Widow Basquiat (7 page)

“Who is that girl?” I asked.

He burst out laughing and said, “It’s not a girl, that’s Teri Toye. She’s a transvestite, isn’t she beautiful? Come out and meet her.”

So I went out and did coke with them.

I later ended up becoming good friends with Melody and her boyfriend of many years, who ran a gallery for a short time. I even showed my paintings in his gallery.

Teri Toye was fabulous, very skinny and so elegant. She had straight thin hair with bangs and wore big black sunglasses. She wore tight little black minidresses and looked like she was straight out of the ’60s. She was a runway model and became famous as the Stephen Sprouse girl. She wore light pink frosted lipstick and had a thin-lipped pout. She was all arms and legs. She looked more like a girl than most girls.

She had not had the sex change yet when I first met her. Then I was hanging out with her one night when she told me that she had recently gone to Switzerland to have the sex change. Her adoptive mother paid for it and bought her the most fabulous Yves Saint Laurent dress. We were at some friend’s loft. Teri Toye and her boyfriend were staying there and they invited me over to do some heroin.

Melody was prancing around in her new Yves Saint Laurent dress and talking about her sex change. She was on hormones
and had developed little small round breasts. So I asked her if I could see it, the sex change.

So, like girlfriends, we went in the bedroom and she lifted up her fancy dress and took off her underwear and showed me. It was such a beautiful job. It looked just as real as any girl’s. She was so happy and proud. Then we started talking. I asked her when she started to feel more like a girl than a boy. She said as far back as she could remember. Melody later married her boyfriend and moved to Iowa. The boyfriend became a shoe salesman.

He walks or rather glides in big steps leaning backward with a bop in his walk, in a bebop kind of glide. He wears polyester slacks and silk socks. On his head he wears the hood of a sweatshirt or a hat with ski goggles on it. Sometimes he wears the ski goggles down over his eyes. He talks quickly like Donald Duck and even quacks. Rammellzee calls girls “freaks” and boys “crimees,” for criminals. He wears shiny patent leather shoes. He calls this his “city look.” In Far Rockaway he dresses in tracksuits because the cops might harass him. He wears rings on every finger and necklaces. He also wears a long white leather trench coat. There is something hip-hop and superfly about him. He always carries one or two bottles of Olde English beer under his coat.

When he sleeps over at Suzanne and Jean-Michel’s loft he never takes off his shoes or hat. He says he does this in case he needs to make a quick getaway.

Rammellzee invented a new language called Iconoclast Panzerism. He says that he was put on Earth to smash the written word apart. He explains that all the letters of the English language come from social change, patriarchal
societies, economics and history. He calls himself Gangster Prankster. He explains that his name, “Ramm Ell Zee,” means “ramming the elevation of the way we read from left to right like a Z.” He believes that the written letter in the Western alphabet is a reflection of a culture and philosophy that does not suit him or his brothers.

Rammellzee keeps the fingernail on his pinkie long for sniffing cocaine. He does very geometric paintings shaped like his alphabet and then he makes sculptures of them.

He is a member of the Five-Percent Nation, a radical offshoot of the Nation of Islam. He says that Jean-Michel has a responsibility to the black man. He tries to convince Jean-Michel to go to the Black Men’s Meetings in Harlem. Jean-Michel tells him that his responsibility to the black man is fulfilled in his paintings.

Jean took Rammellzee on his first airplane. He was terrified as he had never been on a plane before. And when Jean first took him to Barbetta, a fancy restaurant, he was very intimidated and awkward. He didn’t know what to order, or what fork to use, etc.

Once Rammellzee noticed that my shoes were worn out so he took me out to buy some. He was all dressed up in his white leather trench coat with his bug ski goggles on and leaning against a two-tone brown and tan stretch limousine. He opened the door for me. I said, “Where are we going?”

He said, in his best sinister Donald Duck voice, “Wherever you want to go as long as I can buy you a pair of shoes there. That’s where we are going, my little chickadee ha ha ha ha.”

We ended up at Fayva. Rammellzee didn’t know this was a tacky shoe store. It was just a shoe store to him. Then he took me to Tony Roma’s Steak House on 6th Avenue for dinner, which he considered a very fancy place. We had wine by the glass and salad and steak and baked potatoes and dessert. It was very lovely. Then we drove around so that I could show off my new shoes. They were simple little black high heels. At the shoe-shop counter we had bought red clip-on bows for them. I wore them until they fell apart. They were my Minnie Mouse shoes.

Like almost everyone, Rammellzee had a falling-out with Jean. I got the impression that he thought that Jean had sold out to the white art world. But I know that deep down he always loved Jean.

Shortly after Suzanne moves into the Crosby Street loft Jean-Michel takes her to Italy. He is having a show at the Emilio Mazzoli Gallery in Modena. Neither Jean-Michel nor Suzanne knows how to drive a car so Jean-Michel pays to bring Kai Eric along to drive them around.

In the airplane Jean-Michel continuously gets up to do some coke in the bathroom. He says he has to finish it up before he goes through customs in Europe. He says he wants to open up the emergency door exit and jump on the clouds.

Suzanne has hepatitis. She cannot lift up her arms.

Jean-Michel sits beside her; he kisses and licks one of her arms.

“Beautiful arms,” he says. “Venus, I have to paint your arms.”

He takes a blue marker out of his pocket and paints on Suzanne’s arm. He paints her humerus, ulna, radius and carpus. He writes “animal cell” on the inside of her wrist. He draws a ring around her finger.

“Now you are my wife,” he says.

Jean-Michel, Suzanne and Kai Eric travel to Italy. They stay in the houses of gallery owners and rich art collectors. Jean-Michel finds drugs wherever he goes. He and Suzanne are very happy.

One day in Venice, Jean-Michel says he has not listened to Charlie Parker in two weeks. He says that if he doesn’t listen to Charlie Parker he will go crazy. He says he needs to hear the music or he will not be able to breathe. He says that Italy is just like the United States and everywhere else: there are no black men in paintings in museums.

“This is why I paint,” he says. “To get black men into museums.”

They spend all day trying to find a Charlie Parker tape but have no luck. Jean-Michel ends up buying some opera arias sung by Maria Callas. When he gets back to New York he plays the music so loud everyone can hear it outside on the street. People walk past looking up at his windows. He paints “AAAAAAAAAA” onto his boards and canvases.

When the fever begins she thinks it is the coke. When she starts to vomit she thinks it must be the heroin. She cannot stand up. She cannot sit down.

“I feel like there is blood inside of me,” Suzanne says.

Jean-Michel never goes to visit her at the hospital. The doctor says that she has pelvic inflammatory disease. He asks her who she has been sleeping with.

Suzanne says, “Only my boyfriend.”

The doctor says, “I’m sorry, but your boyfriend gave this to you.”

He tells her to sleep. He says the IV is carrying the antibiotic into her body. He tells her she will feel better in six days. He tells her convalescence will take a month. He tells her she will never be able to have children.

Jean-Michel tells Suzanne his mother has always been a kind of witch and knows everything about Haitian voodoo. He says that she learned this to protect herself. He says that she taught him how to do it too.

He paints the words “GOLD” and “YEN” and paints coins into his paintings and then everyone wants to buy them.

“See,” Jean-Michel says, rolling up eight one-hundred-dollar bills into his pocket, “it works.”

I don’t know exactly how long I had been living there. Maybe about one year and a half. Things were really bad between us. He was doing so much coke and was extremely paranoid. Once I got really fed up and flushed an ounce down the toilet. Of course I was doing a lot of coke too but I just wanted it all to stop. I wanted us to be happy again like when I first moved in and we were not doing so many drugs.

Things were really bad. We went days without speaking. I secretly started doing heroin because I couldn’t deal with coming down off five days of coke. Jean started staying out all night in the clubs. He went to Reggae Lounge a lot because Shenge worked there. I introduced them because I used to bartend at
Berlin, which was attached to Reggae Lounge. Jean would do drugs all night there, sometimes for days on end, and slept with other women. This made me crazy but I tried not to show it.

Anyway, the night we were supposed to go to Rome again for another show he didn’t come home all night. When he finally did come home I told him, “I’m fed up with this. I don’t sleep with anyone else. You would kill me if I did.”

Then I said, “I am not going to Rome with you.”

He flew into a rage and started breaking things. I was drinking tequila. It was only about ten a.m. I wasn’t supposed to be drinking because of the hepatitis. He picked up my glass of tequila and smashed it against the wall.

“You are not supposed to be drinking!” he screamed. Then he started breaking other things in the room.

I said, “Why are you so mad at me? You won’t let me breathe without asking your permission. I’ll just step aside and you can have your freedom to do whatever the fuck you want. I’m leaving. I have nothing. No money, nowhere to go, nothing. But I would rather be out on the street than to live like this.”

Jean started packing for Rome. I served myself some more tequila. We did not speak to each other. Jean was shaking from coming down from a night of cocaine. Then he walked to the elevator to leave.

He said, “We promised Rene that he could stay in the apartment while we were gone. Don’t leave the loft until I come back.”

Then he handed me one thousand dollars.

“If you need more money you can go to Annina’s and get it,” he said.

I said, “I don’t need your money.”

He threw the money on the floor and left.

That night Rene Ricard took me to a party because I was so depressed.

He said, “Don’t worry. Everything will be okay; you’ve just never stood up to Jean-Michel like that. It is the best thing you could have done.”

While we were at the party Jean arrived. He wanted to know what I was doing at the party.

Apparently he had gone to the airport with Annina and told her, “I can’t go—I have to go back and talk to Suzanne.” Annina was furious and left without him. Jean left the party and took another airplane to Rome. I went back home to the loft.

Late that night, in the middle of the night, Rene started ringing the doorbell. I looked out the window and could see that he had brought one of those stickup kid tricks home. The kid looked like a thief so I ignored them and didn’t let them in.

“You bitch! You bitch!” Rene yelled at me from the street.

The next day Rene came over and he was furious.

He said, “You weren’t even supposed to be here. You were supposed to be in Rome with Jean-Michel. That was a gorgeous guy from 10th Street I scored last night. You embarrassed me.”

I said, “You can’t bring your stickup banshee boys here.”

I went into the bathroom and lay down on the bathroom tiles. This was all just too much for me.

Rene came in after a while and caressed my hair.

“Please forgive me,” he said.

Rene and I managed to live for about one week together without any major fights. One day the phone rang and it was Annina in Rome. She did not know where Jean was. She told me to go to her gallery and get some money and come to Rome immediately. I told her that I could not go, that Jean and I were in a big fight.

I hung up the phone and asked Rene, “Where’s Jean?”

He said, “You really want to know? She’s ten times more famous than you and she’s a model.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

Rene said, “They are in Japan and they are in love. And, the reason I am here is because Jean paid me to get you out of here.” I knew that this was a lie. But it still hurt. So, I left.

She is very quiet. In one suitcase she places her fishnet stockings, polka-dot skirt, dresses, shoes and winter coat. In another bag she packs her passport and plastic jewelry. She takes a small bag of coke out of the refrigerator and hides it inside her hair, fastening it with hairpins. She leaves the one thousand dollars that Jean-Michel gave her in the loft. She leaves her typewriter, her coat and her hairbrush. She knows you must always leave your hairbrush behind— it’s voodoo.

Outside she sits on the sidewalk with her bags all around her. Six punk, hip kids walk by and ask her what is wrong and she tells them, “My boyfriend doesn’t love me anymore. He has other girls. He is famous.”

The boys take her to their house in Alphabet City. Suzanne sleeps on the couch and they give her American cheese sandwiches for four days. She gives them the coke that is hidden in her messy hair. They watch her take it out. They say she is a magician.