• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 418 0

singer had christened himself Natzee Dog, and dog was just what he made like, groveling on stage, scraping his scarred flesh across it, swinging from the rafters, gouging himself, etc. etc. etc. ad tedium. I just walked out, not even offended. Because he wasn’t crazy like Iggy—he was just trying to be. Which of course is probably actually sicker than Iggy, but in a totally different and far more reprehensible way. Oh, I’m sure the guy's got some real bonafeed masochism down in him somewhere, but it's plain to see he wanks it up and milks it for all it's worth. By the end of the show, his arm was cut open literally in one great red line almost from wrist to shoulder, and he had to go down to the hospital and have about 883 stitches put in so he could show them off at the next gig. I think they should have refused him admittance; they’ve done as much to winos that friends and I have found in the streets and reported because we suspected they might be dying. And as far as I’m concerned winos deserve a hell of a lot more consideration than snotnoses who lacerate themselves so they can get famous.

Somewhere between a more extreme form of Iggy's pathology and Natzee Dog's jerkoff pose we might be able to find Sid Vicious. But at this point I’m beginning to wonder if it's even worth all the trouble. He was the Gary Gilmore of rock, but as with Gary Gilmore, when somebody wants to die that bad you might just end up saying So what, go ahead. I think of the line from Naked Lunch, The Judge to Bradley the Buyer: “‘I would recommend that you be confined or more accurately contained, but I know of no institution suitable for a man of your caliber. Therefore I must reluctantly order your release.’ ‘That one should stand in an aquarium,’ the arresting officer said.”

Gee, I guess that's pretty insulting to Sid's memory, isn’t it? I mean, this was a human being we’re talking about. Especially when you consider how the American and I’m sure the British press portrayed him after Nancy's death: like I said, a patsy, worse, a scapegoat. American society in the late Seventies is cancerous to the pit of the soul it no longer seems to have, and almost nobody wants to talk about it or even admit it, so there have got to be scapegoats. Each season brings a new one: in ‘76 it was Gilmore, ‘77 David Berkowitz hit the charts, and I guess you could say ‘78 was Sid's year. But, perhaps like Berkowitz and certainly like Gilmore, Sid's not only helped dig his own grave, he encouraged everyone else alive to think he was just as cretinous, subhuman, verminal, disgusting, and brutal as they were so delighted to portray him.

So the bottom line as far as I’m concerned is that he's dead and I just don’t give a damn. I don’t think Sid Vicious jokes are in bad taste, because his life as he chose and was suckered into living it was a monument to bad taste. Even when he tried to commit suicide when out on bail in October, that line he came out with: “Nancy, Nancy, I’m gonna kill myself, I wanna be with you!” Like, what bad soap opera did he pick that one up from while nodding to afternoon TV? The best thing you could say is that what happened to him might serve as a warning to others, but as already indicated I don’t think there's too much likelihood of that. So fuck him. Let's forget he ever existed and move on to something else. Because when all is said and done people do have some element of choice.

Someone I dearly deeply love was committed to a hospital mental ward and almost the bigtime cuckoo's nest last year; I went barging out there like some halfassed Sir Lancelot, she eventually got herself out, but when I walked into that place I saw the most graphic evidence of what society can do to people, and just how totalitarian this supposedly free society can get when some administrator arbitrarily decides that you’re not quite fit to mingle with the rest of the herd. What I saw in there was a whole bunch of people who as far as I was concerned were not crazy at all. Well, there was one guy who thought George Benson was sending him telepathic messages, but