In the end Lou’s armor proved to be much thicker.
It reminds me of the famous words, What does not kill me makes me stronger. Veronica was very fond of this quote by Nietzsche. I hope it proves true in my case.
Then again, wasn’t it Nietzsche who also said: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad?
I’m pretty sure it was Nietzsche.
But maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe it wasn’t him.
Maybe it was Alfred E. Neuman.
forty-one
I finally finished the letter I began in Veronica’s backyard. Truth is, I never got beyond Dear Veronica that day beneath the fire escape. All I need to do now is sign it and it will be official. Forever.
Dear Veronica:
Forgive me for not conjuring your image in my mind for long stretches of time and for the days that pass without thoughts of you or wishes for your peaceful rest or a better rebirth or protection from the lord of death and his legions of doom.
Only two months gone and the hours, days, and weeks are already filled with things other than the tremendous loss I felt when you passed. The inertia, paralysis, and grief that hung about me have disappeared. My mind has released itself from the burden of your absence and I feel like a shitheel because of it.
And I threw away the necklace you gave me.
Forgive me for not having your face permanently emblazoned in my brain anymore. I had hoped you would be there always without pause, in my thoughts constantly for years, my mourning and sorrow continuous for decade upon decade.
But here it is, only eight weeks later, and I’m over it. How awful and unkind. How selfish, egoistic, and disgusting of me.
Last week I was sitting by the window and a bus drove by. Its exhaust blended with the smell of the rain on asphalt and I was instantly transported to the very first time I stood outside your building. Waiting outside the door for you to come down after your voice, breathless and hurried, came through the intercom and said: “One minute.”
The memory hung clear for a few seconds and then narrowed in focus into smaller and smaller circles of vision, shrinking all the way down to the size and shape of a peephole and then gone. I slept sound and dreamless and woke up rested without a thought or picture of you. Forgive me, please.
What would you say in response to this? Would you say I’m human? It’s human . . . it’s natural . . . it’s to be expected? Or would you say I’m a monster? Cold, heartless, uncaring, and that’s how it’s always been with me and always would have been? Or maybe it’s none of the above? Maybe it’s . . . maybe I . . . maybe . . .
Yours Always,
forty-two
My mother was very excited the other day. She told me I may be able to get my diploma before Christmas if I keep doing the work I’ve been doing. It was good to see her happy. The poor thing has been through so much. I asked her about final exams and she said they won’t be necessary, I just have to keep completing the work she brings me every week. I am convinced my mother wrote the school a big check. Next year there will probably be a plaque on a desk somewhere in my school with my grandfather’s name on it.
Mom also brought some brochures for colleges (Boston College, Columbia, and Fordham). This took me by surprise. I hadn’t been thinking much about college. I’m not planning on going anytime soon and was hoping to take a year (maybe two) off, but she thinks it couldn’t hurt to start exploring options. I don’t know. Not sure what I want to do besides get the fuck out of here.
I turn eighteen soon and will be moved upstairs to the adult ward. My mother has hatched a plan, bless her heart. She is convinced that the head of security has a crush on her and she thinks she can enlist his help and get me out of here so we can celebrate my birthday someplace special. She whispered all this in my ear in view of the nurses and orderlies. She was holding me tight, pretending to hug me, but revealing her caper in detail.
She thinks she can get Mr. Ruffalo, the security chief, to leave the rear stairwell door unlocked for a ten-minute span right after lights-out on Friday. I would slip downstairs and out the emergency door where my mother would be waiting in a limousine. She would have packed a suitcase for me and we would go straight to the airport and fly to Italy to visit Rome and Naples. Two cities she’s always wanted to see. We’d tour the Vatican and the excavated city of Pompeii.
I didn’t want to burst her bubble but I reminded her that neither one of us had a passport and there was no way to leave the country without one. She suggested Miami as an alternative. I squeezed her tight and told her that if I escaped it would work against me and they would probably keep me here longer. And that it would be best to go to Miami or maybe even Italy after my release, which looks like it will be before the holidays.
I haven’t shaved since I’ve been here and I have a scraggly black beard. When I see myself in the mirror it doesn’t look like me. Not the me I remember as me. I look more like the man in the only postcard Veronica ever sent me. It was a self-portrait of Picasso as a young man. During his blue period, I think. She wrote on the back of it, Matt, you are so much more than you think you are, and so much less than me. Ha ha ha! Just kidding. Happy 17th. Veronica. P.S. If you grew a beard you might look like this. Think about it.
* * *
My best friend here is a girl named Nicole. She plays Bach and Brahms on the flute. They only allow her to play one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. The rest of the time they keep the flute locked up. God knows why a flute would need incarceration but those are the rules here at the Waldorf Hysteria.
When Nicole plays her face gets clear and quiet, like a serious child. But when she’s just hanging out she can be wicked and sarcastic in a very funny way. And she knows the filthiest jokes.
I think I might be in love.
I want to come clean. I really do. I have nothing left to hide.
afterwords
California, November 2013
I’m heading up the 101 with Los Angeles behind me. I think it’s autumn. It’s night so it’s hard to tell. It’s hard to tell in the daytime too. The sun has no seasons in Southern California. Or maybe it does and I just haven’t figured them out yet.
On the edge of Thousand Oaks I find myself at the top of the Conejo Grade. It’s a dizzying decline that twists down into the valley where Camarillo begins. If you didn’t know any better you could easily think you were about to fall off the edge of the world.
This stretch of Cali freeway is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a hitchhiking migrant farmworker who was run over by a drunken teenager who hung himself in his jail cell. Which I suppose makes two ghosts, though it’s only the farmhand who’s been seen in these parts.
And though I have no idea where in the Los Angeles area my father crashed and burned, something in my gut tells me it was here. I’m sure there are ways to research it and find out the truth, but I have yet to do so and probably never will. Sometimes the truth of imagination is easier to live with than the truth of fact.
By day you can see hills rolling on for miles, some of them strange and mysterious, like flattop pyramids grown over wild—too correct in angle and line to be a product of nature. At night it’s like sitting in the cockpit of an airplane as you slowly descend to a narrow landing strip between the mountains, hills, farmland, and the lights of the Camarillians. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, you might get a heady waft of peaty fertilizer or sugary strawberry if luck is with you.
But tonight the air is still. One of your songs comes on the radio. You are only a few days dead so a lot of your songs are being sent over the airwaves. It’s an old song, one of your earliest. A nugget that would spawn so many more of its kind as an unbroken chain of admirers fell under your influence.
It’s a tender tune. A sad, slow song, sweet and delicate. Something churns in my solar plexus and threatens release through the eyes. It catches me by surprise, then it breaks and the tears come. Big drops that fall out easy. They drip like wax, sealing all
the oaths and pledges. It feels good.
I go from surprise to shock when I notice it’s raining. It hasn’t rained here in years but the sky doesn’t know that so it sends the water down as if it were common. It pours like the tropics and it’s very hard to see. Dangerous. West Coast drivers are unaccustomed to wet roads and impaired visibility. We all slow to a steady creep, some of us crying.
I cry as much for your passing as I do for the time unrecoverable that has passed me by. I cry for the boy I was, who became a man. For the city I loved, which has vanished like you have. For the beautiful, brilliant shooting starlet who left this earth while still a child. I cry for never having known you once I was old enough to understand who you really were and the magnitude of the art you made.
The story told here, closing with me on the edge of manhood, is as much yours as it is mine. Its end is where we parted and it would be at least fifteen years until I’d see you again.
I didn’t mention who I was or that we’d met before because I didn’t expect you’d remember or recognize me. You didn’t. So I expressed my admiration as a fan.
I’m pretty sure it was a postpremiere party for a film and I’m certain it was at El Teddy’s or El Internacionale. I don’t recall what incarnation the joint was at the time. You were standing at one of the floor-length urinals in the men’s room. After following you in (I know), I stood and peed—with an empty drain between us to be polite.
Looking straight ahead at the white-tiled wall, I said: “I was listening to you this afternoon. ‘Magic and Loss.’ It’s a masterpiece.”
You glanced over for a little second and after assessing if I posed any threat, you turned back to the wall and said kindly: “That’s pretty cool.” Then you zipped up and walked away.
A little while later I watched you drinking a can of Tecate at the bar. This surprised me because word on the street was that you were anonymously sober. Standing next to my recovering friend whose guest I was that evening, I pointed out the beer. He shrugged and said: “Junkies, man. They have a sobriety all their own.”
I didn’t understand what he meant.
By then you were a long way from junk or speed or whatever it was that possessed you way back when. And to reduce you to junkie, like, Once a junkie, always a junkie—well, for my friend I apologize.
I was happy to see you sip the beer. It made me see clear the fluid and idiosyncratic possibilities in our lives, or maybe more accurately: the fluidity and idiosyncrasy that is our lives. It made me see that there are escape routes out of hell and if we are fortunate we can make a clean getaway and survive.
We survived the fires that started when we kicked the candles in our sleep, too fucked up to remember to blow them out. We survived the fights at dawn when there was nothing left to say but curses, low-blow insults, and the revelations of harbored desires to inflict violence and pain. We survived falling down the stone stairs backward, literally head over heels, because we were so drunk and the last cigarette made us so dizzy. Yes, we were lucky and earned that sip of beer at the bar.
The next time I saw you was ten years after the men’s-room encounter. You were performing at the second permutation of the Knitting Factory. It was the first April of the new millennium and you had just released a new album. Four decades in and your work was as potent, relevant, and necessary as anyone’s, if not more so. I remember thinking as you walked onstage that you were the same age my father would have been; just about sixty. It would be the only time I would ever see you perform live and the last time I would ever be in your presence.
What I proceeded to behold that evening was the living embodiment of rock and roll itself. Its essence distilled and offered up with generosity and benevolence for all those who gathered to bear witness to the passion; to the majesty, ferocity, and might. The power and the glory. Transmitted through vibration, gesture, and mind (mantra, mudra, and meditation), from you to us with love and compassion. For we know not what we do.
And more than anything else, it was punk. Which should come as no surprise since you were its creator. I don’t care what Detroit says, you were doing it when Iggy was a mere Osterberg and Kramer was trying to figure out who the other four would be. As for the lads from my neck of the woods (famous for their “One, two, three, four” count-off and three power chords) who are considered by some as the progenitors of the movement . . . well, that just makes no sense chronologically or otherwise. Not to mention (but I will) that they basically wrote the same song over and over again. And however great a song it may be, it renders deep catalog cuts redundant. Sorry, kids, I guess you had to be there—on the Bowery when it happened. But I wasn’t.
And the same goes for the little London boy. Just the first few sentences you speak to the audience on Take No Prisoners relegates John-John to a corner with some crayons and a finger up his nose. The revolution you started was one of art and intellect. It inspired the defeat of tyranny in Czechoslovakia, for Christ’s sake. God save the queen, indeed.
* * *
The song ends and the tears stop as suddenly as they started. Another song of yours begins to play. It’s the one that got me into all the trouble. You played it that night at the Knitting Factory, a miracle really, because I loved it so much and it was rarely included in your live repertoire. It was sheer delight that evening and maybe even more thrilling tonight.
It opens with a wail (your guitar), then it churns and rumbles (bass and drums), then melts euphoric (more guitar), then you shout. It is heroic and brave. Transcendent and holy.
And it doesn’t look like the rain will stop.
I hit the gas hard and head into the West.
Acknowledgments
I am forever grateful to: my dear parents Dan and Claire, my brother John, Ryszard and Raisa Chlebowski, His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche, Elijah Amitin, Laurie Anderson, Sharon Angela, Jean-Claude Baker, Norena Barbella, Valerie Baugh, Jack Cacamis, Seymour Cassel, Bruno de Almeida, John Frey, Roger Haber, Tom Gilroy, Fernando Gomes, Ti Jean, Joe Laurita, Richard Lewis, Gary Lippman, Steven P. Morrissey, Joyce Carol Oates, Nick Sandow, Joe Scarpinito, Steve Schirripa, Richard Sottosanti, Johnny Temple and Akashic Books, Tina Thor and TMT Entertainment, Olmo Tighe, Mark Turgeon, John Ventimiglia, Francine Volpe, my agents at ICM: Hrishi Desai, Dan Kirschen, and Ruthanne Secunda.
And of course . . . to the incomparable Lou Reed, for his kindness and for all the beautiful art.
Swoop, swoop, rock, rock
MICHAEL IMPERIOLI is best known for his starring role as Christopher Moltisanti in the acclaimed TV series The Sopranos, which earned him a Best Supporting Actor Emmy Award. He also wrote five episodes of the show and was co-screenwriter of the film Summer of Sam, directed by Spike Lee. Imperioli has appeared in six of Lee’s films and has also acted in films by Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, Walter Hill, Peter Jackson, and the Hughes Brothers. Upcoming projects include Bruno de Almeida’s Cabaret Maxime, The Last Full Measure alongside Peter Fonda, Christopher Plummer, and William Hurt, and ABC’s Alex, Inc. The Perfume Burned His Eyes is his debut novel. Photograph by David Imperioli
This is a work of fiction. While some characters portrayed here have counterparts among real individuals, living or dead, all of the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Published by Akashic Books
©2018 Michael Imperioli
Cover Photo: Josepth Sterling, The Age of Adolescence, 1956-64, Copyright Deborah Sterling, Courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery.
ISBN: 978-1-61775-620-7
eISBN: 978-1-61775-642-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956424
First printing
Akashic Books
Brooklyn, New York
Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland
Twitter: @AkashicBooks
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Website: www.akashicbooks.com
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