Lucking Out - James Wolcott [89]
Fran, who used to date Television’s Billy Ficca, went on to write a guide to Cute Guys and later married the brilliant economics writer and Barron’s contributor John Liscio, her life as a suburban mom sliced in two when John died of liver and kidney failure at the age of fifty-one, leaving her a widow with two children. She can be seen briefly in Blank Generation too, sitting at a table near the front. Fran and Mary weren’t paying a nostalgic courtesy call to CBGB’s; they were revisiting the shrine to research a possible film version of Please Kill Me, the oral history of punk that had become the Paradise Lost for those who ached for the gritty crucible they had never known, the train they had missed. (There was a young actor I thought would be perfect to play Verlaine, a guy on the TV series Freaks and Geeks named James Franco.) The Jungian analyst and author James Hillman once observed that some cultural moments and institutions exert an afterlife hold on the imagination through the anecdotes and incidents that accrue into a coral reef of true myth—or, as he put it in three little words, “all that lore.” All that lore is what made CBGB’s compelling long after it became a raucous shell, and what has kept the myth of the Algonquin Round Table alive, no matter how mid-range the achievements of Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley appear today, or how downright dropped-off-the-map the names of Alexander Woollcott and Heywood Broun are. Same for the Beats—they were a self-aware, self-promoting lore syndicate whose exploits still inspire hipster doofuses today, at least those who forswear irony. Lore is publicity that lasts long after there’s nothing left to publicize.
Through the front doors of CBGB’s we went, and there, sitting at his desk in the front, was bearded Hilly, as if he had not left his outpost since we had last seen him, the lone survivor of a deserted fort. The bar only hung with a contemplative weight of desolate quiet because it was early afternoon, not because it was closed for business, but we still felt a subdued piety because so many memories were held here in this living-dying museum that was once our skinny hangout. Hilly welcomed us sweetly, interrupting and then restarting a conversation with a contractor or inspector that had the Pinteresque aspect of missing parts in the dialogue that gave the bits we were hearing an occult quality, broken pieces of a ritualistic spell. We wandered around, so much as it was, but more so. The walls—they were like the drawings and inscriptions on the inside of a sacred grotto, layers upon faded layers of flyers for long-gone bands, rogue galaxies of graffiti, the Pompeian remains of the punk proletariat, so much more powerful than they appeared in photography books about CBGB’s, more charged with presence and the absence of the hundreds of hands that had contributed every indecorous dab. I descended to the bathrooms downstairs, and they were just as Dantesque as ever, the stall-less toilet resting like a debauched throne, like the only thing left after a lightning bolt had blackened everything else to cinders and char. I experienced a tender awe amid this necropolitan splendor that had managed to be left alone, raising itself with minor supervision, as punk itself had.
When we reascended to join the surface dwellers, Hilly was still papa-bear-ing it at the front, his interlocutor gone. One of us asked about Joey Ramone, who was in the hospital with lymphoma, which had been taking it out of him for seven years. “I hear he’s doing better,” Hilly said. “Touch and go, but last I heard he was improving.” It turned out to be the last rally before the final out, Joey dying not long after, on April 15, 2001, a year that had a lot more waiting