by Richard Hell
She and Johnny had been broken up for a while when Johnny introduced me to her, and she and I spent a lot of time together in the following few months. She said just about the nicest thing that anyone had ever said to me. She told me that, at any time in the future, for the rest of my life, if I had the desire, all I had to do was ask her and she’d suck my cock. (One other person has said this to me and that was Rene Ricard, the poet and art writer. The difference is that we’d never had sex, and I would expect that, in fact, his offer expired, at the latest, once I gained fifteen pounds or my face got lined. But I think Sabel really meant it.)
She was a soulful, sane, self-aware sweetheart of a committed groupie. Cynics and some feminists mock the idea of the prostitute with a heart of gold. Groupies in Sabel’s class are not prostitutes—on the contrary, they are humanitarian benefactors. But some groupies were part-time or occasional prostitutes who did also have hearts of gold, as do a meaningful number of nongroupie women who make their living from exercising their sex appeal in various ways, including escorting a person to orgasm. Of course some groupies were psycho fiends—the Nancy Spungen type.
I went out with Nancy for a while too, for a month or two in the year before she went to England and found Sid. I didn’t know Sid very well—we only talked two or three times—but I liked him, and I got a strong feeling of who he was. Dee Dee was literally a role model for Sid—Sid’s favorite rock stars were Johnny Thunders and Dee Dee—and he and Dee Dee had a lot in common. I knew Connie, Dee Dee’s psycho-whore girlfriend who stabbed him in the butt (she had also knife-cut Arthur Kane of the Dolls when she was going out with him), though I never hung out with her. Among the pairings of musicians with that species of girlfriend, I liked being with the men, I didn’t like being with the women. The women were evidence of the insecurities and the low self-respect of the men. The men had problems, but at least they were self-aware and amusing. Most of them had a lot of charm, and a couple of them had a lot of talent. The women were egomaniacal, deluded manipulators, preying on the men (though Courtney did lead a great band). Granted, the men were in bad enough shape that they couldn’t do much better for companionship.
With Sabel Starr.
Sid understood that he was a comedy of helplessness and uselessness. That doesn’t mean he could have been any less a stumblebum, but just that he was self-aware, and because of that he was twice as funny and sympathetic. He could be violent too, but it was the violence of bewilderment and self-destruction and opportunism. He wasn’t really vicious. He just saw that there was a crazy opening into fame and money that required only that he relax into full loutish negativity.
There were two things about Nancy, apart from her insanity, that were different from the other sex-worker girls who liked the bands at CBGB—she regarded herself as smarter than the rest of the girls, and she was exceedingly driven to rise in the world of rock and roll, in the hierarchy of it, and the only means she had was as a girlfriend.
We went out for maybe six weeks, towards the end of my time in the Heartbreakers, around late 1975. She still dressed in clothes you could find at Macy’s—low-budget office and schoolgirl togs—though that included fetish boots, and she used a lot of eye makeup and bright lipstick. She was like a slutty suburban girl cruising the mall. She lived in a small studio apartment on West Twenty-Third Street, where she had a Bad Company poster on the wall. When something impeded her in her groupie-vocational mission, you could actually see in her eyes how all of an avid sudden the wheels started spinning in her head. It was a dazed look and the tone of her voice broke as she groped to right things. You would realize that as flatteringly desirous of your company and as eager to please you as she was, it was impersonal, because she was so fully programmed. There wasn’t any connection between the pair of you.
When I had had enough of spending time with her and told her I didn’t want to get together anymore, she was instantly possessed by naked, shameless disappointment and she started crying and begging me to give her another chance. She pleaded that she’d do anything, and she turned around and pulled her panties down and leaned up against the wall to demonstrate it.
To be fair, that’s not all that creepy. Another girl I went out with for a long time, many years later, and really cared about and respected, did something similar when we were separating. She took Polaroids of herself naked in certain positions and gave them to me, telling me that I could do whatever I wanted with the real thing. The difference was that when that girlfriend did that it made me feel like a messed-up person, but when Nancy did it it made her seem like a messed-up person. I shouldn’t say that about Nancy. I don’t want to begrudge her her moment (the one with Sid, not the one with me). Again, it’s part of the beauty of rock and roll that it’s about people with no conventional skill, but only assertive youthfulness, becoming fascinating.
Who’s good and who’s bad anyway? People like the villains as often as they like the heroes. Americans love winners all the more if they lied and cheated and coerced to get to the top. People admire mobsters like Joe Gallo or John Gotti—or con men like P. T. Barnum or Colonel Tom Parker, or ruthless tycoons like Jeff Bezos or Joe Kennedy. Baseball, the apotheosis of romantic American self-image, is a good example of the national appreciation for winning dirty. Does a guy sliding into second ever honorably return to the dugout because he knows he was tagged before he touched base? No, the player cheats and lies if it increases his chance of winning. We take that for granted as built into the national pastime. Americans are not “gentlemen.” Baseball is not cricket, which is played differently because the object is not “to win” but to get exercise, and the players are “gentlemen.” In America losers are considered fools if they haven’t played dirty enough. Winning justifies everything.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I met Lizzy Mercier when she first came to New York from Paris at the end of 1975, when I had just turned twenty-six and she was eighteen, nearly nineteen. On that trip she was only here for a week or two. She returned for a longer time in early 1976.
She was traveling with Michel Esteban, who was about my age. Esteban had a rock and roll clothing boutique in Paris. He and Lizzy had come to New York because they had heard about what the CBGB bands were doing. Michel and Lizzy were just about to start their magazine Rock News, which would be the first, apart from Punk, focused on the scene at CBGB, and, soon, the one in London.
I never knew in those first few months if Lizzy and Michel were having sex. I assumed they’d originally been lovers. I went through some emotional contortions regarding Lizzy’s relationship with him, but ultimately I had to decide not to care what she did when she wasn’t with me and to expect the same attitude from her. Our ways of life made exclusivity unrealistic. In another sense, for our first year or two, it could be hard to believe we were together even when we were in the same room. We literally couldn’t understand each other, since she spoke very little English and I spoke no French. But we were crazy about each other.
I first saw her across the crowded room at CBGB on a night I was playing there with the Heartbreakers. When our eyes met it was like the sound in the room went off and pin spots lit us. She was wearing bright slippers and shiny skintight leather pants and a freshly laundered and ironed men’s white dress shirt with cufflinks. She had the head of a feline tomboy, with hair so wild and abundant it looked like it would have leaves and twigs in it. Her hips were shapely if childishly slim and there was a defiant lift to her flat nose. She had plush lips and the most clear skin. She was a wraith but assertive. She came back with me to my apartment that night, but she was modest, unsure about how much sex was proper in those first few hours. She blushed.
Right away, it felt like we were uniquely linked, even if we half imagined ourselves into our relationship. Our life together was walled off from everything else in the world. In our conceptions of ourselves we were inseparable; we were lovers and the only family in the world, like Adam and Eve, if he were a seedy addict poet of a musician private
eye, and she was an intellectual sex-kitten chanteuse adventuress little girl. But we both lived and trusted our imaginations. We’d realized them. That was the dreamiest dream of all. We had already made our dreams real.
I didn’t believe in love. I believed in science, in chemistry. Lizzy and I had chemistry that was stronger than “love.” I’ve heard that Plato theorized that men and women were originally one and that’s why they are attracted to each other: to become whole again. Lizzy and I didn’t need to know much more about each other than that we belonged together. It stayed that way for both of us for much of the rest of her life, though soon enough we rarely acted on it because actually being with each other was often hard work: we never were able to fit the reality to that particular dream well for extended periods. The dream took place in instants, or in substrata. We were like fictional characters in that way too—once the romance is consummated the story is usually over.
it felt like we were uniquely linked
Sophisticated people discreetly refrain from speculating about, much less judging, what goes on between couples. Every marriage is its own culture, and even within it, mystery is the environment. There’s that story in Citizen Kane about a man once seeing an unknown girl going the other direction on a passing ferry and realizing she’s the love of his life. (Welles had a million of them, stories and girls.) I don’t actually think my life would have been much different if I’d never met Lizzy, whereas, for instance, even though I only spent two years with Patty Oldenburg, she and her sophisticated lightheartedness and her world of brilliant art hugely changed my life. My wife, Sheelagh, has had an incalculable impact on my life, by far the largest impact of any woman I’ve known. For years I thought of Lizzy as my soul mate, but I don’t think anything would have been much different if we’d never met. We were dreams of each other. Twice we nearly got married, but when it came down to it I knew better at some level and canceled.
It’s a perfect metaphor that we didn’t speak the same language except in all signifiers but words. It also helped to keep us from ever lying to each other. I don’t think we did ever lie to each other. And as over the years she became more and more fluent in English, we only became more friendly, and still we never did lie, though there were areas where we didn’t trespass.
Lizzy was the inspiration for the love interest in my first novel, Go Now (1996), and my song “(I Could Live With You) (In) Another World” was addressed to her.
We were both species of minor hustler, hustlers of culture and of our characters and bodies, but we weren’t cynical or hard-bitten. We were a kind of Hansel and Gretel of culture hustling. It’s just that we wanted to live by our wits in the worlds of human-made beauty and pleasure rather than anything more regimented and secure.
Patti Smith was Lizzy’s other great New York supporter and admirer in those early days. I wondered if they had sex, but I never knew, and it wasn’t something that really concerned me, except that I didn’t trust that Lizzy was anything but an ornament for Patti. I assumed Lizzy had sex with women at times just because she was friends with women who were obviously attracted to her and I doubted if Lizzy would be especially inhibited when occasions arose. But Patti was elsewhere when Lizzy was dying. Michel Esteban always seemed to me to be playing up Patti’s presence in Lizzy’s history because he thought it was good for Lizzy’s career.*
Lizzy was the inspiration
I remember how, once, in the first year I knew her, I visited Lizzy at the bare apartment she was using in New York, and I opened the refrigerator and it was completely empty except for a shelf on the door lined with colorful tiny jars of baby food—strained carrots and mashed peas and pureed plums. She’d seen the stuff in a market and bought some and discovered she liked it. She did hardly anything like other people.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bob Quine, the violently sublime guitar player on most of my recordings, told me, a little while after I got to know him, that he’d been at the first Heartbreakers gig at CBGB in August 1975. He said I was chewing gum as I played and that at a certain moment in the performance I aggressively spat the wad some distance, and he said that that’s when he knew I was a star. I remember that gig. We were doing speed in that period. Speed went well with punk. The Sex Pistols liked speed (sometimes mixed with acid).
It’s true, the Heartbreakers were a good group. I first met Jake Riviera (original name: Andrew Jakeman), the British rock and roll hardass impresario of the pub-rock groups, in my early Heartbreakers days. He discovered and/or managed Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe and the Damned, and he cofounded Stiff Records, and, later, Radar Records. But when I met him he was still a blue-collar road manager for Dr. Feelgood. The road manager travels with the band, overseeing the logistics of touring—it’s field labor, comparable to a work-gang foreman, as opposed to the manager proper, who is the mastermind overseer of a band’s career. The Feelgoods were working-class English white guys who played super-fast, aggressive R & B. When they gigged in New York in 1975, Jake visited CBGB and saw the Heartbreakers and then waited to talk to me. He took me to dinner with Lee Brilleaux, the lead singer of the Feelgoods, and some other people in their bunch, and told me that the Heartbreakers’ set that night had been the best rock and roll show he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a lot of shows. He ended up standing behind his words by helping me out over and over in the coming years, and it all trickled down from that one set of the Heartbreakers.
the Heartbreakers were a good group
Whenever I see any references to the Heartbreakers when I was in it, people are taking sides, favoring either Johnny or me, as if we were rivals and that to like one is to reject the other. That’s wrong. I’ve always admired Johnny, and have never minded admitting it, and, after all, he approached me to ask me to join the band as singer and writer, not to mention bass player.
As I said about him in a memorial article the week of his funeral (in 1991), Johnny, contrary to his luggish image, was genuinely smart. That doesn’t mean he read books or discussed issues and ideas. (Though towards the end of his life he did get political, writing songs about social issues and saying he supported Jesse Jackson for president.) He was smart in the same way that he dressed so perfectly. Smart the same way Elvis Presley was. You couldn’t top him and he didn’t delude himself. All charismatic people are smart, in the same sense that it’s the fittest that survive—tautologically. But that doesn’t make it any less valid. Stupid people look stupid; a charismatic person never looks stupid; therefore a charismatic person is smart. But the fact is that Thunders was positively smart. For instance, he noticed when a lyric I wrote was bad. One of my songs in the Heartbreakers was “Love Comes in Spurts.” Its first two verses went:
I was a child
who wanted love that was wild
though tight as slow motion
but crazed with devotion
insane with devotion
from some other ocean
I was fourteen and a half
and it wasn’t no laugh
and there was one line in those eight that bothered me. I always winced when it came to mind. Then one day Johnny kidded me about the lameness of “from some other ocean.” He knew it was fake and overblown. You wouldn’t think of him as a literary critic, but his perceptions were sharp.
Of course he was even lazier than me. He may not have ever written anything as corny as “from some other ocean,” but his lyrics were half-assed in never having an original idea or turn of phrase. But good songs aren’t about literary invention (though it’s possible for them to have it, and I like trying).
Johnny did cultivate idiocy in his audiences (something the skinhead, soccer-thug element in English punk especially brought out in him), and he had a lot of idiot fans and they like to trash me. Nolan also actively fed that attitude after I left the band, when, from ruffled pride, he’d put me down in interviews. It was partly the Queens street-gang mentality that he and Thunders shared. I actually liked Jerry too, though I’d get pissed off when
I saw some of the things he said, about how I couldn’t make it as a poet so I’d moved to rock and roll, and how I was pretentious and egotistical. (Granted, there’s truth there.) But the worst thing was the flat-out lie that I’d quit the Heartbreakers after trying somehow to get him, Nolan, to come over to my side from Johnny, to make me bandleader. Nothing remotely like that happened. I can’t even conceive that situation. Johnny and Jerry were a unit, and I also accepted happily, was glad, that the Heartbreakers had no leader. (It was only sometime after I left the group that they began billing themselves as Johnny Thunders’s Heartbreakers, partly to distinguish themselves from Tom Petty’s band.)
My leaving the band was really about ambition level. For them the band was basically a party, or, when not, it was the ride to the party. I loved the way they played, and I loved Johnny’s song-making instincts and rock and roll style altogether, and I liked the party, but I wanted the songs to talk about things other than “going steady” and “pirate love.” I also wanted to try some new ways of playing. There was no way to bring this up with the Heartbreakers. If I was going to do those things it would have to be in a band with which I shared certain other aims and one that I led unequivocally. (Ironically, I realized that at this point I actually needed the same relationship with a band that Tom had gotten for himself by forcing me out of Television. We each ultimately needed a band we led.) So, in early 1976, I quit the Heartbreakers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I first met Robert Quine when he started working at Cinemabilia in 1975. At that time he was pretty demoralized. Actually, he was permanently demoralized, but it was worse before he got the chance to publicly turn himself inside out and present the whole funny psycho-gore dissection as absolute music. Rock and roll guitar playing was the only endeavor he had any interest in practicing, but he had no reputation as a musician, was over thirty (b. December 30, 1942), was bald, and dressed in jeans and a sports jacket and a wrinkled button-down shirt, and there was no guitar-auditioning rock and roll band that didn’t dismiss him on sight. (He never forgave people like Lenny Kaye who made the wrong kinds of remarks about his baldness in the earliest CBGB days, before Quine had the kind of reputation that would have made them more respectful.) When he showed up at the bookstore he’d already seen me in Television. He admired Television, and seeing us renewed his hope that there might actually be a place for him in modern music. He lived for raw, savvy rock and roll, but he hadn’t been in a band since he was in law school in St. Louis in the late sixties.
