I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  It bugged me how tolerant Sontag was of Bockris in conversation, and, in retrospect, I’m surprised at how forbearing she was with me, too. Victor was always trying to sound shockingly insightful about modern culture, as if he were Andy Warhol crossed with Marshall McLuhan or something. He also loved to name-drop. But his big pronouncements were clumsily fake and unamusing. (“Unless you have a full-time live-in person, most people don’t have the time to get sex,” he said that night.) It was instructive, if frustrating, to see how patient (in my view), or routinely respectful (in more neutral terms), Sontag was with him. I wanted her to bond with me.

  Still, it was a magical few hours, tucked cozily murmuring and laughing, in that little apartment perched five or six stories up into the whole nighttime city outside hung in glittering white curves, the street surfaces lit in blurry stains by the streetlights and signals and signs, the only sound the clicking of the traffic-light mechanisms, no people anywhere to be seen.

  There was one thing she said that I didn’t understand at all until many years later. She said that she “hated opinions,” that she’d rather not have them. I thought she was being like Victor in contrarian incitement. I took it for granted so completely that opinions defined a person, that one was the sum of one’s opinions and that the point was to have interesting ones, that I could only think she meant something else, like “prejudices” rather than opinions. Wasn’t her whole identity the opinions she spun out in her essays? No, she meant opinions, and that lately she’d been thinking that she wrote the essays to get rid of them, to make “space for other things.” In a way, I was right, because opinions will solidify into prejudices that substitute for perception. Over the years I’ve finally come to realize that once arrived at, opinions dry up and die, and you have to sweep them away, as she said.

  With Susan Sontag. it was a magical few hours

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The band had more than enough offers for well-paying gigs. We were popular in New York, and with the ongoing headlines about punk,* there were dozens of nearby dives, not just in New York, but in Philadelphia and New Haven and Pittsburgh and DC and Boston, where we could make decent money. But I usually didn’t want to play shows, at least not in a systematic way that would take us up levels. By the end of March, Marc Bell, our drummer, was complaining that he was earning so little that he’d actually had to eat dog food. (We split gig earnings evenly, but I got a bigger share of record royalties—the advance—as well as more money, as main composer, from songwriting and publishing rights than the band.) When the chance came around for him to make a steady paycheck by replacing Tommy Ramone in the continuously touring Ramones, he took it. (Tommy disliked going on the road as much as I did.) I didn’t even notice that Marc was gone. He was a cheerful funny guy who well held up his end with us while he was there, but he probably fit better with the Ramones, where he could work in a system and also get the ego gratification of serving not just as drummer but in a band that presented its members as “brudders.”

  At about the same time I decided to stop playing bass. It’s limiting and difficult to play bass while singing. The bass has to keep a strict rhythm, while the vocal is better if it slides around in the beat unpredictably. Bass players who sing, like Paul McCartney or Sting, usually write songs in a style that allows them to match a rhythmically consistent vocal with a simple bass line. I wanted to experiment more with my vocal phrasing, and I knew my bass playing was inferior anyway.

  Quine hated me quitting bass. He thought my bass playing was valuable. I am a rotten bass player but I think I know what he meant. The more competent musicians we got to play bass didn’t sound as good as I did. They were smooth, but our repertoire worked, when it did, partly because it was all a little off-kilter. The performances and arrangements catch you unexpectedly. There’s an unusual liveliness to it. It kind of requires that you pay attention and listen to it on its own terms, but if you’re willing to do that it can blow your mind. If you’re not willing it can sound pathetic, but so be it. Mere competence is always boring.

  We’d succeeded in breaking off our commitment to Sire, and we had people looking at us. Earl McGrath, the head of Rolling Stones Records, began coming to gigs and he told us that Mick was seriously considering signing us, though I don’t remember ever hearing that a Rolling Stone was at a show. It didn’t get further than that. Private Stock, Blondie’s original label, did make an offer, but we didn’t think it was acceptable. That company seemed to be failing anyway.

  Then Jake Riviera started talking to me about where I was going in music. He’d become very successful as a manager of the Stiff Records early-punk and pub-rock groups. (Pub rock was a fifties-style raucous but catchy British rock and roll genre, associated with gigging in pubs, that just preceded or overlapped punk. Bands that Jake signed to Stiff or managed or both included Nick Lowe, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello, Wreckless Eric, and the Damned.) Jake came from the streets and he looked like it and acted like it. He was stocky and pugnacious—he’d been a boxer who’d considered going professional—and he dressed quasi-rockabilly, in narrow-lapelled sports jackets, thin ties, pointed shoes, and a greasy ducktail. His head was block shaped but his face was open. He wielded aggression in unexpected ways. That was natural to him, but I think he also kind of played it up, and played it warped, partly from a feeling of rivalry with Malcolm McLaren. Malcolm was a genius at unconventional ways of doing things that fostered exactly the right kind of attention for his bands.* Jake pulled numbers too but his pranks and acts of defiance were dubiously random compared to Malcolm’s.* Probably what Jake was best at was intimidating people. He liked to be a loose cannon in his dealings with the record industry and it could be effective. He was like Bogart in The Maltese Falcon flipping out at Sydney Greenstreet and company, breaking glass and screaming and threatening, but as soon as he shuts the door behind him, grinning gleefully, and then grinning again to see the adrenaline still making his hand tremble.

  Jake was a stand-up guy for me, including materially, helping me out when I needed it; he didn’t just try to make money off me.** He wanted to bring out our second album. He had a new label, having moved on from Stiff, that he called Radar. The plan was that we’d record a single that year, 1978, with Nick Lowe producing, and then in December and January tour England for three weeks opening for Costello, and after we returned we’d prepare to make an album. Jake/Radar would pay for all this.

  That was something we agreed on in early fall. In the meantime, the spring and summer following the movie shoot, the band was staggering along, playing when I reckoned necessary, teaching songs to bass player Jerry Antonius and drummer Frank Mauro, and annoying each other.

  To be explicit, the real constant for me, the headquarters, the center from which all other paths radiated like a world-sized cobweb, during those years, was my opiated solitude. It seemed as worthy a way of being as another, metaphysically. I was still myself inside the drugs, and I was reasonably true to my values, such as they were. The condition just got boring eventually, and, while “victimless” in ways, it could be dangerous to those nearby who didn’t understand about the egocentricity of it. Most of my life was interior, possibly by that token empty, which may be another way of saying metaphysically faithful.

  On the bright side, life was interesting (that subcategory of boring) on drugs, and in a way more pure and direct than without. I didn’t conceal anything or accept any nonsense (except my own). A person actually has fewer problems when addicted, too, in that any problems are subsumed into the supreme problem of getting enough drugs not to be sick that day. It was also interesting to scientifically manipulate one’s consciousness and pleasure centers and energy level the way the drugs allowed.

  Addiction followed from who and where I was. There’s no disentangling the qualities that led me to use drugs from those that led to more acceptably positive achievements. I wrote “Blank Generation” and conceived Theresa Stern and her views and attitudes, and wrote The Voidoid, which a
re of consummate junkie mentality, before any real narcotics use. It was my natural state, the druggy psychology. I have many fond memories of the narcotics life. There’s an extreme intensity to it that, like being in combat, can’t be understood except by those who have undergone it. I wouldn’t wish addiction on anyone, but there’s something glorious about it, in a sad way.

  Addiction is lonely. It starts as pure pleasure, and the degeneration, in a few quick years, into a form of monumental compulsive-obsessive condition is actually more psychological than physical. Once the drug use has replaced everything else, life becomes purely a lie, since in order to keep any self-respect, the junkie has to delude himself that use is by choice. That’s the worst loneliness—the isolation, even from oneself, in that lie. In the meantime the original physical pleasure becomes merely dull relief from the threat of withdrawal, from the horror of real life. The user will add any other drugs available, especially stimulants, like methedrine or cocaine, to try to make it interesting again. Eventually, I happened to survive using long enough to reach a place where I couldn’t kid myself anymore that it was all on purpose, and the despair and the physical torment of my failed attempts to stop became my entire reality. I found a way to quit, with help. It was luck that I lived that long.

  Addiction does have an effect on an addict’s work. It reduces production and increases self-indulgence. A narcotics addict doesn’t demand as much of himself as he would if he were straight. If an addicted artist is very, very good, a reasonable amount of interesting work can be done, but it will probably be fragmentary and rambling, and chances are there will be far more unrealized or abandoned projects than there would have been otherwise.

  I realize that this description of addiction is self-contradictory in its mix of affirmation, resigned acceptance, and rejection of narcotics use, but still it is true.

  Already, in 1978, I’d learned and recognized enough of this about my addiction that I spent most of that summer enduring endless suffering in attempts to kick. It was thankless too, in the sense that, as a junkie, I couldn’t expect any sympathy. I did have the blessings and care of one stupendously generous person, Susan Springfield (once and future name: Susan Beschta), who was my girlfriend for a year or so around this time. She was the front person for a band of three girls and one guy called the Erasers. The band never found a real identity outside of their inspired name, but they were all good people. Jody Beach, their bass player, ended up marrying ace British session guitarist Chris Spedding. Their drummer was called Jane Fire. For a while, the artist and art writer David Ebony played keyboards for the band, and for a while Richie Lure, Heartbreaker Walter’s fresh-faced younger brother, played guitar.

  When I first started seeing Susan, earlier in that year, the three girls in the band shared a loft, where they also rehearsed, on Elizabeth Street just below Houston. They threw great parties there. At one of them Iggy Pop requisitioned their gear and recruited a couple of guitar players from the partiers and sang and writhed for everybody. Rotten came around a few times when he was in New York, just after the Pistols had disintegrated.

  I had an unprecedented experience there one morning when I woke up on a mattress on the floor, after a long strenuous night, with the course of an entire complex story in my head, carried back from unconsciousness. It depicted how some members of the most neglected, despised class of citizen—being a group of friends who are as socially handicapped and downright (mildly) dislikable as their file-clerk- and bank-teller-type jobs are boring—become, in the course of a dramatic and gruesome narrative, heroes. I published an awkward, sloppy version of the plotline in the East Village Eye as “Lowest Common Dominator” (which title I later used for an unrelated song about Ulli Lommel). It was an awesome experience to have every detail of an entire feature film or pulp fiction story appear in my head fully formed.

  I made another crude and virtually unknown New York movie in 1978 too, a faux-noir feature called Final Reward. It was largely copped, I eventually realized, from Jules Dassin’s 1955 masterpiece of a dark heist flick, Rififi, but was shot for almost nothing in 16 mm black and white. I think I was the only actor in it who was paid. The director, Rachid Kerdouche, thought I was the blank Mickey Rourke, art-slum music’s romantic tortured embodiment of coolness. (All my career I’ve been described as quintessentially “cool” or “hip.” I suppose I’ve fostered this, on levels, in order to seem desirable to girls and to avoid standard hypocrisy and routine consumer life, but I am not cool. I’m cranky under pressure, I’m a mediocre athlete, I get obsessed with women, I usually want to be liked, and I’m not especially street-smart.) Rachid’s view of me was flattering, all things considered, but I wouldn’t have made the movie if he hadn’t paid me the $50 a day or whatever it was I needed to maintain my drug habit. My acting in it was even worse than in Lommel’s flick, mostly because my degeneration had had a few more months to progress since then.

  I hadn’t met Rachid until he contacted me about the acting job (it had nothing to do with my job for Lommel because that movie wasn’t edited until 1979). He was the son of North African Berber nomads who’d immigrated to France for work. His father became a miner, but Rachid thought about nothing but movies, genre movies—Sam Peckinpah and John Huston and Howard Hawks and Robert Aldrich—and had found his way to New York. He was about my age and wore flecked and stained black sports jackets and scuffed black pants and shoes and was fleshy and dark haired and smiled a lot. His abiding treatment of everyone affectionately kiddingly could seem overly familiar, but he was a sweet guy.

  The script was nuts, but theoretically he had a cast that could make it work. Everyone had been recruited from the underground nightlife of late-seventies New York. Teri Toye, who was a male-to-female transsexual—later an inspiration and runway model for Stephen Sprouse—played a shady nightclub owner, Sam(antha), who, in a nice double reverse, is supposed to be a woman posing as a man. Sam’s doofus strong-arm stooges were played by Geoffrey Carey (who ended up in Paris—I noticed him in the Arnaud Desplechin movie Kings and Queen a few years ago) and platinum-blond real-life go-go boy John Sex. The princely, suave, veteran East Village painter Bill Rice played a corrupt police detective. I had the lead role of a guy just released from prison who was the king of the New York demimonde but now has rivals. He decides to pull a complex heist largely to help his burned-out former gang “feel alive” again. John Heys, noted for his wicked Diana Vreeland looks and protruding ears, from the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, was one of my criminal crew, and, most consequentially, Cookie Mueller played my wandering girlfriend.

  Cookie became one of my best friends for the coming two or three years and really never stopped being that, though we saw less of each other later. As an actress, she was known for the scene in Pink Flamingos in which John Waters had gotten her to try to have sex with a chicken. Eventually she became a downtown health advice columnist for the East Village Eye. Those two sentences go well together. She would also become an inspired art critic for Details, and a kick-ass memoirist, and the archetypical subject of the photographs that made Nan Goldin famous.

  She came from Baltimore, “the hairdo capital of the world,” which is how she ended up acting for Waters. She was a trailer-park-style girl. When I met her, she was go-go dancing, freelance, for an agency. She always recommended go-go dancing for its healthful and cosmetically beneficial properties. She did have the most muscular ass of any woman I’ve ever known. Her closest friend was her longtime lover, named Sharon Niesp, a white girl from Baltimore too, who had an amazing gospel voice and would eventually hook up with the Neville Brothers’ Ivan Neville in New Orleans, but everybody loved Cookie, because she was all heart.

  She came from Baltimore

  Cookie had an unusually large railroad apartment on Bleecker Street, just east of Seventh Avenue. Sixties girl-group music (Chiffons, Shangri-Las) was always yearning and berating in harmony there among the kitschy and quasimorbid curiosity-cabinet contents of her cozy bad-girl crib. It was
the perfect place to rest your head in highness. Once the New York painting scene started taking off in the early eighties and she started writing her art column for Details, she benefited from many wack neo-expressionist and graffiti paintings that suited her digs perfectly, too, bestowed by admiring young artists. She shared the apartment with her small son, Max, whose father was in some other city.

  Cookie was nonjudgmental. She had a lot of respect for criminals. She understood why everybody did everything, but she was no kind of earth mother. Cookie wasn’t serene or self-confident. She was serious about her appearance but was hardly ever satisfied with it. Her ideal in that line was a personalized, thrift-store version of girl-group styles of big hair, a lot of black and blue eye makeup, glossy lipstick, short and tight skirts, and spike heels. She was great at doing her look, but it could take her hours to work up the exact ensemble in which she was willing to go public.

  It’s easy to see why she was Nan Goldin’s muse. Nan lived and worked in the gay and wild-kids’ art gutter, and Cookie was the biggest-hearted, funniest citizen of it, as well as way photogenic. She had an unusual face. Her superhero jaw and thinnish lips made her look almost transvestite, especially when she was fully made up. She had bee-stung eyelids; a crisp, small nose; and hair voluptuously long and thick and always dyed, usually frosted and streaked. When she smiled, her lips flattened into wide brush marks too, like some goddess of joy, Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t hold anything back, and she loved to laugh, and her nose would stretch and flatten, Genghis Khan–Marlene Dietrich style, when she did, and her hooded eyes would scrunch completely shut, her head thrown back, laughing full throated, like a schoolgirl, no hardness at all.