The Weather Outside

It’s something how the life will fall as to how the heart is tossed. john stewart, The Eyes of Sweet Virginia, 1982 at the age of eleven, with no drama whatsoever, I moved out of my mother’s house, and for the next thirty-five years I traveled, wrote, and did a lot of drugs. Everyone told me that I would die, but I didn’t. Today, to paraphrase Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, the hours I’ve spent with a straw up my nose are gold. As a true citizen of the dark side, I have experienced most varieties of pleasure and pain in the company of other shitbags and druggedout rock-and-roll trash like myself. I hung out at Andy’s Factory and Norman Fisher’s penthouse. I hitched rides on private planes flying north from southern Mexico, wobbly with bales of weed and beer coolers packed with contraband Mayan cylinders and Styrofoam peanuts. I shot up speedballs in the restroom of an evangelist’s private jet in the skies over Ohio. I chatted over coffee in the zócolo in Toluca with a big pistol tucked in my pants. I relaxed on a lumpy couch in a tweeker double-wide with an Uzi on the gray enamel coffee table. I rode along on late-night adventures with Allen Toussaint, Waylon Jennings, Butch Trucks, Lowell George, and a host of other transient luminaries. In one hazy, addled sequence that resembled nothing so much as the movie Groundhog Day for schizophrenics, I covered Aerosmith’s Rocks tour, a New York Dolls reunion in Detroit, Lou Reed’s Rock ’n’ Roll Animal tour, and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Back My Bullets tour—not one of which I could have survived without drugs and a very high shame threshold.

I covered Gregg Allman’s drug trial in Macon for The Village Voice, on drugs, of course, because Dickey Betts, seeking my sympathy, pulled out the quart-size baggie he kept folded in his boot. I also rode shotgun (with a shotgun) for a friend who scored four pounds of meth in a goat shed amidst the human infestation that nestles around the south end of the Salton Sea. I fell down a rain-slick mountain in Peru, and Billy Joe Shaver fell down on top of me. I stammered through a queasy morning in my mother’s perfect living room with two smooth atf agents who appeared at the door. They were interested in my college roommate. They wondered why my phone number kept showing up on their phone trap. I thanked whatever gods-may-be that it was a trap and not a tap because (master criminals that we were) I routinely called up to order “two ounces of Jethro Tull albums.” Once, in desperation, disconnected in Atlanta, I paid top dollar for an ounce of Vitamin b 6. Once, in a motel on the Sunset Strip, I tried to fuck a nubile starlet who was anxious to fuck journalists from national magazines. I failed in this endeavor because the drugs that provided me with the panache to try denied me the ability to perform. I resolved the situation to the taste of blueberry bodywash and told everybody that I banged her brains out. Boogie nights.

A few blocks down the Sunset Strip, and fi een floors above it, I sat on one of those concrete slabs that used to extend from rooms on the front of the Hyatt to block out the lights of the Strip. I enjoyed the view, relished the vertigo, and listened attentively to a Valley Girl, who was deconstructing the nuances of Jimmy

Page’s relationship with the occult. A few days later, in Montecito, staying at a friend’s house, I dri ed off for a little nap and woke up under a sky full of stars, in a spa full of blood-red bubbles. My friend threatened to charge me for spa maintenance. I went back to New York and prepared for my first (and only) appearance on Bill Buckley’s Firing Line by spending the night before coked up and naked in a sauna with twin Filipino fashion models. Excepting girls with multiple personalities, this was one of my two experiences with group sex (if twins count as a group), and it was not too bad. My performance as adjunct art expert on Firing Line, however, sucked bears.

I called these stupid stunts adventures, and in those years, I was all about adventures. For you, with your trust fund, your lo and your driver, your group interventions, and safety nets, they may seem tawdry. For me, they were magical, raggedy, and legion. I could get paid to go anywhere to look at anything and write about it because I was a good slick magazine writer and relatively punctual. I caught the shiniest train that came by and disembarked at the first glimmer of ennui to catch another. Sadly, the rising arc of excess began to flatten in the 1980s. I was stranded in Fort Worth while my mother was furiously dying, and one morning I noticed that X, one of my favorite bands, was playing in a club called Zero’s. When X played Zero’s, I felt my attendance was required. I wore a black Kinks ball cap and a long cowboy duster, and I leaned against the back wall. Except for Exene and the rest of the band, I was twenty years older than anyone else in the room. That was fine with me until an acne-challenged youth walked up and asked politely, “Do you have any Quaaludes, sir?” It occurred to me then that there might be an expiration date on stupid adventures, and there was, although I spent another decade in denial.

Then drugs killed all my friends and made my face fall off. My friends chose their own paths, of course, but losing whatever

Untitled, 1969

Sand, plate glass, argon tubing

Approx. 152 × 1066 × 244 cm | 60 × 420 × 96 in Installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis