THE 'DARK, DEMENTED, HIGHLY-SEXED' BOOK I READ IN PRISON LET ME LOVE THE FREEST, TOUGHEST WOMEN IN NEW YORK CITY
ON THE 25 ANNIVERSARY OF MAGGIE ESTEP'S SHORT STORY COLLECTION 'SOFT MANIACS' HERE'S WHY THIS BOOK EARNS A SPOT IN THE OUTLAW CANON.
Soft Maniacs, Maggie Estep’s 1999 short story collection, belongs to the outlaw canon, says the author; Estep in 1994 or so. Photo credits: screenshots.
Oct. 17, 2024
"Fuck Me" is what started it.
That's what New York City slam poetry queen-turned-writer Maggie Estep answered when asked the inspiration for what one reviewer—a sex-crime prosecutor—called her "dark, demented and highly sexed" short-story collection, 1999's Soft Maniacs.
"I wrote a rant called 'Fuck Me,'" the then-41-year-old Estep told Salon in 2004. "Then a poet I was reading with challenged me to write about sex from the point of view of a man. I did it, and that story turned into my next book."
Soft Maniacs is built on two female characters and the various men who love them: Katie, daughter of a lion-tamer, and Jody, nymphomaniac psychiatrist. Here's the start of the second chapter, "The Patient," as told by one of Jody's lovers:
"I had a rambling apartment in Brooklyn and I fucked my girlfriend Jody in every part of it. So did a lot of other people."
Estep started the 1990s living on the Lower East Side then hit it big on MTV before finishing the decade as a writer.
Fresh Air's Terry Gross called Estep, then 31, an "emerging star" of "a new poetry scene" in 1994. "Slam poetry" was lyrical competition between poets modeled on the free-style word battles rappers had long waged to hone their skills. The epicenter of the slam poetry scene in New York City, and the world, was the stage of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe—home-turf for the LES-based Estep.
From the Nuyorican’s stage the one-time High Times cover girl launched herself into regular appearances on MTV and spoken-word specials on both HBO and PBS. She also toured with Lollapalooza, performed at Woodstock II, opened for Courtney Love's band Hole and released two spoken-word CDs with her band I Love Everybody: 1994's "No More Mr. Nice Girl" and 1997's Bukowski-inspired "Love is a Dog from Hell."
“Hey Baby,” a track off “No More Mr. Nice Girl” that comically de-constructs catcalling, and its MTV video, earned her an early reputation as a Feminist.
Feb. 1994 High Times. Photo credit: screenshot.
The New York Times Magazine quoted one of Estep's poems in "The Poetry Kings and the Versifying Rabble" in 1995—as an example of the "rabble."
"The next day I got calls from five editors wanting to meet with me—none of whom had seen a word I'd written," Estep told Salon.
By then, she explained, she'd "got tired of the limitations" of spoken-word. "All I wanted to do was sit down and write for five years straight."
"I wanted a complete shock to my system," Estep said. "I got it."
Her first book was 1997's Diary of an Emotional Idiot. Simon & Schuster published Soft Maniacs two years later.
Kirkus Reviews panned it as an attempt "to milk fresh narrative out of the dried-up cow of Downtown counterculture," but Voice reviewer Emily Jenkins saw in it what I saw: it was about managing "obsessions"—whatever they may be, drugs, sex, a particular person, an idea, a righteous cause—and "creating a happy domestic life that doesn’t conform to any established mold."
"Despite some almost terrifying sex scenes," Jenkins concluded, "Soft Maniacs is an optimistic book."
Part of the book’s optimism is that it’s also a work of redemption by writing which, at the time, was something I was personally obsessed with.
Estep confessed to Jenkins—who now writes children's books—that while she enjoyed the material comforts of a middle-class childhood she'd basically been raised by wolves and hazed into adulthood in mosh pits, shooting galleries and strip clubs.
“Moving to the Lower East Side in 1981—it was madness,” Estep recalled. “Me and a couple of friends were just filthy punk rockers going to CBGB’s and shooting heroin.”
“In rehab,” Estep revealed, “I felt like I made a bargain with the devil, because the moment I started detoxing and suffering, I started to really write."
"That’s the thing that’s keeps me on the path ever since," Estep explained. "If I ever go off-kilter again, I’ll have trouble writing.”
J. on the couch in the living room of the author’s Yonkers apartment in 1988. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Like Estep, I un-fucked my fucked-up self by writing.
I read Jenkins' review of Soft Maniacs while I was serving 19 years in prison for shooting a man to death in 1990.
I personally witnessed the birth of militarized law enforcement and mass incarceration in the faces of the men that filled the cells around me. To fight back, I turned my pen into the only weapon I could legally wield. Working as a jailhouse lawyer in prison law libraries, I wrote appeal briefs that sought to free my fellow prisoners, or at least get them a new trial or a reduced sentence. I also helped them file civil rights lawsuits, which challenged unjust and unconstitutional prison conditions and criminal justice system practices.
I even sued to block part of the infamous Crime Bill of 1994.
Once in a while I even won.
V. and a friend playing around on the couch in the author’s Sullivan Street apartment on his birthday in 2004. Photo creditL JB Nicholas.
To relax, I worked out and read. Sometimes I borrowed books from the prison library, but most of the books I wanted to read I found out about in the Voice or some other newspaper or magazine and had to have them mailed to me.
The Voice was delivered to my cell every week via mail subscription. If I didn't get it that way I wouldn't get it at all. The prison library got the Voice and the New York Times and a bunch of other newspapers and magazines but nobody stole Newsweek. Motherfuckers always stole the Voice though. In every prison I was ever in. Probably to jerk-off to the phone-sex and hooker ads it published in the back.
What struck me most about Soft Maniacs wasn't the sex. It was the intensely intimate moments Estep's wild-hearted characters experience when they risk sharing their lives with someone else, someone as damaged as they are.
R. and S., in my bed, Sullivan Street, 2005. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
For example. Here's Jack, after meeting Katie, who "looks a lot like that actress Lily Taylor—only with dirty-blonde hair and freckles." Katie is "so sexy and genuine seeming" everyone wants to fuck her. Including women "who don't usually have dyke inclinations." But not Jack.
I mean, I don't immediately want to crawl under the table and go down on her or walk over and stick my dick in her mouth or things, I want to protect her. She looks so vulnerable, with this face that's wide open and full of brightness, she's really the most beautiful girl I've seen in my life and I want to make sure nothing bad happens to her—although the fact of my being attracted to her pretty much guarantees a lot of bad things have already happened to her because that's how I am, attracted to wounds and damage and the potential for healing these.
Then there's the sex scenes. Here’s an artful, tame one.
Jack and Katie meet up again at Katie's Hell's Kitchen loft five days later. He calls and she invites him over on the spot. Jack describes what he sees when he gets there: "a big messy loft-type thing with a bed shoved over in one corner and huge blurry photographs of body parts stuck to the walls with pushpins."
"I peel off pieces of her clothing. She had black cotton panties on and no bra. Her tits are like little saucers, pale with light pink nipples," Jack says. "Finally she pulls me in her so deep I wonder if I'll ever find my way out." Her eyes radiate "the colors of strange lakes."
"I stick my dick in her everywhere. Her ass, her mouth, her armpit. She sucks me, licks me, rubs me with her ass and her tits and her face."
Angel in my Park Slope loft in 2006. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Jack also fucked Jody, Soft Maniac's other protagonist. Jody was assigned to Jack after he got arrested for allegedly attempting to rape "Christina the Harvard intern" at the office where they worked.
Christina, Jack told Jody, rubbed "that vinyl-clad ass of hers" into his "own worn-down corduroy pants" giving him "the most instantaneous and hardcore hard-on." So he followed her off the elevator into a "disused bathroom," hiked "her skirt up over her ass," pushed "her shoulders and bend her forward over the sink and rip the stockings and panties down over her ass"—all "while not breaking eye contact with her in the mirror."
While Jack was telling his story, he turned around "to see how Jody's taking all this because she hasn't said a word, or even grunted, in several long minutes."
"And don't you know, Jody, my button-down yellow and navy Upper East Side student shrink, is jerking off. I kid you not."
"She rips her hand out of there, which is the giveaway."
K. in the author’s Avenue B studio in 2008. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Jody, we'd previously learned from Rob in the collection's second story, "was exceptional in many ways. Not least of these her ability to climax from anal sex. Even without clitoral stimulation." A doctoral psychology student, Jody also "shot speed and studied these psych tomes for days on end."
After catching Jody playing with herself during their therapy session, Jack keeps seeing her. He explains why: "I mean, she's an amazing lay and she's really smart too." Yet, Jack says,
the thing that gets to me is this broken part of her. This thing she keeps hidden but I see once in a while when I wake up in the middle of the night and find her staring at me—not in the usual hard way, but with tenderness. That she promptly masks. But not before it's given me hope that one day she'll calm the fuck down and stop being such a freak.
Its details and passages like this that earn Soft Maniacs a spot in the outlaw canon. Loving other outlaws in real life is exactly like this and Estep captures it perfectly. Estep's writing is so good you feel her characters' pain as they struggle to transcend their wreckage of their pasts and live in the present with power and hope.
The author (r) with Luis “Blue Boy” Rosado (l), notorious Lower East Side street legend, in 2022, in front Clayton Patterson’s front door. Patterson took thousands of photographs of working-class Lower East Side residents from 1979 to this day. Blue is using his fingers to shape an “L",” for Lower East Side. Photo credit: Clayton Patterson.
When I talk about the outlaw canon, I'm not talking about a new 3D-printed ghost gun.
I'm talking about books like Jack Black's You Can't Win, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, Edward Bunker's Education of a Felon, Jean Genet's Miracle of the Rose, Jack Abbott's In the Belly of the Beast and Caryl Chessman’s Cell 2455, Death Row, all books I first read behind the wall. That's why, when it comes to talking about the outlaw canon, I ‘m qualified by bona fide outlaw credentials. I don't need no doctorate in literature from Harvard.
Even so, you don't have to just take my word for it, you can take Andrew Vachss's word.
Vachss is an overlooked legend, a crusading lawyer who fought for children who'd been abused, then went on to become what his obituary writers pegged as "a celebrated crime novelist." He was so much, much more. He was an extraordinarily rare hybrid of law and outlaw. He breathed life into one of the most infamous vigilante characters in crime fiction, Burke.
Burke served time in prison then worked illegally as a private investigator when he got out. His primary targets: those who preyed on children. In Vachss' first published book, Flood, the eponymous protagonist hires Burke to find the monster who raped and murdered her best friend's child—so that she can kill him with her bare hands.
Vachss' books are weapons, as he intended them to be. They were meant to raise awareness of child abuse and motivate the public to fight against it. Vachss himself explained it in a 2003 "autobiographical essay" on his website, The Zero.
"I intended the book as a Trojan horse. A crime novel that pulls the reader into the story at the same time it delivers a steady diet of hardcore reality," he wrote. "I didn't own a radio station, or a newspaper, or a television network. This was a working man's propaganda bulletin, and I never pretended it was anything else."
#MeToo movement meet your father, an eye-patch wearing literary vigilante.
Defender of children lawyer and author Andrew Vachss in the 1980s. Photo credit: Andrew Vachss via The Zero.
Estep credits Vachss in Soft Maniacs' acknowledgements. He was her friend and mentor. He helped shape Soft Maniacs. He even reviewed it.
“The book is loaded with colossal feats, performed casually," he wrote.
The one that stood out to me was: “the gut level understanding conveyed so powerfully that it evokes something ever rarer than genuine praise: empathy."
When I first got my hands on Soft Maniacs at the Wallkill Correctional Facility in 1999 I was stunned when I saw Vachss in the acknowledgments.
I knew Vachss personally. I met him in 1985, when I was 15. He was a powerful ally. Even then, I could tell Vachss’ whole vibe was like, “We’re gonna win either way I really don’t care if its in this courtroom or outside on the motherfucking street.”
Vachss gave birth to Burke in Flood a few years later, inspired by true-life tales like mine and a million others.
Angel at the Met in 2005. Photo crdit: JB Nicholas.
I didn’t realize how good Soft Maniacs was until I was paroled in 2003. That’s when my twisting and turning path crossed with real-life versions of the book’s main characters.
Jody was Angel. That’s what she called herself. She was actually less than Angelic. She was a junkie-turned-social worker-by-day who turned tricks at night via Craigslist and other Internet websites as Submissive Angel. Sub Angel liked to be tied up and whipped so hard she bled, leaving her flesh cut and bruised for a week. She also liked to do the occasional blowbang or gangbang and went to for-pay play "stripper" parties in midtown lofts.
She snacked pretty much exclusively on gummy bears and liked to catch the last showing of art-house movies at the Angelica. I took to her to the Met. (No, we didn’t try to touch the Caravagio, which also happens in Soft Maniacs.)
Angel explained the duality of her existence like this: "Sometimes I want a steak, other times I crave a Big Mac."
Whether it was heroin or hard cock her joy was the same: "I just like things shot inside me."
That one had a real funny way with words, she really did.
I used to wake up in the middle of the night and catch her staring softly at me, like Jack watched Jody. I got her to quit whoring, but only for a few months. My first impulse was to kick in some guy's door and shred the room with submachine gun fire, but the only door there was to kick in was Angel's. No one pimped her, she pimped herself—with Craig Newmark's help.
In the end, she helped me more than I helped her: by giving me the ability to love without jealousy or expectations. It truly was a great gift.
She’s a registered nurse now.
G. in the Catskills, Fall, 2014. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
G. was another cracked gem. When she was 10 or so, she told her mother her grandfather had been molesting her for years. When her father came home from work, her mother told him what his father was doing to their daughter. G. was in her bedroom, but she could hear what was happening in the living room of their small apartment.
G.'s father was a cop. Whenever he came home from work he always unloaded his gun; whenever he left for work he re-loaded it. The sound of a gun being loaded and unloaded was familiar to her. When her father came home that night, G. remembers, she heard the usual metallic clicking of him taking the bullets out of his gun. But, then, after hearing her parents talk, she heard more clicking and clacking, as her father re-loaded his gun.
“He was playing with his gun and sobbing,” G. remembers.
The gun itself was a snub-nosed .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. It was her father’s off-duty weapon. It was engraved with the words: “To Joey Love Dad.” The snub-nosed Smith had been a gift, ceremoniously presented to him by his father, when he became a police officer. Now, he was contemplating using that same gun to kill the man who had given it to him.
G. remembers her mother pleading with her husband not to do it. G. remembers thinking the exact opposite, "I wished he would go and kill him."
Her mother talked her husband out of it by accusing G. of lying, but it never happened again anyway. He died a natural death decades later, never punished for his grievous crimes.
G. smoked Angel Dust and crack for almost two decades. The stories she can tell include one about falling in love with a 15-year-old boy and making him a father at 17. After they broke up years later, he turned himself into an ironworker. Their daughter is a beautiful and mostly normal young woman. She works at a drug store but the only drug she uses—last time I heard—is weed, which is legal now in New York, so its not really even a drug anymore.
G. has been teaching special ed kids for about 15 years now. God's work.
R. in the Adirondack wilderness in 2015, with a detail of her tattoo, which depicts the family crest of the Marquis de Sade.. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
When I got off parole in 2009, and could finally leave the City without asking for permission, I started hiking in the mountains upstate. Since I rode a bike around the City, like Estep famously did, I didn't have a driver's license. So I took trains and rode buses to get wherever I wanted to go. If a train or bus didn't go there I rode one as far as I could then hitch-hiked the rest.
I met R. on the train to the Adirondack mountains in 2014.
R. grew up in New Mexico and threw a dart at a map of America to decide where she wanted to escape to. The dart landed on New Hampshire. Problem was, the “Live Free or Die” State wasn’t so hospitable. A cop broke into her house and raped her. I think she said she was seeing him and broke up with him and he got obsessed, tried to take her back, literally. Like he owned her. Like she was his slave.
She threw her things into her pick-up truck and raced away until she ran out of gas in Utica, New York. She slept in the truck in a rest area—with an unregistered but fully loaded stainless steel snub-nosed .357 magnum revolver in her hand. She found a job in a local hospital, sold her truck, rented an apartment above a dentist's office and started healing.
R. had the family crest of the Marquis de Sade tattoed in the middle of her back. I had to say no to her alot. I was about transcending fucked-up shit, not reliving it.
She was one of the few women I knew who loved watching porn. Sometimes when I visited her she’d wake up before me to go work and watch some on her hospital Blackberry. The freakier the better. If her furiously frigging herself off didn’t wake me up, her shaking, whole-body orgasm did.
R.’s gun. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
R. and I hiked parts of the Long Path and the Devil’s Path and a lot of the other mountains in the Catskills, Adirondacks and even the Whites in New Hampshire in 2014-15. When we did the Whites, we had to avoid half the state because she was afraid of running into her rapist and I’d convinced her to leave her pistol at home, since we were hitch-hiking around. I got her in the best shape she was ever in.
A year later, she was ready to try living in the city. But not with me. Instead of living in the South Williamsburg artist's loft I lived in with a Cuban painter, a Swedish graduate neuroscientist student and a Mexican graphic designer, she settled into an apartment in Washington Heights. She lived by herself but she wasn’t alone: she had her .357 magnum to keep her company.
She stayed for a year before hitting the road and moving on, again.
There were more but you get the point. In case you didn’t, here’s the outlaw Code to love.
Be kind to those you meet along the way. Love them as you find them. Keep them safe. Keep your side of the street clean. Give them something no one else ever did. Take them to some place beautiful they've never been. Be supportive. Ask what you can do to help. Don’t over promise. Walk away before you run out of patience, way before you lose it. Don’t look back.
Only love them if you dare.
S. and framed Sharon Pell pin-up art behind her in my Sullivan Street apartment in 2005. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
The coporations and the cops killed the last of old New York in the 'Aughts so it's not surprising long-time New Yorkers like Estep who knew and loved the bad old dark days and who had managed to survive fled when the rent got too damn high, the yuppies and the tourists and the chain stores too numerous and even the lights shined too bright.
Estep moved out of the East Village, first to Brooklyn then to the Catskills then over to Hudson. She kept writing too. She published five more books after Soft Maniacs, seven total.
"Think of This as a Window" was her goodbye love letter to the City, published in a 2013 anthology edited by Sari Botton that takes its title from Joan Didion's iconic 1967 essay, "Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving & Leaving NY."
“I fell in love with New York City one day in 1971, when I saw dozens of people blithely stepping over a dead body on a sidewalk,” she revealed. “It was probably a drunk, very much alive, just unconscious, but I didn’t know that then.”
“I was seven years old, walking in Midtown with my grandfather.”
Before she left about 40 years later, Estep wrote, she rode her bike to the furthest reaches of the five boroughs, hunting "for images of the City to burn into my heart."
"The New York I loved was a lawless, exhilarating place where anything was possible," she recalled. "By the late 1990s my beloved Lower East Side wasn’t squalid anymore."
"I hated it."
Now, the 49 year-old writer explained, it "was time to leave the noise and the bodies behind." It was time "for the kind of quiet that only happens deep in the woods, lost, craning my neck up to the sky to find my way."
Instead of urban low-life, "I wanted to write about people who could tell time just by looking at the position of the sun in the sky."
A year later she was dead at 50. A sudden heart attack in 2014.
Maggie Estep and Chloe Caldwell at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, New York, days before Estep was killed by a heart attack. Photo credit: Chloe Caldwell via Twitter.
Chloe Caldwell captured the end of Estep’s story in Vice.
The writer was buried in a snow-covered field on a flurry-filled, gray February day. She was dressed in silver hoop earrings and a burgundy shirt. Caldwell held hands with Laura the Hot Farmer beside the grave. One of Estep's fellow yogis eulogized her as a shooting star—as opposed to the sun or moon.
Afterwards at the memorial, Estep's old upstairs neighbor on East 5th Street, the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt, played "The Book of Love," John S. Hall slammed her poetry and Steve Buscemi read their emails, "lamenting," Caldwell reported, "he hadn’t responded to her last one."
Still. As Estep herself might have quipped during her slam-poet days, beats a slow-death by long-illness or dying alone in a funeral home.
L. swimming in the headwaters of the Hudson River with the high peaks of the Adirondacks in the background in 2020. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
I bought Soft Maniacs home with me from prison but donated it along with my entire outlaw library to what then was a kind of circus-themed punk-house/underground aerial theater run by women called the House of Yes in Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2009. I met them on the subway, while I was working as a news photographer for the New York Post, but that's another story.
Though I had long-since absorbed the life lessons Estep deftly taught in Soft Maniacs, I hadn't consciously thought about the book since. Then, in September, it hit me like a bullet. So I looked to see what Estep was up to. When I saw she was dead—and Vachss too—I borrowed Soft Maniacs from the library, and re-read it in their honor.
When I saw I'd nailed its 25th anniversary, I knew what had to be done. It took a few weeks. Untangling all the connections stirred up some tough, old memories and even a few soft, sentimental feelings of all that has been lost, and those I left behind.
Like Estep did in real life, I rode my bike all over the City to "burn it into my heart" before I made my own escape in 2022. I settled in the Adirondacks, along the Canadian border. Now I'm a licensed guide. I take people fly-fishing and hiking and camping in the vast wilderness that surrounds my new home.
I became one of the people Estep said she wanted to write about when she moved out of the City, someone "who could tell time just by looking at the position of the sun in the sky."
Despite living blocks away from each other in the East Village and going to the same park, Tompkins Square, and sitting in the center under the Hare Krisna tree for tens of thousands of hours over almost 20 years, I never met Maggie.
If I did, I would've wanted her to treat me like one of her characters might have and made me lick the letters of her name on her clit, pausing every once in a while to pull my face up and lecture me dominatrix-style on its proper pronunciation.
"It's EST-tep. Not ES-step. Stick your tongue out! Say it! EST-step."
Maggie Estep. Outlaw legend.
The author is a journalist, publisher of this news blog and winner of the Kathy Acker Award in 2022—named for another Lower East Side outlaw icon.
The author and S., Sulivan Street, 2004. Photo credit: S.