Chapitre 4
The Manson Girl Next Door: Leslie Van Houten
"I have a good friend convicted of killing two innocent people during a night of cult madness in 1969." With this jarring opening, Waters introduces perhaps his most controversial friendship-with Leslie Van Houten, one of the notorious "Manson girls" who participated in the LaBianca murders. Now in her sixties, she looks back at her involvement with horror and takes full responsibility. Waters believes it's time to parole her.
Waters admits his own guilt-of using the Manson murders jokingly in his early films without considering the victims' families or the brainwashed killers. He became obsessed with the case in 1969, shocked that the Manson Family looked just like his friends-Charles "Tex" Watson resembled his high school pot dealer, Susan Atkins reminded him of his housemate's sister, Patricia Krenwinkel was like their commune's earth mother, and Leslie was "the pretty one" like his ex-girlfriend.
The Manson Family embodied parents' fears about hippies gone wrong-real anarchists beyond radical politics. Before they were caught, Waters' "Dreamlanders" gang even took credit for the murders in their $5,000 film "Multiple Maniacs." Waters attended the media-circus Manson trial, fascinated by how kids from backgrounds similar to his committed such terrible crimes.
Waters was initially drawn to the Manson Family's notoriety, even visiting Charles "Tex" Watson in prison. He dedicated his film "Female Trouble" to Watson and used his prison-made toy helicopter in the credits. Critics rightly questioned his flippant attitude toward these horrific crimes.
Later, Waters shifted his interest from Manson himself to Leslie Van Houten, who seemed like someone who could have ended up in his films instead of with the Manson Family. In 1985, he arranged to interview her for Rolling Stone. By then, Leslie had undergone significant transformation-her death sentence had been commuted, she'd had multiple trials, and even experienced six months of freedom while on bail. Waters has now visited her for twenty-four years, watching her patiently work through her shame and responsibility.
Leslie stabbed Rosemary LaBianca sixteen times, feeling "like a shark" or "a primitive animal." Decades later, despite eleven favorable psychiatric reports concluding she was no longer dangerous, parole boards remain unforgiving. How could they understand her LSD-addled mindset-believing she was "an elf three inches high" who would "grow fairy wings" during Helter Skelter?
Waters understands because he took LSD many times in the 1960s. It gave him confidence in his lunacy and cemented relationships with his own "family" of filmmakers. But would they have committed real crimes without their creative outlet? They never met a manipulator like Manson, and Waters was no spiritual leader. His "family" knew how to say no when he went too far.
Despite imprisonment, Leslie has rebuilt her life. She's taught illiterate women to read, stitched portions of the AIDS quilt, made bedding for the homeless, recorded books for the blind, and worked numerous prison jobs. She's consoled Waters through Divine's death and his relationship troubles, while he's advised her on crushes with men in the outside world.
The question remains: when is enough punishment enough? The parole board sends mixed signals, praising her progress while denying release, always citing "the enormity of the crime"-the one thing she can never change. Waters argues that Steve "Clem" Grogan, another brainwashed Manson Family member convicted of murder, was released after fourteen years and has lived quietly and lawfully since.
This friendship reveals Waters' capacity for seeing humanity in those society has written off-a quality that makes his transgressive art more complex than simple shock value.
Chapitre 5
Fashion Having a Nervous Breakdown: Rei Kawakubo
Fashion is vitally important to Waters, and his signature look for decades has been "disaster at the dry cleaners." When he can afford new clothes, they must be purposely wrong. His fashion god is Rei Kawakubo, genius designer of Comme des Garcons, who specializes in torn, crooked, permanently wrinkled, expensive clothing. Critics have called her work "unwearable," "post-atomic," and "fashion having a nervous breakdown"-descriptions that make Waters prouder to wear her designs.
Waters discovered Comme des Garcons in 1983 when visiting their first American boutique in SoHo-a morgue-like space with black rumpled garments displayed like wounded bodies on slabs. Though he couldn't afford anything then, he felt instantly addicted. His fashion rebellion began early against his parents' preferred preppy style, embracing Baltimore thrift shops where Divine and David Lochary would even bring their own pricing equipment to "adjust" costs.
At forty-six, Waters was surprisingly invited to model for Rei Kawakubo in Paris. Among scrawny European street urchins, he was the fattest model, initially relieved to wear a relatively conservative black suit with flood-length trousers, until he saw the accompanying hat. When Kawakubo entered, dressed all in black with her Louise Brooks bob, Waters trembled but managed to beg her to reconsider the hat. She frowned deeper, then wordlessly switched it for one slightly less ridiculous.
Backstage at the show, surrounded by models who looked like "drug-addled janitors or concentration camp victims," Waters realized these were exactly his type of boys. Terror struck when he learned he'd walk first. Right before going on, Rei yanked his collar sideways for a final disheveled touch, then shoved him through the curtain. The audience applauded quietly and severely-he'd made it from Lutherville, Maryland to the Paris runway.
Waters' Comme des Garcons fashion choices face daily challenges in blue-collar Baltimore. At the Holiday House biker bar, a bruiser commented on his meatball-brown, permanently wrinkled polyester sports jacket: "That's a shame about that coat." He had no idea this Value Village look-alike cost a thousand dollars, with dry cleaning instructions more complicated than assembling an atomic bomb.
In New York, Waters can model his "I, a Notebook" jacket made from composition book material without raising eyebrows. Strangers sometimes recognize "Is that Comme des Garcons?" He can confidently wear his hideous gold-and-copper fake-snakeskin Beatle boots or his crooked, unflattering fall jacket without sneers. New Yorkers understand sometimes everyone needs to dress crookedly.
Waters' fashion obsession reveals his lifelong commitment to disrupting expectations and finding beauty in what others consider ugly or wrong-the same aesthetic that drives his filmmaking and artistic sensibilities.
Chapitre 6
Baltimore's Beautiful Monsters
Every Friday night of Waters' life, he drinks. "An alcoholic one night of the week, a workaholic the other six," he explains. His shrink even agreed this seemed like a good plan. When people ask if making movies was fun, Waters responds emphatically: "No! 'Fun' is being home in Baltimore and going out to scary bars."
Bars have always been central to Baltimore life-not "faux" anything, but real and alarming. Even as Baltimore changes, what Waters makes movies about still lurks on backstreets and in unheralded neighborhoods. As a teenager, his mother would drive him to Martick's, a bohemian bar downtown where he'd hang in the "alley-a-go-go" since he couldn't legally enter. What a brave chance his mother took! Though horrified by his aspirations, she encouraged his opportunities to meet kindred spirits.
With fake ID, Waters got into Pepper Hill, a semi-legal gay club beside the police station. There he saw "Pencil," his first drag freak-Baltimore's male Tralala. Rail-thin in skintight black girl's jeans, angel blouse and bleached beehive, he'd screech and sashay, having nell-fits at horrified truck drivers. Though they never spoke, Pencil influenced Waters profoundly-defiantly courageous against hatred, enticing despite repellent packaging, and ecstatically living against the laws of the time.
Before Pencil was "Lady Zorro"-the butch lesbian stripper from Baltimore's red-light district who'd come out nude and snarl, "What the fuck are you looking at?" When Waters saw her 2001 obituary, he was shocked to learn she had a daughter in Oregon. He immediately contacted Eileen Murche, who revealed Zorro had followed his career and "loved how outrageous" he was.
Born out of wedlock in 1936 and raised in hellish foster homes until her grandparents adopted her at nine, Sheila (later Zorro) was always a hellion. After a brief attempt at being a stewardess ended when she threw a drink at a handsy passenger, she became a stripper in Baltimore. Her rage-filled performances gave her a demented, hostile sex appeal-an angry stripper with a great body and a man's face.
In 1966, this lesbian stripper shocked everyone by having a baby girl, Eileen. Despite her chaotic home life with "two mommies" (Zorro and her girlfriend), Eileen was a straight-A Catholic school student. By eleven, she was rolling joints and driving her mother's Lincoln Continental to pick her up from bars. When Zorro's girlfriend left, she had a breakdown, went on welfare, and cycled through mental institutions while Eileen essentially raised herself.
Despite everything, Eileen excelled in school, becoming class president. The Catholic Church proved her salvation-a priest offering work at the rectory, nuns providing support, and elderly neighbors helping with clothes. Through it all, Eileen maintained an almost amused perspective on her unconventional upbringing, acknowledging that lesbian mothers "have the same right to be bad parents as straight ones do."
Only after Zorro died could Eileen appreciate her mother's influence. "I spent my whole life trying to not be like her, only to find out at thirty-five, I am like her," she realized, recognizing her mother's social magnetism in herself.
These Baltimore characters-Pencil, Zorro, and others-formed Waters' cultural education and inspired the outrageous personalities that would populate his films. They were authentic outsiders living by their own rules, qualities Waters would celebrate throughout his career.
Chapitre 7
Five Books for the Happily Disturbed
Despite Waters' brushes with celebrity-jitterbugging with Richard Serra, Thanksgiving with Lana Turner, tea with Princess Yasmin Aga Khan-what he enjoys most is reading at home. True wealth, he believes, isn't about money or property; it's having the freedom to buy any book without checking the price. Of course, the books must be read-nothing is more impotent than an unread library.
Waters has cataloged 8,425 books and reads Publishers Weekly religiously to track upcoming releases. He mourns the death of bookshops but secretly loves Amazon's convenience. Unlike friends who fall asleep reading, he stays up late hooked on good writing. "Never read just for enjoyment," he advises, "read to become smarter and less judgmental!" Choose hard books that require concentration. And fiction IS truth, you fools!
For outcasts who embrace insanity rather than escape it, Waters has narrowed down thousands of twisted volumes to five essential books:
Perhaps no better novel exists than Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure" (1945). This thinly disguised autobiographical tale follows Orville Pym, a creative child who lost his mother and feels unsafe with others. Vacationing with his father and brothers, Orville explores his burgeoning sexuality and perversity with exquisite eloquence. He collects broken china, experiments with fashion, whips himself with musical instrument straps while imagining himself as historical martyrs, chains himself in meadows, makes out with brass statues in churches, and develops erotic tension with a schoolmaster who ties him up. Welch brilliantly captures childhood's undiscovered innocence and ingrained perversity.
"We Need to Talk About Kevin" by Lionel Shriver tells the story of fifteen-year-old Kevin who murders seven classmates, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher. Through letters between Kevin's estranged parents, his mother Eva explores her complicated relationship with a son she never really wanted. Their breakthrough comes when they admit their mutual hatred, allowing Kevin to explain his twisted reasoning: "When you're putting on a show, you don't shoot the audience." This cult book resonated with women who chose not to have children, validating their decisions against societal pressure.
No novel in literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children" (1940) about a hateful, spiteful marriage. Initially overlooked despite some good reviews, it was rediscovered in 1965 as "a big black diamond of a book." Henny Pollit, trapped in marriage to a sanctimonious bore who keeps her pregnant and lectures on "love and goodness," unleashes venomous tirades that leave readers gasping.
Jane Bowles's absurd masterpiece "Two Serious Ladies," Tennessee Williams's "favorite book," transformed Waters into a real reader. This 1943 novel follows two ferociously eccentric women seeking crackpot adventures and cockeyed inner peace. Both women make baffling romantic choices and their unfathomable logic reaches peak lunacy when they reunite at the end, abandoned by their lovers yet declaring complete satisfaction. As Mrs. Copperfield explains her collapse: "True enough, I HAVE gone to pieces, which is the thing I've wanted to do for years."
For snobbish literary wit, try any novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett-that English spinster who wrote twenty dark, hilarious, evil little novels between 1911 and 1969. "Once you pick up a Compton-Burnett," Ivy commented about her own books, "it's hard NOT to put them down again." Her 1951 novel "Darkness and Day," an insanely inventive revision of Oedipus Rex, features endless pages of hermetically sealed, stylized Edwardian dialogue with minimal description. Waters owns all twenty novels and has read nineteen-saving the last one because when he finishes it, there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for him, and he will probably have to die himself.
These literary recommendations reveal Waters' intellectual depth beyond his shock-value reputation-he's a serious reader with sophisticated tastes who finds beauty and truth in literature that explores human complexity and perversity.
Chapitre 8
Outsider Porn: The Accidental Artists
Bobby Garcia is a great artist who doesn't know it. For thirty years, he's been obsessed with filming and having sex with supposedly straight Marines in his apartment. His amateur porn tapes follow a simple formula-Marines strip, jerk off watching straight porn, and sometimes allow Bobby to pleasure them. Bobby's golden rule: "Never tell a Marine you are gay; tell them you are a cocksucker." His advice works remarkably well.
After years searching, Waters finally tracked Bobby down in Twentynine Palms, California. His home was surrounded by chain-link fencing, and as Waters arrived in his embarrassingly fancy rental car, snarling dogs leapt at the fence. Inside, Waters was shocked to discover Bobby lived in what amounted to Noah's ark-eleven dogs, two pigs (750 pounds total) living INSIDE the house, two roosters, and hundreds, possibly thousands of rats that Bobby fed and even named.
Bobby's obsession began in childhood. Growing up in Acapulco "where I became a queer," his family later moved near Fort Hood, Texas. His mother ran a motel housing army men, and young Bobby's job was "to wake them up." By the mid-1970s, he was shooting 8mm loops in L.A., but his true calling revealed itself when he drove to San Diego for his employer (whom he claims was Raquel Welch), ran out of gas near Camp Pendleton, and saw "the beautiful boys" in Oceanside. He never left.
In the early eighties, someone helped Bobby distribute his tapes commercially. He began paying Marines ($20 for "a good-looking boy for a good blow job"), and his films became sensations as some of the first "amateur porn" featuring "all straight guys." Titles like "Shoot to Kill" and "Basic Training" built Bobby's brand. Then in 1993, scandal erupted. After a stolen property arrest, authorities discovered Bobby's tapes. Despite military investigation reaching the Marine Commandant, Bobby only served seven months in jail on the property charge-"the most wonderful time," he sighs dreamily.
Bobby lives in squalor with his beloved animals, seemingly unaware of his cult status. "I never knew people liked the tapes. You see where I'm living. I don't own nothing." Despite his porn career, Bobby reveals surprising depth-opposing the Iraq war ("I don't like nobody to get hurt, not even a butterfly"), watching "The Hours" twenty-five times, and maintaining correspondence with actual royalty through fan letters.
Waters also profiles David Hurles, who pioneered "verbal-abuse porn," locking his subjects alone in rooms with microphones to capture raw sexual pathologies. Like Andy Warhol with an erection, he gave minimal direction beyond "Talk about yourself," distributing over 400 verbal-abuse tapes. His most notorious recording, "Ty Meltdown," featured a criminal's chilling monologue about brutalizing young men in jail-audio sadism beyond typical sexual role-playing.
These outsider pornographers fascinate Waters because they create without artistic pretension-they document their obsessions purely for their own satisfaction, accidentally creating works that reveal profound truths about human sexuality and desire. Their lack of self-consciousness produces an authenticity that Waters, as a deliberate provocateur, can only admire.
Chapitre 9
Living with Art: My Invisible Roommates
Waters lives alone but has many roommates-not human beings but artists whose work surrounds him. He couldn't stand sharing space with actual people, having their belongings around or hanging art he didn't like. Instead, he cohabitates with the creative spirits whose works adorn his walls.
Mike Kelley is his most prominent roommate, his provocative art filling Waters' spaces. His "Dirty Mirror" with painted cocaine lines hangs in Waters' New York apartment, while his "Wedged Lump"-resembling a giant turd with comic-strip stink marks-confronts dinner guests in Baltimore. Waters has Kelley's "Garbage Drawings" above his writing desk and his vandalized history textbooks in his library. His art infuriates some visitors, which Waters loves-isn't contemporary art supposed to provoke?
Cy Twombly, the cutting-edge octogenarian artist, is another reluctant roommate. Waters fantasizes about owning his "Untitled" sculpture from 1992-not a sports car or yacht, but this shockingly ugly yet elegant piece that resembles "Godzilla's semen discharge." Critics dismiss Twombly's work as "bad handwriting," but devotees like Waters see the poetic Palmer Method of a true insider. Waters obsessively reads his catalogue raisonne like a mystery novel, fascinated by details like the footnote about an unauthorized "looping line" added to his "Blue Room" painting-a vandalism that makes Waters consider supporting the death penalty.
Fischli/Weiss's work continues to delight Waters in his home. Their "Airport-Federal Express" photograph dominates one wall of his New York apartment, making him appreciate air travel rather than resent it. Waters treasures their gift of tiny polyurethane trompe l'oeil wood scraps that he carefully places outside his kitchen door with white art-handler gloves, fearing someone might mistakenly throw them away.
Waters is attracted to serious roommates too-artists whose work he initially can't understand. Richard Tuttle perfectly fits this bill with his minimalist troublemaking that makes Waters see something amazing from almost nothing. His barely visible pencil line installations at Mary Boone Gallery in 1992 stunned Waters-art seemingly made for mice, by someone "outside the human condition."
Young blood keeps a home fresh. Richard Baker's schizophrenic career makes him perfect for Waters' collection-he bypasses Baker's uptown gallery paintings for his deadpan little sculptures of household objects shown in Provincetown. Waters owns his handcrafted "pencil," wooden "kitchen knife," clay "donuts," fake pills displayed on a mirror (hidden when ex-junkies visit), and a made-to-order box of spilled Jujyfruits.
Sometimes messy roommates are welcome if they bring charm, like Moyra Davey. Her work lives everywhere in Waters' homes but keeps a low profile, never shouting for attention. She photographs formal, lovely still lifes of neglect-the kind everyone has in their home but never notices. Her "Greatest Hits" photo of out-of-date record albums encourages Waters that nothing is ever truly "used up."
These artistic roommates reveal Waters' sophisticated aesthetic sensibility-he's drawn to work that challenges conventions, finds beauty in the overlooked or discarded, and maintains a sense of humor about human foibles. His collection reflects his own artistic values: purposely homely, haughtily failed, and passively confrontational.
Chapitre 10
The Pope of Trash: Confessions of a Would-Be Cult Leader
Waters is tired of writing "Cult Filmmaker" on his tax forms. If only he could write "Cult Leader," he'd finally be happy. He imagines a spiritual pilgrimage to Baltimore where followers would concentrate on what really matters-their infallibility. Filth would be just the first battle in the war on taste. Together they'd become saints of sordidness, fanatics devoted to a new dogma of dirt, ready to take over the world.
Though not devout, Waters believes in basic human goodness. Brainwashed by angry nuns and impotent Christian Brothers, he rejects concepts like original sin-the mean-spirited idea that babies are born soiled. And the Virgin Birth? "A real feminist concept-Mary getting pregnant without even enjoying sex!" The Resurrection he can almost understand-Divine and Edith returning would be great, though housing will be scarce.
His cult would have specific requirements. You'd need a new name-forget who you used to be. "Mr. Hatt" was Waters' code name; followers could pick an obscure character from his movies like Sandy Sandstone or Vera Venninger. You'd need a uniform-have all tattoos removed surgically, be too thin and poor. Study Karl Lagerfeld's diet book. Fat isn't enough anymore unless you gained it purposely to confuse authority.
Your hair must be restyled by his unlicensed team-longer for boys (unless balding, then drawn on) and shorter for girls (perhaps a one-sided Sassoon with a W in back). Boys should never wear pleated pants, and turn their belt buckle 45 degrees off-center like Joe Dallesandro in "Trash"-the secret sign your gun is loaded. Girls, the bigger your breasts, the higher your necklines; if flat-chested, go topless.
William Burroughs once called Waters "the Pope of Trash"-now it's time to live up to it. When visiting the Vatican, Waters hid in the gift shop buying hideously pious postcards. When he asked for a receipt for his business expense (Warhol's diaries taught us well), the nun snapped, "The Vatican doesn't give receipts!" Waters fumed silently, thinking his cash would fund anti-abortion and homophobic lobbyists worldwide.
Waters' cult would pray to "The Most Hated Woman in America," Madalyn Murray O'Hair. She removed prayer from Baltimore public schools, put out bumper stickers reading "Praying Is Begging" and "Jesus Is Lard," and called Jesus "the most despicable man in history, including Hitler." She was eventually murdered by a former employee who kidnapped her, her son John, and granddaughter Robin, strangled them, and buried their dismembered bodies. "They gave their lives for us-true martyrs to the cause."
Like any good cult, Waters' would require ritual hazing. He suggests infiltrating living nativity scenes-those "Diane-Arbus-photographs-from-hell" where adults dress as Mary and Joseph with real farm animals. Get yourself cast as Mary or Joseph, then at the height of the event, start speaking in tongues. Try "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" in Pig Latin or yell "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" to create panic, joy, sexual relief, and cinematic anarchy.
There's only one way Waters wants to die-spontaneous combustion. Being so guilty and happy, so obsessed and fanatical that you burst into flames for no apparent reason. On the street. At work. For Waters, hopefully in an airport. It's a beautiful death, dramatic, internally cleansing, and all you leave behind is a really good pair of shoes. The religious lesson? Always wear stylish shoes. They won't be comfortable. They shouldn't be. It hurts to be this pure.
This satirical cult fantasy reveals Waters' lifelong mission-to celebrate the outcasts, elevate the lowbrow, and find transcendent joy in what society rejects. His career has been a kind of religious calling, preaching the gospel of filth to a world desperately in need of liberation from conventional taste and morality. As his imaginary cult chant might go: "We're Porn Again with no regrets! NO REMORSE! NO SHAME! ALL LAUGHING ALL THE TIME!"
