Widow Basquiat (4 page)

Some days Jean would wake up and just speak Spanish. I understood very little. He’d go on and on for hours conjuring up everything he could remember like a song in his head. The presence of his mother was with him and he was with her in the words.

Suzanne loves polka dots. She is dressed in a wide polka-dot skirt. She and Jean-Michel do a couple of lines of coke and go to the Mudd Club, Tier 3, Club 57, Studio 54, the Roxy or the Continental. Jean-Michel is dressed in big, baggy pants with paint all over them and a big T-shirt and shoes that are way too big. Sometimes they go out and see the Contortions (who later become Jones White and the Blacks), the Lounge Lizards, DNA, Arto Lindsay or Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

Jean-Michel sells his first painting to Deborah Harry from Blondie for two hundred dollars and spends the money on one expensive dinner with Suzanne. He leaves a fifty-dollar tip.

When he could, he always left enormous tips. He loved to shock, even shock with generosity. It was like punching someone.

Suzanne is waitressing at the Binibon restaurant. One Friday night she comes home and finds Jean-Michel doing coke with three white girls dressed up in ’40s dresses, false eyelashes and high heels, and looking like fluttering dragonflies.

“We’re celebrating,” Jean-Michel says. The girls giggle. “Annina Nosei is going to represent me.” He picks up a knife off of the kitchen table and carves an “S” into Suzanne’s wood floor.

“We are going to be rich just like I told you,” Jean-Michel says, laughing. The girls laugh also. Suzanne takes her waitressing tips out of her pocket and throws them at Jean-Michel.

“Here,” she says. “Get some more coke for you and the girls.”

Jean-Michel leaves the apartment with the three lollipop girls skipping behind him and doesn’t return for three days. Later someone tells Suzanne that Jean-Michel was seen at the Mudd Club with a Puerto Rican boy.

When I first moved to New York I was a cigarette girl at the Ritz. Even when I left this job I kept my red wooden cigarette box. One day Jean found it and, thinking it was just a piece of wood or something, he did a painting on it. He painted a face with a crown and the word “AARON” on it. I was very angry at the time. But I later sold it to Annina Nosei for one thousand dollars.

Too much furniture. Nowhere to move without poking your thigh or hip into a pointed corner of some table, counter or chair. There is some room to sit on the stairs around the piles of magazines and un-ironed clothes.

Suzanne’s mother tries on Suzanne’s Jackie O sunglasses. “These are nice, Suzy,” her mother says. Her mother gets up and walks to the kitchen counter. She takes out five dollars from a box of crackers.

“Here, I’ve been saving these for you,” she says, handing the money to Suzanne. “Nobody likes crackers in this house, so they were safe,” she laughs.

“You know,” she continues, “I still think of you as an ice-skater. You could still do it, you know. Can I keep these sunglasses?”

“Not this time, Mother,” Suzanne says. “Jean-Michel likes them a lot and I bought them at a thrift shop.”

“I understand, Suzy,” her mother says. “Nothing is for keeps, though, remember that.”

While Suzanne is in Canada, the boy who is covering her waitressing shifts at Binibon is killed with a knife by Jack Henry Abbott, the man Norman Mailer wrote about in
The Belly of the Beast.
This man has been living in the halfway houses near the Bowery.

Jean-Michel sees the white, larvae-white paint, the outline of the body drawn by police on the sidewalk.

It takes twenty minutes and forty-two seconds for Jean-Michel to run home and call Suzanne in Canada. “Come home,” he cries. “It could have been you.”

On the airplane back to New York Suzanne knows that her mother has stolen her sunglasses.

Jean-Michel gets ahold of a big piece of opium. He smokes it with Suzanne but decides that the best way to do the drug is to put it in the refrigerator, break off small pieces, roll it into a ball and stick it up their rectums. So this is what they do. They lie naked on the floor for days.

One morning Jean-Michel says that an art critic is going to come over and interview him. There is a knock and Jean-Michel, who is naked, answers the door.

Rene Ricard enters the apartment. He says, “Not only are you the greatest artist I have ever seen, you have the most beautiful penis I have ever seen.” After this meeting, Ricard wrote the “Radiant Child” article for
Artforum.

Ricard hires Suzanne as his secretary to transcribe his poetry. Suzanne tells him that she is the girl that used to call him up.

He says, “Of course you were.”

Rene Ricard writes on matchbooks, wrappers and bits of toilet paper. Every week he gives these scraps to Suzanne in
a plastic ziplock bag. He tells her to type everything on a page in any order.

Rene Ricard teaches Suzanne how to behave on the street, how to behave with the young black and Puerto Rican boys and the “stickup” kids. Suzanne and Ricard have the same taste in men and he teaches her how to have them in her house and not get robbed. He teaches her how to move and what to say and what not to say. He tells her never to allow them to bring their guns into the bedroom and, if something goes wrong, her best defense is to act as vulnerable, weak and passive as she can. He says never to act tough like a black girl or they will kill her in a minute.

Rene Ricard says he is going to teach Suzanne how to be feminine, how to be a star. He explains that when she walks into a party, club or art opening, she must never look at anyone but fix her eyes on a point across the room and walk toward it. Above all, though, he tells her to study drag queens because only they know how to act like women.

They dress in long black waistcoats and walk down 3rd Avenue carrying black and silver walking sticks. At night they wear a top hat. They carry their cigarettes in thin silver cigarette cases. They live without electricity and only use candlelight. They have no appliances or even a telephone. Sometimes they perform songs at the new, hip restaurants in Alphabet City and places like Evelyn’s. They sing “Tea for Two” and “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” in an a cappella harmony. They also paint paintings from a specific time period in the manner of a particular artist and sign them “McDermott and McGough,” followed by the appropriate date: 1789, 1899, 1942, etc.

Vicky is a little frail girl who stutters when she speaks. She deals heroin on 1st Street. She has read everything and can quote Dostoyevsky.

Lili Dones designs menus for restaurants in the East Village as well as eccentric greeting cards. She wears Marilyn Monroe dresses. Her uncle shot himself in the bathroom after they left Cuba. She can always hear it in her head. She still smells like sugarcane.

Hal Ludacer is more beautiful than Greta Garbo.

Patti Astor is Fab 5 Freddy’s girlfriend. She wears the highest stiletto heels in town.

Alba Clemente was an avant-garde performance artist in Italy. She is more elegant and exotic than anyone else.

Maripol is a jewelry designer and looks like Coco Chanel. She creates the black rubber ring bracelets that everyone wears.

Z. was a prostitute in Japan.

Edit DeAk is older than everyone. She is Hungarian. Everyone hangs out in her loft on Wooster Street. She says she once communicated with a panther in a Hungarian zoo.

Tina Chow has the longest, skinniest arms.

Fab 5 Freddy is a good kisser.

Lady Pink is the only female graffiti artist. She spray-paints kittens.

I cannot remember everyone on the scene. Jean always boasted that he had slept with them all. I knew he was lying.

Jean-Michel listens to jazz. He listens to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach, hip-hop, blues and Latin and African music. One day he finds out that Billie Holiday does not have a gravestone on her grave and he can think of nothing else.

He calls Diego Cortez. Cortez is one of Jean-Michel and Suzanne’s first friends. He is an art curator and dealer who knows everything about the club scene and the art world. He is always impeccably dressed with a European air of elegance about him. Jean-Michel and Suzanne adore him. Jean-Michel says he is a “queen—but you would never know it.”

From Saturday to Monday Jean-Michel and Diego Cortez spend hours designing Billie Holiday’s gravestone. Every day Suzanne is sent out to buy them coke.

“Boom for real!” Jean-Michel says when they finish.

Jean-Michel says his paintings are jazz on canvas. He makes his own music also.

One day he buys himself a TEAC reel-to-reel recording machine and composes experimental, improvised music and poetry. He makes tape loops that he then records one over the other as if they were musical instruments. He does this a lot with Michael Holman and Nick Taylor.

At four o’clock Jean-Michel calls the suicide hotline and has a conversation with the man on the other end of the line. Jean-Michel says, “Hijacked Marlboros” and “You won’t be so arrogant once the police arrive” and “It’s gone soft.” The man at the suicide hotline is convinced that Jean-Michel has stolen a truck of Marlboro cigarettes and feels guilty and wants to commit suicide. The man says, “What’s gone soft?” Jean-Michel says, “You won’t be so arrogant once the police arrive.” The man says, “I’m not being arrogant.” The conversation goes back and forth. Jean-Michel makes a recording of this that he later uses with music.

I loved Diego Cortez. He was very funny. He called me Jean’s muse. We were good friends. It was Diego who arranged Jean’s first group show called New York/New Wave at a PS1 space in Long Island City. Throughout Jean’s career Diego got a lot of important people interested in Jean’s work. Without Diego, Jean might never have become famous.

“I love the way you walk, Suzanne. Like you lead with your pelvis with your back slanted and long steps,” Jean-Michel says. He imitates her walking back and forth in the kitchen.

He never buys her presents or clothes. Only food. Whenever he is happy he brings her all kinds of Italian cakes and pastries. She has eaten profiteroles, petits fours, éclairs, Japanese jellies, meringues and marzipan. Sometimes the refrigerator is completely filled with these packages wrapped in paper and string.

I don’t know why Jean bought me pastries all the time. It was really very funny. I think he thought it was something that rich people did. When he did not have money and could not afford the pastries, he would buy me bags of white and pink marshmallows.

Jean-Michel never reads. He picks up books on mythology, history and anatomy, comic books or newspapers. He looks for the words that attack him and puts them on the canvas. He listens for things Suzanne says and writes them on his drawings. He listens to the television.

One day he says, “Suzanne, I’m almost a famous artist now and I don’t know how to draw. Do you think I should be concerned?”

She says, “Well, just teach yourself and there will be no problem.”

Later that day Jean-Michel comes back with seven “How to Draw” books—
How to Draw Horses
,
How to Draw Flowers
,
How to Draw Landscapes
, etc. This was all tongue-in-cheek. He thought the books were hilarious and did several paintings where he copied the drawings.

Jean always did drugs, he never stopped. Whenever he went to Europe or Japan or any new place you could count on it that in a couple of hours upon arriving he knew where to buy what he wanted. It was like he had a radar for it. Once when he came
to Canada to get me, within five minutes he was off on my brother’s motorcycle buying drugs.

His other major interest was girls, women. He loved women. He loved sex. He always had a lot of women. The only time he was faithful to me was the first few months that I lived at the Crosby loft. He had many small relationships with many different women. He would become bored quickly, though. That’s why I always had a problem knowing if I was really special to him. I still sometimes don’t know. Other people tell me I was. He once told me that the only women he had ever loved were me and Jennifer Goode.

I accepted it.

His main interest was music, though. He loved jazz, Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, etc. This is what he listened to at the Crosby loft. When he moved to the Great Jones loft he developed a taste for classical music (I think from Andy Warhol). He loved making experimental music. He actually put out a record that he produced and put up the money for it. The record was a rap record that he did with the rappers K Rob and Rammellzee. I think he referred to it as Rammellzee versus K Rob. He did the drawing for the cover, which was white on black. I think he pressed one thousand of them. I used to have one but I gave it away thinking I could get another but I never did.

His paintings were inspired by the jazz musicians and he felt akin to them. A lot of the early jazz artists, of course, couldn’t
even walk through the front door of the hotels and clubs they were playing in and had to enter through back doors and kitchens, and I think Jean felt this was a metaphor for his place in the white art world: he had entered through the back door. He broke into the white art world in a way that had never been done before by a black.

Jean-Michel says it frightens him that one day he might accidentally eat pork. When he goes to restaurants, especially Chinese restaurants, he asks the waiters over and over again if the food has pork in it.

His mother taught him this. Jean said that the pig meat can get right into your heart and make it grow. He said many scientists knew this. He said that they had X-rayed people who eat pork and that they have more arteries and veins and that the heart became like a big complicated knot.