DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! A High Speed Book Tour (part IV)

The Greatest Honor Ever Bestowed on a Writer, Ever.

Editor’s Note: Mike Edison has been out on the road promoting his new book, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! — Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, an American Tale of Sex and Wonder, on what has been a book tour like no other, perpetrating a mix of literary mayhem and music in bookstores, pizza parlors, dive bars, and art museums, and will be sharing his tour diary and road tales here in this exclusive blog. For more info on DDD and all things Edison, please visit www.mikeedison.com. Click here for the full tour diary.

Nov 5, Chicago
Return of the Fighting Cock, or, Hey Patti Smith, Eat My Shorts!
The World’s Greatest Piano Player’s relationship with The Car is beginning to worry me. It isn’t right. It is…. Well, unnatural. He has begun to fetishize its German engineering to the point of some man-meets-machine post-apocalyptic sexuality that I am not sure I am comfortable with. If we are parked outside of a bookstore, he feels he has to visit The Car. Not check on it, VISIT it. Late at night when it is parked for the evening and we are drinking, he gets wistful about it. He talks to his girlfriend in New York every day but I notice he is careful not to mention The Car. Then again, even the punters are impressed by our ride. How many times have we heard in the last three days, “Hey, whose BMW is this?” and of course no one believes us when we say it is ours. Writers do not tour in Beemers. For most of us a more appropriate vehicle would be a hearse.

Nevertheless, thanks to the sweet but incompetent girl at the rental agency, we are driving 80K worth of hardware thru the Midwest while we play with the individual climate controls for each seat, thinking if we get it just right we could create some sort of cold front or some sort of weather system and make it rain or snow right there in the car. More importantly, tho, we leave Michigan listening to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, trucking straight for Chicago, where THE GREATEST HONOR EVER BESTOWED ON A WRITER IN THE HISTORY OF LETTERS is about to go down: They are naming a pizza after me!!!

1. Celica Rose Marks of Ian’s in Wrigleyville, the Genius behind the DIRTY PIE! 2. Mmmmm. Dirty Pie…

Seriously. What more could I ever dream of? Ever since they handed the National Book Award to that sacred cow Patti Smith I swear I would take more pride in winning Best Blow Job by a Drunk Jew at the Adult Video Awards. (Go ahead, scream, yell, and take your best shot, I can take it. Christ, I used to get in trouble for douching on the Beatles, and then I found out if you make fun of Patti it was ten times worse, like crapping on the Holy Virgin Mother, and not in the good way — the Brooklyn Museum Way — but in the way that makes liberal punks and hippies go into anaphylactic shock the same way their hyper-allergic children do when they eat a peanut or, god forbid, GLUTEN. And let me tell you right now, if YOU WERE ALLERGIC TO BREAD WHEN I WAS GROWING UP YOU WOULD HAVE HAD YOUR ASS KICKED SIX WAYS TILL RECESS. But I digress. Simply put, I would rather have a pizza than a Pulitzer. At least until the Pulitzer comes with a beer.)

THE MIKE EDISON DIRTY PIE CORONATION is all set to happen at Ian’s in Wrigleyville, as fine a pizza shoppe as you will find in a city famous for pizza, with a kitchen run by benevolent and talented stoners. The Mike Edison Dirty Pie is (and this was arrived at after weeks of brainstorming and taste tests) a GUMBO pie, with Andouille sausage, okra, shrimp, green peppers, etc and it is FUCKING DELICIOUS. The pizzeria gig was the brilliant idea of our friend Natalie Slater, unrepentant wrestling fan and kitchen genius who is responsible for the great website and blog bakeanddestroy.net. Be her friend on facebook because pretty soon she is going to be a superstar and you’ll be able to say you knew her when…

1. Another satisfied customer: MrSkin.com editor Mike McPadden, himself no rookie in the porn and pizza game, eats Mike Edison’s Dirty Pie. 2. Edison with the extraordinary Natalie Slater of BakeandDestroy.net. Can this night get any better?

Half the crowd at Ian’s is with the DIRTY program, the rest are college kids and jocks getting ready for a night of binge drinking at what passes for blues bars these days, but by the time I start the show with the traditional intro (“Everyday I wake up and thank the Lord that cocksucking is not strictly a homosexual phenomenon”) I am feeling pretty confident I have them on my side, and to commemorate the occasion Local punk rock blogsite Shu-Izms makes a nice little video spot.

Speaking of cocksucking, somehow a bottle of Fighting Cock made it into one of the road cases (thanks Fisher!) and so forty minutes later, after singing some dirty blues and even a version of I LIKE TO HURT PEOPLE, we are off to the races, mopping up more pizza and some astonishing Whoopie Pies that Miss Bake and Destroy brought for us.

After a few rounds of Fighting Cock it’s a Dirty round of Point-Counterpoint with Chicago’s smartest publicist, Heather West of Western Publicity. (Author’s note: How obvious is it when a Jew goes looking for a discount?)

A writer for the WALL STREET JOURNAL has suggested that this punk rock barnstorming tour somehow obscures the literary value of my book, that somehow getting drunk in pizza joints and doing rock’n’roll gigs in Michigan dive bars discounts the quality of writing and insightful social history of DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! And in my drunker moments I begin to agree with him and get kind of worried than I am shooting myself in the foot by being so… far out. But then I get drunker and figure, aw, fuck’em all, eventually the world will catch up with me. Yeah. That’s it. Now gimme some more of that Fighting Cock.

And so the DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY! Tour rolls on, from bookstore to dive bar to pizza joint, but the next day is the jewel in the crown, a legit (paying) gig at the UNIVERSITY OF FUCKING CHICAGO. And all jokes aside, this is big for me — not only are some very smart people paying me a giant honorarium to deliver the goods viz. free speech, sex, pornography, etc., my brothers live in Chicago and I have to show off for them since mostly they think I am (a) a stoned underachiever, or (b) just stoned, so I try to keep a handle on the whisky consumption just for one night, and am almost successful.

Click here for the rest of Mike’s high speed book tour entries or, for more mayhem, buy his book: Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! — Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers, an American Tale of Sex and Wonder

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 — Mike Edison is the former publisher of marijuana magazine High Times, and was the editor-in-chief of the irresponsibly outrageous Screw. Edison has worked as a correspondent for Hustler and a high-paid gun-for hire of the legendary Penthouse letters. In addition he is an internationally known musician and professional wrestler of no small repute. He is the author of 28 pornographic novels and the cult classic memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). He speaks frequently on free speech, sex, drugs, and the American counterculture, and is “proof positive that one can be both edgy and erudite, lowbrow and literate, and take joy in the unbridled pleasures of the id without sacrificing the higher mind.”

Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers-An American Tale of Sex and Wonder

by Mike Edison