by Richard Hell
That year my girlfriend was a coke dealer named Anne. She’d recently come to New York from San Francisco, where she’d been working as an escort. She was smart and talented—a lighting designer for theater—but insecure (she’s since become very successful in her field and overcome that insecurity). She was stick-skinny, though she had a perfectly ample ass, and her breasts were minuscule and she was embarrassed and self-conscious about that. She’d been insulted by clients for it. Her face was pixie and very pale and looked especially ivory against her shiny-black hair. I wrote odes to her breasts, which were essentially slightly swollen nipples. I did like them because they were novel and perverse (for their resemblance to children’s or boys’). She permitted me huge quantities of coke. We fucked frenziedly all over her carpeted studio, and then in emergencies I would crawl around the floor, spastically, my nervous system jerking back and forth in the scary gap between one and zero, trying to identify any little white specks as stray flecks of coke.
That relationship coincided with the recording of my second album, Destiny Street, mostly in early 1981, right after I’d shot Smithereens. Marty Thau—the guy who’d originally worked with Richard Gottehrer to sign me to the production deal that’d resulted in the Blank Generation album—had wangled some money from a small New Jersey distributor called Jem, which operated a record label called Passport, to cheaply record two or three groups’ albums. Marty called his company Red Star. Once again I was a sucker—ignorant and naïve regarding the record business. Thau himself was making very little investment but he’d be entitled to approximately 50 percent of earnings.
When I asked Quine to join me, he committed immediately and I took his suggestions for drummer and second guitar, respectively Fred Maher and Naux (pronounced Naw-OOSH—originally Juan Maciel). I didn’t consider Ivan from the original Voidoids because I wanted to hear a new guitar combination. We booked two or three weeks’ rehearsal time in a studio called 171A, around the corner from me. I felt so dependent on cocaine that I’d bring a syringe and a stash to rehearsal and then excuse myself to go to the bathroom every twenty minutes. I thought the band would accept my explanation that I’d been drinking too much coffee. One afternoon when Bob used the bathroom immediately after me he returned scowling and seething, but still it didn’t hit me for another couple of hours that he had to have seen my blood spattered across the porcelain.
Once we started recording, at Intergalactic Studio on the Upper East Side, things broke down further. I couldn’t abide Thau and I felt guilty towards the band because of how I’d failed to prepare. I had three or four of the songs only half-arranged: I’d left the proportions of parts to parts (verse, intro, chorus, outro, etc.) undeveloped, and I had no final bass part ready for two or three others. And this was out of a total of seven original songs. Three more cuts were cover versions. I’d also intended to show off my development as a composer by including bridge parts (that single-verse break, like a tune within the tune, that livens up most great songs), but I never got around to it.
Amiable Alan Betrock was producer of the album. As the proprietor of tiny Shake Records, he’d released, in 1980, an “extended play” 45 of two of the three of my Neon Boys tunes that we’d recorded in 1973, backed with two recent Voidoids demos (from the sessions Jake had commissioned). Alan wasn’t experienced but he was inexpensive, he knew pop music, and he loved my band and me. He was a record collecting fanatical aficionado of sixties pop culture and trash music who’d created the collector-catalog fanzine Rock Marketplace in the early seventies, and then founded New York Rocker in 1975 when he got excited about the scene at CBGB.
We had about three weeks to record and mix the album and I was too fragile to come into the studio for one of those weeks. I was strung so tightly by cocaine into supersensitivity and paranoia that I couldn’t tolerate the thought of stepping outside. If I’d gone into the street, some passing stranger might have unexpectedly coughed in my vicinity and blown me out of my skin. I’d call the studio and try to act as if it was an aesthetic choice to instruct Bob and Naux to add some more guitar in this place or that. As a result, by the time I could summon the strength to return, the record was a piercing, percolating drone of trebly guitar noise.
Then I started singing. The vocals were my last good chance to redeem the record, to make it stand out. God knows I was emotionally exposed. I’d have them turn the studio lights down and I’d stand there alone in the cluttered recording room desperately reaching with everything I had. The Them tune “I Can Only Give You Everything” was harrowing and it stretched through a long rotating outro, over which I laid pained wailing. By the time I got to the end I was in tears. I picked up something and threw it. The recording engineer wanted to indicate his full empathy and participation so he jumped out of his chair at the console, whipped through the door to the studio, and started kicking over the equipment himself, as if it were a celebration.
Despite all this, I did then and do now consider the material on Destiny Street to be superior to the set on Blank Generation. I’d learned a lot about making songs since 1977. The songs on Destiny Street had an internal consistency to them, a more satisfying feeling of inevitability. On the other hand, the songs weren’t as unusual in either their style or subjects as the songs on Blank Generation, and their arrangements were sloppier. But strictly as a collection of songs, as opposed to performances, Destiny Street is the better album.
I was proud of the recording when it got released, but it didn’t take long for it to pitch me into despair. All I could hear was my indifference and self-destruction, fatalism and raw mania. It’s only in the last few years, a quarter century later, that I find myself respecting the record again. The best music writers gave it high marks at the time, but I figured that was just because they were predisposed to favor noise, intellect, and failure. Robert Palmer, the devoted and discriminating music critic for the New York Times, named it (in the Times) one of the ten best records of 1982 and wrote in Penthouse, “Richard Hell and the Voidoids have made the most passionate and vital rock album of the year.” Quine brought the first test pressing to Lester Bangs in what turned out to be the week before Bangs died, and Lester told Bob that we’d pulled it off—a worthy successor to Blank, which was high praise considering Lester’s opinion of the first album. Of course there was no chance whatsoever that it would be a hit seller. Not only was the sound too crazed, but the label was obscure and spottily distributed.
Destiny Street Voidoids play the Peppermint Lounge, 1982 (sax player unidentified).
Liva, who was my girlfriend in 1982, was a Dutch vagabond with a mental age of about nine, temporarily working as a call girl. She had a gold tooth, cheerful attitude, and luscious luscious large snow-white tits and blond pubic hair. She’d found her way from Holland to New York City via Borneo aboard cargo ships. If Cookie was honey, Liva was gold—her front tooth, her glinting nakedness in my sunny living room, her lack of interest in making moral judgments, her generosity and happy disposition.
I met her when I woke up in bed with her and another girl from her escort service, in October 1981. We’d spent the night in the sumptuous apartment of one of their clients who’d allowed them to use it for a few days while he was out of town. (Otherwise they each sprang for cheap hotels, being newly arrived in the city. Apparently there was a crepuscular world of drifting girls who would sign on with an escort agency wherever they landed.) I must have come back with her from a rock and roll club. I wasn’t a customer, anyway. At the man’s house we’d drunk a bottle of his Chambord liqueur and Liva was concerned about replacing it. She inhabited a mental space where it actually applied that to live outside the law, you must be honest. Though I didn’t realize she was a prostitute for a little while. We were peers anyway, and soon girlfriend-boyfriend. Before long I invited her to stay with me, and anything she had was mine too.
Life with Liva was to “wander like children in a Paradise of sadness.” Her sad frequent difficulties (which didn’t happen to include d
rug dependency) were always passing inconveniences to her, though, while my addiction felt like a downfall even as I embraced it. Mine was a kind of surrender to life that was an acknowledgment of defeat even if I believed it was inevitable and written into my being, and that the defeat was more true to existence than illusory “success.” Part of the experience was a rejection of belief in the value or meaning of any activity, except to commune with junk.
I hawked in music clubs my distracted imitation of my original self, and I took cheap acting jobs, and pocket money for my newspaper column, and did various other small-time culture hustles (while also summoning everything I could in the writing and recording of new songs when possible), and she took phone calls that assigned her meetings with men.
She had a whole child-style personal mythology of her relationship with the world. It was almost as if she was a tribesperson from precivilization who’d found herself in the twentieth century and managed to evolve ways of navigating it. She couldn’t do any work that required dealing with unexpected contingencies because she had no powers of accepted logic, and she wasn’t capable of menial, unskilled labor because it was too boring and people were mean about her incompetence even there. That left her with her sexual resources, a simple knowledge on which she could rely for survival and some independence. The world was stormy but she had an umbrella. She referred to herself as Liva Paply, the “Paply” referring to “parapluie,” “umbrella” in French. She had a word for hard times and zones of danger and meanness too: “malaca.” There is a cluster of small Indonesian islands called the Moluccas, just west of New Guinea. I think maybe she had some bad experiences there. Also, the word just sounds like bad luck.
With Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious, New York City, late.
Everything that happened to her was weather. She couldn’t understand it and couldn’t control it, and so didn’t get deeply upset about it. That was part of what was moving about her, that childlike condition that could also be seen as a normal healthy way of surviving in a relentlessly poor environment. Her personality broke my heart and filled me with happiness. Mostly happiness. On one hand it sometimes seemed so sad that a person as full of life and devoid of malice as she was would suffer the things she did. She once came back with a bruised face from a job she took, and which got me money for drugs. When she got home she cried, which hardly ever happened. She’d been sent to find a trailer-truck driver in the cab of his vehicle parked in SoHo, where she’d had to give him a blow job, and he’d hit her in the face. We lay in bed together in the morning daylight and it was like breathing sadness, like being cut open. On the other hand, we had some money now and I could get drugs for another day.
By early 1983, I was at my wit’s end regarding drugs. There had been so many cycles of suffering through withdrawal and then instantly succumbing again that it was impossible to kid myself anymore. The final turning point happened one night when I was staying with Cookie. I knew where she kept the stash of drugs she sold and I took it. It was her means of livelihood. She was a friend and I’d stolen from her. That was unacceptable, and it didn’t help that she seemed less upset about it than I was. I couldn’t stand being that person, a cliché owned by narcotics, who by that token couldn’t be trusted even by his closest friends. I had to stop fooling myself and focus on overcoming my habit above all.
As it happened, Lizzy was in town that spring. She offered to help by nursing me in any way necessary at the apartment she’d gotten in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side. I stayed there with her and she was an angel of mercy. I went for some weeks without narcotics, though there was plenty of drinking and dope smoking. I was as mentally confused as I was physically, but Lizzy was patient compassion, always letting me know she expected nothing but only wanted to help however she could.
As ever, when we were together we understood that our relationship was primal and indestructible; that knowledge underlay all other facts of our lives. It wasn’t even dramatic, it was just a law of the natural world. We had a rapport and a bond that was profound without any conditions, or even a lot of consequences. It was like we were a culture of two—it didn’t require any initiative for us to make a harbor for one another, which required no maintenance or acknowledgment to sustain it and carried no responsibilities.
But, lying in bed one evening, we decided to get married. It was just a curious other way of considering what we were to each other. We’d talked about getting married a few times over the years and once had decided to do it but then I’d lost nerve. Now it seemed like conditions were different enough from anything they’d ever been before that it sounded interesting again. I suppose that marriage represented a sign of renewal to us, and an idea of maturity, or even a funny backdoor perversity, and public proclamation, we liked. There was some way it satisfyingly knitted together the threads of the previous ten years.
Lizzy was due to make an album with local black musicians in South Africa. She’d be down there for a couple of months. She had to return to Paris to finish up arrangements and then she and Michel would be off to Soweto. Michel offered me the use of his Paris apartment while they were gone.
My booking agent/manager, Singerman, was really a solid guy. He had old-fashioned ideas of loyalty and he also believed in my talent. He was not the classic intimidator type of music-business manager. He worked hard and he thought up angles, but he didn’t have the aggressive ruthlessness it takes to make it in that business. He was more like Woody Allen in Broadway Danny Rose, trying to get bookings for the lady with the costumed parrots. He handled a lot of the striving new underground groups, like the Fleshtones and Gun Club and the Bush Tetras. It was OK for me because I was more or less his top act. I confided to him my plans with Lizzy. I told him I wanted to take advantage of Michel’s offer and spend a few months in Paris, away from drugs, sealing my freedom from them and focusing on the writing of the book I had in mind (a version of Jake’s road-trip book). When Lizzy returned from Africa, we’d get married. Singerman agreed to bankroll the trip. He’d advance me all expenses for Paris.
Michel had a gorgeous, classically Parisian two-bedroom apartment on the rue de Rivoli. It was all high ceilings and vintage woodwork, painted white, with an art nouveau fireplace, a black leather Corbusier chaise longue, an excellent sound system, and classic French windows that opened onto shallow balconies railed in ornate cast iron. Doubtless it subconsciously reminded me of the late-Picasso Riviera mansion that beckoned from Life magazine when I was a little boy entranced by that image of the artist’s life. On the apartment building’s ground floor were a bar-café and a pâtisserie. It was a short walk to the Île SaintLouis, the Bastille, Les Halles, and the Marais.
Later.
I arrived, and within two days Michel and Lizzy departed for South Africa, leaving me there alone. I didn’t really know anyone else in Paris except for Michel’s broody and nervous twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, Catherine, whom I’d just met.
Within another three days it was clear my plan was a disaster. I was suffering without drugs, drinking wine all day, at a loss as to what or how to write—even though I’d been commissioned by Libération to do a column—and desperately lonely. I didn’t know how to live without drugs. They were all I could think of. I went out on dates with Catherine. I lay with her in bed. She couldn’t speak English but she idolized me. She was the victim of a myth of the romantic artist, which, along with some kind of fantasy that she must have constructed from Michel and Lizzy’s references to me, led her to believe that I was a god of poetry and soul-substance. We spent nights together engaged in heartbroken, desperate clutching, up to the border of actually taking full responsibility for the practice, of going all the way. It was excruciating. She had the noble melancholia of French feminine inwardness and yearning, and the appearance for it, with a long narrow nose, plump creased lips, and skeletal huge dark eyes, altogether Isabelle Adjani. There was virtually no verbal communication between us, but she adored me because I was the isolated tragic poet. We were alo
ne, washed up on the shore of the apartment together. It drove me crazy. Her large breasts swelling against my chest. Her tears and adoration.
I was supposed to be writing a book in beautiful Paris, on my manager’s ticket, awaiting the return of my future wife, who’d gotten me the lovely apartment.
I thought of another girl I could call!
In the early spring of that year I’d taken a Voidoids version to England and our British agency had assigned us a keeper named Ava, who was only sixteen. Ava was a riot, a foul-mouthed, speed-loving, pompadoured adventuress who shared a flat with another poverty-stricken speed-freak girl, a blonde in her early twenties who had a fetish for pubescent boys. She didn’t like any man over thirteen. But that’s another story. Ava and I had had spectacular romps in London and it occurred to me that she’d probably love to deliver some meth to me and enjoy a little Paris interlude. I wasn’t wrong. She caught the next boat train.
I bent her all over the Corbusier. We were in our element. There’s a point where extreme, knowing drug abandon becomes a kind of delicious hell. You are in agony psychologically, and the drugs are like an act of infinite troubling detail, as if you’re making a perfect living mosaic of yourself in another state than the agony that is the reality. It’s like a ballet performed at 1/1000 speed and that’s how I put my granite hard-on into Ava and watched her face and watched her lips as she said something snotty and grateful to me, grinning, and meanwhile Lizzy was in the back of my mind and my heart was breaking, drily and brittle though, not as if I had any meaning to lose. It is quite possible for nothing to have any meaning.
Finally Michel and Lizzy came back. I don’t know how or exactly what got revealed, but my failure and betrayal were not hidden whatsoever. It was the first and only time in all the years I knew Lizzy when everything was ice-cold and shut down. I can’t even say whether she might well have had her own affairs in Africa. Though we intended to get married I’d not asked any oaths of her. But there was no question that I had betrayed us, I had betrayed myself, and I had undercut everything, it was mean and awful, and beyond discussion. I had shown myself to be a fluttering wisp of no use except as a source of pain and pathetic irritation. It had all been an illusion, because I had no substance. That’s how it seemed to me. Lizzy didn’t say much.
