The first time I saw Cookie Mueller she was having sex with a chicken. In Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, a newly reissued collection of her stories, she recalls the day her mother read the script that contained this chicken scene: she was midway through shooting the film Pink Flamingos by John Waters and he was due by to pick her up any minute. “‘ART?!?!?!” her mother screamed, trying to stop her leaving the house. “ART!?!?! THIS ISN’T ART!!” Waters later described her as “a writer, a mother, an outlaw, an actress, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all a goddess.” The second time I saw her was in Nan Goldin’s photograph taken at her funeral. She lies in a pleated silk-lined casket surrounded by flowers, in bangles and eyeliner, and she looks impossibly glamorous and impossibly alive.
I’m reading her stories now for the third time; the first time, some years ago, ignited a gentle obsession. The second upset me. In her Last Letter, she wrote that those dying of Aids, as she would later that year, 1989, were, “people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see.” Now, reading the expanded reissue in the shadow of the death of Mueller’s fellow 20th-century American essayist Joan Didion, I’m excited. Like Didion, Mueller wrote vividly about chaos and culture, but, unlike Didion, Mueller leapt into the mess of it as if a swimming pool painted black.
Maybe it’s the effect of all these years at home in a pandemic, all this time looking out of the window on to streets empty but for an Ocado van, all this time alone, maybe it’s personal – the yearnings of a woman entering middle age wearing Uggs in the suburbs – but today the idea of adventure, of an adventurous life, seems particularly important and seductive.
Even before lockdown the kind of world Mueller describes, where in a single day she is nearly recruited by the Manson family, takes a shit-ton of drugs, goes to a gig at San Quentin prison and, on a mountaintop with a satanist, accidentally summons the son of Beelzebub, was, let’s be honest, out of reach. Not so much the content – mountains remain, as do drugs – but the element of chance. The wide openness of a day, the possibilities, the going out and talking to strangers, the extraordinary things that can happen when a person’s mind (as Mueller wrote of her own in one of her advice columns) is, “so open that at times I can hear the wind whistling through it”.
In her introduction to the book, writer Olivia Laing marvels at how “Cookie’s world of happenstance and chance encounter has been obliterated by the internet… I can’t think of anyone now who doesn’t use Google as a prophylactic against the unexpected, a charm against getting lost that comes at a higher price than might have been predicted.” Less happens in our worlds than hers – less bad and less good. Fewer overdoses perhaps, less violence, but also less art and less moving to a pig farm after falling in love with the farmer that night at a party. Less hope.
Through the 1970s, Mueller took her baby on her adventures – though they weren’t necessarily adventures to her, they were just a way of moving through life – to beaches, Berlin, someone’s house in the countryside that she accidentally burned down. I held my breath during the mothery parts, which on this reading, with two children under my tight belt, felt breathtakingly transgressive. It made me realise I have time only for two kinds of writing on parenting: the rageful reporting on its horrors and cons, and this, stories where a woman’s untameable identity is strong enough that it doesn’t get eclipsed by motherhood, in fact is enhanced by it, her love for her son appearing to propel her further and faster through the world.
It’s a good time to read about freedom. Part of me itches to live the way Mueller did, colliding with expectations of how a woman should be, always hitching rides, high, to the next good place. But more of me is just grateful that she documented it for us, us mothers and others who have got caught in safety nets and chosen paths of least resistance, recording her too-fast life with its dangers and hilarity and the night she was accidentally locked in a Chinese restaurant. “Why does everybody think I’m so wild?” she wrote, of the time the couple whose house she cleaned invited her to go to bed with them. “I’m not wild. I happen to stumble on to wildness. It gets in my path.” It’s not just the stories that are exciting, it’s the revelation they contain – that we might allow such wildness to stumble on to our own paths, even just for an afternoon. I love her for reminding me, with gentle pressure between the lines, to go out tonight, to see what happens, to live a little harder.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
