The house in downtown Portsmouth is crammed with people in tight fitting thrift store wares and ironed flat locks. I feel so square as I enter the party for a book reading of Lisa Carver’s “Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir” that I can barely fit through the door. After blunderingly telling someone I’m a writer from The Wire, I’m greeted with whacks on the back with rolled up newspaper, shouts and disinterested looks.

Maybe I should have stayed at home and watched the baseball game. A couple are making out next to me—the girl growls as she nuzzles her head into her boyfriend’s neck. Lisa Carver is the one I came to see though, and I find her moving quietly around the kitchen, taking a pizza out of the oven. She looks nice and speaks softly after I introduce myself, not the behavior I expected from the founder of iconic punk band Suckdog, legendary zine Rollerderby and notorious sex-pert and volatile sexual performer.

Before the reading comes a set by Mating Dance in the basement. Mating Dance’s sonic warfare consists of heavy drums and pounding bass clunking along to a cacophony of manic, inaudible screams and loud, tuneless blows on brass instruments. Their drummer sports a short, narrow black moustache, not fashionable since a well-known German dictator stole it from Charlie Chaplin. Other members “play” their instruments with a predictable unpredictability, avoiding rhythm and tune with thorough aplomb. It’s horrible and I think it’s supposed to be. “Grraarrgghhrrurr” bellows the angry lungsmith over the mike, immediately and effortlessly hitting the nail on its angry head. Mating Dance demands to be heard, so much so that one audience member, who was clearly not grooving enough, is promptly stomped to the floor by one of the band. Not put off, the audience member scooches closer.

The band silences as suddenly as it began, and everyone moves into the living room for Carver’s book event. Carver and her posse innovatively reenact a scene from the book—her 15-minute “date” with punk legend and fellow New Hampshire-ite GG Allin in New York’s Lizard Lounge during the late 1980s. Fortunately, this does not involve imitating Allen’s tendency for smearing his own ass paste on himself, but rather Erik Swanson standing in for the punk icon, complete with leather jacket and jock strap, nearly comatose and semi-conversing with Rachel Johnson, who plays Carver. For the layman this is the most interesting part of the evening, at least capturing some of the haphazard, improvised and cabaret nature of Carver’s famed shows and her new book.

In “Drugs Are Nice: A Post-Punk Memoir,” the author details her inarguably interesting life, from her childhood in Dover and California to touring Europe and North America in provocative sex operas with first husband, French performer and communist Jean-Louis Costes. In between, Carver formed Suckdog with friend Rachel Johnson and they quickly became cult favorites, mixing music and skits and making out with audience members in now legendary performances. In 1990, she also created Rollerderby, a now legendary zine that earned her the tag of “voice of a generation.”

Carver’s story is fascinating, not because she was some kind of nihilistic sexual performer. She was, and continues to be, fascinating because she completely demolished the safety-line between performer and audience, because her antics continued long after the audience left (or, as commonly occurred, after the show was forcibly stopped), because she stood out in a culture swamped with repetition and cast-offs, and because her shows, words and hedonistic attitude affected so many numbers of admirers.
Carver gives depth and reason to a life in which the public and private have almost always been interchangeable. “My flying limbs and flying vagina—both on stage and off—create a flurry of distraction obscuring my embarrassed heart and shy soul,” she writes. “I want to be and feel truly exposed. I mean, I don’t want to. I’m terrified to! But because I don’t want to, I want to.” Now, settled back in Dover, married with “two brilliant children,” it’s difficult to imagine that the person directing the reenactment in this living room is the same person who has attempted suicide several times, drunkenly brawled and balled onstage and off, flirted with Judaism for a while, and had a child with someone who was rumored to be a Nazi. Yet Lisa Crystal Carver has done all this and still come out smiling. In fact, tonight she is glowing.

A week later I speak with Carver on the phone, where she’s hanging out with her beloved kids and watching Oprah. “I never watch TV, this is great,” she exclaims. “They’re having people on who’ve flattened their hair.” Again, Carver surprises, but that’s what she does. “My rabbi once told me,” recalls Carver, “You see an apple you sniff it, touch it, by the time you bite it the experience is already over. Expecting is the experience. That’s why I like to give people something different.” Carver is only 31, yet she has had more personal highs and lows than most people have in a lifetime. I ask her if it was difficult translating some of these moments onto the page.

“I used old Rollerderbys, Rachel (Johnson, Carver’s sisterly partner in crime), and letters from boys to help me remember stuff, then Rachel nagged me to write some of the harder parts. Prostitution, vomiting, it was miserable writing, I was having to drink to write.” However, with help from Rachel and ex-husband Costes (with whom she is still very good friends), “Drugs Are Nice” was finished and now she is going on a nationwide book tour to support it. “It wasn’t necessarily important that I had to write about me, but to write about the thing, the movement. Nobody had really written about it before. It was also very satisfying explaining a lot of the stuff that I did.”

Carver makes reference to a movement, but she certainly wasn’t lost in any crowd (despite the fact that she acknowledges that her audiences were as “nuts” as she was). Carver was and still is today a unique individual. “Sure, I enjoyed shocking. I wasn’t blessed with any particular talent, I can’t sing, I’m a terrible actress, I’m a lousy publisher, but I guess I felt obliged to entertain.”

Although she’s now reflecting on a career that has spanned almost 15 years, Carver is not one to rest on her laurels, with the book tour moving onto Europe in the spring. It seems there will never be any stopping Lisa Carver. In this sense she takes the punk ethic to new heights, her just-do-it attitude seemingly relentless. A little older and wiser, sure, but Lisa Carver is definitely still the impulsive eccentric of old—or as she puts it, “just plain old disgusting.”