Girl in a Band (11 page)

GROWING UP I'D
never sung, much less sung along to music, choosing instead to smoke a little pot, make art, and listen to Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, Tim Buckley, the Beatles, Archie Shepp, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I liked the same music my brother liked, with the exception of Joni Mitchell and Billie Holiday.

After my piece was published, Dan asked if I was interested in putting together an all-girl band to restage one of his best-known performance pieces,
Performer/Audience/Mirror,
which examines, and flips inside out, the relationship between a performer and a crowd. Whenever Dan did the piece, he stood before audiences with a huge mirrored
wall behind him. He described the audience before him in a staccato monologue, the meaning of every detail of their every movement. Then he overturned it by describing himself to the mirror in relation to what the audience saw.

When I tentatively agreed, Dan introduced me to bass player Miranda Stanton and Christine Hahn from the group The Static. The three of us began rehearsing. We decided we'd call our band Introjection, with Christine on drums, me on guitar, and Miranda on bass. Introjection performed
Performer/Audience/Mirror
at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, with the visual artist and composer Christian Marclay curating the evening.

We took the stage with the tall lakelike mirror behind us. Dan's plan was for Christine, Miranda, and me to take turns interacting with the audience in between songs, but nothing happened as scripted. I played guitar, my song lyrics appropriated from ad copy I'd torn from women's magazines. One song, “Soft Polished Separates,” described how to mix and match tops and bottoms. Another, “Cosmopolitan Girl,” was a word-by-word lift from an oversized
Cosmopolitan
ad telling the world what it was like to live the life of a
Cosmopolitan
girl.

It was an intense evening. All three of us were nervous, and Christine got so rattled during her turn that she left the stage and disappeared into the bathroom. We were supposed to play a song, and then one of us would interact with the audience in some way, in effect stepping through the unseen, unspoken line between audience and performer. Followed by another song, another interaction. At the same time I felt as if something new was lodging in my brain. Mixed in with the nerves was another sensation, as if I were a kid on a high-altitude ride I'd never had a ticket to go on before. I woke up the next day, and even though Introjection had performed precisely one show, I told myself we were now officially on tour. This was surely what the Stones or the Yardbirds felt like the first time they played, I thought, but it wasn't to be.

Dan was disappointed with our performance and told us as much.
Introjection hadn't done what we were supposed to. The problem was we'd all been so nervous we weren't thinking about what Dan expected from us. Then again, it
was
a loaded situation: a male artist using women to interact with an audience, in the process turning himself into a voyeur. As far as I was concerned it wasn't a failure, and whatever happened was a part of the performance, even if it didn't formally fulfill Dan's expectations. The fact that we
didn't
do what Dan wanted created another interesting moment in which music and art intersected in a climate of punk rock and rebellion.

Introjection didn't last long. Christine departed the band to join the ultra-cool German all-girl group Malaria!. Miranda pulled in a few guys for us to rehearse with, but nothing gelled, and Introjection never played another note or show.

I was apartment-sitting for Annina, at her rangy apartment on Riverside Drive. One of my responsibilities was to take care of Annina's big desert turtle, who was allowed to roam free, which meant I had to watch where I walked. It was during this time that I had an amazing shot of luck: my car-accident money came through in the form of a $10,000 check. It was the first real money I'd ever seen, an amount that made staying on in New York possible. I could pay a landlord both the first and last month's rent and secure my own place. What's more, the apartment right underneath Dan's happened to be open and available, and the rent was cheap, too, $150 a month. I would stay on in that apartment at 84 Eldridge Street for the next decade, with Thurston moving in with me soon after.

In 1980, the block between Hester and Grand on Eldridge Street in lower Manhattan was half-Chinese to the south, the other half made up of Jewish wholesale fabric owners. My landlord was Belgian, and rent control caused him to go around referring to himself as a “captive landlord.” He claimed to make no money on any of the apartments. Dan kept insisting to the landlord that I was a California hippie, which annoyed me to no end. Later, when Sonic Youth first went out on tour,
I had to be extremely discreet about subletting out my place so the landlord wouldn't think a bunch of long-haired hippie degenerates were crashing his building.

Like most of the apartments at 84 Eldridge, my new space was a railroad flat. There was a bathtub in the kitchen and bars on the windows by the fire escape. The bed, a mattress on the floor, sat in the middle, at a slant, as railroad apartments were known to buckle slightly down the middle. Cockroaches were a problem, too, and to me the people who invented Combat, the little black roach-trapping contraption, are urban folk heroes.

There was one benefit of Introjection, though. Before Miranda took leave of my life, she wanted to introduce me to Thurston Moore.

“He plays in a band called the Coachmen,” Miranda said. “In fact, they're playing tonight, it's their last gig.” She went on to say she thought there was something special about Thurston.

Later that night, Miranda and I showed up at a venue on Fifteenth Street called Plugg, run by a guy named Giorgio, who had some vague association with Led Zeppelin or the Stones. Plugg, of course, isn't there anymore. But it
was
the Coachmen's final show, and the rhythm guitarist
was
special.

He was very tall and skinny, six foot six, he told me later, charismatic and confident seeming, with pillowy lips. Height never came up for the Coachmen, since the others were even taller than Thurston, except the seated drummer. Afterward, Miranda made the introduction. I was surprised by how excited I was to meet this guy. About our first meeting, Thurston would later tell people that he was very taken by my dark flip-up glasses. There was no Internet back then, no e-mail, no texting, so at some point he and I must have exchanged phone numbers.

All my life up to then I'd been involved with older guys, and I remember thinking,
Oh, Thurston is five years younger than I am
. I decided to be open to this. He had a glow about him I liked, and he also seemed extremely sure about what he wanted and how to get it, though it was more a quiet self-confidence than anything brash.

A couple of weeks later, Thurston and I met up at Danceteria, but our first “formal” date was at A Space, a small alternative art space that featured performances and shows, and afterward Thurston came back to my apartment. I remember feeling so excited he was there, surrounded by my few belongings. We were talking about this and that when he laid eyes on the Drifter tilted against the wall. It sealed the deal, in a way.

EARLY ON, THURSTON
told me about an incident where someone at an art opening made some disparaging comment about his coat. It was a short black trench. I found that comment incredibly endearing. He was genuinely hurt by the remark, and telling me about it revealed his vulnerability. His feelings matched up perfectly with the fatigue and intimidation I felt around the gallery scene and about the fact that art-as-money was now the prevailing atmosphere.

I could also tell that Thurston was skeptical about the art world, and he was right to be, though he knew little of it. Today the traditional art discourse of creating a show around an idea has almost completely
deteriorated into setting up a room with objects for sale. Even then the tide was turning in that direction.

There was something wild, but not
too
wild, about Thurston. His guitar-playing may have been free and untamed, but we came from similar middle-class academic backgrounds. One night not long after he and I started going out, Thurston filled in for the Hungarian actress Eszter Balint—who would later go on to appear in Jim Jarmusch's film
Stranger Than Paradise
—by deejaying at the Squat Theatre. Nico played that night, as did the Heartbreakers, a band led by Johnny Thunders. It was a depressing evening. Nico cried, and though they meant a lot to Thurston, Thunders's band was only interesting for its heritage. Onstage they were a bunch of rock-and-roll burnouts.

We were slowly getting to know each other. When Thurston was eighteen, his dad had died very suddenly from a benign brain tumor—he hemorrhaged following a brain operation. Thurston attended college for half a semester and then dropped out. Later he told people he moved to New York with the fantasy of starting a band with Sid Vicious. Thurston and his good high school friend Harold used to come into the city from Connecticut, soaking up the scene. Years later, when we saw the film
The Ice Storm,
Thurston likened himself to the main character, the kid in the train seat heading into the big city. He told me story after story about going to CBGB in the seventies to see Tom Verlaine, Television, the Ramones, Richard Hell, and Patti Smith—all the music and the people I'd missed out on.

When Thurston and I met, I was still recovering from the end of the relationship I'd had with the older male artist in California. The man and I had been incredibly close, our relationship intense but in retrospect maybe slightly off-kilter. With him I felt I'd found something great, maybe even lasting. He and I talked endlessly about ideas and art, about anything visual in fact. In the end he betrayed me, and it was traumatic. When I met Thurston I was still feeling shaky.

They say you always learn
something
from relationships, even bad ones, and that what your last one lacked, or you missed out on, is what
you're primed to find in the next—unless, that is, you insist on repeating the same pattern over and over again.

The codependent woman, the narcissistic man: stale words lifted from therapy that I nonetheless think about a lot these days. It's a dynamic I have with men that began, probably, with Keller. Growing up I needed to believe he was bigger than life, a distorted genius, declaiming and wild in white. I did all I could to shield him from disapproval, anger, trouble. I defended him when he dropped out of college, lost sleep over the fear he'd be drafted to go fight in Vietnam, but during that reverent period, he foxed me into squatting in a small room off his larger one, smothering every attempt I ever made to figure out my own place in the world.

Thurston wasn't a larger-than-life character in the way Keller was, not, at least, in those days. He could be shy. He was good at concealing what he didn't know and pretended sometimes, for example, to be more knowledgeable about the downtown New York art scene than he actually was. At the same time he exuded a confidence, a certainty about who he was and where he was going. From the start I knew that our relationship wouldn't center on mutually shared ideas about art. But that excited me, too. Our relationship felt more like an intersection of two separate lines. By coming together the two of us could maybe make something new and bigger. Because he was younger, and I was used to going out with older men, I convinced myself I was breaking an old pattern. As for Thurston, he'd recently ended a relationship with a married woman who had a young son. We were starting out on equal emotional footing, and we wouldn't do to each other what had been done to us in our other relationships—or so I believed at that moment. Early in our relationship, I remember the two of us walking down Eighth Street together, holding hands, on our way to a movie—it could have been
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. That night I felt so happy, and so close to him, as if in this dirty, scrappy, adopted place he and I were the only two people who existed within a perfect moment. Soon after that, I started playing music with him.

One day, in our first months together, Thurston told me we were going to visit his mother in Connecticut. He didn't ask me—he just proclaimed it, and though I was upset that he hadn't conferred with me first, that was Thurston's style. It was hard for me to imagine leaving New York for any reason, even for a place as close as Connecticut, but I went along, being, at the time, more of a follower. It was Anne DeMarinis, in fact, the woman Thurston was playing music with at the time, who read my mind, Anne who told Thurston how inconsiderate and self-centered it was of him to assume I was ready to meet his mother, not to mention the rest of his family.

That same unpredictability made Thurston fun and even thrilling to be around, that and his gregarious manner. Outwardly, Thurston was friendly, good-natured, funny, extremely likable. When I finally met his mom, she told me that when Thurston was little, everyone in the neighborhood and the town knew him. “They would say to me, ‘Oh—are
you
Thurston's mother?'” Clearly, with his height and long hair, he was the golden child, and as the youngest of three kids he was used to being doted upon. “Is he as easygoing as he seems?” John Knight asked me the first time the two of them met. The truth was that no, Thurston was not that easygoing. Among other things he had a temper, which flared up whenever he put together an issue of his zine,
Killer,
and he would become incredibly stressed out. Once, when his stapler wasn't working, he picked it up and threw it through a window, shattering the glass. It scared me.

Today, when I think back on the early days and months of Thurston's and my relationship, I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are. It's made me question my whole life and all my other relationships. Why did I trust him, or assume I knew anything at all about him? Maybe I imposed on Thurston a dream, a fantasy. When I look back at old photos of us, I have to believe we were happy, at least as happy as any two creative people who are stressed out with commitments and fears about the future and what's next, and about their own ideas and inner demons, ever can be.

A friend once told me that he thought Thurston and I were a great match, as both of us were so independent, which he speculated must contribute to the success and longevity of our marriage. Thurston would do his thing, including assorted side projects, and I had side projects of my own. No marriage can maintain the thrilling-ness of the early days, and over time, in spite of what my friend said, and as creative as our relationship was, our marriage got progressively lonely, too. Maybe it became too professional. Maybe I was a person—like a stapler—who just didn't work for him anymore.

But at the time, the rumpled shirts Thurston wore with the too-short sleeves and the elbows worn out, the cat he owned named Sweetface, the tortoiseshell guitar that was the same color as Sweetface's fur, the subtle charisma and sensitivity, the fact that he'd lost his dad at eighteen and didn't seem to want to talk about it—all those things made me fall for him.

At the time, as I mentioned, Thurston was playing music with a girl named Anne DeMarinis. Anne was the girlfriend of the artist Vito Acconci, and the two of them lived together in a big loft in Brooklyn. A musical prodigy of some kind, Anne was young and beautiful, though she wore scruffy sweaters with holes in them as if to eradicate her good looks, and she rarely washed her hair. She was grunge before grunge existed. I remember taking the subway to Brooklyn to play music with the two of them; I remember, too, that Dan and Vito had been friends once, members of the New York City poetry scene, but for whatever reasons had become competitors.

Their rivalry made it odd for me to go from Eldridge Street, where Dan lived above me, to playing music in Vito's loft in the middle of what's now Dumbo. Anne played the keyboards. The band, for lack of a better word, had a bunch of different names—the Arcadians, Male Bonding—and also featured a few different drummers. We were playing at Vito's the night John Lennon was shot. Such an unbelievable thing to have happen—New York, the place where everything seemed possible, filled at the same time with so much darkness and violence.

Of the two of us, Thurston lived on the far worse block, Thirteenth Street in Alphabet City. Eldridge Street between Hester and Grand wasn't a block anyone with sense wanted to walk on at night—it was shadowy, scary, and druggy—but it wasn't nearly as bad as Thirteenth Street between Avenues A and B. Drug dealers were everywhere, selling, with users hunched over on stoops and slung in doorways. The first time I went over to his apartment, it was empty except for a few books, some records, a guitar, and a huge pile of shirts in a mountainous heap, all of them specked and gouged with holes, like some blowout sale at a discount retailer's. I remember being impressed by the sight of all those shirts; if nothing else, a bunch of stacked shirts was, you have to admit, kind of interesting.

It didn't take long for Thurston to move into 84 Eldridge. It saved on rent, and we didn't want to be apart anyway. Sweetface, whom Thurston had gotten from a health food store on Prince Street, joined us. The two of us had Sweetface until 1996. She moved with us to our apartment on Lafayette Street in the late eighties and died when Coco was two. When Coco was old enough to talk, she told me how sad she was at losing Sweetface, which surprised me, because who ever knows if a baby remembers anything at all.