Spotlight on … Cookie Mueller Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (1990/2022)

 

‘“Perhaps there is no hope left for the whole of humankind,” wrote Cookie Mueller, “not because of the nature of the epidemic, but the nature of those it strikes.” Cookie learned about AIDS in July 1981, from a New York Times item she’d read aloud to friends on Fire Island; by early 1989, having lost who knows how many friends, she saw her husband, the artist Vittorio Scarpati, hospitalized with two collapsed lungs. “I hope he comes home soon,” she wrote in her art column for Details magazine; he died in September. Nan Goldin, a close friend, photographed Cookie at his funeral and, several weeks later, in her casket.

‘“I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough,” Goldin wrote, in the text accompanying her portfolio of photographs of Cookie from 1976 to 1989. Of course, she lost Cookie, the Cookie she knew and we never will. But Cookie Mueller isn’t lost: she’s there in Goldin’s photographs, the films of John Waters, and in the stories she wrote about her own life, a life I can’t imagine regretting even as it ended too soon.

‘Cookie Mueller was born in March 1949. At 15, she teased her hair until it scraped the ceiling and clomped down the halls of her Baltimore high school in spike heels and cone bras. She dated a boy, she wrote, who was in and out of jail and a girl “born of a lightbulb it seemed,” whose “scalp shone through all the teasing as if her head was a mango.” She arrived in Haight-Ashbury just in time for the Summer of Love, where she encountered Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Anton LaVey, and munched acid until her roommates had her institutionalized. She was transferred to a hospital in Maryland, where she met John Waters at the premiere for his Mondo Trasho. She’d appear in five of his movies, dancing topless to “Jail House Rock” in Multiple Maniacs; brandishing a flogger in Desperate Living; getting screwed with a chicken in Pink Flamingos.

‘From the freak wharfs of Baltimore (where she lived, she wrote, in a crowded three-room basement with a cockroach-eating pet monkey) and Provincetown (where she reportedly wore a monkey-fur coat to pick up the welfare cheque), she travelled around with her young son, Max, landing in Lower Manhattan where she became “sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene,” in Goldin’s words. She wrote a medical advice column for the East Village Eye—a “‘health in the face of drug use’ column,” as she called it—and the art review for Details; she go-go danced and, according to a commenter on Motherboards NYC, sold MDA, which customers would refer to as “a Master’s Degree in Art.” John Waters remembers her snorting instant coffee “because she ‘didn’t have time’ to make it the normal way”; every morning, she claimed, no matter the hangover, she hoisted her ass out of bed to get Max ready for school.

‘Cookie Mueller had her own normal and her own values—good values, adapted for a life that careened like a unicycle down a fire escape. She was the kind of person who seems to live adjacent to the rest of us, subject to different rules and different laws of cause and effect. Adventures just accrued to her, like money for some and lovers for others (“I’m not wild,” she wrote, “I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path”). And she was lucky, in her way: in Sicily, she rented a car, totalled the roof, then returned it to an inspector too short to notice the damage; in Elkton, Maryland she was kidnapped by gun-wielding hillbillies and escaped by hiding in the woods under the lining of her black velvet jacket. She lived a short life as a born survivor; you picture her losing an arm, then tossing it into the ice box as she fishes out a beer.

‘Mueller recorded her life, in her columns and in short, mostly autobiographical stories collected in the wonderfully titled Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which is still in print, and the more extensive Ask Dr. Mueller, which is worth the price on AbeBooks. Cookie was a good writer; she had excellent stories to tell, but had she been boring she could have made a career on chops alone. She pictured John Waters as a “tiny baby, fully developed and compact like a pound cake, almost bursting his bunting wrapper with the desire to communicate to anybody who’d listen,” which is a good description for her tales; the New York summer heat is “served as thick as lava gravy” and “closing in like the lid of a waffle iron.” Her characterizations are precise and brimming; her reality was singular, but her heart was everyone’s. She lived in a different world with the same mud puddles.

‘It’s tempting to think of Cookie Mueller as a doer first and a writer second, because it’s comforting, when you write and you’re dull, to think of dullness as the writer’s lot. The wild are not supposed to have insight, which is reserved for those of us too mired in our own heads to participate. The funny are not supposed to be beautiful, the beautiful are not supposed to be smart—either/or’s as bulkheads for our frail senses of self. This is stupid. Some people make beautiful work and some people live rich lives, and some people live rich lives and record them through beautiful work. The same genius that makes a story can make a life, if you apply it that way.

‘From where I sit (and it’s a dull seat, kind of a worn-out rocking chair with a whining squeak), it’s better to record than to be recorded. Moments pass and when you’re gone so is everything you ever lived through; your world ends, even if you are remembered, and what good is it to live forever, estranged? It seems better to leave a semblance of your world than to live as just a character in someone else’s; even better to be a character who can speak for yourself. Cookie Mueller died at 40, in tragic circumstances in a time of cataclysmic tragedy. But she lived an extraordinary life very quickly—she had a skill for living extraordinarily, and an equal skill for self-expression. Cookie was a character, for John Waters, for Nan Goldin, but a character with the genius to leave her world behind. That’s another way she was lucky.’ — Alexandra Molotkow

 

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Further

The Cookie Mueller Fan Club
Cookie Mueller @ Wikipedia
Courage, Bread and Roses: A Tribute to Cookie Mueller
How it Feels to be on Fire Reading Cookie Mueller Today
Cookie Mueller writes British Columbia—1972
Cookie MUELLER By Emily Gould
Doctor Strange Love
The Simplest Thing by Cookie Mueller
My Bio: Notes on an American Childhood, 1949–1959 by Cookie Mueller
The Mystery of Tap Water by Cookie Mueller
Baltimore 1969 by Cookie Mueller
Theatre by Cookie Mueller
A True Story About Two People: Easter 1964 by Cookie Mueller
Narcotics By Cookie Mueller
Jo Applin on Cookie Mueller & Vittorio Scarpati
Cookie Mueller @ MUBI
Tales of a late, great It Girl
invoking your idols: cookie mueller
A Stirring Exploration of Death by John Waters’ Early Muse
THE CURE FOR A BAD PARTY
A counterculture scene queen revisited
Buy ‘Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’

 

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Extras

Cookie Mueller I GOT A KNIFE

Cookie Mueller Tribute Interview

cookie mueller “secrets of the skinny”

Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

Justin Vivian Bond Reads Cookie Mueller at Low Life @ HOWL 2013

 

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Interview
from Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

 

Cookie Mueller: “They 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.

Mink Stole: Yes, it must have been 1969. You know the story. Well, my version’s probably different. In Cookie’s story, she had me wearing a ball gown, which is completely not true. I was wearing brown bell-bottom jeans and a brown leather jacket.

Susan Lowe: I had black nail polish, miniskirt up to here, black lipstick. We were the punks.

Mueller: And I, the blond, was dressed conservatively, in a see-through micro-minidress and black velvet jacket.

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.”

Stole: Then a couple guys picked us up—we were still in Maryland. They promised to take us to New York, and we believed them.

Lowe: We got in this car with these hillbillies because they had beer in the backseat. They looked like… oh, you know, greased-back hair or a flattop, maybe—farmerish.

Mueller: Burgundy Mach IV Mustang with two sickos, gigantic honkies, hopped-up, and horny on a local joyride.

Stole: The three of us got into the back, and the stupid thing is that we put our luggage in the trunk. That was our mistake. And Cookie carried everything in her bag: an iron… I mean she was loaded down.

Mueller: For the twelve-hour trip, we didn’t forget our two quarts of Jack Daniels and a handful of Dexedrine Spansules (they were new on the pharmaceutical market) and twenty black beauties. Aside from these necessities we had a couple of duffel bags of Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul formals and uniwear.

Stole: We started getting a bad feeling about these guys. I don’t know how long we were in the car before we realized that they were never going to take us to New York, that they had no intention of taking us to New York and never had. What they intended to do, I don’t know.

Mueller: 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.

Stole: I don’t know if they thought they could just ride us around. I don’t know if they intended to rape us or kill us or what. I really don’t know. Anyway, it was still daylight, and we were in this town called Elkton.

Mueller: Smack in the middle of a famous love zone, Elkton, Maryland, the quickie honeymoon and divorce capital of the eastern seaboard.

Stole: At one point we went through a car wash. We sat in the car through the whole thing. We could have hopped out while the guys got out, but they were fucking with us already, and we started to get scared and they knew we were scared and they were somehow getting off on that.

Lowe: Well, this is how I remember it: I remember seeing the same toll taker, and I’m going, What the fuck? And then we realized the guys were trying to make us lost, and then one time we tried to pass a note to the tollbooth—it was me because the tollbooth was on the driver’s side, and I was behind the driver—and they caught us trying to slip a note. We were laughing because we didn’t realize the danger at the time. We were high on black beauties.

Mueller: “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 miniskirt.

The driver casually leaned over and produced a shotgun, and Susan threw the knife out the window.

Stole: Eventually they drove to some small rural house somewhere in the area of Elkton. There was a woman with a small child doing the laundry.

Lowe: A hillbilly house that I have never seen before, except in pictures of Appalachia, maybe. It was in the woods. Mink and I were on the edges, so we jumped out, but Cookie was in the middle, and they drove off before she could get out.

Mueller: 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…

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… 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 burned-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 backward at high speed. This shocked him a bit, but he kept driving farther 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?”

“I just escaped from a mental hospital,” I told him and continued with the backward-tape sounds, now sounding like alien UFO chatter. I think he was believing me. Anyway, he pulled off into the bushes and unzipped his pants and pulled out his pitifully limp wiener. He tried to get it hard. For a second I saw him debating about whether or not he should force me to give him a blow job.

“Ya devil woman, ya’d bite my dick off, wouldn’t ya?”

He tried to force his semi-hard pee-wee rod into me as he ripped my tights at the crotch. I just continued with the sounds of the backward tape as he fumbled with his loafing meat. This infuriated him. “I’m going to ask Jesus to help me on this one. Come on, sweet Jesus, help me get a hard-on. Come on.” He was very serious.

Stole: Susan and I got the woman to call the sheriff. He came and got us and took us to the station. Susan was drunk and passed out; she had tattoos on her belly, and her shirt would ride up, and, well, they just thought we were trash. We were beatniks, we were hitchhiking, and we deserved whatever we got. There was absolutely no sympathy.

So Susan and I stayed in the sheriff’s office for a while, and during this time there was a jailbreak. I remember there was this one really fat guy walking around in his Bermuda shorts. He had a two-gun holster and was yelling, “Leg irons! Next time we put ’em in leg irons!”

Mueller: Not waiting to see whose side the Lord was on, I pushed his wiener quickly aside and threw open the door and dove out into the darkness. I ran faster than I’d ever run, and I wasn’t a bad runner. As my eyes grew accustomed to the half-moon light, I saw that I was running into very deep woods. Aggressive brambles grabbed at my thighs, poison ivy licked at my ankles, and yearling trees slapped me in the face.

After a long time I decided to stop running, so I got under a bush next to a pile of rocks. I felt a bunch of furry things scuttle away. Rats or possums or raccoons, I guessed.

I lay there for a while trying to see things in the darkness. And then I heard his voice. He was far in the distance yelling, “Girl! Girl! Where the hell are ya?”

Did he think I was really going to answer?

As he got a little closer I saw that he had a flashlight, and I got scared again. If his light found me there would be no hope. My white skin was very bright in the bluish flood of the half-moon. I had a black velvet jacket on with a black lining, so I ripped out the lining in two pieces and wrapped one around my head and the other on my almost bare legs. Those brambles had shredded my stockings. No light would bounce off me now. I was awake for a long time, and then I just fell asleep, sure that he had given up the search.

At sunrise, or thereabout, I woke up. I didn’t even have a hangover. I felt very proud that I had melted so well into the underbrush, just like Bambi. Without too much trouble I found this little dirt road, and I started walking to the right.

All roads lead to Rome, I told myself.

 

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Book

Cookie Mueller Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
Semiotext(e)

‘The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller’s stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.

‘Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller’s first calling was to the written word: “I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely,” she once confessed. Mueller’s 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller’s prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller’s stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller’s art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still “new” stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing’s new introduction situates Mueller’s writing within the context of her life—and our times.

‘Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley’s A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin’s oral biography Edgewise, Mueller’s life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller’s writing itself. Mueller’s many mise en scènes—the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS—patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to “a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails… a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.”‘— Semiotext(e)

Excerpt
from Interview

I have lived in New York City for about nine years now. Since one year here is equivalent to seven anywhere else, that makes 63 years for me. With this kind of time passing, one begins to wax cool. It takes a lot to impress a New Yorker. The word cool was invented here, the etymological roots lie somewhere south of 14th Street or north of 116th. When I first moved here I used to bitch about everything. “There are easier places to live,” I used to tell myself in the mornings as I brought the toothbrush to my teeth and there was a cockroach hugging the brush, licking the toothpaste. Now I find myself admiring these roaches for their bold New York attitude. They’re so smart they’ve been around for 300 million years, seven times that in New York of course. There’s even a modern hybrid, a totally new breed, the albinos. Through evolution they’ve adapted themselves to white porcelain bathroom living. That’s admirable. “God love ’em,” I say and smile. They seem like pets to me now, or like wild elk drinking at the edge of a watering hole. I hated it when the pigeons used to wake me up, screaming and flapping on the window sills amid all their caked-up guano droppings. Now I have discovered that 80 percent of all city pigeons are gay. Male pair bonding seems to make more sense for them here. I read it in some very reputable science journal. Now I respect them for this instinctive genius for population control. I used to hate all the flies here, but I’ve learned that fat people benefit because they get exercise chasing them off their hamburgers. Because of flies too, illiterates find something to do with newspapers and magazines. I used to hate the fact that there weren’t any fish in the fountains and lakes in Central Park, but then I found that they’ve all been fried up and eaten by hungry people and that’s good because it’s really proletarian. I’ve been hungry and I have a fishing rod, so I get this. Squirrels are good eating too, except they’re so cute alive and look like rats when they’re skinned. I used to hate people with money here, but they’re the ones who buy art from poor creative people and anyway on an average day there’s always two or three people jumping out of Park Avenue windows or wielding the Wilkinson Sword blades on their blue-blooded wrists. So I certainly can’t dislike them now. Toward the other extreme I used to look with impatience on the uneducated poor here. But then after I had to go on welfare and after waiting in lines for five days to get 15 dollars’ worth of food stamps that were supposed to last a week for a family of two, I decided that the welfare system was the thing to be impatient with. I know now that ghettos are full of people with rich lives. I know for a fact that the wild people on the street corners who are talking to themselves aren’t crazy and lost, they just don’t get enough carbohydrates to sustain the weight of profound ideas rushing into their cerebral cortices.

Even time is physically different here. It’s faster. All clocks are aggressive and they warn you that every hour is zero hour. I have found that all this is quaint and romantic, it is the stuff of which poignant movies about Manhattan are made. “It’s real life here in New York,” the film directors visiting from L.A. say. “Well … if you can live in New York you can live anywhere,” I answer. There is no other response. They wouldn’t be so glib about New York City if they only knew that just

getting out of bed here is like one of those hurdles on the way to wisdom that all the Buddhists talk about.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

Lately, a couple of my girlfriends have committed suicide. One jumped off a building and the other one took pills. As I remember, in conversations with them not long before they decided to do this, they told me they were depressed because:

they were reaching 40

their careers were at a standstill and

they were lonely.

All valid reasons.

There have been times when I’ve been so depressed about these same things that I couldn’t be emotionally positive enough to get up from bed at 5 in the afternoon to take a piss even when my bladder was bursting.

So I understood.

I have tried to commit suicide but the famous Dorothy Parker quatrain rattles in my head.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

You might as well. You’re going to die soon enough anyway and I guarantee when it happens you won’t be ready. In retrospect, I know what I should have said to them. I should have told them about my personal cure for deepest depression, which never fails. “Girls,” I would tell them, “Girls, don’t be such pussies! Get the hell out of here! Take a break from the city! New York is only a small part of the world. Being 40 ain’t so bad in the rest of the world. Nobody on the Adriatic in Yugoslavia will see your hairline crows’-feet wrinkles. In Lesbos, Greece or Fez, Morocco, nobody cares about careers and if heterosexual loneliness is the problem, get your butt on an airplane. There are millions of hetero men walking around in all parts of the world that would fall to their knees in front of you and lick your toe jam. And they’re great looking, some of them have money, even. Not all men in the world are assholes or married or attached or anal or too career-oriented or gay or balding like they are in New York.” It wasn’t as if these girls couldn’t get together the plane fare to somewhere. And it wasn’t as if these girls had inextinguishable burning desires for power and New York city fame that they would be throwing away if they left. But it was true that each of them was sad because they didn’t have a partner. “Look,” I should have told them, “if you’re going to kill yourself anyway, why not go to some country where you can hook up with some fisherman on some coast in Turkey or Italy or Spain or Brazil and be anonymous? Why not start a new career as a fishwife? Fishermen always need wives. Or why not go into some European urban area and hook up with a restaurant owner? You could be the lover and bartender. Or go into the rural areas in southern hemispheres and meet a sandal maker. Think of the fine footwear you’d have.” I mean, hon, if you’re going to kill yourself anyway what difference does it make if you don’t get a mention in New York magazine and what difference does it make if a Women’s Wear Daily photographer finds you sheep-herding in Sardinia wearing a peasant blouse? The next time you find yourself climbing out on a ledge, give me a call. I can recommend a travel agent.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Unfortunately, no, I’m still clogged and messed up in my head but hoping today us the turning point. Thank you asking. Well, Robert Pollard releases music virtually non-stop as GbV or himself or under various guises, and I used to keep up when I was in the States and near record stores, but it’s too hard over here, so I have to stick to trying to find mp3s of everything, which doesn’t have the pleasure of having the physical objects at all, so alas. But that’s what I get for revering someone who makes the word prolific seem like its antonym. You and I really need to find that genie in a bottle on the seashore, or, in our cases, on the banks of our respective rivers. Ha ha, I’ve often wished I could pull off a Lou Reed in the 70s deal in interviews, but I’m too nice, damn me. But, if it helps, your Reed-like love’s fans, while fewer in number, would be really hardcore. Love explaining why current day teenagers don’t get pimples as often and as badly as teenagers did when I was one, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Morgan Fisher is still making wonderful things. I’m not sure about Louis Hock. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything by him. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, J. Thanks, hopefully I’ll be much righter by tomorrow’s confab. I hope the Dodgers to reward your pleasure in their current success stint. Optioned, whoa! Tell more tomorrow. That’s super ace! The movie plans go well, the financing aspect is the worrying part, but we’ll get there. Ride the wolf if your haven’t. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too! Well, except for the student days part in relationship to the McCarthy. I think that video is still my favorite thing he’s ever made. Concentrate on your mojo, man. It’s your best friend, I swear. ** Tosh Berman, It was obviously my blog’s great honor, sir. Even though it was too racy (?) to be embedded in tact. Strange. ** Misanthrope, I cant think of a single example where the word fusion doesn’t portend meh, except in science of course. I like Chipotle. And it’s a godsend here. It’s no Poquito Mas. It’s not even Baja Fresh. But I’ll wolf it down at a finger snap. Thanks, this cold is being obnoxiously clingy. ** Robert, Hi. Those are two really great Bernhard choices to me. For a long time my favorite was an odd one,’Wittgenstein’s Nephew’, which is kind of a slighter novel, but lately I think my favorite is ‘Concrete’. Sebald is amazing, I think, and highly recommended. Bachmann is really strong too, especially ‘Malina’. I like the early Handke, pretty much everything up through ‘Repetition’, but after that his stuff lost me. I too have a hard time with Jelinek. I remember liking ‘Lust’ when I read it ages ago, but I’m not sure if I still would. Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’ is a helluva thing. If you want to slip one country over, I’m a huge fan of Max Frisch’s ‘Man in the Holocene’. Do you like French writers? I’m gigantic on the French avant-garde/experimental writers. They’re my and my work’s meat and potatoes. Happy Friday! ** Okay. Since Cookie Mueller’s wondrous book was recently reprinted and expanded by the mighty Semiotext(e), I thought the time might be right to spotlight it, and … hence … See you tomorrow.