Souls that whisper courage in your ear
It is a fortuitous post, because in speaking to Bertei, you can hear in her velvet voice an empathy that is only earned from a life battered by adversity but with a willingness to wink at it anyway. She can’t help but become one of those people of Mantel’s quote for me—a courage-giver—because her story is one that will have you holding on to it tight-fisted when your own courage is just a faint scratch at the door.
Bertei’s life has been one of courage not so much because of the events that triumph it: her pivotal friendships with Peter Laughner and Nan Goldin, which she so lovingly documents in her book Peter and the Wolves; major contributions as a musician in New York’s No Wave scene by being a founding member of The Contortions and The Bloods, and starring in movies by Scott and Beth B and Vivienne Dick; and a long career of adding her vocals to the likes of Tears for Fears, Whitney Houston, and Culture Club, and penning lyrics to songs for Lydia Lunch and The Pointer Sisters (among others).
Rather, her courage is largely marked by her ability to survive circumstances that would derail the best of us, and yet she still wakes up each day believing in people. It isn’t the kind of courage that we usually think of, because we tend to think of the trait only arising with bold leaps of faith, a precursor to doing something extraordinary—the Joan of Arc type of courage. And though Bertei has exhibited this type of courage too, it’s the quieter mode that’s most remarkable, because it’s an alchemical fortitude that has you enduring painful events and scraping as much good as you can from what’s left, transforming those past hurts into poetry.
And that’s what Bertei does with her forthcoming book, Twist: An American Girl. It’s a memoir forty-four years in the making that chronicles the extraordinary life of an impish puck with carloads of swagger who has seen more than most of us ever will by becoming part of many of her country’s major cultural events. A girl who has transformed into the woman with the velvet voice that kisses you with courage each time you hear her speak.
Even just reading the description of the book, it’s clear that you’ve been through so much. I wanted to ask, what was it like to revisit that? I know both Peter and the Wolves and Why Labelle Matters have memoirist aspects to them, but I was just wondering what made you ready to go back now?
Great question. This book [Twist] has been in the works since probably 1979, when I would write in fits and starts, and it was such a difficult journey. There were moments when I would write a few chapters and stick them in a drawer because there was a lot of trauma involved in my childhood.
Trying to find the voice of the book was really interesting. I didn’t know whether to write it in third person or fictionalise it, then finally I decided, probably about eight years ago, that I would create a character. Even though all the events in the book are true, I needed a character, kind of like a Trojan horse, or armour to go through those war zones of my childhood so that I could have a somewhat objective look at how I survived certain things.
I thought about how much I loved Dickens as a child, and Oliver Twist was a big figure, and the Artful Dodger, so I decided on calling it Twist: An American Girl, because Oliver Twist, my mother’s schizophrenia, and my imagination were all very important to my becoming an adult.
I love that it’s called American Girl as well, because what I love about your life, apart from the seminal moments of being part of the music scene with Peter Laughner in Cleveland or the No Wave scene in New York, are some of the jobs you’ve had. I read that you were an assistant occupational therapist for Vietnam War vets, and you also worked at the Ford Motor Factory. Even those seem important markers of American history that you were part of. What did you learn from them, and how did they affect you?
Sometimes I feel like the lesbian Zelig in Woody Allen’s film. It took me so many decades to filter and transmute and assimilate all those experiences into my view of humanity because I’ve seen so much. But what I’m still learning—and, you know, we’re all still learning, and I feel like I have so much to learn in terms of my journey here on the Earth plane—but I’m still learning to parse judgement from discernment.
Judgement is more from an egoistic point of view, and discernment is trying to view people in a more 360-degree light, because we all have dark and light within our souls and psyches. I had to really understand cruelty, which is a really difficult subject, and you have to face your shadow side and the part of humanity that is within us all, and to forgive people for being human and not being able to ascend out of cruelty. I’m still learning about this; it’s quite a journey. To have worked with veterans who were emotionally disturbed, and to work in a Ford Motors company—I was one of the first women to work on the line in Lorain, Ohio, which was one of the biggest Ford Motors Company [factories] of that era. And I learnt a lot, being a working-class person and being part of a union. What an incredible union we had [back then]; the UAW (United Auto Workers) really took care of us, and so many unions have been busted up. So, there’s so much there, and I could write memoir forever, but I need to move on to fiction at this point.
It’s very interesting because what is fate and what is free will? We think about that. But trigger warning: I was raped by a Vietnam vet and held captive for three days, and it was a very brutal experience. But then, when I was emancipated from a reformatory, I was placed into a veterans’ hospital to work with them.
I had read about that horrific incident, but I didn’t realise. So, that rape actually happened beforehand?
Yup, the rape happened before my job working with art, with veterans, which was an extremely illuminating experience. I really had to think about all the biggest issues. What is war about? Why do men become violent? I think the strongest part of my vocation is speaking about women and what women have gone through in the generations: my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s generation. But I’ve learnt a lot about men and how that gender is pressured in ungodly, cruel ways to be a certain way.
It’s interesting when women have to repress so much—their hurt or their repression goes inward. They hurt themselves or they dissolve into insanity and madness, whereas men hurt other people. It becomes a violent act towards others, more so than women. And it’s not that men suffer any less than women when it comes to a more spiritual aspect.
I was watching the film Women Talking. There was a moment where one of the characters turns to the young man who’s taking notes for the women and says [spoiler alert here], ‘How would you feel if no one ever cared about your thoughts or what you were thinking. How would you feel?’ That was my mother’s generation, and that was my grandmother’s generation. They were working-class women trapped in a society that didn’t care about what they thought, and they were supposed to play specific roles. My mother chose schizophrenia—and I think it was a choice, I really do—and her mother chose music but suffered because of it. And that’s written about in the book. So, it’s so interesting, all of these issues about men and women and what I came to see through my own experiences and also [through my] ancestors. I’m really into ghosts. I learn a lot from ghosts. If you’re willing to listen, they have a lot to teach.
With what your mum experienced, did that give you a determination or a path that made you sure you weren’t going to follow in her footsteps?
Most definitely. In the 1950s and 1960s—and this is pre-second-wave feminism—women were wives and mothers and weren’t really encouraged to do anything but. And to be the perfect wife and mother, in the sense of the Donna Reed [figure], which was a TV show about a woman who was the perfect housewife and mother, and who dressed in a specific way—all of the detrimental things that women were caged into. My mother was not that. She had grown up with a mother who was incredibly creative but also suffered because of her creativity.
My mother also had a very abusive husband who beat her and was a very ignorant man, and she cracked. It’s just kind of like all of the oppression she felt just exploded, and her imagination took over as schizophrenia, helped along by the drugs the psychiatrists were giving her—speed, primarily, because speed psychosis can bring on mental illness. On one hand, my mum was very abusive to me and her other children, and on the other hand, she was extremely, creatively imaginative.
I could’ve chosen to concentrate on the abuse and allow myself to be perpetually damaged by it, or to choose the imagination and the creativity, which was her legacy for me. And it gave me the courage to say, ‘I’m never going to be the part of her that inherited the abuse from man and from society. I’m going to be the part of her that was brave and courageous and reached for imagination.’ And I was able to take risks because of that. I had a tremendous amount of courage. And I see that as her legacy and my grandmother’s legacy to me.
Thank you for using the word “courage”, because for this edition of JANE, our editor, Annika, chose certain words, emotions, or values, and then we personified those for our pieces. And the word that I chose for you was courage. Because that’s your story. I watched your Women of Rock oral history, and I know you spoke a lot about your life in that, and I was just astounded by the way you spoke about certain things. To be honest, I had to pause sometimes, to take in what had happened to you. But the way that you spoke about it, you were saying it with so much love to yourself but also with so much love and understanding to the people who were cruel to you. There wasn’t any bitterness, and I kept thinking how did you do that?
I think my sobriety has a lot to do with that. I mean, I was a mess. As soon as I was emancipated, I started drinking and drugging to kind of repress everything because I couldn’t parse the good from the bad. I didn’t have emotional intelligence, so I would just cover it up with the drinking and the drugs. I didn’t get sober until I was in my thirties, and that’s when the process of healing began. I met other people in the [Twelve Step] program. I had felt very isolated and solitary in the way that I had grown up, that no one would ever understand me, or I would never meet anyone who had gone through an inch of what I experienced, and that became very egoistic, like ‘The world owes me because I’ve gone through this,’ and I was kind of a reprobate in a lot of ways.
It was sobriety that put me on the path of healing to go to therapy, to work a spiritual program. I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t stopped drinking, I can tell you that much. And it also really affected my music career, but that’s a whole other memoir.
It feels like you hit New York at a time when you were ready to explode creatively, and then New York exploded creatively too at the same time. I mean, I have such a romantic view of that period, which I know a lot of people do, but I’d love for you to talk about it.
It was such an amazing period and place, and people are still so provoked about what was going on. I’m writing about it now. Because my mother was schizophrenic and some of the situations I was in [when I was in] reformatory school were so odd and different than most people, when I got to New York and saw what was going on there, it was like a reflection of everything I had already experienced. It was so different from the conservative lifestyles that people were living at the time and so many women [were living at the time]. And I attest this to Patti Smith.
Patti Smith came out with Horses in 1975, and it really changed the paradigm for women and creativity. Because not only was she a writer, writing poetry books and making drawings, but when she did Horses, it was kind of like a clarion call for women to be themselves. She was so androgynous, she was so brilliant, and it created a movement in Europe and in America of women moving to New York City to explore their own creativity, unfettered by any gender norms or expectations or oppressions.
When I got there, so many women [were] doing things. Nan Goldin I had met in Cleveland, but there was Nan Goldin and Kathy Acker and Barbara Kruger, people from all these different artistic pursuits. Lizzie Borden the filmmaker. We were all there, making music, making art, making film, making poetry. There were women coming from Berlin, there was the band Malaria! and the Au Pairs in England, and Lizzy Mercier [Descloux] from Paris. We were all together making art, and we just adamantly refused to be anything but free.
But because of that, I think it also inspired the men in the scene to take risks because they had us to compete with, and we were doing so much and with such wild imaginings, and they had to keep up. We were feminists by proxy. We didn’t call ourselves feminists. We didn’t call ourselves gay or straight or anything, we just moved in a very fluid, organic way in terms of our sexuality. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but that’s the way the scene developed. Everybody was mixing with everyone, and there wasn’t the divisiveness you feel today in terms of all the different camps and labels and brands we seem to fit into, which to me is conformity, really. We compartmentalise, and capitalist corporations can take advantage of us by putting [us] into these little boxes in order to sell to us. It’s a type of commodification. I’m not judging anyone—people do what they want to do— but there is a big groupthink involved in all of this. That was the furthest from our minds in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was very free.
And part of that was that we could afford apartments for, like, 50 bucks, 100 bucks a month in these really broken-down apartment buildings that the landlords were eager to give to us for that amount of money. We didn’t have to work corporate jobs like young artists do today, so we were very, very free. Economics had a lot to do with it as well.
I also want to talk about your time at your reformatory school, where you got into gospel singing, and what that gave you.
Marycrest School for Girls was a type of reformatory on a convent with the Sisters of Good Shepherd, which was one offshoot of three orders that originated in France, and some went to Ireland and some came to America, and I’m sure their tentacles went all over. I know that Sinead O’Connor was at a similar convent school—I don’t know [for] how long, but she did spend time in what they call Magdalene Laundries. Some of them were far more draconian than others. The school that I was in was semi-draconian. We were locked down, we did live in dormitories, and we were supervised 24/7, but there wasn’t any physical cruelty going on as you hear [about] in some of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.
Then Blossom Hill was a higher security reformatory, and that was probably 80% black girls to white. And Cleveland was a very—still is a very— segregated city. In those days, blacks and whites did not mix at all. I came from a very working-class family, and my mother was not a racist at all. She idolised black people. My father was an Italian working-class racist. So, I grew up hearing craziness from him, and my mother being beaten for it, basically. And then I end up in this reformatory. I was the odd person out. No other white kid I knew would have any exposure to anyone black. The way we bonded was through music. We had a choice to go to Catholic services on Sundays or Baptist services, and, of course, I chose Baptist, because of the music, you know. And really, I think it was my voice that allowed me to assimilate into that culture and that school. They accepted me because of my voice.
Gospel music was really a bridge [for me] from my grandmother’s music. She was a honky-tonk and stride piano player. Singing with her was what started me on the musical path, and then being in Blossom Hill, gospel music was just revelatory, because there’s nothing like twenty girls and women singing harmonies together. I think God is music, I really do. I mean, that music would raise the hair off the back of my neck. And it made me feel so close to whatever the power is that’s out there. I connected with it through gospel music, and we had a ball.
We played “the game”—that’s what homosexuality was called in reformatory school. You know, you had the stud, which meant you were butch or a boy, or [if you were] a lady, you were a femme. And we acted out the most macho, egregious states of men. We acted like little pimps, macking on the ladies. It was us modelling what we saw on the outside—“the outs,” we called it. But we had so much fun. We created our own families and created our own society, and the people who ran the school knew what was going on, but they kind of turned their heads a bit. And probably, maybe only 20% of the girls in there ended up being gay on the “outs,” but inside, almost all were playing the game. We were teenagers, and we were coming into our sexuality, and we were locked up, and of course you’re going to want to romance other women. It was just very accepted there.
There’s a performance of yours at the Peppermint Lounge with The Bloods, and you have so much swagger, you’re mesmerising, so I can see you being the little pimp there. With The Bloods, they came out of the No Wave scene, and they were billed as the all-queer rock group. And the No Wave scene didn’t really have any labels, as you said before, so I was wondering if things had started to change by then?
In terms of sexuality, we were all gay, but we weren’t really outed until a journalist in the New York Rocker outed us in the paper. It was really hard on my guitar player because her family didn’t know she was gay, and he basically outed her, and they found out, so she had to deal with the whole struggle of coming out to her family due to this journalist.
It’s so interesting, because I recently posted a few clips of us playing at this festival called the Venus Weltklang Festival in Berlin, and it was mostly women bands and women-led bands like The Slits, the Au Pairs, The Bloods. We were a really good band musically. We weren’t just punk; we were very rock’n’roll. Of course, we couldn’t get touched with a barge pole because we were known as “the little gay hellions.” We did a little mini tour of Europe where we played in Holland—a few times in Amsterdam—Berlin, London, and Birmingham. We fancied ourselves as the female Rolling Stones—groupies and drugs and the whole shebang. We had a reputation as the girls who said ‘No,’ because we wouldn’t compromise. There was one record company man that wanted to sign us and wanted us to give away 50% of our career to him, and we said no, and he was furious, livid!
It was really, really hard for us being gay at that time in 1979–80. We had a rough road, and eventually we broke up because we couldn’t really go any further than where we were. In terms of the scene, we opened for The Clash and so did Bush Tetras, who are still together to this day, and I admire them to this day. But it was still pretty casual in terms of who was gay and who was not, in terms of branding and labels and all of that. Although, there was a very strong lesbian scene starting up in New York City at the time too, where women were going to certain clubs and workshops.
I remember you also mentioned in the Women in Rock podcast all the homophobic backlash with Sophie B. Hawkins too, when you were a backing singer for her. [Sony wanted to drop Hawkins when she said in an interview she was ‘omnisexual.’]
That was just horrible. They put so much pressure on Sophie, and I don’t want to talk about her journey so much, because that’s for her to tell. But for me, it was my bowing out of the commercial music business at that point. I just couldn’t take the homophobia anymore. And I decided I was going to stop doing music, and I moved down to LA and started working on my writing skills. But yeah, the homophobia was rife, and it was also rife in England.
I mean, my friend Helen Terry, the singer for Culture Club, who had a brilliant voice, was a brilliant singer, she happened to be chubby and gay. The male journalists in England tore her apart, they called her names, it was awful the way they treated her, and they basically ruined her career. And it was such a tragedy because she was such a great singer. She ended up being a producer for the BBC, of music programs. She ended up doing well, of course, but the tragedy is we lost her voice.
We could say the same for you, and everything that happened to you in your commercial career. Each time you came so close…
It was such a dichotomy of being a woman in the No Wave and post-punk scene and then entering the commercial music business, which was all about the control of women. And it was really hard to navigate that.
In a sense, I got signed to Geffen because they saw something about my authenticity as a singer and an artist that they thought they could work with. But the moment that I got signed, they said, ‘You have to fire your manager’—Jane Friedman, who was Patti Smith’s manager, whom I adored—and it was just [about] all these controls. ‘You can’t say this, you can’t do this, write some hits, do this, that’s not a hit, dress like this.’ It was relentless, and I kept coming up against that and how to navigate it and not wanting to navigate it.
So, a part of me is responsible for “self-sabotaging” a commercial music career because I had to start saying no at a certain point. There was also a Me Too moment in there, and it was really tough, so I just decided that for a while being a backing singer was fine because I liked the people I was singing with, and it was pressure off of me being controlled. But then after Sophie, I just said, ‘I’m out.’
With your writing, did you see it more as an extension of writing songs, or was writing something you always did? Your words are so visceral. When I read them, I feel them, and they’re so beautiful.
Thank you. That’s so generous and sweet of you to say. I started writing stories as a young kid, but because I was taken out of the home and everything was disrupted, I got taken out of that path. And I loved poetry. My favourite poet was Percy Bysshe Shelley—not only because he was a brilliant poet but because there was activism and anarchy in his poetry, a political force, that I felt very akin to.
It’s in Twist [that] I had a really cruel foster sister destroy my writing once, and one of the first drafts of Twist: An American Girl I lost in an apartment that was taken over by someone in the late 1970s when I started writing the book. And as courageous as I am, Shana, a couple of blows like that made me shut down my writing self. I was very hurt; I was very wounded by those instances. So, I wrote songs for a long time, but then finally came back to writing again in the early 1990s, writing stories and working on the book again.
It’s amazing to me that you’re self-taught in music and writing and you’re so proficient at them. What would be your advice to new writers who are starting out?
I don’t know about that, I’ve got a long way to go! My advice would be: don’t follow any academic prompts. Academia is the death of writing, to me. Yet at the same time, if you look at The New York Times bestseller list, there are no working-class writers there. They’re either from a writing program or MFAs, and I think personally, that’s really hurting our society. If you cut people out, if they don’t have a mirror for their authentic lives and voices, they’re going to get pissed off culturally.
I would say: be authentic, and don’t follow any writing program—even grammar. To me, that’s not even important if it’s somehow repressing what you need to say from more of a heart-based place as opposed to more of an intellectual space where the language becomes so dry nobody cares, except for that elite group of academics and writers. It’s a very insular world. I had to be really courageous to try and get these books published because people don’t want to hear voices like mine in that specific world. It denies the fact they’ve put all this time and money into academia.
If I could give any advice, pay such close attention to your heart when you’re writing, and [write] in a voice that feels real to you. Never play to the crowd. Because when you play to the crowd, you might as well give up. Art comes from a very singular place in us, and we have to stay true to that.