HOW I RUINED COURTNEY LOVE’S DRESS

A True Life Tale of Sleaze

When I was hanging around San Francisco State selling weed and taking Afro-Haitian dance classes, I had a comely friend we’ll call “Lila.”  Lila was a gorgeous German bleach-blonde with a bomb-destroying body, redolent of long thirties sports cars, Greta Garbo, and the Jantzen swimwear logo.  She dressed very much like I did in those days:  in Lycra spandex leggings and ripped up T-shirts — kind of a glam-rock, jazz-dancer look. Lila was more overtly sexy though: her leggings were flesh-colored.  She wasn’t in dance classes, she was just a tremendous slut — a groupie in the Pamela des Barres class — the shimmering kind of peach-flavored hussy in a silky kimono who sometimes end up immortalized in song.   So far, her occasional Mohican boyfriend from the death-rock band “Specimen” had written her no deathless odes.  “Specimen” lived in a house with all the walls painted black, and Halloween spider webs clinging to the corners.  “Sometimes,” she confided in me, “my boyfriend and I like to play voodoo-rape.” 

Lila was roommates with Courtney Love.  This was long before Courtney Love had established herself as one of the great rock n’roll shipwrecks of our time.  At that point, she and Lila were living in a Victorian in the Castro district.  Courtney was already unusual.  Minutes after meeting me, she dragged me into the front room of her house by the wrist to show me a scrapbook she had been working on.  “I’m going to be the best actress in the world,” she told me, with no irony whatsoever.   She was, at that point, in a local band called the White Stains (actual name), and somewhat notorious around San Francisco for stealing other people’s band equipment from rehearsal spaces.   She showed me an enormous bottle of Valium that had been prescribed for her — like a liter of Valium. 

  One night the Lords of the New Church were playing in North Beach, so I decided to go with Lila and a group of her friends who were more or less professional groupies. 

I got dressed at Lila’s house and thought I looked alright, but Courtney had other ideas about what I needed — she was already known for her “Kinderwhore” look: real Victorian nightgowns, worn with your hair teased out, dark, smoky makeup, a pale powdered face, and black tights and shoes. Very Ellen von Unwerth. 

  “Here,” she said, tossing a feather-light piece of ancient embroidered cotton to me, the weight of a Kleenex.  “This nightgown was my grandmother’s, so don’t destroy it,” Courtney told me. 

I promised her I wouldn’t. 

But I lied. 

I had never before, nor have I since, been in an actual groupie experience.  We were all admitted into the hotel rooms of Lords of the New Church — an interconnected number of suites.   I wasn’t actually into the idea of doing any drugs, or fucking anybody, so I gravitated toward talking to the dumbest and oldest member of the band, just to avoid anything unconscionable. 

A little while later, we were all in a big black van with the band, getting ready to go to the show when the van suddenly pulled over to the curb, and the guy in the passenger seat rolled down his window talk to a guy on the street. 

The guy outside the van window was a guy named “Jones” who I had had a crush on at school for months. 

He was a tough, funny, hyper-intelligent guy from Boston who wore long overcoats and looked like he should be playing opposite Lana Turner in a hard-boiled noir epic and regularly played hardcore basketball with black dudes in the neighborhood.  He had impulsively asked me to move in with him earlier that week, despite the fact that we had never been on a date, so this felt like the moment. 

So instead of going to the Lords of the New Church concert, I jumped out of the van and placed myself in the protective custody of Jones.  He was glad to see me but it was a little bit awkward, because he was in charge of scoring hard drugs for the band. 

So my first date with Jones ended up being out to the industrial wasteland that was 3rd Street, waiting indefinitely inside a place called “Happy Donuts” for his drug connection to come through. 

The drug connection never made it, but Jones and I ended up together for nearly 2 years -  my entire college experience, anyway.   The first date lasted 4 days.  I remember, at one point, we were rolling around on the beach, and the nightgown was utterly disintegrating in the sand. Courtney’s nightgown, after about 2 days, started to shred into little half inch strips.  To keep it on my body, I kept tying tiny knots in it. 

I felt terrible.  It wasn’t reparable. 

I kept the ruined nightgown in the back of my Volkswagen bug.  At one point Courtney screamed at me outside of her window as I was picking up Lila.  “Hey, do you have my grandmother’s nightgown?” She screamed. 

“Yeah, but I want to fix it for you!” I said. 

“Just give it to me now,” she said. 

I handed over the tiny, destroyed, knotted, stringy pile of thready pulp the beautiful nightgown had become, feeling really terrible about it. 

 She took it rather well, all things considered, but it was the last time we spoke. 

Courtney would later resurface as a friend of Jones’s.  They overdosed on heroin together at least once.  Jones later told me that when he woke up from one such overdose, Courtney was stroking his arm and looking into his eyes, asking, “Do you like me?  Do you think I’m pretty?” — oblivious to the fact that he was totally unconscious and not really breathing. 

Little did any of us know how famous she would become. She was just a weird chick who had a skosh more psychopathology than the rest of us.  That’s what fame requires, though. 

In any case, Courtney Love, if you ever see this: I am still so, so sorry about your grandmother’s nightgown.   In the end, it was a victim of love. 

Cintraw@gmail.com

Artwork: “Devki,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2020