".....Yeah, hello?!.... Ron?!..... Ron?!! Can you hear me?!!"
"Loud and clear, Steve. Why are you yelling?"
"I can't hear on this damn phone..... Can you hear me?!"
"Yes, you're screaming..... Why don't you turn up the volume?"
"Yeah..... the volume..... ehhhhhh..... How do you.... Robbie!.....Robbie!!!!...... how do you turn up the damn volume on this thing?"...... (some fumbling and garbled words follow, then.....) Yeah.... Ron can you hear me? ...... Oh, that's better..... Look, Ron, Lee Priest is going to do the Last Word.... But that was Romano's column. For Lee, how do you like the name ‘Last Rights?"
Ron could give a shit about the name of the column. First Dorian article, then Blechman's editorial, on top of all the other ghost writing he does, and now this? Inside Ron's head he's hearing, ‘cha-ching!' "Yeah, that's great Steve."
"Yeah... listen, we want to talk about moving forward and how this is now Lee's column and how he's going to be writing this column.... And it's going to be outrageous!!.... Yeah..... And MD is going to be better than ever!"
Ron hangs up the phone, opens a new page in Microsoft Word and 15 minutes later he hits the "save" button on an easy 500 bucks, all while Lee is still asleep.
I just read "Lee's Column" - MD was obviously so excited about replacing me with Lee Priest in the back of the book that they just couldn't wait for the magazine to hit the newsstand so they posted the new column on the boards. It was a good read. Ron's work has a distinct style; so does Lee's (even without all the caps) but even though the by- line says Lee Priest, anybody can tell Lee didn't write it - as much for what it says as for how it's said.
I did, however, appreciate being compared to Bon Scott. That was pretty cool. But MD ain't no AC/DC. Not by a long shot. In the late 70s, Bon, Angus, and the rest of the boys put out a style of rock that was about as brutally honest as you could get. Dirty Deeds, Highway to Hell - that genre of music was gutsy, bold and honest. True hardcore rock'n roll! It wasn't pretty, but it was real. A magazine publisher building an editorial out of pieces of different people is closer in comparison to a story by Mary Shelley, not a rock band like AC/DC. It kind of reminds me of that line by Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder when he said, "I'm playing a dude, playing a dude. . .playing a dude." In MD's case it's one dude telling another dude what a dude is saying. It's similar to what they just recently did with an article that was written by Dennis Wolfe in which he denounces a low-carb diet. Unless Dennis has been using the Rosetta Stone course on English, on top of forgetting everything Chad told him, it's just another example of MD's "Frankenstein Journalism". Something you'll see a lot of in a publication billed as "no bull."
But, hey, a winning formula is a winning formula. And I'm sure Lee will have his name on some mighty fine writing moving forward. And that's really nice. Seeing Lee's name in my old spot put some serious closure to the fact that I'm not there anymore. And it made me really appreciate where I am today. I'm so glad I no longer reside in that land of "no bull" contradiction. However, as the editorial says, the show will go on. The sky is not falling, and MD will likely endure. How well, is anyone's guess. Especially when you remember those famous lines by Abe Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time". . .especially when your mantra is "no bull."
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