Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ exactly like him. It was hysterical. Lou was very protective of her. And she was so sweet. She didn’t have that much of a personality, but she was not unanimated.” Every action aimed to cut his parents out of his life, while keeping them prisoners in it. Meanwhile, like every college kid home on vacation, Lou managed to extract from them all the money he could, and the freedom to come and go as if the house were a hotel. As soon as everybody at 35 Oakfield Avenue was in position ready to do exactly as he wanted, Lou began to enjoy himself.

      In fact, so extreme was the situation that, on this first visit, Toby Reed, looking upon her as the perfect daughter-in-law, took Shelley into her confidence. “They were very nervous about what was he bringing home,” she remembered. “So they really took it as a sign that, ‘Oh, God, maybe he was okay.’ We recognized with each other, she and I, that we both really liked him and we both loved him.” Mrs. Reed filled her in on Lou’s troublesome side and tried to find out what Lou was saying about his parents. Shelley got the impression that the Reeds bore no malice toward Lou, but just wanted the best for him. Mrs. Reed seemed completely puzzled as to how Lou had gotten on the track of hating and blaming them. Pondering the strange state of affairs unfolding behind the facade of the Reeds’ attractive home, Shelley drew two conclusions. On the one hand, since his family seemed quite normal and had no apparent problems, Lou was moved to create psychodrama in order to fuel his writing. On the other hand, Lou really did crave his parents’ approval. He was immensely troubled by their refusal to recognize his talent and needed to break away from their restricted life. One point of Lou’s frustration was the feeling that his father was a wimp who gave over control of his life to his wife. This both horrified and fascinated Lou, who was a dyed-in-the-wool male supremacist. Lou was secretly proud of his father and wanted more than anything else for the old man to stand up for himself. But Lou simply could not stand the thought of sharing the former beauty queen’s attention with his father.

      After spending a wonderful, if at times tense, week in the Reed household, Shelley put together the puzzle. In a war of wits that had been going on for years, Lou went on the offensive as soon as he stepped through the portals of his home. Attempting by any means necessary to horrify and paralyze his loving parents, Lou had learned to control them by threatening to explode at any moment with some vicious remark or irrational act that would shatter their carefully developed harmony. For example, one night Mr. Reed gave Lou the keys to the family car, a Ford Fairlane, and some money to take Shelley out to dinner in New York. However, such an exchange between father and son could not pass without conflict straight out of a cartoon. As Lou was heading for the door with Shelley, Sid had to observe that if he were going to the city, he might, under the circumstances, put on a clean shirt. Instantly spinning into a vortex of anger that made Sid feel like a cockroach, Lou threw an acerbic verbal dart at his mother before slamming out the door.

      On the way into New York he almost killed himself and Shelley by driving carelessly and with little awareness of his surroundings. “I remember him taking this little flower from the Midwest to the big city,” Shelley said. “Chinatown. We drove in a hair-raising ride I’ll never forget in my whole life. Lou showed me how to hang out on the heating grate of the Village Gate so you could hear the music and stay warm.”

      His parents, she realized, “had no sense of what was really in his mind, and they were very upset and frightened by what awful things he was thinking. He must have been really miserable, how scary.” As a result, in order to obviate any disturbance, Lou’s tense and nervous family attended to his every need just as if he were the perennial prodigal son. The only person in the house who received any regular affection from Lou was his little sister, Elizabeth, who had always doted on Lou and thought he was the best.

      However, at least for the time being, Lou’s introduction of Shelley into their lives caused his parents unexpected joy. Ecstatic that his son had brought home a clean, white, beautiful Jewish girl, Mr. Reed increased Lou’s allowance.

      If he had had any idea of the life Lou and Shelley were leading at Syracuse, he would probably have acted in the reverse. As the year wore on, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and their influences began to play a bigger role in both their lives, although Shelley did not take drugs. Already a regular pot smoker, Lou dropped acid for the first time and started experimenting with peyote. Taking drugs was not the norm on college campuses in 1961. Though pot was showing up more regularly in fraternities, and a few adventurous students were taking LSD, most students were clean-cut products of the 1950s, preparing for jobs as accountants, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. To them, Lou’s habits and demeanor were extreme. And now, not only was Lou taking drugs, he began selling them to the fraternity boys. Lou kept a stash of pot in a grocery bag in the dorm room of a female friend. Whenever he had a customer, he’d send Shelley to go get it.

      Lou was by now on his way to becoming an omnivorous drug user and, apart from taking acid and peyote, would at times buy a codeine-laced cough syrup called turpenhydrate. Lou was stoned a lot of the time. “He liked me to be there when he was high,” Shelley remembered. “He used to say, ‘If I don’t feel good, you’ll take care of me.’ Mostly he took drugs to numb himself or get relief, to take a break from his brain.”

      Meanwhile, having presented himself as a born-again heterosexual, Lou now wasted no time in making another shocking move by shoring up his homosexual credentials. In the second semester of his sophomore year, he had what he later described as his first, albeit unconsummated, gay love affair. “It was just the most amazing experience,” Lou explained. “I felt very bad about it because I had a girlfriend and I was always going out on the side, and subterfuge is not my hard-on.” He particularly remembered the pain of “trying to make yourself feel something towards women when you can’t. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I wanted to fix it up and make it okay. I figured if I sat around and thought about it, I could straighten it out.”

      Lou and Shelley’s relationship rapidly escalated to a high level of game playing. Lou had more than one gay affair at Syracuse and would often try to shock her by casually mentioning that he was attracted to some guy. Shelley, however, could always turn the tables on him because she wasn’t threatened by Lou’s gay affairs and often turned them into competitions that she usually won for the subject’s attentions. If Shelley was a match for Lou, Lou was always ready to up the stakes. They soon got out of their depth playing these and other equally dangerous mind games, which led them into more complexities than they could handle.

      Friends had conflicting memories of Lou’s gay life at Syracuse. Allen Hyman viewed him as being extraordinarily heterosexual right through college, whereas Sterling Morrison, who thought Lou was mostly a voyeur, commented, “He tried the gay scene at Syracuse, which was really repellent. He had a little fling with some really flabby, effete fairy. I said, ‘Oh, man, Lou, if you want to do it, I hate to say it but let’s find somebody attractive at least.’”

      Homosexuality was generally presented as an unspeakable vice in the early 1960s. Nothing could have been considered more distasteful in 1962 America than the image of two men kissing. The average American would not allow a homosexual in his house for fear he might leave some kind of terrible disease on the toilet seat, or for that matter, the armchair. There were instances reported at universities in America during this time when healthy young men fainted, like Victorian ladies, at the physical approach of a homosexual. In fact, as Andy Warhol would soon prove, at the beginning of the 1960s the homosexual was considered the single most threatening, subversive character in the culture. According to Frank O’Hara’s biographer, Brad Gooch, “A campaign to control gay bars in New York had already begun in January 1964 when the Fawn in Greenwich Village was closed by the police. Reacting to this closing by police department undercover agents, known as ‘actors,’ the New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, ‘Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.’” Besides the refuge large cities such as San Francisco and New York provided for homosexuals, many cultural institutions, especially the private universities, became home to a large segment of the homosexual community. Syracuse University, where there was a hotbed of homosexual activity, led by Lou’s СКАЧАТЬ