By then, I had become an exile from the traditional theatre (I had come to New York with a theatre degree, planning to work Off-Broadway), making performance pieces and performing them in lofts and back rooms. Other pieces like Careful Movement (performed at St. Mark’s Poetry Project) and Garden (Artists Space) featured a few actors spouting chunks of text, some taped voices and slides. I also wrote “plays” like Sheer Heaven (at The Kitchen, performed entirely in Spanish for English-speaking audiences) and The New World (featuring fourteen actors and music by Glenn Branca). I had a nightclub act (The Ricky Paul Show) in which I played an obnoxious comedian who sang off-key and hurled insults at the audience.

During the Ricky show, fights would break out with the audience, sometimes bottles got thrown. I went to Berlin and goose-stepped onstage. In New York, an enraged feminist tried to throw me down a flight of stairs because I made bad jokes about women’s lib. I was always booed and hissed. Gigs were canceled because my stuff was thought to be in poor taste or too violent or negative! I didn’t care. The energy was exciting. In my own awkward way, I was trying to make a new kind of anti-theatre.

I hung-out at places like CBGB’s, Max’s, The Mudd Club and Hurrah’s. I embraced a “punk” aesthetic. I liked the energy. Aggressive and loud. Antagonistic to the status quo, it didn’t take itself too seriously, it liked to laugh. There was a new attitude in the music that said awkward was good, grotesque was fascinating. Punk was rough, it didn’t smooth everything into lovely shapes.

In punk music, the chords were basic. I wanted to do the same thing with performance—make stuff that was straightforward, not precious, not effete. (I became a fan of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. His work was super-energized, sexual, multilayered to the point of madness, awkward, funny, beautifully designed and way too loud for most people.)

As fun as it was, by 1981 I had reached a point when I had to fish or cut bait. The plays, subsidized with my paycheck from The Kitchen, were not getting reviewed and they were expensive. I couldn’t afford to do them anymore (I paid the actors, paid for rehearsal space, made the posters and sets myself, etc.). And as much as I loved the punk club lifestyle (late nights in the demimonde, the frenzy of the shows, harsh personalities, beer-stink dressing rooms replete with cracked mirrors), Ricky was a one-trick pony.