by Richard Hell
The other incident involved Leslie Woolfolk. She was a cynical, pale beanpole of a girl who ran with a set of voluntarily outcast girls from Sayre who mocked everything. They were like a skittish herd of scaled-down giraffes with pretty, flat kitty-cat faces. I liked all of them.
She agreed to meet me at midnight with her parents’ car keys. We were going to drive into the country out by Versailles, where another of the giraffe girls lived on a horse farm. Her parents’ car had a manual transmission, though, and that was new to me. We managed to reach the farmland, but as I was backing out of a wrong dark driveway, I overshot and got us hopelessly stuck in a ditch.
We spent the cold night in a hay shack, using each other’s body heat for warmth, despite the frustrating limitations she put on it. We figured that in the morning we’d flag a tractor tow and then escape to Florida. At dawn, back in the car, a trooper tapped on our window.
The school threatened expulsion. I didn’t understand that, since it didn’t seem like a school matter. Anyway, our kind schoolmates protested with a petition and the headmaster relented. We were both suspended for two weeks.
My ma’s solution to the suspension dilemma this time was to make me paint the exterior woodwork on our house—the window frames and door frames and the panels under the gutters. She let me listen to music while I did it though. I had a little portable record player I could run out to the yard on an extension cord. I only owned three LPs: The Rolling Stones, Now!; Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan; and Kinks-Size (“featuring ‘All Day and All of the Night’ and ‘Tired of Waiting for You’”) by the Kinks. I played them over and over as I stood up on the ladder painting in the sun. The Stones record started to melt and warp. That night I put it in a hot oven between two frying pans and the next day it sounded even better.
It seems unlikely, but seven or eight years later when I started having a band myself, those three records, the first I ever owned, and the only ones I owned for some time, still held true as what excited me in music—for being fast, aggressive, and scornful, but complicated and full of feelings. They were just casual soundtrack pastimes in 1965; they didn’t mean much more to me than what shirt a person might wear or what stranger might sit next to me on the bus to town. Sure, if I had thought about it when I was listening to them, I would’ve said I wanted the life I imagined the boys who made those records must have had, but I took the music for granted. The music was everything I wanted—it filled me with confidence and restlessness and the feeling of having inside information and sex appeal, but I took it for granted. And I believed I could do it myself under the right circumstances. Though I never expected to actually try to do it myself. I knew from experience that practicing a musical instrument was boring (I’d had clarinet lessons for a year or so), and it seemed very unlikely, inconceivable in fact, that someone I knew (namely me) would get to make records.
CHAPTER FOUR
One day, in the shadow of my teenage misadventures, my mother drove me in silence through traffic towards a shopping center. I was sitting against the passenger door in the big front seat of the ’55 Buick that had replaced the Kaiser. Without a word, she pulled onto the shoulder of the road, stopped the car, and proceeded to beat her head rhythmically but violently against the steering wheel. Blood appeared on her forehead. I wondered how I should behave in the situation.
It was probably my final Lexington mishap that led to the head beating. Rebecca, the Big Boy’s waitress, whom I’d been seeing all that summer I was fifteen, had come home early from work one night and caught me drinking in her apartment with a couple of other girls. Her revenge was to call my mother and claim that she was pregnant by me. She also called the head of the English department at the university where my mom was studying.
Just at this same time though, in 1965, my ma completed her PhD and found a job teaching American literature at Old Dominion, a state college in Norfolk, Virginia. We drove there in our first brand-new car, a little red Chevy Corvair that was Uncle Dick’s and Aunt Phyllis’s graduation gift to her. We moved into an apartment converted from the second floor of an old two-story house on a corner of Jamestown Crescent, which was the main avenue of a quiet, tree-shaded, twenties-era residential neighborhood called Larchmont, a three-minute drive from the college.
Norfolk was a nowhere place. It made Lexington look elegant. Its heart was an enormous naval base, the world’s largest, and the rest of the town matched it in steel and concrete dreariness, every location linked by little tunnels and bridges across a network of polluted bays and waterways. There were a few brick vestiges of an old Virginia that was at least as conservative as the anonymous military, but even the Atlantic shore, twenty miles away at Virginia Beach, which is really what attracted my mother to the job, was ugly: a seedy wad of pretentious middle-class or grungy cheap hotels surrounded by advertising signs, T-shirt-and-souvenir shops, fast food, and blocks and blocks of nondescript small beach houses.
I was enrolled for the eleventh grade at a massive public high school. I’d never been able to study, and now I would be subhuman socially again, too. I would much rather have had a room alone in a cheap boardinghouse anywhere in the U.S. than carry schoolbooks around those wretched halls.
Ma, after a few weeks of my miserable threats and promises, agreed to look for a school more like Sayre. My history was a problem—not only the suspensions, but even at Sayre on scholarship my grades had been all D’s and C’s. We didn’t have any money. My mother talked the situation over with Grandma Linda and they did some research and turned up a coed boarding school in Delaware that would accept me. My grandma gave my mom most of the tuition.
Sanford Preparatory School was about eight miles northwest of Wilmington, clustered in 185 acres of fields and wooded hills. Most of the 165 students across the school’s six grades lived at the school. Some of the five or six small sex-segregated dorms were converted old farm structures, others more recent generic quasi-barracks. The classroom buildings were former farmhouses mostly, and there was an angular, modern new library, walled in big panes of glass that made it cozy inside on snowy days. The school had a brand-new “fieldhouse” (gym), as well as tennis courts, and hockey, baseball, football, and lacrosse fields, and even a small stable. The boys wore sports coats—school blazer optional—and ties, and the girls knee socks and kilts and, over their white cotton blouses, blazers or cardigans.
It was a similar environment to Sayre. My work habits didn’t change. By February I was on academic probation, with an F in Advanced Math, a D in Spanish, and a C in English. I considered the bad marks a problem, but not a big one—it’d been like this since the seventh grade. The ease of the life was becoming a little disturbing though. My role at the school was that of the skeptic and troublemaker and joker, the guy who didn’t take any of it seriously and was always looking for illicit adventure. That was pretty close to how I felt inside, but I needed to bust out of the frame, including busting out of the frame of the frame.
In the spring a friend and I snuck out of the dorm one night and broke into the school clinic and stole a couple of quarts of cherry-flavored codeine cough syrup from a five-gallon jug. I would drink a plastic cup of it in the morning and then goof and navigate in the nod, my head on my arms in the back of class, for an hour or two at the start of the school day.
I remember rainy weather with the Aftermath LP by the Rolling Stones playing in someone’s room off the common area in my dormitory. “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb,” “I Am Waiting.” The record was so ragged and tinselly and expert and full of personality—cavernous and wiseass. The Rolling Stones came up with good titles too. Aftermath. Who would have guessed that that word had the gore, the avalanche feeling it does? It seems like an innocuous word, but no—isolated, it’s ominous, and it’s about achievement, not an aspiration but an accomplishment, specifically a serious crime or other disaster. It’s mass killings and terrible deceptions that have aftermaths.
stole a couple of quarts of cherry-flavored code
ine cough syrup
I didn’t buy into the mythology of rock and roll bands though. As I said, the music was just a common feature of the environment. I wasn’t a “fan.” The style of some of the groups was exciting, but the musicians were people who had taken a chance direction into music. (I still prefer that angle on it, the way it is when a band starts out.) Half the beauty of rock and roll is that “anyone can do it” in the sense that it’s not about being a virtuoso but about just being plugged in in a certain way, just having an innocent instinct and a lot of luck. That’s why it’s the art of teenagers. There wasn’t anything awe-inspiring or even especially interesting to me about bands. (It’s only since I’ve had a fair amount of firsthand contact with pop musicians that I’ve come to see that they actually are, or, more precisely, have become, a breed apart. I’m still not susceptible to the fascination with them, but “sacred monster” is definitely the job description, at least for the front person, the singer in a band. Being a pop star, a front person, takes indestructible certainty of one’s own irresistibility. That’s the monster part. If that ego confidence doesn’t eventually come so naturally that living at all is to flaunt it, you won’t have what’s necessary to give your audience the show, the stimulation, it needs. The audience needs it from the performer in order to identify with it, to give themselves the sense of their own power, to get the full effect and function of rock and roll. It starts off natural and even cute, in the beginners, but is fed and tested on the way to stardom until it’s grotesque in every dimension except that of performance, where it is thrilling and uplifting, which is the sacred part. It’s also usually a monster of stress on its adepts; not really a fate to be desired. Which is another reason the stars are so cranky. They hate everyone for making them into what they’ve turned out to be, so they rub everyone’s faces in it.)
In the summer of 1966, after my first year at Sanford, I was punished for my bad showing by being sent to stay with my mother’s mother, Mama Doll, in Sherman, Texas, where she was a clerk at an air force base. I was made to spend the desert days seated on an upended oilcan crate in front of a gas station, waiting to jockey fuel pumps. A few times a week I had remedial Spanish lessons. I was squirming in the fantastic crush I had on my young Spanish tutor. On top of all that, or underneath it, I suffered a hemorrhoid, though I didn’t know what it was. I could have guessed it was something that ugly sounding, but, being too embarrassed to ask anybody about it, I ended up trying to slice it away myself with a razor blade, in the stained bathroom of the dusty, dark, junk-filled old house where Mama Doll lived with her adored parakeet.
By the time I returned to Sanford in the fall, Life magazine had brought to the hinterlands stories of long-haired kids with their flowers and beads and psychedelic drugs. A simple Beatles bowl haircut was still extreme in rural Delaware. Once or twice students were rumored to have smoked a joint on campus, but that was dubious hearsay. Most of our knowledge of drugs still came from the beat writers. Their drug use seemed exotic and sexy, even though their jazz-and-poetry-loving Zen party world had seeped through deeply enough that a whole class of people you had some acquaintance with more or less lived it. That dilution undermined the seriousness with which you could take it. I couldn’t respond wholeheartedly to the beat writers because there was that ubiquitous youth group who considered pocket copies of Howl to be a secret handshake and I didn’t want any part of that. I was suspicious of the mystic dogma too, the insistence on spontaneity. I’ll be spontaneous when I feel like it.
I liked drugs though. I liked the instant getaway and the physical pleasure of both narcotics and then psychedelics, and, later, stimulants. I never did a ton of psychedelic drugs, but I started relatively early. I was the first person I knew who did any. I used some at Sanford in that first month of the twelfth grade.
I’d read in a magazine that certain morning glory seeds were hallucinogenic. They were easy to use. You only had to wash them and then grind them up. You needed a few seed packets’ worth, and they tasted bad, so you had to mix the powder with peanut butter or something, but that was all there was to it. So, late one afternoon I forced back a few packets of Heavenly Blues. It may have been the happiest day of my teenage years up until then.
I was walking up the path towards my dormitory when I felt the drugs kick in—waves of almost sexual pleasure that also felt like power, and heightened naked perception. It was as if the drugs dissolved all the filters so that everything got perceptible, and everything perceptible important. The classic cliché image of a person under the influence of psychedelics is the drug taker gazing at his hand as he waves it around in front of his face. What’s happening is that he’s seeing trails, like comet tails of flowing stop-motion sown in the air by his fingers. They’re not put there by the drug. If you swish your hands around in front of your face right now you’ll see the same thing. It’s just that you don’t usually notice it because it’s not useful to notice. On psychedelic drugs you notice it; you notice everything. It was like I’d stepped from a more demanding dimension, for which I was suited by having correspondingly greater abilities, like Superman on Krypton, into this earthly one where my capabilities became superpowers.
A few guys knew what I’d done and the news spread around the dormitory. It was hard for me to talk because all the words sounded wrong and too final. There was also that drunken effect of feeling free not just because I couldn’t help doing what I was doing, but because I was aware that because I was fucked up I wouldn’t be responsible for whatever I did.
Dormmates surrounded me in my room, trying to protect me from getting into trouble. I sat on the edge of the lower bunk and then stood and started for the door and they blocked me. I tried to push through them and they wrestled me back. I’d keep to myself, sitting quietly, and wait, as they chatted, until they let their guard down, and then I’d rush the door. It was funny, like something in a cartoon. After a while of this we were making too much commotion and they had to let me out.
There was a school dance going on. Students and a few faculty supervisors filled a big second-story room in one of the older buildings. The light was low and there were crepe paper streamers taped up, and a record was playing.
The upper school had a mascot geek, a sophomore flattered by the attention he got from upperclassmen who circled him to suggest he do humiliating things, like play with himself. I was standing off to one side of the room and I happened to notice him on the dance floor in the crowd. He was in love with cheerleader Marilyn Talbert, a dark-haired, skinny, demure fifteen-year-old with sad, bright eyes and gem-cut cupid’s-bow lips that smiled lopsidedly. I saw him shuffling across the floor. Marilyn Talbert and I were probably the only two people in the room aware of him. He was approaching her, and when he got there he asked her to dance. She said no. I started crying.
At breakfast in the cafeteria the next morning I was tired and disoriented but I wasn’t tripping anymore. As I moved along the line at the steam tables I felt all eyes on me. But despite my sleepy spaciness and self-consciousness, I felt free, cut loose. Something wasn’t over, and there would be collateral repercussions, but I wasn’t worried about them; I was just curious, even eager in a subdued kind of way. I felt good.
Later in the day, I was called to the offices of the headmaster and threatened with expulsion. I tried to cast the drug-taking as scientific investigation. I’m not sure how effective that was, but they didn’t expel me; I was suspended for a week again.
When I returned from the suspension, it was the week of my seventeenth birthday. School was anticlimactic. I was itchy and didn’t care about school at all anymore.
I’d become close friends that fall with a guy I’d only known a little bit the previous year, Tom Miller. The thing that brought us together at school, and would keep us together for most of the coming seven or eight years, was as negative as it was positive. We were both inner-oriented people who didn’t respect much convention and who felt apart from others. We also shared tastes for certain ki
nds of writing and music and shared an anti-real humor.
Tom was a wild card at Sanford. First, he was a day student, not a boarder, so he was less well-known. He was quiet and tense, but he made a lot of ghostly jokes. Most of the world seemed incomprehensibly weird to him, and he was susceptible to all kinds of irrational explanations for that, from things like flying saucers, to extreme conspiracy theories, to obscure religious mysticism. He knew that these beliefs, or suspicions, would seem crazy to a lot of people, and that was part of why he was so private.
From Sanford Preparatory yearbook, 1966. Top row, third from left: Tom Miller; fourth from left: Richard Meyers.
He was a high-strung person who didn’t know how to communicate socially except on his own narrow terms and in his personal language or style, though in those days he was more easygoing and gregarious and mildly whimsical than he’d eventually become.
He had a great sensibility. I can’t remember for sure how far along it had gotten in twelfth grade, but by the time we were reunited in New York a couple of years later, he liked free jazz like Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy and poetry that resembled it, like Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, in its disregard for boundaries and its spontaneity and desperation and spiritual desire and humor. He liked obsessive outsiders—artists whose works were made along patterns you could feel were viscerally, materially connected to the true wacky or hidden reality, because the works were made of the mind substance of people who couldn’t help themselves, because they were driven to create, even if unskilled by orthodox standards. And he liked the other side of that coin, namely highly gifted, hardworking, fully self-aware and sophisticated, worldly artists who nevertheless didn’t give a fuck about pleasing anyone or taking anything too seriously, and who were naturally subversive, and, in their own kind of purity, were incapable of doing bad work—like, in music, say, the original Sun Records musicians, or Link Wray, or pop artists just that wild, like the Rolling Stones in some of their earlier self-written singles, or Bob Dylan. And always there was the funniness of everything, or of everything that was interesting.
