Blogging About Being in Drug Rehabilitation in Japan and More

I have been having correspondence with another friend who I have never met, yet correspond with, just like Charles Bukowski and Gary North. My friend's name is Jp (I'm not sure he would want me to write his full name down. He seems a very humble person). Jp seems to be very well known in Hollywood. He is an artist, creator and producer. 


That's about all I know about him. Seems like a guy who enjoys his privacy and has just a few friends but those are strong relationships.

Jp has been around Hollywood for a very long time. He has seen what went on there in the sixties and knows Sunset Strip and the entertainment area well. It also seems that everyone in the so-called "Hollywood In-Crowd" knows Jp but I also gather he is not a part of that "in-crowd." (People like me think that is a good thing). Jp has been inspiring me, unbeknownst to him, to move into a more creative realm of writing. I think I am going to do that.


I've decided that I was going to start writing more about the many true and bizarre things that have happened to me in my life. I have been arrested a few times, should be dead (more than once); the lead singer of a one-hit wonder rock band, a drug addict, a witness to an exorcism; I won $100,000 at the lottery in '81 or was it '82? I've been divorced twice (not so special); I fought and defeated a rare and extremely deadly childhood cancer, met and worked with many famous people, been on TV; and I have the bragging rights of being the only DeeJay in Japan who has been fired from every FM radio station in Tokyo at least once (Bragging? That's right. If you knew how crappy these Tokyo FM stations are, then you'd agree) .... 


All in all, I've lived a charmed life. I want to write it down while I can.

My 54th birthday party

There's much material to cover, so first, I'll want to write about my true adventures in drug abuse and drug rehabilitation. This, inspired by Jp, but also inspired by Charles Bukowski of whom Jp is also a fan of. I will be posting some of these stories starting today or tomorrow (I am 1/2 way through the first one).


Before I do, though, I think I need to explain another reason why I do this. Of course, I'd like to be a famous writer someday too. But, if I get so lucky to be so, I also know that it would most certainly happen after my death, if at all. That's why I need to post these things. This blog is sort of my notes.


These stories will all be true stories to the best of my recollection and follow my writing style like the following two examples... But they will be even more raw and scary (I hope). I hope that I have the guts to write it down as it was and not to hide facts and sugar coat:


My Life is Like a "B" Horror Movie 


"All I wanted was one little drink, yet I couldn't have it." I said as I lay down on the sofa. The friend snorted the cocaine and rubbed his nose. Through his gasps he looked at me and said,

"Mike! This is a dry county in a Christian country in the Land of the Free. Why is it you have a problem with that? Why do you hate the baby Jesus!?" He laughed sarcastically at the absurdity of it all and handed the straw towards me. I refused. After a 24 hour flight, snorting cocaine was the last thing I needed.


On the left of me, here's a guy breaking the law by smoking marijuana. On the right of me, a guy breaking the law doing cocaine. Me, in the middle, I cannot even buy a glass of wine or a beer just because it is a Sunday? What is this? Enforced Christianity? Didn't Jesus drink wine?


John Belushi, Japan and Me - Or How the Movie Animal House Changed my Life


If you want to be special and do something really different, then you can't do what everyone else is doing. You have to go for the "gusto!" Watching John Belushi taught me to do that... Sometimes, it got me in big trouble with bosses, but the results have always been good. Like Francis Ford Coppola once said, "The things you get fired for at 20-years-old, are the things you are celebrated for at 50-years-old." I want to be celebrated. Who doesn't? Life is short.


Anyway, this inspiration to write these things down all-of-a-sudden. How did it come about? Well, as I wrote yesterday, first I decided to give up forever working with some clowns I know. Then Jp inspired me to watch some Bukowski videos. They caused me to remember how I felt when I was 30. Then Jp wrote about his work and frustrations.


So I decided that I am going to write these things down in the ext few days and here was my letter to JP explaining my motivations:

"Jp, I need to learn more from you. You have so much to share. Now, today, I am inspired by you and Bukowski to finally write down my experiences in drug rehabilitation in Japan. And I am doing that right now (taking a break). My thinking is that my blog writings are my notes (as well as a pocket notebook that I always carry). This year, I may get lucky and get a good sum of money from a business venture that I made a few years ago. I pray so. That allows me to have more freedom. Either way, I know that people create their own reality through self fulfilled prophesy so I am expecting the best and want to live my life. 


I want to write my experiences as I remembered they happened. I think it might make a good (maybe funny) collection of stories or even be good for a script (whether that script becomes movie or not is besides the point). Several people who know me well have read articles and posts when I admitted that I went drug rehab, divorced twice, was arrested a few times, etc. etc. 


They tell me, "Mike! Don't write that. People won't want to work with you!" 


I think, "Yep. Probably true. But so what? It is what it is. That was a long time ago and, in today's society, things (and people) are so f*cked up anyway. If they can't handle someone who is honest about their past, then I don't want to work with them anyway." 


There are so many people full of sh*t who are living plastic lives with plastic faces. Like that Roxy Music song, "In every dream home a heartache." That's the way it is. Our society is so sick because in every dream home there is a heartache; kid's a drug addict, father an alcoholic and having an affair, mom's addicted to pain killers, an unloved person relying on what a doll represents for love... On and on... Yet people want to keep the facade that they are "normal healthy and happy individuals." They don't want to admit their human failings. They want to live a life that is merely a show... 


I don't despise those kinds of people. They need to be pitied. If those kinds of people don't want to work with people like me who want to reach higher ground by telling the truth and admitting their faults, then why would I want to work with them? 


Who is the really sick person in this picture? 


I want to be happy. I want to be closer to God, Buddha, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, the big electrode, nature, peace, earth, the Sun, Bob, Tony, whatever-you-want-to-call-it. I want to reach the higher ground. I don't have any problem admitting my past.


Maybe I am wrong, but the best way to be happy and to reach that higher ground is to admit one's own problems and then, by doing so, you'll be able to be more accepting, understanding and less judgmental of other people's problems.


And, so, with that, my next posting will be about going into drug rehabilitation in Japan. Japan is well known for a no nonsense policy on drugs. Japan will put you in prison even if they find a tiny bit of marijuana on your possession. It is world famous and a well known fact that Japan doesn't mess around with drug abusers. 


Now, I can tell the story to you as it happened to me. Sounds scary? Well, it was, but that was a long time ago. Today? Call me crazy but I have very fond memories of drug rehab in Japan... It was much like my days in a university dorm.


The funny part about drug rehab in Japan is that they put the former drug abusers into the same hospitals as people who have been interned for mental disorders such as insanity or schizophrenia, so, when you are there, you never know why the person next to you is in the hospital. They could look completely normal but be unable to hold coherent conversations. On the other hand, they could look like a crazy mad scientist with their hair sticking out all directions and unshaven, seemingly barking mad crazy but be quite the well mannered gentleman... That sort of gentleman, that would be a normal person; a former drug addict, like me. I always looked like hell but had good manners and respect for people.


Of course I had respect for them, they scared the living daylights outta me. I didn't want them to kill me in my sleep.


The other tougher part about drug rehab is that you don't know when you'll ever be released until a week or a few days before release.

You'd look like this too is you only were allowed showers and shaves twice a week.

Compared to Matsuzawa Hospital, the hospital I stayed in, the movie hospital in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was pretty realistic in many ways. The difference between that hospital and mine? Not much. Everyone wanted desperately to get out of that place yet couldn't; and both hospitals had people dancing in the hallways. At least the hospital McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) was in had background music playing. My hospital had none... Yet they still danced. 


I also kept thinking of ways to escape and couldn't get that theme song from the movie "The Great Escape" out of my head.


The guys in the halls are still there dancing today, I'm sure. I am glad I am out and can talk about it. It is funny in parts and sad in others. I hope you will enjoy it. And I hope I don't come off as a pompous ass.

ROXY MUSIC - IN EVERY DREAM HOME A HEARTACHE

Thanks to Jp

Charles Bukowski, Gary North and Me - The Best Writers Don't Care What People Think

They don't care what you think. The best writers, I mean. I read the famous ones a lot. I think, sometimes, I read new, young ones that could be really good or great someday.

Charles Bukowski

Alas, I am not a great writer but I had a guy as a sort of teacher and advisor to me who is a great writer. In fact, I had two of them who really influenced me greatly. I'm not talking about some writer whom I have never come in to contact with excepting their written words in books I've bought, I'm talking about two who I have actually corresponded with who have written notes and letters to me. Those two guys really influenced me. Their names are Gary North and Charles Bukowski. Everyone knows Charles Bukowski today. He died a few years back. In the early 80's, he was a cult writer and few knew him. After he died, he became famous. Gary North is well known in political and historical circles. He is still alive. I expect that he will be very famous after his demise.

Gary North

Not to be too flippant, but dying is very bad for someone's health but I think it does wonders for an artist's or a writer's career... 


I will always be grateful that Gary North, years ago, would volunteer advice to me as to how to be a better writer as well as  helping me to publish my book. I'll get to Charles Bukowski in a minute.


One of the best pieces of advice Gary North ever gave me was something along the lines of "find your topic. Create a thesis. Study it well, write it and rewrite it. Rewrite it again after that. And finally, stick by your guns until someone can prove you wrong with facts or data. If new data comes up then rethink your position."


That was important advice for me. It was important because all writers  want people to like what they wrote. All writers want to think that they are correct in their thinking. All writers want to be popular and for everyone to like them.


But that is just dreaming and not realistic thinking whatsoever. The writer who writes in an attempt to please everyone - will be relegated to writing boring fiction and fantasy (which could be an honorable profession and much more profitable than writing nonfiction, by the way). 


The best writers, actually, are the ones who don't care what you or I think. The best writers know that readers really loving them or hating them with a passion is the best way to be. When people don't care either way, that's the death knell of any art. People must love you or hate you. That's what Charles Bukowski taught me. 


The following story about Charles Bukowski and me is pretty unbelievable - if you don't know me very well. I know my friend's will hear this story and say, "Yeah? That sounds exactly like something Rogers would do." I have lots of stories like this. Stories where I met the Ramones, Blondie, Arnold Schwartzneggar, George H.W. Bush, Phil Spector and a bunch of other people that I can't recall at the moment.... 

Anyway, here's the story about Bukowski and how he affected me... 


In the early 1980s my best friend, Jeff Hughart, and I started a free underground magazine in Southern California called Sixty Miles North. It was a punk underground rag that got pretty popular in a very short time. At that time, free underground magazines were a novel and new idea. Ours was one of the first.


At that time, there was this old man who was a popular poet and writer in the underground who (pardon my French) didn't give a sh*t what you thought. He had written a few books about how crappy his work life was and Jeff and I thought those books were awesome. His name was Charles Bukowski. Since my friend and I were ex-punk rockers we thought everything in mass pop culture and modern consumerist society was horrible crap so we gravitated towards "dark" writers and artists like Joy Division and Charles Bukowski. Bukowski's novels, we thought, showed total disgust and contempt for modern society and modern life and we liked that a lot.


It seemed it was obvious that Bukowski didn't care if people liked his writing or not. Bukowski thought everything was sh*tty and said so. That's why we thought he was way cool. 


Back in those days, Bukowski wasn't popular in the mainstream and was a cult artist. Bukowski lived in Los Angeles and it was well known that he liked the horse races. That was convenient for me because I lived near Los Angeles and so did my parents. In fact, my folks liked the horse races. They were horse race crazy too and, this is no exaggeration, by the time I was 15 years old, I had been to every race track in Southern California  a hundred times. As kids, we'd run around the horse races areas and knew all the best places to hide and play.


Great, eh? I spent many weekends playing at the horse race track while my parents bet. Now wonder why I am so screwed up today?


Jeff and I spent a lot of time on that magazine. It was our release from our jobs and it was fun. It was our creative outlet. We thought that we could get Bukowski to write for our underground magazine. 


I got a photo of Bukowski and showed it to my dad and mom and asked them if they had seen this guy down at the track. They weren't sure. Since Bukowski was a published author, and pretty old, I figured that he'd relax in the horse track's "Club House." In the Club House it is not crowded as tables cost a few dollars and one can sit, relax and not have to deal with massive crowds of people. Bukowski wrote that he hated the humanity at the horse track. From being there hundreds of times, I knew exactly what he meant, so from that, I also knew he must have sat in the Club House. (If you've ever been to the horse track you know the "smell of humanity": sweat, sh*t and stale cigar smoke....) In the Club House you could have your space and not be pushed and shoved. The Club House was relaxed. Like I said, my parents were regulars so they knew most of the people in the Club House. There were lots of famous retired actors and actresses there. The most famous one that I can remember was Mickey Rooney. He and my dad would often sit at tables next to each other and talk. 


My parents saw the photo but couldn't remember if they'd seen Bukowski or not. So, I went to look for him. Seriously. If you don't know about horse racing, this might seem impossible to do, but if you go to the track a lot and know that certain race tracks are closed when others are open and that there is only one Club House where the regulars hang out, you'd know it shouldn't be so hard to find some old guy betting on the horses. It's be akin to walking into a huge bar with, maybe, 200 customers or so and finding your guy.

Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yuniyoshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's

So, I went looking for Bukowski at the horse racing track... I figured if I found him, I could give buy him a coffee and hand him a magazine, and a stamped envelope addressed with our mailing address (this was way back before the days of the Internet) and ask him to jot down some junk and send it to us for publication in the magazine. 


At the track, I showed his photo to some of my parents friends, the workers there and Mickey Rooney. People said they recognized him but hadn't seen him for a while. I tried three different times but I never found Bukowski at the Club House. I gave up.


Jeff, on the other hand, tried an approached that I thought would never work in a million years. Jeff then sent him a letter out of the blue to his publisher and included the same sort of stamped envelope with the same tack that I tried. I figured my way at least had a small chance. I figured that if I could just speak to Bukowski personally, I could convince him to write for us. Jeff had other ideas.


In Jeff's envelope he included a sample of the magazine and a letter asking for a short poem or submission with a "Thank you." Jeff sent it off and we forgot about it.


Well, you can imagine our shock and surprise when the envelope came back to us from Bukowski two weeks later. We were thrilled... You can also imagine our disappointment when Bukowski hand wrote on our letter a "No thank you!" message saying he wasn't interested in writing for our magazine. We were, as Southern California people said back in those days, "Bummed out!"


But not to be deterred and being two guys with a huge sense of humor (and this is the part where you'll think, "That sounds like Rogers"), we decided to run his rejection letter as "Bukowski's writing for our magazine." I think we called it, "Rejection from Bukowski." We printed his rejection letter as is and told the story. We bragged how our "zine" had finally hit the "big time" as even famous writers like Bukowski refused to write for us (remember we were a punk rock underground magazine so that was cool!) I have that magazine around here somewhere, stacked inside of some boxes so I'll have to find it and show it to you sometime.


After that magazine came out, we, once again, sent one to Bukowski with another note. This time he wrote back to us something along the lines of, "I can't believe you guys are so hard up for material that you'd print my rejection letter." He then added two or three (I can't remember how many) short poems that we printed in the next issue.

U2's Bono is a wanker

From that I learned a great lesson in life and from Bukowski. The lesson in life I learned was anything is worth a try and you can't achieve the impossible until you try to do so and, you have to do what you want. Bukowski's writing, at that time, was very hard core and seemed extremely negative to me (OK. I was negative when I was in "punk mode.") I could have never guessed at that time he'd become so famous and popular. So popular, in fact, that wankers like Bono from U2 would try to increase his coolness factor by acting like he is a friend with Bukowski.


Oh, and that reminds me. I do recall one poem he wrote much later, after our initial correspondence. Here is what Bukowski wrote about the time when Bono from U2 called him: (this is from my memory so it isn't word for word):

I got a call from Bono the other day...

He said "Hi!" 

I said "Hi!" and asked how Cher was doing...

We didn't talk for 

long after

that...

Isn't that hilarious? Bono from U2 is so conceited that he thinks everyone knows who he is so he calls Bukowski to kiss his a*s. But Bukowski is not impressed (or he really doesn't know) and puts him down with the comment about Sonny and Cher! Sensational!

Sixties pop stars Sonny and Cher (Bono)

Today, I still read material by Gary North and Charles Bukowski sometimes and other great and famous writers. Now, thanks to the Internet and blogging, I think I can spot almost immediately some of those people with potential to be good or even great writers someday. In the day of print and paper, it was more difficult and costly for writers to say what they wanted to say. They had to tone down their message. Now, thanks to blogging, writers can say what they want.


The best writers start off as arrogant and obnoxious. They have the raw material to become good someday. These are the young people, though, who need to read and study and refine and write and rewrite. These are the people who need to open their minds and realize that they have so much potential if only they'd throw away preconceived notions.


It is as a famous Zen story goes:

A Cup of Tea

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"

"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

Fellow bloggers, especially you that are young, become great writers! 

Here is my advice to you: Find your topic. Create a thesis. Study it well, write it and rewrite it. Rewrite it again after that. And finally, stick by your guns until someone can prove you wrong with facts or data. If new data comes up then rethink your position. 


Always, do not care too much what other people think... Good art is not democratic.

And, ALWAYS keep an open mind and realize that many of the ideas we believed at 25 we find out at the age of 50 are completely wrong.

Lastly, let me leave you with this quote (and get off my soapbox):

"We have to abandon the idea that schooling is something restricted to youth. How can it be, in a world where half the things a man knows at 20 are no longer true at 40 - and half the things he knows at 40 hadn't been discovered when he was 20?" - Arthur C. Clarke

Psst! Sonny and Cher (Bono) were way cooler than U2's poseur vocalist Bono could ever be! Bukowski was an old man in the eighties. He wouldn't know about U2. Here's the Bono he must have thought he was talking to...

And, when U2 Bono hung up the phone, do you think Bukowski cared? 

Nope. Most probably not.

For Ryu, Andrew, Jp and Allison