Widow Basquiat (11 page)

Suzanne leaves the club and goes to the Great Jones loft. It is two in the morning. She rings and rings the doorbell and finally Jean-Michel answers.

“Oh, thank God it is you, Suzanne,” he says.

Jean-Michel is wearing olive green silk pajamas. He looks a mess.

“Let me give you a bath, Jean,” Suzanne says.

Suzanne washes his body, washes his hair, shaves his face and coos over him as if he were a small child.

Jean-Michel laughs and says, “Imagine, Venus, my best friend is the whitest guy I could find. He is a fucking albino. What do you think of that? What do you think that means?”

“Andy loves you and he is a genius,” Suzanne says.

“I know you’re wondering if I have had sex with Andy. Well, I’m not going to tell you.”

Jean-Michel is dope-sick. He is shaking and feeling nauseous. Suzanne pats him dry.

“I don’t care who you sleep with, Jean,” Suzanne sighs.

Jean-Michel tells her to go and get some dope out of the refrigerator. They snort some heroin and go to bed. Jean-Michel sucks Suzanne’s fingers. He tells her they taste like rum.

I wanted to make Jean jealous. He was very competitive with other artists like Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Enzo Cucchi. He was friends with all of them but very competitive.

I saw Francesco Clemente in a nightclub one night. We didn’t really know each other. I was very bold. I went right up to him and said, “I want you to paint my portrait. I have no money to pay you, but I will pose for you. And I’ll do it with my clothes on.” He looked me up and down and said, “Okay, be at my studio at eleven on Monday morning.”

I went to his studio and we worked together all day for about two weeks. He painted about five large paintings of me. Some
were very surreal. He wanted me to stand in the same position for hours at a time while the sun moved across the windows of his loft on Broadway. He would paint all the colors of the sun changing at different positions in the sky as it was reflected through the windows. My body became very stiff from standing still for so long in one position but he insisted and said it was my idea so I must do it.

At that time he only had the two little girls with his wife, Alba. They were very young. The little one was about two or three. They used to run in and out of the studio while he was painting but were always called away by the maid or by Alba. We would always break for lunch and have a large bowl of pasta.

While Francesco painted he would tell me about India, where he spent half of the year. He told me what it looked like and smelled like and how beautiful it was. He loved India. This is how he entertained me, by talking about India. Soon all these stories ran out and I became bored. So I told him he must pay me for posing for him. He said, “How much would you like? How much do you make as a waitress in one day?” I told him on a good day I made one hundred dollars. So this is what he gave me. And Alba gave me a beautiful pair of leather gloves with fur inside. It was wintertime and I had no money to buy gloves. I liked Alba very much. She was one of the most beautiful and elegant women I had ever known.

Anyway, at the time that Francesco did these paintings of me a show was being arranged at the Bruno Bischofberger Gallery of
collaborations among Jean, Francesco and Andy. A few paintings of me were used in this collaboration. I later found out while having dinner with Andy and Jean that Jean was very jealous and did not know what to paint on the one painting of me by Francesco. So Andy told him to paint fire, which he did. Then Andy said to Jean, “Should we tell her?” Jean became very serious and said, “No, don’t tell her.” I said, “Tell me, tell me.”

Then Andy said, “When Francesco was in India and the other paintings of you were locked up in his loft one of them caught fire and they all burned up. Nothing else in the loft was harmed and no one knows how it happened since there was nothing around that could have started the fire.”

The fire happened the same day that Jean painted fire on the collaboration painting at Andy’s Factory. Jean was furious that Andy told me. Then Andy said that they named this collaborative painting—the one Jean painted fire on
—Premonition.

Jean yelled, “Why did you tell her! Now she will know she is cursed and it is better not to know.”

That night I went home with Jean. I was asleep while he was painting and drawing. He woke me up and seemed very anxious.

“Who is a better painter, me or Francesco?” he asked.

I said, “Leave me alone. I don’t want to answer that question.”

But Jean was very persistent. I was secretly happy that he was jealous. So I answered, not really believing it at all, “Of course Francesco is a better painter.”

He was not angry. He became very curious. “Why?” he asked. “Why is Francesco a better painter?”

And I said, “Because you paint about objects and people in the world. He paints about spirituality.”

Then Jean said nothing else and I went back to sleep.

Later he woke me up again. He was very anxious and presented me with a drawing he had just done and asked, “Is this spiritual enough for you?”

It was a drawing of me sleeping with a snake floating above my head. Now he was laughing.

Jean-Michel is always talking about having a boxing match with Julian Schnabel. He wants to sell tickets to the match. He wants to invite everyone and put posters all over New York. He wants people to place bets. He says he is going to wear an African loincloth instead of shorts and that throwing paint at each other is allowed.

This never happens.

When Jean-Michel and Andy Warhol do a collaboration at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery they make a poster announcing the show. The poster is of Jean-Michel and Andy Warhol dressed in boxing trunks and having a boxing match.

Jean-Michel loves to see artists as athletes. He thinks it is a wonderful joke. On some of his paintings he writes: FAMOUS NEGRO ATHLETES.

When Suzanne needs money she calls up Jennifer and they go to the Great Jones loft. They stand outside on the sidewalk waiting for Shenge. Shenge opens the door.

“Hello, girls,” he says. “Do you need some money? Come back later when Jean leaves.”

The girls walk around SoHo. Sit on a park bench and wait. A few hours later they return. Shenge opens the door. He takes one-hundred-dollar bills out of Jean-Michel’s shoes, from under the sofa and from inside the stove. The loft is full of hidden money.

“There, girls,” Shenge says. “Go pay your rent, hum, um, um.”

Suzanne picks up Jennifer in a taxi. Suzanne is wearing an enormous black hat—as big as an umbrella—and black gloves.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Suzanne says, pulling at her gloves. “I am so scared. I haven’t seen Jean for two months. He’ll be furious that I came. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Let’s go.”

The gallery is packed with at least two hundred people. The crowd spills over into the street. Limousines are lined up for blocks and blocks. Jean-Michel sees Suzanne immediately. Her hat can poke people. She won’t take it off.

He takes Suzanne and Jennifer to the back of the gallery. He says, “You two have to stay here and don’t come out.”

At the back of the gallery is a little corner that is separated from everyone else by a rope. Jean-Michel’s mother is sitting there staring straight ahead of her with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Every few seconds she opens her mouth wide like a fish and closes it. Suzanne and Jennifer sit beside her and greet her but she does not answer but only nods and nods. The three women sit side by side very properly and
quietly watching the opening from behind the rope. They could be on a train, at the movies, or at church.

Everybody in the art scene was there. I had gone with Jennifer, and Jean made us sit in a corner in a roped-off area with his mother. We sat there in a row on three little chairs and occasionally waved at someone we knew. I actually did not mind this because I was so astounded to meet his mother and see her for the first time. I tried to greet her and speak to her but she was so obviously drugged up and could not communicate at all. I wanted to tell her that I loved her son and that I knew everything that she had done to make him a great painter. I wanted to tell her that I knew he loved her. But I could not say anything to her at all. So, at one point, I just reached over and held her hand and she let me.

The girl goes to Pearl. She buys oil paint, acrylic paint and paint sticks. “I can do this too.” She buys canvas and staples. “I can do this too.” On the way home she buys a bag of dope. She puts the bag deep inside her hair.

Suzanne staples the canvas to the walls of her apartment. She paints portraits of Jean, Joan Burroughs with an apple on her head, and famous white people in blackface.

She walks around the East Village with paint all over her clothes. When she waits on tables she has paint all over her hands. She tells the customers at the restaurant. “My hands are clean. This is only paint. I am a painter.” She pulls up her sleeves and shows them how the paint reaches up to her elbows.

Her house smells of paint. It smells like her father, like her home. It smells like Jean-Michel. She breathes and the fumes that come out of her turn her cigarette smoke red.

My paintings represented a creative catharsis of my relationship with Jean. I painted white famous people in blackface with red lips, like George Washington on a dollar bill or the American
Express man. I painted Malcolm X and boxers. I went to my opening at the Vox Populi Gallery on 6th Street in a limousine and an outfit by Andre Walker. He made me a red, white, blue and black dress. A lot of the paintings were in these colors and in gold. I looked like the paintings. I also was wearing a big black velvet turban and black elbow-length gloves. It was really a performance piece. I painted Jean on the cover of
The New York Times Magazine
in whiteface. Five collectors fought over it. After the opening it sold for three thousand five hundred dollars.

I had a big party afterwards at Mike’s American Bar and Grill. Everyone came except Jean. My opening was on a Saturday night. Maripol came to the dinner and she brought
The New York Times Magazine
with Jean on the cover that came out that same night. This enraged me for some reason. So I left the party in my limousine to look for Jean. I found him at Area but he would not go back to the party with me. So I went back alone.

Jean and Andy went to see my art show the next day. I heard that they were both very quiet while they looked at everything. They did not make fun of me or laugh at my work, which was strange.

Later Jean said to me, “You are no fool, Venus.” He said he liked the portraits I had done of him because they laughed at him.

After this I could never paint again. I sold all the paintings except the one of Joan Burroughs, which I gave to Jennifer, and I kept three of Jean’s portraits because he said he wanted them. He told me he would buy them but I said that I would give them to him, of course. But, somehow, I never got them to him.

1. When Jennifer visits Suzanne one Sunday afternoon she finds a bag lady sitting in Suzanne’s kitchen. The woman is dressed in rags and is covered with scratches, bruises and sores. The woman smells like excrement and sulfur.

“Poor dear,” Suzanne says. She is boiling two huge pots of water. She places the bag lady’s oozing, bloody feet inside the pots.

Suzanne says, “There, there. It might hurt at first.”

The bag lady cries, “Ooooooh me!”

Suzanne scrubs the woman’s feet with soap and then swabs them with alcohol.

“We need some fresh socks,” Suzanne says. She tells Jennifer to take off her socks and give them to the lady.

Jennifer takes off her socks. Suzanne carefully puts them on the bag lady as if the woman were a small child.

“There, there,” Suzanne says. “These will keep you warm.”

The bag lady says, “Ooooooooh me!”

2. Suzanne goes to Houston Street to buy some heroin. Outside the crack and heroin house two of the drug dealer’s small girls are playing jump rope with an old, frayed piece of rope.

Suzanne says to them, “My God, little ladies, my God!”

She takes a taxi to F.A.O. Schwarz and buys a bright, rainbow-colored jump rope. She takes another taxi back to Houston Street and gives the girls the new jump rope.

3. Suzanne is walking down 1st Street toward her apartment. Two Puerto Rican boys are beating up on another very young black or Puerto Rican boy. Suzanne says, “Hey, boys, stop it.”

The boys tell her to mind her own business.

“If you stop it I’ll give you each a kiss,” she answers.

The boys pause, laugh and say okay.

Suzanne gives each of them a kiss.

4. It is 4 a.m. It is winter. Suzanne is walking home from waitressing a late-night shift. Her tips are distributed in her hair, socks and inside the pockets of her jeans.

She sees an old man asleep in a doorway. She can see that he is shivering and trembling from the cold. She takes off her winter coat, covers the man with it and runs all the way home in only her lightweight dress.

For two weeks she goes to work wrapped in a red and blue flannel blanket.

5. One day Suzanne goes to the Great Jones loft. Shenge is not there and Jean-Michel opens the door.

He says, “Shit! I have thirty-thousand-dollar checks, forty-thousand-dollar checks, ten-thousand-dollar checks. Checks and checks and Shenge isn’t here to go to the bank!”

Suzanne says, “I’ll go to the bank, Jean.”

She goes to the bank and cashes some of the checks. She puts the money into her blouse.

When she gets back to the loft she gives Jean all the money. He takes some and tells Suzanne to put the rest inside the oven.