Lou Reed Wants You to Deliver a Pizza

The difference between tragedy and comedy, or two decades of artistic ambitions viewed through a shouted insult in a bar

“Lou Reed hates you!” Danny barked at the unseen voice who’d yelled at him to shut up while the jukebox played Lou Reed. “Lou Reed wants you to deliver a pizza!”

It was 2003 or 4

We were at Bar 81, or Verchovyna, - American name on the sign and Ukrainian one painted on the window. Some called it one and some called it the other, no one debated which was correct. It’s gone now, along with Lou Reed. Danny got sober. It’s one more thing that can never happen again.

It was a rainy winter night, and Danny had taken off his soaked boat shoes and draped his wet socks on the booth.

The voice and Danny yelled back and forth a little more, then lost interest. Danny’s brother Joe was there, yelling at Danny to put his socks away, then defending him against anyone who complained about the socks. We all drank to a blackout that night, like most nights when we used to call each other geniuses.

Lou Reed wants you to deliver a pizza, though, sticks with me.

Danny’s a bit of a savant, often far smarter than it seems he had any right to be. And in that one insult to a stranger in a bar, popped open a perspective on the artistic tradition that I couldn’t bring myself to seriously consider until many years later.

The idea of an artistic tradition was something we lived on back then: That there were individuals in the arts who brought life-saving consciousness and humor to the dim, unspoken fiasco of daily life, and that we could honor them by mining those same veins of secret knowledge and beauty. Along the way, we might discover our own veins to explore and open further for our audiences and for the artists who would come after.

That idea was not a consolation then, so much as something that excited us. It gave us a context where our work might have the same wider importance that it had for us.

At the time, Danny and I had just collaborated on a book of poems and illustrations. We formatted it and found a printer. We started a publishing company to put it out. We paid to have 500 copies printed.

We did readings in the city, upstate New York and Massachusetts, spammed all the email addresses we could find and built a website. We were interviewed in a few small papers. We sold and gave away copies in bars. The book was banned in the high school and the bookstore in Cooperstown. We were riding high. Young, ambitious and making some kind of beachhead, it seemed.    

Everything felt different. At the time, Danny’s repudiation of the nobility, profitability and immortality of the artistic tradition could only have come as an insult to someone in a bar. It was a colorful blasphemy on a noisy night. But the seed of suspicion was there, even then: There is no artistic tradition. It is a Ponzi Scheme.

You can’t win if you don’t…

Perhaps Ponzi Scheme isn’t exactly right. But ten years after that night, it felt close. It all felt at least like a state-sponsored a lottery. Like a lottery, the proceeds of the winners come from the pool of the losers,

so do the earnings of the artist come from the masses of failed artists. Of course, not all failed artists are the same. Some give up before they start. Some fail for lack of will, others for lack of nerve, others for lack of energy, others for lack of talent and others for lack of luck. Some just see the game and keep out of it.

Like the lotto winner gets a big gaudy check on a stage in a weekly state-funded photo-op to lure in another wave of suckers, so did we once have a stream of rock stars, movie stars, celebrity authors and great artists. Like the lotto-winners, they are quickly ushered on and off the stage by the people who are showering them with money.

And maybe those winners were helpless. Maybe they were as helpless as helpless as the administrators of the lottery claim to be - just giving the public what they want. Maybe they were all at the mercy of the rogue waves of boredom and depression that have always battered the hull of the ship of state.

Nowadays

This isn’t a polemic. We weren’t betrayed, exactly. We wanted something exceptional. We believed what we wanted. And we discounted anyone who warned us otherwise. We weren’t always very nice about it, either. After all, we were geniuses.

Danny’s about to turn fifty down in Texas. He had a run of selling sketches and watercolors a few years back. But that dried up. He spent a little time in an institution. He quit his job answering phones for the Cancer Society and sold his house. For a while, his hands shook when he tried to draw.

Busy is how I describe my life and myself. I’m working full-time for a financial company, writing copy, peppering my emails with exclamation points. I am a dull boy - always working, always writing, always running to daycare and school for dropoffs and pickups. It’s not very bohemian - certainly not the writerly look that sells watches and scotch.

I don’t love all the work I do, but I do all the work I love. Still, I worry that I’m always rushing and impatient. I worry that I’m getting important things wrong with all my rushing. I’m doing alright.

What eats you

The thing is, I know people whose adult lives have been oceans of free time. And it’s flat-out eaten them alive. I’ve seen how green that grass is.

What I’ve known is day jobs - a quarter century of them now, and rather demanding this past decade. I never know if it’s better to be good or bad at the day jobs. They remind me daily of the significant and very actual difference between what I like to think I’m about and what moves a dollar from one pocket to another. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes not. Sometimes I punch the elevator walls.

Maybe Lou Reed, if he was alive, would read something I wrote for the financial company, perhaps after selling his song catalogue to a private-equity fund for eight figures. His wealth advisor might tuck a copy of the piece into a nice, hefty folder full of brochures and legally required disclosures, so Lou would feel informed. After that, maybe Lou would have called Danny to donate to the Cancer Society, then he might order a pizza.

Doubt comes for us all

Maybe this doubt is essential to the artistic tradition. All real art is priceless or worthless and rarely anything in between. It’s a high wire more than a career path.

Lou Reed had his own period of doubt. The Velvet Underground broke up and he moved back in with his parents in Freeport, Long Island. He took a job typing for his dad. Some artsy types called to ask if he wanted to write the libretto for a musical based on Nelson Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side, then lost interest in the project, as benefactors are wont to do.

By then, Lou was 28, 29, a countdown that runs up to a zero you’re always the last to see. But not Lou. He took the one throwaway song from a never-attempted musical, and he had his hit. A great, absurd wind picked him up.

Is it a tradition or a scam?