Royal Young’s ‘Fame Shark’
Published by Heliotrope Books
As the subject and possibly the propellant, chasing the
adulation of others is the goal of Royal Young’s sharp and sad memoir, Fame Shark.
Shamelessly bold, this young writer has enough insight into
his own character to find its most treacherous flaws and then flays them out
for everyone to gawk and sniff, though not in full daylight. Sexual and drunk,
sometimes in white mink, mostly desiring women but angling for the attention
from anyone with genitalia, young Hazak grows up wanting to become some sort of
movie star/rock star/ artist/ dancer/ actor/ writer/kitchen sink. His lust for fame
heartily nudges him into a little bit of footwork, but mostly into the arms of
people who may be able to help him get ahead. Without discipline for craft or
any workaday understanding of what it takes to learn how to do a few things or
even one thing well, this rough and tumble Jewish kid from the Lower East Side
stumbles out from the shadow of his judgmental, narcissistic penis-sculpting
father and his warm but ineffective mother to murk his way through the canyons,
slums, opening parties and the occasional low end performance gig in New York
City. MySpace figures in greatly as a so-recent flame-out of lost hopes.
As an indictment of the unbalanced appetite for self
aggrandizement in the individual and then society, Royal Young, ne Hazak
Brozgold (the moniker one begs he reinstates),
smashes his face into ours, with those pale blue-gray eyes of sadness
over having his dick worshipped, often in the most incorrect mouths. A guy
without a grounded purpose, who found Bennington so boring he never saw a
second year, Hazak wastes his youth chasing the star fuckers of star fuckers,
sliding his way down the social pole to the lowest crowd of drug dealers in
Bushwick, before Bushwick was Bushwick, until he wakes up one day and
agrees—Okay, I’ll go to Illinois on that train and hang with my solid, White
Jewish homeys since nothing else has
really worked out. Pretty eyes and generational bitterness does not a life make.
Hazak was smart to board that Amtrak.
Intended or not, this highly readable, energized rocket shot
through louche terror has the great chance of striking any reader cold and
dead. But even better, furious. Who does not want to jump on their treadmill
time machine to run back to this youngin’ swilling booze and chaining Marlboro
Reds to yell, supportively, “You’re drinking too much! You are toying with
people who are then toying with you, all dishonestly! Your parents only sort of
care about you, it seems, but really, they just can’t believe how the hell you
are choosing to live! You really might be garden variety addicted, sexually
compulsive, without an ability to focus and you just haven’t figured that out
yet! Meditate! Or learn a trade!”
Hazak is infuriating. But thankfully for us, he infuriates
himself. He was raised better than this and deep down he knows it. It is no
surprise he finds strength in his family, the last option, to pull himself out
of what appears to be the Daddy addiction of them all in our lonely, atomized,
self sucking society of angry, traumatized souls: the search for spirit
crushing fame.
The book is best when things get very rough. When all is
going hunky dory as a kid, landing extras jobs in movies, and when the story
rolls out in the end with a warm fuzzy family feeling, you wish the middle
story would have had big and brave enough shoulders to shrug off the extra pads
around it.
Empty, empty, empty. Self loathing for a reason never fully
revealed. A family that produces addiction and hustling. A perplexing downfall
that never felt fully down. Writing at times just flatly listing events (in the
best way), other times, approaching lyricism through numb sadness. All this and
more. And it will not be found in any dazzling aquarium gift shop. Indie,
available, pulsing and fetid, Fame Shark,
will make you jones for the popping of old fashioned flash bulbs, a guilt-free
blow job (ladies, too), a shit load of money or maybe a nice bowl of soup.
Buy this book. Future pods of literary achievements will
swim toward you from the always moving Royal Young. Keep your eye out for his sharp
eyed fin above the zeitgeist water line. What a perfect chordate Royal chose to
emulate. The shark is a non-boney fish. All cartilage and teeth. Soft and
powerful, a jumble of predation. As with any enlivening memoir, and even more
so with this partially revealing salty tale, you will want to know what will
become of this person, this bottom feeding Chondrichthyes called Hazak/Royal/but
not late for the star studded awards dinner. We wait for Fame Shark II. The You Tube Series?
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