Lucking Out (20 page)

Lester went into a self-described hermit phase his first few years in New York, a holing up many people do when they move to the city and don’t have nine-to-fives. Lester’s work habits worked against him in his efforts to turn total pro and escape the rathskeller of rock journalism, at least as a full-time address. It wasn’t that he was lazy, anything but, but he wrote in key-clacking Kerouacian binges, cannonballing through the paper hoops of deadlines and then spilling more copy than they could use. He was less adapted or temperamentally suited for the sort of fine carpentry and assembly that a more structured piece required, too often winging it with hot-rod flames flying out of his ass and the streetlights rushing by, or so his prose read. It was said that he took the advance for a picture book about Blondie and buggered off the text in forty-eight hours, though some say he had sprinted seventy-two; whatever time ended up on the final clock, the result was a nonbook that didn’t have the discursive, loose-thread-pulling comedy of, say, Geoff Dyer doing everything he diligently could to procrastinate on his D. H. Lawrence biography, or Nicholson Baker embarking on his Updike meditation despite having barely more than smidgens of Updike’s industrious output, fiddling instead with all the silkworm ways Updike has infiltrated his brain. Even such serpentine paths take more discursive leisure than Lester had at his deadline-heavy disposal. Instead, the bigger the project, the bigger the noise-to-sound ratio, his glints of genius lost in the stew. Writing for Christgau at the
Voice
, Lester did superb, lively, often hilarious stuff, but it didn’t get him an upgrade to the first-class compartment. As plum assignments remained out of reach, Lester decided he wanted to step away from the typewriter, seize the microphone, and make like the howling moon.

It was like running off to join the circus without having to run very far. Lester was already a performance artist on the page, an acrobat with crazy bounces, and there was precedence for rock writers getting into the act. Greil Marcus and co-conspirators had recorded a spoof bootleg album called
The Masked Marauders
in which a fake Mick Jagger blues’d it up on that modern lament “I Can’t Get No Nookie,” Lenny Kaye was a journalist and editor who bean-stalked into one of Patti Smith’s transmission towers after Patti herself made the hop from print to poetry reciting to “Piss Factory,” and Cleveland’s Peter Laughner, a friend and fan of Lester’s, wrote for
Creem
and played guitar for a number of bands, his early death of drug-related acute pancreatitis at the rotten age of twenty-four inspiring one of Lester’s best pieces from the heart:

(I had friendly hellos with Laughner, who was a big fan of Television, and was shocked during the concert intermission for something at the Academy of Music when I entered the men’s room and a voice reverberated, “Hey, Wolcott!!!” issuing from someone unrecognizable. “It’s me, Peter.” “Oh, hi, sorry, you caught me off guard.” What had caught me off guard was his smile, which was missing several front teeth since we last spoke, an almost hillbilly grin that hollowed out his cheeks and that I thought might be the result of heroin use, since junkies crave sweets like crazy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood, though, joviality not being something most junkies display, so I didn’t know what to think, my drug-addict knowledge being almost entirely conjectural.)

I don’t want to accuse Lester of cynicism, because other people’s motives are always a murky soup, but I do think there was a dollop of calculation in his decision to hit the CBGB’s stage and unload both barrels, a decision partly derived from the carnival blur of seeing all these bands that he thought sucked to the rotting rafters grandiosely flailing around up there, figuring, “If these tadpoles can do it, why can’t I? I’ve got as much gall as they do, maybe more.” His boots were also following in the footsteps of Patti’s ballet slippers in seeking to translate rants and reveries into shamanistic incantations, though where Patti massaged her spirit fingers in the air as if summoning the ghosts of everyone she had read, Lester seemed intent on being more of a barrelhouse bellower, a rough blueprint of the profane preacher-man Sam Kinison would uncork. Lester’s rock-auteur itch fell somewhere between a lark and a headfirst lunge, and there wasn’t the sense that he was willing to work at it—it was attention he seemed to crave, and a shot at asteroid impact. Lester’s recording and performing phase is so well documented in Jim DeRogatis’s
Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic
that I only want to mention an incident from that flurry that laid a lane divider between us.

It had to do with his obsession with Idi Amin, the vicious, dictatorial president of Uganda in the seventies, whose full name was Idi Amin Dada, which must have appealed to Lester’s surrealistic humor, how could it not. Torture and genocide flourished under Amin, who was also rumored to practice cannibalism; in his insane caprices and delusional grandeur, Amin was like something out of an EC horror comic crossed with
Heart of Darkness
—a monster-buffoon. It wasn’t that Lester
approved
of Amin—he would later bracket him with Hitler as a prodigy of inhumanity—but he would often start scatting about Amin, and the more he scatted, the more it became an impersonation, a tour of the palace of Idi Amin’s babbling mind accompanied by beer burps. I never found this particular channel on Lester’s radio band of funny voices a diverting romp, not because I was offended by its
Ubu Roi
shtick—I just didn’t find it comical or satirical enough. At times Lester’s voice veered into Bela Lugosi territory, not that anybody expected him to be Gore Vidal’s match as a master of mimicry. This serves as the preamble to what happened after the first or second show of Lester’s that I caught, when at some point during his set he started with the Idi Amin stuff, and even more grotesquely exaggerated onstage for an audience, his verbal blackface took on minstrelsy overtones that he may not have intended but served no put-on purpose if he had. Afterward, he asked me what I thought of the show, and I said something along the lines of “Not quite white enough,” my admittedly maladroit, overly dry ironic way of suggesting he might want to tone down the Idi Amin rap. I should have been more plain and explicit, but he knew I didn’t mean he should literally act more white onstage, as if he had ruffled my Valkyrie wings. The matter would have remained a minor nuisance between us if he had not written something for one of the rock mags quoting what I said, minus the context, with the requisite “sniff”—
“Not quite white enough,” sniffed James Wolcott
, as if I had been nibbling a buttered scone or something. Well, such is journalese, of which I’ve committed plenty of my own infractions.

But it became a bit rich when Lester took to the pages of the
Voice
to pound horseshoes about the malignant racism he discovered behind the thin, sliced smirks of downtown hipsterdom and the punk scene. Called “The White Noise Supremacists,” a muckraking title that evoked swastikas, skinheads, and a raised fist clutching a thunderbolt, the article peeled back the black leather jacket of punk to bare the scrawny rib cage of hip fascism. “This scene and the punk stance in general are riddled with self-hate, which is always reflexive, and anytime you conclude that life stinks and the human race mostly amounts to a pile of shit, you’ve got the perfect breeding ground for fascism.” Although it scored some palpable hits with the scattering spray of its bird shot, the article won Lester few assenting allies in the punk scene and put off many more with its heavy icing of bad faith. In
Let It Blurt
, DeRogatis quotes some of the offending jokers cited by Lester, who felt he had taken something offhand and stupid they had said and hemstitched it into a damning exhibit, or mistook a mocking gesture for a genuine declaration. What truly riled people in the slag pits was Lester’s preachy fervor about racism after running his own mouth off the road so often. He was a muckraker who had done more than his own share of mucking. He used the
n
word and similar felicities more than once in my presence, and although he may not have been the worst offender, I never heard anything comparable out of, say, members of Talking Heads or from the other rock journalists on the beat, apart from one who was a close buddy of Lester’s. And although I heard the occasional anti-Jew comment at CBGB’s, it didn’t come from regulars but from boroughs kids trying to sound Scorsese-movie tough. As Steven Lee Beeber’s book
The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s
(a valuable, invigorating history and eye-opener, despite its Halloween title) documents, CBGB’s would have been inconceivable without the Jewish show-business tradition that traveled from Al Jolson to Tin Pan Alley to Lenny Bruce to Lou Reed to Hilly Kristal himself, the patriarchal founder. “Joey Ramone, a figure straight out of Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
, Richard Hell, a Jewish mother’s worst nightmare, and Lenny Kaye, a kind of post-1960s Jewish mystic, rose up, ready to take over the world.” Even punk outfits everyone assumed were Italian, such as the Ramones and the Dictators, were Jewish creations—parodies of guido swagger. So “a breeding ground for fascism” CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City were not, despite a flaunting flirtation with transgressive Nazi chic by some, though not by punk’s originators.

It wasn’t that I disbelieved Lester’s mea culpa over his own use of the word, though you have to wonder if his conscience wouldn’t have been so stricken had he not been overheard. As he related in “The White Noise Supremacists”: “I was in Bleecker Bob’s the other night, drunk and stoned, when a black couple walked in. They asked for some disco record, Bob didn’t have it of course, a few minutes went by, and reverting in the haze to my Detroit days I said something about such and such band or music having to do with ‘niggers.’ A couple more minutes went by. Then Bob said, ‘You know what, Lester? When you said that, those two people were standing right behind you.’ ” But everyone knew he was given to passionate displays of big-heart declaration that he could reverse on a dime, blowing his horn in the other direction. He believed what he believed the moment he believed it, but his fluctuations were more jagged than those of most contrarians, depending on what was fueling him. And nobody appreciated the way he portrayed punk musicians and fans as a bunch of George Grosz grotesques whose defective anatomies flayed bare their twisted values. “So many of the people around the CBGB’s and Max’s scene have always seemed emotionally if not outright physically crippled—you see speech impediments, hunchbacks, limps, but most of all an overwhelming spiritual flatness.” Expecting hills and dales of spiritual plenitude exuding from the patrons of late-night clubs is a losing proposition, and almost anybody can look like a bughouse freak when your eyeballs are soaking like a couple of martini olives.

Which is not to say Lester didn’t have the capacity to change and climb out of his immersion tank of alcohol, cough syrup, and seaweed-choked moods. It’s to Lester’s credit that he did clean up his act and may have been on the road to recovery and perhaps eventual sobriety before his internal house of cards collapsed. The angel of mercy who presided over his makeover was a Southern woman whom I was dating during the period, a blue-eyed, fine-cheek-boned, auburn-haired sweetheart with a mild voice and a wild streak that didn’t show itself in public. Within the slashy confines of CBGB’s she couldn’t have appeared more demure and self-effacing, as if she had taken a wrong turn on her way to the cotillion and ended up doing missionary work among the permanently hungover in the casualty ward. In DeRogatis’s biography he writes that Lester became “a player in a love triangle” between me and the woman whose initials are the same as mine, but it wasn’t really quite that way, it was hardly as
Jules and Jim
as all that, doesn’t matter now. There’s no question, however, that her velvet coaxings and grooming tips had a turnaround influence on Lester, a dramatic before-and-after effect. The next time I saw Lester was, appropriately enough, at CBGB’s, where he no longer lumbered around as if having fallen asleep in the laundry hamper. Gone were the usual promotional rock T-shirt that had been through the Punic Wars and occasionally used as a table mop and the baggy jeans that helped inform an unkind article in the
Voice
(with incriminating photos) about Lester’s slob-dom in which he was described as “a walking dirt bomb.” Now he looked spruce, round cheeked rather than rubber faced, his hair neatly trimmed and his complexion unglazed with booze-damp, wearing a sweater—a sweater! in CBGB’s!—that looked as if he were readying for a weekend at the lodge spent with the crackling of autumn leaves and fireplace logs. He looked a lot like me, actually, a cousin once removed. We exchanged glances that fell somewhere between sheepish and so-what, and that was it. I didn’t intend this to be one of those years-long grudges so beloved by the more militant grievance-hoarders of the
Voice
(and later,
The New Yorker
—some of those passive-aggressive infighters kept the snubbing disdain in the freezer section for
decades
). In time we would have shrugged a mutual let-bygones-be-bygones and chitchatted like normal people comparing notes on the latest rock-scene follies; the woman we both dated was such a deft diplomat and tension defuser that at some point she would have maneuvered us into a peace settlement before our foggy egos could object. But that particular night, I just wasn’t in the mood to be nice.