Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 7

SHEENA IS A PUNK ROCKER

So I’m in the frozen food aisle

at Jewel, trying to find the right

veggie burger, and I realize

“Blitzkrieg Bop” is playing on

the store’s P.A. Thirty years later:

the Ramones as Muzak? Hard to believe.

My hair, reflected in the freezer door

and highlighted by fluorescents,

is turning from salt-and-pepper

to gray (or “silver,” as Lisa Fishman

says). Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee

are all dead. Hard to believe it’s been

over three decades since Christopher

(my roommate) and I went to see them

at a small club in San Francisco, their

first-album tour. Twenty-three,

with black, straight, shoulder-length hair

and tight T-shirt and jeans, I looked

like I could be a Ramone. The bartender

thought so; before the show, he kept

serving me free drinks. That’s about all

I remember, except that the music was

so loud, my ears rang for days afterward.

I was afraid they’d never return to normal.

On the way home from the market, the right

veggie burgers in one of my plastic bags,

the sky above Chicago was clear blue;

a plane quietly moved through it. How

did I, shy Valley boy, end up at a punk concert?

Jenny. Friend of my friend David, who

before he introduced us, enthralled me

with tales about her: “kooky” overweight

art student who lived in a guesthouse in

Granada Hills with cats and movie posters

and a mannequin dressed in thrift-store finery;

who, when she threw parties, greeted her

guests in the driveway, wearing a flowery

muumuu and feather boa, and blowing bubbles

as she sped towards them on roller skates.

She had gay friends, and frequented Astaire

& Rogers marathons at revival theatres.

Still in high school, such a creature seemed

to me a free spirit worth venerating, a kind

of San Fernando Valley Sally Bowles. After

I graduated in ’71, David finally got us

together; we became fast friends. I loved

spending time with her in her guesthouse,

surrounded by objects: her collection of

vintage ladies’ hats, her childhood dolls;

Art Nouveau pictures taped to the walls,

jars filled with peacock feathers and pinwheels.

She introduced me to Debussy and Fauré,

Anaïs Nin, Joni Mitchell and Dory Previn.

Every week, she’d read TV Guide, circling all the Garbo and Katharine Hepburn and Hitchcock films she wanted to watch. She’d sit at her loom, weaving colorful and textured wall hangings, while I wrote poems and short stories about her. Our blissful asexual relationship lasted several years, until Jenny completed her master’s degree at CalArts. Though she was beginning to make a name for herself as an artist, her life took a sharp, overnight turn in early ’76: she discovered Patti Smith. You’ve got to see her! I resisted as Jenny dragged me to the Roxy, but found myself spellbound when, before the band came out, Patti, in her Rimbaud-esque Horses getup (rumpled white shirt, tie, black jacket), read poems and spit on the stage. For the rest of the seventies, Patti would be God. Encouraged by the pictures she’d taken of her, Jenny decided to become a rock-’n’-roll photographer. While I, inspired by Smith’s credo of fearlessness, quit school (six credits shy of my B.A.) and moved from L.A. to San Francisco, “to live the poet’s life.” Which translated as very few poems, but lots of sex and alcohol. Christopher and I met and hit it off; he moved into my appropriately seedy apartment on O’Farrell. We’d hang out with Toni (a.k.a. Tonette), his friend from high school, who made decent money as a dominatrix-for-hire. Jokingly, we called her “brazen hussy.” The three of us drank and smoked and listened to music, Tonette’s neighbor pounding on the wall. They introduced me to Sparks and Eno, Rocky Horror, and Leila and the Snakes, a campy local act whose lead singer, Jane Dornacker, had co-written the Tubes’ song “Don’t Touch Me There.” With her “snakes” (Pamela Wood and Pearl Gates), Leila sang tunes like “Rock and Roll Weirdos,” “Pyramid Power,” “Cathy’s Clone,” and her spoof of Paul Anka’s recent hit “(You’re) Having My Baby”: “(I’m) Getting Rid of Your Baby.” Bona-fide groupies, we showed up wherever they played. Toni and I had a handbill photo (the band in Retro Chic: ’40s feathers, fishnets, and floppy hats) transferred onto two T-shirts. When we wore them to their next performance, Jane, who went by the name “Leila T. Snake,” called us onstage to display our “Leila T. Shirts.” Christopher had to prod me: Get up there! Late in the year, Jenny phoned, peeved that one of the Ramones had told Creem that they’d been followed around L.A. by “a three-hundred-pound cherub named Jenny,” and announced that even though she and everyone else on the punk scene thought Patti’s new album, Radio Ethiopia, a complete disappointment, she was flying up to Frisco to photograph her. We agreed to meet at the auditorium. I remember it darkly: a mystified Smith, less charismatic on a big stage, asking “Where are my maniacs?” oblivious that the fans who did rush the stage were being pummeled by musclebound security guards; Christopher and Toni to my left, looking unhappy; Jenny to my right, flailing to the music. When I’d had enough, I shouted, “Jenny, please stop pushing me!” She turned, screamed a Ramones lyric (“I don’t wanna walk around with you”), and stormed away, but not before Toni brazenly called her a Jewess. After the concert, we sat in Union Square, dejected, while a stoned Patti Smith groupie, who’d attached herself to us, kept moaning, “I’m so fucked up.” Burned out on promiscuous sex, I moved back to Los Angeles to finish college and concentrate on my writing. By then, Jenny was living in an apartment off the Sunset Strip, close to the clubs. She dragged me to see Blondie at the Whisky a Go Go: Debbie Harry, in dark sunglasses and hot pants, coyly enacting “X-Offender.” One morning the phone woke me at 3 a.m. It was Jenny, proclaiming with triumph that she’d just been “butt-fucked” by Iggy Pop. As the years passed, I avoided her more and more. The last time I saw her, she was house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills. Freaked out by the Wonderland murders, she kept checking the window, talking incessantly. Shortly after that, we had a blowout over the phone. I told her I never wanted to speak to her again. “OK,” she said, and hung up. Years (hard to believe how many) later, after I’d relocated to Chicago (after fourteen years in New York), Jenny tracked me down via the Internet. Well, look how far you’ve gotten. We spoke a couple of times, reminisced about her guesthouse. She revealed that it was one of my stories, depicting her as a lonely shut-in, that prompted her to branch out, and led to her involvement with punk rock. But we quickly were at odds all over again. I wished her well; she sent a final, insulting email. To spit out the bitter taste, I did a search for Leila and the Snakes. (I always thought if I ever wrote a novel about those days, I’d call them Vera and the Vipers.) And was dismayed to learn the fate of Jane Dornacker. After her rock group disbanded, she developed a successful career as a stand- up comic on the San Francisco circuit, and also worked as an actress and traffic reporter, first in California and later in New York. In 1986, she was killed when the news helicopter she was reporting from crashed into the Hudson River. The raspy-voiced Dornacker, who referred to herself as a “trafficologist” and “Jane-in-a-plane,” was in the middle of a live report when the chopper stalled, nose-dived, struck the top of a chain-link fence at a pier, then plunged into the river. Thirty-nine years old, she died on her way to Saint Vincent’s. Her last words, imploring the pilot to avoid a collision with the pier below them, were “Hit the water! Hit the water! Hit the water!”