Widow Basquiat (8 page)

One day she stands up and says, “Thank you, boys. I need to get a job.”

She gets three jobs—working at a secondhand clothing store, an after-hours bar and typing scripts for Eric Mitchell, the underground filmmaker.

One month later Suzanne goes back to the Crosby loft to pick up her typewriter. Jean-Michel is back. He is there with David Bowes, Fab 5 Freddy and some other friends. He looks thin and dirty. Suzanne walks past him to get her typewriter. Jean-Michel follows her.

“Are you coming back? Come back. I couldn’t find you. Where were you? I told Rene to take care of you and not to let you leave,” Jean-Michel says.

She knows she cannot come back. Inside her arms she feels that she can carry a piano. She can carry a truck. She knows she can walk, that her legs won’t fail her. As the elevator door closes she can hear Jean-Michel breaking things.

Maybe it is the day to go buy some heroin … The girl takes a cab past Houston Street and buys some dope. She opens the package in the cab, bends over and sniffs it off of her lap. She thinks about the words she loves: rabbit, rain, Rome, Rammellzee, rocket. She giggles to herself when she thinks that dope makes her mind wind up and around alliterations. Her neck and hands feel warm like fur.

A few weeks later she runs into Jean-Michel when she is buying some dope on the Lower East Side. Jean-Michel
takes her for a ride in his limousine. They sniff the dope in the car. Jean-Michel says, “Burroughs was a junkie, Parker was a junkie … it is the road to genius.” At a red light he gives one hundred dollars to a skinny black bum.

“Do you want some money, Venus?” he asks Suzanne.

“No. I never have wanted your money, Jean,” she says.

“I know,” he answers.

Jean-Michel is made for the night, like a mole. The daylight hurts, the sun hurts, but at night he is transformed into a magician, a Merlin with everything wound up tight and sparkling. Nights are for drugs. Drugs are for nights. In daylight he looks for his shadow and crawls up inside it.

Jean-Michel stands at her doorstep. Suzanne says, “No, no, no, you can’t come back.” He is disheveled. One of the soles of his shoes flaps open and she can see his toes. He is unshaven. He brings no belongings with him. He does not expect her to take him in. Like all stray animals, he knows he will not be taken in.

I always took him in. I’d convince myself that I wouldn’t but then he’d appear with the resigned look of someone accustomed to being turned away—a boy without a friend.

When I’d take him back, which was happening all the time, I’d make dinner for him and run out and buy a really good bottle of wine, even if it took away half of my rent money. I loved to spoil him and he always appreciated expensive things, as if consuming them would make him valuable.

I would light a candle and sit him at the table. He would look at the bottle of wine for a long time.

On one of these occasions we sat together quietly and I did not know what to say to him since this had happened so many times now. We felt a bit like strangers and I made some idle chitchat and asked if his paintings were selling well. He said that he was making tons of money now. Jean drew himself up straight and said, “I am famous just like I told you I would be.”

We talked for some time of how he had always painted and how as a child he had dreamed of being a cartoonist. “The only thing that has ever interested me,” he said, “is a blank page.”

That time, for the first time, he also talked about his childhood. He told me how he had always been in trouble and had gone to so many different schools. He also told me about the time he had gone to live in Puerto Rico with his father, when he was eight and after his parents were divorced.

I guess he was lost without his mother. His mother had taken him to art museums and used to paint with him in the afternoons with both of them lying on the floor on their stomachs. She used to paste his drawings up around the house. The loss of his mother had left him with a great sadness. Even though she was now close by at the institution she was far away from him in his mind.

The next morning I gave him an apple to take with him as he was leaving. He said good-bye to me and then five minutes later he came back to the apartment and said good-bye to me again.

“You are my best friend,” he said. It was so sad. That is something children say in kindergarten.

Jean-Michel draws Venus and writes “VENUS” on dozens of pieces of paper. He xeroxes the papers, tears them up and hands them out to friends and strangers on the street. This is how he symbolically announces his breakup with Suzanne. He also pastes these Venuses on some of his paintings.

One night Suzanne goes out to the Roxy and finds Jean-Michel with Madonna. Suzanne throws herself at Madonna and starts pulling her hair, scratching and punching her.

“You are with my boyfriend!” Suzanne says.

Jean-Michel just laughs and laughs.

Later he tells Suzanne, “Well, you beat her up just like a Puerto Rican girl.”

Later he paints
A Panel of Experts.
In this painting Suzanne “Venus” and Madonna are two stick figures having a catfight. On the collage he crosses out the word “Madonna.”

“Why did you do that?” Suzanne asks.

“Because you won, Venus,” Jean-Michel says.

Jean took me to a party at Julian Schnabel’s house. Jean got all dressed up but he would not let me get dressed up. Jean made me wear his long-sleeve overalls that had paint all over them. I was embarrassed. All the other women were all dressed up and looking very beautiful.

Jean laughed at Schnabel’s work. He thought it was a joke. He envied how Schnabel was, how powerful and rich he was. He had no respect for his work but he did respect how Schnabel could propel himself to such a position in the art world. Jean was very conscious and fascinated with people who understood how to do this. He had great respect for people who could improve their lot in life. I think that this is also what he loved about Madonna. And also why he loved Andy Warhol. Jean greatly respected Warhol because he was so famous and had such an interesting life and because he hung out with so many famous people. But deep down Jean thought he was a much more talented artist than any of them. Jean really believed that he was a great artist.

As for Keith Haring, they were friends. Jean went back and forth with him: friends and not friends. Jean had very mixed feelings about Keith’s work. He loved it that Keith gave the graffiti artists an open door. But, at the same time, he felt that Keith’s work was a bit contrived. Jean once said to me that it was “formula art” and that Keith had found a good thing, that he just did it over and over again. Jean resented it, though—that
it took a white guy to bring graffiti to SoHo. Keith hung around with black and Puerto Rican graffiti artists and had a lot of them collaborate on his work, especially a guy called LA2. It was Keith that really made the graffiti artists legitimate. I think his influence in this was greater than Jean’s.

Jean was very nervous about how he appeared all the time and was always thinking of strategies. If Jean made the wrong move it was much more dangerous than if Keith made the wrong move. Jean was the first black to be seen as a legitimate artist in the white art world. He had to secure his own place before he could help the graffiti artists. This is why he did the Fun Gallery show. This gallery was owned by Patti Astor in the East Village. Jean had already shown his work in SoHo. He did this show to demonstrate his solidarity with the graffiti artists. It was also a very hip show. Jean would only put himself out for others if it also helped his own career.

Suzanne spends a month living with friends and then moves back into her own apartment that she had sublet for a year. The place is covered with paintings Jean-Michel gave to Suzanne. She thinks it looks like a shrine. Even the refrigerator is covered with his doodles.

She takes everything down. She throws some drawings and paintings out of the window and they fall on the roof below. The next day someone cleans the roof and everything is thrown out.

Suzanne makes up a spell. She places four “Venus” paintings in a plastic garbage bag. She buys a can of lighter fluid. It is midnight. She walks to Jean-Michel’s loft taking three steps at a time and then turning around three times. She does this until she gets there. It takes her an hour and makes her very dizzy.

On the sidewalk in front of Jean-Michel’s loft she pours lighter fluid on the paintings and sets them on fire. It makes a small bonfire.

Jean-Michel looks out of the window to the street below and yells, “Suzanne, what are you doing?”

She hides inside a telephone booth.

Jean-Michel yells out once more, “Suzanne, I can see you.
Niña
, what are you doing?”

She does not answer. Her heart beats fast like a chicken heart. AAAAAAEEEEEEAAAAEEEE.

The spells don’t work. The girl sleeps with ten different boys in two weeks and it doesn’t work. She kisses a girl at the Pyramid Club and nothing changes.

Suzanne packs her clothes and puts her heroin inside her hair. Jean-Michel sends her a first-class ticket to L.A.

On the airplane she sits beside the country-western singer Mac Davis. He is wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a belt of matching lizard skin. It makes Suzanne giggle.

She gets up and goes to the bathroom and sniffs some heroin and puts on some more red lipstick.

If the airplane crashes she does not care.

Jean, Rammellzee and Toxic were at the airport to greet me. We drove in a pickup truck on the freeway to Larry Gagosian’s house in Venice. Jean was living in Larry’s house. Jean had a studio for painting on the ground floor with a bed in the middle of the room. There was paint and canvases and oil stick everywhere. Jean would go off and leave me alone in Larry’s house. Larry had a lot of art and every single door to every room locked
automatically behind you when you shut it. They forgot to tell me this and one day I was trapped in a room for hours.

In L.A. we used to go to Mr. Chow’s, where Jean would exchange art for dinner. Jean was friends with Tim Kelly, who was the son of Gene Kelly. Once we went over to Gene Kelly’s house to see Tim. It was a grand old Hollywood house and there was an Oscar on the mantelpiece. I was leaning over the bar with my ass in the air trying to get a drink and in walks Gene Kelly. I was floored. He was an idol of mine. Tim introduced us and I shook his hand. Gene Kelly apparently loved Jean and gave him his jacket from
Singing in the Rain.

Jean told me that Madonna had been there to visit him the week before I came. Madonna, he said, had asked him to take her on a shopping spree. He asked me why I never asked him to do this and I answered that it never occurred to me to ask him for such a thing.

Then I said, “Will you take me on a shopping spree?”

And he said, “No. I’m completely broke from Madonna’s shopping spree.”

It does not take long to find a nice, sweet pair of arms. A kid’s arms. A boy who is even more of a child than she is. He is gentle. He has never felt the whack of a hand to the back of his neck. He has never felt a punch to the side of his face. He has never known his skeleton.

Suzanne meets Michael Stewart at the Berlin nightclub, where she is a bartender. He is a busboy at the Pyramid Club. Michael Stewart is a shy, light-skinned black man. He comes from a very nice Baptist middle-class family in Brooklyn.

When Suzanne is in the hospital with PID, which she contracted from Jean-Michel, Michael comes to visit every day. Suzanne is there for two weeks on IV antibiotics and he brings magazines, Coca-Cola and potato chips. They spend New Year’s Eve in the hospital together.

I’ll never forget how sweet and kind Michael Stewart was. I adored him as if he were my kid brother. He was gentle and quiet. When I was sick in the hospital he came to see me every day. He’d do all the things I could not do like pay my phone bills, etc. He was a little bit awed that I was Jean’s girlfriend.

Michael sits at the bar and asks Suzanne for a Coke and talks to Suzanne for hours. He comes in every night he can. He chews on toothpicks and eats the olives and cherries out of Suzanne’s bar tray.

They play tic-tac-toe and geography games. One night Suzanne leans over and kisses his forehead. She tells him he reminds her of her little brother. He tells her he has nowhere to live and she lets him live with her.

He asks her if he can use the shower and Suzanne says, “Sure.”

He asks her if he can drink some of the milk and Suzanne says, “Sure.”

He asks her if he should go out and buy the newspaper and Suzanne says, “Sure.”

He cleans the apartment while Suzanne is at work.

They sleep together and sometimes they make love. In the morning Suzanne says, “You remind me of my brother.”

Once in a while Suzanne disappears for days. She is still seeing Jean-Michel. This never stops.

A few weeks later Michael loses his job and moves back to his mother’s house on Clinton Avenue.

Suzanne sees Michael at a club on 9th Street called Lucky Strike, where Madonna is a bartender. They have a few drinks. Suzanne tells him that she is sorry that she is always going back to Jean-Michel, but that she can’t help it. Michael is very sweet and gentle and just strokes her arm and says, “Yes, yes.”

Suzanne says, “You can come back and stay with me if you like.”

Michael says, “Yes, yes.”

After a few hours he leaves the bar and takes the LL subway to Brooklyn.

It is alleged by the police that Michael was writing graffiti, yet no graffiti or markers are found. Michael is arrested. The officer claims that Michael resisted arrest. The arresting officer calls for a backup unit. Five cops arrive.