Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  I was going to have to find a place to stay the night, as my return plane ticket wouldn’t be valid yet. I saw a guy walking a dog and took that as a sign of domesticity, so I asked him if he lived nearby and he took me back to where he was staying. It was an alternative community in a high-rise tower that had been taken over by “the people,” called Rochdale. It had its own radio station and police force to warn if the police came. You needed a special pass to get past security. There was an independent population of freaks living there, presumably for free, and I guessed illegally, but with a sophisticated internal system: shops, drugs, cafés—everything you needed was in-house. I stayed with the guy and his dog, and in the morning went to the airport and got the flight back to Cleveland.

  13

  BEWITCHED AND BEDRAGGLED

  So it was Bowie who got me into him: Iggy Stooge, aka Iggy Pop. Thanks, David—I loved you anyway but thanks again.

  Before Bowie, the Stooges were just another local band as far as I was concerned. Local as in Detroit opposed to English as in Hull. I therefore paid them little notice. The grass is always greener (unless you’re in Acapulco), or so I thought. Bowie started mentioning him in the rare interviews he gave. The term “mainstream” wasn’t mainstream yet. Fans still enjoyed being part of the underground elite, of which Bowie was still an underground delight—and Iggy Pop was a step or two removed again.

  Every cell in my body had become a receptor, transposing Englishness into something like a hormone or vitamin needed to stave off rickets. But Iggy Pop, aka “the world’s forgotten boy,” was right there in my own backyard, oozing testosterone—an oil spill’s worth.

  My Bowie obsession ambushed me just as I was having one of my rare but not entirely unknown moments of thinking, “Maybe it’s time to grow up.” I had two or three of these over the years. The first one was when I dumped my Beatles drawer. All the posters and magazines and paraphernalia, including my Beatles tennis shoes, went in the trash. By the age of sixteen I thought maybe it was a bit childish to keep poring over such mementos. Thus the purge followed by intense remorse.

  Then, when I got back from Mexico. That time lasted for a week or two. Time to abandon these childish obsessions and unrealistic yearnings. Hunky Dory saw the back of that notion. I never lost my faith.

  “Now, what do you want for your twenty-first birthday, Christy, a watch?”

  “The Gibson Melody Maker I saw advertised in the Beacon Journal for $100.”

  They really were the best parents in the world. But I couldn’t be a good daughter—not yet.

  The Stooges’ Fun House album became my after-work fix. “Dirt” soothed any mental or emotional aching and gave me the incentive to go back in to work the next day, so I could go home afterwards and listen to “Dirt” again.

  I found a copy of the British music paper New Musical Express at Gray Drug at the Summit Mall. Whoever the buyer at Gray was at that time, I thank you a thousand times over, you humanitarian and visionary.

  The picture on my wall showed Iggy astride a mic stand. He backflipped. He walked on outstretched hands. He healed the sick. The picture of him shirtless, wearing those silver strides, took pride of place next to a poster of Brigitte Bardot.

  It was September 22, 1972, when I watched Bowie’s unforgettable US debut as Ziggy Stardust in awe and wonder. I’d just turned twenty-one (and had no idea that I had less than a year to go before I would leave Ohio and America for good). Sue and I drove to Cleveland early to stand out in the cold and listen to the soundcheck. A gray day in Cleveland at its bleakest was the perfect setting to hear the band run through “Five Years.” Pure magic.

  Bowie emerged with his minders to walk back to the hotel. I had never been so close to anything that made me feel “Soul Love” like that before. But this was not the Veronica Lake lookalike I’d fallen in love with while listening to Hunky Dory. Ziggy sported a get-down boy haircut in orange, a short green denim jacket and pegged green jeans rolled up over platform boots. It walked a mere three feet beside me. Trick or treat!

  He and his minders were keeping the pace next to us. They seemed to be watching us as if they weren’t sure when to cross the street. Other side, big boy. The tall, good-looking one with the green eyes spoke. His name was Anton and it looked to me like he was black. (They had black people in England who spoke with English accents?) He invited us to join them. I’m pretty sure we didn’t look like groupie material. I was wearing a cable-knit fisherman’s cardigan. But there wasn’t anybody else around.

  We went to the band’s suite at the hotel and I sat there. I was practically trembling and incapable of looking Stardust in the eye, but mumbled: “People in Cleveland will love it if you play that Velvet Underground song.” They’d played “Waiting for My Man” at the soundcheck. Stardust replied, “Oh, maybe we will do that.” I should have been an A&R man.

  Anton asked if we knew a place to eat. Take David Bowie out to dinner? Let’s go!

  Ziggy waited for me to pull the seat forward and then climbed into the back of my mother’s Oldsmobile Cutlass. “This is a nice car,” he said politely. How embarrassing to be driving my mom’s car! And the funny thing was, I can’t remember even one other time my parents had gone away overnight. This must have been Providence intervening—I’d hijacked her car and now David Bowie was in it. That was just weird.

  The show was one of those turning points in American culture, and now my fellow Stouffer Girls, who I’d fumbled trays alongside in a poorly executed waitress job—older, divorced Neil Diamond fans who’d laughed at my Bowie scrapbook—now they would know too. I liked being right for a change.

  Debbie, Sue, Hoover and I drove to Detroit to see the show again. Witnessing Bowie onstage with Mick Ronson was life-changing I’m sure for everyone there. Ronson, a guitar giant of rare beauty with platinum-blond get-down boy hair, satin strides and muscular forearms giving it some on the Les Paul, was truly Godlike. Oh, yes, let the children boogie!

  As was my wont in those early years, I couldn’t leave with the rest of the audience when the house lights went up. I needed to get closer to the stage as security cleared the hall. “C’mon, Chris, let’s go—it’s over!” As always, my girlfriends trying to urge me to the exit.

  And then, there he was. He too was wandering around the emptying hall, glassy eyed—wandering like me. Iggy Pop. Kicking through the plastic cups, cigarette butts and litter, probably wondering why it hadn’t been him and his band up there onstage enjoying the rapture of all, he was lost in thought, or maybe just stoned, oblivious to the fact that his number-one fan of all time was standing in front of him. With the lights up I could see him in all his glory—dirty blond hair and blue eyes turning green. He saw me—the only girl left in the empty hall—and looked into my eyes. I couldn’t speak during the hundred-mile journey back to Akron.

  —

  I had a plan to get Dianne to leave Columbus, where she was going to Ohio State University, and come to Kent. Who cared what school it was? What difference did it make to a dropout? Stella and Dianne were different from me, though. They were going to get degrees and make something of their lives.

  She was pretty miserable there so it didn’t take much to talk her into it. Maybe she missed me bullying her. I know I missed driving from Dairy Queen to Dairy Queen, from Stow to Medina, and pigging out on chocolate-dipped frozen custards. Now the gorging would involve drugs and men. Well, they didn’t have a Dairy Queen in downtown Kent.

  I found us a basement apartment on West Main Street and waited for her to join me. The stalling-for-time-while-waiting-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-my-life plan wasn’t working. Now I was just stalling for time. The figuring-out part hadn’t happened.

  There were two truck drivers who came in for breakfast at Jerry’s, where I was still holding down my job. Wearing something resembling a waitress outfit, an apron pulling the ensemble together, I served them. I guess I wasn’t the humble servant I’d been aiming for when reading the Tao Te Ching. I was too arro
gant to pull off these waitress gigs. I didn’t mind the service part, but the clothes! Me, in a skirt? No.

  Dianne arrived and we moved into the apartment. Every morning, I’d crawl down from my bunk (it must have been set up for multiple students—four showerheads in the bathroom and bunk beds) and drink a 16-ounce bottle of Royal Crown Diet Cola. I liked the synthetic chemical taste. It offset a hangover nicely, especially with so many other chemicals in the mix.

  I wasn’t delusional or thinking anything was going to happen for me in Kent. I was coasting on apathy, and that made me want to get off. Dianne used to bring out a miniature chest of drawers like something from a doll’s house. Every drawer had different pills in it. I’d go to class (the final days of school), do badly, then work my shift waitressing at Jerry’s, go back to the basement and get Dianne to get out the drawers. Then we’d go downtown and wait to see what kind of pill it was we’d dropped.

  I’d had my eye on the truck drivers ever since they came to my attention at work. Dianne and I liked both of them, which was fine because they didn’t seem to mind which one of us they got. They shared a house closer to Brimfield just up the road, which was often referred to by the locals as “Brimtucky”—a bit more like Kentucky than Kent.

  Fine guys, as we used to say. I was getting a taste for something. I was hoping I was normal, that all the parts worked. They were older, twenty-two or twenty-three. They’d need to have experience because I didn’t know what I was doing.

  Between them they had a BSA and a Corvette, which they’d park next to the curb outside the diner where I could admire them. In Ohio that was known as “foreplay.”

  The ’70 Corvette was a work of art: a custom paint-job to look like a shark; iridescent silver sides graduating from blue to gray then down into a yellow underbelly, and with its red interior it really did look like a shark. Ohio was good for shit like that. And the BSA, a nifty little English speed machine. Students didn’t have that stuff.

  I didn’t mind a trucker—a dark one and a blond one. “Wrap ’em up—we’ll take one of each.”

  All the drugs and alcohol were distorting our better judgment. I was in and out of the clap clinic more often than a syringe-wielding nurse could say, “You’re just going to feel a little prick.”

  But it wasn’t just me. That’s the thing about the clap, it’s contagious. Nobody minded because we were taking so many pills—what difference did a course of antibiotics make? Anything was curable. I even hitched a lift back from the clinic in Ravenna once and, by the time I got to Kent, discovered that everyone in the car must have come into contact with the same strain.

  “Hang on a minute—you were with…what’s his name? Oh, shit! That means…”

  A car of total strangers united by one disease. Now that’s brotherhood. Although it was around about now that the peace and love thing was on a downward spiral. Forget peace and love; we were just trying to get loaded.

  I think it was mainly Dianne and the dark one, and me and the blond. Was I becoming partial to blonds? No, I’d have whoever would have me. But is that not a universal theme? (The philosopher in me is always trying to make things make sense.) Or maybe it was the other way around, me and the dark one? Oh, it didn’t matter.

  Mine would have a go, but he was usually too fucked up to deliver. I only realized looking back on it what the belt looped like a tourniquet dangling from the doorknob meant. I didn’t know about all that at the time, the paraphernalia. Hard drugs were taking over from the psychedelic experimental “trying to improve our minds” stuff. The straight world didn’t like hallucinogens anyway. But everybody liked to get high, and there was something for everyone in pharmaceuticals.

  Those truckers weren’t even hippies. Smack leveled the playing field—come one, come all. The dark one, after giving Dianne hers, would say, “C’mere, Chris, and I’ll give you your dessert,” as a favor to the pretty blond who had nodded off on the job. They were good buds like that, covering for each other. Kent was rife with dessert.

  14

  TATTOOED LOVE BOYS

  The jig was almost up. A few more residences in Kent saw me the unwilling tenant in a badly enacted Howard the Duck rip-off: “Trapped in a world he never made.” That was me. It was all going in the wrong direction and descending into a fug of alcohol and pills. I stalled for time and time ran out. Dianne stayed in Kent and continued working towards a degree. Why?

  I’d get a place in Akron and a job, and get her to move in with me. Stella had dropped off the face of the earth—moved in with a boyfriend. Well, I think it was a boyfriend. It was hard to tell if it was a man or woman. Anyway, she was still at it to get her degree too. What was it with these people? C’mon!

  I’d waited on tables at Stouffer’s in a red polyester dress, hairnet and apron—“Would you like sour cream or butter on your baked potato, sir?”

  I’d waited on tables in a white shirt, black skirt and apron in the restaurant of Blossom Music Center. “An extra strawberry shortcake and hold the steak!”

  The plan now was to make picture frames for Ray Packard, Akron’s premier gallery owner who kept art alive in Highland Square and beyond. I learned to measure, saw, cut, nail. The Packard Gallery was a bubble of consciousness where I could look at beautiful lithographs; Miró, Spain! (Someone, come and get me!)

  Dennis Connelly framed pictures next to me in the basement, listening to a station that played opera as we measured, cut, nailed and X-Acto-knived. When I couldn’t bear any more hard-to-handle arias, I went up for air and to admire the pair of Borzois, Russian wolfhounds, fenced in across Exchange Street.

  “I bet those two can run like fuck,” I thought.

  (It would take me another forty years to understand what Connelly was listening to. When he sang an aria at my father’s funeral, then I understood.)

  I got Dianne to move into Marky Clayman’s house on Crosby Street in Highland Square with me. Marky lived upstairs and we took the ground floor. I painted the walls with resignation; pictures of Keith Richards went up. Dianne and I posed for a photographer who had, ahem, “artistic flair.” With the fee we bought a new cooker.

  Marky Clayman was the entire soul of Akron channeled into one individual. He never changed himself or his surroundings. A Mark Duffet painting hung slightly crooked on the wall, year in, year out. National Geographic, Ramparts, Down Beat: every issue, dating back, far back. A ticket stub from Montrose Drive-in on the table, where it had lain since the night of the screening, seven years before.

  Marky: baseball cap; can of Pepsi; bottle of Cheracol-X. (He had one hacking cough.) An employee of the City of Akron’s water department, he would hold court at his kitchen table, the plaintive melodies of Miles Davis’s protracted notes searching the room like beams of light illuminating the dancing dust almost imperceptibly. The soundtrack of changelessness. Codeine.

  Cheracol-X, cough syrup of choice for the codeine aficionado, had to be signed for in a pharmacy (if you weren’t underage), where the pharmacist kept records of visits so the user had to travel a wide-ranging circuit to satisfy his or her requirements. You could only hit the same pharmacy after a week, maybe two, so ensuring daily rations was a full-time enterprise. Who said a junkie couldn’t hold down a job?

  —

  Annie was there the day I got the job at Halbert’s doing mail-order coats of arms, with a bunch of unemployable types who could draw. The deal at Halbert’s was that we “researched” family names and made up roughly what might look like a family crest for them.

  Levine, Klonowsky,

  Hivnor or Best,

  If you have the cash,

  We have the crest.

  Something like that. We all had desks under fluorescent lights in a warehouse in what resembled a course in creative therapy for the mentally impaired.

  Everybody has a family history. And if they didn’t, well, they did when we got through with them. I could barely make my quota. (Dianne, the good student, took her commissions home to turn in at th
e end of the week. What discipline!)

  I saw Annie across the table and right away I wanted to know her. She had something. Tough and self-assured, she had experience and it showed. Even her hands were gnarly and nimble. Those hands had been around.

  When my name was shouted out at roll call on the second day, she looked up and said, her matter-of-fact voice always hinting at sarcasm, “You’re Dolores Hynde’s daughter? I used to do her hair.” My mother had told me she was losing her hairdresser to the company I’d applied for. This was she?

  By week two Annie invited me to live at her place. Her Copley Road apartment was one floor above a drugstore, the walls lined in circus posters. Little did my mother know that her hairdresser had been a mushroom-distilling freak; “Does she…or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure!” was the claim on the Miss Clairol ad. We discussed the possibility of drilling a hole in the floor and liberating the jars of pills downstairs.

  Annie thought nothing of disappearing for days, driving her Ford Falcon to Florida through man-eating Ohio blizzards, trekking for hours ankle-deep in mud through cow pastures, plucking mushrooms from piles of manure and driving back to Ohio with a couple of baggies full of the stinky magic buttons.

  The word “organic” was just entering common vernacular, and how timely, too. After ingesting two or three of the purplish-gray mushrooms, every pore in our respective bodies would ooze as we melted into the living sofa while watching the chairs and walls breathing deeply. (I thought I saw Annie’s cat Poppy hanging by the neck from a lamp, but it was only a black scarf. It still makes me shudder to think about it.) But, despite the distorted, lingering and often frightening effect on reality that the mushrooms had, we devoured them, and the road trips to Florida increased to “often.”

  Annie used to draw her psilocybin-inspired fantasies, and they went up on the walls next to the circus posters. (Stevie Nicks still draws those.)