Lingering on Lizzie the Limey

Timing isn't everything, it's the only thing

Photo Bill Leissner.

The way to view Bill Leissner’s photo galleries is to click and move. There are thousands of photos and you can’t spend too much time on one if you want to get to bed by 2. But last night I stared at this photo a good long while. If you knew Liz West, the British theater actress who lived here in the ‘80s and maybe part of the ‘90s, this photo says it all. Beautiful, inquisitive, naughty, elegant- and that accent! I met her in late ‘87 when she lived behind Star Seeds with Brent Grulke’s then-girlfriend Maggie.

We locked in at a party, and carried on the conversation at her place, deciding to drive to Mexico as soon as we woke up to get married. Instead we went to Long John Silver for fish and chips. (She fucking loved that place!)

One big thing we had in common is losing our mothers to cancer while we were growing up. But such a loss affects females much deeper. Liz never got over losing her mother. While she was chronicling her own cancer battle on Twitter a few years ago, Liz posted the photo below on Mother’s Day. Her mum’s in the scarf, and Liz looks to be about eight. Her last moment of pure happiness. Robbed of a childhood, there’s been a cloud over her ever since.

And now she had a new boyfriend who kinda liked the crystal meth too much. I wasn’t addicted, but I had to use it whenever I had a writing assignment, which started off every two weeks for my Austin Chronicle column. But then came Spin magazine, and National Lampoon and New Times in Phoenix. They don’t call it crank for nothing, as I knocked ‘em out. That packet in my pocket was deadline stress relief. Oh, you’ll get pages in the morning, perfectly typed and retyped. Performance-exhancing drugs are the hardest to kick because they make you reach your potential, which is the greatest high of all.

I wrote my infamous Pogues review in Liz’s bedroom, snorting lines of crank and pissing in a jug just a few feet from where she was sleeping. Lizzie had bought me a book about influential Irish Americans, which stirred up the Mick pride in that piece that put me on the map for a minute and a half. She was supportive of my writing and came with when Texas Monthly sent me to Vidor to write about the Texas Home of the KKK. While I interviewed Grand Dragons, she stayed in the “American owned” motel and studied her lines from “Under Milkwood,” the Dylan Thomas play she’d just been cast in.

My Vidor story never ran but the magazine paid me in full, $2,000 that financed my trip to San Francisco with Brent and Scott Anderson in June ‘88.

I had broken up with Liz before the S.F. move, and I’m still not sure why. I let go of a lot of things in early ‘88, with speed the last of them. I do remember the exact moment I decided to break if off. Liz was all about “Milkwood,” and suddenly her charming accent became pretentious to my ears. “I have a call at 4” she said one day, and I remember thinking “Why don’t you just say you have to be there at 4?” The whole theater thing was so foreign to me. Plays still make me nervous.

We were together only about four months, but we did have the perfect concert date to always remember our time. It was Terence Trent D’Arby at the Austin Opera House in April ‘88, the month after he laid waste to a Grammys stage that was supposed to belong to his hero Michael Jackson. His new single “Wishing Well” was crawling to No. 1.

You know that concert where you get a performer a month before he’s the hottest thing in the music biz (and two years before he’s a has-been?) The energy in the room said we were all lucky to be there, and D’Arby just came out swinging in a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. It felt like Mike Tyson entering the ring, the new, undisputed champion of ‘80s soul music! In this raw departure from Motown, his Pips were a couple of gay British guys who had all the moves. He was a different Prince.

I did a bunch of speed a couple days later and wrote about TTD for Spin. He didn’t do interviews after one bloke quoted him as saying his debut LP The Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby was better than Sgt. Pepper’s. But I didn’t need to talk to him after the show I just saw. I just needed $40 worth of “talent.”

Now, you would think I had it made in early ‘88- writing for the cool national music magazine and dating a charming British actress. But I was miserable because of the speed. I just had to get out of town or I might die like Billie Lee Brammer. Once I heard that The Gay Place author had a fatal stroke after doing speed, I couldn’t do it anymore without having to sit outside the emergency room for a few hours until I calmed down. I was convinced I was dying every fucking time, which kinda takes the fun out of it.

I was gonna move to New Orleans to manage Dash Rip Rock, my favorite bar band, but that disaster was averted when Brent offered San Francisco (the only city in America with more crank than Austin) as an escape. I did speed one more time, to review a Jonathan Richman show for the East Bay Express, but it was a horrible experience. I went to the free clinic for an EKG and the doctor said the only thing wrong with me was that I had cardiac neurosis. Fear of a heart attack produced psychosomatic symptoms. “Up” drugs have been out since ‘88.

Not long after my Bay Area arrival, Spin forwarded me this letter.

“Hopefully I won’t let you down in the future.” The next year I was living in Chicago, where D’Arby played the Park West to celebrate the release of his second album Neither Fish nor Flesh. This venue was half the size of the Austin Opera House. “This guy is gonna blow you away!” I said to a group of critics. “Get ready for the show of the year!” But D’Arby was lame, his attempt to make his Pet Sounds a bloated overreach. Neither Fish wasn’t a sophomore slump, it was a dump. I was taken down a notch in the eyes of my fellow critics.

But we still have D’Arby at the Opera House, me and Liz, and 1700 others. There are times when everything is perfect and that drive to Mexico makes sense. But things change, godammit, they always do.

Here’s my Spin piece on Terence Trent D’Arby.