We were at a shitty diner in Pompano Beach, one of those places where the waitresses still call you “hon” but mean it more like a warning than a kindness. The plastic booths had that sticky, skin-grabbing quality you only get in the Florida heat, and the pastrami was somewhere between lukewarm and edible — just the way Al Goldstein liked to complain about it.
He was halfway through his sandwich, a smear of deli mustard on his cheek, when he dropped a line that stuck with me like heartburn.
“You know what always gives me a fucking hard-on?” he said, chewing mid-sentence. “Hearing some priest or congressman choke out the words SCREW Magazine. Like the words themselves were acid burning through their tongues. Fucking beautiful. Like—like tantric Chi.”
“Chi?” I asked, sipping a Coke that tasted like it had been filtered through an ashtray.
“Yeah, Chi,” he repeated, like I was a fucking moron. “You know, energy. Life force. Like Star Wars. I don’t need yoga or incense. I get my Chi hearing Scalia or Senator Erwin force the words ‘SCREW Magazine’ on C-SPAN.”
He took another bite, then pointed his greasy finger at the plate. “You see this pickle? This is a travesty. This is what happens when Jews retire to Florida. Even the goddamn pickles give up.”
Two booths over, a sunburned couple turned to stare. Al noticed.
“Keep eating your coleslaw, Stepford,” he barked. “You’re in the presence of genius.”
And he was, in his own barbed-wire way.
“Philly,” he said, leaning in close, his breath full of garlic and conviction, “you know what the First Amendment really means? It means I can print a close-up of a prolapsed anus, mail it to a nun, and call it journalism. And if that offends you, good. That means it’s working.”
Then he dropped his napkin, leaned back, and smirked like the devil after a good deal.
“Speaking of offense,” he said, “you hear about the city trying to make me take down the finger?”
Ah yes. The eleven-foot foam fuck-you statue in his backyard — a magnificent monument to Al’s eternal war with everyone and everything. Originally a prop from Spin City — which, full disclosure, I may or may not have helped him liberate from Silver Screen Studios at Chelsea Piers. That’s another story.
Anyway, the city of Pompano Beach wanted it gone. Claimed it violated some zoning ordinance or public decency clause or whatever polite term they use for “we don’t like your kind around here.”
But Al fought. Tooth and nail. Press conferences on his lawn. A t-shirt campaign. Legal threats. He even ran for Broward County Sheriff. “It’s not obscenity,” he told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s sculpture. It’s protest. It’s fucking art.”
And goddamn it — he won.
They backed off. The finger stayed. A concrete-looking salute to free speech, to defiance, to not going quietly.
“People don’t understand,” he said, tearing the last chunk of pastrami in half like a rabbi with a prayer book. “I’m not just doing this for me. I’m doing this for every miserable bastard who’s ever wanted to say ‘fuck you’ and couldn’t. I’m the sacrificial schmuck.”
Flo refilled his coffee, dropped the bill and walked off before he could complain.
He looked out the window, watching a pelican land in a ditch.
“Let’s go piss off the mayor,” he said, putting the lid on his to-go cup and flicking the bill towards me.
—P.
