I found the hooker at a bachelor party in Atlantic City. I walked into the suite my friends had rented and discovered three normally dressed women chatting with my friends. I had not been to many bachelor parties, but I knew it was unusual to invite women, so immediately, my suspicions were up. They really got up when within minutes, one of the women sat on my lap and started rubbing my hair. Usually, it takes about ten minutes before that happens.

 

    I was sure these women were professionals when two of them started making out while the third, in a tasteful light blue suit, started giving my friends massages. Soon, one woman was standing with her back against the wall, engaging in a sex act with a sub in one hand and a Diet Pepsi in the other. Why, I thought, is it okay for her to do that, but considered rude when I try it? Hooker rules, I discovered, are completely different.

 

    Soon, a woman took one of my friends into another room. In a surprisingly short amount of time, she came back in the room, naked, and fell onto the couch. Concerned, I asked her how big my friend’s penis was. She told me that she couldn’t reveal that information. Hookers, I was impressed to find out, have their own professional code of ethics. At least that’s what I thought until she said, “I couldn’t remember anyway.”

 

    For the next few hours, I became oddly accustomed to seeing my friends having sex. That was because you could see them from the balcony, which one of the women pointed out. I found this fact, more than anything in my upbringing, as the main reason to decline their services.

 

    As I was about to leave, the blue-blazered woman walked in, looking shaken. I asked her if she was all right. Then I offered her a ride home. The highlight of the two hour trip was when she bought me a soda at a rest stop, because having a hooker buy you something is very, very cool. The worst part was when I used her cell phone to call my girlfriend to tell her I was okay and couldn’t talk because I had a hooker in my car. That didn’t go over too well. “Do you want me to call her back?” my new friend offered. No, that won’t help. “Hi. I’m the hooker who was at the bachelor party and I want to vouch for your boyfriend....hello? Hello?”

 

    The rest of the trip was even darker. This was her first bachelor party, and she didn’t like it, although she thought my friends were “gentlemen.” I told she’d really like them when there weren’t hookers around. She has once worked in a massage parlor, that, eerily enough, was in a strip mall in my suburban home town in New Jersey. She was my age and had vacationed every summer with her parents in the same part of Long Beach Island that I had. She dropped out of Ryder college after being raped outside a restaurant she worked at by a man she had served that night. She became anorexic, dropped out of school, started dating much older men in order to feel in control and, after working as a personal trainer, responded to a wanted ad for a masseuse, which eventually led to hand jobs. Now she was saving up to open a spa, but said the money wasn’t the real reason she did this: By taking money she regained some  control of sex. She usually worked Sunday afternoons at a local massage parlor because she feared that the place would get busted and her parents and her boyfriend would find out what she did.

 

    I dropped her off and headed to my mother’s house where I had to wake up early to go to my great aunt’s funeral. Standing there, I remembered how a few weeks before she died, I waited until we were alone and selfishly asked if she were scared of dying. She told me she wasn’t, and how peaceful it was to have seen enough to know the world was all going to be okay. Sad, but okay. π

 

 

    I can’t wait to get into harder drugs. it used to be  when I saw those ads where the guy talks about how heroin made him not care about his family, food or sex, I was sad. Now all I can think is, “How have I allowed myself to be fooled by this mirage of family, food and sex? Hook me up with some of that juicy heroin goodness!”

 

    Until last weekend I had never tried any illegal drugs. This was a source of embarrassment, knowing that people I considered far less cool than I, people who were my parents, had at least smoked pot. So when I found out that George W. Bush, a man who likes only the Beatles albums that came before Sergeant Pepper, had hinted that he’d done drugs, I knew I had to loosen up. Bush said he hadn’t done any drugs since at least 15 years before his father’s Inauguration, which means he couldn’t have been older than 28 when he last got experienced. That’s how old I am. If I ever hoped to run for office, this was my last chance.

 

    Fortuitously, I had lent my apartment in New York to my friend Lani, who has access to a garden in California. Aware of my Clintonesque refusal to inhale anything, Lani has been offering to make me pot brownies since high school. When I returned to my apartment, there was a thank-you note and a baked good.

 

    If smoking marijuana makes people paranoid, then I was particularly sensitive, because just having the brownie in the apartment made me freak out. I kept picturing the cops making a bust and one of those trained dogs sniffing out the brownie. So I hid it in the rarely used crisper drawer until I realized that dessert food in a vegetable drawer was a major tip-off. Then I went out and bought a box of brownies and added Lani’s brownie to the middle-left of the bottom layer. This seemed like a good idea until I decided to eat it last weekend and had to consume 3,200 calories in search of the magic brownie.

 

    Shortly after, I felt slightly blurry, kind of like being drunk without the heaviness. I would explain it more, but you already know, since I am the last person on earth to try marijuana. I was also the most hyperaware, having watched other people get high for 12 years. During my one giggling fit, all I could talk about was how stupid I felt to be giggling and how these fits must be due to the fact that the decreased ability to concentrate makes conversations disjointed and silly. I was the most annoying stoned person ever.

 

    Having lost all my friends, I turned the lights off, listened to the Grateful Dead and tried to picture colorful things. This worked but was very boring. Then I got hungry, so I walked to the Magnolia Bakery and bought some cake. I do this all the time, but I felt better about it because I could blame the drugs. Then I thought about the irony of getting hungry from eating a brownie.

 

    Getting stoned wasn’t that exciting. Sure, I felt a little tougher, picturing myself with long hair, skipping classes, listening to Rush and slamming fudge-nut brownies, but the main thing I felt was confusion. I had defined myself as the guy who never used pot, and now I didn’t have that lazy sense of identity. But I’m not nervous about spiraling into harder drugs, wandering through Tompkins Square Park jonesing for a fix. Not unless there’s a pusher with a good recipe for cocaine Rice Krispies Treats.

 

 

 

    I wanted to be yelled at by Tony Robbins. I wanted to play golf, chant out profit goals, get drunk and hook up with the marketing gals. This is what I figured was going to happen at the Hawaii retreat thrown by Time’s business side. I had gotten invited as a guest because the New Hampshire primaries had been bumped back a week and the important editors and writers couldn’t be spared so they sent me instead. At least that’s what they told me. I think the marketing gals just wanted me there.

 

    But apparently the business world has changed, because the Hawaii trip was about as manly as a Regis Philbin project. The endless activities included a game that involved passing a water balloon, a departmental skit contest, and, as could have been predicted, singing sales guys in drag. Because many Time Warner shareholders read this magazine, I cannot tell you much about the trip. But I can tell you that to make themselves feel better about declaring this trip as a business expense, the business side had all 200 of us put on T-shirts that said “Time to Help” and spend an afternoon doing public service. There isn’t much public service to do in Maui, so I was part of a group sent to help set up a future historical site that I’m pretty sure will never exist, though the poster is very nice. I was obviously put with the less bright folks, because while others taught computers to the elderly or read to children, we moved rocks. The other clue that my group wasn’t that bright was that when our guide was explaining the importance of the site he used the word “penis” and “vagina” about 120 times to keep us interested. He described the birth of the island with these words, the etymology of the word “stones” with these words and even described a volcano we were driving by as looking “exactly like a vagina.” It did not. Hawaii is firmly stuck in the 70s, so all of this didn’t completely surprise me. What did surprise me was when we pulled up to the beach and he told us that while gathering stones, we should put aside any that looked like penises or vaginas so that he could  inspect them for a contest. This, I realized, is how you trick retarded people into picking up stones. It worked incredibly well. In fact, despite the fact that no rocks look anything like vaginas, the winning rock was absolutely phenomenal. It was flat with two hemispheres separated by a fissure in the center. This thing could have been a paperweight at the Georgia O’Keefe museum store. The winner had to hold it while we posed for the group picture, at which point the guide told all the guys to say “p” and the women to say “v.”

 

    It was clear by the fact that the bus was running the entire time that stealing a truckful of rocks from a public beach is not legal even in Hawaii. It was also clear that at some point the carbon emissions from the bus had cancelled out whatever good we were supposedly doing. But whatever damage we did was nothing compared to the group assigned to clean up a cemetery. One overzealous gardener yanked up several bushes, another hacked into a water main sending a 10 foot geyser in the air and a third, raking with a little too much gusto, pulled up several human bones that he had to rebury. Considering Greg Brady did less toying with the Hawaiian gods to summon a tarantula onto Peter’s chest, I’m pretty sure the business side is going to be hexed out of meeting its profit goals for 2000. Also I think our profits will diminished because the plumbers charged us whatever they wanted to repair the water main.

 

 

 

     I never considered myself cheap until I got to the Democratic Convention. Every person I met at every function I attended last week was the most generous soul I ever met, whipping out giant checks to unknown Democratic Candidates. Some paid $100,000 to get onto the floor of the convention while others gave 100 grand to listen to Barbra Streisand. I cannot imagine what they’d pay for basic cable.

 

    For the first time since I was a 13-year-old Jewish boy, I was at the easiest place on the entire planet to get people to give me money. So like the democratic system I had come to know and love during my convention coverage, I figured I would give voice to the unvoiced and, in the process, pocket some mad cash. I let it be known among the lobbiest community that for $20, I would not only listen to any organization’s position, but let them voice their opinions in my column in Time magazine. The money would be put right back into the system, into beer I’d drink while writing. Unless of course I could charge it to my room and expense it.

 

    The first person I approached with my offer was Bruce Kieloch, a 34-year-old guy with a beard, sunglasses and dreadlocks down to his ass. I approached Kieloch because he was waiting with me at the elevator at my hotel. Like everyone else in L.A. last week, he was indeed a contributor to the party. As the head of Kieloch Consulting he officially a “major supporter” of the Gore campaign, having raised more than $50,000. I had gotten about halfway through my pitch -- “You give me $20 and I” when Bruce handed me a $20. I asked him for a check insted, just in case I have to report it to the FEC or my editor digs up some dusty journalistic rule about selling editorial space for petty cash. With his space, Kieloch decided to say, “The most important thing about fund raising is feeling the love.” I think Kieloch may have been drinking.

 

    He brought me to his giant suite, where half eaten lobsters and expensive Cabernet littered the room. He laid down on his bed and started working the phones,  saying he could deliver $20 from an Opthamology lobbiest and an electricity consortium who were also staying at our hotel. A guy wearing a silk short sleeve floral print shirt who cofounded the admittedly less powerful Forest Nature Protection PAC came by and could only pony up $5 in singles. He wanted to use his space to say “I’m committed to ending clear cutting on America’s national forests.”

 

    Then Kieloch offered to let me ride in his limo to the convention so we could work his lobbies friends at the skyboxes for more checks. It sounded promising until I realized that would mean going to the convention and listening to more speeches, and I had friends coming by the hotel to drink. And I had $25 worth of beer to buy them. Democracy is indeed a very good thing.