Widow Basquiat Read online

  Also by Jennifer Clement

  A True Story Based on Lies

  The Poison That Fascinates

  Prayers for the Stolen

  Copyright © 2000, 2014 by Jennifer Clement

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Michael Holman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Broadway Books and its logo, B D W Y, are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Great Britain, in slightly different form, by Payback Press, an imprint of Canongate Books, Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2000. This edition originally published in Great Britain by Canongate Books, Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2014.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Clement, Jennifer.

  Widow Basquiat : a love story / Jennifer Clement.—

  First American Edition.

  pages cm

  1. Basquiat, Jean-Michel—Friends and associates. 2. Basquiat, Jean-Michel—Relations with women. 3. Mallouk, Suzanne. 4. African American artists—Biography. 5. New York (N.Y.)—

  Biography. I. Title.

  N6537.B233C59 2014

  813’.54—dc23 2014014500

  ISBN 978-0-553-41991-7

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-41992-4

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover photograph by Duncan Fraser Buchanan

  v3.1

  For Suzanne

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Words on Widow Basquiat

  She Is This Girl

  Worn with Sounds

  Paper Dresses

  Only One Chromosome Is Missing

  The Magic Horsetail

  Skeleton

  What Furniture Feels Like

  And a List of Good Excuses

  You Can Always Come Back

  The Rainbow Is Here

  Feel Gray, Must Exit

  Thoughts on a Bus Trip

  The Seville Hotel

  The Welcoming Speech

  The Ritz’s Cigarette Girl

  One Face

  Suzanne Meets Jean-Michel at Night Birds

  A Gun in a Paper Bag

  Jean-Michel Basquiat

  In the Closet

  Cadillac Moon

  Arroz con Pollo

  No Black Men in Museums

  Spleen

  Tu Eres Blanca como El Arroz

  First Sale

  Lollipop Girls

  Back to Canada

  Binibon Restaurant

  Lessons on How to Be a Woman

  Downtown Society

  From Saturday to Monday

  Only Food

  How to Draw

  He Never Eats Pork

  Bombero, 1983

  Scratch Out and Erase

  The Burroughs Reading

  The Girl Agrees to Go to Paris

  The Girl Returns to New York

  The Crosby Street Loft Madness

  Black Tar Soap

  A Genealogy of Heroes

  Broken Blossoms (The Yellow Man and the Girl)

  Not for Sale

  Mother Comes to Visit

  Dining Out

  Rammellzee

  They Do Not Know How to Drive a Car

  Modena, Rome, Florence and Venice

  The Hospital Is Very White

  Witchcraft, It Works

  Suitcases and Other Bags

  Coming Back for Good Again and Again

  The Venus Xeroxes

  Inside a Telephone Booth

  L.A.

  Michael Stewart

  The Berlin

  Lucky Strike

  The Next Morning

  Invited to Harlem

  Michael Stewart’s Funeral

  Untitled (Defacement)

  Barefoot

  Aids

  Nothing Seems to Frighten Her

  Earth, 1984

  The Great Jones Loft

  The Painter Likes to Shop

  Dos Cabezas

  The Girl Has a New Friend

  The Painter Forgets to Paint

  Boxing

  What to Do If You Need Money

  The Mary Boone Art Opening

  The Girl Can Also Paint

  A List of Good Deeds

  Going to the Fish Market

  Selling the Refrigerator

  The Last Time She Calls

  Ruby Desire

  Ruby Desire Puts Away Her Cowboy Belt

  He Wakes Her Up

  The Weight of Arms

  Suzanne

  Postscript

  About the Author

  Suzanne, you are a cartoon.

  Jean-Michel Basquiat

  “Widow Basquiat” was a morbid nickname, given to me by Rene Ricard, many years before Jean-Michel died.

  Suzanne Mallouk

  WORDS ON WIDOW BASQUIAT

  by Michael Holman

  As a friend, artistic collaborator in his band Gray, screenwriter of the Miramax biographic film Basquiat and subject of many interviews for the purpose of shedding light on his work and life, I consider myself rather knowledgeable on the subject of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I can tell you, without equivocation and with some considerable jealousy, that the most thoughtful, inspiring, comprehensive, funny and heartbreaking document of any kind on Basquiat’s life is, without a doubt, Jennifer Clement’s book Widow Basquiat.

  Clement’s book is specifically about Basquiat’s relationship with his “widow,” and his first great love, Suzanne Mallouk. Though Basquiat and Mallouk never actually married, art critic and close confidant Rene Ricard saw fit to bestow upon Mallouk this proprietary, romantic and shrouded title.

  Widow Basquiat is a collage/dance of Clement’s stark, poetic prose as if written by the proverbial “fly on the wall,” which does a back-and-forth cha-cha-cha with Mallouk’s own hilarious and honest memories, finished off with a tango dip of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s own “graffiti-inspired” titles, secondhand observations and absurdist limericks.

  Widow Basquiat brutally captures the rise and fall of this tortured love affair, as it is complicated by Basquiat’s meteoric ascendance to the pantheons of art world history. There is feeling, biting humor, shocking abuse of all sorts, bitterness and sweet rhapsody enough for everyone. Read this book and you will never, ever forget it.

  Michael Holman

  SHE IS THIS GIRL

  She always keeps her heroin inside her beehive hairdo. The white powder hidden in the tease and spit. The cops can’t find it. The drug addicts can’t find it. Suzanne holds her head high. She’s carrying a world without corners. She’s holding up the sky. Slight enough to go down chimneys, Suzanne looks like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes. She wears Love That Red lipstick by Revlon and has blue-black hair and white skin. She closes up all the buttons on her shirt.

  Suzanne can knit, ice-skate, sing, read palms and smoke dozens of cigarettes to keep warm inside. Little girls love her because she tells them, “Hey, little missy, I can hear your heart.” They think she’s a music box.

  When Suzanne was ten years old her mother said, “Let’s have a tea party.” They sat together at the kitchen table. It was the first time Suzanne ever drank tea. She put four teaspoons of sugar in it. She said, “It’s too cold.”

  Her mother said, “I’ll only tell you this once so mark my words.”

  “I broke the rocking horse,” Suzanne said.

  “You of all my children
were made like an angel. But you want to look over the edge to hell. Always know where that line is and never cross it. And here are nine kisses,” her mother continued, “for every year of your life.”

  While she kissed her again and again on the forehead, Suzanne wished her mother wore lipstick so that the kisses would be painted on her and everyone would know.

  She wanted to say, “But I’m ten really.”

  WORN WITH SOUNDS

  Suzanne’s mother claims to be a witch. She puts her head down, claps her hands and concentrates. She calls this “cursing people.” Once a man who owned a television store in town asked her, “Who winds you up in the morning?” That night his store burned down. But she can’t stop Suzanne’s father from beating up the kids.

  “He’s an Arab,” she says, “What can I do? Curses don’t get into those black eyes.”

  Suzanne has a scar on her forehead from when he threw her down the stairs. It is shaped like the number 5.

  Her childhood is worn with sounds: chairs against walls; “You good-for-nothing punk!”; the snake-belly slide of a belt, the soft drum sound of a three-year-old’s head against a wall; “You good-for-nothing punk”; tears that mix with Cap’n Crunch cereal; “You good-for-nothing punk”; a hand the size of a maple leaf slapping; the twist and crack of arms and wrists; “Walk on tiptoe, shhh,” whisper. “He’s home.”

  “Don’t worry, honey,” Suzanne’s mother says to Suzanne. “One day you’ll set the world on fire.”

  PAPER DRESSES

  Four draft dodgers and Suzanne sit at the kitchen table. Suzanne’s mother is known in the underground of draft dodgers so men come to Orangeville, Ontario, Canada, to sit at this table dressed in love beads and leather bracelets to ask Suzanne where they can get some pot. Suzanne giggles and pulls some plastic bags filled with marijuana out of her white knee-high boots.

  Suzanne wears paper dresses and maxi-coats. One draft dodger likes to tease her by burning cigarette holes in her dresses. Another one tells her if the war ever ends he’s going to come back and marry her.

  “I’ll never marry anyone,” Suzanne says. “No man is big enough for my arms.”

  I had very hardworking parents. My father had a painting/construction business that at its height employed forty men. My mother had a nursery school in our house. She took all children. She did not close the door to any child. There were normal, autistic, blind and crippled children. There was nowhere for these disabled children to go. My mother was a real radical. During the Vietnam War she took in American draft dodgers. I was too young to know what this meant. These hippies with long hair and beards would just appear at the dinner table. During those Vietnam years my mother must have taken care of forty of these young men. My father was against this and I heard them fighting over it. My father thought they were cowards. My mother thought they were pacifists and she thought that they were too young. My mother became known in the underground of draft dodgers, and boys from all over America came, knowing they would get food and a roof over their heads. They would sleep on the living-room floor.

  My father was intelligent and hardworking. He taught himself everything. He drove a big Cadillac so that we would be like the children of the doctors and lawyers. However, he was domineering and violent. He believed that we would respect him if we feared him. We feared him.

  ONLY ONE CHROMOSOME IS MISSING

  Suzanne walks down the steps from her bedroom. In the hall her mother is feeding a child who is tied with a rope to a chair. The little boy is tied up so he will not mutilate himself. He scratches his face until it bleeds. The doorbell rings and two more children with Down syndrome arrive. This is Suzanne’s mother’s latest business venture. There are no facilities for abnormal children in Orangeville.

  Suzanne thinks, “These are the children that need to go to the doll hospital.”

  For three years the house shelters three or four of these children a day. Their hands get washed, their backs get rubbed, they break things they find. But this house doesn’t shelter black-and-blue children.

  The black-and-blue children are thinking about running away. They think, “We don’t fit in this house.”

  Suzanne loves one of the kids called Sammy. Sammy is a six-year-old black girl. Suzanne knows only one chromosome is missing in her beautiful little face. Suzanne braids Sammy’s hair and buys her candy.

  Suzanne makes her dresses that she copies out of Vogue magazine and she teaches Sammy to count to five.

  One day Suzanne and Sammy are sitting in the garden when Suzanne’s mother comes outside. “Now, you girls be careful, you’re going to turn your skin too dark,” she says.

  Once she gave Suzanne a whole case of bleaching skin cream. “If you think about it hard enough,” Suzanne’s mother says, “you can change the way you look.”

  “If you think about it hard enough,” Suzanne tells Sammy, “you can make that chromosome grow in you.” Sammy looks straight at the sun. She can do that and not even squint or blink.

  THE MAGIC HORSETAIL

  Suzanne’s mother has a magic horsetail. Out of a short, carved ivory stick hangs a white horse’s tail. It was given to her by her great-aunt for luck when she was little, growing up in England. She took it with her to Beirut, where she was a British naval officer. It was here that she met Suzanne’s father. Together they moved to Canada as Palestinian refugees. The horsetail has always been with her.

  Suzanne braids the horsetail, shakes it around. “Make lots of wishes with it, Suzy,” Suzanne’s mother says.

  “Did you make wishes with it?” Suzanne asks.

  “Oh, millions and millions. But I don’t believe in making wishes.”

  Suzanne’s mother always tells lies. She says she saw a woman in Beirut who had transparent skin. She says there are forty-two ways to cut an apple. She says she’s seen the vaults with the gold reserves of England. She says the Earth has two moons. She says she has eaten sheep eyes, ant larvae and raw eggs because she was working as a spy.

  She tells Suzanne, “You have your father’s barbaric blood. You are genetically more Arab than your brothers and sisters. You will always have problems with hysteria, rage and jealousy.”

  Every time Suzanne thinks about her mother’s sulfur-blue eyes it rains.

  SKELETON

  Suzanne has always made a wish to herself. But it is not really a wish because it is going to happen no matter what. She’s going to leave. She’s known this ever since she could look in the mirror at her face.

  When she was six, she walked alone around the block for the first time and it felt good. After that, she did it every day, always walking a little bit farther. In the winter, she’d walk and walk around the house looking for cobwebs, which she would eat to make her strong.

  Suzanne knows her skeleton. She knows where every bone is and which one hurts most. She knows the bruise from falling on ice is different from a bruise from a belt. She has studied the length of her tibia and the width of her femur. The pull of hair from the nape of the neck is different from the pull of hair from the forehead. She has learned the swivel and turn from a hand that can cover her whole face.

  At night Suzanne lies in her bed listening to her father play trictrac with his friends who have also come to Canada as Palestinian refugees. Sometimes, she sneaks down, watches them, and her father pulls her out of the shadows.

  He strokes her hair and gives her a taste of beer with his finger.

  Sometimes I would jump on his back to stop him and I would get thrown across the room. Once when I was five he threw me down the stairs and I hit my head on a heater. I still have the scar on my forehead. He often threw us across the room and we would hit furniture or walls. He would also pick up furniture and throw it at us or break it.

  WHAT FURNITURE FEELS LIKE

  A chair feels like a slap.

  A table feels like a kick.

  A lamp feels like a punch.

  A door feels like a shove, but it can be opened.

  AND A L
IST OF GOOD EXCUSES

  “I fell down the stairs.”

  “My brother punched me.”

  “I crashed into a tree on my bike.”

  “The door slammed in my face.”

  “I slipped on the ice.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “My doll’s hand scratched me.”

  “The rain fell hard.”

  YOU CAN ALWAYS COME BACK

  “I know you’re going to leave. One day you’ll figure it out and leave,” Suzanne’s mother says.

  “Yes, I know, Mum,” Suzanne answers.

  “Well, what have I taught you? What did I fill you up with? You know, Suzy, there’s a big, bad wolf out there just waiting to eat you up. You can leave but you can always come back. You can live here again. Life can be a circle, not just a line. And don’t chew gum ever, Suzy. No lady ever chews gum.”

  THE RAINBOW IS HERE

  Suzanne’s father isn’t going to hit her anymore because she’s menstruating. She told him, “I’m a woman now. I’m bleeding now. You can’t touch me anymore.”

  The house is full of the smell of paint and paint thinners that Suzanne’s father mixes up in the basement for his house-painting company. The smells fill up the house. Suzanne can tell by now if he’s mixing blue or red or yellow. The smell sticks to everybody’s skin. It stings Suzanne’s mother’s eyes. It burns her brothers’ and sisters’ skin. It makes some of the children faint. Sammy learns to cross her eyes. Suzanne giggles.

  Sometimes, Suzanne goes down to the basement while her father is mixing the paint and they giggle together. The fumes are so strong they feel as if they are on a merry-go-round. Suzanne looks into the vat of cobalt blue and thinks she could swim in there. But she just dips her fingers in and they feel so cool.