HARLEY LOCO: A MEMOIR OF HARD LIVING, HAIR, AND POST-PUNK FROM THE MIDDLE EAST TO THE LOWER EAST SIDE by Rayya Elias (Viking, April 4, 2013, $27.95)
Barnes & Noble
97 Warren St.
Tuesday, April 9, free, 6:00
212-587-5389
www.barnesandnoble.com
www.rayyaelias.com
“Another eviction — this time, unavoidable. Kim and I had known it was coming, but we still weren’t ready to be thrown out of our home, no matter how much we deserved it. We were pathetic. Tired, sick, numb, strung out. It was 1987 and we were living on Second Street between avenues A and B.” So begins Rayya Elias’s poignant and brutally honest Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side. Born in Syria in 1960, Elias and her family escaped to Detroit when she was seven. She later moved to New York City and became a punk musician and hair stylist, indulging in sex, drugs, and rock and roll and spending time homeless and in jail before cleaning herself up and getting her life back on track. Elias, who has also created a soundtrack of original songs (“Star,” “Myself Without You,” “Miss You,” “Loaded Gun,” and “Fever”) to accompany the book, will be celebrating the release of Harley Loco at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble on April 10 at 6:00 with a reading, signing, audience Q&A, and conversation with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and the National Book Award finalist The Last American Man. In the introduction to Harley Loco, Gilbert, who met Elias in 2000 in the East Village, writes, “Rayya, meanwhile, was a rough diamond — a black-clothed, raspy-voiced, tattooed dropout of a soul, and she owned a motorcycle, and she kept pit bulls, and she was gay, and she was of Middle Eastern descent, and she’d grown up in Detroit, and she fucking loved the NFL, and she’d been to prison, and she called everyone ‘dude’ or ‘baby,’ and she was trying to clean up her life after years of heroin addiction and decades of an absolutely Byronic free fall into rock-and-roll abandon. . . . It is my honor to introduce these pages — so gravelly, so straggly, so hopeful, bright, and true. Just like the dude herself.” We can vouch for all of that as well — and we’ve even gone to an NFL game with her, even if it was the Jets.