Widow Basquiat Read online

  NO BLACK MEN IN MUSEUMS

  One Thursday in 1982, Jean-Michel tells Suzanne to stand up and walk, they are going to the MoMA. He tells Suzanne to wear his clothes. She ties his pants around her waist with a rope. His sweater hangs down to her knees.

  At the museum Jean-Michel takes a bottle of water out of his coat and walks through the halls sprinkling the water here and there around him. “I’d piss like a dog if I could,” he says, as they wander past paintings by Pollock, Picasso, Kline and Braque. Suzanne does not even ask what he is doing. She knows this is one of his voodoo tricks.

  “There are no black men in museums,” he says. “Try counting …”

  Suzanne cannot find even one.

  “This is another white man’s cotton plantation,” he explains.

  When they get back home Jean-Michel puts on a Charlie Parker tape and tells Suzanne to be very quiet.

  It begins to rain outside, a slow, dark rain that will not stop for three days.

  Jean-Michel paints St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes. It shows the boxer slumped down after a fight, surrounded by a group of sinister-looking white men. Joe Louis is painted with a halo over his head and the paint drips from his name like blood falling down the canvas.

  I realized that he must have been to the MoMA millions of times. I had no idea. I never knew when he went. He never mentioned it to me. I know that his mother had taken him to museums. Jean knew every inch of that museum, every painting, every room. I was astonished at his knowledge and intelligence and at how twisted and unexpected his observations could be.

  I remember he had a book on Renoir that he loved. Once I asked him why and he said, “Because they are so violent.” I argued with him and said that he was wrong, that the paintings showed placid French country life. He said I was stupid. He opened the book and showed me the painting of Mademoiselle Romaine Lacaux.

  “Those red flowers,” he said, “are blood in her hands.” Then he showed me the Sisleys and said, “You can just tell he hates her.” Finally, he opened a page at Une Odalisque—the one of the harem woman—and Jean said, “Look, she is about to fart.”

  His favorite painters were Kline and Twombly, especially Twombly. Jean said that Twombly taught him that he could scratch things out on the canvas. And, of course, he loved comic books, which were a great inspiration to him.

  It made me so happy that he had taken me with him to the MoMA to do his spell with the water. It was really quite funny watching him sprinkle water everywhere, making sure the guards weren’t watching and looking around and up at the ceiling to see if any cameras were on him. He did not think it was funny, though. Jean did it with great seriousness like a priest.

  SPLEEN

  Jean-Michel has a long scar that extends from his chest to his stomach. When he was eight years old he was hit by a car and had to have his spleen removed. At the hospital, his mother, Matilde, brought him Gray’s Anatomy to read. He memorized the whole book: tibia, femur, aorta, oral cavity, pharynx, digital nerve, optic chiasm …

  At the hospital, Matilde touched her son’s scar. “The doctors say you can live without a spleen. The spleen is an archaic organ.”

  Jean-Michel adores Matilde, who lives in an asylum outside New York City. Her illness began when Jean-Michel was a young teenager. She would sit for hours and try to imitate the whistling of birds. She got rid of everything in the house that could break.

  Jean-Michel visits his mother once a month. He takes his drawings and paintings to show her. Matilde looks at them and says, “You are moving very fast.”

  Jean was particularly close to his youngest sister, Jeanine.

  Jeanine was very sweet and naive and dressed in white frilly blouses and tartan skirts. Jean’s father didn’t want Jean to give the girl any money. But when Jeanine came over, Jean would hide one-hundred-dollar bills in the pages of books and give the books to Jeanine as presents.

  I was never invited by Jean’s father to go to his home, even though I was one of the closest people to Jean. He never expressed an interest in getting to know me. I was always polite and respectful toward Gerard but he always gave me that feeling that I was a one-night stand or a casual girlfriend.

  Jean told me that when he was about fourteen the family moved to Puerto Rico. Jean ran away and lived with a disc jockey who worked for a local radio station and he told me that this was his first homosexual relationship. He lived in Puerto Rico for about two years and spoke good Spanish. Soon after they moved back to Brooklyn Jean left home for good. He told me he lived on benches in Washington Square Park and on friends’ couches.

  TU ERES BLANCA COMO EL ARROZ

  Some days Jean-Michel wakes up in the morning and can only speak in Spanish: Sí. Sí. Leche. Arroz. El niño come platanos. La niña tiene canicas. Tu eres blanca como el arroz. Mi nombre es Juan.

  Some days Jean would wake up and just speak Spanish. I understood very little. He’d go on and on for hours conjuring up everything he could remember like a song in his head. The presence of his mother was with him and he was with her in the words.

  FIRST SALE

  Suzanne loves polka dots. She is dressed in a wide polka-dot skirt. She and Jean-Michel do a couple of lines of coke and go to the Mudd Club, Tier 3, Club 57, Studio 54, the Roxy or the Continental. Jean-Michel is dressed in big, baggy pants with paint all over them and a big T-shirt and shoes that are way too big. Sometimes they go out and see the Contortions (who later become Jones White and the Blacks), the Lounge Lizards, DNA, Arto Lindsay or Kid Creole and the Coconuts.

  Jean-Michel sells his first painting to Deborah Harry from Blondie for two hundred dollars and spends the money on one expensive dinner with Suzanne. He leaves a fifty-dollar tip.

  When he could, he always left enormous tips. He loved to shock, even shock with generosity. It was like punching someone.

  LOLLIPOP GIRLS

  Suzanne is waitressing at the Binibon restaurant. One Friday night she comes home and finds Jean-Michel doing coke with three white girls dressed up in ’40s dresses, false eyelashes and high heels, and looking like fluttering dragonflies.

  “We’re celebrating,” Jean-Michel says. The girls giggle. “Annina Nosei is going to represent me.” He picks up a knife off of the kitchen table and carves an “S” into Suzanne’s wood floor.

  “We are going to be rich just like I told you,” Jean-Michel says, laughing. The girls laugh also. Suzanne takes her waitressing tips out of her pocket and throws them at Jean-Michel.

  “Here,” she says. “Get some more coke for you and the girls.”

  Jean-Michel leaves the apartment with the three lollipop girls skipping behind him and doesn’t return for three days. Later someone tells Suzanne that Jean-Michel was seen at the Mudd Club with a Puerto Rican boy.

  When I first moved to New York I was a cigarette girl at the Ritz. Even when I left this job I kept my red wooden cigarette box. One day Jean found it and, thinking it was just a piece of wood or something, he did a painting on it. He painted a face with a crown and the word “AARON” on it. I was very angry at the time. But I later sold it to Annina Nosei for one thousand dollars.

  BACK TO CANADA

  Too much furniture. Nowhere to move without poking your thigh or hip into a pointed corner of some table, counter or chair. There is some room to sit on the stairs around the piles of magazines and un-ironed clothes.

  Suzanne’s mother tries on Suzanne’s Jackie O sunglasses. “These are nice, Suzy,” her mother says. Her mother gets up and walks to the kitchen counter. She takes out five dollars from a box of crackers.

  “Here, I’ve been saving these for you,” she says, handing the money to Suzanne. “Nobody likes crackers in this house, so they were safe,” she laughs.

  “You know,” she continues, “I still think of you as an ice-skater. You could still do it, you know. Can I keep these sunglasses?”

  “Not this time, Mother,” Suzanne says. “Jean-Michel likes them a lot and I bought them at a thrift shop.”
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  “I understand, Suzy,” her mother says. “Nothing is for keeps, though, remember that.”

  BINIBON RESTAURANT

  While Suzanne is in Canada, the boy who is covering her waitressing shifts at Binibon is killed with a knife by Jack Henry Abbott, the man Norman Mailer wrote about in The Belly of the Beast. This man has been living in the halfway houses near the Bowery.

  Jean-Michel sees the white, larvae-white paint, the outline of the body drawn by police on the sidewalk.

  It takes twenty minutes and forty-two seconds for Jean-Michel to run home and call Suzanne in Canada. “Come home,” he cries. “It could have been you.”

  On the airplane back to New York Suzanne knows that her mother has stolen her sunglasses.

  LESSONS ON HOW TO BE A WOMAN

  Jean-Michel gets ahold of a big piece of opium. He smokes it with Suzanne but decides that the best way to do the drug is to put it in the refrigerator, break off small pieces, roll it into a ball and stick it up their rectums. So this is what they do. They lie naked on the floor for days.

  One morning Jean-Michel says that an art critic is going to come over and interview him. There is a knock and Jean-Michel, who is naked, answers the door.

  Rene Ricard enters the apartment. He says, “Not only are you the greatest artist I have ever seen, you have the most beautiful penis I have ever seen.” After this meeting, Ricard wrote the “Radiant Child” article for Artforum.

  Ricard hires Suzanne as his secretary to transcribe his poetry. Suzanne tells him that she is the girl that used to call him up.

  He says, “Of course you were.”

  Rene Ricard writes on matchbooks, wrappers and bits of toilet paper. Every week he gives these scraps to Suzanne in a plastic ziplock bag. He tells her to type everything on a page in any order.

  Rene Ricard teaches Suzanne how to behave on the street, how to behave with the young black and Puerto Rican boys and the “stickup” kids. Suzanne and Ricard have the same taste in men and he teaches her how to have them in her house and not get robbed. He teaches her how to move and what to say and what not to say. He tells her never to allow them to bring their guns into the bedroom and, if something goes wrong, her best defense is to act as vulnerable, weak and passive as she can. He says never to act tough like a black girl or they will kill her in a minute.

  Rene Ricard says he is going to teach Suzanne how to be feminine, how to be a star. He explains that when she walks into a party, club or art opening, she must never look at anyone but fix her eyes on a point across the room and walk toward it. Above all, though, he tells her to study drag queens because only they know how to act like women.

  DOWNTOWN SOCIETY

  They dress in long black waistcoats and walk down 3rd Avenue carrying black and silver walking sticks. At night they wear a top hat. They carry their cigarettes in thin silver cigarette cases. They live without electricity and only use candlelight. They have no appliances or even a telephone. Sometimes they perform songs at the new, hip restaurants in Alphabet City and places like Evelyn’s. They sing “Tea for Two” and “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” in an a cappella harmony. They also paint paintings from a specific time period in the manner of a particular artist and sign them “McDermott and McGough,” followed by the appropriate date: 1789, 1899, 1942, etc.

  Vicky is a little frail girl who stutters when she speaks. She deals heroin on 1st Street. She has read everything and can quote Dostoyevsky.

  Lili Dones designs menus for restaurants in the East Village as well as eccentric greeting cards. She wears Marilyn Monroe dresses. Her uncle shot himself in the bathroom after they left Cuba. She can always hear it in her head. She still smells like sugarcane.

  Hal Ludacer is more beautiful than Greta Garbo.

  Patti Astor is Fab 5 Freddy’s girlfriend. She wears the highest stiletto heels in town.

  Alba Clemente was an avant-garde performance artist in Italy. She is more elegant and exotic than anyone else.

  Maripol is a jewelry designer and looks like Coco Chanel. She creates the black rubber ring bracelets that everyone wears.

  Z. was a prostitute in Japan.

  Edit DeAk is older than everyone. She is Hungarian. Everyone hangs out in her loft on Wooster Street. She says she once communicated with a panther in a Hungarian zoo.

  Tina Chow has the longest, skinniest arms.

  Fab 5 Freddy is a good kisser.

  Lady Pink is the only female graffiti artist. She spray-paints kittens.

  I cannot remember everyone on the scene. Jean always boasted that he had slept with them all. I knew he was lying.

  FROM SATURDAY TO MONDAY

  Jean-Michel listens to jazz. He listens to Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach, hip-hop, blues and Latin and African music. One day he finds out that Billie Holiday does not have a gravestone on her grave and he can think of nothing else.

  He calls Diego Cortez. Cortez is one of Jean-Michel and Suzanne’s first friends. He is an art curator and dealer who knows everything about the club scene and the art world. He is always impeccably dressed with a European air of elegance about him. Jean-Michel and Suzanne adore him. Jean-Michel says he is a “queen—but you would never know it.”

  From Saturday to Monday Jean-Michel and Diego Cortez spend hours designing Billie Holiday’s gravestone. Every day Suzanne is sent out to buy them coke.

  “Boom for real!” Jean-Michel says when they finish.

  Jean-Michel says his paintings are jazz on canvas. He makes his own music also.

  One day he buys himself a TEAC reel-to-reel recording machine and composes experimental, improvised music and poetry. He makes tape loops that he then records one over the other as if they were musical instruments. He does this a lot with Michael Holman and Nick Taylor.

  At four o’clock Jean-Michel calls the suicide hotline and has a conversation with the man on the other end of the line. Jean-Michel says, “Hijacked Marlboros” and “You won’t be so arrogant once the police arrive” and “It’s gone soft.” The man at the suicide hotline is convinced that Jean-Michel has stolen a truck of Marlboro cigarettes and feels guilty and wants to commit suicide. The man says, “What’s gone soft?” Jean-Michel says, “You won’t be so arrogant once the police arrive.” The man says, “I’m not being arrogant.” The conversation goes back and forth. Jean-Michel makes a recording of this that he later uses with music.

  I loved Diego Cortez. He was very funny. He called me Jean’s muse. We were good friends. It was Diego who arranged Jean’s first group show called New York/New Wave at a PS1 space in Long Island City. Throughout Jean’s career Diego got a lot of important people interested in Jean’s work. Without Diego, Jean might never have become famous.

  ONLY FOOD

  “I love the way you walk, Suzanne. Like you lead with your pelvis with your back slanted and long steps,” Jean-Michel says. He imitates her walking back and forth in the kitchen.

  He never buys her presents or clothes. Only food. Whenever he is happy he brings her all kinds of Italian cakes and pastries. She has eaten profiteroles, petits fours, éclairs, Japanese jellies, meringues and marzipan. Sometimes the refrigerator is completely filled with these packages wrapped in paper and string.

  I don’t know why Jean bought me pastries all the time. It was really very funny. I think he thought it was something that rich people did. When he did not have money and could not afford the pastries, he would buy me bags of white and pink marshmallows.

  HOW TO DRAW

  Jean-Michel never reads. He picks up books on mythology, history and anatomy, comic books or newspapers. He looks for the words that attack him and puts them on the canvas. He listens for things Suzanne says and writes them on his drawings. He listens to the television.

  One day he says, “Suzanne, I’m almost a famous artist now and I don’t know how to draw. Do you think I should be concerned?”

  She says, “Well, just teach yourself and there will be no problem.”

  Later that day Je
an-Michel comes back with seven “How to Draw” books—How to Draw Horses, How to Draw Flowers, How to Draw Landscapes, etc. This was all tongue-in-cheek. He thought the books were hilarious and did several paintings where he copied the drawings.

  Jean always did drugs, he never stopped. Whenever he went to Europe or Japan or any new place you could count on it that in a couple of hours upon arriving he knew where to buy what he wanted. It was like he had a radar for it. Once when he came to Canada to get me, within five minutes he was off on my brother’s motorcycle buying drugs.

  His other major interest was girls, women. He loved women. He loved sex. He always had a lot of women. The only time he was faithful to me was the first few months that I lived at the Crosby loft. He had many small relationships with many different women. He would become bored quickly, though. That’s why I always had a problem knowing if I was really special to him. I still sometimes don’t know. Other people tell me I was. He once told me that the only women he had ever loved were me and Jennifer Goode.