Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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СКАЧАТЬ after Shelley left Lou, Lincoln was carted off to the bughouse by his parents, who found him in a state of agitation far beyond their wildest fears. According to Swados’s sister, Elizabeth, he had got into “a helplessly disoriented state. He was unable to go to classes, unable to leave his room. The voices in his head were directing him to do too many different things.”

      In short order, Lou had lost his best friends, his two mirrors. Delmore was still there, but he was going in and out of hospital himself and was hardly in a position to give Lou a shoulder to cry on—although he did give him one piece of important advice. He told Lou that he should see a psychiatrist and that it should be a woman, because he wouldn’t listen to a man.

      However, despite her determination to avoid her former lover, the break-up threw Shelley into a black depression, and she went out and did the one thing that was bound to draw Lou’s attention back to her—she dyed her hair orange. “I remember Lou seeing it and saying, ‘Wow! Now you’re appealing, now you really look like Miss Trash.’” Typically, Lou had to race back to Freeport to show his parents what he had done to the nice Jewish girl they had so doted on. “They saw this nice, wholesome girl turned into trash and they said, ‘Oh my God, Lou has done it again. He has ruined somebody, he has won, he has turned her into trash,’” Shelley recalled. “At that point, his mother even said to me, ‘I hope he doesn’t treat you like he treats us.’ We did horrify his mother. He loved it.”

      As soon as they got back to school, they broke up again. By then she was determined not to go back to him. “He was such a shit.”

      ***

      November 1963 was a cathartic month for Lou. It started with a Syracuse concert by Bob Dylan. “Lou idolized Dylan when Dylan first came on the scene with his first album,” explained Mishkin. “We knew every inch of his music inside and out. All of a sudden there was this music and poetry together, and it wasn’t folk music. Lou was blown away by it. It was an exciting thing. And Lewis immediately got a harmonica and was playing that. And I remember sitting in the apartment with [Eldorado] Stevie Windheim and Lewis figuring out the chords to ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down,’ and we got them and we were playing it and it wasn’t the kind of thing we were going to do for a gig, but we had a good time with it.”

      The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a major turning point for Lou. The event struck a blow to Delmore from which he would never recover. Lou watched helplessly as his mentor cum drinking buddy fell into a paranoid depression. He gave up any pretense of continuing to teach and retreated permanently to the Orange Bar. Soon Lou was looking after Delmore, walking him home at night after long sessions at the bar, making sure he had his key, his cigarettes, sometimes picking up groceries or other sundries for him. When Schwartz left the Orange, he was often so transported to other realms he might head off in any direction like some human dowsing wand in search of companionship or, as often as not, trouble. Lou always made sure Delmore got home, got himself to bed, and was not in too much danger of burning down the premises with a carelessly dropped cigarette. After a while, however, this kind of care takes on a spooky quality as the young man begins to recognize his own fate in that of the older man. Suddenly Lou, who had been benefiting from Delmore’s enlightened encouragement, taking seriously his recommendation to go to Harvard, found himself taking care of a man who was increasingly incapable of getting from A to B without assistance. “Lou always felt that he had to stay around and watch Delmore and take care of him,” said Shelley. “I think Lou began to find that a little tedious.”

      Meanwhile, Lou had initiated his own decline. Ever since he had been put on medication following the electroshock treatments of 1959, Lou had been an inveterate drug user. Or, to use his own description, a “smorgasbord schmuck.” If he wasn’t popping pills, he was inhaling pot, dropping acid, eating mushrooms, horning coke, or dropping Placidyls—not to mention bolting down enough booze to keep the Orange Bar in business around the clock. Now, for the first time, he added heroin to his drug menu, whereas previously he had only sold it.

      Shelley marked Lou’s downslide from the time he started to inject heroin. He had always been petrified by needles and said that he would never shoot any drugs into his veins. Once he began taking heroin, he insisted he could control it all the time and stop whenever he wanted to simply because he had elected to do so. Shelley recalled, “He was getting into heroin on and off. The experience was pretty horrifying to him and he was having some bad LSD trips too.”

      Shelley had no sympathy for Lou’s cries for help. However, Lou had gone into a decline when he realized that Shelley was not only not coming back to him, but was in fact living with two other adult men just three doors down from his apartment. On another occasion when she was sitting in the Orange Bar with her new lover and his Korean vet friends, an acolyte of Lou’s came racing in frantically telling her that Lou was having a really bad time. Although she fully expected that he might not make it through the night, Shelley sent back the reply, “If you send somebody over here to tell me that you’re dying, die!”

      Still, Shelley felt sorry for him. “Lou can’t have a good time, it’s not in his genes,” she stated later. “He feels that he doesn’t deserve it. The moment you say Lou’s okay, he thinks there’s something wrong with you. Because if you say he’s okay, then you don’t see how evil he is, you don’t see all the bad things. He can’t have a wonderful time any more than he can accept that people like him. That’s what’s so sad about Lou.”

      Swados, after Schwartz the most perceptive man Reed knew at university, was the first to note (in a conversation with a girlfriend a year later) that beneath Lou’s often waiflike desperation, his need to be mothered, existed a much tougher, harder, more realistic man. He possessed an ambition and drive of which very few people who knew him at Syracuse had any idea. The fact alone, for example, that he would continue to experiment with drugs for the next fifteen years and survive suggests that he was at heart not only a survivor, but a student of narcotics who took care to know what it was he was ingesting.

      ***

      The most important development in his senior year was literary. Lou leapt across a great gap when he switched from making the short story his primary form to song lyrics, taking his knowledge of the short story structure with him. In many ways Bob Dylan was a major influence on Lou in this decision as well as in his subsequent decision not to apply to the graduate writing program at Harvard, but to pursue his love of rock and roll as a career. Dylan not only showed him a way to write lyrics, he legitimized being a singer/songwriter with intellectual credentials. That was the vital point. Lou needed to be recognized intellectually. He was concerned about Delmore’s response to his decision; he didn’t want Delmore to think that he didn’t consider his words valuable. And yet, Delmore’s collapse may have freed him to journey into that region he had always aspired to—the combination of writing and rock-and-roll lyrics.

      “I thought, look, all these writers are writing about only a very small part of the human experience,” Reed pointed out. “Whereas a record could be like a novel, you could write about this. It was so obvious, it’s amazing everybody wasn’t doing it. Let’s take Crime and Punishment and turn it into a rock-and-roll song!

      “But if you’re going to talk about the greats, there is no one greater than Raymond Chandler. I mean, after reading Raymond Chandler and going on to someone else, it’s like eating caviar and then turning to some real inferior dish. Take the sensibility of Raymond Chandler or Hubert Shelby or Delmore Schwartz or Poe and put it to rock music.”

      Like any foray into oneself, writing proved to be more than exhilarating. It was, for Lou, a long and painful process. “I love writing,” Lou would tell an interviewer, “except that it’s excruciating. It’s a very strange process, I’ve never really understood it myself. But I’m available for, I’m there for, I try to make things as easy as possible for it. I just try and stay СКАЧАТЬ