Lou Reed Concert Ticket. 2009.
Few people can boast of having a story that involves both musician Lou Reed and a trip to the gastroenterologist for a colonoscopy. But then again, you may not know my friend Brigid Berlin. Aside from her notoriety as a Society-born troublemaker and Andy Warhol Superstar, Brigid had also once been "detained" for an assassination attempt on Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, for example, which should make the point that a day in the life of Brigid Berlin is quite unlike anyone else’s you will ever meet. Suffice to say that trying to describe Brigid is like trying to fall up a flight of stairs—it’s impossible—unless, of course, you’re Brigid, who managed this feat once by accident at a party. I will therefore allow the following recollection speak for itself and you can make of it what you will. It concerns an old Lou Reed concert ticket and a story I like to call Colonoscopy Day with Brigid and Lou. And, by the way, that wasn’t a real assassination attempt on Khrushchev. That was just Brigid having fun in the back seat of [former Mayor of New York City] Wagner’s car with a water pistol. Which is another story altogether.
For years Brigid and Lou had enjoyed a long-standing friendship that stemmed from their association with Andy Warhol in the 1960’s. Curiously, though, the two chums hadn’t seen each other for a number of years and so it was, one night in April, 2009, that Brigid and I went to see if we could track Lou down after a performance he was giving at the Blender Theater in New York. An evening which also happened to fall on the same day as Brigid's appointment to have a colonoscopy.
Now Brigid, a self-described “obsessive-compulsive" called me up incessantly the night before her procedure to complain about the prep solution—aptly named GoLytly—that she had to drink in preparation for the examin-ation. All night long she went on about how awful it tasted, the quantities she had to drink, the trips to the bathroom she had to make, ad nauseam. These manic phone calls continued into the wee hours, to the point that when we finally got off the phone, I was so exhausted, I felt as if I had just had the colonoscopy. Needless to say I was especially happy when, on the next day, the whole thing was over and met Brigid in the recovery room where I found her resting comfortably, having Lorna Doone’s and coffee with the nursing staff.
Thinking that she might not be up for going to the concert after her ordeal, I suggested that we go see Lou another day, preferably on one in which a colonoscopy had not been scheduled. But adversity of this kind is no match for intrepid Brigid, and we went to the show as planned.
What I couldn’t seem to communicate to her as we made our way to the theater that night was that we weren’t going to see the more familiar Sweet Jane/Take a Walk on the Wild Side Lou Reed, but the din laden, aural assault-ridden caterwauling of Metal Machine, Lou’s infamous experimental noise band that, as the ticket forewarned, featured No Songs and No Vocals. They might have added ’No Clue’ to the ticket because Brigid had no idea what she was in for. “Do you think Lou’s going to sing [his old down-tempo ballad] Sunday Morning?” she asked innocently along the way.
By the time we got to the theater the noise onslaught was already underway. Brigid’s hopes of hearing Sunday Morning were quickly dashed when she realized that the sounds emanating from the concert hall weren’t coming from a broken sound system, but was the show itself! Few things can render Brigid speechless and I soon found out that white noise and guitar feedback were among them. To my delight, however, the commotion had the effect of keeping Brigid from talking about her colonoscopy for an hour and twenty minutes. Prayer answered.
After the show, Brigid announced her presence by bursting into Lou's dressing room five minutes after the gig was over. Lou, halfway into a fresh T-shirt, reacted as if storm troopers had just taken the building,
then, seeing who it was, gave Brigid a big hello. "How are you, Brigid!" he asked, hugging her with his free hand. Brigid, true to form, skipped the formalities and went right into the details of her colonoscopy. “Oh, Lou,” she cried, “they made me drink this horrible solution and I had to pee all night and I couldn’t sleep and..."
"What's she talkin' about?" asked, Lou.
"Brigid had a colonoscopy today," I explained.
Brigid continued her harangue as we walked from the dressing room to the downstairs foyer. Along the way, Lou asked asked me if the colonoscopy was really as bad as Brigid was making it out to be. "It was horrible!" came Brigid's voice from beyond the dressing room. The thought of catching up with her old friend couldn’t have been further from her mind as she used the words “torturous” and “twisted” to describe every moment of her ordeal. It was all really quite insane. Even for Brigid.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” said Lou, finally, trying to change the subject. “But tell me," he continued, "how did you like the concert?”
"The concert?"
“Yes, Brig—the concert," I said, nudging her. "We just saw Lou’s concert!”
“Oh,” the inimitable Brigid replied, sitting on a metal folding chair and lighting a cigarette. "Well, to be honest, Lou, it was like having two colonoscopies in one day!” Brigid doesn't mince words.
In my mind I was already out the front door hailing a cab on 23rd Street. But as I slowly lifted my eyes to gage his reaction, for a split second I could swear that I actually saw the eternally gloomy Lou Reed laugh.
“She hasn’t changed a bit,” he said, at last.
"She hasn't?" I rejoined, feigning horror.
And with that the two Warhol graduates went on to have a long overdue catch-up session—that is, after Lou was fully appraised of Brigid's day at the gastroenter-ologist's. Afterwards, we all packed it in for the night and went home. But not before I got off a snapshot for posterity.
And so ended Colonoscopy Day for Brigid, and for Lou, a less than favorable critique of his concert. I never thought that my memory lane would be paved with colonoscopies and old concert tickets found in my junk drawer, but that ticket stub will always be around to remind me of that day. It just goes to show that a good junk drawer is truly the next best thing to keeping a diary. As for Brigid, she still hasn’t changed a bit. She's still dropping bombs and laying landmines everywhere she goes. But it's one of the reasons why I love her. With Brigid, there's never a dull moment.
RIP Brigid Berlin (1939-2020)
Photo by Rob Vaczy
" I’m sorry you had to go through that,” says Lou.
