E-Mail This Article to a Friend A scum-shock queen grows up, continued

At 19, she married Costes, a perpetually naked Parisian performance artist, after they’d been together in person less than two weeks. Together, they assumed the Suckdog mantle. Their first time out, Costes got naked, strapped an umbrella on his back, and added a turkey baster for a phallic squirter. Carver wore nothing but Christmas lights. They tossed a noisy cassette in a boom box. Then they yelled, brawled, screeched, and everyone ran away.

Other times during those Suckdog days, Carver would hit people. She’d dare people to hit her. She’d pee, pretending to be a cat or a dying person, while Costes would make fake-fecal mixes of spinach and chocolate pudding. They’d stage rape scenes. Shows would get cancelled when town selectmen heard what Suckdog was all about, as happened in Rowley, Massachusetts, in November 1989.

In Drugs Are Nice, Carver tells this story in leaps and bounds, sometimes forgetting the narrative glue — mostly because the era was already recounted in splotches all over Rollerderby. But one formative experience that wasn’t really covered candidly in her ’zine was her sadistic relationship with Boyd Rice, a shock-noise cult figure and hermetic hard-drinking basement dweller who fathered her son Wolfgang, who was born with a missing chromosome. Rice’s drinking worsened and he continued to flex his manipulative muscle, so when Carver got pregnant again, Rice demanded that she have an abortion. She did. They split only when a hammered Rice strangled her, smashed her head against a futon frame, and ended up in jail.

"I had to get drunk every day to write the Boyd chapters," Carver admits, sunlight from the coffee shop’s front window casting yellow onto her tall visage. "It was the only way that I could write this hideous stuff. My daughter was in preschool from nine [am] to noon, so I would be drunk writing. My husband would pick her up from school, then I would sober up."

Above all, Carver’s biggest difficulty in making the private public has been honestly discussing her situation with Rice. "You know I have an open marriage," she says, lowering her voice to a whisper in the coffee shop, even though she’s telling someone with a recorder. "So I still have the whole process of falling in love and seducing and all that. And now it’s strange because [potential love interests] read bad things that happened with Boyd and that’s, like, creepy. You don’t like to think about someone you feel new with trapped in that yucky situation. That almost makes someone seem dirty, a lot more than being a former prostitute, or having fake shit onstage."

Carver also admits that she worried about her safety while writing the book. After all, Boyd is on a first-name basis with Charles Manson. "I briefly thought, ‘He could come kill me because I’m killing his career. And what does he have to lose?’ Then I thought, ‘He hates jail. He’ll never kill me because he hates jail.’ " She also had their son to consider. "But [Wolfgang’s] really in his own world. He’s schizophrenic and he’s not going to be doing research on his parents in the library. It’s just not going to happen."

One person she didn’t necessarily expect to hear from was Stanton LaVey, someone she briefly mentions around the time Rice took her, pregnant, to meet Church of Satan head Anton LaVey. In passing, she prints the rumor that Stanton was not only Anton’s son but his grandson, a product of incest. Nearly two weeks ago, Carver blogged on her MySpace site that she’d just been assaulted by the younger LaVey, who was also suing her for libel, and his female partner Szandora outside her Los Angeles book-tour stop. But typically, Carver wouldn’t admit to any fear. "That was the wimpiest beating I ever got," Carver writes. "This whole tour we’ve been trying to illustrate the crazy times in the late ’80s underground, and that’s back when I was getting in fights, so not only are we doing it onstage, but outside ... too."

Back at home, where Carver has to wait for a San Francisco Bay Guardian reporter to call, she says she’s not worried about having to explain her lifelong choices to Sadie when the three-year-old gets older — not the never-ending string of lovers, the whoring, the abject insanity. "I’m not ashamed of a single thing that I’ve done," Carver asserts. "Not one thing. There are things that I’ve done that have been horrible mistakes, like getting pregnant after Wolfgang and aborting the child — that was a horrible thing and I feel shame about it because it was a wrong, bad thing to do. But I don’t feel ashamed of it, like I don’t want [Sadie] to know. But I certainly don’t feel bad about being a prostitute. And I don’t feel bad about being slutty because," she giggles, "I have a lot of love to give."

After this, Carver’s considering film or music. "I’d want to tell funny, truthful, little stories, but make them have a rhyming chorus. And a lot of back-up singers, maybe six friends come over and go ‘OOOOOH!’ really loud.... You’re going to hear me telling a story: ‘And then this happened, it was really gross.’ And what rhymes with gross? ‘I peed on toast?’ Yeah, that’s what I’ll sing."

POST SCRIPT

Halloween at Boston’s Club Europa: the phallus in Carver’s bipedal book tour. The Drugs Are Nice expedition hasn’t been a traditional reading series — Carver is constitutionally opposed to those. "Making authors read from their books is a sin and a crime," she lamented back in New Hampshire. "Like watching somebody paint in slow motion."

So tonight, as a top-billed act of TraniWreck, a local semi-monthly all-gender cabaret, Carver emcees two scenes from Drugs Are Nice. First, her roving ensemble of volunteer actors re-enacts the infamous potato-peeler incident and an entire ketchup bottle gets poured on a wrist-skinning actress. Then there’s "My 15-minute Date with G.G. Allin" — a retelling of Carver’s brief make-out session with the dead rocker.

Gussied up in fishnets, a slitted skirt, and a satiny sleeveless top, Carver seems more at ease here than she did in her own home: she’s loud, giggly, coquettish, playful, howling. She even makes out with local B-movie director Warren Lynch when he correctly guesses "Lydia Lunch" during a participatory quiz of sinister lyrics from ’80s post-punk musicians. At the end, Carver tries to read a conclusion, but the club din has gotten so loud it’s nearly impossible to hear. So Erik Swanson — a Carver cohort clad in boots, a jacket, and a thong, who’d earlier played G.G. Allin — grabs the mike. "This used to be Lisa Suckdog, ladies and gentleman. Now it’s some old lady who wrote a book."

Then Swanson invites a trio of young women onstage to pee. All of them cute, the three women tramp onstage, tug down their underwear, and squat over an empty pizza box while Carver watches. "When you see a boundary crossed like that," she’d said of such displays the day before, "it moves something inside of you: you feel kind of shook up and free and scared and it's exciting."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com.