Go Now

by Richard Hell

Down on his luck and disillusioned with the music industry, punk star Billy Mud's listless days are punctuated only by scoring drugs, empty sex, and scribbling brooding profundities in this ever-present notebook. So when he is offered a chance to drive a car from California back to New York - all expenses paid - he gladly accepts. Billy's assignment is to chronicle the trip in words, while Chrissa, an ex-girlfriend he hopes to win back, takes the accompanying photographs. As an opportunity to get out of New York and out of a long-term funk, the trip is irresistible. And if it also provides a chance to get clean and to prove he's a writer, well, all the better.
Author Richard Hell, an originator of punk, a poet, and now a novelist, takes us inside the head of this down-on-his-luck genius as he skids and ricochets his way across America. It is mostly the landscape inside Billy's own head that we see, and that is often a very scary place. Once out on the road, it is not long before our hero is up to his old tricks and we watch horrified and laughing as he slides inexorably toward a chilling, breathtaking denouement.

Genres: Fiction, Music, Punk, Rock N Roll, Novels, Literature

176 pages, Hardcover

First published June 10, 1996

About the author

Born in 1949, Richard Meyers was shipped off to a private school for troublesome kids in Delaware, which is where he met Tom (Verlaine) Miller. Together they ran away, trying to hitchhike to Florida, but only made it as far as Alabama before being picked up by the authorities. Meyers persuaded his mother to allow him to go to New York, where he worked in a secondhand bookshop (the Strand; later he was employed at Cinemabilia along with Patti Smith) and tried to become a writer.
He arrived in the Big Apple at the tail end of the hippie scene. He took acid (and later heroin), but sought to develop a different sensibility in the manner of what he later referred to as 'twisted French aestheticism', i.e. more Arthur Rimbaud than Rolling Stones. He printed a poetry magazine (Genesis: Grasp) and when Miller dropped out of college and joined him in New York, they developed a joint alter ego whom they named Teresa Stern. Under this name they published a book of poems entitled Wanna Go Out?. This slim volume went almost unnoticed. It was at this point that Meyers and Miller decided to form a band. They changed their names to Hell and Verlaine, and called the band The Neon Boys.
During this hiatus, Hell wrote The Voidoid (1973), a rambling confessional. He wrote it in a 16 dollar-a-week room, fuelled by cheap wine and cough syrup that contained codeine. He then played in various successful bands: Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids.
Hell recently returned to fiction with his 1996 novel Go Now.

Reviews

[Nicole Iovino · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Richard Hell, but what was that?? I picked this book up out of curiosity with practically NO expectations, but he proceeded to disappoint. This was not a novel, it was Richard Hell’s 170 page egomaniacal, misogynistic rave about drugs and his disturbing libido. An embarrassing vanity project and major failure.

[Grant Talabay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Punk legend Richard Hell takes the reader on a whirlwind heroin fueled cross country trek. Good but there are better books about dope out there.

[Mayu Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

finally finished this horrible book that's so precious to me. I'll confess... the sex scenes were supremely captivating.
What is left is a bruise.

[Andrew]

Like probably nearly anyone else who's read Richard Hell's fiction, I arrived via his work with Television and the Voidoids. Simply put, while the man created some of the finest rock music of all time, his fiction fails to live up to this lofty standard. I will definitely say that he possesses talent, it's just that he tends to employ it in this cheap-ass way. Ever been around a junkie who only talks about where they cop from, and when? Now imagine a whole novel of that, and you'll soon realize that maybe you're the one nodding out.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Hell is probably best known as the singer and bass guitarist of the early punk band The Voidoids. His novel Go Now, based on some of his own experiences, is like Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting in that it explores the social and psychological effects of heroin addiction. The book is narrated by Billy, who often comments on how messed up he is both by junk and by rock and roll culture, and who gets himself into injurious situations, perhaps to prove to the reader (and to himself) how messed up he is.

The book itself is messed up. The narrative is as sex-obsessed as Leonard Cohen, as drug-focused as Jim Carroll. However, instead of the religious imagery of these two writers, in Hell’s novel we have an imagery that could be characterized as Baudrillardian, and reflecting what Guy Debord termed the “The Society of the Spectacle” and Fredric Jameson “image culture.”

The story begins with Billy, a musician in a punk rock band, being hired to fly from New York to Los Angeles with a woman named Chrissa; from there they are to pick up their employer’s DeSoto Explorer and return to New York. As part of the job, Chrissa is to take pictures and Billy to write about their experiences as they drive east. So the narrative is in the form of a picaresque or, to employ the more popular term, a road trip. Or so it seems.

The pair travels through cities like San Francisco, Reno and Denver, places that would probably be interesting to know about, but the fact is that for much of the narrative Billy limits himself to describing how he feels—before, during and after sex, for instance, and before, during and after his drug fixes. Sometimes, he does comment on the strained relations he has with the people around him—which is a good thing, because if he didn’t, he would be like the narrator of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, commenting on little beyond the events in his own mind. Fortunately, late in the novel Billy wakes up from his drug-induced stupor long enough to pay attention to his surroundings, and to describe them in some detail. This is in Lexington, Kentucky, Billy’s hometown—and perhaps not so coincidentally the hometown of the book’s author as well.

The book is messed up on the level of its discourse as well. In many instances Hell’s prose seems over-written, and there were a few purple passages that I thought could have been improved by leaving out an adjective or three. However, if it is true that “each man kills the thing he loves,” as Oscar Wilde writes in “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” then Billy’s mixed metaphors, split infinitives, redundancies and neologisms (or are they misspellings?) supply evidence for his frequent claim that he loves language. Perhaps his mangled grammar can be interpreted in the context of Ezra Pound’s “Make it new.” And in fact there are some very good passages here—analyses of feelings, philosophical comments on identity, and a discussion on the psychology of the serial killer that reminds this reader of some of the ideas of Georges Bataille. While the book is not quite On the Road, often it is as hyperbolic and yea-saying as that important peripatetic work.

Acquired May 3, 2010
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

[Roman Kot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Надто коротка як для роману. Прямолінійний сюжет

[Diann Blakely]

The author, a Kentucky native who is a crack--so to speak--reader of Rimbaud, from whose UN SAISON D'ENFER he took his name (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/boo...), an extraordinary musician, and more-formidable-than-you-have-ever-guessed-poet-and-novelist, now lives in New York, but given his border state roots, I often wonder why is he never among participants in Southern literary to-dos. Especially because Hell’s wife (a much less frightening role than that phrase might imply), Sheelagh Bryan, has begun a new job curating book exhibitions at the Morgan Library, and neither that institution nor Scribners’--which published GO NOW, and if you read the excerpt (http://www.furious.com/perfect/gonow....), you will see the chilling origin of the title--nor THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW makes a habit of hiring or publishing lightweights.

Hell composed the anthemic “Blank Generation” and then turned from punk rock to devote himself to writing sharp-minded poetry, fiction, criticism, and also an in-progress autobiography. While protesting he’s but an “amateur” reader of his French poetic predecessor, one need only look up the etymological roots of the word in quotation marks and see where it takes you.

Rimbaud was, after all, the poet who believed that deranging of all the senses was necessary to achieve the state in which one was fit to write the stuff, and I wonder why the NYTRB, after selecting Hell as the reviewer of Edmund White’s brief biography, didn't choose him to write about John Ashbery's new translation of the ILLUMINATIONS. Is it because the Voidoids’ DESTINY STREET REVISITED, a reworking of the group’s second album, was released not long ago and thus re-ghettoized him as an aging punk rocker with clouds of substance abuse somehow damaging his intellect? Not so, not so, despite Hell's protests that he is no poet, “only a carrot,” for what practitioner of the art wouldn’t be proud as Lucifer of the following triplet?--“They all died by coin toss. / Love's a form of memory loss. / I can't forget that triple cross.” Listen closely to his lyrics, and pay close attention not only to GO NOW but his other novel, GODLIKE, and also HOT AND COLD, his collection of poetry, reviews, and other prose, and see if you don’t agree that he wouldn't have been a perfect choice.

[Lucile Barker · Rating 1 out of 5]

137. Go Now by Richard Hell
Unlikeable narrator, Billy, with too much dope and too much testosterone. He is the leader of a band that never seems to rehearse and is having an affair with a high school student. Then he is paired with a very young female photographer with who he has had a previous sexual relationship to go on a road trip in an old 1950s Dodge convertible classic car, which is the most interesting character in the story. His chief concern is scoring drugs in each town, and seducing whoever is available. He seems to revel in being caught. Theoretically the leader of a rock band, the main character barely has the discipline to tie his shoes, let alone be a musician. Nasty. Seems to have the eighties’ greed and cynical tinge that I wish I hadn’t been so close to. Some of this is autobiographical, but I did not want to know. Hell was some big deal in rock; I am very glad I missed his work. As for his book, it can go now - right back to the library.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oohhhh as disappointing as his ego is large. Sigh.
I can't even begin to say where this falls apart. It's a disaster. He's obviously not professional material.
I bought this for cheap cuz I grew up listening to Neon Boys and Television. Cuz I loved the New York punk scene more than anything when I was 15. I bought Hell's lifestyle - the drugs, the clothes, the music. I guess he's better at living his lifestyle than writing about it.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

More like a 3.5 but I want to round up since I am feeling generous. Solid junkie book with an irredeemable narrator (love it), but at times a middling story (sigh). I don't mind an ego jerk fest and I get the narrator is a loner from junk but a roadtrip book can be spent outside of motels. Great ending though.

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really depressing. Could never possibly end in a way that is profound. A book about a loathsome young man stuck in a perpetual spiral that could be broken at any time, and is often almost broken, but this guy is so fucking weak and harbours so much hate for himself that he gives it up without a thought. Is it because it's easier to keep fucking up and hate yourself for doing it, is it comfort in self-loathing, is it just fear of living, fear of life, fear of addressing yourself as a living thing? He is in a constant state of self-escape no matter how often he cannot think or speak about anything but himself. He seems to have a complete cognitive understanding of his drug addiction, and often considers drug use as fulfilling the same purpose as sex, but has no understanding of his sex addiction. A deeply pathetic weakwilled person trapped enough by dependency on these things to understand them as meaningless, or worthless, or harmful, or just perpetuating the same state of nothingness, a poison sustenance, but too scared of reality to stop.

To the capacity it exists in as a travel novel, it is the trapped counterpoint to the free story of Thompson's Fear & Loathing. There is a similar assignment of the writing of the story, there is the idea of the trip as a job that must be performed and is somewhat failed at, there is the discovery of what being an American means, and conclusions on the "American Dream." Like Thompson, Hell reaches these conclusions still arguably in the middle of the novel, and then spends the rest of it falling prey to them. A small but interesting take on the American condition appears in the second half of the novel when Hell writes about "...that whole American rack tearing our left sides toward religion and our right to murder." He has the perception that the 'freedom' in America is simply a trapping of its citizens in a no-good-ending desperate fling with money and drugs and sex and fame and violence. And because this trapped freedom is so crushingly pushed on Americans they can do nothing but stew in their vices and the delusion of freedom. I don't believe anything this guy tells me. You shouldn't either.

Ultimately it's about two hundred pages of confused self-hatred. The narrative is always trapped entirely within the narrator's head. You start despising him. He is overtly aware of his addiction and the danger to himself he poses unthinkingly, constantly, and the vulgarity he imposes on others, and yet he refuses to stop. He always succumbs to himself and hates himself afterwards and is too weak to just stop even at these few points when stopping would be the easiest thing to do. He is a sociopathic personality unable to decide if he wants to feel like nothing or wants to feel like something, if he wants not to exist or can't bear his nonexistence. He 'wants out' of himself. He seems to be bisexual but will not allow himself to pursue other men and spends chapters making excuses out of nowhere as to why he cannot have gay sex now that he's an adult. He is mistreated by and mistreats his ex girlfriend constantly. He betrays every named character in the book in some way. He identifies with and loathes femininity at the same time; his relationship with femininity is sort of an extension of his self-hatred. He is a womanising unreliable pathetic lying piece of shit.

For some reason some people who read this book think it's some kind of ego trip. In a way, it wouldn't exist without the presence of a massive ego. All this guy thinks about all book long is himself. But in no way is it flexing a lifestyle, it's not a rock n roll fast times fun type of deal, it is utterly despicable and miserable. There's no way Hell wrote this book with the intention of being self-congratulatory. It is a brief, agonising exposure to the most deeply pathetic psyche in the world. By the end he explicitly asks to die and you wish you could kill him not so he gets what he wants but because by that point you hate him more than he hates himself. It's a relief to finish the book and get out of this guy's head. Thank god. Hell uses simple language often pretty messily but it's honest enough to make you feel uncomfortable or unclean reading it, so it must be 'good writing'.

[Glass River]

Could the patriarch of punk, the lead anarcho-instrumentalist-vocalist of the Voidoids (their breakthrough track was ‘Love Comes in Spurts’) write a novel? More importantly would it be a novel anyone other than a loyal fan with spiked hair and safety pins through his conk would want to read? William Gibson (king of the punk-SF writers) had no doubt.
Go Now is vile, scabrous, unforgivable, and deserving of the widest possible audience.
That Richard Lester Meyers (b. 1949) intended to do the literary thing at some point is evident from his adopting his nom de guerre culturelle from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer.
Go Now, like the Voidoid’s hallmark track, ‘comes in spurts’. The narrative is summarised by one disaffected blog-reviewer (cheerfully disregarding the finer points of capitalisation) as: ‘i got high, i Had sex, I drove Around a bit. Heh!’ Aptly put, bloggist. In form, Go Now is a ‘drugalog’, dramatising, and glorifying, the existential loneliness of ‘junk’. Only junk can transport us to where the essential truths of the human condition are found, we, the uninitiated (unhooked?), are to understand.
It is 1980. The sun comes up. Billy Mud (born Michael Bernstein) is no early riser. His eyes open, his nostrils flare. Smell of the bed (‘nasty, but like home’). Armpits (whiffy). The New York apartment (‘sharp chemical-metallic smell that sweat glands make when deprived of heroin’). Autumn outside (‘exhaust fumes mixed with the wet air . . . It smells like just-cooked junk’). All this olfactory assault and it’s still page one. It’s time to get up and cook some junk for breakfast. The only problem is our hero has run out. Nothing in his trusty teaspoon. He goes to his French girlfriend-turned-dealer to ‘cop’ some junk. He scores, injects, and luxuriates in the high:
I sit there. There’s my dick inside my pants, really warm and heavy and potent. Maybe I should jerk off. I haven’t come in days – it’s like pissing or taking a shit, you can only do it on the outskirts of highs.
It is, we infer, a somewhat sluggish bodily member, but (male readers will enviously register) when unsluggish extendable past his navel. Or so he tells us.
Billy Mud is lead guitarist in a group whose vogue has passed. He still picks up the necessary money in ‘dingy nightclubs’ where ‘the girls, as a rule, are there to be abused’. Which he does – out of ennui, not sexual interest. Something at last happens to relieve his boredom. A girlfriend, Chrissa, has been commissioned to deliver a classic automobile to LA – a fire-coloured ’57 De Soto Adventurer (the colour of New York methadone, Mud thinks; the analogy would not occur to everyone). ‘The road!’ – that sovereign remedy for all adventure-seeking Americans. On the drive across, his agent suggests he write a book about America – a ‘Kerouaciad’ for the 1980s.
Off they go, following the two-lane blacktop over prairies where once the covered wagons trundled. En route Mr Mud scores dope everywhere, and screws (to Chrissa’s intense exasperation) anything screwable. It climaxes in Mud-Bernstein’s (and Hell-Meyers’) native Kentucky. He hasn’t been in touch with his family for ten years. He celebrates by screwing his aunt Jane. She finds the reunion gratifyingly out of the ordinary. He steals all the Percodan from her medical cabinet, and then it’s back on the road. Incest in Kentucky is one of the few things that happen in this novel, though Mud’s anabasis takes in some sharp topographic observation. For example, you are in New York – but only on Los Angeles, like a fly on a window pane. To Mud, the West Coast city is, if anything, even less congenial than New York:
The conspicuous electric signs and elaborate architecture are like smiles pasted onto fear. And then there’s the frightening sweet smell of the place, like an orchid’s ulterior motive, disgustingly attractive, like the smell of your own farts.
Mud survives, despite the world an unkind fate has dumped him in. ‘The way things are now’, he says, ‘a few bags of dope make me feel lucky. And you know I think it’s true. I’ve always been lucky’.
Gibson is right. It’s a nauseating novel – but damnably readable.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not sure what to think of this book. One thing is for sure the author is a talented writer and there are lines and sometimes, a series of strung-together lines of brilliance, but often like the lead character, who is at the very least closely based off the author, Richard Hell over-indulges in his poetic pontificating. The story itself is substituting an excited by the world, Jack Kerouac, writing about a multitude of colorful characters and experiences he encounters as he and some friends race around the country in an old car, with a angst ridden punk rock self-destructive and completely depraved heroin addict who races across the country in search of his next fix while he uses and abuses his female traveling companion and others along the way. The narratoring punk junkie is the antagonist along with sex and drugs and occasionally a mere glimpse here and there of his humanity acts as a possible protagonist. You probably shouldn’t like or enjoy this book but at the same time, I wouldn’t say it’s not worth reading.

[NancyToxic · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had so much potential, I loved the setting, the characters, dialogue, Hell's narrative style... I just really did not like how the story was executed and the ramblings between scenes. It's a shame. The first few chapters had me by the throat as well as the insane chapters leading up to the end. It was just the in-between chapters that I struggled to get through. I really did consider not reading any further. Its short length was a motivating feature for sure.
I used to consider Richard Hell a writer whom I'd read anything he put out, including his shopping list, but after this... I think I need a break, and I'll probably just stick to his non-fiction works in future.

[Alec Downie · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a point in the book where Hell writes, " ...and I start ridiculous, lying antidotes plausibly. just to lead him on and make a fool out of him",

That is how I felt, as a reader.

Junkie glorification, self absorbed BS lies and philosophising, with intermittent misogynistic, juvenile, sexual fantasy.

I only read on to see if there was a twist or some redemption worth caring about.

No encore required!

[Michael]

It’s gross, disgusting, and not fun… yet it’s really hard to put down. A better reader than me could easily knock this out in a couple of hours.

It’s hard not to want to know how this road trip unravels, but it’s also hard not to think that the author sees himself in the main character based off the little history I know of him. Which in that case, sorry!!!

[goops · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn’t finish this. Awfully derivative. It has some nice moments of prose but it was outweighed by the bad dialogue, plotting, characterization, and let’s be real, also by all the bad prose. Don’t know why I expected more from Richard Hell - his music is way better than this book.

[Willow · Rating 1 out of 5]

Self-centred crap from a loser druggie. Badly written and easily put down. Go now? I'm gone.

[Jameson Ketchum · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of all time.

[Lila Lobdell · Rating 1 out of 5]

I lost any respect I had for Richard Hell after reading this narcissistic drivel

[Vanessa Martin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not memorable.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty and well written

[Cliff Bailey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Liked Hells' songs on a punk LP I have, so thought I'd check out his ramblings. Picked it up from a Tesco charity shelf for 50p . So far I dont feel cheated.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

craaazy ending

[Donald Forg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good thing this was a short book. Not sure why I read it all except maybe curious on what happened.

[amelia fliving · Rating 3 out of 5]

read this cause i like richard hell but now i don’t think i could ever look him in the eyes lol. this was self indulgent and it feels like he just read on the road and wanted to write that, but make it smut, with him (or a thinly veiled portrayal of himself) as the main character. also so full of self pity which got really tiring, of course all the women are just sex objects, and all for it to end like..that… but the vibrant and nasty writing itself i definitely enjoyed

[Annabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This might as well been autobiographical billy is exactly like Richard hell and chrissa is very obviously lizzy mercier descloux

[Hannah Goes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disgusting at parts. Not as good as I dreamed I was a very clean tramp.

[honora · Rating 4 out of 5]

vile.

[Susan Gottfried]

Originally posted at http://rockread.westofmars.com

The nice thing about my continued growth as an expert in Rock Fiction is that people send me books. Go Now, Richard Hell's 1996 novel (novella? I didn't count the words) is one of those books that showed up with a Random Act of BookCrossing Kindness.
I picked it up the other day because I needed a quickie read, and it was a skinny book. How's that for prioritizing your stack of To Be Reads?
Richard Hell has been around music for a long time, most notably as a founding member of the Voidoids. He's also been around drugs for a long time. No wonder they came together -- sort of -- in the Rock Fiction book, Go Now.
Actually, I'd call this more of a Road Trip book than a work of Rock Fiction. Sure, we're told Billy is in a band, but between the drugs and the adventure, we don't really see much in terms of music. At most, I'd call this one of those fringe books in the Rock Fiction genre: there's a guy who makes music, but that's the extent of it.
So we've got this road trip, and at the same time, we've got the story of a junkie. The two can't mesh well, and they don't. Billy is a train wreck, but what junkie isn't?
This is my issue. I'm not a fan of junkie fiction. I'm not a fan of train wrecks. I need something redeeming in a character, and there just isn't much redeemable about someone who's trapped in a very dark, needy place. Add in the fact that I can't relate to a junkie's lifestyle and … yeah. I'm doomed.
In the right hands, this book will be viewed as a fabulous work of fiction. Billy's written with an authenticity that rings so very true, even if I hadn't known anything about Richard Hell, I'd be able to tell Billy is based on some autobiographical traits.
While this wasn't my sort of read, that doesn't mean it's not a good one. If you're into Road Trip Junkie stories with only a hint of Rock Fiction, go for it. .