Widow Basquiat (6 page)

Suzanne moves from under the table into a closet in the bedroom. In here there is a green trench coat, a pair of moccasins, black and pink pumps, a tin frying pan, a supermarket plastic bag full of bills, two large boxes of chalk. Under one moccasin Suzanne finds a small box of birthday candles.

Jean-Michel’s favorite soap is Black Tar Soap. He uses it every day. It makes a gray lather. No one else can use it. It is his joke. Jean-Michel draws it on his paintings.

Everything was symbolic to him. How he dressed, how he spoke, how he thought, who he associated with. Everything had to be prolific or why do it and his attitude was always tongue-in-cheek. Jean was always watching himself from outside of himself and laughing.

When he had a blonde girlfriend from a WASP upper-middle-class family he dressed like a preppy, like a Kennedy. But he would do just one thing to throw the whole thing off, like keep his hair in crazy dreadlocks—and not the dreadlocks you see on anyone.

He tried to make people notice him, wake them up, by using a symbol out of context. This occurred in his paintings and in his actions. He never took anything as it was. Any idea, any belief, any norm was very quickly examined and used in his art.

Jean-Michel loves boxers and musicians. His heroes are Hendrix, Joplin, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Joe Louis. He loves anyone who died from a drug overdose. He says he loves Suzanne also because she is the first woman he has ever met who is a living, walking, breathing cartoon.

Jean had a pair of red boxing gloves. He said he liked to put his hands in them and just lie on the bed and watch television. He said he could feel thunderbolts in them. Sometimes he would bounce and box around the apartment hitting the refrigerator and the walls.

On the television screen the girl makes herself smile by pushing up the corners of her mouth with the tips of her fingers.

Jean-Michel and Suzanne are in bed under Suzanne’s Superman blanket. They smoke pot, eat and watch silent movies.

Jean-Michel sucks Suzanne’s fingers.

Jean loved silent movies because they were like cartoons. I think that he felt that even in life we should be walking around with a word-balloon above our heads—you can see this in his art also.

He always kept watch for any black characters but, of course, they only appeared as servants, if at all.

We watched D. W. Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms
dozens of times and Jean could quote whole sections of it: “It is a tale of temple bells, sounding at sunset before the image of Buddha; it is a tale of love and lovers; it is a tale of tears.” The quote he loved best was, “The yellow man holds a great dream to take the glorious message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons …”

I remember he did a few paintings of the yellow man on some cardboard boxes. For a short time he called himself The Yellow Man and he called me The Girl or Lucy, using a funny, formal language.

He would say, “The Yellow Man is desirous of a kiss from The Girl,” etc. This lasted only a short while.

I think he adored
Broken Blossoms
because of all the opium-smoking scenes, and there were many boxing scenes also.

The mime and mute aspect of these movies moved him deeply. Sometimes, after a session of watching several silent movies he would be very quiet for hours and just mime to me anything he wanted or wanted to say and the apartment would be filled with a strange, quiet feeling as if we were underwater.

Jean-Michel is like the child who tells the fat lady on the bus, “You’re fat.”

His paintings scream
Famous Negro Athletes
and
Origins of Cotton.
The words are childishly scrawled backwards or scratched out and placed with provocative images of kings with black crowns covered in tar and feathers. He says, “There are only fifty people who buy art. They buy whatever I paint because they are whitewashing history … just like the ‘Mammy’ saltshakers that disappeared.”

He refuses to sell his paintings and writes “NOT FOR SALE” on some of them. He is furious because people are writing about his ghetto childhood and call him a “graffiti artist” and “primitive.” “They don’t invent a childhood for white artists,” he says.

He wears Armani suits to paint in and throws them away afterwards. He makes fun of everyone by wearing pseudo-African garb to important art openings.

Jean-Michel paints
Obnoxious Liberals
because he says he is sick of liberal white art collectors. He makes Suzanne cope
with the people who come to the loft to buy his paintings. He hides in the bathroom.

Suzanne says, “Please sit down. Can I get you some coffee?”

Jean-Michel comes out of the bathroom and says, “I don’t think it goes with your couch.”

The buyers are insulted. He pours a box of granola on their heads from the window of the loft as they leave. He says, “I feel like an art mascot.”

He never sells paintings to people he does not like.

Jean-Michel is full of fears, especially when he is all coked up. He is afraid that he will be a flash in the pan. He is afraid that the KKK is going to kill him because he is getting so famous and he is black. He installs an elaborate alarm system in the loft. He thinks that the CIA is going to murder him.

One day he comes home to the loft with two delivery boys. He has bought a color TV, a stereo system, a TEAC recording machine. He sits on the sofa looking sad and crying. “I didn’t know what else to buy,” he says to Suzanne. “Did you want something?”

When he first starts to get rich he rents limousines to take him everywhere. He drives down to the Bowery and throws
one-hundred-dollar bills to the bums. He tells Suzanne, “I have to do this every day.” He remembers that once he and some friends harassed a street bum and poured a liquor bottle over the bum’s head.

I met Shenge Ka Pharaoh (whose real name was Selwyn O’Brien) before Jean did when I was working at the Berlin nightclub as a bartender. Shenge worked at Reggae Lounge. Then Shenge was always around. He did everything for Jean. He cleaned, ran errands, bought drugs and was a buffer for Jean from people and situations Jean did not want to deal with. Shenge always loved me and always referred to me as Jean-Michel’s woman. He had a charming Barbados accent. I think that Jean was probably closer to Shenge than any other friend he had. In my opinion even closer to him than Andy Warhol. Andy was really only around in the latter part of Jean’s life when Jean was famous already. Andy was Jean’s connection to other famous people.

Jean trusted Shenge with all his secrets.

Shenge was very small, thin, fragile and gentle looking. He had a beautiful face with small features and sparkling eyes. He had a full beard, dreadlocks and soft loose-fitting, flowing clothes and he had a profound spirituality about him. He was always around Jean until the last few months of Jean’s life. I asked Jean where Shenge was and Jean told me that they had had a falling-out and that they were not friends anymore. This was typical. Every person that was close to Jean eventually had a fight with him. I think it scared Jean to have people get too close.

Shenge was part of the family. I loved Shenge too. Shenge and I still see each other occasionally on the street. We both have this look in our eyes like only the two of us shared some kind of deep experience. We don’t have to say anything. We just hug each other and know. Shenge more than anyone knew what I went through with Jean. And I know what he went through too. We are the only people that share both the ecstatic and hellish experience of Jean. Jean behaved a certain way with Andy Warhol. He did not show his whole self to Andy. Because both Shenge and I lived with Jean, we knew the whole person. We knew how deeply compassionate and loving he could be at one moment and then suddenly become cruel, cold and angry. It was basically either me or Shenge who lived with Jean. Most times it was the three of us hanging out.

One night I had been out with Rene Ricard, after living in the Crosby Street loft, and Jean was now living with Shenge at the Great Jones loft. Rene and I were with T. doing coke at a party. Then T. invited us back to his house. Rene told me to go and said he would be back shortly. So I went, but I was really frightened of T. (who is a very famous gallery owner in SoHo). I only went because I thought Rene would be there too. Rene never showed up.

Immediately T. began to act very strange. He asked me how big Jean’s penis was and if it was true that Jean had herpes. I was very scared.

Then T. took his pants off and started chasing me around with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand. I was terrified and I ran
out the door. He followed me with no pants on and wearing just a white shirt and a tie. It was really a ridiculous sight. I was very high on coke and scared that he was going to rape me.

In the street I jumped into a cab and went home. I put on my pajamas and tried to sleep but I couldn’t. I kept crying and crying. So I put my coat on over my pajamas and put on my shoes and sunglasses and took a bottle of Rémy with me in the pocket of my coat.

As I walked to the Great Jones Street loft I drank the Rémy to come down from the coke. I was really drunk by the time I got there. I knocked on the door and Shenge answered.

He said, “You would not want Jean to see you in this state.”

I said, “Why not? I’ve seen him in worse states than this. Shenge,” I continued, “something terrible just happened to me. Please, I have to talk to him.”

So Shenge let me in. When Jean heard my voice he came running down from the bedroom. He threw the television at me from the top of the stairs. I was at the foot of the stairs. Shenge jumped in and pushed the television out of the way. Jean ran down and tore off my sunglasses to see my eyes. He was furious that I was drunk and high. He had never been this violent with me before. He hated it that I would get high without him. He somehow felt responsible for this. It was okay if he gave me drugs because he felt that he was there to take care of me.

“Who were you with?” he yelled.

I crouched down on the floor and held on to his ankles. I was too scared to tell him what had just happened to me.

Jean said, “I don’t want to know what happened. I can’t deal with this now. I’m dope-sick. Go upstairs and get some sleep.”

I was sobbing and I couldn’t get up off the floor where I was crouching. So he carried me upstairs and put me in his bed. He said he was going to go out and get some dope and that he would bring me some so that I could sleep.

While he was gone, Shenge came up and asked me what had happened. When I told him he said, “Don’t tell Jean. He would kill T., he would go crazy. No, girl, you did the right thing, girl, um, hum, hum, um, hum.” (Shenge would say um, hum, hum, um um very fast all the time. It was a habit. It was somehow comforting to hear.)

Then he said, “Don’t worry, girl” with his beautiful singsong Barbados accent. “He is going to get you something so you can sleep. Don’t worry, we will take care of you. You are where you should be, you are home, um, hum, hum, um, hum.”

Shenge was not gay, but he had this very feminine maternal side to him. He was like our mother or something. He looked after us. He was so gentle.

Jean-Michel doesn’t like Suzanne’s mother. He met her for the first time when Suzanne ran away to Canada to get away from him and he went there to bring her back. He hates Suzanne’s mother’s English accent. He said that just the way she speaks shows she is patronizing and a racist.

Jean-Michel’s friends think Suzanne’s mother is marvelous and charming. She meets Fab 5 Freddy and Rammellzee. She says she understands Rammellzee and that what everybody thinks is gibberish in his talk is accurate.

Jean-Michel keeps saying over and over again, “Stay away from my pile of drawings.” Suzanne’s mother becomes so fed up with hearing this that she steals one of the drawings.

Later Jean-Michel pretends that Suzanne’s mother is invisible. He paints
Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari
. He tells Suzanne that these paintings are inspired by her mother’s visit.

A few days after Suzanne’s mother has left, Jean-Michel wakes up Suzanne in the middle of the night to show her a painting he has just finished.

“It’s called
Self Portrait as a Heel
,” he says.

Jean-Michel likes to take Suzanne to fancy restaurants. One night at one expensive Italian restaurant there is a long table with twenty white businessmen having dinner. Jean-Michel says, “They are the kind who have their own private jets.”

The businessmen stare, whisper racist remarks and drunkenly laugh at Jean-Michel. They think he is a pimp because he is black and has dreadlocks and is wearing messy clothes. They think that Suzanne is a prostitute. She is heavily made up and has her hair teased up in a beehive.

Jean-Michel tells the maître d’ that he is going to pay for the businessmen’s dinner. It costs him three thousand dollars. This is how Jean-Michel laughs back. He does this to fuck with them. Most of Jean-Michel’s outlandish behavior has to do with a desire to fuck with people’s racism.

I was sound asleep in the Crosby loft one night and Jean-Michel was out clubbing. It was about five in the morning when I woke up because I heard people talking in the living room. There was Jean sitting on the couch with the most gorgeous, blonde, young, svelte woman. I was livid—how dare he stay out all night and come back with a beautiful woman. I called him into the bedroom.