Gonzo Neurotic

“Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.” —Anthony Bourdain

Fifty years of sex, drugs, show business, and bad behavior from the inimitable laureate of American excess, Jerry Stahl.

Long before descending into the underworld of addiction in Permanent Midnight—the memoir, and later film, that made him famous—Jerry Stahl had built a singular career reporting from America’s psychic gutters and cultural sideshows. Ricocheting from porn sets, televangelists, undertaker conventions, recovery culture, and all manner of Hollywood grotesquerie, he fearlessly explored the darker territory of heroin, fatherhood, Jewish identity, and survival. Stahl’s work has always been electric—but much of it had lain buried in the lost world of alt-weeklies and pre-internet magazines, decimated by the digital corporate ogre.

Now, in Gonzo Neurotic, Stahl brings together the New Journalism that shaped his singular voice, interlaced with his own wild-ass commentary on his youthful lunacy and catastrophic life choices. Spanning the 1970s to the 2020s, the book takes readers from the “wet heart of Pageantland” at the Miss America contest, to the twisted realms of post-nuclear cult erotica, to the TV show ALF, and to the extremes of midnight moviedom. Simultaneously, Stahl charts his own mental and physical struggles alongside profiles of such figures as Marlon Brando, Samuel L. Jackson, Benicio del Toro, and an enterprising brothel owner who opted for the professional name “Hillary.” The result is a sharp, wickedly funny, and ultimately cathartic reckoning with a half-century of cultural and personal upheaval.

The range is the point. Stahl confesses to writing Cafe Flesh, the post-apocalyptic sex film that replaced Pink Flamingos on the midnight circuit; works out what Hugh Grant did for Divine; goes looking for Brando; sits down with Mickey Rourke, Bruce Jay Friedman, and the late pornographer-philosopher Marco Vassi; files a dispatch on his own hepatitis C diagnosis and what he calls the end of being hip; and reports from the singles trade, the sin trade, and the smart-drug boom. Fiction and screenwriting sit alongside the journalism—I, Fatty, Perv, Pain Killers, an episode of CSI—and the collection closes with “Mona’s Gorilla Lounge,” the first thing he ever published. Threaded through it is the running column O.G. Dad, written in his sixties about new fatherhood, which supplies the book its unlikely tenderness.