Another Little Piece of My Heart (31 page)

The same forces that were pushing the country toward reactionary politics also stiffened the hierarchies of taste. The adventurous publication
Commentary,
which had once run essays by Susan Sontag, now veered toward neoconservatism, reflecting a trend among chastened intellectuals. “A conservative,” said the pundit Irving Kristol, “is a liberal who’s been mugged.” But
I wasn
’t a conservative, and I had been mugged. The perp apologized—he explained that he was a junkie. Judith, who was with me, insisted on confronting him. “How do you expect us to get home?” she fumed as he took our money. He gave us carfare.

To me, a neocon was a liberal who missed the pleasures of class privilege, who was sick of living communally and repressing sexual jealousy, who wanted to dress in something more status enhancing than a T-shirt and jeans, who yearned for assets and stability. This was the same prosperous crowd that had sponsored the radical hybrid culture of the mid-sixties; now it looked for safety. Every style that had once been transgressive was packaged attractively for this audience; museums and art spaces incorporated every radical gesture. Meanwhile on Broadway, Christian musicals with a hippie edge replaced the spirit of
Hair
. I could
assess the state of pop culture in 1971 by contemplating
Godspell
and
Jesus Christ Superstar
. Better that, I told myself ruefully, than a musical called
I Protest.

The mainstream press had embraced a tame version of the New Journalism, so the real thing had to move further out on the ledge. The result was a style called “gonzo,” whose major practitioner, Hunter S. Thompson, had a rocker’s sense of excess and a radical’s insight into the grotesqueness of American politics. But his work didn’t interest me—it read like a night in a bar with a maudlin drunk. Still, the magazine that published him,
Rolling Stone
, was one of the few bright spots in the media. It had emerged from the sixties scene to mingle literary reportage with rock criticism, the perfect combo for me. The editor offered me a dream assignment—an interview with William Burroughs. I was ready for my comeback.

Burroughs received me at his “bunker,” a loft on the Bowery that came with a built-in orgone box. He had a practiced rap and he laid it on thickly, including the part about men and women being different species that weren’t meant to mate with each other. He was as droll as his writing, and as deadpan in his delivery, but when I asked about the power of love he got serious, or so it seemed to me. Love was an invention of women, he said. It wasn’t something men needed. I had struggled to believe that needing love didn’t make me unmanly, and I tried not to look as appalled as I felt. Another great American writer had turned out to be a pig.

I was trapped between my revulsion toward Burroughs and what I thought a piece on him should be. He was surrounded by a hip honor guard that cherished his dystopian genius. Numerous bands took their names from references in his work—Steely Dan was a dildo in
Naked Lunch
. His dour face was the perfect icon for the sour mood that dominated vanguard culture, and he was well on his way to replacing Norman Mailer as a hipster literary superstar. But by then I was sick of celebrated writers who advocated terrible things. I’d lost my tolerance for black clothing and Downtown irony. To me, this was another retreat from idealism, a backlash for left-wingers.

I’m not saying there was no good music around in the early seventies. I admired David Bowie—I just didn’t trust him, and he didn’t want me to. His persona was slippery, which is not the same thing as transformational. It was about changing your presentation, not your consciousness. I tried my best with glam rock but it felt brittle, very different from the
sixties idea of gender as a flowing, unfocused, playful thing. That concept didn’t go with the new longing for roles and authority. It seemed inevitable that formerly androgynous hippies would develop an interest in S&M as the decade progressed. Leather was the new tie-dye.

If I’d been nineteen and trekking downtown from the Bronx I would probably have been impressed by the style that was coalescing into punk. But I was burned out before my time. I felt like a puritan defending a bankrupt utopian vision, and I didn’t think it would be welcome at
Rolling Stone
, so I decided not to file anything about my afternoon with William Burroughs. I’d never blown an assignment, and this felt like a big deal. But it wasn’t just a negative reaction to him that had stopped me; it was the way the scene had changed. The drug of choice was no longer acid but cocaine, the perfect agent of numbness—and expensive to boot. It was cool now to spend a lot of money on getting high, and you could find a nice return on your investment from MDA, a variant of speed that provided the buzz of LSD without the unpredictable hallucinations. My friends called it Miracle Drug of America. When you wanted to come down after a night of partying you could pop a quack (quaalude). That great leveler, booze, was back as well. The idea was to maintain; to keep yourself on an even keel. I went to dinner parties where rounds of aquavit were followed by lines of coke. Music was playing, and in that hyped-up state I felt the rhythm as an invitation to climb an even slope toward a joyously vacant summit.

I had one more junket left in me.
Vogue
dangled an offer from the Brazilian government to fly me to Rio for a pop festival. The editors didn’t seem to mind that Brazil was a military dictatorship. I couldn’t help thinking of old
National Geographic
pieces about life in Berlin just after the Nazis took power, which blithely featured photos of swastikas waving in the breeze. But I shouldn’t knock
Vogue
—I was a columnist there during the late sixties, and they suffered my insouciance gracefully. One day I was introduced to the publication’s guiding light, the doyenne of American fashion, Diana Vreeland. She was the most carefully put-together old lady I’d ever seen, but I had no idea who she was. I whispered to my editor, a lovely woman with horse-country manners, “Who is she?” My editor tried not to roll her eyes, just as later she would sit primly at a performance in the East Village I had dragged her to, a play
called
Che
, in which the male and female leads had real intercourse onstage every night. What can I say?
Vogue
spent good money on me, and it paid for my drugs.

Rio was fascinating. I had never been in a place where race relations seemed so mellow, though they were actually quite rigid. In America, all the racial resentment was out in the open; here it was most evident in the segregation by altitude. The black slums climbed the steep hillsides around the city, and they were subject to collapse during frequent storms, with deadly results. But these precarious
favelas
were central to Rio’s mystique. I remember standing on the balcony of a luxury apartment in Copacabana during a reception held by an executive at the biggest Brazilian TV network. Naturally this honcho was an American. His flaxen-haired son pointed eagerly to the favela that rose a few blocks from the building. He traveled there often, he explained, porting his guitar to jam with the locals. He had no fear of being robbed, not in a friendly land like this, and his father made it clear that the programming at the TV network reflected Brazilian culture, which was “simple and fun-loving.” I knew how sophisticated the scene in Rio was. It was hard not to spit in the honcho’s face.

Somehow I managed to elude the police escort that was assigned to transport reporters to the festival, and I hooked up with artists who were part of a sly cultural movement called Tropicalism. Painters, musicians, and filmmakers worked with one eye over their shoulders. Films by left-wing directors had to be smuggled out of the country so they could be screened in New York. (A friend of mine actually did this.) Every now and then, I saw the police enter a café and drag someone off. As for the event I had come to cover, it was about as daring as the soap operas that dominated TV. The audience was chaotic and irrepressible—this was a city where several layers of conversation could be heard in every phone call—but the real life of Rio was missing from the stage. Still, one vanguard band had made it through the cleansing process. They were called Os Mutantes, the Mutants, and they sounded a bit like the Mothers of Invention. There was no translator present, so I couldn’t really do an interview, but I promised to write about them. How could I not? Their antic style was to the spirit of cultural resistance in Rio what a similar group, called the Plastic People of the Universe, would be to Soviet-era Prague. By then I understood the crucial role that pop music played in countries where there was no political outlet for freedom.
Though the best-known Brazilian composers were in exile, the songs on the radio could be subtly antigovernment, and I soon learned to read the codes. Subterfuge reigned, as it always does when anger is risky.

It was a revelation to visit a military dictatorship. There were bullet holes in the Congress building from the latest coup. Soldiers were everywhere, and their behavior was quite unpredictable. Not even the police in Chicago had frightened me as much as these badly trained thugs walking around with machine guns. I returned to the States with the uncanny feeling that I was glad to be home. I wrote about the sterile quality of the festival in Rio, and the vitality of the cultural dissidents I’d met. I called the piece “The Sound of Silence.” My editor at
Vogue
regretfully said she couldn’t publish it. Too political.

Swallowing my dismay, I retreated to my favorite recovery zone, Fire Island. Judith and I had rented a house that was more like a shack, which was perfect for me. I took refuge in the restorative effects of body surfing, ample drugs, and sex, marital and otherwise. I didn’t visit the Sunken Forest, where gay men frolicked among ambling deer—I wasn’t ready for that. But I did walk around the beach naked, reveling in the long hair brushing against my back. The media and its discontents seemed distant on this island, and as fall approached I decided to stay. The crowds were gone, the water was still warm, and the shrubbery took on an auburn hue. I started to write an essay, very different from my journalism, about what it was like to grow up as a descendant of slum dwellers. I was experimenting with repetition borrowed from Allen Ginsberg. I watched the ferries from the mainland come and go, freed from the tyranny of schedules and deadlines—and also the news. No one I knew on Fire Island had a TV. So I was stunned to see the front page of a local tabloid that someone had left in the sand. Janis Joplin was dead.

She’d overdosed, of course—the rock-star version of a poetic death. A roadie, concerned when she didn’t appear for a recording session, went to her hotel and found her body. This was in L.A., a very hard city to be alone in if you’re fucked up. Janis had friends there, as well as a girlfriend, but perhaps they were too busy to see her. Her only visitor, it seems, was her dealer. The fatal dose might have come from him, or it could have been someone in the music industry charged with keeping her well supplied. There were a number of people willing to provide rock stars with drugs if it assured their dependence and loyalty.

Back when I toured with Janis, she showed no signs of heroin use; she didn’t nod or scratch or leave the room to shoot up. As far as I could tell, alcohol was her only excess, and it seemed understandable given her insecurity. Her original band, as I’ve mentioned, was a major source of support, but her new group, a put-together ensemble, couldn’t possibly relate to her in the same way. She was every bit the superstar by then, driving a psychedelically painted Porsche. Rockers of her caliber are the ultimate transients, and they soon lose the attachment to a community that can create stability in a whirlwind existence. That was why Janis had come to San Francisco in the first place—she needed to find a hometown where she was normal. But stardom had made her a citizen of the system, a ward of the industry, and she lacked the self-possession to survive in a constantly shifting milieu. That was my take on her situation, though I could only grasp it from afar.

I raced home from Fire Island and called Janis’s publicist, the only person I knew who stayed in close touch with her. The publicist was a voluble and caring woman. We’d both wanted to be the friend Janis could call when she felt desperate, the catcher in her bottle of rye. But there was no way for us to keep track of her. Pretty much everyone in her circle was in the music business, and, like so many others, they practiced the hip ethic of nonintervention. No one stopped her from skirting the edge of the cliff. Like Don McNeill on the day he drowned, she was simply doing her thing, and, like the guy who left Don alone after seducing him, no one would feel responsible for Janis’s death.

I’d known many junkies. There was Tom, the woman who had introduced me to the East Village, and the first person in my life to OD. A close friend of mine was hooked on a sedative with the enticing name of Placidyl. He had so much of it in his body that his sweat bore a metallic odor. I enrolled him in a rehab program, to no avail—he eventually put a gun to his head. These addicts were very dear to me. In the days following Janis’s death I thought of them all, along with every rocker whose path to destruction I had witnessed silently, every acid casualty I’d iced out of my life, everyone I’d seen fall by the wayside while I clung on. Why hadn’t I intervened?

I locked myself in and let the answering machine overflow. Deadlines came and went, but I couldn’t work. I would sit at the typewriter in a state of profound wooziness, so that I couldn’t construct a sentence. The words didn’t come together, and when I finally managed to string out a
thought I couldn’t figure out where to go with it, how it fit into a larger whole. I went through a ream of typing paper, five hundred sheets, without producing a coherent piece. I knew then that I would never again write about rock. Every album in my collection carried memories of disillusionment. I would hear a song and burst into tears.

Writing had been the companion to all my adventures, the thing that enabled me to cope with life since my childhood. Now I had to face the possibility that I might never be able to count on that outlet again. To this day, when I think about what dying would be like—what it
will
be like—I recall the baffling sense of everything vanishing from my grasp. This was the feeling of writer’s block. It was the real sound of silence.