Untitled #3

by Grace Jones

  I remember I was always difficult about signing autographs. I hated it. We would be out together and there would be all these autograph hounds. They didn’t have phone cameras like now. They wanted signatures, to prove they had met the famous. I didn’t want to do them. I said, “No. I don’t do that.” Andy turned that around. After all, he treasured a signed photograph he had received from Shirley Temple when he was thirteen—“to Andrew Warhola.”

  After I refused to sign autographs all night, Andy asked, “Why do you say no?”

  I said, “It is trivial, a waste of time. It’s not fun.”

  He changed my mind. He said, “When you do that, these people go away feeling really bad. They will go, ‘That spoiled bitch, doesn’t she know who put her where she is? I am not going to buy her record.’ With the energy you take to say no, instead you say yes, using the same energy, and they will go home happy.”

  I said, “But Andy, if I start signing, we’ll end up the whole night signing autographs.”

  He said, “It doesn’t matter. Having the positive energy you get back is worth signing the autographs even if you don’t want to. Smile and sign. No one gets upset. And,” he added, “the most important thing . . . they will buy your records!” I was thinking of the moment; he was thinking of the bigger picture. I never thought about record sales! I don’t say no anymore. I got it. And you realize people stand around for hours waiting for you. They will fly to other countries. “Everybody must have a fantasy,” he said. “For some people, you are the fantasy. You must not spoil that.” To this day, when I am chased and surrounded by paparazzi, hunted at all times of the night and day, I remember what Andy said to me, and I make sure however tired or private I might be feeling I try to put on a little show for them. After all, we were once photographed jogging in Central Park, him in jeans and jacket, me in little “batty rider” shorts. That was a performance.

  I am aware of the fact that what is being photographed is the fantasy of fame, and for that moment, that is what I am representing. At that moment, I am at the center of fame. Andy would want me to look and act famous, because I have been given that power, and with it comes a certain amount of responsibility. It’s to be taken seriously. Even if that sometimes involves scaring the pants off someone, wrestling Kate Moss to the ground, or posing at an awards ceremony as if it’s the best place in the world to be even if it’s boring and you hate who you’ve been sat with and don’t actually know who they are, although you’re told they are the hottest thing on the planet right now.

  Andy would never make you feel guilty about selling yourself. That’s what he changed—that artists don’t have to die before they make a lot of money. He would probably have said, “Why wouldn’t you sing ‘Boogie Wonderland’? It’s only entertainment. Don’t take it so seriously.” But he had a line over which he would not go; there was definite quality control, which was why Richard was so nervous showing him the covers. Andy would look at everything before he issued the final touch, the final approval, and nothing less than perfect in his eyes would get through.

  It was awful, how he died, ten months after the Arnie-Maria wedding. It was a simple operation, but he would always talk about it. He didn’t want the operation. He put it off and put it off. Like he knew something was going to happen. In the last photograph taken of him, as he sat in the back seat of the car driving him to the hospital for his surgery, you can see from his expression that he believed he was heading into the unknown, his final appointment. His near-death experience had made him a little psychic. It is so strange he should die when he did, and how he did. It makes you wonder. When the pieces don’t add up, and they don’t fit—and they didn’t—then you wonder. It’s too bizarre.

  He passed so suddenly; it was quite shocking. It was as though he had been erased. He found life so interesting. Death itself, being inside it, not seeing it happen, wasn’t so interesting. No more images. He once said he didn’t believe in death, because he wouldn’t be around when it happened. He said he couldn’t say anything about it because he wasn’t prepared for it. Death happened to other people. He knew, though, that there was a close relationship between celebrity and death. Death could make the obscure famous. The true celebrity would have a life—many lives—after death. She would be immortal, posing forever, hiding the truth, and revealing it.

  6.

  Discovery

  When we left Jamaica, all the Jones children scarred by the force of Mas P and Bishop Walters swore we would never go back. We wanted to get as far away from Jamaica as we could. The church had ruined Jamaica for us. Burned it down. I was the first one to go back, after about seven or eight years never going near it. I crept back in, feeling more Paris than Jamaica, with a French accent that was American, a model and singer, not a teacher or a preacher’s wife. I thought I had put enough distance and trips and enough experience between me and the Bible to deal with the church, but I still thought the followers of Bishop Walters were going to burn me at the stake when I came back.

  I did feel that the island tried to kill me. I had near-death experiences. I put that down to the fact that my religious family didn’t want me back, and strange things would happen, like they wanted to keep me away because I had brought such shame. There were three very close shaves with death in Jamaica. A boat almost struck me while I was swimming in the ocean, and a car nearly hit me while I was filming in Ferngully, a few miles outside where I now live part-time in Ocho Rios. Ferngully is on the way to Kingston, where the road slowly curls upward, deeper into the green world, and is named for the different varieties of giant fern there reaching to the sky, competing with each other for light and almost joining in the middle, blocking out the sun and cooling the air.

  On the two-lane roads that wind around and through Jamaica, a lot of drivers will try to make what we call a third lane. They will overtake on a corner at sixty miles an hour without caring that a car might be coming the other way. I got out of a car; nothing seemed to be coming, and then suddenly, a car sped out of nowhere and grazed along the side of me, metal scraping along my skin.

  Thirdly, at some point, I swear someone planned to murder me. Certain forces on the island seemed very interested in wiping me out of existence because, they figured, I had gotten above myself. There’s a whole other book in that story, and there were a few other minor near-death experiences as well. There was a definite sense that took a long time to fade away that certain people wanted me taken off the island in a wooden box, either because they thought I was the devil, or because they though I didn’t belong there. I thought, I’m going to be killed here. If I had a choice, yes, sure I would like to die on the island, but not yet, and not suddenly, out of the blue, chased into the grave by fate or hate.

  It wasn’t the island threatening my life. It wasn’t the church, really. It was my own anxiety. I went back feeling I was now armored because of those teachers I had found across the water—Sam, Tom, Andre, Antonio, Richard, Issey, Helmut, Hans—but I still felt as though I was entering a haunting. I needed to come back and not be scared by the ghosts. Not dead people ghosts but memory ghosts.

  To deal with the ghosts, I visited a psychic, the one used by the Reagans, and she was very keen that I keep crossing the water and visiting the island. The more I did, she said, the more the island would want me. The island was more important than the church. I had to keep going back to Jamaica to overcome this feeling that I wasn’t wanted there.

  My main teacher in Spanish Town, certainly in the matter of basic, inspiring common sense, had been my aunt Sybil. “Nothing beats common sense,” she would say. She always tells me how she trusted me to deal with whatever happened in my life because I could always read situations well and find a way through. I might get lost, but I would always find myself again.

  You can see how organized she is by how tidy her garden is at her Kingston bungalow. Like me, she grew up among lots of brothers and had to develop a lot of strength to deal with all that male energy. “You had to fight to k
eep your place.”

  Sybil loved her brother, my dad, very much, and however far out and over the top I was—running around naked in New York, dressing up and stripping off in Paris—she saw through the wild escapism to her young niece making up for lost time. She thought that I was breaking away from a world where it was always You can’t, never You can. She always kept watching over me.

  When I went back to Jamaica the first time after being away living some new lives, Sybil told me that she wanted me to take a drive and see the island as it really was. She said, “You are now so international, but you don’t know Jamaica at all. And you should! It is where you are from; it is what made you strong and powerful.”

  I drove with my French then boyfriend Jeanyves. We did what Aunt Sybil said, followed a route she had mapped out for us, and I saw Jamaica for the first time. I had grown up there, and I knew nothing about it. I didn’t know how close the beauty was to me. I only knew the dark religious stuff, and very little about what was over the border of Spanish Town, whether it was glorious or dangerous. We found Jamaica, not the Jamaica of religious freaks. I flew out of the cage.

  There was darkness and danger out beyond my community, places that were like the American Wild West. I knew nothing about an edgy, volatile Jamaica where you had to fight to survive, the knowledge of which would have given me a better sense of life. I knew nothing about the island’s colonial history, and nothing about the third-world parts of Jamaica; the glory and the squalor. There is the Jamaican paradise, where the cruise ships land and the air seems painted blue and the bold, outspoken people have the widest smiles in the world, the reggae plays, and no one seems sad; and then there is the smell of the slums and decay in Kingston and you wonder where all the money is. There is this tension between a special place that is always growing and a ruined place where growth is stunted, the gap between a beautiful beach with a rapidly arriving sunset and a trip into the corrugated roofs of Trench Town. The history of poverty, slavery, and industrial pollution scars the landscape, and there are the sun and sea, doing their thing.

  Looking at the island from outer space, it’s tiny, but inside, it’s crammed with enough life and variety to fill a planet. There are the obvious tourist things to experience in Jamaica—the spectacular views, the coach tours to craft villages, the changing vistas within a few hundred feet, the warm, soft air. The tourists come and they stay in the swish all-inclusive resorts, and maybe visit the coffee-growing areas in the Blue Mountains. There’s a different Jamaica beyond the usual holiday centers: remote, drowsy back water villages where life is mostly lived outdoors; dirt-floored beach shacks; the pulsating, chaotic and exhausting Kingston, seen stretched from the hills like a cockeyed cousin of Los Angeles, bursting at the seams with energy, all that inhaled rhythm, the shock and recoil of the traffic; the blown dust; the constant tropic din; intoxicating rums; luxuriant molasses; trees felled by hurricanes and left to fend for themselves; treacherous mountain roads with hairpin turns surrounded by thick vegetation, where you ride along walls of green above a steep drop to the ravine below; roads that lead nowhere but the end of the road; places with names like Treasure Beach, Buff Bay, Silver Hill Gap, Frenchman’s Cove, Pum Pum Rock (shaped like a woman’s genitals), and Hellshire, which is actually a fine sandy beach outside Kingston loved by the locals, and fizzing with open-air, fish-frying life. Fleeing slaves discovered the therapeutic Bath Fountain in the seventeenth century, and it seems to have stayed exactly the same since then. Cockpit Country is an inland forest preserve, where there are native plants with names like Madame Fate, horse poison, spirit weed, and dog’s tongue.

  There are glowing phosphorescent waters, hot springs, bubbling streams, healing waters, white-water rafting, tropical fruit you’ve never come across before, the most beautiful sights, very spiritual and restorative, and a frenzied, swelling lushness. Even the cemeteries are flush with green, as though death doesn’t put a dent in the life of the place.You can see one place, the grass and trees and vines; visit a few weeks later, and there is so much new growth you would not recognize it. It made me think that everything growing excites me.

  On the northeast coast, at the very edge of things, there’s Port Antonio, denser, rougher, hard to get to, where paradise is wonderful, but weird. It’s like a fucked-up heaven, which suits me. It takes a couple of hours from Kingston deftly navigating a spiral of twisting and turning roads that cut into what becomes more and more a jungle. The gigantic ragged vegetation thriving either side of the road makes Jurassic Park seem like a window box. The trees and grass that threaten to conquer the roads have to be constantly cut back. Eventually, you reach Port Antonio, arranged around a spectacular bay, simmering with freestyle frontier action, typifying how Jamaica can be for both the dropouts and the globetrotters, the bums and the billionaires. Watch the people milling about, and you get a real sense of how the Jamaican sensibility can be an exuberant hybrid of pirate, gadabout, British Empire orderliness, enigmatic, indigenous swagger, slave resistance, all roughly tossed together in the heat, rolling mists, and local history. Gossip is perpetually in the air, and grown men speed around the streets chasing deals or just feeling the air racing past their face on battered small kids bikes, because they’re cheap, and within reach.

  Outside the no-nonsense town center, where the population thins out and there are either a few warped shacks or a few smart well-tended villas, it can feel like you’re at the mouth of the Amazon, over the border from the heart of darkness. The mountains foaming with foliage crash into the sea, which is always putting on a performance, serenely or a little aggressively, under clouds that change shape and color by the minute.

  There are names, places, initiative, history, energy, enterprise, music that shows how inventive Jamaicans are. I needed to see some of that. Aunt Sybil was encouraging me to get out and see all of the island, even if it meant starting out as a tourist. I needed to reacquaint myself with a place that had become so corrupted in my mind.

  On this road trip, it was all new to me. The generally toothless roadside vendors with their shacks propped up on breeze blocks, selling acai and salt fish, fresh coconuts, jerk chicken, jackfruit, strips of mango, and yams. Leaves on trees so big they would hang over you like umbrellas. It was like going on some unknown journey. Sybil didn’t tell me what was going to happen, but she planned it brilliantly. I had no idea what I was going to see or encounter. It was like being born, seeing the island for the first time, outside of the bubble, outside of the religion. I could feel my own spirit awaken. She wanted me to see it and then come back and tell her what I thought.

  I have been coming back ever since. And I changed the minds of my brothers and sisters. “My God,” I said, “it is not that fearful, awful place that we fled.” And whenever I came I would get a bus and put everyone on it, get some music blasting, a bit of rum, some ganja, some coconuts, Let’s party. We would stop at the side of the road and get some jerk chicken. It was good, because we started forgetting that other Jamaica, and we got used to this Jamaica, the real Jamaica, where the most extraordinary things have happened, and where it was all about beauty and energy, not Bible-black ugliness. That was the most astonishing thing about what the church did to us. In the middle of this island that is surely one of the great examples of creation—as crazed, crooked, and derelict as it can be—they blotted it out and replaced it with all this cruelty.

  Jamaican culture is very strong and resilient. The place has survived so many hurricanes; there are deep caves that thread through the land that hid escaping slaves and pirates on the run. There are glittering treasures, secret coves, and listening hills. The language bends into itself, resisting the indifferent imposition of the Queen’s English; the music booms and booms and booms and cracks and slaps. It’s laid-back and lively, gentle and menacing. There’s a continual sense of motion, and time seems larger and looser than it does anywhere else.

  On that trip, I was in awe. Sybil wanted me to love this place. She’d tried to show me
a different world when I was younger, and she tried to save me. She waited until I was old enough to see for myself, and she set me straight.

  The time away added other geography to my personality. It threw a foreign aura around the tenacious Jamaican center. I’ve got something fluid and precarious in addition to the Jamaican. I’d gone through sensible Syracuse, hippie Philly, helter-skelter New York, and into the stinky, sensual depths of Paris. By the time I came back from my travels, I was prepared to take on the island. In Paris I was worried that I would not be understood, not because of the language but because of who I was as a person. I didn’t really understand myself, and I realized that if I didn’t understand myself, how could anyone else?

  The main reason I didn’t understand myself was because of what happened in Jamaica. I knew I had Jamaicanness in me, but I didn’t know what it was. Finding the Jamaica that I was running away from helped me understand myself. I needed to recognize myself in order to gain the confidence I needed.

  The moment my music came together as something that came from me was when there was the introduction of my Jamaican roots. That was me. That suited me. Previously, I had been more of a mimic, a sponge, absorbing and learning other styles, mastering experiences, putting them on like a costume, wearing them like a wig. I was a transplanted transatlantic creature with one foot in an airport and one foot in a nightclub. I was making my presence felt by posing for photographs and dancing on tables. I needed to come down to earth a little.

  Once Jamaica became part of the music it was so much more natural, because that reflected who I actually was. The voice matched the music. That’s me. I can do all the other stuff, but at the heart of it is the Jamaican experience. It’s unprocessed; it’s me, naked. It’s where my soul was, so if I wanted to make soul music, however mutant, I needed to be in touch with my soul.