BAD AND PROUD

Everybody has a John Waters story. Or at least, everyone in Baltimore does. That’s what my buddy said over a game of pool, recounting the time he impatiently elbowed Waters out of the way to get the bartender’s attention at Ottobar. Because despite the notoriety, the glory, and the new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, John Waters and Baltimore remain in a symbiotic relationship. They need each other to thrive. Which is why every so often, on a Friday night, you’ll still catch him throwing a few back at Club Chuck, a seedy dive on North Charles Street.

When I first moved here six months ago (as of writing this), I identified an interview with John Waters as the top priority on my Baltimore bingo card, even higher than watching the O’s win a World Series or cracking into a bushel of blue crabs with the members of Turnstile (John had never heard of them. I asked. But he said he was gonna check ’em out!).

My colleagues loved the idea. Of course the Pope of Trash should grace the pages of CREEM magazine! “That should be no problem at all,” our editorial director Jaan Uhelszki said to me. “He’ll talk to anyone.”

Not so, evidently. After a drawn-out back-and-forth with one of the publicists for his Mosswood Meltdown festival in Oakland, I was getting nowhere. Jaan discovered he had his fan mail sent to Atomic Books in Hamden, so I sent him a magazine, a T-shirt, and a handwritten note, begging him to get in touch. Crickets. He was doing an event there a few weeks later to promote his latest novel Liarmouth. I waited in line for an hour and spent $60 on John Waters ephemera (which I'll subsequently write off my taxes) just to get two minutes with him face-to-face.

“Hey, John! It’s me, Mandy from CREEM!”

This girl again, his face seemed to say from behind the COVID-safety plexiglass. “Oh, hello!”

“I just moved here from New York, and I really want to interview you for the magazine.”

“It’s cheaper here, huh?” he said, smirking knowingly and avoiding my request.

“Yes,” I replied, laughing. “Thus the basis of its appeal. So how about that interview?”

I could tell the handlers of the event were getting impatient with my needling. There were other people in line!

“Yes, yes, we can do an interview. Just leave your information at the bar and I'll make sure my publicist gets in touch.”

I never did hear from said publicist. But I guess interviewing John Waters is a little like converting to Judaism (they say that most rabbis reject potential converts at least three times)—it’s all about persistence. So I didn’t give up! After several weeks of correspondence with some other publicists, I finally got my 15 minutes on the phone.

Ultimately, I would end up with 18.

At long last, the interview was approaching. I was nervous! I’m never nervous! But this was JOHN WATERS. In the lead-up to his star’s unveiling on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, I watched as features popped up in all the fancy magazines, with original photography no less. I had never interviewed someone so famous, and I had so much emotionally invested in this: This was the guy, the pinnacle of art and creativity in my newly adopted home, one I was still getting to know. And you know what he told me?

“You made the right decision. You completely made the right decision”—to abandon NYC, that is. “Baltimore is still good because it is cheap enough to have a bohemia, and you have to have great bad neighborhoods for new people to move in. To have bohemia! Or nobody can afford it.”

It seems an anomaly that any East Coast city could remain affordable in this, the year of our Lord 2023. And while it is different from the Baltimore in which Waters filmed Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos (“All the great, scary, dark bars in Baltimore are gone,” he says), in that way it is the same—it is accessible enough to make crazy, cheap, unfunded art.

Waters says that while he dreamed of his Walk of Fame star, he never imagined that it would happen, though he qualifies: “I did walk down Hollywood Boulevard the first time I went to L.A., and I got a jaywalking ticket.”

I ask him if he always wanted to be famous, and he said only an idiot would say yes to that.

“I guess I always wanted to be in the arts and show business and to have my work known. And if there was the fame part, that came to me as a way to market my movies, because I had no money for advertising. So I would show up and look like a lunatic and give a little introduction that was crazy and bring Divine on stage.”

This was a remnant of his vaudeville days, when he’d tour the country working the arts theaters and colleges with Divine, the drag queen and John Waters muse who starred in many of his films. While Baltimore is cheap and bohemian, it’s also very working-class and Catholic, and I wondered what it was like to march around filming his movies with his band of oddballs and freaks.

“It was fun!” he says. “It’s like when kids go out and make a movie today. They don’t know anything about permits or any of that kind of stuff. We just did it. Went for it. And we were like a cell, as they used to call it in those political days. We were just using film to be cultural terrorists, in a good sense of the word. ” I think of Divine in Pink Flamingos: “Filth are my politics, filth is my life!” Why did Waters start to make these films? To bathe in sleaze? To create characters with no moral compass?

“I was overly baptized,” he said. Catholic, of course. “I was baptized so many times, and all the original sin was sucked out of my soul and it was ready for the filth to take.”

And it’s not just his films, as barbaric as they can sometimes be. In preparing for this interview, I watched Female Trouble with a new man in my life. About a third of the way through the 89-minute film, he asked me how much was left, said it was making him anxious, and bailed to the other room to play Call of Duty. They aren’t for everyone. But for the people who do love them, there’s a world of content to consume: the spoken-word albums and Christmas shows, and books, lots of books.

“I always want a way to tell stories,” he explains. “It doesn’t matter. I write books. I make records. I act. I do everything. Just a way to tell stories and keep out there. You have to have many backup careers. To me, they’re all equally important. I don’t like writing a book more than making a movie or making a movie more than doing spoken-word shows. It’s important that you need to be out there always, to meet the new fans, to meet the new people and see what the kids are doing and how they’re dressed.”

And when you take it all in, all the different modes of storytelling, you see the big picture: “There is no moral to anything I’m doing. But if there’s any political message, it’s don’t judge other people until you get the whole story. And you never know the whole story. People don’t even know the whole story about themselves, which is why there’s such a thing as psychiatry.”

And you see the ways they intersect, like the trampoline scene at the end of Female Trouble—“Divine was very brave and took trampoline lessons at the YMCA by a man named Mr. Castor who had no idea Divine was gonna be in drag or anything until the day he showed up and we filmed it. [Mr. Castor] was a very good sport about it”—and the trampoline subplot in Liarmouth. I’m convinced that the only reason he gave me three extra minutes on the phone is because I clocked this motif; to him, “trampolines are always extreme and crazy and probably dangerous.”

A little like Baltimore City. Just like everyone in Baltimore has a John Waters story, every John Waters production tells a different story about Baltimore, past and present. And while there’s no moral to it, it becomes a love story of sorts, one that cherishes the odd blend of grittiness, lawlessness, and weirdness that allows art to thrive here. Like the many musicians John counts as friends:

“Beach House, Snail Mail, Dan Deacon. What’s that other one called? Future Islands. There are a lot of them and they are really good and they’re very close-knit here,” he notes. “What I love is that I never left Baltimore.... Often people, as soon as they get any success, leave whatever town they’re in, but you don’t have to do that anymore. COVID has made everywhere like Baltimore, but we’ve always been bad and proud. ”

He snickers quietly over the phone.

“Just don’t leave anything in your car, and watch your back. I’ll see you around.”

And then he hangs up.