by Kim Gordon
The next morning over breakfast, I asked her if she and the other members of her band had spent time with Yuck. Sure, she said—they hung out and talked a little. I couldn’t help asking if they knew who her parents were. “No way,” she said. How cool is that?
46
Photo by George Holz
EVEN WHEN YOU’RE in the public eye, you never understand how you come across to other people. For some reason, Thurston and I seemed to intersect with a generation of late baby boomers who’d lived in cities, had kids in an attempt to create rock-and-roll babies, and didn’t want to age the same way their own parents had. They had music in common with their children. Even if they were in their forties or fifties, they still had a banked fire in them, a raised finger, a sneer, hidden under years of living. As time went on, it seemed, Thurston and I had come to symbolize that feeling for many.
Within the band, though, it was business as usual. For as far back as I could remember I’d been careful not to come across as the female half of a “power couple.” I also went out of my way never to bicker with Thurston in front of Lee and Steve. My whole life I’ve accommodated other people’s feelings—ironic, given how often the press likes to remark on my strong-seeming persona. Unless it was something burningly important, I held my tongue for the greater good—the music—though maybe it went deeper than that.
On the other hand, Lee and I regularly butted heads, usually during mixing. Lee would go off on tangents, insisting on hearing the mix in various different ways before returning to the original version we’d already agreed on. Sometimes Lee had a good idea, and his tangents were worth it. I grew to realize that his love of different versions was just his way of working. Ultimately I felt that Lee and I could work out our issues and that we’d eventually reach some agreement—we were both just very stubborn people.
When Thurston didn’t like something, he would just turn off. He would sulk, placing the rest of us under his cloud, not wanting to talk about things, unable to take confrontation of any kind. At those times I became an ambassador, a diplomat. In 2011, Sonic Youth provided a soundtrack for a French film, Simon Werner a disparu, directed by Fabrice Gobert, and I remember vividly that Thurston didn’t want to be there, though at the time I didn’t realize he was already involved with another woman. Sonic Youth shared all publishing rights, and I think over time Thurston grew to resent that. Bands are the ultimate dysfunctional family. If Steve was bothered by something Lee did, he usually told Thurston first. I’m pretty sure I must have been a source of annoyance to Steve, as I would usually say what was on my mind during mixing, especially about the drums, since they heavily affected the sound of the whole record. But then, so did Lee.
As we became more experienced, the band dynamic got easier, and we found people to work with who could deal with us. After I became a mother, I stepped back a lot, recognizing I couldn’t be involved in every decision involving the band, that I lacked the energy, and in some cases even the interest. I trusted Thurston to make good decisions. In response, he would always present the available options to me and for the most part I concurred with him. I was just more selective about what I cared about.
It was complex, since Steve and Lee were in New York, and for the most part, Thurston and I were in Northampton. After 2000, the studio in the city became more and more theirs. I was busy trying to balance and schedule our lives. If Thurston and I were rehearsing in New York, for example, that meant it made more sense to fly out of New York on tour, rather than flying out of the nearest airport in Massachusetts. If we were heading out for a short series of dates, that meant I would have to enlist a babysitter or caregiver to watch over Coco while we were gone.
Thurston didn’t have that same amount of forethought. Most people saw him as an exuberant, seemingly joyous person who lived entirely in the present. Privately, I knew that he was more calculated, because his lyrics were always well crafted, with rock allusions, and he put a lot of thought into his rock-and-roll strategy. Dan Graham once saw us play the song “Confusion Is Sex” at CBGB and said later, after watching Thurston self-consciously trying to make a “rock moment” happen, “You’re supposed to scream and then fall down on the stage, not fall down onstage and then scream.” I would never have attempted something like that—it just wasn’t me, and Thurston was the true rock-and-roller, the punkologist, the guy who idolized Richard Hell with his music, his poetry, and his self-adoration.
After we moved and Thurston got older, he got better at saying no to offers once in a while. If he hadn’t, he would have shot off back to New York every couple of days. To be fair, I don’t think he really wanted to live in a small Massachusetts town. That’s probably why he kept so busy, so as not to think about it. Maybe it reminded him of his own childhood in Bethel, Connecticut—his old yearning to escape and be free. Small-town silence almost obliges you to have inner resources, which the racket of New York doesn’t. New York is all about distraction and what’s next. The city has seasons, but they’re muted, and the transition of summer to fall to winter has more to do with changing temperatures than it does with the leaves turning, or the trees getting bare, or the grass going from brown to green, or getting older. With its dopamine running wild all over the streets, New York was probably good for Thurston’s nerves, acting them out for him. Whenever he would return from the city, he would be in a great mood. He would come into the kitchen and wrap me up with his long arms, a big kid.
Toward the end, though, he stopped doing even that. He seemed lost in his own weather pattern, his own season. After a couple of days back from New York, the lack of distraction would get to him. He’d be on his phone, fingers racing, chasing after the things he felt he was missing out on. When he came into a room, he spoke in a big captain’s voice, commanding attention. It was as if he were talking over his own mood, pressing it down, distancing other people from what was really going on. He’d lost that youthful glow. He wasn’t happy, I knew, which made me feel lonely, and somehow at fault.
It’s hard to figure out when it all started. I was aware of his unhappiness, but I made excuses, too. I had my own doubts about our relationship, but I pushed them under, reasoning that every long-term relationship has its pitfalls, nothing is perfect, no one can have everything. In many ways, Thurston’s and my musical, creative life was ideal, despite the fact that I wasn’t being true to myself if I didn’t follow through with my artwork. When we moved out of New York, my life as a visual artist became almost my biggest concern and preoccupation. I saved up whatever time I spent away from Coco and home and the band for doing art. In 2003, I had a show at the Participant Inc. gallery in New York. That was also the year that I met “her” for the first time, when she came into the gallery in the middle of the installation.
47
“Cotton Crown”
Love has come to stay in all the way
It’s gonna stay forever and every day
It feels like a wish coming true
It feels like an angel dreaming of you
Feels like heaven forgiving and getting
Feels like we’re fading and celebrating
You got a carnal spirit spraying
I’m gonna laugh it up
You got a cotton crown
Gonna keep it underground
You’re gonna take control of the chemistry
And you’re gonna manifest the mystery
You got a magic wheel in your memory
I’m wasted in time and I’m looking everywhere
I don’t care where
I don’t care where
Angels are dreaming of you
Angels are dreaming of you
Angels are dreaming of you
Angels are dreaming of you
New York City is forever kitty
I’m wasted in time and you’re never ready
Fading fading celebrating
I got your cotton crown
I got your cotton crown
I got your cotton crown
<
br /> I got your cotton crown
I got your cotton crown
I got your
48
OUR MARRIAGE COMBUSTED when I inadvertently discovered a bunch of texts between Thurston and the other woman. The shock of it was overwhelming, and the only reason I didn’t have a complete breakdown was because of Coco. I would have done anything in the world to shield her from having to deal with what was going on between her parents. Not only is it horrible to find out that you’re not the most adored person in your father’s life, betrayal also changes the way you see men, and right as you’re entering the world as a so-called adult, too.
And so it all started, in slow motion, a pattern of lies, ultimatums, and phony promises, followed by e-mails and texts that almost felt designed to be stumbled on so as to force me to make a decision that he, Thurston, was too much of a coward to face. I was furious. It wasn’t just the responsibility he was refusing to take; it was the person he had turned me into: his mother. I could either put up with the humiliation, or I could end things.
We tried to save it. We were both in therapy and seeing a marriage counselor too. But it was like dealing with an addict who was unraveling, who couldn’t stop himself. He and I still slept in the same bed—it was a big bed—but in the mornings, we would get dressed and go downstairs and do our own thing. I’d make breakfast for myself and Thurston would disappear into his office on the first floor or into the basement, where his vinyl collection lived. During the day, whenever I saw him, he’d be texting away madly on his iPhone, as if searching for something.
Before Thurston, she, the woman, was romantically involved with a former close associate of Sonic Youth I’ll call Tom. All of us had seen this very shy, anti-technology, anti-domesticity guy transform into a man clutching a cell phone, which he started calling his “walkie-talkie,” whose private number only she knew, and how Tom began talking about moving in with her, and about marriage, and having children, and how the second he came offstage he already had his phone to his ear as if she had become a part of his body.
It had ended badly, theatrically, crazily, like some tabloid story. No one could really understand how Thurston, who had always had a good nose for the user, the groupie, the nutcase, or the hanger-on, had let himself get pulled under by her, too. She was a current that dragged you underwater and you were miles from home before you even realized it.
Someone told me later the woman would have been happy seducing anyone in the band. In fact, I was the first one she pursued. Two years earlier, she had walked into the Participant Inc. gallery, where I was setting up a show, and introduced herself as an editor at a well-known publishing house. Then she zeroed in: “I’m leaving town tomorrow,” she said, “but would you be at all interested in doing a book?”
It turned out she needed someone—me—to edit a book about mix tapes she was publishing. “Thanks, but I’m not all that interested right now,” I said. I didn’t think Thurston would be interested, either. He wasn’t the coffee-table-book type, which is what the project sounded like. When I asked Richard Kern about her, he told me that he was keeping his distance, which made me laugh, because if a filmmaker whose work involves a lot of aesthetic exploration of extreme sex, violence, and perversion wants to keep his distance, chances are she’s something else.
But when I told Thurston about the mix-tape project, and brought up the sexual predator part, he was interested. Two years after Tom had moved across the country to escape her, Thurston and the woman—who was then involved with someone else, and also had a baby daughter—started up a small book-publishing company, Ecstatic Peace Library, the goal being to publish limited-edition art, design, photography, and poetry books. They set up an office in our Lafayette Street apartment, which was empty most of the time by then.
Later I found out she had pretty much set up house there, cooking meals and leaving plates and pans to dry by the side of the sink, and even lining up all of Coco’s old childhood dolls across the bed on the nights her daughter slept in my own daughter’s old bedroom.
The few books Ecstatic Peace Library published were mostly to her taste, which surprised me. The first was by one of her photographer friends, James Hamilton, who worked at the Village Voice in the seventies. She had an idea for a Yoko Ono book that would turn into a kite. It seemed like a book meant for the MoMA gift store.
During this time I suspected nothing, even though everyone who met or encountered her had the exact same toxic, dark reaction, the same feeling of “What was that?” as if someone, or something, was trying to take them over. She would say the strangest things to me as she grabbed my arm and steered me toward a cab. “I want to be your personal assistant,” and “What can I get you? Do you need any stockings?” Vanishing, she would come back fifteen minutes later with half a dozen pairs.
Her solicitousness was all the more strange since she knew how much I disliked her, especially when I saw what went down between her and Tom. “Why are you working with her?” I asked Thurston once. “She seems so crazy to me.”
“Well, she’s professional when we work together,” Thurston said. He added, “I know how to deal with her.”
49
MY FRIEND JULIE later told me that she had suspected for a long time Thurston and the woman were having an affair. “It was the cigarettes,” she told me.
Thurston and I were spending a week on Martha’s Vineyard at Julie and Daisy’s rental house in Chilmark. Thurston kept going outside, or for long walks, and when he returned everyone could smell smoke on him. He’d always been a casual smoker, but recently he’d been on a tear, though he always made it a point never to smoke in front of Coco or me. It was always outside, away from the house, the stubbed-out, stepped-on butts on the lawn or the driveway the only evidence.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that Thurston keeps his smoking secret from you?” the woman said to me once. “That he wants to hide it?” She laughed. “What do you think that’s all about?” She seemed to take a sadistic kind of pleasure in my not knowing the answer.
Thurston left the Vineyard early to attend a memorial service in New York for Tuli Kupferberg, a member of the Fugs, a band he and Byron Coley were planning on writing a book about. At least that was his official explanation. I missed out on the conversation my friends had that night as they sat around talking about Thurston and why he had left the island early. “I think he’s having an affair with her,” Julie said flat-out.
“Stop,” someone said. “Just stop with that line of thinking.”
Someone else said, “Let’s try and be positive here.”
“It’s the cigarettes, I tell you,” Julie said. “The cigarettes are always a giveaway. Mark my words.” When the truth came out, Julie told me she always smoked the brand of cigarettes of whomever she happened to be going out with at the time, and that Thurston was smoking the same brand the woman smoked.
One morning I got up to go to yoga. Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing the same things back. It was like a nightmare you don’t ever wake up from. At yoga class I was trembling, and when I came home I confronted him. At first he denied it but I told him I had seen the texts—just like in the movies, only this was painfully real.
Thurston claimed that he wanted to break it off. He claimed he wanted to come back to our family.
In time I found the e-mails and videos from her on Thurston’s laptop, and the hundreds of text messages between the two of them proudly displayed on our monthly cell phone bill. When I confronted Thurston again, he denied it, then admitted it, then promised things were all over between them. It was a pattern that would happen over and over again. I wanted to believe him. I understood that the cigarettes were a mark of some secrecy between them, a ritual and a taboo that could only happen outside the home when no one else was around.
In October that same year, Thurston flew down to North Car
olina for a second memorial service, this one for an old friend named Harold, who had been the best man at our wedding twenty-seven years earlier.
Thurston seemed nervous and I offered to go with him, since I knew how much he loved Harold and that it would probably be an emotional experience for him. I chalked his nerves up to the fact he and Harold had become somewhat estranged over the years. But a couple of weeks later, with my paranoia now ramped up, it came to light that Thurston and the woman had met up in North Carolina, and that he’d made two separate hotel reservations, one at some no-name hotel—to put me off the scent, maybe—and the other at a more expensive B & B.
I didn’t find out about this until I was in New York and about to go to a publication party for Ecstatic Peace. By this point, Ecstatic Peace Library was all but dissolved, but the book she and Thurston had been working on was still being published. Arrangements had been made to make sure she didn’t show up. I didn’t want to go—it was traumatic to even be in the same room with James Hamilton, who knew about the affair—but I had to stake out the territory of what was left of my marriage.
That day, when I discovered the truth about the rendezvous, I can remember wandering around New York shaking, trying not to cry. I called my therapist back in Massachusetts, though I can’t even remember what she said. The book party was just as painful as I feared it would be. The next day, Thurston was scheduled to fly out to L.A. to record an album produced by our friend Beck, and I was planning on driving home. When I confronted Thurston about his rendezvous in North Carolina, we ended up talking in the front seat of my car, as a friend was spending the night at our apartment and there was no privacy.