Give Me All Your Cash Except the Pink Stuff

by TRB

I will never know how much pink money I have made in my life. But I will never forget receiving it.

It worked liked this: we had a fellow on the staff of The Stars and Strips European Edition named Joe. And I don't remember if he was an actual staff writer. I do remember that Joe covered Jazz, which is respected greatly in Europe, unlike it is here - its home. Blues also receive more respect in Europe than they do here, their hometown. But Rock. Well Rock is worshiped. Rock musicians are Gods in Europe; It is also a good sounding board for short group tours of new material before they take it to the States.

One day Joe, the Jazz lover put his arm around me and asked if I wouldn't mind taking my Rock reviews and interviews and mailing them to Communist Bloc countries where underground newspapers would appreciate them greatly. Undergound newspapers? I hadn't worked for one of those since 1967.

I said I would do it as long as someone else did the mailing. I didn't want to go into business with the Soviet Bloc while I was enlisted in the U. S. Army. I was interviewing rock groups four or five times a week. It became very tedious with the addition of their publicists who both spoke for them and told them what to say. It was not a glamorous job; more like a pain in the butt. But this thing with Joe and the "spooks" with whom he worked might be alright. It was "only rock'n roll."

But I had forgotten all about the talk with Joe, who was setting up an interview with me and singer, song-writer, jazz pianist Nina Simone, worlds most talented angry person.

One day the dirty white envelope just showed up at this apartment complex where I lived down the street from the paper. I tore the envelope open. It had funny, oversized stamps printed in exotic inks. I was mesmerized. Inside of the envelope were the names of several communist countries and what I believed might be undeground papers there. And then there was the money.There was maybe a half pound of it. And it was pink. Dirty pink.

Of course it would be dirty, being such a light shade of pink. I wondered if they had yellow or white money.

I was living with a lovely woman at the time. She was from California and thought perhaps much communist thought had gone into the color of this money. Her theory, which I still believe occasionally, when I receive a contact high at a family outing, was that the Communists tired of being called "Pinkos" by Americans, had responded by glorifying the color pink on their money.

My theory was that they were called pinkos because their money was pink.

I went right to Joe with this near-brick of pink money wanting to know what amount I was holding. He took it, sighed, inspected the various denominations with their portraits of people known to very few other people and said. "I think you've got about $20 here. Naturally I was disappointed and immediately schooled in the devaluation of currency. I asked "What do you do with this money, does the bank accept it, turn it into Marks?"

"Oh no, " he said. "they would laugh you out of a bank with that stuff. You need about $1000 of it before they will even let you come to the counter"

Of course I saw the cosmic joke in this immediately, and I can't remember how many cirgarettes were lighted with my "earnings," how many fire places were started. You have to laugh, right? I even laughed at the various bricks of pink money that followed. And there were many.

Where I draw the line, hoewever, is fan mail. Suddenly after my articles began to appear in Eastern Europen papers, I had an uptick in my mail, a major uptick. This was 1980. The hostages were out in Iran. American Rock groups had not really broken into the communist bloc countries.

But there were my stories. I kept writing them and fan letters kept coming.

I had to thrown almost all of them out. An interpreter told me they were from young boys and girls who wanted - get this - my autograph. Why? Because I had actually been in the same room with the person who they thought was most special in the world. And they just wanted the autograph of someone who has spent time with the person, had interviewed the person, who might even be a friend of that person.

Try to imagine having so little freedom, and being so convinced that you will never see the performer you idolize, that you would accept an autograph from a complete stranger who had met him?

I continued to throw away mail, countined to pick up large bags of useless money and went on with my life.

I probably earned $3000 or so in pink money, but I didn't attempt to cash it in. I do remember the winter of 1980 though, almost as though it had been wall-papered into my mind in pink dirty money,

(This will run as a small chapter in the eventual ebook "The Newspaper man is Defunct" ed. note)