He said this with a certain sadness and pride in his voice.
I first met Dada Trash aptly enough on Halloween. We were both in our sophomore year of college. Dada had gone out as “Surrealism” and his face was painted with interweaving images of leaves and fish. Styrofoam cups were krazy-glued all over his body and he carried a giant wooden fork and spoon as dual scepters. I liked him immediately.
The two of us soon began to collaborate on a series of Super-8 movies. They were art flicks. We would have done porno loops but me and Dada Trash couldn't find any girls who would take their clothes off so we had to pick topics that were closer at hand. Like our film Meadow Muffins which was a documentary about piles of cow shit in various fields around Delaware. Another documentary called Hygiene consisted of one ten-minute shot of Dada Trash popping the numerous zits on his face into the camera until you could barely see through the lens. By the time we finished screening that one, not a single person was left in film class, and five students and the professor were in the bathroom driving the porcelain bus.
Our ultimate Super-8 epic was called Dad! True to the spirit of Sergei Eisenstein, it was a silent film. Dad! opens with a shot of the red evening sky. Slowly the camera pans down till the screen is filled by a gaudy neon lit porno shop. A nervous young man about twenty years old walks into the place. Inside, he glances at the magazines for a few moments, then makes his way towards the peep show booths in the back. There is a dim shot of the boy walking down the hallway of doors. Scuzzy men in dirty raincoats shuffle past. Illuminated signs on the doors advertise the movies showing in the booths. Swamp Pussy. Hot Buns for the Baker. Pumping Granny. Enema Antics. The young man picks a booth and walks in. The camera zooms in on the sign on the door: Journey to the Center of My Bunghole.
Inside the booth there's a shot of the young man from the chest up. The light from the film flickers on his face contorted in ecstasy. His arms move in a way that suggests the boy is jerking off. Then the camera pans over to a glory hole drilled in the wall. A hand pokes through the hole and starts beckoning to the boy. The young man's bliss is suddenly interrupted as he stops and stares at the hand. It begins making obscene pantomimes of jerking him off. There's a shot of the boy's face in deep, perplexed thought. Cut to a black screen with white words that say: “Even though I'd never actually done it with a guy I'd always been tempted… Ah, what the hell!”
The young man gets up and sticks his dick into the glory hole. There is a long shot of him from the shoulders up, his face going through ever higher levels of bliss as the invisible man on the other side of the wall sucks him off.
Cut to a shot of the two adjoining peepshow booths filmed from the outside. Both doors open simultaneously and the occupants emerge at the same time. Suddenly the anonymous lovers see each other. One of them is an old man about sixty who is wiping his lips. The young man looks at him in overwhelming shock and horror. There is a shot of the boy's face as he screams something. Then cut to a black screen with the single word: “DAD!” in big white letters. The End.
Needless to say, that one didn't go over too well with the film department either. I think both of us flunked our Cinematography class that semester.
When punk rock came around Dada Trash was finally in his natural element. This was the world he had been waiting for, one where it was fashionable to piss people off. Hell, it was expected. The punks were a culture of irritation. But, of course, Dada Trash still didn't fit in. Conformity would have been death for him. The punks wanted to piss off the world and Dada Trash wanted to piss off the punks. He would go to hardcore shows dressed as a yuppie or a Marine, just to see the reactions he'd get. I had to drag him out of more than a few fights. Dada never did anything belligerent, it was merely his clothes and appearance that caused the violent reactions. While everyone was decked out in dark shades, checkered shirts, buttons, and other new wave '80s fashions, Dada Trash dressed in leisure suits, bellbottoms and vintage '70s clothing. Style and Fashion were some of his favorite realms in which to fight his artistic war. Dada loved poking holes in common concepts of conformity and nonconformity. He considered Devil's Advocate a valid career choice.
Dada Trash once had a summer job working for a health insurance firm in Philadelphia. It was one of those horrible office jobs where he worked in a sea of cubicles. His office was just a cramped little square among all the other identical squares. Everyone wore the same three-piece suit, everyone's office area looked exactly the same. The only stamp of individuality, the only way to tell any of the cubicles apart was by the family pictures that everyone put on their desks. Smiling, drooling, cherubic babies, the prune-like faces of grandparents, wedding photos. The gilt-framed pictures were the only humanity left in the suffocating office environment.
In general, Dada Trash hated his coworkers. He thought they were the most boring two-dimensional people alive. So he came up with a little prank to mess with their minds. He went out and got a couple of eight-by-ten gilt photo frames and put them on his desk like everyone else, only he didn't put any pictures in the frames. He just left them as a couple of blank squares. It was great, whenever one of his coworkers would come into his cubicle and try to make small talk, they'd grab one of the photo frames off his desk while saying something like, “So, is this the wife and kids?” Then they'd notice the frames were empty and their narrow conservative brains just could not compute. Sometimes they'd fumble for something to say, but usually there was just an awkward silence followed quickly by them excusing themselves. Dada Trash said it was the best conversation killer he had ever come up with.
His music had an equal ability to annoy. Back in the punk rock days Dada Trash was in thrash bands like Virgin Potato and The Queebs which were so bad that not even the most dedicated hardcore heads could stand them. I watched him play sets that drove away aficionados of industrial noise and experimental dissonance. When he was in Bongwater Enema, they cleared every room they played till not a single club in town would give them a gig. Dada disbanded them in triumph, having achieved just what he'd set out to do. Dada set new lows in musical tolerance. Sometimes his outfits alone were enough to drive an audience away before they played a single note, get-ups that would frighten even Kiss back into their mothers' closets.
“Clothing is art that you can change and broadcast every day, wherever you go,” Dada Trash told me. “Art that's like a second skin. An aesthetic plumage. You become a walking advertisement for yourself.”
A longtime obsession of Dada's was collecting tacky '70s clothing. Pink polyester slacks. Acres of platform shoes. Disco leisure suits. T-shirts with Farrah Fawcett and John Travolta on them. His closets looked like museums of lost fashion, the wardrobe that time forgot. With most of those clothes, there was a reason why they had been forgotten. Dada Trash had a rare talent for buying the ugliest piece of clothing a thrift store or flea market had to offer.
And he wore the shit too, usually in the most clashing and painful color combinations possible. Some outfits were so hard on the eyes you literally had to turn your head away. No matter how you slice it, yellow socks do not go with red vinyl pants. Orange and black do not match, unless it's Halloween. Some days Dada Trash reminded me of a surrealist clown, a time traveler with really bad taste.
Like one night in the Haight when we walked down to the grocery store. Dada wore a fuzzy white yak hair jacket, wraparound neon orange shades, powder blue crotch-hugging polyester pants, and a pair of pink suede clogs with six-inch platforms. While we were walking down the sidewalk an old black woman did a double-take and said, “Man, you some kind of pimp who just got out of the joint after being in since the '60s?”
“No! He's Bootsy Collins!” I said.
Another time back east the two of us were at a Residents show in New Jersey. Everyone in the crowd was a stereotypical late-blooming punk rocker, or dressed down in basic black. Dada, on the other hand, looked like some glow-in-the-dark used car salesman. He wore a fluorescent orange and yellow polyester leisure suit with white bowling shoes.
“Have you noticed?” he asked me at one point.
“Noticed what?” I asked.
“Nobody's caught my look yet,” Dada said proudly. “I'm still the first person