“Ronnie Cutrone: I loved Jim Morrison dearly, but Jim was not fun to go out with. I hung out with him every night for just about a year, and Jim would go out, lean up against the bar, order eight screwdrivers, put down six Tuinals on the bar, drink two or three screwdrivers, take two Tuinals, then he’d have to pee, but couldn’t leave the other five screwdrivers, so he’d take his dick out and pee, and some girl would come up and blow his dick, and then he’d finish up the other five screwdrivers and then he’d finish up the other four Tuinals, and then he’d pee in his pants, and then Eric Emerson and I would take him home.” [1]
I have a fascination with vice. Hedonism has its degrees and, at the far end of the spectrum, it becomes animalism. Prostitutes. Junkies. Transients. All living for “lesser” pleasures. Is it a simple addiction, or a driving life philosophy? How self-aware are these people? Are they knowingly exchanging time for intensity of experience? Is it worth pissing on yourself to feel that good?
The obtainment of pleasure is the master of human focus. When will it come? How long it will last? How do I maximize it? This includes all types of pleasure. Everything from religious to physical passion. A great emphasis is placed on the security of future pleasure. Indulgences of less decadent flavors — such as family, home, and other domesticities — are the commonly accepted goal. Fleeting pleasures like sex, drugs, adventure, and other dopamine-steeped activities are considered less valuable experiences and, from a religious perspective, of an evil bend. I don’t intend to discuss the merits of pleasure varietals, but to explore the curious habits of those who live in a near-animal state of sensualism.
When living in Boston, I frequented the Harvard Book Store. One afternoon I was scanning the fiction section when I noticed a sign indicating that both Bukowski and Kerouac were available only by request. As an avid Bukowski reader, I found this odd. Certainly, he was a filthy old man constructing semi-autobiographical novels out of lewd diction and awkward sentences, but I never considered him worthy of censorship — and most definitely not at my usual bookshop. I approached the counter and asked a young man in an argyle sweater vest why Bukowski was kept off of the shelves. The employee looked at me, smirked gently, and replied, “Because people steal it.”
I now had something tangible in common with those who would shoplift.
A common question asked of me by the uptight, educated sorts is, “Why do you like that drunkard?” Because he was free. He lived his life as he chose, which is a greater achievement than may be seen from the Harvard students across the street from the bookshop. Those students will spend their lifetimes questing for a socially acceptable happiness. Respect, financial security, and acknowledgment on the menu. These items are complex desires with winding roads leading up to them. Life seen as a series of obstacles between the man and his goals.
There was a purity to Bukowski’s lifestyle. He existed. He woke, he drank, he wrote, he fucked. His goals were no more complex than procuring a bottle, or orgasming. Crude, but nearly touching on Buddhist ideals in that he removed a number of the wants most men experience. As he put it:
“I made it to the bed, got the clothes off, dropped in as down in the railroad yards they moved across the tracks picking cars, places, hoped destinations — better towns, better times, better love, better luck, better something. they’d never find it. they’d never stop looking. I slept.” [2]
Perhaps the most self-aware example of living in a hedonist, animalistic state would be Dash Snow’s Hamster Nests. The Nest would entail hundreds of shredded phone books, Dash and a group of his friends, and enough drugs to render them burrowing, defecating, fucking, drooling animals. Dash, Dan Colen, and fifteen of his pals “rolled around” in a room filled with shredded books for eight hours in preparation for the installation at the Deitch Projects gallery for the first public exhibition of a usually private party.
Snow, born into an art-royalty family, was self taught — possessing a ninth grade education. Presented with incredible wealth and a choice of outcomes, Dash chose a life that ended with one final binge in July, 2009. Addled with drugs and alcohol, in constant trouble with law enforcement, and living the life of voluntary poverty, his point is not to be mistaken. He saw purity in the lives of rodents.
Spiders and rodents know something that we have forgotten. Whether that simplicity is nobler than the complexity of culture, economics, and intellectual engagement is open for debate, but I cannot dismiss these artists as mere drunks and junkies. Authors and artists, emissaries of beauty and emotional existence, are too often entwined in lives of abuse and insanity.
“I wasn’t asking for love. but something was odd. the books never spoke about it. the parents never spoke about it. but the spiders knew.” [3]
[1] Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Grove Press, 2006) 31.
[2] Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1969) 88.
[3] Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1969) 116.
There’s nothing quite so tiring as moving. Physically as well as emotionally. Over the past two days, what was MY space, is returning to a room in a house that is not my home.