Authors: Glenn O'Brien
The Madame Realism Complex
, 1992
Cookie Mueller first achieved fame (or notoriety) acting in the films of John Waters, whom she met in her native Baltimore. She also acted in films by Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, and Susan Seidelman, and in my film
Downtown 81.
Cookie starred in stills too, and is the subject of Nan Goldin’s
The Cookie Portfolio.
Although Mueller spent years in Baltimore and later worked and held court in New York, she often lived an “on the road” lifestyle, with extensive sojourns in San Francisco, Provincetown, and Positano, Italy. She contributed to many magazines, writing fiction, memoirs, and advice. Her “Ask Dr. Mueller” column was a popular feature in the
East Village Eye.
She was also a regular contributor to
Details
before it became a men’s magazine. The selection here is from her memoir
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black.
Cookie died of AIDS in 1989, a few weeks after her husband Vittorio Scarpatti.
T
HEY
WERE
just three sluts looking for sex on the highway,” the two abductors and rapists said later when asked to describe us.
This wasn’t the way we saw it.
A lot of other people didn’t see it this way either, but these were women. Most men who know the facts say we were asking for it.
Obviously you can’t trust every man’s opinion when it comes to topics like rape. A lot of honest men admit that they fantasize about it and that’s healthy but the ones that do it to strangers, unasked, ought to have hot pokers rammed up their wee wees.
The worst part is there’s no flattery involved in rape; I mean, it doesn’t much matter what the females look like; it doesn’t even seem
to matter either if they have four legs instead of two. Dairy farmers have raped their cows even.
“It’s great to fuck a cow,” they say, “you can fit everything in . . . the balls . . . everything.”
So I guess it just depends on your genital plumbing as to how you see the following story.
True, we were hitchhiking. True, we were in horny redneck territory, but we hadn’t given it a thought.
It was a sunny day in early June, and Mink, Susan and I were on our way to Cape Cod from Baltimore to visit John Waters who had just finished directing us in his film
Multiple Maniacs.
When we told him we were going to thumb it, he said incredulously, “You three?? You’re crazy! Don’t do it.”
“He’s just overly paranoid,” I told Susan and Mink. “Hitchhiking’s a breeze.”
It made sense anyway because we only had about fifty dollars between us and above all we needed a beach.
Mink the redhead was dressed casually as always in a black leather jacket with chains, black fingernail polish and tight black Levis. Susan, the brunette, was dressed as was her normal wont, in a daytime low cut evening gown, and I, the blond, was dressed conservatively in a see-through micro-mini dress and black velvet jacket.
This was not unusual for us, in fact benign, but in Baltimore at this time, the height of fashion was something like lime green vinyl pants suits, or other petroleum-based togs in chartreuse plaid or paisley that melted when the temperature was above 98.6. These clothes became one with Naugahyde car seats on a hot day. So people stared at us. They laughed right in our faces when they saw us.
“I hate to tell ya this,” somebody would always take us aside, “but this ain’t Hallor-ween.”
To this day I can’t figure out why we looked so odd to them. What did they see when they looked at their own outfits in their full-length mirrors?
In Susan’s thrift store Victorian mirror that was about as useful
as looking into a huge silver wrapped stick of Wrigley’s, we put on our Maybelline black eyeliner lines and mascara, and were looking much better than any of the other displaced hillybilly beau monde on South Broadway that day.
“FINE MAKEUP, SENSIBLY PRICED” the Maybelline ad on TV said. I thought to myself how true it was. Couldn’t beat it for a long trip; water-proof, smudge-proof, it sure held up.
For the twelve hour trip, we didn’t forget our two quarts of Jack Daniels and a handful of Dexadrine Spantuals (they were new on the pharmaceutical market), and twenty Black Beauties. Aside from these necessities we had a couple of duffle bags of Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul formals and uniwear. We were all set.
On the street, we had no problem getting a ride due north.
The trouble started after about an hour into the journey. We had been travelling in an old green Plymouth with a salesman and his
Gideon Bible.
He had run off the road into an embankment. Trying to follow our conversation, he’d gotten too drunk on the Jack Daniels, so we left him after he passed out behind the wheel.
“I don’t think he was ready for us,” Susan said, as we tumbled out of his car laughing.
“Let’s make sure the next ride is going to Delaware or Connecticut,” Mink suggested, “or at least a little further north.”
We had no idea that we were standing smack in the middle of a famous love zone, Elkton, Maryland, the quickie honeymoon and divorce capital of the eastern seaboard.
Men whose eye pupils were dilated with goatish desire stopped before we could even free our thumbs. We decided to be selective. Apparently we weren’t selective enough.
After a long dull lull in traffic, we hopped right into the back of a burgundy Mach 4 Mustang with two sickos, gigantic honkies, hopped up and horny on a local joy ride. They told us they were going to New York City, the Big Apple, they said.
It is a fact that retarded people do not know they are retarded; they just know that some people do not talk about stuff that interests them.
The conversation we were having in the back was beyond their ken; after a quart of liquor and five Black Beauties apiece, we were a bit hard to follow, even for people who read all the classics.
I suppose they got jealous. They decided to get our attention by going around in circles, north, then south, then north again, passing the same toll booth four times.
Mink, the most astute of us, realized that her instinctive internal migratory compass was awry.
“We’re trying to go north,” she reminded them.
They just laughed.
“We see that you’re playing some kind of circling game with your car.” She was trying to make herself heard over the din of some backwoods hard rock bubblegum music that was blaring on the radio.
“Yeah, guys, I saw this same cheesey truck stop whiz by twice already,” Susan pointed to a roadside diner that was whizzing by for the fourth time.
“I think they’re just trying to get our attention,” I said, taking the psychological angle.
“No,” said Mink, “these guys are assholes. They’re wasting our road time.”
She should not have said that, but Mink has never been afraid of telling people about their personality flaws.
“Assholes, huh?” the driver scoffed, and he veered the car right off the highway and into a field of baby green beans and then got back on the blacktop and headed north again. The tires squealed the way they hardly ever do in real life, only in squalid car chase movies
“Round dees parts we don’t call nobody assholes,” he said. “That’s kinda impolite. We call ’em heiny holes.” And they laughed and laughed.
“Well at least we’re going north again,” I said and in the very moment I said it I realized that it was a ridiculous thing to say.
There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low down, that all people are quixotic,
and haunted, and burdened and there’s just no way to lift their load for them. With this in mind I wanted to say something to Mink and Susan about not antagonizing these sad slobs, but right then the driver turned to me.
“You ain’t going north, honey, you ain’t going nowhere but where we’re taking you.”
These were those certain humans.
“Let’s ditch these creeps,” Susan said.
“We’re getting out at the next truck stop,” said Mink and she gathered her duffle bag like a career woman in a taxi with her attache case.
“Shut the fuck up,” the driver said as a Monarch butterfly was creamed on his windshield. The wings mushed into his wipers as the blades squeaked over the splattered glass.
“Fucking butterfly guts,” he said.
“We have knives,” the guy riding shotgun said and he grinned at us with teeth that had brown moss growing near the gums.
“Big fuckin’ deal,” said Susan, “so do I,” and she whipped out a buck knife that was the size of my mini skirt.
The driver casually leaned over and produced a shot gun and Susan threw the knife out the window.
Suddenly the effects of the Jack Daniels were wearing thin and the black reality of a speed crash was barreling in.
Mink began scribbling a note on a Tampax paper, “HELP!!! WE ARE BEING ABDUCTED BY ASSHOLES!!! CALL THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY!!!”
It was a note for the woman at the toll booth.
When we stopped there Mink started screaming and threw it at the woman. The note fluttered back into the car as we sped away.
“Have you ever fucked calves’ liver?” Mossy Teeth said.
“How the hell ya supposed to fuck calves’ liver?” the driver asked.
“Well, ya buy some fresh liver and ya put it in a jar and ya fuck it. It’s better than a pussy.”
Now that’s disgusting, I thought, almost as disgusting as the popular practice in 17th century France when men took live ducks and
placed the heads of the ducks in a bureau drawer, put their dicks in the ducks and then slammed the drawer shut at the moment of their (not the duck’s) orgasm. Men will fuck anything.
I suppose they also cooked the duck and ate it too.
They pulled into this long driveway. The dust was rising and matting the mucous membranes of our noses. Everybody sneezed.
I began to realize that for them we were party girls, that this wasn’t something unusual, that girls around these parts were game for a good time, a gang bang, and that threats of murder might just be considered all part of the fun.
We bounced full speed down this backroad for quite awhile, passing vast stretches of young corn plants rustling and reflecting the sun on their new green leaves. I remember getting sliced by young corn plant leaves once, the same kind of painful wounds as paper cuts.
Mink and Susan and I couldn’t even look at each other; our eyes hurt.
A white clapboard house came up near diseased elm trees in the distance. Some chickens ran away from the fenders. A rusted out pickup truck was growing weeds and a blue Chevy was sitting on four cinder blocks right next to a display of greasy old auto parts and an old gray dog that was trying to bark. We pulled up right to the house and from the front door, screen door slamming, came a big acne scarred man in his BVD underwear, a plaid flannel shirt with a sawed off shotgun.
“I told you once before, Merle, get off my property,” the man hollered, “I’ll blow your fuckin’ heads right off your shoulders.”
“My cousin’s a little crazy,” the driver said to us and he laughed.
“You wouldn’t do no such thing,” he bellowed to his cousin with the yellowish drawers on.
“Oh yes I would,” the cousin said and aimed his gun at the windshield.
“You think he’d shoot us, El?” the driver asked his buddy.
“Sheet,” the other one said, “hed shoot his granny.”
The screen door slammed again and then next to the cousin was
a woman with dirty blond hair and dirty bare feet. She was wearing blue jean cut offs and a tee shirt that said MARLBORO COUNTRY on it. She looked forty-five but she was probably twenty.
A toddler of about two came to the door, pushed it, and fell out into the dirt. The baby started crying but nobody in the yard noticed. The baby got to his feet and stopped crying when he picked up a piece of car tire and put it in his mouth. He was teething, I guessed.
The woman grabbed the shotgun muzzle. “Put that fucking gun down, Henry,” she said.
“Leave goa dis gun, woman,” Henry said and shook her off, aimed again. She jumped for it again, and in this moment the three of us, Mink, Susan and I started diving out of the car windows. Mink and Susan got out but Mossy Teeth, El, grabbed my thigh and held me fast. Merle spun the car around and we took off, making corn dirt dust in all the faces of everyone who was standing there in front of the house.
Susan and Mink tried to run after the car, yelling to me to jump. I couldn’t now. It was too late. We were burning rubber up the gravel path while Merle and El were pulling me back into the car. They got me in the front seat with them. I was straddling the bucket seats.
I wondered what was going to happen to Mink and Susan, but I bet they wondered more what was going to happen to me.
What happened was this: I began to feel the mood change. As they were talking to each other I noticed that they sounded scared; El even wanted to get out and go home.
After a lot of fighting, Merle finally did let El go. He let him out at a backwoods package store.
Now Merle and his little brain began to wonder what to do with me. His buddy was gone. Who would fuel the fire?
I assumed that he would rape me. He wouldn’t let me get away without that at least. Of course I didn’t want to get raped, so I began to think of a plan.
I have always been an astute observer of sexy women and unsexy women, and in all my years I’ve never seen a crazy woman get chased by a man. Look at bag ladies on the street. They rarely get raped, I
surmised. And look at burnt-out LSD girls. No men bothered with them much. So I decided that I would simply act crazy. I would turn the tables. I would scare him.
I started making the sounds of tape recorded words running backwards at high speed. This shocked him a bit, but he kept driving further into the woods, as the sun was setting and the trees were closing in.
“What the fuck are you supposed to be doing?” he asked me nervously. “You a maniac or something?”