by Lydia Lunch
NO ONE MADE YOU BUY THIS BOOK—YOU BOUGHT IT BECAUSE YOU NEED TO VENT SOME POISON TOO. And I hope in return it inspires you to scream—not in your lover’s face—but into the bottomless void of the eternal night backlit on some shitty stage howling your guts out seeking purgation surrounded by a handful of hungry orphans desperate for the nourishment of creation’s offal.
1967
Blood buckets down the undulating walls. Invisible fists rage with superhuman strength and hammer the door. The ancient wood frame buckles, crumples, and heaves. The empty nursery reverberates with the mournful howl of a pitiful infant who cannot be located. I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor clutching my throat, trembling. Dry mouthed. Unable to breathe. The Haunting of Hill House is the most terrifying movie I’ve ever seen. I’m eight years old.
A suffocating humidity saturates the night air. Static electricity vibrates the hair follicles. The low buzzing hum of the black-and-white Motorola is swallowed up in the wheezing yelp of a stray dog, which bellows like a town crier somewhere in someone’s backyard. His harried yapping immediately mimicked and amplified by every mutt in the neighborhood in a round robin of barks and howls. A desperate warning cry which signals the coming maelstrom.
The atmosphere stiffens. The dogs retreat. Time bends. In a sudden explosion of white noise, hundreds of frenzied voices come shrieking out of nowhere. As if all Hell’s fury in a sudden expulsion from middle earth materializes, compounding my terror.
Men, women, and children who have been hoisted upon the backs of older brothers, all shouting slogans in a demonic gospeled fervor. Equal work! Equal pay! Say it loud! We’re black and we’re proud!
The riots of ’67 have detoured down Clifford Avenue and are stampeding directly in front of my house. Hammers, baseball bats, pipes, and bricks all employed in the demolition of cars, windows, storefronts. A hideous industrial opera of unbearable din. My father chain-smokes and paces. Unleashing a litany of curses. Punches the air in his best Marlon Brando as his station wagon crumbles under the endless battery of physical abuse. The ambulance and firetrucks barrel in, splitting the angry throng in two. Their sirens a deafening symphony which exaggerate the cacophony. Police helicopters circle the periphery. Giant mechanical insects whose diabolical hum blankets the shrill.
My fear is drowned in sound but reborn as joy in flames. The family car is set on fire. I start to laugh. Maniacally. To dance. To sing. “Come on baby LIGHT my FIRE. Try to set the night on FIRE!!!!” My father assumes I’ve lost my mind and against my insistent protest sends me to my room.
I skulk upstairs dejected. “Kind of a drag,” mumbled under my breath. A noisy rebellion of violence. Clanging. Pounding. Exciting. And I’m locked out! I can’t really comprehend what’s happening, but it feels so right. I’m no longer frightened, I’m charged up! Zoning in to the collective urgency. The passion. Determination. I head to the attic, my hidden retreat. Turn on the radio. Top 40 in 1967 was insane. “White Rabbit,” “7-Rooms of Gloom,” “Funky Broadway,” “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” “Are You Experienced?” Back to back. I had no idea what any of these songs were referencing. What they really meant. How subversive they really were.
I used the radio to disappear. To escape from my family. Enter another dimension. Melt inside a psychedelic sound stage which cascaded out through the airwaves filling my already fractured psyche with throbbing, slinky, funkified soul music, where soaring rhythms and strangled guitars took me out of myself and gave me goose bumps.
“I break out … in a cold sweat” stimulated me in ways I could only express by shaking my ass, flapping my arms, and stomping my feet. Jimmy Lee Johnson, the seven-year-old black boy next door, “Skinny Legs and All,” had the entire James Brown drop-to-one-knee, use-his-sweatshirt-as-a-cape routine down pat. It’s the first time anyone flirted with me. I was amazed by his mimicry. His fluidity. His tiny body gliding through the air with so much passion and control. He must have caught JB on The Ed Sullivan Show. Everybody was glued to the tube on Sunday nights. The Rolling Stones, The Animals, George Carlin—all penetrated my unformed psyche, courtesy of Mr. Sullivan. Even the infamous Doors controversy where Morrison refused to change “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” subsequently banning him from future appearances, struck a raw nerve in my adolescent conscience.
Music is the connective tissue between protest, rebellion, violence, sexual awareness, and community. Just the way it is. The Summer of Love. What a bold-faced lie! Reagan was elected governor of California. Lyndon B. Johnson increased troop presence in Vietnam, ignoring the massive demonstrations which rocked the nightly news. Several hundred thousand strong in New York City alone. Race riots stormed through Cleveland, Detroit, Watts, Birmingham, Alabama, Rochester, New York, and dozens of other U.S. cities, inflaming tensions. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his World Heavyweight Championship for refusing the draft. Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys wouldn’t go to war either and got tied up in a five-year legal battle which he eventually won. The Boston Strangler was sentenced to life in prison and escaped from the institution he was held in.
Bread was twenty-two cents a loaf, a gallon of gas was twenty-eight cents, and the inner-city ghetto which I called home was brimming with hard-working people with attitude and conviction whose lust for life couldn’t be beaten out of them by piss-poor housing conditions, lousy pay, the police, or politicians. They taught me to fight for what I believed in, take pride in what I did, never give up, keep the faith, and, when hoping for a better tomorrow isn’t enough, turn up the goddamn music and dance the blues away.
Well, you can take the wigger out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the wigger. After all, “The World Is a Ghetto.” And even though I’ll never forget my roots, I refused to allow them to strangle me by the ankles because even if I had to “Beg, Borrow, and Steal,” this “Lightning’s Girl” was going to be sure she was “Making Every Minute Count.” Just like the radio taught me.
1967 helped to define who I was to become. I may have been too young to fully grasp the political implications of the time, but it started a fire in my belly that burns as bright today as it ever did. The National Organization for Women was officially incorporated in ’67. Grace Slick and Janis Joplin both threw down at the Monterey Pop Festival. Shirley Temple ran for Congress. I was just a tiny terror screaming my bloody head off to “Funky Broadway,” already plotting my big city escape.
CANASTA
I can admit all of this now, only because I’ve lost everything I ever had. Including my soul. I feel little pieces of it breaking off and dissolving into dust like brittle petals on a ruined flower.
I was just a kid. A fucked-up little girl. Forced to grow up too quick. Too hard. Abandoned like a stow-away, shipwrecked into a life I never wanted to live. A life that felt like it was living me.
I felt like a mere spectator of inherited calamity whose origins trip back multiple generations, impregnating the very fabric of that ill-defined and terminally chronic condition called “family,” where as an only child of an only child, I was forced to withstand all the abuse, tyranny, and trauma that is usually distributed equally amongst the brood.
There was only one direction the bat swung in, at my knees, causing them to buckle, collapse, corrode, crumple, felling me whenever, if even for a momentary interlude I felt I had finally landed on solid ground.
My mother split when I was thirteen. She tried and failed to raise me as friend, sidekick, mascot. You know how that works. I was made to play lure for sick and twisted old men, whose greasy eyes and wandering hands were an obvious threat to my future mental health.
But I guess I blew her trip. I couldn’t play nice. Pissed her off. She felt threatened by my youth. It brought out the jealous, vindictive cunt that lurks beneath the temporal lobe of most alcoholic, middle-aged, and fading fast ex—beauty queen strippers turned switchboard operators down at the Last Ditch Motel.
My mother adored me when we were alone, when she was be
tween johns, when she was lonely, desperate for attention, affection. She’d lavish me with sickly kisses and silly toys, stupid keepsakes, cheap key rings, charm bracelets, dumb trinkets. Mementos to her own fading luster once she could no longer stand to play witness to the funhouse mirror’s twisted reflections as they ricocheted into an infinity of self-doubt and psychic lacerations, a homicidal force-field rifled with fear and loathing whose very nature attempted the murder of angels. And even though I was no angel, I was not yet the monster I was sure to become.
She dumped me with a father I had never met in a city I had never been to on the hottest day of the year, July 14, 1973. Retribution against my preemptive attack on her new boyfriend, “Uncle Randy.”
One night, “Mom,” which she despised being called, was out picking up some crappy Chinese take-away and a dime bag of pot, when even before she hit the corner store, her latest loser, an Appalachian ex-con with a rap sheet as long as his right arm, had already started in on me, cracking jokes about “Teenage pussy tastes like chicken chow mein and kumquats” and “Why don’t you come over and keep my lap warm until your mother gets back,” licking his chapped and cracked lips like a desert lizard flicking fly paper off his tongue.
He was tugging me toward him with a python grip around the nape of my neck, when in a fit of adolescent rage, fear, and repulsion fueled by the obnoxious proximity of his Pabst Blue Ribbon breath, I picked up a beer bottle and cracked him over the head, sending him reeling backward into the cheap plasterboard “entertainment center” which collapsed under his considerable weight, causing the stolen TV and dozens of eight-track tapes to clunk down upon his pea-brained nugget, spewing forth an acid rain of cigarette ash and bong water all over his dirty white wife beater which strained to contain his bowling ball—shaped blubber belly. I barreled out into the street screaming and laughing like a lunatic, running straight into my mother’s arms, who took one look at me and screamed, “I can’t trust you alone for five minutes!” as she ran into the house leaking a thin spittle of chow mein and egg drop soup up the sidewalk.
Heat wave hit Wayne County like a blister on a burn. And “Say hello to your daddy for me” was all she said the next afternoon as she banged on the fucked-up Impala’s horn and threw me out the passenger door after luring me in for what I thought was going to be a picnic at Lake Wobegone, 120 miles south of the state line.
Last I saw of her.
My father was another story. He was never out of earshot. I was always at his side. Couldn’t leave his sight. I became crutch, clutch, concubine. Maid, muse, wet nurse. Baby. Mommy. Girlfriend. Life support and ultimately death harbinger. Daddy knows best. How hateful little girls can be.
I never called him “Daddy,” but it’s still a word forever warped by everything he wasn’t, a word that still rankles. Five letters and two simple syllables that instantly produce a nauseating metallic swell of the tongue, a blistering of the lips, a scraping razor burn akin to an esophageal Pap smear. A violent urge to regurgitate.
My father, that decrepit septic tank of treachery, that filter of perversity and lechery, a psychotic buffoon whose insidiously sadistic rituals polluted forever his every cancer-soaked brain cell, staining his fingers, toes, and tongue with a golden nicotine glow which seemed to swell and grow with every unfiltered cigarette he sucked down in an endless surrender to his own death, and to his daily massacre of whatever elegant morsel of humanity was left over inside me after the repeated soul rape of my mother’s revolving-bedroom-door amours.
The weekend ritual. My father’s specialty. A typical Friday night free-for-all where whatever was left of his pickled brains was further pummeled by booze into the brick wall of his own obliteration. Him and his asshole buddies. A permanent bender. Three out of seven days. For years on end. The memory still lingers.
One night during a marathon Black Jack match, I called Freddie Matolla “a fat-fuck huckster” and told him to keep his filthy hands to himself. The bloated chimp had one hand up my short plaid skirt and a blistered thumb hitched under my panty line ready to yank them aside.
My asshole father butted in under his breath with the threat that if I wanted a place to sleep that night, I show some respect, play sweetmeat, swallow it down, and let it slide. No harm in a little snuggle. Go on and give Uncle Freddie a smooch. No one had to tell me that what starts with a kiss usually ends with a fisting.
I told them both to fuck off and got my right ear boxed with a rubber plunger. It rang like Sunday school church bells for two days after. But I was always getting cracked in the head. Enough times to occasionally crumple into contusion, usually for saying something I wasn’t supposed to, or NOT doing something I was supposed to, or for skulking the South Side Slopes, prowling the streets for a wandering eyeball or two, a stray gaze, that thousand-mile stare set somewhere behind the black and baby blues of the sunken skulls of lonely low-life losers. Wasted pasty mama’s boys who I’d sucker up to and into my sex, baiting them in with fraudulent promises of pussy ever after. If they could just buck up, grind down, and do the time for my petty crimes.
Looking for more of that negative attention—the only kind I ever got at home. The only kind I’ll ever be able to truly respond to. The kind I blame my mother for forcing me to suffer after she ran off with some two-bit snitch—couldn’t stand the sight of her little bitch ruining all the fun …
But then I’m jumping the gun here, rallying prematurely, and all this ballyhooing is the result of what I’m about to detail, not the reason it all happened in the first place. Little that I did endeared me to Pops, who not only despised my mother and their short-lived Jersey Shore summer affair, but used me as target for retribution against the responsibility he had always rebuked.
He tolerated me only now, after more than a decade of dismissing my existence, because just on the cusp of puberty, my body scented with the bloom of youth, my beauty about to blossom, my boobs about to bust forth, I was the “big-draw money raker” at his Hanover Haven Strong-Arm Street Sweeps, his weekly Canasta game. Four rowdy louts dumbly clustered around him with fists full of singles they were dead set on losing, encouraging his raging assholism which they applauded and supplemented with a stupidity that was somehow touchingly disgusting, and horrendously moronic.
A real armchair philosopher complete with his own fat and fucked-up fan club, Pop’s line of reasoning was, “Do as I say, not as I do” … “Shoot first, ask questions later,” and, “You can’t win for losing” … although I gotta hand it to the ass-wipe, if you could’ve, he would’ve … ten times over.
Two months into my residency, when my dad, the dick, who would have gambled on a cockroach race if they had a window for it down at the local OTB, was hosting another Friday-night blow-out and losing big time. By now down 732 bucks … wanting to even the score and having nothing left to barter since his car had been impounded by Dick Chase’s auto body shop for the better part of that year due to lack of payment, he decided to put ME up on the auction block. That filthy skunk. He had already forfeited the lawn mower, his power tools, the living room couch, and his shaving kit. The stakes suddenly tripled. Allow me to break it down …
The five shits sat in a circle. A round table littered with half a dozen overflowing coffee cans filled with the diseased butts of two hundred Chesterfields, Pall Malls, Viceroys, Camels, and two or three still spit-soaked White Owls whose gummed-to-death tips acted as magnet to cellophane, ash, and fingernail clippings. The browning air was moist and heavy with the mordant aroma that only men on the brink of drinking and smoking themselves into that big unfit sleep are steeped in.
The sticky floor had been pissed on by the slippery-dick trickle of Schlitz, Coors, Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, and Johnnie Walker Red. The carcasses of thousands of split peanut shells sang a stupid song to the broken bones that had been prevented at least for tonight, by the five lechers who were gathered around the bare, moth-specked forty-watt bulb at my father’s precariously perched three-legged dining room table.
By 9:15 they were all shit-faced. Drunk as fuck and squealing like the insufferable sex pigs that they were.
I was forced to play waitress, barkeep, and Barbie doll. Keep their busted cups full of rotgut, the pickled pigs feet coming, the corn dogs warm, and smile like I meant it. Yeah, right … Give me something to smile about, assholes.
I don’t think I even learned to crack a grin until I was fourteen, and then only used it as a rouse to lure lousy dirt boys into bed with me in the hopes of pilfering their wallets. But that came later.
The aforementioned Fat Freddie Matolla, who sold little old ladies burial plots for their future grandchildren, was hijacking the ante up, trying to force the other monkeys to throw down their cards, slapping happy at his porky thighs, hoping to score a big wet one while chewing on my virgin tenderloin.
Jersey Joe di Blasco, small-time hood and part-time security guard down at the local bingo hall, was sweating blood. Tongue wagging like a side of beef swinging. The ring around his collar leaving dirt stains on his greasy neck. Mighty Mike Junco was contemplating a winning streak. Defined by his cauliflower ears as ex—amateur wrestler with a federation so small it had only two initials, he was punching the air with a Brooklyn cheer, sitting not so pretty on a pair of tens, grinning like a lunatic. I feared he’d pop a hole in his shit-sluiced shorts, exposing his hard-on which was straining the worn brown corduroy of his high-waters.
Deano la Martino, a sleazy sad-sack Italian door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, with a pencil-thin salt-and-pepper mustache used as peanut shell crumb catcher, henpecked to near death by a high-maintenance beauty salon addict and her four intolerable bastard kids, was the only half-humanoid left who could still wager a bet. He looked so morose I thought he had burst his colostomy bag. He struggled with the winning hand knowing full well in order to save face, and in the meantime maybe my ass, at least from the other baby killers, that he’d have to go through with it. He’d have to claim his booty. Me. And off we went to my father’s bedroom.