He paused nervously. Then he summoned the masculine chill I later learned could conceal vast reservoirs of fail.
“My friend’s band is playing a show next month,” he told me. “I thought we could sell it on a card table afterward.”
At that moment, I realized any hope that book might have would be up to John and me.
I started a death campaign to sell out the small print run. I set up a launch party, then a signing at Bluestockings, the Manhattan feminist bookstore. I took the Chinatown bus to Boston with a backpack of books, walking in the snow from comics shop to comics shop. I begged for interviews. I sold copies off barstools after my burlesque gigs. I held my head up and grinned hard and pretended that I was scrappy and that this was fun, but in my heart I believed that if I was any good, I would have a real publisher that took care of this for me.
John attended signings and made cocktails, but selling the book took over my life. I begged him to work hard with me, but John was in Baron von Fullovit mode, busy trying on the new bespoke suits his wealthy boyfriend gave him.
One night, after a signing, I asked John to do some more book drudgery. He stormed out. The next day, he emailed me to explain himself. “You have really got to stop resenting people who aren’t as productive as you,” he wrote. “Do beware of ‘life is permanent warfare,’ as Umberto Eco said. It will stunt your work.”
It was a while before we spoke again.
Cosette was another model for the SuicideGirls who quit in the fall of 2005. She was a stunning, muscular woman with ice-colored hair twisted into spikes—a tanned punk Barbie who looked like she could punch. Unlike me, Cosette had few political motives for leaving SuicideGirls; she just thought it was a good time to go.
In early 2006, Cosette and I agreed to meet in person at the opening of an underground gallery. Amid the chopped-up robo-chicks and paintings done in the artist’s blood, I recognized her at once. We were both shrink-wrapped in black, our portfolios in our hands, hustling as hard as we could to force the curator to acknowledge our existence. We were two sex worker shards washed up on the art world’s shores, and everyone legit was trying to kick us back out to sea.
“Molly!” “Cosette!” we cried, hugging each other and pawing through each other’s portfolios. I’d made mine myself on my living room floor; its corners were bent, and there were thumbprints on several reproductions of my drawings. Hers was expensively printed. The first image was a painting of a lily, running with perfectly rendered drops of blood.
“You’re amazing,” I told her sincerely. “I usually hate it when people I like say they’re artists, because they’re always awful but I have to lie to them and say they’re good.”
“I know what you mean. I hate people who can’t paint and front like they can. I busted my ass for this. I stripped all through art school. All I want to do is paint.”
I stared into her eyes. They were cold blue, framed with swoops of liner. She had high cheekbones, full lips with dimples at the corners, and acne-scarred skin she covered with thick foundation.
“We’re so alike,” I marveled.
“Um, sure . . .” she said, looking away.
Cosette spoke with a South Philly rasp, tough and warm. She’d run away from home as a teenager, dancing in peep shows, squatting, getting tattooed, begging for change on Saint Mark’s Place with the crustpunks I used to worship. By the time she was nineteen, she was showing at galleries. Cosette was built like a cartoon sex symbol: a stylized figure eight that makes the wolf scream va-va-VOOM. When she danced she was Pam Anderson–perfect, as long as she hid her tattoos beneath her gloves. After Giuliani closed half of New York’s strip clubs, the remainder became as competitive as the Bolshoi, but she could still net a thousand bucks a night.
Cosette always fell for the worst guys—including one who had a tattoo of a woman with two black eyes, in front of crossbones, over the legend “You already told her twice.” During art school, an abusive boyfriend stole her money, she ended up back in Philadelphia, showing oil paintings in upscale galleries, oil wrestling for money at bars. At twenty-four, she bought a dilapidated house.
Cosette borrowed her aesthetic from 1992. She wore platforms and PVC miniskirts showing off her dancer’s legs. Her best friends were dealers, tattoo artists, and party promoters with cerise dreads who hired her to go-go dance at their raves. Between the drugs and the men, she lived in chaos, but her art was her ballast. No matter how wrecked Cosette got, she staggered to her easel every morning and picked up her brush.
Cosette could paint with such liquid beauty that I wanted to gouge holes into my arms. She painted like an Old Master, blue mists layered with a patience that was indistinguishable from torture, every eyeball limpid, every hair defined. She forced her damage back into those paintings. Cosette painted dicks bound with diamond rings. A woman’s foot, its pedicure shining, nailed into a Lucite heel. When we started showing together, collectors would jump for her work, while mine hung ignored on the wall.
Cosette was no frail flower: she’d beaten many boyfriends into mash. When she told me these stories, my stomach sank, but they thrilled me too. I hadn’t hit anyone since I was thirteen, and even that had been part of a ritualistic white-girl slap fight. When men screamed at me on the street, I shrank back, knowing I was helpless. We love the violence in others that we cannot do ourselves. We imagine what it would be like to be that brave.
Cosette and I soon became inseparable. I took the Chinatown bus to Philadelphia and sat in her crumbling house, listening to her tell me about strip clubs and drug dealers. We went to shows together, delighting when we could get on VIP lists. We talked endlessly about feminism, beauty, and art. Cosette ran painting ideas by me, elaborate plays on vulnerability and artifice.
We told each other our fears as well as our desires. “I think I have nothing in me but the ability to work,” I said one night during an hours-long phone call. “If I got cancer, everyone pretending to like me now would abandon me.”
She assured me this wasn’t true.
We were women in public, and that meant stalkers found us. Some guy fixated on MySpace photos of me walking on glass, and messaged me obsessively, asking about my feet. I blocked him. He sent me an ejaculation of death threats: dozens of emails with variations of “FUKKKKKK BITCHHHHHH DIEEEEE ON BRRRRROKKKEN GLASSSSS.”
I ignored him. Cosette harassed him till he quit the Internet. “This kitten has claws,” she wrote on MySpace.
I loved her for hitting back.
Soon, Cosette was splitting her time between New York and Philadelphia. Her home was there, but in New York were all the artists and curators and press—the whole hissing, biting, kicking world we meant to conquer. Also, New York meant money.
One night Cosette invited me to a hotel bar to hustle guys for drinks.
“I don’t want to drink that much,” I told her.
She scowled with disgust. “You’re missing out. When I worked with another girl at strip clubs, we always made so much more money. You and me could be such a good team, too. Blond and brunette.”
We never made it to the hotel bar. Instead, we lay curled next to each other in my bedroom, planning shows we’d paint, the galleries Cosette would run, a magazine we could publish together to promote female artists.
“Why should I feel bad for using my looks? Or the fact that I’m a woman?” Cosette asked. “Think of all the things I haven’t gotten because I’m a woman.”
Despite our ambition, we had almost no entrée to the New York art scene. There, art was a hobby for trust-fund kids. The road to getting a gallery started with an MFA from a prestigious school—preferably Yale—which would cost you around fifty thousand dollars. Tack on a staggering sum for studio space. In New York, money was the silent grist for the creation of art. To talk about such things was to cheapen oneself as an artist. But the system was there, subtle and undeniable as a wall.
I woke up the next morning and made Cosette coffee, Café Bustelo in a stovetop pot.<
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“I need a sugar daddy,” she sighed. “Why can’t I get a rich guy?”
“Your voice is too low class,” I told her. Cosette and I told each other everything. We were so close that we used the toilet in front of each other. We admired each other so much that—as if to avoid being entirely swept up into each other—we started to let a bit of poison creep into our friendship. We used words to wound the other in the places we knew it hurt most. (I was wrong about her voice: when she did temporarily land a wealthy man, her voice was one of the things he adored.)
I had a burlesque show that night, debuting a new act. It was ill-rehearsed and identical to all the old ones, but a friend who worked fashion parties had saved me two veils from the trash. I shimmied through the number for Cosette as she lit a cigarette. I ended it with a flourish, pulling off a glove I’d filled with glitter, sending a cloud of starlight into the room.
Cosette grinned for a second, impressed.
“That’s a good trick,” she said. “I could do burlesque if I wanted to. Burlesque is basically stripping for fat girls.”
Backed by a rich guy, Cosette opened a gallery in Philly. She quit stripping to focus on curating shows. In celebration, I drew a peep show booth from the dancer’s point of view.
A friend who worked at a peep show told me it was a game among dancers to convince customers to lick the windows. “Lick me through the glass,” they’d whisper. “It would turn me on soooo much.” Clients did it, ignoring the crust of other men’s semen—a peep-show version of the Vaseline on Hollywood’s camera lens.
In my drawing, Cosette and three muses gathered in the booth. The muses gossiped around the pole. The peep show curtain was sliding open. Cosette was walking out of frame, her wig dangling off one finger. She was smiling.
Cosette gave me a solo show at her gallery.
It’s not like I hadn’t hung any work since that ill-fated night at the Rain Lounge. My work had been exhibited in group shows for years, and I’d thrown more successful DIY endeavors at hookah bars and comics shops, but this was different. It was a solo show in a real gallery, with all the legitimacy that implied.
My style was developing. I couldn’t make a straight line, but it didn’t matter. My pen swooped for curves, dove and sang around swirls. My hand moved naturally to delineate dancers’ breasts and bellies, their lips and thighs. I gave them high Marie Antoinette wigs, each curl lovingly detailed, and goyish pug noses. My dancers were both cartoony and highly rendered, like a nineteenth-century American advertising poster from the era before illustrators got the hang of it. Mine was not a style that would generally be recognized as “fine art”—but then, the divide between fine art and illustration is for critics, not the people who deal with the mess and dross of creation. It also ignored history. Toulouse-Lautrec designed posters. Dalí did a cookbook. Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling illustrated the Bible—and served as PR for the mass murderers then running the Vatican.
I wasn’t yet confident enough with color to leave it to its own devices. Instead, I scribbled on scrap paper with watercolor pencils, wetted the scribbles with my brush, then stroked the candied pigment neatly across my inks. They were still so far from what I wanted, but I was getting closer. When I hung the drawings, they seemed like crude little things, staring back at me from the gallery’s walls. Feather-clad homunculi, malformed but proud.
An hour before the opening began, Cosette and I took a picture. I wore a schoolgirl skirt, Mary Janes with platforms, and skull barrettes in my hair. She wore a tight black dress. She’d tried to hire an up-and-coming alt model named Stoya for the job. When Stoya got sick and couldn’t make it, Cosette left her screeching cell phone messages, swearing she’d never work again on the East Coast.
We look so young in that photo—glittery trash angling for respectability.
I hoped against hope to sell out the show.
One piece sold, earning five hundred dollars for the two of us.
Cosette and I showed work in galleries that were labeled “lowbrow” by some, “pop surrealist” by others. The style was a blender, stirring together tattoos, comic books, hot-rod art, big-eyed girls, and cartoons. Looking at these paintings was the visual equivalent of gobbling ice cream with all the fixings. They were lush, bright, meticulous, funny. Juxtapoz magazine was the bible of the scene.
Pop surrealists painted with lustful detail and a blue-collar level of craft. They had often started as illustrators, though many hid this background; galleries considered illustration low-class. Some were little more than ponies repeating a sole, tired trick, but at their best, pop surrealists beautifully deconstructed the culture that had shaped them.
One of the scene’s top painters, Travis Louie, mentored many young artists, myself included. He hung my work in shows he curated, and taught me tricks with acrylics, pencils, and washes. A Chinese American artist who grew up working-class in Flushing, Travis had a thick Queens accent and grease burns up and down his arms, proof of the time he’d spent working in restaurants.
Travis painted monsters. But that trivializes his work. His paintings were daguerreotype gray, with pencil and paint mixing as delicately as fog. His creatures posed with intense dignity in Victorian outfits—as his grandmother once had at Ellis Island, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted and she was permitted to come join her husband in New York. In her best dress, she waited to be photographed, cataloged, and renamed. To be remade, by an indifferent bureaucrat, as an American.
Travis signed his paintings in Victorian script. At a decaying Hester Street restaurant, he tried to teach me to write in this style, coaching me to press the pencil deeper when I wanted the lines thicker, then hold it lightly when I wanted them thin.
He waited patiently, then took the pencil from my hand and signed his name.
His letters were fine as spiders. They looked like they might crawl away.
After a few months, Cosette’s gallery began to falter. Her shows didn’t earn much money, and her backer was getting frustrated. To calm herself, she smoked heroin after-hours. I told her she should move to New York full time.
Moving into a cubbyhole in a hipster flophouse in Bushwick, she got a job filling in paintings for a pop surrealist painter, doing all the meticulous detail he was too famous to have time for. We showed together in small Lower East Side galleries, and dressed carefully to go to bigger art openings at white-cube palaces like Opera. We wondered why those galleries didn’t show us.
“I’d rather whore out my body than whore out my art, I always say,” Cosette told me as we painted our lips in the bathroom of a Fancy Gallery.
“I don’t want to be just pretty. Too many girls can be pretty,” I responded. “I want to be Hollywood perfect, so I always look good in photos.”
“Yeah, guys will fuck anything. The point is to be media hot,” Cosette said, then asked me what plastic surgery she’d need to achieve that.
I thought for a moment. “A nose job,” I offered.
“Fuck you.” She scowled, then continued. “I know I need a nose job.”
“What do I need?” I asked, hoping to restore her smile. “I need a nose job too.”
“No, no! You need a boob lift and some liposuction.”
I gave my hair a nervous pat as we left the bathroom. Backs straight, our bodies presented in tight black dresses. We needed to be noticed. We opened the gallery’s glass door. The room was hot white and packed with humanity: women whose frail shoulder blades poked from their designer sacks; tattooed rich boys pretending to be poor; a famous comedian; collectors holding price lists; the artist’s shy father; the artist herself, a tall redhead with cupid’s-bow lips.
Her show consisted of tiny pencil portraits of women. Each perfect. Each polished. Each a mirror of the last, meaningful mostly in repetition. But only a puritan demands that art have something to say. The pieces were in elaborate frames, spray-painted white, dust and spiderwebs caught by the paint. Besides a few collectors, no one looked at the paintings.
“Let’s grab the Juxtapoz photographer,” I said.
We snapped into our kabuki pose for the camera: lips parted, chins lifted, backs arched, tits thrust forward. With the right muscular configuration, we could be perfect.
Cosette and I sat in Lit, an East Village dive bar with a gallery in the back. I was sandwiched between an art journalist and Louis, a curator I wanted to work with. Cosette massaged the journalist’s knee. The bar was blood dark, the walls covered with graffiti and band stickers glazed with beer. I couldn’t hear anything over the music. I wanted desperately to leave. It’s good for my career to be friendly with these people, I told myself, smiling hard. If I can just sit close enough, long enough—if I can tolerate enough of these nights—eventually they’ll like me enough to put me in shows.
I forced myself to stay.
Cosette cut me with her brilliance. The eyes she painted were gray, clear, and bloodshot—I could fall through the wood panel into her world. But for women, talent was never enough. Cosette had talent, but she got most of her shows by charming people.
I felt neither brilliant nor charming. No matter how long I worked on a piece, I saw only my defects: the cartoon lines, the hands like flippers. Every time someone insulted my work, the words looped through my brain.
I kept drawing anyway—by now I knew I had no other choice—but if I wanted to keep making art, I had to win the favor of the gatekeepers of this world, like the one sitting next to me. How do people do this? I thought. What do you say?
“Did you see the John John Jesse show?” I screamed.
Louis moved closer to me. My heart leapt. A month before, he’d put me in a big group exhibit upstate, but my piece hadn’t sold. Maybe, if we could talk like humans tonight, I could redeem myself.
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