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.
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