Lucking Out (21 page)

Moods aren’t always the most reliable guidance systems to go by, because that “next time” turned out to be the last time I would see Lester. There was no way to know, but there’s almost never any way to know. I got a shaken phone call one day from J., who told me Lester had been found dead, his body sprawled on the couch, as if he had lain down to take a nap, except his eyes were open, his skin had gone gray. The word “suicide” didn’t flashcard in most of his friends’ minds. It didn’t fit his state of morale. Even though Lester was prone to dive-bomb depressions, nearly everything was looking up for him now—new girlfriend, the prospect of decamping to Mexico to write a novel without Manhattan jamming his frequencies. So an accidental overdose was the likely candidate, and yet that assumption didn’t make for a neat fit because Lester had made such strides in recent months getting off the intoxicants and obliterators that had been his faithful sidekicks for so many years. He had reversed the tailspin that had sent Peter Laughner and so many others nose-diving. It was Albert Goldman—who didn’t know Lester personally but who was a psychopharmacological wizard whose forensic premise was that you couldn’t fully comprehend any rock star’s phenomenology unless you knew what he was “on,” what was in his tox screen—who later explained to me how common such fatal setbacks were, the why factor. The heavy-duty addict who’s dumped the booze and drugs from his system is in a weakened state that persists longer than he anticipates, and is often most vulnerable when he’s feeling better but his system is still processing the slow-motion shock of withdrawal; it’s really a time to take it nice and slow and easy. However, the addict’s ego, that Gollum clinging to the rocks, tells the withdrawer that after all the big-time stuff he’s taken and the epic binges that they still talk about wherever bearded sailors gather, having a taste of this or popping a little of that is nothing he can’t handle, no big deal. Lester was especially vulnerable because for good or ill he seldom did anything in a small way, using a mental measuring cup.

Goldman’s snap diagnosis was confirmed (for me, anyway) when DeRogatis’s biography came out in 2000, detailing how on the night before Lester died, the guitarist Bob Quine (of Richard Hell and the Voidoids) visited his apartment carrying a tape of the new Voidoids album. “Lester emerged from the bathroom and swallowed a handful of pills. ‘Valium,’ he said when Quine inquired.” The next day Lester rang up a friend named Nancy Stillman, whom he hadn’t spoken with recently, and “she thought she recognized the higher pitch that Lester’s voice assumed when he took Valium, and she asked him what he was on. ‘Don’t be my fucking mother,’ he snapped.” It was Stillman who found the body later that night. It wasn’t Valium that ended up fingered as the primary suspect in Lester’s death, but Darvon, a narcotic and analgesic that packed a much bigger risk of overdose. Whatever the final tab (“No one will ever know for certain whether Lester took two Darvons or twenty-two,” DeRogatis wrote), Lester’s death at the robbing age of thirty-three was a resonating heart-punch to everyone who knew and read him, though within journalism the resonation was confined at first to a small shock field.

In the obituary for Lester that ran in the
Voice
(May 11, 1982), Christgau wrote of Lester’s problems bending the cage bars of rock reviewing and making his escape. “Although he was a more coherent, punctual,
professional
journalist than 90 per cent of the editors who considered him a lunatic, his autodidactic moralism, chronic logorrhea, and fantastic imagination rendered him unsuitable for the slicks. Anyway, rock criticism is below police reporting and horoscopes in the literary hierarchy, and while Lester wanted to write—and did write—about almost everything, rock criticism was what he was best at.”

How low rock ranked in the literary hierarchy was played out for me just a day or so later, when I attended a cocktail party hosted by Mort Zuckerman, the real-estate mogul who bought the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1980 and wooed William Whitworth away from
The New Yorker
to be the magazine’s editor in chief. I’m not sure why I was invited to the party. I knew Whitworth through Pauline—he was one of Pauline’s editors, a model of tact and equanimity—and wrote for him at the
Atlantic
, but not every New York–based writer who contributed to the magazine under its new regime had been invited to this clambake, and I felt like a guest pass among a bevy of season-ticket holders. Since it was news in my universe, I mentioned to a couple of writer/editors there how awful it was about Lester’s death, and it was clear I had flown right into the clouds as far as they were concerned, so few pigeon tracks did they have of who Lester was or what he did, apart from a front-page
Voice
byline or two that may have leaped off the newsstands. He was a distant rumble downtown that they were dimly aware of, though they agreed someone dying that young was awful. By the time I was introduced to Nora Ephron, who thanked me for something I had written about her recently (or was it for a dig I had taken against her former husband Carl Bernstein?), I had wised up enough to delete Lester’s overdose as a conversation topic among guests aglow within the magic aquarium of Mort Zuckerman, his money, and what Mort Zuckerman’s money would mean for the
Atlantic Monthly
. Besides, nobody likes a bringdown. At the end of our brief chat, at a loss for a suave way to take my leave, I inanely said to Nora, “Well, maybe we’ll run into each other sometime soon.” “I doubt it,” she said, not curtly, but as a clipped fact of life, spearing my empty pleasantry with a fish fork.

And so it proved to be. I wouldn’t run into Ephron until decades later on the opposite coast, where she and I were among those enveloped within the celestial orange cloud of the hospitality of Arianna Huffington, who was hosting at her Brentwood home a party for the
Nation
magazine in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, then at the zenith of its luminariness under the impresario wand of the
Times
’s elegant book-review editor Steve Wasserman. The pheromones of success suffused the gathering even more strongly than they had at Mort Zuckerman’s decades before. But then, success had become so much more successful since the seventies, a higher, richer, headier halation. I spotted Ephron from a safe distance; she formed a trinity with two other women, one of whom was the
New York Times
columnist and dark-stockinged, red-tressed femme fatale Maureen Dowd. “You should go over and say hello,” my date for the evening suggested, but I declined, not wanting to interrupt this impromptu meeting of the Dorothy Parker Society. Gore Vidal was also in attendance, ensconced on a sofa (even in his late infirmity, nobody ensconces like Gore Vidal) as admirers, one after another in an orderly fashion, stopped to pay their respects, as if presenting themselves to a monarch in exile. I paid mine too, as was only proper, knowing much better now that we like-minded writers have to stick together no matter how much we defund each other’s patience.

CBGB’s wasn’t a romantic-erotic rendezvous spot, a lovers’ retreat with discreet corners for nuzzling and those more advanced favors provided in the balconies of Studio 54, say. It was not a place one went in search of a tender touch and molten glances. (Once when I asked the poet-rocker Lydia Lunch how things were going, she said, just fine: “My boyfriend and I spent the weekend drilling holes in each other’s teeth.”) Nor was it a slumming scene doused with the alley-cat stink of
nostalgie de la boue
, a dive where posh debutantes or downtown gamines in black leggings could find ravishment at the seam-ripping hands of a sensitive brute who worked at the Strand Bookstore by day, club-hunted by night, and knew how to weld. (Or perhaps there was too much alley-cat stink. I made the mistake of taking a date there once who prided herself on being a bohemian spirit, something she cultivated growing up in New Orleans like a rare orchid. She took one whiff of CBGB’s, and if she had recoiled any harder, I would have had to catch her in my arms. And here I thought she would appreciate our little pissoir.) Personal charisma was sliced too thin in the punk scene to attract colorful moths. A lazy entitlement lolled south through the loins of those beyond-cool scenesters looking for something soft to lean against or into, as long as it didn’t involve minimum-plus effort. One female friend, a fellow journalist who went on to direct films, nailed this type as the sort of charmer who, if you buy him a drink, might let you give him a blow job later. Falling asleep while receiving a blow job was not an unheard tale in those pioneer days, not the sort of thing to bolster a girl’s confidence, though most sounded philosophical about it. Musicians scored at CBGB’s (there was a sex chart in the ladies’ room peter-metering the top contenders on the scene, a historical gem unfortunately lost to history—drowned under waves of graffiti), but musicians always score, in every musical field; they never go home alone (unless they already have somebody there waiting), from the classical violist to the jazz saxist to the most malnourished-looking rocker who at 3:00 a.m. can barely stand and hold his liquor without violent expulsion. When one of my former girlfriends, who traded in rock journalism for a folk-rock guitar, told Patti Smith that her latest fella had thrown up on her recently, Patti said, with the wise sisterliness of experience: “Oh, nearly all my boyfriends have thrown up in my lap at one time or another. A guy’s not really your boyfriend until he’s thrown up on you.”

Punk, new wave, the underground scene, whatever handle was hung on what was happening downtown, it wasn’t about hot-wiring the body, setting it into centrifugal motion under a flashing dome of lights with the bass thump rising from the floor like the heartbeat of a fertility god. When audiences stood at CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, or some unspecified fire-hazard club, it was usually to see better, and when they did instruct themselves to move, it was primarily back and forth from the waist, a metronomic trance that was a cross between an assenting nod and a Hasidic Jew shuckling as he reads the Talmud. Even Blondie—who would score a commercial success denied the Ramones and Television with a disco-inflected album whose diamond-etched production delineated the pop tunefulness of songs the band had muddled through for years onstage, like the cast of
Gilligan’s Island
trying to build a boat—didn’t unhinge their fans’ hips and get them dancing, no surprise given that Blondie’s phosphorescent chanteuse, Debbie Harry, teetering in high heels and flickering in and out of phase like a TV screen on the blink, couldn’t get a groove going long enough for the other Mouseketeers to follow. It didn’t help that her boyfriend and Blondie guitarist, Chris Stein, would sometimes sing harmony not by joining her at her mike but by hollering into her ear, which would throw off anyone’s equilibrium. Whether Stein did this because he was being thoughtless or deliberately obnoxious, I was never sure, but this was a prankster who hit balls, so I tilted toward the latter interpretation.

What you wore mattered more than how you moved, and what you wore didn’t matter much at first, until fetishism gained a steel toehold. Just as I never went hippie during the sixties (tie-dye doesn’t look good on
anybody
, the one fashion dictum I hold absolute), I never went punk, sparing myself incalculable embarrassment in the future of photos surfacing on the mocking Internet showing me decked out like Jimmy Ramone, Boy Reporter, with my notepad flipped out, ready for action. Although I did buy a long brown leather overcoat with an almost military cut that had one friend concerned that it looked a little German officer corps, something retrieved from the Moscow retreat. I showed the label that marked it as American made from the sixties, but she still thought it might make people think of Field Marshal Rommel. To soften any such impression, I repaired a sleeve on the coat that was threatening to drop off like a severed arm with a ring of large pink diaper pins, which I thought was a nice punk touch (since safety pins were now all the piercing rage, stuck through fabric and flesh as if the two were interchangeable), with the baby pinkness adding a note of put-on, an anti-punk punk statement. It was without much in the way of using my brain that I wore this thrift-shop pink-diaper-pinned brown leather overcoat to my first meeting with William Shawn, the editor of
The New Yorker
, who, with a brown-egg composure as impossible to crinkle as a Zen master’s, helped me out of it and hung it on the coat stand without a single comment or flicker of surmise, as if it were just another outer garment worn to ward off cold. As he led me into his office, I noticed a rip in the brown sofa that looked like a knife gash, itself a rather punk touch. I asked someone about it later, and she said, “It’s been there for ages—so long the rest of us don’t notice it anymore.” Although Shawn said nothing about the coat and it didn’t cost me an assignment from
The New Yorker
(a profile of a Las Vegas entertainment legend named Shecky Greene—a comedian renowned among fellow comics for his improvisational genius), I decided not to waltz that leather number out in adult society again unless I was sure of the company I was meeting. A true punk seditionist wouldn’t have cared, but I started going to the ballet about then and knew so little about it that I wanted to look inconspicuous, if that makes any sense.

Punk fashion itself began to feast on its own lean meat as the “look” at CBGB’s and similar clubs mutated into mutant
Clockwork Orange
aggro-wear baroque in its puncture-mark motorcycle-vampire detailing—a scavenger mix of Goth and garbage heap still venereally visible in what remains of the ungentrified East Village today (the punk equivalent to the historical restoration of the bonnets and shoe buckles in Colonial Williamsburg). This look reflected the transatlantic influence of English punk, which was far more radically tooled, piratical, politicized, defiantly, cawingly larynx’d, and media-provocateurish, and small wonder—London had all those “red top” scandal-crazed tabloids like the
Sun
and the
Daily Mirror
primed to have a sizzle-shit of indignation over the latest outrage from the obliging Sex Pistols. (THE FILTH AND THE FURY, barked the now-famous front-page headline of the
Daily Mirror
after the Pistols swore like parrots on live TV.) Meanwhile, here in our fair parish, the New York tabloids, the
Daily News
and the
Post
, had so many other five-alarm melodramas to cover (from the “Son of Sam” serial-murder rampage to the New York Yankees’ Billy Martin–Reggie Jackson–George Steinbrenner axis of ego in the burning Bronx) that they weren’t going to squander valuable outrage space on fish bait. Dominating the underground-rock-scene coverage in the daily press was John Rockwell, the chief rock critic of the
New York Times
and a friendly nodder to avant-garde aspirations, who accepted whatever sonic detritus might come jet-engining his way as if it were cousin to Stockhausen or La Monte Young banging on a treated piano. He wasn’t going to fry bacon on his forehead over some skin-and-bones character spitting out curses onstage or off. Short of human sacrifice, offending Rockwell would take some doing.