Going through the boxes from the book tonight I came across the tapes.  Most of them are so garbled now that you can barely decipher what's being said. I managed to get this, the opener, where it all began, and frankly magic happened.  She called me Kate even when I preferred to be Kat, so as I got older, depending where I was traveling to I would answer to a gamut of different names.  But for the book I'm called Kat and the tape I'm called Kate.  These days, depending on your location I will turn around to anything from Kat to Kitty to Katelan.

(Speaking Into The Recorder)

Kat: February 16th, my cousin Holly and I are taking a road trip. Wherever we end up, we end up.  We don't care.  We're fucking going crazy.  This is our night.  We're running away.

Holly: We have time, lots of time. We have forty-eight hours to be awake, to have fun, to live life and not think about it. My mind is clear right now, absolutely clear. I have no thoughts except for me, Kat, this
car, and our budget of $5.25 and a gas card. We are going to make an adventure out of this.

It's not a great recording, and as the night progresses it's harder and harder to understand. But it was the beginning and that's all that really matters. And as you can see the edits were tiny.

Photo by Richard Mann

Nancy Spungen just wanted to be "somebody."  You can't knock her for that.  Growing up I had a fascination with her.  I think most of us grow up and want to leave some kind of legacy behind.  "Somebody" means different things to different people though.  In my teenage years my cousin Holly and I would take road trips with no destinations just to dream.  We wanted to be "famous", for what, I'm not sure.  I knew I was leaving for New York in a few months and she was jumping from job to job in Boston.  All we knew was that we needed each other.

My life has been a series of co-dependent addictive relationships.  I think my friend Ben summed it up best when describing me years ago.  "Kat is like vanilla ice cream sprinkled with crack.  Smooth, tasty, and goddam what a rush." When I think back to my highschool years, this is exactly what I'm talking about.  Teenagers have a way of thinking they are immortal.  They are fearless, we were no exception I'm sure.  Looking back on who were were, I would have placed a bet we'd be dead by the end of the summer.  But we lived, for a while at least, and then there were a series of deaths. 

This all has a point, I swear.  You see in a few weeks I'll be releasing Blood and Pudding.  It's weird to call it memoir since I no longer know the girl who wrote it.  Seems she died the same time the love of her life and her cousin did.  It's also strange to be releasing journals we once tried so hard to hide.  Back then we all brought out the worst in each other.  We were addicts, mental cases, thieves, and lost.  We came from good homes.  We wanted attention.  We wanted to be "somebodies". 

Blood and Pudding took ten years to put together.  It went through three editors, four micro-cassettes, five re-writes,  and something like six journals.  Some of my editors and friends wonder why I didn't send it to a big publishing house and I really did struggle with the choice.  But in the end I made my decision because of this:

1997

Kat: "What should we do with the book when it's done?"

Holly: "Just release it.  Those who need it will find it.  No one should ever force something on the world. Just make sure it's pure."

What she meant was "Make sure it was true." She was okay with tiny edits, paragraphs being slightly altered, or grammatical errors being fixed.  She was not okay with changing the tapes, reforming sentences, and making our secrets marketable.  And being that she is no longer here.  I had to respect that.  Looking back, maybe she had a different definition of "somebody" than I did, but if it's one thing I've learned over the years, it's to always respect the dead.

Coming Soon: