Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ afternoon. I looked at him and said, ‘What are you doing? We have a job!’ And he said, ‘Fuck you, get out of here. I don’t want to work today.’ I said, ‘You can’t do this, we’re getting paid!’ Mishkin and I physically dragged him up to the show. Ultimately he did play, but he was very pissed off.”

      Reed seemed to at once want the spotlight and to hate it.

      “Lou’s uniqueness and stubbornness made him really different than anyone I had ever known,” added Mishkin. “He was a terrible guy to work with. He was impossible. He was always late, he would always find fault with everything that the people who had hired us expected of us. And we were always dragging him here and dragging him there. Sometimes we were called Pasha and the Prophets because Lou was such a son of a bitch at so many gigs he’d upset everyone so much we couldn’t get a gig in those places again. He was as ornery as you can get. People wouldn’t let us back because he was so absolutely rude to people and just so mean and unappreciative of the fact that these people were paying us to get up and play music for them. He couldn’t have cared less. So we used the name Pasha and the Prophets in order to play there again. And then the people who hired us were so drunk they wouldn’t remember. He would never dress or act in a way so that people would accept him. He would often act in a confrontational manner. He wanted to be different.

      “But Lou was ambitious. He wanted to be—and said this to me in no uncertain terms—a rock-and-roll star and a writer.”

      ***

      In May 1962, sick of the stodgy university literary publication and keen to make their mark, Lewis and Lincoln, along with Stoecker, Gaines, Tucker, et al., put out two issues of a literary magazine called the Lonely Woman Quarterly. The title was based on Lou’s favorite Ornette Coleman composition, “Lonely Woman.”

      Originating out of the Savoy with the encouragement of Gus Joseph, the first issue contained an untitled story, mentioned in the previous chapter, signed Luis Reed. It described Sidney Reed as a wife-beater, and Toby as a child molester. Shelley, who was involved in the publication, was convinced that just as Lou’s homosexual affair was mostly an attempt to associate with the offbeat gay world, the story was a conspicuous attempt to build his image as an evil, mysterious person. He was smart enough, she thought, to see that this was going to make readers uncomfortable. “And that’s what Lou always wanted to do,” she said, “make people uncomfortable.”

      The premier issue of LWQ brought “Luis” his first press mention. In reviewing the magazine, the university’s newspaper, the Daily Orange, had interviewed Lincoln, who boasted that the magazine’s one hundred copies had sold out in three days. Indeed, the first issue was well received, but when everyone else on its staff apparently got lazy, Lou put out issue number two, which featured his second explosive piece, printed on page one. Called “Profile: Michael Kogan—Syracuse’s Miss Blanding,” it was the most attention-grabbing project Lou ever pulled off at Syracuse: a deftly executed, harsh attack upon the student who was head of the Young Democrats Party at the University. Allen Hyman recalled, “It said something like he [Kogan] should parade around campus with an American flag up his ass, which at the time was a fairly outrageous statement.” Unfortunately, Kogan’s father turned out to be a powerful corporation lawyer. “He decided that the piece was libelous,” remembered Sterling, “and he’d bust Lou’s ass. So they hauled him before the dean. But … the dean started shifting to Lou’s side. Afterwards, the dean told Lou to finish up his work and get his ass out of there, and nothing would happen to him.” By May of 1962, Reed’s literary career was off to a running start.

      Despite this, Lou’s relationship with Shelley—not his classes—had dominated his sophomore year. They had spent as many of their waking hours together as was possible, camping out over the weekends in friends’ apartments, using fraternity rooms, cars, and sometimes even bushes to make love. Lou received a D in Introduction to Math and an F in English History. Then he got in trouble with the authorities again when a friend was busted for smoking pot and ratted on a number of people, including Lewis and Ritchie Mishkin.

      “We smoked all the time,” admitted Mishkin. “But we didn’t smoke and work. We may have played and then smoked after and then jammed. Anyway, the dean of men called Lou, me, and some other people into his office and said, ‘We know you were smoking pot, so give us the whole story.’ We were terrified, at least I was. But nothing happened. Lou was angry. With the authorities and with the informer. But they were pretty soft on us. We were lucky, but then all they had to go on was the ‘he said, she said’ kind of evidence, so there was a limit to what they could do. But they had us in the office and they did the old, ‘We know because so-and-so said …’”

      As a result of these numerous transgressions, and with his apparent academic torpor at the end of his sophomore year, Reed was put on academic probation.

      ***

      The summer of 1962 was somewhat difficult for Lou. This was the first time he had been separated from Shelley for more than a day, and he took it hard. First, in an attempt to exert his control over her across the thousand miles that separated them, he embarked on a zealous letter-writing campaign, sending her long, storylike letters every day. They would begin with an account of his daily routine—he would go to the local gay bar, the Hayloft, every night—and tweak Shelley with suggestive comments. Then, in the middle of a paragraph the epistle would abruptly shift from reality to fiction and Lou would take off on one of his short stories, usually mirroring his passion and longing for Shelley. An exemplary story sent across the country that summer was “The Gift,” which appeared on the Velvet Underground’s second album, White Light/White Heat, and perfectly summed up Lou’s image of himself as a lonely Long Island nerd pining for his promiscuous girlfriend. “The Gift” climaxed with the lovelorn author desperately mailing himself to his lover in a womblike cardboard box. The final image, in the classic style of Yiddish humor that informed so much of Reed’s work, had the boyfriend being accidentally killed by his girlfriend as she opened the box with a large sheet-metal cutter.

      Shelley, a classic passive-aggressive character, rarely responded in kind, but she did talk to Lou on the phone several times that summer, and he did not like what he heard at all. Lou had expected Shelley to remain locked in her room thinking of nothing but him. But Shelley wasn’t that kind of girl. Despite having commenced the vacation with a visit to the hospital to have her tonsils out, by July she was platonically dating more than one guy and at least one was madly in love with her. Despite the fact that Shelley was really loyal to Lou, the emotions Lou addressed in “The Gift” were his. He paced up and down his room in frustration. He couldn’t stand not having Shelley under this thumb. It was driving him insane.

      Then he hit on a plan. Why not go out and visit her? After all, he was her boyfriend, he was writing to her every day or so and had called her several times. It sounded like the right thing to do. His parents, who had kept a wary eye on their wayward son that summer, still frowning on his naughty visits to the Hayloft and daily excursions on the guitar, were only too happy to support a venture that they felt was taking him in the right direction. At the beginning of August he flew out to Chicago.

      Shelley had been adamantly against the planned visit, warning Lou on the phone that her parents wouldn’t like him, that it was a big mistake and wouldn’t work out at all. But Lou, who wanted, she recalled, “to be in front of my face,” insisted.

      By now Lou had developed a pattern of reaction to any new environment he entered. His plan was to split up any group, polarizing them around him. In a family situation, as soon as he walked into anybody’s house, he took the position that the father was a tyrannical ogre whom the mother had to be saved from. On his first night in the Albins’ home, he cleverly drew Mr. Albin into a political discussion and then, marking him for the bullheaded liberal Democrat that he was, expertly lanced him with a detailed defense of the notorious conservative columnist СКАЧАТЬ