Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ who was also very, very nice.”

      Shelley Albin had a unique face. Looked at straight on, what struck you first were her eyes. An inner light glimmered through them. Her nose was straight and perfect. Her jawline and chin were so finely sculpted they became the subject of many an art student at Syracuse. It was an open and closed face. Her mouth said yes. Yet her eyes had a Modigliani/Madonna quality that bayed, you keep your distance. Her light brown hair reflected in her pale cream skin gave it at times, a reddish tint. At five feet seven inches and weighing 115 pounds, she was close enough in size to Lou to wear his clothes.

      “We were inseparable from the moment we met,” Shelley recalled. “We were always literally wrapped up in each other like a pretzel.” Soon Shelley and Lou could be seen at the Savoy, making out in public for hours at a time: “He was a great kisser and well coordinated. I always thought of him as a master of the slow dance. When we met, it was like long-lost friends.” For both of them it was their first real love affair. They quickly discovered that they could relate across the boards. They had a great sexual relationship. They played basketball and tennis together. When Lou wrote a poem or a story, Shelley found herself doing a drawing or a painting that perfectly illustrated it. She had been sent to a psychiatrist in her teens for refusing to speak to her father for three years. Lou wrote “I’ll Be Your Mirror” two years later about Shelley. And Shelley was Lou’s mirror. Just as he had rushed a fraternity, she, much to his delight, rushed a sorority and then told them to go fuck themselves an hour after she got accepted.

      “His appeal was as a very sexy, intricate and convoluted boy/man,” Shelley said. “It was the combination of private gentle lover and romantic and strong, driven thug. He was, however, a little too strong, a dangerous little boy you can’t trust who will turn on you and is much stronger than you think. He had the strength of a man. You really couldn’t win. You had to catch him by surprise if you wanted to deck him.

      “The electroshock treatments were very fresh in his mind when we met. He immediately established that he was erratic, undependable, and dangerous, and that he was going to control any situation by making everyone around him nervous. It was the ultimate game of chicken. But I could play Lou’s game too, that’s why we got along so well.

      “What appealed to me about Lou was that he always pushed the edge. That’s what really attracted me to him. I was submissive to Lou as part of my gift to him, but he wasn’t controlling me. If you look back at who’s got the power in the relationship, it will turn out that it wasn’t him.”

      Whereas the entrance of a stunning female often offsets the male bonding between collaborators, in the tradition of the beats established by Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady, Lou correctly presumed that Shelley would enhance, rather than break up, his collaboration with Lincoln. In fact, it became such a close relationship that Lou would occasionally suggest, only half-jokingly, that Shelley should spend some time in bed with Lincoln. Their relationship mirrored that of the famous trio at the core of their generation’s favorite film, Rebel Without a Cause, with Lou as James Dean, Shelley as Natalie Wood, and Lincoln as the doomed Sal Mineo.

      Lou presented Lincoln to Shelley as an important but fragile figure who needed to be nurtured. Lincoln was homely, but Shelley’s vision of him in motion was “like Fred Astaire, Lincoln was debonair and he would spin a wonderful tale and I think Lou could see this fascination. Lou felt very responsible and protective toward Lincoln because nobody would see Lincoln and we liked Lincoln.” The first thing Lou said to Shelley was, “Lincoln wants you, and if I were a really good guy, I should give you to Lincoln because I can get anybody and Lincoln can’t. Lincoln loves you, but I’m not going to give you to him because I want you.” Shelley realized that many of Lou’s ways of being charming and his gestures were taken straight from Lincoln. “A lot of what I really loved about Lou was Lincoln, who was in many ways like Jiminy Cricket standing on Lou’s shoulder, whispering words into his ear. They were going to take care of me and straighten me out and educate me.”

      The most important thing about Lincoln and Shelley was their understanding and embracing of Lou’s talent and personality. If Lincoln was a flat mirror for Lou, Shelley was multidimensional, reflecting Lou’s many sides. Perceptive and intuitive, she understood that Lou appreciated events on many different levels and often saw things others didn’t. For the first time in his life Lou found two people to whom he could actually open up without fear of being ridiculed or taken for a ride. For a person who depended so much on others to complete him, they were irreplaceable allies.

      Initially, Lou’s first love affair was idyllic. Lou rarely arose before noon, since he stayed up all night. He and Shelley would sometimes meet in the snow at 6 a.m. at the bottom of the steps leading to the women’s dorm. Or else in the early afternoon she would take the twenty-minute hike from the women’s dorm to Lou and Lincoln’s quarters. Like all coeds on campus, she was forbidden to enter a men’s dorm on threat of expulsion, so she would merely tap on their basement window and wait for Lou to appear. When he did, he would gaze up at one of his favorite views of his lover’s face smiling down at him with her long hair and a scarf hanging down. “I liked looking in on their pit,” she recalled. “It was truly a netherworld. I liked being outside. I liked my freedom. And Lou liked that I had to go back to the dorm every night.” From there, the threesome would repair to a booth at the Savoy where they would be joined by art student Karl Stoecker—a close friend of Shelley’s—and English major Peter Locke, a friend of Lou’s to this day, along with Jim Tucker, Sterling Morrison, and a host of others, to commence an all-day session of writing, talking, making out, guitar playing, and drawing. Lou was concentrating on playing his acoustic guitar and writing folk songs. The rest of the time was spent napping, with an occasional sortie to a class. When the threesome got restless at the Savoy, they might repair to the quaint Corner Bookstore, just half a block away, or the Orange Bar. But they always came back to home base at the Savoy, and to the avuncular owner, Gus Joseph, who saw kids come and go for fifty years, but remembered Lou as being special.

      ***

      Lou was so enamored of Shelley that in the fall of 1961 he decided to bring her home to Freeport for the Christmas/Hanukkah holidays. Considering the extent to which Lou based his rebellious posture on the theme of his difficult childhood, Shelley was fully aware of how hard it would be for Lou to take her to his parents’ home. She remembered him thinking that he would score points with his parents: “It was sort of subtle. He was going to show his father that he was okay. He knew that they would like me. And I suspect in some ways he still wanted to please his parents and he wanted to bring home somebody that he could bring home.”

      Much to her surprise, Lou’s parents welcomed her to their Freeport home with open arms, making her feel comfortable and accepted. Lou had given her the definite impression that his mother did not love him, but to Shelley, Toby Reed was a warm and wonderful woman, anything but selfish. And Sidney Reed, described by Lou as a stern disciplinarian, seemed equally loving. They appeared to be the exact opposite of the way Lou had portrayed them. In her impression, Mr. Reed “would have walked over the coals for Lou.”

      At the same time Shelley realized that Lou was just like them. He not only looked like them, but possessed all their best qualities. However, when she made the mistake of communicating her positive reaction, commenting on the wonderful twinkle in Mr. Reed’s eyes and noting how similar his dry sense of humor was to Lou’s, her boyfriend snapped, “Don’t you know they’re killers?!”

      Given their kind, gracious, outgoing manner, the Reeds were sitting ducks for Lou’s brand of torture. He would usually begin by embracing the rogue cousin in the Reed family called Judy. As soon he got home, Lou would enthusiastically inquire after her activities and prattle on about how he wanted to emulate her more than anyone else in the family, often reducing his mother to tears. Next, Lou would make a bid to monopolize the attentions of thirteen-year-old Elizabeth. Confiding to her his innermost thoughts, he would make a big point of excluding his parents from СКАЧАТЬ