I CREATED LAURA WARHOLIC: my experience of Alexander Theroux's world

I CREATED LAURA WARHOLIC

by Alexander Laurence

It’s almost thirty years since I met the person Laura Warholic novel is based on. After college, I had moved to post-beatnik and bohemian San Francisco in 1989. This was a San Francisco that was very cheap to live. Many people lived in large old Victorian apartment buildings. At the time when I met Laura, I was living in an ugly and average apartment in the South of Market area, which was known for it’s lack of any civilization or reason. It was just a bunch of warehouses and industrial buildings. There were only a few cafes and restaurants, and you had to walk a mile to find any reliable transportation. It was also where many nightclubs and music venues were. Doing most of the day it was quiet. I lived with some hippie Germans who were just passing through town on their world travels.

In his book Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes, Steven Moore says: “Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual (2007) is based on an affair Theroux had in 1995–96 with a young woman named Laura Markley.” Who is this person exactly? I thought that I would add to overall picture. I met her in Fall 1991. How it happened was by chance really. I had left a note at the old Rainbow Grocery Cooperative: it was a hippie whole foods place that started in the Mission. I was selling a pro-style camera that I owned but didn’t really use anymore. I didn’t think that anyone would call. One day I got a call from a stranger: it was Laura.

I told her to meet at my apartment in Dore Alley. I just happened to be listening to a John Coltrane tape. I wasn’t a big jazz listener, but obviously I made a big impression. Laura saw the camera and wanted to buy it. She was an art student and recent college graduate from the East Coast. We were both the same age. We were both 27 years old at the time. We had to walk back to Market Street to find an ATM machine. Laura didn’t bring any money for some reason. On the way over, Laura told me she was involved in the poetry scene. That meant back then in those days, Cafe Babar and the Chameleon: this was where the open mic beat revival scene was happening. An old roommate of mine, Bucky Sinister, was the host at the Chameleon. Through Bucky, I met Squishy, who by the way would show up as a character in Laura Warholic. I felt that I was a regular attendee of these readings. Unfortunately I had never seen Laura or her friends at any of these readings.

Maybe I was spending more time focusing at SF Art Institute and studying writing with Kathy Acker, and writing fiction? I didn’t notice that there was a whole new group of women poets in the scene now. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Beat Revival happening at Cafe Babar. I was only a shadowy figure at Babar. I wasn’t really part of that scene, which started in North Beach a few years before. I sold the camera to Laura for one hundred dollars. It was a cold unemotional meeting. I didn’t think that I would be dating her a year later. She was completely out of my mind afterwards.

The next time I met her was at this Peter Fonda film tribute night. I was living upstairs from Submit Theater where it was held. It was an event where they would show two Peter Fonda films at the same time, the early biker ones, and bands would perform songs in front of the films. It was a spectacular event. Members of the band Brian Jonestown Massacre were in attendance. I had left my dumpy apartment with my German expatriates, and moved in with Otter Campbell and Simone Third Arm, who were performance artists, and legends in the local club scene. Otter would eventually become a character in the book Laura Warholic, although she had never met the writer Theroux. I found myself selling popcorn for the event. Otter and I had spent most of the day making the popcorn in the kitchen of our warehouse flat on the second floor. I noticed some good looking girl across the room. It was Laura. She approached me and wanted a refund, because according to her: “The popcorn was stale.”

Not only was the popcorn was stale (even though it was not), I recognized her as the girl who had bought the camera from me six months previous. A lot had changed in that time. I was moving up in the world. Laura was going to see bands and attending hipster events. I was in charge of some of these events. I hadn’t seen her at any poetry readings. But I did go to Cafe Babar and Chameleon, and I noticed a whole group of new people. I was even hosting a Tuesday night reading in Japantown, at the Blue Monkey Cafe, that soon got national attention over a poetry license issue. I mentioned to Laura that I knew who she was. I informed her that I had sold her the camera six months before. She said: “Oh yeah! It doesn’t work.” I knew that was a lie. She didn’t know how to use one obviously because I had taken several pictures with it. That was my second experience with her.

In Spring 1992, I would finish writing an every version of my book Five Fingers Makes A Fist (2007). It was published around the same time as Laura Warholic. I had won the Bay Guardian Poetry Contest in early 1992. I noticed that Laura used to read a lot at Paradise Lounge on Sundays, and it was the nearest club to my room. I did a few spoken word readings with Otter in April 1992. Right before she left town for Ibiza. As I left one event at the Chameleon, I noticed Laura was there with her boyfriend. She probably thought Otter and I were a couple at the time. Who knows? My friends from LA the Carma Bums were in town for some readings. I remember some great night at the Paradise Lounge where we all read. Laura approached me after the readings. We chatted in a more flirty way. I impressed her somehow. Things had changed. Before it was like she had a boyfriend, or wasn’t much interested in me. It was like she had the big ego, and I was just some non-entity. But the tables had turned?

Apparently she wasn’t concerned with her boyfriend. She also had a crush on some artist I knew. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any advantage of the situation because I had decided to go to LA for a few months in summer 1992. Otter was in Europe. I wasn’t getting along with Simone Third Arm. The whole warehouse had become a heroin haven and some undesirables were lurking around. I was waiting for the police to be crashing on the door at any minute. Lucky for me, I put all my stuff in storage, and skipped out of town, and missed all the drama and violence that soon took place. I did get Laura’s phone number and address. I told her that I was going away for a few weeks and I would write her.

In LA there was hardly anything to do and I didn’t have a car and I didn’t know too many people there anymore. I wrote a spontaneous novel in my family’s garage in two months. I was reading a lot of Vollmann and trendy novels of the day. I would write to Laura on a weekly basis and we created a bond then and there. When I met Laura her tastes in literature were conventional. She liked Bukowski and Henry Miller. Some of the Beat Generation. Mostly stuff I read when I was 16, a decade before, when I didn’t know anything about literature. Since high school, I had read over a thousand books, and received a BA in English Literature. I had taken classes with SE Gontarski and Jacques Derrida. I had met Harry Mathews, Gilbert Sorrentino, and even William Vollmann by then.

Laura Warholic was from Syracuse, NY. I didn’t really know where that was, even though I lived in Brooklyn in 1991. Her parents had already divorced. She was English and Polish. Her Dad had married again quickly to a better family. Her mom was somewhere in Massachusetts boozing it up. Her younger sister was retarded. It sounded like some bad childhood. She hooked up with some fashion oriented guy in high school who people thought was gay. She escaped from her hometown to NYC, to attend Parsons School of Design. It was there she had a six year relationship with some student who was so forgettable I have forgotten his name. Not surprisingly they broke up soon after.

Laura Warholic did have some drawing ability. I have shared these notebooks with Steven Moore. I have one of her notebooks still. Her poetry wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Her reviews for Cups Magazine were some of the best stuff she ever wrote. Laura’s problem was she didn’t apply herself and her art very much. You wouldn’t know she was a writer or an artist. We would run into people that she went to school with: some of these people are Jacqueline Humphries and Isabel Samaras. These are people who had successful careers in the art world after college. At Parsons, Laura studied with Sean Scully who is internationally known. Of course Laura only regarded him as someone she flirted with. Laura ended up with some secretary job in NYC after college. It was a failure. Why did she spend all that family money just to work for some lawyer?

She was 25 years old and having a mid-life crisis. She would often get scouted by some modeling company. She didn’t care about that. She was young, thin, and tall. It was difficult to be in NYC and see others you went to school with having success while you are sitting there in an office. Laura decided to break up with her boyfriend, and travel to Europe and Mexico. I noticed that she always dated guys that never shared her desire to see the world. Some time around 1990, she ended up in San Francisco. It was some fresh new city where she could pretend to be a hippie. She soon had a boyfriend. She went out with this guy Ian from Iowa. She attracted regular looking guys who were from the farm.

From our letters we arranged that I would come back to San Francisco where I would rent her cheap room while she was gone to Europe for two months. Ian wasn’t going with her. I was planning my return. I had a plan to succeed. I had three different manuscripts. I was planning a homecoming reading at the Chameleon. While Laura was gone, my previous girlfriend, Madeleine, had also left to Prague. Stephanie Phillips had left Australia. Otter was still in Europe. The town had changed. I became best friends with Ying Guo from Hong Kong, who I met through some writing group, most of the members had also gone to Prague. I made a few films with others.

Even though our hot letters were a promise of something to come, my relationship with Laura Warholic was put on ice. I became friends with her best friends Zoe Rosenfeld (who later worked for the New Yorker) and Gail Eigl, who became the character Gayle Bagel in the novel Laura Warholic. I went out on some dates with Zoe at that time. Gail Eigl was married. She was a high school teacher who wrote poems as well. She was a person that I considered level headed. I felt like we could be honest with the other. I am still friends with her to this day. I think at the same time, she filled Laura Warholic’s mind with some fantasy. Laura did send me and Gail some letters from Europe. I was wondering why she even went there?

When Laura got back to the Baker Street apartment, I moved a block away on Broderick, where some fellow writers were living. I helped Laura get on unemployment. She broke up with Ian within a week. Laura made sure that we saw each other every day that week. I felt like I was trapped. I was so free weeks before, and now I was starting a serious relationship. I was telling Gail Eigl that I didn’t think Laura liked me. She told me: “Just hang in there.” She was often critical of me, and judging me constantly, and grilling me for information. Was this a job interview?

We started having sex and everything was swinging and okay. I introduced her to my friend Ying Guo who she thought was gay. When I met her friends, they were always similar: ugly left wing dudes, who were depressed, dark, and alcoholic. Often they were unemployed and poor. When she saw my library, she said: “You have read all these books?” By 1992, I was reading all sorts of experimental writers, language poets, Michael Palmer and Norma Cole. I was into Dalkey Archive Press and Fiction Collective 2. I think it was Gail Eigl who mentioned to me the novel An Adultery. My ex-girlfriend Madeleine was familiar with Darconville’s Cat. I really got into Theroux when the Review of Contemporary Fiction did an issue on Theroux. I had worked on a previous issue of RCF on Grove Press previous to that. So Theroux was on my radar by 1992.

As I got to know Laura and her friends: it was obvious that Laura hadn’t read very much, and her friends were better read than she was. Laura got jealous and insecure really early into our relationship. She had tried to read my diaries. She wrote a letter to Zoe Rosenfeld, after she flipped out that I went on a date with her. Still to this day Zoe will not talk to me. I saw her often when we both lived in NYC five years later. So towards the end of the year we broke up for a week over Laura’s jealous behavior. My grandmother died right before Christmas 1992. She lived nearby in North Beach. After my successful reading at the Chameleon, I was doing a weekly guest spot there.

I was left with some money and my grandmother's belongings. 1993 started well. I was doing readings at the Blue Monkey Cafe. That is where I met Dave Eggers who was the editor of Cups Magazine. Eggers went to college in Chicago, and had just moved to San Francisco. I thought of him as more an editor and a cartoonist. That is what he planned on doing. He invited me to a Cups editorial meeting. That is where I met Bryan Bence and Tom Stolmar and the rest of the early Cups crew. At the first meeting, I told them that we have to do interviews. I mentioned Vollmann, Acker, Mark Leyner, Dorothy Allison and Avital Ronell: all people we interviewed in that first year. Most of these people were not taken seriously by the literary magazines in San Francisco. The general taste of literary magazines in San Francisco was really boring. I had pitched an interview with Vollmann for years. Vollmann appeared on the cover of the Bay Guardian and the Examiner in 1995. Only years before this was impossible.

As Cups developed, I became more central. I was doing all the literary content. My friend D Strauss did all the music interviews. Laura Warholic was the art writer. Eggers had left in 1994 to do Might Magazine. David Latimer was our new publisher. I had met him back in 1988 when he bought some poetry chapbooks from me. We reviewed a lot of Dalkey Archive books. I did most of the literary interviews. Some still are available online on Free Williamsburg and The Portable Infinite. It was about five years of steady coverage of books, even though most of our advertising came from the music industry. I was the main editor most of the time we were in NYC. By 1998 or so, the magazine was bought and it died soon after.

So back on the Laura Warholic front: 1993 was a good year for us. I just read some of Laura’s manic letters to me today. They are crazy and insane, but the love was there. Laura used to write letters to other girls who she thought were a threat to her. The first one was to Zoe Rosenfeld. That caused a break up for a week. I was never interested in going out with Zoe. Then she wrote a letter to the writer Mary Gaitskill. This caused a longer separation. There were also letters to my family and ex-girlfriends. Otter and Squishy visited me in early 1993, when Laura was on a family visit. I guess much of the depiction of them in the book Laura Warholic stems from these weeks. It was a very wild time.

But with all the sexual tension and shenanigans, I was still able to interview some of the biggest writers of the 1990s: Martin Amis, Will Self, William Vollmann, Douglas Coupland, Irvine Welsh. The list is long. Laura became bitter and jealous. She would critique me all the time. Many letters occurred. She complained about bills and having student loans. Her rich grandmother bailed her out at one point and the stress was gone. I encouraged her to take a class with Kathy Acker. She read more. Laura wrote reviews of literature and art books. 1994 ended up not being so good a year in terms of our relationship, and the jealousy continued. Laura gave up on art and writing. She no longer desired to go to Europe or Mexico. Laura demanded a lot of attention.

Laura became jealous of any friendships with female writers, such as Mary Gaitskill, Eurydice and Elizabeth Wurtzel. That is when she decided to seek revenge on me and write letters to my friend the artist Donald Grose, and also Alexander Theroux. At this point I didn’t care. At this point we had been going out for three years, and things became more juvenile and silly. Laura objected to getting our own apartment. We still lived in a dumpy apartment on 745 Baker with other roommates. I had my own room at least. Things got worse at the end of 1994. Laura’s letters from this time are mean spirited. She sounds depressed and suicidal. I felt like things were going well for me professionally. I had this old relationship that was dragging me down.

We had decided to take some holiday trips separately. I went to Los Angeles to visit my family for Christmas. When I got back Laura was going to Boston for a few weeks. During my trip, I visited Julia Solis, who was doing a magazine called Spitting Image. I had never met her before. When I got there Laura had sent Julia a letter saying: “Here are some poems and I am the girlfriend of Alexander Laurence.” I told Laura she shouldn’t do this ever since the Mary Gaitskill debacle. I wasn’t the property of Laura Warholic and any thoughts like that seemed to me vulgar and rude. I wasn’t writing letters to Laura’s friends or being rude to people that she spoke to. I felt like I was trapped in this relationship and couldn’t talk to anyone. It was abusive. I didn’t speak to Mary Gaitskill for almost a decade, and we reconciled in 2010.

When I got back to San Francisco in early 1995, we had broken up. I felt like this relationship was going nowhere and was just ugly and a dead end. Laura Warholic went to Boston and never returned to San Francisco. She moved in with her mother. I was stuck with her friend Daniel Murtagh as a new roommate. I continued doing Cups in 1995. People asked me “What happened to Laura?” I wasn’t sure. She left town and she left all her stuff here in SF. She would write letters to Daniel Murtagh and others talking about what an asshole I was. One of these letters was featured in Steven Moore’s new book. Laura didn’t have many friends in San Francisco, so her absence didn’t affect much. She wasn’t missed at all.

After a year of doing the new glossy Cups Magazine, five people who were associated with it, decided to move to NYC. It became more national and we had national distribution in Tower Records and cafes. I was out of touch with Laura Warholic most of 1995 and 1996. At the beginning of 1997, I decided to go to Boston, where I had never been before. I didn’t know many people there. Somehow I contacted Laura Warholic there. I met her on the last day I was in town, at a neutral space, near Harvard Square. She had short hair. She was working again as a secretary for a lawyer. I think she was on prozac which killed her sex drive. The meeting was cold and distant. She told me that she had dated Alexander Theroux but it was over and she was hiding from him. “He was worse than you” she said.

I got married to a British photographer in Fall 1997, who I had met in NYC. I sent a letter to Laura Warholic mentioning that I was married now. Now Laura wanted to be friends and she wanted hang out when she was in NYC. Apparently she was in NYC all the time and she had even made a trip with Alexander Theroux, where they spent some time with his nephew Justin Theroux. I remember that I let Laura Warholic stay at my old apartment. She often stayed at the Hostel in Chelsea. It was the first time I had heard of the place. Even though we were both 33 now, Laura still lived like she was 23. We ended up seeing the Lyres at Coney Island High on one of her trips. That was when I first heard of Jeff Conolly. I mention this because Jeff and the Lyres (aka Craven Lucks) show up in the novel Laura Warholic.

We also attended Cavestomp 99. Laura was really into garage rock and 1960s music. I never really heard about this obsession in San Francisco. I supposed this was about her interest in the Lyres and all things Jeff Conolly. Also I was introduced to Jared Everett, who was in the Lyres. Jared ended up being in the band Darker My Love and White Fence. Jeff and Jared both worked at record stores in Boston on Newbury Street. That was the one time I actually had a weird encounter with Monoman. Laura would later come to LA in 2003 and we would see the Lyres a final time. After that, Jared Everett stayed in LA and became part of the new scene.

Back to Theroux: It was sometime in summer 1998 that he started writing me letters. Somehow he figured out I was friends with Laura Warholic again. Was he stalking her? Laura mentioned a restraining order. Laura and I didn’t really talk about Theroux too much. I didn’t really think about him for years. She just played it off as a brief failed experiment with a guy 25 years older than her. As I have known Laura for almost 30 years now, most guys she dated were her own age or younger. Was Theroux spying on us in NYC and Boston? Theroux contacted me via letters. He wanted me to spy on Laura and Jeff Conolly. I did see Laura at the time but we weren’t good friends. I was trying to keep my own marriage alive at the time. My wife wanted to move to London. I was living in London, NYC, LA, and making trips all over. Cups had folded in 1999. I was working for Interview Magazine and some internet companies in that time. Just trying to stay relevant.

I interviewed a few authors in 2000, but I had switched over to covering music which was more lucrative and in demand. I thought the idea of writing a book about Laura Warholic was a joke. I had never written about her myself. When I read the novel Laura Warholic: it’s not about me or Laura, it’s about Theroux and his frustration with the world. In private, Laura told me not to speak to Theroux. She probably enjoyed the attention. But she would never bother to read such a book. I didn’t think it would ever come out. Soon I saw a chapter of it in Conjunctions.

Years passed and there was nothing. Steven Moore contacted me a few years later that there was indeed a finished book. He sent me the first three chapters. I was thinking “There is no way someone is going to publish 1000+ page book of this ongoing ranting.” Finally it came out in 2007. I didn’t really read it. I just skimmed it for any details about me and Laura. There were 50-100 facts about us, but it seemed mostly fantasy. It just seemed like a writer who doesn’t give a fuck anymore. I asked Laura Warholic if she read the book. She said no. I told Gail Eigl about it. She wasn’t too interested either. Who is the audience for this book really? I sat down and actually read the whole thing two years ago. I made notes of any references to me. I didn’t skim. I read the whole essay. Most writers would include an essay that goes on for three pages, but Theroux goes on for 40-50 pages. When some character goes on a rant, it could be summerized in three sentences, but Theroux lets it go on for pages, so he can cram in more details and information, like in Laura Warholic’s rant (page 699).

I miss the big novel, but later in life I don’t want to experience one anymore. If I do I will just go read Homer, Don Quixote, Middlemarch, Ulysses, and Magic Mountain. But bravo on publishing a big hefty angry nihilistic scorch the earth book that people will hate! At the end of the day, I feel like I have created this Laura Warholic person, and set her loose on the world. She wasn’t always like that. She was a nice quiet girl from Syracuse. Maybe she was a deadhead as far as I knew? I didn’t know I would inspire this sexual maniac, and thus inspire this hateful book, from some clown who worshipped at the altar of some madness. I have a hunch that possibly Theroux had already written 500 pages of Laura Warholic before he knew her or what the book would be. Then he had some experiences with Laura, and decided that she would be the main character in the book.

I am glad that Steven Moore has come to write a book so insightful as Alexander Theroux: a fan’s notes. This 80+ year old needs some attention and shouldn’t be forgotten. Three Wogs is a great book. Darconville’s Cat is his best book. An Adultery is worth checking out. His poetry not so great. Laura Warholic is a tribute to that past greatness, and maybe an expression of a loss of relevance? Not just has Theroux’s work become more marginal over the years, but literature itself, and the “literary novel” is something of the past. I have little interest personally in Theroux’s notes and output over the past twenty years, but those early four or five books, mostly novels, they are wonderful, and as good as anything out there. Thanks to Moore for creating an outline of the entire scope, that not everyone will witness in total.