The Televisionary Oracle (28 page)

One December my girlfriend Layla and I drove to Atlanta from where we lived in Durham, North Carolina, to catch a live show by my third muse. Her uncle had not only scored us two tickets. As a friend of the concert’s promoter, he’d wangled a couple of backstage passes for us. We had an excellent chance to meet Bowie in the flesh.

Irrationally, I took with me a tape of songs that I had recorded with my band Momo (a word borrowed from the French slang for “madman,” used as a name by Artaud around the time he was sent to an asylum for the first time). I was hoping for a chance to give my raw treasure to Bowie—for what deluded purpose wasn’t clear. To see if he could help us get a record deal somehow? To ask us to be the opening act for one of his shows?

Bowie’s spectacle exhilarated me. With a hypnotized adoration I would not have given any other famous performer, I laid bare my psyche to be reprogrammed by his lyrics, singing, gestures, everything. I was the kind of blank-slate devotee that I had often ridiculed. And yet throughout the show I simmered with the joyous expectation that this was only the foreplay for an even more miraculous event: meeting my hero backstage.

Layla and I waited a respectful fifteen minutes after the closing song to accost him. His sweat had dried. He was eating a peach. With arrogant humility, I strode up to him, squatted so as not to tower over him, and handed him “Sacred Game,” Momo’s cassette tape of ten songs and poems. Hoping to appear wildly enigmatic and cool, unlike all the other groupies that normally sought his favor, I didn’t say hi or introduce myself. Instead, I greeted him with chanted excerpts from Momo’s composition “I Love America.”

For whatever reason—either he was impressed with my poetry or with the gall I showed by walking up to him so brazenly—Bowie engaged me in a conversation. Actually, he did most of the talking. I tried to sound smart by asking questions that fostered the momentum of his rap.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, Bowie explained to me his theory of how America in the 1970s had much in common with Germany of the 1920s. An unruly form of music called jazz was on the loose back then, breaking down cultural inhibitions and catalyzing riotous eruptions of hedonism. In Bowie’s view, the Third Reich’s fascist clamp-down in the 1930s was in part a response to the chaotic repercussions of jazz. He likened this sequence to what he foresaw happening in America. The upsurgent music and culture of the 1960s, which had temporarily wilted under the relentless influence of dour Nixonism, would soon resurface in a tidal wave of jangly mayhem. A wave of anarchist bards would tickle and tempt the collective psyche into greater and greater acts of liberation. After a few years of this libidinous uproar, though, there would be an authoritarian backlash that would make the era of Nixon look like an age of enlightenment. Or so he prophesied.

I had never come across these ideas in any article about Bowie, and as far as I knew I had read every one of his major interviews. What if, I speculated, he had chosen to share these secret thoughts with only a chosen few, of which I was one? On the four-hour car ride back to Durham in the middle of the night, and with Layla’s encouragement, the insane thought grew in my imagination that Bowie had recognized me as a kindred, if less developed soul, and had delivered unto me a special dispensation. I was to be his protégé, I fantasized; his younger brother in the cultural wars to come. As if in some magical blast of psychic insight, Bowie saw that I was destined to be one of the most elite of the anarchist bards. When the prophesied counterrevolution loomed, I imagined he imagined, he and I would evolve into the ultimate
freedom fighters, singing and dancing and committing beautiful chaos with shrewd intensity. And our work would be all the more pure and effective because we would never get swallowed up by the system.

As I drove and Layla patiently massaged me, I hovered in an electrified state halfway between sleep and waking. One side of my mind was pouring forth extravagant scenarios of my glorious future as if I were stoned on red Moroccan hashish; the other side watched the unfolding panorama with cool objectivity and made sure I didn’t drive off the road.

As we sped across the border of South and North Carolina and passed through Gastonia, the dawn still three hours away, I received a riveting revelation about what my next move must be. The vision arrived out of nowhere, unexpectedly, and fully formed. I was to relocate to Santa Cruz, California—a place which at that time I knew only by reputation as a wild hippie utopia—and ply my trade there. Nowhere else but there, my unknown spiritual source informed me, could my genius bloom. Here in the Deep South it could at best emerge only in sullen and distorted forms of expression.

Strangely, as this lucid waking dream erupted, Layla withdrew her kneading hand for the first time in a long time. I imagined that she sensed in that moment the beginning of the end of our relationship.

As indeed it was. A few weeks later, I dropped out of Duke University and headed for the West Coast on a Greyhound bus.

My ascent to the role of culture hero in Santa Cruz began at an open mike at the Good Fruit Company cafe. My song “Blasphemy Blues” and long rant-poem “Scare Me Smart” impressed a reviewer for a local entertainment rag, who described my contribution as a “mouth-waterin’, id-ticklin’, ass-kickin’ communiqué from the collective unconscious itself.”

Within a year, I had done seven poetry readings and performance art spectacles in cafes and maybe twenty others in guerrilla street shows. I’d also xeroxed and sold two hundred copies of my first homemade chapbook and practiced the art of compassionate demagoguery in a semi-regular late-night show, “Babbling Ambiance,” on a local radio station.

Best of all, I’d cobbled together my first Santa Cruz band, Kamikaze
Angel Slander. When we played our first gig at a friend’s party, our set consisted of five songs I had written with Momo, covers of two David Bowie tunes, and four brand new epics my bandmates and I had whipped up, including a poem with musical accompaniment called “The Prisoner Is in Control”:

Meanwhile, out in the wide world beyond the borders of Santa Cruz, the first part of Davie Bowie’s oracle in Atlanta was proceeding as prophesied. By the late 1970s, the rowdy, fuck-the-world spunk of punk music was in full eruption. I was appreciative of and sympathetic to the Sex Pistols and their ilk, though I felt vaguely superior to them all. Bearing (my delusion of) Bowie’s seal of approval, I thought of my work as more subtle and intelligent than their simplistic and decadent dissidence. Sooner or later, I was sure, I would ride the punk surge to greater visibility, even as I distinguished myself from it with my more spiritual sensibilities.

There was only one factor darkening my growing exhilaration: grubby poverty. None of the music or spectacles I was creating earned me more than the cash I plowed into making them happen. And I resented life’s apparent insistence that I was supposed to take time out from my ingenious projects to draw a steady wage. My enrollment at the University of California at Santa Cruz helped. For a few sporadic quarters I was able to garner government loans and grants in return
for attending once-a-week poetry and creative writing classes. Monthly allotments of food stamps also aided the cause.

Despite assistance from the welfare state, I was still compelled to degrade myself with actual jobs. Among my humiliations were stints washing dishes at restaurants and posing as an artists’ model and putting in time as a farm laborer in apple orchards. And even then I just barely made my rent, let alone being able to finance the kinds of accessories that up-and-coming mega-stars need, like a car and high-quality musical equipment.

I lived in a moldy basement with nothing but a temperamental space heater to warm my fingers as I composed rebellious anthems on my dinky electronic piano. On occasions I was forced to resort to a “performance art” trick, which was to hang out in cafeteria-style restaurants and scavenge the food that diners left behind. My wardrobe? Both my street clothes and stage costumes were garnered entirely from a warehouse called the Bargain Barn, which charged a very reasonable dollar per five pounds of recycled garments.

The proud shame I felt about my poverty was in marked contrast to the proud pride I sopped up as lead singer of my new band Tao Chemical. We were punky and funky and melodic and literate and politically polemical and spiritually aware all at once. In one of our shows we shared a stage with author William Burroughs, and on another occasion, I arranged for punk novelist Kathy Acker to call long-distance in the middle of a show to deliver an obscene screed. But the smart-ass, fuck-the-world trickery we had in common with those two malcontents was balanced by an equal devotion to messages of peace, love, and understanding. “Compassionate nihilism” was my description for our politics. We were New Age punks, a social category that as far as I knew had not existed before we invented it.

The name Tao (pronounced “Dow”) Chemical was itself a masterpiece of contradiction. It derived in part from the multinational company Dow Chemical, which was the hated manufacturer of the Vietnam War’s most nefarious novelty, napalm. The other meme came from the Chinese word “Tao,” famous for thousands of years as the earthly embodiment of heaven’s truth. Juxtaposing these two meanings embodied the esthetic by which the band was ruled: weaving together the
opposites that seemed most alien; playing sacred in the heart of the profane and vice versa; redeeming the darkness not by avoiding it but by exploring it armed with light.

One of the first songs Tao Chemical wrote as an ensemble was “Post-Manhood.” It was a seminal artifact of my career as a macho feminist.

“Post-Manhood” had a sweet, major-key melody that distracted even the most homophobic and sexist listeners from the controversial message. It embodied one extreme of our musical approach: wrapping confounding and confrontational lyrics in a pop package.

At the other extreme of our oeuvre were sardonic tunes that paid almost no homage to conventional song structure: no rhymes whatsoever, no typical verse-chorus structure, and not even a passing reference to (ugh) romance. Among these was “Scare Me,” a response to Ronald Reagan’s reign of affable terror.

I did condescend, in the end, to composing one—but only one—love song for Tao Chemical, breaking the unwritten rule in the music biz that a minimum of eighty-five percent of a band’s material must
deal with the vagaries of amour. The first verse and chorus of “Romance Is a Sickness” went like this:

Tao Chemical was a supple vehicle that allowed me to scratch my creative itch just about any way I wanted. I was hot. I was radical. I was doing exactly what I was born to do.

On the other hand, I had made almost no progress in improving my financial lot. I had a plenitude of visions but a scarcity of longrange master plans. And I was almost utterly unknown outside a medium-sized California beach town.

I still didn’t own a car, bought my wardrobe at the Bargain Barn, and cooked my rice-and-bean-dominated meals on a hot plate.

I trusted in the Goddess and believed the universe always conspired for the best, but had no idea where the specific money and help were going to come from to make my urges come to fruition.

And though I was a fucking legend in my own mind, the brute facts about my impact on the world were increasingly hard to ignore. Except for an infinitesimal mention of my music in
Option
magazine, my work had never once been reviewed anywhere outside Santa Cruz in a single music magazine or poetry review or performance art rag, not even of the “alternative” variety.

Before the devil’s bargains I made with CBS and WBM almost two years ago, I had never caught the attention of or signed a single contract with any entity in the music business. The three records I made were all do-it-yourself productions done on budgets so low I had to
donate blood to pay for one of them. Rock videos for my songs? Ha!

At least my poetry book,
Images Are Dangerous
, was not a vanity-press job. It was put out by Jazz Press, a legitimate and credible publishing company in Santa Cruz that had done books by established poets like Jack Marshall, Morton Marcus, and Deena Metzger. On the other hand, the book materialized mostly because I incessantly badgered the publisher, who was a friend of mine, and because I myself handled every step of the physical production of the book, including typesetting, layout, art design, and photostatting. It was accorded a favorable review in New York’s tiny
St. Mark’s Review
, but that was all.