The Mudd Club

by Richard Boch

  Olga was sixty-five and her friend Katy was seventy but that wasn’t a problem either. Living in Brooklyn their whole lives, they weren’t much afraid of anything. They hopped on the D train at Kings Highway, changed to the double R, got off at Canal and walked the two blocks to White Street. When they arrived at the door the crowd did the “Red Sea routine.”

  Olga was impressed by the mob outside but thought the location was shabby. She thought the place was interesting, crowded and loud but couldn’t help telling me, “It’s not the way we danced when we were young.” She drank a few martinis, met Steve and hobnobbed (her word) with the Punks, the No Wave and the New Wave. On my advice she avoided using the bathroom. An hour later, I put them in a cab and warned the driver what he was in for.

  Just after 1 A.M. but it felt like the night had already peaked. Aunt Olga mixing it up at the Mudd Club, surely a metaphor for something.

  Find Me Later

  Taylor Mead, nearly a decade younger than Olga, is almost as worldly. A poet and one of the original Warhol Superstars, he’s wandering around in the middle of the street, scratching his head, looking over at the door but not really connecting. It’s a distraction on a busy night and I don’t like it.

  With a combination of duty, kindness and impatience I open the chain and step into the crowd. I hear, “Richard, Richard” but look straight ahead and move toward Taylor. A few probably wonder what’s with the old guy in the street, but if I don’t reel him in he’ll be floating around out there all night.

  I grab Taylor and spot Peter O from the SoHo News, Ernie Brooks from The Necessaries, and Tim Wright, the bass player from DNA. Patti Astor, the downtown film star and future graffiti gallerist-connoisseur, exits a cab, seizes the moment and follows us to the door. The crowd’s big and people wearing heavy coats make it seem even bigger but the Red Sea does its thing and the six of us keep walking. I turn and ask a good-looking clean-cut kid standing in the crowd, “Who you with?” He says “No one” and I say “Come on.” Security opens the chain and we all step inside. I try and get everyone a drink but Taylor, a self-proclaimed trust fund baby, wanders toward the dance floor and Patti’s already on her way upstairs. Tim’s disappeared and so have Peter and Ernie.

  Taylor Mead getting excited, 1980, by Marcia Resnick.

  I look around, spot the good-looking clean-cut kid and we head for the second floor. I bang on the steel door of the men’s room, say it’s me, and it opens. Roxanne’s inside with someone I’ve never seen but must have let in. I’m already bored with the kid so I bite into a Quaalude, stick half in his mouth and tell him, “Find me later.” I walk through the second floor, hear Alice Himelstein laughing and squeeze into a booth with her and Mary Lou Green. Alice looks at me, laughs some more and leaves me thinking, well OK. Jo Shane, Vicki Pedersen and Millie David are sitting nearby with art world muse Edit DeAk’s boyfriend, John Savas. He’s wearing a wig from one of the Fourteenth Street wiggeries that specialize in Dynel creations so the girls start calling him Johnny Dynel. The name sticks, and he likes it. He adds a second L and makes Dynell his real last name.

  By now it’s getting late, I’m downstairs and DJ David’s hungry. He cues up the eleven-minute version of James Brown’s “Sex Machine” and makes a hot dog run to Dave’s. It’s a smooth move, timed perfectly, and he’s back in time to change the record.

  Back outside, the door’s the same as I left it twenty minutes ago except there’s no Taylor Mead to rescue. The clean-cut kid I found in the crowd and lost in the bathroom steps outside to talk to me but doesn’t have much to say. He’s got two more Quaaludes in his hand, gives me one and wants to know what I’m doing later. The ludes say RORER 714 and look like the real thing so I snap one in half and chase it with a beer. I tell the kid, “Don’t leave, have another drink and we’ll get out of here by five.”

  So far, it’s been a stellar night.

  Johnny, Edit and Chi Chi

  I’m not certain I ever knew Clean-Cut’s name but when I woke up he was gone. The hookup was another round of random; the sex an empty hour of noise and sweat. Promiscuity for its own sake was becoming equal to the throwaway gratification of cocaine. Both left me trying to forget but wanting more. More was becoming equal to nothing.

  I made some coffee and jumped in and out of the shower. I rolled a joint and scribbled on a few sheets of paper in the studio. It was already getting dark outside—the 4 o’clock afternoon of another day. I put on an old Quicksilver album, Happy Trails, and tried to escape. By 8 P.M. I started getting hungry so I headed for One University Place. By 11 I was back at the door of 77 White Street. A few hours later, the newly named Johnny Dynell showed up.

  I met John Savas at the Mudd Club during those pre-Dynell days. He told me he “grew up in a tiny, tiny town way, way upstate,” landing in New York City in 1975. He didn’t know anyone and hooked up with a roommate via the bulletin board at the School of Visual Arts. His first apartment, at Bleecker and MacDougal, was a block from where I once lived. The roommate “turned out to be a wacko” (as roommates often do).

  Johnny started hanging with his neighbors who introduced him to Marie’s Crisis on Grove Street, the Ninth Circle on Tenth Street and the wild “West Village world of poppers.” He got a job at Food, a popular restaurant founded in 1971 by the artist Gordon Matta Clark and located at the corner of Prince and Wooster in SoHo.

  In 1978, Johnny met Edit DeAk, the writer and critic, during a party at Edit’s loft. He moved in with her and it wasn’t long before she brought him to the Mudd Club. After that it was only a matter of time.

  One year later, on a 2 A.M. nighttime stroll between White Street and Dave’s Luncheonette, Johnny and Edit ran into Chi Chi Valenti and a friend. Edit knew the friend so they stopped to talk while Johnny and Chi Chi just stood there, staring at each other. He remembers the connection was “boom, click, immediately” until Chi Chi and her friend walked away. He kept staring, and Edit knew it was over for her and Johnny.

  Chi Chi had a certain something, different from all the other certain somethings out there. Everyone flirted with her, Rudolf Piper dated her and I ran around with her after work. Steve Mass was fascinated and intimidated by Chi Chi and hired her to work at the Mudd Club. The next time Johnny saw her she was wearing the fox fur coat and standing at the foot of the stairway to the second floor. I was outside, clueless to what was going on.

  A cheap Dynel wig from Fourteenth Street and a new name was just the beginning. The Broadway stroll kicked off a Mudd Club romance and the “boom, click, immediately” turned it into a lifetime together for Chi Chi and Johnny.

  Unsafe Panties

  Past 1 A.M., Dynell heads for the dance floor and I keep watching the crowd. I’m looking for someone a little dirtier than the clean-cut kid but it’s probably still too early. I open the chain for Pat Place and Laura Kennedy instead. I say “Hi,” Laura keeps walking and Pat cracks half a smile. I think we like each other. No one else outside looks interesting but they all look willing to pay. It’s Saturday night, it’s already crowded, and the club has to be making a lot of money.

  Inside, drink tickets have become the new currency, making things easier and more complicated at once. Steve usually hands them out, always gives me a decent-sized stack and I give most away. Besides the tickets, I use the not-quite-mutual respect for the bartenders that allows my friends to drink for free. With me at the door it’s an arrangement that works both ways.

  Outside, the scene hasn’t changed. I grab Chi Chi and we take the elevator up to Ross Bleckner’s, leaving the fate of the door and second floor in the hands of the other people. Ross isn’t home so we make ourselves comfortable, finish our drinks and have a cigarette. Fifteen minutes later, we look at each other and laugh. We better head back downstairs.

  I get sidetracked at the second-floor landing but Chi Chi keeps on walking. I try and push past photographers Nan Goldin and David Armstrong but they look confused and can’t figure out which way to turn. Vicki Pedersen, wh
om Gary calls Blanche (as in Yurka, the actress who portrayed Madame De Farge in MGM’s A Tale of Two Cities), tries to get my attention but I just wave. I move toward the bar, where Steve is talking to Danny Fields while Danny tries to figure out what Steve’s talking about. Years later, he still had no idea.

  I walk toward the back, and the door of the small bathroom is open. Teri Toye is standing there in a bright green dress and a combined state of dismay and amusement after accidentally flushing two hundred dollars down the toilet. Steve gave her the money for what ever reason, and Teri apparently put it in her panties—the unsafest place of all. She exits and breezes past me.

  Doomed Vogue cover girl Gia Carangi and makeup artist Sandy Linter were on the dance floor earlier, where Allan Tannenbaum snapped a few photos. Now they’re just feet away smoking cigarettes, unaware of the careless flush. Gia’s pioneering supermodel status still seems intact even though she’s looking a bit wasted—her eyes just a dark late-night stare far removed from a bright shine cover shot or an ad for Dior. Lesbian chic hasn’t yet been invented or applied but Gia—only nineteen—is out front well in advance. Right now she’s just standing there, beautiful but not moving; I say “Hey” and Gia nods a slight smile but says nothing. I step out of the bathroom, head for the stairs and spot John Lydon leaning against the wall near the bar or the bar near the wall. He looks unhappy and I’m not even going to try.

  The PiL vocalist ex-Sex Pistol was the last to arrive and still upstairs when I left. I wandered down Broadway alone and went home. I started to brush my teeth, dropped the toothbrush, it bounced off the sink and into the toilet. I stared at it for a minute and went to bed.

  I woke up early, returned to the paintings started yesterday and moved them past scribble. Later I took a cab to 2 Charlton Street and spent another ninety dollars on cocaine. The purchase didn’t make me feel good or bad—just a little bit lost. I left Charlton, walked two blocks and bought a new forty-nine-cent toothbrush at a deli. I jumped in a cab, headed for One University and the driver wanted to know if I was working that night. I leaned forward to see who the fuck was asking and realized it was Cedric, a regular Mudd Club cabbie; I told him, “Yeah, but not till later.”

  Maybe it was the coke or maybe it was me, but right then I had the uncomfortable feeling that my world was getting way too small. Intent on fitting in, I was pushing myself out. Fucking around, playing with heroin was asking for more trouble. Copping from Joey and Ligia, a drug-dealing couple on Bond Street (separated by two degrees from the Rolling Stones), I was late to realize that no one using, or selling, heroin gives a shit about anything except dope.

  Still I pressed on, and nights later found myself in a loft on East Thirteenth Street with Claudia. Upstairs, downstairs or next door to Larry Rivers’ old place, we picked up a half-gram of so-called China White. We hung out and got off with our friend Steve, the bass player for one of downtown New York’s headline attractions. He was our connection for the night and another one of my future semi-permanent roommates.

  I left Thirteenth Street feeling good. I didn’t feel lost, though I was starting to nod. I walked to the corner, drifted off the curb and hailed a cab. I closed my eyes and heard myself say, “Broadway and White, two blocks below Canal, left side, far corner please.” The high was close to perfect. I guess I was going to work.

  Mutant Grift

  Ten minutes later I walked into the Mudd Club, the lights were still on and Anita Sarko was digging through a box of records. I leaned on the bar, asked for a soda, and tried to steady the China White drift.

  Outside only a few people were waiting but by 1:30 or 2 the place was crowded. I sat on the chain, leaning back against the front of the building and hoped the fresh air and some mindless conversation would keep me awake. When Sally Webster, one of the Mutants from San Francisco, jumped out of a cab and came running for the door I got up and let her in. Two minutes later, the driver got out looking for the girl who just beat the fare. It was the free ride Mutant grift and Sally pulled it off like a pro. The cabbie got burned; the excitement got me moving.

  Soon after, my friend’s mother came by dressed in her usual trench coat and beret and just stood there staring at me. The still “Handsome Dick” Richard Manitoba was a few feet away looking as if he weren’t quite sure what was happening. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a scrap of paper and presented his version of a high school pass signed by Steve Mass: “God bless Handsome Dick Manitoba and let him in free at all times.” He shrugged, I opened the chain and they went inside—my friend’s mother went upstairs and Dick went down. I turned around and Chris Spedding, a man who could kill with a Gibson Flying V, was walking toward the door. He barely said hello or nodded acknowledgment but that was part of the appeal. I kept the chain open as Claudia and our friend from Thirteenth Street came in right behind him. She looked at me and tried to roll her eyes but they only rolled halfway; I tried to smile but my eyes rolled instead. The China White turned out to be the real deal.

  I never even buttoned up my coat and by the time I figured out I was cold it was 4 A.M. There was an open bottle of beer in my pocket and I finished it on the way upstairs. I headed for the bathroom and found a couple lines of coke.

  In the scheme of things, January was a challenge. It was the first full month of winter, the nights seemed darker and it felt kind of strange standing outside. I was getting confused and wasn’t sure if my job was important, if I was important because of my job, or if any of it even mattered. I started losing sight and was struggling to get some of it back. In early 1980, I wasn’t up to the looking inward part of my story.

  Oblivion and Enlightenment

  I make it home and crash on the sofa. An old black-and-white portable TV my grandmother gave me when I left for college is propped up on a trunk in the middle of the room. The trunk sits on a dirty pink rug that was clean when our friend Solveig gave it to us. Gary, a total TV freak, leaves the set on whether he’s home or not. There’s no remote so at five or six in the morning I wind up watching everything from test patterns with static buzz to I Love Lucy and the early morning news. The biggest story of the day is the American hostage crisis in Tehran. Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary general, tries to negotiate, Jimmy Carter gets shit on for the way the situation is being handled, and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan only augments the tension. Despite my wide-open mind I’m selectively oblivious, but from a distance it looks like a mess. My own little world seems self-contained and peaceful by comparison. From Fourteenth Street south all the way to White Street and Murray Street, the late-night, early-morning hours offer nearly everything I need. The only side effects of this life I’m living are too many drugs and too little sleep—leaving me flying blind or cocaine frozen.

  I wake up trying to work out what day it is and when I do it’s nearly gone. Later, I’m back on White Street, when Peter Nolan Smith, a self-described “unknown writer,” shows up. He works at Hurrah, has the night off and likes hanging out on the front steps of Mudd. He finds the White Street experience somewhere in that “middle ground between oblivion and enlightenment” but I just listen and only half agree. My time of enlightenment or any other personal Age of Reason hasn’t yet arrived so I ditch Peter and step inside in search of oblivion.

  Dragon People

  The following night I see myself looking at a long taxi ride to the nowhere world of the barely Upper West Side. The near legendary Jim Fouratt, along with Ruth Polsky, a booking agent and music promoter (who years later was hit and killed by a taxi on Sixth Avenue), are running the show at Hurrah. The club’s been featuring performances by everyone from the Patti Smith Group and Iggy Pop to the Ramones and the Sun Ra Arkestra. Walter Steding and The Dragon People are going on around 11 P.M. and I’m meeting Marcus Leatherdale at his place on Grand Street before heading uptown. Glenn O’Brien’s introducing the band, Blondie’s Chris Stein is joining them onstage and Marcus’ wife, my friend Claudia Summers, is a keyboard-playing Dragon Person.

  We
arrive a few minutes before the band takes the stage, order a drink and move up front. Glenn makes the introduction and the PA system briefly crackles and pops before Walter’s vocal turns into an indescribable wail. When his violin starts screaming and scratching the entire band heads into its own dark account of funky No Wave electronica. Andy Warhol gets nearly trampled as a good chunk of audience runs for the door. It’s a wild show and I stick around long enough that my ears start ringing. I grab a cab on Broadway and tell the driver to wake me up at White Street.

  It didn’t matter who was spinning or what was playing—unless it was a Pat Boone record or some other grenade Anita Sarko occasionally hurled onto the dance floor. For the moment, it was X-Ray Spex and Poly Styrene was screaming over the beat while Johnny Dynell stood in the booth taking DJ lessons from Anita. Steve Mass was watching and offered him a job on the spot. Johnny said yes and figured he’d “just do it, to do it.” I thought it was a good decision.

  The “Love to Love You Baby” era was a half-decade past and the glory days of Studio 54 were already winding down. We were in the thick of post-Punk when Johnny Dynell bravely took Disco retro before it had a chance to go there on its own—a bold move but not without its Disco-hating detractors.

  His first night was a Saturday and his set list walked a line between inspired and dangerous. He played Michael Jackson at his own risk and got harassed by a few freaked-out Punk-loving White Street denizens. He knew James Brown was safer but he didn’t care. Dressed in Jordache jeans and a tight-fitting tank top, he gave us “Disco as a concept.” He called Blondie’s “Atomic” “the last Disco record” and when he played it the crowd roared. Johnny Dynell was spinning the dance floor in a new direction but he’s still quick to point out, “David Azarch and Anita Sarko were the soundtrack of the Mudd Club.” Johnny just gave it a kick in the ass.