I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

by Richard Hell

  My favorite fairy tale has always been “Hansel and Gretel.” It has everything. I’ve always liked being with a sister sans supervision—lost—and I like cake too, and self-reliance and ingenuity. But, strangely, considering that the refuge in “Hansel and Gretel” is really a death trap, the most magical thing about the story is the way it nevertheless evokes a glowing warm haven deep inside the ominous cold forest. And that’s what Cookie’s apartment was like, and it was made of Cookie!

  Furthermore, she had cocaine. Well, that was a little later. But she did end up dealing cocaine and ecstasy and even heroin, to supplement her single-ma food stamps. She used the drugs herself too, but she was good at keeping to her self-imposed consumption limits. (A line of hers to me: “Your capacity for overindulgence is bigger than mine.”)

  She called everybody “hon,” as in “honey.” Her skin was honey, her hair was honey, her writing was honey. The smartest, most bitchy people, like Rene Ricard and Gary Indiana, loved her because she was purely goodwilled, quick, and nurturing, and she reveled in trashiness, her own and others’, and the throwaway low bon mot (which talent she eventually turned into her memoiristic literature). She was game for anything. I don’t know much about her lesbian relationships, but I know she loved having sex with men and didn’t hesitate when opportunities of any interest arose. I didn’t know her in love. We would do drugs and have sex and laugh and talk. I understand one of her most intense, obsessed New York affairs was with a man who perpetrated very rough sex. She was said to love him. She eventually married a wonderful, sweet, perfect Cookie-partner of an excitable, mystical, extremely handsome Italian artiste named Vittorio, and they accepted heroin addiction together.

  That fall—on Saturday, October 28, 1978—we played a show at CBGB that was important because it was broadcast live on the radio (WPIX) and was so well recorded that most of it ended up getting released, much later (in 2002), on my CD Time (which also included the London Music Machine gig). The date showed what we were like back in the USA (glad to be home), with a new bass player and drummer. It was a benefit for St. Mark’s Church, arranged by its tenant the Poetry Project, to raise money for restoring the church after a terrible fire, and there were a lot of poets there, along with the CBGB mob.

  Elvis Costello, with whom we were due to tour England soon, was in town and he asked to join us for a song or two. I sang a new number, “The Kid with the Replaceable Head,” even though I’d only written two of the three verses. I just repeated the second verse. When we brought Elvis on, he said I should be president. Then he sang my song “You Gotta Lose.” For the finale, in honor of the church, we did a surprisingly skillful version of the Stones’ “Shattered.” Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan were in the crowd. I secretly kidded them in my patter, with an “om” dropped in for Allen, and then, to blow Ted’s mind, since he had no reason to think I’d ever heard of him, an unacknowledged paraphrase of a few lines of his—appropriated, as if they were mine, the way he would do. He was always really nice to me afterwards.

  In late October we recorded the “Kid with the Replaceable Head” single (backed with “I’m Your Man”) with Nick Lowe producing, for Jake’s Radar Records. I thought I was making a pop hit with “Kid.” I even diluted the lyrics in the chorus because I thought they might be too morbid for the public. (The original chorus went, “Look out! Here he comes again. / They say he’s dead. He’s my three best friends. / He’s so honest that the dishonest dread / meeting the kid with the replaceable head.” I changed “dead” to “done” on the single.) On December 15 we left for London, where we would do a few Christmas shows with Elvis before the three-week British tour with him.

  True to my pattern, I actually believed I was clean when I left. My test was whether I could go three days without heroin or methadone. Inevitably, after confirming that way my freedom from addiction, I’d celebrate by getting high on the fourth day (or the end of the third).

  Jake did a creative thing for us in London by renting a houseboat on the Thames, off Cheyne Walk, for the band to live in. But it turned out not to be a good idea to cram us all into a tight space. By the end of the first three days I was junk-sick and irritable. Quine was always impatient and grouchy on tour. The weather got cold, and not only was the boat underheated, but heavy snowfall upriver raised the water level so much that the gangway to the dock got submerged and for a while we were stranded offshore. I shivered and sweated in my clammy bedclothes, trying not to count the minutes in my cold sleeping cabinet as I read, randomly, C. S. Lewis’s Voyage to Venus. I copied a line from it into my notebook, “that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.” I knew about Lewis’s Christian agenda in his fantasy/science fiction and it cheapened him for me, but I’ve stolen the concept of that line a few times over the years.

  My hopelessness grew. I gave an interview to a major music paper in London where I said that my ideal existence would be to have an intravenous drip of heroin while getting a blow job, with some oatmeal on the side for health purposes. (“See, for me, every kinda effort seems a compromise.”)

  Quine got fed up with me. The whole past year’s disappointments for which I was responsible now had the pressures of touring added. For the first time he lost his temper. On top of my faithlessness in doing the flick and refusing to gig much, the problem of my quitting bass had been compounded by our having signed on an impossible freak to replace me. He was a young guy, not dumb, but seemingly devoid of character except for the determination to be consistent with Bob and me. He was like a sociopath; all his powers of perception were focused on compiling analyses of what we said and did, to be employed in the creation of algorithms intended to generate behavior by him consistent with ours. It was pathetic and repulsive, and it made me feel like a parody myself. I was walking around with a mean-spirited caricature as a shadow. He was really the “blank” one. I was a fraud who pretended to blankness. It got labyrinthetically self-repellant.

  The entire Costello tour was just a stretched-out version of those first few cold, angry, nauseated days on the houseboat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Around 1979, things start to become a blur, not because they moved fast or because I can’t remember them but because of the way everything got absorbed into the drug monotony. It was like my real human life was a thin network on a sticky medium of drug routine that for the next five or six years rolled around in my limited environments every day into a smeared filthy wadded sphere of undifferentiated drug dimness, the little veins of any real pure life lost and dirtied inside. Hopelessness, depravity, and fun.

  After I took the money Jake had given me to make demos for the album he wanted, I recorded him only four new songs, which, along with other evidence of my useless condition, led him to indefinitely postpone the album we’d planned.

  I had a booking agent who indulged me, a nice guy who was in too deep, named Robert Singerman. I could always get him to take care of me. I let my band disintegrate and would just rehearse whomever I could muster when times got desperate enough that I’d commit to a cheap Singerman tour.

  I started contributing a column, “Slum Journal,” to the new monthly East Village Eye. I got a hundred dollars per tabloid page of each installment, I was guaranteed a minimum of a full page an issue, and I was allowed to publish whatever I wanted. The writing was usually atrocious because I didn’t meaningfully care and I was overdoing stimulants.

  The coke and speed I’d started relying on to counteract the narcosis acted as aphrodisiacs, not that I needed much intensification in that area. Cocaine itself is like an orgasm shuddering the nervous system for ten or twenty minutes. (Heroin is like sex too, but the postcoital swoon.) It’s funny how, being as coke is like sex itself, it increases the desire—and ability—to seduce partners for actual sex as well. I guess it’s like it takes money to make money. And, like money too, no amount is enough. When coke is injected, rather than snort
ed, the crash is especially bad because a shot starts the high at peak. To maintain, I had to shoot up every fifteen minutes. Thirty years later, I still have the scars on my left forearm. At the time they were a crusty thick twine of scab from the inside of my elbow to my wrist.

  Under coke my brain and cock were one. Alone at three AM in my dingy apartment, I would phone some girl the look in whose eyes I’d noticed that week and ask her to come over and let me close-up draw her naked between-legs. She would always agree, for two reasons: my powers of persuasion, and I knew how to pick them. Plus I had cocaine. We’d do a couple of doses and she’d undress and lie on her back on my mattress and I’d stretch out between her thighs with a pad and pencil. Many do secretly love to be released from sentiment or initiative into submission to a trusted other’s ultra-deliberate sexual orchestration. It’s like drifting on a warm current in the moonlight, with lots of shooting stars, and kisses from the fishies, an occasional muscular tentacle entering, or maybe a little electrified eel.

  Sex pervades all, so it would seem necessary to treat it in the description of anyone, but it’s hard to describe one’s own sex experience well because people—any audience—have so much of their self-image and self-esteem wrapped up in sex. Everyone’s sensitive to how it’s talked about, including me, because, again, bodies are wired to want overwhelmingly to reproduce themselves (have sex), and that depends on one’s sex appeal. Anything said about sex is going to push people’s buttons and arouse resentments, interfering with communication. So maybe I should stick to masturbation here. That’s less threatening, anyway. Often enough, on those solitary cocaine nights I’d opt to masturbate rather than invite over a girl, since, no matter what, another’s presence complicates things. I’d get my sketch pad and number 2 pencil and take off my clothes and sit down in front of a full-length mirror in my derelict bedroom and draw my cock to orgasm. My incest fantasies were about having sex with myself. It seemed self-evidently the erotic pinnacle. Self-evidently. After all, who knows better what one likes than oneself?

  I wasn’t all that sophisticated. I had my first genuine experience of sadomasochistic or dominant-submissive sex that year too. There had been the time when I’d been in Television and I had a little reunion with Ruth Kligman (who was notorious as the ingenue Elizabeth Taylor–lookalike art groupie who’d been with her lover Jackson Pollock in the car when he crashed to death—she later had affairs with de Kooning and even Jasper Johns). One drunken drug-sodden night I let Richard Lloyd tag along to her loft with me and she was excited to have us tie her to her bed in her underwear, etc. But that was comparatively slight as S & M.

  My introduction to the real, complex pleasures of slave ownership began on a hot summer night in 1979, at the loft of my crystal meth dealer. He cultivated relationships with people who had nightlife reputations. Usually I would do a line, cop mine, and split. That night I lingered because his girlfriend wandered into my range further than she had before and I really noticed her. She was a tall blonde, quite young, with thick, straight, shoulder-length hair, a curvaceous figure, and a broad-featured but beautifully proportioned, prepubescently complected face, Kate Winslet style. She was barefoot and wore well-cut leg-hugging creased white slacks and a long-sleeved blue and white striped shirt, like a French sailor. We kidded each other a little bit. Another customer arrived and the girlfriend and I drifted into a corner, talking. She was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She’d designed and sewn the pants she was wearing.

  The dealer soon told me that they were about to go to a nearby club to see a band and asked if I’d like to come along. In the dark club, one of the things his girl shyly confided into my ear was that she always wanted to completely lose herself in sex. Her boyfriend decided he had to retrieve a tape recorder from the loft. Still, she resisted going home with me. I said he’d accepted our situation or he wouldn’t have left the way he did. Look how long he was taking, too. We’d already kissed. She relented.

  Back at my apartment we were both most of the way undressed in the quick but unhurried distance from the front door to the bedroom. Near-naked, sitting facing each other on the bed in the moonlight, her breasts gleaming, she told me something that I hadn’t realized she’d meant when she’d said she liked to lose herself. She wanted me to take control of her. I owned her and she wanted me to use her.

  As I slapped her, it dawned on me that there was more to it than I’d realized, that what she’d said had made me her slave. It had made her my ideal, but that was to enslave me, as a writer is slave to his “muse.” It was like she was a language in sex that I would use to write a poem. But I had to use her in the way that excited her, or the work would be a failure. (Of course I could just have gone crude and treated her as subhuman, disregarding her actual responses, and in fact I did do versions of that, but consciously, with deliberation, and for her sake as much as mine. It was complicated.)

  I was inspired by the desire to please her by exercising her slavery as fully as possible! I wanted to ravish and dominate her beyond anything that had ever occurred to her could be, and to fully employ my faculties in the game.

  She left at dawn. I was high from the experience for days, for long after the drugs wore off. I assumed that it would change my future love life. It didn’t really. There’ve been a few incidents and relationships, but I’m too lazy to be a committed dominator, too relaxed and eclectic. Being a slave owner is hard work. That’s the beauty and the reward of it, but still . . . Some years later when Kathy Acker wanted me to slap her while I fucked her in the ass, it was hard to work up the motivation, even to keep a straight face. Not that I didn’t enjoy it.

  In 1980 I carried out Jake Riviera’s lavish commission to leisurely drive a sky-blue 1959 Cadillac across America. Jake collected cars and had found the Cadillac on the West Coast. The ’59 was the model with the most exaggerated fins of all the rocket cars of the fifties. The legend was that a bike rider had been fatally impaled on one. Roberta Bayley and I were to pick it up from a mechanic in Venice, California, and drive it back to New York. Jake would cover all the expenses and we could design any route and take as long as we wanted on the road. Roberta’s job was to take photographs along the way, and mine was to take notes, with the idea of making a big book from the trip, a kind of punk chronicle of the USA. As it turned out, the drive was a drug-sick, broke-down farce and disaster, and a worse problem was that I was too chemically oppressed to write much of anything afterwards. (Instead, nearly fifteen years later the assignment became the premise for Go Now.)

  The following year I acted in the movie Smithereens, directed by Susan Seidelman. I had my methadone from Fernando and I kept it to a minimum, so for practical purposes I was competent and reliable (with a few blips). Still, I existed in a whole other realm from Susan and her NYU filmmaking crew. They were straight. Susan was a bit nervous about my level of responsibility so she invited me to stay with her while we were shooting and I agreed. It was cozy at her apartment: good food, goodwill, and specialized VIP treatment.

  Smithereens is by far the best film I’ve been a part of. It was the story of a girl on the outskirts of the “new wave” music scene in New York who wanted to be famous despite lacking any particular talent. I played a hustling musician she saw as her ticket to the top. The script was the first one by Ron Nyswaner, who would write the Academy Award– winning Philadelphia a few years later. Seidelman’s follow-up effort was Desperately Seeking Susan. Smithereens had a lot of charm if it wasn’t exactly aesthetically exciting. It was a kind of liberal Hollywood mixture of sympathy and cynicism in its conception of the New York quasipunk club scene of the time.

  I liked the people on the production. Susan Berman, who played the lead, Wren, was a darling even if she wouldn’t really kiss me. I got most close to a guy on the crew, the camera operator, Ken Kelsch. He’d been a Green Beret in Vietnam and was still scrambled from that experience. We’d stay up drinking and talking.

  (I’d been interested in the Vietnam
War for a while, for everything it revealed about the state of things. I thought that the best books to come out of that war made up a lot of the best American writing of the second half of the century, and I collected rare editions of them: Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers, etc. The books not only dealt with essential matters of life, but, I eventually realized, they also served as antidotes to self-pity for me. Things could be much worse! I also collected books about concentration camp life for the same reasons, I think.)

  Filmmaking as a profession is unique, short of life-threatening, for its emotional intensity. Everyone is so raw, as artists under pressure—to justify the huge money investment and deal with unforeseeable new crises every day—and everyone involved is so dependent on each other to make it all work, it becomes like a crazed, devoted family. And then suddenly it’s finished and everyone parts, and the whole process is undertaken again with a different set of people in whole other roles, somewhere else. For the actors it’s especially insane—they have the relationships with each other their roles demand, on top of whatever “real” relationships with each other they may have (and, as a rule, they are magnetic beings); they have to be prepared all day to immediately shed any inhibitions and produce specialized, assigned behavior that looks natural and spontaneous despite bright lights and all the strange human attention focused on them; they need pampering to be in the best position to focus on behaving in those unlikely ways, while at the same time they’ve got to maintain the sympathy of everyone on the set because the success of the project depends on everyone’s mutual help . . . It’s hard work. Actors really do earn their big paychecks.