WHAT HASN’T LYDIA LUNCH done for drugs? The famed writer, performance artist, Dead Boys groupie and Teenage Jesus & The Jerks frontwoman has seen it all. She’s written vividly about her experiments with mescaline,THC, pot, acid, Quaaludes, Valium, coke and angel dust, among other substances—and now, from her perch in Barcelona, has released her ninth book, Will Work For Drugs.
Lunch is known to be a troublemaker and was a primary instigator of the No Wave movement on the Lower East Side during the late 1970s and early ‘80s. She continues in her prolific output of art and music, although she’s no longer in New York. “I left after Bush stole the last election,” she tells me, discussing her move to Spain five years ago. To have an icon of the Lower East Side live in Europe feels like betrayal, but according to her new book, out this month from Brooklyn-based Akashic Books, living in New York was just another bad habit. Living overseas has provided a calmer existence where she has more time to work on her art; she’s even regenerated and transformed her persona. “I’m sweet as they fucking come, darling,” the famously aggressive Lunch tells me, “sweet as they come.”
Like most artists from the punked-out No Wave movement, Lunch’s reputation is based upon being an enfant terrible, rebel and provocateur, so talking to her for an hour and discovering she’s actually personable and considerate came as a pleasant surprise. Lunch earned her name bringing lunch to all of The Dead Boys. She was infamous for gleefully stealing other women’s boyfriends, a heinous crime in my book. But beyond that, the nice lady on the phone had from a young age been a pickpocket, shoplifter and short shift hustler who had turned tricks on the street and tried every drug in the book; her work has always been all about confrontation.
Although I was right here in New York when Lunch became famous as a disaffected youth, I didn’t follow her work then. Many years later, thanks to hard work and longevity, she’s become a cult figure, and I was inspired to read her book.
Lunch left New York in 1990, moving around throughout the United States and Europe where she continued to write and make music and art. She extols the advantages of living and working in Europe, mainly because she’s venerated there—she claims more European venues are interested in the work she’s doing. In addition, the political climate and quality of life suits her working regimen. Although she originally established herself in a particular place and context—in the artistic climate of the Lower East Side—she insists that one of her methods of revitalization has always been to pack up and relocate. She even boasts about her idyllic four years living in Pittsburgh.
Although she lauds the Euro lifestyle of healthy food and siestas, her troubled past has provided the most dramatic fodder for her art.The most powerful writing in Lunch’s book is in her confessional pieces recounting the traumatic existence she endured as a child and adolescent growing up with abusive parents in Rochester. Writing about her mother’s jealousy in “Desperate Measures,” she’s not balanced or objective; but there’s plenty of rage. “It brought out the jealous, vindictive cunt that lurks beneath the temporal lobe of most alcoholic, middle-aged and fading fast exbeauty queen strippers turned switchboard operators down at the Last Ditch Motel.”
Jumping from the frying pan into the fire, she moves in with her father, who she describes as, “that decrepit septic tank of treachery, that filter of perversity and lechery, a psychotic buffoon whose insidiously sadistic rituals polluted forever his every cancer-soaked brain cell, staining his fingers, toes and tongue with a golden nicotine glow which seemed to swell and grow with every unfiltered cigarette he sucked down in an endless surrender to his own death, and to his daily massacre of whatever elegant morseled humanity was left over inside me after the repeated soul rape of my mother’s revolving bedroom-door amours.” It’s hard to say which parent she likes least.
Lunch describes herself as a selfmade orphan when, at the age of 14, she traveled to New York City to see The New York Dolls. Not long after, she returned home to Dad, “that cheap fucking pig,” and took a job as a waitress to earn enough money to run away from home. She returned to the City a couple of years later with a fistful of cash and soon thereafter formed her own band, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks. Subtlety and depth tend to be weak points in Lunch’s narratives, and you can only wonder how bad the parents really were. During our interview, she mentioned what seem to be some acts of kindness: “At 12 and 13 my father drove me to rock concerts. I’d be arrogant and say, ‘This is for my career, and my mother would ask, ‘what career?’”
Some of the essays in Will Work for Drugs are purely autobiographical, while others feature Lunch’s take on feminism, the plague of insomnia, the difficulties in loving a damaged person, her attraction to cops and how religion is the crack cocaine of the masses.The end of the book features interviews with fellow renegades including the late Hubert Selby Jr., legendary author of Last Exit to Brooklyn, seminal rock journalist and writer Nick Tosches and Permanent Midnight author Jerry Stahl. Her prose is hyperbolic, hard-boiled like a detective novel written by James M. Cain or maybe Mickey Spillane; she casts herself as a female Genet. Lunch’s MO is to penetrate to the core of her subject to unearth some truth, no matter how ugly it turns out to be. She seeks to shake things up and wake her readers out of their complacency—and she sometimes succeeds, except when she becomes repetitive and too one-sided.
With her life seemingly in order these days, one can’t help but wonder how the outrageous Lydia Lunch of years past copes with the placidly idyllic lifestyle of Barcelona. “I don’t know anyone in Spain who’s an alcoholic, a drug addict, who’s depressed or suicidal and who hates their parents.” I couldn’t help but ask her, “Lydia, isn’t that what they call ‘boring’?” Her answer: “No. It’s not boring, it’s healthy and the way life should be.” I don’t buy it. If anything, she sounds a bit lonely.
Nonetheless, Lunch says she has mellowed out in her personal life and is finally seeking out her own utopia, even though she thinks the world is, in many ways, steadily getting worse. Half of our conversation was composed of her rants about the unjustness on the world political scene: She considers herself a “town crier” who admires President Obama but thinks the damage caused by the prior administration may be too immense to repair. “Almost everything the United States says it is, it’s almost the exact diametric opposite.”Working for drugs might actually be a viable alternative, since she believes most people in our country work 9 to 5 in “shitty, low-paying brain-dead, minimum-wage slave labor camps.”
Lunch shudders at the thought of that lifestyle, saying that she always “had to create to maintain sanity.” It must have worked—after all, she says, “I must be the sanest woman I know.”
By Lydia Lunch (Akashic Books), 160 pages
