proceeding as if he hadn’t heard you and telling the story the exact same way he had before, with the same pauses, the same inflections, even the same anticipatory laughs as he relished the next bit in the story (as if they had been written as italicized cues adjoining the dialogue in a radio script) and sped up toward the payoff line. I would later know cokeheads who wouldn’t brake their spiel even as I put down the phone, tiptoed to the bathroom, peed, washed my hands like a priest before mass, and then picked up the phone again as if I had been there the whole time. But it was never the same spiel, as if the playback button had been pressed. I filed Lester’s repetition compulsion away as a minor interesting anomaly until he came to New York on a record-company junket, I believe, and a group of us visited him at the hotel he was being put up at and he entertained us with a boom box—a ghetto blaster was the parlance in favor then, until the term made liberals nervous in their service, to quote that distinguished theologian, Reverend Ike—which was loaded not with music but with a tape of Travis Bickle’s mirror monologue from Taxi Driver. “You talking to me? You talking to me? You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here.” I can’t say this was a speech that won its way into my heart when I saw/heard it the first time in the actual film—I’ve always thought it smacked more of an actor’s improv audition than a prize scene to be set on the mantel next to Brando’s wounded lament to his brother in On the Waterfront (“you shudda took care of me, Charley”)—but even if it had earned a spot on my personal Oscar shelf, it wasn’t something I wanted to hear replayed at DEAFENING VOLUME until each vowel cracked and splintered with static. It also made conversation nigh impossible, which may have been Lester’s passive-aggressive intention, his perverse way of dominating a discussion even without having to say anything. Whatever the explanation, assuming there was one, it smacked of mind-fuck, though in fairness Lester never pulled anything like that again, at least in my vicinity.
It must have been later that year—1976—that Lester moved to New York from Michigan, ready to take the next ramp up in his career, one that led away from strictly rock reviewing and tour de force rampages (however fantastically baroque and comic a canvas he had made them for his paint-gun blasts, as in his much-beloved “James Taylor Marked for Death” and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” in which Lou Reed was valentined, among other things, as “a panderer living off the dumbbell nihilism of a seventies generation that doesn’t have the energy to commit suicide”) into a dressier salon of journalism, where you weren’t treated as an itinerant peddler. Lester had a much more difficult freshman orientation experience than I did, because I came to New York a nobody with no reputation to live up to, whereas Lester had a well-publicized clownish side that made fans anticipate/expect antics, of which he had a Santa bagful. Sometimes the hijinks bubbled up out of pure ebullience, other times it was the alcohol/cough syrup/whatever taking to the stage for a sweaty workout. This may have been no different from the way he behaved in Michigan or on press junkets. What was different was that in New York in general, the local rock scene in particular, and CBGB’s in super-particular, he found the audience less receptive, and he in turn was less entranced by his newly adopted milieu: the recipe for a sour letdown. He would watch some band performing in the beery late hours and complain, “It’s not exactly Iggy,” meaning Iggy and the Stooges, and, true, no one onstage was rolling around on glass shards and flaunting Adonis abs for the greater glory of the sun god; likewise, he would compare some hard-charging unit unfavorably to the MC5. He would go on and on about how Television was essentially no diff from the Grateful Dead with their endless guitar ragas, a way of putting down Television without conceding a few points of originality. And it may have had more than a little