Widow Basquiat (3 page)

The graffiti artists never painted on his face.

I don’t think he was ever found, but we all thought about him.

Jean-Michel has found Suzanne like a small box, an old coat, a penny on a sidewalk, found a little boy-girl like him. He also knows his skeleton. When he was hit by a car as a child his mother gave him
Gray’s Anatomy
to read in the hospital. He willed his bones whole. He knows what makes an arm bend to strike, what bones can be crushed and what bones carry him across the street. He knows his boneless shadow that disappears in summer. He is in a band called Gray. The band plays instruments hiding in boxes.

Jean-Michel wears a big, long overcoat. He stands away from the bar and comes in every day to watch Suzanne. She reads
Nausea
by Sartre behind the bar. This is an old-man, taxi-driver bar. Cigar-smoke dark. Suzanne looks like a boy except for her red lips. She is a shoe-shine boy with a black cap on her head and big shoes. She asks the customers in her honey, twelve-year-old voice, “Mister, sir, will that be a double or single?”

Jean-Michel watches Suzanne for two months. He never speaks to her. He leans against the jukebox at the back of the room, smokes cigarettes and plays Eartha Kitt’s song “
My Heart Belongs to Daddy
” over and over again. He has
very short hair with long dreadlocks in the back. He is twenty years old, slender and tall, but childlike. There is a thickness about him from his excessive use of marijuana. Suzanne thinks, “If he falls on me he will be so heavy.”

He only orders the best. Every four days he puts a pile of pennies, nickels and dimes on the bar and orders a Rémy. Suzanne knows he will always want what is expensive.

He tells Suzanne, “You’re a pretty one.”

The third or fourth or fifth thing Suzanne tells Jean-Michel is, “High heels are a plot against women, they throw our spines out and stop us from standing on the ground.”

I always called Jean-Michel Jean.

Jean-Michel comes into the bar every day. He reads Suzanne his poems from his “Black and White Notebooks.” He calls her Venus. He tells her he is thinking about her feet, thinking that they are always on the ground. He wants to touch her feet. He tells her to take off her shoes and walk with him in the street.

One day the owner of Night Birds, a Chinese man, shows Suzanne a brown paper bag with a gun in it. “Why don’t you have a nice white boyfriend?” he asks.

Jean-Michel moves into Suzanne’s apartment. He brings only a broken radio and a tin can full of crayons. Kids’ stuff.

I had to quit working at Night Birds when the owner caught me and Jean kissing at the bar. He said he would never let his daughter do what I was doing and that I should look for a white boy. Then he showed me a gun he had hidden in a brown paper bag and that really frightened me.

Even though he’d been hanging out at the bar for a few months staring at me, I had only known Jean for a few days when I let him move into my apartment. He said that it would only be for a while, but from then on we could never stay away from each other.

He smells of leather, oil paint, tobacco, marijuana and the faint metallic smell of cocaine. He wears handmade wool sweaters and long Mexican ponchos. He never walks in a straight line. He zigzags wherever he is going. Suzanne follows behind him. She feels like a Japanese woman.

Jean-Michel can never get a taxi to stop for him. Not even later when he wears an Armani suit and has five thousand dollars in his pocket. Jean-Michel hides behind a car and Suzanne hails the taxis.

He has the scar of a knife wound on his buttocks. He says his mother is in an insane asylum and that his whole world spins around her.

He moves in with Suzanne.

Jean-Michel brushes Suzanne’s hair for hours. He paints or draws. He snorts some coke. He picks up boys or girls at the Mudd Club and disappears for days. He looks at girlie magazines and masturbates. Jean-Michel likes to spit into Suzanne’s mouth.

Suzanne and Jean-Michel have terrible fights because only Suzanne is earning money. One day Jean-Michel says, “Fine, I’ll get a job.” He goes to work as an electrician’s assistant at the apartment of a rich white woman. Suzanne is so proud of him she makes him a special dinner.

When Jean-Michel gets back home he is furious, clapping his hands together. “That white bitch looked at me as if I were a worker!” he says. Jean-Michel throws Suzanne’s dinner into the garbage and does some coke. Suzanne locks herself in the closet.

It was clear that his sexual interest was not monochromatic. It did not rely on visual stimulation, such as a pretty girl. It was a very rich multichromatic sexuality. He was attracted to people for all different reasons. They could be boys, girls, thin, fat, pretty, ugly. It was, I think, driven by intelligence. He was attracted to intelligence more than anything and to pain. He was very attracted to people who silently bore some sort of inner pain as he did, and he loved people who were one of a kind, people who had a unique vision of things.

In the closet there are two dead spiders. Clothes rolled up on the floor mixed up with shoes. There is a pair of ice skates. The blades are still sharp. Her face rests inside the hem of a winter coat. She can hear Jean-Michel moving around in the kitchen. His shadow moves around beneath the closet door. His shadow touches her hands and feet. The front door slams shut.

Over the stove Jean-Michel has painted faces of little girls crying. He has written in huge block letters: TEARS CUT THEIR CHEEKS.

With acrylic on canvas Jean-Michel paints a Cadillac and a moon. The letter “S” appears on some paintings—placed here and there like a small worm or snake. “S” is for Suzanne, like a tattoo. He paints, pauses, picks up a book or magazine and when he finds a word or sentence that he likes he paints it on the board or canvas.

They are code. The crown is the logo from the TV show
The Little Rascals.
He mixes Spanish and English. One painting is of Suzanne, painted like a stick figure holding a box that says “FOOD.” Beside her Jean-Michel paints himself carrying a box that says “SAL.”
Sal
is Spanish for “salt”—he says he is a “Mammy” saltshaker.

He paints kings wearing black crowns covered in tar and feathers. He paints a simple square house with a triangle roof that has an “S” inside, “Because, Suzanne, you are my home.”

On one painting he writes, “Jimmy Best on his back to the suckerpunch of his childhood files,” because he hears a hobo say this on television.

He writes “TAR” everywhere in thick dark strokes because “I sometimes feel as black as tar.”

He knows what it is to have a knife thrown at him. He knows what it is like to be tied up and fed like an animal. He knows the sound of a slap against his cheek and what blood tastes like. He hates the sound of a key in a lock, a door opening, the first step inside.

For a year or so before I met Jean he had called himself SAMO. He had painted some graffiti on the walls around New York City signing that name everywhere. Sometimes he’d run into people who still called him that. It was his street name. He dropped it when he no longer wanted to be part of the streets and subways.

They are skeletons—naked inside and naked outside. They sit down to eat naked. Jean-Michel has made his favorite dish, arroz con pollo. His Puerto Rican mother taught him to make it. Suzanne is white; she holds her left breast with her right hand—her other hand holds a fork. Across the table Jean-Michel is black. He wears a red Mexican
charro
hat as he gives Suzanne a plate of steaming chicken. Beside Suzanne is the word “TAR.” They can see the inside of each other’s bodies. Jean-Michel can see Suzanne’s teeth and an almond-shaped vagina. Suzanne can see his ribs and shoulder joints. This is a painting:
Arroz con Pollo
, 1981, acrylic and oil paint stick on canvas, 68 x 84 inches.

One of the hardest things to describe about Jean is his elegance. There was something so beautiful about the way he moved and spoke. This partly had to do with his drug use, which kept him very slim and childlike. But it was innate also. I was also very slim and waiflike. We looked twelve years old.

What most people don’t understand about Jean-Michel is that his crazy behavior had nothing to do with being an enfant terrible. Everything he did was an attack on racism and I loved him for this.

I also understood racism. My mother tried to get me to bleach my skin. She never wanted me to go out in the sun. She said I was too “Arab looking.”

I remember that in high school I wanted to play the part of Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz.
I practiced singing the songs for weeks and my voice was the best in the school. They gave the part to another girl because they said my skin was too dark. I remember that I came home and wept. My mother said, “Suzy, well, they’re right.”

One Thursday in 1982, Jean-Michel tells Suzanne to stand up and walk, they are going to the MoMA. He tells Suzanne to wear his clothes. She ties his pants around her waist with a rope. His sweater hangs down to her knees.

At the museum Jean-Michel takes a bottle of water out of his coat and walks through the halls sprinkling the water here and there around him. “I’d piss like a dog if I could,” he says, as they wander past paintings by Pollock, Picasso, Kline and Braque. Suzanne does not even ask what he is doing. She knows this is one of his voodoo tricks.

“There are no black men in museums,” he says. “Try counting …”

Suzanne cannot find even one.

“This is another white man’s cotton plantation,” he explains.

When they get back home Jean-Michel puts on a Charlie Parker tape and tells Suzanne to be very quiet.

It begins to rain outside, a slow, dark rain that will not stop for three days.

Jean-Michel paints
St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes.
It shows the boxer slumped down after a fight, surrounded by a group of sinister-looking white men. Joe Louis is painted with a halo over his head and the paint drips from his name like blood falling down the canvas.

I realized that he must have been to the MoMA millions of times. I had no idea. I never knew when he went. He never mentioned it to me. I know that his mother had taken him to museums. Jean knew every inch of that museum, every painting, every room. I was astonished at his knowledge and intelligence and at how twisted and unexpected his observations could be.

I remember he had a book on Renoir that he loved. Once I asked him why and he said, “Because they are so violent.” I argued with him and said that he was wrong, that the paintings showed placid French country life. He said I was stupid. He opened the book and showed me the painting of
Mademoiselle Romaine Lacaux.

“Those red flowers,” he said, “are blood in her hands.” Then he showed me the Sisleys and said, “You can just tell he hates her.” Finally, he opened a page at
Une Odalisque
—the one of the harem woman—and Jean said, “Look, she is about to fart.”

His favorite painters were Kline and Twombly, especially Twombly. Jean said that Twombly taught him that he could
scratch things out on the canvas. And, of course, he loved comic books, which were a great inspiration to him.

It made me so happy that he had taken me with him to the MoMA to do his spell with the water. It was really quite funny watching him sprinkle water everywhere, making sure the guards weren’t watching and looking around and up at the ceiling to see if any cameras were on him. He did not think it was funny, though. Jean did it with great seriousness like a priest.

Jean-Michel has a long scar that extends from his chest to his stomach. When he was eight years old he was hit by a car and had to have his spleen removed. At the hospital, his mother, Matilde, brought him
Gray’s Anatomy
to read. He memorized the whole book: tibia, femur, aorta, oral cavity, pharynx, digital nerve, optic chiasm …

At the hospital, Matilde touched her son’s scar. “The doctors say you can live without a spleen. The spleen is an archaic organ.”

Jean-Michel adores Matilde, who lives in an asylum outside New York City. Her illness began when Jean-Michel was a young teenager. She would sit for hours and try to imitate the whistling of birds. She got rid of everything in the house that could break.

Jean-Michel visits his mother once a month. He takes his drawings and paintings to show her. Matilde looks at them and says, “You are moving very fast.”

Jean was particularly close to his youngest sister, Jeanine.

Jeanine was very sweet and naive and dressed in white frilly blouses and tartan skirts. Jean’s father didn’t want Jean to give the girl any money. But when Jeanine came over, Jean would hide one-hundred-dollar bills in the pages of books and give the books to Jeanine as presents.

I was never invited by Jean’s father to go to his home, even though I was one of the closest people to Jean. He never expressed an interest in getting to know me. I was always polite and respectful toward Gerard but he always gave me that feeling that I was a one-night stand or a casual girlfriend.

Jean told me that when he was about fourteen the family moved to Puerto Rico. Jean ran away and lived with a disc jockey who worked for a local radio station and he told me that this was his first homosexual relationship. He lived in Puerto Rico for about two years and spoke good Spanish. Soon after they moved back to Brooklyn Jean left home for good. He told me he lived on benches in Washington Square Park and on friends’ couches.

Some days Jean-Michel wakes up in the morning and can only speak in Spanish:
Sí. Sí. Leche. Arroz. El niño come platanos. La niña tiene canicas. Tu eres blanca como el arroz. Mi nombre es Juan.