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Authors: Jennifer Clement

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It was the first time I had ever seen him feeling sorry for himself. He was usually so gutsy.

After the bath we watched television and went to sleep. When I woke up he had already left the loft. He had left me a note that said, I remember it perfectly, “Venus, morning glory, sweet potato, I have the money and you have the gold. JMB.”

Later I saw those words “morning glory and sweet potato” in a painting of his,
Eroica I
, one of his last paintings. On that same painting he had also written “man dies” four times.

HE WAKES HER UP

One night Suzanne is asleep alone in her apartment and the doorbell rings. It is Jean-Michel. He asks if he can come in. Suzanne presses the buzzer and waits for him to come upstairs. She waits two minutes, three minutes, ten minutes and he doesn’t appear.

Suzanne laces up her ballet shoes and runs downstairs but she can’t find him. She walks around the block but she can’t find him.

She is wide awake now and takes a taxi to buy some dope. On the way back to her apartment she asks the driver to go past the Great Jones loft. All the lights are turned off there and she goes home.

In her apartment Suzanne sniffs the heroin and her room looks round and blue. Words come to her mind in a great rush: Euclid, Newton, Galileo. She wants to look into microscopes and be surrounded by formulas and equations. She thinks about
Gray’s Anatomy
and how she and Jean-Michel, high on coke, used to look at the book for hours as if they were reading a book on magic.

Suzanne remembers how Jean-Michel would paint and suddenly yell out to her, “Venus, read me the names of the bones in an arm.” And she would call back, “Humerus, ulna, radius, carpus.”

Two weeks before his death, at two a.m., he came and rang my buzzer. I let him in but he never came up. He was in a very bad state and sounded desperate. But this was as much as he could do. He had crossed the line, the invisible line in drug addiction. Every heroin addict has some sense of where that line is. It is a choice to cross it. I chose not to.

I know that he came to say good-bye and this is the kindest thing he ever did for me. I know he came to say good-bye because he knew his death was imminent but then he must have suddenly changed his mind. He didn’t want me to see him in such a terrible state, ravaged by heroin.

THE WEIGHT OF ARMS

Suzanne gets a job as a bartender at Tunnel. She works there five nights a week. This pays her rent and gives her enough money to buy heroin every day. She sniffs it before work, during work and when she gets home. It has turned her into a skeleton with great big black holes for eyes. The heroin keeps her warm and safe. It is animal fur around her bones.

On August 12, 1988, Jean-Michel is found dead from an overdose of heroin. He is found leaning in front of a fan as if he were trying to get some air to breathe. It is determined that he choked on his vomit. No church agrees to perform the funeral service because Jean-Michel was not a member of any church. Finally the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel agrees to hold the service. This is the place where all the jazz artists’ funerals had been held.

I don’t remember much about this time. I remember I rode over to the Great Jones loft on my bicycle just as Jean was being carried outside to the ambulance. I leaned against a wall covered in yellow graffiti that said “LISTEN, WATCH, MOON,” and watched the shape of his body covered by a sheet being placed into the ambulance. I watched until the ambulance was out of sight. His body looked so small and flat under that sheet as if no one were really there.

I remember Rammellzee telling me that “the mutherfucker is dead!” I remember Rene Ricard saying, his teeth chattering, “You are a widow now.” And, I remember calling Jean’s father and asking him if I could go to the funeral because it was going to be a private funeral.

The casket was closed because he was so destroyed by heroin and because an autopsy had been performed.

My left arm weighed two pounds and my right arm weighed six pounds. I wanted to cover my mouth. Over and over I’d place my hand over my mouth. I knew that if I covered my mouth the knowledge of Jean’s death could not get inside of me. It took two weeks before I could stop doing this.

Now, whenever I am around the Great Jones loft I will do anything not to walk near it. I cross the street or go around the block.

Even after all these years people are always looking for me. Strangers call me up. Dealers, collectors and biographers call me up. They all want to know what it was like to be with Jean. Sometimes I tell them. But they never get it right. I walk the places he has been.

SUZANNE

Suzanne covers her mouth with her hands. Over and over again, with quick birdlike gestures, she covers her mouth. She sleeps with a piece of cotton cloth over her lips. There are no teeth inside her words: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

After Jean-Michel’s death in 1988, Suzanne withdrew from the New York art world and everything that went along with that lifestyle. She went on to college and medical school (where she graduated both times with the distinction of summa cum laude). She now works in New York City as an addiction psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She specializes in treating artists.

POSTSCRIPT

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960–1988)

THE BEYELER RETROSPECTIVE 2010

AND A HANDFUL OF FRIENDS

For Tony Frazer

In Basel, Switzerland, banners that announce the great art exhibitions line the streets and blow and soar like flags. For the next few months, above the streets these signs read: BASQUIAT. Glued to poles and walls are the almost life-size posters of Jean-Michel sitting barefoot in a chair wearing a black Armani suit and tie that are covered in splashes of red paint. He holds a long paintbrush in his hand and looks straight into the camera’s eye. This photograph was used for the cover of
The New York Times Magazine
on February 19, 1985. This year, at the Beyeler Foundation, the largest retrospective ever of Basquiat’s work is being exhibited in order to celebrate what would have been Basquiat’s fiftieth birthday. A handful of his friends have come: Dr. Suzanne Mallouk, Michael Holman, Fab 5 Freddy, B-Dub and myself. This year we have all been celebrating our own middle-aged birthdays of the living.

We meet in the foyer of the gallery and walk together
among the paintings. I listen to the voices of these friends around me just as I used to listen to them when we were in our early twenties in New York City at clubs and shows, in the subway and on the streets. As we move in the large exhibition halls, we comment on the paintings we know well and marvel at the ones we’ve never seen. Basquiat’s work takes us back to our old lives: our young lives.

Under the painting
Red Man
, Fab 5 Freddy asks, “Do you know where Jean-Michel is buried?”

Suzanne says, “Yes, of course. In Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Section 176, Lot 44603.”

“You really amaze me!” Freddie exclaims. “Dr. Mallouk, you’re something else! Have you been there? I want to go there. Let’s go. When can we all go?”

Suzanne tells us a story that no one has ever heard. “After Jean died some rich socialite, who had been his lover, had a court order issued to the coroner to take a blood test to make sure that Basquiat had not died of AIDS.”

We stand quietly for a moment thinking of those who are not here because of an overdose of drugs or because of AIDS. We think of Cookie Mueller and her husband, Tina Chow, Keith Haring, Joseph’s boyfriend, Klaus Nomi and John Sex.

“Jean did not have AIDS,” Suzanne confirms.

For a moment we also remember the writers. NYC graffiti artists always called themselves writers. They’d say “Let’s go writing” or “Are you a writer?” or “What do you write?” This writing was used to communicate among the city’s straphangers. Walls were paper and trains were books. And
reading graffiti meant reading backwards as this was always a first step to understanding the words.

There was also artistry in how the can of spray paint was used. The paint could not drip, and if it did, the drips were called “tears.” If it dripped very badly we would say it was “crying.” I remember once walking down 1st Avenue past Tompkins Square Park and reading some graffiti that wept blue all down the wall. The rounded, balloon letters said:
He Makes Me Eat Meat.
Under these words was written:
Why Do Fathers Walk Out on Their Kids
?

Jean-Michel, as SAMO, wrote all over the Lower East Side one summer. He wrote:
Which of the following Institutions has the most political influence: A. Television B. Church C. SAMO D. McDonald’s.
This wall was immortalized in one of Lisa Kahane’s photographs.

We remember Rammellzee’s loft with his robot creatures on skateboards and where each skateboard stood for a letter of the alphabet and we also remember Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery. Patti was the first art gallery in NYC to show graffiti art and she was instrumental in bringing hip-hop culture into the mainstream white art world.

In Switzerland, we feel the small street gang of New York City ghosts around us: Dondi, A-One, Bear 167 and Rammellzee. Some of these ghosts had premonitions when they were alive and even tagged TDS (The Death Squad) all over the subway trains and walls. We think of Michael Stewart who was killed by seven policemen for writing in a subway:
PIR NEMA PIR NEMA.

We remember how at the beginning of Jean’s rise to fame,
he used to make canvases out of anything he could find. We stand and look at
Portrait of VRKS
,
Untitled (Hand Anatomy)
and
Low Pressure Zone.
He used any old sticks nailed together with no attempt to create a ninety-degree corner so that the cloth was stretched and stapled onto sticks without wrapping around the back.

We stop and look at the painting
Irony of Negro Policeman
and I whisper, “Irony. Irony. So, what do we all think about the fact that the abuser is in charge of the legacy of his victim?”

We are all quiet.

We know that we cannot repel ghosts.

Michael Holman, who used to be a member of Basquiat’s band, Gray, reminds us of the drug dealer on 3rd Street between Avenues A and B. We used to stand outside his window and call up to the third floor, “Raton! Raton!” An empty plastic cup with a drawing of the Jetson family on one side would be lowered out the window on a string. We would fill the cup with money and the man would pull it back up and into his apartment. After a few minutes of waiting we’d call out, “Raton! Raton!” and once again the cup would be lowered with drugs inside.

We walk through the gallery pointing to the large painting
Eyes and Eggs
that Suzanne named, as she did many of his works. It is a painting of the cook at Dave’s Luncheonette, a place we all would go at four in the morning, starving after a night of dancing and drugs at the Mudd Club. We look at the painting and remember the coffee and scrambled
eggs and egg creams. We recall the bright stainless-steel light, cigarette smoke, and the prostitutes and pimps hanging out at the next table with black and brown Doberman dogs outside tied up to parking meters.

We walk quietly for a while looking at the paintings of famous boxers.

“What happened to Annina Nosei?” Michael asks, referring to Basquiat’s first art dealer.

“She’s a professional ballroom dancer now,” Suzanne answers.

“It’s so strange what happens to people, where they go and what they become,” Michael continues. “I heard about a woman who fell in love with the Eiffel Tower and married it! I think I remember this because the Eiffel Tower was always too big for me, just too damn big for me.”

In a back room of the museum Suzanne and I are suddenly confronted by her old refrigerator covered with Basquiat’s doodles and the words “TAR, TAR” scribbled on the door. It had always stood in her kitchen at 68 East 1st Street. She sold the refrigerator at Sotheby’s for five thousand dollars. Andy Warhol bought it. As we look at it we remember her apartment that was covered with Jean-Michel’s paint splatters on the walls and paint stick melted into the floor ridges in the wood floor.

I remember what it was like to open that refrigerator in 1983 and find a half-eaten pastry, a red and white milk carton, a box of Domino sugar, a pair of red high-heeled shoes, a dish of bracelets and a cup of earrings. Suzanne even kept
her Jackie O sunglasses in that refrigerator and a couple of books. “I don’t lose the things I keep in there,” she used to say in her singsong, songsing voice.

As we contemplate the refrigerator in the cold and reverent gallery space with a white sign beside it that says “DO NOT TOUCH” and protected by alarm wires and a museum guard, Suzanne and I turn and look at each other,
really
look at each other.

Suzanne says, “You know, I kept no souvenirs. I did not want to be a tourist in my own life.”

Jennifer Clement

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JENNIFER CLEMENT is a poet, biographer, and novelist. She is also the author of the novels
A True Story Based on Lies, The Poison That Fascinates
, and
Prayers for the Stolen
(awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Literature). She was part of the New York City art scene during the early eighties, but she now lives in Mexico City. She is a member of Mexico’s prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores and is also cofounder and director, with her sister Barbara Sibley, of the San Miguel Poetry Week. Clement was the president of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012.

BOOK: Widow Basquiat
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