Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  It was like running off to join the circus without having to run very far. Lester was already a performance artist on the page, an acrobat with crazy bounces, and there was precedence for rock writers getting into the act. Greil Marcus and co-conspirators had recorded a spoof bootleg album called The Masked Marauders in which a fake Mick Jagger blues’d it up on that modern lament “I Can’t Get No Nookie,” Lenny Kaye was a journalist and editor who bean-stalked into one of Patti Smith’s transmission towers after Patti herself made the hop from print to poetry reciting to “Piss Factory,” and Cleveland’s Peter Laughner, a friend and fan of Lester’s, wrote for Creem and played guitar for a number of bands, his early death of drug-related acute pancreatitis at the rotten age of twenty-four inspiring one of Lester’s best pieces from the heart:

  Realizing life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral. But there are voluntary reactions. I volunteer not to feel anything about him from this day out, but I will not forget that this kid killed himself for something torn T-shirts represented in the battle fires of his ripped emotions, and that does not make your T-shirts profound, on the contrary, it makes you a bunch of assholes if you espouse what he latched onto in support of his long death agony, and if I have run out of feeling for the dead I can also truly say that from here on out I am only interested in true feeling, and the pursuit of some ultimate escape from that was what killed Peter, which is all I truly know of his life, except that the hardest thing in this living world is to confront your own pain and go through it, but somehow life is not a paltry thing after all next to this child’s inheritance of eternal black. So don’t anybody try to wave good-bye.

  (I had friendly hellos with Laughner, who was a big fan of Television, and was shocked during the concert intermission for something at the Academy of Music when I entered the men’s room and a voice reverberated, “Hey, Wolcott!!!” issuing from someone unrecognizable. “It’s me, Peter.” “Oh, hi, sorry, you caught me off guard.” What had caught me off guard was his smile, which was missing several front teeth since we last spoke, an almost hillbilly grin that hollowed out his cheeks and that I thought might be the result of heroin use, since junkies crave sweets like crazy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood, though, joviality not being something most junkies display, so I didn’t know what to think, my drug-addict knowledge being almost entirely conjectural.)

  I don’t want to accuse Lester of cynicism, because other people’s motives are always a murky soup, but I do think there was a dollop of calculation in his decision to hit the CBGB’s stage and unload both barrels, a decision partly derived from the carnival blur of seeing all these bands that he thought sucked to the rotting rafters grandiosely flailing around up there, figuring, “If these tadpoles can do it, why can’t I? I’ve got as much gall as they do, maybe more.” His boots were also following in the footsteps of Patti’s ballet slippers in seeking to translate rants and reveries into shamanistic incantations, though where Patti massaged her spirit fingers in the air as if summoning the ghosts of everyone she had read, Lester seemed intent on being more of a barrelhouse bellower, a rough blueprint of the profane preacher-man Sam Kinison would uncork. Lester’s rock-auteur itch fell somewhere between a lark and a headfirst lunge, and there wasn’t the sense that he was willing to work at it—it was attention he seemed to crave, and a shot at asteroid impact. Lester’s recording and performing phase is so well documented in Jim DeRogatis’s Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic that I only want to mention an incident from that flurry that laid a lane divider between us.

  It had to do with his obsession with Idi Amin, the vicious, dictatorial president of Uganda in the seventies, whose full name was Idi Amin Dada, which must have appealed to Lester’s surrealistic humor, how could it not. Torture and genocide flourished under Amin, who was also rumored to practice cannibalism; in his insane caprices and delusional grandeur, Amin was like something out of an EC horror comic crossed with Heart of Darkness—a monster-buffoon. It wasn’t that Lester approved of Amin—he would later bracket him with Hitler as a prodigy of inhumanity—but he would often start scatting about Amin, and the more he scatted, the more it became an impersonation, a tour of the palace of Idi Amin’s babbling mind accompanied by beer burps. I never found this particular channel on Lester’s radio band of funny voices a diverting romp, not because I was offended by its Ubu Roi shtick—I just didn’t find it comical or satirical enough. At times Lester’s voice veered into Bela Lugosi territory, not that anybody expected him to be Gore Vidal’s match as a master of mimicry. This serves as the preamble to what happened after the first or second show of Lester’s that I caught, when at some point during his set he started with the Idi Amin stuff, and even more grotesquely exaggerated onstage for an audience, his verbal blackface took on minstrelsy overtones that he may not have intended but served no put-on purpose if he had. Afterward, he asked me what I thought of the show, and I said something along the lines of “Not quite white enough,” my admittedly maladroit, overly dry ironic way of suggesting he might want to tone down the Idi Amin rap. I should have been more plain and explicit, but he knew I didn’t mean he should literally act more white onstage, as if he had ruffled my Valkyrie wings. The matter would have remained a minor nuisance between us if he had not written something for one of the rock mags quoting what I said, minus the context, with the requisite “sniff”—“Not quite white enough,” sniffed James Wolcott, as if I had been nibbling a buttered scone or something. Well, such is journalese, of which I’ve committed plenty of my own infractions.

  But it became a bit rich when Lester took to the pages of the Voice to pound horseshoes about the malignant racism he discovered behind the thin, sliced smirks of downtown hipsterdom and the punk scene. Called “The White Noise Supremacists,” a muckraking title that evoked swastikas, skinheads, and a raised fist clutching a thunderbolt, the article peeled back the black leather jacket of punk to bare the scrawny rib cage of hip fascism. “This scene and the punk stance in general are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” Although it scored some palpable hits with the scattering spray of its bird shot, the article won Lester few assenting allies in the punk scene and put off many more with its heavy icing of bad faith. In Let It Blurt, DeRogatis quotes some of the offending jokers cited by Lester, who felt he had taken something offhand and stupid they had said and hemstitched it into a damning exhibit, or mistook a mocking gesture for a genuine declaration. What truly riled people in the slag pits was Lester’s preachy fervor about racism after running his own mouth off the road so often. He was a muckraker who had done more than his own share of mucking. He used the n word and similar felicities more than once in my presence, and although he may not have been the worst offender, I never heard anything comparable out of, say, members of Talking Heads or from the other rock journalists on the beat, apart from one who was a close buddy of Lester’s. And although I heard the occasional anti-Jew comment at CBGB’s, it didn’t come from regulars but from boroughs kids trying to sound Scorsese-movie tough. As Steven Lee Beeber’s book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s (a valuable, invigorating history and eye-opener, despite its Halloween title) documents, CBGB’s would have been inconceivable without the Jewish show-business tradition that traveled from Al Jolson to Tin Pan Alley to Lenny Bruce to Lou Reed to Hilly Kristal himself, the patriarchal founder. “Joey Ramone, a figure straight out of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Richard Hell, a Jewish mother’s worst nightmare, and Lenny Kaye, a kind of post-1960s Jewish mystic, rose up, ready to take over the world.” Even punk outfits everyone assumed were Italian, such as the Ramones and the Dictators, were Jewish creations—parodies of guido swagger. So “a breeding ground for fascism” CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City were not, despite a flaunting flirtation with transgressive Nazi chic by some, thoug
h not by punk’s originators.

  It wasn’t that I disbelieved Lester’s mea culpa over his own use of the word, though you have to wonder if his conscience wouldn’t have been so stricken had he not been overheard. As he related in “The White Noise Supremacists”: “I was in Bleecker Bob’s the other night, drunk and stoned, when a black couple walked in. They asked for some disco record, Bob didn’t have it of course, a few minutes went by, and reverting in the haze to my Detroit days I said something about such and such band or music having to do with ‘niggers.’ A couple more minutes went by. Then Bob said, ‘You know what, Lester? When you said that, those two people were standing right behind you.’ ” But everyone knew he was given to passionate displays of big-heart declaration that he could reverse on a dime, blowing his horn in the other direction. He believed what he believed the moment he believed it, but his fluctuations were more jagged than those of most contrarians, depending on what was fueling him. And nobody appreciated the way he portrayed punk musicians and fans as a bunch of George Grosz grotesques whose defective anatomies flayed bare their twisted values. “So many of the people around the CBGB’s and Max’s scene have always seemed emotionally if not outright physically crippled—you see speech impediments, hunchbacks, limps, but most of all an overwhelming spiritual flatness.” Expecting hills and dales of spiritual plenitude exuding from the patrons of late-night clubs is a losing proposition, and almost anybody can look like a bughouse freak when your eyeballs are soaking like a couple of martini olives.

  Which is not to say Lester didn’t have the capacity to change and climb out of his immersion tank of alcohol, cough syrup, and seaweed-choked moods. It’s to Lester’s credit that he did clean up his act and may have been on the road to recovery and perhaps eventual sobriety before his internal house of cards collapsed. The angel of mercy who presided over his makeover was a Southern woman whom I was dating during the period, a blue-eyed, fine-cheek-boned, auburn-haired sweetheart with a mild voice and a wild streak that didn’t show itself in public. Within the slashy confines of CBGB’s she couldn’t have appeared more demure and self-effacing, as if she had taken a wrong turn on her way to the cotillion and ended up doing missionary work among the permanently hungover in the casualty ward. In DeRogatis’s biography he writes that Lester became “a player in a love triangle” between me and the woman whose initials are the same as mine, but it wasn’t really quite that way, it was hardly as Jules and Jim as all that, doesn’t matter now. There’s no question, however, that her velvet coaxings and grooming tips had a turnaround influence on Lester, a dramatic before-and-after effect. The next time I saw Lester was, appropriately enough, at CBGB’s, where he no longer lumbered around as if having fallen asleep in the laundry hamper. Gone were the usual promotional rock T-shirt that had been through the Punic Wars and occasionally used as a table mop and the baggy jeans that helped inform an unkind article in the Voice (with incriminating photos) about Lester’s slob-dom in which he was described as “a walking dirt bomb.” Now he looked spruce, round cheeked rather than rubber faced, his hair neatly trimmed and his complexion unglazed with booze-damp, wearing a sweater—a sweater! in CBGB’s!—that looked as if he were readying for a weekend at the lodge spent with the crackling of autumn leaves and fireplace logs. He looked a lot like me, actually, a cousin once removed. We exchanged glances that fell somewhere between sheepish and so-what, and that was it. I didn’t intend this to be one of those years-long grudges so beloved by the more militant grievance-hoarders of the Voice (and later, The New Yorker—some of those passive-aggressive infighters kept the snubbing disdain in the freezer section for decades). In time we would have shrugged a mutual let-bygones-be-bygones and chitchatted like normal people comparing notes on the latest rock-scene follies; the woman we both dated was such a deft diplomat and tension defuser that at some point she would have maneuvered us into a peace settlement before our foggy egos could object. But that particular night, I just wasn’t in the mood to be nice.

  Moods aren’t always the most reliable guidance systems to go by, because that “next time” turned out to be the last time I would see Lester. There was no way to know, but there’s almost never any way to know. I got a shaken phone call one day from J., who told me Lester had been found dead, his body sprawled on the couch, as if he had lain down to take a nap, except his eyes were open, his skin had gone gray. The word “suicide” didn’t flashcard in most of his friends’ minds. It didn’t fit his state of morale. Even though Lester was prone to dive-bomb depressions, nearly everything was looking up for him now—new girlfriend, the prospect of decamping to Mexico to write a novel without Manhattan jamming his frequencies. So an accidental overdose was the likely candidate, and yet that assumption didn’t make for a neat fit because Lester had made such strides in recent months getting off the intoxicants and obliterators that had been his faithful sidekicks for so many years. He had reversed the tailspin that had sent Peter Laughner and so many others nose-diving. It was Albert Goldman—who didn’t know Lester personally but who was a psychopharmacological wizard whose forensic premise was that you couldn’t fully comprehend any rock star’s phenomenology unless you knew what he was “on,” what was in his tox screen—who later explained to me how common such fatal setbacks were, the why factor. The heavy-duty addict who’s dumped the booze and drugs from his system is in a weakened state that persists longer than he anticipates, and is often most vulnerable when he’s feeling better but his system is still processing the slow-motion shock of withdrawal; it’s really a time to take it nice and slow and easy. However, the addict’s ego, that Gollum clinging to the rocks, tells the withdrawer that after all the big-time stuff he’s taken and the epic binges that they still talk about wherever bearded sailors gather, having a taste of this or popping a little of that is nothing he can’t handle, no big deal. Lester was especially vulnerable because for good or ill he seldom did anything in a small way, using a mental measuring cup.

  Goldman’s snap diagnosis was confirmed (for me, anyway) when DeRogatis’s biography came out in 2000, detailing how on the night before Lester died, the guitarist Bob Quine (of Richard Hell and the Voidoids) visited his apartment carrying a tape of the new Voidoids album. “Lester emerged from the bathroom and swallowed a handful of pills. ‘Valium,’ he said when Quine inquired.” The next day Lester rang up a friend named Nancy Stillman, whom he hadn’t spoken with recently, and “she thought she recognized the higher pitch that Lester’s voice assumed when he took Valium, and she asked him what he was on. ‘Don’t be my fucking mother,’ he snapped.” It was Stillman who found the body later that night. It wasn’t Valium that ended up fingered as the primary suspect in Lester’s death, but Darvon, a narcotic and analgesic that packed a much bigger risk of overdose. Whatever the final tab (“No one will ever know for certain whether Lester took two Darvons or twenty-two,” DeRogatis wrote), Lester’s death at the robbing age of thirty-three was a resonating heart-punch to everyone who knew and read him, though within journalism the resonation was confined at first to a small shock field.

  In the obituary for Lester that ran in the Voice (May 11, 1982), Christgau wrote of Lester’s problems bending the cage bars of rock reviewing and making his escape. “Although he was a more coherent, punctual, professional journalist than 90 per cent of the editors who considered him a lunatic, his autodidactic moralism, chronic logorrhea, and fantastic imagination rendered him unsuitable for the slicks. Anyway, rock criticism is below police reporting and horoscopes in the literary hierarchy, and while Lester wanted to write—and did write—about almost everything, rock criticism was what he was best at.”

  How low rock ranked in the literary hierarchy was played out for me just a day or so later, when I attended a cocktail party hosted by Mort Zuckerman, the real-estate mogul who bought the Atlantic Monthly in 1980 and wooed William Whitworth away from The New Yorker to be the magazine’s editor in chief. I’m not sure why I was invited to the party. I knew Whitworth through Pauline—he was
one of Pauline’s editors, a model of tact and equanimity—and wrote for him at the Atlantic, but not every New York–based writer who contributed to the magazine under its new regime had been invited to this clambake, and I felt like a guest pass among a bevy of season-ticket holders. Since it was news in my universe, I mentioned to a couple of writer/editors there how awful it was about Lester’s death, and it was clear I had flown right into the clouds as far as they were concerned, so few pigeon tracks did they have of who Lester was or what he did, apart from a front-page Voice byline or two that may have leaped off the newsstands. He was a distant rumble downtown that they were dimly aware of, though they agreed someone dying that young was awful. By the time I was introduced to Nora Ephron, who thanked me for something I had written about her recently (or was it for a dig I had taken against her former husband Carl Bernstein?), I had wised up enough to delete Lester’s overdose as a conversation topic among guests aglow within the magic aquarium of Mort Zuckerman, his money, and what Mort Zuckerman’s money would mean for the Atlantic Monthly. Besides, nobody likes a bringdown. At the end of our brief chat, at a loss for a suave way to take my leave, I inanely said to Nora, “Well, maybe we’ll run into each other sometime soon.” “I doubt it,” she said, not curtly, but as a clipped fact of life, spearing my empty pleasantry with a fish fork.