Disgraceland

by Jake Brennan

  The boos continued. So did the shouting.

  Chuck shouted/sang back, “You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle.”

  Lunkhead wasn’t having it. Enraged and now being held back by a small basketball squad, and still holding his switchblade, he was quick to get lippy: “I’m a Mississippian…and this nigger asked my sister for a date!” Lunkhead grew more upset and struggled to break away from his classmates to tear Chuck limb from limb.

  Chuck shouted/sang more lyrics at him: “And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell.”

  Chuck was pushed out of harm’s way and out the exit door into the night, where he was soon greeted by Mississippi’s finest and hauled in. For what exactly, he wasn’t told. He was kept in jail overnight but he was alive. In the morning he was driven to the airport, but only after being relieved of the $700 he’d made from the previous night’s show by the cops. C’est la vie, thought Chuck.

  Chuck experienced plenty of racism back home in St. Louis as well despite his growing fame, and not just from lunkhead frat boys. Judges, particularly the judge presiding over his appeal for the charge that he violated the Mann Act. Chuck was hauled in before a gig at Club Bandstand, his club in St. Louis, on December 23, 1959. Violating the Mann Act was a serious charge. Designed to cut down on human trafficking and prevent the transport and thus spreading of prostitution, it was nefariously used by authorities to target high-profile black men (see boxer Jack Johnson as exhibit A to Chuck Berry as exhibit B).

  Chuck was fucked. The cops said she was only fourteen. And whiteish. Chuck thought she was American Indian. The authorities didn’t care. She was underage and thus she was the hammer they were going to use to bust up Chuck Berry and his nightclub. The one that cops viewed as a black mark on the image of white purity that the city wanted to project. Club Bandstand was where the girl worked after Chuck brought her up in his Cadillac from El Paso across state lines, thus committing—according to the Mann Act—“white slavery.” Her age wasn’t the only problem. St. Louis cops got wind of her because they’d heard about the young, exotic-looking girl working over at Chuck’s place who was tricking herself out.

  Chuck stood trial and faced ten years in prison. Hard time. After two weeks, the all-white-male jury found him guilty. The racist judge gave him five years. Chuck appealed, successfully claiming and proving bias on behalf of the judge and had his sentence dropped down to three years. He eventually had the sentence reduced to a year and a half, but in the end the cops got what they wanted. In Chuck’s absence, Club Bandstand went under and closed. Chuck served his time but he was never the same afterward. He was no angel, but he wasn’t what authorities claimed he was, either. He was a target. He was a marked man. It was unjust, and Chuck was unable to accept it.

  Two-three count, nobody on, he hit a high fly into the stands. He also invented rock ’n’ roll.

  Chuck Berry seldom thought about these incidents. They were just his life. Other people had their problems. Chuck had his. So what? Best to just keep your head down and keep your mind occupied. Especially in prison. Chuck’s writing was enough to keep him busy. He had just finished the sixteenth chapter in his autobiography, one that detailed his midcareer rise to the top of the pop charts in 1972 with the release of the novelty song, “My Ding-a-Ling.” The tune was a schoolyard version of the erotica he would later come to write from his cell. Filled with sly innuendo and a singsongy chorus, it was a joke. Chuck was as surprised as anyone at its success. But the money poured in.

  Chuck took part of his earnings and used it to indulge his new hobby: videography, an extension of the interest in photography that he’d had since childhood. Chuck purchased the video company Corplex, and rolled it and its assets (including the company’s employees) into a new company he’d incorporated called Chuck Berry Communication Systems, Inc. At the time of Chuck’s writing he estimated he had spent more than three quarters of a million dollars in electronic equipment to indulge his fascination with photography and videography, specifically the three-quarter-inch video-mixing editor set he had back at his home in Berry Park.

  Berry Park was Chuck’s dream brought to life. For a minute anyway. Chuck, smartly, began investing in real estate as soon as he started making real money. Berry Park was his answer to the exclusive, all-white country clubs that he and his father would service as carpenters and handymen back when he was a boy. Clubs that would pay him a meager wage but never allow him to join. Berry Park sat on thirty acres about forty miles outside St. Louis in Wentzville, Missouri. When it opened in August 1960, it was a sparkling and integrated utopic realization of midcentury America. Guests swam in the guitar-shaped swimming pool, hunted in the woods, fished in the pond, and danced in the lodge. The park succeeded in its early years, for about as long as Chuck could keep his eyes on it, but by the close of the decade, with Chuck’s constant touring and legal troubles, the property eventually fell into a seedy, bleak existence. The country club was shuttered. As a business, Berry Park pivoted to a residential real estate venture owned by Chuck, where he would rent rooms and trailers on the property to locals while he continued to reside in the “big house” on the property.

  After Chuck’s stretch for tax evasion, he went back to Berry Park, continued to perform and to diversify financially, investing in local real estate and restaurants. By all accounts Chuck’s tenants and employees were happy. All but one: Hosana A. Huck.

  Mrs. Huck, a cook at Wentzville’s Southern Air Restaurant, was a very disgruntled employee. In 1989 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Huck had filed a civil suit for invasion of privacy against the owner of the Southern Air Restaurant; Charles Edward Anderson Berry, aka Chuck Berry.

  The headline read: CHUCK BERRY TAPED WOMEN, SUIT CHARGES.

  The article stated that “a suit accuses rock ’n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry of videotaping women as they used the women’s room at his Southern Air Restaurant in Wentzville…The suit alleges that the videotapes ‘were created for the improper purpose of the entertainment and gratification’ of what it describes as Berry’s ‘sexual fetishes and sexual predilections.’”

  Chuck Berry didn’t judge. Who was he to say what was right and what was wrong between two consenting adults? Consenting being the key word. Chuck’s employee, Mrs. Huck, alleged that she did not consent to being videotaped. She alleged that her employer, the musician with the keen interest in videography and former owner of a video company, secretly videotaped her urinating to get himself off.

  Unfortunately for Chuck Berry, there were tapes. Lots and lots of tapes. How they surfaced and came into the hands of authorities is a matter of debate. Mrs. Huck, who filed the initial claim against Chuck, made her statement to authorities after her husband, a handyman who also worked for Chuck, supposedly found a box of videotapes in a trash dumpster on public Wentzville property (not on Chuck Berry’s property), and when he stumbled upon this cardboard box of lewd and scandalous VHS tapes—that happened to contain videos of his own wife—there just happened to be two of St. Louis’s finest on hand to witness Mr. Huck’s discovery.

  It could not be claimed that Mr. Huck took possession of the tapes illegally. How could it? He found them. In a public place. And there were cops there who could back him up.

  The tapes told their own story. And it was not a good one. There were numerous recordings, all with big-bosomed blondes. Chuck denied they were his, along with two other tapes with hundreds of women; all white, relieving themselves. They were filmed surreptitiously from cameras positioned behind toilet seats. Close-ups. From the front and the back. Footage was expertly spliced together with a second camera positioned above the toilet to capture the wide shots of the women before and after relieving themselves. And these clips were all edited together into compilation reels with various shots being frozen in time for lasting effect. The women, for the most part, were adults. But there was also footage of girls under the age of ten.

  After the tapes were found, Berry P
ark was raided. Small amounts of marijuana, what looked like hash, $122,501 in cash, and fifty-nine more VHS tapes were hauled out of Chuck’s home.

  County Prosecutor William J. Hannah took too big a swing and tried to claim that not only was Chuck Berry a sexual predator but also a major drug player, dealing millions of dollars in cocaine.

  Nothing had changed from the ’50s. St. Louis authorities were still out to break Chuck Berry. Even when they seemed to have him dead to rights on legitimate charges, they couldn’t resist swinging for the fences instead of taking the bloop single to safely advance their case.

  Public opinion turned on them, and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial claimed the prosecutor was “showboating” and plainly looking to advance his own career. Nevertheless, Chuck was charged with marijuana possession and child abuse. Missouri law stated that featuring young people, naked, on video constitutes child abuse.

  Chuck turned himself in.

  He sued for the return of his tapes.

  He sued the lawyers.

  He sued the plaintiffs.

  The women spoke up. They’d had it with the man known around Berry Park as “Charles.”

  Sharissa Kistner, who lived on Chuck’s property with her mom in one of the trailers, claimed that Chuck approached her one day and told her that he could see her in her room from his mansion. According to Sharissa, he said that he was “thinking of you yesterday while I was playing with myself.”

  Chuck wasn’t deterred. He sued the grandstanding prosecutor, who subsequently lost his reelection bid. With that, the prosecutor’s office dropped the child abuse charges. In turn, Chuck dropped his suit against the prosecutor and pleaded guilty only to the marijuana charge. He got what amounted to a slap on the wrist: two years probation for the weed and an agreement to pay $5,000 to a local substance abuse program.

  That took care of the authorities, but it didn’t take care of the women.

  They rolled their multiple beefs concerning Chuck’s toilet tapes into one class action suit. Chuck paid out a reported $1.2 million in settlement fees to make the case go away.

  Afterward, and for the rest of his life, Chuck was defiant in the face of his critics. What did they know about it? Videography to Chuck was merely self-expression. Just like music and poetry and sex. Rock ’n’ roll had once been his outlet. In the early days anyway. When he was young and making young people’s music, but for the majority of his life, rock ’n’ roll—the music he invented—was just a job. “Chuck Berry” was the position he made for himself and filled. “Charles” was who he really was.

  Chuck Berry was defiant but he wasn’t angry. Later in life, his critics, the ones from the big newspapers and magazines back east, would from time to time attempt to get Chuck to cop to that rock ’n’ roll racial resentment rap: The white man stealing from the black man, how did Chuck feel about being appropriated? That sort of thing. Chuck never took the bait, even if he knew he had a case. The critics’ take was lazy and simple. They didn’t get it. Chuck knew what his contribution was. He didn’t need the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” moniker that Elvis had. Sure, he wouldn’t mind Elvis’s bank account or the freedom Elvis was allowed, to come and go as he pleased, to sleep with whomever he wanted, to be whoever he wanted to be, but Chuck was content with what he’d accomplished.

  He admitted as much to the New York Times once: “Had I been pushed like Colonel Parker pushed Elvis, had I been a white boy like Elvis, sure, it would have been different.” He regretted the comment as soon as it left his lips. Why let them see you sweat? Why give them the satisfaction? Besides, what really bothered him was how racist attitudes affected who and how you could love. Free love was always a joke. Ask Sammy Davis Jr. about “free love.” Chuck was unable to love how he wanted. And unlike the white artists who were starting out at the same time as him, Chuck couldn’t express this injustice through music.

  Rock ’n’ roll was just that—rock ’n’ roll. It stayed the same. No matter how much it changed. No matter who was playing it or what they were wearing. No matter what year it was. There was only one constant: Chuck Berry. One thread: his riff.

  And Chuck had other interests he could rely on, explore, tinker with, and dabble in. Chuck was writing again and thinking about music. He wasn’t writing about sex and he wasn’t writing poems. He was giving his hand a spin at music criticism. And why not? What did the critics actually know, anyway? Nothing, that’s what. He was Chuck Berry and he invented rock ’n’ roll, so who better an authority to opine on this new type of music that the kids were all telling him was going to make rock ’n’ roll obsolete—punk rock. Chuck was approached by some local kids who had a handmade ’zine called Jet Lag and asked to give his take on some of the more popular punk records that had come out over the past couple of years. Chuck thought that writing some record reviews would be fun. And it was. But as he expected, it was all just rock ’n’ roll.

  Chuck said of the Ramones’ “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker”: “A good little jump number. These guys remind me of myself when I first started. I only knew three chords too.” And on “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols, Chuck stated, “Can’t understand most of the vocals. If you’re going to be mad at least let the people know what you’re mad about.”

  Chuck Berry wasn’t mad. He was Chuck Berry. Charles Anderson Edward Berry? Now that guy had a legitimate beef. He also had some videotapes to edit and a second book to write.

  Chuck Berry said so in the pages of his autobiography penned from behind bars: “Now that I know much more about the writing of a book, strangely enough I intend to go for another. One that I will enjoy, the true story of my sex life. It shall not infringe on anyone or thing but me and my excessive desire to continue melting the ice of American hypocrisy regarding behavior and beliefs that are now ‘in the closet’ and only surface in court, crime, or comical conversation.”

  God save Chuck Berry.

  Chapter 7

  Sid Vicious

  Sid Vicious stared down into his lap. He thought for a half-second about that pervy Chuck Berry song, “My Ding-A-Ling,” that had been an unexpected second-coming hit in England for Chuck when Sid was a teen. What a dumb song.

  “I want to play with my ding-a-ling.”

  Sid laughed in spite of his predicament. He was always able to find something to laugh at, even now. But then reality always hit him and snapped him back hard.

  It was the sign. The sign said, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING RIKERS ISLAND NEW YORK CITY PRISON COMPLEX, but it might as well have said, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE FROM DOPE SICKNESS. Because that was what was going through Sid Vicious’s mind as he was bused into the infamous prison.

  Sentenced for violating his parole after eight foggy weeks of freedom, a court trial was hanging over his head. From all accounts Sid wasn’t even sure if he was guilty or not. The charge: murdering the love of his life, Nancy Spungen.

  As a new prisoner to Rikers, Sid was stored in a cramped holding cell with the other new arrivals. It made no difference whether he was black or white or a gangster or a suit. Whether he was a dope fiend or mentally ill. There was no special treatment. Not even for a rock star. The holding cell was stuffed with inmates and there was zero privacy.

  There were two long benches but not long enough for all of the inmates to sit. The other option was the disgusting floor. A sticky mix of dirt, blood, spit, piss, cigarette ash, and feces. The smell was overwhelming. It was all of that mixed with the odor of a thousand third world nation bazaars.

  If Sid was lucky, the screws would have him sorted out in a couple hours and out of that shithole and off to fresh horrors like the open dorm he’d be living in until making bail or going to trial. This was a different kind of hell.

  The open dorm holding cell was where Sid would work out his dope sickness: in the open, sweating it out next to sixty-four other inmates. No partitions, just a cot without barriers to fend off the hustlers and rapists. Prison is no place for the pretty and despite the thousand-yard junkie
stare, the acne, and the butch haircut, Sid Vicious, with his high cheekbones and lanky demeanor, was indeed pretty. And famous. A tough burden to carry in Rikers, where rape was as certain as the shitty food.

  But being raped wasn’t the worst of Sid’s problems. No access to heroin was higher on the “oh shit” list.

  It was the end of 1978. An awful year if ever there was one for Sid Vicious. It began with so much promise: The Sex Pistols—the band he had only joined the year before—were on their first tour of the States. But that American foray, which began in January of ’78, lasted almost all of two weeks before the strain of being on the road broke up the band. After parting ways, band members began collaborating separately with manager Malcolm McLaren on the soundtrack to the Julien Temple–directed mockumentary, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, based loosely on the band’s history from McLaren’s incredibly self-serving point of view. Then of course, there was the incident of October 12, 1978, where Sid might or might not have murdered Nancy. But Sid’s demise had been coming for some time.

  When those who knew Sid Vicious spoke of his downfall, they would usually point to one of two women: his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, or his mum, Anne Beverley. Nancy was more maternal than a girlfriend should be. And Anne was more affectionately dependent than a mother should be.

  Sid was suspected of killing one of these women. And the other woman is suspected of killing him.

  Sid’s Sex Pistols bandmate Johnny Rotten said that Sid was “fucked from the beginning.”

  “The poor fucker was doomed…His mother was a registered heroin addict, so where do you really go from it?…When parents do that to you, it sets you off on such a fucking bad trip.”

  Before he was “Sid Vicious,” he was Simon John Ritchie, born on May 10, 1957, to a high school dropout for a mom and Buckingham Palace guard/part-time trombone player for a dad. The dream was for the Ritchies to split from the hardscrabble grind of postwar London for an easier way of life in Ibiza, Spain. So young Sid and his mom departed for the Spanish island off the coast of Valencia and waited for Sid’s dad to arrive to support the family. He never came. Sid and his mom were forced to return to London to make a life for themselves on their own. It was London in the ’60s. Career opportunities for a high school dropout were scarce. Unemployment was on the rise. So, Anne Beverley, in an effort to raise her son by whatever means necessary, took up a heroin habit to obtain free housing for herself and her son from the UK’s welfare system. No matter what any heroin addict says about a practical reason to start using, there is never a practical reason that isn’t eventually eclipsed by the need to chase the selfish feeling of achieving that very first high again. It’s a very warm stone that turns its users into liars with astonishing speed. Worse than becoming a user, Anne Beverley sold drugs to make ends meet. Even worse than that, she was not averse to getting her young son in on the action, sticking a brick of hash down Sid’s pants to sneak through customs after a trip to Ibiza. On Sid’s sweet sixteen, his mum gave him a little bag of smack and a couple of needles. It took the impressionable young boy little time to reason that if smack filled the hole in his mum’s heart, it would probably work for him, too.