Lucking Out (15 page)

“I thought she was a lesbian.”

“Oh, that. So what. Aren’t you up for a challenge?”

“No. Are you sure you’re talking to me and not H.?”

(H. was always giving women he scarcely knew neck rubs to “loosen them up.”)

“It’s just that your senses of humor are so much alike,” Pauline said. “Anyway, it’s worth considering.”

And then I found myself up in Pauline’s hotel room with one of Pauline’s friends, whom I’ll call Madison. In the realm of pulp fiction Madison would have been known as a man-eater: slender, dark eyed, her gaze direct and appraising, long, thick brown hair—an urban Jane ready to swing from a vine and carry a man off to her bachelorette tree house, where she would ravish her prey between tidbits about the latest movies or art shows she had attended. Not the worst way to spend an evening, if you could keep up with her quick costume changes of mood. She was unique in Pauline’s circle for her lightning lack of hesitation to sass Pauline or shoot down innocent bystanders until smoke poured from their fuselage and sent them plashing somewhere in the Pacific. She could be breathtakingly rude, like Lauren Bacall in the backseat of a limo, casting aspersions that carried the whap of a slap; yet she could be tremendously tactful and generous, too, returning from her travels with the perfect present, often a rare edition of a book that the recipient had mentioned in passing but Madison had entered into her case file. Her tastes and Pauline’s often clashed because her taste seemed so whim-driven. “She’s a snob who likes everything,” someone said, but the snobbery came across as brattiness, not as the pinched anality of someone awaiting Susan Sontag’s next encyclical. Her sexual forthrightness was the flip side of the pickup-artist swagger Pauline found so amusing, and here she was, seated on the edge of Pauline’s bed in the Royalton, looking up at me with licky eyes, as if I were that night’s barbecue special, or was that my tropical imagination? And was Pauline stage-managing this moment? I pretended innocence just this side of stark insensibility, suspecting that whatever might transpire between Madison and me that night or any other night would be broadcast to Pauline, and I simply didn’t want Pauline knowing my business, not like she seemed to know that of so many others. Much as I adored her, I didn’t want the godmother to have total jurisdiction.

Although the seventies had a lot more going on at groin level than the decade that followed (when whoring for fame earned its racing stripes), it would be an error of my own emphasis to leave the impression that Pauline’s loyal band was primarily libido-driven, a nest of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
swingers trading “biting repartee” without benefit of painted fans and snuffboxes, as Pauline occupied the center of the silken web, eating the flies we brought her. The erotics at play were less those of the flesh than those of yearning, striving egos—an erotics directed toward recognition. The motoring force at work as we sat there in the glorified drawing room of the Algonquin was the drive for approval and attention, Pauline’s approval and attention most of all (the larger world’s acceptance an amplification and ratification of hers), which was won and held not by being smarty or fawning or doctrinaire but by being receptive to whatever might be coming around the corner, willing to play the tricky carom. She couldn’t stand “stiffs,” whose tastes were fully formed, rigidified, and stuck in the petrified forest of the past, and those of us sitting in the Algonquin were on the upswing of our careers, just starting our scouting missions. These were the years of encouragement. Some would stray off target, disappear into the reeds, defect from criticism under the pressure of unfulfilled expectations and career frustrations, or simply find something more frolicking to do, Pauline being more ambitious for them than they were for themselves. In a sense we all would fail Pauline because none of us would surpass her defiant nerve, her resounding impact. But tonight, we’re modestly in character, the future only extends so far, and Pauline is sipping tea from a cup, having brought her own tea bag. H. is there, looking Southern courtly as his words seem to roll down his tapered wrists, like beaded droplets. R. is there, leaning forward, avid, his date poised on her chair as if it were a lily pad, choosing each peanut from the peanut bowl with premeditated care. Madison presides from her corner of the sofa, giving a Tallulah Bankhead performance. As for me, there I am, just a few years after leaving college, sitting at the Algonquin with the greatest film critic then or now, part of the gang, wearing jeans that probably need washing and nursing a Coke, the only thing I ever ordered. And Pauline—she listens, she laughs, she passes along nuggets (“I asked Peckinpah why he made —— look like such a dumb cow in ——, and he said, ‘Because that’s what she
is
’ ”), but she doesn’t hold forth, she doesn’t make pronouncements, she doesn’t pontificate, and she doesn’t traffic in absolutes, like Ayn Rand holding an indoctrination séance. “Let’s order a last round, like civilized people,” she says, and rings the bell.

A waiter miraculously materializes, as if emerging from the carpet.

It gets late, eleven thirtyish, the hotel guests have levitated to their rooms, only a few rendezvousing couples occupy the corner tables, and Pauline has galleys to tackle the next day. She rings for a waiter, the bill is brought, and Pauline pays the tab. Pauline always paid the tab, though some chipped in. A couple of us accompany her across the street to the steps of the Royalton, where we say our good-byes. The air rings with cold. “I have a screening tomorrow night for
The Last Tycoon
, so let me know if you’re up for it. It’s hard to imagine Elia Kazan and Fitzgerald being a good match, but you never know.”

And with that, a wave as if given to a departing train, and up into the marble lobby of the Royalton she goes.

It was like seeing my own ghost, the Spirit of Punk Past.

I was home, dawdling across the cable-TV dial, when I was arrested by the sight of a host of once-familiar faces, a few of them sporting incongruous New Year’s Eve hats and leis. Incongruous, not because it wasn’t New Year’s Eve, but because of the lean, lunar faces jutting under the hats. These were not faces normally associated with holiday mirth. Fervent intent was usually more like it, furry heads and furrowed brows. I identified the bleached-out footage as being shot along the bar at CBGB’s, some of the faces belonging to Tom Verlaine (sitting on an actual bar stool, like a normal person), Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca, John Cale, Deborah Harry, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, the journalist Lisa Robinson, and Lenny Kaye. And then, a flash of light and gone, there I was: me—the me I once was, one of the milling crowd, part of the scene. Chatting with someone at the only place where my memories are three-dimensional, a hologram in my head that still feels like a crummy home movie. The film—run on the Independent Film Channel—was Amos Poe and Ivan Kral’s
Blank Generation
, a music documentary shot mostly in the loose bowels of the Bowery, its title taken from a song by the sun-glassed poet, mouth-grimacing virtuoso, and inadvertent style setter Richard Hell, whose torn T-shirt bearing the inviting plea “Please Kill Me” proved to be one of the period’s most enduring fashion statements, along with laced-tight bondage gear tricked out as smart evening wear. Filmed in black and white with no live-synced sound (the songs draped over the images like a scratchy, patchy carpet),
Blank Generation
jerked along like a home movie even back then and today looks like an archaeological find, a kinescope discovered in a salvage yard recording the last known sightings from that prelapsarian age when un-trust-funded artists still coyoted the streets and, be it ever so humble, every hovel felt like home. I had forgotten I was in
Blank Generation
, however fleetingly, and seeing myself again as if for the first time didn’t make me mourn Lost Youth, that not being my preferred form of masochism; it made me smile. It was like a college yearbook come alive. Here were my fellow classmates, the old alma mater in its midnight glory.

My admission into the orphanage began as an assignment like any other, a pop-in/write-up of eight hundred words. The year before, the
Voice
sent me to review some poet-chick fronting a drummer-less rock band, a setup I pictured as some macrobiotic Beat type with bird’s-nest hair declaiming her lyrics from loose-leaf pages while a lot of noisy noodling went on in the background. How I drew this mental sketch on the basis of near-zero actual familiarity I can’t recall, although I did see the poet Anne Waldman read once in the East Village, standing on one leg like a stork as her voice ascended into incantation. What I can recall is that there was some pro and con among those with actual working knowledge of the downtown scene as to whether this rock-poetess was a true original talent, a magpie on the make, or something betwixt, a combination of thin-lipped calculation and burning vocation, like Bob Dylan after he had outgrown his Woody Guthrie britches and began playing his personas like a cardsharp. Shortly after entering below the awning of a bar and club with an initialed name, a place I’d never been to on a street that still looked like a Robert Frank photograph of raw, spilling night, I gingerly installed myself for a bar-stool view of the stage, which was stationed left of the aisle and barely large enough for a barbershop quartet. The atmosphere was most unmagical, worthy of a cheap paperback set on skid row. It had a palpable texture, this prosy ambience, a bit of World War I trench-warfare leftover aroma of dung, urine, and damp carcass, but it was the seventies and not a time to be picky. Then I saw this visage, this vision, shark-finning the length of the bar, and I knew this had to be Her. A scarf was knotted around her throat, and her hair was raven; her chin cocked directly at her destination point, doorward.

Patti—one of those performers whose first name alone was enough to spell it all—projected star quality, had willed it into being and possession with a bite of hauteur. What Madonna would master and Lady Gaga after her would embellish into jeweled armor, Patti Smith flashed like a blade: the crowned awareness that to become a true star is to act like a star from the moment of self-conception and let the world play catch-up. Even when chewing gum, she seemed to be chewing it for the ages. Patti looked formidable and imperious until she grinned, the sort of equine grin Pauline Kael treasured in Lily Tomlin but goofier, like a latch that allowed her whole body to hang loose.

That grin was retracted before Patti’s first set under a game face of gunslinger intent as she took the stage and wagged around, wiping her nose now and then with a sawing finger, while her musicians tuned up as best they were able. Her lead guitarist, who shared Patti’s sapling thinness, was Lenny Kaye, he of the Yeshiva-student spectacles, whose name was better known to me than Patti’s. I had been reading his articles for years in
Hit Parader, Creem
, and
Rolling Stone
(where he reviewed
Exile on Main Street
), and every rock cultist had a copy of
Nuggets
, his influential, indispensable double-album compilation of psychedelic hits and rarities, many of which sounded like garbled satellite transmissions from the weird beyond. On bass was Ivan Kral, on piano the nimbus-curled Richard “DNV” Sohl, one of those fallen angels with more room to fall. (He would die of a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven.) As soon as the band revved its engines, it was clear that this wouldn’t be bop prosody set to a bongo beat; the opening number, the Velvet Underground’s “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together,” came out of the corner punching, Patti hitting the word “shoot” in the Harlem heroin stanza—“Everyone shoot shoot shoot”—with a right-left combination as if the mike stand doubled as a sparring bag. (Patti’s brand of calisthenics would find its musical anthem in “Pumping.”) What other songs were in that first set? “Space Monkey,” to be sure, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” (a Smokey Robinson cover in which Patti substituted “junta” for “hunter”), her tender tribute to her sister, “Kimberly” (how many songs then, before, and now have been dedicated to sisters?), “Redondo Beach” (“where women love other women”—a song and a descriptive phrase that led many young women of lesbian or bi inclination to believe Patti belonged to their sorority), “Piss Factory” (her first single, a prole lament and lyrical gesture of defiance), “Birdland,” and the expansive version of “Gloria” that seemed to camera-pan across the wide-screen horizon on galloping hooves. (It would provide the climactic set piece to her
Horses
album.) The band wasn’t as tight and motoring as it would become (especially after Jay Dee Daugherty joined on drums), but it also wasn’t the Fugs futzing around, and Patti already had her stage persona pencil-sharpened into a self-conscious, couldn’t-care-less wild child, playing with her zipper like a teenage boy with a horny itch, pistoning her hips, hocking an amoeba blob of spit between songs, scratching her breast as if addressing a stray thought, and, during the incantatory highs, spreading her fingers like a preacher woman summoning the spirits from the Père Lachaise graveyard where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde were buried to rise and reclaim their former glory. It was one of those nights when the invisible partitions between you and the performance dissolve and you realize, This is something, even if you don’t know what that “something” is yet. There’s a knock at the door that you have to answer.

One thing I learned from Pauline was that when something hits you that high and hard, you have to be able to travel wherever the point of impact takes you and be willing to go to the wall with your enthusiasm and over it if need be, even if you look foolish or “carried away,” because your first shot at writing about it may be the only chance to make people care. It’s better to be thumpingly wrong than a muffled drum with a measured beat. Now, Patti didn’t need me championing her in the
Voice
—it wasn’t a rescue operation, like Pauline going to bat for
Bonnie and Clyde
after Bosley Crowther clubbed it in the
New York Times;
Patti’s breakout probably would have been able to hop from pony to pony no matter who supplied the initial press boost—but I needed to feel that I could write about something new and still forming that mattered, something that I could help
make
matter. Readers and fellow writers get a mean rise out of demolition work of overblown popularities or grandiose follies, but it’s the trail-scout discoveries that a critic cracks into daylight that make the difference after all the balloons have popped, whether it’s Edmund Wilson’s championing of his brother Princetonian F. Scott Fitzgerald or Randall Jarrell’s rescuing Robert Frost from the hayloft of platitudes and Yankee pith to which his poetry had been consigned; a critic remembered only for his damnings, however brilliant and left bleeding his victims, has failed, leaving behind little more than a patch of crabgrass with a few Easter eggs scattered around.

So, leaning on the throttle to hurry up the future, I reviewed Patti’s performance in the
Voice
(accompanied by a photo of what looked like Patti in a white Communion dress) with all flags flying:

Okay, true, granted, I slapped a bit of mustard on that fastball, especially in the last sentence (“schizzy” was a pure Pauline-ism). But it was the last great hurrah period of rock-crit tell-it-from-the-mountain epiphanies, and few of us were immune. Only a year earlier a pop music critic high on the totem pole named Jon Landau had pronounced, “I saw rock & roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” (Arise, ye faithful!), and when Springsteen (with Landau now serving as his record producer and horse whisperer) went on to make the covers of
Time
and
Newsweek
the same week, an unprecedented coup, I muttered to myself at the newsstand: “I have seen the future of rock, and now we’re stuck with him.” It wasn’t that I disliked Springsteen—how could you dislike a scrappy car mechanic of a singer-songwriter-showman so driven, enthusiastic, passionate, embracing, and earnest? It’d be like ragging on Thanksgiving. But it was his very earnestness, his eager-to-serve sincerity, that dulled the tips of my nerves even when I was riveted by one of his legendary performances at the Bottom Line in 1975, the stint that has lived in the annals of Bruciana. I remember checking myself during one of his big rousers with the question, “This is incredibly exciting, so why am I not excited?” It just seemed too smoothly assembled from every rock fan’s dream kit of salvation. Eight hundred years later, he’s still never awakened me, his husky voice intoning like something chiseled on Mount Rushmore now, an august chunk of Americana.