New York Dolls (part one): Boys In Makeup

Groucho, as Freedonia's newly installed president, is handed a report from the Treasury Department. "Why, a four-year-old child could understand this!" he scoffs, then quickly turns to an aide and says, "Run and get me a four-year-old child."

So, I wrote this in my early forties in 1997, and fortunately my inner 19-year-old had me by the throat, insisting that it's his 1973 that needs to get told, the truth of his damaged and agonized perception. And maybe I could now add words fore and aft that would help you understand this boy and his world better, but they'd weaken the piece, make it too soft.

Or maybe you in your own perception can hear what's around the story's edges. "The kids in these songs have never heard of the Cool Generation. They are actively, hopelessly involved," wrote Richard Goldstein in 1966 about the Shangri-Las. And to me, 1973 – even before I'd heard the Shangri-Las – was about my failure and my world's failure to live up to those kids. But maybe my prose was good enough to show something more?

I do need to say, though – the reason for this introduction – that despite what's written here, Reggie and Kerry, for instance, are actually in my mind as happy memories. So part of me at the time must've known more than the official story I was telling myself. (Was I more willing to count their cheer as genuine cheer than my story admits? I feel like a jerk for not thinking that it was genuine when I wrote this, though see "blame" below.) Meanwhile, Fred is damn near the hero of the story. And some of what I wrote about dullards can't be true. ("Some" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.) Still, in case you, or me, in our wisdom, want to go back and counsel 19-year-old Frank, "You don't need to blame everyone so much; you don't need to blame yourself so much," 19-year-old Frank has an answer: "Self-blame is beautiful."

I wrote this for my fanzine Why Music Sucks. It's long, so I've broken it into three parts, the second made up of what had originally been footnotes to part one. In the fanzine original I'd had the footnotes snake around what they were commenting on, so you were seeing words and their reflection looking back at each other. I don't have the formatting ability to do that here.

Parts two and three get posted soon, I hope.

Thanks to the University of Georgia Press, who published my book Real Punks Don't Wear Black (and here), where I reprinted this, and are letting me reprint this now.

In this piece I refer to the one by Liz Armstrong, which came right before it in my fanzine, and contained the following paragraph.

Liz Armstrong: Although absolutely crazy/strange things seem naturally attracted to Sarah [freshman roommate at the University of Missouri] and me, we usually aren't running around all the time. Normally we just sit around and watch television (I'm now an addict, thanks to her), flip through magazines and sigh, sleep, and generally look for excuses not to do homework. At least once a week we play dress-up. Sounds silly, but it's so fun! See, we shop quite often at this really neat vintage shop and buy all sorts of things that we'll never be able to actually wear. My most recent purchase is a vintage linen, lace, and satin prom dress – very Victorian looking. Anyway, we make a mess out of our room with all the clothes. We try stuff on until we find a particularly stunning outfit, and then we spend lots of time on each other's hair and makeup. When satisfied, we decide where we'd fit in in real life. I usually end up in a Calvin Klein ad or a rock video. From there, we adopt a "voice" (sometimes foreignly accented) and make up a line or two. Me (as a CK model) (in a really bad British accent): "Be dangerous. Be careful. Just be." As a rock video chick, I don't say much; I just walk around, dazed, with semi-watery eyes and a slack jaw. Sometimes I'll press a finger near my nose and sniff violently, like I'm all coked-out. After doing little skits for each other, we walk up and down our hall, past the open doors of the hallway gang/slumber party crew, and talk loudly about either stupid stuff that happened or racy stuff that never happened. When back in our room, we make a halfassed attempt to tidy the place, but we always end up leaving ⅞ of our stuff lying around. Finally, we do something overly normal (like homework) while still dressed up. It gives us a sense of excitement while performing a mundane task.

Frank Kogan: I related very well to what Liz wrote about playing dress-up with her roommate. Interesting: When I was a freshman in college my roommates and I would do the exact same thing. We'd go to the clothing stores or thrift shops and buy the tackiest women's clothing we could find, either really sleazy stuff (vinyl was just coming in; so were tank tops) or ridiculously lacy and satiny shirts and dresses. We'd claim they were presents for our sisters or girlfriends. I'm not kidding. We also had contacts in the drama department who got us wigs. And we'd dress in these things and decide what role to play. On one weekend we'd prance around the hallways telling outrageous stories about sexual adventures we'd supposedly had, and we'd address each other as "Bitch" in really loud voices, and argue about Broadway shows that we'd never actually seen. The next weekend we'd be high-school girls from the '50s and carry on loud conversations about "dreamy boys" and about our daddies, and we'd pretend that we were getting high on cough syrup and vanilla extract. I cultivated a really annoying giggle at this time, which I've still got.

All right, I'm lying. We did no such thing. I made it up. But wouldn't it have been interesting if we had done it? —But there's no way I'd have had the courage.

I was really lonely and unhappy freshman year in college. I'd grown up in a university town with a high-powered intellectual dad and mom and older brother, and for college went to an east coast prestige school, so you'd think I'd have been on home ground, but I wasn't. I was very alienated. High school had been very interesting: very traumatic at times but full of life. Since it was a liberal college town with a lot of faculty brats, the freaks were an influential group in the high school, large enough to undermine the status of every other group but not strong enough (or confident enough) to establish their own status, so the social life was very unsettled yet open. And freakdom and hipness there didn't have the same contempt for ideas that one probably found elsewhere. People were very messed-up, but I had the sense that, smart or dumb, everyone was really willing to try things out and not pretend they knew what to do or who they were. I probably romanticized this in my mind and romanticized it even more in my memory, but anyway, romanticized or not, I carried this image into college of what I expected young people to be: people who weren't taking things lightly, people who were really trying, you know? So I got to this prestigious college where everyone was supposed to be the smartest of the smart, and I expected students to be intellectually or emotionally adventurous or something, and they weren't. They were smart but they were dullards. It's as if the top boring two percent were scraped off of every high school in the country and sent to my college. They weren't offensive or snooty, usually; depressed would be a better word, or suppressed or repressed. And no doubt some – but only some – of the problem was me: my not actually being able to see into these different people's different lives. But the atmosphere of the place wasn't inspiring people to express what was interesting in their lives either, it seemed to me.

So after freshman year I dropped out, then a year later I didn't know what else to do so I went back and was actually much happier. My opinion of the place didn't go up, but I'd figured out how to get what I wanted from it. I actually liked a lot of the teachers and a lot of the course work. This was disconcerting compared to my high-school years, to find that I liked the teachers more than the students. But it stopped bothering me that the students seemed so bland, and I made some friends, etc. etc. I still don't really respect that time of my life – it was limbo. But I learned a lot in my classes.

Back to freshman year, a year when I wasn't dressing in interesting clothes. My roommates Kerry and Reggie hated each other, so each was very cheery towards me – because by being cheery towards me each was proving that he was basically a friendly person not a hateful person and that obviously, therefore, the other guy was at fault, the obnoxious other guy, and deserved to be hated. We could never completely avoid each other, since we shared a three-room suite that was set up so that both Kerry and Reggie had to tramp through my room to get to their respective rooms, and the phone was in my room so they had to come out to take their calls. Kerry was handsome and blond and dressed very well but otherwise was a complete slob and would never pick up the place, and his dirty clothes were everywhere, all over my room as well as his. I didn't really mind this, but it infuriated Reggie. Reggie was persnickety and complained a lot, and he'd go into rages at Kerry, whereas Kerry would just glide in and out like he couldn't care less. He had a few records that he'd play in his room over and over, an Elton John that made me learn to hate Elton for his hamfisted piano playing and oafish vocals. I think there was a Carly Simon record that bored me and a Linda Ronstadt record that bored me and a Bonnie Raitt record that had "Love Has No Pride" and was really quite beautiful. I thought his taste was impossibly square compared to mine. I had Velvet Underground records that I thought of as great hard rock but that completely baffled everyone else. They thought it was awful noise. I'd put on "Sister Ray" whenever I needed to drive people out of my room so that I could work or sleep. My room became a sort of meeting place, actually, mainly devoted to our listening to records. I kept buying old Kinks albums from back when the band was good, and Reggie and I would joke about not being able to leave for class until the side ended (and he'd go and I'd end up cutting the class). The people from next door were often visiting us. One of them, Fred Smith, had gone to my high school. We'd been friends in grammar school but not really in high school; he was politically conservative (actually moderate) and I was liberal, and that had made me uncomfortable, and there were other differences that I don't know how to identify, differences in outlook, and I was often really afraid of differences back then. In college by some awful coincidence (I thought) we were assigned to suites right next to each other, and to my surprise he turned out to be the most interesting person nearby, and we became friends. So he and one or another of his roommates would often be visiting my room. Fred played up his eccentricities – he would go from comically cute to comically gruff, and he'd always answer his phone "Smith speaking!" and then when he was in my room he'd pick up our phone too, when it rang, and say "Smith speaking!" And he got to the point where when our phone rang he'd dive for it, knocking people aside, and say "Smith speaking!" into the receiver. And then his roommate Timothy got into the habit, when he was visiting us, of answering our phone too and saying "Smith speaking!" This must have confused callers. They must have thought we had a butler. Once a friend of mine from my home town called, and Timothy answered and said "Smith speaking!" and so my friend went "Oh, hi Fred," and chatted with him for a while thinking he was talking to Fred, until Timothy identified himself for real. Well, this must tell you how uninteresting my freshman social life really was, that the most vivid thing I remember is how people answered our phone. Once Fred was visiting, and Reggie was visibly depressed about something, and would clomp through my room to his, and slam his door shut, and then come out and go through my room to the outside and then return through my room back to his without saying anything, and slam his door shut after himself. Fred thought this was pretty funny, so whenever Reggie made one of his trips-with-slam, Fred would follow up by opening Reggie's door a crack and then slamming it. After Fred had done this for the third time Reggie came charging out and dived on top of Fred and started pounding him. We pulled him off; the freshman advisers found out and, I think, forbade the two of them to be in the same room with each other. But later, after the ban was lifted, Fred and Reggie became friends and even became roommates the next year, though Fred could get irritated by Reggie's depressions and stuff. Reggie seemed too tired for me, but, as you've gathered, I wasn't likely to look into what was really going on with people.

As for Kerry, he ignored us except when he had to counter Reggie's criticisms. As I said, the place didn't inspire people to display their interestingness. I remember once Kerry was doing acid with his girlfriend and I could hear them having sex in his room and after he'd come he said, "That was fantastic," and the whole thing – acid, sex, and Kerry – seemed totally vacuous. At least from my side of the door.

So I did nothing creative with dress-up. Freshman year my creativity was all in letters, sent to the outside world. Real life was elsewhere, real life was a fantasy, real intensity was a hope or a memory.

However, in 1973, the year when I dropped out of college, boys in makeup changed my life. Not boys I knew, of course, but boys onstage, boys on record. Not Bowie, though I liked him and had his records. He made sense to me as an inferior extension of Dylan, the next step into The Strange, and I liked his transvestite image as a way of stepping out of ordinariness and out of boy-mandated toughness. But as for the way he actually looked, his style didn't matter to me. He dressed in weird sci-fi gear; or he copied the Garbo pose from the famous Steichen photo, where she'd pulled back her hair to show the bones of her beauty. Bowie was like a guy with a sign around his neck that said, "I represent stylishness." It had no gut-level meaning to me. The sci-fi stuff was an evasion; I mean, I'm weird 'cause I'm from outer space – what kind of an explanation is that (as opposed to being weird because of one's experiences as a human being)?

The makeup boys who changed my life were the New York Dolls. Or, if they didn't change my life, they at least warmed up my understanding of the world. David Johansen sang songs about girls from the suburbs who moved to the big city (like I'd just moved to New York after dropping out) and tried to be somebody (like I hadn't) and ended up bruised and messed-up and strung-out, whores or massage babes or groupies, but still dreaming of stardom, or dreaming of home, or just dreaming (like I had a dream of forgotten intensity). But what the Dolls did was to dress up like the characters in their songs, like the losers and groupies and yearning suburban glitter babes they hoped to get for their audience. The Dolls were transvestites in cheap vinyl, on platform shoes; they came up with a bargain-basement glamour that anyone could invent for himself or herself, made up of scraps and overstock and worn by the riff-raff. (Was that true? Well, it didn't have to be true, it was the image.) They dressed up like tough girls – no, like warm-hearted, desperate girls who were trying to look tough – dressed up like whores, floozies, groupies. It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me.¹ I won't really try, because that would take up a hundred pages. But up until then I'd more or less gone along with the freak thing in how I'd dressed – by then the freak thing wasn't very freaky, it had devolved down to jeans and army jackets, long hair and a blank expression, very unpretentious and anti-ostentatious. It supposedly signified rebellion but I knew better – it was just another way of holding back and hiding out, the freaks no longer being rebel kids but just normal neurotic "outcasts" who knew their place and were satisfied to stay in it. It was as boring then as gangsta and grunge clothes are now. Except I didn't even do the freak thing: I just bought jeans and wore the shirts my mother got for me, but I managed to look a little scruffier than she'd intended, as if I just didn't care how I looked.² Basically, I was dressing defensively, dressing so as not to threaten people, dressing not to look too straight but not to look too freaky either, dressing so as not to display ambition (either mainstream ambition or countercultural ambition), and never actually was willing to learn even the basics, never tried things on in stores before I bought them, never went shopping much for myself, never spent the time to see what looked good on me or how to make myself look good. I was still reacting to that whole horrible junior-high experience from seven years earlier. The idea of getting all dressed up still felt like giving into fear and into excessive concern with what others thought of me. So I tried to ignore the issue altogether, not stand out and not be a target; but this was just another way of giving into fear.

New York Dolls "Frankenstein"

My friend Maureen from high school was beautiful and suicidal and hated herself, and she told me that she couldn't bear to look at herself in the mirror unless she'd dressed up. This made no sense to me, because Maureen looked utterly beautiful no matter what, always. She was also brilliant and intimidating but with no real belief in her own brainpower. I was so frightened of what she thought of me that it took a while to dawn on me that she was frightened of what *I* thought of her. She was the person who got me to understand the Dolls. She said, "What's wrong with trying to look good?" and with that sentence, from her, from this woman who felt she had to invent a look for herself or she was nothing, the whole freak thing ended for me and glitter began. Of course I never at all, myself, dared dress up as glitter. But at least now I understood that looking good could – in principle – be self-expression, could be done on one's own terms. And I think this has influenced my writing – if my clothes won't swing and glitter at least my prose will, damn it! But also maybe I felt inside that glitter just wasn't me, as a fashion. I began to be disturbed that, in order to be emotionally effective, David Johansen had to feminize himself and sing about groupies and girls rather than about thoughtful intellectual young men like himself. And the Dolls as a band failed to reach the teen girl masses: Instead it got the thoughtful intellectuals like me; so why couldn't David Doll sing about me? Why couldn't he sing about his real audience? At least, why couldn't he sing about Maureen, about an insecure intellectual girl? Well, perhaps he did, but he sang about something in us that we could never express, boys who wished they could show the emotions of desperate girls; smart girls who wished they could tear loose and be party girls; boys who wanted to party and jump out of cakes… well, I don't have the right words here. The Dolls never sold many records. The Sex Pistols cashed in by taking the Dolls' sound back to aggressive boy punk. The next generation of boys in makeup, the New Romantics, went back to a less emotional, more conventional Bowie "stylishness." I went back to college.

Well, this might go a hundred pages, after all. It reveals my sentimentality, at any rate.

Maureen explained the Dolls' "Frankenstein" to me. It's another girl-(or-whatever)-lost-in-the-big-scary-city song – the words basically rewrite Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" – and of course the girl meets disaster and fear. Did she ever, could she ever, expect such a Frankenstein? And then the monster is stalking her, tracking her down, but maybe he wants to be her friend. You know, maybe the monster is lonely. And the song ends with a question, "Do you think that you could make it with Frankenstein?" And Maureen explained to me that Frankenstein wasn't just a creature to have sex with, he represented the whole funky New Yorkiness of New York, the ostentation and the terror, the dreams and the fear. So I figured out that David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life,³ whether I could embrace life in all its pain and dreams and disaster. Of course, the way I've lived my life, in so much fear, maybe means that my answer is no, but still it's a real good question.

Meta paragraph for Substack: Even if my attempt to drop out had succeeded, or if in my life I'd never been near a college, a big hunk of my ability to be the unaffiliated intellectual I am now would've depended on the existence of academia. --But setting my story aside, let's personify a university, imagine that this university wants to propel away from its usual self, take a year or two off to see what's on the other side of the mountain, to see what it could see... Well, I was talking to Tom Ewing recently on bsky [convo begins here; the particular subthread I quote from is here], saying that even though affirmative action was a lost cause politically, I was still in favor of it, "but one reason it lost is that it refused to affirm for class as well as race and gender, so continually felt like a slap in the face to the white working class. Making it work to include class, tho, is something I wouldn't know how to do, given that one of the status markers of the working class is to fail (sometimes deliberately) at school." Don't know if all this seems to be at a distance from the story I’m telling here of me, at age 19, not knowing how to reach out of myself to what was directly around me, and in turn not feeling reached to. Although I'm not working class, this feels like a similarity: on the one hand, this utter blind spot in affirmative action, and, on the other, my own freshman failure to reach, and my not being reached. In my book I write, "the drive towards academic diversity tends to run aground not on the question whether intellectuals can appreciate an Elvis, but on whether an Elvis can make it into the social group 'Intellectual' – while still remaining Elvis."⁴

This entry was originally posted at https://koganbot.dreamwidth.org/393251.html. Comments still welcome here, there, and anywhere.

1. "It'll be pretty hard to explain why this image meant so much to me." (Marking this here for anyone reading the next installment who wants to see the context of the note.)

2. "As if I just didn't care how I looked." (Marking this here, etc.)

But anyway, here's Poison.

Poison “I Want Action”

3. "David was asking if you – if *I* – could make it with the monster of life." (Marking this here, etc.)

4. The full passage goes, "the drive towards academic diversity tends to run aground not on the question whether intellectuals can appreciate an Elvis, but on whether an Elvis can make it into the social group 'Intellectual' – while still remaining Elvis. In the average white high school, over the last fifty years [I wrote this circa 2003 [Edit: but lifted "last fifty years" and the "rocks, greaseballs, hoods..." vocabulary from my Columbine piece 1999]], the refusal groups are – depending on time and place – rocks, greaseballs, hoods, greasers, grits, rednecks, farmers, burnouts, stoners, jells, dirts, dirtbags, skaters. And if greasers etc. want to join the Intellectual Gang, they have to stop acting like greasers. It's a vicious circle: The greasers are anti-intellectual because they've been excluded from the 'Intellectual' group, and the 'Intellectuals' exclude the greasers because the greasers are anti-intellectual. But excluding the greasers is itself anti-intellectual." That's where I'll leave my thought for now, pregnant but not giving birth, with phrases like "acting like greasers" and "excluding greasers" vague and less bloody than real life.