Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  And so it proved to be. I wouldn’t run into Ephron until decades later on the opposite coast, where she and I were among those enveloped within the celestial orange cloud of the hospitality of Arianna Huffington, who was hosting at her Brentwood home a party for the Nation magazine in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, then at the zenith of its luminariness under the impresario wand of the Times’s elegant book-review editor Steve Wasserman. The pheromones of success suffused the gathering even more strongly than they had at Mort Zuckerman’s decades before. But then, success had become so much more successful since the seventies, a higher, richer, headier halation. I spotted Ephron from a safe distance; she formed a trinity with two other women, one of whom was the New York Times columnist and dark-stockinged, red-tressed femme fatale Maureen Dowd. “You should go over and say hello,” my date for the evening suggested, but I declined, not wanting to interrupt this impromptu meeting of the Dorothy Parker Society. Gore Vidal was also in attendance, ensconced on a sofa (even in his late infirmity, nobody ensconces like Gore Vidal) as admirers, one after another in an orderly fashion, stopped to pay their respects, as if presenting themselves to a monarch in exile. I paid mine too, as was only proper, knowing much better now that we like-minded writers have to stick together no matter how much we defund each other’s patience.

  CBGB’s wasn’t a romantic-erotic rendezvous spot, a lovers’ retreat with discreet corners for nuzzling and those more advanced favors provided in the balconies of Studio 54, say. It was not a place one went in search of a tender touch and molten glances. (Once when I asked the poet-rocker Lydia Lunch how things were going, she said, just fine: “My boyfriend and I spent the weekend drilling holes in each other’s teeth.”) Nor was it a slumming scene doused with the alley-cat stink of nostalgie de la boue, a dive where posh debutantes or downtown gamines in black leggings could find ravishment at the seam-ripping hands of a sensitive brute who worked at the Strand Bookstore by day, club-hunted by night, and knew how to weld. (Or perhaps there was too much alley-cat stink. I made the mistake of taking a date there once who prided herself on being a bohemian spirit, something she cultivated growing up in New Orleans like a rare orchid. She took one whiff of CBGB’s, and if she had recoiled any harder, I would have had to catch her in my arms. And here I thought she would appreciate our little pissoir.) Personal charisma was sliced too thin in the punk scene to attract colorful moths. A lazy entitlement lolled south through the loins of those beyond-cool scenesters looking for something soft to lean against or into, as long as it didn’t involve minimum-plus effort. One female friend, a fellow journalist who went on to direct films, nailed this type as the sort of charmer who, if you buy him a drink, might let you give him a blow job later. Falling asleep while receiving a blow job was not an unheard tale in those pioneer days, not the sort of thing to bolster a girl’s confidence, though most sounded philosophical about it. Musicians scored at CBGB’s (there was a sex chart in the ladies’ room peter-metering the top contenders on the scene, a historical gem unfortunately lost to history—drowned under waves of graffiti), but musicians always score, in every musical field; they never go home alone (unless they already have somebody there waiting), from the classical violist to the jazz saxist to the most malnourished-looking rocker who at 3:00 a.m. can barely stand and hold his liquor without violent expulsion. When one of my former girlfriends, who traded in rock journalism for a folk-rock guitar, told Patti Smith that her latest fella had thrown up on her recently, Patti said, with the wise sisterliness of experience: “Oh, nearly all my boyfriends have thrown up in my lap at one time or another. A guy’s not really your boyfriend until he’s thrown up on you.”

  Punk, new wave, the underground scene, whatever handle was hung on what was happening downtown, it wasn’t about hot-wiring the body, setting it into centrifugal motion under a flashing dome of lights with the bass thump rising from the floor like the heartbeat of a fertility god. When audiences stood at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, or some unspecified fire-hazard club, it was usually to see better, and when they did instruct themselves to move, it was primarily back and forth from the waist, a metronomic trance that was a cross between an assenting nod and a Hasidic Jew shuckling as he reads the Talmud. Even Blondie—who would score a commercial success denied the Ramones and Television with a disco-inflected album whose diamond-etched production delineated the pop tunefulness of songs the band had muddled through for years onstage, like the cast of Gilligan’s Island trying to build a boat—didn’t unhinge their fans’ hips and get them dancing, no surprise given that Blondie’s phosphorescent chanteuse, Debbie Harry, teetering in high heels and flickering in and out of phase like a TV screen on the blink, couldn’t get a groove going long enough for the other Mouseketeers to follow. It didn’t help that her boyfriend and Blondie guitarist, Chris Stein, would sometimes sing harmony not by joining her at her mike but by hollering into her ear, which would throw off anyone’s equilibrium. Whether Stein did this because he was being thoughtless or deliberately obnoxious, I was never sure, but this was a prankster who hit balls, so I tilted toward the latter interpretation.

  What you wore mattered more than how you moved, and what you wore didn’t matter much at first, until fetishism gained a steel toehold. Just as I never went hippie during the sixties (tie-dye doesn’t look good on anybody, the one fashion dictum I hold absolute), I never went punk, sparing myself incalculable embarrassment in the future of photos surfacing on the mocking Internet showing me decked out like Jimmy Ramone, Boy Reporter, with my notepad flipped out, ready for action. Although I did buy a long brown leather overcoat with an almost military cut that had one friend concerned that it looked a little German officer corps, something retrieved from the Moscow retreat. I showed the label that marked it as American made from the sixties, but she still thought it might make people think of Field Marshal Rommel. To soften any such impression, I repaired a sleeve on the coat that was threatening to drop off like a severed arm with a ring of large pink diaper pins, which I thought was a nice punk touch (since safety pins were now all the piercing rage, stuck through fabric and flesh as if the two were interchangeable), with the baby pinkness adding a note of put-on, an anti-punk punk statement. It was without much in the way of using my brain that I wore this thrift-shop pink-diaper-pinned brown leather overcoat to my first meeting with William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, who, with a brown-egg composure as impossible to crinkle as a Zen master’s, helped me out of it and hung it on the coat stand without a single comment or flicker of surmise, as if it were just another outer garment worn to ward off cold. As he led me into his office, I noticed a rip in the brown sofa that looked like a knife gash, itself a rather punk touch. I asked someone about it later, and she said, “It’s been there for ages—so long the rest of us don’t notice it anymore.” Although Shawn said nothing about the coat and it didn’t cost me an assignment from The New Yorker (a profile of a Las Vegas entertainment legend named Shecky Greene—a comedian renowned among fellow comics for his improvisational genius), I decided not to waltz that leather number out in adult society again unless I was sure of the company I was meeting. A true punk seditionist wouldn’t have cared, but I started going to the ballet about then and knew so little about it that I wanted to look inconspicuous, if that makes any sense.

  Punk fashion itself began to feast on its own lean meat as the “look” at CBGB’s and similar clubs mutated into mutant Clockwork Orange aggro-wear baroque in its puncture-mark motorcycle-vampire detailing—a scavenger mix of Goth and garbage heap still venereally visible in what remains of the ungentrified East Village today (the punk equivalent to the historical restoration of the bonnets and shoe buckles in Colonial Williamsburg). This look reflected the transatlantic influence of English punk, which was far more radically tooled, piratical, politicized, defiantly, cawingly larynx’d, and media-provocateurish, and small wonder—London had all those “red top” scandal-crazed tabloids like the Sun and the Daily Mirror prime
d to have a sizzle-shit of indignation over the latest outrage from the obliging Sex Pistols. (THE FILTH AND THE FURY, barked the now-famous front-page headline of the Daily Mirror after the Pistols swore like parrots on live TV.) Meanwhile, here in our fair parish, the New York tabloids, the Daily News and the Post, had so many other five-alarm melodramas to cover (from the “Son of Sam” serial-murder rampage to the New York Yankees’ Billy Martin–Reggie Jackson–George Steinbrenner axis of ego in the burning Bronx) that they weren’t going to squander valuable outrage space on fish bait. Dominating the underground-rock-scene coverage in the daily press was John Rockwell, the chief rock critic of the New York Times and a friendly nodder to avant-garde aspirations, who accepted whatever sonic detritus might come jet-engining his way as if it were cousin to Stockhausen or La Monte Young banging on a treated piano. He wasn’t going to fry bacon on his forehead over some skin-and-bones character spitting out curses onstage or off. Short of human sacrifice, offending Rockwell would take some doing.

  (I once attended a party hosted by Rockwell in his loft to welcome Greil Marcus on a visit to Manhattan. Marcus, the author of Mystery Train and the future annotator of all things Dylanesque and Elvisiana, was based in California and considered the super-cerebral prince regent of the West to Christgau’s East Coast suzerainty. He had the gritted zeal of a Marxist rhetorician with a deep-sea diver’s quest for buried cosmology and gnostic scraps of “the old, weird America,” wielding a different set of academic/analytical equipment from the majority of us ditchdiggers. In retrospect, the fact that I was invited to such a soiree marked an unofficial induction into the ranks of the fraternal order of rock critics, a sign that I wasn’t considered just another freelancer dressing up the set. It wasn’t only rock writers invited either. A Village Voice editor was engaged in such intense nebbishy flirtation with a New York Times writer, a petite, vibrant blonde who looked as if she were always up for a game of volleyball, that he came over to us and nervously said, “I mean, suppose something happens tonight, suppose we go back to my place, or her place—I don’t know, I mean, she writes for the Times,” italicizing the last word aloud. He was reassured that he would be able to acquit himself—“It’s not as if you’re going to bed with the building.” He nodded, though you could see he was still mentally nibbling on the daunting task ahead like a squirrel working a nut. It was the age of Annie Hall and everyone played his or her part.)

  But at some point the shock of the new wore off until bigger shocks were needed to keep everything twitching. Punk was an after-dark pursuit, but the darkness doubled, to quote a Television lyric, and acquired a taste of blood in its mouth and the oral archery of letting fly with saliva and phlegm. The array of spit tricks that came to be associated with punk were a British import, Talking Heads and other New York bands returning from their first English tours full of battle tales about being saliva-bombed in a relentless bukkake while onstage; as I recall, Tina Weymouth was a favorite rain target of punk gobbers, being spat on cited as a welcoming gesture of acceptance, like the Hells Angels pissing on an inductee’s jeans as part of the initiation ceremony, then making him put them on. Coming offstage night after night and removing a dripping coat of spittle with a dry towel didn’t foster a sense of belonging, however, no matter how favorable the subsequent reviews. Pogoing, too, was an English import, an indoor exercise perfect for tight spots, turning the pogoer into a hopping human exclamation mark. (Whereas disco demanded tons of hip room under the dome to set Dionysian centrifugal forces into motion.) Pogoing was compared to the hopping of the Masai, but the Masai hopped in unison, at least in the African documentaries and dubious colonial-war movie footage I had seen, whereas this indoor bouncing was closer to Whac-a-Mole with shaven and Mohawked heads popping up through the holes.

  The droogier members of the English punk scene and the rock journalists who critically ransacked their way through the columns of New Musical Express (NME, as it was better known, a homonym for “enemy,” as the Sex Pistols reminded us in “Anarchy in the U.K.”) and Xeroxed fanzines with names like Sniffin’ Glue and ransom-note layouts found much of the New York punk scene de-balled with artiness, affectation, and rhyming couplets, unwilling to wage militia battle against the deadwood holding insurrectionary energies down. While David Byrne seemed to be knitting a cardigan with his acoustic guitar and Tom Verlaine conducted a séance with the French Symbolist poets in some automobile graveyard, English punk bands such as the Damned had songs titled “Stab Your Back,” and another band with a heavy rep was called the Stranglers, as if it had no need of sharp implements to inflict harm. None of the CBGB’s punk bands were politically, militantly barricades-smashing like the Clash, a band Patti was the first to clue me in on and who seemed to have scoped out the field of fire for themselves. Unlike the Sex Pistols, whose cobra attack and anarchist cry, thrilling as it was, seemed too obvious a wicked potion whipped up in the manager-impresario Malcolm McLaren’s Dada lab. A brilliant magpie with a knack for extracting the most delectable, usable bits, McLaren played his protégés and the press like a cross between Dickens’s Fagin and Diaghilev, an exploiter capable of producing exaltation, although the corrosive charisma of Johnny Rotten—who always looked a little jaundiced around the gills—and the nose-bloodied insensibility of the bassist Sid Vicious proved more than even McLaren’s mesmerist power could handle.

  As English punk bands snatched the imaginations of New York rock fans by the scruffy balls and snub-nosed tits, the New York scene began to sling the drool around like sloppy seconds, and bands such as the Dead Boys became the house sensations. They were not subtle, the Dead Boys, jingling with Nazi regalia and flying a snot rag as their pirate flag, but they made for good copy and oodles of after-dinner conversation, taking romance for a spin with such numbers as “Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth” and “Flame Thrower Love.” While their black leather look may have been borrowed from the Ramones (with Joey’s blessing—he noodged them to move to New York), their stage exploits were more Iggy Pop–ish, each set a roller-coaster ride on a pain-pleasure sine wave. Pain was represented by the lead singer, Stiv Bators, looping the mike cord around his neck into a noose and hanging himself from the stage’s light rig, his urchin feet dangling, like a suicide artist. Pleasure was articulated by the occasional blow job that Bators received onstage, the apple-bobbing of the young female volunteer sometimes simulated (judging by the overactive head action), sometimes not. I seldom threaded myself far enough up front and to the side to get a decent viewing angle to render a decisive verdict. Gary Valentine, bass player for Blondie, singled out the servicing of Bators’s dangler onstage at CBGB’s as the sign that “brain rot” had infiltrated the scene, attracting audiences addicted to sick tricks. The Dead Boys weren’t the only sick tricksters out there, but they showed more variety and panache in their slapstick, such as lapping up a lick of their own vomit from the stage floor, blowing their noses into slices of bologna and then eating them (this was the guitarist Cheetah Chrome’s showstopper), and, on one renowned occasion, pissing into the safety helmet of the previously mentioned bartender-bouncer Merv, a highly educated man who subscribed to the Times Literary Supplement and with whom I used to chew the fat about Kingsley Amis and Frank Kermode between sets. We both agreed that Kermode’s critical style could do with a dash of pepper. It was never clear to me how his hard hat ended up in Bators’s hands as a portable urinal, though it was difficult to believe Merv would have volunteered it as a prop. He was a tolerant man who had witnessed much behind the bar, but he was not an accomplice to shenanigans.

  The Dead Boys didn’t revert to mild-mannered personas when they were out in civilian daylight. In that they were consistent. I once saw Cheetah Chrome drop his cheetah-spotted pants in the middle of St. Marks Place, pivot, and moon someone walking toward him—his way of saying hi. Walking in the same direction at that moment was Karen Allen, the freckled delight with the root-beer voice from Animal House and the original Indiana Jones. So she got mooned too. C
hrome probably wasn’t aware Allen was sharing the same sidewalk as the friend he was hailing, but had he known, he might have dropped his drawers even sooner. He was, in his own fashion, a true vaudevillian.

  So when the news came that the U.K.’s the Damned would be performing at CBGB’s on a double bill with the Dead Boys, grisly anticipation gleamed from every Dracula fang. The Damned and the Dead—their very names told you they belonged together, competing for Gothic supremacy like rival biker gangs fighting over bragging rights over whose ass is hairier. (Such a contrast to the weekends when Television and Talking Heads double billed, more akin to watching twin rocket launchings set after set, each arc higher than the last.) The Damned were the odds-on favorite to triumph in this steel-cage Black Mass. They had been around longer and proven themselves in London and the rugged vomitoria of the English provinces, and with a drummer called Rat Scabies, it was clear they weren’t angling for debutantes, like Roxy Music, but trawling the Céline sewers. (Everyone eagerly awaited the New York Times, given its formal style, reviewing the band and keeping an institutional straight face as it referred to “Mr. Scabies.”) The Damned also had a guitarist named Captain Sensible, whose name was a welcome whimsical stroke, like the fabulous ID of the lead singer of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, the defiant, unbarricaded voice of the girl-power punk anthem “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!,” each hoarse syllable hurled upward from the dungeon floor. The Damned were more a glued-together assemblage of shock tactics: Scabies’s drums came hard down the tracks, and Dave Vanian’s vocals nailed the staccato rush of “Neat Neat Neat” and “New Rose” like a rivet gun. Vanian wasn’t a slurrer, unlike so many punk slingers. But the Dead Boys were newer, rawer, maybe a trifle leaner and hungrier, with home-court advantage. They had less to lose from this contest, more to gain.