I felt really crappy almost immediately afterward. I was right, in a way, but I didn’t like how the exchange made me feel. Why couldn’t I have just nicely told her there was a dog under the seat? Why do I always have to take it there? I don’t want to be mean, I really don’t. It makes me feel better when people smile rather than frown in my direction. I love my rebellious nature but I’m a grown up lady now and let’s face it: the middle finger is more appropriate and attractive when paired with a mohawk instead of a manicure.
Category: Crazy bitches
Jane Street
I did a reading for one of Ms. Puma Perl’s writer’s nights last night. She is a killer poet and author, a true East Village rebel artist, and an all around lovely person, so if she asks I am there. I feel like she is one of the keepers of the creative flame in a neighborhood that has lost much of that fire, and I am grateful that she includes me in her circle.
So I wrote a piece a while back that I read last night, and I hadn’t intended to post it anywhere. But since I haven’t had any time to blog lately, and a friend asked me if she could find it online, I decided I might as well house it here:
JANE STREET
One of my best friends is semi-famous. She’s not like, Motley Crue or Tom Cruise famous, but she’s got a lot of action in her life as a performer. Let’s say she’s past 5000 facebook friends famous.
We’ve been friends for 25 years and it’s a relationship in which there is a lot of trust because we went through some difficult times together. I was the semi-famous one when we first met, so it’s been entertaining to watch the roles reverse, and it has created a safety wall around us because we both know what it’s like to be either visible in a way that isn’t fully the truth, or invisible, which is an untruth in another way.
Recently my friend flew into town to meet someone new that she had hired, and she asked me to come with her to a party this person was throwing so I could offer my assessment. I do love to give an opinion and gladly accepted the invitation.
The party was at the Jane West Hotel, where I lived for a brief time in the mid-80’s when it was a trannie hooker flophouse extraordinaire. It was hardcore, complete with the guy in the weird cage desk in the lobby and a vibrating air that smelled of crack sweat and desperation. The guest rooms were bum hotel tiny but two friends and I managed to rent a large, sparsely furnished room in the basement. These two friends were Michael Schmidt, who has since become a well known designer and who created the legendary party Squeezebox, and a supremely talented painter named Martine. We were all kids fresh out of the Midwest, so we had a lot in common, primarily obscurity and a lack of income.
Our room must have been a ballroom at one time. It maintained that sad brokedown aura of elegant days gone by, with ceramic tile on the floor and a balcony running along one side of the room. It was probably beautiful once, but by the time we arrived, it was filthy and depressing. There was another large room on the other side of one wall that housed parties, most notably the Rock Hotel, which was the first party in New York to feature hardcore and heavier bands like Motorhead on a regular basis. And sometimes they’d rent out that room for low rent disco parties. The bass would thump, thump, thump all night long against the wall near my head, until I would sit up in bed and scream, FUCK YOU, MICHAEL JACKSON! FUCK YOU!!
We were beyond broke. Michael (Schmidt, not Jackson) weighed little more than a hundred and some odd pounds and lived on mini-marshmallows for what seemed like one entire week. He sat crunched up in his jacket like a bony mantis picking them one at a time out of the bag with long fingers, shivering in front of our television, which featured a screen cracked with what looked remarkably like a bullet hole.
We shared a bathroom with a Chinese family who we never saw, but every single day, without fail, would jam the toilet beyond use with leftover food. The floor and tiles were gritty with grime, and waterbugs were our constant companions as we stood in flip flops day after day, shaking angry fists at the unusable toilet and the unseen Asians who crept in at night to fill it with rice and mystery meat.
And just to round out the picture of this magical time in my life, I was date raped in our room by a Frenchman who was my boss at my very first job in New York, working as a salesgirl at Betsey Johnson. I didn’t know that it was date rape at the time, it was quietly traumatic in a way that didn’t become clear to me until years later, but this is a another story. I just want to give you a memory snapshot of my time at the Jane West Hotel.
So now it’s been renovated to the nines and it’s very fancy and Jane Street is THE street in the West Village. And this is where my friend’s very expensive new person was throwing the party.
When we approached the building I recognized the entrance staircase, but everything else was quite different. The smoky desk cage was gone. The lounge we entered was sumptuous, with a sort of murder mystery mansion come Moroccan feel, featuring that taxidermy of exotic animals that is both horrible and beautiful and very fashionable right now. Suffice to say not a waterbug in sight.
At the entrance to the party room was a single file line-up of very bored looking models hired to stand in a row as eye-candy. They were very pretty, of course, but looked miserable and bored. It seemed a pointless waste of thin nubile flesh to my experienced party eye. I would have given them drink tickets and sent them into the fray. Let ‘em get too drunk, pick a fight at the bar, blow someone in the bathroom! This gives the guys something to focus on and old cranks like me the opportunity to feel superior with our more mature behavior. Everyone is happy. Instead they just stood there, like giant statues, reminding me of all my physical flaws as I slouched past them, avoiding eye contact.
The new hire was cute: one of those typical industry girls–short, animated, not much makeup, trying very hard to exude that super-hip, “just one of the guys” energy that many women working behind the scenes in entertainment adopt in order to survive. She seemed cool enough. She introduced us to people who seemed cool enough.
My friend and I got a drink and sat on a plushy couch and things immediately went awry in that quietly horrendous way that these kinds of parties always do for me. The models looked even more hostile from our new vantage point. We were seated across from a couple on the couch who were as cute as could be and more boring than should be humanly possible. I think the guy was gay. He had side-swept bangs that he kept tossing out of his eyes and the kind of wardrobe that my boyfriend and I play a game with on the street: “Gay or Hipster”. His adorable and clueless girlfriend was dressed perfectly in overpriced Soho boho gear. Someone took a polaroid of the two of them and handed it to her. She set it down immediately and stared off into space with her hand in her chin. He stared out into the crowd, probably wishing he could tell his girlfriend he’s gay.
I said, “You should keep that photo, you both look very cute in it.” They turned for a moment, looked at me as if I had three heads and then went back to staring into space.
My friend sat next to me, talking to new hire, who, in the space of five minutes had morphed curiously from professional businesswoman to teenage drinky gal. She had curled herself up into a ball with her knees scrunched against my friend and was alternately whispering into her ear and taking gulping swigs from a Heineken bottle.
My friend, who is the soul of patience, responded to each utterance briefly, and with eye contact and body language tried to direct Drinky Gal to the fact that there was another person on the couch, namely ME. But she could not be less bothered with my unimportant ass and rambled about her bad relationships and how she couldn’t be friends with ex-boyfriends and the usual completely inappropriate stuff that you shouldn’t talk about with employers but we all do when we drink too much.
I caught a small portion of it and said something that I thought was incredibly deep about the fact that until the lesson is grasped your energy will remain stuck. She glanced at me with that same three head glaze, and went back to ignoring me and whispering. I rolled my eyes and stared into space. Then I went back to staring at the young couple, fascinated by how truly not-fun they were at such an early age. The polaroid sat there, unclaimed, and its presence tortured me.
My second glass of wine kicked in and I started to get really mad, and I decided to play a game with Drinky Gal. I figured, I’ll give her the stare of death until she either gets uncomfortable and is forced to include me in the conversation, or until I finally master the power to explode people’s heads by deftly harnessing and focusing my rage. I thought, surely before her head blows up into a million pieces and covers my friend’s face with drippy viscera and bits of brain, she will notice that she’s being an asshole and include me in her dumb, stupid, ridiculous conversation.
She did not notice. And try as I might, I could not make her head explode. My wine glass quickly drained to empty and along with the wine, my passion dissipated, the residue a sort of limp resentment. If I had a third glass things were sure to head south, but my friend knows me well and we took our leave, abandoning Tiny Toad and her Heineken bottle.
In the cab I asked, “Why do people think that they can be rude to the wives and best friends? Don’t they realize we are the ones who will be sitting in the car with you on the way home, complaining about their shitty behavior?”
My friend slouched into the seat and sighed. “I don’t know. I guess she just got too drunk. I’ll give her three months and see how it goes.”
Then she asked, “Was it weird being in that hotel again?”
I said. “It was fine. Except for the stupid fuckface models reminding me that I’m a billion years old.”
She snorted. And I felt loved and that made me less angry about being ignored. And it occurred to me how much easier and safer things are for us than they used to be.
Twenty years ago this same friend was a nobody to the outside world, but still everything to me. She helped me put back the rubble of my shitty East Village apartment when my crazy, high-on-pills boyfriend trashed it nearly beyond repair. He smashed my antique jewelry box through a closed window, where it flew along with shards of glass down five flights and onto the courtyard below. The box contained all my tiny trinkets, a necklace from my dead father and a check for a few thousand dollars from Sony records, the only real money I would see during my big rock career. This friend climbed a concrete wall to try to salvage some of the items and almost got shot by a cracked out neighbor for the effort.
She had a broken mom and I had a gone daddy and it fucked us up nice, so then we fucked ourselves up. We fucked inappropriate people. We made disastrous choices. We talked complete shit. We spent endless hours working a coke grinder at our dealer/friend’s house, until the sun was well up in the sky, until we felt nothing but a longing for death, and still we didn’t stop. We both know what it is like to lie down on a dirty floor and cry, desperate and alone, for help that won’t come.
At the time, much like those models probably, we had no idea how impossibly beautiful we were. We were so very young and lost, how could we understand that we sparkled? Our hearts were broken. Our badass middle finger in the air hid the fact that we thought we were garbage. And we were of no real use to each other’s healing process, except that it was always a safe place to crash, a guffaw in the dark, a warmth in the eyes that did not falter. A true love, if you will, and a soft landing among the jagged rocks we’d chosen to reside upon.
I thought about the new hire and her less than stellar party behavior and the gorgeous decor of the hotel and my past there when it looked so much different, and the bored couple and the photographers and how all of it, everything around us in those public situations is like a tiny tapping on our window. We can hear it, it exists, we can even play with it and have fun. But because we are now closer to whole, it lives outside of us, and cannot penetrate or harm in any deep way.
So ramble on, Drinky Gal, and rock on, fancy new hotel, and enjoy your own trajectories, beautiful models. I hope they give you an ocean of free drinks and let you roam free at the end of the night. I do not begrudge you your youth and beauty, I can live without being included in your conversations, although I’ll probably still keep trying to blow up your heads telepathically, if only for personal, petty amusement.
I See You
Drew: It’s terrifying. Your lips move and I feel actual fear. (waves hands in the air) Gaaahhh!
Bebe Buell, Babes, and Bathroom Brawls
So, my longtime and dear friend Bebe Buell asked me to do a spoken word opener for her record release party last night. She said, “You’re so funny, Raffer. I am envisioning you with a new spoken word career!” Which is very kind, and I gladly accepted and wrote something specially for her night.
My mom is in town for a visit, and staying with me, so I’ve been on the go nonstop all week, and I worked all day. I ran home, curled my hair, threw some eyelashes on, printed the piece out quickly, then ran to the venue without checking. the pages.
True to Raff minor chaos form, I got onstage, read the first three pages happily, and then realized as I stood in a spotlight, with 350 people listening, that I had left the last page at home. Le sigh. Le panic. Le FREAKOUT. I had to wing it. I am SO not into winging it. But I had a great time, and I think the crowd did too, and I’m so grateful to Bebe for her incredibly generous spirit and her awesome audience. Please pick up her new album “Hard Love”. You won’t be disappointed, I think it might be her best yet.
All my best girls showed up for support, and in another typical Raff situation, two of them almost got in a major brawl in the ladies room when a zaftig goth girl complained loudly to the bathroom attendant that I had stolen her material. I have killer friends, and I do mean killer in both senses of the word. They do me proud.
And happily, more than a couple of people I met asked if they could find the piece online, so I am posting it here. And then I’m going back to bed, because my vodka-soaked head is killing me.
As per usual, namaste, my bitches.
BEEB
When Bebe asked me to get up here and say something, I thought about a number of stories that I’ve written, but decided that since it’s her record release, it makes sense to begin by speaking about Bebe, and how we met.
When I was a teenager I was a nerd. I wore thick glasses and lived in a small town in Michigan. And I was insane about Todd Rundgren. Like devoted, rabid fan. His nerdiness spoke to my nerdiness in a way that I felt no one else could understand. I knew we were meant to be together. One day we would be madly in love. I would stand at his side wearing the coolest clothes and we would use big words like “onomatopoeia” and “ubiquitous” in our everyday conversation.
Because it was the 70’s I had pictures of him up in my locker at school, cut out from Creem and Rolling Stone Magazines, where I got all of my most important news. There was no internet. You couldn’t google your idols, you just had to wait for these magazines to come out each month, and listen to flat, vinyl records over and over again while you looked at the jacket cover and fantasized about another life. A life that involved fitting in and rock stars and skyscrapers and fancy backstage parties. A life that did not include shoveling snow in moon boots and waiting for your birthday so you could get contact lens and stop being abused for being a four-eyed nerd at your Todd-festooned locker.
One day I opened a magazine, most likely the aforementioned Creem, and there was that famous photo of Todd and Bebe sitting at a small table looking up at the camera. I stopped breathing for a minute. Bebe looked so beautiful, and not much older than me. Her big blue eyes were wide and sweet, she wore a flower in her long, light, full hair and her mouth was parted slightly open, as if she were waiting to be kissed. She was so beautiful.
I thought to myself…“That fucking bitch.”
I was pissed. My hair never looked like that! I had assumed, wrongfully I could see now, that Todd was waiting patiently for me to pull myself together and move to New York so we could start our life together. Bebe was an interloper. She had stolen my man, my future life! I began listening for signs of her in his songs. I practically had a meltdown when she put out a record of her own. That was really taking it too far. I was gonna beat her up one day. As soon as I got the hell out of Dodge and into New York City, she was gonna get it.
Well…I did get the hell out of Dodge, and I stopped wearing glasses and started my own band. Screw you, Todd. I don’t wanna be your goddamn girlfriend anymore. I’m going to get famous and then you and all the hometown haters will be sorry that you didn’t appreciate me when you had a chance! I was officially a Cycle Slut from Hell with an attitude to match the name.
Sometime in the late 80’s Dee Dee Ramone hosted a show that featured a number of bands, including my band, the Cycle Sluts, and Bebe was scheduled to play. I was finally going to get to see my teenage nemesis in person and I was very curious. I assumed that I would hate her. She was blonde, after all. Surely just a spoiled model with nothing to say.
I dressed in my heavy metal gear for sound check and put my guard up. Too cool for school, just hanging here near the stage, smoking a cigarette in my thigh high boots. You know how it is.
Bebe spotted me immediately and got up from her seat and marched directly over to me and introduced herself with a big smile. Liv, who was just a little girl then, smiled and waved from her seat. Bebe’s blue eyes were even more clear in real life. Her hair looked great (of course). She was so friendly and natural. They both shone like the sun and their presence was so warm and friendly that I couldn’t help but warm up a little bit in the light.
I thought…“That fucking bitch.” Now I had to be nice. This did not fit into my master plan.
My brain sort of exploded. And my brain has been exploding ever since. Bebe has taken me to Todd’s house for the weekend, we took a road trip to Wisconsin with Skid Row and Guns and Roses, and another time we went to a strip bar with Gene Simmons, with whom, by the way, I had a very deep and thoughtful conversation about silicone breasts. My teenage nemesis helped make some amazing rock and roll moments possible for me. This is all the proof I need that life is magic.
So today I thought I would hail all the women who have entered my life much as Bebe has: as someone to eye with suspicion as we are raised to do. Who are you? What do you have that people will love you for more than they love me? Are you prettier than me? Skinnier than me? What are you going to take from me?
If you can get past the the butt-sniffing phase, you can occasionally find someone to call sister. Sometimes you gain an archenemy instead. But this can be fun as well, full of catty conversations with friends, dirty looks across the room, and the occasional bar brawl that leads you to review your current life choices. Or maybe that’s just me? Regardless, I get a little smarter with every connection.
So here’s to you, my girls. You bitches, you gossipers, you haters, you nurturers, you lovers. I am so grateful, more grateful than words can say, for the tender hand you extend when I fall. I forgive you for sometimes pushing me off the cliff in the first place.
Here’s to you, girls who weren’t born pretty and made themselves so. I salute you for the effort. You look fabulous. Here’s to the girls who put themselves through college. The ones who get the job done. The ones who can carry half their weight, the ones who can stitch a wound. The ladies who know what it’s like to lug their own suitcase up six flights of tenement stairs. The women who will stop their car on the highway to rescue a stray dog. The ladies of pro-wrestling. You’ve all got great asses.
Here’s to anyone who’s ever sent a cringe-worthy drunk email or left a wasted late night message on the phone. Here’s to the cheaters who just couldn’t help themselves. Here’s to the girls who have figured out all his passwords. You know you’re crazy, but you’re fucking smart. Here’s to anyone who’s ever made an ass out of themselves over love. Here’s to you, who loved so much the bones of your heart had no choice but to crack in a million pieces under the weight. They fused back in new patterns and you were never the same. Harder perhaps, but less of a sap and more compassionate where it counts. You chose the pain; now you don’t need to choose it again.
So here’s to damaged goods. You couldn’t stay away from that bad boy, and now you’re flawed with the occasional std and the constant bad attitude. Here’s to your junkie past that scarred your skin and burned your brain. Who gives a shit. That was yesterday, this is today. Don’t do it again and you’ll be fine. You are fine. You are a stone cold fox.
I laud you, single mothers. I don’t know how you do it, it looks like the hardest job in the world, and I’ve worked some shit jobs in my day. I have a friend who lost her four year old to cancer. She told me some days it was all she could do not to go to the cemetery and dig that baby up just to hold her one more time. Imagine the courage it takes to get through just one of those days. The good mother is superhuman. What it does to your boobs is criminal and it is my God-given right to glare at your stroller that blocks my entrance into the liquor store, but I hail the you just the same.
And I bow to you, wives who make their marriages work, and wives who could not. Either way you are golden and grand and you have done the best you could with what you know. Give yourselves a gold star, a pat on the back, a big glass of wine in a fancy goblet, unless you’re one of my girls in recovery. In that case you can have an ice tea with no sugar. I want you healthy and happy because there’s a lot of work to do out there.
I have so much love for you, you’ve carried me through the best and the worst of times, which are sometimes interchangeable. You loaned me clothes, bought me lunch, called to gently break the news about my cheating man, did coke with me until the sun came up and then called the next day to tell me we had to stop. You shouted and clapped at every show I performed, no matter how off-key it sounded. You forgave me. I’m so grateful that you forgave me.
Here’s to the witches, psychos, crazy bitches, shrews, harpies, cunts, fishwives, hellcats, she-devils, whores, harridans, skanks, nymphos, prudes, dogs. The festerers, the obsessives, the maniacs, the freaks, the drunk dialers, the wallflowers, the fatties. The ones wearing too much makeup. Too thick, too skinny, not pretty enough, too pretty, not the right one. The rock and roll bitches, because you are my favorite bitches of all. You are perfect, my dear. Stop shouting into the wind and and do your best to learn to sit peacefully in your imperfection. It will get better, I promise.
I raise a toast to my girls: Take a look at yourself next time you’re in front of a mirror. This might be the most beautiful you’ll ever be in your life, so enjoy it while you can. Maybe not. Fuck it. Fuck it. You are a champion, you are more lovable than you think you are, you are a muse, you deserve to have songs written about you. You are holy, you are whole. You just have to shut the fuck up and step out of your own way.
So here’s a salute to you my sisters. I hail you my frenemies. I thank you my enemies. Without you, I am nothing.
Now let’s get on with this show because time is ticking and Bebe and I aren’t getting any younger.
Reviewing the Situation
Hot Guys Who Aged Badly
I pulled up one of my ex’s facebook pages. This was the guy that I really hurt myself over for years. Poems and sobbing and phone calls and long nights of painful obsessing and when we were together just staring at his perfect, exquisite face. He was so beautiful I ached. The thought of him touching another girl was unbearable to me. And of course he was ALWAYS touching other girls. I could not imagine a life without him and yet life with him was horrendous and painful. I suffered. Oh, how I suffered.
She said, “Yes, got it. Very hot.”
I clicked on a photo of a paunchy, puffy, haggard old man in a Hawaiian shirt, sitting on a lawn chair with a can of cheap beer in his hand, and said, “This is him now.” Clicked back to an old photo, “Then.” Clicked back to the recent photo, “Now.” I was like an eye doctor: “This one, or this one…”
Yes way my dear.
We’ve been joking about starting a web page called Hot Guys Who Aged Badly. I actually took the Tumblr url, but I haven’t put anything up yet. It’s not like I haven’t aged too, and I don’t want to be mean to people, there’s enough of that online. Still, perhaps in the name of public service…
Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution
Best Text Ever
From a female friend who shall remain nameless for the time being:
“I guess guys with hospital bracelets are a no? But he does have cool jail tattoos.”
More Conversations with Crazy Friends
I’m constantly (and unsuccessfully) trying to prove to myself and others that I’m not crazy. It’s a fine tightrope walk: behaving uber responsibly 80% of the time, and then totally bonkers the other 20%. This is an improvement, years ago it could have been 50/50. I haven’t had a boyfriend over the last 20 years that hasn’t got a warning from someone ahead of time. Some, if questioned, might even put the crazy quotient higher, but I choose to avoid those people whenever possible.