Schwartz was thus barred from two of the most powerful strands of Lou’s work.
***
Lou’s relationship with Shelley reached its apotheosis in his junior year when, she felt, he really gained in confidence and began to transform himself. Ensconced together in the Adams Street apartment debris of guitars and amps, books, clothing, and cigarettes, Lou now lived in a world of music accompanied by the spirit of Shelley. She knew every nook and cranny of him better than anybody, and before he put his armor on. She had become his best friend, the one who could look into his eyes, the one he wrote for and played to.
Lou needed to be grounded because although Lincoln could be cooler than whipped cream and smarter than amphetamine, he was a lunatic. Lou always needed a court jester nearby to keep him amused, but he also required the presence of a straight, 1950s woman who could cool him down when the visions got too heavy. Shelley Albin became everything to Lou Reed: she was mother, sister, muse, lover, fixer-upper, therapist, drug mule, mad girl. She did everything with Lou twenty-four hours a day.
Lou was drinking at the Orange as Delmore told stories of perverts and weirdos and fulminated over the real or imaginary plots that were afoot in Washington. Lou was flying on a magic carpet of drugs. Pages of manuscripts and other debris piled up in his room, which Shelley felt was a purposeful pigsty. Lou was having an intensely exciting relationship with Lincoln, who was going bonkers, lost in a long, hysterical novel mostly dictated by a series of voices giving him conflicting orders in his head. Lou was also displaying that special nerve that is given to very few men, getting up in front of audiences three or four times a week, blowing off a pretty good set of rock and roll, playing some wild, inventive guitar, becoming a lyrical harmonica player, turning his voice into a human jukebox.
Everything was changing. Rock was “Telstar” by the Tornadoes, “Walk Like a Man” by the Four Seasons, “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons—all great records in Lou’s mind—but what was really happening on campuses across the USA was folk music. Dylan was about to make his big entrance, beating Lou to the title of poet laureate of his generation.
At this point, Lou appeared to have several options. He could have gone to Harvard under the wing of Delmore Schwartz and perhaps been an important poet. He could have married Shelley and become a folksinger. He could have collaborated with any number of musicians at Syracuse to form a rock-and-roll band. Instead, he began to separate himself from each of his allies and collaborators one by one.
***
The trouble started with Lou’s acquisition of a dog, Seymour, a female cross between a German shepherd and a beagle cum dachshund, three and a half feet long standing four inches off the ground. If you believe that dogs always mirror their owners, then Seymour was, in Shelley’s words, “a Lou dog.” Lou appeared to be able to open up more easily and communicate more sympathetically with Seymour than with anybody else in the vicinity. As far as Shelley could tell, the only times Lou seemed to feel really at peace with himself were when he was rolling on the floor with Seymour, or sitting with the mutt on the couch staring into space. Soon, however, Lou’s love for the dog became obsessive, and he started remonstrating with Shelley about treating Seymour better and paying more attention to her.
Meanwhile, Lou’s behaviour increasingly hinted at the complex nature Shelley would have to deal with if she stayed with him. “I mean he got crazy about being nice to that dog,” she commented later. “He was a total shit about it, so that was a clue.” But then he couldn’t be bothered to take the dog out for a walk in the freezing cold. It soon became evident that it fell to Shelley to feed and walk the dog. Even then the mercurial Lewis decided to dump the dog. Shelley had to persuade him not to. Then Lewis hit on another diabolical plan. He would take the dog home to Freeport and dump it on his family, without warning. And he knew exactly how to do it.
That Thanksgiving, Lou and Shelley returned to Freeport with the surprise gift. Displaying its Lou-like behavior, at La Guardia airport the dog rushed out of the cargo area where it had been forced to travel and immediately pissed all over the floor, leading Lou’s mother to start screaming, “A dog! Oh my God, a dog in my house! We don’t need a dog!” Riposting with the artful aplomb that would lead so many of Reed’s later collaborators to despair, Lou presented an offer that could not be refused, announcing that the dog was, in fact, a gift for Bunny.
Dismayed at first by this invasion of their domain, the Reeds were, in time—much to Lou’s chagrin—unexpectedly delighted by the new arrival. As it turned out, the dog possessed some of Lou’s charm without any of his less attractive attributes. Soon Seymour was scurrying around the Reeds’ living room or snuggling up to Toby as if she were her long-lost mother. In short, Seymour became the light of Toby’s life in a way Lewis never could be.
“Can you imagine,” Lou ad-libbed in a 1979 song, “Families,” “when I first took her there nobody wanted her, but soon she became more important than me!”
Naturally, as soon as Lou saw how much his family liked the dog, he quickly reversed his decision to bestow her on Bunny and insisted on taking her back to Syracuse where she would live with him until he graduated, after which Seymour would live out the remainder of her life as the most popular member of the Reed household.
During their visit Lou took Shelley into Harlem to pick up drugs. “He said, ‘Come on, we’ve got to pick something up,’ she recalled. “I remember going up to 125th Street. Really vile, nasty hallways. It was a guy who was a musician, I remember him sitting at this grand piano in his apartment in Harlem. I think there was a connection between the guys in the bar in Syracuse and the guy there. I knew we were going to pick up drugs, my memory was that it was heroin, but I couldn’t swear to it. I was more worried about his driving. And I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in Harlem. I had a bad attitude. For white kids to do that at the time was stupid. It was dangerous. I could have gotten raped or killed. He loved that.”
It was, however, neither the drugs nor the dog that finally caused his relationship with Shelley to break down. Although there was no doubt that Lou was in love with Shelley and their relationship was enlightening for both of them, Lou experimented sexually. According to Mishkin, for example, Lou had a thing for big girls, especially “one big fat ugly bitch who he also really loved to fuck on the side.” He also occasionally had sex with one of the black female singers who accompanied the Eldorados. “I never observed him being particularly nice to Shelley,” Hyman commented, “but then I never observed him being particularly nice to anyone.”
When Lou wasn’t nice to a woman, he could, it turned out, be particularly cruel, constantly pushing them to an edge, thereby testing the strength of their love. His idea, Shelley said, was, “I’m going to remake you and then I’m not going to like you, and I’m going to push you around and see when you’re going to leave me. The worse I treat you the more it proves to me that you love me and you’ll stay with me forever. He clearly got very obnoxious. He had to have somebody to kick around so he felt big, and at that point I was the kickee.”
She was not the sort of girl to take this kind of treatment lying down, and she retaliated with several thrusts of her own. On one occasion the Eldorados were booked to play a fraternity at Cornell. Shelley had been dating one of the fraternity brothers sporadically on the side and decided to go along for the ride. When Lou walked in with the slightly effeminate walk he had mastered, the brothers were enraged to see Shelley on his arm. She had spent several weekends at the fraternity house and now this little Jewish fag … Shelley had not told Lou about the predicament, and even he was impressed by the hostility that greeted him. “Jesus, they’re so nasty, they’re a bunch of animals,” he told Shelley. Somewhere during the evening she casually explained, “They’re so hostile because I’ve been here on various weekends with this guy Peter. I’m his girlfriend.” They barely got out of there alive.
Back at Syracuse the relationship between Lou and Shelley came to a climax one night at another fraternity job, when Lou came up to her between sets and said, “I’m going to go into the back room with that girl. Do you want to watch?” Seeing Ritchie Mishkin smirk at her, Shelley finally snapped, decided that she had taken enough abuse from Lou, and left the fraternity. It was February 1963 and bitterly