This week our series on the renowned artists, writers and musicians who have lived, or currently live, in the Hotel Chelsea continues. Today’s Resident Bohemian is legendary punk rock musician Dee Dee Ramone by Jess Sauer. -RJ

In reality, Dee Dee Ramone fatally overdosed in Hollywood, California, in the summer of 2002. In fiction, he fatally overdosed in 1998, amid the ruins of the Chelsea Hotel. In reality, Dee Dee’s wife found him dead in their apartment. In fiction, well, in Dee Dee’s own words in his novel Chelsea Horror Hotel: “The heroin exploded into my brain. Then in an instant, I collapsed dead on the floor of the stage. And I sunk down into Hell as demons hovered over my body.” The stage is the one he’s sharing with an all-dead punk supergroup comprised of Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders, the Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators, and the New York Dolls’ Jerry Nolan. The demons—at least as far as Chelsea Horror Hotel is concerned—are literal.

That Dee Dee accurately predicted his manner of death in a book published the year before doesn’t bespeak an eerie prescience so much as a resigned logic: given his decades-long struggle with drugs, the likelihood of him dying that way was strong. Out of context, the death Dee Dee imagined for himself might appear to be the blaze-of-glory fantasy of a washed-up icon, but this isn’t the case. Chelsea Horror Hotel’s dominant mood is plaintive, and Dee Dee bumbles around the Chelsea in a Charlie Brownian state of weltschmerz, plagued by cockroaches both literal and human. Defeated even in his fictional final moments, Dee Dee lip-synchs “Chinese Rock,” his own song, in order to earn money for a last shot of heroin, which he scores from the (literal) Devil. He’s annoyed with his fellow punk icons and cursing that his chosen profession has involved hanging out with so many creeps. There’s no romance implied in Dee Dee dying at the Chelsea; Chelsea Horror Hotel may be a fictional account of Dee Dee’s years at the hotel, but his distaste for the place is unmistakably genuine.

Chelsea Horror Hotel is a poison-pen letter to New York, but Dee Dee’s vision of the Chelsea’s squalor, inspired by his life there in the late ’90s, is ultimately far too goofy to be truly grim. There are Satanists luring bums into the basement and feeding them to piranhas. With the help of his dog, a talking Airedale named Banfield, Dee Dee gleefully bumps off his neighbors one by one, shoving them into traffic or skewering them under exposed mattress boxsprings. All the while, he earnestly wonders whether his problem might be that he’s too nice for New York. When a neighbor uses black magic to vaporize Dee Dee’s body, leaving only a cartoonishly floating pair of eyeballs, Ramone writes, “Obviously I am frustrated to the max right now.” By the book’s end, the hotel’s been reduced to rubble and is balanced precariously on the gaping mouth of Hell—subtlety was never Dee Dee Ramone’s, or any of the Ramones’, strength. In reality, Dee Dee is dead and the Chelsea lives on, but it’s a very different Chelsea. Dee Dee, at least, died a real Ramone.

“Chinese Rock” by The Ramones

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“Spider-Man, but with tits.”

There is a 2:1 bald-spot-to-ponytail ratio in Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas. The man in front of me has a biblically voluminous beard and a t-shirt printed with Leonardo’s jumping-jack man. A red plastic tag pokes out from his shoulder like a solitary blood feather. I think he must have bought this t-shirt specially for this occasion, and I feel tender toward him. He reminds me of a helpful character I might have met in the CD-ROM game Myst, had there been helpful characters in it.

A man turns to Leonardo Bloodfeather and his seatmate and asks, “Did you come to see Crumb or Spiegelman?” Without hesitation, Bloodfeather indicates himself with his thumb and says “Crumb,” then nods at his neatly coiffed, behoodied friend and says, “Spiegelman.” I have come to see both—actually, all three, the third of which is Francoise Mouly, whom the inquisitive man refers to as “Spiegelman’s wife.”

A voice booms from the loudspeakers like the voice of God in the Book of Genesis, which Crumb recently illustrated (Norton, October 2009). It turns out not to be God, but rather Maya King, a freshman nursing major. She wants us to turn our cell phones off.

Another voice follows, loud and Oz-like. It’s the head of a department, whose name I don’t catch, and he is welcoming us to the evening. People look around, assuming he’s actually standing somewhere. He is not.

The lights go out. Goodnight, notebook.

Crumb comes out first, tripping slightly, in fisherman sandals. Later, Spiegelman will mention that they are both amblyopic. I have to look this word up, because I first hear it as “apliopic,” which is so not a word that Google doesn’t even have a suggestion for it. Being amblyopic means one can’t see 3-D very well, which seems like a potentially helpful affliction for a cartoonist, except when traversing a dimly lit stage, or performing most other tasks besides cartooning.

Francoise Mouly’s hair is an energetic doodle. Her shirt is plain yet complicated, the way French clothes tend to be. She says “umm” endearingly, with at least two Ms each time. There is an illuminated MacBook in front of her.

She asks whether Crumb saw himself in Crumb, and he says enough to completely change the way he looked. He says he threw his fedora in the woods, grew a beard, and started wearing “a stupid windbreaker.” A tech guy sneaks up behind him and rigs an auxiliary mic to augment the one that’s slipped down his lapel into uselessness.

The screen behind their heads shows a picture of Crumb and his brother’s childhood bedroom, which is covered with magazine covers. Mouly has picked out the New Yorker covers from the pictures and found separate images of each of them to display next to the photograph. Crumb appears amazed and puzzled by this attention to detail. Crumb talks about the peak and decline of his brother’s obsession with comics. Mouly mentions superhero comics and Crumb’s distaste for them.

Spiegelman’s microphone clicks and sizzles as he lights a cigarette. He says that superhero comics were read by the kids who beat them up. Crumb adds, “Cute animals were good.” Spiegelman agrees. He says that after the CCA comics code, Donald Duck was more mature than superhero comics. He is wearing a vest like Perry White, Clark Kent’s boss.

He mentions MAD magazine, and Crumb says, “Wow.”

A MAD magazine cover appears on the screen. Crumb and Spiegelman reference Peter Saul, Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, Terry Gilliam, Jay Lynch, Wally Wood, Hugh Hefner, and a slew of defunct comic magazines. Spiegelman says Witzend editor Wally Wood’s idea of underground was, “Spider-Man, but with tits.” Crumb says, “Hefner? His sense of humor?” then gives a thumbs-down and makes a fart noise.

Both cartoonists worked for Topps Bubblegum, and Spiegelman says this coincidence led him to look up Crumb when he moved to San Francisco. He says that after meeting him, he became satisfied that Crumb would do all of the revolutionary things he’d planned on doing himself, then went to drop acid in the park. Crumb says he has absolutely no memory of this meeting. Spiegelman says, “I remember meeting your first wife and thinking it was your mother.” Crumb says, “That’s how I like them.”

Mouly brings up Crumb’s current wife, Aline. She talks about how the Crumbs moved to France and begins a slideshow of their house. She shows a picture of their bathroom and Crumb says, “That’s our bathroom.” She shows a picture of their hallway and Crumb says, “That’s our hallway.” She shows a picture of them hugging, and Crumb says, “Awww, we’re in love.”

Spiegelman says that whenever he’s in France, he starts dreaming in French “with a retarded vocabulary.”

Crumb’s miniCribs is over. Now things get heavy. Images from Spiegelman’s post-9/11 book, In the Shadow of No Towers. Images from a Harper’s Magazine article by Spiegelman, in which he used tiny “fatwa bombs” as a rating system for cartoons deemed blasphemous by Muslims.

Mouly brings up a controversial discussion she did with Crumb at the University of Virginia, where he mentioned women having rape fantasies. He says, “I’m sorry. Women don’t really have rape fantasies.” The audience roars with laughter, like, “Fucking Virginians!”

Mouly flips through a variety of Crumb and Spiegelman’s rejected New Yorker covers. Spiegelman has drawn Santa pissing in the snow next to a “Remember the Homeless” sign, Bill Clinton getting a blowjob in front of a firing squad. In regard to a published New Yorker cover depicting a Hassid kissing an African-American woman, Spiegelman says a girl wrote him a letter saying how nice it was for him to have drawn Abraham Lincoln kissing a slave. Mouly shows Crumb’s version of Eustace Tilley, a pimply yokel he refers to as “Eustace Tilley’s great-great grandson, Useless Tilley.”

Talk turns to Crumb’s illustration of Genesis. Mouly and Spiegelman say it was the first time they’d read the Bible. Spiegelman stipulates that he started reading it once while in a mental hospital, but a veteran friend warned him, “It’ll drive you crazy.” In reference to the begats, all of which Crumb has drawn, Crumb says he used National Geographic and pictures of “people from the Middle East.” He says, “God, it was tedious.”

The house lights rise for the Q&A. Francoise Mouly says there is no microphone and encourages anyone with a question to shout it out. Bass Hall has a 3,000-person capacity. In other words: This is not an ideal strategy. The first man requests an autograph. One asks whether Noah’s sons were modeled after Moe, Larry, and Shemp, which Crumb doesn’t explicitly deny. One interrupts an answer to scream a terrifyingly loud question at Crumb about sex, which Crumb completely blows off. Someone asks whether there is anything they believe shouldn’t be drawn. Crumb says he’s already drawn everything, including “blowjobs for babies.” For the last question, Crumb indicates a woman in the front: “You, girl.” She asks Crumb why he came tonight.

His answer is simple enough: “I got railroaded, basically.”

***

Original illustrations by Russell Etchen.

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