|   The best party ever... | J
Apr 17, 2002 5:21 AM | | Handsome Dick Manitoba (of the Dictators): "My parents went away on vacation. It was a Friday night. I was working in the post office, and I had my car, and I drove around to all the playgrounds in the Bronx, stoned out on 'ludes, and said, 'Everybody come to my party.'
"Now I had a reputation for being a party buster. I would go to people's houses and take, like, a jar of pickles & throw it out a 7 story window and then take a thing of cottage cheese and smear it all over everyone's carpet. So people kind of said, 'Well...we're not gonna hurt the guy on <i>purpose</i>, but when there's a party there, we're gonna let ourselves a little loose...'
"So I went around to every playground in the Bronx just screaming, 'Everybody come over to my house for a party!' Playgrounds where there were, like, a hundred people. Friends and others...So I got a bag of a hundred Quaaludes. There were a couple of bottles of booze, about twenty cases of beer.
And whatever there <i>is</i> was that that party...There were guys f*cking girls, girls f*cking girls--I don't <i>think</i> there were any guys f*cking guys. I <i>know</i> there were girls f*cking girls and guys f*cking girls, and I know that the security police from the housing project we live in came up, and I know that the real police from the city of New York came up.
"I know that about $800 worth of jewelry was stolen from my parents' bedroom. Pillows, shopping carts, were thrown off the 26th-floor terrace. One of my friends just fell flat on his face--where normally your hands would go out instinctively to protect yourself, he fell flat on his face & broke his nose. Thre was blood all over the floor. He went to the hospital. My other friend, Cliffie, was totally naked, and he got locked out of the apartment on the 26th floor, and when the cops came up, he hid in the stairway naked--while I was dressed in a jock strap with red lipstick swastikas drawn all over my body. I was in bed with some girl, and all of a sudden the door opens, and it's the NYC police and 'What the hell is going on here???' And I said--and I'm stoned from, like, a <i>billion</i> Quaaludes--I go, 'It's okay, it's okay.' And I swear to God I remember this, the cop took me aside and said, 'Eh, I wanna tell you something. The next time you have a party like this, you better invite me.'
"Cops kept coming up. Security cops came up twice; regular cops came up once. And (Richard) Meltzer (rock journalist, contemporary of Lester Bangs & sometime lyricist for Blue Oyster Cult) was being...quite obnoxious. He knew this trick where you can take pencil lead & shaving cream & write on the walls & it won't come off--it's ingrained in the wall. And he wrote F*ck you, assh*le all over the walls...There was a total amount of about 300 people went through the house at one point. Someone stole the rest of the Quaaludes, everything... |
| And I wasn't invited... | J
Apr 17, 2002 5:24 AM | | "The next morning I could only talk, like, 'Duh-guh-duh...' and it took us 18 hours to scrub the floors and try & scrub the walls. And then my parents came home. My parents come home, and there's <i>no jewelry</i> and <i>F*ck you, assh*le</i> written all over the walls & half the house thrown off the terrace. They had just moved from the city housing project to the world-saving Co-op City. And I had said to them, 'I'm gonna have <i>one</i> party in this house.' Better than ten sh*tty parties, right, I'm gonna have <i>one</i> party that people are gonna remember forever--a <i>legendary</i> party. And a few months after that my parents went on vacation, and I had the party...
"And people remembered it forever."
But what about his parents?
Don't be ridiculous, his expression (says). "So what could they do to me?" And then, with just a tinge of rue: "Ah, but it was my fault. I shouldn't have been living there in the first place."
Of course, now he is living there again.
***
I read this in a book (The Noise, by Robert Duncan) that was written in 1984, and presumably this inteview took place not long before then. Handsome Dick has his own bar on Avenue B now, following several years of bartending at a place on Avenue A in the East Village. He's an AA guy; I gather he had some cleaning up to do. I went to a WFMU record fair in 1993 that he was bartending at & when I saw that decided to drink at the makeshift bar in the Elks lodge where the fair (complete with live broadcast) was taking place, as opposed to the bar down on the corner (this was in Hoboken, across the street from Elysian Field, where the first-ever baseball game was reputed to have been played, in 1840, I believe--though I've read plenty of accounts disputing the history of baseball as we know it, but I'm off-topic enough). A buddy & I decided that we couldn't do any better than to be served by "The Handsomest Man In Rock And Roll." We chatted with Handsome Dick & I asked him about this party. His head dropped downward for a second, then he looked at me & replied in a low, pretty deadpan voice, "That was some party." |
| wild | unleasHell
Apr 17, 2002 8:52 AM | | saw the WTC photo below, must be unreal being that close...
what camera(s) do you have/ use?
I have an A2 with a few lenses, including a 17-35mm Pro Lense which ia awesome... |
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