Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

15. This was that chick with Lyme disease.

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16. This was the gay law student with the spiky hair.

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1. “Close to the Borderline” was also the inadvertent cause of the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me. I was playing Glass Houses at college—this was like 1991—and my roommate Mike Schauer walked into our dorm room at the exact moment Joel was singing the lines, “Another night I fought the good fight / But I’m getting closer to the borderline.” Mike made a very strange face and said, “Is this Stryper unplugged?”

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2. It just now occurred to me that—if Billy Joel were to actually read this—he must hate how every attempt at advocating his genius is prefaced with a reminder of how cool he isn’t.

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3. Actually, it turns out I was completely wrong about this: When I eventually had the opportunity to interview Joel (months after the completion of this essay) I asked him about “Laura,” and he said it was about a family member. He noted, “There’s a complete giveaway line where I sing, ‘How can she hold an umbilical cord so long.’ Now, who the hell could that be about?” Obviously, I can’t argue about the meaning of a song with the person who wrote it. But I still think my interpretation is more interesting than his truth.

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1. Three days before Pohlman’s haircut, Dischner had told me that “What sets us apart from the other twenty-two Guns N’ Roses tribute bands in America is that we don’t wear wigs.” This new development with Pohlman’s scalp was not to his liking.

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2. Premonition’s two singles, “He Is Rising” and “Mr. Heroin,” were both (presumably) about Carlos and allegedly charted in Greece.

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3. The last time Paradise City performed in Harrisonburg, they received a death threat from two Middle Eastern patrons after playing “One in a Million.” Over the course of the weekend, this story is breathlessly recounted to me six times.

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4. During the Paradise City set, Punky will lay on the dressing room’s concrete floor after falling down a flight of stairs. Though he will continue to post-party with the band for most of the night, Punky will need to be rushed to the hospital by ambulance the following morning when—upon finally sobering up—he will realize he has broken his wrist. Oddly (or perhaps predictably), the band will simply leave him in Harrisonburg and drive back to Ohio.

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1. It’s possible that The Man Show might be off the air by the time this book is released, mostly because Jimmy Kimmel seems like something of a rising cultural force. Of course, it’s entirely plausible that Comedy Central would replace The Man Show with an innovative new series featuring two guys sitting in a beer garden each week and comparing their wives’ vaginas to that of a Hereford heifer.

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2. Although the fact that he never missed a cut-off man in his entire career somehow makes this seem acceptable.

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3. And—as I mentioned earlier—it’s surprisingly unsexy (it’s sort of like watching that cow get butchered at the end of Apocalypse Now).

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4. However, you gotta give Steve Nash this: On December 11, 2001, Nash scored 39 points against the Portland Trail Blazers on 12 of 16 shooting. He scored 17 points over the final 6:23 of regulation, including two free throws with 3.9 seconds remaining that gave Dallas the win. And then he went back to his hotel room AND PROBABLY HAD SEX WITH ELIZABETH HURLEY. Nice night, dude.