DAVID CARUSO: BEVERAGE

David Caruso is like an alien species that crawled headlong out of the Florida swamps and infiltrated Miami in mirror shades. He’s the sunburned, insecure redhead you see standing in convenience stores having D&M’s with Penthouse, the type who winds himself in cling wrap on weekends then jacks off over charcoal renderings of Elvis. He gives the impression that he’s the Sensitive New Age Guy who only eats ‘orange foods’ and has installed a light-up dance floor in his bedroom just so he can solo tango to Manilo hits in the dark hours. I fucking hate those guys. They knit sweaters and wear your Grandmother’s perfume and learn archaic Tongan dialects just to sound cool in bars.

Anyone who’s ever watched the abortion that is CSI Miami will understand that Caruso is no longer an actor but a drinking game. One tortuous evening I knocked back a shot of absinthe every time he touched his gun holster and found myself up-chucking a Picasso onto the carpet as the credits rolled. Innocent suburbanites have been hospitalised after knocking back a shot of Smirnoff each time Caruso slides off his sunglasses whilst muttering lines like “No more streetwalking for her, the only job she has now is a date with the afterlife.” I made that up, but game over. David Caruso: you are a beverage.

What’s more – Caruso plays a character called Horatio Caine. Sounds like some kind of Satanic inbreed from a Edgar Allen Poe novel. One who haunts a bell tower and eats women’s fingernails and calls his hair “Mamma”. In the CSI Miami back-story, it is claimed that Horatio has a history in explosives and was a former officer of the US bomb squad. How plausible is this? Well, let’s do the math. If Horatio was sent an anthrax parcel he’d probably taste the shit. If he was confronted with six green wires sprouting from a ticking box, he’d put it in a passing pram and hope the mother failed to notice. Every episode he strokes that toy store cap gun and gazes melancholically at the bodies of dead strippers who’ve mainlined glue (when you know all he’s fantasizing about is wearing their stilettos).

Bring back Sipowitz to commercial television. He was mean, he was fat and he sported an awesome moustache and the kind of sausagey hands that could render a grown man unconscious just by accepting a smoke from one them. I miss those days. I long for the era of crime TV when the Caruso’s of this world were weeping into handkerchiefs at poetry readings and the real cops were accepting bribes from Latino street gangs, smashing delinquents heads into windows and confiscating their nose candy for personal use at the weekend.

R.I.P