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By Root 534 0

Sid's who supposedly had all kinds of information about a dope dealer who’d been hanging around the Chelsea and Sid and Nancy and made himself scarce as soon as her death was discovered. Rockets used to call me up all the time when I was covering the case for the Voice and even after that, drooling on in his methadone monotone about dope dealers and Sid and Nancy's personal, chemical, and sexual habits, but a lot of the stuff he was saying seemed to make pretty good sense at the time. He said the cops flipped out when he drew a picture for them of a knife belonging to this one particular dealer. But who among us would it serve for me to inflict Rockets on myself one more time? The State of New York has decided to let what I imagine to be a confluence of convenience and public opinion dictate their handling of the Nancy Spungen murder, and if Sid was in fact innocent, then that's just tough shit for whoever cares about it which is almost nobody at this point. It's a disposable culture, and there's no reason why jurisprudence shouldn’t conform to the mores of the rest of society; we all got our kicks off Sid, and now that there's nothing left to suck out it's only customary to toss him on the garbage heap, especially since he was human garbage in the first place. He served his purpose and got to enjoy his 15 minutes; all that's left now is to go scouting around for a new kickboy

If it makes any difference to anyone now, there's a pretty good chance Sid actually did kill her. I spoke to Joe Stevens at the CBGB bar about a month ago, and between bitter recollections of how Malcolm stiffed him for a phone bill in the thousands of dollars and of being pretty much totally frozen out by the entire New York recording industry for his involvement with Sid, he gave me his part of the lowdown. I said, “Shit, I’m just sick to death of this whole sordid mess. I don’t know if he did it, he doesn’t know if he did it….”

“He did it,” Joe cut in. “He told me so. Sid is a very nice guy—he just gets kinda twitchy sometimes.” And that might just sum it up, in a way. Sometimes I think one of the hardest things in the world is to recognize the psychopaths in our midst. They float so freely meld so comfortably with the society as it prevails. Because they are instinctual chameleons. Nobody I talked to in New York that knew him believed he killed her, but then our whole image of murderers has been so warped by the modern screen that I doubt if we’d recognize the face of the beast until the knife was coming down our own guts. And of course there is still the possibility that he really didn’t do it, that he might have just said that to Joe in one of his well-documented spews of macho rubbish.

What I do think is that Sid was just that, rubbish, and not in a way the ubersociety portrayed him. From all accounts I can gather, he was just an asshole. Certainly he was a patsy. (I wrote that in the Voice article, and Stevens told me when Sid read it he said, “What's a patsy?” Joe explained to him, and Sid said, “Yeah, that's what I am.” Any old port in the storm, I suppose.) His death is the ultimate coup in terms of his patsyhood for McLaren, a man some people are still defending though he looks to me like the compleat slime. His compere Vivienne was so sensitive as to make up that shirt with Sid's mug: “She's dead, I’m alive, I’m yours,” and now Malcolm's got the perfect ending for his movie, which of course everyone me included will rush out to see. I have always believed that McLaren was not so simple as your average Allen Klein strata slime, that he was indeed also a Sex Pistol and the money aside really in his heart of hearts wanted to live to see anarchy prevail and (British, at least) society blown to bits by at least some variant on these prototypically plug-ugly subhuman Visigoths.

But then you have to ask yourself, all morally and socially left-wing concerned as you fancy, whether you would really like to see things reduced to the level of rubble that people like Malcolm dream of. It's true that none of the old rules apply and no one has thought