Life with My Sister Madonna

by Christopher Ciccone

  After a few minutes, she opens it, bleary-eyed.

  “I can’t stay here because of the bugs, Madonna. You gotta help me—I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  She thinks for a second, then makes a call.

  “Hi, Janice, my little brother Christopher needs a place to stay. Can he stay with you for a couple of weeks?”

  I hold my breath while Madonna waits for an answer.

  Then she adds, “No, he can’t stay here, Janice. I thought he could, but the guy that owns the apartment found out and says he can’t.”

  Now, at least, I know why she changed her mind.

  And while I am still a little irritated that she couldn’t be bothered to explain that to me in the first place, I am relieved that at least she isn’t just throwing me out on the street. And living with Janice Galloway, a dancer from Michigan who went to college with Madonna, turns out to be fun. And I am happy that her one-bedroom, sixth-floor walk-up on First and Ninth is completely bug-free.

  Together, Janice and I subsist on canned tuna and crackers. At night, dressed in our jazz pants and leg warmers, we hang out in the gay bar across the street and, during the day, race from audition to audition, surviving from hope to hope.

  I live with Janice for about three months in her two-room apartment. Now and again, I hang out with Madonna, and we see Martha Graham’s dance company together. Although Madonna has clearly jettisoned her dance career and is set on becoming a pop star, she still loves to see proper dance performances. I love spending time with her, but I am in survival mode, and landing a paying dancing job is all that matters to me.

  Finally, to my relief, I am offered a job dancing with an Ottawa-based dance company, Le Groupe de La Place Royale. I call Madonna and give her the news.

  “You really think you should take it?” she says. “I mean, it’s not New York. It’s not where you need to be if you want to be a dancer.”

  Imitating her blunt manner, which I’ll eventually permanently make my own, I inform her that she has been less than helpful to me, that I don’t have any money, and that the company has offered me $300 a week, twice what most New York dancers are earning.

  She gives a small sigh, says, “Well, fine,” and hangs up the phone.

  Brother dismissed.

  LIFE IN CANADA is quiet, cold, and regimented. Even being part of a dance company feels like a regular job. We take class and rehearse from nine to five, Monday through Friday. Not quite what I had envisioned, but I learn a lot and become a much better dancer.

  When I go home to Michigan for vacations, Madonna isn’t there, but the rest of my family seems stunned that I’ve become a dancer and am actually getting paid to do it.

  I go on tour with the company to Europe—to Wales, to England, and to Italy—but however glamorous my life seems, I yearn for something more challenging. Naturally, when I hear the siren’s call once more, this time luring me back to the Big Apple, I don’t turn a deaf ear.

  “Come back to Manhattan,” Madonna says. “I’ve got a manager now. I’ve written a pop song. I’ve got a contract. I’m making a record: ‘Everybody.’ And I wrote it. Great, isn’t it?”

  “Great, Madonna, I know that’s what you want and I’m glad for you.” I try hard not to sound patronizing, but knowing that I’m probably failing.

  “But I need backup dancers to go on track dates with me, so how about it?” she says quickly.

  “Track dates?”

  “Yeah, in clubs all around the city. Coupla hundred a time. They play my record, I sing to it, and we all—you, me, and another dancer—dance to it.”

  I hesitate for a fraction of a second, my first abortive trip to New York still fresh in my memory.

  “And you can come live with me,” she continues, as if she were reading my mind.

  “I really can?”

  “Definitely. You know you’re the best, Chris. You know how great we dance together, how great we look together. And I need you.”

  My sister needs me.

  I’m on the next plane.

  THREE

  Curiouser and curiouser!

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  MADONNA IS LIVING in a fifth-floor walk-up on East Fourth Street between Avenues A and B. Two small rooms, no furniture except a big white futon and a perpetually hissing radiator.

  I’m hardly through the door when she plays me “Everybody.”

  It doesn’t really grab me, but I want to be kind to her. Besides, I’m her new backup dancer.

  “I like it,” I say. “So when do I start?”

  She rams a fistful of popcorn into her mouth.

  I wait while she chews it.

  She takes a sip of Evian.

  “Well, Chris, I don’t actually need you anymore.”

  My sister doesn’t need me anymore.

  I don’t know whether to jump out the window myself or push her out instead.

  “Are you fucking kidding me, Madonna?”

  “Just filled your spot this morning, but if he doesn’t work out…”

  I feel as if she’s kicked me in the stomach.

  This time, at least, instead of telling me I can’t stay, she says I can move in and live with her permanently.

  The first thing I do is paint the rusting bathtub white. For the next five days, the fumes practically asphyxiate us.

  I spend my days auditioning for dance companies while Madonna races frantically all over town in pursuit of further fame and fortune. Her efforts pay off. As a result of her recording contract—$15,000 to cut two singles, first “Everybody” and now “Burning Up”—her career is on the upswing and she isn’t broke anymore. So after a few weeks, she moves to a loft on Broome Street, leaving me the East Fourth apartment to myself. We haven’t had time to hang out much together, but now I have to figure out how I am going to pay the rent on East Fourth all on my own, which I can’t afford. Luckily, Mark, an neighbor who lives downstairs and works in the shipping department at a company that manufactures greetings cards for the gay market—all featuring naked men—offers me a room in his apartment.

  He rents me a room not much bigger than a bathroom and gets me a job at the greeting card company. But the job isn’t in the least bit sexy or glamorous. All I do all day is count the cards: three, six, nine, twelve. Three, six, nine, twelve, and put them in boxes. By lunchtime, I’m dizzy with boredom. When I’m not working, I audition for dance companies but don’t seem to get anywhere because the competition for the few spots is ferocious.

  Meanwhile, perhaps feeling guilty because she has yet again abandoned me, or perhaps because she is aware that I have always loved art, Madonna invites me to come with her to see Jean-Michel Basquiat. She tells me she’s hung out with him a couple of times, then throws me a triumphant look that insinuates she’s also slept with him. As she intended, I’m impressed.

  Basquiat is exactly a month older than me, and already a legend. He’s Haitian, with a blond Mohawk and eyes wild from shooting too much heroin. First a graffiti artist, he started out painting T-shirts and postcards and sold them around the Village. Soon he was drawing violent, cartoonish pictures on lumber and foam rubber and selling them by the dozen for thousands of dollars. These days, he is represented by Mary Boone and has just had a sold-out show at the Fun Gallery that everyone in Manhattan can’t stop talking about.

  I think to myself how clever of my sister to hook up with Basquiat. He is off-the-wall, but he is hip and hot, and for Madonna that’s all it takes. She is “in love” with the idea of this infamous artist. Moreover, he lives on the edge, which is honey to her. And above all, his artistic credibility lends her the street cred she craves.

  So we go up to his massive loft on the Lower East Side, with canvases everywhere, clothes all over a dark room. In the dim lighting I can make out a sink filled with dirty dishes. The place smells of part linseed and part paint cleaner. In a second room, with the door open a crack, I can see Basquiat’s shadow on the wall, painting.
r />   Madonna yells, “Hey, I’m here.”

  He kind of mumbles hello, without turning to look at us, and keeps right on painting.

  Madonna introduces me to him, he says hello to both of us. He and Madonna don’t kiss or hug. He just goes on painting.

  Madonna and I sidle back into the dingy kitchen. I can’t help noticing a small heap of smack on the counter. I am about to say something, but she shakes her head.

  “I never talk when he’s working,” she says.

  That’s a first! I think to myself.

  After around half an hour of watching her watching Basquiat paint, I leave. Still, it’s a step up from counting cards.

  From then on, Madonna and I start hanging out more. Unlike many of my friends, she never drinks late into the night. In fact, she doesn’t drink at all, except for the odd lemon drop—her favorite drink. And her relationship with Basquiat is short-lived because she loathes his drug habits and its attendant behaviors. Like me, Madonna abhors tardiness or unreliability. To this day, we are both punctual and endeavor always to keep our word.

  Her charms must have worked their magic on Basquiat, though, as after their breakup he gives her two paintings, one of which—a small one—she still keeps on a little marble ledge in the bathroom of her New York apartment.

  She is deep into the downtown scene, hustling “Everybody” all over town. “Everybody” was cowritten by Steve Bray, one of her boyfriends from Detroit. At Danceteria on Twenty-first Street, I meet Mark Kamins, the DJ who helped her land the record deal for “Everybody.” She just marched into the club and gave it to him. And, hey, presto, he played it! That easy? I’m not so sure.

  According to current club gossip swirling around the eighties’ downtown club scene, the easiest way for an unknown female singer to get her record played is to have sex with the DJ. I have no reason to believe this is how Kamins operated, but I do know that Kamins not only plays Madonna’s record; he also introduces her to Michael Rosenblatt, the A and R man at Sire Records. Rosenblatt immediately gives her tape to Sire Records’ president, Seymour Stein, who likes it so much that he asks that Madonna be brought to see him at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he is being treated for a heart condition. When she arrives, he is in a hospital gown with a drip feed in his arm, but on the spot makes the decision to sign her.

  Madonna flirted with Mark and Michael—the two men who were so instrumental in launching her career—which certainly wouldn’t have hurt her prospects. In a similar way, she also flirted outrageously with self-avowed lesbian Camille Barbone, her first manager. I doubt that she and Camille had more than a business relationship, but true to Madonna’s pattern, I am certain that she dangled just the right amount of sexy bait necessary to hook Camille. As Madonna herself has once confessed, she is a born flirt and automatically turns her flirtatious charms on anyone who crosses her path, particularly if he or she can help her career—which, of course, anyone with whom she flirts naturally ends up doing.

  When Madonna is done with Camille and with Mark—like William T. Sherman blazing through Georgia—she’s on to Jellybean Benitez, DJ at the Funhouse, one of Manhattan’s first Latin hip-hop clubs and the perfect market for her music. After she sweet-talks Jellybean into playing her record, they begin dating. When I meet him, my first thought is He’s a bit short for you. Again, not her type, but useful. Not for her mythology, like Basquiat—but because, like Mark, he plays her record regularly.

  My sister’s persistence pays off in spades. In November 1982 “Everybody” hits number one on the dance charts. I still think it’s a silly song, but I’m surprised and happy for her.

  That fall and into the spring of 1983, I see guys come and go, in and out of my sister’s life. None of them linger. She is calling the shots. She isn’t one for long, drawn-out hellos or good-byes. In that, I later learn, we differ.

  NOW VERY MUCH part of the downtown culture, Madonna inevitably becomes aware of Manhattan’s hip S&M scene, as well. Its heterosexual heartbeat is the Hellfire Club, and its gay heartbeat the Mineshaft, which was immortalized in Al Pacino’s movie Cruising.

  One of her best buddies, Martin Burgoyne—a charismatic, tall, blond boy from Florida around my age who bartends at Lucky Strike, a small, dim bar on East Ninth Street—wears leather motorcycle boots, is pierced in a number of places, and displays a red handkerchief in his jeans pocket, indicating that he’s into S&M. He openly plays on the dark side and likes it. Not my thing at all.

  Perhaps due to her friendship with Marty, S&M becomes one of the leitmotifs of Madonna’s career, but I don’t believe she is into it personally. Nor do I want to have those kinds of images of my sister in my head, unless she is enacting them for publicity purposes—which I believe she always is. However, away from any sexual connotations or role-playing, in the boardroom, in the movie studio, and in most of her intimate relationships, including with me—even though she is far shorter than most dominatrixes—she milks the image for all it’s worth. By assuming a Venus in Furs persona, composed of part Margaret Thatcher, part Amazonian warrior, part kitten with a whip, part Lola from The Blue Angel, she will in the future achieve her goal of coming out on top in all her business and personal dealings.

  Marty introduces Madonna to photographer Edo Berteglio and his girlfriend, French jewelry designer Maripol, who designed those seminal colored rubber bracelets that everyone else in the Village is now wearing as well. However mainstream and oftimitated her concepts would later become, Maripol’s influence on Madonna’s image can’t be understated, as she is responsible for creating her punk-plus-lace look. She also is indirectly responsible for introducing me to the man who will become the first love of my life.

  Maripol is art director at Fiorucci, the hip Italian sportswear retail store on East Fifty-ninth Street. In the early eighties, wearing Fiorucci jeans or T-shirts is the ultimate badge of supercool. The store has a café, a tattoo parlor, and quirky salespeople, such as performance artist Joey Arias, who channels Billie Holiday to perfection. Andy Warhol shops there; so do Basquiat and Keith Haring. Madonna and I and half of downtown Manhattan love hanging out at the Fiorucci cappuccino machine, star-spotting.

  I am there when Andy meets Madonna. He is the same with her as he is with anyone about to come under the spotlight. He has his picture taken with her, and that’s all.

  Afterward, she says to me, “Andy’s cool, but he’s not much of a conversationalist, is he?”

  I nod silently in agreement.

  I’m in Manhattan for about two months when Maripol calls and tells me there is a vacancy at Fiorucci. One of the salesmen in corduroys, a guy I’ll call Danny (not his real name), is going on vacation, and would I fill in? Anything is better than counting greeting cards, so I’m off to work at Fiorucci.

  The day I arrive, Danny is leaving on a monthlong vacation. Before he leaves, I catch a glimpse of him in the manager’s office. He’s handsome, lean, three years older than me and a classic New Yorker who grew up in Queens, but doesn’t drive and has never been out of the city.

  The moment Danny arrives back from his vacation, I begin pursuing him with a drive to rival Madonna’s in the days when she was determined to get her record played by Kamins and Benitez. After some mild stalking on my part, Danny capitulates and agrees to go on a date with me. We then begin a relationship.

  However, it quickly becomes apparent that Danny can’t take his hard liquor. He is a mean drunk, with violent tendencies.

  A snapshot from the start of our relationship: We go to a Halloween costume party, me as Julius Caesar and Danny as a slave boy. Dire miscasting, or maybe just a tribute to my Italian heritage. Whatever the case, we party at a friend’s loft. I start to feel sick. I tell Danny I’m leaving, go home alone, and pass out cold.

  The next thing I know, there is an almighty crash and Danny hurtles right through our bedroom window, covered in blood, blind drunk, and yelling profanities. When he finally sobers up, he tells me he was downstairs, buzzing, but I hadn’t answered
, so he’d climbed up the fire escape, then deliberately smashed through the window.

  Other times when he’s drunk, he takes a swing at me out of the blue. I put a stop to it all one morning when we are walking through Washington Square Park and, with no provocation, he lifts his umbrella and is about to hit me. In the nick of time, I sidestep. I wrest the umbrella from Danny, then pick him up and throw him over a park bench.

  I am bigger than him, and stronger, and I’ve proved it.

  I tell him that he’s attacked for the last time, and if he ever hits me again, I will hit him back.

  He doesn’t.

  He gives up hard liquor, and our relationship improves dramatically. Two years after our first meeting, I move into his four-room railroad flat on Morton Street. There, we sleep in a single bed with three Siamese cats, Boy, Girl, and Anisette. Danny has painted all the floors and the walls white. An old oil painting of the Madonna and child hangs on one of them. There is no air-conditioning, and the bath is in the corridor. Some nights, I wake up and hear clattering in the kitchen and wonder why Danny is up so late doing the dishes. I go in to see how he’s doing and discover that massive water bugs are marching all over the dishes. But I don’t care. I’m happy with Danny and our existence of relative domestic bliss. And the cats quickly dispatch the water bugs.

  Our lives fall into a pleasing routine of dinner parties, travel, and holidays with his family—as my family as yet knows nothing about him. I am now twenty-four years old, and for the first time in years I feel safe and secure.

  In some ways, Danny is my Christopher Flynn, my mentor as well as my lover. And for the next eight years, we will live together in happiness, harmony, and monogamy.

  When I first tell my sister about Danny, she isn’t the least bit curious. She doesn’t ask to meet him, nor does she want to know anything about him. My personal life is of little interest to her—that is, not unless it impacts her or can serve her career in some way, which, down the line, it will.