Tom Verlaine Is My White Rabbit

By Chelsea Spear

The last week of June 2008 found me in New York City. I’d been trying to escape the obligations and responsibilities that awaited me in my hometown: the whoosh I still heard in my ears as a birthday with a zero on the end passed me by, and the dozens of hours I suddenly had free. My life was about to change, and I had no idea what to do next. So far I’d attempted to distract myself with a free concert at which two of my favorite bands played, and a stage play written by a playwright and musician whose work I found intriguing, if not always successful. The poignancy and significance and melancholy of these works had not merely sated me, but left my brain feeling bloated and heavy and unable to even process the idealistic notes of hope they sounded.

Somehow I ended up in the East Village, on a stretch of 4th street and Broadway once known as “record store row.” I had about an hour to kill before one of my oldest friends was to take me out for a drink, but I couldn’t bring myself to enter the mecca known as Other Music lest I spend money I did not, at the moment, have. The early-summer sun beat down on the pavement, and I sweated through my blue cotton dress. I kept walking west. I looked up.

A tall, spindly man was standing less than ten feet ahead of me, taking swooping strides. His gaze was aimed squarely at the ground. His hair had started to thin a bit, giving him a slightly pinheaded appearance. At first glance, he looked like any other aging East Village hipster who’d pour you a bourbon and tell you all about the time they walked in on Debbie Harry and Chris Stein having sex in the CBGB’s bathroom or lost a game of billiards to David Byrne or secretly manhandled Tom Verlaine’s Fender Jazzmas—

No. It couldn’t be.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen Tom Verlaine on the street. That was at the tail end of the Invincible Summer of 2001. One of my short films was about to screen at a small-gauge film festival, and little did I know that I would also receive a grant to make my first big short film. As I arrived at the Knitting Factory, a lanky man had brushed past me, holding his guitar as though it were a shield. The identity of the man hadn’t registered with me until later that night, when my friend Chris offhandedly mentioned that Verlaine had been recording something in one of the smaller rooms at the Knit. Had it clicked with me that I had brushed past The Tom Verlaine, my concentration might have been shot for the rest of the night.

As it turned out, I did win that grant, and I went on to make two short films and fall in unrequited love with the chain-smoking, death-pale DP for both of them. Nor was it the second time I saw Verlaine in his natural habitat. That was four years ago, about two blocks from where I was standing at the time. I’d gotten a pre-movie lunch at the Dojo West, and looked up from my tofu burger to see an impossibly tall man picking up take-out. I watched him in the mirror on the wall next to our table; my friend watched me and tried hard not to laugh at my fangirlish behavior. A few months after that, I made a short film and attempted to extend it into a feature, a project that would take me to the limits of my ability, drain my bank account, and make me cry. As I looked up and saw Verlaine, a thought crossed my mind: Perhaps he is my White Rabbit.

Photo © Patty Heffley

Shallow though it may sound, it broke my wee heart a bit to see that the years had not been kind to Herr Verlaine. He no longer bore the ethereal good looks from the sleeve of Marquee Moon. His waist was still the circumference of my wrist, but the skin around his eyes had grown yellow and crepey, and his receding hairline suggested Zippy the Pinhead. As he took a drag off his cigarette, I noticed that the back of his famous hands resembled undersea photographs. The whole effect was similar to seeing a genetic mesh of Peter O’Toole and Stretch Armstrong. And yet, somehow, I could not look away.

My knees felt like rubber bands, but I pressed forward. Verlaine came a few steps towards me, one eyebrow snaked above the frames of his Wayfarers as if to say, “Be cool, okay?” (Though, of course, it could have been a twitch or a muscle spasm.) I nodded, casually, as though legendary rockers made vague facial gestures to me all the time. It was the only way I could convey the thought: For you, Tom, I’ll be cool.

And then, it was over. If I smoked, I would have needed a cigarette right about then. Instead, I kept moving forward, wondering what adventure would await me next.