PARADOXIA
Authors: Lunch Lydia
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©1997, 1999, 2007 Lydia Lunch
Published in the United Kingdom by Creation Books, 1997
Introduction ©2007 Jerry Stahl
Afterword ©2007 Thurston Moore
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-35-4
eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75065-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007926053
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
Table of Contents
Dedicated to those who have withstood the test of my insanity. Bart D. Frescura, J.G. Thirlwell, Vanessa Skantze, Emilio Cubeiro, R. Kern & Marcy Blaustein. Thanks to J.K. Potter, Hubert Selby, Jr., E.M. Cioran, and Susan Martin for endless inspiration.
H
ubert Selby, Jr. famously said that he grew up feeling like a scream without a mouth. Lydia Lunch, one of his most celebratedâand most uncompromisingâliterary progeny, delivered scream, mouth, teeth, blood, hair, sperm, knife, and adrenaline in her purgatorial masterpiece
Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary,
for which the late legend Selby himself penned the introduction to the original UK edition.
When
Paradoxia
was first published, it was considered extreme. It still is. Even thoughâhey, it's
kismet!â
right now America is all about the X-treme. If not the Triple-X. (Or, if you're, you know, hard-core and art-damaged, the
trangressive.
) But among the faux-disturbo crotch-pastry that passes for “edge” in contemporary American culture, be it prose, TV, movies, theater, painting, or VW commercials, Lydia remains an off-the-menu item. What she did, among other things, was publish a different kind of victim chronicle, in this case a chronicle of her victims. Which made her that rarestâand purestâof artist: the unrepentant perp.
Ms. Lunch has not just written, but lived through situations that the MTSP (Millionaire Thrill Sex Purveyors), known collectively as “The Media,” would soil themselves trying to reenact. I considered, in my own shabby stab at an introduction, making like a carny barker and marching out some
Para
-highlights. Believe me, there are passages in this book that can make a motherfucker crack sulphuric sweat. But, as my stepmother used to say when she was high on stain remover,
Why leave the meat out in the sun and let it die?
Far be it for me to judge whether an author is required to “live” what he or she writes about to make it “authentic.” Does the fact that Ms. Lunch has clawed hard pleasure out of back alleys that would scare wharf rats explain the urgent power of her prose? Where does “Rochester Red” go to learn how to make a straight razor as beautiful as the
Mona Lisa
? Does she need to know the feel of fingers squeezing her own throat to write sentences that pressure the reader's own hyoid bone? For that matter, is it necessary for a woman to have been violatedâor to have committed all manner of deviant social, sexual, and civil violations herselfâfor her prose to pack the visceral impact of a fist in the face ⦠or wherever else a fist can go?
She calls, men crawl!
Does it mean something that there are legions of beautiful genius-boys who've slavered blood from the fresh kisses carved in their chests? For
her?
You tell me.
On page and off, Lydia walks it like she talks it. So be prepared. The first time they read
Paradoxia,
people have been known to rip their clothes off and wave their fists at the sky.
BEHOLD THE DOUBLE-D DOSTOYEVSKY
. Over the years, Lydia has emerged as a literary voice with an unparalleled genius for lending elegance to blunt-force trauma. But
Paradoxia
is where it happened first.
If I had to describe Lydia with the title of a '50s pulp novel, I'd go with
Language Is Her Bitch.
What she does with words generates the same soul-shivering thrill as seeing your nightmares projected in 3-D on the ceiling of a hospital room in which you will never be curedâbecause you love your disease too much. The landscape is littered with damaged souls. And damage is a kind of love. Because what's more seductive than destruction, whether it be one's own or someone else's?
Love is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead yet â¦
Excuse me for being romantic. The same thing happens when I read the Book of Revelation.
Do not be surprised at how much the word “love” comes up in relation to
Paradoxia
. This is a book that makes us love the pain. Not out of masochismâ
paradoxically
, I have to add, though I fucking
hate
myselfâbut from the savage humanity required to speak the unspeakable, and distill it into truth.
No names have been changed to protect the innocent.
They're all fucking guilty.
S
o twisted by men, a man, my father, that I became like one. Everything I adored about them, they despised in me. Ruthlessness, arrogance, stubbornness, distance, and cruelty. A cold calculating nature, immune to all but my own reason. Never able to acknowledge the repercussions of my behavior. Oblivious to the brutality and selfishness with which I would lacerate others.
Selfish and self-centered, without remorse. An animal driven by instinct. Running on intuition. Always searching for the next tasty morsel, unsuspecting prey, gullible innocent. My goal, rarely to maim or kill, but to satisfy. Myself. If that meant at the expense of someone else's pride, vanity, or even existence, so be it. My intentions were always true. To myself.
Days, weeks, months, years spent with nameless faces. Losing myself in anonymity. Both theirs and my own. I'd make up different characters, complete with names to suit my mood. Stella Dora, Lou Harris, Sheila Reeves, Lourdes Vega, Lucy Delgado. I'd stalk bars, clubs, bookstores, public parks, the emergency rooms. Seeking to find in lost men a place to lose myself. Searching for a pocket of weakness. Looking for the “sweet spot” ⦠a small tear in their psychic fabric to feast upon. To hide inside. A place to disappear in, manifesting myself in a multiplicity of personalities which all shared the same goal. To trick the next john into relinquishing his moral, financial, spiritual, or physical guard, so that no matter what the outcome, I won. I got what I wanted, whether it was money, dramaâor sex. They always gave the most important things freely. Themselves. What they didn't give, I would take.
I've always had a masculine nature. Most men can't stand the competition. It drives them crazy. Insane. Forces them to want to lash out. To dominate, fight to maintain control. It doesn't work that way with me. It's either a one-two punch, or a fight to the bitter end. The only thing my father ever taught me was to never give up. Never give in. Put up a struggle. Act like a man. And even though as a species I deplored them, I still found myself both siding with and lashing out against their sex. That battery of emotion which charged my life force acting as conduit to an elevated state.
Lenny grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Kitchner, Ontario, Canada. One of eleven kids. All forced to work long hours tending the fowl. Ran away at fourteen, sick of hard manual labor, the smell of chicken shit. Couldn't stand to answer to anyone. Started hustling pool. Card sharking. Barroom brawling. Got 86'd from every juke joint within a fifty-mile radius by the time he was sixteen. Looked for larger fish to fry. Bigger hustle. Joined the army just to get a free ticket out. Pulled a short stint until the dishonorable discharge came through. Began wandering the northeast corridor. Perfecting the art of rip-off. Con man. Short change artist with a passion for check-cashing schemes. Fell into door-to-door sales. Tupperware, Fuller brush, household cleaning fluids. Bibles. Going door-to-door would allow him easy access into lonely housewives' frustrated boredom. Sweet-talk them. Walk them into the bedroom. The kitchen. The bathroom. Hot hands itchy to molest unwilling flesh. Thrived on their resistance. Their weak protests. Made it a challenge. Get inside them, squirt, and flee. Before they knew what hit them. Before they realized they'd been screwed. Duped. Kept a map in his car riddled with little red crosses. A dog marking his territory. Never liked fucking the same woman twice. Bad for business. Never know when the unsuspecting husband might return from work early.
He worked mornings. Spent his afternoons at the racetrack playing the perfectas. Won enough to cut his losses. What he didn't make back at the track, he'd hustle at the card table. Kept him in pocket change. Met Lucy on a blind date, when her girlfriend Rosalee couldn't get the weekend off from selling fortunes down at the Lakeside Amusement Park. I was conceived on a Saturday night in the backseat of a rundown Chevy. He was drunk, she was in tears. They tied the knot six weeks later. My father's daughter.
I split the '67 cherry-red Mustang almost in half, flooring the gas, smashing it into the forty-foot pine tree, three feet from the front window of the old lady's house. The shock on her face, priceless. Almost gave her a coronary. Al grabbed the wheel. Seconds too late. Screamed at me to back out. Take off. Get the hell out of there before the cops arrived. Pulled me out from behind the wheel. Threw it in reverse and floored it. Surprised that the fucking thing still ran. Pulled into his garage. A couple blocks away. Slammed the door shut. Couldn't stand to even look at me. He had just spent three months and four grand rebuilding the engine. Customizing the paint job. Reupholstering the interior. He should have never let me drive. I had just turned thirteen.
I promised to pay him off in pussy. He turned around. Told me to go home. He'd call me later. Maybe. I shrugged and slunk out. I knew he would. I had him hooked. Hooked on my pussy.
We'd been screwing each other for six months. Seduced him on the front steps of the rectory behind the Holy Redeemer Church. He was taking a short cut on the way back from the auto supply shop. I was smoking a joint. Called him over. I knew who he was. I'd already plowed through half the neighborhood. The two brothers who lived across the street. Their cousin. The ex-Marine on the corner. The old man who ran the record store. The check-out boy from the local market. The kid who delivered pizza. His older brother. A couple of his friends. Half the guys who picked me up hitchhiking. The small-time pot dealer.
Praying that one of them, any of them, all of them would help to erase the greasy memory of my father's hot hands. Hands he couldn't keep to himself. Hands that couldn't sit still. Hands that couldn't help but to poke, prod, pinch, pull, pollute. Hands that had a mind of their own. Hands ⦠much like my own.
I learned by example how to hustle, boost, steal, hijack, corral, connive, and convince just about anybody of anything. Valuable lessons for which I am grateful. I inherited Lenny's ability to sweet-talk with forked tongue, walk the fine line between obsession and madness, and get what I wanted. When I wanted. Come hell or high water, like Lenny used to say. Before the heart attack killed him. Turned him into ashes. The ghost of a memory whose spirit still haunts, lives, and breathes through me. Manifests itself in me. My hands, his devil's workshop. My sex, his unquenchable hunger. A hunger from beyond the grave, which predated my cradle.
The Greyhound pulled into Port Authority. The stinging aroma of fresh urine and stale sweat slaps me in the face after the nine-hour overnighter. I grabbed the small leather bag that housed all my worldly possessions and shook off the previous sixteen years. I had eighty-two dollars in my pocket and the phone number of a friend's cousin who lived on Bleecker and MacDougal. Sunny was a middleaged hippy from Woodstock. She sold pot to pay the rent. She said I could stay with her. For three days. Then I'd have to work something else out. I was a liability to her business. I was cocksure enough to believe I'd figure it out. Even sleeping in the subway surrounded by bums and tunnel dwellers would be preferable to spending one more day in upstate stuck in a ghetto of rednecks, race riots, and social retards whose idea of fun was 3.2 kids, the dog, the cat, the car, the truck, and a moderate mortgage. I had finally escaped.
That night Sunny suggested I check out Mothers, a club long since closed, on 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. A funky little club whose clientele consisted of queers, queens, neighborhood locals, rock musicians, and a few leftover glam transvestites. All swilling beer, vodka, bourbon. The occasional joint passed around sweetly perfuming the air, whose undertone itself was sour, sickly.
Targeted the mark. Feminine, long hair, probably from Jersey. After numerous drinks I stuck my hands down his pants. Convinced him to let me crash at his loft, fooled him into believing he'd be rewarded with hot blowjobs administered by my teenage mouth. Played up to his jailbait fantasies. Confessing I had just run away. Broke free from parental prison. It was my first night in town. I was trying to get hooked up. He bought it and brought me over to his place on 24th Street.
A massive storefront. Subdivided into small cubicles. Four other roommates. Hippies and free jazz musicians. Kitty, Lenny Bruce's daughter, had just moved out, leaving vacant a narrow makeshift room, suspended from the ceiling directly facing the front door. I knew I'd have it in a day or two. Screw the dick that brought me there for a few nights, feign my period, and move upstairs. It worked. Avoided him whenever possible. Ingratiated myself to the other roommates with a daunting mix of arrogance, humor, innuendo.
The room under mine was occupied by a couple who bore a striking resemblance to John and Yoko, who only surfaced every few days to score heroin or, in desperation, methadone. They gave me the most important information anyone just arriving broke and almost homeless in NYC would need. The phone number of a doctor in the Bronx who freely wrote up scripts for black beauties, Percodan, and Quaaludes. John and Yoko insisted that if I wanted to turn my now forty-three bucks into two hundred or more, I make an appointment and sweet-talk the good doc.
I started selling black beauties for three bucks a pop in the park between 23rd and 25th on Broadway. I could move my entire stash in a day or two, selling the shit by the handfuls to scaggy street kids who stole or begged enough chump change to eat once or twice a day and get high at least as often. Every few weeks I'd head back up to the Bronx, pay off the doctor, hit the park again. It was easy maintenance. You could get by on three or four dollars a day then, if you knew how. And I still wasn't paying any rent on 24th Street. Only going back to John and Yoko's when I needed to shower or sleep. Sneak in and out. Hoping they'd forget I was there.
I met “Ill Will” one day while peddling. If Tommy Lee Jones did
Midnight Cowboy
, it would have bred Will. Scuzzy, haggard, a real charmer ⦠He'd bring me coffee, give me a weak smile, and ask for twelve black beauties. He invited me up to his room at the George Washington Hotel on Lexington near 23rd. A sleazy waystop for local prostitutes, transients, and general lowlifes just passing through New York on a whim, on their way from disappointment to disaster. Will claimed to be the only full-time resident. At least for the last three weeks.
The frayed lobby led to a creaky elevator which deposited you on sticky linoleum on a floor you didn't request. It worked when it wanted to. Like the residents. The whole building stunk of death and old age with a strong undercurrent of cheap cologne and Lysol. We took the stairs up two flights, littered with cigarette butts, empty beer cans, and the corpses of hundreds of roaches. I needed a shower before we even hit his room.
Room 453 smelled of barbecue and old leather. Three black cowboy hats framed the side of the bed, hanging from small nails, hammered in with his boot. A battered acoustic guitar leaned forlornly in the corner, sunlight splashing off the strings. I asked if he played. He shrugged, picked up the beast, and sung,
“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
⦠I keep my eyes wide open all the time ⦠because you're mine,
I walk the line ⦔
A deep baritone, melodious, haunting. His repertoire consisted of Johnny Cash, David Allan Coe, and Charlie Feathers. He claimed he could only remember the words when he was high. His memory improved with grass. Asked if I'd like him to turn me on. Had a stick of Mexican skunk. He lit up, sucked down half the joint, and passed it over. I didn't know it was laced.
I woke up to another nuclear sunset. The sky bloody pink, casting an eerie incandescence on my pale skin. I was groggy. Naked. Will sucking softly on my toes. Told me to “Git up, we need some libations!” Suggested the Blarney Stone a few blocks away. Made a mean meatloaf. He looked dejected when I told him I didn't eat meat. Assured me we'd find something for “Little Queenie.”
I spent the weekend with Will, playing pool, pinball, smoking joints, drinking, popping the occasional black beauty. Needed all the fuel we could get. Staying up all night, shooting the shit, running around all over the city. He confiding he was splitting in a day or two. Had been there almost a month. Didn't like to stay in one place for too long. Drifter by trade. Kansas City, St. Louis, Portland, Reno, Detroit, San Diego, Trenton, Key West, Atlanta. He was just passing through. He'd hop a train, bus, ride, walk if he had to. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go ⦠Anywhere. Just to get away. Something to do. Forward movement. Momentum. He'd work if he had to. Hustle when necessary. Steal if it came to that. Didn't need much. Kill if he felt cornered. Liked me because I didn't ask too many damn questions. I didn't ask him anything. I didn't really care. I concocted my own stories to fill in the blanks. Wasn't hard to figure. I reinvented my life story every time I told it. What he didn't tell me, I didn't need to know. Not yet.
I saw him again two weeks later. On the cover of the
New York Post
. Unshaven, head cocked to the side, black cowboy hat tipped to one eye, smiling. The headline read:
CANNIBAL CAUGHT! CHELSEA HOTEL MURDER MYSTERY SOLVED!
Will had been tracked down to a transient hotel in El Paso, extradited back to NYC, and brought in for questioning. A young woman had been murdered, found bound and gagged, her fingers, toes, and left cheek chewed off, on or around the first of the month. Will had blown in on the Amtrack two days before she disappeared. Charges were pending. “Ill Will” still sits in Rikers waiting for an appeal. Trying to sell the rights to his story. Make a helluva Movie of the Week.