Reed & Imperioli

FAN is Dirt’s column about the way fandom touches every sector of our culture. We’ve previously covered Kosovo pop, Costco and Moomins.

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Becky Miller on Michael Imperioli’s “weaving act” of a debut novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes.

Michael Imperioli, multi-hyphenate extraordinaire, wears an ungodly number of hats: he is a meditation teacher, a Broadway guy, screenwriter, novelist, Sopranos star, the lead singer of the rock band ZOPA, the owner of a swanky UWS bar, a podcaster, and a famous Central Park stroller. But his least celebrated and most iconic feat is being a die-hard Lou Reed fan. Nostalgic, grainy Instagram posts of Lou litter his profile on Lou’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, always accompanied by a simple thank you. 

Imperioli’s 2018 debut novel The Perfume Burned His Eyes borrows its title from a line in Lou Reed’s 1989 song “Romeo Had Juliette.” You could almost think of the tune itself as a novel. To me, Reed’s version of Romeo and Juliet blows Stephen Spielberg, Leonard Bernstein, Baz Luhrmann, and every other remake of a remake out of the water. 

The gritty Manhattan that Reed helped to define unfurls from his voice. The song travels between the East and the West sides of the city, with Reed crooning about crack dealers and kids celebrating a cop’s death in Harlem while the titular Romeo Rodriguez runs a comb through his black ponytail and tries to win, and keep, Juliette. It oozes teenage angst and love, undefined principles, nothing concrete except the buildings and eternal yearning.

Imperioli and his main character, 16-year old Matthew, both spent their youth in this throbbing city, listening to Lou Reed. Imperioli began writing The Perfume Burned His Eyes in 2013 when his own son was sixteen and experiencing heartache, and he was middle-aged, grieving Lou Reed’s recent death. Imperioli’s novel is a weaving act that combines multiple generations of boyhood and multiple levels of truth into an ode to New York and Lou. 

The Perfume Burned His Eyes follows Matthew, a delivery boy in 1976, who finds himself dropping off strawberry milkshakes, bacon, and pickles at Lou Reed’s door and is quickly taken under Lou’s wing, performing dirty work and companionship for the shamanic rockstar. Some readers posit that the book is autobiographical, with Imperioli slyly alluding to a past of van driving sans-drivers license when Lou needed a hand. It is pretty to think about their truthful crossovers in the Village when Imperioli was in his twenties and Lou was hanging around writing New Sensations (1984) and The Blue Mask (1989). Maybe they shared a cigarette or a gin and tonic or a simple nod on the street outside of Christopher-Sheridan station. I would like to imagine so.

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