Earlier that day, students had marched down Oxford Street. Standing on the sidelines, I’d tried to draw them, jostled so often that some of my sketches were just jerks of the pen.
A protester grinned at me. “Don’t get arrested,” he teased.
What cheekbones. What a voice.
“You neither,” I called back.
The crowd kept marching. I returned to my walls.
Was the boy arrested, I wondered. I blended the paint on an aristocrat’s cheekbones with my fingertips. I hoped fervently he was not.
Then the last rococo girl was done, and the wall with her.
Letting the brush slip from my fingers, I lay down on the icy floor. Melissa stood over me, laughing. “Go away!” I groaned. I didn’t know if I’d ever get up again.
On the cab back to the airport, we passed Trafalgar Square. A protester had spray-painted the word Revolution on the base of Nelson’s Column.
I pressed my forehead to the glass. How many times can I smile for Simon, I wondered. With my nail, I dug at my paint-stained palms till the skin was raw. But the color stuck to me. It would take a week to get off.
How many times can I put this mask on before I have no face left?
The cab pulled up to Heathrow. Dragging suitcases weighted down with art supplies, Melissa and I ran for the plane.
In the winter of 2010, the world started to burn.
I was painting pigs in Nero’s nightclub.
When I returned from London, nothing was the same.
In the last days of 2010, the world was exploding. The London protests continued. In front of Parliament, police officers beat students carrying shields painted to look like books. In Tunisia, protests broke out against the dictator Zine El Abdin Ben Ali after a young fruit seller set himself on fire to protest a policewoman’s destruction of his cart. In Egypt, protestors fought the military dictatorship. In Greece and Spain, the Indignados movement decried the austerity programs forced on them by the EU. Solidarity emerged from unexpected quarters: When union members in Wisconsin took over the state’s capital building, Egyptian activists showed their support by ordering the protesters pizza. These were small gestures, magnified by the Internet, but they hinted at something: from Tahrir to Madison, protestors were watching each other, finding common cause.
Soon, tent cities appeared in city squares from Athens to Madrid to Cairo. Many of those who took up residence in those tents had never before considered themselves political. The encampments had soup kitchens, libraries, first aid stations—and media centers. Governments cracked down, and the camps became war zones: each day, protesters uploaded photos of police repression, the air full of rubber bullets, tear gas, and defensive Molotov cocktails.
From our loft, I watched Twitter as young Egyptians chanted, “The people want the regime to fall!” I marveled at their bravery. Americans complain about bankers wrecking the economy, I thought, but they’d fight back like that.
The protest encampments spreading across the world were preceded by, and sometimes inspired by, massive leaks of secret government documents.
In 2010, the transparency group WikiLeaks began releasing information that the United States wanted hidden. It started with a video called Collateral Murder. Footage taken in Baghdad in 2007 from an Apache helicopter showed American pilots joking before they gunned down two journalists. Then they opened fire on a car that stopped to help. They were war pigs with a heartland drawl—soldiers from a country that believes its military consists exclusively of heroes.
After Collateral Murder, WikiLeaks kept releasing information—hundreds of thousands of pages’ worth. Transcripts of Guantánamo tribunals. War logs revealing torture and murder in Afghanistan and Iraq. Diplomatic cables detailing the corruption of America’s allies. The document dump made WikiLeaks’s editor in chief, a white-haired hacker named Julian Assange, into an international celebrity—and a global target. These combined attentions magnified his already significant faults. When two Swedish women accused Assange of sexual assault, he fled to London.
In May 2010, less than a month after newspapers ran the first diplomatic cables, the US Army arrested a young private, Chelsea (then called Bradley) Manning, for the leaks.
They locked her in an outdoor cage in the Kuwaiti desert.
Back in New York, I kept drawing my foofy burlesque girls for T-shirts, books, and magazines. But on the Internet I kept following the worldwide political upheaval.
I loved my artist friends, but the life we led no longer seemed relevant—forever comparing turpentine textures, angling for gossip about which CEO had bought which painting for how much money. My friends seemed to live in a different universe from the world that was exploding online. And so did I.
I hated myself. I wanted to do violence to my clichés.
Week in Hell, my first real art project, was born of this discontent. The idea was simple: I’d lock myself in a hotel room, cover it with paper, and draw until I broke. It wasn’t about hell—except perhaps the hell inside my head. It was about being left alone, with nothing to do but draw, nothing to look at but the lines that poured from my fingers.
Melissa and I decided to pay for Week in Hell using Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website that Kim had used to fund her Impossible Girl record. We planned to cut up the art and sell specific sections of paper for specific amounts. People who contributed even a dollar could watch me draw. Some people thought crowdfunding was begging, but I considered it a way for disobedient artists like me to compete with those who had galleries, grant money, and trust funds.
I finally posted the Kickstarter page on Sunday night. By the next morning I’d raised five grand, enough to rent the hotel I needed. In two weeks, the Internet gave me twenty-five thousand dollars—committing me to draw more than two hundred and fifty square feet of art. Some of the contributors were friends and longtime supporters, but most were strangers. After a decade of throwing Dr. Sketchy’s classes, drawing comics, and painting burlesque girls, people had slowly discovered my work. Now they were helping me create more.
I chose the dates of Week in Hell to line up as near as possible with my twenty-eighth birthday. We needed a hotel suite, to give me enough wall space to accommodate the two hundred and fifty square feet of art I’d promised. First we booked a suite at the Chelsea. But after developers bought the hotel, they kicked out its long-standing residents and revoked all bookings, including mine. Then we tried the Ace Hotel, but when I told them about my plans, they refused to book a room for me. All such “artistic collaborations” had to be reviewed by their creative director for “brand consistency,” I was told.
Finally, we settled on the newly revived Gramercy Park Hotel. This time, we didn’t tell them what we were up to; that way, they’d have no chance to object.
As the date approached, I grew fearful. It was the first time I’d ever stretched myself like this: not drawing for a client, just seeing what I could do on my own. But it thrilled me too. As I filled those sheets of paper, my old self would be discarded. A new self would take her place.
On the first day of Week in Hell, we hid the rolls of paper inside a suitcase that would have been large enough to hide me too. Melissa and I dressed up the way I imagined people who could afford to stay at the Gramercy might dress. When we got to the reception desk, I was shaking, certain they’d discern our plan. But they blithely handed us our room keys. Melissa and I were guttersnipes in the house of power. We soaked it in, grinning at each other with wide, sneaky grins. Then she closed the door behind us.
The room echoed around us, its pink walls punctuated by a blue velvet headboard and a vast chaise lounge. The minibar had goblets cut from ruby glass. It was a cloister of expensive silence. No one had stopped us.
We got up on the bed and jumped.
As I stretched out on the bed, Melissa covered the walls with paper. Then she left me to my own devices.
I turned on my laptop, logged into Ustream, and sent the link to my backers. I turned the c
amera toward myself, smiled, and waved.
Then I began to draw.
I started above the bed, drawing a giant face vomiting girl-things. I hoped the image would influence my dreams. Then I took on the walls: Camels and mermaids holding up umbrellas to collect rain. An undersea Algonquin round table. A Green Man over the TV. I drew for ten hours and then collapsed, shaking, in my old sweater. Then I got up again and twirled around, singing.
I kept the livestream on for five hours a day. Viewers passed in and out, giving me suggestions for what to draw: lemurs and lampreys, anglerfish luring mice. When they yelled at me for blaring the same songs over and over, I stuck my tongue out at them. They goaded me to draw even more. I had guests, but over the week that stream was my most constant companion.
I may have stayed glued to the wall, but the room was a circus around me. Friends brought whiskey. Photographers, press, and videographers circled inside and out. Steve Prue came to shoot me for a Week in Hell art book. Girls visited. My friend Katelan Foisy, an artist and a witch, lay topless on my bed while I sketched her on the wall. I drew angry faces on her nipples. Amber Ray stopped by. I drew her portrait, with dozens of coke-snorting piglets forming an intricate lace over her eyelids. When I finished, she kissed her portrait’s lips. That red was the only color on my walls.
An accordionist from LA played for me, and Lauren, a young, red-haired photographer, strummed the ukulele. Dante Posh, a beautiful dominatrix, all cheekbones and legs, stood in the bedroom in short shorts. I drew her as a statue, with her customers as pigs, laying flowers at her feet.
Then Stoya came over.
In 2011, Stoya was arguably the most desirable woman in the world—or at least in the pornographic world. She was also a close friend. We’d met at some forgotten party and decided we were both evil witches, with our cigarettes, fur coats, and sharp tongues, and then we started to make art together.
I hate the word muse, but Stoya was mine. I drew her over and over. Later, I even drew on her—a series of New Orleans tableaux over her neck and back—as part of a collaboration with the photographer Clayton Cubitt.
A former ballerina, Stoya had kept her dancer’s flexibility. I loved drawing her hard stomach and her shoulders, so thin that every detail of muscle stood out. Her narrow eyes were skeptical against the mathematical beauty of her face. Aside from a trademark mink, Stoya dressed in pure slobcore: worn black leggings, black T-shirts falling off her shoulders, hair twisted into a bun. She was too lovely to attract me physically, but her mind fascinated me. Stoya spoke in a girlish whisper that made her contempt for idiots sting harder. Because she was in porn, she was used to the world underestimating her intellect.
Stoya loved avant-garde dresses from Comme des Garçons and avant-garde books by George Bataille. She was working to organize porn performers into a political force. She was reckless, confident, and, above all, free.
I could never draw Stoya as beautiful as she was. Instead, I tried to capture her cleverness.
I devoted one panel of the door just to Stoya. I drew her sylph’s cheekbones and mocking brows, then turned her face into a hot air balloon. I started to weave in threads of our conversation, drawing her as much from imagination as from life. Stoya told me she’d just gotten back from Moscow, where a Russian instructor had trained her in acrobatics using the lyra, an aerial hoop. When she made a mistake, the instructor would whack her leg back into place. That’s how she knew he cared.
I drew Stoya dangling from a balloon, then filled its basket with tiny Stoyas gluing crystals along the edge of a peacock tail that Stoya had recently constructed for herself.
As I drew, Stoya told me about the latest porn convention she’d been required to attend by the porn company she worked for. For six hours she sat at a table, signing autographs and posing for photos with fans. Then the security shepherded her and her fellow contract performers to a nightclub, where they had been booked to host a party. All day and night, she was trailed by amateur photographers. I worked them into my drawing, lizards floating around the multiplicity of Stoyas.
I woke up and drew and drew until I fell asleep, pausing only to make coffee. My dreams burned. Often I jolted awake in the middle of the night, grabbed the marker, and drew for an hour to soothe myself. I couldn’t let the maid in or order room service, so as not to tip off the hotel. Instead, Melissa dropped by every day with food.
Fred visited me only once, but that week he was an interloper. This romance was between the room and me. Each night I would sink into the comforter, rubbing myself, then stare at the walls, planning to conquer them like the Ottomans conquered Constantinople.
As the days passed, I started moving away from drawing girls. The old inspirations were bleeding out of me. New ones, more contemporary and violent, took their place.
I scribbled a five-foot squid with books in its tentacles, inscribing the WikiLeaks slogan, “We Open Governments,” on its crown. I drew a pug dog in an ersatz military cap, his face resembling a Botox-mottled dictator. To represent war, I drew hundreds of girl-things lining up, climbing a ladder. Once on top, they gleefully jumped into a fire. Only midway did they realize what they’d done. They burned alive, and their ashes floated onto the heads of their sisters, as they waited, oblivious, to join them in their fate.
I didn’t plan this, any of it. But it felt preordained.
After five days, I’d filled two hundred and forty square feet with art. At the end of the last wall, I drew myself as a tiny girl-thing, signing my own name.
The livestream was on when I finished. Ten people were watching. I pointed the camera at the wall, then toward me. I had a dotty grin. “I did it,” I gasped. Then I slid down the wall and lay on the floor, propping my face on one hand. “We did it.”
The ten usernames typed emoticons of applause.
We sat alone, each in our boxes, grinning at each other.
I finished the last wall on September 9, 2011, four days before my twenty-eighth birthday.
That night, Melissa planned a party for me. Everyone I loved filtered in through the door of Gramercy Hotel’s Lexington Premier Suite.
Jo Weldon and Amber Ray. Yao Xiao, a young illustrator who helped at Dr. Sketchy’s, brought me enamel nail-guards like those once worn by Chinese aristocrats. Melissa posed for Polaroids in her garter belt. Jen Dziura came in her white cashmere coat. And John came too—John, my best friend.
I lay in bed, without taking off my Louboutins. I couldn’t get up.
This was the New York I’d dreamed of. It was Frida’s parties and Colette’s Paris and everything I’d read in books—all of it here, with girls pressing around me, posing for pictures against my art. They were so beautiful, and so rare, and I kissed their smooth cheeks. How could anything be as right as this, right now?
John stripped. I stripped. We jumped on the bed. I hit him with my pillow and he slugged me hard with his. We went down, then sprang up again.
“You are a work-obsessed monster!” he shouted.
“You never worked at all!” I yelled back.
We hit each other, over and over, until we collapsed on the bed, covered in sweat. Naked except for his violet underwear, John lay belly up, panting.
“I won!” I screamed.
“Only because I let you,” he answered.
I woke up the next morning unable to move. My mouth tasted like ash. “Water,” I gasped. The photographer Steve Prue and a videographer were there to document the pack-up. Melissa rolled the paper back into the suitcase, ripping long strings of paint off the wall, then frantically patching it where needed.
Without the art, the room was a shell. So was I. In that room, I’d emptied myself of reserves I didn’t know I had. Now I was dying to leave.
The hotel disgorged us blinking into the sun, those crawling walls rolled safe in the suitcase. I stood on the street in my dress, its shoulders poking out like an exoskeleton. I didn’t know it, but in a week, everything would change.
On September 17, 2011, I
walked down to the National Museum of the American Indian, on the southern tip of Manhattan. A few dozen protesters sat on the steps.
One man held a sign reading, “I Can’t Afford a Lobbyist. I Am the 99%.” He was part of a small group of protesters calling themselves Occupy Wall Street, who were protesting against financial corruption, against the influence of money on politics, and for the vast majority of Americans who made too little income to be enfranchised in the American system. Looking at that lone protestor, I couldn’t know that Occupy would soon come to stand against much more: against violent cops, the control of public space, unfair deportation, systemic corruption, endemic capitalism, and war.
After the protests that had torn through the rest of the world, America felt primed for something big. But what that might be, few people knew. In late June, activists with a group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts had been trying to sleep on the streets near the Federal Reserve. Then, on July 13, the Canadian anticonsumerist group Adbusters called for something more grand.
“Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?” the Adbusters website asked.
Well, obviously, I thought.
The website called for twenty thousand people to “flood” into New York’s financial district, to set up a home base there, and to “occupy Wall Street” for a peaceful protest based on their idea of the Egyptian revolution. “Following this model,” the posting asked, “what is our equally uncomplicated demand?” But it left the question open.
Beneath the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, Adbusters ran a photo collage of a ballerina balanced on Wall Street’s famous bull. Smiling beatifically, she stood en pointe, her arms floating, one leg in arabesque. Behind her, tear gas swelled, barely obscuring hordes of rioters in what I presumed was the revolution.
Adbusters had marketing as slick as any corporation they critiqued, but that poster caught my heart.
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