Fellatio, Jello Puddin' Pops and Cold Turkey

Darling readers, I’m sure those of you who took bets that little Rainy’s ADD had finally kicked in and she was abandoning her blog were thinking about collecting. No, I just had a very busy week tending to the petty acts of survival and my glamorous job as an underemployed news stringer which included – killing a multimillion-dollar planned development while it was still a watercolor rendering, documenting confused Cub fans’ angst over the Sox playoff success, more zoning stories, police blotters and orthodox Jewish rabbis studying the Halacha. What a fucking exciting life I lead.

I did manage to get over to Border’s and read a good chunk of Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s new tell-all “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” while drinking some lame coffee drink in the café. The Border’s sales associates are on to me because I haven’t purchased a book there in like three years, preferring instead to speed-read almost complete tomes inside the store. It isn’t that difficult to do when you’re reading mostly crap, and I owe about a thousand dollars in overdue fines at my local public library. I’m caught up on all the new Scott Peterson books, and Lawford’s insider memoirs about growing up in the Kennedy family was next on my clandestine reading list. (Which reminds me, I still need to check out the unauthorized Michael Jackson bio, “Freak.”)

I found Lawford’s book tucked upstairs in the music department in the celebrity drug addict section. I managed to locate it easily, looking it up on the store locator. When I came back downstairs, a sales clerk asked me somewhat sarcastically as I was headed to the café, “Did you find what you were looking for?” Well, lady, if Border’s doesn't want its customers reading books in the store and returning them to shelves when they are finished looking at them, DON’T PUT IN CHAIRS OR A COFFEE SHOP FOR PEOPLE TO SIT AND READ, BITCH!

Anyway, my dissident reading habits all harken back to when I was 14. My friends and I would sprawl across the aisles in Jewel Osco, reading books like “The Happy Hooker” and “The Sensuous Woman,” after which, we’d help ourselves to grapes in the produce section and practice rolling them between our teeth without breaking the skins, a la the Sensuous Woman’s chapter on learning the fine art of fellatio.

Do we really need another book on the Kennedys? The answer to that question, darling readers, is yes. Like the smack, herb, LSD, pills, coke and booze that Christopher Lawford ingested into his body every day between the ages of 13 and 30, these regurgitations of the Kennedy Clan are an addiction that must be fed. Lawford is the son of JFK’s sister Patricia and movie star Peter Lawford, who in his prime was one of the sexist bastards of all time.

I always thought that Christopher Lawford, in his younger days, was the sexist third generation Kennedy after John-John. But at age 50, Lawford is looking a wee bit too much like Phil Spector nowadays judging from the photo on the dust jacket, with his fright-night, Spector-esque coif. Still, Chris has inherited his old man’s devilish good looks before poor Peter lost them becoming an emaciated drug addict and arranging helicopter drops of cocaine on the grounds of the Betty Ford Clinic while going through rehab with Liza Minelli.

I judge a good Kennedy book by how much new information I can glean about America’s favorite Royal Family. For example, in Seymour Hersh’s “The Darker Side of Camelot,” I was shocked to find out that JFK had a sexually transmitted disease called Chlamydia that he passed on to Jackie, which can cause premature birth and miscarriages in pregnant women. The night after he was assassinated, Bobby went to the Oval Office and expunged JFK’s medical records so the nation wouldn’t find out that its martyred president had the clap. Early on in Chris Lawford’s book, we learn that one of Bobby Kennedy’s kids took a crap in the Lawford’s swimming pool while visiting them in Malibu.

More Pat and Peter Lawford fun facts:

- Pat was the sixth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children and considered the most sophisticated of the five Kennedy sisters.

- Pat made the sign of the cross each time before she engaged in intercourse with Peter Lawford.

- Pat was a TV producer for Father Peyton’s “Family Rosary Crusade” - the program that made “the family that prays together, stays together” a household phrase.

- While newlyweds, Pat and Peter lived in a two-bedroom Malibu beach house that was once owned by Gloria Swanson.

- Pat and Peter killed a bottle of Scotch just hours after she gave birth to her first child and the first male grandchild born to a Kennedy daughter.

- Christopher Lawford never bonded with his mother through sucking.

- Pat and Peter moved out of the Malibu beach house once owned by Joe Kennedy’s mistress Gloria Swanson, and took their own digs, leaving the house to newborn Christopher and his baby nurse because they couldn't stand the smell of Christopher's stinky diapers.

- Pat was so enamored with big brother Jack that she often pimped for him when he visited her and Peter in California, hosting nude pool parties with Marilyn, Jeannie Carmen and other Hollywood starlets.

- Peter Lawford made up all that crap about Marilyn Monroe calling the night she o.d.’d saying, “Say goodbye to the president for me and say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.” Peter lied to assuage his guilt over not rushing over to Marilyn’s house as she succumbed to sleeping pills.

- Peter said Pat took everything after their divorce, including precious mementos of JFK’s presidency. After Pat relocated to Manhattan just a few blocks away from Jackie’s penthouse on Fifth Avenue, Peter sent a truck packed with five-gallon containers of water and a note that said, “Dear Pat, you forgot to drain the swimming pool.”

- Pat often got drunk on wine in front of her children, who would be confused by her sudden speech incapacity as she drilled them on geography at the dinner table.

- Pat never remarried or fully recovered from her divorce and brothers’ assassinations, settling for the company of gay male friends and dysfunctional drinking buddies.

- Pat once rented Boston Red Sox Jimmy Piersol’s house in Hyannis Port, the summer Piersol had his famous nervous breakdown during a game and climbed the backstop.

- Peter Lawford brought a prostitute as his date to RFK’s funeral.

- Hugh Hefner, feeling sorry for Peter, let him stay for free in a small guest cottage on the grounds of Hef’s Playboy Mansion during the 1970s. While visiting Hef with a "female companion" at the height of his Jello Puddin' Pop fame, Bill Cosby described Peter as "pathetic" within earshot of Christopher Lawford.

- In his later years, Peter Lawford could not achieve orgasm without getting his nipples lacerated with razor blades.

Lawford’s “Symptoms of Withdrawal” is the first Kennedy memoir since the Kennedy Spin Machine hacked out Rose’s “Times to Remember,” that totally glossed over how she disowned her daughter Kathleen for marrying a Protestant and having a husband who was a horny, cheating bastard that lobotomized their retarded daughter. Lawford is winning rave reviews for his writing, but I wouldn’t say there is anything overtly personal in his book that would cause the rest of the Kennedy family to disown him.

There’s no index, which is annoying, but I plan on putting one together as a public service when the paperback edition comes out. The Kennedys are a dynasty that never really got off the ground. I think American would have been a much different and better country today, had Jack and Bobby lived to carry out their progressive ideas of government. I mean, why the Kennedys and not the Bushes? Like the first half of Christopher Lawford’s life, something, somewhere got really screwed up and God stopped blessing America.