[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:19] Jessica: And I am Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City, where we still live.

[00:29] Meg: And where we podcast about New York City in the '80s. I do ripped from the headlines.

[00:34] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:36] Meg: And today we have a special guest. We are. First of all, we should say where we are. We are at the holiday cock. We are at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge. And we've only been here a few minutes, so I don't know why I screwed that up. Which is on St. Mark's and which is well represented in the '80s. We are here with Guy Richard Smit. Jessica, you take it.

[01:01] Guy: Okay.

[01:02] Jessica: I get to hold the thing. Oh, my God. I never get to hold. Oh, I never get to hold the thing. We are very excited to have you. And why don't you start by telling us a little bit about your current social relevance, and then we're going to turn back the clock to your days in the '80s.

[01:22] Guy: My name is Guy Richard Smit, and I am an artist and a cartoonist for The New Yorker. I've lived my whole life in New York. I've been in bands since the '80s. I've done acting. I've done comedy. I've done. Yeah, downtown theater and dance and all kinds of stuff.

[01:42] Meg: I think that's a very interesting place to start because you mentioned that you went to Trinity School when you were little. Well, first of all, what neighborhood did you grow up in?

[01:49] Guy: I grew up in Morningside Heights, 120th Street and Morningside Drive.

[01:54] Meg: And your parents are academics?

[01:57] Guy: My father was a professor at Columbia University and my mother was a professor at Rutgers University.

[02:02] Meg: And so they had you start at Trinity School when you were little. And then what happened?

[02:08] Guy: Well, you know, it was never a great fit for me. It was very academically rigorous. But also the kids were jerks. Incredible jerks. A good many of them.

[02:22] Jessica: Like The Dalton School level.

[02:23] Guy: Well, you know. So I was there at a time when John McEnroe, who was a Trinity School kid, was a hero. And there were so many wannabe John McEnroe's in my school. It was God awful.

[02:37] Meg: That's really interesting. Cause he was kind of a dick. Like, by profession almost.

[02:43] Guy: Right. Yeah. No, we would. I remember getting taken out of homeroom class to watch a match. And he was the quintessential brat. And that was who we were supposed to aspire to apparently.

[02:54] Jessica: For those who aren't familiar with John McEnroe's antics, look him up on YouTube. There's a lot of tennis matches that start well and end in tantrums and thrown rackets. So that's what your peers were aspiring to.

[03:09] Guy: To, so far as I could tell, yes, I heard. Later I ran into my latin teacher, Mr. Flanagan, who I really liked. He was an old school kind of teacher. And apparently I expressed how difficult a time I'd had there. And he, from his telling it was a particularly bad few years of students, that it wasn't typically like that, but man, was it like that when I was there.

[03:37] Meg: And so then you left Trinity School and you went to LaGuardia High School, and you just mentioned all these artistic things that you've done throughout your life. Did you know you were an artist at such a young age?

[03:50] Guy: Well, I didn't have many aptitudes, but one thing I could do was draw, and I enjoyed it. It was the only time when other kids would want to be on a project with me or anything. And I remember I won best artists in the 7th grade and best artist in the 8th grade, and I didn't expect it. And I got a copy of Janson's History of Art: The Modern World that I still own, which is like the quintessential art history book from the period. I don't know if anyone knows what it is now, but I'd started going to because I had so few qualities, I could draw and I expressed the desire to go to Saturday morning classes at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And my parents said, sure. And I went. And I loved it. Totally loved it. I was about ten. And you'd go, first of all, you had the. You'd go there like an hour before the place opened, and you'd be going around and drawing all these incredible things. And I still remember. I walk into different rooms and I can remember certain sculptures. I've literally drawn them as a ten year old. So it's like it's implanted in my brain. It's burned. And then when I was eleven, I heard about this place called The Art Students League. It is the oldest art school in the country, and it's on 57th Street, and it's this beautiful Beaux- Arts building. And they allowed eleven year olds, apparently, to draw naked adults on Saturday mornings, which I promptly did and went every Saturday morning. I had Mr. Pellettieri, Michael Pellettieri, and he's still teaching there. He's like 88 and he's still teaching there. That changed my world. I became an artist. You'd walk into this place and it smelled of nicotine and oil paint and abjection. Is that a word?

[05:39] Meg: Sure.

[05:41] Guy: I just totally fell in love with it. And I would draw, and I would draw, and I would draw, and I would draw. And then there were older kids there, but, oh, yeah. So I took a bus. I would take the bus up to 120th Street, which is not far from LaGuardia Music and Art and a kid. I was holding my portfolio, and I was really? Cause I felt very professional with a portfolio. And this kid asked me if I went to LaGuardia Music and Art, and I was like, I don't know. What's that? I walked home, and I was like, mom, what's LaGuardia Music and Art? And she reluctantly told me. I tried out for it and got in, and it changed my life totally.

[06:14] Meg: And how did you try out?

[06:16] Guy: I walked up to 136th street. I had a portfolio because I'd been drawing so much, and I had all this stuff I didn't have to. I suppose someone told us what you're supposed to have in your portfolio. And I went, and they had us draw things there. I remember screwing up. They had us work with pastels, and I did a terrible job, but I got in.

[06:36] Meg: And so what's the transition to music?

[06:39] Guy: Well, so. Okay, a couple things. So LaGuardia is also known as the Fame school, and Fame had been a movie at the time and was a tv show while I was going to the school. And there is an absolute energy there. It's a real thing. You walk through the halls, and if you're turned on by stuff, you see the dancers going, and you're like, that looks like so much fun. You're hanging out with acting students, and they look like they're having so much fun. And the music students seem to be having fun. And I wanted. I liked rock. I could hardly play anything. My old friend from Trinity School, Tom Beaujour, was a guitarist. So we decided to start this punk band called Addictive Manifesto, and we were very serious about it. There was a place called Giant Studios where we would rent space. I think it was $10 an hour to rent a room, and we would all show up with $5 and get 2 hours in there every Saturday. And we wrote these songs. I still have. I still have a tape. I don't know if it plays, but. And we went far. I mean, far some 14 year olds could go. We played CBGB's. We played the Trinity School dance. We played. We got a. I can't remember the breezy newspaper, but they wrote a thing about us. Yeah, yeah.

[08:04] Meg: I heard rumors about that Trinity School dance and different stories about. Tommy Carroll did some.

[08:13] Guy: So our drummer was a guy named Sean Gowen, and his dad was the super of Tom's building. And they were Irish. Like, had Irish accents, full on Irish. So. And I was. I dated a girl, Courtney Stickle from. Sorry, what was the mayor. No, the mayor of New York in the '60s who famously went up to Harlem to speak after.

[08:37] Meg: It's not Wagner.

[08:38] Guy: Yeah, Wagner High School. She went to Wagner.

[08:41] Meg: I've heard tons of stories about Wagner lately, because a lot of kids who went to Wagner were told, well, if you don't get into LaGuardia High School or The Bronx High School of Science or one of these schools that you test into, you will go to Julia Richman and you will die.

[09:00] Guy: So our drummer, Sean Gowan, went to Wagner, and Tommy Carroll went to Wagner, and Tommy Carroll and Sean apparently had both punched teachers. Oh, my God.

[09:13] Meg: I've heard that too.

[09:15] Jessica: That's our tie in to a previous episode about Adam and Neil Rubenstein. Teacher Spitters. They spat on our french teacher. Yes. And they supposedly punched someone out as well, but they shoved and spat in the face of. I think it was Madame de Sauvelier, something like that. And they were the. You know what our friend Alex calls the weeblows of the 84th Street gang.

[09:44] Guy: They were the hangers on.

[09:46] Jessica: The hangers on, yes.

[09:48] Guy: So were the red twins. Hangers ons.

[09:50] Jessica: That's what I'm saying. They are the red twins.

[09:52] Guy: Oh, the spitters were the red twins. I had my own run in with the red twins.

[09:57] Jessica: Tell us.

[09:58] Guy: I was coming out of the movie theater on 86th Street. Cause, you know, we would just walk up and down 86th Street with no place to go, whatever. And I was wearing a bowler hat because I was.

[10:07] Meg: Oh, dear, we can already see where this is going.

[10:12] Guy: Yeah. I was wearing a bowler hat, and I was busy expressing myself. We come out of the movie theater, and the two red twins show up, and one of them takes my hat, and they're like, it's a Frisbee. And they throw it to each other. And for whatever reason that I still can't figure out, they did this for a few minutes, and then they gave my hat back, and I was waiting for this to go. I was gonna get stacked. Like, it was just gonna. Supposed to go where I'd heard about these guys, you know, and they weren't being nice. They were being total assholes. But then, for whatever reason, they lost interest and gave me my hat back.

[10:48] Meg: A mild little bullying.

[10:50] Guy: Yeah. Yes.

[10:51] Jessica: Yeah.

[10:51] Meg: Nice.

[10:52] Jessica: A sartorial bullying.

[10:54] Guy: I will say that because of the way I dressed, a lot of kids in a lot of bullying situations couldn't figure out what to do with me.

[11:03] Jessica: So describe the rest of the outfit.

[11:06] Guy: I'm thinking if I was wearing the bowler hat, I would often wear a morning coat with that, and then probably had a western shirt on because I had this, my favorite. It had these all flowers on it and probably tight black pants, combat boots. Yeah. You know, the best. Yeah, the best stuff.

[11:39] Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[11:46] Meg: So. Okay, that. That's a good segue. Did you know you were cool, or did you have any sort of sense of, like, how you, like, landed in sort of the world of teenagers in New York? I mean, obviously you were cool if you were playing music at CBGB?

[12:04] Guy: Yeah, I don't think that I definitely. I went through a thing after leaving Trinity School because I was. I was at the bottom of the social hierarchy at Trinity School. In fact, I'll tell you how I got to the bottom of the social hierarchy. There was this one kid below me, Sasha Brodsky, the one kid below me, and he would always, like, he would lick his lips. You remember those kids? And they would have the red. I don't remember what I said to him, but I made fun of him in front of a bunch of people, hoping that I would get a people, like, yeah, you go. Just hoping to get some sort of endorphin rush. And he punched me in the face.

[12:51] Meg: Oh, no.

[12:52] Guy: I remember thinking, like, yeah, I totally deserved that. Like, as it was happening.

[12:58] Meg: So he rose above you.

[13:01] Guy: My spot.

[13:05] Meg: I'm sorry. You had that coming.

[13:07] Guy: I totally had it coming. No, I was fully, like, just, like, I didn't even try to, like, do anything about it. But when I started going to LaGuardia High School, I was like, I have a chance. First of all, I grew, like, I grew five inches over the summer. I was suddenly no longer pudgy, and I decided I was going to reinvent myself. And I did that. And it was totally ridiculous, because it was that kind of childish reinventing where you pretend that you're someone, but you'd find that you're like, if you say you're the best, people are, like, he's the best. It was this weird thing that very quickly became a problem, and I screwed it up.

[13:48] Jessica: But when you say that you reinvented yourself with intention. When you were talking about it and you described your western butler outfit, I had a few flashes of some of the most iconic and ridiculous '80s movies, like the Duckies of the world. And so I'm wondering. Cause when I went from The Fleming School, which was hippie and weird, to Nightingale, it was a forced reinvention. I had no, like, I went from bohemian and off kilter to in a kilt. Oh, my God. I didn't even mean to go there. Off kilter to kilted. So this idea of teenage reinvention, the look is really interesting to me. So how did you do that?

[14:37] Guy: I mean, I'd been sort of starting. I'd been going there on the weekends, but at Trinity School you had to have a uniform.

[14:43] Meg: Going where?

[14:44] Guy: Going into my own style thing. I was into hardcore punk. I started going to CBGB's matinees. When I was a Trinity School. I remember going to Butterfly on 8th Street where you could get a fake id and there'd be a line out front waiting for. And I only made my fake id say I was 16 because all I cared about was getting into this Sunday, hardcore matinees and Hilly, who would man the door at the time, would call your parents and he would sit there and he'd be like. And I remember giving him my ID and I tried to lie as little as possible. And it said I was a Trinity School. But of course Trinity has a crest and everything in it. But he's like, how old are you? I was like, I'm 16. And I told my mom I was going to see this concert and they had to be 16 for. I guess I knew that they called people and I asked her to tell them I was 16. So Hilly calls her, I'm not a great liar. And so I tried to keep it very brief, but she was a great liar and loved telling stories. She gave him this whole thing about how it was my birthday that day that I just turned 16. And he's like listening to it, looking at me. And this is fucking Hilly, the owner of CBGB's and this sort of legendary character and he's just like so tired of his crap. And he hangs up. He's like, happy birthday, kid. Let's go in. But, yeah, so I was already going there and you couldn't show up. You had to dress the part to go into CBGB's. You couldn't. And of course, I probably looked ridiculous, but I was convinced I looked awesomely cool.

[16:16] Meg: It sounds kind of awesome and cool to me.

[16:19] Jessica: Far cooler, frankly. I'm gonna speak for both of us than we were. So it was, necessity was the mother of reinvention.

[16:30] Guy: Yes. I couldn't go on and be on the lowest level of the. I had already, to be quite honest. Remember the Grosvenor dances? And this is when I was still at Trinity School and I'd really love to dance and I enjoyed it. And I would ask girls to dance, and they would say yes. Most of the boys at that age just couldn't. They would just stand over on the court, didn't know what to do. I remember one night, like, being like, I'm gonna ask every girl to dance. And I literally, I would go, like, you know, I'd ask them to dance, and we'd dance, and I'd be like, thanks. Walk out the next girl and be like, hi, you wanna dance? And they'd be like, okay, dance with them. Thanks. And move on to the next one. And. Which also probably gave me a false sense of what you can expect of women. So, in any case, that changed my, the other kid's view of me almost immediately. I was always a listener. I was always pretty funny. Whereas most of these guys couldn't transition from tennis to talking to a girl. The captain of the lacrosse team, but hadn't made it to talking to a girl, but were fascinated by talking to her. Like, how does someone talk to a girl? And then to watch someone actually do it, I went up right before I left the place. I probably had a higher social ranking than mine, but it was one of those little, you know, it was these little moments of self realization. And so when I went to LaGuardia High School, I was like, I have a chance to totally make who I am, none of these people know me. I was. And so I did that and tried to, I guess, maintain mystery or something. The first kid I met I remember was, he was in line with me, literally, the first person I met. So we sit down, I ask him his name, and he's like, Philip. And my name's Guy, blah, blah, blah. And it turned out that he was. His last name was Kadish, and his grandfather had been this incredibly important abstract expressionist painter, and he was named. His godfather was Philip Guston. So it was this insane, like, I just, like, smack dab in the world of New York culture. And this while I didn't know who Philip Guston was at the time, as soon as you got into paint, like, real painting, you were like, oh, this man's a God. And I know his grandson, and I still do to this day. Yeah. So it was just like a new world of possibility and people.

[18:54] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[19:01] Guy: Growing up in New York, you don't have a garage. So the only places to go play were these cheap rec rooms, essentially, and they were. These padded rooms. Smelled like beer. The mics smelled terrible. I mean, were just disgusting. The drums had split cymbals. It was a good idea to bring in your own drum heads, but you could just go in there and you were with your friends, and you could sound as bad as you could or did. Cause no one else could hear and no one cared. And there were literally at Giant Studios, there were like 20 rooms. It was on 30th Street on the west side. And I remember then they moved down to, I think, 14th Street and had an even bigger space with like 30 or 40 rooms. Yeah. And every New York band played there. And so you'd run into them. I don't know. Do you remember Urban Blight? They had graffiti on the. What do you call it? The basketball court behind PS 41, the playground behind PS 41. For 30 years it stayed up there somehow. It was insane.

[20:00] Meg: And what else did I find? Oh, Putrid Covenant.

[20:04] Guy: Putrid Covenant, yes. Ted Gannon's band and Chris Philipowski. And we would rehearse with them, and we performed with them a couple of times. Yeah. And Wolf Meinhardt. Wolf Meinhardt was a good friend. And his sister was Jocelyn Meinhardt. Jocelyn Meinhardt was going out with Ad-Rock, and we went to high school together. And I would go to Wolf's house, and Ad-Rock would show up. And this is when he was doing his full tapered Adidas uniforms that he would wear. He looked so cool. And we followed him around one night while he was tagging up, and he gave me a copy of Cookie Puss, which was one of their first singles. He was a really sweet guy. Yeah. So this is probably '85, and I think they released She's on It in '85 or '86, but they were already obviously, like, headed there. And his, I mean, he, in my mind, has always been, like, the guy in the band, and he was definitely the guy.

[21:10] Jessica: Tell us about your band. Like, so we know that you practiced in a shithole.

[21:15] Guy: Right.

[21:15] Jessica: And tell us more about what you played, what you loved, what it was like to get your first gig at CBGB's, your whole thing.

[21:24] Guy: So we were called Addictive Manifesto, and we had very serious songs. And I sang in a slightly fake british accent.

[21:32] Jessica: Excellent.

[21:33] Jessica: I love it.

[21:34] Guy: There was another guy, Gary Wertz, who was later in a band called The Mommyheads, that was a big college band. For a while, I think we were doing Sex Pistols covers. I mean, we were really young, but we didn't want to do that. We knew that it was lame to do covers, and so we started writing songs. I was literally writing songs on a recorder. And I got a bass. I got a Kramer bass. Which is like the cheapest, bottom of the line bass you could get. It was a fake Fender bass. And I would write songs on a bass, which I still do. That's still how I write songs. But because it was just so, like, you get the kind of, like, the basics of it. You can get the rhythm. You could get a riff down on it. And we. I remember we recorded at a place called The Batcave, right off of Union Square.

[22:28] Meg: How do we get copies of this music? I was searching for it.

[22:33] Guy: There's my. My next band. Or one of the bands later still in the '80s, The Ochrana. And we performed. Performed a lot at Lismar Lounge, which was around the corner from here. It's now d.b.a. We played The Pyramid Club many times. We played CBGB's many times. We played Tramps. And that. We got on, like, record compilations and stuff. It's difficult for me to listen to. Why? I've just developed so much since then. It's childish. I was in high school, but we had a real following. And that was like a real thing. We had a bassist who was 30?

[23:15] Jessica: What?

[23:17] Meg: Okay, now I have to ask. What did your parents think about all this?

[23:21] Guy: I remember my dad came to see us at CBGB's and he said, why is everything so loud? You know, it was. As you probably know, it was a time when parents weren't that terribly involved by them not giving me any advice. I just kind of wandered off and did stuff.

[23:34] Meg: I was just making a lot of assumptions about sort of how creative you were from a very early age and thinking that must be because your parents were encouraging in that regard. I mean, my parents were not particularly encouraging in that regard.

[23:48] Guy: I will say that my dad was a, he was an art historian and really admired artists. And I think always envied artists that they could. Whereas he was studying them and talking about them and doing research on them. His son was doing it. And I think that he appreciated that.

[24:14] Meg: Do you think you were born being able to draw?

[24:17] Guy: No, actually, drawing is kind of hard for me. But it was something that, again, to go back to how little I could do. It was something that I could do and I liked. I derive a great deal of pleasure visually. So I enjoyed looking at art. And then I enjoyed and I tried. And that's the one thing I've done, is always. Is anything that looks fun. I have a misplaced confidence that I can try it or get decent at it.

[24:48] Meg: I think that's amazing. And I feel like a lot of the time when I was growing up, I was like, well, if that's not my thing, I should leave that to other people. And I think I. I feel like I missed so many years of actually just, like, give it a shot, whatever. Be mediocre at it. It's better than not doing it. And you might actually get kind of good at it.

[25:10] Jessica: That brings me back to Guy, your description of asking the girls to dance. The girls were not asking you to dance or the other boys. I think that for us at that time, girls were not wandering around going to CBGB's with their shitty bass. Like, there's definitely a really different experience for boys and girls. And I think that now I wonder. I shouldn't say I think anything. Cause I don't know what the kids are doing these days. You guys could comment on this, but do you think that there's as much of a divide, a gender divide on just go out and try it?

[25:47] Guy: I feel like it's better. I think there's a kind of a celebration of young women making rock music, punk music, like, angry, you know, everyone's like, yeah, go for it. That said, I think there's also. There's a lot of pressure on young women right now to be all the things. And I think they're, from what I've been noticing, they seem to be freaking the fuck out about it at that age. It's just a lot to take on. But, yeah, I'm sure at the time there were, I mean, our, so when I was in my next band, our bassist was a woman. She was a 30 year old woman who then started teaching at The Bronx High School of Science.

[26:28] Meg: She was a 30 year old woman.

[26:29] Jessica: But she was a woman. And doesn't that say something about what women had to deal with? That she was playing around with these pissers?

[26:35] Guy: That it never occurred to me that she was like, oh, my God, no one will fucking play with me except for these little brats.

[26:42] Meg: But at least I can take the subway by myself. No one's going to tell me I'm not allowed to go on the subway.

[26:48] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[26:56] Guy: From leaving Trinity School to, I think the music band scene was the quickest lesson to what New York really was for me. Because you were meeting all like, you'd be like, we need a bassist. And someone was like, yeah, I've got some people, like, lined up. They're gonna come in. And these guys would come in from, like, Long Island. I remember this one guy lived. I was suddenly dealing with people from different classes, and I'd not really had that experience. Certainly at Trinity School, I was going into people's apartments that were totally different than what I had grown up with, seeing family lives that were totally different than what I was used to, and seeing kids who would curse at their parents, which was always like, what the fuck's going on? Do you remember that phenomenon?

[27:40] Jessica: No. No. It was inconceivable. And I mean, there are two things in your comment about that. One is just for us, as you said earlier, your parents were not hanging out with you. Your parents were not. One's parents were not that involved. So the idea of cursing at them, in a way, I was sort of like, we were a step away from calling them like, Mr. Dorfman, how would you like your eggs today? So to curse at your parents is like, what the flip side of it is, and certainly that there would have been a harsh punishment if that had happened. As you say when you're wandering into really different echelons within the city. Yeah, you're going to see stuff that it's just not part of your social contract.

[28:26] Guy: Yeah. I remember a series of kids with single moms, single moms with serious depression, to the point where there was a mattress, they were in railroad apartments, and there'd be this dark room with a mattress in it. And it was like a living room. This was more than once or twice that you'd see this, like, super depressed moms.

[28:47] Meg: That's very interesting.

[28:50] Guy: It was really wild.

[28:54] Meg: I'm kind of not surprised by that. I mean, I'm in no way surprised.

[28:58] Jessica: I'm only surprised by the mattress. Yes.

[29:04] Guy: It's just this is a yoga mat now.

[29:06] Jessica: Yeah, well, yeah, whatever. But I mean, like, yeah, depression does not surprise me. And if you're a single mother in the '80s, in the '80s, and you're not coming from money or divorcing money or whatever, you're fucked. So, yeah, the depression, I understand. It's just this, you know, we lived in a world of cover it up.

[29:28] Guy: Yes.

[29:29] Meg: Yeah, absolutely.

[29:31] Jessica: So the idea of having something so explicit.

[29:36] Meg: Let'S put sheets on that mattress.

[29:38] Guy: At the very least, I believe in covering it up.

[29:41] Jessica: I support you in that. But I think that that's probably what was so terrifying. Was the raw, naked, just emotional chaos.

[29:52] Guy: No, I thought of it when I was listening to your episode about the single mom phenomenon, how at that age and in those years, it was apparently like the idea of a single mom was a strange thing and my own experiences with them, and I didn't have. I didn't have that experience until. Until crossing into these different worlds. And then also, you know, and then at the same time, there was this one family that I. That lived on Bleecker Street, and they had the coolest loft. It was so cool, and the dad was so cool, and the mom was so cool, and it was like the perfect avant garde family that you just wanted to be part of. So you got to see that, too, you know? And they weren't squares at all. The dad looked like he should have been an actor. The mom looked like she should have been an actor. Yeah. Got to see it all.

[30:47] Meg: And that all came from the intermixing of all the music scenes.

[30:51] Guy: Exactly, exactly.

[30:52] Meg: Because that's tons of different schools, I guess, and different neighborhoods.

[30:58] Guy: Yeah. And you get the kids who are like, I want to be in a band. And not everyone wants to be in a band, but so they would have to. We were forced to hang out with kids from other schools. It's funny because sometimes I ask my kids, like, so you're hanging out. So and so what school do they go? And he doesn't know. And I realized, like, half these kids, I didn't know where they went. I'll never know where they went. I don't know where they are. But, you know, it wasn't. We were into music and talking about that. Yeah.

[31:27] Meg: And that is a difference. I definitely feel like the kids that I met from other schools, if it was at a party or whatever, it was like, oh, those are the, you know, whatever. Those are the Collegiate kids, and those are the Dalton kids. It did define you like, what school you went to. So it's a whole different scene.

[31:44] Jessica: Well, and if you had stayed at Trinity School, you probably would have been more locked into or at least subjected to it.

[31:50] Guy: Right. I mean, I remember there was, like, the, like, Brearley School. They were slutty.

[31:56] Jessica: That's not the reputation that we knew of them.

[31:59] Guy: Well, they also studious and slutty, and, you know, you work hard.

[32:09] Jessica: Well, their mascot didn't help.

[32:12] Guy: It did not. It did not. No. Yeah. Then there was Spence, which was, like, somewhere in between, and the Chapin was prissy, and then Sacred Heart was all was dangerous. Catholic girls. You're gonna marry them if anything goes wrong. I'm trying to remember, though, what was the Nightingale girls?

[32:44] Jessica: Our impression at the time was the Brearly beavers were studious. Chapin was just kind of blandly prissy. Spence bitchy. We were kind of like the girls you drink beer with.

[32:56] Meg: I think that's fair. I mean, we were the girls. It was more than just the appearance. It was also the actuality.

[33:04] Jessica: Well, we were sort of slobs a little bit compared to some of the others. Like, we would happily roll into school with like, you know, a very crumpled kilt and long johns and duct taped Lucas. Yes. Slobs.

[33:20] Meg: So we were talking about Tommy Carroll earlier.

[33:23] Jessica: So who's Tommy Carroll? Why are we talking about Tommy Carroll?

[33:26] Meg: Tommy Carroll went to Wagner and then he was in a band called NYC Mayhem. He did punch a teacher at Wagner, but I was doing a little sleuthing and he was straight edge, which I thought was interesting. Or at least at some point he became straight edge. And I mean, NYC Mayhem is like a pretty big deal, right?

[33:50] Guy: Yeah, totally. No, he became. I mean, this is before that, so far as I remember how it all worked at that point, he was just a total vagrant and terrifying. And he showed up at the Trinity School dance and a famous, I think kicked the principal and they stopped our concert and we were really impressing everybody, I swear.

[34:14] Jessica: Yeah.

[34:14] Meg: What I heard is that he was trying to slam dance and it went south, that it wasn't overtly violent, but rather this is what one does.

[34:25] Guy: Right. And they had never seen it before at Trinity School and they freaked out. Yeah, freaked out. I can totally believe that.

[34:31] Jessica: Like the greatest movie scene ever. That's like in the Trinity School lunchroom.

[34:37] Meg: But the police were called.

[34:38] Guy: Well, I made that happen.

[34:42] Jessica: So you mentioned straight edge, which was quite a thing at the time. And now I think that would be sort of. Would it be laughable now? Like, how do you remember straight edge?

[34:54] Guy: So there was a point where hardcore punk, you'd go and everyone smelled like Aquanet and it was great. And they would slam dance, they would do all the things. People were weird always. And then suddenly you'd go to a gig and everyone had shaved heads and started talking and would have these big Xs on there. Minor Threat had wrote a song about straight edge and they were straight edge. And so it was this kind of Reagan-esque reaction to the crazy nihilism and kind of fun times of real punk rock. And I basically, I was like, I'm out of this is, I want to put on eyeliner now. So. Yeah. And then it just became these goons. In my estimation, it was just guys with like, who should have been jocks but were playing really hardcore rock with terrible lyrics that sounded like they were written by a twelve year old girl. And some of them were actually super right wing, like youth defense league. They used to have. They claimed they were like blue collar and actually I was at an opening, and there's a space called White Cube. And the curator, the owner of this guy, was this fantastic older hispanic guy. And we were talking. He's like, oh, you grew up in New York? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, we talked about playing music. He's like, my son was in a band. And I was like, what band was that? He's like, YDL (Youth Defense League). And I was like, what the fuck? They were terrifying. They would like, the lead singer used to carry a shillelagh.

[36:20] Jessica: No.

[36:22] Guy: If you saw him and if you were wearing Doc Martens, he would try to take your Doc Martens. It was a super right wing, like, oh, yeah. They had a song called Blue Pride. Like, blue collar pride, kind of a Reagan-esque kind of America thing. And it turned out he was like, oh, my God. I know. It was awful. Every one of those kids. Child was a child of a crazy artist. And, like, one's parent. Like, one's parents was like a Hungarian transsexual. So it was basically like an '80s reaction to insane bohemianism. And it was so hilarious. Like, these kids screaming up, Blue Pride. Of course it was fake. They were total. Their parents were wackos. And all their parents were just like, oh, my God. And then there was. What was it? Token Entry. A lot of them were playing with this idea, Gorilla Biscuits.

[37:20] Jessica: You just said that with a totally straight face. You're so accustomed to it that we're like, what the fuck?

[37:26] Guy: They were big.

[37:33] Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[37:40] Meg: So you're talking a little bit about there being a threat level, right? But that was amongst kids, you know, kid on kid violence, I guess, potentially. Was there ever. Were you ever in situations where you felt like you were in over your head as far as being in an adult situation?

[38:03] Guy: I started going to Danceteria when I was 15, and I had this girlfriend, Alexandra Storey, who grew up on 12th Street. She introduced me to a sophisticated downtown and made me mixtapes. And I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with her at Danceteria when we were 15. And he was so high on heroin, like, we actually walked out because he couldn't get through a song. And at that point, I was thrust into a world of adults. It was not kids anymore. And it was sometimes very weird and sometimes super cool. And I never got. I would get myself into situations and I would handle them, but for the most part, weird. I remember being fascinated by the New York gay scene, and there was a place called Boy Bar where everything was happening there was a performer called John Sex, and I would go see a lot of his shows, so I'd go see. And again, I was 15, and, you know, you go to these places, and I had make. I would wear makeup. I would do this whole thing, but I wasn't into. I was playing both. You know, I ended up giving, like, hand jobs to people that I was like, I didn't really want to do that, but I, you know, I kind of asked for this situation, so.

[39:14] Meg: So you weren't traumatized?

[39:16] Guy: No. I mean, no. No, I was not traumatized.

[39:20] Jessica: I had to tell you this, but make you feel. You feel like you have a group. I have a friend who is a major banana, but sometimes extraordinarily funny. And he was a musician, and in the same kind of situation that you were. And he was telling me about, he would hang out with this guy from the scene. His name was Rick, Rick Daroma. And Rick would go over to his place, and they would, you know, they would hang out and watch tv and stuff. And he said after a while, after Rick had been going down on him for a couple of weeks, he realized that he had a boyfriend, and he was like. And I had to stop things there. So I think that might be, like, just turned up a notch from your experience. But, you know, so you were just shy of the relationship. The hand jobs were.

[40:15] Guy: Where I'd only ever give it to them once, and then I'd ask someone else. Go to the next person. Exactly. They all want hand jobs. All these people want hand jobs. God damn, I'm gonna be busy tonight. That's a lot of hand jobs.

[40:30] Jessica: They got two. What am I? What's a boy to do?

[40:35] Guy: Yeah. And it was fascinating because I also realized that not only was I not gay, like, I didn't like the way that men, like, came onto me, and I noticed that it was the same way that guys would come onto girls, and it was. And it. So it's just totally changed the way I behaved around girls cause I didn't like it.

[40:59] Jessica: That is very interesting, fascinating, and something I can say I have genuinely never heard before. So describe for our listeners your perspective of what that typical male approach.

[41:12] Guy: For instance, I was telling you how I kind of, you know, I got to high school and I started doing this cocky thing, and I was like, oh, yeah, the girls love this cocky guy. I'll be the cocky guy. And then I notice, like, oh, this is just what dudes do. And guys would be like, tell you about how much money they were making, like, and the weirdest shit, like, and you're like, I don't give a shit how much money you make. Why are you telling me? Oh, I'm supposed to be impressed. And now, you know. And so I would, you know, it taught me things to avoid that I didn't like hearing or that didn't, that weren't interesting. And it was when I also realized, like, that however people respond to the cocky thing, it was not something I was comfortable with anymore. And, you know, and I learned to be me.

[41:58] Jessica: Field trip, field trip, field trip, field trip.

[42:05] Meg: That you're in a band that's such a communal situation. It's very public. The only way it can exist is really with other people, either to create it or to listen to it. But then what you do now feels very private. I mean, as an artist and a cartoonist.

[42:24] Guy: So the last band I had called Maxi Geil and Play Cult, and we were around for ten years in the aughts, and we performed with, like, the Scissor Sisters, and we played big acts. We toured all over Europe. But my wife was in the band. I had met her many years before. Cause she'd been the lead singer of a friends band. We were a six piece, and as we all got older, we were all hitting our forties, and we had two kids. We brought one of them on tour twice. I couldn't handle the politics, the band politics, because these were always my bands. I was always the primary writer with the last band. It was literally an art project that turned into a huge band by the end, I could tell the drummer hated my guts, hated me. The bassist didn't like me either. And I didn't know how to be in that room anymore, and I couldn't really want to be. And so after some wilderness years, and then after doing the sitcom, which also took a lot of dealing with a lot of people, which at least was kind of over a short period of time. And it's been really wonderful just to do this thing where it's just me and just paper and ink. It takes so little overhead. I don't have to schedule anything. I just have to do my little pages in the morning and try to come up with something. So it's a big difference. And it's also this learning curve. It's kind of like when you have a six piece as opposed to a guitar, and you're sitting in front of in a coffee shop and just playing your guitar. It's very stripped down. I'm fascinated by the economy, the visual economy, and the idea of just one line. You get one image. One little line, that's all you get. And you have to try to max out what kind of pathos or humor you can suck out of that.

[44:20] Meg: Did you always work in that particular kind of The New Yorker medium?

[44:25] Guy: I've always been fascinated with them. And my grandparents, who lived, who were New Yorkers, had this copy of the 1925 to 1950 cartoon anthology. And as a kid, they had one of those really depressing, boring apartments where it was just, like, totally stuck in the forties. And they had this one yellow book, and it was The New Yorker cartoons, and I would just go through it, and there was this one cartoon in there that was so traumatizing, so bizarre, and I later found out who it was by. As an eight year old, it blew my mind. And I'll describe it to you. It's a full page, and it's this group of people, and they're all staring to the left, and there's this light coming at them, and they all look like they're kind of farmers or whatever, and it's beautifully rendered. Whoever did this is an artist. And there's a woman standing there looking at the light with her daughter on her shoulders, and the daughter's looking at the light, and her mouth is open. She's dumbfounded. And the woman who's holding her is looking at the woman behind her, who's also dumbfounded, and she says it's her first lynching.

[45:48] Meg: Oh, my God.

[45:55] Jessica: Holy shit.

[45:57] Guy: So I was. I understood that this guy was against lynching, and I remember thinking, like, this is the most horrific thing I've ever seen. He's not showing me anything. You don't see anything. It's this one little line. And I have so many emotions running through my body right now, my little eight year old body. Also, because you don't. I recently learned what, like, I think Roots have been on television or something. Like, I understood what he was talking about. I remember that. And I remember thinking, like, is this funny? It's so beyond funny, but it's affecting. And I remember just thinking like, shit, I'm looking at art right now. This is. This isn't a. This isn't. Or cartoon. It's a cartoon, but it's art and I've been, like, utterly fascinated with him ever since. Turned out that it was by Reginald Marsh, who was a Ashcan School guy. Yeah, one of the greats. And who spent many years as a The New Yorker cartoonist. Yeah. So it was, like, totally right. And he also would do covers for The Masses, the John Reed Club, all the super lefty things. He was trying to upset people. He was trying to wake up, you know, these, like, cosmopolitan New Yorkers as to what was going on. And I was just like, this is whatever this is, it's real and it deserves respect. And so, yeah, from thence on, I was always aware of that as a special thing. So when the pandemic happened, my LA dealer was like, you should, because every show had stopped. Like, you weren't going to get any. Every show had been canceled, and no one knew what to do. And he's like, you know, I've been begging you forever, but you should really do The New Yorker cartoons. And I was like, I haven't. He would always tell me this, and I always, like, spend a half hearted day, like, okay, well, what would my style be? How would I do it? And I would come up with, like, one or two good ones, and I'd be super proud of myself. And I had, again, back. I'd always had this idea of turning them into, like, these large paintings that these should be paintings that they should be. You should see The New Yorker cartoons in a museum or a gallery. And I'm not like a steely kind of artist. I always try to insinuate myself into worlds, hence sitcoms, hence bands, all that stuff. So I did a couple, and I was super proud of myself. But then the third one sucked, and then the fourth one sucked. And then I realized, like, I'm gonna have to really learn how to do this. And the only way I could figure out how to do that and to figure out if something was actually good was to start submitting them to the The New Yorker. So I started submitting them. And the rule is you gotta submit ten a week or not every week, but ten. And I chose to do it every week because in my mind I had to get there really fast. I didn't, and I had to learn this thing. And I love a learning curve. I just. That turns me on. Just, like, getting better at something, failing to get better at it, and then getting better at it again. So I submitted them, actually, and a month in, I came up with a really good one. And I got a letter, like, an email back from Emma Allen, the cartoon editor, and she said, I showed this to David. He really loves it. You should keep going. And I thought I was in. I was like, fuck, yeah. This is awesome. I've been doing this for what, a month? Fuck, yeah. So a year and a half later, they finally bought one. But there was a period of time there where I was just like, didn't you say that these were great. What's going on, guys? But then reminding myself that it's the The New Yorker and that it's the last magazine standing, and you're gonna have to kind of wait for them. They're not gonna write you and explain how you can make your cartoons better. They're not gonna write you and be like, good try this needs a little bit of work here or anything. I remember when I was doing it. So my mom was a professor of, essentially, information history. She was a librarian, but in her forties, she became obsessed with Russian library systems and learning Russian. And every morning I'd walk by her office, and she'd be up at, like, 06:00 a.m. and she'd be, like, listening to her little Walkman and going over declensions. And as much as it seemed wacky to me, it really stuck with me that that's how you do something. And I remember thinking, like, I'm not gonna stop doing this until the The New Yorker buys one. And if my kids see me doing this every day and not caring that they don't even respond, because they don't respond. When they don't take them, they don't respond to you. They just goes out into the ether. And thankfully, thankfully, you know, Instagram is great, and you can share stuff. And I started doing them for Artnet. I would do a weekly one for Artnet and for Hyperallergic. So I was doing them for other people. So I was getting some satisfaction, but I was like. I was like, I'm doing this. So these boys see someone in their fifties, like, trying something new. Totally. And just doing it and doing it and doing it until it gets in. And so it was very, you know, when it did, I was very. I was like, phew, Jesus Christ. Now I can quit.

[51:54] Jessica: See, that's my style. Oh, look, I achieved it. I mastered it for a second. Now I know. Goodbye.

[52:03] Guy: I've done, like, one great album. I've done one. I've done a lot of that. You know, where I'm just like, okay, that really just almost destroyed me. Now gonna go. There's a. My youngest son is obsessed with The Simpsons, and there's. For whatever reason, there's this episode where Apu makes a list of very hard of the hardest things to do in the world or very hard things. Apu's list of very hard things. And number three is get a cartoon in The New Yorker. And he came to me and he was like, look. And it was like, the first time he'd ever looked at me and like, yeah, you did a very hard thing. The Simpsons said, it's, you know, The Simpsons validated. It was a very hard thing.

[52:50] Jessica: I love that so much. So sweet.

[52:52] Jessica: Field trip. Field trip. Field trip. Field trip.

[53:00] Jessica: Anyway, just. You had said that we should come up with a pithy wrap up. And I think that it's kind of difficult because our guest is the king of pith. You've been so entertaining and so much fun, and we've been sitting here in the Holiday Cocktail Lounge and under a speaker and for the first time in my adult life, I'm not complaining because it's the right kind of music, which goes perfectly with our wonderful guests oeuvre. So I guess this is. We're uptown girls talking to an even more uptown guy than us. And we're sitting here downtown, and that's New York.

[53:43] Meg: Thank you, Guy.

[53:44] Guy: Thank you so much for having me, girls, a pleasure.