Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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      What Lou Reed needed most was to find a coconspirator, an equal off whom he could bounce his ideas and behavior and receive inspiration in return. Almost miraculously, he found such a person in what would become the second golden period of his life (the first being his discovery of rock and roll). Lou’s first great soul mate, mirror, and collaborator, whom he roomed with in his sophomore year, was the brilliant, eccentric, talented, but tortured and doomed Lincoln Swados. Swados came from an upwardly mobile, middle-class, and, by all accounts, outstandingly empathetic Jewish family from upstate New York. Like Reed, he had a little sister called Elizabeth, upon whom he doted (and to some extent, like Lou, identified with). The two students fell into each other’s arms like lost inmates of some Siberian prison of the soul who finally discover after years of isolated exile a fellow voyager. To make matters perfect from Lou’s point of view, Lincoln was an aspiring writer (working on an endless Dostoyevskian novel); his favorite singer was Frank Sinatra; Lincoln’s side of the room was covered in more crap than Lou’s; and—this was the clincher—Swados was agoraphobic. He spent most of his time holed up in their basement room either hunkered over a battered desk or playing Frank Sinatra records and rapping with Lou. Whenever Lou needed a receiver for one of his new songs, poems, or stories, Lincoln was always there. Their relationship was the first of many constructive collaborations in Lou’s life.

      One of Lou’s strongest personalities was the controlling figure who always needed to be the center of attention and the most outstanding person in the room. Here again Lincoln was his perfect match, for if Lou ever worried that he might not yet possess the hippest look in the world, Lincoln presented no threat. He was usually togged out in a pair of pants that ended somewhere above his ankles and were belted in the middle of his chest. His customary short-sleeve shirt invariably clashed with the pants. A pair of bugged-out eyes that made Caryl Chessman in the electric chair look like a junkie on the nod stared out of a cadaverous face capped by a head of dirty, disheveled blondish hair. Lincoln’s body was as much of a mess as was his mind. He rarely bathed or brushed his teeth and at times emanated an odor that obviated any close physical relationships. The whole ensemble was tied together by a disembodied smile that clearly indicated, at least to somebody of Lou’s perceptiveness, just how far out in space Lincoln really was most of the time.

      Their basement room was furnished like some barren writer’s cell out of Franz Kafka’s imagination. The two black iron bedsteads, identical desks, and battered chairs ensconced upon a green concrete floor and lit by a harsh bare lightbulb could not have better symbolized both the despair and ambition at the heart of their twin souls. They both despised the world of their parents from which they had at least temporarily escaped. Both were intent upon destroying it and all of its values with some of the most vitriolic, driven pages since Burroughs spat Naked Lunch out of his battered typewriter in Tangier. The room became their arsenal, their headquarters, their cave of knowledge and learning, and the engine of their voyage into the unknown. In time, Lou would rip off Lincoln’s entire repertoire of attitudes, gestures, and habits. Lou later confessed, “I’m always studying people that I know, and then when I think I’ve got them worked, I go away and write a song about them. When I sing the song, I become them. It’s for that reason that I’m kind of empty when I’m not doing anything. I don’t have a personality of my own, I just pick up other people’s.”

      Having met his male counterpart, Lou now needed, in order to pull out the male and female sides warring within him, a female companion. Within a week of settling in with Swados, Lou saw her riding down the university’s main drag, Marshall Street, in the front seat of a car driven by a blond football player who belonged to the other Jewish fraternity on campus and recognized Reed as their local holy fool. Thinking to amuse his date, a scintillatingly beautiful freshman from the Midwest named Shelley Albin, he pulled over, laughing, and said, “Here’s Lou! He’s very shocking and evil!” making, as it turned out for him, the dreadful mistake of offering “the lunatic” a ride.

      Although in no way as twisted and bent as Lincoln Swados, Shelley was as perfect a match for Lou as his roommate was. Born in Wisconsin, where she had lived the frustrated life of a beatnik tomboy, Shelley had elected Syracuse because it was the only university her parents would let her attend. In preparation for the big move away from home, Shelley, along with a childhood girlfriend, had come to Syracuse fully intending to mend her ways and acquiesce to the college and culture’s coed requirements. Discarding the jeans and work shirts she wore at home, she donned instead the below-the-knee skirt, tasteful blouse, and string of pearls seen on girls in every yearbook photo of the period. When Lou hopped into the backseat eager to make her acquaintance, Shelley was squirming with the discomfort of the demure uniform as well as her dorky date’s running commentary.

      She vividly recalled Lou’s skinny hips, baby face, give-away eyes, and knew “we were going to go out as soon as he got into the car.” She also knew she was making a momentous decision and that Lou was going to be trouble, but that it certainly wasn’t going to be boring. “It was such a relief to see Lou, who was to me a normal person. And I was intrigued by the evil shit.”

      The feeling was clearly mutual. As soon as the couple let Lou off in front of his dorm, Reed sprinted into their room and breathlessly told Swados about the most beautiful girl in the world he had just met, and his plans to call her immediately.

      Lincoln had a strangely paternal side that would often appear at inappropriate moments. Seeing his role as steering Lou through his emotional mood swings, Swados immediately put the kibosh on Reed’s notion of seducing Shelley by informing him that this would be out of the question since he, Lincoln, had already spotted the pretty coed and, despite not yet having met her, was claiming her as his own.

      Lou, for his part, saw his role in the relationship as primarily to calm the highly strung, hyperactive Swados. Reasoning that the nerdy Lincoln, who had been unable to get a single date during the freshman year, would only be wounded by the rejection he was certain to get from Shelley, Lou wasted no time in cutting his friend off at the pass by calling Shelley at her dorm within the hour and arranging an immediate date. That way, Lou told himself, he would soon be able to give Swados the pleasure of her company.

      Shelley Albin would not only become Lou Reed’s girlfriend through his sophomore and junior years—“my mountaintop, my peak,” as he would later describe her—but would remain for many years thereafter his muse. “Lou and I connected when we were too young to really put it into words,” Shelley said. “There was some innate connection there that was very strong. I knew him before everything was covered up. My strongest image of Lou is always as a Byronesque character, a very sweet young man. He was interesting, he wasn’t one of the bland, robotic people, he had a wonderful poetic nature. Basically, Lou was a puffball, he was a sweetie.” For all of Lou’s eccentricities, Shelley found him “very straight. He was very coordinated, a good dancer, and he could play a good game of tennis. His criteria for life were equally straight. He was a fifties guy, the husband of the house, the God. He wanted a woman who was the end-all Barbie and would make bacon when he wanted bacon. I was very submissive and naive and that’s what appealed to him.”

      But Lou also had his “crazy” side, which he played to the hilt. Like many bright kids who have just discovered Kierkegaard and Camus, he was the classic, arty bad boy. Alternating between straight and scary, Lou reveled in both. “There was a part of Lou that was forever fifteen, and a part of him that was a hundred,” Shelley fondly recalled. Fortunately for Lou, she embraced both parts equally. And going out with Lou gave Shelley the jolt she needed to throw off her skirt and pearls for jeans and let her perm return to her natural long, straight hair. Seeing her metamorphosis, the boy Shelley had left so brazenly for Lou was soon chiding her, “You went to the dogs and became a beatnik. Lou ruined you!” In fact, Shelley, an art student, had simply reverted to being herself. But she enjoyed the taunt, knowing how much Lou liked it when people accused him of corrupting her and enjoyed the notoriety it won him. Shelley was also astonishingly СКАЧАТЬ