Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story. Victor Bockris

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      Creedmore State Mental Hospital. (Victor Bockris)

      Into this unit one early summer day walked the cocky, troubled Lou. He was escorted through a labyrinth of corridors, unaware, he later claimed, that his first psychiatric treatment session at the hospital would consist of volts of electricity pulsing through his brain. Each door he passed through would be unlocked by a guard, then locked again behind him. Finally he was locked into the electroshock unit and made to change into a scanty hospital robe. As he sat uncomfortably in the waiting room with a group of people who looked to him like vegetables, Lou caught his first glimpse of the operating room. A thick, milky white metal door studded with rivets swung open revealing an unconscious victim who looked dead. The body was wheeled out on a stretcher and into a recovery room by a stone-faced nurse. Lou suddenly found himself next in line for shock treatment.

      He was wheeled into the small, bare operating room, furnished with a table next to a hunk of metal from which two thick wires dangled. He was strapped onto the table. Lou stared at the overhead fluorescent light bars as the sedative started to take effect. The nurse applied a salve to his temples and stuck a clamp into his mouth so that he would not swallow his tongue. Seconds later, conductors at the end of the thick wires were attached to his head. The last thing that filled his vision before he lapsed into unconsciousness was a blinding white light.

      In the 1950s, the voltage administered to each patient was not adjusted, as it is today, for size or mental condition. Everybody got the same dose. Thus, the vulnerable seventeen-year-old received the same degree of electricity as would have been given to a heavyweight axe murderer. The current searing through Lou’s body altered the firing pattern of his central nervous system, producing a minor seizure, which, although horrid to watch, in fact caused no pain since he was unconscious. When Lou revived several minutes later, however, a deathly pallor clung to his mouth, he was spitting, and his eyes were tearing and red. Like a character in a story by one of his favorite writers, Edgar Allan Poe, the alarmed patient now found himself prostrate in a dim waiting room under the gaze of a stern nurse.

      “Relax, please!” she instructed the terrified boy. “We’re only trying to help you. Will someone get another pillow and prop him up. One, two, three, four. Relax.” As his body stopped twitching, the clamp was removed, and Lou regained full consciousness. Over the next half hour, as he struggled to return, he was panicked to discover his memory had gone. According to experts, memory loss was an unfortunate side effect of shock therapy, although whatever brain changes occurred were considered reversible, and persisting brain damage was rare. As Reed left the hospital, he recalled, he thought that he had “become a vegetable.”

      “You can’t read a book because you get to page seventeen and you have to go right back to page one again. Or if you put the book down for an hour and went back to pick up where you started, you didn’t remember the pages you read. You had to start all over. If you walked around the block, you forgot where you were.” For a man with plans to become, among other things, a writer, this was a terrible threat.

      The aftereffects of shock therapy put Lou, as Ken Kesey wrote in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, the gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying.” Lou’s nightmares were dominated by the sad, off-white color of hospitals. As he put it in a poem, “How does one fall asleep / When movies of the night await, / And me eternally done in.” Now he was afraid to go to sleep. Insomnia would become a lifelong habit.

      Lou suffered through the eight weeks of shock treatments haunted by the fear that in an attempt to obliterate the abnormal from his personality, his parents had destroyed him. The death of the great jazz vocalist Billie Holiday in July, and the haunting refrain of Paul Anka’s No. 1 teen-angst ballad, “Lonely Boy,” heightened his sense of distance and loss.

      According to Lou, the shock treatments helped eradicate any feeling of compassion he might have had and handed him a fragmented approach. “I think everybody has a number of personalities,” he told a friend, to whom he showed a small notebook in which he had written, “‘From Lou #3 to Lou #8—Hi!” You wake up in the morning and say, ‘Wonder which of them is around today?’ You find out which one and send him out. Fifteen minutes later, someone else shows up. That’s why if there’s no one left to talk to, I can always listen to a couple of them talking in my head. I can talk to myself.”

      At the end of the eight-week treatment, Lou was put on strong tranquilizing medication. “I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS. I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS. I HATE PSYCHIATRISTS,” he would later write in one of his best poems, “People Must Have to Die for the Music.” But in his heart he felt betrayed. If his parents had really loved him, they would never have allowed the shock treatments.

      ***

      Lewis Alan Reed was born on March 2, 1942, at Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Sidney George Reed, a diminutive, black-haired man who had changed his name from Rabinowitz, was a tax accountant. His mother, Toby Futterman Reed, seven years younger than her husband, a former beauty queen, was a housewife. Both parents were native New Yorkers who in a decade would move to the upper-middle class of Freeport, Long Island. СКАЧАТЬ