Cookie Mueller, _Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories_

 I LEARNED OF this through a very positive review in the LRB a while back. Cookie Mueller was, among other things, an actress; she appeared in several John Waters films. She also wrote strikingly non-judgmental advice column in the East Village Eye and a column for Details magazine.

This volume collects some of the columns and a few short stories, but for the most part it is autobiographical essays about Mueller's life and adventures growing up in Baltimore, making the scene in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, working with John Waters, and making the scene in the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s and early 1980s. She died in 1989 at age 40, of "AIDS-related complications," according to the "about the author" note.

Mueller seems to have lived fairly impulsively, in regards to travel, work, sex, pharmaceuticals, and so on--the sort of person who "always took candy from strangers," as Keith Richards put it in "Happy." The stories consequently reflect some very dicey situations ("Narcotics," "Abduction and Rape--Highway 31, Elkton, Maryland, 1969"), but even though the whole book is a walk on the wild side, Mueller maintains a witty, matter-of-fact tone and wry humor, as when her efforts to revive a friend who has overdosed in a bathroom are constantly interrupted by a partygoer outside the door who keeps demanding he be allowed in to urinate ("Sam's Party--Lower East Side, 1979"). The revived person then complains that his friends did not remove his sharkskin suit before they dunked him in a tub of cold water. 

The literature of transgression is vast, but we might draw a line between that written by people who write about it freshly, memorably, and vividly (Genet, say) and those whose experiences are outrageous but whose sentences are pedestrian. Mueller could really write.

"I lived there with my pet monkey who liked cockroaches. He used to scan the fabric walls for them. When he saw one from all the way across the room with his primate super X-ray vision, he'd swing the distance on the ceiling pipes and deftly scoop up the bug with one hand, pop it in his mouth, and swing back to the curtain rod window perch where he lived. He was a good pet."