Will Work for Drugs (9 page)
The Masters whose subjects not unlike myself were forced by circumstances beyond their control into playing victim at the hands of cruel gods and vicious monsters whose only offering of salvation beyond this tortured existence was in the knowledge that a suffering that wounds beyond the shallow exterior of flesh and boneâpenetrating through the multiple levels of epidermis into and beyond every fiber of your being, an agony from which no solitary moment without would ever again be completeâis offered up in loving submission to a greater being. A being with no equal. Whose godlike powers and omnipotent understanding, no matter how cruelly projected, or simultaneously you are rejected from it, is reward unto itself. A being who in my case has disappeared completely from my life, appearing only in visions as apparition and savior.
B
orn in 1928 in the Badlands of Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jr. stomped a new asshole in the face of literature with his first novel
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Published in 1964 and committed to film in 1990, it remains one of the most harrowing and influential works of American literature. With each consecutive masterpieceâ
The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream
,
Song of the Silent Snow,
and
The Willow Tree
âSelby forced his readers into emotional battlecades where obsession, violence, and madness colored the scars bearing witness to lessons learned the hard way. He died in April 2004 from chronic lung disease.
This interview was conducted under interrogation lights in Selby's Los Angeles bachelor pad in 2001.
LL: Your books have inspired the last three generations of writers, myself included ⦠Did writing save your life?
HS: I don't doubt it, in probably more than one way. The basic thing was it gave me a purpose. It gave me a reason to bother living ⦠I started writing because I wanted to do something with my life before I died. Because I kept dying. It became a way of life. I think that was the most important thing. Everybody needs some reason to live. There may not be a reason for this life, but we all need a reason to live. It has a very therapeutic value to it ⦠If I wouldn't have written, I might have exploded, who the hell knows â¦
LL: Writing as release valve ⦠Blow off steam in the pressure cooker ⦠When and why did you leave New York?
HS: 1965 ⦠there was a job offer. In retrospect, I was just trying to get away from
me
⦠I was just out of my head ⦠in all kinds of trouble, so I came out here, but of course I brought me with me. I always do. I can't seem to leave me behind ⦠So I stayed in California till '78, went back east till '83, and I've been here since then.
LL: Do you miss it?
HS: Very, very much ⦠You're born and raised in a city, then you live in a place like L.A., it's not even a suburb ⦠it's just a big nothing. But the New York that I miss doesn't exist anymore. Physically it's gone, plus the peopleâthat's what really makes the memoriesâare now all over the place, if they're still alive. One day I just decided I would enjoy this town for what it has instead of bitching about what it hasn't.
LL: There's a real dynamic between the East and West Coast. A definite East Coast snobbery. The basis of our reality is so different. It doesn't get much more real than withstanding the battlefields of Brooklyn, especially coming up as you did in the 1930s and '40s ⦠You enlisted in the Merchant Marinesâwhy?
HS: It only lasted a couple of years before I got sick. I always wanted to go to sea, there was a war going on, and it became easy for people to lie about their age. Who knows how many millions of kids did ⦠I was fifteen when I first started in the New York City Harbor. At sixteen I started sailing to Europe. That was 1945-6. In September of 1946 I got pulled off the ship, they said I was going to die.
LL: Most people who caught TB at that time didn't survive.
HS: The stress of the war, the hygiene conditions, lack of nutrition ⦠I was in the hospital for about four years. I had ten ribs cut out, the whole story â¦
LL: Did you read a lot?
HS: That's when I started reading. Mickey Spillane, all the shoot-'em-ups. You could read a couple a day.
LL: Was
The Room
inspired by time actually spent incarcerated?
HS: Yeah â¦
LL: So, if you weren't tortured enough by having TB, multiple operations, and being incarcerated in a hospital for four years â¦
HS: Well, I didn't realize it at the time, but I became institutionalized ⦠Any time the world became too much, I could always end up in an institution. The great thing about institutions is that you can bitch and moan and everybody agrees with you.
Yeah, we've all been screwed
⦠There's no responsibilities. You don't have to worry about anything. Except it interferes with your freedom.
LL: Drug bust?
HS: I got busted in September of '67 for heroin. Boiled down to possession or driving under the influence. Out here in L.A.
LL: How hard was it to get
Last Exit to Brooklyn
published?
HS: One night I was down at the Cedar Tavern, where we all used to hang out and Amiri Baraka [poet, political activist] suggested I try Sterling Lord, who was Jack Kerouac's agent. I sent them a manuscript, they called me back and said,
I think we can make money her
e. He gave it to Barney Rosset at Grove Press, who at that time was probably one of the greatest publishers in the country, and they published it.
LL: What was your advance?
HS: I think maybe a few hundred bucks â¦
LL: Did you hang out with the Beats?
HS: No.
LL: Did they interest you?
HS: Not really ⦠I read one or two of Jack's books.
LL: You're occasionally painted into the same corner as the Beats. What's the difference between you and them?
HS: When they talk about the Beats, they're talking about forty or fifty different writers. What I disagree with is the people who called themselves Beatniks had the idea that if they just put words on paper, it was good. No technique, no discipline, no craft, no art. Just “
I did it
.” If you picked up an instrument and tooted or threw paint on something, then that's Art. I just don't believe that.
LL:
The Willow Tree
⦠Last time we spoke you referred to it as a sixteen-year incubation ⦠Relief at last? The longest pregnancy on record?
HS: I don't know about that, but I can sure look an elephant in the eye with that one. It was very difficult. The end of something and the beginning of something else. I had to break through somehow. I had the book clearly in mind since 1983. But when I actually started writing, I'd write for a few weeks, then one day I'd get up to go inside and write and I'd get close to the door, but something would just pick me up and throw me out of the room. Sometimes I'd have to try for a few weeks just to get in the room. The actual writing took maybe six months, but it happened over a period of many years. Each time I did get back to work, I had to write my way back into the rhythm of the book because there might be six months to a year between writing sessions. It was originally 700 pages. I had to cut out about 300 pages. It was a strange, painful experience. The most painful book to write.
LL: The main theme of
The Willow Tree
is that in the face of desperation and violence, one man who has overcome the nightmare of his life and has survived is trying with all his strength to not relinquish hope. Was it difficult as a writer who concentrates on the darker side of life to detail redemptive themes in a way you as a reader can respect?
HS: The actual writing was not the problem â¦
LL: Just the ghost in the doorway �
HS: It might be as simple and obvious as my past had me by the fruits and didn't want me to do this, didn't want my freedom. It tried to prevent me from breaking loose from the past.
LL: When were you the happiest?
HS: Before I was born â¦
LL: In the womb?
HS: No, no ⦠that was horrible ⦠That's when I started to die â¦
LL: Torture begins in the womb.
HS: That's right, man! I started to die thirty-six hours before I was born. By the time I was born, it was hopeless, I was blue from cyanosis, I had a couple kinds of brain damage, my head was out of shape, it was just extraordinary ⦠My mother had toxemia, she didn't know what to do about breast feeding, the doctor said,
Don't worry, he'll eventually suck out all the poison
⦠So that's how I started life ⦠pissed off â¦
LL: THE MAN WHO REFUSED TO DIE ⦠Are you a dirty old man?
HS: Am I old? I guess I am ⦠I'm seventy-one ⦠I was born a dirty old man.
Bibliography: Hubert Selby Jr.
Last Exit to Brooklyn
(1964)
The Room (
1971)
The Demon
(1976)
Requiem for a Dream
(1978)
Song of the Silent Snow
(1986)
The Willow Tree
(1998)
Waiting Period (
2002)
Introduction by Mike Ryan
Interview by Lydia Lunch, 2002
R
hythm and structure. Very simple concepts that provide the basis for poetry. The foundations of epic works by the likes of Homer and Dante. Through simple components these authors addressed the major themes of life, all of which drive toward the same infernal question: Why do I exist?
In the Gospel of Thomas, Nick Tosches found a simple rule, as basic and obvious as the most elementary algebraic equation and as powerful as nuclear fusion: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
But first he would steal books. And find other simple aphorisms: “Death to the living, long life to the killers.” Became a barroom porter at fourteen. Worked and then abandoned a stint as a paste-up artist for the Lovable Underwear Company. Snake-hunted in Florida. And then a conclusion: “Immature writers plagiarize, mature writers steal.”
Tosches became a music critic in New York City for
Creem
magazine in the 1970s alongside cohorts Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer. While he was living in the neighborhood of the burgeoning punk/new wave culture and interviewing people like Patti Smith and Blondie, his tendencies led him toward old country-music outlaws and other originators of rock and roll. After his years at
Creem,
he began his work as a biographer, the vast majority of which focused on men caught in the grips of good and evil. Musician Jerry Lee Lewis. Boxer Sonny Liston. Mob boss Michele Sindona.
Through his novels, a screenplay, poetry, and his own commentary, it is apparent that Tosches himself has also struggled with good and evil, darkness and light, and the insanity which accompanies these things. But while he pursues the high calling of wrestling demons, he also engages in the elusive thing called solitude, sometimes known as the art of doing nothing. That which Nick Tosches cares about above all things is the feral desire to live, in a world where survival depends on cash flow. Hence the introductory quote to
The Nick Tosches Reader
:
“Now, Mr. Faulkner,” she said, “what were you thinking of when you wrote that?”
“Money,” he replied.
In the year 2000, Tosches released the tiniest of books called
The Last Opium Den
. It chronicles his quest to find not only pure opium as a treatment for his recently diagnosed diabetic condition, but also to satisfy his romantic desire to experience an opium den itself. The book opens with the line,
You see, I needed to go to Hell.
I was, you might say, homesick
. A tour through the Asian underworld eventually leads him to a shack somewhere in Indochina. The romantic vision of the opium den proves untenable, but he makes do and reposes for an indefinite period of time savoring “God's own medicine.”
That place which he had left, run by “these rubes who turned New York into a PG-rated mall and who oh so loved it thus,” would beckon him. Nick Tosches finally returned to a New York City filled with ghosts, to deliver his own blood, and he has been restless ever since.
LL: I have to say that I hate the impersonal nature of phone interviews. I prefer to actually smell my subjects. I thought that maybe we could just set the stage a little.
NT: Okay.
LL: It is 7:45 a.m. I am in L.A. I am sitting near a window. It is still wet with night-blooming jasmine. I am wearing a thin black slip. I'm barefoot. I got hair in my eyes and I'm smoking a Lucky Strike and drinking a Cuban coffee. What about you?
NT: Okay. I've been ⦠awake ⦠since yesterday morning because I've been up all night writing this wretched garbage, or trying to write it. I already had to go out at 6 in the morning to get stuff notarized, then FedEx it. And now I'm sitting here. I got nothin' on but this old robe. There's a plumber here fixing the toilet bowl. It's hot, but I've opened the windows, and I got the fan on. I'm smoking ⦠a Camel ⦠through a Dunhill cigarette holder, and I'm drinking what they call ⦠I think it's Vienna Sumatra coffee. And off in the distance is the plumber.
LL: I was up until about 7 a.m. I fell asleep about ten minutes before I was supposed to call you. I was up all night too, so we're in the same shape. You still live in New York City?
NT: I still do. I wish I only lived here part of the time. I get out of the country a lot, but I still want to have a place out of the country, and I don't. So yeah, I live in New York.
LL: I put in a decade in New York City. Every step I take there, I feel like I'm crushing ghosts.
NT: Oh yeah, well â¦
LL: Do you think New York still possesses the same manic electricity that has stimulated so much great art?
NT: No. That's a good way to put it, with the ghosts. The New York that I love has completely vanished. So I'm living in a limbo with an umbilical cord ⦠to nowhere.
LL: You said you leave the country a lot. Where to?
NT: I was going to Paris a lot, because I had this girlfriend there. She dumped me, or I dumped her, or something. I spent a lot of time in Sicily. But now I just have to stay here and do this work because it's all a year overdue.
LL: What is a year overdue?
NT: Garbage. Complete, wretched, DRECK. I have to do two magazine stories, and then a book, and it's all wretched dreck and I just need to work my way out to freedom. If I had the money I would just give everybody their money back and not do any of it. It's too much.
LL: But you're chained to it for now.
NT: That's it, yeah! I'm just resigned to it and my only consolation is I am not going to sign any more contracts or take any more money from anybody once this is all completely cleared up. Freedom. That's all I want.
LL: You just finished
In the Hand of Dante
?
NT: Yesâit takes place during the last year of Dante's life, and simultaneously right now, in the present. It's about how the most beatific spiritual vision can become a force of great evil.
LL: That's a subject you are often drawn to, men who are being torn apart by the battle of good and evil.
NT: Or the ambiguity of what's good and what's evil. And who invented what first.
LL: Territory you covered in your books on Jerry Lee Lewis, Sonny Liston, and the book
Trinities
.
NT: Yeah.
LL: Writers, by their very nature, are vain, narcissistic ⦠We spend most of our days alone. How much do you struggle in your own life with assholism, with cruelty, with intolerance? And is that what you're trying to understand better by tackling these subjects?
NT: I don't know if I'm trying to understand it. I'm all right with just turning away from everything at this point. I know that
In the Hand of Dante
has really upset ⦠and even revolted a lot of people. On the other hand, it's been called a work of great beauty. In Italy and Germany they're just terrified of it.
LL: It's interesting how different countries interpret things.
NT: Yeah! But at this point, I am basically ready to pack it in. I want seven years of absolute nothingness. A seven-year stretch, before I croak. Next year is as good a time as any to start it.
LL: Well, writing dominates your entire life when you're working on something.
NT: Yeah, well, I hate it!
LL: It dominates everything. And back to the methodology, what is your procedure?
NT: Of working?
LL: Are you in lockdown?
NT: Yeah! Although I could spend hours working, writing something I love, whether it's an essay about something that nobody's ever gonna give me a dime for, or a poem, or some obscure animal of a wisp of a notion or a line. There's always this wretched stuff where I know I must perform within the perimeters of a given stage. I just can't seem to do it until my back is against the wall. Until everything is overloading me to the point of impossibility. And so, thus ⦠okay! See ⦠I spend enormous sums of money. My idea of fleeing involves money. But there's no money. It becomes like the snake that bites its own tail. That's it. But I can't fulfill these commitments. And they always involve people who wanna pay me the most, yet never want what I can do best.
LL: So what you love turns into what you hate.
NT: It's almost like,
So why do you want ME to do it?
Yeah, I do hate it. And then there's this diseased aspect of my mind where as much as I hate it, I'll get so involved in it, and go off into such obsessive detail rather than just go in there and be a hack. That's all I really need to do to do the job properly. I don't even seem to be capable of that! It's like the travails of boredom.
LL: You said you need a seven-year break, which is understandable. You've been incredibly prolific.
NT: I want a seven-year stretch of nothingness. LL: Shoot the clock.
NT: Yeah.
LL: Start there. I've read you frequent the same restaurant every day for lunch. Do you employ other regimens to free up more of your time to just write?
NT: I'll tell you the truth. Until the other day, I hadn't written anything since last year. That's how bad this situation really is. It's a joke. I have these two articles that are a year ⦠more than a year overdue. I've just begun one of them, and the guy who's waiting for this garbage book from HarperCollins keeps calling my agent and saying,
How's the book coming?
The book is now at the end of the list! He's looking at next year, at best. Now I want to get everything out of the way by ⦠let's say ⦠when the first warm breeze of next year blows.
LL: How did you first come into contact with Hubert Selby?
NT: The first time ⦠oh Jesus! I first came into contact with him twenty years ago, when he was living in New York. I was at my blackest, most chilling, deadliest period. It was right around when I finished
Trinities
. Everybody was telling me I was gonna die. I asked Selby's publisher where he was. I figured, if
he
was still alive, that means I could fuckin' live forever. I wrote him a letter. He basically turned out saving my life, for the time being. I was really reaching out for darkness, and I got light instead. We built a new friendship over the last six or seven years. Time flies when you don't work.
LL: What were you doing that was so death defying?
NT: I was just being what I was. Which was doing exactly what I wanted to do. Which was being in a state of oblivion for months at a time, only interrupting it to get dragged off to the hospital.
LL: Was it alcohol, or anything you could get your hands on?
NT: It was alcohol and everything else. It was mostly unbelievably huge sums of alcohol, and then I would, on top of that, go for heroin, or whatever. It was electricity from booze that was keeping me alive. I didn't see any other way to be, or one single valid reason for me to be any different.
LL: Selby's so inspirational. That he's managed to live in this fragile body with so much energy!
NT: I know! He's Johnny No-Lungs, ya know?
LL: When I started doing spoken word, and realized that he was still alive, I contacted him. And at that point he hadn't been doing many shows. I was just amazed that the guy was interested, wanted to do it, and had the stamina.
NT: Though he'll never see it as such, I think he did, if not literally save my life, at least take me and head me toward some piercing wisdom. There was one thing he said to me, one line. He said,
Never look for light to enter you. Try to find the light that's been buried and let it out
. It was like the Gospel of Thomas. I do things my own way. And I'd gone so long without drinking, I realized that I could never drink hard liquor again. Because I knew it would take over my body and my soul. Physically it would. So I said,
Let me try to drink a beer
. And I found out that I could go out and drink beer, and not drink the next morning. Then I lost my taste for beer, and I became an expensive wino, who just relaxes with it.
LL: You quoted the Gospel of Thomas. Did Selby turn you on to that?
NT: No, no! I found that one on my own. It was almost exactly what he was saying, though. Whether he was aware of it or not, there was such a parallel. But he brought it home so piercingly, because of how he said it. He's a treasure and this country should be placing laurel leaves on his head, and gold bars at his feet. They're not doing it.
LL: They'll wait till he dies, and he'll still be lucky to get the recognition he deserves then.
NT: Writers are the only people that get paid posthumously. Selby will be fucking rich twelve years after he's dead, after it becomes required buying.
LL: Do you still drink?
NT: Yeah. I drink two glasses of wine a day with lunch. To me, lunch is the highlight of my existence. Like I said, my New York doesn't exist anymore. I don't go out. There's nowhere for me to go and see old friends. Or to even walk down blocks that are pleasant. The social clubs I used to go to are now like some kind of chi-chi shoe store or something, Korean dry cleaners ⦠so it's all gone now and lunch is the time for me to relax, a few glasses. And now, maybe once a month or so, I'll purposely go out to drink too much. The thing is, I've turned into an expensive wino so I only drink good wine. I don't drink at home. So if I go out I have to bring my own wine with me. That's my routine now. Yesterday I didn't drink anything, I didn't leave the house. I worked. I looked at the clock and it was 10 o'clock, and then it was 10 o'clock at night, and then it was 2 o'clock, and I figured, well, I'll just keep going. And here I am.
LL: You mentioned before your flamboyance, that you like to spend extravagantâ
NT:âamounts of money, yeah.
LL: Is that a rebellion, orâ
NT: Nah. It's just that I never had anything when I was young and once I got a taste of it, I figured,
Well, this is what the money's for?
I try to share it, and lavish it on myself. I figure that that's just what it was for. LL: You've gotta spoil yourself.
