Mallory's Camera

For me, the most amazing thing about Lou Reed is that he actually managed to qualify for a liver transplant. Figure someone at the HRSA has a secret history as a mosh pit trawler.

I'm not a big fan of Reed's early stuff with the Velvets at all though I like his Edgar Allan Poe tribute album a lot. He was part of a triumvirate of wizened old rock 'n' roll troubadours that also includes Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits. (Them I do like.) In death, he's most instructive as a cautionary tale, how the pyrotechnic sizzle and boom of Youth invariably gives way to the agoraphobia and liver disease of Old Age. It is the blight that man was born for, etcetera, ad nauseam.

My first impulse upon hearing that Lou Reed had croaked was to text B.

I quickly stifled it, though. B suffers from the same liver disease that Lou Reed suffered from. It's a Boomer epidemic: The CDC estimates that something like as many as one out of every 25 Boomers have Hep C. When last I spoke to B about his liver, it was operating at around 35%. He was supposed to start either interferon or some other miracle drug regimen in August, but was clearly uncomfortable discussing it -- which is to his credit: Most people with chronic, incurable diseases have a hard time talking about anything other than their chronic, incurable diseases. It's sort of like their world shrinks to the perimeter of their immune systems.

First thing I did after B was diagnosed was to rush out and get myself tested. I'm clean.

I think I passed Lou and Laurie on a NYC street not so very long ago. He was very short, which came as kind of a shock because I always think of subjects that inspire that kind of photographic iconography as tal-l-l-l... Probably because I worked around models for so long.

Lou Reed's death came at the end of a reflective weekend. I crammed a lot of social stuff into last week, which was unusual for me. I have major intimacy issues though -- you didn't know? --so coming home on the train from ___________, I could feel myself growing more and more depressed. I watched rural horse country morph into the suburbs, and the suburbs morph into Bronx urban blight, through the windows of the train. It was like time lapse photography. I felt my own insignificance -- purple speck of coral on a pink and cream coral reef -- and that insignificance oppressed me. I won't need a liver transplant, but I'll die nonetheless, probably in some drab hospital room tended by people who won't love me.

I chased these cheerful thoughts away by hanging out with Rutger. He's very talkative -- trills and meows more than any other cat I've ever known. And also by rereading my favorite Edgar Eager books, Half Magic and The Time Garden, and a bad historical novel (Penmarric), and by watching Hitchcock's Rebecca.

Rebecca really needs someone to do for it what Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea did for Jane Eyre. In terms of modern culture, Rebecca de Winter is an entirely sympathetic heroine, a free spirit dragooned into marriage to an awful chauvinist pig, and wistfully trying to work out a compromise that would allow her to have a life but at the same time fulfill her responsibilities. And she gets murdered for it. One senses Hitchcock would have been on board for that, but the stipulations of the Hayes Code would never have allowed it.

I'm going up to Syracuse this weekend to visit RTT. It's Parents Day weekend at Syracuse University! "Maybe they'll organize a tour of Lou Reed's dorm room for visiting parents!" said B, but that's the only thing he said about Lou Reed.