Photo: Kate Simon
It’s hard to imagine Nick Tosches ever having been young. His interests, the way he dressed, the language he used, his love of cigarettes—everything about Tosches was out of time. He wasn’t so much from a different era as he was from a different sensibility, one that refused to distinguish between highbrow and lowbrow, didn’t countenance small talk, wore ties and stood when a lady entered the room, but also trucked in ethnic slurs. He saw no contradiction in being both courtly and vulgar.
Tosches, who died on Sunday at the age of sixty-nine, began his writing career as a record reviewer for Creem and Rolling Stone. Throughout the seventies, he wrote about music with audacious flair, mixing Latin phrases and Biblical themes with a sailor’s vocabulary. Album reviews couldn’t hold him, and in 1988 he published his first novel, Cut Numbers, about a loan shark.
In 2012, he published Me and the Devil, a novel about a writer named Nick who lived in the same downtown New York neighborhood Tosches lived in, and had the same opinions, friends, and outlook, and who regained his waning vitality by drinking the blood of young women during violent sexual bouts. “It’s the vampirism of trying to regain something of youth through young flesh,” he said when I visited him, on a magazine assignment, in his brick-walled apartment. We talked for two hours, sometimes about his book, but more often about vanity, technology, illness, how New York had changed, and old age. Tosches was observant, restless, and hilarious. Our conversation remained unpublished—here’s a small part of it, in tribute.
INTERVIEWER
I think this is a book that no one under the age of forty or fifty could have written.
TOSCHES
No matter how gifted, or what powers of imagination they had, no one under forty or even fifty could pull it off. It’s a book about aging as much as it is about anything else. And seeing the world change. It’s a book about love. And it’s always, in a way, about books, because there are certain small parcels of ancient wisdom I’ve been fortunate enough to discover through the years, and have held closely. And I keep trying to spread them. I don’t even know if people are looking for wisdom these days.
I think people are looking for better cable TV service.
You’re right! Or the smart phone with the next gizmo. And that says a lot. It’s like everybody’s afraid to die, but how often do you hear, Oh, I can’t wait until this week is over? You want to get closer to what terrifies you most. Through writing a book, I get close to what scares me about myself. People just … they’re not really living. It’s just a certain—this breath is really the only thing we have. That’s it, you know? That’s it.
Abbie Hoffman once said, “They tell you when you get old, you get wiser. You know what you get? You get hemorrhoids.”
Well, I had hemorrhoids when I was nineteen and really rocking, so I don’t know what the hell he was talking about. He was a guy who couldn’t get enough attention, so he killed himself! Talk about not living your life! He just had a fabricated life. He didn’t know what to do with the real one.
I just know that the world is going more insane. One consolation, one good part about getting much closer to the grave than to the cradle, is that the feeling of being a speck in the universe, which we all are, doesn’t bother me one bit. I never, ever thought I’d outlive civilization! Which I think I’ve already done. And it feels great!
When did the decline of civilization begin?
I think it’s fallen apart in the last … like, right now. As we speak, it’s just going to hell. The whole thing is going down, and I like it. I like watching people get stupider and stupider, ‘til they couldn’t tell if they were getting raped unless their fucking phone rang and someone across the street told them.
I mentioned Abbie Hoffman in order to say that getting older is always a surprise to people. We’ve seen our grandparents and parents get older, yet it’s still a surprise when it happens to us.
Well, up to a point, it’s virgin territory, and it’s like, Oh, this is going to go on forever, except that life is going to get better. And then you realize that it doesn’t. If you live the right way—and the right way to me would be considered the wrong way by many—you do gain a good outlook, and it comes down to this—it doesn’t pay to worry. It doesn’t pay to give a fuck. Because ninety-nine percent of what you worry about ain’t never gonna happen. What’s gonna happen is gonna come over your left shoulder and just do you in.
Did you write this book, among other things, to work out your understanding of being older?
Yeah.
So what’s your current understanding?
Just enjoy every fucking blessed breath. Just enjoy it, because it’s not getting better. Even at the senior rates, I don’t go to movies. I derive my entertainment from bad news. It’s perverse but it’s funny. It’s so fuckin’ funny to overhear people, to observe people. It’s a riot. I don’t like to read newspapers or watch the news. It’s all right here. I just walk out on the street, and there it is.
Rob Tannenbaum writes about music and pop culture for the New York Times, LA Times, New York Magazine, and other publications. He is the coauthor of I Want My MTV, which has been optioned by A24.
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