***
In the fall, Lou took stock of his situation and made plans to see a therapist. This time, however, to bolster his decision he drew upon former advice from the towering figure of his college days, Delmore Schwartz. In times of emotional turmoil Lou often returned, mentally, to his college years, the time when he felt most open to change.
Lou recalled a conversation he had had with Delmore in his senior year at Syracuse when the drunken poet had given him an astute piece of advice. “He told me,” Lou remembered, “that I should see an analyst, and it should be a female analyst, because I wouldn’t listen to anybody else.” Lou had always been adept at one of the cardinal rules of rock—being or finding the right person at the right time. Now, his powers of survival still intact, one of the great misogynists of the era went through a series of intense sessions with a woman therapist to whom he had been introduced by a mutual friend. As a result, he emerged claiming that he had never before been in such good shape.
“It’s like I’m really healthy these days,” he told John Holmstrom. “Physically and mentally. I went to a doctor, a lady psychiatrist, which I’m sure will turn every Lou Reed fan off and say, ‘Oh, what a fag.’ But, you know, in case there are people out there who might want to go see someone … I met this woman who is really fantastic … I talked to her and she stayed with me practically like for hours every day during what was going on. And I was really in trouble. I mean, it’s all the things that were going on but I wasn’t coping with it. I was not handling it because of some things that were going on. It’s like I had a problem, you know, so she solved the problem. Isn’t that amazing? And ever since that day, literally a couple of months ago, my whole life has changed. And I’m totally different. You can probably tell. And I’m saying to you, isn’t it amazing that if you try hard enough and if you have some friends who are okay and that, you know, I believe there’s a God or something. I really do. Because there are things that go beyond coincidence. And I think a lot of it has to do with if you’re a good person. I mean, if you’ve been honest on a certain level, and I think you get paid back for that in the oddest way, in ways you don’t think of, and it’s my honesty that let me meet her, for instance.
“I’m delighted,” he concluded triumphantly, “because I think I’ve become an adult. I think I have a twenty-four-hour job I like, and I think I do it really good and everything. It’s like I love being in a rock band. I mean, that’s all I ever really wanted. And I got it.”
He got a lot more than that. As Ellen Willis has written in one of her brilliant essays on Reed: “During the seventies virtually every significant development in rock and roll has borne Lou Reed’s imprint.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ladybug
1978–83
I then thought, in a most delicious instant
That stands beyond all reflection,
Of dissolving you like a mint or
Crushing you …
Lou Reed, “He Thought of Insects in the Lazy Darkness” from All the Pretty People
The end of the seventies signaled a personal as well as professional rebirth for Lou. No sooner had he gotten his head straight about being in a rock-and-roll band than he met the woman who was to become his second wife and soul companion through the 1980s, Sylvia Morales.
An enchanting black-and-white photograph taken by David Godlis perfectly captures the Sylvia that Lou met one night in 1978 while attending a meeting of the Eulenspiegel Society. Encased in a floral-print white gown that hugs her voluptuous frame, she stands before the pockmarked wall of some nightclub beside a series of signs that say, “EXIT. LADIES. EXIT.” Framed by shiny, black, shoulder-length hair, Sylvia’s high-cheekboned face is illuminated by the flare of a match she holds to her cigarette. She bears a remarkable resemblance to Rachel. Eyes hooded, lips twisted around the fag, a black pocketbook clutched between elbow and breast, she might have stepped off the page of some hard-boiled Raymond Chandler thriller about the life and death of a harlot. Full of the promise of the night, she wears the white shoes of a prom queen.
Sylvia, twenty-two, was a regular at CBGB as the sidekick of her striking roommate, the punk star Anya Phillips. A Chinese American photographer, stripper, and underground spirit, Phillips was the most erotic, powerful woman on the New York punk scene. Under Anya’s thumb, Sylvia joined her as a stripper and part-time dominatrix. However, according to a mutual friend, Terrence Sellers, “Sylvia was always the butt of jokes and was always being teased and criticized by Anya—‘I hate your shoes’ and ‘Do this’ and ‘Dress up.’ So she lived in Anya’s shadow. But I liked her. She was nice but very flat compared to Anya’s constant theatricals. Sylvia was kind of a coarser version of Anya. She was pretty but she had a larger nose, darker skin—she looked more ethnic.”
Though the half-Mexican Sylvia played lady-in-waiting to the regal Anya, underneath her patina of punk glamour she was a much straighter, steadier character than her flamboyant roommate. Her father was an old-world Hispanic and lifetime military man. Army brats are often lost souls, but Sylvia was grounded by the goals of the 1950s. Her aim in life was to get behind a good man and devote herself to his success. Sylvia had a strong ambitious streak. In between stripping and socializing at CBGB, she went to college to study writing. At two in the morning, while everybody else was raving it up in the club, Sylvia could be found slumped at the bar, her nose buried in a fat textbook as she waited patiently for Anya to choose the next victim she was going to take home with her. Glenn O’Brien remembered Sylvia as “a great presence at CBGB’s. But I also thought she really had a brain.”
The few Syracuse friends Lou was still in touch with looked down on Morales as a B-list girl for a man of his caliber. However, Shelley, who had had one last meeting with Lou in 1978, understood that the relationship could work because Sylvia possessed two characteristics essential for Lou: experience in New York’s trashy underground world, plus a down-to-earth, old-fashioned attitude to romantic relationships. And Shelley believed it was the straight side of Sylvia that attracted Lou most. When Shelley had seen him, Lou had been burnt to a crisp. First, it had taken him a full day of drinking to get himself together to visit her. Then, when he arrived, he had demanded a strong drink and spent their last time together complaining about how lonely he was, and how success had only made him lonelier. “Sylvia’s a very fifties-type girl,” Shelley remarked. “Lou’s a very fifties-type guy. He’s ultimately straight, I want my woman to do what I want her to do, and I want her to take care of me, cook that pound of bacon when I want it. He has the modus operandi of the shark, always looking for a worthy opponent. It’s wonderful if it could be a woman. He really won’t play with a guy who might literally punch him out or really is smart enough. As long as he keeps using this method on women, he’s got a natural superiority.”
Lou could not have been more titillated by Sylvia. Wasting no time with pleasantries, he whisked her away right under Anya’s nose at the Eulenspiegel Society meeting. Terrence Sellers recalled Anya’s rage that night when the specimen she considered to be her dowdy little slave went home with a prize as grand as Lou: “Lou just spirited her off, leaving Anya standing on the street corner ranting and raving and screaming. Sylvia did not come home for about a week and a half. When she and Lou got back, Anya was in such a rage she went completely crazy and Sylvia moved out.” Sylvia moved to a building on East 12th Street that housed, among others, Allen Ginsberg and Richard Hell. One of Allen’s friends, Rosebud, recalled seeing an unfailingly chivalrous Lou carrying Sylvia’s garbage downstairs on more than one occasion. “And that was really the last we heard of Sylvia. She never came back to the scene. She never came back to the clubs and hung out. She just went off with him and that was it.” John Holmstrom thought, “It was hilarious, it was nice, but I was shocked that Sylvia was going out with Lou, because Sylvia seemed like such a quiet person.” Once he got hold of Sylvia, Lou would demand her total attention, cutting her off from her friends and family, jus
t as he had done to Bettye and Shelley.
Despite the fact that he was still involved with Rachel—they were in the midst of a trial separation—Lou started going to Times Square to watch Sylvia strip at the Melody or the Madame Burlesque. Sylvia and the other girls were required to perform for twenty-five minutes, six times a day. A higher class of strip joint, more like theaters than bars, these venues didn’t serve alcohol, and the dancers would go on in costume—though most of their clothes would quickly come off. The dancers performed onstage while, for the most part, the audiences sat and watched, but spectators could also approach the stage and deposit money in their garter belts and panties. That year, Sylvia also starred in an underground film by Beth and Scot B. Wearing a skimpy bustier that exposed her breasts, and brandishing a whip, she played a dominatrix torturing a nerdy customer who could have been a clone of Lou Reed.
One small fact that Sylvia neglected to mention to Lou up front when she met him was that she had recently spent a memorable night with John Cale! Her liaison wasn’t that coincidental considering how small the downtown music scene was, but just indicated once again that Lou and John shared similar tastes in women, adding another ironic chapter in their history of competition for women, going back to Nico. It is not clear exactly when Lou found out about Sylvia’s relationship with John.
Seeing that Sylvia had embraced the S&M world, Lou must have been assured that he had chosen the real thing, that she wasn’t a fake. However, a cooler head might have realized that in both stripping and S&M acting, Sylvia was just playing a part.
During the time Lou was falling in love with Sylvia, he was struggling through the breakup of his relationship with Rachel. When Lou had moved to Christopher Street, Rachel took a separate apartment. Lou’s four years with Rachel had been emotionally charged on the deepest levels, and the loss of her doglike devotion left him at times despondent and cynical. Continuing to use quantities of amphetamine and alcohol, he found himself increasingly alone and desperate. During the remainder of 1978 Lou kept in touch with Rachel whilst privately nurturing a new partnership with Sylvia.
Whilst continuing to be a multiple-drug user through the end of the decade, by 1978 Lou was finding it harder to get speed. The Lister group was breaking up. Then, in a move typical of the hard-boiled drug culture, Lou’s major dealer, Bob Jones, paid back a long-term debt. Back in ’75, when Lou had introduced Bob to amphetamine, he’d sold him, for a considerable amount of money, a bunch of pills that turned out to be placebos. When Jones complained, Reed had snapped, “Welcome to the world of speed.” Now, Jones, who had maneuvered himself into a position of considerable power within the group so that he could effectively block anybody else from supplying Lou, told him that he was sorry but he was fresh out of “chinamen” and did not expect to be receiving a fresh supply for some time. It was the perfect twist of the knife.
According to his own account, Lou tried to stop taking drugs by drinking alcohol, which led to such classic songs as “Waves of Fear” and “Underneath the Bottle,” in which Lou lamented that he felt the same as he always did—so down he could not get any lower. Alcohol began to take a noticeable toll on the thirty-six-year-old Lou. One visitor to Christopher Street discovered a wasted Lou sprawled on the couch, whining at Sylvia just as he had carped at Shelley about Seymour: “You gotta take the dogs out so they can shit!” (By this time Baron had been joined by two other dachshunds, Duke and Count.) Lou often expressed the opinion that each of his dogs was worth one hundred times more than most human beings he had ever known.
***
Apart from among her new domestic chore of walking the dogs, Sylvia, who was close with her family, also attempted to bring Lou back to his family. She arranged for them to visit Freeport at Hanukkah for example. A friend pointed out how much Lou probably loved that “as long as he could say he didn’t like it. As long as he could announce, ‘I don’t like being here, this was not my idea, I don’t do this stuff, I’m much too hip, where’s my present?’ And, ‘Why didn’t you make what I like?’ I bet his mother made his favorite meal. You bet he liked it. He’s got to be clever enough to pick someone who’s going to do that. It’s perfectly safe.”
Still, it was the consensus of opinion among Lou’s friends that his obsessive misery came from his family. “His parents are totally dismissive of his achievements, and it’s very irritating,” observed one. “They could not relate to what he was doing at all. They couldn’t accept anything about the reality of his life. They thought Sylvia was a nice girl.”
Lou’s parents were very straight people who were so insulated that, for example, they never traveled. On the one occasion the Reeds took the first real vacation of their lives, they made a trip to Hawaii that turned into an unmitigated disaster. As they had booked themselves into a hostelry in the most tawdry, commercial tourist section of town, Sylvia, who had spent a good part of her youth in Hawaii, urged them to switch their reservations to a more pleasant location. Flatly ignoring her advice, they took the grueling twelve-hour flight and checked in at their dismal lodgings, whereupon they found themselves unhappy with their surroundings and, more importantly, upset by the loss of their daily routine. The following day, despite having fully paid for a two-week stay, the Reeds returned to Freeport.
One can only imagine how well his parents’ naive confusion about life beyond the hinterlands of Freeport must have gone down with Lou, as an adolescent and adult. In the mirror of his family Lou appeared to have changed little since he was a teenager. He trusted his mother. She was accessible and nonthreatening, and he knew she would always love him. The problem was that she was never going to choose him over his father. Lou could not get around this fact. It seemed as if he wanted to be afraid of his father as a means of creating conflict. He didn’t want to attack his father, but everything Lou did was a way of repudiating what Sid stood for. Lou had, for example, illustrated his refusal to take money seriously by losing whatever he made in the sixties and again in the seventies (even after Sidney had taken the trouble of going to Dennis Katz’s office to sort out the financial paperwork). Then when Lou did have money, he squandered it in a blatant fashion designed to make an accountant sick. Living with Rachel had been another way of defying his father. Now in introducing Sylvia to his parents, he was raising the prospect of supplying them with grandchildren and a continuation of the Reed line. It was an effective trap that would soon supply Lou with another way to disappoint his long-suffering parents.
In 1979 the Reeds didn’t understand Lou any better than they had twenty years earlier when they had dispatched him to Creedmore. Still, Lou’s friends felt that he really loved his father and hoped the old man would live long enough to get some gratification, if Lou could ever open up to him. Lou undoubtedly adored his little sister, as he would make clear in a song with that title, but even Bunny had incurred the Reedian wrath when she married a man whom Lou portrayed in another family song as fat and brainless. Sylvia soon discovered that there was no discernible basis for an active relationship between Lou and his family. And there was no question that their blanket rejection of his incredible success bugged Lou to nightmarish proportions. The only people he appeared to be afraid of were his parents. On the rare occasion when they came by the dressing room after a concert or when he bumped into them by chance in New York, according to friends Lou would lose it, turning ashen and shaking all over. In the early 1980s, he told an interviewer, “I keep my distance from them so that I can get done what I have to get done.”
***
In 1978, Lou made a move that signaled another form of return to his roots, buying a sizable property in the rural suburb of Blairstown, New Jersey. He used the place as a retreat from the city, where he and Sylvia still kept an apartment. In Blairstown he could fish on a man-made lake, shoot hoops in his backyard, and maintain his latest diet of fresh fruit and nuts. The move led so-called friends to smirk that Lou was safely “back in suburbia now,” intimating that his adventurous exploration of the cul
tural underground had now ended and that in fact he had never felt comfortable with the denizens of the Lower East Side, but retained the soul of a suburban son. John Cale’s reaction was typical: “We don’t keep in touch. He’s turned into a regular home bird, settled down on a nice farm out in Jersey. I don’t see him. I don’t even listen much to what he does.” This sort of reaction made Lou’s blood boil to such an extent that Sylvia soon took it upon herself to control which articles about him actually got through to Lou. Like so many men of distinction, he became increasingly isolated from the real world, surrounded, indulged, and, most significantly, informed by a praetorian guard of enablers.
The Blairstown property, some eighteen wooded acres approximately one and a half hours from New York by car, was beautifully situated, but the house itself was nothing more than a simple cabin dating back to the 1930s. Over the years Lou and Sylvia would add several haphazard extensions. Not ready to go completely back to nature, Lou installed a satellite dish and hooked up TVs and other electronic equipment, ranging from a jukebox and computer games to a pinball machine. Video equipment, amplifiers, and guitars were stashed everywhere. The master bedroom was cozy, and they had some big comfortable couches in the living room. In the garage, Lou kept a collection of vehicles ranging from motorcycles to snowmobiles.
To this cornucopia of country possessions Lou added one item that irritated Sylvia more than any motorbike, video machine, or other adolescent apparatus Lou might need. As soon as he got to the country, the paranoid Lou purchased a gun in case of any unlooked-for interruption into his privacy or person. Sylvia freaked. The last place on earth she wanted to be was alone in a secluded rural setting with an out-of-control drug addict and juicer like Lou Reed toting a gun! Yet, since she hadn’t yet extended her power in the extremely unbalanced relationship, she relented, hoping, no doubt, that if push came to shove, the myopic Lou would shoot better than he could drive.
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