By LARRY GETLEN – NY Post
When Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine was 15, she and a “friend” met a pair of suave, cowboy-hat-wearing drug dealers who were 24 and 38 years old. While her friend began dating the 24-year-old — a man who had recently escaped from Leavenworth prison — Valentine became an item with the 38-year-old, and the four became a tight, wild hangout crew.
That “friend,” by the way, was her mother.
Since February 2010, Valentine has been recalling tales of her youth gone wild and even some hellacious survival experiences — including a teenage rape and a home invasion — 140 characters at a time, in more than 1,750 tweets to date, on her “@kvmemoir” Twitter account.
When her bandmate, vocalist Belinda Carlisle, released her own memoir earlier that same year, Valentine was inspired to tweet hers, becoming the first celeb to “pen” a memoir on Twitter. She began with: “Mom @ 17 met Dad in Hyde Park/London. He was in USAF. She always said I was born coz she ate a sandwich in the park 4 lunch 1 day.”
Many of her tweets convey a literary flare, as with, “Stepmom had eyes like little black stones, when she smiled there was no sparkle.”
She also doesn’t shy away from her tragedies. A tale from when she was about 14, of a night when she was with a friend who picked up two guys at a bar, includes the tweet, “They took us to apartment, she went in bedroom w/1 guy. The other one forced me. Wasn’t 1st sex for me but was rape. He got mad I was crying.”
The memoir’s other harrowing passage comes when she recalls, over 39 tweets, a 1985 home invasion where she and musician friends Carlene Carter and Charlie Sexton were tied up and terrorized in her home. One read as follows: “Lunged at him. Carlene was sobbing & screaming. He dodged me, grabbed my arm & twisted it until I dropped the knife. Then I started crying.”
“What I was trying to convey is that it was a devastating occurrence,” Valentine tells The Post. “I’d bought the house in January, and that happened in July. I moved out. I couldn’t be there anymore.”
Luckily, all escaped unharmed, but the perpetrator was never caught.
“Your house is where you’re supposed to feel safe. I never stayed in that house again,” she adds.
Valentine also caused controversy when she tweeted about an abortion she had in the ’80s, two days before the Go-Go’s played Madison Square Garden.
“[Some people tweeted], ‘Why don’t you use the real word’ — because I said ‘terminated’ — or, ‘I feel bad for you. That was a terrible mistake,’ ” says Valentine.
But worse, she had never told her husband about the abortion, and he learned about it by reading her tweets.
“He was like, ‘Oh my God. You didn’t tell me that,’ ” she says. “It was uncomfortable. You love somebody and think you know them really well, and all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Blammo!’ They feel like they should know.”
Valentine — whose band releases a remastered version of its 1981 debut, “Beauty and the Beat,” on Tuesday and performs at Irving Plaza on Friday — posts anywhere from two to 15 tweets several times a week, taking care not to overwhelm the feeds of her 1,100 followers. Her story is currently in 1999, and she’ll continue until it catches up to the present.
While there are several frustrating aspects to the project — it’s difficult to read from the beginning, and it’s impossible for her to edit posts without completely deleting them — Valentine is thrilled to help deepen the perception of what Twitter can do.
“People shake up the genre from time to time, and attention spans are shorter. So why not do it on Twitter?” she says. “If I do make it a book, I’m gonna keep it like it is — except in reverse order.”
