DIED 2013
I was standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand.
Hitchhiked my way across the USA.
Put the spike into my vein, and then things weren’t quite the same.
And I said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side.
TO ME, HIS SONGS were pure inspiration. In one early study of this gospel, my boyfriend and I made a 16mm black-and-white film with “Walk on the Wild Side” as the soundtrack. It featured a tennis match where the main character turns from a man to a woman with each volley. I hand-colored the ball yellow in every frame; when you ran the film, it wobbled and jumped as if possessed by the devil. The point was obvious. Just as easily as a man can become a woman, a ball can become a grapefruit. And in the eighties, my friends and I would sing along to “Heroin” as we cleaned our shared syringe with a little water and passed it around.
I was standing in the lobby at some writers’ event in 1997 when I heard of Allen Ginsberg’s death from hepatitis. By then, I’d known I’d had the virus for about three years. It was a number on a lab report to me, nothing more. But if Ginsberg’s death didn’t puncture my sense of immortality, I did begin to understand something important, how big ideas about art and revolution were so easily infected with the stupid romance of self-destruction. In 2011, I suddenly got very sick, so weak I couldn’t get off the couch to drive my daughter to school. In 2012, I took the cure. Not the easy, quick thing we have now, but it worked. And while I got better, Lou Reed died, as did Gregg Allman and David Bowie, as had Ken Kesey and Jim Carroll years before. Keith Richards, Steven Tyler, and I live on.
After his death, his wife, Laurie Anderson, published an article about him in Rolling Stone. How strange, exciting, and miraculous, she wrote, that we can change each other so much, love each other so much through our words and music and our real lives. Yes, I thought. What a beautiful couple they were. Too bad some of us were so determined to get the wrong idea.
Every band should have a cover of “Sweet Jane.” This is mine.