Lou Reed

by Anthony DeCurtis

  For some, Brooklyn in the forties and early fifties was a world of egg creams and raucous, sunny afternoons at Ebbets Field, of men waiting at newsstands for the bulldog editions of the next day’s newspapers in order to get the sports scores and racing results, of women sitting outside on stoops to escape the heat, watching their kids and sharing gossip with neighbors. If Reed noted or participated in such routines, they only rarely penetrated his consciousness in later years, and he didn’t share those reminiscences with others. He would repeatedly describe his upbringing in Brooklyn as a combination of familial oppression and neighborhood tension. As a songwriter, he would eventually exalt the grittiness of New York’s streets, but as a young boy growing up, he found it off-putting—both frightening and a little beneath him. He couldn’t even romanticize it in retrospect, though he described it in terms far worse than it likely was. Taking his imagination to the extreme was a habit that began early with him.

  Reed attended P.S. 192 on Eighteenth Avenue, four blocks from his parents’ apartment. His mother would escort him to school, despite the short distance. Reed recalled that he didn’t walk to school alone before the age of nine because “if you walked the streets, you’d get killed.” As for the school itself, he said, “They lined you up in a school yard with wire fences, no grass to walk on. The playground was concrete and they had lunch monitors.… People were pissing in the streets. A kid had to go to the john, you raised your hand, got out of line, and pissed through the wire. It was like being in a concentration camp, I suppose.” It’s inconceivable, of course, that teachers, especially in a coeducational school at that time—or any other time, really—would call on boys to urinate through a fence rather than use the school’s restroom. Perhaps the boys did it on their own when they were playing in the school yard and no teachers or oppressive “lunch monitors” were present, and Reed conflated the memories in order to enhance his anecdote. But then if, however ironically, you’re comparing your elementary school to a concentration camp, anything is possible.

  If Reed’s contemporaries heard evocative street corner singing or the wonders of New York radio while growing up in Brooklyn, such charms were lost on or unperceivable to him. “I didn’t hear nothin’ in Brooklyn,” he said. “The radio didn’t exist.” He concluded, “I couldn’t have been unhappier than in the eight years I spent growing up in Brooklyn.” Somewhat jokingly he later added, “Most of my childhood memories are not available to me. My childhood was so unpleasant that I absolutely don’t remember anything before age thirty-one.” Reed did attend Dodgers games with his father, though he would later disparage the experience, wryly claiming that the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn—a source of never-ending heartbreak for, and much written about by, literary Brooklynites of those days—was the cause of his cynicism. He claimed to have cared about the Dodgers “very much,” but their departure for Los Angeles in 1957—ironically, long after Reed and his family had themselves left the borough—made it impossible for him to ever care about baseball again.

  When Reed was five, his younger sister, Merrill, whose nickname was Bunny, was born. Now with two children, the Reeds, like so many other solvent families who lived in cities at around that time, began to think about moving to the suburbs. The war was over, and America was becoming the world’s great economic engine. The baby boom was in full swing, and the crowded urban centers were beginning to seem indistinguishable from the cramped environments that so many of their ancestors had fled. The postwar era in America was characterized by a desire to establish a reassuring normalcy, to erase the Europe of wars and genocide, to lose the past and live in America’s eternally bright future. No doubt the Cold War was coming into being, and the threat of nuclear annihilation lent a persistent undercurrent of dread to the era. But that whiff of mortality only fueled the desire for stability, a kind of submerged rage for order. The booming economy and the New Deal reforms that the Roosevelt administration had put in place to combat the Depression meant that social mobility was, for once, a true possibility in America. The dream of owning your own home was becoming a reality for millions of people. And when Sidney Reed was offered the job of treasurer at Cellu-Craft, a Long Island firm that, in the true spirit of The Graduate, manufactured plastics, it seemed as if the Reeds were finally getting their shot at that dream. So in 1952, the Reed family moved to Freeport, Long Island.

  SIDNEY REED WANTED TO raise his kids on Long Island in part because he believed it would be safer, and he “thought that the opportunity on the island would be better,” said Allan Hyman, one of Reed’s close friends on Long Island, of Reed’s father. “That was the way a lot of people felt.” Freeport was one of the small towns along the south shore of Long Island that served as a bedroom community for New York. The Reeds moved there at a time when conformity was not merely desired or valued; it was an unquestioned good. The Reeds’ home—an undistinguished three-bedroom ranch-style house at 35 Oakfield Avenue—cost $10,000, and it had been built in 1951. Many of the families streaming to the island from the city were from Brooklyn, and many of them were Jewish. Jews were a distinct, if significant, minority, and Reed was enrolled in Hebrew school at Congregation B’nai Israel, which he attended three days a week—and loathed—in preparation for his bar mitzvah. In stark contrast to the identity politics of today, assimilation was the order of the day in the early fifties on Long Island, and none of Reed’s friends, Jewish or not, recall incidents of anti-Semitism or bias. There was a black community in Freeport, and students socialized across racial lines at the high school level, though racial strife would erupt there later, in the sixties. “It was a fantastic place to grow up,” said Doug Van Buskirk, who attended school with Reed. “Probably anybody on the south shore of Long Island would say that in the fifties. People could walk anywhere at any time of the day or night. We would return late from a party and walk across town. It was a very safe, almost totally a middle-class town.”

  While people identified with their local town, the various spots along the shore—Freeport, Baldwin, Oceanside, and Rockville Centre among them—all bled into one another. Class distinctions blurred as well. Professional families, like Reed’s, lived on the same street as blue-collar families who owned the local shops or worked in service industries like plumbing and heating. It was an era before McMansions and the conspicuous display of wealth. Economic gradations existed, of course—a nicer car, a maid, ownership of a boat—but they were subtle and people didn’t feel the need to make an issue of them. “I don’t think any of us thought about someone’s house not being as nice as someone else’s,” said Judy November, who was Reed’s lab partner in high school, when her last name was Titus. “It was a different time; we were less materialistic about things. But all my friends, I thought, were economically comfortable.”

  If you weren’t an old money family with the heritage and social cachet to show for it—and none of the families in Freeport were—your wealth or lack of it was a private matter. Even the competitive suburban ethic of “keeping up with the Joneses” was less about materialistic warfare than about maintaining the calm equilibrium of prosperous conformity that had brought everyone out there to begin with. Any sign of decay or indifference—an untended lawn, a battered car, a peeling paint job—evoked unsettling memories of the anonymous, teeming clamor and frightening disrepair of the city. In that regard, every family had to pull its weight in order to maintain the uniform and controlled demeanor that was the hallmark of suburban life. Anyone who could manage to scrape together $10,000 to buy a home in the area was likely to be “comfortable” or “middle class,” to use two of the vague expressions Americans employed at that time—and since that time—in order to blur class distinctions. And in the fifties, if you had arrived in a suburb like Freeport, you had planted your stake in the soil of the American dream. Even today, Freeport looks much as it did back then. The homes have been spruced up and expanded a bit, but not torn down for massive reconstructions. It’s as if the houses themselves got the message: once yo
u arrived in Freeport, you were there to stay. What was there needed to be maintained, but nothing more was required.

  ACCORDING TO ALLAN HYMAN, Reed’s father was “a quiet guy. Very reserved. I viewed him as fairly strict. He set up boundaries for his family and his son. He wouldn’t tolerate people cursing in front of him. He had middle-class values and he wanted everybody to act appropriately. He wanted Lou to respect him and his mother. That’s the way he was. My father was similar. They were very conservative. They expected that we would behave ourselves at the dinner table and we would dress a certain way.

  “I had a lot of friends whose parents were very involved with their kids in sports and stuff. They were people you could go out and toss a ball with. My father and Lou’s father were not like that. Lou’s father was much more cerebral. He was also very penurious. Typically, when I went out to dinner with my friends’ parents, they would always pay. But when I went with Lou and his parents, they would expect me to pay my share. Like, ‘You had the hamburger. You owe a dollar fifty.’” As for Toby, Hyman said, “If you wanted to cast somebody as a fifties housewife living in the suburbs with an apron, taking care of her husband and children, that was Lou’s mother. The ultimate wife. She was really attractive, gracious, friendly—a very nice person. She was one of those women who, when I was there, would always ask if I wanted anything to eat. She would bring me milk and cookies.” Richard Sigal, another of Reed’s Long Island friends, agreed. “I never got to know Lou’s father very well,” he said. “But Lou’s mother—not only was she beautiful, but she was always very nice to me.” Reed’s sister, Bunny, described her mother as an “anxious individual throughout her life” who “took a traditional role with my father, always staying subservient to him.”

  Whatever its appeal for others, Freeport seemed like a jail to Reed. His parents did not have a large circle of friends. There were no cultural or entertainment trips to Manhattan for the family—no museum visits, no theater, no circus. It was a small, tight, protected world. Merely having arrived on Long Island seemed to be enough for his parents, particularly his father, who viewed the boring regularity of their lives as a virtue. Still, Sidney loved music and often played it at home—show tunes, Benny Goodman, big band jazz. He had a sizable record collection that was meticulously organized. But Reed would only describe Freeport and its environs in the most caustic terms throughout his life. “Hempstead’s like the crotch of Long Island,” he said in one memorable tirade. “It’s one big bus terminal with faggots walking around saying, ‘You in love?’ Great Neck is the Jewish Towers. If you run into a diseased criminal mind, it’s from Great Neck. Nobody goes to more great lengths to escape their upbringing than someone from Great Neck. Usually they become sadistic criminals who do senseless rape-murders on four-year-olds. You find a letter that says, ‘I was raised in Great Neck, what’ya expect? Hi, Ma.’”

  Reed’s father and the desire for unperturbable respectability that he represented would become the central target of Reed’s rebellion. “He would refer to my father as a horrible Republican,” said Hyman, whose father was a successful lawyer. “And he would say that his father was a horrible, disgusting Republican accountant. I didn’t get it at the time—I didn’t know from Republicans. I just thought Lou was being Lou, trying to be outrageous and shocking, which he was starting to become. He would love to shock. That was his thing. It was probably one of the reasons I found him so interesting, because most of my friends were not like that at all.”

  For his secular education, Reed attended the Caroline G. Atkinson Elementary School, which he entered in the third grade. He had been nervous and frightened in Brooklyn, and those feelings persisted in Freeport. According to his sister, who would go on to become a psychotherapist, Reed “suffered from anxiety and panic attacks throughout his life.… It was obvious that Lou was becoming increasingly anxious and avoidant and resistant to most socializing unless it was on his terms. He was possessed with a fragile temperament.” However, as with many of the children who were transported by their families from New York City to the suburbs, the change in environment enabled Reed to adopt an air of urban swagger. While many Freeport families were city exiles, not all of them were, so Reed’s experience on the mean streets of Brooklyn gave him something like street credibility, or enabled its pretense. Perhaps more important, his rude behavior in the well-behaved town of Freeport was unlikely to elicit the same harsh response that it would have in far more confrontational Brooklyn. In Freeport, Reed could be one of the tough kids, or posture as one, with little in the way of consequences. “He started being disrespectful early on,” said Richard Bloom, who attended school with Reed, and that behavior would continue.

  NOT LONG AFTER THE Reeds arrived in Freeport, fifties youth culture began to disrupt the seemingly tranquil surface of that decade in America. Along with the early tremors of rock and roll came cinematic antiheroes like James Dean and Marlon Brando. They brought along with them the specter of juvenile delinquency, the apolitical rebellion of teens against the conformity and blandness American society had come so wholeheartedly to embrace. Reed walked both sides of the line. “Lou was a good student,” November recalled. “He was a fairly serious student. He wasn’t known as a bookworm, but he applied himself. He was considered a responsible member of our class, and he was quite well-liked.” Reed would later describe his life growing up on Long Island as terrible, but, in November’s view, “my sense was that he did enjoy himself. I did not sense hostilities from him. I did not sense negativity at all.” He was even well-behaved as November’s lab partner. “He was diligent,” she said. “He didn’t blow up any experiments while I was in the room!” Reed indulged all the same pleasures of suburban Long Island life as his friends: tennis, outings to Jones Beach, horseback riding, movies, occasional boating, frequent socializing.

  Reed was also a great reader. “Lou and I were always reading,” said Richard Sigal, who attended school with Reed from the eighth grade and stayed friends with him through college; that Sigal would eventually become a professor of sociology with a specialty in deviant behavior was a fact that Reed would enjoy when the two men resumed their friendship as adults. “We loved Ian Fleming—the James Bond novels,” Sigal said. “It was almost one-upmanship: who could get his hands on the new book and finish it first, so we could tell the other guy about it.” That competitiveness extended into other areas as well. “We played tennis when we were in high school and college,” Sigal said, “and it was like Connors and McEnroe. We were exactly at the same level. He’d win a set, I’d win a set. It pissed him off. He tried so hard to beat me, and I tried so hard to beat him. He didn’t like losing.”

  But there were areas in which it was impossible to compete with Reed. “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us,” Sigal said. “The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn’t do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn’t even have thought about or known how to find.”

  In the late fifties and the sixties, magazines like Evergreen Review and publishing houses like Grove Press, both founded by Barney Rosset, began putting out work that consciously attempted to subvert the self-satisfied conservatism of postwar mainstream American culture. Sexuality was an important front in that battle. Rosset led the fight for the publication of unexpurgated versions of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The lines between sexually charged literature and erotic provocation for its own sake began to blur. Playboy published its first issue in 1953, and, month after month, titillating photographs of the girl next door with her breasts exposed nestled against short stories by literary heavyweights and essays about the freedoms afforded by the First Amendment. Similarly, serious literary work with daring sexual content appeared in avant-garde magazines
next to photographs and illustrations that skirted the lines of smut. Insulting the sexual conservatism of the times in any way was a shot across the cultural bow.

  If depictions of heterosexuality represented a threat to the mainstream, homosexuality was perceived as explicitly dangerous. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Gore Vidal, and John Rechy, among many other writers, began exploring homosexual themes in their work, and the love that dared not speak its name began to find its voice. While considered controversial, such writers were also praised by forward-looking critics, and the fact that their work was considered shocking only increased its allure for the generation of burgeoning rebels that included Lou Reed. Writers began chronicling the ways of a heretofore invisible American underground, a world that Rechy eventually called the city of night and that Reed would ultimately make his aesthetic—and, at times, his personal—home. Hustlers, transvestites, male and female hookers, and drug users populated a subterranean realm that Eisenhower America, with its manicured suburbs, either was entirely unaware of or pretended did not exist. That the realm of gay cruising largely existed, of necessity, in criminalized environments—Mafia-run bars; marginal, potentially violent sections of town; shabby rooming houses and hotels—only made it more seductive and subversive. Such a world must have seemed as much an imaginative creation as Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden for young literary rebels remote from New York or Los Angeles. For Reed, the city of night packed the same emotional kick—and it was a relatively brief car or train ride away.