Richard Hell - I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp # 12 Richard Hell & The Voidoids

 

I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp tails off in the last 25 pages. Really Hell was at his most interesting when he was at his height, 70 to 78. That's a pretty good run. The memorirs are slightly curate's eggy, I have ni unterest in the bodily shapes of the women he slept with. Why would anyone. It's poet's license but it's also invasion and indeicretion. 

But when Hell writes well he writes very well. About the times. About Verlaine. About himself and their relationship. About drug dependency. About New York. The book ends with possibly it's finest and most moving passage. About bumping into Verlaine by chance in New York late one night. 

'The other night I was walking home from a restaurant when I saw Tom Verlaine going through the dollar bins outside a used bookstore. I'd been surprised to see him there a few times in recent weeks. Usually I only spot him somewhere every two or three years.  In public he always holds himself nervously apart from everyone, meeting no eyes, as if he assumes everyone wants to accost him. His head and neck perch like a raggedly spooked hawk on the high, bulky prospect of his middle-aged body above the crowds, his eyes self-consciously focused on something in the distance. When I see him on the street I don't try to get his attention, but this time I was too curious to let the moment pass. What was he doing? The books in the dollar bin are as useless as they come - outdated text-books, forgotten mass-market trash, operating manuals. I walked up to him and asked . "Finding out anything about flying saucers?" The last time I'd spoken to him in person as opposed to a few e-mails had been seven or eight years before. "Yes, this is the Greek edition." He grinned at me, holding out a Greek-language three-volume set of some sort, proffering  it theatrically as if it were a great, but fragile and possibly dangerous prize and he was an animated cartoon, like Gumby, the way he does. He smiled something else, wide-eyed, going along with the flying saucer stuff. I replied "I hear Plato came from Pluto." He continued to smile widely. His teeth looked brown and broken in the night light, even worse than mine, (he still smokes), and his face was porous and expanded and his hair coarse gray. I turned away and walked on, shocked. We were like two monsters confiding, but that wasn't what shocked me. It was that my feeling was love. I felt grateful for him and believed in him, and inside myself I felt grateful to him and believed in him and inside myself I affirmed the way he is impossible and the way it's impossible to like him. It had never been any different. I felt as close to him as I ever did. What else do I have to believe in? I'm like him for God's sake. I am him."