Tony Hightower is always right.

She’s allergic to good news. All her best friends are miserable.

I’ve invented a sandwich that you can never finish. But only one person can eat it, or else it loses its magic.

A woman with one heel. Cinderella, half vindicated, half discovered, limping to the castle.

A fetish for the grotesque. Finding freaks, outcasts, buying them dinner, watching them eat, though his cover story is plausible. A writer. It’s the best excuse.

Dead eyes don’t always hide deep thoughts. Aloof. Or maybe zoned out. Or alpha-waved. Or zero iq. A, z, a, z.

A golfer who never golfs. A chef who never cooks. A filmmaker who never makes a YouTube short, or even picks up a camera. An office worker who never gets anything done. A great lover who dies a virgin.

I missed my bus. The book I wrote last year got made into someone else’s series while I sat on my ass and played angry birds.

I’d rather be privileged than free. Privilege is given. Freedom is taken. If you have a choice, you’d be stupid to choose freedom. If you don’t, then, well, you’re not privileged, are you.

He knew Robert Johnson. Played the delta blues out of the back of his car for 60 years. Toured with the stones, thorogood, stevie ray vaughan, the dead, jack white, then he got back in his car & drove home.  One day his hand breaks, and he gets offered an office job.

I run an auto body shop. One day I get an application from the kid who bullied me in high school. He just got out of prison. I hire him, and nice him as hard as I can. He doesn’t recognize me. My revenge is complete, internal.

A jury of eleven people get sprung from their case to find all their friends and family are gone. All they have is each other.

I’m a rat on the train tracks, looking at the stars. They’re actually the lights of the subway. My feet and fur are always sticky. I wish.

He tweets his turds. It wins him a Pulitzer Prize. Hollywood calls him. He answers from the toilet. He’s not Elvis, he always has to tell them.

She fantasizes that she’s Julie Hagerty from “Airplane.”

Everything is brown. He thought he loved it, but it’s too much.

She’s obsessed with looking up her own skirt in public. Mirrors, video cameras, trip wires. One day, she gets caught. It’s not sexual, she insists. She just needs to know she’s all still there.

He’s in love with the announcer on the subway. She’s a sixty year old housewife in Maine. He hears her voice everywhere. He tracks her down, goes to her house. “I’m calling the police now,” she says, in perfect diction.

Siamese twins, connected at the earbud. It’s a medical condition. Doctors come from all over the world. It’s not music, but an exposed vein they share. They can’t hear the diagnosis. They die happy.

He identifies with Jonah. He wants to be swallowed by a whale. He keeps jumping into oceans, he gets banned from cruises and all sea travel. Finally, he stows away and gets his wish. Regular whales won’t help him, but a killer whale will.

A cassette tape. He has no player. It’s all he has left of her.

All those chickens, drowning in feed. Crushed by plenty.

He’s never won an election, because he tells people what they want to hear. Also he has a single horn coming out of the top of his head, and two tails, one coming out of each buttock, hairless and mouselike.

The greatest panhandler of all time. He saves up, buys a football stadium, fills it with people wanting to hear the secret of his success, and then bums fifty cents from each of them.

She makes it to 100 years old. When asked what she wants, she says she wants to fuck Willard Scott. One night, he comes in, incognito, and fucks her. Her last orgasm ever. Eleven years later, and she won’t shut up about it. No one believes her. I believe her.

The lonely spinster with forty rhinoceroses in her apartment. How does she feed them? Love.

It’s not like I can come up with a whole lot of reasons why I’m not sad to see Roger Clemens fall so completely, to the point where he might be the first ever major leaguer to actually do time for crimes related to steroid use, but the ones I have feel like plenty.

To say he was a pompous piece of shit impugns all other pompous pieces of shit, even among all-star major leaguers, which frankly is a self-selecting group of PPOSes. The guy had never heard the word no, never acknowledged his team once over his entire 76-year career — he often appeared convinced that the other people on the field dressed just like he was were merely ardent fans who had won some kind of contest to stand closer to the light of the world that was the Rocket than anyone else did, and not fellow players, often all-stars themselves, who at least still had some dim understanding of what being part of a team was all about, or at the very minimum understood the good PR of paying lip service to same — and seemed, constantly, to mistake himself for some kind of God, whose word was law and whose every thought was gospel.

He had long since surrounded himself with an entourage of people who worshipped at the light that shone from his Texas-sized ass, and who repeatedly covered for his every indiscretion and transgression, be it with an underaged country singer, a botched negotiation that resulted in switching teams under cover of night and under suspicious circumstances (a feat Rocket and his people committed multiple times over his career), or getting his people to bring steroids across the border in both directions so he could maintain his self-image as the greatest pitcher who ever lived.

The numbers he amassed over his career are impressive. Of course they are. But the conversation of the best to ever throw no longer includes him. His reputation has finally caught up with him, and all the puff pieces in ESPN The Magazine and Sports Illustrated aren’t (and won’t be) enough to hide the fact that this guy is missing a certain self-awareness that is required to actually function in society, and all those strikeouts, all those awards and all that money are merely numbers on a page, next to the actual careers-as-careers of people like Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax. Shit, Don Drysdale and Steve Carlton turned out to be jackasses of the highest order too, but at least they played the game properly, and they earned their way into the Hall of Fame.

It wasn’t just that Rocket did steroids. Lots of people have had that happen, and seriously, it’s baseball, the sport of stolen bases, the hidden-ball trick, spitballs and hidden emery boards. If you cheat and get away with it, more power to you. Crime pays. It’s that Rocket forgot that sports aren’t life. Had he stayed in the sporting world, he’d still be a world-class dick who ruined every team he left and named his kids Kody, Kris, Krusty, Kumquat and Karrot, but he’d have been able to take a few years off from the game, go sit on his pile of money on his half of the state of Texas where all his trophies are, and come back in a few years after all this had blown over to accept his Hall of Fame induction and re-enter the sport as an owner or a broadcaster or whatever the hell he wanted. But he forgot sport wasn’t reality, or maybe he never knew in the first place, and so he showed up on Capitol Hill and testified under oath that he had never taken steroids, had never met with the people they were accusing him of meeting with, and what, you’re gonna believe these little shits when I’m the one telling you the truth? I didn’t do anything wrong. These twerps just hate the Rocket for being Rocket! Look me in the face and tell me you believe them over me. Fuck this sworn testimony bullshit. I’m telling you, man to man, I ain’t done what they say I did. How can that not be enough for you, Senator?

So now, he faces a couple of years in the pen for perjury, and Cooperstown is fading fast. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. There was another way, though. Consider the case of Mark McGwire.

A lot of the facts are the same. kid phenom, power player, succeeded at every level he ever played at, was a star from Day One in the majors, developed a reputation for being reclusive and boorish off the field, but no one cared as long as he kept hitting the long ball, and allowed himself to be the marquee guy in the sport when it really needed one. He played the game. And when congress came calling to investigate him for steroid use, he didn’t thump his chest and try to lie his way out of a paper bag. He actually listened to his lawyers. He turned turtle. I’m not here to talk about the past, Mister Senator, sir. I’m here to talk about the future of the game. Over and over again. He wouldn’t answer a single question. I’m not here to talk about the past. Like Alberto Gonzales, his testimony-that-wasn’t made him look like the lying sack of shit he was, and he was mocked unmerciful for years afterward, but after that, he disappeared into the California hills, and has only started to make appearances again in the last few months. And people seem to have begun the forgiveness process. He might even get into Cooperstown someday.

For Rocket, there’s no chance. If he spends even one day in prison for this, he’ll replace Barry Bonds as the poster child of all that is wrong with this era. And frankly, that’s as it should be. But he’ll probably get probation, and he’ll buy a baseball school somewhere, and while his statistics will endure and be passed by better cheaters and the occasional actual great player, his place on the Mount Olympus of the greatest douchebags in the history of sport will remain unobscured, unblemished, and immutable.

I’ve always had an arms-length relationship with Alex Chilton. Sure, I heard “The Letter” a million times, and the first time I heard “September Gurls” as a kid, I was all, hey, that’s alright, though i was just a kid and didn’t have access to a lot more, especially since there wasn’t a radio station that reliably played them in Toronto in the late 1970’s. I remember there being a bit of a to-do when Big Star broke up, but while the deejays on my favorite stations mentioned how great they were, they never actually played them, and at that point I was still too young to do anything other than hunt down the occasional album with my paper route money when I had the chance, and the Sam The Record Man outlet in Fairview Mall didn’t have any Big Star anyways.

Then punk entered my life, and I finally had some music of my own. The eighties were a flood of Jam and Clash songs, punctuated with the occasional Black Flag & Bad Brains thing and whatever pop or reggae tracks I managed to get out of the Island or Stiff catalog. I discovered Elvis Costello & Nick Lowe, and from there found jazz, and it wasn’t until the release of Tim that I really had ever even properly heard of the Replacements.

Which opened the hell out of my eyes. Listening to Paul Westerberg scream and stumble his way through the crazed fraught masterpieces he’d wrote, well, I finally, thought, that. That’s the kind of song I want to listen to forever.

I listened to Tim and Let It Be for the next year without interruption, learning every melody line, every missed bass fill, every spliced guitar solo, every broken note Paul sang, every fumbled outro, despite the obvious and inescapable fact that the whole band was a bunch of fuckups, they could still make perfect pop, still pull the emotions they wanted out of you whenever they wanted, still make art, in the widest and truest and most personal sense of the word. When Paul starts into “We are the sons of no one” on Bastards Of Young, he means it with every molecule of air in his lungs. At the end of Let It Be, the line “How do you say I miss you/to an answering machine?” still makes me stop and take a deep breath even now, twenty-some years and hundreds of listens after the first time I heard it. It was — it is — beauty, honesty, shit, perfection. They’re letting their nerve endings hang out and daring us to watch the light show. It’s remarkable, and it makes me look at wastes of time like the whole emo movement like it’s some kind of extended comedy act. I can’t take anyone in that scene seriously after listening to Paul Westerberg be realer in his sleep than System Of A Down will ever be in a quadrillion years. And I like System Of A Down.

Which brings us to Alex Chilton, and “Alex Chilton.” Again, my only exposure to him until well into my adulthood was through the Replacements, and maybe that was for the best. You can never make your own case the way another great artist and fan can make it on your behalf. It almost didn’t matter how great you actually are, as long as someone thinks enough of you to write a chorus as beautiful as 

Children by the million scream for Alex Chilton when he comes around
They sing, “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”

I remember the first time I heard that song. I was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant across from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, living on leftovers from the kitchen, and sleeping in a flop house. It was about 1987 or 1988, and I was homeless and destitute. But when we would clean up at the end of the night, one of the cooks would let me put on my cassettes while we finished our chores (I was in no hurry to leave, even at 4:00 in the morning), and I would often bring in Tim to play. The other guys didn’t mind, it was upbeat and they thought I was crazy, so they indulged me. When Pleased To Meet Me came out, I stole the cassette from a record store; at that point, that band was by far the best thing in my life, and I wasn’t going to have the money to buy it, like, ever.

The first time I played the new tape in the kitchen, the cooks didn’t like it as much. They wanted a routine, and I was fucking with it. But that shitball boombox on top of the salad table was the only tape player I had access to, and I’d be damned if i was going to let anyone take that away from me. And that was when I first heard “Alex Chilton,” and it made me cry a little, and I thought, you know, I’ve been hearing about this guy my whole goddamned life. Maybe I should hunt him down and see what the hell the big deal is.

So I found a tape called Bach’s Bottom, essentially an outtakes and seconds collection, not a great place to start. I had no one who knew about him to help me, I just had my instincts, and the tape was cheap, so I figured it was as good a place as any. I had never heard of Big Star. Fuck, I was homeless, every minute spent indoors anywhere was a little victory. It was just too sloppy and repetitive for me to get (it seemed there were about 93 versions of “Take Me Home And Make Me Like It,” and “Bangkok” just seemed kind of racist), so I figured either Westerberg was having us on about him or he heard something in him that maybe wasn’t there, and so that was it for me & Alex Chilton for another few years, until I was actually in a band of my own, and the chorus of people around me were all shocked that I wasn’t into him yet.

So I managed to buy (I was employed and homed by this point) #1 Record and Radio City, and it was another one of those moments when you realize you’ve been holding your breath for a really long time, and you open your lungs and breathe deeply for a minute or two, and you realize the air smells like flowers and you’re awake for the first time in months. So many more things made sense after that. That happens every once in a while.

There’s a reason this piece isn’t about Alex Chilton as much as it is about my favorite of his fans, and that’s because as much as I now love Big Star, I never really got into Alex Chilton’s solo stuff. Maybe at some point I will. I see why people love it, and it’s great for all the reasons the Replacements are great. But when I want to hear Alex Chilton, I still go to Paul Westerberg.

It’s true that without Chilton, there is no Westerberg, at least not in the way that I grew to love and require in my life in the way I required food and shelter, and for that, I will honor his life and art in as much detail as I have in me. Hey, I’ll listen to “Thirteen” forever. Even though Westerberg may touch me more, and I may feel closer to him through his recorded and live work than I did to Chilton, who I always only ever knew as a bit of a hot mess whose best work happened before I knew who he was, I’ve spent enough time with both of them now that I really feel like I lost a good friend yesterday, one that I didn’t get to know nearly as well as I wanted to before he died.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put on a record.