You might know Cookie Mueller, she did a few stints as proffesional muse, best known as an actress in many of John Waters' early movies and embodying the age of AIDS in many of Nan Goldin's photos. Yet, I've been wanting to do posts on writers for a while now, and I think of Cookie Mueller as first and foremost an amazing writer and my first pick to start writing about authors. Cookie Mueller was born in suburban Maryland in 1949 and started writing at age 11 when she wrote a 321 page book about the Johnstown, PA flood of 1830. When she finished the book she stapled it together, wrapped it in butcher paper and saran wrap, and put it alphabetically in the town library, where it was never seen again. As a teenager she enjoyed wearing loads of makeup, dying and spraying her hair into towering boufants, and dating alcoholic teenage boys who were hospitilized from stds and drinking. As she put it :"Whenever you're depressed, just change your hair color," my mother always told me when I was a teenager: I was never denied a bottle of hair bleach or dye. In my closet there weren't many clothes, but there were tons of bottles."
She managed to save up enough money to move out to Haight Ashbury in San Francisco where she partied hard and was for a time checked into a mental institution by some concerned roomates.
Here is a segment about the time she spent on the Haight, from her book Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black:
"It was too early to get up, but I decided I couldn't sleep any longer in the same bed with this person who I liked just fine yesterday when we liberated two T-bone steaks from the Safeway supermarket which we cooked and ate, much to the disgust of the vegetarians I lived with. After the steaks we drank a gallon of cheap Napa Sonoma red wine and took some LSD... Owsley Purple Barrels. But now he was sweating too much in bed, staining the one sheet I owned with all that wasted power from his pores. It meant he couldn't hold his liquor or his drugs, which irritated me so much I had to escape.
I went to the bathroom quietly so I wouldn't wake the eleven people I lived with. My roomates were spread out among five bedrooms. Five, if you consider the glassed in porch off the kitchen that overlooked the dismal cement courtyard. We shared this courtyard with another building where Janis Joplin from Big Brother And The Holding Company lived. On some mornings I could see her rattling her pots and pans in her kitchen. Sometimes we'd talk across the concrete abyss like housewives.
I put on my eye makeup. It was a throwback to the time when I plastered the makeup on thick and teased my hair. No one else wore eye makeup in the Haight... an occasional Dayglow flower or third eye on the forehead perhaps, but definitely no eye makeup. Then I went out on Haight Street looking for something new. "
I went to the bathroom quietly so I wouldn't wake the eleven people I lived with. My roomates were spread out among five bedrooms. Five, if you consider the glassed in porch off the kitchen that overlooked the dismal cement courtyard. We shared this courtyard with another building where Janis Joplin from Big Brother And The Holding Company lived. On some mornings I could see her rattling her pots and pans in her kitchen. Sometimes we'd talk across the concrete abyss like housewives.
I put on my eye makeup. It was a throwback to the time when I plastered the makeup on thick and teased my hair. No one else wore eye makeup in the Haight... an occasional Dayglow flower or third eye on the forehead perhaps, but definitely no eye makeup. Then I went out on Haight Street looking for something new. "
So that story continues with Cookie rambling out onto the Haight and finding herself smoking a joint in a painted bus with the Manson Family. She ditches them cause they seem dull and dim witted and goes to see Jim Morrison play and ends up taking some peyote and almost getting sacrificed in the desert by Anton LaVey and a friend of hers who's a newly converted satanist.
This era lead to a rambling life of cheap on a whim traveling. Cookie spent time living in Provincetown, British Columbia, San Francisco, Jamaica, Pennsylvania, and Italy. In 1969 she met John Waters at the premiere of Mondo Trasho and they hit it off immediatly. She appeared in his next movie Multiple Maniacs and in subsequent movies Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, and Polyester. She also showed up in a ton of other cult and indie movies by other directors such as Underground USA, Downtown 81, Smithereens, Subway Riders, and Variety. In 1971 she had a son, Max, who you may remember as the baby in Pink Flamingos.
As her cult actress status was fading she moved back to New York to concentrate on working as a writer and columnist making some money on the side as a Go-Go dancer. She was art editor for Details magazine and wrote a health column for the East Village Eye called "Ask Dr. Muller" which as you might imagine was in keeping with the current scene in the village and Dr. Muller's own take on health.
In one story from Walking Through Clear Water In A Pool Painted Black she describes bringing a friend who has overdosed on heroin back to life in a bathroom at a party:
It was his party and he'd die if he wanted to.
Sam was that kind of guy. He never let anyone down, especially himself.
This particular party was for his birthday, at the apartment he shared with his lovers, Alice and Tom. All his loyal friends were there, the famous, the infamous, the washouts, the successful rogues, and the types who only have fame after they die. They were the representatives of the New York alternative subculture, the people who went to sleep at dawn. And never held a nine to five job because they were too odd looking, or sassy, or over qualified.
Because Sam had an MFA degree, he never had any money, but he always gave great parties... never pretentious ones, always wild ones. He wasn't short handed with the food or liquor.
It wasn't even midnight but the party was already jamming and jumping. Alice hadn't even gotten around to lighting the candles on her attempted Cordon Bleu birthday cake when I noticed Sam thanking a rock star for a very small birthday present, one of the many very small presents he'd received all night, yet another glassine bag of heroin, his drug of choice.
Sam was that kind of guy. He never let anyone down, especially himself.
This particular party was for his birthday, at the apartment he shared with his lovers, Alice and Tom. All his loyal friends were there, the famous, the infamous, the washouts, the successful rogues, and the types who only have fame after they die. They were the representatives of the New York alternative subculture, the people who went to sleep at dawn. And never held a nine to five job because they were too odd looking, or sassy, or over qualified.
Because Sam had an MFA degree, he never had any money, but he always gave great parties... never pretentious ones, always wild ones. He wasn't short handed with the food or liquor.
It wasn't even midnight but the party was already jamming and jumping. Alice hadn't even gotten around to lighting the candles on her attempted Cordon Bleu birthday cake when I noticed Sam thanking a rock star for a very small birthday present, one of the many very small presents he'd received all night, yet another glassine bag of heroin, his drug of choice.
So the party continues with Sam over dosing in the bathroom and Cookie, being a party proffesional herself, doing her own little brand of emergency medical technician with a home concoction of ice water and a needle of salt water while yelling at the party goers to give up on the bathroom line and pee outside. She brings him back to life and of course his first words are "WOW, that was pretty good stuff. Can we get some more?"
In 1986 Cookie married Vittorio Scarpati, an Italian artist and jewelry designer. They were both addicted to heroin and had AIDS, dying within 7 weeks of each other in 1989. About death Cookie said : "Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free."
In 1990 Semiotexte launched its Native Agents book series with Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. Its amazing to me that a book thats only 190 pages can feel so epic. Cookie can entertain with name dropping any time she wants "..... the blond in the center of the group was extolling the vitues of Jimi Hendrix, having fucked him the night before. I walked on by. It seemed silly. I'd fucked him the night before she had".
Yet, her real strengths shine through in the parts that don't involve stars. When she falls in love with an illiterate pig farmer and lives on his farm, riding horses after he's been sent to jail. When she finally makes a breakthough in the go-go dancing business only to attract the scariest customer possible. These stories might seem exageratted and maybe they are but theres something in them that makes you identify in ways that seem universal. Her stories of hitchhiking home with Mink Stole and Susan Lowe after filming Multiple Maniacs made me think about filming stuff for my friend Ryan Trecartin's movies. The picture of those girls out on the highway in "horny red-neck country" wearing a prom dress or a see through plastic raincoat with go-go boots felt oddly familiar and made me glad that hitchhiking is pretty taboo these days. The hitchhiking leads to abduction and rape which is actually not a rarity in Cookie's stories. She faces all sort of trauma and drama and yet still manages to enthusiastically push ahead and write about it later.
As John Waters put it "Cookie Mueller wrote like a lunatic Uncle Remus - spinning little stories from Hell that will make any reader laugh out loud. She was a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch doctor, an art-hag, and above all, a goddess. Boy, do I miss that girl.”
Here are some of her books.
