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By Root 850 0

the familiar discomforts of Max’s Kansas City—the Algonquin Room of Andy Warhol’s Factory—but perhaps he acted disgruntled there too, his look of disgruntlement being the little parasol he carried wherever he went. The first time I saw Lou at CBGB’s he parked himself at a table in the back; at the table directly in front of him were a couple of rock chicks who were acting a trifle feisty. One of them, the more lubricated of the duo, began clapping along to whatever song was being played with the floppy enthusiasm of the temporarily uncoordinated. It was mildly annoying but also amusing, as so many things are in life, but Lou was not amused, his public amusement expressed mostly by a smile on a tight leash, easily mistaken for a sneer. “You’re clapping off the beat,” he told the girl, who paid him no never-mind, too far gone into the woolly interior to register a reprimand, even one from one of the founders of our country. “Clap on the beat, cunt,” Lou said, as she persisted in clapping as if trying to kill a fly in midair. Curiously, “cunt” didn’t come across as an offensive slur when Lou said it; it had the flat tone of an impersonal insult, just another nail he happened to be hammering. And CBGB’s wasn’t like the Village Voice, where the wrong word could set the entire playground into Balkan upheaval; a former hangout for the Hells Angels didn’t lend itself to an atmosphere of heavy self-policing, language- or otherwise. Thwarted in his efforts to make the girl desist in her infernal flapping, Lou left the table like a diner who flings his napkin on the table and exits in a huff, only Lou and his huff didn’t leave, simply shifted to another table, conceding this round to an oblivious amateur.

He fared no better in a later run-in with a more lucid adversary. One night Lisa Robinson, rock journalist extraordinaire, came up to me with the winged-Mercury enthusiasm of someone with some really good gossip to share and asked: “So did you hear what just happened? Verlaine just confiscated Lou’s tape recorder. Went up to him and demanded he fork it over.” Which Lou did, like a shoplifter surrendering a pack of cigs.

Such a heartwarming display of lèse-majesté by Verlaine, putting Lou on notice that his seniority and status didn’t count, not in this saloon, not in Verlaine’s musical jurisdiction, not where Television and its signature riffs were concerned. Verlaine must have suspected in advance that Reed was packing, foraging for inspiration, unless of course Lou was flaunting the handheld recorder in full view, making the recording-angel rounds like Warhol, who carried his around like a little air freshener. Then again, suspicion was slivered deep into Verlaine’s nature, which was flecked with paranoia. Wariness seemed wired into the very tilt of his head, the angle at which he appraised whoever approached him.

(Even when Verlaine got angry, he was methodical. I remember once watching him destroy an uncooperative amplifier during a performance at a bar called Mother’s. Most guitar heroes would have made a big Rocky Horror Picture Show of equipment wreckage, but Verlaine simply began tilting the amp forward and knocking it into the wall as if it were a vending machine that hadn’t dispensed the candy and wouldn’t give him his money back; interrogating it with his hands, as if trying to shake out information, until it was clear he wasn’t going to get anything out of this holdout and polished it off for good. It was a set I remember well because for some reason Patti, sitting next to me, had been reading about the Mormons and the name Brigham Young seemed to rebound off the wall as Tom gave the amp what for.)

Although Verlaine was also not one to court the press or any other species, he and I got along fine, he wincing with irritation only if I rattled on too fast as if the curtain had just been pulled off my parrot cage, which I didn’t take any more personally than I did Cale’s death grip, since Verlaine winced at every speed jabber. Offstage, his sense of humor had a touch of the gallows. Once I was standing on a subway platform,