Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  Just outside the city limits the whole country was bending over to take it up the backside. The green meadows of Montrose were being churned up and rolled away, concrete expanding over the hills of Ohio like molten lava.

  —

  Duane Verh called me from Cleveland. I agreed to an audition to sing in a band he was putting together. It was no secret that I had aspirations.

  Bass players were all cool during the “Rescue Me”/ “Groove Me” days, but Duane was super cool—the coolest of the cool cats in the Cleveland music scene. Whatever he wore, he wore like a Jamaican: short-sleeved Italian shirt, open collar, gabardine trousers, thin belt, Italian shoes, ribbed socks, hair pushed back, jazz-musician style. And he had an imperial beard, the thumbnail-sized tuft between chin and bottom lip. With his dark Croatian eyes, he was exotic, for sure, and I wanted, would have loved, to be in his band.

  —

  I was going to need money and a passport.

  I moved back into my parents’ house: one last effort; let’s get on with this thing. “Christy, I know you’re going to do what you want to do, just don’t let me see it!” The only request my mother made that I would take seriously.

  I didn’t realize then that my parents’ out-and-out disapproval of everything I held sacred was a gift. I would have to find my destiny; as it said in the Tao, “Raise your children like birds to fly.”

  “You won’t win on this one, Christy.” I heard that often.

  “I will when I’m gone,” I thought.

  Corn, tomatoes, apple cider and macaroni and cheese were the only things we agreed on. Oh, and Mom’s apple crisp: “Yes, please.”

  It would still be dark as my dad drove me in his orange Carmen Ghia to Halbert’s corrugated tin warehouse, with its overhead strip lights, me, first of the degenerates to arrive. He’d drop me and continue on to Cleveland through hail and downpour to the telephone company where he served a lifetime to maintain and put his two bright kids into college.

  So they could drop out.

  I was accepted into the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. I’d taken the day off work from Halbert’s, flown up there and submitted my portfolio, a meager collection of half-finished junk I’d salvaged from my laughable efforts to get through the courses at KSU, including the unfinished dulcimer. They accepted me!

  I must have thought my parents would pay the tuition fees. I didn’t have the money. Had they known they were on the cusp of losing me forever, maybe they would have. But even I didn’t know how close I was to the end.

  The end of Akron.

  My head was pounding, sticky with violence, idealism and visions of rock bands. I really was getting jaded. I had a hunch: a city could protect me, or I could learn how to airbrush gas tanks. I had one eye on an XLCH in a Harley-Davidson showroom. And the other eye covered in panstick to hide the purple and yellow bruise I’d left the Heavy Bikers’ clubhouse with that last time. I didn’t think I’d be going back there, but they probably had other ideas.

  Leave now.

  16

  LET’S GET ON OUTTA HERE NOW—LET’S GO!

  It was now 1973. Bowie had revived my faith in rock. It had staggered and lost its balance, but only temporarily. And Lou: I saw him at the Akron Civic Theatre—one of his solo shows after leaving the Velvets. Going strong—there was still hope.

  As long as Iggy was out there, there would always be hope, but it had been a bad few years if you were a rock star and twenty-seven. That feeling of immortality the sixties had imparted certainly took a hit.

  In my personal story, like in a mining disaster, hope was running out as each day passed. I’d never seen a passport before, and I was going to need one. I’d need an accomplice too.

  Cindy Smith, Debbie’s older sister, had a ’65 Corvette Stingray in racing green, with a white convertible top—the coolest car ever made. A few years back, when the Jeff Beck Group had played Cleveland I went with Cindy. It seemed so long ago: now.

  The top was down as we zoomed under glittering turnpike lights, stars and clouds racing overhead while the heater blasted our go-go boots under the dashboard where we passed the joint low.

  Cindy wore chunky silver rings that made a clunking sound every time she changed gears, thrusting the chrome ball forwards and sideways while the Stingray lurched and lunged, patchouli oil wafting from her wild hair.

  She knew local WMMS disc jockey Doc Nemo. Cool, cool, cool—everything was cool. But nothing was as cool as the Jeff Beck Group, rock giants who towered over us grateful connoisseurs, reinforcing our belief. We were dazzled by Beck’s virtuosity, the nancy-boy posturing of his cockerel cohorts and the sheer excellence of Rod Stewart discovering his mega talent in front of our very eyes.

  Nemo invited us to meet the band after the show. I was wearing my houndstooth shirt with the label that said Trafalgar Square in it. That sounded English to me. Did we look English enough? The DJ had a baggie full of killer weed so we were ushered into their hotel room, no questions. Rod Stewart and Ron Wood showed Nemo the door straightaway but kept the bag of weed, and us.

  Rod the Mod (he of the original get-down boy haircut!) and Woody with his black gypsy eyes (the first in a family of canal gypsies to be born on dry land) and me and Cin! Apart from getting that autograph from Paul Butterfield and sharing a beer with Buzzy Feiten, this was my only close encounter so far with the major league.

  Clearly, the two fops were not unused to girls stripping off as soon as room service delivered the ice bucket and split. Are you kidding me? They “entertained” their way across America and back many times over. But nothing like that was on the cards during this outing, not with sixteen-year-old Chris Hynde in the mix. Good grief, no. Pot was one thing but, beyond that, well, I was still sewing outfits for my Midge doll.

  Stewart grabbed a guitar off one of the twin beds, wielding it like a pool cue, and rammed the headstock into my bony rear end. But sexual innuendo was lost on me, even when instigated by the ultimate get-down boys: Ron “Wood if he could” in his tapestry strides and Rod “up for a prod” in his granddad’s undershirt.

  With we girls showing no signs of disrobing, the randy duo devised a game to amuse themselves. Stewart scribbled impossible-to-pronounce names—at least when very stoned—on the joints: “Corolleum,” “Sleghegsstoose,” “Ramsplano.”

  We’d reach for the roach and he’d snatch it back, waving a bony finger. “No! No! No! Not till you say it!”

  Beck himself made a brief appearance, darting into the room, taking one look at us and leaving quickly with a couple of joints and Cindy’s car keys. Jeff Beck was in Cindy’s Corvette, tearing up the expressways of northeastern Ohio, and Cin and I were smoking pot with Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. Oh, what a perfect day.

  I don’t know how long I lay passed out on the bathroom floor, but the plan concocted in my absence was that I would stay with Wood and Cin would go off with Stewart. I put paid to that notion, telling them, “I can’t stay here! I have my driver’s training lesson in the morning!”

  That kind of blew it for Cindy, and I reckon that night is what the song “Cindy’s Lament” is about. But then, I’m the girl who thinks Bob Dylan wrote “Standing in the Doorway Crying” for her, so don’t quote me on that.

  Consequently, Cindy seemed like a good person to go to London with. I called Duane and canceled the audition. I didn’t tell my parents what I was planning, but left my newly arrived passport out on the kitchen counter where they would see it.

  England, finally, here we come!

  17

  LIMEYTOWN!

  I stepped off the plane at Heathrow and onto English tarmac with “I-G-G-Y” on one lens of my wraparounds, and “P-O-P” on the other, written in Old English lettering, which I’d carefully applied in Halbert’s white-out. I’d stitched “Bernice”—of “Cum Fix” fame (my S. Clay Wilson alias)—on the back of my denim jacket in snakeskin. Sartorially, I was a victim of the Summit Mall, but I was trying my best to look cool enough for London. “I’
m here!”

  It was 1973, the month of May, the best month of my life thus far. We exited Heathrow, got in a black cab and told the driver to “Take us to a hotel in London.”

  My first sightings of Victorian and Edwardian buildings, cobbled streets, red pillar postboxes and phone booths and the double-decker buses driving on the wrong side of the road were more beautiful than all my schoolgirl imaginings.

  It wasn’t the sixties, though. Former dolly birds in miniskirts now looked like tired versions of the teenage daughters they were with. (Those mother-and-daughter sets seemed to be everywhere.) Girls walked arm in arm with each other in a way I could never imagine doing with my pals. (Walk arm in arm with Annie down Copley Road? Good Lord, no. She’d think I’d gone crazy.)

  We passed a hundred pubs, their amber lights ever-so inviting. I tried to peer in and get a good look at every traffic light. “Old boys,” men in pubs, didn’t seem to mind sharing the bar with people half their age. I would soon discover that they all bopped along to the same music on the jukebox like it was perfectly normal. It seemed kind of freaky. A man my dad’s age listening to the same music as me? Very strange.

  The cabbie dropped us at a bed and breakfast in Bayswater. The Lion Court Hotel was more of a student hostel than a hotel, with shoes drying on window ledges, bunk beds and cheap towels.

  I hadn’t brought much: a few changes of clothes and the three records I didn’t feel I could leave behind—White Light/White Heat, Raw Power and Fun House. I had a couple hundred dollars to last me for what would turn out to be the rest of my life. I needed to find a job.

  We stashed our suitcases and walked up Queensway to the Bayswater Road (not “Bayswater Road,” but “the Bayswater Road”) and wandered along a parade of outdoor market stalls selling paintings and handbags and crafts. I’d never seen anything like it before. This was real Alice in Wonderland stuff for sure. I went from stall to stall and asked anybody I could collar if there was a job going. We ended up with some sleazebag back in the Lion Court Hotel.

  The following day, I started my first job, selling handbags in an indoor market called Point on Oxford Street, near Tottenham Court Road. There were about thirty stalls specializing in all sorts: cheesecloth shirts; “loons” (bell-bottoms); Indian scarves and incense; smoking paraphernalia.

  It seemed that cigarette papers weren’t the exclusive domain of head shops. A lot of people rolled their own cigarettes (fags, as the locals said). I’d never seen that before. You could buy a pouch of loose tobacco and Rizlas, the paper they all used, which didn’t automatically designate “pot smoker.” The only time I’d seen that in the States was Bugler tobacco, which came with rolling papers in the package, but only winos smoked that shit (and me in years to come, when I’d get to the States and couldn’t find any Golden Virginia or Cutter’s Choice—described by Joe Strummer as not a tobacco but a religion).

  Another difference was that you could buy ordinary cigarettes in packs of five, like samples, the “trial size” you’d get for free in the States. The cheapest cigs you could buy (that was the other thing, they were a variety of prices, not a standard price) were called Player’s No. 6 (the ones I’d discover that English bikers smoked). “Numbies,” they called them. They were smaller than an ordinary cigarette but stronger than all the rest put together. Boxes of matches were a nice touch too, with pictures of birds or wildlife on them like collectors’ cards.

  There was a protocol for everything that I had to learn. For example, you’d never walk into a “newsagent” and say, “Gimme a pack of Rothmans!” That would be considered rude. You’d have to say, “May I have a box of Rothmans, please, and some matches.” Writing about it now, it all seems so insignificant, but it was the beginning of my assimilation into English life. After all, immigrants have to learn the language.

  My stall in Point was at the back, and I would sit there quietly fascinated all day, watching people mill around. English people: lank-haired guys with seedy complexions wearing short brown leather bomber jackets with lousy collars; girls in flowered dresses and wavy, nondescript haircuts that owed nothing to Vidal Sassoon. It looked like the sixties had been hijacked by the Amish. I didn’t see one Jean Shrimpton lookalike—not a nod to anything that so much as hinted at Terence Stamp.

  Still, even the most dowdy English were more glamorous than anyone at the Summit Mall. Everyone was underweight with undernourished, pallid skin tones, greenish in hue. But anything was always going to be better than bulging stomachs spilling over the waistbands of polyester slacks or “shorts,” an unfortunate American craze virtually unknown to the English. Best of all were the shoe stalls. Debbie Smith would have gone crazy.

  By day three I met some guys who took me to a pub, and I discovered that pubs didn’t serve wine. Maybe a bottle of sherry was stashed behind the counter for the publican’s wife, but it was mainly beer, which they drank warm. If I’d served warm beer at any establishment I ever worked in I’d have been out on my ear. They didn’t seem to mind. Even a Coke came without ice. Nobody was bothered. I asked for a tequila and that too drew a blank. “Okay, then, I’ll have a whisky.” That was when I noticed old boys in flat caps side by side with teenagers listening to the latest charts: Wizzard, Peters and Lee, Alvin Stardust, David Essex. Weird!

  The music itself was surprising. A song called “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” was number one. It wasn’t rock and roll. I couldn’t have described it—English pop music, I guess.

  There were pictures at every newsstand of the hairy-chested Gary Glitter, shirt unbuttoned. He was on the cover of all the teenybopper magazines! Why would a teenage girl want to look at that? Where was Mark Bolan? I thought girls wanted effete little things, not big, burly, manly-looking men. It was outrageous!

  London was throwing a lot of curveballs I didn’t see coming, but I didn’t care. The weirder it got, the more I loved it. Yes, I was in love with it.

  I got separated from Cindy after getting thrown out of the Lion Court. It turned out you weren’t allowed to take bottles and guys there after midnight. I would get used to being thrown out of places. There was a Spanish lesbian called Maite selling leather jackets in the kiosk next to mine, who invited me back to her place in Clapham, south of the river. There was a room going in the house. “I’ll take it.”

  My new life was beginning. The room was £4 (“four quid”) a week. Everyone in the house had a padlock on their door and there was one “payphone” in the “corridor” (the alien terminology). We all shared a filthy kitchen and a toilet in its own little cubicle next to the bathroom. To take a bath we were required to put a “shilling,” or “5p bit,” in a meter for hot water.

  You never asked for “the bathroom” in a public place unless you wanted a bath. If you wanted to relieve yourself you asked for “the toilet.” You could never say that in the States. It was starting to occur to me that Americans had odd habits too. Seeing them from a new perspective was fun. (Why would you ask for a bath when you wanted a toilet?)

  I’d never been on an overground or underground train before. At the “top” of my new street, Englewood Road, there was a “Tube station,” which was what they called the subway. Crazy language was English in the hands of the English.

  I could jump over the turnstiles at Clapham South and go anywhere I wanted on the Northern line for free, as long as I didn’t get caught. I didn’t get caught—I couldn’t afford to get caught. I had to be frugal and careful.

  Public transport! (What genius thought that one up? When the word got out in America, they’d all want it!) I could now go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. The days of waiting for someone to pick me up in a car were over. For the first time I felt like my own person; I didn’t have to answer to anyone. It felt so right, like something I’d been waiting all my life for.

  I kept finding that, by not knowing anybody, I got to meet people fast. A guy at a bus stop who I’d only known for twenty minutes would technically be my oldest friend in town. Buses
were another shared commodity. They weren’t just for down-and-outs or cleaners on their way to work at five in the morning—businessmen in pin-striped suits got the bus too. A guy in uniform patrolled the aisles and sold you your ticket for however far you were going. One stop was 5p, and so on. He’d turn a crank and roll the ticket out of a machine hooked on his belt that made a distinctive noise (which I can only describe if you’ve ever heard Shane MacGowan laugh).

  “Tottenham Court Road.”

  “That will be twenty pence, please.”

  (Shane MacGowan laughs.)

  Civilization: you could smoke on the top deck of the bus; you could smoke in movie theaters too. They called them cinemas—how quaint. (Everyone coughing their lungs out.) You could drink alcohol in public; the bottle didn’t need to be concealed in a brown paper bag.

  Every high street had an Indian restaurant; cafés, called “caffs,” only sold instant—“powdered”—coffee. That was the one thing I really missed. Oh, and I could have polished off a whole dozen Amy Joy donuts. You could buy a single sachet of shampoo. No jumbo family sizes—a single wash! English guys didn’t wash their hair more than once every two weeks, as they were afraid it would make it fall out.

  One night, I traipsed along behind some of these new friends of mine to Leicester Square (don’t try to pronounce that if you’re American), where we ended up in a basement that had been a club in the sixties, Studio 51, and was now used as a dance studio or rehearsal room, or place to score.

  I explored the historic cavern, thoroughly entranced. Drumheads lined the orange walls, serving as mounts for black-and-white shots of the early Rolling Stones. Brian! I studied each photo: the checked shirts, Framus and Vox guitars; Bill in his leather waistcoat; Mick wielding maracas, which made him look tiny; Keith when he had teeth; Charlie looking like he’d lost his jazz combo.

  The sixties seemed so far away. I’d fallen in love with sixties London, but I’d missed it. I was too late. So to be transported back there so unexpectedly was like waking into an ethereal dream. As I meditated on the photos I heard music coming from the next room, someone playing acoustic guitar and singing in an unimaginably sad voice—a familiar voice. I followed the music and found a handsome but beaten-down-looking American playing his guitar, all alone. It was Tim Hardin.