Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [177]
And then there is Mike, whom I mentioned earlier in relation to his disinterest in Richard Hell. Aside from all the stuff I already listed, he keeps intersecting with paranoia, and I keep telling him that things don’t always really have the patterns they sometimes seem to. His eyes are almost too sharp, and there is real and well-grounded fear in them. Aside from Jane, whom he fell in love with and was rejected by, most of the girls he's come in contact with seem pretty much like trash, and punk trash at that. He says he doesn’t care. He says he's beyond suicide. He says he feels dead, blank, null, void. It's not a pose. He got rid of all his records because he says they remind him of things he doesn’t want to think about. About all he has in his apartment is one Diane Arbus pic of some retards on the wall. Since dabbling in Crowley Satanism, he's been freaked: he thinks the spirits are after him, and maybe they are. The other night he cut open his arms with a razor blade, not too deep, just enough, and put food coloring in the wounds. When I asked him why he said he just wanted to see what would happen. Which reminded me of the time I was on the phone with Rockets Redglare while doing my Sid ‘n’ Nancy story for the Voice. The subject of s&m came up, everybody from their friends to the cops seeming to be in agreement that Sid and Nancy's version of the bondage trip was really kiddie pennyante stuff (one friend in fact told me that they had quite a normal sex life; she said that was the only stable part of the relationship). Rockets blabbed on about which little kinks Sid and Nancy were into, but then he came out with the most amazing thing: “Yeah, but I can see how she coulda stabbed herself, or he coulda accidentally stabbed her. Y’know, like one night me and my girlfriend were fucking, and we took a razor blade to bed with us. We were just making little surface cuts and like that, but then we really got to fucking and forgot the razor blade was still in the bed and her elbow went back into it up to the bone. Somethin’ like that sobers you up real quick.”
I didn’t say anything. All could think was, what on earth do these assholes think they’re doing? I thought the stuff he was describing was more disgusting than real-life heavy-duty s&m—I mean, Christ, at least that's honest. This was real dilettante shit, except they were hurting themselves anyway because they were so fucking lame, and what's more disgusting than somebody who doesn’t basically have them toyingwith somebody else's pathological compulsions, just because they think it's chic or cool? Wouldn’t you be pissed off if you were a righteous grade-A certified pervert, and a bunch of little assholes come along rippin’ off your scene without even manifesting the balls to actually get more than a toe in the water or asshole more precisely? That's one reason I always hated David Bowie, because James Williamson told me that Bowie was never the slightest bit gay in the first place, but affected it because he thought that was the way to make it in the music business. And that's the true perversion: consciously going against all your basic human instincts in the name of fashion.
So as far as I’m concerned on that level people like Sid and Nancy and Rockets are just creeps, and Mike simply doesn’t know any better. I remember in the old days when we used to see Iggy maul himself while hurtling through the audience: it was sick, he was sick, we were sick for endorsing it, but at least there was something real about it. It was honest self-hatred. By 1977 we’d gotten to the point where well take your pick of groups but the ultimate for me was this bunch of wanks from Toronto who called themselves the Viletones and showed up at CBGB's one night. The lead