
Hell Is Other People
Speak, memory: “Nan’s pussy got damp but not soaking wet,” the musician Richard Hell recalls late in his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. “It was slick, like a squeaky rubber duck.” There are many shivery, illicit pleasures in this louche memoir of bygone bands and lost downtown haunts, including the author’s anatomically vivid, clinically surreal descriptions of past conquests. Hell writes of meeting—in a late-’60s poetry class taught by José Garcia Villa—a “sad, hysterical girl with red capillaries on her nose and cheekbones, and large breasts that looked like twin