JT LeRoy – The Hot Press Interview

“Send me your address and I’ll send you a raccoon penis bone.”

It’s not an offer you get every day. But then, JT LeRoy’s not the kind of boy you meet everyday. The 21-year-old’s writing has been lauded by such institutions as the New York Times, The New Statesman, The Guardian and Esquire, but perhaps a better measure of his stock is the number of novelists, filmmakers and musicians queuing up to heap praise at his tiny feet: Chuck Palahniuk, Dennis Cooper, Mary Karr, Courtney Love, Mary Gaitskill, Joel Rose, Dorothy Allison, Allison Anders, Gus Van Sant, Suzanne Vega and more. There’s a song on Garbage’s new album about him called ‘Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)’. Tom Waits interviewed him for Vanity Fair a

couple of months back.

The literati are no different to the film and music industries in their appetites for fresh and tender meat, from Jim Carroll back to Arthur Rimbaud. But the wonder about JT LeRoy is that he made it this far at all, let alone produced a book the calibre of his debut Sarah, a transgressive fairytale based on his experience as a “lot lizard”, or truckstop hustler, in the wilds of West Virginia. The Sarah of the title is JT’s mother, a teenaged punk rock trailer-and-motel mom who dressed her 12-year-old son as a girl and taught him all she knew about tricking.

Some novels make the reader feel like their DNA is being altered as they read it: The Catcher In The Rye, The Butcher Boy, Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas. Sarah is another. LeRoy’s latest book The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, essentially a road-ribbon of interconnected autobiographical short stories, was actually written first, and is rawer in tone if no less defined in style. If he keeps this up, JT LeRoy looks like becoming a one-man literary cult.

“It’s a lot better than hearing somebody say it’s a piece of shit,” he says in a sleepy drawl that is part flirtatious sprite, part southern drought.

JT is talking down a San Francisco phone-line monitored by an extravagant number of caller id systems. The writer dislikes face-to-face interviews, and for photo shoots prefers to obscure his features with a selection of props and masks, as is evident in recent spreads for The Face and Vanity Fair where he posed as Cinderella and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. In fact, the most widely seen image of LeRoy was lifted from the cover of avant garde LA author Dennis Cooper’s book Period, in which he appeared as a central character. LeRoy was introduced to Cooper’s work by a trick with a literary bent, and as a rent boy sometimes took the name of Ziggy, the Husker Du obsessed lost lamb in the 1994 novel Try, a matter-of-fact tale of stepfathers fistfucking their stepsons, Slayer songs and underage snuff-sex movies that somehow came across as funny as it was depraved.

JT stands for Jeremiah Terminator. The former name is the legacy of his mother’s bible-bashing family background (the title of his new book is a quote from the Book of Jeremiah – he was often sent out by his grandparents to evangelise on the streets as a boy). One of the funniest passages in The Heart… involves the seven-year-old innocently singing the opening lines of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ to his stony faced grandfather. The Terminator handle is a joke on his diminutive frame, retained after he discovered it made the johns a little warier of him, as if there was something tougher about this kid than met the eye.

LeRoy began writing as an assignment from his therapist Dr Terrence Owens. Through contacts with various agents and editors, he scored a book deal at the age of 17, a development that spooked him so much he almost quit writing altogether. While stalling for time, JT began contributing to Spin and the New York Press, honing his craft and picking the brains of every writer he interviewed, asking some of them to critique his work, sometimes writing under the Terminator alias. To this day, he avoids giving readings of his work, preferring to let friends deputise for him.

“I just don’t wanna have people coming up to me and everything, that’s just too weird,” he explains. “I’m incredibly paranoid as it is, I really am, and I couldn’t stand the idea of people, like, looking at me. My only saving grace is that maybe they’re really not; I can say, ‘Nobody gives a shit, they’re not really looking at you’. If they actually were, I’d go insane.”

LeRoy once mentioned in an interview that he can actually hear people’s thoughts as they look at him.

“Yeah, it depends what medication I’m on!” he laughs. “But it gets really loud in my head, my brain starts narrating what I think they’re saying or thinking. I know logically they don’t give a shit, but you look at someone and even for that second you judge people and start thinking they’re thinking really bad things.”

This is a characteristic JT’s e-mail correspondent Shirley Manson terms ‘hypervigilance’. In other words, LeRoy’s ability to read people is one of the reasons they now read him.

“He had to learn about other people in order to remain safe,” Manson says. “His life was so precarious and so dangerous, he had to learn how to read a person in the flicker of an eye. For someone to survive such diabolical circumstances as he has and have his spirit intact and have this phenomenal will to survive and to matter, his force of character insisting that we all take note of his existence I think is a miracle in the true sense.”

You can tell a lot about a person by observing their reaction to JT LeRoy’s work. Some get protective, wanting to pick him up and run away with him. Others are in awe of his resilience and the ability to turn unimaginable pain into a fiction. Sympathy however, is not a factor. If LeRoy couldn’t articulate his story with such vivid insight, precious few would give a damn.

“I think there’s a lot of responses,” JT says. “A lot of people write and thank me for kinda giving words to what they experienced – even if the story is very different. It gives them a vocabulary for it or something. There’s a lot of different reactions, there’s men who see opportunity, people who would like to be a good parent, there’s people who I guess are kinda angry, like how can I be so young and have this stuff goin’ on and they just want to put me down. That’s fairly new but I’ve been dealing with it.

“A review came out in the New York Times by this writer who I really used to admire named Ann Powers,” he says. “She’s a rock critic, and I don’t know why they gave my book to a rock critic to review, but she obviously has some issues with my age, and I really don’t think she read the book, I think she read the first chapter. But she refers to me as like a ‘baby celebrity’. She said that The Heart Is Deceitful wasn’t lyrical, which I don’t think is true; I think some of it’s really pretty. If you’re a jaded New Yorker I think the book probably isn’t the best thing for you to read. She says really nice things about Sarah but I wonder if she fuckin’ read it because she just says stuff like Sarah’s about how he becomes a ‘street hustler’, and I’ve never heard anybody, no matter how mangled…”

JT’s taking this little more to heart than he should, but he has a valid point. Sarah’s hustlers had no streets. That might sound like a pretty basic observation, but it’s crucial in distancing the book from urban hustling myths like The Basketball Diaries or Last Exit To Brooklyn or City Of Night and placing it within the southern storytelling conventions of Flannery O’ Connor and Carson McCullers. This could be the ballad of any sad café, only the clientele are transgender Tinkerbells and their trucker johns. Sarah’s geographical location is also important if the reader is to accept its core elements of magic realism. In the city, a dirty reality prevails, just as in rural life suspension of disbelief is a survival mechanism. LeRoy’s Appalachia is a country of skunk cabbages and swamp gas and religious icons, of superstition and miracle, a place where the plants eat people (“Those plants are carnivorous, but I exaggerated, y’know, the way they would attack somebody”) and where people still believe in the talismanic power of a raccoon penis bone.

“It’s kinda like one of those eye of the beholder things, there’s many different things you could say it’s about,” LeRoy considers. “You could say it’s about lot lizards, you could say it’s about a relationship between a mother and a son, you could say it’s about a search for oneself, you could say it’s about a search for one’s gender.”

Sarah opens with its narrator receiving the sacred amulet of a coon bone from Glad, the benign patriarch of the lot lizards that frequent The Doves Diner. It’s a rite that echoes the Catholic confirmation service – in this version of the south, sex, superstition and religion are inseparable. In fact, JT remembers chapels where the lizards would attend services before hitting the lots.

“Yeah, you have ministers who minister to anybody,” he says. “I remember this one place where the guy who was the minister was also a pimp, the truck drivers would come in and they’d get hooked up with one of his flock. It was quite a racket. People couldn’t touch him. But finally he got busted – it took a while.”

Adding to the overall air of surruralism (and I’m sure Tom Waits will forgive me using his word in this context) are plot developments more commonly found in Brothers Grimm fables: imprisonment, flight, an ogre character in the form of Le Loup, a troupe of wise matriarchal figures.

“I just wanted to write about raccoon penis bones,” LeRoy reflects. “I thought I was writing a short story and that I’d finish it relatively fast. The thing took six months, and it would’ve been faster only I put it down for like, two months. But inside me it was like the road map was already printed, it wouldn’t go away, it was still gnawing at me. All I wanted to do was finish and be done with it but at the same time . . . you know, it’s kind of like if you’re eating a dessert, you’re really enjoying it but the goal is almost to finish it. Or it’s kind of like having sex, I just wanted the orgasm, but at the same time it kept pulling me off in different directions. I’m like, ‘Am I ready to come yet?’ ‘No, you have to lick the toes, you have to play with the nipples!’ you know what I mean? It just wouldn’t end on me!”

When I remark that the narrative voice in Sarah is neither cross-gender nor genderless, it’s more like a third gender, a pointy-eared imp on a toadstool, JT says this:

“That’s funny ’cos I have a point on one of my ears!”

Until now I’ve bypassed the graphic depictions of violation and sexual abuse in JT LeRoy’s writing in favour of highlighting its traditional attributes. However, there’s no denying his prose its brutal energy, a forceful rhythm driving the innate melody of the language. In Tom Waits’ words, “JT’s stories are like stitches, like exit wounds, dispatches, depositions. You’ll need handkerchiefs and Novocain to get through his new book. It is a golden diving bell crawling through the shark-infested waters of his childhood.”

Consider the opening and closing sections of The Heart Is Deceitful… ‘Disappearances’ documents how a four-year-old LeRoy was taken away from his foster parents by his 18-year-old Mom, later getting whipped on his bare behind with a belt by one of her pick-ups, a come-stained sheet stuffed into his mouth to suppress the screams. In the title story, one of his mother’s seven-day husbands rapes him after she runs off with the guy’s money. LeRoy describes this episode as a surreal nightmare, birds’ wings flashing in his eyes, a drill blade twisting and hollowing out between his legs as the towel under him turns “crimson and soggy like tomato bread soap”. In the final episide, ‘Natoma Street’, the protagonist, now 15, enters an LA De Sade scenario of his own volition, paying $100 to strapped and cut as he hangs from a bar by restraint cuffs, clamps locked onto his body, longing to be castrated, to be unstitched from his shadow like Peter Pan. Here the writing is a razor applied to gooseflesh, a crow’s agonised caw.

It also admits the forbidden. Like Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out Of Carolina, these stories suggest that in order to survive the experience, a victim of sexual abuse may eroticise it, try to find some kind of gratification in it.

“For me it’s the behaviour that I can’t engage in,” LeRoy says, “because I just don’t have any part that says, ‘You can’t do that ’cos you’ll get killed. There’s a part of me that definitely thinks I can get killed and keep goin’ on. And it wants me to get killed. It’s kind of like if all you have to eat is stale bread you really might start developing (a taste for it). Like, there’s a lot of poor whites down south – we did this with my Mom – who put jelly on meat because the meat was usually really foul tasting, but then it became something you just do even if the meat is good quality.

“The thing is, everyone was always trying to get me to write,” he elaborates, “because when I would write I would be in the least danger in terms of self-destructive behaviour. But the really odd thing is the emotions are all there, it’s not cold, but when I was writing it they weren’t connected. It’s as if the brain is like an onion and there are all these layers and sometimes you don’t know what the fuck’s going on in there. And when I was writing it was like those layers were nerve endings that had been reconnected without the outer layer knowing. Like working something out in your sleep.”

When he writes about a particularly difficult experience, does he feel as if he’s transformed it, made it into something more bearable?

“It definitely helps. It’s kinda like there’s a way that I can tell the truth or find out how I feel, ’cos a lot of these I wrote just for the author Dennis Cooper or for my therapist’s class. It was kinda funny, ’cos when we were editing – and some of those stories I hadn’t read in like five years – all of a sudden reading these stories I was like: ‘Oh my fuckin’ God!’ I’ve gotten healthier, I’ve matured or whatever, I’m less fucked up. It used to be when someone would respond, an editor or something, they’d say, ‘Oh they’re so raw!’ and I’d be like, ‘What the fuck’s your problem, wimp?!’

Talking to the present writer some weeks ago, Mary Karr, author of The Liar’s Club and Cherry, came out with the following quote about LeRoy.

“I love him, he’s a great little human unit. He’s a brilliant young writer. I hope Hollywood doesn’t eat him alive.”

I run this past JT, and he says, “She’s fucking amazing – the two books that really influenced me between The Heart Is Deceitful and Sarah were The Liar’s Club and Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes, because this was autobiography or memoir, but with humour.”

When I fill the writer in on the controversy Angela’s Ashes caused in the city of Limerick, claims that McCourt exaggerated the squalor of his childhood, he says this:

“Whatever, it was his fuckin’ childhood and I would venture that it was probably bad. It’s like, what the fuck, okay, maybe instead of having zero you had three. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not he was completely fuckin’ wealthy, it was so beautiful, so well written. But I think it was probably really painful too for people to know that they were there when someone was suffering. What can you do except say, ‘It really wasn’t that bad. And if it was that bad and I was around then I should’ve done something.’”

Mary Karr’s Hollywood comment is a cautionary one, although with the film adaptation of Sarah in Gus Van Sant’s hands it stands a better chance than Alan Parker’s dismal version of McCourt’s book. There are more than a few similarities in tone between My Own Private Idaho and Sarah, the braiding of Twain-like yarn spinning or Shakespearian drama with the subculture of the boy hustlers. Plus, My Own Private Idaho has particular resonance for LeRoy: when he was tricking in San Francisco, he always made good money outside showings of the film.

These days he’s more likely to keep correspondence with – or at least interview – the kind of people who’d show up at the premier of a Van Sant film. Still, LeRoy has no illusions about maintaining his journalistic practice with the New York Press.

“It’s cool because I can be lazy about it,” he says. “If I had to write one of those articles like, ‘We’re sitting here having coffee’ and I have to describe him and do all that shit, that’s like writing a novel, y’know? That’s fuckin’ hard work!”

This from a novelist!

“I’m fuckin’ lazy! I hate that shit! I’m an accidental novelist really. I was assigned to write by my therapist, and really I’d rather read fuckin’ catalogues, I’d rather pick my nose, I’d rather pick my butt or something. But I can do it (journalism) pretty easily, I get to meet a lot of really cool people. I got to interview Joe Strummer y’know? It’s great to be able to talk to people, and it’s cool ’cos I can send them my book and sometimes they really respond to it and then we can have a connection. What a fuckin’ cool thing that is. Like Suzanne Vega y’know? ’Cos her song ‘Luka’ was one of the first times I ever cried about anything like child abuse. Of course, I did not connect it to myself or anything . . . like if I heard a child abuse story or something I’d think, ‘Well, too fuckin’ bad!’ But it was really honest. And she read my book Sarah when it was in a galley and she was very supportive and wrote a blurb for it and participated in the reading and it was amazing.”

Henry Rollins on the other hand, wasn’t quite so supportive, despite the fact that JT’s mother used a fragment of his pants tied to their car’s rear view mirror as a compass.

“My Mom stole a piece of his pants from Ian MacKaye’s house,” he recalls. “She spent the night there and she cut a piece of his pants off the wall and we just used to follow his pants. But you know, we e-mailed him about maybe giving a reading or something, and for me it was like, ‘Jesus Christ’, his pants fuckin’ ruled my life’, y’know, to actually connect with the real person… I mean, he didn’t know that or anything, but he was kinda fuckin’ harsh. He just was kind of a dick, he had this (adopts gruff Rollins bellow) attitude, and it was like, ‘Dude, lay off the steroids’ or whatever the fuck.

“It’s always really nice when you connect with someone who by rights could be an asshole, in other words, society gives them the right to, but they’re not. Y’know, like Shirley Manson is so fuckin’ amazing, she’s such a real person, and I think that’s why she’s in a lot of pain sometimes because she’s just so fuckin’ open. You gotta see the tape of her reading ‘Meteors’, she was the best, she really blew everyone else the fuck away. I’m gonna give it to Gus Van Sant because I think if she could do a southern accent she’d be my choice to play Sarah. She fuckin’ had it down. And she’s been just so warm and lovin’ to me, it makes me cry. There’s nothing to say. How do you express it? You can’t. I love her, y’know. If anyone’s fuckin’ mean to her, any press people, I will fuckin’ hunt them down and kill them. I’ll do something worse to them first!”

Such pronouncements say a lot about how JT LeRoy got to this point. A flower cut out of tungsten, he’s a shy Madame George who loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves. Go baby go.

Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things are both published in paperback by Bloomsbury