i almost became a famous punk musician but when i got a call from johnny rotten’s manager after the sex pistols split up and john was looking for a guitar player for his new band, did i want to audition? i told him to fuck off with his ‘audition’. i had my own band.
problem was bill the saxophone player had taken a fancy to me. i wasn’t even wearing a black bikini with rhinestones in the shape of a skull over each nipple produced by workers in factories earning $556 a month for working 18 hour days making 500 pieces a day seven days a week with one day off a month, who use their lunch breaks to wash their hair. but bill said he found me beautiful.
it was not that he wanted to feast his mighty rod upon my anus put his ugly horrible dick into my arse, bill said, ‘i just want to be able to touch you sometimes’.
i was 20 and i didn’t want to be beautiful, i wanted to be taken seriously as a musician. and i couldn’t think of anything more gross than being touched by bill — but i didn’t want to lose my sax player.
it must have been ari up from the slits who told johnny about me, since his girlfriend was ari’s mother.
at the roxy, on the 23rd of april 1977, after gobbing on me the whole time we were playing, ari went into the toilet, ripped out a toilet seat, jumped onto the stage and hung it around my neck. and that’s how we finished our set.
i should have taken that toilet seat home and had it framed but it reeked of piss and shit and vomit and i was in love with viv, not with ari. i should have asked ari for her number. but i should and shouldn’t have done a lot of things and i almost always fall in love with the wrong woman.
i guess this is what gilles deleuze called an old man’s project1 listing all the things you should and shouldn’t have done, could have done, would have done, all the possibilities and impossibilities.
after that bill became increasingly less enthusiastic about coming to rehearsals. maybe i should have let him touch me sometimes.
↩︎Ah, that’s something quite marvelous, you know, there is a whole evolution, and when one is old, one has a certain idea of what one hopes to do that becomes increasingly pure, I mean, that becomes more and more purified (épuré). I conceive of the famous lines of Japanese sketch artists (dessinateurs), these lines that are so pure and then there is nothing, nothing but little lines. That’s how I conceive of an old man’s project, something that would be so pure, so nothing, and at the same time, it would be everything, marvelous. I mean this is reaching a sobriety, something that can only come late in life. link