A Little Trouble with the Facts (15 page)

Afterward, we had dinner at Nha Trang, a Vietnamese hole in the wall in Chinatown, where the dishes were on our table
almost before we ordered. He asked me about my family, and I told him a little about the yippies and Merry Pranksters and the squat, and he said his mother had been a singer in her youth too, and he’d lived a childhood backstage. As we downed rice noodles and cheap Chinese beer, he asked me more—all the questions about my past that no one in New York had ever asked, or at least that I’d never answered truthfully.

As the hours wore on, he walked me through SoHo toward Chelsea and then up to Midtown—pointing out graffiti marks, tags, stickers on the way, explaining styles, histories, techniques—and we passed each green subway lantern that would’ve put me on a train uptown, we talked and talked and I didn’t tuck into my Broadway flat till past two.

The third night, Cabeza gave me the address of his studio in Queens. He said it was time he showed me the documentary he’d made about Wallace long ago, so I could get a picture of “the artist as a young man.” “You would’ve liked him,” Cabeza said over the phone. “Maybe you will.” I took a cab right over from The Paper.

Cabeza’s studio was in a defunct factory, which hadn’t been the Eagle Electric plant for thirty years, on a cracked cobblestone street in an industrial district in Queens. It wasn’t one of those light-filled lofts of SoHo or a converted Williamsburg warehouse. Even though it was on the second floor, it had low ceilings and the dank feel of a cave. It also happened to be his living room and bedroom, his kitchen and his closet, the couch and the bed pushed into corners behind screens. In the center of the room was a high narrow table that had once lived in a high school chemistry lab, which Cabeza used for editing. There was a sink in one end, a Steenbeck editing table at the other. In the center was an old film-reel projector.

“I was trying to make a series,” Cabeza explained, as the projector began to whirr. “Every time there was a new innovation in the
style, I wanted to get a ‘master’ to demonstrate on film. It turned out there was a new evolution in the style just about every six months. From the throw-up it went to the burner, from the burner to the wild-style piece and then the blockbusters. These days it’s roller letters and scratchiti. I couldn’t keep up with it all.”

He went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of pinot noir. He held it up and raised his brows. I nodded. “Nowadays, style is all anyone cares about. You’d be surprised how petty the beefs can get. Everyone wants to claim his or her rightful place in the graffiti pantheon. In the early days, when they were writing on the trains, it was all about rebellion and subversion. Now it’s all about style, who invented what and which arrow came first.” Cabeza shook his head while he uncorked the wine. He went back to the kitchen, and quickly brought back two jam jars and poured them both full. He lifted me onto the editing counter and handed me one of the jars.
“Salud,”
he said, touching his glass to mine. “Shall we get started?”

Cabeza cut the lights. The old projector chugged and ticked and a sputter of blue light hit the home movie screen. The room smelled of burning dust. The film was 16 millimeter, black and white. There were no credits or titles, just a flash of light on a young man in a subway tunnel.

It was young Malcolm Wallace, no older than Kamal, but a whole lot slimmer. He was crouched on his haunches, aiming a spray can at a wall. His hair was wild, and his cheeks were soft and hairless. There was the hint of stubble above his lip, but the hair on his cheeks grew in unevenly, like it wasn’t fully committed. He was wearing a pair of dark pants and a white turtleneck unrolled up to his chin. On top of that was a white Adidas jacket with stripes down the sides. Around his neck over the turtleneck, he wore a couple of strands of what I thought might be Buddhist prayer beads.

“Guy always looked sharp,” said Cabeza. “That was a big part of the Stain mythos. Even when we were just kids, he came up
with these interesting combos. A good street look, with a little something from the hippies. He wore those Guatemalan bracelets, or maybe an Indian shirt. He always had the urban ghetto cool, with a tinge of Euro. Something to put you off guard.”

On the film I could hear Cabeza’s voice from behind the camera. The same voice, minus the smoke: “So, tell us how you got into all this.”

“This? Well, you know, man. I mean, I’ve been tagging for, well, as long as I could walk almost. As long as I could run, definitely.” Wallace laughed and pointed at the camera, then shook up his can again. “Well, nah, I mean, I been doing this since the beginning. I was out there with Tonka and Stitch, and Cay, A-1, all those b-boy writers. We started putting our name up, just to get up.”

His can started hissing and he started marking the wall with a black curve.

“Hey, let’s wait on that, okay?” came the voice from behind the camera. “I want you to talk us through it, show us what you’re doing as you’re doing it, all right?”

Stain pulled the spray can back from the wall. “Sure, man. Hey, whatever you want. It’s your picture, right? I’m just the actor. Or maybe you could say ‘the talent,’ right?” He laughed. “Am I right, man?”

The voice from behind the camera was impatient, nerdy: “Sure. Talent. Just a minute. Hold on.”

The older Cabeza, in the room with me, added his own commentary: “I was just trying to get him to do it in order, but that was hard for him. He was free flowing. Aquarius.”

The camera jostled and unfocused and then focused again. Throughout the pause, Wallace looked calm and cheerful. “Okay, so why don’t you start painting now,” said young Cabeza.

“Ya ready?”

“Ready.”

Wallace stood up. “Homeboy, check it out. Today I am going
to teach you how to do a throw-up. This here is going to be like a cooking class, like Julia Child in the rail yards.” Stain smiled wide at the camera, showing off the gap where he was missing a canine. He didn’t bother to stop and ask Cabeza if he was doing okay. He was perfectly confident. He was a genuine charmer, effortless. “A throw-up is a step up from a tag. Here’s my tag, Stain 149,” he said, and then demonstrated his basic style, spraying his name in simple script. His signature looped around, the letters overlapping so that the word was barely legible. “And now, here’s the throw-up of my name.” He sat up on his haunches a little higher, took another spray can off the ground, and began to paint bubble letters in white. These were thick lines and he went over them a few times with his can, until they popped from the wall. He was serious and silent while he painted.

“I bet the girls loved him.”

Cabeza nodded. He refilled my jam jar. “
Claro que si
. He had a girlfriend, though, Mae Rose Sims, from Georgia. He was crazy about her. But after he got dropped from the gallery, she left him.”

“That wasn’t very kind of her.”

“It was his own fault, maybe. He was so angry. I know she cared for him deeply, but she didn’t want to watch him destroy himself. After she left, though, he started to spiral.”

On-screen, Stain was saying, “Now, once you’ve done the throw-up you can add a fill-in, or you can leave it like you want it.” Wallace twisted the cap off the spray can and put on another, thicker cap. “Now, if you get one of these spray starch can caps, you can cover a larger area in a shorter time. That’s good, because speed is king.” He sprayed, using darker, wider, strokes to cover the area inside the bubble lettering.

The camera moved vertically to take in his whole tall, narrow frame. “Key is, time is your enemy. Along with the Five-0. You have to move like lightning. Get it up; fill it in. Style comes
second, once you’ve mastered the basics. You get fancy and get caught, you be illin’. So keep it simple.”

He was a jaunty-looking kid, with energy to spare. Even standing in one place, he couldn’t keep still. As he talked, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, switched his hands from one pocket to the next, took his pick out of his pocket and played with the spokes.

“So, that’s it. You think you’ve got it? I hope so. Because I’ll see you on the lay-ups, homeboy. And if you don’t know what’s a throw-up, you won’t be welcome on the Bench. That’s the Hundred Forty-ninth Street, my street, my Bench. I’m Stain 149. Word up.”

The light flickered and the film unfurled. We sat in the glow of the projector, the celluloid flapping through the reel. Cabeza approached me with the wine bottle, his eyes gleaming. All at once, I wanted to know everything about him.

“Was it Stain who named you Cabeza? Where did that come from?”

He poured my glass full. “
El grande cabeza
,” he chuckled. “‘The great head.’ Another way of calling me brainy. Where I grew up, it wasn’t good to be too smart. I tried to pretend I was an athlete like the other kids, but I wasn’t much good at it. Then someone found a hardcover copy of
Don Quixote
in my schoolbag, and he and a few other kids beat me with it. After that, they taunted me:
El grande cabeza, el grande cabeza,
until it just became
cabeza,
and then that stuck.”

“Cruel.”

“I hated the nickname as a kid, but when I got older, it got to be so I liked it. All the boys who used to tease me for being a smarty were stuck in Aguas Buenas working for their fathers selling kitchen supplies to homemakers. I got out. Good thing I’d been reading all those books. I did think I was pretty smart.”

“So, what is it?” I was still on the countertop and he was
standing in front of me as the light danced on the screen behind his head.

“What?”

“Your real name.”

Cabeza shifted so that the features of his face were no longer visible against the screen’s light, and his head was just a silhouette. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he said.

I thought it over. I’d told Cabeza things over the last few days I hadn’t told anyone else. I leaned forward and whispered the three words into his ear. He didn’t snicker; he didn’t even suppress a laugh. He kissed me. It was the kind of kiss I’d been hoping for, though I hadn’t really known I was hoping for him to kiss me until then. But it felt natural and inevitable, like the kiss to end a scene in any good black-and-white. It was full of a few days’ longing.

He put his hands through my hair, “You’re beautiful,” he said.

“It’s not kosher to kiss your rabbi,” I said.

“Then I’m done being your rabbi.” He put his hands beneath my thighs, and lifted me off the editing table. He carried me to the couch by the wall, and held me in his lap. I pulled away to touch his face, the soft stubble on his square chin. I knew I was getting into something it wouldn’t be easy to back out of again. He stroked my hair for a moment, pushing it away from my eyes, and seemed to watch me think.

“No one gets to see this girl,” he said. “The one behind the façade. She’s pretty nice. Actually, she’s terrific. How come you keep her all locked up?”

Now I kissed him.

“Wait one minute.” He reached out and found the cord to the projector and yanked it from the wall. The whirring stopped and the light went out. The rest took place in darkness.

I
t was 3:30 a.m. and I was standing next to a grown man sucking on a pacifier. I’d freshened up at Cabeza’s and arrived at Twilo right on time, but Blondie was already a half hour late.

I tapped my martini glass and lifted my chin at the bartender. He pointed at the sign above him that read
POWER BAR
. “Only energy drinks and protein shakes,” he yelled above the din. I’d gotten my first drink upstairs. This was no kind of bar at all.

The pacifier-sucker had a long mop of green and yellow hair, a Mickey Mouse nose stud, and eyes glazed thicker than Krispy Kremes. His lips curled at a dancing girl in a glow necklace and a T-shirt that read
CLUBBING IS NOT A CRIME
.

Not for most people. I hadn’t seen the inside of a nightclub since The Incident, and now it was like visiting the site of a hit and run where I’d been both the casualty and the driver. I was back there all over again, slumped over the steering wheel and every tendon ached. The strobe lights were paparazzi flashbulbs; the techno was the soundtrack of my shame. If Blondie didn’t show soon and if I didn’t get another martini, I’d find the door and use it the way I should’ve used it that fateful January night.

I’d looked for Blondie everywhere. I’d checked among the zonked-out carcasses on the stadium seating near the fire exits. He wasn’t in the throbbing slo-mo dancing mass. A topless beef
cake mounted the Power Bar and cleaned up with his washboard abs. That wasn’t Blondie either.

“You see,
there
she is, I
knew
she’d come!” came a voice from behind me. I turned around to see Blondie swatting away the pacifier-sucker with the iridescent blue-green eye of a peacock feather. He was walking toward me from the dance floor, followed by a short brawny man with a shaved head and wire-frame glasses.

“Charles,” Blondie gestured toward me with the peacock feather, coming so close he almost tapped me on the head. “
This
is Valerie Vane.”

Charles came right at me for a quick study. “You’re right, Gid, she is
so
much prettier in person,” he declared, as if I weren’t there. “Those tab shots make her look…well, I’ll say it—pug-nosed. But, well, she’s not at
all
. Her nose is lovely. And the hair. Outstanding. Very forties starlet, very throwback.” Then he took my hand. “It’s really a shame you didn’t get better photos into the hands of the press agents. We have a friend who is an
outstanding
photographer. He’s done everyone. Ivana, Monica, Imelda. You’d do well with him. Don’t you think, Gid?”

“Oh, I agree. A better picture would’ve been better, soooo much better,” Blondie said. “But I think David LaChapelle. He’s done Amanda Lapore.”

“You always disagree with me.”

“I was agreeing!”

If these guys thought I’d arranged the Club Zero catfight as a photo-op, they were too dim even for the disco. I needed more than a refill. I needed to slosh knee-deep in gin. Blondie was pushing through the crowd in front of the Power Bar and waving some bills. Charles asked me if I needed anything and I told him two martinis. “One for the road.”

“One for the road?” said Charles. “Oh, that’s funny. One for the
road
. She’s got a sense of humor.” He was still talking about
me in the third person, though we were alone. “She’s not leaving already, is she?”

“She might be soon if she doesn’t get a martini,” I said.

Charles left me to convey the request to Blondie, who shouted back from his place at the bar, “Only virgin over here. Of course that doesn’t apply!” He smiled at me and when I didn’t smile back, he put a fistful of bills into Charles’s hand and instructed him to go find a
bar
bar.

Blondie returned with a Red Bull and I hoped we’d get down to business now, and not clock any more of my snooze time. But I wasn’t done with show-and-tell yet. “It
is,
” said a six-foot transvestite in six-inch heels to a midget on a leash. She was in a purple silk number that looked eerily similar to a Vera Wang I owned. He was wearing fur chaps and a mustache. “You know, we were just standing over there looking at you thinking, she is soooo familiar. And Tim said Valerie
Vane,
and I said
no,
and he said,
yes,
and I said, well, I haven’t seen
her
face in the papers in
months
. I thought she’d
died
or maybe just
faded
. And which is worse? I’m Sharon Needles,” she said, presenting her hand so I could kiss it. “And this is Tim.”

I shook hers and then bent down for his, but he bared fake fangs.

“What a pleasure to have you at our club. Of course, it isn’t
ours
but we’ve spent enough money here we might as well own shares,” said Sharon with a lilting voice and a bobbing Adam’s apple. She tittered at her own joke, putting two big fingers to her lips. “I’m glad to see that your days as a house-frau are over.”

“They’re not over,” I said. “I’ll be back in my muumuu soon. Just one night out to see Gideon here. He has something he needs to share with me.” I turned toward him to make my point. “Then it’s the La-Z-Boy for me.”

“Well, then, this
is
special.” Sharon looked at Blondie, who was grinning ear to ear like he’d just been crowned Ms.
Chelsea. “You’re responsible for Valerie Vane’s return? I’m impressed, Giddy.” She grabbed Blondie and pulled him closer, looping her arm through his, giving a tug on Tim’s chain. He barked. “What was your spot again? Club Zero? We don’t like it there. Too many debutantes. The genuine article, not us tranny wannabe’s.”

I could already see where this was headed. Sharon wanted to get me reminiscing. The spotlights spun around our little klatch and the music boomed faster. “I’m here for work,” I said as flatly as possible.

Sharon let her big blue eyelashes lie for a moment on her cheeks, like two butterflies resting on a mound. “Not very much fun anymore, are we?” she said. It was as if she’d put a quarter in a gumball machine and gotten the eraser. “Well, I hope you’re at least doing a story on this party. It hasn’t really started yet; it gets going around five. I’ll take you up to the deejay booth to meet Jr. Vasquez. I can even get you Gatien. But, he’s a little press-shy just now. You know, because of those kids who died. But you won’t harp on that, I hope!”

Tim was licking Sharon’s calf. Blondie stepped in. “Val’s not doing a story on the party. I promised her a tidbit on the gallery. You know—” He gestured, a kind of pantomime in which an imaginary box exploded.

Sharon looked at him like he’d stolen the eraser. “The gallery, the gallery. It’s all he ever wants to talk about.” She sighed. “If I hear another Darla Deitrick story, I may just turn into a piece of art myself. Put a wire through my back and hang me on a wall!” She looked down at Tim and shook him off her leg. “Down, boy.” I imagined a pretty domestic scene with the two of them. Sharon in the tub rubbing lavender soap into her size thirteen feet, and Tim in his doggy bed, mewling. Sharon looked back at me, this time right into my eyes. “Say it once?” she said.

“Say what?”

“Don’t you know who I am?” Sharon said. “A command performance?”

Tim barked and panted. Here it was all over again, every gut-wrenching headline. I hated Blondie for it. “Enough,” I told him. “I don’t parrot myself in exchange for tidbits. If you have something to say, you say it, or I’m gone.” I started to back way.

“Please, no, Valerie. What I have to say is important. Just one minute.” He made nice with Sharon using some words I didn’t hear, and she harrumphed. She tugged Tim’s leash and off they went, like a six-foot girl and his dog.

“Sorry,” Blondie said. “I had no idea they were going to put you on the spot like that. It’s just, well, they’re fans. We’re all fans.”

I took a deep breath. Maybe I’d been too hard on Blondie. He probably didn’t know how far he’d already pushed by asking to meet at a nightclub.

Charles returned with my martinis. Blondie dispatched him after the dynamic duo. Then Blondie said, “This way.” I double-fisted my martinis and followed him down a black corridor flashing with lights and into a lounge. The room was small but Blondie and I found a corner that was darker than the dance floor and even less comfy.

“First off, I’m not working for Style anymore,” I said.

Blondie glanced up from his Red Bull. “I figured that when I called your office and they put me through to the obituary desk. That doesn’t sound very cheerful,” he said. Blondie’s freckles looked like perforations in his skin under the black light. His face reminded me of a strainer.

“Then why did you still want to meet me?” I started in on my second martini.

Blondie dropped his eyes. “Before I say anything, I really need to make something clear.” He looked at me plaintively. “I went to work for Darla because I really respected her. The way
she got her start? A lot of people think all art dealers are just rich kids who dabble. Not Darla. She was from outside Cleveland. Her father is a plumber—don’t tell anyone I told you, she’d kill me! Her mother is the ‘Muffin Maiden of Smith Street.’ No joke. She makes six hundred types of muffins. And we’re not talking blueberry, here. Mushroom muffin, celery muffin. Bubble gum muffin! I kid you not.”

“Muffins. Got it.”

“Okay, she went to prep school, but Darla is basically a midwestern girl. She comes to New York after paying her own way through two years at RISD. She has no money. She has no backers. She has a recipe for Parmesan muffins and her charisma. That’s it. She opens her SoHo gallery dealing in unknown artists and—wham!—she’s a superstar, a wonder girl. I studied her in
college
. My art history prof had a
crush
on Darla Deitrick.”

Blondie was about to give me something. He just had to pay penance first. I drained my martini glass. Sharon and her Chihuahua were already becoming a memory.

“You see, I really admired her. But I’ve seen certain things—things you wouldn’t believe. And I don’t think it’s right. I mean, even in this business, which is full of sharks, I mean obviously. I just think it isn’t right.”

We were interrupted by the sensation of someone hovering over us. Dear old Charles. “I have a little something!”

Blondie looked up, right into the black light, and his eyes glowed demonic. “Honeeeeey,” he said, as if he were spreading it on toast. “You’ve had your Valerie time. Can’t we just have a
minute
?”

Charles bowed his head and held out his palm. In it were two tabs of Ecstasy. Blondie perked up. He grabbed one, popped it, and then offered me the other. I shook my head. Charles shrugged and took it himself. He held up two fingers—a peace sign—and said, “Number Two! Anything else I can get for you girls?”

I held up my two martini glasses. “How about some refills?” I didn’t necessarily want more now, I just wanted to get him gone. Now that Blondie had popped the pill, we were on a clock. I knew that in a half hour or less, he’d be rolling. Then he’d be as useful to me as a headless mop. “You’ve said your Hail Marys,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

Blondie moved closer. “Those paintings by that graffiti guy? The ones you asked Darla about? She had them. I saw them in her storage facility, at least until a couple of weeks ago.” Now here was something. I looked into Blondie’s strainer and I wondered how well it would leak. “There were a lot by that Stain, but that wasn’t all. There were all kinds of graffiti paintings back there. Anyway, she was trying to empty out the space so she could close it down.”

I asked Blondie why Darla was unloading. He moved closer still.

“She’s brilliant in so many ways, like I said, but arithmetic is not her strong suit.” He shook his head sadly. “Not her strong suit. It’s gotten a little tight at the gallery. And Darla needs cash. There’s a Pollock on the market that David Geffen would kill for, and she’s been dying to sell him something…but I don’t need to get into that.”

I would’ve wanted to hear all about it, but I saw sands spilling through an Ecstasy-shaped hourglass. “How many pieces are in the storage space?”

“A couple hundred. Very old work. Some of it she’d taken to sell on consignment maybe thirty years ago. Most of it not worth anything. She asked me to do the inventory. It was just internal—I wasn’t supposed to show anybody except Darla. There were probably about ten or fifteen by your friend. I know he was very famous once, but he dropped out of the art world, you know, without croaking, and his market took a dive.”

I was fuzzy on math myself, and to begin with, I didn’t know
how all this worked. “Back up,” I said. “Work artists had given her to sell on consignment?”

“Yes, ‘consignment.’ That means she had promised to sell them, but she didn’t own them outright. Like I said, they’d been in storage for maybe twenty, thirty years. I guess she just hadn’t sold them and no one had ever come to claim them. They all had different stories. They were mostly unknown artists of no account, except the Stains.”

I was starting to settle into my seat. The martinis were helping, but I was also glad about Blondie. He hadn’t asked me here just to parade me around like a well-groomed hen at a 4-H fair. “So, does she still have them?”

Blondie thought about it a second.

“I saw a few of them in the viewing room. Darla was shopping them around. She was very aggravated because they were a hard sell. Nobody on the street wanted them. She kept walking around the gallery yelling, ‘Crap, crappity, crap, crap, crap.’ And of course, once she finally found a buyer and finalized the transaction, Stain comes around asking about them, wanting them back for some reason.”

“Do you know who bought them?”

“No,” he said. “Could’ve been more than one person. But probably not too many. The transactions didn’t happen during regular business hours. I know that much.”

“But you know they were sold?”

Charles was upon us again. He’d returned with my martinis, holding the glasses out to me like twin trophies. “Thank you sooooo much,” Blondie whined. “
Kissy, kissy
. Big hug! We just need another teeny weenie minute. Okay, honey?”