I most remember reading Chelsea Girls in the dark, in bars around San Francisco in the nineties—beneath the staircase in the back room at Dalva, in a booth at Blondie’s or the Uptown, at little round cocktail tables at the Paradise Lounge or Casanova. I was starting to write stories, but wanted only to write about my life and the girls I was falling in love with, lightly stalking, being dissed by. I wanted to write about being drunk in the daylight and also at night and about having sex in dark, damp rooms, hands smelling like cigarettes and pussy, the beds perpetually grimy, flat on the dusty floor.
Aside from all that, I also wanted to write about New England. I had only recently emigrated from the North Shore of Boston, a grimy, busted city called Chelsea, old-world and hostile. It was a strange, tough place, and I had become preoccupied with it since arriving in San Francisco, partly because people from Chelsea don’t move to San Francisco. A person needs money to move, and people in Chelsea do not have any. I myself managed to bundle together a purse by working as a prostitute; had it not been for that wise decision I might still be in Chelsea. Often I meet people from Massachusetts, and they are always from Newton, which has become a bitter joke. Newton is the anti-Chelsea, a place where people have money and go to college and are afforded the privilege of moving around this country.
Of course it struck me that this collection of stories shared a name with my city. Eileen Myles was more than a simple writer; they were bound to their writing in a way that nearly transformed them into a shaman. “At the end / of the world / I am / my poem,” so ends the final piece in their poetry collection Not Me, “A Poem in Two Homes”; Chelsea Girls contains similar proclamations. “I am a significant person,” they write in “Light Warrior,” an investigation of their name, “maybe a saint, or larger than life. I hear you judge a saint by her whole personality, not just her work.”
Of course, the Chelsea in Chelsea Girls is not scabby old Chelsea, Massachusetts, but the far more glamorous Chelsea Hotel, where Sid famously killed Nancy and Andy Warhol filmed his Girls. It’s also where Eileen Myles is fucked for the first time by a woman named Mary, a wholesome-looking lesbian waitress. Mary has “powerful, black Celtic eyelashes,” and takes the author to the Chelsea, with its bad art and thin beds. “How do lesbians have sex?” is of course an eternal, offensive question, delivered by leering men and idiots of all genders. However, the secret is that everyone, perhaps especially lesbians, must learn to have sex, must teach themselves and one another, constantly charging up against the limitations of assumptions and convention and imagination, not to mention the body. In the story “Chelsea Girls,” the author is delighted to learn they need not give up the vigorous rogering heterosexuality had occasionally provided: “So Mary started fucking me. One finger two fingers three fingers. And her face all that strong part coming out, dissolving her prettiness and pale freckles and Celtic distance into force.”
For me, at twenty-three, girls were the mystery, and drinking (being drunk) and writing was the mystery. Eileen Myles was deep in it, solving it, reporting from the inside. These were sacred texts, for sale in the window of a bookstore like no big thing. Look at how they write about their affair with a famous junkie called Robin.
I must fuck Robin. That was my job. She had the largest … cunt, vagina I had ever stuck my finger in. It was big red and needy. I stuck two three fingers in and fucked her and fucked her… . She moaned and growled with pleasure. Such a woman, I have never met such a horny animal nor have I ever so distinctly serviced a woman before. Do you want my fist inside you. Anything she shrieked, anything.
Eileen’s work suggested this, but my own investigations were likewise proving that females were not particularly fragile. In fact, they had the stamina of professional wrestlers. Queer sex could feel like children’s make-believe and a carnival haunted house and a lion devouring an antelope. It could feel like psychic surgery and a newfangled workout routine and an aggressive cuddle-fest. We were, as Myles reported, “animals.” Reading this made me feel happy and alive. I was of this people; I must find my own complicated junkie to have violent sex with. In 1994, nothing seemed like a better idea, save being able to write about it later.
“I wonder what anybody thinks about using your own life, the actual words people say to you in the secrecy of love, or separation, or the oblivious moments when they’ve simply torn off an insult and flung it at you and you’re the one who remembers every little word, at least the ones I use and I fling it back in their faces, if not there, then here, sooner or later and they say, ‘Oh, I can’t believe I said that.’”
That’s from the beginning of the end of a story called “Jealousy.” It’s a big question. Did Eileen feel liberated to spread their whole personality out onto the page like this? Was it okay? Could I do it too? These were my questions as I luxuriously smoked cigarette after cigarette inside various bars, a pint of amber beer before me, slopping some onto the pages as I went—my pages and theirs because now I always brought Chelsea Girls with me when I wrote. I would pick a story and read it before starting into my own notebook. It was like a prayer before beginning: Dear subconscious spooky hidden writing place, please hear the glory of this story, “Bread and Water,” one of my favorites ever. A broke lesbian who has her period and cannot even afford tampons is sort of bleeding around her East Village apartment hoping for a grant that will never come, tallying the petty but significant amounts she owes the bakery and her neighbor, not getting a piddly ten-dollar deposit back from the television repairman. Dear everything that understands how much ten dollars really is, let this truth and the deceptively simple, plainspoken way in which it is delivered, a voice just so cool, please let it trigger in me my own whatever it is, my own voice, my own cool, let like recognize like and release something, okay? Gulp, gulp, smoke, begin.
Beyond the seductive enchantment of the voice—blunt, almost arrogant with authority, tangential, intensely conversational, personal, real—the deeper zing of Chelsea Girls was the stories about growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts, a city not at all far from Chelsea, and the class bracket such a place sets you in. Chelsea Girls is a significant lesbian book but it is also a significant working-class text. Check out this summer job, from “Bath, Maine,” “At work we dipped these small—or sometimes fairly large—wooden frames into vats of stain. Their destination was the cheap carnivals, and beach towns of America. Those mirrors that say Grateful Dead, or NY Yankees.” Over and over the work reveals itself to be a history of what it meant to be working class in America before globalization, before technology transformed the workplace. How an illicitly sourced diet pill turned the monotony of xeroxing into a light show. The clamor backstage at Filene’s Basement (RIP), the infamous Boston designer discount market in the belly of the defunct Filene’s department store downtown. There was an underground entrance accessible from the subway, and women would line up outside the glass doors, ready to stampede their way in. My sister worked at Filene’s Basement, and, coincidentally, my alcoholic father worked at the post office, just as Eileen’s alcoholic father had. This was my occupational landscape, and to find it in this document of serious lesbian cool flipped me out. Eileen worked as a cab driver, a waitress, behind the register slinging tobacco at the Harvard Coop. They worked as a chambermaid at a Holiday Inn, where they were shocked to encounter a disgraced family friend, a woman doomed to die an ugly, alcoholic death in the not too distant future.
Chelsea Girls revisits the death of Myles’s own alcoholic father. In “The Kid,” a chillingly sad piece, the child Eileen is instructed to “watch” their father and they watch him die, savoring the terrible moment and the proximity to death, that mystery, and the strange bond it strings between them forever. “I would be a beatnik,” they declare at the end of the story, as they recount the ways her father’s death has altered the family, attempting to control how it would alter them, “I would make everyone so sad and be so cool.” Sadness and cool are the twin pillars of Myles’s voice, mixed with the detached, dark humor born of the two.
There is also sexual violence, and the casualness of the reportage is deliberate. This is the female day-to-day, is it not? Myles falls in love with an office coworker, who turns out to be a girl famously gang-raped at a New England dance in the sixties. “Nothing should take that long she said.” The author’s own similar assault, at a summer house on the Cape, is detailed in unsentimental, spare language. The effect is wrenching, infuriating. In the morning, sick, hurt, and hungover they walk to the beach and write their name in the sand, EILEEN MYLES, wondering, “I had been raped, right?” That the culture of acceptance and denial is strong enough to blot out the unequivocal horror is a horror of its own.
“Fear of not being understood is the greatest fear I thought lying on the bathroom floor at 11 P.M. worse than not pleasing people, worse than anything else I can think of. Worse than being cold or alone. Worse than getting old.” So begins “Robert Mapplethorpe Picture,” which explains the cover photo of the 2015 edition, a portrait of the author snapped by Mapplethorpe in 1980. The joke of the story is that Myles offered the image to their mother back in Arlington for her “photo wall,” which her lesbian poet daughter was conspicuously absent from. A piece of “real” art smuggled into the regular working-class decor. To be an artist and a queer is to be an outsider in your family as much as in the culture at large, especially in the 1970s or 1980s. The secret Mapplethorpe is a metaphor for the daughter herself—a lesbian icon, an influential poet, “a significant person, maybe a saint,” sitting there in their body in the family and culture that neither sees nor understands them. With Chelsea Girls, Myles forces a cultural and a literary reckoning with their life on their own terms, demanding understanding, the text held to the reader’s throat. What it was like to be female, with that permeable body, to be a lesbian, to be working class or flat broke, to be a poet, a drunk, a speedy pill-popper, to be heartbroken and heartbreaker, to be half an orphan, to have so much to say yet forced to claw out a place to say it with your own ragged, dirty fingernails—this is Chelsea Girls.
That it was allowed to go out of print at all is, in the parlance of the North Shore of New England, a sin. That it is back in print, able to be placed in bookshop windows, to grab the eyes of a person whose life it may profoundly alter, is not a miracle—it’s justice. “I would like to tell everything once,” the author writes, “just my part, because this is my life, not yours.”
A version of this piece was first published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015.