Everyone is Watching (13 page)

Here is the original storefront for the Peep-O-Rama and an example of the viewing booth – put a quarter in the slot and watch the fairground ride. All Edmund sees are time restrictions and
imitative art. He sees the inconvenience and the disappointment that comes from watching images shown in a booth, how the imagination cannot replace what should really be there – the touch of
a real body or the smell of the streets. He remembers ordering the men who were imperfect. And so the city was the same, that filthy place, which didn’t work. What is it now? A historical
exhibition of a cleaned-out place.

The residents of East Tremont in the Bronx are going about their daily business in 1950. Pedestrians can barely move down the teeming sidewalks for they are filled with people
coming in and out of the tenements, entering and exiting the stores. The tenement blocks are full. People are hanging out of windows, watching the passing day. The grocery stores and butcher shops
are thriving. The tailors and delis are full. The roads are jammed with trucks, cars and wagons. Everybody knows everybody here. You can’t walk ten yards without knocking into someone you
know. This person is a second cousin of this person. This person is related to you by marriage. You grew up with this fellow, sat next to him in school, lived in the apartment above that one.
People are watching the street through windows, from stoops, store doorways, barber chairs, bar stools, grocery stoops. Kids are playing in the streets. They play stickball, jump rope, play for
penny games, tag, pram pushing, kicking cans, baseball. The kids are ragged and loud. A woman in a third-floor apartment yells down to the kids on the street. The weather is unseasonably hot. The
women bring out chairs onto the street and they sit down, cross one foot over the other and lean back. These moments. Stillness in the busy street. Women return home with groceries. Now there are
other jobs to do. It is all right; the kids are being watched by the neighbours. The kids play in the alleyways and under the storefront awnings, in the shade, swipe an apple or two from the grocer
and run. When the men return from work in the evening they sit out on the stoops.

One day in December in 1952, 1,530 households along a one-mile stretch of East Tremont receive a letter from Commissioner Moses telling them they have ninety days to move.

Ninety days?

What is this? What is this you’re telling me?

They want us to move?

Move where?

What money do we have for this?

I was born here. So were my children.

Ninety days?

I’m not going anywhere.

You must be joking.

Move from this place? No way in hell.

The residents form a neighbourhood alliance. They protest. They petition the mayor. They gain the support of the mayor and the elected borough officials. The residents are told not to worry.
This issue will be cleared up soon. It will be sorted out. Don’t worry about it. Just go on with your ordinary lives, they say.

But they don’t know Robert Moses.

The residents are eventually shipped out. Generations of families, neighbours, businesses. 1,530 households are packed up, moved on. In come the engineers, the construction workers, and the
bulldozers. The buildings are razed. The land is cleared.

Robert Moses and his army watch the protestors light a bonfire in the street. One of the men points to a figure being hoisted high and thrown into the flames.

Hey, Bob, is that you?

The figure is ablaze.

Why, so it is, says Moses. Quite a likeness, he laughs.

A mother, father and five children are sitting in one room of a tenement, a single bed to one side of the room and a cot in the centre. The father is perched on a wooden crate
and holding onto the cot. The flash has rendered the family pale, their skin white and glaring, blank. Coats, clothes are hung up in the back room, every shelf stuffed with pots and pans and
equipment, the floor swept but not clean.

Seven men are crammed into a tenement room, two men resting upon a dirty mattress, raised upon a mezzanine. One man is sitting up and leaning forward, the other lying flat on
his back. Both pairs of feet are bare and dirty. Boots and socks stand upon the floor before three other men trying to sleep covered over with blankets and sheets. The rest of the room is filled
with trunks and boxes. The camera flash reveals the dirty marks on the walls and ceiling.

One boy is riding on the back of another in a playground. The children in the background are climbing up and down ladders that are secured over a single climbing beam. Beyond
the playground is a tenement building. Some of the curtain blinds are drawn, some are open. The boy hanging on the older boy’s back is looking at the camera.

A crowd is huddling on the street in winter before a burnt-out tenement building that is covered with ice. A hose lies on the ground in front of them. Some of the icicles
hanging from the ledges of glassless windows are feet-long. From the viewpoint of a dark alleyway, the building, covered as it is in ice, is white and bright, cleaner than the crowd standing on the
sidewalk, brighter than the filthy alley walls.

I have told you about the photographs I have had taken, how Eakins has captured my image and how I remain there still on paper. Mathew Brady also took my photograph. He
photographed many other important men. He took photographs of soldiers in the war, those who were living and those who were dead. He photographed the battlefields. He wants people to be able to see
history with their own eyes rather than rely on the subjective words of others. He wants his photographs to create an accurate history. His photographs mean these men will never be forgotten.

I have my own memories of this time. I don’t know if they are as reliable. When I went to look for my brother the men did not look me in the eye and I was glad of it. I picked a path
through them. I asked a nurse where my brother was. Brother? she said. Darkness was falling. I listened to the men as they moaned. I could not write about this stubby hill, this nightfall. I could
not move. Lucky are we who live so internally – the guns can never get us, I thought. I had possibly lost a brother. The rest of the men will fall like dominoes. At the surgeon’s tent I
found the doctor. His face was as grey as the bed sheets. Do you know where my brother is? I asked. There he was on the bed in the corner of the tent. George was not dead. George was alive and
lying in the bed. He was not so greatly changed. There was only a scar on his cheek that would heal very soon. I felt at the time we had been saved. I realize now that death had only been delayed
for it will come to us all in time.

The tents lined up for nearly a mile – the battle had not gone well – you could see it in the faces of the dying men and in the bloody limbs scattered across the ground, in the tears
in the flesh, white fat, blue veins, blue skin, fingers and arms. The outcome could be read in the flesh. The limbs at the top of the piles were fresh and pink. Some feet retained boots, too rotten
to remove, though the rings had been pulled from all the fingers. I watched the soldiers sleeping. I watched death take them. Often, there were things they wanted to be known before they died. They
asked me to write their letters. I resisted the urge to add flourishes of phrasing, even though the letters would have been greatly improved by this. I wanted their letters to be authentic. When
the writing was done I read the letters back and felt satisfied to read someone else’s words written in my own hand. But war is not something you can describe, Bucke. You cannot do it with
words or images. When we look back at something, we look back as if through a gauze. The only truth is that of the present moment.

It starts as a way to get good at something. Lisa Lyon goes for the weights the other women don’t look at. Everyone watches when she lifts those bells, her hands and her
arms held high in the air. She is breathtaking. On the beach, in the sun, she wears a bikini. The definition of her muscle punctuates her body, which is not mammoth, though it is very large and
strong, and dazzling in the sunlight as she lifts the bells.

Lisa is more interesting than the male bodybuilders because she is something unexpected. She makes people look twice, once at her body, and once again, looking for the reason
why. They never find the answer. They never get past the body.

The way she sees it is that, if you’re talking about some kind of animal, a cat, a wild cat, a lion, for example, if you’re talking about a lion and you see the
lion running across the plain as it chases the antelope, you don’t say, look at that female lion or look at that male lion, you say, look at that animal. Lisa says there should be no gender
distinctions. We should exist only in terms of physical form.

When Robert Mapplethorpe sees Lisa for the first time, he cannot get over the way she looks. He says to a friend it’s a shame about the scar on her face. She would have
been perfect if it wasn’t for the scar.

What scar? the friend says.

When she comes out of the bathroom, Robert sees that she has no scar at all. The black mark on her face was just ash from her cigarette. When they meet they laugh about this.

In the chill of the city, Lisa scurries over to Robert’s studio in the heavy coat Robert bought for her and the jewellery she spent her savings on – crashing
against her chest as she walks, slamming into muscle. Covered up like this, she feels unusual, but once she gets out of the cold and into his studio, she reveals herself like a superhero. She holds
herself perfectly still, her biceps flexed and taut, one leg straight, the other bent, her arm in the air, just one arm, just one bicep, the angular line of her buttocks, the square jaw, the tiny
nose, small eyes, solid stomach, fully-formed thighs. Robert, his assistant and the woman who sorts his bills stand there looking at her. There are no more photographs yet she continues to
flex.

Robert sees in Lisa the same thing she sees. They are both interested in form. Together, they come up with a plan. Lisa is dressed up in all the things she can be: natural and
made up, as a hero and a victim, in high heels and stockings, in all the things that are sexy: as Eve, as a bride, as a man. They get carried away. They are like children. They go everywhere
together. She is a good replacement for Patti, but she does not want to possess him. She is all the male parts he isn’t and he’s all the slyness and the cunning she is not. Together
they form one whole person. It is not like it is with Patti Smith, who is all art and intellect. No, this is about bodies and form. Lisa looks at the photographs, all the women she can be. But she
is always Lisa.

They make a book together. It is called
Lady, Lisa Lyon
. They drive out to the desert, just Lisa and Robert. As they are passing through small-town America she looks
over at Robert who has fallen asleep against the glass. His hair is long and curly. He is like her beautiful girlfriend. She strokes the side of his face. She catches her arm in the rearview mirror
and is taken off-guard by the ripple of muscle. This is the body she knows better than any other yet it still takes her by surprise.

Lisa stands on the desert rock. It is already midday. The sun is scorching. Robert is distracted. Robert is getting it all wrong. She can tell by the way he is frowning and
getting her to do the same poses over and over. She doesn’t tell him that the angle of light is incorrect. Oh no, she doesn’t say a thing.

Lying in the motel room Lisa listens to Robert throwing up in the bathroom. He is ill. But they are here, the two of them, in this motel, so far away from New York.

Can I get you anything? she calls out. Don’t you want something to eat?

He stumbles out. He switches off all the lights. The smell of vomit wafts over her. He goes to the window and looks out. In the orange light he looks so young. He doesn’t seem to know
where he is.

What are you looking at? she says.

He blinks.

She holds out her hand. He lies down next to her. She pulls him in. His skinny body is cold and clammy against her sunburnt chest. She rubs him better. He snaps awake like someone has flicked a
switch, and then they are fucking.

As a child, Lisa had nightmares. As she grew up she used the physical pursuit of excellence to help her sleep at night. Sometimes she writes poetry. Other times she dances.

Robert, are you coming to bed?

But he is in the bathroom and he doesn’t want to come out. She wants to say to him that the longer he leaves it the worse it will be, putting off sleep, putting off dreaming, but he
doesn’t like to sleep. When he does, he sleeps all day, the lamplight in his studio is his own private moon.

They have sex in a motel room. The cheap, fascinating glow of the neon sign makes Lisa think of microwave ovens, extraterrestrial life, California. What sex always does –
confuses reality with fiction. She holds him in her strong arms. He is so cold but she is warm because of the desert sun – she thinks, we are like sleeping lions in Africa and nothing can
hurt us.

In the studio Robert positions the lights so that they focus on the centre of Lisa’s torso. She rolls her shoulders forward and tenses the muscles in her shoulders and
her chest. She clasps her hands together. She holds the tension. She holds her face still. She pouts for him. It is all about the contrast between the beauty of her face and the strength of her
body. It is all about how both of these things are the same. She holds it there, all of herself, in this position, and lets him take his picture.

Lisa and Robert go out together all the time. They have such fun. They are the same person. She doesn’t mind the way he shows her off. She doesn’t mind flexing her
muscles for strangers.

Lisa frets about the pictures. She worries what they will show. She worries what Robert will see in them. Lisa looks at the photographs. They are very beautiful but this is not
the life she hoped to see – it is a life she already knows, frozen in a frame. She sees form and she sees structure but nothing of what is inside. The shot of her body with the muscles pulled
taut has been cropped at the neck. Robert says he will name her in the title but there will be no face. We do not need to see your face, he says. It’s all about the body.