“Last night I dreamed the whale Moby Dick swallowed up every woman and girl on the face of the earth, including me. All of us, pulverized into mush. My eyeballs were intact, so when the whale turned on its side I crawled into its head to peek through his blowhole. With all the women gone from the earth, the men’s heads and third legs exploded into nothingness – headless, third-leg-less bodies running amok and in circles like cartoon roadrunners.”
This is a passage from Twist: An American Girl, a coming-of-age memoir by Adele Bertei, a writer, director, performer and musician. She had the Moby Dick dream when she was a child but still remembers it clearly. “What a metaphor concerning the invisibility of women’s stories through the centuries,” the 68-year-old says by phone from Paris. “We need to break the conspiracy of silence and more women need to be angry and speak out.
“We need to also hear more working-class stories. You look at the New York Times, you’re not going to see any working-class stories there. Culture can’t continue to be as elitist because when you shut people out of a culture, where they have no mirrors, the dam is going to burst at some point.”
Bertei was the creator of the Bloods, the first all-woman openly queer rock band. She was part of the New York “no wave” movement of the late 1970s and went on to write songs or perform as a backing singer for 1980s acts such as Tears for Fears, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, the Pointer Sisters and Matthew Sweet. One recent article dubbed her “the most iconic rock’n’roll musician you’ve never heard of”.
That glamorous life offers little hint of Bertei’s harrowing childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s and 1970s with a violent father and a mother whose struggle with undiagnosed schizophrenia led Bertei to spend her teens in foster care. Twist: An American Girl, bracingly candid and stylishly written, is her attempt to understand.
She explains: “As a child faced with the severe traumas that I went through, in order to survive I needed to know how cruelty finds its way into human hearts or I wouldn’t have made it. I had to try and understand what was going on to have compassion. Otherwise the rage and the sadness would have killed me off. I had to delve into the systemic reasons behind racism and misogyny and homophobia.”
Bertei has been writing the book on and off since 1977 when she dived into New York’s counter-cultural scene, acting in underground films and reading prose and poetry to open for writers such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Kathy Acker. Sometimes she would write for a few months then stick the manuscript back in a drawer for years. The creative shove she needed was the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016.
“I felt it was imperative to tell this story because we’ve gone down such a dark rabbit hole where truth has turned into lies and everyone’s so confused about everything. It was important to tell it now because those stories of America in the 1960s and 1970s were very much mirrored in my own personal story and they’re still going on today.
“Cruelty: there’s this wave of a malefic nature that has swept across America and it’s very dangerous. If we don’t heal by opening these wounds and talking about how these systemic things oppress us and how miserable we all are having to wear these masks, then we’re never going to heal and we’re not going to get rid of this terrible oppressive system that’s killing us all.”
The story told through the eyes of an alter ego, Maddie Twist (a nod to Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist), a device that she likens to a narrative Trojan horse. “I needed some armour to go through the story, through those war zones of my youth and to avoid the adult scrim of the type of analysis that’s been put on anything you write about race or gender right now. The cancel culture wars. History cannot be whitewashed and it was very important for me to tell it like it was in that moment and bring the reader in.”
Bertei’s mother’s own poverty-stricken mother had played honky-tonk piano in speakeasies during the Great Depression. “There was a lot of trauma in their lives. My mother was a dancer and ended up basically leaving the earth and choosing schizophrenia and madness as a way out.
“I think she chose it, quite honestly. I know doctors would disagree with me, but her break from reality could be quite brutal and abusive, but it could also be incredibly magical, so over the years I needed to figure out how to not be angry at her but transform her affliction into the courage she gave me to believe in my imagination.”
Her father was a working-class Italian immigrant. “Very angry. Didn’t want to speak English. Wanted to be a gangster. A lot of Italian guys in Cleveland in those days aspired to be Al Capone. A very brutal, very angry, violent man, a virulent racist.
“My mother was the opposite. She identified with the struggle and the pain that she saw Black people enduring during the civil rights movement. I was lucky with that because I was the white girl anomaly in a Black culture for a couple of years when I was in a reformatory called Blossom Hill.”
Along with her two younger brothers, Bertei became a ward of the state in 1967 and spent the rest of her childhood in foster homes and reformatories in the greater Cleveland area.
She recalls: “The reason one foster family didn’t work out is because I had a foster sister who was clearly a repressed gay girl and, when she discovered that I was having a love affair with another girl in junior high, she practically beat the life out of me. I had to run away because I was being shamed at school. The foster parents actually cared about me and were very upset that I had run away. I didn’t find this out until much later in my life.
“The first reformatory was run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd and, when I first got there, I felt very safe and I appreciated the sanctity of the place. It felt like a safe harbour for me. But again, I loved girls and nuns weren’t having it, even if they were loving each other,” – she bursts out laughing and adds, “I do believe that goes on.”
Bertei, still not yet 15, was sent to a maximum security reformatory school for girls. “It was about 80% black girls and we created our own society. During those formative years we’re discovering romance and our sexuality. We weren’t about to have ourselves robbed of that inside a locked-down institution so we created our own society and we had a great time.”
Bertei had known she was gay since she watched the British actor Hayley Mills in the 1959 film Tiger Bay. “She was so adorable and I thought, oh, I want her to be my girlfriend. That’s when I knew that I fancied girls.” But in her local community in that era, “it was completely taboo. You could even say the word lesbian or homosexual or queer. It was verboten and people lost their lives because of it.
“The fortunate thing about being in Blossom Hill is I never would have experienced that kind of freedom to court other girls if I was outside those walls in a junior high school or a high school. I would have been ostracised completely. In a way, it’s that alchemy of being able to turn something that’s supposedly dark into something quite joyful.”
It was also at Blossom Hill that Bertei began singing gospel music on Sundays and found her voice as an artist. “I realised that to me, God is music. It always has been and always will be.”
The young Bertei was singing at a bar in Cleveland when she was discovered by Peter Laughner, a guitarist and singer-songwriter who became her mentor and like a brother. After Laughner’s death aged 24 resulting from severe drug and alcohol abuse problems, Bertei moved to New York.
She says: “Getting to New York was very overwhelming and scary but I immediately fell in with a crowd of other misfits. One of the first bands I saw when I landed was Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Lydia Lunch was playing this song and the lyrics are ‘Little orphans running through the bloody snow’. And I thought, I’m home! Now I know where I belong. I joined this gang of renegade artists in downtown New York and found home again.”
Such a move would be much harder for an aspiring young artist in the New York of today, she notes. “We have lost something. The whole point of our scene was that you could go to a city like New York and rent an apartment for $50, $100 a month where you wouldn’t have to live five people to an apartment and work a corporate job just to stay alive.
“Now, if you’re making art, it’s difficult and there’s all this commodification and marketing that you have to do and it just takes the soul out of the work and turns it into corporate commodification. That’s not what art has ever been about. Art has always been about rebellion and I feel sorry for kids today who don’t have that scene, aren’t able to economically recreate that scene where they don’t have to work so hard. They don’t have the freedom we had.”
Bertei was lead singer of the Bloods, an out lesbian band that toured the world and opened for Richard Hell, the Heartbreakers and the Clash among others. “We were a competent band musically but we were also dead set on living the rock’n’roll lifestyle that the Rolling Stones would live. We had groupies. We did drugs. We did all of the things that rock’n’roll boys would be lionised for but as women we were demonised.”
The Bloods’ sole release, Button Up, was released by the Au Pairs’ label Exit Records in 1981 and was a favourite of the British DJ John Peel. “But after that, I think because of our reputation and the fact that we were all pretty much out of the closet as lesbians, no music people would touch us with a bargepole in terms of recording or managing us. Eventually we broke up because there was nowhere for us to go.”
Bertei moved to Los Angeles in 1993 and worked as a behind-the-scenes director and ghostwriter, contributing to advertising campaigns and writing for various media outlets. She has created and led songwriting workshops for homeless young people and taught songwriting to prison inmates. Music’s better angels have been evident to her since, as a child in 1960s Cleveland, she heard the sound of Liverpool, another tenacious city familiar with hard times.
“I loved British pop and Gerry and the Pacemakers had a song called Ferry Cross the Mersey,” she remembers. “When I was a kid, I would hear this as a foreshadowing of the fact that I was not going to have a home and that one day, perhaps, I would find a home and I would be accepted and loved. He sings about that in the song and it moved me so deeply. Songs were mirrors to teach me what I was feeling.”
Twist: An American Girl is out now
