DOWNTOWN DIRT

Rachel and Lou, 1977.

Ed McCormac, Vanity Fair:

“Lowering my gaze to the zebra-skin rug on the floor, I found a pale, delicate ankle, a hairless shin, a slender calf, and a rather bony knee, which quickly, coyly crossed, as I glanced up, over another knee under a blue silk kimono.

This must be the lady of the house, I thought. Rachel. She reminded me of Cher, only prettier, as she sat in a chair across from the sofa, holding a telephone receiver to an ear while studying me intently with large dark eyes, curtained between sheets of shiny black hair. She was about to call someone on the phone. As she dialed, her silken kimono fell slightly away, revealing, for a second, a smooth, flat chest. And in a voice no more feminine than my own, the woman said, “Well, this is her brother, and I just wanted to let her know I’ll be away for awhile. Tell her I’ll call back.”

When Rachel got off the phone, I asked, “Where’s Lou?”

“Sleeping,” she said. “For the first time in about three days.”

“Is that all?”

Ignoring my sarcasm, Rachel asked “How are you feeling today?”

“Like shit. God, my fucking head!” I looked at her. “Have we met before?”

“Don’t you remember last night?”

“Not really.”

“You were really out of it. Lou was worried that you were so out of it you might not know what you were doing. So we brought you back here to sleep it off.”

“Oh, he’s a real Jewish mother, Lou is, for a guy who’s supposed to be setting such a bad example for the fucked-up youth of America . . .”

“I believe in glamour. You oughta stop the mind trip a little and get into the physical trip a little. If you think somebody who’s smart is good, you should see someone who’s smart and beautiful.”

Charlton Football Grounds, England 1974.

“And let’s see: Let’s take abortion back to the Supreme Court and take that away so that women can go play with coat hangers and get really fucked up. And of course what happens here will spread. How many people have to drop dead from AIDS? Why do they think that’s not going to spread? Do they have to wait until AIDS works its way to the suburbs before the great middle class rises up and says, Ohhh! Well, everybody should be saying Ohhh! right now. These are very scary and treacherous times even though people seem to think that everything’s OK. But we’re right in the middle of it. Why do you think people are taking crack? And where do you think the crime comes from? It’s a hopeless, dead-end situation, and you’ve got to give to people, you can’t just sit there saying things are good for us. That’s an extraordinarily easy thing to say. That’s no big thing, anybody can go outside and say that. We need to help people.”

“I recommend heartbreak. Being abandoned by your lover, totally destroying your life. Everyone should try it out at least once.”