’re also asking for more updates…but what if they’re half-assed?

Anyways, I’ll say it again — drop down to the lower left of my blog, and there you can register and then….comment away!

Maybe this is the shot in the arm ISP needs…who knows?

In the meantime, enjoy a free handjob movie! It features Cameron Love showing her love to another guy….while her boyfriend watches. It’s one of the latest updates at the world-famous Manojob.com!

I love flea markets. And used book stores. And used record stores.

I used to love thrift stores, but when everyone else started to like them as much as me, all the fun went away.

Oh, listen to me. Thinking I’m all cool and shit cause I figured out Thrift Stores a long time ago.

Anyways, I love all those places cause I love The Score. And it’s not about making money on The Score…it’s just knowing that you found it, and it’s worth way more than you paid for it. Well, making some extra coin is kinda cool, too.

Scores can be defined so many ways: my Auntie thinks she’s scored big when she finds a cheap Hummel Plate; my pal B thinks he’s scored when he finds a Tiki mug; the Armenians I live next to think all the tsatskes cluttering up their homes cumulate into One Big Score.

My best Score was a self-portrait of Bukowski; I bought it from a dude in a used bookstore for $75 in 1991, and, about a decade later, I eBay’d it for almost $4,000. I’ve scored some really cool shit over the years, but don’t worry…I won’t brag.

OK, just for a sec, and off the top of my head: a Ray Johnson book with an original piece collage laid in for less than a Happy Meal; Burroughs “Call Me Burroughs” on ESP; tons of Titters and Beauty Parades and Wink and a tube of Darkey Toothpaste with paste still in it.

None of my scores come close to this: some scrap metal dealer in England was handed a cup, and it turns out that Score is worth a million. The Dealer got the cup from a dude who got it from grandpa, and he played with the cup when he was a kid.

Cool gift, grandpa.

Dude thought grandpa’s toy gift was a brass cup. He kept it under his bed after he got tired of playing with it, and The Score has been there ever since.

Turns out the brass cup is gold Persian treasure, manufactured before The Big JC walked the Earth.

The best part of the story? Dude used the million dollar cup as target practice with his BB Gun.

Some of my pals make B movies; specifically, horror movies with what’s now called a “micro-budget.” In real words, this means their movies cost less to make than what you paid for your car.

I appreciate movies, and I really appreciate people who make movies that aren’t porn. Not that I don’t appreciate pornographers…but to me, making dirty movies is kinda the easy way out, specifically when we’re talking about someone who wants to make movies as a career choice.

Does that make any sense?

Anyways, I went to the Fangoria convention in LA last weekend, cause my Movie Makin’ Pals had a booth there, and I wanted to show some love.

While I like the horror genre, I don’t love it…but I’ll watch them from time to time.

Evil Dead, Re-Animator, Robo-Cop (horror?)…and the popular ones, like some of the movies based on Steven King novels, and, most recently, two of the biggest piece of shit movies I’ve ever had the displeasure to sit through: Cloverfield and I Am Legend.

I’ve never been to a convention like this, so I really didn’t know what to expect. It was pretty much what I thought it would be: the booths where people sold their monster movies, and monster books, and monster magazines, and their monster movie promotional stuff, as well as the people there dressed up like monsters and more monsters and zombies and what-not.

And the fucking weirdos.

But what I didn’t know was going down — from a movie I haven’t mentioned yet — is Night of The Living Dead, and its 40th anniversary.

Night of the Living Dead is one of my all-time top 10 films. It ranks 7th, right between Goodfellahs and Blade Runner.

There’s a number of reasons I rank the film so high, some having to do with its merits as a piece of art, and one or two that have nothing to do with fancy reasons at all. I think I was in 9th grade the first time I saw it at a midnight movie, and it’s stayed with me ever since. Anxiety and me don’t mix very well, so whenever I’d have anxiety ridden dreams, there I was…in that farm house in Pennsylvania, trapped inside, the zombies outside. They’d always wind up chasing me, cause somehow or another, I’d find my way out of the house and in the field…with the flesheaters.

There’s been others, too. All the sequels, and 28 Days Later, and that Will Smith hunk of shit I’ve already named, but none of them hold up to The Masterpiece that is Night of The Living Dead.

And guess who was sitting in the largest booth, right in the middle of the Fangoria convention?

The cast from the movie!

Barbara, and the Sheriff who winds up offing the hero, and the little girl who hacked up her mom with a trowel and ate her, and Barbara’s brother, and one of the super creepy zombies who was all over the place during the film, and Romero himself!

It was so grand I walked out to the ATM, got a hundred bucks, and bought stuff from them. They autographed 8×10’s, and talked to me about the movie, and all in all it was a great day. Barbara was the best, and during our conversation, I had to ask her:

“Um, so, I know this is really personal, but what did Romero pay you?”

“Well, nothing. I got shares of the movie, but Romero never had it copy written, so that’s that.”

“So Night of The Living Dead is public domain?!?”

“Yes, it is.”

I kinda wanted to cry. Not tears, but something…like…how does a dumbfuck idiot director not copyright his movie? but Romero was really close-by, and that wouldn’t have been a very smart thing to do.

Instead I told her how fucking smokin’ hot she was in the movie, and how great it was Romero had her brother eat her after he turned into a zombie, and how she’s still super hot now.

After my geekboy starstruck episode with all the people who had filled my nightmares since I was in 9th grade, I walked over to this dude who was selling bootleg copies of Decline of Western Civilization and I snatched one up for 15 smackeroos.

A bargain!

But not as good of a bargain as getting Night of The Living Dead for free, which, if Barbara is correct, is exactly how much all the cable companies pay to air it.

Which is about the same most people pay for any movie these days, thanks to file sharing and the internet.