by Lydia Lunch
Praise for Paradoxia (Akashic Books, 2007)
“Lunch’s headlong plunge into manic devastation and corruption at times recalls the better work of William S. Burroughs … Strangely honest rantings from a modern-day Genet.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A lurid, profane account of downtown living …”
—Newsday, “Our Favorites of 2007”
“Beyond the book’s chronicling of Lunch’s desires, it serves an over-arching, exhibitionist desire to perform, and it brings a decrepit, vanished New York to life … It recreates its time and place with vivid authenticity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Paradoxia is compelling, exhilarating, and infinitely readable.”
—Paper
“Paradoxia is very much a cultural document—a glimpse of the warts-and-all attitude of someone who strove to be transgressive and often succeeded. Through streaming open-mike cadences, staccato scorn, and a highly attuned olfactory memory, Lunch captures the swoony, viscous downtown of yesteryear, when sex and the city meant something else entirely.”
—Time Out New York (4 stars)
“Hubert Selby, Jr. famously said that he grew up feeling like a scream without a mouth. Lydia Lunch, one of his most celebrated—and most uncompromising—literary progeny, delivered scream, mouth, teeth, blood, hair, sperm, knife, and adrenaline in her purgatorial masterpiece Paradoxia.”
—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
“Intoxicating. Dirty. Erotic. Damn, Lydia Lunch’s Paradoxia intrigues and resonates with every word … [It] is a seductive and redemptive story of lust—lust for satisfaction, for power, for solitude, and for understanding how to live.”
—Feminist Review
“Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst … and gives voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song.”
—Barbara Kruger, Artforum
“A gritty, autobiographical tale of hedonistic excess through three decades.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[Paradoxia] is real noir in a declamatory and clear voice … In a culture where the ‘true’ has been denatured, Lunch reclaims its bestial power.”
—Eye Weekly (Toronto)
“Lydia Lunch often is compared to Hubert Selby, Jr. and Jean Genet. Reading Paradoxia, I see some Dostoevsky in her shattered protagonist and her unforgettable, murderous opening line … Paradoxia has a place in the literature of depravity, and like the good work in that genre, it’s intentionally funny.”
—Bookslut
“Within the body of her blunt bullet point prose … Lunch can be brutally original. Or originally brutal.”
—Harp
“Paradoxia is at once a moving confessional of an irredeemably abused girl and a steely-eyed account of that girl’s coming to womanhood by meticulously, soberly reclaiming that abuse.”
—Bust
“Lunch’s direct and visceral prose and her skill in shaping exciting narratives make Paradoxia a compelling page-turner.”
—Hipster Book Club
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2009 by Lydia Lunch
Foreword ©2009 by Karen Finley
eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75004-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-73-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008937351
Some of the stories in this volume originally appeared in an earlier form in the following publications: Sex and Guts: “Death Defied by a Thousand Cuts”; The Wire: “1967”; Inappropriate Behavior: Prada Sucks! and other Demented Descants edited by Jessica Berens and Kerri Sharp (Serpent’s Tail, 2002): “Motherhood: It’s Not Compulsory”; Your Flesh Magazine: “Assume the Position”; Another Man Magazine: “‘In Times of Universal Deceit …’”; Incriminating Evidence by Lydia Lunch (Last Gasp, 1992): “The Beast”; Storie: “Johnny behind the Deuce”; Dirt: “Hubert Selby Jr.: The Man Who Refused to Die”; Sex and Guts: “Nick Tosches: Squalor and Splendor”; Crave: “Jerry Stahl: The Living Perv”; Sex and Guts: “The Violent Disbelief of Ron Athey.”
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword by Karen Finley
Introduction: Will Work for Drugs
PART I: DESPERATE MEASURES
Death Defied by a Thousand Cuts
1967
Canasta
PART II: CUNTZILLA
Elusive Bitch
Motherhood: It’s Not Compulsory
Assume the Position
“In Times of Universal Deceit …”
PART III: SHORTCHANGED
The Beast
Johnny behind the Deuce
Dear Johnny, Jimmy, Joey …
Dead Man
The Devil’s Racetrack: Ray Trailer
PART IV: ROUGHNECKS
Hubert Selby Jr.: The Man Who Refused to Die
Nick Tosches: Squalor and Splendor
Jerry Stahl: The Living Perv
The Violent Disbelief of Ron Athey
Afterword: Sick with Desire
FOREWORD
BY KAREN FINLEY
Lydia Lunch is a contemporary renaissance poetess, musician, artist, and provocateur. Her career has spanned three decades and has influenced a range of styles and content, through genres of music, spoken word, performance, film, gender and sexuality, humor and politics. She is also a cultural critic and has been a major pioneer in the international art scene. One of Lydia’s most powerful contributions to the art world has been her unique skill at transforming her traumatic childhood ordeals into daring and illuminating expressions that enforce and inspire creative responses rather than eliciting destructive ones.
In this collection of personal essays, short fiction, and interviews, Lydia presents her own life for reflection to once and for all void the diary as a self-indulgent exercise or tool of pity. Her generosity with her own life experiences provides the reader an opportunity to glimpse the creative potential as outlet. Alice Miller writes about the relationship of trauma and the imagination in The Drama of the Gifted Child. And here, in Will Work for Drugs, Lydia gives evidence of redirecting her traumas by how she escapes through the lens of the imagination. We enter her commitment to (and love of) the imagination, and exit with the knowledge of the power of that creative sphere.
Lydia refuses to be subservient to the destructive acts she has witnessed, and instead develops sacred space in the intimacy of this book and nurtures the collective sacred space with the activation of her life as art, her words and deeds as the illumination of art.
When in doubt, her faith kicks in and she continues creating, transforming—despite the odds and circumstances—amidst the fragility of human existence. Lydia survives with swift humor which uncomfortably wraps and soothes the anger with a bitchy wit and sardonic word-tailoring that continues a long tradition of jester, comedienne, and political humorist.
Although her point of departure is usually the experience of self, she maps her territory for us as a community organizer for the disenfranchised. Lydia positions herself as an outside/inside agitator, inciting to chaos, breaking the depressive calm as she threatens the community to wake up and take action. Wear and utilize your emotional soul burden as artistic pride.
At times we see her analyze—and reanalyze—historical and emotional events with intellectual passion and rigor while she deconstructs theories of complacency
and political ideologies. She plays a cat-and-mouse game in her skill as a master debater. The cat never lets up. But she will let the mouse roar.
Lydia volunteers her own emotional life to become our mirror, to judge and learn from, laugh from; and then we can gaze upon our own hearts and heads. This generosity mesmerizes me, for Lydia does it with her twinkling assertive je m’en fous, joie de vivre, and heavy breathing. Her insistence on our acceptance of her gift is probably the only authentically aggressive part of her.
If we don’t see or hear her words, the now of emotional destruction is within reach.
Lydia presents the symbols and standards of power such as obedience, rules, punishment, and authority as true myths of the American Dream. She allows us a viewing from the underbelly, the shadow of our American life—or, rather, the American Nightmare. We understand our own versions and boundaries of morality. Lydia creates for us a disturbance by giving us her truth, though not with scientific methods. Consider, for example, her essay “1967,” in which the outside political authority and the father authority break down and abuse their pathetic power over her.
Her courage—to be Lydia, to find Lydia, and to express Lydia—is the spiritual centerpiece and moral of the story. Through trial and error, she believes, the great human insistence of soul will eventually become an individuated self that will heal and give sustenance, guidance for those beginning the journey. The courage to not just witness but to take action with authority is an expression of love, beauty, truth, grace, and sensitivity—the stuff real art is made from. Lydia offers rage with attendant tenderness to the gentle palms holding her book, to the personal encounter of reading. Will Work for Drugs provides the soul search in the written word. What nurtures the soul of the artist? With Lydia Lunch it would never be the complacency of good intentions, or the inaction of thought and deeds.
It is a privilege and honor to introduce you to Lydia Lunch’s Will Work for Drugs. I am certain you will be enthralled, moved, and riveted as you turn these pages written by one of America’s National Treasures. You are in for quite a ride!
Karen Finley
March 2009
INTRODUCTION
WILL WORK FOR DRUGS
Yeah, right. I wish they made enough good drugs to reward the blood and brain matter I have splattered over these pages, countless stages, celluloid, vinyl, acetate, and compact disc. The fuel that propels me is more likely to be a grotesque imbalance of testosterone and estrogen polluted by multiple dioxins conveniently dumped in the Love Canal near Niagara Falls by the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation for decades before my birth in Upstate New York.
It takes a master alchemist to create a functional stability between the contamination of genetic mutation, environmental hazards, moral pollution, hormonal imbalance, and toxic emotions from which I struggle. My daily existence is a battlecade of extreme fluctuations where chaos clobbers apathy which beats the shit out of depression which follows irritability which slams into anger which eclipses ecstasy which slips through my fingers far too often. I’m still searching for the drug that can trigger the switch which will allow euphoria its rightful position as a top contender in the war of my emotions.
I had my first mood swing while still in the womb when the the bliss of non-being was shattered by the bullrun of my father’s bloodline brutally crashing through my fragile endocranial cast. The inside of my head has been punching the shit out of itself since I was a child. Migraines rebel against my internal landscape, that sewer of muscle, meat, sinew, and blood which stinks of sulfur and rose water. My brainpan overflows with ancient memories which have fractured into splintered obsidian only to be melted into tiny hammers whose thunder eventually roars out of my mouth. This collection commits to the page a sampling of the cries and whispers which batter the inside of my head like fevered ghosts ghoulishly intoxicated by the primordial essence which has poisoned my very existence. Enjoy—
Lydia Lunch
April 2009
PART I
DESPERATE MEASURES
DEATH DEFIED
BY A THOUSAND CUTS
I was born surrounded by Death. My mother miscarried before me, after me, and I was born choking the life out of my dead twin brother. At the age of six my grandmother, a cruel Sicilian witch with long white hair which smelled of camphor, died in bed while sleeping beside me. For years afterwards I was chased through the fruit cellar by the evil echo of her heinous cackle. My mother was surrounded by Death too: eleven brothers and sisters, only three of whom lived to see adulthood. Pneumonia. Tuberculosis. Cancer. Diabetes. Stroke. A sick brood indeed.
I spent my formative years in the town where future Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi conducted his first experiments in lust killing. Month after month the lurid details of his latest victim, always a preadolescent girl my age, would be splayed across the evening news or the front page of the daily paper, grid-marking the map of bodies I was convinced I was next to join. Years later I survived a cocaine-induced killing spree by satanic heartthrob Richard Ramirez, who must have gotten his psychic signals crossed when instead of sneaking into my bungalow for a few carefree hours of hard metal and soft flesh, took a left turn and missed my apartment by a mere three blocks. Although at the time, in the advanced stages of a sick addiction to adrenaline and the endless pull of Death’s black magnetism, I felt as if I had already spent many a new moon subjugated to the Night Stalker’s unique charisma. Ricky never knew me, but I felt as if we were dating.
By nature I am Death defiant. I have survived illnesses which have killed lesser mortals. Burst appendix; infected lymph nodes; E. coli; “unintended intra-operative awareness”—the result of an undetected and unwanted ectopic pregnancy which exploded, filling my body with pus and poisoned blood, causing me to black out until I woke up seizing with the unbearable horror of being paralyzed under a Russian surgeon’s vicious butchery in a scuzzy community hospital in downtown Los Angeles, surrounded by blinding white light, which was, in fact, not the light, but the fluorescent overheads, which I floated eye level with while silently screeching and beseeching every god, goddess, and demon whom I thought worthy of summoning, as I begged for Death, begged for relief, begged to be set free from what I assumed was Hell’s ultimate punishment: unrelenting physical pain. Not enough anesthesia will do that to a person.
I have been stabbed in the gut an eighth of an inch short of pancreatic poisoning. I have been forced into the desert by a Manson wannabe whose idea of “True Romance” was bloodstains in the sun-bleached sand. I have been bottled in the forehead with a Heineken with such brute force it broke. I spent a charming weekend with a sexy drifter who was arrested three days later and charged with cannibalism. I have been held hostage in snowy woods by a Robert Blake look-alike holding a sawed-off shotgun to my left temple demanding to be told horrible fairy tales detailing a dozen ways in which I would murder my sisters.
I bullied a junkie gunman to put his piece back in his pocket, turn around, walk away from me, and go shoot someone from his own neighborhood. I guilt-tripped a knife-wielding crack tweeker to head uptown where people were actually worth sticking up. I’ve been on two transatlantic flights which were stalled on European runways for hours while bomb-sniffing dogs were sent through the luggage hold to retrieve deadly explosives. And that was just the early ’80s …
I taunted Death, and Death taunted back. But like a lover who sweet talks you with endless promises of fantastic potential but always comes up short in the pants, you eventually grow bored with possibility. And the attraction you once swooned with now sours and leaves you cold. Besides, Death is forever … Life … no matter how much you torture yourself or allow others to pick up the pillory and nail you to a post, is goddamn short. Shit … sea turtles live longer.
I’m grateful for every minute I’m still alive. I’ve been granted numerous stays of execution. I courted Death, who always wins in the end, but truly I wanted LIFE. In the Extreme. I needed experiences which would force me to tru
ly appreciate everything. I wanted to take nothing for granted.
A friend once said, “Shut the fuck up. You’ve got it made … You’ve had everything you ever wanted. All the sex you could stomach, all the drugs you could consume, cool friends who worshipped you. What more do you want?” I was glutting on everything in a desperate attempt to feel something, anything. I wasn’t born numb to life, but the trauma of birth, repeated exposure to the violence of alcoholism and the rage of its impotence, poverty, and night terrors had short-circuited my emotional hard drive before I even hit puberty. I fought long and hard to get sensation back.
And yeah, I’m a fucking contrarian—on one hand, I simply DON’T GIVE A FUCK. A self-centered alien femme-bot soldiering forward in spite of the imminent collapse of my own physical and mental well-being, chortling sadistically as the planet crumbles. On the other hand, I’m war torn, battle fatigued, and deeply wounded by humanity’s ignorance, stupidity, and greed. My compassion is a driving force which insists I give voice to the murdered sons and battered daughters who are forever looking for love in all the wrong faces because they didn’t know how to love themselves enough while hating everything and everyone else.
Most people suffer from having too much emotion. They obsess over minor imperfections, comparing themselves to unrealistic images perpetrated by a celebrity-driven media who value net worth over content or meaning. They panic in the face of disapproval or contradiction, fearing that if they disagree with the staus quo, the general consensus, or a lover’s opinion of right and wrong, they will be abandoned and left to fight it out alone. Their insecurity is exaggerated by jealousy, which in turn fosters such a desperate need to be understood that they’ll waste an exorbitant amount of time and energy pitching temper tantrums riddled with endless tirades berating friends and lovers who just don’t get it. Energy and emotion which could and should be more fruitfully employed elsewhere, like in the written and spoken word, where if somebody doesn’t want to hear it—they aren’t forced to listen. And if they don’t get it—tough shit.
