Don't fuck with the Big O

Like the rest of the country, Chicago is all abuzz about yesterday's live telecast of the Oprah show and her public tongue lashing of James Frey, author of the best selling, controversial-exposed-as-a-lie memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."

Unless you live in a cave, Frey's sensational fake memoir of his years as a criminal drug addict on the mutha of all benders was recently exposed by TheSmokingGun.com as fabrication. Last September, Oprah anointed Frey and his book as an "Oprah Book Club" selection, which automatically means instant celebrity for some poor writer whose been struggling to pay his or her rent and cell phone bill while laboring over the Great American Novel. It also means a guaranteed readership of millions who'll do anything that Oprah tells them, even jumping off the roof of the John Hancock Building.

Why Frey submitted himself to Oprah's flagellation before millions of television viewers is beyond me. Personally, I would have told her to go get fucked and then move to France next door to Roman Polanski. Then again, you don't fuck with the Big O, for there was Frey, with his greasy receding hairline, nervously downing glasses of water until I sat waiting for his bladder to burst all over Oprah's couch.

I don't regularly watch Oprah. I don't particularly like her, and have grown hardened to her happy talk, thanks to real life. I mean, it's easy to lecture some single welfare mother about gratitude and finding happiness when you have over a billion cool ones in the bank. I much prefer finding my own reading material than to jump on the Oprah Book Club bandwagon reading whatever sentimental swill that she recommends.

The only time I have seen Oprah in person was on the Jumbotron at the United Center, sitting front row and center at Tina Turner's farewell concert with Stedman, her best friend Gayle, and the rest of her sycophants. When the Jumbotron wasn't focused on Oprah, she was yawning and checking her watch, but as soon as the camera zoomed in on her, Oprah suddenly came alive; jumping out of her seat and pumping her fist in the air to beat the old Harry. I came to the conclusion that Oprah was extremely sleep-deprived when she snuck out of the concert before it was over.

Oprah as a coporation, is also not necessarily a good citizen of Chicago's philanthropic community. She doesn't support any of the philanthropic foundations which are much better equipped to address societal ills, such as the outstanding Chicago Foundation for Women which supports a majority of Chicago's women's non-profit services community. Instead, she hawks her Angel Foundation and other Oprah-branded charities that suck millions of dollars away from organizations serving women and girls, or populations most at risk of contracting HIV and AIDS (e.g., heterosexual African-American women), or support Chicago's deplorable public schools, perpetuating our broken philanthropic system. Unless something is in it for Oprah - some guest she can exploit on her show or publicity - forget it.

But last night, my friend and I paused "The Aristocrats" DVD to watch the 11 p.m. repeat of Oprah's attempts to rehabilitate her Oprah-brand and image as goddess of the soccer moms, after the earlier live telecast was pre-empted by Chimpy's presidential press conference. We spent the first several minutes commenting on Oprah's choice of wardrobe during her opening mea culpa apologizing for her half-cocked phone call to Larry King last week proclaming the brohouha over Frey's book as "much ado about nothing." The winged collar on Oprah's blouse made her appear as if she didn't have a neck. I remarked to my friend that if not an intentional choice, it was certainly subliminal, providing Oprah protection if things got dicey and she could retreat down into her blouse.

In addition to Frey, who if he were a prisoner under interrogation at Guantanomo Bay she surely would have tortured him, Oprah spanked Nan Talese, Frey's publisher and Doubleday vice president, who essentially blamed her editors for not catching the book's many discrepancies. (That's right, Nan, blame it on the workers just like every other major corporation that lays off 30,000 workers because of bad executive decision-making.) Washington Post Richard Cohen also was a guest (or plant), who praised Oprah for her courage in admitting that "you made a mistake."

It doesn't surprise me that journalists are lining up this morning to kiss Oprah's ass. I have seen Oprah's wrath against reporters - especially reporters making crap money - who dare cross her "Hineyness" up close and personal. In 1989, a Chicago Sun-Times gossip columnist reported a wild rumor that was sweeping the floor of Chicago's Board of Exchange that Oprah had stabbed her boyfriend, Steadman Graham, after coming home and discovering him in bed with her male hairdresser as being essentially true. Oprah had the columnist summarily fired when she threatened to file a mega slander suit against the Sun-Times, even though it was a blind item. (This columnist now writes for a community newspaper group, but the queens sill love her and insist that Oprah did come home and catch Steddy with his cock shoved up her hairdresser's behind.)

But it wasn't until Oprah tried to get my late friend, Don Alexander, fired after he phoned in a complaint about one of her shows that I truly began to understand just how powerful Oprah was. Don was a reporter and editor in the Royko-mold, although without Royko's success. He was a brilliant writer, but unfortunately had a serious drinking problem that kept him from advancing beyond crappy $25K-a-year jobs working for neighborhood rags. Don fulfilled his own self-prophecy of not living to 50 when he died suddenly at age 48 a few years ago, alone in his apartment with the TV blasting and a warmed-over beer on the table next to his Lazy Boy recliner. The only consolation of Don dying so young was that in the final 18 months of his life, I had never seen Don happier after he moved from Chicago, where he was miserable, to Atlanta where he blossomed under the love and support of an old army buddy and his wife.

Don had spent much of his adult life in the U.S. Army, reaching the rank of master sergeant. He managed to earn a degree in journalism and left the army shortly before the first Gulf War where he was stationed in Alaska. He could speak knowledgably about any subject - politics, science, religion, literature, history - and there were many late nights of slurred phone conversations about events yet to transpire that at the time, I passed off as more of Don's drunken rants, but shockingly proved to be true.

He was the greatest colleague I ever worked with. Listeing to Don's end of his personal phone calls working at the desk adjacent to his, he should have been the one to write "A Million Little Pieces," as he discussed waking up in the morning to find cops in his bedroom shoving guns in his face looking for some fugitive that had shown up at one of his many parties, or screaming at his mother, "Suck my dick," when she blew her share of the rent money playing video poker. As I pretended to be busy at work and not eavesdropping on his personal phone calls, Don would invaribly share his side of the story after he hung up and we were outside having a smoke.

While I was getting in touch with the intuitive spirits, Don would be writing seamless, one-draft, perfect columns, accurately predicting events like 9/11 years before it occurred when the country was preoccupied with President Clinton getting blow jobs by a pudgy intern. In fact, it was just a few weeks after 9/11 when Don called me at work (I had left the paper) and asked if I had heard any news stories about someone phoning in a terrorist threat against Oprah on WGN. When I asked him why, he told me he had just been released by the Chicago bureau of the FBI for leaving an angry message on the general manager of WLS, the local station that carries the Oprah show, voice mail.

Apparently, Don had been drinking heavily the night before and was watching a repeat of the day's earlier telecast. I didn't see the particular show, but Don had taken offense to something Oprah said about "what did America expect" in reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition to calling Oprah a "$500 million cunt," he left his name and work number, and his immediate supervisor's name and work number. The next morning, the Lincolnwood police showed up at the office and escorted Don to the police station, where he was interrogated for the next five hours by the FBI. Eventually, the feds released Don with a stern warning. If it hadn't been two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the station probably would have ignored Don's voice mail as just another crank call.

To the executive editor's credit, a brave young man whose name I won't mention here because I don't want him to lose his job, he refused to buckle under Oprah's demands that he terminate Don. Instead, he told Don that he didn't care if he exercised his right to free speech, but to please leave out his place of employment in any future angry calls to celebrities. For those of us who listened to Don's story, our first response was, "Well, Oprah is a cunt."

It wasn't until Don passed away a few years later that I ran into a former colleague at his memorial, actually a loud, raucous party hosted by his famly that had propped up Don's cremains on the buffet table next to the Jell-O mold. We were standing in the kitchen when I mentioned Don's terrorist threat against Oprah. To my surprise, she told me she had a copy of the police tape of the actual voice mail. We quickly made arrangements to meet for drinks the next week and she would give me the tape to make copies (I made seven).

Like "The Aristocrats," the three-minute-long, voice-mail message is one of the most vile, vitriolic verbal attacks I've ever listened too. In the message, Don threatens to take Oprah out, refers to ABC as the "other Disney channel," and uses the work "fuck" thirty times in one sentence. From what I understand, Oprah hit the roof when the cops played it for her.

At any rate, Oprah accomplished what she set out to do on her show yesterday morning. She rehabilitated her brand, but not until after she read all the angry e-mail from her fans telling her that she was wrong when she said the truth doesn't matter. She won the praise of her most vocal critics, proving that she is a sly, master manipulator by disguising her spin with tears and astonishment. This will all die down eventually, but wherever my friend Don is, I hope he's feeling vindicated and laughing his ass off. He's the only guy I know who got away with fucking with the Big O.

Who's your favorite clown?

Friday the 13th turned out be even unluckier for Chicago wise guy, Joey "The Clown" Lombardo. The feds arrested Joey Friday night after he had evaded an international manhunt nine months on the lam.

Joey was a made guy who fled his West Side neighborhood shortly before the FBI showed up at his modest bungalow to arrest him last April for 18 unsolved murders dating back more than 30 years. The sting was part of a multi-year, FBI investigation called "Operation Family Secrets" that nabbed 14 aging Chicago mobsters on an assortment of RICO, extortion and murder raps.

The news of Joey's arrest was a disappointment to many Chicagoans who cheered Joey's flight from justice, hoping that he was sucking down some fruity tropical drink on a beach somewhere in South America while being fanned by topless native beauties. During his nine months on the run, Joey wrote several long amusing letters to a federal judge proclaiming his innocence and offering to take a truth serum, provided that FBI and ATF agents did the same. Full of spelling and grammatical errors, Joey apologized saying that, "Englush was neber my bist sobjeck."

If you grew up in Chicago, you likely have your own happy childhood memories of the Mafia, whether it was finding a gun ditched in your back yard, gaping at the gangsters' mansions in River Forest and Oak Park, or having a distant relative who was "connected." In addition to being the nation's fattest city, Chicago is the cradle of organized crime.

For example, during high school I worked at a mob-owned Dairy Queen. The mob didn't actually own the franchise, but the building and property were owned by a Mafia button-man named Tony who rigged slot machines in Vegas. The franchise owner, Dennis, was terrified of Tony who had a habit of dropping by unannounced during our busiest times when customers were lined up outside around the building. He'd take Dennis to the back of the store and shake him down. Dennis would often emerge with a black eye or blood dripping down his face, but nobody thought anything of it. We also got paid in cash and I seriously doubt if anything was deducted for social security or state taxes. Fortunately for Dennis' teenaged employees, Tony never visted at closing time after Dennis had gone home, and we'd be locking each other in the freezers or making scupltures out of the soft-serve ice cream.

Growing up in Chicago's northwest suburbs, it wasn't unusual to see some poor schmuck light on his juice loan payments sitting in the back seat of a black caddy surrounded by goons, or guys dressed in Armani suits idling by pay phones, sauntering to and from their luxury cars in the middle of the day when most kids' fathers were at work.

Joey became boss of the Chicago outfit in 1975, after Sam Giancana was whacked in his basement while cooking sausages. For years, Joey entertained us with his antics ranging from broad daylight-mob hits to cutting up in court by peering out of masks made from newspapers, earning his nickname "the Clown." Many of Joey's feats have been fictionalized in movies like "Casino."

My boyfriend grew up on Chicago's West Side just two doors down from Joey on Ohio Street. He said it wasn't uncommon for Joey to come bursting out of his house in his boxer shorts and a Dago T, shooting a .38 into the air when the neighborhood kids were making too much noise playing outside. Joey's crew would also send the kids down the street to buy "clinchers," which were big, mushy, 16-inch softballs that they'd smack 450 feet to the end of the block with baseball bats that had no doubt been used to bash guys' brains into puree. Ocassionally, Joey would drive down the street at 100 mph, park his car in front of his house, and run inside leaving the car door wide open, not to emerge for several weeks.

Once when my boyfriend was about nine, he and his friends were playing in the alley, when Joey marched out of his house in his satin bathrobe and Italian leather slippers, and held two guys at gunpoint while he made them clobber each other with bricks.

Despite these incidents, their neighborhood was safe and relatively crime free. Joey didn't tolerate any shit. When my boyfriend's uncle, Chops, a popular bartender at the neighborhood Italian joint, got into trouble with gambling and someone shot a bullet through my boyfriend's grandma's window, Joey graciously helped his grandma take out a second mortgage on her building where all her extended family lived. He put Chops on a payment plan so Joey's associates wouldn't break Chops' legs.

Poor Chops passed away at a ripe old age on New Year's Day. This past year while Chops was in a nursing home, I'd take my boyrfriend's mother to visit him. After Joey went on the lam, Rose, who is hard of hearing, would probe Chops about Joey, screaming, "DIDN'T JOEY THE CLOWN WANT TO KILL YOU ONCE," arousing the attention of the six or seven nurse's aids smoking cigarettes in the day room.

Joey served a lengthy prison sentence and vowed never to go back to the joint after the FBI showed up at his garage 18 months ago to take a DNA sample from inside his mouth. Joey has since been linked to whacking Alan Dorfman, a mob lawyer who was rumoroed to have been flipped by the feds in 1983, gunning Dorfman down in the parking lot of the Purple Hilton in Lincolnwood at 2:30 in the afternoon. Joey was also said to have been present when Vegas point man, Anthony "the Ant" Spilotro and his brother Michael, were beaten nearly to death in a basement in Bensenville in 1986, then buried alive in an Indiana cornfield in their underwear. A farmer found the shallow grave a few days later plowing his field, and the headlines of the then, Rupert Murdoch-owned Chicago Sun-Times screamed, "THE MOB BOTCHED IT."

A strand of hair found inside a discarded black ski-mask used in a 1974 mob hit on a local businessman, has since been linked to Joey through the magic of DNA. The feds had egg on their faces when they sheepishly reported that Joey was no where to be found after they showed up at his house to arrest him, claiming that they didn't have the manpower to monitor all the wiseguys under investigation in Operation Family Secrets, "24/7."

Joey was arrested sitting in the passenger seat of a friend's Lincoln in an alley in Elmwood Park, just a few miles from his Ohio Street bungalow. Since then, the feds have been acting like they caught Osama Bin Laden, who they said would have a better chance of making bail than Joey the Clown. Touting Joey's capture as a major blow to "the Outfit," they've compared Joey's hiding places to "spider holes," but I'd hardly call a house in Elmwood Park a "spider hole." He was hiding right under their noses these past nine months, while they turned the world upside down looking for him.

The FBI is just stupid and misguided, grabbing easy "popcorn" headlines by pursuing aging gangsters lucky enough to have surivived their many decades in Chicago's La Costra Nostra to become old men crapping in their Depends. Going after a dozen or so depleted gangsters who should have been put away 30 years ago for ruining thousands of mom-and-pop businesses extorting outlandish payments for waste pickup and protection, and filling chuckholes on the Kennedy Expressway with oatmeal, is a lot easier than pursuing big, mean motherfucker gangbangers whose crimes are far more brutal in their totality, with ties to international terrorism. So much for homeland security, I guess.

Joey now sits in a federal jail, a cement anvil-shaped building in downtown Chicago with slits for windows. It's too bad that Chops couldn't have hung around a few weeks longer, so he could see Joey's latest mugshot of him looking like a homeless person with long, greasy hair and a scraggly beard, unlike the reputed mob leader and sociopath that he was during his prime.

Ahey, ta da da ick

Seems like every time I tried to sit down and update this blog, I had to deal with crazy elderly people or arrange a cheap cremation for an indigent friend.

The holidays were swell but I'm glad to see them end. Too many people, even strangers, kept stopping by and I don't want to consume another alcoholic beverage for the next month. It's nice to be popular, but I really am starting to get sick of my friends. They need to stay home for awhile and take down their Christmas decorations, like I've been doing for the past day and a half. My collection of Swedish candle holders and ornaments has now swelled to five plastic crates. Lugging that shit around and packing it up was almost as bad as moving.

So far 2006 is shaping up to be a year of miracles lost, starting with Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve. It was shocking to see the world's oldest teenager struggling to regain his speech after suffering a debilitating stroke last year, let alone doing it on global television. Like my jingle-bell-areola-dance that I did for my boyfriend and next-door neighbor on Christmas Eve, I could have done without Dick wishing me a "Ahey, ta da da ick" after the ball was dropped in Times Square on New Year's Eve. Do we really need to see this?

I wanted to do a "year in review" with pithy observations of important world events that took place in 2005, like the Michael Jackson child molestation trial, the tsunami, Robert Blake's murder acquittal, Terri Schaivo, Pope John Paul II, Hurricane Katrina and the appearance of Our Lady on the viaduct wall underneath the Kennedy Expressway. But I'm no pundit, and anything that has to be said about these events was said already by people much cleverer than I, like Pat Robertson.

So instead, I'll wrap up some of the ongoing sagas from 2005 PDD entries.

Rob - My ex-neighbor Rob stopped by the morning of New Year's Eve. He stayed two minutes, long enough to tell me how shitty his holidays were. He got so drunk on Christmas Eve, that one of the bartenders from Bob & Trish's New Beginnings had to drive him home and put him to bed at 6 p.m. But Rob is making progress recovering from his broken heart and his brush with a 30-year prison sentence. I told him that I hoped 2006 will be better than 2005, and that time heals all wounds in spite of yourself. He said felt ready to take back his gun collection, that includes a Thompson submachine gun, which is against the law to own. He left after one of his buddies called him on his cell phone and went to pick up his guns that his friend was holding. Rob also bought another gun last week.

Dumbo Drop - Just when I thought my father would make it through the holidays without having a meltdown, I received a call from my little brother on New Year's Eve around 7 p.m., telling me that the nursing home where my mother lives called to say that my father showed up at their New Year's Eve party drunk on vodka. I was already wearing a little hat and had had several drinks, and was in no condition to drive 40 miles to pick him up. One of my brothers who is a recovering alcoholic and devoted 12-step drama queen, who always wants to stage an intervention for one family member or another, went to pick him up. We think my father snuck back after my brother took him home and got his car. Every time we talked to my father, he gave us a whole new story, including one where the cops hid his car. I went out to see him on Jan. 2, his 80th birthday, and had to read him the riot act. We laid out a whole new set of rules, including limiting his daily visits to see my mother. So much for A.A. He told me A.A. was boring and all people did at the meetings was tell depressing stories, which I think is the whole point. He promised he wouldn't drink anymore and I laid out a schedule of activities for him, including volunteering at the local hospital and walking around the Gurnee Mills shopping mall. I told him that if he didn't cut the shit, my brother the 12-step drama queen was going to have him committed to an alcohol rehab center.

Barry Cowsill - The one day when I didn't check the Cowsill website, there was a heartbreaking announcement from one of Barry's brothers saying that Barry's body had been found on a wharf in New Orleans. Barry turned up missing in Hurricane Katrina. Information is still sketchy, but preliminary assessments from the NOLA medical examiner said that poor Barry died of storm-related causes. Reports I have read said the body was found on Dec. 28 and was identified through dental records on Jan. 3. Apparently, Barry had been deceased for quite some time. The body was recovered on a wharf not too far from the New Orleans Convention Center, where Barry was spotted alive and smoking a cigarette on CNN news video in the early days of September, when family members last heard from him from messages left on his sister's cell phone.

Pretty sad stuff. Like the miners who died in the Sago Mine, 2006 has yet to produce any miracles. The Cowsills seem like a nice family, and who among us cannot identify with or love a dysfunctional family? The news accounts I've read seem to indicate that Barry was found on a pier along the banks of the Mississippi River, and not actually in the water. I find it amazing that a body could lay on dry ground without someone noticing it being there until four fucking months later. But then, what happened to the people left behind in New Orleans who had no choice but to ride out the storm and its even more horrifying, dangerous aftermath, should happen to no American.

Whether Barry was binge drinking in NOLA all this time or simply wandered away from the Convention Center looking for a path out of the cesspool, only to be swept away in fetid flood water or clobbered over the head by thugs, we still don't know, but the Cowsills have promised to tell the whole story to their fans after they themselves get some answers. There isn't going to be a memorial, per Barry's wishes. He just wants everyone to party. You gotta love him!

What is a wharf, anyway? I know what a pier is, like Navy Pier in Chicago, and I can't imagine a body laying on Navy Pier for four months without some tourist becoming curious. If someone could tell me what the hell a wharf is, I'd appreciate it.

Now that this story has come to a sensational ending, I hope the Cowsills get some gigs and a documentary on "True Hollywood Story" that they so richly deserve.

Other than that, kids, I'm back on the weed wagon after a holiday weed binge, ready to pee into a cup so I can hopefully become unhappily employed again working some soul-sucking job!