The Dirty Boys Author(S): John Waters and Mike Kelley Reviewed Work(S): Source: Grand Street, No
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Jean Stein The Dirty Boys Author(s): John Waters and Mike Kelley Reviewed work(s): Source: Grand Street, No. 57, Dirt (Summer, 1996), pp. 8-22 Published by: Jean Stein Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25008031 . Accessed: 01/02/2012 18:11 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Jean Stein is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Grand Street. http://www.jstor.org John Waters, Manson CopiesDivine's Hairdo, 1993. JOHN WATERS/MIKE KELLEY The D irty Boys -February 21, 1996 JOHNWATERS So happy Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Don't you think Catholics always feel a little dirty? MIKEKELLEY Yeah, I think they do. It's bred into them. JOHNWATERS Exactly. And I think sex will always be a little better because it is dirty. You can never really escape that, no matter how healthy you get. MIKEKELLEY Yeah, it's true. It charges everything. JOHNWATERS So actually I am perversely glad that Iwas raised Catholic even though I think it screwed me up. MIKEKELLEY Oh yeah, definitely. That's for sure. JOHNWATERS Now, have you ever heard of this compulsive disease called pica which makes you want to eat dirt? I've been obsessed with it for a long time. MIKEKELLEY I've heard about people having the compulsion to eat things like metal. JOHNWATERS The dirt thing seems to exist mostly in the South and among poor people. 9 JOHN WA TERS / MIKE KELLEY MIKEKELLEY Oh, yeah. I heard about this-that they like to eat that red clay. JOHNWATERS Exactly. I never knew anyone that did it, did you? MIKEKELLEY Well, when Iwas a kid, near me there was an area where I think there were a lot of southern blacks. I used to see people chewing this red clay. I don't know where they got it. I always thought it was sort of like chewing gum. JOHNWATERS Almost like chewing your cud. I think it is probably bad for you eventually. I have this article from FDA Consumermagazine which says that in some cities, when the clay isn't available, the craving is often transferred to laundry starch. MIKEKELLEY Yeah, my mom worked at a liquor store that also sold laundry detergent and had a little deli cabinet. People used to buy the laundry starch in these little packets, like baggies, and chew it. JOHNWATERS I'm going to try it.Maybe it's the drug of the future. Except it says here that the starch interferes with your iron absorption and adds 1,600 calories every time you eat it. MIKE KELLEY Damn. JOHNWATERS Maybe it's a form of bulimic behavior to eat starch. The article goes on to say that among adult males with pica, "the bizarre forms ... and the substances consumed are limited only by the imagina tion."Now tellme, if you had to eat one of the following, would you prefer: "toilet-bowl fresheners, mothballs, charcoal, inner tubes, cigarette butts, tomato seeds, refrigerator frost, hair,match heads, toilet paper, or ashes"? Did you ever eat any of that as a child? MIKE KELLEY No. JOHNWATERS Me neither. I used to eat string from towels. MIKEKELLEY I liked to chew on the collars of my shirts. I'd chew the ends into these wads. I'd sit in class and nervously do that. Or I'd chew on the end of my tie. 1 0 THE DIRTY B O YS JOHNWAT1ERS I bet those shirts had laundry starch. But you didn't chew on your own hair? MIKE KELLEY No. JOHNWATERS Apparently a lot of kids get addicted to chewing on their own hair. This is a major problem. Children develop these large hair balls called trichobezoars. They have to be surgically removed from their stomachs. MIKEKELLEY It's better to eat it than to put it in other places. I knew a guy who worked in an emergency room, and he was always getting guys who put things up their urethras. They would come inwith something stuck up there. I remember two cases he described. One had used a coat hanger with beads on it, and he couldn't get it out. The other guy would feed an earthworm up his dick, and itwould crawl up into his bladder. So he would always come in with these bladder infections. JOHNWATERS I bet he was Catholic. Did you ever go to the Hellfire Club in New York City? MIKE KELLEY No. JOHNWATERS Itwas a straight and gay S&M place-before AIDS. AIDS ruined everything. But I saw a guy in there once who obviously had a sexual attraction to dirt. He had on the filthiest pair of under pants and was lying on the ground, jerking off and licking the floor. But, Imean, for four hours. People just stepped over him and walked around him. I thought, "Thank God, I don't have that deviation. Life's hard enough." MIKEKELLEY That does sound like an embarrassing condition. JOHN WATERS I guess Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoons has the same problem in a way. MIKE KELLEY Oh yeah, I never thought of that. Luckily they never show him with his pants off. 1 1 JOHN WA TERS / MIKE KELLEY Z ~~~...Om e V_ w ~ bv_ John Waters, 1971. JOHNWATERS I know. But maybe Charles Schulz has pica. MIKEKELLEY One of the reasons Andre Breton threw Salvador Dali out of the Surrealist group was because of that painting, The Great Masturbator. It's got a guy with shitty underpants on. That was so offensive to Breton. JOHNWATERS Seems like a lot of things were offensive to him. Did you read that one book, Investigating Sex,where all the Surrealists discuss sex? It sounds like my parents sitting around talking. MIKEKELLEY I know, it's incredible how prudish ... 12 THE DIRTY B O YS JOHNWATERS If there were a contest between L.A., New York, and Baltimore to see which was the dirtiest city,which one do you think would win? I don't mean dirty as in trash on the streets.When I say dirty, I guess Imean it favorably in some ways. It is interesting to me at least. MIKEKELLEY Do you mean like funky? JOHNWATERS Well, I never use that word. I hate itwhen people saymy films are funky. It is about the only adjective that gets on my nerves. But I know both L.A. and Baltimore have bars that are dirty, that are great. They are without irony. I don't think there is one in Manhattan. I think if you move toManhattan you give up the right to real dirt because you're going for trendy dirt. You go to dirty L.A. bars, don't you, sometimes? MIKEKELLEY Yeah, I used to, but I hate hipster bars. In my old neighborhood near Santa Monica andWestern, there used to be a lot of drunks' bars. But that was before the rise of gangs and all that. JOHNWATERS So theywere still safe to go to. MIKEKELLEY Itwas just old drunks. They weren't filled with able-bodied men, you know; there wasn't a lot of street action in front of them or anything. I used to like to sit in those places and have drinks. JOHNWATERS I still like to go exploring in Baltimore, in places that are not hip bars at all, places that are totally like biker bars or mutant bars, really. We have a bar in Baltimore that's really great and dirty called the Atlantis. It has gay strippers-I mean, male strippers, they aren't necessarily gay. Women go too. It's right next to a pen itentiary. So, in the beginning, it used to be the first place you could get ajob when you got out ofjail. You had nude burglars it was kind of funny. What is so creepy in there is that you can never sit at the bar, because if you tip them, they "teabag" you. If they're dancing above you, they hit your forehead with their balls. I love that term "teabagging." I'd never heard it until Iwas there. That's the kind of dirty bar that makes me laugh. 13 JOHN WA TERS / MIKE KELLEY MIKEKELLEY There used to be a bar in L.A. near Melrose that I think was a transvestite pick-up place for ex-cons. Itwas kind of multicultural. ... If Iwas really drunk I'd stick my head in there. JOHNWATERS I think that dirt is basically very anti-American. I have a friend whose mother cut down a tree in her yard. She said, "Why did you do that,Mom?" and her mother said, "Trees are dirty."And they are; they drop things. The other thing I've noticed recently: when I'm driving to New York on the New Jersey Turnpike and I go to the men's room, I see all these normal men who presumably took a shower when they got up. They run in and take a piss and then stand there and wash their hands for twentyminutes with all this soap like they just performed open-heart surgery.