by Neal Pollack
Twenty whiskies later, Pollack and the Kramers had locked arms, and were singing “Sweet Caroline.” Pollack unzipped his pants. Through his open fly, he pulled a document. It was a fifteen-thousand-word essay called “Jefferson Airplane Through the Meat Grinder and Onto the Grill.” Barry Kramer read the opening sentence: “One song made me nauseous; another made me puke.”
“I wanna publish this as my cover story,” he said. “We’ll get R. Crumb to do the cover art.”
Pollack stood on the table.
“You may publish my story!” he said. “But I need five thousand dollars immediately! To build a bomb!”
“I’ll give you twenty-five bucks,” Kramer said.
They loaded into Barry’s Chevy and headed off to the Frutcellar in downtown Detroit, where the MC5 was scheduled to do a show in front of the same hundred people who always came to see them when they were unannounced. Pollack stumbled in to find John Sinclair standing in the middle of a crowd of black guys, telling them about the upcoming “race war.”
“You must arm yourselves,” he said. “It’s gonna be the biggest race war yet.”
Wayne took the stage.
“Brothers and sisters!” he shouted. “Are you ready to blow up the world?”
The crowd, half black and half white, retreated to opposite sides of the room, eyeing one another suspiciously. From the stage, Kramer shrieked: “Get ready for the race war!”
John Sinclair shot his gun, once in the white direction, once in the black. The two sides charged each other, snarling, fists pumping, chains brandished. The MC5 thwacked away, providing the soundtrack for the end of the world.
Pollack inhaled the smoke and the blood and the urine and the sweat, and excitement shot through his bones.
“Twenty-five bucks for a magazine article?” he said.
A large black man grabbed his ankles and flipped him onto the floor. A white guy looped a bicycle chain around his neck and yanked. Cartilage popped. Pollack was in agony. John Sinclair whacked his attackers with a gun butt.
Shit, Pollack thought. I’d do this for free.
The next day, a Sunday afternoon, a dozen people including Pollack and Danny Fields from Elektra Records straggled into the University of Michigan student union to see a rock show. Three dirtballs took the stage and started slogging through an incomprehensible chordless flood plain of noise. Pollack snored standing up. Then a note of clarity sounded in the sludge, followed by a sharp guitar rip. Onto the scene bounded a lithe mad thing of beauty, a man-boy, teeth bared. An atomic viper blast of dervish, he twisted his body in ways not known to man. From his throat came a dumb roar of pure anguish.
“My god,” said Fields. “He’s beautiful.”
Pollack stood his ground, trembling with fear and joy.
“James Osterberg!” he shouted.
The lead singer gave a quick karate chop, and the music froze. He stared coldly into the audience. Sweat dripped from his every pore.
“No, man,” he said, “I’m Iggy Stooge.”
Iggy whirled the microphone in a broad loop, and smacked himself in the head. The music began again, just where it had paused. Danny Fields started to dance, but Pollack stayed still, awash in love.
Afterward, they approached Iggy, warily, deferent. Iggy picked lice out of his hair and scratched his balls.
“I’m from Elektra Records,” Fields said.
“Yeah,” Iggy said. “You some kind of janitor?”
“No, I’m a talent scout.”
“I got no talent.”
Pollack dropped to his knees.
“You have risen,” he said.
Pollack got back to New York about six months after he’d planned. Detroit had a way of sucking you in. The cab dropped him off. His loft building was gone, replaced by public housing, a parking lot, and a highway overpass.
“Goddamn you, Robert Moses!” he said.
He went to the bank.
“Your account is empty,” said the teller.
“That’s not possible,” Pollack said. “I have a trust fund because Elvis killed my father.”
“Our records show that you’ve spent three hundred thousand dollars in the last two years.”
Pollack smacked his forehead.
“Fuck! I’m so stupid! I should never have bought that bar in Phoenix and given it to Waylon Jennings!”
He looked at the teller as sweetly as possible.
“Can I borrow a twenty?” he said. “I’ll get you into the Fillmore East tonight….”
Well, now he really needed some money. Where was he going to get it? The Voice paid, but not enough. Rolling Stone paid, but not enough. Creem didn’t pay enough either. Plus, he didn’t have a typewriter.
Pollack walked the streets of Manhattan that were no longer his streets; he was broke and desperate and alone. Vast waves of steam rose from the sewers and enveloped him in waves of gaseous filth. A hard neon glow tore at the bags under his eyes. He dreamed of a hot shower and a feather bed. Sleeping in the park may be glamorous when you’re twenty-one, he thought, but when you’re twenty-seven, it’s just another stop on the road to hellfire.
He stopped at Fifty-third Street and Third Avenue, where he found an unusual concentration of teenage boys in seductively tight jeans and cowboy shirts. They were smoking cigarettes, leaning against lampposts, squatting on newspaper boxes. Cigarettes hung from every mouth, packs bulged from every back pocket. Pollack stood on the street corner, not sure what to do.
Iggy sure would like it here, he thought.
A limousine pulled up and the window rolled down. A porcine businessman with a bad toupee peered out. He wagged a fifty-dollar bill.
“Let’s go around the block,” he said.
Pollack held the bill. He studied it, and it seemed real. One of the boys in tight jeans nudged him.
“If you don’t want this trick, I’ll take it,” he said.
The businessman furrowed and began to look frustrated. The limo driver stepped on the gas. Pollack fixed him with a gaze of pure seduction.
“For seventy-five dollars, I’m yours for the night,” he said.
He got in the limo, which drove away. A buzz rose up on the corner about the competition. Who’s the new slut, the boys wondered. He sure is cute.
Pollack made so much money as a male prostitute that he was able to take Iggy to Woodstock.
“You’ll love it,” Pollack said. “This will be the greatest music festival of all time.”
And so they came into the fields and through the hills, along the mighty highway strip, trudging through an epic of mud in their boots and their sandals, lined two by two by four, sleek naked bodies romping in the ditches of freedom, arms locked around the lake. By the campfire, they sang the song of their age:
We are the Woodstock Generation
We love the sun and rain and cloud
We take our drugs for recreation
We like to play our music loud.
We are the happy, happy people
We love our Crosby, Stills and Nash
We’ll have our coitus unprotected
No fear of fluid, itch or rash.
We smoke our pot, we drop our acid
We think the world’s so brave and new
Our youthful gaze is bright and placid
No one can tell us what to do.
We are the Woodstock Generation
We love the stars and sky and earth
We are God’s loveliest creation
The world is ours by dint of birth…
“Fuck this,” Pollack said. “We’re walkin’.”
Pollack had freelance assignments to write about the festival from eight different publications. None of the magazines printed them because they were afraid of the truth, Pollack said later. Still, on that hopeful Friday morning, he and Iggy traveled eight miles through the summer haze from the spot where the car they’d stolen had broken down.
“Man,” Iggy said on the fourth mile, “I’m thirsty.”
He grabbed the nearest woman and began licking her. Other women gathered around Iggy and began licking him. He gyrated from woman to woman like a dynamo. Moving in a swirl of sex, they all disappeared behind a copse of poplars. Pollack watched, followed, took notes.
How did Iggy get all those chicks?
Later, they came upon a circle of albinos sitting around a kitten. “Rise, kitty, rise,” the albinos chanted. A man was wrapping himself in plastic, because, he said, he was Plastic Man. A beautiful girl dressed in frontier-era clothes handed out apples from a basket. The rain came then, and the girl seemed to melt away. Enormous purple dragons swooped from the sky and crisped the crowd with their nostril flames. The moss on the rocks was alive. Sometimes great droves of people trampled by, and other times, the earth was still. From below, a sonorous voice called Neal Pollack’s name, called him home to Hades. These mushrooms are really strong, Pollack thought. Was that dwarf really wearing a Richard Nixon mask?
They were actually close to the stage. Iggy chewed on a mouthful of grass. Pollack smeared mud on his chest. A folk warbling filled the air…
Swing low, sweet chariot
Comin’ forth to carry me home…
“God,” Iggy said. “That is horrible!”
“I know that voice,” said Pollack.
There she was onstage: Joan Baez, slightly older, always wiser, wearing that same white cable-knit sweater, still impervious to playing in front of four hundred thousand people. Neal Pollack felt his heart bloom again with love, like it had that first night in the Village so many years ago.
Iggy was shaking him.
“Neal, man,” he said. “Hey, Neal. You were singing along!”
“I’m in love,” Pollack said.
“Love is for idiots,” said Iggy. “Folk music is for fools. Take this brown acid.”
As the LSD pickaxed his brain, Pollack made his way through the crowd. He slid under the fence and past security. In the performers’ area, Joan sat on a quilt, knees drawn up to her chin, pensively regarding the sky.
“Joan,” Neal said.
“Hello, Neal,” said Joan.
“How are you, baby?”
Their eyes met and they felt the idyllic hopes of 1961. Their hearts briefly filled. Joan exhaled.
“I’m good,” she said. “What’s that on your head?”
“It’s a top hat,” said Neal. “With flowers on it!”
“Yes, but why?”
“Because,” Pollack said, “I AM A HIPPIE!”
He and Iggy began a mad war dance.
“Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!” they said. “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!”
Joan shook her head.
“Good-bye, Neal,” she said.
She put a hand on Iggy’s face and kissed him, hard, on the lips. Then she shouted: “Guards!”
Security moved toward them. Pollack and Iggy ran. The heavens exploded with great zags of lightning, wild peals of thunder, and raindrops the size of grapes. Pollack and Iggy threw themselves into the opening of a white plastic tent. Inside, eight kids were gorging themselves on a great buffet of gourmet salami, cheese, fruit, bottled water, and chocolate cookies.
“Where’d you get all this stuff?” Pollack said.
“Never underestimate the power of a Connecticut trust fund,” one of them said.
They smoked hash but soon they slept, because morning was coming. When they woke, it was nearly noon. They saw that the stage was empty, but the field was more crowded than before. The air felt like the inside of a washing machine on rinse. Army helicopters hovered, dropping supplies.
“Forget this,” Pollack said.
Three hours later, they were at the house of J. Douglas Finch in Greenwich, Connecticut. His parents were at the beach for a month, and he had the place all to himself. Pollack and Iggy had their pick of high school graduates, and they slurped on the girls merrily. The air was full of high-grade pot. They all smoked and laughed and listened to Kinks records.
There were highlights of Woodstock on television.
Some hippie babe said, “It was all so beautiful.”
“What a bunch of assholes,” Pollack said.
On New Year’s Day, 1970, I, now a firmly established and respected critic of American popular culture, went to Max’s Kansas City to pick up a press kit from Lou Reed’s publicist. Neal Pollack was spread across the stoop, naked except for a party hat, passed out in a puddle of vomit. I nudged him with my foot.
“Neal,” I said. “Wake up. It’s the seventies.”
Pollack stirred.
“Already?” he said.
“Why don’t you go home?” I said. “You look terrible.”
“Don’t have a home,” said Pollack. “I’m broke.”
A short cab ride, two pots of coffee, and a hot shower later, Pollack was at my loft in SoHo, wearing a velvet smoking jacket, sitting on the couch, listening to a Flying Burrito Brothers album.
“This is OK,” he said. “But it ain’t George Jones.”
Through the front door came a woman. She had long dark hair down to her waist and soothing, soulful almond eyes. She wore a black turtleneck and flared jeans, and carried a bag of books from the Strand.
“Sorry,” she said. “I decided to stop at a Visconti retrospective on my way home.”
Pollack reclined on the couch in his most seductive posture. A thin purring sound emanated from his gut.
“We have a houseguest, darling,” I said. “Just until we can get him a couple checks from the Voice. Neal Pollack, my second wife, Barbara.”
Pollack moved to kiss her hand.
“Charmed,” he said.
“She’s an editor at Film Comment.”
“Ah! Well, I auditioned for an Andy Warhol movie once. Perhaps you saw the finished product?”
“No,” Barbara said. “I despise Warhol.”
In the kitchen, we unpacked our Dean and DeLuca bags. Pollack was in the living room. “Midnight Rambler” played very loud. Barbara peeked out. Pollack was masturbating.
“Paul, I don’t like having this man here,” she said. “He scares me.”
I took a can of salt-packed Apulian sardines from the bag and put them in the cabinet where Barbara and I kept our Italian canned goods.
“It’s just for a few weeks until he gets himself together,” I said. “You don’t understand. Neal is the dark genius prince of rock criticism.”
From the living room, we heard “OOOOOOOOOH, BABY!”
We looked out. Pollack was spread-eagled on the couch, naked, snoring. Barbara bit her lower lip. I later realized she was feeling vague stirrings of lust.
She could fight it all she wanted. She could protest and beg me to get rid of the interloper. At night, in bed, she could be a feral panther. But on those nights when I shrugged her off to read my Foucault and my Dada art books, she twitched in the sheets wretchedly. Pollack was the most disgusting person she’d ever met. But, damn him, he had a way of insinuating himself sexually into any situation. He stripped the reproductive dance of any pretense, reduced it to the barest elements of noise and flesh. It was all fluid exchange and bald sensation. As he wrote once, “Fucking should be a raw sock in the guts.” From the abyss of her heart and a hidden corner of her loins, my wife knew she wanted him.
The weeks passed like months. Pollack would just be coming home when we left for work. When we’d return from dinner in the Village, he’d be sitting at the kitchen table, bottle of Jack Daniel’s in front of him, listening to Zombies LPs at full volume, making rough pen sketches of Ornette Coleman in his notebooks. He called them “meta words in picture form.” He sent them to various newspapers, wiped himself on the rejection letters, and left the soiled papers sitting around.
“You disgust me,” Barbara said one morning as Pollack climbed through the kitchen window from the fire escape.
Pollack wagged his tongue at her.
“Aw, baby,” he said. “You just wanna feel the hot lizard on your thighs.”
She blushed.
“Why do you waste your brilliant mind on such depravity?” she said.
February 24 came along soon enough, and the Stooges were playing a show at Ungano’s. Pollack showed up backstage and opened his coat.
“Daddy went to the drugstore!” he said.
Out spilled quantities of weed, booze, coke, heroin, blues, reds, Romilar, Robitussin, nutmeg, ’shrooms, acid, and the magic substance known as STD.
“Whoa!” Iggy said.
Pollack took them all. He smoked and snorted and licked and injected. Swallowed and ingested. Iggy took it easy, just going for the coke and heroin and pot. He had a show to do, after all. Pollack broke a bottle, slashed it across Iggy’s chest.
“Bleed for me!” he said.
Iggy said, “You know I will!”
“Also, the drugs cost me five hundred bucks.”
“So?”
“You owe me money, you fuck!”
Iggy snapped on his dog collar. He took a jar of peanut butter and smeared a great gob onto his bloody chest.
“I don’t owe nothing!” he said.
Pollack dove into the crowd. He landed on me. I was in the front row with my notebook.
“Where’s your old lady?” he said.
“She’s at home,” I said. “All alone.”
The drugs started. Pollack felt the drops of sweat on his neck mutate into living reptilian globules with mouths and teeth like knives. Or so he thought. The floor rose toward him. His knees sank. Iggy, ripping it up on stage, grew to eight feet tall, but his voice sounded faint and thin. The guitars softly cut through Pollack’s veins.
Iggy was straddling a photographer, who took shots of his crotch. People in the crowd were beginning to hit one another, spurred on by the screech of a saxophone and the horror-thwack of untutored bass. Pollack twitched wildly. I shook him, but he was lost in a drug spasm.
I looked away. When I turned back around, Pollack was gone, as though he’d drifted into the heating ducts. There was no way anyone could get through this crowd, I thought. How the hell…
Iggy dove into the crowd. He splattered us with his sweat and blood and filth. Where was Pollack? An amp blew up. Iggy’s pants came off.