by Richard Hell
I returned to New York.
This is the end of the story of my life up until I stopped playing music and stopped using drugs. A few months after I returned to New York from Paris, I finally, against all the resistance of my pride, attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. The beautiful Victoria Gandolph, a sometime girlfriend I’d known since the early CBGB days, had cleaned up in NA and she persisted in urging me to try it. I fled the first meeting I attended, horrified that a stranger had approached me part of the way through and hugged me. On Victoria’s reassurances, and for lack of any better ideas, I eventually tried again. On the second or third meeting, it took. I came to see the practicality of NA and I stayed with it, and I left music at the same time, knowing how pervasive and tempting drugs were in that line of work. There was a two-or-three-year period of relapse at the end of the eighties and in the earliest nineties, but apart from that, I’ve had no drug problem since.
Once I’d cleaned up and left music, I had to figure out a new way to make a living. I experimented a little but decided within a few years that the only satisfying possibility was to become a professional writer, which is what I did.
I have chosen this cutoff point for the book because it feels natural and because the closer I get in the story to the present day the more problematic it gets to describe situations frankly. Anyway, a writer’s life is fairly uneventful, and, as this book concludes, every moment of a life contains all its other moments. The tale is consistent, even repetitive, enough. It doesn’t need another twenty-five years.
God likes change and a joke, to paraphrase Karen Blixen, and the joke tends to be that the changes happen in a pattern returning you to everywhere you’ve been.
EPILOGUE
The other night I was walking home from a restaurant when I saw Tom Verlaine going through the dollar bins outside a used-book store. I’d been surprised to see him there a few times in recent weeks. Usually I only spot him somewhere once every two or three years. In public he always holds himself nervously apart from everyone, meeting no eyes, as if he assumes everyone wants to accost him. His head and neck perch like a raggedy spooked hawk on the high bulky prospect of his middle-aged body, above the crowds, his eyes self-consciously focused on something in the distance. When I see him on the street I don’t try to get his attention, but this time I was too curious to let the moment pass. What was he doing? The books in the dollar bins are as useless as they come—outdated textbooks, forgotten mass-market trash, operating manuals. I walked up to him and asked, “Finding out anything about flying saucers?” The last time I’d spoken to him in person, as opposed to a few e-mails, had been seven or eight years before. “Yes, this is the Greek edition.” He grinned at me, holding out a Greek-language three-volume set of some sort, proffering it theatrically, as if it were a great, but fragile, and possibly dangerous, prize and he was an animated cartoon, like Gumby, the way he does. He smiled something else, wide-eyed, going along with the flying saucer stuff. I replied, “I hear Plato came from Pluto.”* He continued to smile widely. His teeth looked brown and broken in the night light, even worse than mine (he still smokes), and his face was porous and expanded and his hair coarse gray. I turned away and walked on, shocked. We were like two monsters confiding, but that wasn’t what shocked me. It was that my feeling was love. I felt grateful for him and believed in him, and inside myself I affirmed the way he is impossible and the way it’s impossible to like him. It had never been any different. I felt as close to him as I ever did. What else do I have to believe in but people like him? I’m like him for God’s sake. I am him.
When Tom spoke to me there outside the bookstore, it was forty-two years ago, 1969, and he was nineteen years old; we both were. His misshapen, larded, worn flesh somehow just emphasized the purity of the spirit inside. He made a bunch of beautiful recordings too. Who gives a fuck about the worldly achievers, the succeeders at conventional ambitions?
If I had died in 1984, at the point this book ends, as could easily have happened, there would have been left such scant evidence of me that my life would be mostly just a sad cautionary tale. It’s by writing a book like this one that I am redeemed at all. My life is not different for having written this book—my life only comes into being by having been written here. What I have been given and what I have been and what I have and what I and what—all are only to the extent they all are only to the extent all are only to the all are only to all are only all are all.
We know that we are constructed of time, not of sequence, and it is impossible to write time “not of sequence,” except maybe in poetic flashes. I didn’t want to write about a person through time, but about time through a person.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to: Libby Edelson, my glorious editor, and Kirby Kim, my magnificent agent, whose instincts and skills and commitment made this book possible; Leah Carlson-Stanisic and Steve Attardo, designers par excellence, for, respectively, the book’s interior and jacket; Jonathan Lethem and Eric Simonoff, for their original acts of goodwill; Carolyn Rhodes and Babette Meyers, whose love and loyalty and generosity have meant more than they know; all the kind photographers; and the gallant Marvin Taylor and Lisa Darms and their helpful colleagues at the NYU Fales Library and its Downtown Collection.
About the Author
Since retiring from music in 1984, RICHARD HELL has focused primarily on writing. He is the author of the journals collection Artifact, the novels Go Now and Godlike, the collection of essays, notebooks, and lyrics Hot and Cold, as well as numerous other pamphlets and books. Hell has published essays, reportage, and fiction in such publications as Spin, GQ, Esquire, the Village Voice, Vice, Bookforum, Art in America, the New York Times, and the New York Times Book Review. From 2004 to 2006 he was the film critic for Black Book magazine. He lives in New York City.
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ALSO BY RICHARD HELL
THE VOIDOID
ARTIFACT
GO NOW
HOT AND COLD
GODLIKE
CREDITS
TEXT
Excerpts from drafts of this book appeared in the periodicals Another Man (UK), Bombay Gin, the Brooklyn Rail, Ecstatic Peace, Le, Russh (Australia), Vanitas, and Vice, and as the pamphlet Chapter 28, published by Rain Taxi. Thanks to those editors.
Excerpt from “Today, This Insect” by Dylan Thomas from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Re-printed by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Excerpt from “Sonnet I” from The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, copyright © 2000 by Alice Notley, Literary Executrix of the Estate of Ted Berrigan. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group USA Inc.
“Cats Climb Trees” from Toad Poems (A Once Book) by Tom Veitch, copyright © by Tom Veitch. Reprinted by permission of Tom Veitch.
Excerpt from “Am I a Good Person” from Poems I Guess I Wrote (CUZ Editions) by Ron Padgett, copyright © 2001 by Ron Padgett. Reprinted by permission of Ron Padgett.
Excerpts from Yellow Flowers (Dot Books) by Andrew Wylie, copyright © by Andrew Wylie. Reprinted by permission of Andrew Wylie.
Untitled poem from Svelte (Genesis : Grasp Books) by Simon Schuchat, copyright © by Simon Schuchat. Reprinted by permission of Simon Schuchat.
Excerpt from “Love Comes in Spurts,” words and music by Richard Hell, copyright © 1977 (renewed) by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI), Quick Mix Music Inc. (BMI), and Dilapidated Music (BMI). All rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.
Excerpt from “Blank Generation,” words and music by Richard Hell, copyright © 1977 (renewed) by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI), Quick Silver Music (ASCAP), and Dilapidated Music (BMI). All rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.
PHOTOS
Title page; I always liked seeing Dee Dee; Richard Hell and the Voidoids, 1976; Blank Generation album orginal cover shot; wi
th Susan Sontag © by Roberta Bayley, used by permission of Roberta Bayley.
Ernest Meyers, 1948; I came from Hopalong Cassidy; Gardenside, on the edge of town; the author with his mother and sister, spring 1957; in full pathological innocence: © by Richard Meyers, used by permission of Richard Meyers.
crazy about Mimi McClellan; in the Mott Street loft, 1971; her components…Theresa looked a bit hard; preliminary Neon Boys; the Neon boys ready to rumble; with Sabel Starr; Lizzy was the inspiration: © by Richard Meyers, used by permission of Richard Meyers, courtesy of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries
From Sayre basketball team, 1965; stole a couple of quarts of cherry-flavored codeine cough syrup; from Sanford Preparatory yearbook, 1966: used by permission of Richard Meyers.
With girlfriend Marianne, 1968; at the beginning she was just a funny rich chick: © by Bevan Davies, used by permission of Bevan Davies.
Terry Ork; Quine was an angry guy; Anya with James Chance: © by Marcia Resnick, used by permission of Marcia Resnick.
The pathology prevails: © by Christopher Makos www.makostudio.com, used by permission of Christopher Makos.
Roberta Bayley at her post, CBGB: © by GODLIS, used by permission of GODLIS.
pimply, frayed, windblown; with Robert Quine and Mick Jones backstage; Destiny Street Voidoids play the Peppermint Lounge, 1982: © by Bob Gruen www.BobGruen.com, used by permission of Bob Gruen.
it felt like we were uniquely linked: © by Blank Generation LLC, used by permission of Ivan Kral.
the Heartbreakers were a good group: used by permission of Richard Meyers, courtesy of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.
With Peter Laughner: © by Leee Black Childers, used by permission of Leee Black Childers.
With Carole Bouquet in Blank Generation feature fiction film, 1978; the Voidoids performing at CBGB in Blank Generation film: © by Roger Deutsch, used by permission of Roger Deutsch.
She came from Baltimore: © by Nan Goldin, used by permission of Nan Goldin.
With Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious, New York City, late: © by Eileen Polk, used by permission of Eileen Polk.
Later: © by Beate Nilsen, used by permission of Beate Nilsen.
Copyright
The Credits section serves as a continuation of the copyright page.
The names of seven briefly appearing characters have been changed.
I DREAMED I WAS A VERY CLEAN TRAMP. Copyright © 2013 by Richard Meyers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-219083-3
EPUB Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780062190857
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* We wrote our first collaborative poem in his honor, “Ode to Mr. Sackin.” It contained lines like:
I fanned myself with Mary Magdalene. Now that she is you
I still don’t believe me.
Like a dot in the shark
my closets flower into decadent empires
where there are no bookworms.
I am a hack and you, Mr. Sackin, are the hackee
and
It was a rotten idea.
My festering dragon
nudges against your trousers. He wants something
good to read.
We know you’ll have the book Mr. Sackin because you’re a fuckhead.
It was more or less the way we talked to each other, and, in its written form, it was the beginning of a pastime, a recreation, that eventually resulted in our book, Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern.
* An untitled poem of Simon’s from Genesis : Grasp number 5/6:
when it is too late to turn on the TV
and the cold whisper seeps into your hands
as the night gets progressively wet
stop for a second to smile at cowboys
who clatter over stones to ranchlands
where immense lines of indians
walk along cold night speed rivers
as grey wind slams shatters windows
and old heads stare drunk in the glass
* Wylie has since become the reputed “jackal” of literary-world fame, for his matchless success as a writers’ agent of ruthless initiative. His Wylie Agency represents half the bestselling first-rate writers on earth. Bockris is a journalist specializing in assembly-line biographies of successful, relatively “high-art” practitioners of popular culture, like Patti Smith and Keith Richards and Andy Warhol. Saroyan is a benevolent literary scholar, poet, and writing teacher.
* Within two or three years of Lizzy’s first visit to New York she was making records. Michel had started a record company called ZE in partnership with a very rich young entrepreneur named Michael Zilkha (ZE = Zilkha Esteban). Both Michaels tended to take pretty, vivacious, smart, charismatic young women as protégées they’d attempt to make into recording stars. The label’s genre specialty was noise (“no wave”) and funk, often combined. Lizzy’s records often had African music backing. She had a hit dance single (“Mais où sont passées les gazelles?”) in France, recorded with black African musicians in South Africa, in 1984. I wasn’t really conscious of her music career and I believe she took it pretty casually too. It was primarily another means of getting her to tropical seas around the world. I only ever saw her perform live once, at the nightclub of its moment, Nell’s, on West Fourteenth Street in New York, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. She didn’t look comfortable there. But she always looked great on the album covers, and in fact I’ve discovered from YouTube that in the right environment, Lizzy was a knockout seller of a song, too, dancing so fine, in some of the African music videos and French TV she did.
* Twenty or so years later, I was given an LP by a friendly local used-record dealer who said that he’d had it since he was a teenager and that it led to his devotion to New York punk. It was a copy of Hendrix’s double Electric Ladyland album, except side two of it was actually side two of the Blank Generation album. You could see how there could have been a mix-up at the factory—“Hendrix” and “Hell” are close alphabetically, but probably more importantly the Hendrix album’s catalog number was 6307 while Blank’s was 6037. My friend insisted that he played the record for months thinking it was all Hendrix and that the Voidoids’ side was his favorite of the four. Eventually I gave the double album to Ivan Julian. I’ve never heard of the existence of another copy.
* For instance, a long feature in Time magazine on July 11, 1977, that
described “the demon-eyed New Yorker who could become the Mick Jagger of punk, Richard Hell. The music aims for the gut. Even compared with the more elemental stylings of 1950s rock ’n’ roll which it closely resembles punk rock is a primal scream. The music comes in fast, short bursts of buzz and blast. Some groups have but two or three chord changes at their disposal, occasionally less: last week at CBGB’s a fledgling group set several unofficial records for length of time played without changing chords at all.” It also quoted five lines from “Blank Generation,” calling it “already a punk classic.”
