Globalhead

by Bruce Sterling

Dori did a “comic book” once, called Lonely Nights. An unusual “comic book” for those who haven’t followed the “funnies” trade lately, as Lonely Nights was not particularly “funny,” unless you really get a hoot from deeply revealing tales of frustrated personal relationships. Dori also did a lot of work for WEIRDO magazine, which emanated from the artistic circles of R. Crumb, he of “Keep On Truckin’ ” and “Fritz the Cat” fame.

  R. Crumb once said: “Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures!” As a manifesto, it was a typically American declaration, and it was a truth that Dori held to be self-evident.

  Dori wanted to be a True Artist in her own real-gone little ’80s-esque medium. Comix, or “graphic narrative” if you want a snazzier cognomen for it, was a breaking thing, and she had to feel her way into it. You can see the struggle in her “comics” ’—always relentlessly autobiographical—Dori hanging around the “Cafè La Bohme” trying to trade food stamps for cigs; Dori living in drafty warehouses in the Shabby Hippie Section of San Francisco, sketching under the skylight and squabbling with her roommate’s boyfriend; Dori trying to scrape up money to have her dog treated for mange.

  Dori’s comics are littered with dead cig-butts and toppled wine-bottles. She was, in a classic nutshell, Wild, Zany and Self-Destructive. In 1988 Dori was in a car-wreck which cracked her pelvis and collarbone. She was laid-up, bored, and in pain. To kill time, she drank and smoked and took painkillers.

  She caught the flu. She had friends who loved her, but nobody realized how badly off she was; probably she didn’t know herself. She just went down hard, and couldn’t get up alone. On February 26 her heart stopped. She was thirty-six.

  So enough “true facts.” Now for some comforting lies.

  As it happens, even while a malignant cloud of flu virus was lying in wait for the warm hospitable lungs of Lester Bangs, the Fate, Atropos, she who weaves the things that are to be, accidentally dropped a stitch. Knit one? Purl two? What the hell does it matter, anyway? It’s just human lives, right?

  So, Lester, instead of inhaling a cloud of invisible contagion from the exhalations of a passing junkie, is almost hit by a Yellow Cab. This mishap on the way back from the deli shocks Lester out of his dogmatic slumbers. High time, Lester concludes, to get out of this burg and down to sunny old Mexico. He’s gonna tackle his great American novel: All My Friends Are Hermits.

  So true. None of Lester’s groovy friends go out much anymore. Always ahead of their time, Lester’s Bohemian cadre are no longer rock and roll animals. They still wear black leather jackets, they still stay up all night, they still hate Ronald Reagan with fantastic virulence; but they never leave home. They pursue an unnamed lifestyle that sociologist Faith Popcorn (and how can you doubt anyone with a name like Faith Popcorn)—will describe years later as “cocooning.”

  Lester has eight zillion rock, blues and jazz albums, crammed into his grubby NYC apartment. Books are piled feet deep on every available surface: Wm. Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, Celine, Kerouac, Huysmans, Foucault, and dozens of unsold copies of Blondie, Lester’s book-length band-bio.

  More albums and singles come in the mail every day. People used to send Lester records in the forlorn hope that he would review them. But now it’s simply a tradition. Lester has transformed himself into a counter-cultural info-sump. People send him vinyl just because he’s Lester Bangs, man!

  Still jittery from his thrilling brush with death, Lester looks over this lifetime of loot with a surge of Sartrean nausea. He resists the urge to raid the fridge for his last desperate can of Blatz Beer. Instead, Lester snorts some speed, and calls an airline to plan his Mexican wanderjahr. After screaming in confusion at the hopeless stupid bitch of a receptionist, he gets a ticket to San Francisco, best he can do on short notice. He packs in a frenzy and splits.

  Next morning finds Lester exhausted and wired and on the wrong side of the continent. He’s brought nothing with him but an Army duffel-bag with his Olympia portable, some typing paper, shirts, assorted vials of dope, and a paperback copy of Moby Dick, which he’s always meant to get around to re-reading.

  Lester takes a cab out of the airport. He tells the cabbie to drive nowhere, feeling a vague compulsion to soak up the local vibe. San Francisco reminds him of his Rolling Stone days, back before Wenner fired him for being nasty to rock-stars. Fuck Wenner, he thinks. Fuck this city that was almost Avalon for a few months in ’67 and has been on greased skids to Hell ever since.

  The hilly half-familiar streets creep and wriggle with memories, avatars, talismans. Decadence, man, a no-kidding death of affect. It all ties in for Lester, in a bilious mental stew: snuff movies, discos, the cold-blooded whine of synthesizers, Pet Rocks, S&M, mindfuck self-improvement cults, Winning Through Intimidation, every aspect of the invisible war slowly eating the soul of the world.

  After an hour he stops the cab at random. He needs coffee, white sugar, human beings, maybe a cheese Danish. Lester glimpses himself in the cab’s window as he turns to pay: a chunky jobless thirty-three-year-old in a biker jacket, speed-pale dissipated New York face, Fu Manchu mustache looking pasted-on. Running to fat, running for shelter—no excuses, Bangs! Lester hands the driver a big tip. Chew on that, pal—you just drove the next Oswald Spengler.

  Lester staggers into the café. It’s crowded and stinks of patchouli and clove. He sees two chainsmoking punkettes hanging out at a Formica table. CBGB’s types, but with California suntans. The kind of women, Lester thinks, who sit cross-legged on the floor and won’t fuck you but are perfectly willing to describe in detail their highly complex postexistential weltanschauung. Tall and skinny and crazy-looking and bad news. Exactly his type, really. Lester sits down at their table and gives them his big rubber grin.

  “Been having fun?” Lester says.

  They look at him like he’s crazy, which he is, but he wangles their names out: “Dori” and “Krystine.” Dori’s wearing fishnet stockings, cowboy boots, a strapless second-hand bodice-hugger covered with peeling pink feathers. Her long brown hair’s streaked blonde. Krystine’s got a black knit tank-top and a leather skirt and a skull-tattoo on her stomach.

  Dori and Krystine have never heard of “Lester Bangs.” They don’t read much. They’re artists. They do cartoons. Underground comix. Lester’s mildly interested. Manifestations of the trash aesthetic always strongly appeal to him. It seems so American, the good America that is: the righteous wild America of rootless European refuse picking up discarded pop-junk and making it shine like the Koh-i-noor. To make “comic books” into Art—what a hopeless fucking effort, worse than rock and roll and you don’t even get heavy bread for it. Lester says as much, to see what they’ll do.

  Krystine wanders off for a refill. Dori, who is mildly weirded-out by this tubby red-eyed stranger with his loud come-on, gives Lester her double-barreled brush-off. Which consists of opening up this Windex-clear vision into the Vent of Hell that is her daily life. Dori lights another Camel from the butt of the last, smiles at Lester with her big gappy front teeth and says brightly:

  “You like dogs, Lester? I have this dog, and he has eczema and disgusting open sores all over his body, and he smells really bad … I can’t get friends to come over because he likes to shove his nose right into their, you know, crotch … and go Snort! Snort!”

  “I want to scream with wild dog joy in the smoking pit of a charnel house,” Lester says.

  Dori stares at him. “Did you make that up?”

  “Yeah,” Lester says. “Where were you when Elvis died?”

  “You taking a survey on it?” Dori says.

  “No, I just wondered,” Lester says. “There was talk of having his corpse dug up, and the stomach analyzed. For dope, y’know. Can you imagine that? I mean, the thrill of sticking your hand and forearm into Elvis’s rotted guts and slopping around in the stomach lining and liver and kidneys and coming up out of dead Elvis’s innards triumphantly clutching some crumbs off a few Percodans and Desoxyns and ’lud
es … and then this is the real thrill, Dori: you pop these crumbled-up bits of pills into your own mouth and bolt ’em down and get high on drugs that not only has Elvis Presley, the King, gotten high on, not the same brand mind you but the same pills, all slimy with little bits of his innards, so you’ve actually gotten to eat the King of Rock and Roll!”

  “Who did you say you were?” Dori says. “A rock journalist? I thought you were putting me on. ‘Lester Bangs,’ that’s a fucking weird name!”

  Dori and Krystine have been up all night, dancing to the heroin headbanger vibes of Darby Crash and the Germs. Lester watches through hooded eyes: this Dori is a woman over thirty, but she’s got this wacky airhead routine down smooth, the Big Shiny Fun of the American Pop Bohemia. “Fuck you for believing I’m this shallow.” Beneath the skin of her Attitude he can sense a bracing skeleton of pure desperation. There is hollow fear and sadness in the marrow of her bones. He’s been writing about a topic just like this lately.

  They talk a while, about the city mostly, about their variant scenes. Sparring, but he’s interested. Dori yawns with pretended disinterest and gets up to leave. Lester notes that Dori is taller than he is. It doesn’t bother him. He gets her phone number.

  Lester crashes in a Holiday Inn. Next day he leaves town. He spends a week in a flophouse in Tijuana with his Great American Novel, which sucks. Despondent and terrified, he writes himself little cheering notes: “Burroughs was almost fifty when he wrote Nova Express! Hey boy, you only thirty-three! Burnt-out! Washed-up! Finished! A bit of flotsam! And in that flotsam your salvation! In that one grain of wood. In that one bit of that irrelevance. If you can bring yourself to describe it …”

  It’s no good. He’s fucked. He knows he is, too, he’s been reading over his scrapbooks lately, those clippings of yellowing newsprint, thinking: it was all a box, man! El Cajon! You’d think: wow, a groovy youth-rebel Rock Writer, he can talk about anything, can’t he? Sex, dope, violence, Mazola parties with teenage Indonesian groupies, Nancy Reagan publicly fucked by a herd of clapped-out bull walruses … but when you actually READ a bunch of Lester Bangs Rock Reviews in a row, the whole shebang has a delicate hermetic whiff, like so many eighteenth-century sonnets. It is to dance in chains; it is to see the whole world through a little chromed window of Silva-Thin ’shades …

  Lester Bangs is nothing if not a consummate romantic. He is, after all, a man who really no kidding believes that Rock and Roll Could Change the World, and when he writes something which isn’t an impromptu free lesson on what’s wrong with Western Culture and how it can’t survive without grabbing itself by the backbrain and turning itself inside-out, he feels like he’s wasted a day. Now Lester, fretfully abandoning his typewriter to stalk and kill flophouse roaches, comes to realize that HE will have to turn himself inside out. Grow, or die. Grow into something but he has no idea what. He feels beaten.

  So Lester gets drunk. Starts with Tecate, works his way up to tequila. He wakes up with a savage hangover. Life seems hideous and utterly meaningless. He abandons himself to senseless impulse. Or, in alternate terms, Lester allows himself to follow the numinous artistic promptings of his holy intuition. He returns to San Francisco and calls Dori Seda.

  Dori, in the meantime, has learned from friends that there is indeed a rock journalist named “Lester Bangs” who’s actually kind of famous. He once appeared on stage with the J. Geils Band “playing” his typewriter. He’s kind of a big deal, which probably accounts for his being kind of an asshole. On a dare, Dori calls Lester Bangs in New York, gets his answering machine, and recognizes the voice. It was him, all right. Through some cosmic freak, she met Lester Bangs and he tried to pick her up! No dice, though. More Lonely Nights, Dori!

  Then Lester calls. He’s back in town again. Dori’s so flustered she ends up being nicer to him on the phone than she means to be.

  She goes out with him. To rock clubs. Lester never has to pay; he just mutters at people, and they let him in and find him a table. Strangers rush up to gladhand Lester and jostle around the table and pay court. Lester finds the music mostly boring, and it’s no pretense; he actually is bored, he’s heard it all. He sits there sipping club sodas and handing out these little chips of witty guru insight to these sleaze-ass Hollywood guys and bighaired coke-whores in black Spandex. Like it was his job.

  Dori can’t believe he’s going to all this trouble just to jump her bones. It’s not like he can’t get women, or like their own relationship is all that tremendously scintillating. Lester’s whole set-up is alien. But it is kind of interesting, and doesn’t demand much. All Dori has to do is dress in her sluttiest Goodwill get-up, and be This Chick With Lester. Dori likes being invisible, and watching people when they don’t know she’s looking. She can see in their eyes that Lester’s people wonder Who The Hell Is She? Dori finds this really funny, and makes sketches of his creepiest acquaintances on cocktail napkins. At night she puts them in her sketchbooks and writes dialogue balloons. It’s all really good material.

  Lester’s also very funny, in a way. He’s smart, not just hustler-clever but scary-crazy smart, like he’s sometimes profound without knowing it or even wanting it. But when he thinks he’s being most amusing, is when he’s actually the most incredibly depressing. It bothers her that he doesn’t drink around her; it’s a bad sign. He knows almost nothing about art or drawing, he dresses like a jerk, he dances like a trained bear. And she’s fallen in love with him and she knows he’s going to break her goddamned heart.

  Lester has put his novel aside for the moment. Nothing new there; he’s been working on it, in hopeless spasms, for ten years. But now juggling this affair takes all he’s got.

  Lester is terrified that this amazing woman is going to go to pieces on him. He’s seen enough of her work now to recognize that she’s possessed of some kind of genuine demented genius. He can smell it; the vibe pours off her like Everglades swamp-reek. Even in her frowsy house-robe and bunny slippers, hair a mess, no make-up, half-asleep, he can see something there like Dresden china, something fragile and precious. And the world seems like a maelstrom of jungle hate, sinking into entropy or gearing up for Armageddon, and what the hell can anybody do? How can he be happy with her and not be punished for it? How long can they break the rules before the Nova Police show?

  But nothing horrible happens to them. They just go on living.

  Then Lester blunders into a virulent cloud of Hollywood money. He’s written a stupid and utterly commercial screenplay about the laff-a-minute fictional antics of a heavy-metal band, and without warning he gets eighty thousand dollars for it.

  He’s never had so much money in one piece before. He has, he realizes with dawning horror, sold out.

  To mark the occasion Lester buys some freebase, six grams of crystal meth, and rents a big white Cadillac. He fast-talks Dori into joining him for a supernaturally cool Kerouac adventure into the Savage Heart of America, and they get in the car laughing like hyenas and take off for parts unknown.

  Four days later they’re in Kansas City. Lester’s lying in the backseat in a jittery Hank Williams half-doze and Dori is driving. They have nothing to say, as they’ve been arguing viciously ever since Albuquerque.

  Dori, white-knuckled, sinuses scorched with crank, loses it behind the wheel. Lester’s slammed from the backseat and wakes up to find Dori knocked out and drizzling blood from a scalp wound. The Caddy’s wrapped messily in the buckled ruins of a sidewalk mailbox.

  Lester holds the resultant nightmare together for about two hours, which is long enough to flag down help and get Dori into a Kansas City trauma room.

  He sits there, watching over her, convinced he’s lost it, blown it; it’s over, she’ll hate him forever now. My God, she could have died! As soon as she comes to, he’ll have to face her. The thought of this makes something buckle inside him. He flees the hospital in headlong panic.

  He ends up in a sleazy little rock dive downtown where he jumps onto a table and picks a fight with the bouncer.
After he’s knocked down for the third time, he gets up screaming for the manager, how he’s going to ruin that motherfucker! and the club’s owner shows up, tired and red-faced and sweating. The owner, whose own tragedy must go mostly unexpressed here, is a fat white-haired cigar-chewing third-rater who attempted, and failed, to model his life on Elvis’s Colonel Parker. He hates kids, he hates rock and roll, he hates the aggravation of smart-ass doped-up hippies screaming threats and pimping off the hard work of businessmen just trying to make a living.

  He has Lester hauled to his office backstage and tells him all this. Toward the end, the owner’s confused, almost plaintive, because he’s never seen anyone as utterly, obviously, and desperately fucked-up as Lester Bangs, but who can still be coherent about it and use phrases like “rendered to the factor of machinehood” while mopping blood from his punched nose.

  And Lester, trembling and red-eyed, tells him: fuck you Jack, I could run this jerkoff place, I could do everything you do blind drunk, and make this place a fucking legend in American culture, you booshwah sonofabitch.

  Yeah punk if you had the money, the owner says.

  I’ve got the money! Let’s see your papers, you evil cracker bastard! In a few minutes Lester is the owner-to-be on a handshake and an earnest check.

  Next day he brings Dori roses from the hospital shop downstairs. He sits next to the bed; they compare bruises, and Lester explains to her that he has just blown his fortune. They are now tied down and beaten in the cornshucking heart of America. There is only one possible action left to complete this situation.

  Three days later they are married in Kansas City by a justice of the peace.

  Needless to say marriage does not solve any of their problems. It’s a minor big deal for a while, gets mentioned in rock-mag gossip columns; they get some telegrams from friends, and Dori’s mom seems pretty glad about it. They even get a nice note from Julie Burchill, the Marxist Amazon from New Musical Express who has quit the game to write for fashion mags, and her husband Tony Parsons the proverbial “hip young gunslinger” who now writes weird potboiler novels about racetrack gangsters. Tony & Julie seem to be making some kind of go of it. Kinda inspirational.