The Flower Eaters

The Flower EatersOne

In my tree house, I would like a shrine to the lowliest of goddesses: the groupie. She's an American invention, and she is the quintessence of feeling like nothing, an experience that never really properly gets memorialized. Her submission is the kind that can only be found in the woman who is eternally a girl. Most women don't really want to think about the groupie anymore. But she is the place where most of us started. She is the ugly little hometown we all had to escape but never leaves us. She is the wide-eyed girl that wants to know what it's like to be with a boy, who believes that if we find the right one, it's all wrapped up, and that the world is golden. I spend a lot of time denigrating that part of myself, but she still chirps in my mind like a dime-store parakeet.

Where did she first raise her little disheveled head? It was the first time I sat on my daddy's lap and listened to his heartbeat. The first time I stared into his big brown eyes and wanted to live there. I had a silent one-ness with my dad when I was little that has only been equaled in my grown-up life once or twice. And when he left, whether it be for a day, or for good, those small experiences were the only ones I wanted. I think to be a true groupie there has to be a momentous separation from the father. His disappearance turns him into a magical, sparkly figure who must be pursued. This is what gives the groupie her edge.

As a young girl, I had a fantasy that David Bowie was my dad. My conscious mind really told the truth in this situation: not that he was my boyfriend, but that he was my dad. If he was my dad, he could never really leave, his magic and beauty would always be a part of me, part of my bloodstream. In that way, I was already a good little American consumer. Not only did I want him around physically, I wanted him to be a part of me cellularly. Why? Cause I felt like nothing.

I've thought about the all the groupies I've known: me, my mom, my best friend, maybe you too. I think of the groupie as the harijan, "the untouchable" of the caste-system of American pop-culture. The one who plays clean up for all the denizens of fame, that still keeps the hope alive that famous people (and perhaps men, period) are more than human. She is that poor little girl who will do anything, ditch biology, crawl thru glass, give some head, to get a taste of the magic. All her actions point to the ol' standby that men are the only ones who've got the keys to the franchise of life. The groupie, though not a carnivore, is definitely a consumer who ends up getting eaten in the end. Not fabulous enough to be a concubine, or evil enough to be a succubus, she is the everyday sort who puts on her rainbow-piped gym shorts and goes on a hunt for the magic penis. Perhaps I am describing her in too melancholic, harmless a fashion. Groupies, whether they be in the business of rock n'roll, law, or medicine can be some of the most ugly scheming little bitches of all time. Their deep, yawning nothingness makes them that way. They can be as bad as any imperialist asshole when it comes to their need to conquer. No friends, you won't be getting the "Almost Famous" version here. Where I come from, the groupie's got a bad overbite, some bleeding, super-skinned knees, and an aching, deranged heart.

Cut to the chase, let's get to the orgasm. Paul McCartney said that after the Beatles first U.S. Tour he thought Americans were the loneliest people in the world. Here we are, so young, the outcasts of the world. The poor self-esteem of the criminal and the religiously fanatic is shot through our gene pool. We feel so bad, the only way to make up for it is to feel so so so good. And there is nothing like rock n' roll to fuck the mind's pleasure center like an atomic vibrator. And so it is only right that the American groupie is the most rabid, cannibalistic fan of them all. Surely, as we are nothing, the best way to catch that magic, make it a part of us, is to tear at, fuck, or optimally marry the source. The more evolved would say picking up the guitar would be a better option, but that takes too long. It is easier to suck it, fuck it, bathe in it. Do you remember a.m. radio? Probably not. There was a time where it represented a beautiful Oz-like utopia in sound to all the sad denizens of the Midwest, which is where I am from. Gladys Knight and the Pips after the Stones after Terry Jacks. The high and low, the black and white, the mediocre and the sublime were all allowed to exist in one place. It was a quick and easy aural shot of transcendence.

The Bay City Rollers were the little neon-pink tulips that rose from am radios' utopian soil, and every girl wanted more than a whiff. The following is my encounter with these fragile boys, who nearly were devoured. You have to remember that when this occurred, I did not yet feel like nothing.

"S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT!"

I was quite wee, and my very young daddy, who was a top-forty d.j., was emceeing one of their shows. We went to Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox, where the Rollers were making a special appearance. My Dad had one of those piss-stadium beers in one hand and my sticky little hand in the other and we met the lads by their limousine. The boys ascended from their black car, so pale and slender, their shoulders narrow, and their hair ornately chopped-up in beautiful plummage. They wore plaid pants in gleaming red and green, and their little hipbones jutted out. Their young weenies were pressed firmly into their skinny white thighs. I stared intently at those weenies, that took on a life of their own in those pants. They looked gentle and timid, as if playing dead. If a weenie could do such a thing. My first male love, my dad, was of hearty German Norwegian stock with curly black hair and big broad shoulders. These men were like girls, bird-like and frail. They looked almost like me, except with weenies. Where was their daddy, I thought.

We followed the bird men in plaid up these metal stairs to a scaffold. As the steel stairs squeaked underneath us, we were greeted by the most deafening roar of high ecstatic voices. It was the electric tone of a swarm of insects. I squinted into the lime green field, and all I could see was an ocean of plaid scarves waving, back and forth, back and forth. I was standing next to the blonde member of the Rollers. He waved a tiny wave, a weak smile on his pale Scottish face. I was standing so close to him, I could feel the warmth coming off his body. But he wasn't there. It seemed to me, though I thought I must be crazy when I thought it, as if the insect sound was somehow sucking out his soul, and he was internally struggling against it. Playing dead. I see now that this was probably true.

Later on we went to the show at the Arie Crown, a place where they have livestock events and car shows. The show was sold out. My mom, sister and I waited in the green room, where they had RC and Tab in a silver bucket. I ate a tiny swiss cheese sandwich and sucked on an R.C.. until it was time to go upstairs.

I felt it as soon as we started up the stairs, but "it' wasn't a part of me. It was a presence around us like smoke. I would later feel "it" inside my own body: the need to tear the wings off those little bird men, rub their faces in my flat little chest. But I wasn't there yet. I didn't even think of myself as a girl.These were suburban girls, with soft round thighs in too-tight pants and little baby boobies, and they were screaming full-bodied, chest-heaving screams. Tears rolled down their faces. They seemed to be in physical pain. And yes, there was the sour smell of piss in the air. The place was dark and warm, and I felt instinctually that these girls were expressing something so utterly, utterly urgent. The bird-men bobbed up and down, perpetually smiling. Suddenly girls were appearing on the stage, wrapping their bodies around the young men. Big dudes ran out of the wings, unwrapping the young girls from the bird man's bodies and carrying them off the stage. There was one girl after another, and sometimes we would be only feet away from them as they dragged them backstage. I will never forget the girl who required four men to carry her off. She was spasming, her little pink baby-tee pulled up around her chest to reveal soft white rolls of fat, her sad little face knit in anger and disappointment. "I JUST WANT TO TOUCH THEM! I JUST WANT TO TOUCH THEM!" she wailed over and over.

I remember my mom, who was probably only 13 years older than the girl, squeezing my shoulder and bringing me closer into her lambskin coat. I was absolutely stricken by the experience, didn't have the words for what I saw. I wanted to tell someone, but didn't know what to say. If I could, I probably would have said: "Do you know how weird we are?"


Two

By the time I was ten, I had watched enough television, looked at enough magazines, and weathered enough of my parents' drug-fueled misery to know that I was nothing. I knew it with fierce certainty, and slid further into a world of books and rock stars, and none of them had tits.

We return now to David Bowie. The first man I had any stirrings in my body about. My dad lived in a dingbat bachelor pad with brown carpeting and dying ferns, and owned one of those highly coveted beta videotape machines. He had taped a documentary about the history of rock n'roll hosted by the dreamy Jeff Bridges, who narrated the program in low slung jeans, walking on a L.A. beach.I watched this documentary religiously every Wednesday that we slept there. I don't know how many times I watched it. They had a skinny, beautiful Bruce Springsteen doing "Rosalita" and The Eagles with floppy hair and embroidered shirts.

The absolute climax of this program however, was to be found in David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, who truly broke my groupie cherry. The moment of penetration occurred during a live performance of what I liked to call "Ziggy Played Guitar". He is wearing a red samurai-style kimono and big plastic 40's lady's bracelets. He does this movement, which I will not be able to describe accurately, where he is in a lunge and raises himself up into this god-like pose with his legs wide apart and his long, pale arms outstretched. The feeling I had watching this one moment in Ziggy's time was pure elation and a lust that was spiritual in nature. It was almost the feeling I had when you fly in your dreams. I would do anything, ditch biology, crawl through glass, give some head, for that feeling.My only option at the time was to play the moment over and over again in rapid succession, the proverbial addict taking hits off the pipe. Thank God it was on tape. My sister sat next to me on the brown velvet couch, absolutely helpless.

"Jeez Tracy," the nine-year-old said, 'do you know how weird you are?" Yes, I had some idea.

My pilot light was definitely turned on. Soon I would be dancing in the shower to "Hurts So Good" by John Cougar. What makes this even more horrific is that I had no secondary sexual characteristics.My dad had the "Hunky Dory" LP, and I listened to it on headphones over and over in some dark corner, behind a rubber tree plant. I was literally trying to make the sound a part of me. In some strange gender reversal, it is almost as if by merging with my object of longing, I could be born again. Lofty, but true.

And so I trudged through life, half in a dream, thinking that one day the delightful merge I longed for—like the one on my dad's lap, like the one I had with the hi-fi would happen, and I would be complete. Over time, I would see the impossibility of the occurrence, but as I am an American, I knew there must be a way to overcome the impossibility.

* * *

One of my dad's most long-standing paramours was definitely a super-groupie. Tall and slender, with long raven hair, her ass was on the cover a 1972 "gentlemen's" mag, perched on a bicycle seat. For the purposes of this essay, we'll call her Faye. Faye was my first experience of a real-live anima woman, the beautiful kind that men can project their most exalted, untouchable inner-femininity on. My mom was pretty, but in that Midwestern, I-have-to work-for-a-living way. Faye had the kind of beauty you only find in 70's foreign films: porcelain, impossibly symmetrical and fragile in feature. Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger's long-time girlfriend, is Faye's spiritual sister, if not in reality, in her own private cosmology.

Faye lived in Athens in the early 70's with a bunch of American models who posed for European Vogue, and they were all in a race to nab famous husbands. There are tons of photos of them on white rocks by the sea, dressed Biba-girl style with scarves on their heads, embracing wrinkled old Greek fishermen. Liquid eyeliner and long legs abound.

"Your dad's really only a b-level celeb," she would say, "I believe I've failed."

We lived in rented apartments, and it was a big deal to go to a fondue restaurant on the weekends. She was a princess humoring the plebes. "Jesus Christ," she said, "my best friend ended up in a castle with one of the guys from Monty Python for Christ's sake."

Faye had been with baseball players, even had a couple of dates with Shel Silverstein, and a short stint with the editor of a major arts magazine. She would spend her days in the slow, furtive nurturing of her beauty, taking baths, eating cocktail onions out of the jar and smoking cigarettes. At night she gave the performances that would keep these powerful men around and her meals bought: as the care-free, fun-loving muse in the floppy hat. When they discovered who she really was, things got difficult. Faye was in fact deadly intelligent, only making her task all the more impossible. She was a capable photographer and had a scret penchant for the lesbo-genius Virginia Woolf. Faye's mom was a showgirl nabbed by a rich Jewish textile tycoon, and in many ways she had been pruned into her destiny. I use the word "pruned", as I saw her consistently growing against her own better interests, according to her upbringing. In our long exchanges, where it seemed we were always the same age, Faye would have some shocking revelation about my dad or herself that would force her to shove many cigarettes in her mouth in awful succession.

"I don't think your dad really likes me very much," Faye said, "what do you think?"

"D'accord," I would answer back.

"Let's get the hell out of here," she would say, and we would abscond to some coffee shop where I would watch her smoke more cigarettes.

I knew instinctively that if Faye flourished too far, she risked that life-changing madness that will burn the truth right out of you, and so I kept my observations simple, and open to interpretation.

It became very apparent very early on that I was not going to follow in Faye's footsteps. I was appraised very early on my physical flaws that could only be changed with plastic surgery that they haven't invented yet. "If only your eyes were wider apart", she said. "Your nose smaller." Then I would have the magic, I knew it. Could nab a rock star from the front row, just like she did. Then the world would be golden.

There is nothing worse than longing for a completely new physiognomy, and seeing no other recourse, I completely rebelled. Faye lived in a very simple world, where the primary motivating force of humanity was sensation and sexuality. My father seemed to agree, and acted the egregious sensate. Fuck them all I thought. I am moving into the attic of my pale little body, my mind, and I'm never coming out, fuckers.This proved to be close to impossible.

Three

As my dad was a demi-celebrity, the proverbial big Zeus in the small Olympus, and he was the quintessential dark-haired, denim-crotched babe in the 70's sense, there were women around constantly. And my dad had no problem availing him self of them, as if he lived in some 24-hour sex pharmacy. There was no lack of sexual healing in his life, but it was mixed with drugs, which gave it all the charm and gentility of chemotherapy. 19-year-old car models, secretaries in frilly polyester shirts, ex-wives of football players with fake tits, cigarette-voiced chick bartenders, there was loads of insta-pussy waiting on that brown velvet couch. Their exchanges were brief, intense, and often very, very loud.

Faye had won out of the pack of women who seemed to me to be almost Stepford Wife-ian in their empty, vacated quality. I see now that they were all probably high, and I hated them all. It was like the Bay City Roller girls had grown bigger, meaner, and liked to use their fangs to eat drugs with their flowers. They gave less than a shit about me. And it was much easier to see my father as the victim, as the object of consumption, when really in the end he was masterminding the bloodbath. (I know, a little melodramatic, but pretty apt.) This to me was mating. This to me was heterosexuality. If my dad was any form of flora, he wasn't the pink-tulip kind. He was a big red mushroom that could get you very high. He was young, he was cute, he was famous and funny, and by all accounts, a good lay. He also had the good drugs. And he was miserable. What lost little girl between the ages of 18 and 45 could resist? A question to all grown-ups: do you know how weird you are?

I realize now that I saw all women as groupies, or at least potential ones. There was no other paradigm that I was exposed to. I don't want to sound like Valerie Solanis or one of those scary 70's proto-feminist separatists, but heterosexuality looked fucking terrifying to me. It looked hard, cold and loveless. It looked to me about loss of self. I watched my mom search for her indigent self almost predatorily, like so many divorced women of the time. Yoga and secretarial classes, wine-tasting parties and wilderness vacations were filled with the self-less refugees of bad marriages. I watched Faye consistently push her own reality down and away from herself in order to placate the magic mushroom. Sure, there was a feminist movement, but it had yet to liberate anyone I had known.

In the theater of life, I decided that I was not capable of being an anima woman, the only role offered me in my small reality, that I would become my own odd mixture of scowling misanthrope and cultural anthropologist in big black shoes. This would later become its own sort of female archetype (there are thousands of us now approaching middle-age), helped along by punk and new wave, and should also be duly represented in my tree house, but we'll get to that later. In the ol' cliché, rock n' roll (always and still does) came to my rescue. This is one the biggest gifts (besides an inveterate child-like view of the world) my daddy gave to me. One day my dad brought home the first Pretenders album and threw it on the brown velvet couch. Not to be too rock n' roll 101, but he might as well have thrown a grenade.

Four

Just looking deep into the album cover, I knew everything that I had believed previously was simply a lie. Faye and dad just fell away, like old skin. The gorgeous aliens on the cover, in graphic black and white, were the only proof I needed that indeed, there WERE other life forms. Ziggy was the ambassador from a brave new world, and here were more of his cosmic denizens, landing effortlessly in the cold Midwest.

So on the cover, the band is standing in a Stanley Kubrick white void. The gorgeous alien in the middle, the brunette in red leather is a changeling: a little bit boy, and a little bit girl. The scowl on her face seems to say: "Hello, you callow fools, you have never ever heard anything like this before." So there I was, bare feet in the brown shag, standing nervously at the record player, hiding myself behind the rubber tree plant. Like Charlie unwrapping the magic chocolate bar, I removed the black record from the white cover and gingerly placed it on the hi-fi, my pale little hands all a tremble.

This will sound cloying or even quaint, but hearing the first notes of the first song, side one, "Precious" was like eating dark chocolate for the first time. The taste is weird at first, kinda bitter, but then suddenly it's all smooth and soft and you're inhaling it through your nose and eating more and more til it's all over your fingers and your mouth is all florid with dark sweetness. Her voice was syrup oozing over whizzy, wiry boy guitars that sounded like signals bouncing off U.F.O's.

And then from outta nowhere she sings, "FUCK OFF!"Hey, wait a minute. What was THAT? Did I just HEAR that? Let's play it again, let's see…okay… Well- not-me-baby-I'm-too -precious - FUCK OFF! Oh my God. That's what she said. That's WHAT SHE SAID.

Friends, I played that little measure over and over again. Til I was falling on the shag in gales of shocked adolescent laughter. I have no doubt that Liz Phair, Courtney Love and all those other plebes did the exact same thing, and their need to divide and conquer was born.

Now, explaining the import of The Pretenders arrival to a young girl now is like explaining how exotic and shocking Elvis was in the fiftie's. When I was growing up, girls simply did not play guitars. The only rock star with tits was the loveable Suzi Quatro as Leather Tuscadero from "Happy Days". Not to demean her in anyway, but Leather didn't seem to me as formidable and drop-dead elegant as Miss Hynde. (Though there couldn't have been a Chrissie without a Leather, or for that matter, a Joan Jett. These ladies were the true shag-do pioneers.)I had never heard a lady sound so strong and threatening and calm. I was used to my white lady singers being sad like Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro or desperate and on-the-edge like Janis Joplin. This lady was none of those things. She was goddamned rooted in her high-heel boots. Some of us oldies-but-goodies have Betty Friedan. I've got Chrissie Hynde.

I knew instinctually, in my little 13-year-old body, that Chrissie was the spiritual and physical leader of this group, that there was no Svengali in the wings or super-talented dude letting her front for the sake of pop culture novelty. I knew that she could fuck the members of her band if she wanted, in fact she could fuck anyone she chose to and not lose one iota of herself. Now the reality of course was much more complex I'm sure, The Pretenders were in fact alcoholic human beings, and two of them would be dead very soon.

I did further research and found out that the pop genius Ray Davies was her boyfriend. In pictures together they didn't look like Mick and Bianca, or even John and Yoko. They looked equal, almost twin-like. If he said. "fuck you bitch, I wrote 'You Really Got Me'", she could say, 'yeah well, I wrote "Tattooed Love Boys". In my 13-year-old imaginings of their relationship, submission of any kind was completely impossible. There was no flower to be eaten, no souls to be lost in this union. To me, they were the rock n' roll version of the movie "Pat and Mike", a kind of heterosexuality they only had in movies. I see now that they fought terribly, that Ray was border-line mental in the great rock tradition, and that Chrissie had a penchant for kicking out car windows, but my mind at the time made them both strong and elegant, just like their music. My projection was absolutely essential to my well-being.

This is where I began to truly eat the flower, when I decided that I was going to take pop culture into my self, like the rest of the world with the Aniston shag-cut or the Pritikin diet. In 8th grade, I took the album with me to my mom's hair-stylist and said: "I want hair just like hers", and I walked out with my first, trainer shag haircut.I was going to get to that brave new world if it fucking killed me. If I had to rebuild cellularly. And I almost did.

Five

I plastered my room with pictures of rock stars and women throughout the ages with haunted, heavily made-up eyes: Theda Bara, Patti Smith, siouxie, Clara Bow, Alice Cooper. In an act of transcendental groupiedom, I would sit hunch-shouldered on my merimekko bedspread and meditate on these images for hours, hoping to drink in the pictures' essences to transform myself. I pummeled myself with punk rock, 60's soul and garage in a bid to reshape my soul. It was brave new world or bust.Everyday in my mind was a salon at the Chelsea Hotel. Long-legged, black-haired boy poets (preferably pock-marked) lounged about like cats. Patti Smith was my best friend and would throw the I-Ching on my bedroom floor. Iggy would show up, completely unannounced at my door, strip off his shirt and throw himself on my bed. I'd cover his torso with Jif, and lovingly lick it off, but stop when I got to his weenie because I was too scared. If I stayed just the way I was in my beige turtleneck and brown cords no one would see the brave new world I had created. Not a one. And so my Chrissie haircut was the first time my inner life asserted itself outward. And it was one of the best things I ever did. The shag really is a magical thing. It made David Bowie Ziggy Stardust.

I became a sartorial samurai. There was no form of ripped dress, fishnet, or garter I would not wear. Some days I was a boy, and some days I was a girl. I was lonely, but I was fucking free. I should explain that my school was full of moneyed, seemingly content golden children. They seemed to me congruent with their realities. Physically most were Sea Breeze- advertisement gorgeous with poreless skin and immaculate clothing. They did things like ski in Aspen, play tennis, and have brunch on Sundays. I think it was satisfying for me to believe on some level that they were more real than I, though I know this was a projection. B.C. (before chrissie) I was merely a phantom in the halls, a.c. I was a puzzling presence, and at best, someone to be FEARED.

At sixteen, I was filled with the delicious exhiliration of actually being perceived. I, in no way, resembled the lost Persephone I once was. I was a composite of all the girls on my walls. My persona suggested a decadence and recklessness that was really a lie. Yes, my transformation was only really visual, until I encountered one of the most gorgeous, fucking hot mammals that had ever crossed my path. His name was Arthur, and my reaction to him was profoundly unsettling, to say the least.

Before Arthur, I had relegated myself to a life of fantasy. All of my sexual activity would be had in the confines of my mind. I thought I could go the distance maybe with girls, as they were less scarier than boys, and there wouldn't be that awful soul-killing result of the sexual transaction. (I would find out later how I wrong I was about that!) Because of all that had happened, to me, my mind was the only safe place to be.

I don't when I started to discern this, but every time dear Arthur walked by, my heart and crotch would clench up, and the world looked like it was glowing in a vaseline-smeared lense. My eyes could not leave the site of the silhouette of his booty or the nape of his neck. He was the first real live boy I ever wanted to fuck, he was my own Bay City Roller, and the sight of him made me grow big ol' FANGS. Some days you eat the flower, and some days the flower eats you.
Six

There was a recklessness and a lack of fear of the world about Arthur that made me want to be near him as much as possible, bury my head in his flat chest, like the girls at the Rollers. But I had to do it without being noticed. I pretended a casual repulsion for him, scowling at him over my notebooks, pretending he wasn't there, three feet away, when really I was trembling and sometimes nauseous. I studied his daily movements, and the smallest acts became fodder for slow, repetitive daydreams. Friends, I had never ever experienced anything like this before. I felt like maybe I was going nuts. All the clichéd shit I had read in Shakespeare and novels from English class, well, maybe it was true. As a sworn teen iconoclast, I harbored hatred for all clichés, but here I was pretty much the exploding embodiment of one. I fought it like a virus.

Arthur wore lip gloss and eyeliner to school, and dressed like a dime-store mod, in lime green suit jacket, impossibly tight pants, and white vans. He had a prominent nose like an English rock star, while everyone else at our school had their noses chopped into submission. I knew this was not an easy thing for a young man to carry, but he did, with head held arrogantly high. He was always stirring shit up in the hallway, offending people with teenage blue humor (I heard him say the word "pussy") or playing Rick James too loud on his boom box. He carried himself in a slightly fey manner that freaked out the boys and made me want him more. For Halloween, he came to school dressed as John Delorean, a millionaire busted for coke, and pretended to snort powdered sugar out of a plastic bag. In my movie-drugged adolescent mind, he was just like Mercutio in Zefferelli's "Romeo and Juliet": sorta savage and funny with a quiet hum of desperation underneath.

Arthur had the great awkward bravado of the shat-upon geek. I could smell it on him. I did my research, and found a picture of him in an old yearbook. He was kinda pale, a bit amorphous in appearance. Really, he was fucking invisible just like me. At some point he knew he had to pull the great rock n' roll swindle and make a face. I knew he stared in the mirror just like me and said, "how do I make this work?" And he did.Arthur became a fixation, a constant jingle in my head. I thought maybe I could communicate with him telepathically and he would show up at my door and kiss me deeply. I realized the sensation, the need I was having was not unlike my need to merge with David Bowie. Speaking with him was out of the question, so I just memorized him, drank him in like a picture. And friends, I think that fixation was a form of visualization, and it all happened.

Seven

The whys and wherefores don't matter, but Arthur was my first real tongue-kiss. Through a chain of events having to do with a friend relating my deep love for him, Arthur left his blonde girlfriend at a soccer game and walked home with me. Once we got to my room, with taped-up pictures of all my heroes falling off the walls, Arthur sat himself confidently across from me on the floor . He looked me right in the eye, and planted that deep kiss that I played over and over in my head like Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Palais.

The kiss in real life was awful. Like a needle dragging across a record. I didn't know how to do it. He opened his mouth when he kissed me, and so did I, and our mouths kept opening wider and wider until it turned into slapstick. I can't tell you how awful it was. More evidence that I should of stayed in the cold attic of my mind instead of venturing out into my body, and consequently, some form of collective reality. I felt as soon as he left that it wasn't worth it. That I was a fucking failure, that I should just keep reading and fantasizing about mid-seventies New York in my mid-eighties Midwestern bedroom.

But for some reason, he kept coming back, and we kept perfecting our make out sessions, until finally I really believed that I had mastered some small space of reality. His kisses were sweet and soft. Like me he wore pancake on his zits, and every time we kissed he smelled like sweet make-up and clean adolescent sweat. It just kept getting better, but I waited for it to fall part. That wouldn't happen for a good three years.

I thanked God every night for Arthur, and I thanked Chrissie, cuz suddenly I had my very own flower that I could inhale for as long and as deeply as I wanted. I knew it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have her aesthetic support. And I thanked her even more deeply when Arthur and I learned the art of the dry hump.

Let's talk a little about dry humping. I had never seen it in the movies. Never heard it spoke of. As a grown up, it is a rare and lovely occurrence, and entirely underrated.But one day, I ended up on top of ol' Arthur and we're rubbing our pelvises, and suddenly like a match being lit under my feet, this heat started rising through my body and I CAME. I was truly in awe of the occurrence, and in the words of Pete Shelley became a full -blown orgasm addict.I was constantly pulling Arthur into some dark corner, into some secluded place so we could dry hump. I had to have it, like cigarettes, like bubblegum. Finally he had to have a talk with me. "Tracy, we don't talk anymore. You just want to, to dry hump." Yes, so that's what it was called.So, I tried to talk to Arthur, and to listen to what he had to say. And he was always funny, and sarcastic, but the whole time I just wanted to get on top of him and have at that lovely swelling hump under his jeans. Soon the pants would be off, and I would learn what all the rock n' roll hubbub was about. If there is such a thing as bubblegum porno music, it should start playing NOW. It took some time, but I lost it to Arthur, who was incredibly kind, even when I cried the first couple of times. (I'm being honest here ladies – didn't it hurt for some of you?) In a very short while, our teenage love had the power and simplicity of a Ramones song. I like to call it the three chord fuck. We were not yet 18, and that's all we needed. There was no drama, no theatrics, no baggage. It was more direct and blissful than any merge I've attempted since.

I thought maybe I had done it. That I had the cosmic comingling I longed for. Like the one where I lived in my dad's brown eyes. Like the one where I stewed in the magical strains of "Hunky Dory". We made tapes for each other, documents of our inner universes. I floated in his and he floated in mine. I think of the young girls now and the fact that they're making their own porn at fourteen. Anal sex and the like I know are not uncommon occurences for today's young ladies. In the words of Marvin Gaye, it makes me wanna holler. Young ladies, there's absolutely nothing wrong with dry humping for a good three months. I know fuckin' Britney Spears apparently wants to get to the dick as soon as possible, but you don't have to. And instead of porn, try making a goddamn mix tape.

But I digress.

The complete lock-in occurred when Arthur brought a tape over that contained the pain and poetry of the Kinks. He said: "There's a song on here I think you'd like." We lay down on the floor in my room in front of the boom box and listened to "Too Much on My Mind".

There's too much on my mind
There's too much in my mind
And I can't sleep at night thinkin'
About it
It's ruinin' my brain
I'll never be the same
My poor demented mind is slowly going
There's too much on my mind
And there's nothing I can do
About it

Yes, Arthur could see I was a nut. And he didn't run. He brought me a song to celebrate it. To me, it was like the poster looking back at me and becoming real. He was celebrating all the things that nobody saw.He saw me. He really saw me. And he wasn't going anywhere for a good long time.Thank you, Chrissie. Thank you, Ray.

Eight

Yes friends, all flowers rot, if not tended to with delicacy and dedication. All great bands make awful records as time goes by. There were many reasons why I was nuts. There were many reasons Arthur possessed a desperate hum. When you are in the beginning of things, those small far-off alarms simply fade into your lover's mix tapes. But just like bodies begin to droop, and hair grows in unwanted places, Arthur and I's love became all too real and unpalatable. All the things that brought us together, as they say in the grand pop music tradition, drove us apart.

We both had unglamorous secrets, the squalid, warty kind they don't even really talk about in foreign movies, or in sparkly Beatles songs. The secrets that the groupie and the shat upon geek cum rock star are trying to run away from. I will not reveal them here, because it's really not the secret that counts. It's the effect in this case. We were both abandoned in basic ways, not an uncommon occurrence for the children of the baby boomers, and eventually all the poison that primal loneliness breeds just washed over the whole thing and killed it.It was a very long process for the flower to die. Actually about eight years, which shows you the little thing actually had quite a life force. But le petit fleur was eroded by cheating, lying, fear, drugs, suicide attempts, and abortion. It scarcely matters who did what, but the initial euphoric merge became traumatic entanglement, and as they put it in the pop psychology lexicon, enmeshment. Arthur liked his pot, and I liked my drama. He wanted to numb it all, and I wanted to stir it up. It became a living hell, really, but both of us had been left so many times we couldn't stand to see the other go. I felt like he was all I had, because I still didn't know there was a me.

I kinda blame it on rock n' roll. Rock n' roll is really about the illusion of love, not the reality. Maybe if I had listened to Leadbelly instead of the Ramones I would have understood. Ray and Chrissie's (who in some ways were my imaginary parents) relationship was really a mess, but I couldn't see it at the time. When we were little, couples just split if something wasn't working. They just were gone, and fuck the kids. It was the sort of narcissism where the parent is real and the child is a cipher in the parent's drama. That's why living in my daddy's eyes was such an impossible dream.Arthur and Iwere part of that grand experiment in the 70's that was really fueled by the spirit of rock n'roll: "fuck you, this is what I fucking want, and I'm going to get it." It was only right. But you know Woodstock lead to Altamont, and most of us kids were left dirty in the mud, lost in all the bad feedback. That was Arthur's desperate hum. That was the sharp noise in my head that made me nuts.

It all went wrong really when Arthur started playing in a band. It made me need him even more. He was my inner exalted male coming to life in front of me. Over the years Arthur and I broke up many times. He fucked other girls, and his inate charm turned into something aggressive and predatory. Somehow I always got him back. Suddenly the transaction that I feared was occurring. There was no more equality, no more bliss. The whole thing was taking on the tenor of sadism. He was my father, and I was one of those lost empty bitches waiting on the brown velvet couch.

Nine

I don't know how it happened, that I had become one of those fanged, lost succubi watching her boyfriend playing in a band. I think at first I really was disgusted by it, or at least a small part of me was, but then the rush that it brought to my ego was so dangerously pleasurable, that I kept taking hits off the submission. Yeah, he big magic man, me small wood sprite frolicking. I could have lost many many years of my life in just such a fantasy. (And I did.)

Submission in small tastes is delicious, but as a way of life, well, you'll end up with your head in the easy- bake oven. And in the end, as any s& m expert can tell you, submission is simply a sneaky form of control. Basically, I gave up everything that made my existence my own. I had an office job that paid alot but left me exhausted and pissed off. I went head long into the illusion that Arthur had the keys to the franchise of life. I would tend to him like a flower, and he would get up there and sing my song. He would be the one that would live in the eyes of others, and I would make sure he was presentable.

The role of muse is a fairly dangerous one, in my experience, fraught with insanity and blood-loss. Yet it is so necessary to any creative transaction. As a muse, you're really just the plot device in someone else's drama. And sometimes really the line between "muse" and "mother" is fairly negligible. I remember laying in bed late at night, our legs that had never seen the sun rubbing against eachother, telling Arthur the breaks were too long between songs on stage: "work some thing up, keep the momentum going!" My spot-on insights poured out: "Wear the plaid pants, they look so good on you!" I delivered this pronouncements with earnestness and urgency. Arthur actually had a song called "Talking Doll", I'm sure an homage to my loquaciousness: "you're a talking doll, and you know it all, and you're not afraid to say it." But I was just trying to help.I'd pay the rent so he could be an artist. I would do all the tending as long as he would be my exalted inner male. Not that different than a guy with his trophy wife: "Here, baby, here's 1,000.00, get some nice underwear." I might as well have been hooked up to poor Arthur on an i.v..

Metaphorical carnage is unfortunately a part of living in any sort of passionate way. It's like what one of my friends, who was dumped by a long-time girlfriend, said: "I feel like my hands have been chopped off." It is impossible to get out of this planet inviolate. But I wished for that possibility my whole life since I had seen so much psychic breaking and entering in my childhood. In the end, Arthur and I lost legs and eyes.

So there I was, looking up at Arthur on stage with a guitar, and he suddenly took on the hypnotic quality of a demi-god, at least to me. I stood in a row of swaying young women, mouthing the words, shivering at the parts of the songs that were about me. "Yes, that cute ass up there is MINE", I would say to myself over and over. "I INSPIRE HIM. HE COMES HOME WITH ME. NOT YOU. " But as Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, and I think maybe Emilou Harris sung:
"Love is a rose but you never not pick it
lose your love when you
say the word MINE"

Basically, we had all been picked. Our friends were numb, emotionally stunted and alcoholic: your typical scene of "rock n' rollers". I dare not admit any true emotion in the presence of my clan, lest I be mercilessly judged as "intense" or "nuts". We were all victims of that delusional zombie condition where you feel you are of great importance. What is it about pop music, one of our most vibrant art-forms, that attracts such a catatonic lot? Well, I think I've explained that already. But the traditional hierarchy was already in order. All the girlfriends in the audience with their office jobs, wearing their favorite night-time rock n' roll finery: mini-skirts, push-up bras, thigh high boots. Stuff you could be noticed in from up on stage. We were all brimming with yearning, and if we were thirteen we would have been pissing ourselves. There wasn't one musician among us girls, not even a one who discussed their "creative interests". We were being sucked into the "good midwestern girl" vortex, taking care of our artistes.

GIRLS, DON'T DO IT. BECAUSE IF HE'S GONE YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOUR HANDS HAVE BEEN CHOPPED OFF.

My only form of rebellion was to dress like a boy, which Arthur seemed to like anyway.Secretly, I think all of us girls hated eachother. It was the kind of thing they talk about in feminist theory where women will destroy their competitor for the magic penis. I knew at least two of my friends wanted to get at Arthur's phantasmagorical weenie, and eventually they both did. I knew that I needed out, and the good Lord did it for me.

I'll never forget when Arthur told me one of his admirers was moving in with him. We were sitting in the house he was living in with his bandmates, the walls covered with forty-fives, the shelves littered with ashtrays and dirty bongs. He was wearing a "Jesus Loves Me" t-shirt and a scarf, ala Syd Barrett. I was wearing purple jeans and a Schlitz t-shirt, ala early 90's androgynous dirthead. The girl, unlike me, had a sweet doll-like symmetrical face and a docile nature. All she wanted to do was help. There were organic vitamins she bought for him by his bed, strange hippy salves. She was a rock n' roll nurse.When he uttered the words:"rock n' roll nurse is moving her shit in this weekend," I hit him in the head with a couch cushion. Arthur was genuinely shocked, but there was no way he couldn't see it coming. After I hit him, I felt somehow satisfied. I cried and laughed right in his face, splattering his ironic t-shirt with tears and snot. "Jesus doesn't love you, oh no, he does not. And I don't either." Well, I really did, and maybe Jesus did too. If the rock n' roll nurse was moving in with him, it must be really the end.

It took me a very long time to get over Arthur. I went into shock, and he got married. Isn't that what men and women do? Eventually the pain got so bad I only had one choice: teach myself some chords on a guitar.

Ten

So there I was with my hands chopped off, watching the ghost blood spurt out of the stumps. And really the yearning of the trod-upon groupie saved my life. The groupie goddess kept me listening to records, kept that little lovely flame in my sternum burning. The groupie is really a good, loving sort at her root. She feels such immense pleasure, such a powerful sense of discovery, and all she wants to do is help. But like all good things in excess, the ecstacy of this young one just turns into at its extreme, self immolation and a complete flight from self. It's important for the groupie to remember that it's not the singer, it's the song. And the song you can listen to over and over, learn to play on the piano. The singer might actually chop your hands off.

As is my dramatic nature, I believed that I could not love anyone but Arthur, that absolutely no one else could tolerate the sharp noise in my head, my deeply disturbing quirks. He gave me more attention, in his own circuitousness way, more than anyone I had known. Arthur knew everything about me, and he would be the only one who could understand what it was like to feel so left, but I couldn't talk to him about it because he was the one who was gone. Someone else had come to salve his wound, and I just didn't have the chutzpah or sexual bravado to get someone to salve mine. I used his mix tapes as a stancheon, in fact a bubblegum tape he made at the end became a symbolic, cryptic summing up of it all that I listened to over and over: "Indian giver, indian giver, you took you love way from me." "Dizzy, I'm so dizzy, like a whirlpool, it never ends." The fact that the tape really said anything about me per se may be a projection, but it was one I needed more than food.

I just couldn't see getting on top of anyone but Arthur, and anyone who wanted me would have to hit me in the head with a couch cushion, or perhaps a brick, to make me see that I should. Eventually, that did happen, and when I finally fucked someone else it was still so strange that it wasn't Arthur. Now, someone else has taken Arthur's place, and someone took that person's place, and so on, and it's hard to see me with anyone but this more recent gentleman. Yes, I am an odd sort, easily imprinted with other's fingerprints. I say this in hopes that you are just as odd.

So there was some healthy part of myself that separated the singer from the song, and I started having dreams about Patti Smith being my mother and all sorts of phantasmagorical messages from the collective unconscious. All the messages said basically what Parliament said in a more palatable way than the Bible: "the kingdom of heaven is within." I loved the Staples, with Pops and Mavis, once again as if they were family. Once you've been parented by pop culture, you keep going back to the teat.

So, I decided that I would have to be my own inner exalted male. I had no idea what this creature was like and what it would do to my physical being or sexuality, but I had been a quiet pale writer and I wanted to make a loud loud noise. I thought by learning to play the guitar, it would be an antidote to abandonment sorrow, that could take all that suicidal Sylvia Plath energy and scream it out. I would never be my mom or my stepmom Faye or any of those weird ladies on the couch. I would rid self of self-pity and self-doubt and all the things I felt that got me into trouble, and no one, no one could really ever hurt me again, because the thing I loved the most would be a part of me.Yes, in some ways, I felt like Jeffrey Dahmer, but just like wanting to fuck Arthur, I had to see what the deal was with playing a power chord. And I learned how to play them at the age of twenty eight, having no real affinity for the instrument except that it was a thing of power, like a fucking magic pirate sword, and I was holding it.

I find it funny that I thought it would all be so simple. I think that's part of being an American, the hope that it will all be so simple. It's that adolescent consciousness that we have, the almost tragic vitality we have that makes materialism the "ism" that it is.But eventually I found myself on stage with a band at Spaceland, nervously, anemically strumming, (but I think it sounded okay), staring out at a bunch of disaffected young people. Instead of being a girl out there, I was a girl up there. And unlike the time I lost it to Arthur, I thought, "is that all there is?"

Eleven

For so many years music had been this inscrutable magical thing, that I really believed that when I played on stage I would possess the keys to the franchise of life. That my need to fuck musicians would cease, my poked out eyes would grow back Elizabeth Taylor violet, my scars would peel off like silly putty, and my chopped off hands would be replaced with Pete Townsend's long, slender ones. This is what I had projected on the musician for years: a sense of impossible elegance and wholeness. Even as I had read bios and done my research and knew the depth of their miserable lives, somehow musician self-loathing seemed mythical and so much more delicious than mine. Yeah, Brian Jones was a manic-depressive, but he looked so much better, golden-haired and wrapped in Moroccan tapestry, being a paranoid asshole than I did. And he knew how to play the sitar. If I was in a band all the things about me I found repugnant would suddenly be beautiful. Right? The answer is, in the great Buddhist tradition: Yes. And no.

The good news is, there had to be that elegance and wholeness somewhere within me, otherwise I wouldn't be projecting it out onto the musician, right? I thought I just had to kill that fucking unevolved groupie girl for once and for all. Some where I had an instinct for it (that place of perfect contentment), but as I am a good American, I believed it was somewhere in those lime green meadows, somewhere near the fountain of Youth, south of Niagara Falls, way far from the Bermuda Triangle. They don't tell you exactly where it is, because that's the test. If you can surmise the location, that means you deserve the rewards right? Its that place where you dont shit, you dont smell, and no one ever leaves. And I refused to believe all of the pop-culture psychology cliches about happiness being an inside job. How could you really believe that? I mean, women's magazines that told me for years what a piece of shit I was, also espoused this new-age philosophy about inner peace. The same thing those Altamont fuckers talked about. What was I supposed to believe? They never had girls on the cover of "Self" who looked like me, and yet I was supposed to take their advice and love myself?

Rock n roll was the only place I saw any idealogical consistency. And looking back, I think I was trying to be the thing that my dad worshipped: the musician. Anyone who came of age in the sixties thought Dylan was Shakespeare and that Morrison was Dionysus come to Hollywood. Disc jockeys in their own way are super-groupies, parasites on the bruised body of rock n' roll. Dad hung out at the Playboy Mansion with Elton John. There are pictures of him holding a microphone up to Mr. John's mouth, and there is the eager, insecure look of the groupie plastered on his handsome face. That picture always made me so so sad. You're my DAD. Isn't that good enough? Oh no, dear friends, it was not. He had a poster up in his bachelor pad that said: to be good is not enough, when you dream of being great.

I always sensed a feeling of failure in my father, even though he was literally one of the most listened-to voices of the seventies. He was just the boy in the box. He was the one that was never seen. My dad's pop was quite literally blind. Both his eyes just broke at the age of 37. Somewhere my dad lacked the audacity to grow up because he knew he was somehow at fault. And there wasn't enough drugs or pussy to change the fact that he was gypped out of a father that could look into his eyes, and see him and only him.

By being in a band, I was going make my blind dad see me. I was going to be an atomic sunflower. And I was also going to flip him the bird in the process: "you see, dad, I am more ballsy, more man than you. Fuck you forever and ever." But he could not give something he had never been given. I once played him a c.d. of a little musical project I had done with a friend. He said: "that guy you're singing with is a great guitar player". Well, I was going to play guitar, just like Chrissie and Joan and all those valiant, inviolate goddesses who sprung out of Zeus's head, or rose out of the sea foam on a shell.

But guess what? The guitar was completely alien to me. It wasnt a magic sword, it was a big, slimey trout flopping around in my hands. Simply strumming in front of people without fainting was enough for me. Perhaps it was just that introductory self-hatred that flows so easily when you try something new, but my newly-grown hands seemed somehow aristocratic and soft. I needed the hands of a carpenter to deal with the thing. I couldn't even begin to think about the technical aspects of my Les Paul-Epiphone-copy-with-the-broken pickups, I was so overwhelmed. And when such technicalities were discussed, I flat lined like I did when people talked about cars. How fucking stereotypically female of me, I would tell myself. You'd think I hadn't evolved at all. And all I could think was that all of my brilliant musician friends were laughing at me. Well, some of them were. But ya know, fuck them right? Did the Slits care? No! Was I too old for this shit? Fuck you! It's brave new world or bust! I'm not invisible! I'm not! You see, I am holding the magic sword! No one bosses me around and tells me what to do! SEE ME. FEEEEEL ME. TOUCH ME. HEAL ME.

The doggedness that brought me into the impossibility of being in a band also brought me to some astounding knowledge. Playing music involved lugging equipment. A LOT. No boys hit on me, EVER. No girls really either. And we had to fight just to keep the audience looking at us. In a sense, I felt more invisible than ever, because here I was trying so hard to be seen, and all my struggles didnt lead to shit, in a very direct and visceral sense. I suppose if I was doing it for the music I could somehow be inviolate. But really the meek little girl was doing it for the power, and I just wasn't rock n' roll nuts enough to throw myself around like Iggy or flash my tits like Courtney so that the monolithic father out there could see me.

My motivations were incorrect, but my spirit was true. I did become something of a fuzzy mascot to my friends, I believe. I was so shocked at my musician friends who weren't just so glad to be a part of something so amazing! They would actually complain about their plight of being the channelers of the most powerful art form on earth! Rock n' roll! C'mon kids! It's the only thing that can save us from existential gangrene! And the audiences, dear friends. Zombies. I think we would have needed to be sucking off donkeys to get their attention. No offense to L.A. audiences: but wake the fuck up! It's this sort of sleep-walking that got us George Bush! PLEAAASE YOU FUCKERS! FREE JOHN SINCLAIR!

The simple fact is this, I have always been aware that you can't take anything for granted. Not even the ground beneath your feet. So I fought very hard for my little piece of the musical experience. And for the one realization I really DID NOT WANT. There was not going to be any magical merge with the universe, was there? You see, there went my American simplicity. Now simply isnt fast enough. Just as my view of love was unrealistic, so was my sense of craftsmanship, or of process. And thats okay. You get there when you get there. Id like it to be now.I couldn't avoid letting go of Arthur by being Arthur. I was never going to make the blind see. I know the kingdom of heaven is within, but I don't want to GO IN THERE. But it's so weird, that little groupie goddess, the one who got me in so much trouble in the first place, the one I was trying to ditch somewhere in some existential motel in the desert, is standing with me at the door of that weird place inside me. She refuses to leave, because she just wants me to understand her. She wants me to see her really, thats all she wants. And for the first time I am looking into her eyes. And in her whimsical, avid way, she's saying, even if it's Amityville Horror in there, it's really just a movie isn't it?