Book Review: Paging Dr. Mueller
Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories by Cookie Mueller
“Firstly, you’re right about my mind being open, in fact it’s so open at times I feel the wind whistling through it.”
— Cookie Mueller, “Ask Doctor Mueller” column, East Village Eye circa 1983
During her attenuated forty years on earth, the inimitable Cookie (born Dorothy Karen Mueller in 1949) amassed a resume that would blow up LinkedIn.
By her own account (“Haight-Ashbury — San Francisco 1967”), after surviving high school and a less-than-idyllic upbringing in Baltimore, teenaged Cookie split for the West Coast. She arrived just in time for the so-called Summer of Love, and spent the next two years in communal living.
“Knowing that we were the blessed ones in states of grace, we lived clean lives in preparedness and took drugs to kill time. We got ready with our backpacks and our energy granola. We practiced astrology, yoga, levitation, transcendental meditation, astral travel, telekinesis, cabalism, prayer. We waited and waited, and hoped, but the world didn’t fall apart. It was a big letdown.”
As the power of flowers began to decompose, Cookie’s hippie roommates urged her to check into a mental hospital, after an unspecified breakdown. Upon release she returned East. Over the next two decades she went on to toil at “various inane jobs” including: go-go dancer, clothing designer, underground movie actor, barmaid, drug dealer, herbalist, fish packer, credit clerk, bar mitzvah entertainer (“even though I’m not Jewish”), playwright, advice columnist, art critic and posthumously, author.
From 1971 up until her untimely death in 1989, she was also a single mom to Max Mueller, the son who, she declared, “taught me more than anyone.”
Back in Baltimore at the turn of the Seventies, Cookie connected with fledgling film maker John Waters and became a key player in his beyond-eccentric repertory company, appearing alongside Divine, Edie Massey and Mink Stole in trash classics such as Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble.
On the printed page Cookie Mueller exudes natural talent. She’s a born writer: “I started writing when I was six and never stopped completely.” As the Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow once said of himself, she was a great noticer. Her peripatetic life supplied scads of material and she knew what to do with it — intuitively. Throughout the first half of Walking through Clear Water…, each of her autobiographical stories lands like a targeted strike, expanding and/or exploding on the page. They’re funny, perceptive, sensitive, sharp and self aware yet never self conscious.
I first encountered one of the Cookie Mueller stories collected here in an 1982 issue of Bomb magazine. Salty and sweet at the same time, “The Pig Farm — Baltimore & York, Pennsylvania 1969” charts the course of an unlikely star-crossed love affair with sly humor and a deep, possibly bottomless well of empathy. As a storyteller, anyway, Cookie fearlessly navigates every curve in her erratic path without ever coming across as lost or directionless. She may not know where she’s ultimately headed but she understands where she’s been.
Her penchant for hitchiking takes a harrowing turn in “Abduction & Rape — Highway 31, Elkton, Maryland 1969.” Yet even here she displays staggering insight — hard-won understanding — into the “assholes” who kidnapped her and two female friends.
“There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low-down, that all people are quixotic, and haunted, and burdened, and there’s just no way to lift their load for them.”
In her early stories, one crazy incident bleeds into to another, resulting in a tumult of anecdotes and logically impossible sequences that miracuously cohere more often than not. This seeming chaos is grounded by Cookie’s charismatic personality and compassionate instincts, her generosity of spirit, and as Mueller herself admits, more than her share of good luck.
During the mid-Seventies she weathered several unheated seasons in the bohemian enclave of Provincetown on Cape Cod, before moving to New York City. Downtown Manhattan provided a fitting backdrop for her heyday, and perhaps her eventual downfall (“Narcotics”).
Frankly, the 1982–89 art reviews from Details magazine collected here are disappointing, at least compared to the autobiographical tales in the first half of the book. The East Village gallery scene would appear to be fertile territory and I turned to these pieces anticipating jump-started memories of a now-almost-forgotten underworld. Yet instead of documenting the art and artists, Cookie Mueller hovers above the fray or just meanders — performing, riffing and free-associating, delivering monologues that fall somewhere between a semi-memorable reading at an indie bookstore and a mildly diverting early morning club conversation fueled by a few drinks plus a line or three of cocaine.
The Details columns reflect some of the too-cool-for-school downside of Eighties downtown Manhattan. They’re “inside” to the point of insularity. As opposed to the autobiographical stories, where you read in thrilled disbelief, laugh and shake your head — “who IS this woman?” In Details, and to a lesser extent the tongue-in-cheek East Village Eye advice columns, you’re meant to know “who she is,” and to feel a bit left out if you don’t know her. It’s ironic that Cookie became the darling (or den mother) of the Eighties demimonde because in her best writing she’s the living definition of down-to-earth, totally unpretentious, just as satisfied shacking up with a pig farmer as a rockstar (though she inevitably moved on from both).
Ominously, as Cookie eulogizes Jean-Michel Basquiat at the end of 1988, her empathetic spark and gift for casual aphorism finally re-emerge, and combine to moving effect. She attends a lavish (by local standards) party put on by a dissolute and disengaged Basquiat toward the end of his life, and her reaction when the host sneaks out of his own bash is poignant.
“Maybe Jean-Michel had found that packing for the trip was better than getting there, the climb more rewarding than the summit… [L]ooking at him, I began to feel somehow protective, but kind of angry and sort of sorry for him too.”
One year later Cookie Mueller would be gone too, a victim of AIDS-related complications. Her last Details column was about her husband, the artist Vittorio Scarpati, who was mortally ill himself and died in 1989 as well. It’s a beautiful and heart-beaking tribute, not only to Vittorio Scarpati but to an entire community who stood up against a cruel and merciless epidemic.
“Vittorio continues to draw in his hospital room, to compile his illuminated visions, spreading some light around. There is a communique here for all of us that tells of strength and character, bravery, and courage in the midst of adversity and intense physical pain. Vittorio has learned that like a flood of sunlight, hope can vanquish gloom. Things are never so bleak and threatening as we believe.”
Perhaps we can best remember Cookie Mueller the way she encouraged us to remember Jean-Michel Basquiat. And of course by reading her wild and wonderful stories.
“Jean-Michel had a full life. He did everything he could and did all of it well. Don’t feel sorry for him. It’s the rest of us, left behind, we should feel sorry for.”
