Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (32 page)

V
alerie’s ultimate demise—a fate some saw as
inevitable and others saw as a tragic result of a misrecognition of her value as a writer, thinker, and revolutionary—raises questions about how to remember, or forget, those who have, as Monique Wittig once said, managed to “blast out the ground.” The many disappearances of Valerie Solanas have created a mythology around the end of her life. The notion of “sightings” is commonly heard among those who knew her—sightings of a ghostly, waifish figure driven to the limits of sanity, falling off the edge and into oblivion. Still, the story of Valerie’s end owes much to her relationship to
SCUM Manifesto
; even after her release from the mental hospitals, she had faith she could change the world with
SCUM
. Only after these final hopes were shattered did she truly cease to exist as Valerie Solanas.

Back on the Scene

After her release from Dunlop in late 1973, Valerie’s whereabouts became more difficult to track down. As Mary Harron wrote, “There were many sightings of Valerie Solanas in the East Village in the late seventies, sleeping on a bench in Thompson Square Park or sitting on a stoop at St. Mark’s Place, dirty and unkempt, dazed like a street person.
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1
She roamed through St. Mark’s Place, as scholar Jennifer Doyle wrote, “hanging out in the street, managing the rumpled bags of a woman who had nowhere else to go.
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Valerie spent much time thinking about the fate of
SCUM Manifesto
, and how to rescue it from the stranglehold Maurice had over it. More than anything, she wanted to reclaim
SCUM Manifesto
for herself.

In 1974, Vivian Gornick, who had written the introduction to
SCUM Manifesto
for Olympia Press in 1971, received a phone call from Valerie. Vivian recalled the conversation as both memorable and fear inspiring. Valerie had called to ask Vivian what she knew about the foreign rights to
SCUM Manifesto
. Vivian explained that she knew nothing and had written the introduction as a freelancer, was paid a flat fee for her work, and had nothing to do with Maurice or the press. Valerie replied, “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. But that prick is stealing from me, ya know. He’s publishing the
Manifesto
all over the place, and I’m not getting a fuckin’ dime. I gotta get ta the bottom a’ this.
”
3

Two months later, Vivian received a second phone call; Valerie now demanded to know what Vivian knew about the Italian publication of
SCUM Manifesto
, as she believed the Italian publishers had been in New York buying publishing rights from people who did not own those rights. Vivian indicated that, once again, she knew nothing about it. Three months later, Vivian received a third phone call, at 7:30 a.m. Six months after that, a call came at 1:00 p.m. and another at 1:00 a.m. Valerie always called from the street, often breaking off the conversation to yell at passersby for interrupting her, and insisted again on knowing about the foreign rights to
SCUM Manifesto
. “It was always the same street voice speaking with the same guttural urgency asking the same hopeless question,” Vivian recalled. “What did I know about the Swedish Irish Danish Greek rights to
SCUM
that were being sold surreptitiously by that prick Girodias who was stealing her work her money her life. . . . This went on for two or three years. She was never threatening, but I began to dread the sound of her voice. The urgency in it kept accumulating. She wasn’t stalking me, but she was definitely keeping track. Once she found me in Colorado, and once in Tel Aviv.
”
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In Valerie’s final call to Vivian, at two o’clock in the morning, Vivian screamed at Valerie and fired off in a rage about how Valerie could not call in the middle of the night. She never heard from her again.
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Speaking highly of Valerie’s work, Vivian acknowledged that Valerie had remarkable charm as a writer:

I was amazed that she was the same conversational, clever creature when I had only known the rasping, self-involved, violent woman. She had a very interesting, bemused, very individual voice. She was very good. The
SCUM Manifesto
was very good. She was absolutely crazy but she was a brilliant maverick, underworld figure. She was not as talented and worldly, but in many places she really resembled Genet. She was not as sustained but she was as inspired by the underside, black underworld brilliance. . . . To her nothing was unthinkable and unsayable. She was a guttersnipe like Genet and Celine, people who stop at nothing—so crazy they are able to say anything.
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In 1974, Valerie left for Washington, DC, eager to depart New York and return to her roots. She shared a room with a woman she connected with in the DC women’s community. This roommate—a former student of Dana Densmore from a martial arts school in the district—recalled that Valerie functioned at an acceptable level but clearly seemed mentally ill. “She was functioning but not at a very high level. She was struggling—she was struggling to be in the world at all.
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After returning to New York, Valerie moved into a place where she had once lived in the mid-1960s, the Village Plaza Hotel, at 79 Washington Place, near Washington Square Park. By 1973, the hotel had grown even seedier than it had been. A tiny reception desk was arrayed with a mix of signs: “No Refunds,” “All Rents Must Be Paid in Advance,” “No Checks Cashed,” “No Outgoing Calls for Transients.
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Valerie did not stay long this time, as she had received a sum of money owed to her through her father’s will. (While she was confined in hospitals, this money was withheld from her.)

Shortly thereafter, she moved to Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street into an apartment, nicer than the hotel. One day, while making her usual visit to one of her favorite sandwich shops, Blimpie’s, at Eleventh Street and Sixth Avenue, she met a man with whom she would eventually live, in a long-term, romantic relationship, for the next four years: Louis Zwiren. Easygoing, but suffering from agoraphobia, Louis had a relaxed, straightforward, playful vibe that nicely complemented Valerie’s intensity and ambition. Louis often hung out at the sandwich shop, eating his dinner and hitting on women. The day they met, in 1973, Valerie had walked in and he went over to try to pick her up. In classic Valerie style, she responded in her snarky fashion that the entire place looked like a mausoleum because no one aged there and everyone looked so young. “I went over to her. I started talking to her,” Louis said. “She was sitting by herself. She was biting her fingernails, all the time. . . . I was very comfortable with her, extremely comfortable. She was very easy to talk to.” When asked what had attracted him to Valerie, he said unequivocally that he loved her personality and her humor. Valerie immediately impressed him.

Valerie talked to Louis about her life, recounting stories about her days on the street as a homeless woman. “She said that as long as she had a pillow, she didn’t mind sleeping outside. She needed a pillow. All she needed was a pillow.” She told Louis that she had two kids—he was the only person she admitted this fact to—but that she had not seen them since right after they were born. Telling him that her mother had raised them, she said she had felt relief that they were well taken care of. “She felt that, being that they’re not fully developed mentally, that they’re not fully human until they’re mentally developed. She was glad to get away from kids,” Louis said. She assured him that she could not have any more kids because doctors at Bellevue Hospital had removed her uterus. He believed this resulted from precancerous cells that had signaled stage 1 cancer, though Valerie claimed the procedure allowed the Mob to bug her and monitor her movements. She told Louis about her time as a prostitute, reporting that older men were much better in bed than their reputations would suggest.

At first, Valerie hesitated to become sexually involved with Louis, not letting him into her room and then making it clear that she needed a good amount of time before she became sexual with him. Louis remained patient. “It took a long time before we got intimate, you know?
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Louis and Valerie eventually moved in together, at Louis’s place, where they stayed for about a year. The two started a sexual relationship, something Louis felt conflicted about given her extreme hatred of men. Though he was guarded about discussing his sex life with Valerie during our 2012 interview, he discussed it frankly in 1997. “She liked me to go down on her. So she would come.” She did not reciprocate because he did not like women to go down on him. “She wouldn’t let me suck, she wouldn’t let me do anything with her breasts. She . . . didn’t feel anything.” When asked if Valerie felt sexually attracted to women, Louis recalled that she felt women were better than men in bed. She told him she was a lesbian. “I couldn’t understand, because she seemed to enjoy sex and love, you know. She was very affectionate, very affectionate to me. And loyal . . . very warm.” To this, Louis added, “She didn’t hate men if they were in the men’s auxiliary. She just thought men were inferior, that’s all.
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Their relationship was far from monogamous. Valerie often stayed with, and had sex with, a woman named “Space” (Connie De Marco), a beautiful Italian “far out” artist at the Village Plaza Hotel with whom Louis had also had a sexual relationship with previously. Space had a colorful history; she once divulged to Louis that the best sex she had ever had was with a man named Blind Richie, a blind saxophone player who would run with wild energy through the streets of New York with his cane. Valerie loved Connie, telling Louis that her favorite women in the world had tan skin and “mulatto” backgrounds. “Brown is best,” she would say matter-of-factly.
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Valerie’s liaisons rarely followed prescriptive ideas about romantic versus platonic love. Still the men who developed sexual intimacy with Valerie mostly described her as warm, loving, and gentle. When asked whether Louis and Valerie called each other “girlfriend” and “boyfriend,” Louis noted, “We were, like, living together and having sex.
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Louis noted that to those who brushed Valerie off, she was hostile, and toward people she did not know well, she was “hard.” But she had another side of her: she’d crack jokes, “shoot the shit,” and “smile like a little girl.” Another male friend expressed surprise at Valerie’s eventual warmth toward him: “She turned out to be very warm. When she doesn’t feel defensive about men, she can be a very likeable person.
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Louis loved Valerie, remembering small quirks about her and speaking of her with affection. He knew that her favorite song—“The Air That I Breathe,” by the Hollies—made her happy:

If I could make a wish, I think I’d pass

Can’t think of anything I need

No cigarettes, no sleep, no light, no sound

Nothing to eat, no books to read

Making love with you has left me peaceful and warm inside

What more could I ask

There’s nothing more to be desired

Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you

All I need is the air that I breathe yes to love you.

She loved listening to doo-wop; as long as she could listen to doo-wop, she would always feel that life was worthwhile. She hated classical music, often ranting that it should not even count as real music. Valerie was always excited to talk to Louis about her ideas and theories, insisting that she hated the idea of “reverse racism” and felt certain that black people could never harbor truly racist feelings against whites, that whites were the only real racists. A huge fan of Levi’s jeans, she always wore jeans and swore to Louis that even tight-fitting jeans were the most comfortable clothing on earth. She drank Ovaltine (malted milk powder) constantly and had spaghetti with Ragu sauce nearly every night for dinner. An incessant smoker, she rolled her own cigarettes (always with Tops tobacco) and had a “tobacco odor” that Louis loved.

One day Valerie decided to go see Disney’s
Fantasia
; she remembered loving it as a girl. The local movie theaters had rereleased it and she had desperately wanted to see the film again. “She went by herself to see it. I didn’t go with her to see it for some reason,” Louis recalled. “She said it was for kids. She thought it was the greatest thing in the world as a kid but as an adult, she said it was
nothing
, you know? She was disappointed.”

Valerie was in the habit of shoplifting. It became a way to show love and affection to others—as she sometimes gave away what she stole—while also allowing her to survive. Eager to cook for herself in her kitchenless apartment, she stole a hot plate from the corner store on Fourteenth Street, then did it again four or five times. Eventually the owner caught her in the act and banned her from the store. She then returned with money to buy one but he would not sell it to her even if she paid for it: “She kept trying to come back a couple of times to buy it but he just wouldn’t,” Louis said. In the middle of winter one time, when the weather hit four degrees below zero, Valerie was arrested for shoplifting. The arrest revved up her paranoia that the Mob would find her and she would have to return to jail. “They never matched her fingerprints so they let her go,” Louis said. On another night, Louis told Valerie he had always wanted to try caviar. Immediately, she went out to Balducci’s, a gourmet food market on Sixth Avenue, and stole several jars of caviar and brought them home. “We were eating a lot of caviar then!” Louis chuckled.

Valerie’s paranoia and “dark moods” intruded on the otherwise enjoyable existence she and Louis had together. She would get paranoid and say mean things to him, mostly putting him down. “I would feel hurt,” he said. “I wouldn’t be talking much, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.” Louis felt that Valerie treated him with immense sweetness most of the time. “I thought shoplifting for me was pretty sweet,” he said. “Outside of sex, there wasn’t much touching, but verbally she was very affectionate.” She would tell him he was “the greatest” and would say he had “Louis logic” because he didn’t think like everyone else. Sometimes she called him, tenderly, her “Jew boy,” making Louis laugh. One time, when he let a homeless couple live with them, Valerie called the man, Ron, a “lump.” She always told Louis, affectionately, that
he
was never a lump like Ron. “She differentiated me from the other lumps, I guess,” he said.
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