Introducing Shmushkin

Andras Jones

See below for links to the video and MP3 of "Punkin Lovin'"!

[The New Masculine] • Andy Shmushkin is the guy who sings the songs that accompany my occasional posts about new masculinity on Reality Sandwich. He’s kind of my muse, sort of my brother, possibly my nemesis, and definitely an inspiration to me. I want to introduce him to you.

Little Andy had an auspicious beginning. He was born with a moustache, and a hard on. His mother was a Buddhist monk in the mountains of Northern Canada. His father was Canada’s most beloved alcoholic in the 70’s (no small honor.) Shmushkin grew up between the monastery and the barstool.

A kid with a moustache gets lots of attention. Some of it good, and some of it great. The women of the taverns took to him and the men all got a kick out of his father and his mannish son. Everyone looked after the kid, as much as they could through the bottom of a whiskey glass, and Shmushkin had lots of sexual adventures at a very young age. His tales of youthful encounters are epic.

Between excursions with his besotted father he would return to his mother at the monastery on the outskirts of Banff. There the monks treated Shmushkin like a child of destiny. The strict austere love of the monks trained Shmushkin to “hone his twinkle”, as he puts it. He grew solid and flexible under their guidance, and confident. Very confident.

I met Shmushkin when I was living in a trailer outside of Andy Dick’s place in Los Angeles back in ‘03. Shmushkin liked the songs I was writing with Dick and the ones that Andy turned down ended up in Shmushkin’s repertoire.

How did Shmushkin go from being a moustached boy in northern Canada to a couch-surfing folk singer in turn of the century Los Angeles? That’s really a tale for him to tell. He’s always saying that he’d like to tell it in “the world’s first pornographic children’s film.” He insists that he doesn’t mean child pornography but it’s a fine point and one that I’m not sure a major distributor would understand.

When I met him, Shmushkin had just stopped working for Barely Legal magazine as a chaperone for Barely Legal girls. We were both at one of those “boring” Hollywood events that make a great story later. Andy Dick was chasing after every cute boy or girl he could get his hands on, which can be a particularly nightmarish brand of entertainment especially when even Andy’s not enjoying it. Amidst these madcap hijinks Shmushkin had a pleasant amused air that made it easy to be around him. It drew people to him and Andy Dick, sensing someone with more natural charisma than he had, was no exception. When he heard that Shmushkin needed a place to stay he told him he could live in my trailer. I reminded Andy that he had two trailers so Shmushkin got the second one and we became neighbors.

Shmushkin had to start going by his surname because there was only room for one Andy in the Dick compound. He got a kick out of telling people to call him Shmushkin because, according to him, the name means pussy in the slang of the shtetle that his father’s family was run off of back in the old country.

Shmushkin and I would hang out swapping tunes and smoking pot. Turns out he was a fan of the records I made with my band The Previous. This kind of blew me away. People who knew my band’s music were rare and fans were even rarer. When I heard him sing my songs I couldn’t believe how much better they sounded. Without all my righteous anger and desperation to be understood I could actually hear them. Shmushkin almost never raises his voice and his subtle versions of the songs I had penned put my own bellicose performances to shame.

For the last several years his job as a chaperone for Barely Legal girls had been a deeply fulfilling experience for him, but not in the way that many men might assume. Accompanying eighteen and nineteen year old girls to photo shoots to assure their safety and honor gave him a sense of purpose, and it offered a challenge that inspired him. He referred to himself during this period as a “samurai eunuch.” His office was paid for by Hustler Inc. as part of an out-of-court settlement in a series of sexual harassment lawsuits. Shmushkin was good at his job. The girls liked and trusted him. He said that being a kid with a moustache was kinda like being a porn star but never explained what he meant by it. The girls seemed to understand.

The one time he faltered as a chaperone was just before I met him. There was this girl named Helen Hellion and he fell hard for her. The love affair caused him to resign in shame. Not only did he break his rule of chaperone celibacy but he did so with a girl who wasn’t even “legal.” Hellion, it turned out, was only sixteen and faked her age to make the money for a trip to Paris to study fashion and cocaine. Hellion was a smart cookie. Very well-read. Way too young for me, or for him, but it didn’t matter to Shmushkin. It wasn’t about age. Hellion was old enough to enjoy Shmushkin’s gentle love and he knew it. The shame for Shmushkin was in his failure to live by his own code. He had promised himself to contain his sexual energy with the young women in his charge and he had let himself down. This seemed to be a turning point in his life, an existential crisis from which he would soon emerge as the charismatic character that almost took Hollywood by storm that season.

It only took a few weeks of Shmushkin and me playing music together before Andy D was falling out of love with Shmushkin. He hated Shmushkin’s versions of the songs. He hated the songs. When Andy turned a song down he expected it to be the end of it. It still drives him crazy that Shmushkin is singing my song "Punkin Lovin’" on Andy’s live CD, Do Your Shows Always Suck?

Before Andy banished Shmushkin, first from his heart, and then from his Airstream trailer, he took him to an event at The Knitting Factory in Hollywood. He invited Shmushkin onstage to play "Punkin Lovin’" to prove what a crappy song it was and people loved it. Some executives from National Lampoon were in the audience that night and invited Shmushkin in for a meeting. The following day Shmushkin borrowed my guitar and went down to the corporate offices. When he came back he had an invitation to have his (our) stuff on the National Lampoon website. Shmushkin said he was excited because he was a hug fan of Caddyshack and I reminded him that Caddyshack wasn’t officially a National Lampoon production, but he pointed out that since it used enough former National Lampoon talent (stars, Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and writer, Doug Kenney) it qualified. I couldn’t argue, and I was excited too.

We needed to record "Punkin Lovin’"and quick. So I called my friend Willie Wisely and we got Shmushkin into the studio. Meanwhile, we got to work on the video (featuring Lisa Jenio of the cult-pop band Candypants) and in under a month we were ready to deliver a song and a video in time for Halloween. Before we could get it to National Lampoon the song (which I had snuck into a package that Andy’s manager was sending to KROQ) ended up getting primetime airplay. KROQ devoted an hour to the song and its topic of pumpkin fucking on one of their morning shows. All of a sudden it seemed like all anyone in LA could talk about was pumpkin fucking and this mysterious character named Shmushkin. He had that energy around him that people who are on the verge of becoming famous sometimes have. It was fun to be around.

What does all this have to do with the emerging new masculine archetype? It’s difficult to put my finger on it, exactly. Like some harbinger of personal apocalypse, Shmushkin’s appearance on the scene coincided with major changes in my own life. These were not comfortable changes and they demanded a new kind of thinking and a new way of being just to stay emotionally alive. I noticed that many of the men of my generation were encountering similar soul-testings during this millennial shift. What they didn’t have, and I did, was Shmushkin. And that made all the difference. He was the trickster that led me off the path and into the thicket where I would discover my power, but first we had to meet and contend with the Anti-Shmushkinites.

To be continued…

See Shmushkin’s video for "Punkin Lovin’" here: http://www.nationallampoon.com

And to listen to "Punkin Lovin'," click the MP3 link below: