by Lydia Lunch
LL: So what you love turns into what you hate.
NT: It’s almost like, So why do you want ME to do it? Yeah, I do hate it. And then there’s this diseased aspect of my mind where as much as I hate it, I’ll get so involved in it, and go off into such obsessive detail rather than just go in there and be a hack. That’s all I really need to do to do the job properly. I don’t even seem to be capable of that! It’s like the travails of boredom.
LL: You said you need a seven-year break, which is understandable. You’ve been incredibly prolific.
NT: I want a seven-year stretch of nothingness. LL: Shoot the clock.
NT: Yeah.
LL: Start there. I’ve read you frequent the same restaurant every day for lunch. Do you employ other regimens to free up more of your time to just write?
NT: I’ll tell you the truth. Until the other day, I hadn’t written anything since last year. That’s how bad this situation really is. It’s a joke. I have these two articles that are a year … more than a year overdue. I’ve just begun one of them, and the guy who’s waiting for this garbage book from HarperCollins keeps calling my agent and saying, How’s the book coming? The book is now at the end of the list! He’s looking at next year, at best. Now I want to get everything out of the way by … let’s say … when the first warm breeze of next year blows.
LL: How did you first come into contact with Hubert Selby?
NT: The first time … oh Jesus! I first came into contact with him twenty years ago, when he was living in New York. I was at my blackest, most chilling, deadliest period. It was right around when I finished Trinities. Everybody was telling me I was gonna die. I asked Selby’s publisher where he was. I figured, if he was still alive, that means I could fuckin’ live forever. I wrote him a letter. He basically turned out saving my life, for the time being. I was really reaching out for darkness, and I got light instead. We built a new friendship over the last six or seven years. Time flies when you don’t work.
LL: What were you doing that was so death defying?
NT: I was just being what I was. Which was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Which was being in a state of oblivion for months at a time, only interrupting it to get dragged off to the hospital.
LL: Was it alcohol, or anything you could get your hands on?
NT: It was alcohol and everything else. It was mostly unbelievably huge sums of alcohol, and then I would, on top of that, go for heroin, or whatever. It was electricity from booze that was keeping me alive. I didn’t see any other way to be, or one single valid reason for me to be any different.
LL: Selby’s so inspirational. That he’s managed to live in this fragile body with so much energy!
NT: I know! He’s Johnny No-Lungs, ya know?
LL: When I started doing spoken word, and realized that he was still alive, I contacted him. And at that point he hadn’t been doing many shows. I was just amazed that the guy was interested, wanted to do it, and had the stamina.
NT: Though he’ll never see it as such, I think he did, if not literally save my life, at least take me and head me toward some piercing wisdom. There was one thing he said to me, one line. He said, Never look for light to enter you. Try to find the light that’s been buried and let it out. It was like the Gospel of Thomas. I do things my own way. And I’d gone so long without drinking, I realized that I could never drink hard liquor again. Because I knew it would take over my body and my soul. Physically it would. So I said, Let me try to drink a beer. And I found out that I could go out and drink beer, and not drink the next morning. Then I lost my taste for beer, and I became an expensive wino, who just relaxes with it.
LL: You quoted the Gospel of Thomas. Did Selby turn you on to that?
NT: No, no! I found that one on my own. It was almost exactly what he was saying, though. Whether he was aware of it or not, there was such a parallel. But he brought it home so piercingly, because of how he said it. He’s a treasure and this country should be placing laurel leaves on his head, and gold bars at his feet. They’re not doing it.
LL: They’ll wait till he dies, and he’ll still be lucky to get the recognition he deserves then.
NT: Writers are the only people that get paid posthumously. Selby will be fucking rich twelve years after he’s dead, after it becomes required buying.
LL: Do you still drink?
NT: Yeah. I drink two glasses of wine a day with lunch. To me, lunch is the highlight of my existence. Like I said, my New York doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t go out. There’s nowhere for me to go and see old friends. Or to even walk down blocks that are pleasant. The social clubs I used to go to are now like some kind of chi-chi shoe store or something, Korean dry cleaners … so it’s all gone now and lunch is the time for me to relax, a few glasses. And now, maybe once a month or so, I’ll purposely go out to drink too much. The thing is, I’ve turned into an expensive wino so I only drink good wine. I don’t drink at home. So if I go out I have to bring my own wine with me. That’s my routine now. Yesterday I didn’t drink anything, I didn’t leave the house. I worked. I looked at the clock and it was 10 o’clock, and then it was 10 o’clock at night, and then it was 2 o’clock, and I figured, well, I’ll just keep going. And here I am.
LL: You mentioned before your flamboyance, that you like to spend extravagant—
NT:—amounts of money, yeah.
LL: Is that a rebellion, or—
NT: Nah. It’s just that I never had anything when I was young and once I got a taste of it, I figured, Well, this is what the money’s for? I try to share it, and lavish it on myself. I figure that that’s just what it was for. LL: You’ve gotta spoil yourself.
NT: Yeah, and … that’s it.
LL: I’m gonna quote you, from The Last Opium Den: “Enough of this profundity. The labor involved in its elucidation is far too great. You want enlightenment? Go get it yourself … paradise has no words.” That’s so beautiful. What do you know at fifty—are you fifty now?
NT: I’m more than fifty.
LL: What do you know at fifty something that you wouldn’t have admitted to yourself at twenty-five?
NT: Oh, well … at twenty-five I never, ever, ever would have perceived of the value and the power of just being completely, openly honest. I would have been both afraid of it and also would think of it as being destructive to something. Now I realize that it’s just the only fuckin’ way. I also know now that I have a very palpable sense of life being finite, and therefore being less willing to sacrifice any of it to bullshit. I’m more aware of the main events, which is that every single breath, this very breath now, is really the only gift that we have. Without that, there’s nothing. It’s the most immense gift. That’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Also, I don’t have to put up with anything I don’t want to put up with. Fuck ’em. If it weren’t for the fact that I can’t stand the idea of being in jail, I would just go around shootin’ people. Just to shut ’em up, you know.
LL: The problem with that thought, and I entertain it daily … I just don’t have enough fuckin’ bullets.
NT: Just hearing myself say it, it reinforces how much I believe that. I’m glad that you somehow got me to articulate it. At this very moment while I feel half dead. Now I got half a smile on my weary face. I’m just gonna jump in the shower and … I think … go have my lunch. Then come back and collapse.
Bibliography: Nick Tosches
Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll (1977)
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story (1982)
Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll: The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years before Elvis (1984)
Power on Earth (1986)
Cut Numbers (1988)
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams (1992)
Trinities (1994)
Chaldea and I Dig Girls (1999)
The Devil and Sonny Liston (2000) The Nick Tosches Reader (2000) Where Dead Voices Gather (2001)
In the Hand of Dante (2002)
The Last Opium Den (20
02)
King of the Jews: The Greatest Mob Story Never Told (2005)
JERRY STAHL
THE LIVING PERV
Jerry Stahl restores my faith in contemporary writing. His memoir Permanent Midnight detailed one of the most harrowing and hilarious journeys into degeneracy and drug addiction ever published. Stahl followed it with Perv—A Love Story, a belly-slapping good time (at the expense of his own manhood) chronicling cringe-inducing pubescent sexual scenarios involving failed, fractured, and just plain fucked-up romantic encounters. Plain Clothes Naked comes on its heels, a fat contemporary detective noir whose punch line features a purloined polaroid of George W.’s nutsack. Brilliant.
In June of 1999 I had the pleasure of strapping Stahl to a plush red-velvet sofa in my living room for forty-five minutes of psychotherapy that left us both spent, soaked in sweat, convulsing in fever, and delirious with the opportunity to once more stroke each other’s ego in a verbal tongue-to-brain fuck.
LL: After Permanent Midnight, did you feel you had more to live up to or more to live down? It was a huge revelation dealing with the worst low points in your own personal life.
JS: Neither. Just putting it out there in a way that seemed deeply remarkable and disturbo at the time, but as soon as you do it seems completely pedestrian. So all the shit that is shocking to Joe Square is Mickey Mouse to a whole other population. I don’t think it’s about living it up or down, it’s about finding another disgusting quarry to mine.
LL: What do you think failed about the film version?
JS: I don’t think it failed. I think it succeeded in what it was trying to do. I thought the acting was great, it was just a different kind of asshole than what’s painted in the book. Once you take the money, I think you’ve just got to shut the fuck up.
LL: The many sides to our assholism … Was it horrifying to know that your life was projected not only up on the big screen, but eventually would be invading other people’s homes via cable TV?
JS: The horrifying thing is, is that it wasn’t my life, it was somebody else’s version of my life. So it was a relief that Jon Bon Jovi wasn’t playing me and they didn’t change the drug to ecstasy. There’s no muscle, gland, or corner of the brain that’s been evolved to deal with the fact that people are going to be staring at you over their bunions in their bed, at some really off portrayal of you. It’s so disturbing and so weird that I don’t even think about it … It’s somewhere between denial and oblivion.
LL: No matter how much we reveal in our writing and readings, I find the most satisfaction in gloating over the things people don’t know … Do you feel the same? You’re exposing more in one book than most people have to deal with in their entire lifetime
JS: I’m exposing what seems like the truth at the time. I couldn’t write Permanent Midnight now. Everything is completely different. I was ten minutes clean. My nerve ends were completely flapping in the wind.
LL: Do you think writing was a huge part of your recovery?
JS: Who the fuck knows? It got me out of the bathroom down the hall from the queens-next-door nightmare I was living in on Sunset Boulevard. When I didn’t have a place of my own. On the corner of Crack and Eightball … taking a shit at Musso & Frank’s because I didn’t have a toilet. It got me out of there.
LL: Did sex change a lot after you got clean?
JS: Absolutely.
LL: Better or worse?
JS: If you’d never fucked anyone without being totally loaded, it’s really terrifying. There’s no place to hide. So on one level it’s terrifically hot because you’re feeling everything. On the other hand, it’s paralyzingly disturbing because you can’t chemically stage set the experience. I had to fuck people for money, shelter, food, drugs. I was a chemically altered whore in a lot of ways. Then I stopped being a whore, stopped being chemically altered, and I wasn’t sure what the fuck was underneath it. If anything. The no-place-to-hide-ness of it is probably spectacularly healthy for that reason.
LL: What’s so amazing, especially about your readings and the details in Perv, is that most men spend their entire lives bragging about the sexual prowess they will never possess, yet you willingly expose some of the most excruciating and humiliating sexual experiences of your life. You must be a sexual master.
JS: I wonder if shame has become my new heroin. It really is embarrassing in one way, but at the same time you get strung out on revelation. On saying the unsayable. I’m sure you know that. It’s another kind of drug. I had a woman come up to me and say, I can’t believe you said your penis at rest was the size of … What did I say?
LL: An acorn.
JS: An acorn at rest. And she said the same thing: You must be really confident.
LL: Has it made it easier to score with women? Are they lining up to throw down?
JS: I said, Let’s focus on the phrase “at rest.” It’s the accordion factor. Let’s march that out right now. As a wise woman once said, Jerry, you have nothing to be ashamed of … You’re a hard average. I was so proud at that moment. At fifteen or sixteen, that’s how it is. The reason it was so fresh to me is because there’s a cliché about recovery from dope or whatever substance, and it’s true. You stop developing emotionally at the age you start using every day. Okay, so I wash ashore clean and I may be in my forties, but in my head I’m feeling what guys are feeling at fourteen. Which is a weird vulnerability. When you stay hard on a speedball for seven hours, your standards are a little warped back in the real world. At my age, you’ll blow your prostate out your fucking ear.
LL: Especially if the person you’re screwing isn’t on the same chemical high.
JS: I was always with straight women. But the only women I ever actually had relationships with were ex-hookers, ex—dope fiends, horrifying survivors of God knows what kind of abuse, because they’re the only people who, in my state of exposed nerve endings, I can actually be with. I fall in love with their pain, they fall in love with mine. And that’s where the sex comes from.
LL: Pain is the great divide. Those who have walked barefoot into the mouth of the volcano and those who haven’t. And if you haven’t, you’re just not on the same level of understanding.
JS: That brings it back to something you asked before about revealing all this. I’m the luckiest motherfucker in the world. Because having done that, I don’t need to hide. Anybody that can relate to me will, anybody who doesn’t isn’t in my face. The groupies I would get, the one-in-a-hundred women who would actually want to be locked in an elevator with me are so bent anyway that I can fucking relax.
Bibliography: Jerry Stahl
Permanent Midnight: A Memoir (1995)
Perv—A Love Story (1999)
Plainclothes Naked (2001)
I, Fatty: A Novel (2004)
Love Without: Stories (2007)
Pain Killers (2009)
THE VIOLENT DISBELIEF OF RON ATHEY
If the inside of your head gets pummeled with enough emotional blunt-force trauma to splinter the psyche, you develop ways to punish the body, that fleshy prison which houses the pain.
When the agony of life’s relentless frustration is steeped in the malignant tyranny of deception and abuse, and the ones closest to you deny not only their culpability, but worship at the feet of false idols to justify the perpetuation of their violence, your trusty friend the razor will never tell a single lie.
If the sight of blood brought forth from your own hand spells an almost immediate relief, a sublime release of pressure, consider yourself a member in an elite coven who strive to decode the mystery of self-sacrifice. Whereby a violation you now control can provide a temporary satiation, a stifling of the nauseating screams and endless insinuations of a world turned inside out.
The undeniable aroma of skin melting under the cigarette’s ugly kiss localizes the all-consuming daily irritants until it fills yellow with pus, leaks out, drains, scabs over, and is eventually picked clean, revealing a fresh growth of virgin pink. As the wounds heal and the bli
stered skin renews with life, these marks of identity play as time capsule which can further separate you from the original sinner, the antagonist responsible for your infection, a soul sickness born of pain and loss.
The cycle of abuse changes course only once you have decided to own your self-flagellation. Not simply as revenge or repetition of the crimes committed against you, but in celebration as ritual to all that has been will-fully overcome.
This is the first commandment of the new testament in accordance with the Bible of Pope Ron Athey.
Throughout the 1990s, Athey’s Torture Trilogy was both a pageant to and a lurid slur against classic religious imagery and its relationship to the eternal themes of death and disease. The 1991 production of Martyrs and Saints illustrated the cruel and impersonal nature of supposed “caregivers.” Three nurses, lips sutured closed, lead three mummified bodies on gurnies into the operating theater where the bodies are violated with enemas, specula, and genital piercing.
1994’s Four Scenes in a Harsh Life opens with an androgynous St. Sebastian pierced with arrows and covered with oil. Athey acting as Holy Woman proceeds to anoint the audience with the saint’s greasy runoff. The second act, entitled “Steakhouse Motherfuckers,” is a twisted pantomime to “asshole redneck culture.” A sleazy stripclub, drag kings lining the gangplank, howling in macho delight as a trio of gaudy strippers parade obscenely by. The last temptress is portrayed by Divinity Fudge, a 300-pound black man in drag who the frenzied patrons attack in what Camille Paglia has coined “the giddy abandon of a gang rape.” The third act, which reclaims violence as ritual by “taking from the wounds and giving to the audience,” involves a series of deep cuts meticulously patterned on Divinity’s back, whose blood is blotted onto paper, strung, sometimes over a hundred feet of clotheslines, and sent floating above the audience. Athey follows by performing a solo suicide scene, inserting sixteen large hypodermic needles in a geometric pattern up his arm and attacking his face with a needle the size of a stiletto, attempting to reclaim, through passion and ritual, the violations he has previously committed against himself in anger and frustration.
