Widow Basquiat (5 page)

acrylic and oil paint stick on canvas
65⅓ x 90½ inches

She hits him. She hits him on the scar and hard into the place where his spleen would have been. For one second her fist is inside his body.

He painted
Bombero
once after a fight when I hit him like a man hits a man. I only did it once. I never did it again.

He had disappeared for days and someone told me that they’d seen him at the Roxy with a blonde. Someone else told me he was living with two black girls in SoHo. Someone else told me he’d gone to LA. I was furious. I went out and picked up a Puerto Rican hip-hop boy who put his gun under my pillow.

Then Jean came back. I told him to get out and that I was going to call the Fire Department. I would never have told Jean that I was going to call the Police. He would never have forgiven me that. Never! So I said the Fire Department and that made him laugh and laugh so I punched him very hard. I know it must have hurt, but he just hugged me and laughed.

Then, of course, he painted
Bombero
a few weeks later but the painting was not funny and the fireman in the painting scares me.

“I scratch out and erase but never so much that they don’t know what was there. My version of pentimento,” Jean-Michel tells Suzanne as he copies the writing on a cereal box: Sugar Coated Corn Puffs.

I remember the day that some buyer asked Jean for his CV. He was furious at first because, of course, he did not have one and he had never studied anywhere and I could tell that he suddenly felt a wall stopping him, but this only lasted a second. Then he tore out a piece of paper from a copybook that he liked to draw in and wrote something that was full of spelling errors and scratched-out words. It was Jean’s version of a CV. It began: “Jean-Michel Basquiat, born Dec. 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York.” He included all the public schools he’d been to since first grade and stated that he’d dropped out of school in the eleventh grade. He wrote that his first ambition in life was to be a fireman, and that his artistic ambition was to be a cartoonist.

This was all written out in a perfectly organized list and printed to look like a serious document. He added his early themes, which he numbered as: the seascape from
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea;
Alfred E. Neuman; Alfred Hitchcock; Nixon; wars; weapons; and cars.

I do believe that he wanted to be a fireman since he always stopped whatever he was doing when a fire engine passed by. He felt a reverence for firefighters and he liked to draw them with their funny hats. He called these hats “helmets.”

To this résumé he also added that he had failed at life drawing in ninth grade. He was very proud of this and boasted about it, especially when he started making money.

He asked me if he should add his musical influences to the list.

I said, “No.”

So, of course, he did.

He considered music to be his greatest influence and scribbled
West Side Story, The Watusi, Walking Harry
and
Black Orpheus
on the list.

When he finished, he suddenly asked me, “Do you think they ever asked Picasso for his curriculum vitae?”

“Of course not,” I answered.

He said that if anyone ever asked him for it again he was going to give the measurements of his hand.

He left the apartment and went out to buy a ruler. When he came back he began to measure his hand and write it all down:
Right hand with four fingers and one thumb. Palm measures: three and one half inches wide and three and one half inches long. Small scar on index finger. He also added the length of his fingers and thumb.

Then he really got into this and started to measure his whole body. When he had finished, he measured my body also. He made me lie down on the floor and wrote down all my measurements. He said he hated to be the one to tell me, but he had discovered that my left arm was shorter than my right arm.

I’ve always known that.

William Burroughs is reading at the Ritz. Jean-Michel puts on his paint-covered baggy pants and trench coat. Suzanne dresses up in black. They go down past Houston Street and buy some coke. They sniff it in the taxi on the way to the reading.

“Don’t talk to me, Venus,” Jean-Michel says. “I don’t want to hear your voice. I hate your Canadian accent.” In a singsong voice he imitates her and says, “Mum, Mum, Mum.”

Suzanne is quiet. The coke is sharp and cold in her nose and mouth.

William Burroughs sits on the stage behind a desk with one bright floodlight on him. His voice is deep and scratchy and full of alcohol. Jean-Michel watches him silently, like a predator.

When they get home Jean-Michel tells Suzanne to stand against the wall. She lets him move her as if she were a doll. He pushes her against the wall, places her arms at her side and lifts her head. With his fingers he closes her eyelids.

“Don’t talk to me, Venus,” he says. “I don’t want to hear your voice.” He places a tin can on her head. He places a jar of paint on her head. He laughs. He tells her to open her hand and spits into her palm.

Jean was the one who told me that William Burroughs mistakenly killed his wife. Well, he did not say it was a mistake. He told me the story as if to insinuate that there was a very thin line between love and murder. He had a glint in his eye like he was trying to scare me. Like it was a cool thing that Burroughs killed his wife.

Later Jean got to know Burroughs well, and Ginsberg, but I was not with him then. He read Kerouac all the time.

She can sleep for two days. She can sleep for five days. Once she was able to sleep for seven days and her body fell beneath her when she tried to walk.

Through her sleep-haze she can hear voices. These are the voices of graffiti artists that have come to take Jean-Michel to a graffiti art show at Fashion Moda (the first graffiti art gallery in the South Bronx). Suzanne can hear the voices of Rammellzee, Toxic, A-One, LA2 and Dondi White spewing off their hip-hop language. “Where’s your freak, Jean-Michel?” “Watch it boy, he’s a real crimee. You know what time it is. Where’s your freak? It’s word up. Listen bro, all your homies will be there. You know what time it is. Homie Futura 2000 will be there. What a crimee! Where’s your freak? It’s word up and you know what time it is.”

Jean-Michel disappears for weeks.

Suzanne’s mother calls her from Canada.

“Suzy,” she says. “I’ve sold everything. It’s taken three weeks and I’ve had two garage sales. Your father bought everything.”

“I think I might die, Mum,” Suzanne says.

“I know, dear. That’s why I want you to go to Paris and check up on your sister.”

Suzanne goes to a loft where Jean-Michel is staying to say good-bye. The loft is a mess and Jean-Michel and a blonde French model are sitting on the bed doing heroin. He tells Suzanne to get out. He tells her that he doesn’t love her anymore. He tells her he never loved her and that she is a white Arab piece of shit.

In Paris, Suzanne’s sister has a job taking care of an American man who is diabetic. Suzanne and her sister have to iron his clothes and give him massages, which take forever because he is so fat. He takes them to La Coupole. He taunts Suzanne with his diabetic needles. He says, “Makes you want some heroin, doesn’t it?”

While I was in Paris Jean kept calling me to come home. I never told him that I was taking care of a sadistic diabetic man and trying to get my sister out of the situation. Instead, I made it sound like I was having a fabulous time. I told him that I had a French boyfriend who was a musician and who bought me stuff. I told him that the drugs were good. Jean was furious. He’d hang up on me and then call back a few minutes later.

Dressed with a glamorous Audrey Hepburn scarf on her head and large sunglasses, Suzanne arrives at the Pyramid Club straight from the airport, carrying her suitcase. She hopes she can find someone to take her in for the night.

Jean-Michel is there with Shenge. He walks up to Suzanne and says in a fast, desperate kind of way, “I am very rich now and I have a big loft in SoHo—please come and live with me.”

Shenge and Jean-Michel clean up the loft and place flowers everywhere. The refrigerator is filled with pastries.

Every morning Jean-Michel leaves the loft to go and paint in the basement of Annina Nosei’s gallery. He returns every two hours to see Suzanne and bring her some cakes. Then he comes home every evening at six.

Jean-Michel lets Suzanne wash his dreadlocks when he sits in the bathtub. They take a long time to dry—like sponges. Suzanne pats them and squeezes them in a towel for an hour.

In the Crosby Street loft there was a color TV and a TV stand on wheels that was either in the living-room area or would be dragged into the bedroom area. There was a Haitian voodoo statue that stood about three feet tall with a little bag around its neck. The statue was crudely carved out of dark wood. Jean bought this statue one day and told me to never open the bag around its neck. I never did. He told me never to touch the statue. I never did.

There were lots of toys around. Jean loved toys. Toy trucks and cars, marionettes from Italy. Strange little handmade toys. There were drawings and papers strewn everywhere in the painting area, which was also the living-room area. There were books all over the floor or leaning on the wall. The kitchen table had bowls of fruit and flowers on it. Jean always bought me flowers—those red flat plastic-looking things with the yellow penis coming out of them. Those were his favorite flowers. There were bottles of expensive wine. Everything was always a mess. I cleaned it up every day. He had oil-stick crayons everywhere, hundreds of them. Many were mashed on the floor.

He always shopped at Whole Food and Dean and DeLuca on Prince Street in front of the Annina Nosei Gallery. He bought expensive plates and stainless-steel pots and pans and utensils to cook with. The refrigerator was always full. He liked fruit mixtures. He bought a juicer and made carrot and vegetable juices. But then he would go and buy expensive Italian pastries or chocolates. He would only buy expensive food.

In the bedroom on the bed was a pale yellow and gold wool blanket with a floral large diamond design and a child’s Superman polyester comforter. There was a black piece of fabric on the headboard shelf. We always went to sleep with a mirror covered with coke right at our heads on this headboard shelf. There was white powder ground into it all over the place.

Sometimes he would stay out for three days at a time on coke and in the clubs with other women. He would not talk to me but he still wanted me there. He had different people over at night. Sometimes it was fun for me. We would sit around the living-room coffee table and do coke for hours.

The smell of his sweat came out of my pores.

She irons the clothes, folds his clothes, places them in the same order on the shelf—the red sweater is folded this way and placed above the red shirt. She places the soap at an angle on the sink and always places the towels in the same order 1-2-3. She irons one shirt five times. She makes the bed three times and irons the sheets. If a sweater fades in the wash she cries. She never speaks and only answers questions or speaks in a panicky monologue:

“My mother was a spy in the war. They took her to see a woman with transparent skin. They could see her heart beating in there and her lungs and blood. They could see her eyeballs turning. This was a military secret. Nobody knows about this. And they would give the woman food—turnips, oranges, bread—and watch it all go down into her. This was a military secret. I heard about her when I was five and I thought she must have been very beautiful like a larva, but very scared. I kept looking at my own stomach and wondering what was in there. I chewed carefully. My mother said she was a kind of Venus or virgin.”

At first Jean-Michel thinks this is funny and puts some of her words in his paintings. Then he tells her to shut up. He
paints
Self-portrait with Suzanne.
He paints her speaking her chicken-chatter, “PTFME E a a a R M R M O AAAAAAAA.”

They do coke six or seven times a day. He tells Suzanne she can only wear one dress. It is a gray shift with white checks. He tells her she can only wear one pair of very large men’s shoes. He does another line of coke. Suzanne walks clunk-clunk-clunk, her feet wading in the shoes, around the loft. He tells her she can’t wear lipstick anymore. He says she can only buy groceries and detergents. Then he says no, he will buy them. He does another line of coke and paints
Big Shoes
, a portrait of Suzanne in big shoes. He calls her Venus. He says, “Hey, Venus, come and kiss me.” He says, “Venus, go get us some coke.” He writes “Venus” into his paintings and says Suzanne is only with him for his money.

Jean-Michel sticks black paper over all the windows so that they won’t know if it is day or night. “The day is too light,” he says.

Soon Suzanne stops cleaning and Jean-Michel stays at home all day.

Suzanne finds a place to live under a small table, like a small cat that finds a hiding place. From here she watches Jean-Michel paint, sleep and do drugs. He picks up books, cereal boxes, the newspaper or whatever is around. He finds a word or phrase and paints it on his board or canvas. A few
times a day he crawls under the table with Suzanne and gives her a kiss on the forehead. Sometimes he pulls her out, has sex with her, and then puts her back under the table and continues to paint.

Sometimes Suzanne weeps a little and Jean-Michel says, “Shut up, Venus. I know what it is like to be tied up and fed, with a bowl of rice on the floor, like an animal. I once counted my bruises and I had thirty-two.”