Drawing Blood

by Molly Crabapple

  “I have a question,” Louis said.

  He wants to know about my art! I’m going to get a solo show! I’ll quit modeling and draw full-time and curators won’t snicker that I’m a whore. I will be famous!

  “Are your tits real? ’Cause everyone says they’re fake.”

  I forced myself to laugh.

  “When you’re thirty,” he continued, “you’ll be really ugly. Your boyfriend will leave you. But I’d still fuck you.”

  I tried to smile again. I wanted to look chill. I wanted to be the cool girl who could take a joke just right. Cool girls get shows. Uptight bitches don’t. I would never get a show by telling a curator to stop talking about my tits.

  I inched toward Cosette for protection. I didn’t want to sleep with him, but it might hurt me more if I didn’t. If you reject a powerful man, you can end up blacklisted. The man wouldn’t see it like that, of course. He’d just feel awkward and stop inviting you to important parties. Then where would you be?

  Better to force a smile. Save the hate for later.

  Whenever an eminent man is accused of sexual harassment, a flood of new allegations appears. The media asks why the dozens of women he harassed didn’t “come forward” until that first case made the news. I remember that curator. If I’d complained (where? MySpace?), the art world’s ranks would have closed around him. I would have been accused of leading him on. “What did she expect?” his peers would say. “She was drinking with him. She was using her looks. She was asking for it.”

  Coming out against the powerful can render you powerless.

  But I remembered. Years later, drinking whiskey with younger women, I’d listen as they told me about the bosses they had to push away—all those drinks, all those nights when they walked the tightrope between avoiding having to sleep with a powerful man and avoiding hurting his feelings so he wouldn’t destroy them. It gets better, I tell them. You get older. You get powerful. Men get afraid. But it takes a lot of nights to get there.

  Smile. Keep a list for later.

  The next morning, I called Cosette and told her what Louis had said. He’d never speak to famous female artists that way, I fumed—the kind who showed with Fancy Gallery Owner, beauties with white-blond hair and tattoos up their slender arms. Louis wouldn’t dare insult them. They had power.

  “He probably thought you were into it,” Cosette said. “Your boobs were hanging out of your shirt.”

  Louis was sheepish when he saw me at the next opening. As an apology, he stuck me in a few group shows. He never gave me a solo.

  “I’m doing a show of young female artists,” he told me once, as I came to collect my percentage from a piece of mine he’d sold. We sat in the gallery’s back room, where he counted out my hundreds on his desk. The curator rattled off the names of the female artists he’d chosen—all of them very young women who painted girls as fragile as he imagined them to be.

  “I’m a young female artist!” I cried, still hoping to force my art onto his walls.

  “Not like them,” he said, handing me the bills.

  I was twenty-three.

  “I want to try cocaine,” I whispered into Cosette’s ear. Coke was omnipresent, and I felt ludicrously innocent never having done it. I wanted to check off that experience box.

  We were sitting in the corner booth at Lit, where she’d dragged me along to keep her company on her date with Famous Gallery Owner.

  “Oh my god, this is your first time!” Cosette beamed, then turned to her date. “Babe, get Molly some coke!”

  We piled into the graffiti-encrusted bathroom. The gallery owner cut three bumps on the back of the toilet. We each did one. I lowered my head. The line vanished. Bitterness bled down my throat.

  “Clean your nose,” he ordered. “You don’t want to look like a”—he drew it out—“coke whore.”

  In Lit’s back gallery, we met up with a graffiti artist who’d tagged trains in the 1970s. He was just back from a commission tagging Louis Vuitton in Paris. I clenched my teeth, awake and electric. I would have given anything not to have to speak.

  “You’re the only one who doesn’t talk talk talk when you’re on coke,” Cosette gushed. “Want another bump?”

  I shook my head.

  The next morning I woke up barely able to move, my throat burning and my head stuffed with chemical snot. “Coke flu,” Cosette said with a laugh.

  After she moved to New York, Cosette’s drug use became more obvious. New York tolerates only fuckups who have trust funds to back them up.

  One night, curled up next to me in a booth at Lit, she asked if I wanted more coke. Ever since I’d tried it, she wanted nothing more than to do it with me again. At first I thought she was joking, but then she started going from one Lit patron to another.

  “Do you like to party?” she rasped, her words slurring from whiskey. “I mean, snow. Party.”

  “No!”

  She whirled around, almost falling.

  “Do you like to party?”

  “You already asked me!” the man snapped.

  I scooped my arms around her tiny waist, and pulled her outside onto the curb. The cold wind slapped us awake.

  “You need to be more discreet,” I hissed.

  A cop car blinked across the street.

  It never occurred to me that we might be arrested. More than half the prison population is in for drug crimes. But blonds don’t get stop-and-frisked.

  “I fucking know how to score coke!” Cosette shouted, storming back inside.

  When Cosette was sober, she was deeply charming—tough and vulnerable at once. She got another job in New York, running a gallery for a famous tattoo artist. She started making friends with better-known pop surrealist painters, even posing for one who was renowned for the organ-red lushness of his canvases. She arranged solo shows in LA. Her paintings sold as soon as she hung them. But the more she succeeded, the more she ricocheted between depression and rage, and the more she resented me for my comparative stability.

  One night, Cosette begged me to go with her to a book launch at Lincoln Center, for an art book by a painter with whom she worked. The crowd was filled with all the artists we knew. As the night drew on, she drank more and more free wine. She clung to my arm for balance. Her nails dug into my shoulder. I was suddenly exhausted.

  “I’ve got to go home,” I pleaded with her.

  She looked at me with betrayal. “Nooooo,” she whined.

  “I’m really going,” I said, shaking her off. I staggered toward the door. I’d been drinking too much myself.

  She followed me outside onto the street.

  “Fuck you!” She was hunched over, pointing one black nail at me. “Fuck you, you fucking fake. You look like a drag queen. Everyone just laughs behind your back. You just want me to get raped.” She staggered down the block, like a doll whose joints had been loosened. I watched her get smaller.

  I bit my lip, hard, and flagged a cab.

  I wrote Cosette an email saying we couldn’t be close friends anymore. It was a prissy, middle-class note, filled with I care for yous and I wish you the bests, and I cringed as I hit Send.

  She wrote me back instantly. Our friendship wasn’t working for her either. We came from very different backgrounds, and in hers, abandoning a drunken friend was a betrayal, far worse than standing outside an event screaming insults. “I’d rather be punched in the face than in the back,” she wrote. And yet she insisted that she wanted to preserve a “business relationship” with me. “I know that sounds cold but I know you feel the same way—we are both women that will put our careers over emotions.” She promised always to be nice to me when we saw each other in public, as we inevitably would.

  I spent the rest of that day in bed. I admired the email she sent, and that made the end of our friendship hurt all the more. I remembered how she looked when she painted. All the world’s compulsion, its beauty, its redemption and pain, were hidden in her panels, until with brushstrokes she coaxed them out. I re
membered how we walked through Philly at night. She grabbed my arm. Her strength made me brave.

  Cosette was so talented, so strong, and, sometimes, so true. I remembered standing in the cavernous darkness of a gallery’s bathroom, painting on our new faces. All the kindnesses we’d given each other, now lost. Then I remembered her shouting at the receptionist who had done nothing to deserve it, and how kindness can be a fleeting thing.

  I hauled myself over to Fred’s drafting table. I unrolled a three-foot piece of paper. I started to draw. I drew hundreds of tiny girls, piled atop each other—each of them a stylized, eyeless self-portrait. As I drew, I imagined myself picking scabs. Beneath them would be new skin: pink, shiny, and smooth.

  It was a few months before I had the courage to start going to art openings again. Cosette’s job as a curator, and her friendships with influential artists, established these openings as her world. She started showing Fred’s work at her gallery, but I couldn’t even bring myself to attend his events.

  Fred finally got sick of my hiding. “Dress up,” he ordered, and he hauled me into Cosette’s gallery. She stood in the room’s center. She looked the same, coldly beautiful, her platinum hair spiked, her waist wrapped in black. Despite her promises, I feared a scene.

  I shouldn’t have worried. There was one thing that Cosette cared about. It was what I cared about. We’d be artists, do or die.

  I met her eyes across the room. I walked up to her.

  “Cosette!” I cried.

  “Molly!” she answered.

  We air-kissed. Our smiles were hard and false.

  When Julian first shot me for SuicideGirls in 2003, he pointed out one of the models in his photos. She was a blue-haired girl, dressed as a peacock, raising her arms as if to fly. “That’s my friend Amber Ray,” Julian bragged. “She’s the most famous burlesque dancer in New York.”

  If a woman’s power is her capacity for self-creation, Amber Ray was woman extreme. Amber’s corseted waist was impossibly narrow, her eyes impossibly wide, her body as stylized as a Playboy drawing, surreal even beneath her elaborate costume.

  I saw Amber again in Heeb magazine, smirking in fascist dominatrix gear. Then on LiveJournal, with her husband, Muffinhead, wearing suits made of hundreds of stuffed animals. She was a different woman each time. In costume, she was a butterfly, a peacock, a golden god. She was Ishtar and Betty Boop. Her wigs towered. Her lips made a hot pink moue. She was everyone, all at once, the whole spectrum of female existence. She was unrecognizable. She was herself.

  Over the years, Amber and I brushed against each other in New York’s art underworld, and she once did my makeup for a shoot in LA, but it was backstage during the last days of my burlesque career that we first had a chance to speak. Most bars’ backstage spaces are cramped, with eight women leaning over one another for a slice of mirror, and the one at the Slipper Room was no different. Though chaotic, backstage was Amber’s chrysalis. As she rouged her cheeks, she raised up a shield of unapproachability. She looked like she’d eviscerate anyone who interrupted her, so even in those tight quarters, other performers gave her berth.

  By the fall of 2005, I drew so much that I could barely summon the effort to prepare for gigs. Amber sneered at my costume bag, a plastic shopping bag disgorging wrinkled capes and stockings. She kept her gowns neat in garment bags.

  I eyed my G-string skeptically. Half the sequins were missing. The stage manager was panicking because the CD I’d given him wouldn’t play.

  “You should try looking through your stuff before a gig, to make sure your costumes are in one piece,” Amber said, rolling her eyes.

  Fair enough, but I barely had the time. “I think you and I know someone in common,” I offered, changing the subject. “Cosette. She said she knew you in Philly?”

  “Oh, her. Yeah, we had some friends in common. What a crazy bitch.” Amber’s lips parted into a mischievous smile. For a second, she looked six years old.

  Then it was showtime. Amber walked to the curtains with a queenly slowness. I peered through a gap. On the center of the stage sat her most elaborate prop: a girl-size, crystal-encrusted lotus. She stepped daintily into the center. She knelt, pressed a button, and the lotus began to spin.

  The curtains parted. She emerged, plush and pearly. Her eyes narrowed in joy.

  I asked Amber to pose for Dr. Sketchy’s. She came dressed as a clown, cloud white, crying rhinestones, petticoats high on her thighs. Seeing her model in such finery for thirty-odd artists showed me what Sketchy’s might be. Afterward, I helped her carry her bags to her apartment on the other side of the BQE.

  Amber lived with her husband on the fifth floor of a tenement, at the far end of a chipped marble staircase. Inside, the apartment exploded with costumes. A headdress shaped like the solar system dominated the kitchen table. Glitter coated each planet. Her multiple Golden Pastie burlesque awards lined one bedroom wall. Wigs teetered upon wigs, and boxes of paste jewelry stood stacked in towers. She draped her bunk bed in brocade. Whatever space wasn’t taken up with makeup belonged to biographies of dancing girls: Memoirs of a Showgirl by Shay Stafford. My Face for the World to See by Liz Renay.

  Then Amber told me how she came to be Amber Ray.

  Amber grew up working class, raised by a single mom in Wisconsin. She worked as a hotel maid, as a stripper in Milwaukee and Philly, then as a dominatrix in New York. She never went to college, but she educated herself on the theory and practice of show business. Tweaked glamour was her addiction: she loved Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Carol Burnett, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She started styling herself to go to goth clubs, wearing kabuki masks, butterfly wings, black-light paint in designs drawn from horror films. When the burlesque revival hit, she became one of its first rock stars. Soon the broke club kid was flown to Montreal to perform for the notorious fashion designer Thierry Mugler.

  By 2005, Amber was still broke, but she was also an ornament of New York’s haut monde. She attended private dinners thrown by fashion designers, and museums hired her to show up at galas dressed as a butterfly. The guests at these events were mostly executives, but Amber supplied the style. As long as she was there, they could forget that people like Amber were being shoved out of New York by people like them.

  She told me all this while wiping off her makeup. Beneath the paint she had a round, wholesome, eyebrowless face. Her hair was thin, scraped into a sand-colored bun. She put on a pair of sweatpants, then took out a tackle box full of Swarovski crystals. As she spoke, she removed the Swarovskis one by one with a pair of tweezers and glued them onto a corset.

  As I watched her skillful hands, I never wanted to leave her apartment.

  Amber produced a burlesque tribute to Cole Porter at Galapagos. She hosted, of course, peeling herself out of a tuxedo while singing “Let’s Do It.” She invited me to dance, more out of kindness than anything. She even offered me two feather fans she’d manage to rescue from the trash after a party. To impress her, I sewed my costume extra carefully—a belly dancer’s blue beading, blue satin gloves. I laid it out for Amber. She was not impressed, but not obviously disappointed either. “My little weirdo,” she cooed, tugging my hair.

  She ran through my number with me over and over. I always missed my cues.

  “Raise your arms here!” she snapped.

  I threw my arms up. My fans knocked over her lamp.

  On the night of the show, Galapagos was as black as a womb. A girl ate fire in the reflecting pool. We huddled in the unheated backstage while Amber swanned around in front, her dressing gown dripping marabou, charming one older patron after another. She had a stable of patrons who’d take her out for expensive dinners. There was no finer arm candy than Amber Ray.

  I finished my act, and the stage curtains closed. I stared at the floor. It sparkled with glitter fallen off a thousand other girls.

  All through this time, the image of curtains kept reappearing in my art. They marked boundaries of space, of truth and falsity, of time. But at that m
oment in New York, they suggested the barrier between us and them—between underground artists and the patrons who had money to give them. The curtains were always black, heavy, and seemingly impenetrable.

  Now and then, in real life, they parted. The burlesque dancer Darlinda Just Darlinda showed up to a Deitch Projects opening wearing nothing but a mink coat and body glitter, her lips organ red. Her costume was a visual nod to Anita Berber, the notorious Weimar dancer who loved to show up naked at parties, mink slung over her shoulders, monkey on one arm, locket of cocaine around her neck. Two girls in thousand-dollar shoes stared at Darlinda, their eyes daggers behind fishnet veils.

  The performers I knew were poor. For a while, Amber had worked cleaning hotel rooms, though she cheered herself up by fetishizing her own uniform. These performers had no health insurance, no savings, and no stability. They darned their stockings while their apartment ceilings caved in. They risked getting chucked out of New York the moment the rent got too high. Yet with sheer style, they made themselves the center of attention in rooms that they’d never have been allowed to enter without their personas. They smashed through, armed with little more than will and window dressing.

  But their acts ended, as acts always do. Afterward, the curtain closed again.

  Every Christmas, Marc Jacobs’s production company hired New York’s spangled weirdoes to attend his Christmas party. My friends hung out in scanty theme costumes, serving as wallpaper for the real guests. The gig paid three months’ rent. This year, the party’s theme was “the Orient”—an ersatz mix of Egypt, Venice, and Hollywood. Marc hired Amber to create costumes for the occasion: hundreds of ruffs, codpieces, and chiffon face veils. Collapsing with sleep deprivation, she begged me for help. My task? Ironing ruffs. Each bit of lace had to be arranged into dozens of precise folds, like an accordion. I ironed them crookedly, burning both the fabric and my hands.