Terrain Vague

Originally published in 1994

Nicole Panter’s short fiction showcases her sharp-edged talent at its peak. She cuts right through to the heart of human pain with a true writer’s skill, in lean, honest stories that don’t flinch from the unadulterated truth. Doomed and abusive relationships, emotional lost causes and sexual hypocrisy share the pages of her latest collection, Mr. Right On And Other Stories. The title story recounts the narrator’s bitter realization that her latest paramour is a sham liberal who uses his politically correct pose to seduce feminists; “Bell,” the wrenching romantic counterpoint to that tale, depicts the shattering moment when two friends find themselves overwhelmed by the sorrow that fills their lives. If the pen was ever mightier than the sword, it is in Nicole Panter’s hands— but writing isn’t her only talent. She’s also a crack shot with a pistol. “It just seemed like an inevitable skill that one would have to pick up living in the city,” she explains. Four years ago, she decided to sign up for shooting lessons.

“I ended up in a shooting range at Northridge,” recalls Nicole, “looking like my liberal punk rock self. The guy who was teaching the class was very right-wing, and the class was a bunch of scared homeowners, except there was this one mom and son, and the son was about twenty— he looked like a pit bull.” The instructor picked the pit bull as his star pupil, and singled out Nicole as the obvious washout before anyone in the class had even handled a pistol. Nicole, he predicted, would jump every time a gun was fired.

She was not amused.

“So I thought, well, fuck you. We got down there, and I shot the first shot right dead bull’s-eye. Second shot, I thought I missed, but I’d shot through the first shot. The ‘shining example’ was all over the place, so he quickly became the butt of the jokes, and I became the teacher’s pet.”

“My aim has kept up ever since then. One of my greatest joys in life is taking liberal friends down to the range and teaching them how much fun it is to shoot, what a Zen exercise in focus it really is. I’d like to be a good liberal, but I can’t protect myself being a good liberal in terms of guns. It’s like a losing battle at this point. I feel more capable knowing that if someone came after me I could protect myself.”

Secure in this knowledge, Nicole Panter takes some time to talk about her life and work. Her father, she says, prospered in the Great Depression due to his great culinary invention: the Philadelphia Cheese
steak Sandwich. “He made a ton of money… bought a bunch of Philadelphia real estate and a boxer who became a light heavyweight world champion. The place is still there, called Pat’s King of Steaks— so I am the Princess of Steaks, if we want to get technical about this.”

Nicole grew up in Palm Springs, where one of her schoolmates was future Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd. “She was a wallflower,” recounts Nicole, who was cut from significantly different cloth. “I’ve always had a bad attitude, and been a bad girl. I’ve been an insolent, mouthy outcast. I ran away from home when I was fourteen. The farm worker’s struggle was going on in the Coachella Valley when I was growing up… I was always really aware of it and around it. I organized my first lettuce boycott when I was eleven. When I ran away from home, I knew that if I went to L.A. they’d look for me, so I went and picked fruit in the Coachella and Imperial Valleys.”

“I had graduated high school when I was fourteen. I had skipped tons of grades when I was little, so I was always a few years younger than anyone else. I signed up at College of the Desert, which is the local junior college, for classes four nights a week in addition to going to high school. I was in school from 7:30 in the morning until about ten at night for a year. That’s how I got my high school diploma, and then I split.” Nicole eventually ended up in Los Angeles, where she put herself through UCLA and took a degree in anthropology. But there was more to L.A. than college in the late ’70s: the punk scene was taking off, and Nicole was an integral part of it from the beginning, working for Slash magazine and managing such groups as The Motels.

“It was great. Punk was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.” Her most famous association was with The Germs, the legendary punk band she managed from 1977 to 1980. “I was sitting outside of Club 88 one night, ” she recalls, “on the curb, drinking beer in a brown paper bag. Darby Crash sat next to me and said, `Buy me a beer.’ I said `Fuck you— get your own beer.’ And he went, `I’m in this band called the Germs. Will you manage us?’ And I said, `Okay, I can do that.’” It was the beginning of a memorable friendship.

Nicole and Darby would gain a certain measure of infamy in the “punkumentary” The Decline of Western Civilization, directed by Penelope Spheeris. (Spheeris, of course, would eventually use Decline as a springboard to a Hollywood career that recently yielded The Beverly Hillbillies and Little Rascals. Her punk credibility is clearly a thing of the past.) While Fear’s Lee Ving burned up the screen with his onstage vitriol, Darby came across as the film’s doomed fool, rambling incoherently at gigs and demanding beer from the audience. Looking back on this experience, Nicole is quick to point out the manipulation behind this image. “The people who worked on that film made sure that Darby was good and loaded before they filmed him. I was encouraged to drink and do drugs before I was interviewed.” The film makers, in essence, chose the reality they wanted to portray and simply used the players to get the desired effect.

Darby— memorialized in Mr. Right On‘s “1979/Fuck You Punk Rock”— committed suicide in 1980. “Even though I had quit the band, Darby and I were friends until the day he died,” says Nicole. “I was one of the people he called at the end. Kurt Cobain’s death made me think about him a lot. It was fourteen years ago that he killed himself, and it was intentional. It was not an accidental overdose, as the press has subsequently, persistently reported.”

Nicole met another friend, famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, when she photographed him for a Slash magazine interview. “My friendship with Phil was based on our shared neuroses and fascination with pharmaceuticals. And depression. It was a good friendship. A lot of people— guys especially— would just go down there and hang on his every word. I was ‘special’ by virtue of the fact that I hadn’t read his stuff. After he died, I knew him so well by that time that I couldn’t bear to read it because it would have broken my heart.”

In the intervening years, Nicole has traveled extensively, living and working in Mexico, Haiti, India and England. She now resides in Venice, California, where she concentrates on her fiction. She cites an impressive list of literary influences: “Flannery O’Connor, Jim Harrison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller… in a funny way Charles Bukowski. I write about explicit sex a lot. I write about explicit sex explicitly, especially lately. I don’t have any distaste about doing that, and I think the reason is because I’ve read people like Bukowski and Miller. Raymond Carver, of course… Eudora Welty. The usual disgusting ones: Celine, Sade. Paul Bowles— put him at the head of any list. I’ve never read Phil, but in a way Phil really influenced me, because he described his process to me a lot.”

Her writing was also influenced by the late acting teacher Peggy Feury, who Nicole studied with for years. “After a very short time it became apparent to me that what I was studying for with her was to figure out writing. She was a genius at helping you dissect a play and the writing and the material in such a way that you understood what organically had happened to make that piece of work happen.”

Nicole also works as an assistant to writer/director Frank Pierson, who wrote Cool Hand Luke and Dog Day Afternoon. Last fall this job took her to South Dakota, where Pierson directed the cable television movie Lakota Woman. Her four months in South Dakota gave Nicole an opportunity to get acquainted with the Native American members of the cast and crew, many of whom were from the nearby Pine Ridge reservation. The elaborate Hopi designs tattooed on her back and shoulders by artist Jill Jordan served as her introduction.

“Everyone kept quite separate, the Anglos from the Indians, but I have these amazing tattoos on me; they loved that, and I really got close to a lot of the Indians. It’s a sacred Lakota thing to adopt someone, it’s one of the Seven Sacred Traditions, and I got adopted by this woman who is an amazing radical. The tattoos were the initial attraction; then people found out that I was really political and had been arrested about 25 times for various human rights causes. A lot of them were veterans of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee. The woman who chose me is a long-time American Indian Movement member. She truly is like my long-lost sister. There was a ceremony where the medicine man adopted me into the family. Now I have family up there.”

Nicole’s latest extra-literary endeavor is a country western band, Honk If Yer Horny, which sends up the genre while respecting its traditions. For this undertaking, she’s adopted the alter ego of k.d. bang; bandmate Annette Zelinskas (from The Bangles and Blood On The Saddle) is Tammy Whynot, while Pleasant Gehman goes by the stage name of Canya Fucker. `k.d’ wrote the A-side of their recent single, “Gas, Grass or Ass— Nobody Rides For Free.” The B-side features two C & W classics: “Hillbilly Whorehouse Country Dyke Bitch” and “Everybody’s Fuckin’ My Baby (But Me).” With tunes like these, and raucous live shows, Honk If Yer Horny just might be the gig that buys Nicole Panter the time she wants to devote to her writing.

“Everyone says that’s gonna be what makes us rich,” she muses. “We’re all petrified.”

Copyright © 1994 by Dan Whitworth. All rights reserved. Originally published in Axcess Magazine.