The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  Two women were deep in conversation, and Madame Realism eavesdropped with abandon. The first woman was saying, “He had an apartment near his dealer’s, and his wife didn’t know about it, and he had to distort her face so that she wouldn’t know who the model was. So he made the faces like penises and vaginas.” “The faces?” the second woman asked. “Yes,” said the first, “like the nose coming out? That’s a penis.” They were talking about Picasso, Madame Realism figured out, because whatever else you might say about Renoir, his noses didn’t look like penises. Although, upon viewing a late painting of nudes, she wanted to rush over to those women and tell them that a Renoir elbow looked like a breast. Or like a peach. Peaches and breasts. Peaches are much more like flesh than apples, or for that matter, onions. A bowl of breasts—a still life. She looked again at the masklike faces of children, the hidden faces of men dancing with women whose faces and bodies were on display. If masks, what were they hiding? she asked herself, moving closer to the painting as if that would reveal something. Instead, she saw brushstrokes. Disappointed, she walked on and thought about D. H. Lawrence and how the flesh and its passion refuse education and class, are, in a sense, used to defy them. She wanted to look at these paintings with something like sympathy rather than indifference. But somehow this evocation of the simple life and its joys, the contented family, the gardens of Eden, did not produce in her pleasure, but she did become aware of how hungry she was. Madame Realism was not one to discount this effect, and couldn’t wait to sit down and eat. But there was more to see.

  Facing Sleeping Girl with a Cat Madame Realism heard two young women agree that the cat looked just like theirs; it was so real, down to the pads on its paws. But, said one, “Doesn’t that girl look uncomfortable?” Madame Realism agreed, silently. The sleeping girl had been positioned so that the light would hit her bare shoulders and partially exposed chest. This was supposed to be a natural position, though any transvestite could tell you that naturalness wasn’t easy to achieve. Although, according to one of the writers in the exhibition’s catalogue, Renoir had “an instinct” for it. Naturalness, that is, not transvestism. Shaking her head from side to side, Madame Realism followed the crowed to Gabrielle with Jewelry. Women are home to him, she thought, big comfortable houses. And if representation has to do with re-presenting something, what is it we repeat over and over but our sense of home, which may become a very abstract thing indeed. She imagined another sign. It read: Representation—A Home Away from Home.

  Wanting very much to leave and eat, to go home, tired of the insistent flow in front of paintings, of which she was very much a part, Madame Realism was entrapped by another conversation, carried on by two men and a woman. The first man to speak was waving his arms, rather excitedly, saying, “The washerwomen were square. He was painting things as if they were rigid, fixed in a space that wouldn’t move.” The woman responded, “You can see why his paintings would appeal to the common man and woman. His people are just so unselfconscious.” The first man countered, “But his talent was remarkable.” The second man asked, “In his notes and letters, is there a more cerebral quality?” The first man answered, “No, and he wasn’t a happy person.” The woman exclaimed, “But his paintings have such joy.” Both men said “vitality” in unison. “It’s often true,” said the first man. “He was a very cranky guy from a poor family. The sensuality in all his paintings . . . Just wishful thinking.” The woman said, “He was like Mozart, a basic talent, but without intellect.” The first man threw his arms out again and implored, “But he was a natural flowing talent. It just flowed out.” The second man said, “Genius.” At genius, Madame Realism walked out of the exhibition to the souvenir shop. He sounds more like a fountain than a painter, or more like an animal who holds a paintbrush. If, according to that same writer in the catalogue, Renoir’s brush “was part of him,” then maybe he didn’t even have to hold it. Madame Realism bought five postcards and thought the paintings looked better in reproduction than as originals, just as a friend of hers told her they would. Maybe that’s why he’s so popular, she thought.

  Back home, Madame Realism surrounded herself with the familiar: her cat, cheese, beer, the television. She turned it on, a public service broadcast which just happened to be about investing in art. She sat up in bed, dislodging her sleeping cat from her lap, and moved closer to the set. The host asked the art-as-investment expert: “The oldest cliché in your business is, ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.’ You’ve suggested that that attitude is a sure loser for an investor in art.” “Exactly,” answered the expert. “The word is appreciation. I don’t care what you like, if you don’t learn how to appreciate art, you’ll never become a collector.” The host smiled and said, “If you don’t appreciate art, it won’t appreciate for you.” “Exactly,” said the expert.

  Madame Realism switched to another channel and turned the sound off. Her cat returned to her lap and she fixed the reading lamp as best she could. Often it burned into the top of her head and gave her headaches. Robert Scull had just died, an art collector of some notoriety. When asked, it was reported in his obituary, if “he bought art for investment and social climbing, Mr. Scull responded, ‘It’s all true. I’d rather use art to climb than anything else.’” Madame Realism put the paper down and the day’s words and phrases bounced in front of her eyes. She turned off the light, got comfortable and fell into a deep natural sleep, undisturbed even by the screams in the street.

  The Madame Realism Complex, 1992

  Cookie Mueller

  (1949–1989)

  Cookie Mueller first achieved fame (or notoriety) acting in the films of John Waters, whom she met in her native Baltimore. She also acted in films by Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, and Susan Seidelman, and in my film Downtown 81. Cookie starred in stills too, and is the subject of Nan Goldin’s The Cookie Portfolio. Although Mueller spent years in Baltimore and later worked and held court in New York, she often lived an “on the road” lifestyle, with extensive sojourns in San Francisco, Provincetown, and Positano, Italy. She contributed to many magazines, writing fiction, memoirs, and advice. Her “Ask Dr. Mueller” column was a popular feature in the East Village Eye. She was also a regular contributor to Details before it became a men’s magazine. The selection here is from her memoir Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. Cookie died of AIDS in 1989, a few weeks after her husband Vittorio Scarpatti.

  Abduction & Rape—Highway 31—1969

  THEY WERE just three sluts looking for sex on the highway,” the two abductors and rapists said later when asked to describe us.

  This wasn’t the way we saw it.

  A lot of other people didn’t see it this way either, but these were women. Most men who know the facts say we were asking for it.

  Obviously you can’t trust every man’s opinion when it comes to topics like rape. A lot of honest men admit that they fantasize about it and that’s healthy but the ones that do it to strangers, unasked, ought to have hot pokers rammed up their wee wees.

  The worst part is there’s no flattery involved in rape; I mean, it doesn’t much matter what the females look like; it doesn’t even seem to matter either if they have four legs instead of two. Dairy farmers have raped their cows even.

  “It’s great to fuck a cow,” they say, “you can fit everything in . . . the balls . . . everything.”

  So I guess it just depends on your genital plumbing as to how you see the following story.

  True, we were hitchhiking. True, we were in horny redneck territory, but we hadn’t given it a thought.

  It was a sunny day in early June, and Mink, Susan and I were on our way to Cape Cod from Baltimore to visit John Waters who had just finished directing us in his film Multiple Maniacs.

  When we told him we were going to thumb it, he said incredulously, “You three?? You’re crazy! Don’t do it.”

  “He’s just overly paranoid,” I told Susan and Mink. “Hitchhiking’s a breeze.”

&nbs
p; It made sense anyway because we only had about fifty dollars between us and above all we needed a beach.

  Mink the redhead was dressed casually as always in a black leather jacket with chains, black fingernail polish and tight black Levis. Susan, the brunette, was dressed as was her normal wont, in a daytime low cut evening gown, and I, the blond, was dressed conservatively in a see-through micro-mini dress and black velvet jacket.

  This was not unusual for us, in fact benign, but in Baltimore at this time, the height of fashion was something like lime green vinyl pants suits, or other petroleum-based togs in chartreuse plaid or paisley that melted when the temperature was above 98.6. These clothes became one with Naugahyde car seats on a hot day. So people stared at us. They laughed right in our faces when they saw us.

  “I hate to tell ya this,” somebody would always take us aside, “but this ain’t Hallor-ween.”

  To this day I can’t figure out why we looked so odd to them. What did they see when they looked at their own outfits in their full-length mirrors?

  In Susan’s thrift store Victorian mirror that was about as useful as looking into a huge silver wrapped stick of Wrigley’s, we put on our Maybelline black eyeliner lines and mascara, and were looking much better than any of the other displaced hillybilly beau monde on South Broadway that day.

  “FINE MAKEUP, SENSIBLY PRICED” the Maybelline ad on TV said. I thought to myself how true it was. Couldn’t beat it for a long trip; water-proof, smudge-proof, it sure held up.

  For the twelve hour trip, we didn’t forget our two quarts of Jack Daniels and a handful of Dexadrine Spantuals (they were new on the pharmaceutical market), and twenty Black Beauties. Aside from these necessities we had a couple of duffle bags of Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul formals and uniwear. We were all set.

  On the street, we had no problem getting a ride due north.

  The trouble started after about an hour into the journey. We had been travelling in an old green Plymouth with a salesman and his Gideon Bible. He had run off the road into an embankment. Trying to follow our conversation, he’d gotten too drunk on the Jack Daniels, so we left him after he passed out behind the wheel.

  “I don’t think he was ready for us,” Susan said, as we tumbled out of his car laughing.

  “Let’s make sure the next ride is going to Delaware or Connecticut,” Mink suggested, “or at least a little further north.”

  We had no idea that we were standing smack in the middle of a famous love zone, Elkton, Maryland, the quickie honeymoon and divorce capital of the eastern seaboard.

  Men whose eye pupils were dilated with goatish desire stopped before we could even free our thumbs. We decided to be selective. Apparently we weren’t selective enough.

  After a long dull lull in traffic, we hopped right into the back of a burgundy Mach 4 Mustang with two sickos, gigantic honkies, hopped up and horny on a local joy ride. They told us they were going to New York City, the Big Apple, they said.

  It is a fact that retarded people do not know they are retarded; they just know that some people do not talk about stuff that interests them.

  The conversation we were having in the back was beyond their ken; after a quart of liquor and five Black Beauties apiece, we were a bit hard to follow, even for people who read all the classics.

  I suppose they got jealous. They decided to get our attention by going around in circles, north, then south, then north again, passing the same toll booth four times.

  Mink, the most astute of us, realized that her instinctive internal migratory compass was awry.

  “We’re trying to go north,” she reminded them.

  They just laughed.

  “We see that you’re playing some kind of circling game with your car.” She was trying to make herself heard over the din of some backwoods hard rock bubblegum music that was blaring on the radio.

  “Yeah, guys, I saw this same cheesey truck stop whiz by twice already,” Susan pointed to a roadside diner that was whizzing by for the fourth time.

  “I think they’re just trying to get our attention,” I said, taking the psychological angle.

  “No,” said Mink, “these guys are assholes. They’re wasting our road time.”

  She should not have said that, but Mink has never been afraid of telling people about their personality flaws.

  “Assholes, huh?” the driver scoffed, and he veered the car right off the highway and into a field of baby green beans and then got back on the blacktop and headed north again. The tires squealed the way they hardly ever do in real life, only in squalid car chase movies

  “Round dees parts we don’t call nobody assholes,” he said. “That’s kinda impolite. We call ’em heiny holes.” And they laughed and laughed.

  “Well at least we’re going north again,” I said and in the very moment I said it I realized that it was a ridiculous thing to say.

  There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low down, that all people are quixotic, and haunted, and burdened and there’s just no way to lift their load for them. With this in mind I wanted to say something to Mink and Susan about not antagonizing these sad slobs, but right then the driver turned to me.

  “You ain’t going north, honey, you ain’t going nowhere but where we’re taking you.”

  These were those certain humans.

  “Let’s ditch these creeps,” Susan said.

  “We’re getting out at the next truck stop,” said Mink and she gathered her duffle bag like a career woman in a taxi with her attache case.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the driver said as a Monarch butterfly was creamed on his windshield. The wings mushed into his wipers as the blades squeaked over the splattered glass.

  “Fucking butterfly guts,” he said.

  “We have knives,” the guy riding shotgun said and he grinned at us with teeth that had brown moss growing near the gums.

  “Big fuckin’ deal,” said Susan, “so do I,” and she whipped out a buck knife that was the size of my mini skirt.

  The driver casually leaned over and produced a shot gun and Susan threw the knife out the window.

  Suddenly the effects of the Jack Daniels were wearing thin and the black reality of a speed crash was barreling in.

  Mink began scribbling a note on a Tampax paper, “HELP!!! WE ARE BEING ABDUCTED BY ASSHOLES!!! CALL THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY!!!”

  It was a note for the woman at the toll booth.

  When we stopped there Mink started screaming and threw it at the woman. The note fluttered back into the car as we sped away.

  “Have you ever fucked calves’ liver?” Mossy Teeth said.

  “How the hell ya supposed to fuck calves’ liver?” the driver asked.

  “Well, ya buy some fresh liver and ya put it in a jar and ya fuck it. It’s better than a pussy.”

  Now that’s disgusting, I thought, almost as disgusting as the popular practice in 17th century France when men took live ducks and placed the heads of the ducks in a bureau drawer, put their dicks in the ducks and then slammed the drawer shut at the moment of their (not the duck’s) orgasm. Men will fuck anything.

  I suppose they also cooked the duck and ate it too.

  They pulled into this long driveway. The dust was rising and matting the mucous membranes of our noses. Everybody sneezed.

  I began to realize that for them we were party girls, that this wasn’t something unusual, that girls around these parts were game for a good time, a gang bang, and that threats of murder might just be considered all part of the fun.

  We bounced full speed down this backroad for quite awhile, passing vast stretches of young corn plants rustling and reflecting the sun on their new green leaves. I remember getting sliced by young corn plant leaves once, the same kind of painful wounds as paper cuts.

  Mink and Susan and I couldn’t even look at each other; our eyes hurt.

  A white clapboard ho
use came up near diseased elm trees in the distance. Some chickens ran away from the fenders. A rusted out pickup truck was growing weeds and a blue Chevy was sitting on four cinder blocks right next to a display of greasy old auto parts and an old gray dog that was trying to bark. We pulled up right to the house and from the front door, screen door slamming, came a big acne scarred man in his BVD underwear, a plaid flannel shirt with a sawed off shotgun.

  “I told you once before, Merle, get off my property,” the man hollered, “I’ll blow your fuckin’ heads right off your shoulders.”

  “My cousin’s a little crazy,” the driver said to us and he laughed.

  “You wouldn’t do no such thing,” he bellowed to his cousin with the yellowish drawers on.

  “Oh yes I would,” the cousin said and aimed his gun at the windshield.

  “You think he’d shoot us, El?” the driver asked his buddy.

  “Sheet,” the other one said, “hed shoot his granny.”

  The screen door slammed again and then next to the cousin was a woman with dirty blond hair and dirty bare feet. She was wearing blue jean cut offs and a tee shirt that said MARLBORO COUNTRY on it. She looked forty-five but she was probably twenty.