On a snowy night in Hoboken, a purple house sat dark save for the kitchen. Deborah Wright was talking to her daughter about her plans for the evening. “I don’t want you hanging around those goth boys anymore. This convention nonsense is exactly that—nonsense. You’re not going.” Meredith, curly blonde hair, Doc Martens, and all black, stared back at her mother without saying a word, without moving a muscle. This is a woman she’d have to deal with only for a few more years, and then vamoose: off to Bennington or Evergreen, or move straight to the City, never to return to Hoboken or any part of New Jersey. All the smog and trash of Trenton would only be something she’d see from an Amtrak window, and her entire adult life would be spent on the island of Manhattan.
Meredith was thinking about all of this, her future, while her mother continued lecturing her about the gory movie con that she wasn’t allowed to go to. “I read an article in the Times today about some of the people that are going to be there… Italians? Filipinos? You must be on drugs. If I can’t trust the guests of this convention with the safety of my daughter, how about the hoard, the greasy masses of freaks who rent filth like… ’Cannibal Holocaust’ and ‘Faces of Death.’ I didn’t have kids to get a daughter like this!” Meredith could’ve corrected Deborah, her precious mother, that none of the people involved in the two borderline snuff films she mentioned, still infamous for their animal cruelty and real death. Meredith could’ve told her mother that she was going into the City to see the director of Seconal, The Monochrome Peacock, Nine Lives of a Hussy, Cannibalico, Debris, and Brain Death: Enzo B. Bucci.
(When I was following her, I must admit I’d no idea my wife was on a plane with Enzo himself—nor that Bennington was somewhere in Tribeca entertaining a couple of toddlers.)
Like any avid horror fan, Meredith read Fangoria regularly; knowing her mother would never approve of a subscription, she visited the same book shop by the video store by the record store by the other book store in a town she saw romanticized in the indie press, mostly by Yo La Tengo. Maxwell’s was still open, but who was there to see? Meredith missed Nirvana by a hair when they last played Hoboken in late-1991, and she took most other Matador, Sub Pop, and indie-to-major rock bands for granted in an era of alternative abundance: Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, Unwound Sleater-Kinney. And then there were the awful megastars of the dreary mid-1990s, a top tier of charlatan rip off artists like Green Day, Weezer, and worst of all, The Smashing Pumpkins.
Meredith never felt like defending Courtney Love, but never forgot what Billy Corgan said when asked if he’d ever tried to commit suicide: “No, because if I had tried to kill myself, I would have succeeded.” Even at 16, it felt like a particularly stupid and childish response to a serious question, and after getting her hands on a mortifying report on Corgan from SPIN in 1994, she actively rooted against the band, telling everyone at every opportunity about what a smug, self-righteous asshole Billy Corgan was, how he was an unapologetic commercial sellout, and most offensive of all, a fraud desperate to claim the throne abdicated by Kurt Cobain less than two years ago.
Meredith was thinking about all of this as her mother continued talking at her, without a single word or thought registering, a white noise of blue-blood moralizing on the disgusting and crime-ridden streets of Manhattan. “You’re not going out tonight.” Deborah palmed three Xanax into her mouth and followed it with a double brandy. “But I’m going off to bed.” And in 15 minutes, Deborah was indeed off to bed; practically comatose, she slept right through her daughter sneaking out of the house—using the front door—wrapped in nine layers, two pairs of gloves, and three pairs of socks. She only brought one thing with her: a VHS tape of Orgy 2, known in Italy as Sei strisce della gazzella rossa, or Six Stripes of the Red Gazelle, a movie she watched at least 25 times throughout 1995.
She knew the tape had a butchered cut with a bad English dub, at least half an hour missing, and a cropped aspect ratio that destroyed Bucci’s masterful widescreen compositions. She knew she’d likely have to wait until college, or her life in the City, to see any of these movies as they were intended to. But for now, this was enough: a bit of travel in a bit of snow, alone with a copy of Orgy 2 waiting to be signed by the master himself, on her way into Manhattan, one night in January 1996.
—Follow Rooster Quibbits on Twitter: @RoosterQuibbits