The hilly half-familiar streets creep and wriggle with memories, avatars, talismans. Decadence, man, a no-kidding death of affect. It all ties in for Lester, in a bilious mental stew: snuff movies, discos, the cold-blooded whine of synthesizers, Pet Rocks, S&M, mindfuck self-improvement cults, Winning Through Intimidation, every aspect of the invisible war slowly eating the soul of the world.
After an hour he stops the cab at random. He needs coffee, white sugar, human beings, maybe a cheese Danish. Lester glimpses himself in the cab’s window as he turns to pay: a chunky jobless thirty-three-year-old in a biker jacket, speed-pale dissipated New York face, Fu Manchu mustache looking pasted-on. Running to fat, running for shelter—no excuses, Bangs! Lester hands the driver a big tip. Chew on that, pal—you just drove the next Oswald Spengler.
Lester staggers into the cafè. It’s crowded and stinks of patchouli and clove. He sees two chainsmoking punkettes hanging out at a Formica table. CBGB’s types, but with California suntans. The kind of women, Lester thinks, who sit cross-legged on the floor and won’t fuck you but are perfectly willing to describe in detail their highly complex postexistential weltanschauung. Tall and skinny and crazy-looking and bad news. Exactly his type, really. Lester sits down at their table and gives them his big rubber grin.
“Been having fun?” Lester says.
They look at him like he’s crazy, which he is, but he wangles their names out: “Dori” and “Krystine.” Dori’s wearing fishnet stockings, cowboy boots, a strapless second-hand bodice-hugger covered with peeling pink feathers. Her long brown hair’s streaked blonde. Krystine’s got a black knit tank-top and a leather skirt and a skull-tattoo on her stomach.
Dori and Krystine have never heard of “Lester Bangs.” They don’t read much. They’re artists. They do cartoons. Underground comix. Lester’s mildly interested. Manifestations of the trash aesthetic always strongly appeal to him. It seems so American, the good America that is: the righteous wild America of rootless European refuse picking up discarded pop-junk and making it shine like the Koh-i-noor. To make “comic books” into Art—what a hopeless fucking effort, worse than rock and roll and you don’t even get heavy bread for it. Lester says as much, to see what they’ll do.
Krystine wanders off for a refill. Dori, who is mildly weirded-out by this tubby red-eyed stranger with his loud come-on, gives Lester her double-barreled brush-off. Which consists of opening up this Windex-clear vision into the Vent of Hell that is her daily life. Dori lights another Camel from the butt of the last, smiles at Lester with her big gappy front teeth and says brightly:
“You like dogs, Lester? I have this dog, and he has eczema and disgusting open sores all over his body, and he smells really bad…I can’t get friends to come over because he likes to shove his nose right into their, you know, crotch…and go Snort! Snort!”
“I want to scream with wild dog joy in the smoking pit of a charnel house,” Lester says.
Dori stares at him. “Did you make that up?”
“Yeah,” Lester says. “Where were you when Elvis died?”
“You taking a survey on it?” Dori says.
“No, I just wondered,” Lester says. “There was talk of having his corpse dug up, and the stomach analyzed. For dope, y’know. Can you imagine that? I mean, the thrill of sticking your hand and forearm into Elvis’s rotted guts and slopping around in the stomach lining and liver and kidneys and coming up out of dead Elvis’s innards triumphantly clutching some crumbs off a few Percodans and Desoxyns and ’ludes…and then this is the real thrill, Dori: you pop these crumbled-up bits of pills into your own mouth and bolt ’em down and get high on drugs that not only has Elvis Presley, the King, gotten high on, not the same brand mind you but the same pills, all slimy with little bits of his innards, so you’ve actually gotten to eat the King of Rock and Roll!”
“Who did you say you were?” Dori says. “A rock journalist? I thought you were putting me on. ‘Lester Bangs,’ that’s a fucking weird name!”
Dori and Krystine have been up all night, dancing to the heroin head-banger vibes of Darby Crash and the Germs. Lester watches through hooded eyes: this Dori is a woman over thirty, but she’s got this wacky air head routine down smooth, the Big Shiny Fun of the American Pop Bohemia. “Fuck you for believing I’m this shallow.” Beneath the skin of her Attitude he can sense a bracing skeleton of pure desperation. There is hollow fear and sadness in the marrow of her bones. He’s been writing about a topic just like this lately.
They talk a while, about the city mostly, about their variant scenes. Sparring, but he’s interested. Dori yawns with pretended disinterest and gets up to leave. Lester notes that Dori is taller than he is. It doesn’t bother him. He gets her phone number.
Lester crashes in a Holiday Inn. Next day he leaves town. He spends a week in a flophouse in Tijuana with his Great American Novel, which sucks. Despondent and terrified, he writes himself little cheering notes: “Burroughs was almost fifty when he wrote Nova Express! Hey boy, you only thirty-three! Burnt-out! Washed-up! Finished! A bit of flotsam! And in that flotsam your salvation! In that one grain of wood. In that one bit of that irrelevance. If you can bring yourself to describe it…”
It’s no good. He’s fucked. He knows he is, too, he’s been reading over his scrapbooks lately, those clippings of yellowing newsprint, thinking: it was all a box, man! El Cajon! You’d think: wow, a groovy youth-rebel Rock Writer, he can talk about anything, can’t he? Sex, dope, violence, Mazola parties with teenage Indonesian groupies, Nancy Reagan publicly fucked by a herd of clapped-out bull walruses…but when you actually READ a bunch of Lester Bangs Rock Reviews in a row, the whole shebang has a delicate hermetic whiff, like so many eighteenth-century sonnets. It is to dance in chains; it is to see the whole world through a little chromed window of Silva-Thin ’shades…
Lester Bangs is nothing if not a consummate romantic. He is, after all, a man who really no kidding believes that Rock and Roll Could Change the World, and when he writes something which isn’t an impromptu free lesson on what’s wrong with Western Culture and how it can’t survive without grabbing itself by the backbrain and turning itself inside-out, he feels like he’s wasted a day. Now Lester, fretfully abandoning his typewriter to stalk and kill flophouse roaches, comes to realize that HE will have to turn himself inside out. Grow, or die. Grow into something but he has no idea what. He feels beaten.
So Lester gets drunk. Starts with Tecate, works his way up to tequila. He wakes up with a savage hangover. Life seems hideous and utterly meaningless. He abandons himself to senseless impulse. Or, in alternate terms, Lester allows himself to follow the numinous artistic promptings of his holy intuition. He returns to San Francisco and calls Dori Seda.
Dori, in the meantime, has learned from friends that there is indeed a rock journalist named “Lester Bangs” who’s actually kind of famous. He once appeared on stage with the J. Geils Band “playing” his typewriter. He’s kind of a big deal, which probably accounts for his being kind of an asshole. On a dare, Dori calls Lester Bangs in New York, gets his answering machine, and recognizes the voice. It was him, all right. Through some cosmic freak, she met Lester Bangs and he tried to pick her up! No dice, though. More Lonely Nights, Dori!
Then Lester calls. He’s back in town again. Dori’s so flustered she ends up being nicer to him on the phone than she means to be.
She goes out with him. To rock clubs. Lester never has to pay; he just mutters at people, and they let him in and find him a table. Strangers rush up to gladhand Lester and jostle around the table and pay court. Lester finds the music mostly boring, and it’s no pretense; he actually is bored, he’s heard it all. He sits there sipping club sodas and handing out these little chips of witty guru insight to these sleaze-ass Hollywood guys and bighaired coke-whores in black Spandex. Like it was his job.
Dori can’t believe he’s going to all this trouble just to jump her bones. It’s not like he can’t get women, or like their own relationship is all that treme
ndously scintillating. Lester’s whole set-up is alien. But it is kind of interesting, and doesn’t demand much. All Dori has to do is dress in her sluttiest Goodwill get-up, and be This Chick With Lester. Dori likes being invisible, and watching people when they don’t know she’s looking. She can see in their eyes that Lester’s people wonder Who The Hell Is She? Dori finds this really funny, and makes sketches of his creepiest acquaintances on cocktail napkins. At night she puts them in her sketchbooks and writes dialogue balloons. It’s all really good material.
Lester’s also very funny, in a way. He’s smart, not just hustler-clever but scary-crazy smart, like he’s sometimes profound without knowing it or even wanting it. But when he thinks he’s being most amusing, is when he’s actually the most incredibly depressing. It bothers her that he doesn’t drink around her; it’s a bad sign. He knows almost nothing about art or drawing, he dresses like a jerk, he dances like a trained bear. And she’s fallen in love with him and she knows he’s going to break her goddamned heart.
Lester has put his novel aside for the moment. Nothing new there; he’s been working on it, in hopeless spasms, for ten years. But now juggling this affair takes all he’s got.
Lester is terrified that this amazing woman is going to go to pieces on him. He’s seen enough of her work now to recognize that she’s possessed of some kind of genuine demented genius. He can smell it; the vibe pours off her like Everglades swamp-reek. Even in her frowsy houserobe and bunny slippers, hair a mess, no make-up, half-asleep, he can see something there like Dresden china, something fragile and precious. And the world seems like a maelstrom of jungle hate, sinking into entropy or gearing up for Armageddon, and what the hell can anybody do? How can he be happy with her and not be punished for it? How long can they break the rules before the Nova Police show?
But nothing horrible happens to them. They just go on living.
Then Lester blunders into a virulent cloud of Hollywood money. He’s written a stupid and utterly commercial screenplay about the laff-a-minute fictional antics of a heavy-metal band, and without warning he gets eighty thousand dollars for it.
He’s never had so much money in one piece before. He has, he realizes with dawning horror, sold out.
To mark the occasion Lester buys some freebase, six grams of crystal meth, and rents a big white Cadillac. He fast-talks Dori into joining him for a supernaturally cool Kerouac adventure into the Savage Heart of America, and they get in the car laughing like hyenas and take off for parts unknown.
Four days later they’re in Kansas City. Lester’s lying in the backseat in a jittery Hank Williams half-doze and Dori is driving. They have nothing to say, as they’ve been arguing viciously ever since Albuquerque.
Dori, white-knuckled, sinuses scorched with crank, loses it behind the wheel. Lester’s slammed from the backseat and wakes up to find Dori knocked out and drizzling blood from a scalp wound. The Caddy’s wrapped messily in the buckled ruins of a sidewalk mailbox.
Lester holds the resultant nightmare together for about two hours, which is long enough to flag down help and get Dori into a Kansas City trauma room.
He sits there, watching over her, convinced he’s lost it, blown it; it’s over, she’ll hate him forever now. My God, she could have died! As soon as she comes to, he’ll have to face her. The thought of this makes something buckle inside him. He flees the hospital in headlong panic.
He ends up in a sleazy little rock dive downtown where he jumps onto a table and picks a fight with the bouncer. After he’s knocked down for the third time, he gets up screaming for the manager, how he’s going to ruin that motherfucker! and the club’s owner shows up, tired and red-faced and sweating. The owner, whose own tragedy must go mostly unexpressed here, is a fat white-haired cigar-chewing third-rater who attempted, and failed, to model his life on Elvis’s Colonel Parker. He hates kids, he hates rock and roll, he hates the aggravation of smart-ass doped-up hippies screaming threats and pimping off the hard work of businessmen just trying to make a living.
He has Lester hauled to his office backstage and tells him all this. Toward the end, the owner’s confused, almost plaintive, because he’s never seen anyone as utterly, obviously, and desperately fucked-up as Lester Bangs, but who can still be coherent about it and use phrases like “rendered to the factor of machinehood” while mopping blood from his punched nose.
And Lester, trembling and red-eyed, tells him: fuck you Jack, I could run this jerkoff place, I could do everything you do blind drunk, and make this place a fucking legend in American culture, you booshwah sonofabitch.
Yeah punk if you had the money, the owner says.
I’ve got the money! Let’s see your papers, you evil cracker bastard! In a few minutes Lester is the owner-to-be on a handshake and an earnest check.
Next day he brings Dori roses from the hospital shop downstairs. He sits next to the bed; they compare bruises, and Lester explains to her that he has just blown his fortune. They are now tied down and beaten in the corn-shucking heart of America. There is only one possible action left to complete this situation.
Three days later they are married in Kansas City by a justice of the peace.
Needless to say marriage does not solve any of their problems. It’s a minor big deal for a while, gets mentioned in rock-mag gossip columns; they get some telegrams from friends, and Dori’s mom seems pretty glad about it. They even get a nice note from Julie Burchill, the Marxist Amazon from New Musical Express who has quit the game to write for fashion mags, and her husband Tony Parsons the proverbial “hip young gunslinger” who now writes weird potboiler novels about racetrack gangsters. Tony & Julie seem to be making some kind of go of it. Kinda inspirational.
For a while Dori calls herself Dori Seda-Bangs, like her good friend Aline Kominsky-Crumb, but after a while she figures what’s the use? and just calls herself Dori Bangs which sounds plenty weird enough on its own.
Lester can’t say he’s really happy or anything, but he’s sure busy. He renames the club “Waxy’s Travel Lounge” for some reason known only to himself. The club loses money quickly and consistently. After the first month Lester stops playing Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music before sets, and that helps attendance some, but Waxy’s is still a club which books a lot of tiny weird college-circuit acts that Albert Average just doesn’t get yet. Pretty soon they’re broke again and living off Lester’s reviews.
They’d be even worse off, except Dori does a series of promo posters for Waxy’s that are so amazing they draw people in, even after they’ve been burned again and again on weird-ass bands only Lester can listen to.
After a couple of years they’re still together, only they have shrieking crockery-throwing fights and once, when he’s been drinking, Lester wrenches her arm so badly Dori’s truly afraid it’s broken. It isn’t, luckily, but it’s sure no great kick being Mrs. Lester Bangs. Dori was always afraid of this: that what he does is work and what she does is cute. How many Great Women Artists are there anyway, and what happened to ’em? They went into patching the wounded ego and picking up the dropped socks of Mr. Wonderful, that’s what. No big mystery about it.
And besides, she’s thirty-six and still barely scraping a living. She pedals her beat-up bike through the awful Kansas weather and sees these yuppies come by with these smarmy grins: hey, we don’t have to invent our lives, our lives are invented for us and boy, does that ever save a lot of soul-searching.
But still somehow they blunder along; they have the occasional good break. Like when Lester turns over the club on Wednesdays to some black kids for (ecch!) “disco nite” and it turns out to be the beginning of a little Kansas City rap-scratch scene which actually makes the club some money. And “Polyrock,” a band Lester hates at first but later champions to global megastardom, cuts a live album in Waxy’s.
And Dori gets a contract to do one of those twenty-second animated logos for MTV, and really gets into it. It’s fun, so she starts doing video animation work for (fairly) big bucks and eve
n gets a Macintosh II from a video-hack admirer in Silicon Valley. Dori had always loathed, feared and despised computers but this thing is different. This is a kind of art that nobody’s ever done before and has to be invented from leftovers, sweat, and thin air! It’s wide open and ’way rad!
Lester’s novel doesn’t get anywhere, but he does write a book called A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise which becomes a hip coffeetable cult item with an admiring introduction by a trendy French semiotician. Among other things, this book introduces the term “chipster” which describes a kind of person who, well, didn’t really exist before Lester described them but once he’d pointed ’em out it was obvious to everybody.
But they’re still not happy. They both have a hard time taking the “marital fidelity” notion with anything like seriousness. They have a vicious fight once, over who gave who herpes, and Dori splits for six months and goes back to California. Where she looks up her old girlfriends and finds the survivors married with kids, and her old boyfriends are even seedier and more pathetic than Lester. What the hell, it’s not happiness but it’s something. She goes back to Lester. He’s gratifyingly humble and appreciative for almost six weeks.
Waxy’s does in fact become a cultural legend of sorts, but they don’t pay you for that; and anyway it’s hell to own a bar while attending sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous. So Lester gives in, and sells the club. He and Dori buy a house, which turns out to be far more hassle than it’s worth, and then they go to Paris for a while, where they argue bitterly and squander all their remaining money.
When they come back Lester gets, of all the awful things, an academic gig. For a Kansas state college. Lester teaches Rock and Popular Culture. In the ’70s there’d have been no room for such a hopeless skidrow weirdo in a, like, Serious Academic Environment, but it’s the late ’90s by now, and Lester has outlived the era of outlawhood. Because who are we kidding? Rock and Roll is a satellite-driven worldwide information-industry which is worth billions and billions, and if they don’t study major industries then what the hell are the taxpayers funding colleges for?
Ascendancies Page 31
