Everyone is Watching (7 page)

Here is the outdoor Reading Room. The shelves are lined with books. Sparrows are bathing in the dirt.

Edmund sits in his regulation fold-out chair. He can see the Empire State Building behind a black tower that is decorated with gold. Kindergarten kids are passing him. They clutch rope circles
that are tied onto a long rope line. One boy is proudly singing his alphabet.

Edmund remembers when Bryant Park used to be empty of people except for the homeless and lonely men. Now the public are sitting on picnic chairs, reading newspapers, peering into lunch bags,
balancing laptops on their knees, closing their eyes against the sun.

The long branches of Bryant Park trees hang suspended over the path where he is sitting but he does not feel protected. He looks up at the Empire State Building. He can see the windows and the
window blinds clearly. Grey clouds move behind the building. They do not penetrate exterior walls. This is what it feels like to have it not go in, to find out that one’s body and soul are
too hard. I used to be as tall as the Empire State Building. Once upon a time I stood higher than the rest. You could see every eyelash, every speck of colour in my eyes. I was not afraid to be
seen in detail.

Edmund used to segment the city according to different types of lovers. There were the eye-openers of Greenwich Village, the seedy males of the Meatpacking District, the gaudy show-offs of
Broadway.

When he wrote
Hotel de Dream
he imagined Stephen Crane’s Painted Boy. He imagined what it was like to want the thing you cannot have, to see it standing in the street, to speak
with it, touch it, but to never have it for yourself.

The lawn of Bryant Park is lush and green. Sparrows peck at the neatly shorn blades. Edmund watches two women talking at its edge. They have made their way down from the bar to smoke cigarettes.
One slips her stockinged foot out of her high-heeled shoe and places it delicately onto the restricted grass.

1936 is Moses’ swimming-pool year. He opens the renovated Hamilton Fish Pool and Bathhouse in Manhattan on June 24th. This pool is large enough to accommodate over two
thousand swimmers and holds 485,000 gallons of water. There is a diving pool and benches with planted trees for shade and a wading pool, locker rooms and playing fields for sports. On June 27th the
Thomas Jefferson Pool and Bathhouse is opened in Harlem providing relief from hot summers for the people in the surrounding tenements. On July 2nd the Astoria Pool and Play Center opens in Queens,
positioned in front of the Triborough and Hellgate Bridges with views of the Manhattan skyline. It is big enough to accommodate 3,000 people and is lit by underwater floodlights in the evening. On
July 7th the Joseph H. Lyons Pool is opened on Staten Island to a crowd of 7,500 people. The Highbridge Pool and Bathhouse in Manhattan on July 14th, the Sunset Pool in Brooklyn on July 20th, the
Crotona Pool in the Bronx on July 24th, the McCarren Pool in Brooklyn on July 31st, the Betsy Head Pool in Brooklyn on August 7th, the Jackie Robinson Pool and Recreation Center on August 8th, the
Sol Goldman Pool in Brooklyn on August 17th.

Moses likes to swim. He swims whenever he gets the chance. He will swim morning, noon or night. He is formidable in the water.

Walt’s dress shirt is hanging over the waistband of his trousers. Bucke’s own clothes are pressed and tidy. This is the difference between the two of them. It is
something Bucke cannot ignore. Bucke wants to look smart for Walt. Walt has not changed his clothes in several days.

Don’t you think we should send word ahead to the engineer? Bucke asks.

The figures in the car through which they are passing are relaxing before dinner, reading books, sitting quietly. There is a mother bouncing a baby on her knee.

Walt laughs. He is determined to see how everything works.

When they reach the engine carriage they see a man standing before the furnace. He is blackened with dirt but his eyes are bright.

Walt shakes him vigorously by the hand, dirtying his own hand.

How much will she take? Walt says.

Whatever we give her, she’ll use.

May I try?

Walt throws logs into the furnace. What fun he is having.

Look at me, Bucke!

Bucke is watching. Bucke sees everything very clearly. Time is moving too swiftly. Times are changing. Train travel is becoming popular. High towers are being built. People can
now climb to the top of a building and see the boundaries of a city. They can see where things begin and end. These boundaries don’t appear to concern Walt. Here he is playing with the engine
of a train as a child would. Walt is not the age he is physically. He doesn’t notice any contradiction in the world. Walt describes the city as if it was a natural place. To him, the city is
as natural as the woodland, as calming as the ocean. He describes Trinity Church and Castle Clinton as if they had grown right out of the earth. At other times, he says that the wonder of the whole
universe can be found in the form and structure of a single leaf.

Walt wants all the things he cannot have. He says that when he is in one environment he is sure to be longing for another. For the hustle of Fulton Street, he says, or his beloved Broadway when
he is looking at Camden’s streams and fields. The city holds treasure for Walt. But Bucke is an expert on the mind. This is where real treasure lies; it can be found in human consciousness.
By developing consciousness we can learn to see from above. Walt sees from above. Even when he is asleep and disconnected from his surroundings Walt sees everything, while Bucke can only see
boundaries and borders, lines preventing one thing from connecting with another.

Walt is writing a letter in the dining car. He is hunched over the paper, consumed by his writing. Bucke is working on his manuscript. It occurs to Bucke that he and Walt are
not sitting in the same place. They are both together on this train but they are separated – one is in his letters and poetry, the other in his biography.

Walt is writing to Peter Doyle. He is explaining that it would be far easier for Peter to visit him in Camden when he goes there later in the year rather than Walt travelling
to Washington. He is feeling very tired. He thinks he has eaten something that doesn’t suit him. He must be more careful with his diet. His appetite has not changed with age.

He crosses this out and begins another letter.

He writes that he is feeling better than he has felt in a long while, yet there is so much work to do back home that it would be best if Peter were to visit him rather than Walt travelling to
Washington. When could he come?

Walt folds the letter then crushes it into a ball and stuffs it into his jacket pocket. He stands up. He waves his napkin as a goodbye to Bucke.

Bucke watches him go.

In their compartment, Walt is describing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln as if he had witnessed the event himself.

Did you really see this, Walt? asks Bucke.

In a way, we all have seen it. Either we are sitting low down in the centre of the stalls or we are perched high upon the balcony. It depends who is telling the story. The position of our
imagining shows others who we think we are. I used to see our president in the camp. One morning he crossed through the medical unit and stopped to talk to the soldiers there. He shook the hand of
every man he met as if he was a friend.

Bucke remembers the first occasion when he heard
Leaves of Grass
being read at a party. He listened to
Leaves of Grass
, then he met the man. The feeling was the same.

You wanna film me? Patti Smith says.

Yeah, says Steven.

What for?

To see who you really are. To see what you do and how you do it. To understand you, Patti.

You wanna cut me up into tiny pieces and sew the parts together? she says. If you film the outside, what about my insides? If I explain my inner thoughts to you, everything will come out, you
see. Can you really communicate another person by showing them walking into the shower, or humming tunes, or eating dinner, or sharing memories? You’ll try to tell a story but there is no
story. Wouldn’t it be a trick? I am right here, man. I’m growing old. So are my kids. So are you. This is the only thing I know. I don’t need to be remembered. It’s all in
the art I produce.

She shakes his hand, thanks him for his time, and walks out the door. Steven waits for the ‘I’m sorry, but’ speech from Lenny Kaye, but Lenny smiles and says, We’ll see
you next week.

In the grounds of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michael Heizer, sitting in the cabin of a tractor, waves his cowboy hat and lassoes the air whilst dragging a thirty-ton
granite slab over the manicured lawn.

This is
Dragged Mass
.

The commission is a breakthrough, a way to get things moving here, rip apart the marbled hallways and the monotony of the established art scene. The torn gulley that scars the lawn and the heavy
weight of mass symbolize the necessary destruction of old order.

The curator Sam Wagstaff welcomes it with a loving embrace.

The mass sits there for days. Rain falls. The buckled gulley becomes a muddy trench. The mass, which is supposed to sink majestically into the lawn, does not sink. Eventually, it is hauled away,
blown up with dynamite and removed piece by piece.

In New York City, Sam tours the downtown galleries during the day. At night he tours the bars and clubs. This is a contrast from the world he’s left behind, the perfect
green lawn (restored at great expense), the empty hallways and reverent air. There, his body was just an empty ancient vessel. Here, he can touch things, feel their weight.

The first time Sam Wagstaff sees Robert Mapplethorpe is in a photograph on the mantelpiece of a mutual friend. In the picture, Robert, dressed in a French sailor hat, is
smiling coyly at the camera.

Who is this? says Sam.

Robert Mapplethorpe.

The feeling in his stomach is the same as when he looks at a great work of art.

The first time Sam speaks to Robert on the telephone he says, I’m looking for someone to spoil. And Robert says, You’ve found him.

The first time Sam visits Robert’s studio, he sees a pair of leather pants hanging on the wall with a baguette protruding at the crotch.

The first time Sam meets Patti, she is barely dressed. Her hair a mess, she speaks in sweet profanities.

The first thing Sam buys Robert is a camera. The second is an apartment far away from Patti.

Sam tells Robert to take more photographs. They go away together to Fire Island, to European cities. Robert takes photographs of Sam as he used to take photographs of other
people. Sam doesn’t mind – it is the
way
Robert takes the photographs.

Sam becomes the subject of art. In Robert’s photographs, Sam is dressed or not dressed at all. Sam in the bath, pulling faces in repose, a man preparing himself for the
day; at the beach, in a dark room, dressed in nothing but a pair of white underpants. There are the couple shots – artist and patron – Sam squatting in the corner of a white room and
Robert standing over him, one arm over his head, Robert, the skinny kid in loose denim jeans; the wedding picture, Sam in front of Robert though it is always Robert’s face you’re drawn
towards; images spread across the pages of a photo album, four eight-panel pages showing a cock bound and trussed in black leather cord – Sam’s or Robert’s, it’s not
entirely clear – cord tied between the buttocks, twisted and fastened to the wrists, the front view, back view, side view.

Before Robert, Sam didn’t consider photographs to be works of art. They were more like historical documentation or reportage to him. It is Robert Mapplethorpe who changes
his mind. Sam sees Edward Steichen’s
Flatiron Building
like the prow of a ship emerging through the mist, the dagger-sharp blackness of the tree branch cutting through the
rain-drenched air.

It looks just like a painting, he says. Not like a photograph at all.

And there is that feeling again: the turning of his stomach.

Sam Wagstaff buys the photographs in auction houses and in second-hand stores. A long line of people form quickly behind him. The crowd picks up the pictures that Sam has been
looking at. They want to see what Sam has seen. Sam and Robert carry the photographs back to Sam’s apartment in plastic bags and brown-paper bags. Patti comes later to organize the pictures.
She lays the photographs out on the floor and orders them, catalogues them, figures out where they should go.

Robert and Sam enjoy the thrill of the chase. But once they possess the item, it loses its meaning.

For Sam, the subject of the photograph is not important. It could be of anything – medical photographs from the turn of the century, industrial photographs from the
1930s, anonymous photographs from any time at all. What Sam does is bring them all together so that a person can look at one and then another in one view. In their mind there will form a sequence,
something of Sam’s imagination displayed in a line.

At an exhibition of his own photography collection, Sam reads the words from the exhibition catalogue:
This exhibition is about pleasure, the pleasure of looking and the
pleasure of seeing, like watching people dancing through an open window. They seem a little mad at first, until you realize they hear the song that you are watching.

Sam’s favourite photograph in the exhibition is Thomas Eakins’
Male Nudes: Students at a Swimming Hole, 1883
. The picture shows a group of naked young men. Two are swimming
in a lake, one is sitting on the bank, two are gazing into the water, two are getting ready to jump. One is cocked and ready, balanced on the edge of a rock, about to dive. Sam feels as though he
comes to the scene by accident, strolling through a wood, the last days of summer, when the season has cooled, when the air has changed, when the day seems shorter than it should. The diver holds
his position. His friends look on, frozen in time. A breeze blows in, not one of them moves. Water laps their skin. A beetle crawls across the diver’s toe. The sun shimmers on the water,
catches the surface, catches the eye.