Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  Richard Sigal, who attended Alfred University in upstate New York, had remained friends with Reed and visited him at Syracuse with his friend Tommy, whose sister went to the school. He remembered his first visit to Lou’s room: “We knocked. No one answered. I tried the knob and the door opened. It was five p.m. and the room was dark. As our eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, we noticed that it looked like a tornado had blown through the room. There was stuff piled on other stuff. Every chair was stacked with books, clothes, junk. The sheets were gray, which was not their actual color, but from never having seen the interior of a washing machine. His sheets were also covered with his writings. Apparently, when he’d get a thought while in bed, instead of looking for a piece of paper—an impossible task, given the state of his room—he just wrote the ideas on his sheets. That’s probably why they were never washed. Finally, I noticed a hand and wrist poking out from the sheets. I peeled back the covers and there was Lou. He sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. I asked why he was sleeping at five in the afternoon. He said he stayed up all night and slept during the day. God only knows how or when he went to his classes.”

  As Reed roused himself, Sigal could see that something was bothering him. “While he was sitting on the side of the bed clearing his head, he said, ‘Swados!’” Sigal recalled. “He said it louder and then screamed, ‘Swados!’ I had no idea what he meant. It sounded like some sort of mantra. Then he said, ‘Swados, stop playing that…’—I don’t remember if it was a drum or a guitar. Neither Tommy nor I had heard a thing. But Lou, with his sensitive ear, had heard Swados playing an instrument. Enter Swados from another bedroom. Lou introduced us to him; he was an odd sort. He disappeared after the introduction.” Sigal had an even more dramatic experience on another visit with Tommy. “Once again, the door was open, but no Lou. I was about to leave him a note, when a guy came bursting through the door, a large fire extinguisher in his hands, threatening to spray us because the CIA was chasing him. He kept threatening us, and I started eyeing a large cast-iron skillet in the kitchen that I thought might fit well against his head. Tommy and I could probably have taken him, but neither of us wanted to get sprayed with the extinguisher. This went on for a while, with the guy’s paranoid delusions motivating his aggression. That’s when I went to the window and looked out. I told the guy that the CIA guys were gone. He lowered his nozzle and slipped out the door, which I quickly locked behind him.”

  Relieved, Sigal later pondered the significance of that intrusion. “I don’t think it was an accident that this guy ended up in Lou’s apartment,” he said. “He was probably one of Lou’s druggie friends. When we later told Lou what had happened, he just laughed, but never explained who the person was or why he was there.” The “druggie friends” theory reflects Sigal’s assumption that Reed was an early participant in the drug culture that was just beginning to come to the fore in the early sixties. “I do remember him telling me that he sent to Arizona to buy some peyote,” Sigal said. “When it arrived, he diced it into a fine pile, then swallowed a handful, chased by a glass of water. ‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘I threw up,’ he said.”

  That was hardly Reed’s only drug experience while at Syracuse. His sister, Bunny, was on a teen tour in California as a high school student when her parents called and informed her that she needed to see a doctor to get a gamma globulin shot, as they had done. It was a precautionary measure because Lou had contracted hepatitis from using a dirty needle, though this detail was never explicitly discussed. Richard Sigal recalled visiting Reed at his parents’ home in Freeport during a college break. “God, he looked horrible,” Sigal said. “He was yellow and he looked like a Biafran. He was just skin and bones. I asked his mother, ‘What’s wrong with Lou?’ And she said, ‘Oh, he has hepatitis.’ I thought, ‘Lou is fooling around with drugs,’ but we never discussed it.”

  Given such events, Reed’s reputation as a user began to spread. It was still the early sixties, and any sort of drug experimentation was far more of an underground experience than it would be in just a few years. Sigal recalled being home from college on break at his parents’ house, hanging out with two friends from Freeport, when Reed dropped by to see him. “When he walked in the door, those two guys stood up and left. I didn’t know why. Later I asked them, and they said, ‘Hell, he could be carrying drugs.’ It was almost like, if Lou walked in, you’ve got to pull the shades down. They didn’t want any part of it.” In the preprofessional world of suburban Jewish Long Island, drugs held little glamour. They were seen as part of the urban life that those families had moved to Long Island to escape.

  REED’S ROMANTIC LIFE TOOK a dramatic turn for the better when he met Shelley Albin, an art student who had come to Syracuse from Highland Park, Illinois, a posh suburb north of Chicago. To this day, Reed’s friends speak in rapturous tones about her beauty. It was a quality Reed appreciated. “When I would come into a room, I recognized that I would get attention,” Albin said. “I never quite understood it, but Lou liked it.” On one of Sigal’s trips to Syracuse, Reed introduced him to Albin. “She was exquisite, a total knockout,” he said. “Lou scored big-time having Shelley as a girlfriend. I think she was the first steady girlfriend he ever had.” Allan Hyman remembered her in similar terms. “Lou ended up with this gorgeous, really nice girl in college,” he said. “I knew Shelley well. She was great. I couldn’t believe how terrific she was for him. It was the first time he had a girlfriend that I’m aware of. When he was seeing her, he actually started coming out of his shell a bit. She seemed very bright, and she was nuts about him. But they were polar opposites. As introspective as Lou was and how outrageous he would act toward others, she was just the opposite. She was very sweet and personable, somebody you would never expect would be interested in hanging out with him.” Albin’s friend Erin Clermont, who would later befriend Reed and become an occasional lover of his, recalled the first time she saw Reed and Albin together. “I was very struck by him,” she said. “He seemed slightly smaller than she was, and there was something sexy about that. They used to be able to wear the same jeans.”

  Albin saw something beneath the veneer of hardness and sophistication that Reed affected. “It’s a strange word to use about Lou, but he was pretty naive,” she said. “I was tremendously naive. I didn’t have that much experience when I came out of high school. This was the sixties. It wasn’t a very slick world. I came from the Midwest.” Highland Park, she said, was a suburb somewhat like Westport, Connecticut. “I grew up in the woods,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot to do besides ride your bike and run around in the back. College was a whole different world. Just being able to smoke was a big deal. Girls still routinely wore dresses and skirts to class.” She added, “As a freshman I had a nine o’clock curfew that was really enforced. They would look to see if you were in your room. If you wanted to go away for the weekend, you had to have a note from your parents. They had alarms on all the doors, and boys couldn’t get past the front desk. There were double doors and guards.” Albin responded to both the sensitivity she detected in Reed and the larger world that his interests suggested. For college, she wanted, like Reed, to get away from home, so choices like the University of Illinois or the University of Wisconsin were out of the question, as far as she was concerned. Her parents showed little interest in where she went to school, believing that she would only be going to get her “Mrs.” degree. “My girlfriends all got the same treatment,” she said. “It was a completely different era. You were going to be a secretary or a teacher and that was it. It was never taken seriously that girls should study or be interested in books.” She had hoped to attend the University of California at Berkeley, an adventurous choice for a Midwestern girl, but her parents vetoed that. A cousin who was an artist recommended Syracuse because of the quality of the school’s art program and because he knew a dean there.

  Albin met Reed when she was a freshman and he was a sophomore. “When we met he had the reputation of being kind of a rasc
al, that he was an evil guy and you had to be careful around him,” she said. “Those fraternity boys he knew—Richie Mishkin and Allan Hyman—they didn’t dare act out the way Lou did. So to know Lou sharpened their edge a bit—or so they thought.” Despite his image-making, Albin did not initially find Reed a fearsome figure. “He was still more of a kid who would play basketball or tennis, and he played folk music and old fifties stuff,” she said. “That’s what that era was. They’d hang out on street corners and play banjos and guitars. It wasn’t the same Lou as people think of as Lou Reed. It was a sweeter Lou.” Albin herself played guitar, and she and Reed would occasionally play together in private or for a few friends in somebody’s kitchen. As for his reputation as a sexual player, that, too, was something of an image. “I got the impression that he never really had a girlfriend in high school,” she said. “I didn’t ask him. I think he put on an aura later of being a ladies’ man. Hardly at all. That didn’t fit with the guy I met. He didn’t do as much in college as he pretended later. I met him after he’d been at college for a year. He was awkward. Boys I went out with in high school were smoother.” What drew her to Reed was his sensibility. “I liked his brain,” she said. “We could talk for hours and hours, days and days. We liked to read the same books. He would write a story and I would make a painting on the same subject. We just got along. We connected. He was the first person who thought like an artist and spoke like an artist, a writer, a creative person. He was an incredible romantic. So we connected on that level. It was very much a creative-mind thing. I was crazy about him. I was absolutely in love with him.”

  Reed’s relative inexperience manifested itself when he brought Albin home to visit his parents in Freeport during school breaks. On her first visit, Albin said, Reed “opened the door to his bedroom and said, ‘Wait here.’ I waited for what seemed like an hour. I thought, ‘This is bullshit. I’m going out there.’ He had parked me in there for who knows what reason. I think it was because he didn’t know how to bring a female home to his parents.” As for Reed’s parents, Albin said, “I was quite struck by how warm they were. Very outgoing and welcoming.” In their eyes, it probably didn’t hurt that “I was white. I was straight. I was a girl. I looked like Miss Midwestern, and I was at the time. I think his dad was a great guy. His father was just grateful to see a normal person.” That she was an upper-middle-class Jewish girl no doubt helped as well.

  Reed had not characterized his parents in any negative way beforehand. “He didn’t think they were evil,” she said. “He didn’t say a word to me about how horrible they were or what a bully his dad was. He told me about his electroshock treatments, but he never said it was because he was supposedly gay. Back then, if a doctor told you to do something, you did it. That’s the way our parents were brought up.” Still, Reed was not above provoking his parents. “Lou made it difficult for his dad on purpose,” Albin said. “He liked to pick scabs. That’s who he was. He would flip his hand around and kind of wiggle his ass on purpose near his father or near people on campus. And it got to be so that he eventually walked like that more often. When I first met him he wasn’t doing that. He would do that to get attention.” Her impression of Reed from seeing him around his parents was that he was “overly catered to, like a lot of boys are, even when they grow into men. ‘I don’t eat those vegetables.’ ‘I don’t do this, and I don’t want that.’ He was repeating what he grew up with. I never thought anything of it because that was the way I grew up. Dad is the boss. Mom stays home, and doesn’t have an opinion. Mom gives up her life. Lou was very insecure, and he needed a nurturer. Like many men are, Lou was basically looking for a replacement for his mother with a little sex thrown in.” She even detected a strategy at work when he told her about his electroshock therapy. “He didn’t seem to have a lot of anger about it, or at least he didn’t express it,” she said. “What he was using it for was to say, ‘I’m not an average guy. I’m really special. I’m really different. I can’t be counted on to be normal. I may do something a little weird. Aren’t you a little afraid of me?’”

  That impulse also came through in Reed’s effort to keep Albin off-balance regarding his sexuality. “He was always trying to get your goat and poke at you, no matter who you were,” she said. “He always thought it was cool to have a woman who looks like a guy. That had a lot of fantasy worked into it for him. I don’t know if he was actively bisexual. I had a nine p.m. curfew at school, so I was not around at nighttime, and he had another life. I never asked, ‘Where did you go, and what did you do?’ I suspect he got involved with guys at some point here and there. And it’s not as if he wasn’t going to do it if I asked him. But Lou and I would look at a guy and discuss what he looked like, how cute he was.” Later at Syracuse, Reed hung a poster for John Rechy’s groundbreaking gay novel, City of Night, published in 1963, on the wall of his room. Albin took the ambiguity in stride. “You want to go screw a guy? Go ahead. It had nothing to do with me—I’m not a guy. I’m not jealous of that. He would screw a chipmunk if it felt good. That was his attitude.” Like so many people in Reed’s life, she ultimately abandoned the effort to define his sexuality. “Whether Lou was gay or bisexual, it doesn’t really matter,” she said. “I think he floated. I think by nature he was more driven to women because of his relationship with his mother. That’s what he thought was normal. It was comfortable.”

  On one of their trips to Freeport during a college break, Reed took Albin to the Hay Loft. “It was a mixed gay bar, men and women,” she said. “Lou liked to set up scenarios so he could write about them later. There was a woman there whom I found attractive, and we were dancing. Why not? He was trying to get this thing going where she and I would go out to the car. I didn’t want to. ‘Come on, you’ll like it.’ ‘I don’t want to.’ So he gave up.” What Reed had in mind, according to Albin, “was not a threesome—just me and her. Totally voyeuristic. He thought that would really shock me. The fact that I wasn’t interested in it didn’t occur to him.”

  Reed also had Albin accompany him on a trip to Harlem, presumably to buy drugs. “I don’t know why else he would have gone there,” she said. “It was a family apartment, and the guy was a nice guy. But it was a dark, stinky hallway and stairwell. I knew this was a place we were not supposed to be.” The worst part, however, was driving there with Reed from Long Island. “He was a horrible driver, a scary, horrible driver,” she said. “I had never driven with him on campus, but when we got on the highway, it was horrifying. I never would get in a car with him again, ever.” That jaunt to Harlem was hardly the only time that Albin, who didn’t drink or use drugs, experienced Reed’s involvement with the drug culture in Syracuse and beyond. The various fraternities that his band played gave him “access to a world that he could sell drugs to,” she said. “He had a good business selling heroin to the fraternities. That was before he had begun to use it. When I met him he really wasn’t doing much drugs—weed, poppers, whatever.” He also used Albin as a way to conceal his activities, rightly assuming that her innocent beauty, general rectitude, and Midwestern demeanor would shield her from suspicion. Albin’s upbringing, very typical of the time, had taught her that a woman should do whatever was necessary to accommodate her man. “Any man’s opinion is better than yours,” is how she described the ethic of that era. Consequently, Reed’s wishes were beyond questioning. “He would keep a grocery bag full of pot in my dorm room,” she said. “‘Okay, I’ll keep it there.’ He would say, ‘Bring a handful to so-and-so and get the money.’ ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘I’m going to get some peyote from Arizona and have it sent to your address.’ Now, I could have gotten booted out of school for all this. It didn’t occur to me to say no. It never occurred to me that really what he was doing was protecting himself. He was a user, and I was susceptible.”

  At one point, during a period when she and Reed were on the outs, Albin dyed her brown hair blonde. “At the time it was considered trashy to bleach your hair,” she recalled. “It became more orange fr
om my natural reddish tint, fairly crass and ugly. As my mother said when I got off the plane at home, ‘Why not carry a mattress on your back, too?’” Reed, of course, loved it, and insisted that Albin come visit his family on Long Island during a break. “He wanted to horrify his parents, to show how he had ‘corrupted’ and ‘ruined’ the girl his father and mother liked so much—the wholesome Midwesterner,” she said. “I indulged him, and it was a strange trip.”

  Finally, Albin decided she had had enough. “The reason I left is he began being really crappy to me, and it was just nasty,” she said. “It was stuff you would do if you were an overbearing, abusive husband. ‘I’m going out for drinks with the guys. You stay home. Don’t you dare let me catch you out.’ That kind of thing. In my sophomore year, I lived in a small house—they called them cottages at Syracuse. There were maybe twelve rooms. You could go in and out when you wanted. I was mostly living with Lou, and he was just, ‘I’m going out. I don’t want you to come.’ So I’d go back to my room. The next day the married couple that Lou shared an apartment with would tell me, ‘Lou had some girl with him that night and he was really nasty to her. We could hear it. I thought you ought to know.’ It bothered me and it didn’t bother me. I just recognized he was more trouble than anything else.”