Stanley - or - This story has no redeeming social value with Music.

I am single. I am bored because I have nothing and no one to do. One of my Viper Girls told me "Ma, you are not allowed to date anybody without a written permission. It is like you have this sign on your head flashing Weirdos Welcome!" Sadly, this is not unreasonable. 

I met Stanley at a screw-rinse-repeat joint in New York City called The Candy Box. I think it was 1976. Stanley was the bald bespectacled guy telling us he “screwed both bartenders and all the other whoo-ers sitting around on the bar stools." Stanley is still loud, profane and bespectacled as I write. A Caveat Emptor, "Whoo-ers are all no good", delivered in loud Brooklynese has to be experienced to be fully appreciated.

I do not know why exactly, but I took him home. He came with me because I told him I had a pool in my backyard. I think he thought I was lying or nuts. He was right about the nuts.

I always enjoyed Stanley. Stanley and I used to have the greatest fights. He was naturally funny. And he always left me money. He could be generous and stingy at the same moment. We hung out together for twenty five years. We made a porno. We ate at every great Italian restaurant in three states. We fought epic fights. He was mean. Years later I found out he used to stand behind me just out of hearing range and make fun of me to people I knew. Stanley financed every crazy thing I could think up to do. And I am creative. Laissez le bon temps rouler.

Everything was great until I got sober and truthful. One day I said to him

"Stanley, God gave you a package that cannot be beat. Even Ron Jeremy steps back. Nevertheless, you suck in the bed. Now that I am dually diagnosed, I am no longer de-generate and de-praved, and the government gives me $638.25 monthly, I do not have to fuck you. So just pay for the fricking thing and stop that whining."

It was the beginning of the end.

Stanley went and got married. He came to see me even after he got married. For a long  damn time. As a wedding present to him and his bride Angela, I taught him how to eat pussy. I know why I did not teach him sooner. He was always a bit prissy about the physical part of life. All that experience taught Stan nothing. It is kind of a turnoff if a guy is salivating copiously all over you at the critical moment because pussy has germs. I miss him still. I still meet him in my dreams.

Although his career was relatively brief, cut short by a tragic plane crash, Otis Redding was a singer of such commanding stature that to this day he embodies the essence of soul music in its purest form.

His name is synonymous with the term soul, music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of funky, secular testifying. Redding left behind a legacy of recordings made during the four-year period from his first sessions for Stax/Volt Records in 1963 until his death in 1967. Read more here...