Widow Basquiat (12 page)

Valda was a very tall Latvian American. She wore her hair very short like a boy. She had blue eyes that turned up at the sides the way they would if you had your hair pulled really tight in a ponytail. She was very beautiful and intelligent.

One of the times when Jean and I broke up he took her to Culebra near Puerto Rico. I was so devastated that I could not get out of bed. Valda was involved with Jean on and off for years. Valda and I became friends even when I was with Jean. We liked each other very much and never felt jealous. Valda later told me that when she was in Culebra for two weeks with Jean that all he could do was talk about me. I loved Valda for this. That’s the kind of girl she was. Sometimes Jean, Valda and me would hang out together.

After Jean’s death Valda took it upon herself to search for the child Jean had told her he had. Jean never told me this. However, he did tell several people that he got a girl pregnant in New Orleans on a one-night stand and that the girl had the baby—a son named Noah. Valda told me that Jean often spoke to her of this child and that he was always sending money to the child’s mother. Valda could never find the child.

I was once at the Great Jones loft and this gorgeous black woman came over and asked Jean for abortion money. He took some money out of his sock and gave it to her.

After she left, Jean asked me why I did not have his baby. I told him I could not have babies. He said that I was just saying that
because I did not want to have his child. I just mumbled something back like, “No, no. Maybe some other time …”

I never told Jean that the PID infection he gave to me had damaged me so badly. It would have hurt him so much to know and I am glad he never knew.

After clubbing, at four in the morning, Suzanne and Jennifer take a taxi down to the fish market. Dressed in their black nightclub dresses they walk among the barrels filled with fish. Their feet get caught in the wet nets on the ground. They listen to the fishermen boast and brag about their biggest catch and look into the dull, large eyes of dead fish.

Suzanne and Jennifer like to watch the sun rise. They like to examine the strange things that come out of the sea, accidentally caught in the nets: squid, crabs, a small shark, a yellow blouse, a turtle, an orange, oyster shells.

They don’t talk about the clubs or the boys they met or did not meet. They don’t talk about where they might be in ten years. They ooh and aah over the shimmer of fish scales and talk and giggle with the fishermen.

One night after clubbing Jennifer and I went down to the docks to talk to the fishermen. This was something we did quite often. I remember one time someone had caught an enormous red and purple octopus. It lay inside a net. When we got up close to look, it suddenly let out a great stream of black ink that spattered all over our shoes.

Suzanne calls Jennifer. She says she needs money to pay the rent. She has not paid the rent for five months. She is going to sell her refrigerator, which is covered with Jean-Michel’s doodles. Suzanne says that some representatives from Sotheby’s already came over and agreed to auction it. Jennifer’s boyfriend is a poet but he also has a trucking company called O’Neill Trucking. Suzanne wants Jennifer’s boyfriend to take the refrigerator to Sotheby’s.

The refrigerator sells for five thousand dollars. Andy Warhol buys it.

I was working as a waitress at Mike’s American Grill. Each night after I finished waitressing I would call a limousine and drive around looking for Jean. I would go to the clubs or to his loft. Sometimes he would let me in and sometimes he wouldn’t. I was really a mess. And really high on heroin. I had no shame whatsoever. I’m very embarrassed about it. I could not control myself. It was like I didn’t care how I appeared. I was always very fabulous, though. I had a lot of style and was very dramatic. Soon I stopped doing this. The limousines were so expensive that I didn’t pay my rent. It was around this time that I sold my refrigerator at Sotheby’s for five thousand dollars. I was nuts. I
was obsessive. Then I realized I just had to get on with my life. I stopped stalking him and I just tried my very best to ignore the impulses. I stopped going to art galleries, I stopped hanging out with the people Jean and I knew together. I was trying to heal myself. It took everything I had inside to stop this behavior. But I did.

Then I got a job at Hawaii 5.0. and once in a while Jean would come by and stare in the window. He would not say anything but just stare; eventually he would leave. It reminded me of the way he used to stare at me at Night Birds when I first met him.

Sometimes he would come in with people like Lauren Hutton, Malcolm McLaren and others. He would stare at me with a mean look on his face. It was a small restaurant with only one small room so I was the only waitress and I would have to wait on them.

Jean loved to order me around. He would say, “Waitress, would you dump my ashtray,” or “Waitress, fill our water glasses.”

One day he came by and was just staring in the window so I went outside and asked him what he thought he was doing.

He said, “I’m watching you, Venus—just watching you. Why don’t you come over later?”

I said, “No!” And then he grabbed my arms and said that he missed me.

I went to see him about one week later. He was so famous now that everything between us was very strained. People called him from all over the world and everyone was telling him how great he was. It was very sad because he did not seem to enjoy it at all. For example, Jean would be on the telephone talking to some German art dealer and then he’d get off the phone and go into the bathroom and vomit because of the drugs. Or an art critic would come by, drink some good wine, and go on and on about Jean’s place in the art world. Jean would walk behind the guy and stick out his tongue. Jean hated art critics; he called them “maggots.”

I left after a week and I don’t think I ever slept with him again. It was too painful because by this time he could only think about heroin. I went to visit him and I went to dinner and parties with him but I never slept with him again. Then slowly, slowly I cut him out of my life completely.

The last time she calls up Jean-Michel on the telephone is when Andy Warhol dies.

She says, “Jean, Jean, I am so sorry about Andy. How are you? Do you want me to come over?”

Jean says, “No.” His voice is slurred and Suzanne can tell that he is very high on dope.

Suzanne keeps insisting, “Should I come over? Do you want me to come?”

“Come and give me a bath, Venus,” he says.

“Okay, Jean,” she says. “I’ll be right over.”

When she gets to the loft Shenge opens the door. “Go home, Suzanne,” Shenge says. “He is asleep, um, and dope-sick. Go home.”

Suzanne kisses Shenge’s hand. “Yes, yes,” she says.

I called Jean when Andy died. I knew he would be very upset. But he could hardly speak to me he was so out of it. In a slurred whisper he kept asking me, “What fables do you know?”

Suzanne changes her name to Ruby Desire. She has a big cowboy belt made that has a big brass buckle that says “RUBY D.” The buckle is so large and heavy it looks like it could tip her over with its weight. It makes her walk leaning her body slightly to the left. She cannot run or skip anymore.

She sings, “Do, re, mi, fa. Do, re, mi, fa,” over and over again until it becomes her own private language.

When people stop her on the street and say, “Hi, Suzanne,” she answers, “I am no longer Suzanne, I am Ruby Desire. Do, re, mi, fa.”

I decided that I wanted to sing. So I started taking voice lessons with a jazz singer. I went three times a week. I saved up all my money and went into a little studio with an engineer and produced and made a demo tape.

I booked myself a show at Area and hired two big black bodyguards and a sax player. Everyone came. I sang two or three songs. I think I was probably really bad. But at least the hype was good. I had my hair done up like Priscilla Presley in the ’60s and it took a lot of guts.

I made the bodyguards follow me around everywhere and light my cigarettes for me. I called myself Ruby Desire. I looked all over town for a red limousine but couldn’t find one. So I knew all these East Village guys that drove old ’60s classic motorbikes. A whole pack of them came with me and the leader had a red motorbike so I drove with him but with a scarf over my head so as not to ruin my hairdo. It was great. I sang “Fever” and another song that was very poor that I wrote myself.

After singing I mingled with the crowd and my bodyguards followed me around everywhere. I heard someone say, “Who the hell does she think she is with those bodyguards?” It was really a lot of hype. I put myself out there and was surprised at how good I was at promoting myself.

At this time I didn’t talk to Jean at all. I wanted to be famous for myself and not as his girl.

I did other shows at Madame Rosa’s and I started to really become known as Ruby Desire. To myself, though, the whole thing made me laugh. I never took any of it very seriously.

Around this time I met Jonathan Hood, who was a singer and a songwriter. He really liked my voice and wanted to work with me. We started seeing each other and he soon moved into my apartment. I barely knew him. He was signed to Crepuscle Records based in Belgium. Jonathan was able to convince the record company to let me do a remake of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” This record got a lot of club play in New York and
I started doing shows all over the place. Jonathan and I also started doing shows together as Ruby Desire and the Hood.

We did one really big show in the Michael Todd Room at the Palladium. I had two beautiful black girls dancing behind me. We also had two bodyguards standing at the front of the stage wearing mirrored sunglasses. It was a really important show and it was very professional. By now I was pretty good and more relaxed and I was still studying voice.

Jonathan was friends with Mark Kamins, who was a big record producer. He came over to my apartment one day to play Jon something new he was working on. He just had the music down. It was sort of an African chant on top of a house beat. Jonathan convinced Mark to let me do the song and I wrote the lyrics for it.

The day I was recording the song, in walks this six-foot-five-inch Rasta from Guyana with dreadlocks to his waist and tribal scars on his face. He was quite intimidating. His name was Warren Doris. It turned out that the song was his and he did the African chant or chorus on the song. The song turned out so well that within one month I was signed, along with Warren, to Capitol Records.

Soon the song was released on a compilation album called
The Black Havana Dance Compilation.
It had nine other new artists on it.

As soon as the album came out it started going up the dance charts in America and England. Warren and I were sent on a tour to Europe with three other artists for one month and a half.

As I was the only white person on the tour, Warren protected me as best he could. He was into Santeria and made me wear magic beads under my costume and he would sprinkle me with holy water before we went onstage.

The whole experience was a nightmare even though we found out that the album had gone to number five on the dance charts in America and to number one in England. It was also the first time that I had been clean from alcohol and drugs for so many weeks.

After that tour I decided that I hated the music business and so I quit.

When Suzanne returns from Europe she puts her cowboy belt away at the back of her closet. New York feels different. She doesn’t want to be who she was. She thinks it is because she needs some heroin. She thinks she needs to see Jean-Michel. She also needs a job.

When people on the street call out to her, “Hello, Ruby!” she answers, “I am not Ruby anymore. I am Suzanne.”

She buys pink ballet shoes and wears them tied up her calf like a ballerina. She dyes her hair blue-black and cuts it short around her ears.

She goes to see Jean-Michel at the Great Jones loft. He lets her in.

He says, “I always let you in, Venus.”

He is so thin he seems transparent. He stumbles when he walks and fans himself constantly with his hands. His teeth are covered with a yellowish film of dirt. His long arms are dry and covered with needle tracks. There is paint on his face and in his hair and sores on his cheeks.

He says, “Why have you left me, Venus?”

Suzanne soothes him, caresses his hands, sucks his fingers and says, “Things change, Jean. I have never left you.”

“Everyone has left me,” he says.

“Let me give you a bath,” Suzanne says. “You always like that.”

She takes him to the bathroom, undresses him and puts him in the tub. She washes his hair and scrubs his skin, being very careful not to hurt his sore arms. This is a body she no longer knows.

She thinks he looks like a starved ten-year-old child. She rubs his clavicle bones and his hip bones.

“You have to get clean, Jean,” she says. “You have to just stop it.”

“I always loved it that you were the one person who never said that to me,” he answers. “I’m sick and tired of people telling me to get off drugs.”

“I am sorry, Jean. I won’t say it again,” the girl answers.

Jean-Michel lets Suzanne brush his teeth. He opens his mouth wide and says, “Ahhhhhh.”

When I got back from Europe, which had been hell, I immediately went to see Jean. He was a mess and so I bathed him like I always used to. His paintings were all facing the wall so that he would not have to look at them. It was very strange. The only one I saw was
Riddle Me This, Batman
that was against the wall of the bathroom. In the center of the painting Jean had written “NOTHING TO BE GAINED HERE.” Further down in the painting he had written, “COWARDS WILL GIVE TO GET RID OF YOU.”