Face It

by Debbie Harry

  That car hauled around a lot of people and gear before it finally died. Sometimes we would pile in and go to Coney Island. I loved the place. It was magical when I was a kid and Coney had begun its decline. There were all those great old rides like the Steeplechase, which was a crazy simulated horse race—and the 262-foot parachute jump that they’d bought from the 1939 World’s Fair. As a thrill seeker, an adrenaline-craving idiot, I loved those rides and had I grown up in a different environment, I imagine I might have become a stunt girl, an astronaut, or a race car driver. I drive fast and I drive well, though these days I have to sometimes talk myself down off the ledge—“What are you trying to prove? Take it easy, drive nicely.”

  But even when the old rides vanished and Coney became dilapidated, the magic lingered. Perhaps it became even more magical—with the ghosts and remnants of rides, carnies, freaks, and boardwalk oddities. It was also a good place to buy secondhand stuff. There was a strip of garages in a burned-out area sort of across the street at the Wonder Wheel end that had people selling cool things for almost nothing. Which was good because nothing is what we had, aside from youth, desire, love, and music.

  One of the thousands of things I love about Chris—and one of my favorite visual memories—is the way he rode shotgun while I drove. He was a quiet passenger, for the most part. He didn’t drive yet—like a lot of native New Yorkers who never needed to learn—so he would sit in a trancelike state, absorbed in his thoughts, as he watched the scenery go by. An auto-Zen reverie.

  Chris and I would drive to Brooklyn fairly often to visit his mother, Stel. She was a sort of beat painter and lived in one of those great apartments on Ocean Avenue, with large rooms done in a mixture of texture and color in an artistic, lived-in style. Stel always cooked hamburger and kasha for us with loads of garlic and we ate it like greedy pigs. It was usually the best and sometimes the only real meal we’d have the whole week. Gary Valentine came with us one night. He was living with us in our Bowery loft, because he had been run out of Jersey on a paternity rap. After dinner, when we left for the city, it was raining really hard, a blinding rain, a downpour.

  My little Camaro wasn’t in the best shape. The distributor cap was cracked and moisture would sometimes turn the car off, so I was kind of nervous about all the rain beating down on us. As we headed down a ramp on the BQE, blinded by the storm, I drove directly into a small lake. The water flew up high above us. Momentum carried the car about fifty feet, then it stopped dead, luckily right under an overpass. We knew we were in a terrible position as we climbed out to stand in the road. We pressed ourselves as flat as we could against the wall, expecting at any moment to be crushed by some blinded vehicle. Then I remembered the flares. On one of the family holidays in Denville, New Jersey, with my father’s brother Tom, he insisted that I needed some emergency flares for the car. Okay, it couldn’t hurt, maybe someday I’d need them. This was that day.

  We grabbed the flares and set them up behind the car and waited; sometimes if you waited a bit, the Camaro would dry out and start up again. But we just kept on waiting. Oddly, there were no cars coming down the ramp. No cars at all. We had heard a very loud noise above us up on the ramp. We knew it had to be an accident. As the visibility cleared, we could see a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler on the ramp we’d just come down. The trailer part of the truck was wedged between the guardrails on either side of the road and the cab was bent into an L, forming a complete roadblock. The truck that had been right behind us—and that might have killed us—instead saved our lives. We stood under the overpass waiting for the storm to go by, knowing how unbelievably lucky we were. We got awfully quiet.

  Makes me think about some other close calls . . . Other than the one we all share in common, birth. Ha, birth! Squeezed out into harsh bright light, half strangled, dragged down by gravity, deafened by the noise, held upside down by the ankles, slapped on the butt, throat scalded from the first sudden gulps of oxygen . . . A shocking, hazardous, and sometimes terminal event. Death gives us a wakeup call with our very first breath—sort of a reminder of who’s the boss. Once I had survived my near-death birth and whatever trauma came from the adoption, my life as a small child was plain sailing. Okay, there was the coma from having pneumonia and there was falling off a trapeze onto my head—but that was really all she wrote. So, other than my obsessive, gun-toting boyfriend in New Jersey, things had seemed pretty safe until I moved into the soon-to-be-bankrupt city of New York in the late sixties and the seventies.

  I’m sure I don’t have all my experiences on tap, but I remember one from the time when I worked at the Head Shop on East Ninth Street. When I finished work, I walked the half block to Ben’s storefront apartment. That famous old TV ad was running through my head: “It’s ten P.M. Do you know where your children are?” So, it might have been that time of night . . . I was always cautious and kept an eye on whoever was behind me. In those days we all watched our backs. Ben’s door had a tricky lock. Sometimes you had to jiggle it around before it would open, and I was thinking about the lock when I got to the shallow inset of the doorway that night. I had the key ready and this time it opened so easily, I smiled to myself as I slipped inside quickly and shut and locked the door behind me. Just as I did, I heard a man right on the other side of the door, sighing in frustrated anger. It jolted my heart. He had been right behind me, just seconds away from grabbing me.

  There was another time on St. Mark’s Place and Avenue A when I had a run-in with a couple of street kids. I’d been working uptown for the BBC, so my usual evening trip was to walk back from the Lexington Avenue subway stop at Astor Place. One of the things I wanted back then was a bag from a leather store on West Fourth Street that all the hippie downtowners loved because their bags and shoes were so beautifully designed. I eventually bought myself a shoulder bag—like a smaller version of a mail sack but with large metal rings and made out of thick cowhide. That night, when I got to the last block at St. Mark’s Place, the bag hanging on my shoulder, two kids came running and in a flash I was down on the sidewalk, flat on my back, being dragged by the bag strap. I hung on to that fucking bag like I was going for a touchdown. I think the only reason they didn’t get the bag was because it was made so well and didn’t tear. And fortunately, no knives were pulled or guns drawn, just a snatch-and-run. It’s been almost fifty years and I still have that bag.

  I got rid of my St. Mark’s apartment after the Wind in the Willows broke up and I wanted to change everything in my life. I moved down to 52 East First Street into a second-floor apartment with Gil. It was smaller than my old place but it wasn’t too bad. There was a front room on the street end, a kitchen in the middle, and a tiny bedroom in the back with a window just above our heads that opened onto an airshaft. The people in the building were an assortment of musicians, bikers, and the usual Lower East Side types. Loud music day and night was flavored with the scent of pot.

  One night as Gil and I were sleeping, something woke me up. There was a strong smell of gasoline coming through the airshaft window. I shook Gil awake and we headed for the door, but he didn’t want to open it, because of the running and shouting in the hallway and what sounded like gunshots. Then a guy pounded on our door, yelling, “Get out! The building’s on fire!” We opened our door to see flames shooting down the smoke-filled stairs. People were escaping and running outside. Fire trucks, hoses, cop cars, and ambulances jammed the street. Next morning, we got the scoop: a biker gang had been living on our top floor. That night the leader had been tied up, tortured, then set on fire. On the front page of the Post and the Daily News the next day were shots of the remains of the blackened chair.

  When everything’s gone mad . . .

  Bobby Grossman

  We were homeless. A friend of Gil’s, Al Smith, let us crash at his studio on First Street and Avenue A for a while. I think—here’s where my sense of chronology gets a little messy—this was when I took off for L.A. with the millionaire I met at Max’s, and then decided that I could not li
ve in L.A. in the sixties, for fear of losing my soul. So instead I came back to NYC and became a Playboy bunny and a junkie. Go figure. I also got back with Gil and I found us an apartment up on 107th Street and Manhattan Avenue, which at that time was borderline Harlem. But the only close call on 107th was when Gil—thinking it would be handy to have a connection in the apartment with him—invited some very serious drug dealers to live in our spare room. Old-time junkies, a real mess, with big puffy hands and high all the time. Fortunately, we didn’t end up as collateral damage in one of their all-night deals.

  Time to move on to the nastiest close call, which went down in the early seventies, back when I was mad for the New York Dolls and went to as many of their shows as possible. One night, I heard there was some kind of party for them on West Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street. I was at my friends’ apartment on Avenue C, and since they didn’t want to come with me I started walking from their place alone—all the way across town—in my very highest platforms from Granny Takes a Trip. It was a hot night, around two in the morning. Walking maybe a mile or more in those shoes was quickly becoming impossible, so I started looking for a cab. But in those days taxis never cruised Alphabet City. It was too dangerous. Eventually I took off my mighty, multicolored shoes and tried walking barefoot. In rough neighborhoods like this, glass doesn’t stay in one piece or place very long, and broken bottles, shattered car windows, you name it, covered every inch of the sidewalk and road. Walking on broken glass was even more impossible; even though I tried to pick my way through it, there just weren’t enough bare spots to walk without shoes.

  While I had been trying to find a cab, there had been a small white car circling me. It would go east on Houston then come back around. Around and around. Finally, it pulled alongside of me and the driver asked quietly, “Do you need a ride?” I was never a hitchhiker, not once in my life, even during the hippie years when it was the thing to do. It never appealed to me to get into a stranger’s car. I said, “No, thanks,” and kept trying to tiptoe across Houston. The driver didn’t give up. He circled a few more times, stopping each time to see if I’d changed my mind about that ride. I finally realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere, so on his next circuit, I took him up on his offer and got into the car.

  My first impression of the driver was that he was not bad looking. Short, dark hair with a bit of a wave or a curl—in fact, good-looking—and wearing dark pants and a white business shirt open at the neck. After I thanked him for picking me up, there was no conversation, he just kept driving in silence. Right away, though, his stench started to reach me. A fierce body odor that almost burned my eyes. It was very, very hot in the car, but the windows were barely cracked open. So, I reached for the crank to roll down my window. But there was no window crank. And no handle to open the door from the inside. That’s when I saw the dashboard was just a metal frame with holes for the radio and glove box and the whole car had been stripped of everything. It was like a scene out of Tarantino’s Grindhouse movie Death Proof.

  A sensation hit me then that I will never forget. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Like an animal when they are alarmed or ready to attack. Every instinct was on full alert. Somehow, I squeezed my arm through the crack in the window and sort of jumped up in my seat and managed to open the car door from the outside. When he saw what I was doing, he stepped on it and swung a fast left turn into Thompson Street, which threw me out of the open door and onto Houston, onto my ass in the middle of the road. But I wasn’t really hurt and luckily he didn’t come back for me. I picked myself up and hurried the last two and a half blocks to the Dolls’ party, but it was over when I got there.

  I had not thought about that night for maybe fifteen years until one day, on a flight to L.A., I read a story in Time or Newsweek. It was about Ted Bundy, the serial killer. He had just been executed in Florida in the electric chair. There was a photo of him. He gave the journalist a description of his car and of his modus operandi and how he got his victims, and it matched exactly what had happened to me. My story has been debunked since, because Bundy is said to have been in Florida at that time and not NYC. But it was him. When I saw that article, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up again. These are the only two times in my life I have had this sensation.

  Back in the loft, where we had had our close call with death by carbon monoxide, life went on much as normal. We got used to the poltergeists and they got used to us. Poltergeists, I learned years later, almost always manifest through children or adolescents. Chris and I were at a dinner party with William Burroughs, who had a great interest in the paranormal. Burroughs asked us if there were any kids in our building. Chris said no. I said, well, there was one, Gary, our adolescent bass player. Gary was always in some kind of trouble. He was hiding out at our place because the cops in Jersey were after him for statutory rape. Gary was a teenager himself, almost the same age as his girlfriend, but when he got her pregnant her mother reported him, right as he turned eighteen. Gary was a true punk rocker in that he had attitude and resisted any form of authority or anyone telling him what to do.

  The “Blondie Loft,” as it became known, wasn’t just where we lived—we rehearsed there, even played a show there. Amos Poe shot some of his documentary about the New York punk scene, The Blank Generation, in our loft. Amos at that time was an underground filmmaker whose style was a mix of French new wave and New York punk, very cool and very DIY. He gave me a role in his 1976 movie Unmade Beds, where I dressed in silk underwear and sang an a cappella jazz song to the tortured hero. And in his next film, The Foreigner, I played a mysterious woman who sang a song in French and German.

  Chris shot some great photos of me in and around the loft. The famous baby-doll photos, for example, which were a kind of “garbage art” using props we’d found in the trash. Wandering around the streets—as Chris and I did a lot of the time—you would always find something cool that someone had tossed out. Sometimes the contents of a whole apartment that some landlord had cleared out when the tenants disappeared or didn’t pay the rent. Downtown New York was perhaps more transitory back then. One day, Chris and I came across a pile of broken baby dolls discarded on the curb, all messed up and sad looking, waiting for the garbage truck, so of course we took them all home with us. Those mangled dollies hung around with us for quite some time—and they ended up in a centerfold photo of me that ran in Punk magazine. I liked the idea of centerfolds. Chris also shot me for the “Creem Dream” centerfold for Creem magazine.

  Chris had sent some sexy images to Punk, but they wanted something that was “more punk.” So, I started working on what I would wear for the photo. Benton, our landlord, loaned me his leather bikini bottoms, and Howie, one of our sometimes-extended houseguests, gave me the Vultures T-shirt, which I still have. The sci-fi space glove was one of our junk store finds. The south side of Houston Street between Mott and Bowery had great junk stores, before the neighborhood became safe.

  My original oversized, black sunglasses came from one of those places. The stores all had bins and tables and racks out front, piled with anything and everything—really, really cheap. Inside, one low-watt, bare lightbulb would hang from the ceiling, casting a pale, dim view of the proceedings. As soon as you walked in, you were enveloped by the smell of mold and mildew, layers upon layers of dust, old wood, rust, and yellowing paper mixed with hints of exhaust fumes from the street. On a warm day these smells—cool and ancient—would drift out to mix with the truck exhaust as you walked past. Even the Canal Street stores seemed posh compared to these places.

  We set up to do the session in the front half of our floor. Chris took his time getting the lights just right. He took his time getting the shots just right too. He wasn’t one of those people who shoot fast and use up rolls of film because one shot is bound to be okay. That wasn’t because of our financial circumstances. He aimed to get what he planned to get—and he usually got it right. He was a scientific photographer. I knew I looked okay, I had a
good face, but I was always unsure about my body. Chris made me look better. He had these voyeuristic leanings, staring at me fixedly for hours in the heat of the lights, as I posed as sexily as I could to get him going. But he didn’t need any help in getting going, he was already going. Chris and I would always end up in bed after a shoot.

  We had been living in the Blondie loft for a little over a year when Benton threw us out. I don’t know why he did it. I guess we must have fallen out over something but really, during those times we never seemed to live anywhere for much longer than a year. The timing was pretty terrible. It was August 1976 and we had just started working on Blondie’s debut album. Years later, our crazy ex-landlord would claim it was his pact with the Devil that had made Blondie successful. We were tenacious. We kept working. We didn’t give up and disappear—like some people might have liked us to. We kept at it, even when everyone else on the scene except us was getting signed. We sharpened up and we built a following. Now, finally, we had a record deal. But it was complicated. Like most things to do with Blondie and the music business would turn out to be.

  Marty Thau, who had managed the Dolls, told Craig Leon that he thought we had potential. Craig used to work with Seymour Stein, who cofounded Sire Records and had signed the Ramones. Marty and Craig had partnered with Richard Gottehrer—who cofounded Sire with Seymour—in a production company called Instant Records, and that’s who Blondie signed with. If you think the New York band scene was incestuous, the music business was even more so.

  They decided to do a single first to test the waters. We recorded “Sex Offender,” a song Gary and I wrote. He was playing the music and as soon I heard it, I wrote the words on the spot. The lyrics were part commentary on how ludicrous Gary’s rape situation was, and part commentary on how preposterous it was to criminalize hookers. I had the cop and the hooker fall for each other. The whole song was written and ready to go in fifteen minutes, so to speak; that doesn’t happen often. Craig Leon produced the single and they took it around and it wound up at Private Stock Records, a small label run by Larry Uttal—another music business veteran who was part of the clique. They agreed to release “Sex Offender,” but we would have to change the title. That was annoying, but then I came up with “X Offender,” which was okay.