Will Work for Drugs (10 page)
NT: Yeah, and ⦠that's it.
LL: I'm gonna quote you, from
The Last Opium Den
: “Enough of this profundity. The labor involved in its elucidation is far too great. You want enlightenment? Go get it yourself ⦠paradise has no words.” That's so beautiful. What do you know at fiftyâare you fifty now?
NT: I'm more than fifty.
LL: What do you know at fifty something that you wouldn't have admitted to yourself at twenty-five?
NT: Oh, well ⦠at twenty-five I never, ever, ever would have perceived of the value and the power of just being completely, openly honest. I would have been both afraid of it and also would think of it as being destructive to something. Now I realize that it's just the only fuckin' way. I also know now that I have a very palpable sense of life being finite, and therefore being less willing to sacrifice any of it to bullshit. I'm more aware of the main events, which is that every single breath, this very breath now, is really the only gift that we have. Without that, there's nothing. It's the most immense gift. That's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Also, I don't have to put up with anything I don't want to put up with. Fuck 'em. If it weren't for the fact that I can't stand the idea of being in jail, I would just go around shootin' people. Just to shut 'em up, you know.
LL: The problem with that thought, and I entertain it daily ⦠I just don't have enough fuckin' bullets.
NT: Just hearing myself say it, it reinforces how much I believe that. I'm glad that you somehow got me to articulate it. At this very moment while I feel half dead. Now I got half a smile on my weary face. I'm just gonna jump in the shower and ⦠I think ⦠go have my lunch. Then come back and collapse.
Bibliography: Nick Tosches
Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll
(1977)
Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story
(1982)
Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll: The Birth of Rock in the Wild Years before Elvis
(1984)
Power on Earth
(1986)
Cut Numbers
(1988)
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams
(1992)
Trinities
(1994)
Chaldea and I Dig Girls
(1999)
The Devil and Sonny Liston
(2000)
The Nick Tosches Reader
(2000)
Where Dead Voices Gather
(2001)
In the Hand of Dante
(2002)
The Last Opium Den
(2002)
King of the Jews: The Greatest Mob Story Never Told
(2005)
J
erry Stahl restores my faith in contemporary writing. His memoir
Permanent Midnight
detailed one of the most harrowing and hilarious journeys into degeneracy and drug addiction ever published. Stahl followed it with
PervâA Love Story
, a belly-slapping good time (at the expense of his own manhood) chronicling cringe-inducing pubescent sexual scenarios involving failed, fractured, and just plain fucked-up romantic encounters.
Plain Clothes Naked
comes on its heels, a fat contemporary detective noir whose punch line features a purloined polaroid of George W.'s nutsack. Brilliant.
In June of 1999 I had the pleasure of strapping Stahl to a plush red-velvet sofa in my living room for forty-five minutes of psychotherapy that left us both spent, soaked in sweat, convulsing in fever, and delirious with the opportunity to once more stroke each other's ego in a verbal tongue-to-brain fuck.
LL: After
Permanent Midnight,
did you feel you had more to live up to or more to live down? It was a huge revelation dealing with the worst low points in your own personal life.
JS: Neither. Just putting it out there in a way that seemed deeply remarkable and disturbo at the time, but as soon as you do it seems completely pedestrian. So all the shit that is shocking to Joe Square is Mickey Mouse to a whole other population. I don't think it's about living it up or down, it's about finding another disgusting quarry to mine.
LL: What do you think failed about the film version?
JS: I don't think it failed. I think it succeeded in what it was trying to do. I thought the acting was great, it was just a different kind of asshole than what's painted in the book. Once you take the money, I think you've just got to shut the fuck up.
LL: The many sides to our assholism ⦠Was it horrifying to know that your life was projected not only up on the big screen, but eventually would be invading other people's homes via cable TV?
JS: The horrifying thing is, is that it wasn't my life, it was somebody else's version of my life. So it was a relief that Jon Bon Jovi wasn't playing me and they didn't change the drug to ecstasy. There's no muscle, gland, or corner of the brain that's been evolved to deal with the fact that people are going to be staring at you over their bunions in their bed, at some really off portrayal of you. It's so disturbing and so weird that I don't even think about it ⦠It's somewhere between denial and oblivion.
LL: No matter how much we reveal in our writing and readings, I find the most satisfaction in gloating over the things people
don't
know ⦠Do you feel the same? You're exposing more in one book than most people have to deal with in their entire lifetime
JS: I'm exposing what seems like the truth at the time. I couldn't write
Permanent Midnight
now. Everything is completely different. I was ten minutes clean. My nerve ends were completely flapping in the wind.
LL: Do you think writing was a huge part of your recovery?
JS: Who the fuck knows? It got me out of the bathroom down the hall from the queens-next-door nightmare I was living in on Sunset Boulevard. When I didn't have a place of my own. On the corner of Crack and Eightball ⦠taking a shit at Musso & Frank's because I didn't have a toilet. It got me out of there.
LL: Did sex change a lot after you got clean?
JS: Absolutely.
LL: Better or worse?
JS: If you'd never fucked anyone without being totally loaded, it's really terrifying. There's no place to hide. So on one level it's terrifically hot because you're feeling everything. On the other hand, it's paralyzingly disturbing because you can't chemically stage set the experience. I had to fuck people for money, shelter, food, drugs. I was a chemically altered whore in a lot of ways. Then I stopped being a whore, stopped being chemically altered, and I wasn't sure what the fuck was underneath it. If anything. The no-place-to-hide-ness of it is probably spectacularly healthy for that reason.
LL: What's so amazing, especially about your readings and the details in
Perv
, is that most men spend their entire lives bragging about the sexual prowess they will never possess, yet you willingly expose some of the most excruciating and humiliating sexual experiences of your life. You must be a sexual master.
JS: I wonder if shame has become my new heroin. It really is embarrassing in one way, but at the same time you get strung out on revelation. On saying the unsayable. I'm sure you know that. It's another kind of drug. I had a woman come up to me and say,
I can't believe you said your penis at rest was the size of â¦
What did I say?
LL: An acorn.
JS: An acorn at rest. And she said the same thing:
You must be really confident
.
LL: Has it made it easier to score with women? Are they lining up to throw down?
JS: I said,
Let's focus on the phrase “at rest.”
It's the accordion factor. Let's march that out right now. As a wise woman once said,
Jerry, you have nothing to be ashamed of ⦠You're a hard average
. I was so proud at that moment. At fifteen or sixteen, that's how it is. The reason it was so fresh to me is because there's a cliché about recovery from dope or whatever substance, and it's true. You stop developing emotionally at the age you start using every day. Okay, so I wash ashore clean and I may be in my forties, but in my head I'm feeling what guys are feeling at fourteen. Which is a weird vulnerability. When you stay hard on a speedball for seven hours, your standards are a little warped back in the real world. At my age, you'll blow your prostate out your fucking ear.
LL: Especially if the person you're screwing isn't on the same chemical high.
JS: I was always with straight women. But the only women I ever actually had relationships with were ex-hookers, exâdope fiends, horrifying survivors of God knows what kind of abuse, because they're the only people who, in my state of exposed nerve endings, I can actually be with. I fall in love with their pain, they fall in love with mine. And that's where the sex comes from.
LL: Pain is the great divide. Those who have walked barefoot into the mouth of the volcano and those who haven't. And if you haven't, you're just not on the same level of understanding.
JS: That brings it back to something you asked before about revealing all this. I'm the luckiest motherfucker in the world. Because having done that, I don't need to hide. Anybody that can relate to me will, anybody who doesn't isn't in my face. The groupies I would get, the one-in-a-hundred women who would actually want to be locked in an elevator with me are so bent anyway that I can fucking relax.
Bibliography: Jerry Stahl
Permanent Midnight: A Memoir
(1995)
PervâA Love Story
(1999)
Plainclothes Naked
(2001)
I, Fatty: A Novel
(2004)
Love Without: Stories
(2007)
Pain Killers
(2009)
THE VIOLENT DISBELIEF OF RON ATHEY
I
f the inside of your head gets pummeled with enough emotional blunt-force trauma to splinter the psyche, you develop ways to punish the body, that fleshy prison which houses the pain.
When the agony of life's relentless frustration is steeped in the malignant tyranny of deception and abuse, and the ones closest to you deny not only their culpability, but worship at the feet of false idols to justify the perpetuation of their violence, your trusty friend the razor will never tell a single lie.
If the sight of blood brought forth from your own hand spells an almost immediate relief, a sublime release of pressure, consider yourself a member in an elite coven who strive to decode the mystery of self-sacrifice. Whereby a violation you now control can provide a temporary satiation, a stifling of the nauseating screams and endless insinuations of a world turned inside out.
The undeniable aroma of skin melting under the cigarette's ugly kiss localizes the all-consuming daily irritants until it fills yellow with pus, leaks out, drains, scabs over, and is eventually picked clean, revealing a fresh growth of virgin pink. As the wounds heal and the blistered skin renews with life, these marks of identity play as time capsule which can further separate you from the original sinner, the antagonist responsible for your infection, a soul sickness born of pain and loss.
The cycle of abuse changes course only once you have decided to own your self-flagellation. Not simply as revenge or repetition of the crimes committed against you, but in celebration as ritual to all that has been will-fully overcome.
This is the first commandment of the new testament in accordance with the Bible of Pope Ron Athey.
Throughout the 1990s, Athey's Torture Trilogy was both a pageant to and a lurid slur against classic religious imagery and its relationship to the eternal themes of death and disease. The 1991 production of
Martyrs and
Saints
illustrated the cruel and impersonal nature of supposed “caregivers.” Three nurses, lips sutured closed, lead three mummified bodies on gurnies into the operating theater where the bodies are violated with enemas, specula, and genital piercing.
1994's
Four Scenes in a Harsh Life
opens with an androgynous St. Sebastian pierced with arrows and covered with oil. Athey acting as Holy Woman proceeds to anoint the audience with the saint's greasy runoff. The second act, entitled “Steakhouse Motherfuckers,” is a twisted pantomime to “asshole redneck culture.” A sleazy stripclub, drag kings lining the gangplank, howling in macho delight as a trio of gaudy strippers parade obscenely by. The last temptress is portrayed by Divinity Fudge, a 300-pound black man in drag who the frenzied patrons attack in what Camille Paglia has coined “the giddy abandon of a gang rape.” The third act, which reclaims violence as ritual by “taking from the wounds and giving to the audience,” involves a series of deep cuts meticulously patterned on Divinity's back, whose blood is blotted onto paper, strung, sometimes over a hundred feet of clotheslines, and sent floating above the audience. Athey follows by performing a solo suicide scene, inserting sixteen large hypodermic needles in a geometric pattern up his arm and attacking his face with a needle the size of a stiletto, attempting to reclaim, through passion and ritual, the violations he has previously committed against himself in anger and frustration.
1997's
Deliverance
examined faith healing and the Filipino phenomenon of psychic surgery. On a stage covered in hundreds of pounds of dirt, three men on crutches come to see the Healer. They end up suspended on meat hooks to be bled while undergoing simulated surgical castration via genital stapling. Mummification and burial follows. Throughout the performance, a parade of images are employed, playing on themes culled from Santeria, Buddhism, Catholicism, and Judaism. Even Kali makes an appearance, interrupting a scene of double sodomy. In a light-hearted moment, the goddess severs the offending dildo in half with a pair of garden shears.
For the past five years, Athey has been focusing on
Joyce,
a multimedia theatrical presentation whose premise, like most of his previous work, summarizes the insane beliefs and outrageous behaviors of his family's religious perversity.
Raised in an extremely dysfunctional Pentecostal household, the young Ronnie Lee was sainted as a prophet messiah who proselytized in tongues, and whose tears were coveted by the entire congregation. The adoration bestowed upon him in the revival tent did little to alleviate the daily nightmares heaped upon him as an unwitting victim of his mother's schizophrenia, his aunt's hyper-sexualized insanity, and his grandmother's channeling of otherworldly specters.
Joyce
debuted at the prestigious Kampnagel Theater in Hamburg, Germany in 2002. As Athey's most accomplished work, the stark beauty and emotional impact of this production all but defies description. Three immense screens project images of the young Athey self-mutilating, his aunt Vena undergoing an agonizing Betadine douche turned fist fuck for Jesus, his high-strung mother Joyce squirming and maniacally lint-picking, and his grandmother Annie Lou summoning the ectoplasmic angels whose beseeching shrill is exorcised in a series of automatic writing and action paintings.
The stage is platformed above the video screens and divided into four rooms where the main characters' repetitious compulsions escalate into an orgiastic frenzy. Mother Joyce, unable to withstand another moment of the voices within or the chaotic surround, smashes through the plasterboard walls while suspended upside down. Joyce has for the duration of the performance been trapped in a makeshift one-room insane asylum. The video screens vortex Joyce into infinity, an endless, unbelievably moving, visual spiral which reveals the vulnerability of body as prison.
Ron Athey forces the body to transcend its confines. His brilliance manifests as exorcism of, and for, the cauterizing of his own pain, and by pushing the boundaries of endurance through artistic expression, he shares his compassionate epiphany: We all need to break free from the shackles placed upon the individual by society, family, religion, and gender. And possibly through the catharsis of performance and ritual, we might finally be able to lay to rest the demons who've sent us in search of the respite only a knife or needle could at one time provide.
LL: How old were you when the spirit moved you to start preaching?
RA: Out of the four kids that were raised in our house, I was the only one that was interested in religion. My family didn't like churches ⦠because they were too boring. At least they were right about something. We only liked revival meetings, so we were like church junkies in a way, going from revival tent to revival tent. Anywhere from the middle of the Mojave Desert, to Rosemead, to downtown Los Angeles. We lived in Pomona, about forty miles east of L.A. We were always on a journeyâto see someone with stigmata, or someone who specialized in exorcisms. There was one church we went to where I felt like I could receive the gifts of the spirit ⦠which is speaking in tongues. I was nine when it busted out of me.
LL: What busted out of you?
RA: The gloss-a-lalia! My own demons. I thought I was filled with something from outside of me. Something took over. I left my body. It was like being high. I was having an epileptic seizure while screaming at the top of my lungs.
LL: And you were being filled. That's the point of fevered religion.
RA: I still have it! I was a tiny, over-emotional, tender creature and I remember being in this church. I started crying. So the minister took his white shirt off and tore it into squares, and put a tear on each square. And everyone lined up for one of my tears. So talk about grandiosity and self-importance! And the contrast of it ⦠People were lining up for one of my tears. Meanwhile, I was going to an all-black school, in the poorest fucking neighborhood. My mother was in a mental institution and if I ever did anything wrong I was threatened to be put in a foster home. So it's like,
You're special, we love you!
and then,
You're about to LEAVE
.
LL: No special treatment at home for the little saint.
RA: Maybe compared to my brothers and sisters. My sisters had it worse. In creating
Joyce,
I wanted to show how sick it can be when women create a power structure. When they would bring my mother home from the institution, she would hear my sisters talking about her in the middle of the night and pull 'em out of bed by their hair. Out of bunk beds.
CLUNK
âon the concrete floor. My older sister was kind of good-looking, but she looked like someone threw her teeth at her from across the room. My grandmother would hold her by the chin and start slapping her face just for being ugly, until they both fell down. Really twisted shit. Instead of that sister being fucked up about her face, my younger sister went and had her entire face sawed apart then put back together. She had a half-inch of skull sawed out because you could see her gums when she smiled. She had a rib removed and her lower jaw extended.
LL: When did you decide body manipulation would become part of your artistic expression?
RA: I started self-mutilating at fifteen when I couldn't understand the concept of Jesus anymore. You're crying, and there's no one to pray to. I stuck tweezers in a light socket trying to wake my body up. I did cuttings with razor blades. Fingers, hands, arms. I would slam my head into concrete walls and floors. I felt like a numb piece of meat. That's when my head started ringing. I felt like I was just going to float away. Once I injured myself I would flatline a little bit so that I could go on with the next day.
LL: Is this when you began to ritualize the high of self-abuse?
RA: I think it's because I was exposed to S & M bars before the whole '70s thing was over. You'd go in and there'd be all these guys under the bar just drinking piss. Somebody in chaps is getting fucked in the ass. Someone with a hard-on getting strung up on a chain-link fence.
LL: And that made you feel right at home?
RA: I felt that's what I needed. Structure. I never wanted to belong. I was never a “boy” in that scene. I never joined it. But I would go there and get drunk and leave with someone or a couple people, get tied up, and be set on fire. We would run the whole gamut. I'd get shot up with homemade crank, feel like I had a stroke, then shit in some old man's mouth on a toilet seat on stilts. And there was NO LIMIT.
LL: When you first got into that scene before you understood the possibility of reclaiming your trauma and ritualizing it, did you feel any guilt over the transgressions you were committing?
RA: I had no guilt whatsoever. I wanted someone to fucking kill me. And it felt good. I would go off with anyone and go anywhere. In the early '80s, I got into the Hitler Youth look. I remember going to bars and realizing that I had a different kind of power. Instead of someone sleeping with this weird boy all of a sudden, I was the top and someone was giving me a hundred bucks to kick him in the head with my boots on. I was experimenting and wide open to feeling everything. Somehow I had no taboos at all. I wasn't afraid of blood. I wasn't afraid of shit. I wasn't afraid of piss. I just walked into everything like a child, without any hangups. I have more hangups now than I had then.
LL: When did you stop using drugs?
RA: By the time I was twenty-five, I was dying. Too much heroin and methadone ⦠and Valium. My first addiction. I was a trash bucket and I did so much LSD and crystal meth and speed when I was younger that I actually couldn't take any stimulant. If I did coke I'd be climbing the walls. Heroin was the end of the road for me. My nervous system was shot. Every time I'd do speed, I'd start hyperventilating the minute it hit my blood.
LL: How did you progress from sticking tweezers into electrical sockets, shitting in people's mouths, to body modification and performance?
RA: A lot of leather bars had piercing salons. The Gauntlet had opened in L.A. in the mid-'70s. Genital piercing in the backâmy first encounter with expressing your freakishness through mutilation or adornment. When I was on acid, I would just take broken glass or tear a can open and cut myself. I wanted to feel blood pouring on me. And I would start cutting other people without asking. Here we are, twenty years later!
Joyce
was like pulling teeth for me. I had been writing notes on it for five years. The challenge was in making a work so personal about not only my schizophrenic mother but also three other schizophrenic women. And how it becomes one shared disease. All happening in an insane religious household where a twisted sexuality which revolves around red-hot Betadine douches and five long fingernails up the cunt is the daily order.
LL: You were only a child when this happened. Were you in the same room when this was going on?
RA: It happened in the bathroom at least once a week, during my whole life when I lived at home. The women in my family were obsessed by the idea that “you're filthy.” And you probably are after a while because you don't have any natural enzymes left after you've rinsed yourself out, scrubbed yourself raw, and have had your mother jerk you off until you come, making you feel dirty and ashamed.
LL: When in reality the filth is coming from the victimizer who then drains you of your natural defense against their disease.
RA: Exactly the point. Performance as cleansing ritual from the disease of my mother.
