Sunday Morning! “Twist: an American Girl” by Adele Bertei

One of the little pet theories that I’ve developed over a few years of these posts (and hopefully I haven’t beaten this one into the ground) is that corporate publishing seems to me to be about where the music industry was in the 1970s: kinda bloated, monopolistic, focused on huge contracts and advances and marketing pushes, and churning out increasingly disposable “product.” I do read the big blockbuster books that come out, on occasion, but I find they read more like film treatments than novels. So, I don’t post about them very often. In fact, one of the posts I actually regret writing here was an early piece about a book that I praised, but which felt forgettable and low in calories a week later.

As a result, I tend to focus here, and in my writing for BUST Magazine, on the indie publishers who are taking more chances and publishing books mainly because they want to see them in the world. This can be tricky, admittedly. I’m not sure at what point an independent publisher that is effectively owned by a very wealthy person (who might well see it as a means to get their money cleaner) should be called an “indie” anymore. And, I’ve no doubt a few of the indies are susceptible to the same shady accounting issues that brought down a few of the indie record labels. For the most part, though, I see much more of the “labor of love” aspect in the indies than I do in the “big five” publishers.

So, I guess it’s not terribly surprising that many independent record labels and former record label people have now launched publishing imprints. One of the books I read this week, Adele Bertei’s memoir “Twist: an American Girl,” is one of the first titles to be published by the newly-launched Ze Books. Michael Zilkha was the visionary behind Ze Records, the “mutant pop” label that put out much of the funky downtown music that wiggled its way between punk and disco in the early 80s. He sees the new book imprint as a new way “to give again a platform to ‘out-of-the-ordinary voices’.” I had to special-order it from our local “indie” bookseller, who looked at me like I was asking for something strange and possibly nefarious- just like ordering punk records back in the day!

Once upon a time… Adele Bertei and Lesley Woods

Adele Bertei is one of those totally uncompromising artists who serve as a somewhat humbling example to the rest of us. She has been writing and performing music since the 1970s and is maybe best known for forming the funk punk band “The Bloods,” who are considered the first band composed of out gay women, and put out the great single “Button Up.” She’s a great singer who I first knew through the music she recorded with Jellybean Benitez, but she has performed with Thomas Dolby, Whitney Houston, the Contortions, Culture Club, and written songs for everyone from Lydia Lunch to the Pointer Sisters.

Oh, and then, she was also involved in the independent film scene; my film critic partner knew Bertei from her role in the Lizzy Borden movie “Born in Flames.”

An extremely accomplished autodidact, Bertei could have written an account of her early years in the fertile music scene of New York in the early 80s. Instead, she has written a harrowing, deeply moving account of growing up in working class poverty outside Cleveland and being shuffled mercilessly through the foster and state care system after being removed from her schizophrenic mother and abusive but distant father. Somehow, along the way, Bertei not only survived, but figured out who she was as a queer girl, singer, and an artist.

Or, “Maddie Twist” did. Maddie is the “Trojan horse” Bertei uses for “protection while taking the journey back through the war zones of my youth.” The story is told as if it was a novel, which gives a certain distance from the painful realities it depicts. It also allows the writer to get in close with a strong sense of detail. We can hear the music as Maddie watches her wild mother Kitty dancing half-naked in the kitchen. While Kitty is erratic and even violent at points, she’s also a deeply sympathetic character; we can understand easily why Maddie loves her.

Cleveland!

The father, not so much. “Big Al” has divorced Kitty at the start, but “still hangs around,” mostly it seems to make trouble; not to pay any bills. Many of the men Maddie encounters in the story are broken and also dangerous. Patriarchy as a system of bullying with a very hard edge. They’ve been ground down at the lower end of the economic system and men like Big Al seem determined to grind the women who suffer them a little lower. It’s almost a relief when Maddie and her brothers are removed from the home.

The foster homes are weirdly idyllic, and sort of exceedingly suburban, but they come built with a strong sense of internal hierarchy: Maddie is the poor girl coming to live with the middle class families, and the children of those families, for the most part, treat her like shit. Class is also a hard edged system. In one of the more heartbreaking sections of the book, a girl who seems to have taken a liking to Maddie and brought her into a new home and cool social scene, turns on her and punches her repeatedly when word gets around that Maddie’s been kissing another girl. She flees the foster home and ends up in a much worse situation, kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a deranged vet, before two sympathetic women bust her out.

Unfortunately, her salvation from the foster homes is a Catholic school for wayward girls, where the nuns can’t suffer Maddie’s persistent attraction to girls and she can’t understand where’s the sin in loving someone else. Through her series of trials, we get a strong sense of what’s important to her: her books and poetry, her desire for other girls and burgeoning queerness, and the music that runs through her life and provides the closest thing to real salvation.

I think the conceit of “fiction” also really helps in these sections. Sometimes memoirs can get a little mired in self-absorption and sour grapes, and become a slog to read. Twist is not a slog; I finished it in an afternoon. My descriptions don’t do the story justice. Bertei writes her fictional self as a plucky, curious square peg, trying and failing to fit into a world that she sees well enough to know is deeply dysfunctional. Her last name is no coincidence; Maddie reads like a Dickensian waif, and the story reads like a sometimes-heartbreaking adventure.

Finally, reform school feels like an oasis as Maddie grows into herself as a “stud” in a place where plenty of girls get with girls. It’s a tough place too, but she’s strong enough when she is finally released to stand on her own two feet. She gets a job and an apartment and finds her tribe among the drag queens and gay bars of Cleveland. Right at the end of the book, she witnesses a band called Cinderella Backstreet preforming in a bar and decides then and there she wants to be a rock singer.

Those of us who maybe obsess a bit on such things will recognize legendary Cleveland musician Peter Laughner in that scene. Bertei has written a book about Laughner and how he mentored her creative energies in their band the Wolves before his very untimely death. In a sense, Twist is a prequel to “Peter and the Wolves” and even her radiantly joyous book about the band Labelle. It’s also a sharp reminder that this was a true story, if slightly fictionalized, and she really did live through these things to make a meaningful life for herself.

If she could get through all of this, clearly Adele was ready to survive the music industry.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, playing, pondering, watching, or being released from this weekend?