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.
