Will Work for Drugs

by Lydia Lunch

  1997’s Deliverance examined faith healing and the Filipino phenomenon of psychic surgery. On a stage covered in hundreds of pounds of dirt, three men on crutches come to see the Healer. They end up suspended on meat hooks to be bled while undergoing simulated surgical castration via genital stapling. Mummification and burial follows. Throughout the performance, a parade of images are employed, playing on themes culled from Santeria, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Judaism. Even Kali makes an appearance, interrupting a scene of double sodomy. In a light-hearted moment, the goddess severs the offending dildo in half with a pair of garden shears.

  For the past five years, Athey has been focusing on Joyce, a multimedia theatrical presentation whose premise, like most of his previous work, summarizes the insane beliefs and outrageous behaviors of his family’s religious perversity.

  Raised in an extremely dysfunctional Pentecostal household, the young Ronnie Lee was sainted as a prophet messiah who proselytized in tongues, and whose tears were coveted by the entire congregation. The adoration bestowed upon him in the revival tent did little to alleviate the daily nightmares heaped upon him as an unwitting victim of his mother’s schizophrenia, his aunt’s hyper-sexualized insanity, and his grandmother’s channeling of otherworldly specters.

  Joyce debuted at the prestigious Kampnagel Theater in Hamburg, Germany in 2002. As Athey’s most accomplished work, the stark beauty and emotional impact of this production all but defies description. Three immense screens project images of the young Athey self-mutilating, his aunt Vena undergoing an agonizing Betadine douche turned fist fuck for Jesus, his high-strung mother Joyce squirming and maniacally lint-picking, and his grandmother Annie Lou summoning the ectoplasmic angels whose beseeching shrill is exorcised in a series of automatic writing and action paintings.

  The stage is platformed above the video screens and divided into four rooms where the main characters’ repetitious compulsions escalate into an orgiastic frenzy. Mother Joyce, unable to withstand another moment of the voices within or the chaotic surround, smashes through the plasterboard walls while suspended upside down. Joyce has for the duration of the performance been trapped in a makeshift one-room insane asylum. The video screens vortex Joyce into infinity, an endless, unbelievably moving, visual spiral which reveals the vulnerability of body as prison.

  Ron Athey forces the body to transcend its confines. His brilliance manifests as exorcism of, and for, the cauterizing of his own pain, and by pushing the boundaries of endurance through artistic expression, he shares his compassionate epiphany: We all need to break free from the shackles placed upon the individual by society, family, religion, and gender. And possibly through the catharsis of performance and ritual, we might finally be able to lay to rest the demons who’ve sent us in search of the respite only a knife or needle could at one time provide.

  LL: How old were you when the spirit moved you to start preaching?

  RA: Out of the four kids that were raised in our house, I was the only one that was interested in religion. My family didn’t like churches … because they were too boring. At least they were right about something. We only liked revival meetings, so we were like church junkies in a way, going from revival tent to revival tent. Anywhere from the middle of the Mojave Desert, to Rosemead, to downtown Los Angeles. We lived in Pomona, about forty miles east of L.A. We were always on a journey—to see someone with stigmata, or someone who specialized in exorcisms. There was one church we went to where I felt like I could receive the gifts of the spirit … which is speaking in tongues. I was nine when it busted out of me.

  LL: What busted out of you?

  RA: The gloss-a-lalia! My own demons. I thought I was filled with something from outside of me. Something took over. I left my body. It was like being high. I was having an epileptic seizure while screaming at the top of my lungs.

  LL: And you were being filled. That’s the point of fevered religion.

  RA: I still have it! I was a tiny, over-emotional, tender creature and I remember being in this church. I started crying. So the minister took his white shirt off and tore it into squares, and put a tear on each square. And everyone lined up for one of my tears. So talk about grandiosity and self-importance! And the contrast of it … People were lining up for one of my tears. Meanwhile, I was going to an all-black school, in the poorest fucking neighborhood. My mother was in a mental institution and if I ever did anything wrong I was threatened to be put in a foster home. So it’s like, You’re special, we love you! and then, You’re about to LEAVE.

  LL: No special treatment at home for the little saint.

  RA: Maybe compared to my brothers and sisters. My sisters had it worse. In creating Joyce, I wanted to show how sick it can be when women create a power structure. When they would bring my mother home from the institution, she would hear my sisters talking about her in the middle of the night and pull ’em out of bed by their hair. Out of bunk beds. CLUNK—on the concrete floor. My older sister was kind of good-looking, but she looked like someone threw her teeth at her from across the room. My grandmother would hold her by the chin and start slapping her face just for being ugly, until they both fell down. Really twisted shit. Instead of that sister being fucked up about her face, my younger sister went and had her entire face sawed apart then put back together. She had a half-inch of skull sawed out because you could see her gums when she smiled. She had a rib removed and her lower jaw extended.

  LL: When did you decide body manipulation would become part of your artistic expression?

  RA: I started self-mutilating at fifteen when I couldn’t understand the concept of Jesus anymore. You’re crying, and there’s no one to pray to. I stuck tweezers in a light socket trying to wake my body up. I did cuttings with razor blades. Fingers, hands, arms. I would slam my head into concrete walls and floors. I felt like a numb piece of meat. That’s when my head started ringing. I felt like I was just going to float away. Once I injured myself I would flatline a little bit so that I could go on with the next day.

  LL: Is this when you began to ritualize the high of self-abuse?

  RA: I think it’s because I was exposed to S & M bars before the whole ’70s thing was over. You’d go in and there’d be all these guys under the bar just drinking piss. Somebody in chaps is getting fucked in the ass. Someone with a hard-on getting strung up on a chain-link fence.

  LL: And that made you feel right at home?

  RA: I felt that’s what I needed. Structure. I never wanted to belong. I was never a “boy” in that scene. I never joined it. But I would go there and get drunk and leave with someone or a couple people, get tied up, and be set on fire. We would run the whole gamut. I’d get shot up with homemade crank, feel like I had a stroke, then shit in some old man’s mouth on a toilet seat on stilts. And there was NO LIMIT.

  LL: When you first got into that scene before you understood the possibility of reclaiming your trauma and ritualizing it, did you feel any guilt over the transgressions you were committing?

  RA: I had no guilt whatsoever. I wanted someone to fucking kill me. And it felt good. I would go off with anyone and go anywhere. In the early ’80s, I got into the Hitler Youth look. I remember going to bars and realizing that I had a different kind of power. Instead of someone sleeping with this weird boy all of a sudden, I was the top and someone was giving me a hundred bucks to kick him in the head with my boots on. I was experimenting and wide open to feeling everything. Somehow I had no taboos at all. I wasn’t afraid of blood. I wasn’t afraid of shit. I wasn’t afraid of piss. I just walked into everything like a child, without any hangups. I have more hangups now than I had then.

  LL: When did you stop using drugs?

  RA: By the time I was twenty-five, I was dying. Too much heroin and methadone … and Valium. My first addiction. I was a trash bucket and I did so much LSD and crystal meth and speed when I was younger that I actually couldn’t take any stimulant. If I did coke I’d be climbing the walls. Heroin was the end of the road for me. My nervous system wa
s shot. Every time I’d do speed, I’d start hyperventilating the minute it hit my blood.

  LL: How did you progress from sticking tweezers into electrical sockets, shitting in people’s mouths, to body modification and performance?

  RA: A lot of leather bars had piercing salons. The Gauntlet had opened in L.A. in the mid-’70s. Genital piercing in the back—my first encounter with expressing your freakishness through mutilation or adornment. When I was on acid, I would just take broken glass or tear a can open and cut myself. I wanted to feel blood pouring on me. And I would start cutting other people without asking. Here we are, twenty years later! Joyce was like pulling teeth for me. I had been writing notes on it for five years. The challenge was in making a work so personal about not only my schizophrenic mother but also three other schizophrenic women. And how it becomes one shared disease. All happening in an insane religious household where a twisted sexuality which revolves around red-hot Betadine douches and five long fingernails up the cunt is the daily order.

  LL: You were only a child when this happened. Were you in the same room when this was going on?

  RA: It happened in the bathroom at least once a week, during my whole life when I lived at home. The women in my family were obsessed by the idea that “you’re filthy.” And you probably are after a while because you don’t have any natural enzymes left after you’ve rinsed yourself out, scrubbed yourself raw, and have had your mother jerk you off until you come, making you feel dirty and ashamed.

  LL: When in reality the filth is coming from the victimizer who then drains you of your natural defense against their disease.

  RA: Exactly the point. Performance as cleansing ritual from the disease of my mother.

  AFTERWORD

  SICK WITH DESIRE

  I’ve always had an overwhelming compulsion to confess, to reveal the most revolting details of my existence to others. I possess a criminal predilection which bears no guilt yet admits to not only my own crimes of passion, but also my complicity in aggravating others to commit crimes both for and against me.

  I play judge, jury, convict, and victim. A schizophrenic passion play that feeds on the intoxicating repercussions of the repetitive cycle of abuse. An unending theme in my body of work.

  From my earliest lyrics, spoken word performances, and films, I have sung vicious incantations bemoaning the cruel fate of the human condition, where each of us bears some mark of battery.

  We have all been victimized at some point because of our gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, religion, or lack of. Our first cry is slapped out of us as we are violently wrenched from the relative safety of the crimson universe deep within our mothers’ bodies. Born in blood and battered into breathing, life begins with brutality and baptizes with violence.

  And violence is an addictive electrical current which burns at both ends. Cruel lessons taught within the torture chamber of the nuclear family replayed with systematic repetition over and over again in our adult relationships until we are able to recognize the patterning of ritualized abuse and readdress our participation in its ongoing cycle.

  I have always felt the need to strike back, not only at the closed fist of my father, our fathers, the fathers of our country and God—the father, that motherfucker—but at times, in a perverse reversal of roles, at parts of myself.

  To attack my own body. To use my body as whipping post and sacrifice in submission to my own inherent sadomasochism. To that redneck faggot truck driver who overrides so many of the other sexual schizophrenics who cohabitate in this insane asylum, my body. Which is forever riddled by an agitation, an irritation, an insatiability. A need to be challenged, threatened, throttled, pushed to the brink—because anyone who has been traumatized by life realizes that to fully appreciate every breath, nothing short of fearing YOU WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO TAKE ANOTHER ONE will renew your vigor for every moment that still remains.

  My goal has always been to if not step off the wheel, away from the scaffold, and out from under the guillotine of genetically preprogrammed trauma bonds, to at least recognize that I am not the only one living under a life sentence of victimhood, willing or not. I am not the only one SICK WITH DESIRE.

  I create as a form of public psychotherapy speaking to and for a minority of passionate extremists who feel either betrayed or never fully defined by gender.

  I have always felt I was cross-dressing in my own flesh—a hotel for so many, many monsters.

  And I admit it:

  The American Way of Life has turned me into

  A death-defying murder junkie

  Drunk on disasters, calamities, casualties, bombs bursting in air, bullets ricocheting off the bellies of pregnant women, the bombing of abortion clinics, crippled children poisoned on a school bus, shopping-mall murders, crumbling cities polluted beyond repair, craters of despair in the eyes of men, women, and children, their brains rotted by the cathode glare of the television, the Internet, video games—

  Where all the Killers are heroes

  All the Killers are heroes …

  And I myself am filled with a MURDEROUS RAGE

  Gang Warfare waged under my skin

  A battle of bitches boxing their way out

  I have become the RAPIST whose IMPOTENCE

  At annihilating the REAL KILLERS is MANIFESTED

  As violence against myself

  And anyone else who gets in my fucking way

  A PASSION KILLER riddled with CRIMINAL URGES

  A SADIST incarcerated in her own TORTURE CHAMBER

  One minute you’re FLESH AND BLOOD

  And the next you’re FLESH AND BONES

  PILES AND PILES OF FLESH AND BONES

  MY WAR IS THE BATTLE OF SEX AS AN ANIMAL ACT

  FOUGHT HAND TO GLAND

  ONE WOMAN VERSUS EVERY MAN

  I’ve gotten inside the enemy’s head

  I’m sleeping in his fucking bed

  MY WOMB—A TOMB—A SACRIFICIAL CUNT

  THE MORE THEY KILL THE MORE I FUCK

  Welcome to MY church—

  The Church of the Unholy Redeemer

  Where the only commandment is

  REBELLION from FALSE VIRTUE

  REBELLION from FALSE VIRTUE

  Pleasure is the only true rebellion

  Pleasure at the Mouth of the Abyss

  Pleasure at the Brink of the Apocalypse

  Ecstasy at the Brink of the Disaster

  In Times of War—it’s not my War—it’s not your War

  We, especially as women, need to insist upon our Pleasure

  Demand our Pleasure

  Because it’s the first fucking thing they stole from us

  And we might not have much Time left …

  Small Pox, Anthrax, Avian Bird Flu, Nuclear Warheads

  Biochemical Retribution as Revenge for Spiritual Bankruptcy

  WE MIGHT NOT HAVE MUCH TIME LEFT

  So with whatever Passion and Cruel Lucidity I can bring to bear

  I always wanted Life to be Naked

  I always wanted Ecstasy and I finally found it

  I must find Ecstasy in this Insanity

  Freedom from their Slavery

  The Truth in their Lies

  Life in their Death

  Beauty in their Homicidal Genocide

  Peace in the War Whore’s evil orgy of Death and Negation

  Love amongst the Ruins

  Pleasure in my own Pain

  Also available from the Akashic Books

  PARADOXIA: A PREDATOR’S DIARY

  by Lydia Lunch

  160 pages, trade paperback original, $13.95

  “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 …”

  —Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

  “Paradoxia reveals that Lunch is at her best when she’s at her worst … and give
s voice to her sometimes scary, frequently funny, always canny, never sentimental siren song.”

  —Barbara Kruger, ArtForum

  ISTANBUL NOIR

  edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  300 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  Brand new stories by: Lydia Lunch, Feryal Tilmaç, Riza Kiraç, Hikmet Hükümenoğlu, Behçet Çelik, ¡smail Güzelsoy, Jessica Lutz, Yasemin Aydinoğlu, Tarkan Barlas, Bariş Müstecaplioğlu, and more.

  “Istanbul straddles the divide of Europe and Asia, and its polyglot population of twelve million seethes with political, religious and sexual tensions, as shown in the sixteen stories in this strong entry in Akashic’s noir anthology series. Most of the stories are fittingly dark, though a couple are lit by a macabre humor … [A] welcome complement to the mostly historical mysteries set in Istanbul.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  HIGH LIFE

  by Matthew Stokoe

  336 pages, trade paperback original, $15.95

  *A selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery series

  “High Life is perhaps the greatest neglected masterpiece of true noir. I’ve never read anything like this, nor do I expect to.”

  —Ken Bruen, author of The Guards

  “Stokoe’s in-your-face prose and raw, unnerving scenes give way to a skillfully plotted tale that will keep readers glued to the page.”