Remember the 80’s? The legwarmers and the feathered hair and the cheesy guys named Chad? Remember Ronald Reagan and Bernie Goetz and the very first hints of the AIDS epidemic? Well, Ted Rall does and, along with artist Pablo Callejo, he’s wrapped it all up into a gorgeous whirlwind of a memoir. The Year of Loving Dangerously (published this month by NBM) tells the story of what happened to Rall in 1984, when he was kicked out of Columbia University and found himself very close to living on the streets of New York City.
Having just been dumped by Philippa, the love of his life until then, Rall goes on the romantic lam. He meets ladies in bars and pizza joints, and, with a combination of cheerful opportunism and terrified despair, trades nights of love for a place to crash. Rall is known first and foremost for his political cartoons, but, man, he knows how to tell a story, too. Through his travails, YOLD not only paints a sharply detailed portrait of the Reagan era, with its slick trading floors and its back-alley addicts, abandoned by society, but also tells a larger human story of getting by. To see the young Rall hustle for survival in a cold-hearted city is to feel what it’s like when you’re yanked from your comfort zone, and forced to come up with all the answers on the fly. PW Comics Week was able to talk with Rall, an accomplished cartoonist, about collaborating with an artist for the first time as well as revisit life, fashion, love and politics in the 1980s.
PWCW:
Your story shows you slipping out of the economic mainstream and into a choice between gigolo-dom and homelessness. Did that experience affect your political consciousness?
TR: Well, I was a left of center guy all my life, so it’s not like I had some big right-to-left political transformation. The reason I picked this episode to write about, though, was that I felt like it was a metaphor for the insecurity created by the capitalist system. I mean I had everything going for me in that system— I was white, male, in perfect health, had a scholarship to an Ivy League university—and yet I went from the warm bosom of school to the street very quickly. I thought, if this can happen to me it really can happen to anyone. People like to blame the victim but it's just bad luck. Of course bad luck is a part of every political system but under Reagan in particular and in our capitalist system now, the problem is the absence of decent safety net. There just aren’t many places for people to turn, which we see now, in a time when millions of Americans are losing their homes, losing everything. You could understand the lack of a safety net in a poor country but when you live in the wealthiest country that's ever existed, there’s just no excuse.
PWCW: You do a great job of capturing the cultural moment of 1984 — the corporate world as it intersects or doesn't with the world of the underclasses, the looming threat of AIDS, the fashion. Did those realities become clearer to you with hindsight or were you aware of them at the time?
TR: I was a very political kid - when I was nine I went with my mother to pass out pamphlets for McGovern to our Republican neighbors and I always read the paper, so I was aware that Reagan's election represented a turning point in American politics, that it really broke the social contract once and for all. But what surprised me looking back were two things. One, I was shocked that the university was so callous. I can't imagine that an administrator, even from a legal standpoint, would kick students out like that today. It may have been the end of the old school Ivy League. Those were the last years of it being an all male school. And then, in terms of the time, I'd forgotten how totally crazy the fashions were. Women were wearing legwarmers and crazy fuzzy boots. Guys thought it was cool to wear bright pink and yellow Izod shirts. It’s like, what were we thinking? At the time we didn't think the 80s had any fashion at all.
PWCW: You seem to have avoided that trap, though. You’re wearing band t-shirts and black jeans throughout the book.
TR: Yeah, that was the punk thing, all black. Black jeans didn’t exist at the time. You had to dye them yourself until Canal jeans started dying some and selling them. But they’d come out kind of crappy and you couldn’t wash them too often or the dye would rinse out. I dyed mine in the tub. Then, you know the yellow stitching on Doc Martins, you’d go over that with a black marker. We were fanatics about wearing all black.
PWCW: There's such an incredible richness of setting in the art. What kind of research went into creating the images? And how did you and Pablo Callejo work together?
TR: Pablo Callejo is a genius or has some kind of deal with the devil because he'd never been to New York City before the book was published. He had to do everything from photo referencing. I sent him tons of photos, of the city and of myself, of course. I wrote the script in considerable detail. I described each panel, saying there should be light coming in through the window indicating that it’s morning, things like that. Then he’d do a page and send it to me and I'd look for anachronisms, and there were always a few. Like, there’s a scene in Riverside Park with Chris. He’d gotten a photo of 72nd St. Pier but that didn't exist then. Or he showed a pile of Village Voices but it was only sold at newsstands at the time.
PWCW: What made you decide to work with another artist instead of doing the art yourself?
TR : I’d never collaborated before, and this is my fifteenth book. My editor suggested it and I was actually a little insulted at first, but then I thought that it would give me the chance to really massage the dialogue and captions and make them sparkle and not have to worry about the art. I’d seen Pablo’s work in Bluesman and I thought we’d be lucky to get him. I needed an artist who was going to establish a great tone. Pablo was able to channel the way things really felt at the time. When I show the book to people who were in the city then they go, oh, God, that’s exactly right.
PWCW:
In her introduction, Xaviera Hollander focuses on the idea of sex as an economic transaction, and in the book you talk about “the intersection between sex and expediency.”
Were you at all worried about putting yourself out there as having used sex in that way?
TR: A place to stay is always a financial transaction so in that sense you can never fully separate sex from money. Just the other day, though, I got an email from an old girlfriend that had the word “User” as its title. She’d read the book and she felt like she’d been used. I knew some people would react like that but I think there's something a little churlish about calling people to task for revelations that they make themselves. It’s like when Obama wrote about doing drugs and people said, “Aha, you did drugs!” and it’s like, well, yeah, he just said he did. So anyone who's like aha your heart was not pure, all I can say is, yeah, I told you my heart wasn’t pure.
PWCW:
Did your need to see relationships from an economic point of view change your ideas about romance?
TR: I think the impermanence of romantic relationships is what I came away with. As a parallel to economic insecurity in the book, there's romantic insecurity. I realized then that any relationship can come to a crashing halt at any time. At any moment, someone can meet someone else, get tired of you, decide they don't like the cut of your jib anymore, and they'll just be gone and you'll never know why. So ever since then I've probably held a little bit back. I don't share myself except with a few people. I think this is something that happens to everyone as they grow up. It’s the same with economic insecurity. Most people have been laid off so everyone should be able to understand what that’s like. This isn’t meant to be a political book. I wanted to write a story that everyone could relate to.
PWCW: You set up a lot of expectations in the book, especially with your friend, Chris, who seems headed for destruction. Are we going to see more of this story?
TR: I’m glad you asked because, yes, it's going to be a trilogy. I call it the sex, drugs, and rock’n roll trilogy. The next book will be the year of Chris. It’s a wild, crazy roommate book. I tried to assume a just-the-facts tone for this book, but the next one is going to be far more rollicking.
