“Naked and Famous” by The Presidents of the United States of America

I can't explain glacial motion
Or why Los Angeles don't drop into the ocean
I can't unfold the layers of mystery
Or piece together the tragedy of history

'Cuz those lucky suckers, they don't have to work
Big 3-D billboards and big 30-foot Smurfs
And everybody wants to be naked and famous
Everybody wanna be just like me, I'm naked and famous

I met a poet, said she didn't like the smell of it
Then took her clothes off in a restaurant for the hell of it
I met a DJ who lived in seclusion, reality and sobriety were her only
delusions

And those lucky bastards, they don't have to work
Big 3-D billboards and big 30-foot Smurfs
And everybody wants to be naked and famous
Everybody wanna be just like me, I'm naked and famous

Woo uh hoo hoo hoo
Wow ah hoo hoo hoo

Well, don't get a nosebleed, don't get upset
We can't be naked and famous just yet
There's a big gold dollar sign on the Sunset Strip
And you can send your friend a postcard, it ain't worth the trip

Everybody wants to be naked and famous
Everybody wanna be just like me I'm naked
Everybody wants to be naked and famous
Everybody wanna be just like me I'm naked
Everybody wants to be naked and famous
Everybody wanna be just like me I'm naked

Wow wow yeah
Ah hoo hoo hoo
Whoo

Everybody wants to be naked and famous
Everybody wants to be just like me I'm naked and famous

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I want to be on vacation now, dammit!

This is going to be a slightly short post. Short in that most of it is not my writing.

First, I have amazing friends. Maria, thank you for the peace of mind. And Jen, thank you for the rad-ass French Kitty journal - I'm making out with it right now. It's totally hot.

Second, please stop and even if you don’t pray, pray for Robert Borneman, who is my friend Kaye’s brother. He was attacked last week and I hope this is cool with you Kaye that I’m sharing this, but it just really freaked me out that something like this could happen out of the blue. I mean I know it happens every day, but still. When it’s someone you know it’s more real somehow; thank god Bob's okay. I got this email from Kaye today:

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The following story is from my brother, Bob. It is about a horrible event that took place last week in his life. I had heard an abbreviated version from my mom the day after it happened, but reading it really puts things into perspective. It made me think this past week about how close we come sometimes to death in our lives. How important it is to let those we love know how much we care about them. Thank God he is okay and will recover mentally and physically from his injuries. I ask for your thoughts and prayers for Bob that he finds peace and rest, as well as peace for the man who attacked him.

Kaye

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I called in sick to work this morning. I wasn't sick, though. I had been assaulted the night before by a total stranger while en route to a party. (His children were screaming profanities at people in the street and I stopped at the front door to alert the parents - and was attacked before I could even say a word.) The police are taking it from here, but I don't know when I'll need to testify. Spent the rest of the evening at the emergency ward to make sure I had nothing broken. Nothing broken. Nothing bleeding either (excpt my palms where I was clutching the doorframe as he dragged me inside the house to beat me up on his own property and then claim that I was tresspassing) - just really, really sore from being slammed repeatedly against the wall and choked to the point that I could not breathe. Luckily the neighbors, who happened to be outside to watch the eclipse, saw everything and called the police and came to his door (which made him stop - he had already threatened to shoot and kill me while I was inside his home and claim it was self defense). Not sure if they will testify against him in court, they are his neighbors, after all, and have to live near him.

Once the neighbors had rescued me, they took me across the street (I was still rather afraid he was going to try to shoot me from inside the house) and another neighbor also called the police. The children all bolted from the house and ran to another neighbors' home. Then the husband and his wife (who had been beside him all this time, clearly afraid he was going to kill me in his drunken delerium) jumped in a car and took off. (He had put a football jersey on over his wifebeater teeshirt to "disguise" himself, I guess.) They took off and the neighbor with the cell phone narrated to the police the direction they had headed off in. Police pulled them over and then asked me if I was sure I wanted to testify against him and make a citizen's arrest. I agreed. They then took me to where his wife had driven him to, in order to identify him (I remained in the police car). He then claimed he wanted to put a citizen's arrest on me for tresspassing. The policeman asked me if I wanted to continue to press charges given that he was claiming to press tresspassing charges on me. I said I would quite happily be arrested for tresspassing since the witnessing neighbor has seen him drag me into his house to start slamming me up against the wall; the tresspassing charges were absurdly false. I think the police may have informed him that he would be guilty of yet another crime if he filed false charges. Needless to say his claim that I tresspassed vanished. He was cited (for battery) and returned home. The police took me (and my bicycle) home and from there I went to the emergency ward to get checked out and have a medical report made. I didn't get home until late - the entire thing took about 5 hours. I had nightmares until dawn.

I am still trying to figure out the moral of the story. I have a tendancy to blame myself first and then slowly realize that it was not my fault. I could have let the kids scream epithets out their window (off the roof actually) at passing strangers. I didn't have to try to alert the parents to their children's misbehaviour. If they had been screaming, at some passing African American: "Hey You Fucking Nigger!" I could have just walked on and let the African American do the same. If they had shouted "Kill the Christ-Killers!" at a passing Hasidic man, I could have ignored it and let him do the same. After all, I'm not their alcoholic, abusive father. The man needs help though. Maybe a court trial and either fines or jail time will help him get that help. Maybe it will never happen. They had been up on the roof, screaming, "Faggot!" at a passing stanger, who decided to not let it go.

I'm really not in much of a state to figure it out. My throat is still sore and my right arm (at the shoulder) really hurts. But I have all my teeth and both eyes and an unbroken nose. He was so intent on tearing my shirt off my chest and slamming my head against the wall that he never had time to swing. He did nicely bruise up my windpipe when he shifted hands to strangle me. Luckily that neighbor showed up in the driveway right then and said he'd called the police. As I stumbled backwards out of the house as he released me I saw the wife, looking very frightened at what her husband had been about to complete, whispering, "Please go!" to me. Right then, instead of thinking about the threats he had just made to shoot and kill me, all I could think of was: that poor woman - if he can do this to a total stranger who knocks on his door, what does he do to her?

It plays across my mind, over and over. It's odd to me that I never raised my voice and never raised my hands to push him back. Once he had hauled me into his hallway all I kept repeating, as calmly as I could, in an eerily detached way, as if watching a movie of myself being slammed against the hallway, "Let go of me, sir. Let go!" I could have tried to kick him in the nuts, to fight back, to gouge out his eyes, to fight. Why didn't I fight back? At the time I tried to respond to irrationality and drunken rage with intellectual calm. I'm not sure that's what saved me. I could easily have been dead in another minute or two.

So, what saved me? The setting was comic: it was unnatually dark. The moon was in full eclipse. Luckily for me it was in full eclipse since that was why the neighbor was standing outside at that very moment, witnessing it all. And when he stepped forward onto their driveway he made his presence known to the attacker, who released me, knowing he was being watched by someone out of his reach. It wasn't my cool rationality that saved me, it was another total stranger who made the decision not to keep on walking, to not turn the other way, to help even when he wasn't asked to help. As I sat in the police car, the earth's shadow slowly pulled away from the moon - crescent, half - and full again. Ingmar Bergman would have been proud - or maybe Joseph Conrad - or maybe Tennessee Williams ("I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.") . Humor saves me now. I laugh at the melodrama of it (and then I pause and shudder at the thought I could have been strangled, shot, or beaten to death by a drunken idiot for absolutely no reason whatsoever).

I distance myself. I ponder the moral. I thank God for the moon, the police, and the kindness of strangers.

- R. Borneman