The Mudd Club

by Richard Boch

  I looked around and everywhere was talent to spare and talent wasted. The club gave it room to breathe and Steve Mass allowed it to happen. I felt the energy and heard the dance floor screaming. I could never tell if the second floor was ready to collapse or explode. Always excited, never scared, I felt the same way wandering those downtown streets, not knowing what might happen. I was a former kid from the boroughs and burbs, an artist from the neighborhood and a Mudd Club doorman. I was still young, and there was still time. I wanted to paint. I wanted to say what I had to say and I didn’t want to mess it up. Then midnight to five happened and I kept getting lost in the middle.

  Cookie

  During the course of any given night, someone always saved me. New friends or old, they distracted me from the insanity and protected me from myself. All I had to do was survive the distraction and protection.

  Cookie Mueller, the writer, John Waters film star and small-time drug dealer, was a new friend. With tattooed fingers, an arm full of bangles and way too much eyeliner, she was the supergood bad girl and a beautiful distraction. Between the rebel spirit and a heart of gold, Cookie was a one and only.

  I felt close to that spirit but wanted closer. Standing together on the front steps, we made plans to pierce my ear at her apartment on Bleecker near Jones Street. I gave her a kiss and she headed inside. She turned around and said, “See you later, hon.” I was smiling. It was still early.

  Two days later, accompanied by Richard Sohl and a bottle of Rémy Martin, I arrived at Cookie’s. A few drinks, a few joints, we iced my ear and lined up a cork and a needle.

  I closed my eyes.

  Ricky laughed.

  Cookie said, “Hold still.”

  The Ouch! moment came and went.

  A quick swab of something, a little more ice and she slipped a gold X-shaped stud thru my earlobe. We smoked one more joint, said thanks and left the Rémy behind. The years passed, I still have the hole and I still think about Cookie.

  Ricky and I walk across Bleecker and head for One University Place where Ron Beckner is tending bar. He’s been working with Mickey Ruskin for years and even shared his SoHo apartment with Max’s Kansas City’s tough and tiny gatekeeper, Dorothy Dean. I’ve only gotten to know Ron over the last few months and he just started hanging out on White Street.

  Cookie Mueller, 1979, by Bobby Grossman.

  Artist Stephen Mueller is the curator of the One University jukebox and he’s busy loading his latest selection of Punk, New Wave and old guard. He and Ron seem equally unimpressed by a Cookie Mueller ear piercing but overly impressed by the new Raincoats single. Bored after one Bloody Mary, Ricky and I walk outside to smoke a joint with Alan Midgette, the actor and Warhol doppelgänger. We’re sitting across the street on a broken bench in Washington Square, working our way thru a second joint when Gary shows up. Ricky wants to go back inside for another round but I say, “Bye, see you later,” and hop the R train around the corner. It’s 6 P.M. and I need to paint a little, eat a little and get myself ready for work. It’s already been a long day and I have to be at the Mudd Club by 11. By 7 A.M., I want to be passed out in my own bed. Where Gary passes out is up to him.

  Not Quite Coke

  The following night Solveig stopped by the loft for dinner. Tall, blonde and beautiful, maybe thirty years old, she’s got a new car, a very rich boyfriend and a nice apartment on East Fifty-seventh. Pat Wadsley introduced us and we connected over common interests and bad habits. She walked in, stuffed a bottle of Stoli in the freezer and made herself at home. I ran over to Petrosino’s on Duane Street, a neighborhood fish market a few doors west of Barnabas Rex. Gary made salad, I made garlic bread and Solveig helped steam a bag of mussels in beer. When we finished dinner and lit a cigarette, the reality of no cocaine set in. I’d find some at the Mudd Club but that was still three hours away. The psycho dealer on Charlton Street always had great coke but he wasn’t around. The musician Kieran Liscoe, a nice guy, sold severely stepped-on coke—less than ideal—but he was home and he answered the phone. Solveig had the car, so we made a run to the west twenties, just north of the Flatiron.

  The area was a dead zone, and calling the neighborhood nondescript would be overly descriptive. Liscoe’s building was dark, the elevator just a metal box with a glass “porthole” in the door. His loft was long and narrow, a dreary affair with a herd of cockroaches grazing on the countertops of a dirty kitchen. An old-school combination safe in the corner of a closet was home to a few ounces of seedy pot, a modest stash of counterfeit Quaaludes and a bag of white powder pretending to be coke. We each picked up a gram and Solveig dropped me off at Mudd. Two hours later, she showed up with Gary and spilled whatever not-quite-coke was left on the bathroom floor. They stood at the bar looking sad and ordered more Stoli. They both drank for free.

  As a team, the three of us were trouble. Separately, it was hard to tell which one of us was worse.

  Music and Weed, Ray Guns and Snorkels

  The nights were unpredictable—fun and trouble the double edge. A home-cooked meal turning cocaine desperate, we hunted down that shitty gram of stepped-on blow. Finding the humor only went so far. I needed to take a step back and lose myself in a bag of pot.

  A few days later, my friend Monica Schofield arrived in town and stayed at the loft. We knew each other from the University of Connecticut School of Fine Arts and we shared a love of music and weed. I had a night off; we rolled half a dozen joints and headed to White Street to see Mary Wells.

  Fifteen years earlier Mary opened shows for the Beatles. Now she was a bygone legend doing a lounge act and trying for a comeback. Looking either older or larger than I expected, her voice still had a sweet ring, and her blue sequin dress the kind of sparkle curiously appreciated at Mudd. Four R&B session players were moving the sound with more than enough power to deliver the hits and cut thru the dance floor haze. I was happy smoking a joint and revisiting American Bandstand but for Monica it wasn’t enough. Thirty minutes later she went back to the loft.

  When we were in school I thought of Monica as an artist, a party girl and a friend; crazy about each other was our connection. She showed up in New York, didn’t get what was happening at Mudd and didn’t get what was happening with me. She left the next day and we lost touch for the next thirty years. To her the Mudd Club was just, “Oh, that place.” For me, I’ll always remember Mary Wells singing “My Guy.”

  I said good-bye to Monica at Port Authority. Later that day I met up with Ray, a good-looking guy in a suburban kind of way. He was hanging at a loft on Prince Street and I was stopping by to visit a friend of Gary’s. We never once discussed Mary Wells or the Mudd Club but instead talked about a connection that he wanted to turn me on to.

  Gary’s friend Charlie lived in the SoHo loft with a girl named Carrie. Gary had a thing for Charlie, and Ray had a thing for Carrie. She was blonde and beautiful and had her own thing going on with a much older, legendary Hollywood superproducer but still found time to come up with the name “Raygun” Ray. I just tried to keep track of who was doing what with whom.

  When Carrie, Ray, Charlie and Gary finally took a break, they headed for the Mudd Club Beach Party. It was a rainy Sunday night and Carrie dressed appropriately in a bikini, heels and a trench coat. They hung out at the bar, had a few drinks and she flashed the crowd. The following evening her parents arrived in town and couldn’t wait to see what all the fuss was about. They showed up in flippers and snorkeling gear, a day late but still taking the beach party theme full fetish.

  Today I give Carrie a hug whenever I see her. She and Ray are still friends but Charlie’s gone. The beach party, the trench coat, the flippers and snorkels—just another night on White.

  Back outside I was working alone. The crowd was inside and I was left drifting, remembering. Arriving in the city I felt that buzz and excitement of being in New York but wanted more. Standing a few feet from the CBGB stage or lost in the back room of a West Side bar, I was always searching. I was trying to
connect, but when I tried too hard the bottom fell out, that feeling a part of something, never more than almost. I was hoping this time was different.

  Sitting on the chain, rocking back and forth, it was a rare moment of comfortable alone that couldn’t last. The Beach Party might’ve been winding down but New York in the late seventies was a cultural explosion existing in a pre-AIDS, pre-Giuliani, pre-Reagan world. Less than three years after I arrived, small apartments and empty commercial lofts were still available for a few hundred dollars a month and anyone could live in Manhattan. Bohemia still existed, and people were clinging to at least some part of a soon to be lost New York. We ran around the Mudd Club as though it were high school—albeit more permissive than the one I knew. Survival was cheap and the big casualty numbers were still more than half a decade away. In 1979, it seemed none of us saw it coming, though someone surely must have—someone always did.

  I had little fear and even less guilt. If either one got to me, I did a few lines of coke, lit a joint and flirted with a bag of heroin. If anyone asked, I was doing fine. Mistakes were made but fuckups could be fixed with a little sleep, a few dollars, a shot of penicillin and a night on White Street. Even though I was working at Mudd, painting was what I did—I was young, and that’s what I believed.

  A near-constant roar punctuated by horns and sirens, voices and cries; the city had its own sound and so did White Street. The sound of empty bottles crashing thru a chute behind the Mudd Club bar was familiar reassurance and rarely a distraction. Buried in a DJ mix of “Pop Muzik” and Pistols, the bottles had to go somewhere. After a while I stopped noticing.

  Alexa, Debbie and Sama all worked at Mudd and did everything from serving drinks to picking up bottles and glasses. They did it with little thanks and even less glory—the only payoff an occasional trip to the bathroom, elevator or basement.

  Debbie worked her shift wearing a nurse’s uniform, giving her a touch of porn allure in a demented kind of way. Alexa was the daughter of Pop Art scholar Sam Hunter—an interesting art world pedigree, somehow lost in the artcentric world of Mudd. She went on to assist Gretchen counting covers and handling money, work that was followed by a brief stint outside, working the chain. Immortalized in a See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil photo taken with Steve Mass at the upstairs bar, the girls look happy and Steve looks like Steve.

  Alexa finally left after negotiations broke down during a wage dispute with Steve. Sama left Mudd for no other reason than it was time. Nurse Debbie hung on to her job, if not her mind, and stuck it out a bit longer.

  Three decades and a fast-forward later I still see The Nurse serving drinks. I see Alexa running around carrying that bus-tub filled with empties, forever amazed that her glamorous side remained intact. I remember Sama walking out that door after she quit. I thought she was going to Dave’s for a hot dog but she never came back.

  Management

  Empty bottles weren’t the only things crashing and Glenn McDermott’s management days were quickly winding down. From my fly-on-the-wall perspective, I saw it coming. Maybe he thought he owned the place and a preoccupation with cocaine might’ve added to the delusion, but who was I to say?

  Never really part of Mudd’s creative core, Glenn was mostly behind the scenes though certainly part of the mix. His girlfriend Debbie worked in the office at Reno Sweeney, the famous West Village cabaret, and sold coke on the side. She did some business at home, some at Reno’s and some at Mudd. She was generous and the coke was good but it wasn’t cheap.

  DJ David, Gary and Solveig—our party girl partner in crime—were all friends and we hung out at Glenn and Debbie’s. We drank and drugged together. We shared a few meals. They were good times, fast coming to a close: Steve Mass saw what was and wasn’t happening and the writing was on the dirty bathroom walls.

  When Steve hired me, Glenn appeared to be in charge of something. It was his idea to shuffle me from the door to the bar to the upstairs bar until Steve sent me back outside. Then one busy Friday night, less than a year after he helped open the Mudd Club, Glenn McDermott’s White Street run stopped running.

  I stood at my post watching Joey Kelly, Jay Siano and DJ Danny Heaps follow Glenn straight out the door. “Really, you’re leaving?” was all I could say as Mudd management Phase One came to an end. Minutes later, Steve stepped outside and told me that Glenn, along with his friends, his brother, and miscellaneous associates, were no longer allowed in the club. I didn’t know what Glenn’s “departure” was about; I just knew it would never happen to me.

  Working outside kept me in the clear, one step removed from the bullshit. I was a good employee—I showed up, did my job and behaved within the far-reaching boundaries of Mudd Club behavior. Most importantly, I never handled the money and for the moment it seemed that no one cared about the number of Rémys or Heinekens I was drinking. Trips to the bathroom or the basement were part of the job. My only responsibility: to be sure the right people got in.

  Chi Chi showed up just after, and we started talking. I told her something just went down but wasn’t sure what. I pointed to a few people and she opened the chain, handling it like a pro. She helped put the night’s clusterfuck of a plank-walk into perspective. We started talking about hair color, platinum blond specifically. We followed up with a shoe fetish discussion involving those infamous peep-toes and one oddly accented Mudd Club regular who loved them. Finally, she looked at me and said, “Darling, you need a drink,” went inside, got me one and disappeared. I worked the rest of the night alone, maintaining a fair share of grace under pressure. Louie and Robert would be back tomorrow but for the moment, ego and cocaine, cigarettes and beer got me thru. People asked me where Joey was. No one asked after anyone else.

  Employees came and went but for the moment nothing about the Mudd aesthetic changed. A parade of creeps took Glenn’s place and ripped off the club as they reattempted to manage the unmanageable. The worst of the bunch: an old man named Jim Connelly who drove a beat-up limo and talked a mile of shit to Steve or anyone willing to listen. Connelly assumed the role of “security chief”; I just tried to smile and do my job.

  Looking the Other Way

  Despite all the changes the neighborhood was still a tangle of old warehouses, factories and illegal living spaces without regard for building or fire codes. The Mudd Club and 77 White were no different, and the occasional visit from the New York City Fire Department meant stall them at the front door, run inside and check the back door. They’d come in, walk through and flash their lights. If you had a fireman fantasy it was fun, but in the end it was all business. They did their job, made their statement and ten minutes later got back in their big red fire engine.

  The New York City Police Department was less disruptive. They’d call me over to their car and ask, “Is he inside?” but they never bothered me, and kept a friendly eye on the club. I had no idea what the deal was (with either Fire or Police), though knowing Steve and considering what went on inside, I assumed the arrangement was beneficial to all parties. Sometimes cops stopped by for a drink with their wives and girlfriends, some would moonlight at the Mudd Club door. The police were easygoing and no-nonsense. Whether parked in the alley or working off-duty at the door, NYPD was the best security we had.

  I’m not sure who was looking the other way when fifteen-year-olds were hanging at the bar. New York’s drinking age was eighteen and underage drinking a nonissue that never appeared to concern anyone, including me; sixteen-year-olds showed up at the door and drunken sixteen-year-olds left a few hours later. Phoebe Zeeman, that notorious underage Mudd Club regular, looked like a kid and drank for free; maybe we just pretended she was older. Whether she went home to her parents or back to her own apartment, had breakfast at Dave’s or headed straight to first period homeroom, I never bothered to ask. Either way, no one ever checked for proof of age.

  Years later, the actress and singer Eszter Balint told me she was fourteen when I let her into Mudd. With a straight face I responded, “I th
ought you were fifteen.” By the time she was eighteen, she was one of the stars of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise alongside Lounge Lizard founder John Lurie and musician-actor Richard Edson. A few years earlier, they were all hanging out on White Street.

  Today that’s difficult to process, but Mudd existed in a time of self-destructive naïveté. Fueled by a bit of chaos and the last shred of a sixties dream, there was hunger for excess that was never satisfied. Our behavior was often more than reckless, our political incorrectness without apology. There was a freedom and magic that time allowed, until it didn’t. Fifteen, twenty or thirty years old, we planned on staying young, and continued to believe anything was possible. Today “young” has become mind over matter but the possibilities, a challenge. The costs have gotten higher; the effort requires more effort.

  Lost Pants, Visuals and Voyeurs

  The last days of June 1979, there’s a NYPD blue-and-white parked in the alley and I’m working the door with a Heineken in my hand. When Richard Sohl arrives from the Ninth Circle on West Tenth Street, we step inside, order a cocktail and head downstairs. I have some coke that I dump on my fist but Ricky just watches. We talk, I light a joint and he wonders out loud, “Where’s Midge?” (a.k.a. Andi Ostrowe).

  I look him in the eye.

  “She lost her pants again, she’s upstairs looking for them.”

  Ricky needs more information.

  “What was she doing?”

  I try not to laugh. “Probably something dirty.”

  The fact is, Andi hasn’t even arrived. We both crack up, knowing the rumor has at least some possibility of truth—for any one of us.

  Minutes later, I hand Ricky half a Linda Ludes bootleg lude and we walk back to the bar. I order him another vodka tonic before I step outside. It’s hot but not crazy hot and the crowd’s still small—hard to tell where the night’s headed. It’s early, the cops drive off and one of the cabbies tells me he’ll be back for me later. He’s got a lookalike brother who also drives a cab and I never know which one I’m talking to; but they’re polite, good-looking and fuckable in a way Rudolf liked to call “sexy bridge-and-tunnel.” They know where I live and if I pass out in the back of their cab, they’ll be sure to get me home. Besides, I enjoy sex with visitors from other boroughs; it feels almost taboo.