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Introduction

BY CHRIS STEIN

Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection

I don’t know if I ever related this story to Debbie . . . or anyone for that matter. In 1969 after traveling around, driving twice cross-country, I was staying with my mom at her apartment in Brooklyn. This was a tumultuous year for me. Psychedelics—and my delayed reaction to my father’s death—caused breaks and disassociations in my already fractured psyche.

In the midst of heightened states, I had a dream that stayed with me. The apartment was on Ocean Avenue, a very long urban boulevard. In the dream, in a scene that referenced The Graduate, I was chasing the Ocean Avenue bus as it pulled away from our big old building. I was pursuing the bus—yet inside it simultaneously. Standing in the bus was a blond girl who said, “I’ll see you in the city.” The bus pulled away and I was left alone on the street . . .

By 1977, Debbie and I were traveling extensively with Blondie. Far and away our most exotic stop was Bangkok, Thailand. The city then wasn’t covered with cement and metal but was fairly bucolic, with parks all around and even dirt roads near our upscale hotel. Everything smelled of jasmine and decay.

Debbie developed a touch of “la tourista” and stayed behind one night in the hotel while the guys from the band and I went to the house of some British expatriate whom we’d met in some bar or other. His old Thai maid prepared a banana cake for us into which she had chopped fifty Thai sticks—the seventies equivalent of modern super-strong “kush” or other intense strains of weed. We’d also just come from a long stretch in Australia, where pot was strictly policed and forbidden at the time. We all got well stoned and somehow led each other back to the hotel.

Our room was also very exotic, with decorative rattan elements and two separate cotlike beds equipped with hard cylindrical pillows. Debbie had fallen into a fitful half sleep and eventually I drifted into a foggy blackness. Somewhere toward morning, my unconscious dream self became clearer and began an internal dialogue. “Where are we?” asked this internal voice—whereupon Debbie, still in a half sleep on her cot, said aloud, “We’re in bed, right?” I sat up, suddenly wide awake.

Did I actually speak and produce a response from her even though we both were in semi-asleep states? To this day, all these years later, I am convinced that I only thought the question.

And another story that’s even more subtle and weird and difficult to convey . . . Getting high was just a part of the music and band culture that we came up in. It didn’t seem like anything extraordinary. Everyone at all the clubs drank or got stoned with almost no exception. I wasted a tremendous amount of time and energy dealing with substance abuse and self-medication. It’s impossible to say if what I’d like to see as psychic events were merely induced delusions. Perhaps it’s like any religious faith—you believe what you want to believe. Certainly, consciousness extends beyond oneself, one’s body.

Anyway, Debbie and I were once again in some state of advanced intoxication at a very elaborate party downtown. Small events and views were sharply defined. I remember a spiral staircase and fancy chandeliers. Some fellow showed us his Salvador Dalí Cartier watch—and that fleeting glimpse has stayed with me forever. It was an amazing object, a standard tear-shaped Cartier design but with a bend that mimicked the melting watches in The Persistence of Memory. The crystal face was broken and the owner complained of having to spend thousands of dollars to replace it. To me, though, the cracked glass was a perfect Dadaist commentary on the original. I loved that.

The event—whatever it was—was very crowded. I remember being on a balcony when we were approached by an older man in a very fancy suit. He had a slight accent, maybe Creole. He introduced himself as Tiger. And that’s it for my specific memories, except for the extravagant sense of connection that Debbie and I felt with this guy. It was as if we had known him forever—a person we’d known in past lives. Do I believe in that stuff? Maybe. I don’t recall how much Debbie and I discussed this meeting afterward, but it was enough to compare notes and similar reactions.

Pretty early on—maybe 1975—Debbie found this person, Ethel Myers, who was a clairvoyant, a psychic. She’d likely come as a recommendation, but we might have simply found her through an ad in the Village Voice or Soho News. She worked out of an amazing ground-floor apartment that was on a side street uptown, right around the Beacon Theatre. Ethel’s environment was beautiful. It probably looked the same as it had when her building was built near the turn of the century. Her sitting area was an atrium that was like a greenhouse taken up with furniture. Decorative plants and herbs hung all around. Yellowing books about ectoplasm and tarot lay on dusty end tables. The whole place was well worn and reminded me of the apartment in Rosemary’s Baby when Mia Farrow and Cassavetes are first shown it.

We sat down with Ethel and she encouraged us to use a cassette machine we’d brought to record the session. She didn’t have any idea of who we were but proceeded to do a great cold reading. She told Debbie that she saw her on a stage and that Debbie would be fulfilled and travel a great deal. At one point she said that a man, presumably my father, was watching and that this man sarcastically said of me, “I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.” I derive a lot of my sense of humor from my father—and the “ten-foot pole” bit was something he actually said all the time. Was she just in touch with the vernacular of the fifties that the old man used or was it more?

Debbie still has the cassette in her archives but I remember us listening to it years after and Ethel’s voice being very faint, as if it had somehow faded in the way of a ghost deteriorating over time.

Just now I called Debbie to ask what, if any, of this she remembered. She said, “You know, Chris, it was different back then, there was a lot more acid in the air.”

We still have a connection.

CHRIS STEIN

New York City, June 2018

Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection