Widow Basquiat Read online

  The grass around the house turns yellow and two cats die from the fumes. Children stop coming to play. The mailman tells people he saw red vapor coming out of the windows. At school the teachers complain that these children are always coming to school with their clothes on inside out.

  Suzanne’s mother says, “Children, you don’t need to be going and leaving and looking for a rainbow. The rainbow is here.”

  FEEL GRAY, MUST EXIT

  It’s easy. You sell everything you own and buy a ticket. Even if you have no place to go, some words have to sing inside. Suzanne has the magic words; they are going to turn her into a bright flag, they are going to make her measure the length of her arms. The words are: Seville Hotel, New York City. It’s easy. You sell everything you own.

  “Don’t cry over anything that can’t cry over you,” Suzanne’s mother says.

  Suzanne has a garage sale. She makes a big sign: FEEL GRAY, MUST EXIT. She sells everything and only keeps two pairs of pants and two T-shirts that she dyes gray in the bathtub.

  Her mother buys her toothbrush for one dollar. Her sister buys her birth control pills and Iggy Pop records. Her father says, “You’ll be back.”

  Suzanne says, “Maybe,” and thinks, “If you’d never hit me, I wouldn’t know my skeleton.”

  THOUGHTS ON A BUS TRIP

  There are no footsteps, but you’re moving. What is the distance between? Outside the trees move, the houses move. Inside everything is still. The woman in the back is weeping. She wipes her face with her sleeve. The smell of diesel is the smell of movement. Suzanne is sitting with her feet together, her knees together, her hands together, very prim as if waiting for a concert to begin.

  Her mother kissed her forehead at the station, “Be careful, Suzy,” she said. “Everybody is hungry.” Her brothers and sisters gave her a card. It says, “Suzy Q, we love you.” Her father gave her twenty dollars. “Call us,” he said.

  Suzanne sits still, so skinny, knowing the size of her bones. Knowing how to cover bruises with makeup. Knowing how to disappear. She thinks about Sammy, who came and left so quickly, who sucked the salt out of her fingers. She remembers the day Sammy learned to say “Ouch.” And that was all she would say forever after, “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” like a little song.

  Suzanne came home from school one day and Sammy wasn’t there anymore. “You know how these kids are, Suzy,” Suzanne’s mother said. “They just kind of come and go. She was sweet, though.”

  You can’t get your arms to stop making circles in the air if you never say good-bye.

  But the reason I decided to go to New York was because I had seen Iggy Pop and I thought I had seen God. And because I had sent to Interview magazine for Rene Ricard’s first book of poetry, The Blue Book. I had never sent for anything before but something told me to do this. I had read that book over and over again like a Bible. I realized that a book can reach out and embrace you like an arm and make you walk away from everything you thought you understood.

  THE SEVILLE HOTEL

  It is Valentine’s Day, 1980. The shop windows are filled with red hearts and paper lace. “I’m going to New York City,” Suzanne told the draft dodgers when they asked, “Little lady, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

  “And,” Suzanne continued, “I’m going to be famous and eat artichokes.”

  “Go to the Seville Hotel,” they said.

  THE WELCOMING SPEECH

  There are three middle-aged prostitutes in the lobby of the Seville Hotel.

  “What’s gonna ruin you, girlie?” the one in the blue dress asks.

  “What do you mean?” Suzanne answers.

  “What she said,” the one in the yellow dress interrupts. “What’s going to ruin you? A man? A job? No job, no man? Your babies? What?”

  “A man’s gonna ruin her, for sure,” the one in the red dress says. “Let me tell you, everybody gets ruined by something—even if you’re a queen in a castle—something’s gonna say, you’re mine.”

  It was February 14, Valentine’s Day, 1980. I went straight to the Seville Hotel. The first night a prostitute was murdered by the infamous “Slasher.” It was terrible. There were cops everywhere and the women who were staying at the hotel were moaning and screaming and cussing at the police officers. I was so frightened that I moved out to the Martha Washington Hotel on 29th and Madison, which was only for women. No men were even allowed in the lobby.

  I found Rene Ricard’s number in the phone book and I used to call him and we would discuss philosophical things and I would tell him how brilliant I thought he was and read him my own poetry. It never occurred to me that he would not speak to a stranger. He would talk to me for hours. He was very kind. I never told him my name, though, and he never asked. This special telephone friendship lasted for several weeks.

  THE RITZ’S CIGARETTE GIRL

  Suzanne wears black elbow-length gloves, a short pearl necklace, fishnet stockings and a short skirt with a crinoline underneath. She wears white pancake makeup, thick black eyeliner and red lipstick.

  She smells like lemon soap and coffee. She has a red wood cigarette box with compartments. As Suzanne walks around the Ritz nightclub she singsongs in her sparrow-voice, “Cigarettes, cigars, Life Savers, joints. Cigarettes, cigars, Life Savers, joints.” She makes a lot of money and rents an apartment on the Lower East Side.

  LeRoy Neiman, the illustrator from Playboy, wants to sketch her. All the young Puerto Rican boys want to go out with her. And the lesbians, the ones who wear Chanel No. 5, want to take her home.

  She sucks on Life Savers all night. Green, red, yellow, orange. Some people put tips inside her gloves. The owner of the Ritz tells her he loves her and wants to put a hole in her heart. Suzanne quits this job. She tells the owner she can’t breathe deeply anymore. She gives him her gloves filled with rice.

  A week after arriving in New York I was hired as a waitress at Max’s Kansas City. It was a very hip place at night like CBGBs. These two places had all the cool bands. I worked in the day and the customers were mostly businesspeople from the offices in the area. When the manager left to manage the Ritz, she took me with her as a cigarette girl. I got fired for selling joints, but it was really because I had been having an affair with one of the owners. Soon I got a job at Night Birds as a bartender.

  I did not know anything about being a bartender so I went to a bookstore and bought a book on mixing drinks. I learned all those different drinks and all their names by heart. I became an expert at this by practicing with water at home and pretending to have all the ingredients. However, I didn’t really need to know all this since Night Birds was a very dark, seedy bar where taxi drivers stopped by in the afternoon for a beer, and where a few alcoholic men hung out all day. The bar was so dark it always felt like night in there, so it attracted people who did not like daylight.

  Looking back, it was the perfect place to meet Jean because he liked the night and never liked the day.

  ONE FACE

  Even though one year has passed, downtown New York is still covered with one face that is marked “MISSING” and “Child last seen going to school bus stop, wearing black pilot-type cap, blue corduroy jacket, blue pants, blue sneakers and carrying blue bag.”

  On light poles, telephone booths, in shop windows, along the walls of buildings, and in subway stations a small boy’s face on a pasted poster looks out. His face is also hidden behind layers of old rock concert posters and advertisements. His name is Etan Patz:

  Age at disappearance: 6

  Date of birth: 10/9/1972

  Date of last contact: 5/25/1979

  Race: White

  Gender: Male

  Height: 3′ 04″

  Weight: 50 lbs

  Eyes: Blue

  Hair: Blonde

  Missing from: New York, NY

  He has been missing for one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year. His mother is quoted in the newspapers: “It was the first time I let him walk to the bus stop alone. It
was the first time I let him. I never let him go alone before. It was the first time I let him walk to the bus stop alone. It was the first time I let him walk to the bus stop alone.”

  The graffiti artists never painted on his face.

  I don’t think he was ever found, but we all thought about him.

  SUZANNE MEETS JEAN-MICHEL AT NIGHT BIRDS

  Jean-Michel has found Suzanne like a small box, an old coat, a penny on a sidewalk, found a little boy-girl like him. He also knows his skeleton. When he was hit by a car as a child his mother gave him Gray’s Anatomy to read in the hospital. He willed his bones whole. He knows what makes an arm bend to strike, what bones can be crushed and what bones carry him across the street. He knows his boneless shadow that disappears in summer. He is in a band called Gray. The band plays instruments hiding in boxes.

  Jean-Michel wears a big, long overcoat. He stands away from the bar and comes in every day to watch Suzanne. She reads Nausea by Sartre behind the bar. This is an old-man, taxi-driver bar. Cigar-smoke dark. Suzanne looks like a boy except for her red lips. She is a shoe-shine boy with a black cap on her head and big shoes. She asks the customers in her honey, twelve-year-old voice, “Mister, sir, will that be a double or single?”

  Jean-Michel watches Suzanne for two months. He never speaks to her. He leans against the jukebox at the back of the room, smokes cigarettes and plays Eartha Kitt’s song “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” over and over again. He has very short hair with long dreadlocks in the back. He is twenty years old, slender and tall, but childlike. There is a thickness about him from his excessive use of marijuana. Suzanne thinks, “If he falls on me he will be so heavy.”

  He only orders the best. Every four days he puts a pile of pennies, nickels and dimes on the bar and orders a Rémy. Suzanne knows he will always want what is expensive.

  He tells Suzanne, “You’re a pretty one.”

  The third or fourth or fifth thing Suzanne tells Jean-Michel is, “High heels are a plot against women, they throw our spines out and stop us from standing on the ground.”

  I always called Jean-Michel Jean.

  A GUN IN A PAPER BAG

  Jean-Michel comes into the bar every day. He reads Suzanne his poems from his “Black and White Notebooks.” He calls her Venus. He tells her he is thinking about her feet, thinking that they are always on the ground. He wants to touch her feet. He tells her to take off her shoes and walk with him in the street.

  One day the owner of Night Birds, a Chinese man, shows Suzanne a brown paper bag with a gun in it. “Why don’t you have a nice white boyfriend?” he asks.

  Jean-Michel moves into Suzanne’s apartment. He brings only a broken radio and a tin can full of crayons. Kids’ stuff.

  I had to quit working at Night Birds when the owner caught me and Jean kissing at the bar. He said he would never let his daughter do what I was doing and that I should look for a white boy. Then he showed me a gun he had hidden in a brown paper bag and that really frightened me.

  Even though he’d been hanging out at the bar for a few months staring at me, I had only known Jean for a few days when I let him move into my apartment. He said that it would only be for a while, but from then on we could never stay away from each other.

  JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

  He smells of leather, oil paint, tobacco, marijuana and the faint metallic smell of cocaine. He wears handmade wool sweaters and long Mexican ponchos. He never walks in a straight line. He zigzags wherever he is going. Suzanne follows behind him. She feels like a Japanese woman.

  Jean-Michel can never get a taxi to stop for him. Not even later when he wears an Armani suit and has five thousand dollars in his pocket. Jean-Michel hides behind a car and Suzanne hails the taxis.

  He has the scar of a knife wound on his buttocks. He says his mother is in an insane asylum and that his whole world spins around her.

  He moves in with Suzanne.

  Jean-Michel brushes Suzanne’s hair for hours. He paints or draws. He snorts some coke. He picks up boys or girls at the Mudd Club and disappears for days. He looks at girlie magazines and masturbates. Jean-Michel likes to spit into Suzanne’s mouth.

  Suzanne and Jean-Michel have terrible fights because only Suzanne is earning money. One day Jean-Michel says, “Fine, I’ll get a job.” He goes to work as an electrician’s assistant at the apartment of a rich white woman. Suzanne is so proud of him she makes him a special dinner.

  When Jean-Michel gets back home he is furious, clapping his hands together. “That white bitch looked at me as if I were a worker!” he says. Jean-Michel throws Suzanne’s dinner into the garbage and does some coke. Suzanne locks herself in the closet.

  It was clear that his sexual interest was not monochromatic. It did not rely on visual stimulation, such as a pretty girl. It was a very rich multichromatic sexuality. He was attracted to people for all different reasons. They could be boys, girls, thin, fat, pretty, ugly. It was, I think, driven by intelligence. He was attracted to intelligence more than anything and to pain. He was very attracted to people who silently bore some sort of inner pain as he did, and he loved people who were one of a kind, people who had a unique vision of things.

  IN THE CLOSET

  In the closet there are two dead spiders. Clothes rolled up on the floor mixed up with shoes. There is a pair of ice skates. The blades are still sharp. Her face rests inside the hem of a winter coat. She can hear Jean-Michel moving around in the kitchen. His shadow moves around beneath the closet door. His shadow touches her hands and feet. The front door slams shut.

  Over the stove Jean-Michel has painted faces of little girls crying. He has written in huge block letters: TEARS CUT THEIR CHEEKS.

  CADILLAC MOON

  With acrylic on canvas Jean-Michel paints a Cadillac and a moon. The letter “S” appears on some paintings—placed here and there like a small worm or snake. “S” is for Suzanne, like a tattoo. He paints, pauses, picks up a book or magazine and when he finds a word or sentence that he likes he paints it on the board or canvas.

  They are code. The crown is the logo from the TV show The Little Rascals. He mixes Spanish and English. One painting is of Suzanne, painted like a stick figure holding a box that says “FOOD.” Beside her Jean-Michel paints himself carrying a box that says “SAL.” Sal is Spanish for “salt”—he says he is a “Mammy” saltshaker.

  He paints kings wearing black crowns covered in tar and feathers. He paints a simple square house with a triangle roof that has an “S” inside, “Because, Suzanne, you are my home.”

  On one painting he writes, “Jimmy Best on his back to the suckerpunch of his childhood files,” because he hears a hobo say this on television.

  He writes “TAR” everywhere in thick dark strokes because “I sometimes feel as black as tar.”

  He knows what it is to have a knife thrown at him. He knows what it is like to be tied up and fed like an animal. He knows the sound of a slap against his cheek and what blood tastes like. He hates the sound of a key in a lock, a door opening, the first step inside.

  For a year or so before I met Jean he had called himself SAMO. He had painted some graffiti on the walls around New York City signing that name everywhere. Sometimes he’d run into people who still called him that. It was his street name. He dropped it when he no longer wanted to be part of the streets and subways.

  ARROZ CON POLLO

  They are skeletons—naked inside and naked outside. They sit down to eat naked. Jean-Michel has made his favorite dish, arroz con pollo. His Puerto Rican mother taught him to make it. Suzanne is white; she holds her left breast with her right hand—her other hand holds a fork. Across the table Jean-Michel is black. He wears a red Mexican charro hat as he gives Suzanne a plate of steaming chicken. Beside Suzanne is the word “TAR.” They can see the inside of each other’s bodies. Jean-Michel can see Suzanne’s teeth and an almond-shaped vagina. Suzanne can see his ribs and shoulder joints. This is a painting: Arroz con Pollo, 1981, acrylic and oil paint stick on canvas, 6
8 x 84 inches.

  One of the hardest things to describe about Jean is his elegance. There was something so beautiful about the way he moved and spoke. This partly had to do with his drug use, which kept him very slim and childlike. But it was innate also. I was also very slim and waiflike. We looked twelve years old.

  What most people don’t understand about Jean-Michel is that his crazy behavior had nothing to do with being an enfant terrible. Everything he did was an attack on racism and I loved him for this.

  I also understood racism. My mother tried to get me to bleach my skin. She never wanted me to go out in the sun. She said I was too “Arab looking.”

  I remember that in high school I wanted to play the part of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. I practiced singing the songs for weeks and my voice was the best in the school. They gave the part to another girl because they said my skin was too dark. I remember that I came home and wept. My mother said, “Suzy, well, they’re right.”