Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ a female cross between a German shepherd and a beagle cum dachshund, three and a half feet long standing four inches off the ground. If you believe that dogs always mirror their owners, then Seymour was, in Shelley’s words, “a Lou dog.” Lou appeared to be able to open up more easily and communicate more sympathetically with Seymour than with anybody else in the vicinity. As far as Shelley could tell, the only times Lou seemed to feel really at peace with himself were when he was rolling on the floor with Seymour, or sitting with the mutt on the couch staring into space. Soon, however, Lou’s love for the dog became obsessive, and he started remonstrating with Shelley about treating Seymour better and paying more attention to her.

      Meanwhile, Lou’s behaviour increasingly hinted at the complex nature Shelley would have to deal with if she stayed with him. “I mean he got crazy about being nice to that dog,” she commented later. “He was a total shit about it, so that was a clue.” But then he couldn’t be bothered to take the dog out for a walk in the freezing cold. It soon became evident that it fell to Shelley to feed and walk the dog. Even then the mercurial Lewis decided to dump the dog. Shelley had to persuade him not to. Then Lewis hit on another diabolical plan. He would take the dog home to Freeport and dump it on his family, without warning. And he knew exactly how to do it.

      That Thanksgiving, Lou and Shelley returned to Freeport with the surprise gift. Displaying its Lou-like behavior, at La Guardia airport the dog rushed out of the cargo area where it had been forced to travel and immediately pissed all over the floor, leading Lou’s mother to start screaming, “A dog! Oh my God, a dog in my house! We don’t need a dog!” Riposting with the artful aplomb that would lead so many of Reed’s later collaborators to despair, Lou presented an offer that could not be refused, announcing that the dog was, in fact, a gift for Bunny.

      Dismayed at first by this invasion of their domain, the Reeds were, in time—much to Lou’s chagrin—unexpectedly delighted by the new arrival. As it turned out, the dog possessed some of Lou’s charm without any of his less attractive attributes. Soon Seymour was scurrying around the Reeds’ living room or snuggling up to Toby as if she were her long-lost mother. In short, Seymour became the light of Toby’s life in a way Lewis never could be.

      “Can you imagine,” Lou ad-libbed in a 1979 song, “Families,” “when I first took her there nobody wanted her, but soon she became more important than me!”

      Naturally, as soon as Lou saw how much his family liked the dog, he quickly reversed his decision to bestow her on Bunny and insisted on taking her back to Syracuse where she would live with him until he graduated, after which Seymour would live out the remainder of her life as the most popular member of the Reed household.

      During their visit Lou took Shelley into Harlem to pick up drugs. “He said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to pick something up,’ she recalled. “I remember going up to 125th Street. Really vile, nasty hallways. It was a guy who was a musician, I remember him sitting at this grand piano in his apartment in Harlem. I think there was a connection between the guys in the bar in Syracuse and the guy there. I knew we were going to pick up drugs, my memory was that it was heroin, but I couldn’t swear to it. I was more worried about his driving. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in Harlem. I had a bad attitude. For white kids to do that at the time was stupid. It was dangerous. I could have gotten raped or killed. He loved that.”

      It was, however, neither the drugs nor the dog that finally caused his relationship with Shelley to break down. Although there was no doubt that Lou was in love with Shelley and their relationship was enlightening for both of them, Lou experimented sexually. According to Mishkin, for example, Lou had a thing for big girls, especially “one big fat ugly bitch who he also really loved to fuck on the side.” He also occasionally had sex with one of the black female singers who accompanied the Eldorados. “I never observed him being particularly nice to Shelley,” Hyman commented, “but then I never observed him being particularly nice to anyone.”

      When Lou wasn’t nice to a woman, he could, it turned out, be particularly cruel, constantly pushing them to an edge, thereby testing the strength of their love. His idea, Shelley said, was, “I’m going to remake you and then I’m not going to like you, and I’m going to push you around and see when you’re going to leave me. The worse I treat you the more it proves to me that you love me and you’ll stay with me forever. He clearly got very obnoxious. He had to have somebody to kick around so he felt big, and at that point I was the kickee.”

      She was not the sort of girl to take this kind of treatment lying down, and she retaliated with several thrusts of her own. On one occasion the Eldorados were booked to play a fraternity at Cornell. Shelley had been dating one of the fraternity brothers sporadically on the side and decided to go along for the ride. When Lou walked in with the slightly effeminate walk he had mastered, the brothers were enraged to see Shelley on his arm. She had spent several weekends at the fraternity house and now this little Jewish fag … Shelley had not told Lou about the predicament, and even he was impressed by the hostility that greeted him. “Jesus, they’re so nasty, they’re a bunch of animals,” he told Shelley. Somewhere during the evening she casually explained, “They’re so hostile because I’ve been here on various weekends with this guy Peter. I’m his girlfriend.” They barely got out of there alive.

      Back at Syracuse the relationship between Lou and Shelley came to a climax one night at another fraternity job, when Lou came up to her between sets and said, “I’m going to go into the back room with that girl. Do you want to watch?” Seeing Ritchie Mishkin smirk at her, Shelley finally snapped, decided that she had taken enough abuse from Lou, and left the fraternity. It was February 1963 and bitterly cold. Lincoln accompanied her on the long walk back to her dorm telling her not to worry, that he was still there and that she was right to leave. That she shouldn’t have let Lou treat her so badly for so long.

      “Lou and I had such dire things going on between us for the previous few months,” Shelley explained. “The groupie thing just finally put me over the edge. I never had any doubt that Lou was going to be a rock star and that if I was going to stay with Lou, I was going to be a rock star’s wife. I made the decision to leave him and to stay away from him based on the next ten years of my life.

      “The next day he said, ‘I was so stoned I don’t remember doing that. Why are you mad at me? Did I do that?’”

      But Shelley had finally come to understand what made Lou tick, and she didn’t like what she understood at all. The struggle to conquer and control was much more important to him than the possession, just as being a voyeur was becoming more important to him than natural sex. Basically, Lou was incapable of maintaining any kind of normal, nurturing relationship. Like a shark, he had an urge to poke at bodies until he found a live one, then devour it as ferociously and completely as he could, letting the blood run down his chin.

      By the middle of his junior year, Lou had turned himself into a monster with eight different faces. It was in these various guises that he would slither through his life, building up great bands only to tear them down, devouring and destroying everybody he could seduce, because he resented the whole situation of life and didn’t want anybody else to have any fun if he wasn’t able to.

      Ever since Lou had moved into his own apartment, the relationship with Lincoln Swados had been less close. As the junior year ground on, Lincoln showed alarming signs of having a real nervous breakdown. “I don’t think either of us knew that Lincoln was truly schizophrenic,” Shelley remembered. “Lou was so busy pulling so much of his drama from Lincoln that I don’t know how much he realized Lincoln was truly ill, or whether he just thought Lincoln just had a better scam going. He was trying to pick up on Lincoln’s traits and abilities. Much of Lou is Lincoln.” Shelley claimed that for both men, the trajectory of a love relationship went something like this: “I’m going to stroke you and treat you kindly and bless you with my knowledge and presence, and then kill you.” Allen Hyman agreed that Lou had picked up many of СКАЧАТЬ