A Place Like This
by Mark S. King
 Mark S. King crammed a lot of living into
the 1980s as evidenced in his new memoir A Place Like This. A slim 180
pages, King’s, dizzying, rollercoaster tell-all takes us on his daze and
dark nights in Hollywood’s drugs, sex (sans rock and roll) gay culture.
The real bon mots in his memoir are not the
passages about drugs, sex, celebrity boinking, or the AIDS crisis. Most of
us old enough to read have been there either vicariously or personally.
Rather, the gems lie in King’s ability to take us to places we’ve
probably never been and to evoke heartfelt childhood memories.
He opens with his hilarious 1980 appearance
on The Price is Right, where his feathered and hairsprayed red hair snaps
“like an orange sheet over a bed” as he jumps up and down in
excitement. His phone sex service business, a unique phenomenon of the 80s
before internet and 900 numbers killed it, is fascinating as he fulfills a
man’s (and occasionally a woman’s) fantasy of the perfect lover over
the phone. King takes you through the calls pretending to be what the
customer wants in a man to get off. King never shares his customer’s
carnal pleasure; he’s too busy satisfying an itch inside his broken leg
cast with a ruler or playing cards with buddies with the help of the
phone’s mute button: “Talk dirty. Push. Ask for another drink.
Release. Ask what they are wearing.” He becomes a successful
entrepreneur, buying a condo with his earnings and calling it “The House
That Jack-Off Built.”
Halfway through his memoir, King reminisces
about his dad teaching him to build a box kite when he was a kid. It is a
quiet moment, very reminiscent of the kite-flying ending in Truman
Capote’s A Christmas Memory. He also nails his experience as a
10-year-old sissy of an Air Force Colonel lip-synching to Gwen Verdon’s
“Who’s Got the Pain When They Do the Mambo?” at one of his
mother’s coffee klatches. These memories are so delicately detailed and
emotionally rich, I wish King had done the same with his Hollywood
experiences.
King’s AIDS passages have a familiarity
to them, yet his cockeyed perspective keeps them interesting as he
describes two friends dying simultaneously as “a ghoulish race…to the
finish line” or compares the sound of a friend’s death rattle to a
percolating Mr. Coffee.
Did Hollywood corrupt Mark King? While King
never says he was a victim of Hollywood, he never says he wasn’t either.
His Web site www.marksking. com answers the question somewhat; though he
left Los Angeles in 1993, drugs and relationships have continued to
challenge him.
King certainly has talent; his graceful and
powerful gift of describing his growing up years is proof enough for me
that maybe pre-Hollywood is where his literary heart lies. I hope one day
he will take us there.
Charles L. Green is an Atlanta-based writer
and award-winning public relations professional.
|
Back to Top of Page 