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After twelve years, I am finally ready to tell ... THE TRUE STORY OF "SPEW"
This is a nostalgic story about New York City in the 1990's. This is a story about a special sort of bad luck. Mostly, this is a story about "Spew: Synthetic Television," a show that ran on public-access television for six months in 1995. I was its creator.
MY BAD LUCK (a preface)
I do whatever I can to avoid speaking negatively of anyone. Don't get me wrong: I am not a kind or holy person. I suffer a form of instant karma. The minute my lips form a negative word about anybody, chances are they will materialize within touching distance. I could be climbing a glacier in Nepal, speak snarkily of a colleague, and discover them rappelling past me on the way down. I've often considered volunteering to speak badly of children depicted on milk cartons, so that they may be discovered emerging from a doorway ten feet away. Except for the fact that this wouldn't work. No -- my instant karma must be horrifyingly cringy. Painfully, deeply uncomfortable, in an "I can't believe I exist" sort of way. I think the curse began during my sophomore year in high school when I mocked a classmate named Troy. Troy was perfectly nice, a little effeminate, and -- as it turned out -- gay. I was less nice, but also a little effeminate and knew for a stone-cold fact I was a raving homosexual. Thus, logically, I decided that Troy should be crushed. Sitting on a bench with some friends, I went into an elaborate impression of Troy (except I don't think Troy actually said, liltingly, "HIIII. I'M TROOOOOY. I TALK LIKE A GIIIRRRLLL. LA LA LA.") For a moment I felt the masculine surge of power that comes from belittling helpless people. This buzz lasted about a quarter of a second, until I noticed the expressions on the faces of my friends. I followed their gaze to the expression on the face of Troy -- who, in my school of twelve hundred people, passed by in the hallway at just that very moment, holding his books to his chest. His faun-like eyes tapped into the pain of the entire world. A silent telepathy passed between us. "I know you're gay, too," Troy said. "And that makes you a terrible, terrible person." And he passed on without saying anything. This kind of luck is perhaps different than what happened with my public-access television show. But read on and you may see a similarity in statistical improbability, of the sort that leaves one gaping at the heavens, blaming them for their divine, deserved unfairness. Except that with "Spew," I declare that I was innocent. Now let's change the subject.
THE MAGIC OF PUBLIC ACCESS
In the 1980's and early 1990's, Manhattan public access cable was like the Wild West. Oh, you poor darlings of the new millennium, you may relish your one thousand channels of today's TV offerings, but I declare that plenitude of choice to be a curse. Nobody pays much mind to public access nowadays. For those of you who don't know, public access television is a federally mandated requirement of cable providers: they must provide the common man use of a portion of their airwaves. Even in 1994, when my story begins, it occupied a good chunk of cable real-estate. Back then, with a subscription to basic cable, one got about twenty channels. A full four of these were non-commercial public access. And these were highly trafficked, low-numbered channels, too -- 16, 17, 34, and 69. Nowadays, Time Warner Cable banishes public access to the high end of the spectrum, and it's easy to ignore the channels completely thanks to the digital guide. But back in the day, you had to pass two channels of public access to get to MTV on channel 20.
On my first viewing of Manhattan's public access TV, I was immediately bewitched. I got a taste of the madness in 1993, on my first night in Manhattan. My brother George showed me channel 35, the working-girl sister to the four nonprofit channels.
"The Robin Byrd Show" consisted of a collection of "celebrity" strippers of varying savoriness, sandwiched between really hilarious phone-sex and escort commercials. Robin Byrd presided over the goings-on, an omnisexual porn star unapologetically a few years past her prime. She always wore a bikini top that was reminiscent of Princess Leia's Tattooine slave-girl outfit from "Return of the Jedi." She was goofy, bleached blond, most likely high while on the air, and (I suspect) a brilliant businesswoman.
"Call Asian Escorts now. You do not have to be Asian to call." "Welcome to the Dungeon. ... Let's go down." "Call 970-P-E-E-E. The extra E is for Extra Pee." When I saw Robin Byrd for the first time, I knew New York was my home.
Unlike its noncommercial public-access sisters, Channel 35 had a reason for existing -- somebody wanted money from you in the end. But the other four channels were a giddy, improbable grab bag of unrestrained self-expression. Off the top of my head, I remember these shows: "Mrs. Mouth" featured a man with eyes and a nose drawn on his chin and a wig around his neck. He was shot upside-down, offering hilarious commentary and occasionally gargling strange substances. Bonus features included soap-opera dramas portrayed by down-and-out Barbie dolls. "The Church of Shooting Yourself" featured a hipster/nerdy guy walking the streets of Manhattan, talking with frequent insight into his video camera. "On Patrol" featured Brandy Wine and Brenda-a-Go-Go, two vivid-looking drag personalities who interviewed local downtown celebrities. I was a huge fan of Linda Pendergraft, a lovely woman in her mid-thirties who offered New Age advice to her watchers in a breathy, baby-doll voice. In its early years, the show was incredibly simple: Linda would launch into a nonstop, 28-minute, stream-of-consciousness monologue, all the while looking meaningfully into the camera. She jumped topics acrobatically, sometimes returning to an abandoned train of thought many minutes later. If you smoked a joint while watching, the sudden return to logic could be gasp-inducing and even wise. Another show featured a guy who basically sat there, cock-and-balls naked, not doing much of anything. He was pretty easy on the eyes. I liked that show. There was an old woman whose name I can't remember who'd interview rich people at their various rich people functions. I always wondered what the rich people thought -- did they realize they'd be sandwiched between, say, the naked guy and those "White man are the devil!" preachers? These public-access shows, the best of them, weren't underground, culty pleasures for a hip few. Back then, everybody watched public access. In those days there just wasn't that much TV to watch. The "World Wide Web" was a few years from global domination. One could either watch television or, God forbid, read. And in Manhattan, which was then stacked so thickly with creative nutjobs, public-access TV was often the best thing on.
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Channel
35 -- aka "Paid Public Access" -- featured "The Robin Byrd Show."
For
New Yorkers of a certain era, the commercials are still part
of a delicious, shared language.