Weekend Stubble

In 2004 the hee-larious electorate of Orange County elected one Steve Rocco to their school board without apparently knowing anything about the guy. Anything and everything is what they got: scraggly and wearing a knit cap, Rocco has weirdly transfixed meetings with rambles about the death of John Lennon and a conspiracy to kidnap his own parents by county medical officials.

Throughout the year, Orange County Weekly's The Rocco Files has suggested that not only is Rocco a performance artist, but maybe the second coming of Andy Kaufman:

Rocco hints at his real identity in his website, andykaufmanlives.com. There, he claims Andy Kaufman "faked his own death" in what was obviously the most masterful stunt in a masterful career and went on to live in relative obscurity.... Immediately below that declaration of faith, Rocco provides readers with a fascinating Q&A—with himself. It’s a technique Rocco employed in Hey, Man, the self-produced, self-distributed pamphlet of self-interviews in which Rocco grills himself about his resolution of the Kodak/Albertsons/SmokeCraft Sausage conspiracy that led to his 1980 conviction for shoplifting several rolls of film and a sausage from a Santa Ana grocery store....

Q: Steve Rocco, do you have anything to do with the Andy-returns sites or press releases?

A: Absolutely not. I stand on the corner and stare at the sky. They walk up behind you and yell boo.

When the Weekly tried a phone number listed by Rocco, it proved to be for the unamused office of Kaufman's former manager. One reader theorized that "Steve Rocco is probably the same ex-pro skater Steve Rocco who was a fan of the "comically political" punk band the Dead Kennedys, and he’s just following in DK frontman Jello Biafra’s footsteps by getting involved in a little politics and monkey wrenching it."

It won't be his first outing. The Weekly also discovered a self-published 1992 book by Rocco, which "revealed that Albertsons Supermarket tried to murder him 20 years ago":

The alleged plot by the seemingly innocuous doubler of grocery coupons began in 1980, when police arrested Rocco at a Santa Ana Albertsons and booked him on shoplifting charges. It’s an incident Rocco detailed extensively—really, really, really extensively—in his 1992 book, ROCCO Behind the Orange Curtain: Secret Chronicles & Public Record Accounts of Corruption, Murder & Scandal of Corporate & Political California.

Sadly, Amazon is out of copies, and I can't find one on eBay or Bookfinder. But I'm already sold on it: I must find that book....