The Ballad of Speedball Baby: A Memoir by Ali Smith, EXCERPT

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is the thrilling, extremely funny, and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable story of Ali Smith—coming of age in ’90s New York—who commits to the messy, exhilarating life of a musician and must survive the slings and arrows society reserves for women who refuse to comply.

As an only child reeling from the demolition of her parents’ toxic marriage, the New York City underground music scene offers a young Ali a different family of misfits and talented outsiders to belong to.

She becomes the bass player for edgy band Speedball Baby, a decision that will take her around the world—from onstage at the legendary CBGBs to the red-light district of Amsterdam. She’s often the only girl in a broken-down tour van, being strip-searched at the Croatian border, chased by lunatics, and navigating the seedy underbelly of a male-dominated music scene full of addiction, violence, and misogyny—all while keeping her sharp wit and dark humor intact.

Rimmed with heavy black eyeliner and smelling faintly of cheap booze, The Ballad of Speedball Baby is a pulse-quickening, unpredictable ride through the ’90s music scene—alternately terrifying, hilarious, and painfully evocative—as well as a love letter to the power of female solidarity.

“Ali Smith has given us a gift with Momma Love.” — Gloria Steinem

The Ballad of Speedball Baby is “a sometimes harrowing ride poetically described in neon prose.” — Kate Pierson, the B-52s

Excerpt

Context: As her band, Speedball Baby, approaches the Croatian border on tour in 1997.

The lonely trill of a bird. No reply. The crisp rustle of breeze through a low, dry bush.

We jump in unison when a guard bangs hard on the side door.

“Out!” comes the order.

My attitude toward cops in New York is one of mistrust but not much fear. In my circles, we clash with them a lot—mostly at protests. So when three guards direct us out of the van now and start carelessly tossing our bags into the dirt after us, it’s still hard to feel too panicked.

“Who?” One demands, pointing to a bag. Martin steps forward to answer for the contents.

Another throws Matt’s effects pedals bag into the dirt and leaves him to explain away what looks exactly like a bounty of bomb-making material.

Next, a large guard with bulky, veiny arms plucks out my grandma’s little vintage brown suitcase with the big orange flowers on it.

“Who?” He swings his weapon to the side to hold the odious thing up and away from him like he’s plucked a dirty diaper from a garbage pile.

“That’s me.” I raise my hand and chirp, far too cheerfully, hoping to ingratiate myself.

He balances the bag on one meaty paw and unzips it with the other before riffling through. My knees start feeling rubbery.

“What is it?”

“A diary. Journal. I write in it.” I mime writing, which looks like I’m asking him for the check. A line of sweat works its way into my eye where it stings.

Then he finds my box of tampons. It’s a large box. The kind of box a woman brings from America when she’ll be gone for two months and wonders whether the tampons she’ll find in Europe will be as skinny as their hand-rolled cigarettes. He holds it close to his face, like a jeweler judging the chunk in his hand as diamond or glass. Inquisitive. Hopeful. And then it dawns on him, and I watch the realization fall over his body like a wet blanket. I have never, before now, seen a line of deep red embarrassment literally crawl up a person’s neck to the top of their head. When he’s filled up with bright red, he throws the box aside like a black adder that’s bitten him, drops my bag into the dirt, and hurries away toward the small, concrete building without saying a word.

Did anyone else see that? That was so insane. That was. . . was that a problem? Armed men generally don’t like to be embarrassed. I feel the heat, the sweat, the still air. We’re not in Manhattan. I don’t really know where we are. I look down, mournfully, at the tampon box which lays coated in dust, its contents spilling out through its torn top.

Thirty seconds. One minute. Two minutes. I shuffle on the spot. I tap my toe against the dirt and notice dust has worked its way into my Converse through a little hole. Around me, guards continue their intense search and Johan flutters around them like a worried mother hen, communicating in hushed, reasoning tones.

Ron is the one of us who’s had the most frequent, most unfortunate brushes with the law. They’ve found him on dark side streets on the Lower East Side and driving 110 on a 65 stretch of road. He fidgets now out of habit.

Then I see her. A lone female officer, small under the weight of her enormous weapon. She may be even younger than I am. She walks straight toward me, and I stand at attention.

Just as she reaches me, another guard rooting around in the back of the van where the equipment is hits what he’s sure is “the jackpot.”

“What is this?!?” he shouts triumphantly to the room at large.

Ron has really been trying to stay clean lately. He checked into rehab a few weeks before this tour, and he’s done well. Instead of heroin, he’s taken to obsessing over gourmet food and fine wine, a welcomed change. He’s swung wildly in the opposite direction and started taking a lot of supplements—vitamins C, E, and B-complex, echinacea, worm wood, etc. He’s been carrying this collection of pills around loose in an oversized, clear sandwich bag, and it’s this bag of about three hundred pills that the officer now holds aloft like a marlin he plans to mount for his wall.

Martin blurts out nervously, “It’s vitamins!” Only, with his British accent, he pronounces the word “VIT-a-mins,” not “VITE-a-mins,” and all hell breaks loose.

“Amphetamines!” the guard, having misheard, bellows. There’s the buzzing excitement of an impending kill in the air.

“You’re going to jail!” one says looking straight at Ron and smiling while clapping his crossed wrists together like he’s being handcuffed.

It all happens quickly now. The boys are hustled into the building, Johan nipping at their heels, softly pleading, and I’m left with the female officer.

We stand together in the discomfort of the sudden silence until she gestures toward the building. Inside, she corrals me, from behind, to a small, empty cinderblock room. The only light comes weakly from a row of squat windows near the ceiling on one wall and dissipates into gray haze half way to the floor. The door’s lock clicks behind her and I start to sweat; a private, hellish little panic.

I look sheepishly in her direction. Surely soon she’ll raise her finger to pursed lips to make sure we don’t get caught before offering me a pull of Rijeka from her hip flask. We’ll fake the sounds of her flogging me. “No! Stop! Please!” I’ll wail as our shoulders shake with stifled laughter about all the macho bullshit going on outside this room. We’ll roll our eyes about how she’d been sent to deal with the embarrassing messiness of my womanhood. I’ll promise to compose myself before meeting back up with the others. And it’ll be just like a sleepover with a very socially awkward, mean-eyed girl your mother made you invite over who showed up with a hip flask of booze and a machine gun. Right?

“Off,” she gestures. I raise my eyebrows. Oh. So we were really doing this.

She leans against the door, stone-faced, as I slowly unzip my jeans and lower them. I can see now she’s probably a couple of years older than me—maybe thirty. I consider inviting her to that night’s show. Then I remember that even under the best of circumstances, our band isn’t for everyone.

With my pants crumpled around my ankles, I give a little shrug and smile weakly.

“Up!” she commands. I tilt my head, like a dog unsure whether she’s heard a rabbit in the underbrush, then slowly lift my t-shirt, exposing a road-weary bra. I waver slightly in the soft, gray light of the room, my pants down, my shirt pulled up to prove there aren’t any pouches of heroin strapped around my waist. Her hands clutch her machine gun.

Everything good and fun and enviable is outside of this room and, for all I know, has driven—or been dragged—away. Who will come to get me now? In the seconds that pass like years, I study my captor. Has she chosen this job or has it chosen her? Has the war hardened her past the point of return? Does she like music? Does she like anything? When she looks at me, does she see a spoiled, privileged American living a life of freedom she can’t, and does she hate me for it? And what might that hate look like if nobody comes to rescue me from this room?

Then, unexpectedly, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude, total and complete. Because even though this woman is comically unfriendly, fate has not put me in this cinderblock cell, alone and half-naked, with a man.

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Ali Smith is an award-winning photographer and writer whose work is regularly featured in The Guardian, The New York Times, and many more publications internationally. Her book Momma Love: How the Mother Half Lives won two international book awards and was praised by The New York Times and Gloria Steinem who called it “a gift to moms.” Ali has taught, lectured and exhibited at The International Center of Photography, NYU, and many galleries and institutions worldwide. With a passion for telling women’s stories, Ali forged her vibrant artistic style in New York’s underground music scene where she played bass in the seminal punk / blues / avant-garde band, Speedball Baby. Her memoir, The Ballad of Speedball Baby, is her literary debut.

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Category: On Writing