Promises! Promises! Or Crossroads, or even Passages! I don’t care which one it is, I am just desperate to get into a rehab facility. I want my turn. As the endless stream of “troubled” glitterati continues to pour in and out of rehab, I’m starting to feel a tad excluded—resentful, even. I want to eat Read More
The Freakin’ Popper
Christmas is done, and I can’t say I’m displeased or anything.
I mean, come on—a popper? Santa couldn’t do any better than a freakin’ popper?
You know what a popper is? It’s this bubble-thing made out of see-through plastic. Stick’s attached to it. Little blue plastic wheels on the bottom. Fisher-Price puts Read More
Every time I turn on Logo (the gay channel), I find myself confronted with a discussion program featuring the same group of hard-done-by homosexualists, all complaining about the same issue. The cause of their suffering? Gay bashing? The Christian right? No, these inverts are focused on something far more gruesome: their homo-media invisibility, i.e., the Read More
The setting is the bar at McHale’s in Hell’s Kitchen, just after dark, where a woman beside me is taking desultory drags on a cigarette-one of those overlong, ultra-something brands-while reading a paperback edition of Kerouac’s On the Road , and, jeez, I’m annoyed. I’ve never approved of reading Kerouac in a barroom (or any Read More
I was at Steak Frites on a Friday night. I’d had the gin and tonic, the frisée salad, the glass of red wine, and now it was time for the first Parliament Light of the evening. It would also be my first cigarette in three days, and that first drag was so heavenly and guilt-free. Read More
Hey, smoker: When was the last time you really looked at a pack of cigarettes? Really looked, like you were searching for the hidden message contained in the mumbo jumbo of the Surgeon General’s warning. Steve McFadden remembers. It was an early spring day at the Jersey Shore, a time of year that signifies hope Read More
I heard one of those tobacco apparatchiks on TV, threatening us with a black market in cigarettes if the weed is taxed beyond the reach of lungs just dying to suck it in. Visions of Prohibition danced through my head: black cars crossing the borders in the wee hours of the morning, Eliot Ness smashing Read More
