Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [175]
But I was probably being self-righteous. Probably because I don’t think I really saw him either. While I was doing the article for the Voice, talking to everyone who had known him and rereading every bit of Pistols press I could find, I had caught myself, in the midst of this mountain of incontrovertible evidence of what a fuckup if not psychopath this guy was, still somehow feeling somewhere inside that there was something charismatic, romantic even, about him. When now I really wonder if he deserved my or anybody's sympathy. That interview in Fred Vermorel's book The Sex Pistols: The Inside Story, where Sid goes on about how he doesn’t read, hates TV, can’t stand the movies, laughingly brags that the only thing in the world he cares about is heroin—“I spend every ha’penny I make on it!”—while Nancy laughs along with him… there was a part of me that responded to that, identified with it, admired it even. I’ve never taken heroin, partly because I’ve abused every other drug I’ve ever gotten my hands on and knew I’d like it too much, partly because I figured nothing could be as good as Burroughs’ description of it, partly because of the human evidence of its effect that began to accumulate around me like so many half-ambulatory scrapheaps over the years. I hate it, I think it's evil, I don’t want to work or even hang out much with anybody who is into it on any level, I think it's just something that should be recognized for what it is and then abhorred and avoided, just like fascism, racism, and Scientologists. But the hours I’ve put in daydreaming, fantasizing, romanticizing about it over the years. I mean anyone would have to admit that it does simplify things in a quite concrete and mathematically predictable way. Junkie life devolves to hassling in the street, copping, fixing, nodding, then repeating the cycle. Of course it eliminates all such little botherations as the unpredictabilities and indeterminancies of romantic or sexual pursuits. You can also forget about your neuroses on all levels—since you have effectively ceased to be human, you now lack the qualifications for any kind of personality much less neuroses in the first place. William Burroughs said he never met a psychotic junkie, but I wonder if that's not begging the question somehow: I mean, how could a doorknob or a kickstool be psycho?
But there's more to the Sid fixation, not to mention the junkie romanticism, than that. For one thing, the reality obliterated half of the myth in front: Sid and Nancy were possibly two of the most pathologically tortured humans on the face of the earth. The heroin didn’t stop Sid from acting out, whether he actually did kill Nancy or not; there's also that night he slashed Patti Smith's brother. I think the really insidious element here is that looking at someone like Sid, no matter how fucked up he might get right unto death, in the face of all the evidence otherwise, his way just looks easier than yours. Because in whatever measure, by choosing not to be cowardly as Sid finally (always) was, you let yourself in for the myriad petty and huge contradictions of life as most of us are forced to live it. And now the question of choice enters the picture, which is perhaps the bottom line to the whole thing. Was Sid just a victim, or does everybody, even (to take the most extreme example I can think of) a person in Auschwitz, have certain options?
Sid was an asshole, as he himself would have been the first to tell you. Let's say not a doomed