Role Models

by John Waters

  I guess I should feel guilty that I caused a sex crime with one of my own films, but I don’t. A fan sent me an amusing clipping about a fifteen-year-old New Hampshire boy who had gone public with his complaint about a hazing incident he had been a victim of in football camp. The young lad explained that his fellow teammates had held him down and “teabagged” him. He claimed the upperclassmen got the idea of dragging their testicles over his face “from a scene involving a male stripper in a movie by cult director John Waters.” Yes, I guess they did get the idea from Pecker, but my teabagging scene was blissful, and not quite so aggressive. Still, I was secretly delighted that my comic sex act had crossed over to real life. I mean, there are so many worse things that could have happened.

  Like necrophilia. The only perversion besides scat I haven’t tried. You have to save something for the autumn of your years, don’t you? A healthy neurotic never says never to a new sexual fantasy. Isn’t necrophilia the ultimate fear of performance? Ask Karen M. Greenlee—she ought to know. This twenty-year-old self-described “morgue rat” worked in funeral parlors (where else can you meet a body?) and had sex with a corpse. She got caught by police in the back of a hearse after stealing a body from a Sacramento mortuary. She told police she “intended to stay with her dead lover until the body got so ripe she couldn’t stand it.”

  Which made me wonder—do all celebrities get fucked after they’re dead? Should I be so liberal that I accept this fact? When Anna Nicole Smith passed away, didn’t word go out on the necro circuit, “Okay, you’ve got thirty-six hours and the bidding starts at $200,000.” Was Elvis blown postmortem? Was Piaf gangbanged?

  What dead celebrity would you like to fuck? Come on, it’s a question all healthy neurotics may have to ask themselves one day. Most of my friends pick the obvious choices—Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But not me. I’d go for director Luchino Visconti. In that plush elegant coffin that his onetime boyfriend Helmut Berger must have wanted to throw himself into at the funeral. Or better yet, “Rotten Rita” (real name Kenneth Rapp), the biggest speed dealer to the early gay male stars of Warhol’s movies in the Silver Factory period. Maybe Ingrid Superstar (the so-called missing Warhol star who wandered away from her mother’s house decades after her stardom diminished, never to be heard from again) could join us for a threesome. And then, if we’re lucky, Andy, from beyond the grave, could film us!

  R O O M M A T E S

  I live alone but I have a ton of roommates. Luckily, they’re not human beings. I couldn’t stand the idea of having someone else’s belongings around. I don’t have the mental space. Worse yet, suppose they suddenly hung on the wall something I didn’t like? I can’t listen to someone else’s music or borrow their books either. No sirree, no real-life people sharing my bathroom or reading my newspapers before me! Instead, I live with artists.

  Mike Kelley is one of my roommates. Yes, the man who made pitiful seem sexy by turning grimy thrift store stuffed animals into heartbreaking, jaw-droppingly beautiful sculptures by placing them on stained blankets on the floor or facedown on card tables next to one another like dead Jonestown suicide cultists. Suddenly a museum or an art gallery took on the appearance of a coroner’s office displaying corpses of toys after an airplane crashed into Santa’s sleigh mid-flight on Christmas Eve. Mike Kelley lives with me everywhere. In my New York apartment on the living room wall hangs his Dirty Mirror (1997) with its disgusting leftover cocaine lines painted in acrylic. A bloody hep-C trace can even be noticed as you look at the repulsive stain that totally obscures the mirror’s reflection of the viewer, not that you’d want to see your face after a night like this. What a terrible drug-over this artwork suggests: reckless, misleading moments of chemical joy that seem so sour an hour later.

  Mike is a really “shitty” roommate, but he knows this is a compliment. His Wedged Lump (1991), a large painting on paper that suggests a giant turd surrounded with comic-strip stink marks, hangs in my dining room in Baltimore, where my dinner guests are forced to confront the fate of their meal no matter how gourmet the initial presentation appears. I live with Mike Kelley in my workspace, too. Right above my writing desk in New York is one of his Garbage Drawings (1988), isolated refuse from the original Sad Sack cartoons that features fumes of filth that I hope will inspire my screenplay or book ideas.

  Even my library is defiled by Mike Kelley. Hanging in Baltimore is one of the hilarious 1989 Reconstructed History vandalisms—a real page from a history textbook that Mike defiled with glee, the same thing all gifted and pissed-off kids did in high school, hoping to turn their rage into art. “BARF” adds Mike to the historic signing of the Declaration of Independence illustration, and now every Fourth of July I can feel patriotic thanks to Mike Kelley’s troublemaking, defiant reinvention of this dull textbook.

  My assistants live with Mike Kelley, too. Outside their office is the Auditions sign he created for a Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition in 2004. Mocking the hastily drawn cardboard signs casting agents put up in the halls of hotels to lead actors to their correct tryout rooms, my roommate Mike celebrates the sadness of Hollywood, the despair of missed appointments, failed careers, and the ever-present cliché of the casting couch.

  Some of my friends make fun of my roommate Mike. “How much was that?” a usually liberal-minded friend shrieked when she saw Child Substitute (1995), the pitiful collage Mike did that looks like a five-year-old retarded boy began cutting out pictures of animals from Sunday newspaper supplement ads but lost his train of thought and abandoned the project. “It cost enough,” I answered vaguely to her snorts of contempt. Every time this friend comes to my New York apartment she notices new details of the crudely cut out and lumpily glued-on photographs of pets, framed in the cheapest way possible by the artist, and shakes her head in bafflement. I love how mad Mike’s work can make some people. Isn’t that the job of contemporary art? To infuriate? The real naysayers who can’t see the reverse beauty of Mike’s sculptures or paintings should be outraged because they secretly know that his art does hate them and they deserve it.

  Somebody else lives with the one Mike Kelley piece I desperately wanted and missed out on buying. I first saw Storehouse (1990) in the traveling “Just Pathetic” show at my late and great dealer Colin de Land’s gallery, American Fine Arts in New York. The “sculpture” is nothing but a cardboard shipping box filled with soiled, packed-up cat toys, uneaten pet food, and wormer medication that obviously didn’t work. Pushpinned to the wall above are two Hallmark-type greeting cards from a vet expressing sympathy for the “death of your pet.” This mundane still life of sadness and private mortification made me remember Mike’s quote to the Los Angeles Times about another sculpture he had done: “Everything in this piece is a failure.” I suddenly felt like selling everything I owned at the time to buy this incredible “failure.” So I asked Colin the price. True to his legend, he took months before he got back to me (“Hope the delay did not cause terrible anguish,” he wrote) with the answer: $10,000. Stupidly, moronically, I didn’t have the art nerve at the time to pounce. I could see this grubby little sculpture of refuse was beyond financial value. Why was I such an art chicken? Now fucking MOCA in Los Angeles owns it and I’m pissed. Every time I look at the slide that Colin sent me, I fantasize about breaking into the museum and stealing Storehouse. Guards, trustees—you have been warned. I like that sculpture more than you do!

  My roommates need to be illusionists and Mike Kelley certainly is. He’s a companion who can make you see something supposedly shameful in a beautiful, hilarious, radical, subversive way. Isn’t he really a miracle worker? Art and Auction magazine called Mike an “apocalyptical vulgarian” but who cares about a roommate’s reviews? I call him a terrorist and a healer and he never has to pay rent in any of my abodes. Matter of fact, I’ll pay him!

  Cy Twombly isn’t thrilled to be my roommate, and who could blame him? He’s got better apartments and houses to move into than mine, believe me. Isn’t Cy Twombly beyond
a doubt still the most cutting-edge artist working today, even if he is over eighty years old? According to my close friend the writer and former museum curator Brenda Richardson, he can make even the most seasoned art collectors and accessions committees seethe in skepticism and rage over his work. My walls and floors are not worthy of Cy Twombly’s drawings, paintings, or sculpture.

  Just look up his Untitled (1992) and you’ll see what I mean. No, I don’t own it. You think I’m made of money? But I can fantasize, can’t I? If I ever won the stupid lottery or suddenly made a fortune with Pink Flamingos being turned into a video game, Cy’s sculpture would be my midlife crisis purchase to impress myself. To hell with sports cars (no one over thirty years of age should ever be seen in a convertible), yachts, or ridiculous bling. Owning this shockingly ugly and elegant work of art would make me feel young again.

  I first saw this Untitled (catchy title, eh?) at the opening of the Cy Twombly Gallery at the Menil Collection in Houston. Rich people, art critics, and museum heads never looked more vulnerable as they turned the corner and came face-to-face with the rudely witty, obscenely imperious sculpture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s supposed to be about “time and meaning,” “transformation,” and “metamorphosis and myth,” but to me it looks like a most confident and graceful depiction of Godzilla’s semen discharge. A big load. Steaming. In wood and plaster. Go see it. It’s still there.

  “Bad handwriting” is what the general art public always squawks about when they think of Twombly’s stunningly messy and sometimes sparse paintings and drawings, which to the untrained eye can certainly be mistaken for the penmanship of an “outsider” artist. But on closer inspection, the lucky ones, like us, see the exact opposite—the poetic Palmer Method of a true insider. And we Twombly cultists can get quite obsessed with trying to focus on each and every one of Cy’s mysterious codings. Take for example Cy Twombly: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Volume 1, 1948–1960, a book I read every word of like I was following a mystery novel. Imagine my thrill when I saw the tiny “note” beneath the provenance, exhibition history, and references to Blue Room (1957), Cy’s elegantly painted and pencil-filled canvas of his signature scratch and scribbles. “The center left part of the painting,” this footnote read, “contains one drawn element, a looping line that is not by the artist.” Amazing! But what art vandal would dare add even the tiniest marking to a Cy Twombly painting? Maybe I am for the death penalty after all. I mean it—in the scheme of things, this is grave! I knew Blue Room had been on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art for a while. Oh my God, had it happened here? “No,” I was told by the curator at the time, “it was exhibited in Baltimore on loan from Ileanna Sonnabend and the painting was already framed in Plexiglas,” obviously to prevent repeat offenders. But most important, who was the insanely observant inspector who noticed this one small squiggle in the millions of others in Cy Twombly’s work and had the courage to first tell Cy and then us? Who else but the art historian Heiner Bastian, the editor of this scholarly volume, and to this day, I am in awe of his obsessive eye for detail.

  You see, Cy Twombly is, quite simply, better than you and me and has the right to feel superior to all collectors. He should judge us because he makes perfect mistakes and laughs at the concerns of the moneyed class, who deserve the problems of abstraction. For me, his thoroughbred so-called scribbles celebrate an ecstasy that only a dyslexic child prodigy could feel over his secret code words and alternative alphabets. This exclusive, violent, erotic handwriting that may seem illegible to others can be read if you just give it a chance.

  Look at Cy’s thirty-eight separate drawings entitled Letters of Resignation, which he did between 1959 and 1967. Critics have called them “a confession,” “a farewell,” “a dialogue,” but I think none of these descriptions are exactly correct. Letters of Resignation is a rant, an agonized response to the lack of power this fictitious author feels. His terrible impatience and obsessive frustration turn the very act of writing and revising into a torturous revenge against authority. Art historians are right when they describe these scratched out, erased, painted-over, and rewritten drawings as “violent,” “ritualistic, almost fetishistic,” but they are wrong when they speculate that Cy Twombly “does not allow the meaning of the markings to extend to the real world.” Bullshit. I can read them and so can you if you just give up everything you’ve been taught in elementary school.

  Come on, let’s try. Drawing I. You see violent angry pencil scratches and undecipherable words all written together without meaning? Well, be a little looser! Yes, you can see that this handwriting may be illegible to the artistically impaired, but remember, even the most basic psychology textbooks explain that a child’s first scribbles make “sense to the ear even though what is written might be meaningless to the eye.” Got that? Let’s try again. Chicken scratch? Not so fast. Let’s translate and pretend we are inventing and deciphering secret dialogue written for an office worker that only Cy Twombly understands. Here goes. Look again at Drawing I. What could he be saying?

  DRAWING I

  “I’m going to try to write this letter and then I’m going to throw it out.”

  Maybe, you think. Remember, you can’t be wrong when you are translating from an abstract language. Go to Drawing II. See the three sections that look like some sort of deranged outline? Notice the indecision of the pencil markings? See how thick the lead is in the middle of the paper? Let’s try to “read” it.

  DRAWING II

  “Okay, I’ve got to get organized, make a list of my gripes, pay back the fuckers who do the things at work that get on my nerves. No, cross that out. Let’s start again. I’ve got to be calm or no one will listen…”

  See? You can understand Cy Twombly’s insanely looping penmanship if you just open up your mind. Jump ahead to Drawing VII. That whirlpool of scrawls, angrily spinning out of control. Go on—you can do it!

  DRAWING VII

  “So I have to go up, up in the air above your stupid heads, or better, get down! Down under your awareness, floating in the knowledge that even though I am beneath you in salary, I am richer because I can see what you can’t.”

  Now you’re getting good at translating what Cy Twombly’s character is saying. Experiencing the rage of his powerless letter writing, the blindness of authority figures who would ignore his authentic complaints even if they could read what he was writing. Excited? Me too! Experience Drawing XV, my favorite one. God, looking at it makes me insane! I feel Cy Twombly throbbing in my veins, begging to be heard.

  DRAWING XV

  “If I took a lie detector test, I could pass it! If they asked me if I liked my job, I’d say yes even though I hate it! I’ve had to eat humble pie for so long even the cops couldn’t tell what was the truth! Do I like my boss? Sure, he’s a good man. LIE! I’m a liar but you can’t tell. He’s a stupid moron but you don’t know I’m thinking that, do you? Tell the truth, liar-mouth!”

  Jump to the end, Drawing XXXVIII. Doesn’t it, at first, look like a paragraph written in real words? Look closer: those are “suggestions” of words; not even one letter is actually in any alphabet. These schizophrenic pencil strokes, consumed by rage and a suicidal decision to throw caution to the wind, free their creator to tell the world what he really thinks.

  DRAWING XXXVIII

  “I’m okay now, the other side of madness, beneath the valley of ultra-agitation. I finally realize that none of what you now understand matters anyway. I am a person who knows how to write down things. Someone as smart, confident, insane, and in full control of his handwriting as I am always has the last laugh and here it is. I quit. You know my name…Ty Rombly.”

  Cy Twombly has been called a “natural aristocrat” and I have no problem with that. He refuses to speak to me as he hangs on my walls, but that’s okay. Silence worked for the amazingly aggressive and powerful female artist Lee Lozano, who in 1971 vowed for “art” never to speak to women again. And she didn’t, either! For twenty-eight years she neve
r uttered a word to any member of the female sex. What started out as a statement against the power of men in the art world, entitled Boycott Women, got sidetracked into an obsessive lunacy that lasted right up to the day she died. Lee Lozano needed to plan her daily life carefully. “I remember sitting in a restaurant with her once,” recalled the artist Sol LeWitt in a published interview, “and a waitress came to the table. Not only would Lee not talk to her, she would hide her eyes. When she came to my studio, if my girlfriend opened the door, Lee would turn on her heels, run down the stairs and be gone.” At the end of her life, Lee became ill and had to go live with her parents. But what did she do at the dinner table? Block the view of her mother with her hands and demand, “Dad, will you please pass the salt?” This pathological, cockeyed, sexually political plan worked for Lee Lozano’s artistic legend, so who can blame Cy for being standoffish?

  From what I’ve heard, Cy doesn’t really participate in the mail either. Can you blame him? When your handwriting can be worth a million dollars at auction? I first met Mr. Twombly when we were jurors together at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and he was a lovely, witty, smart man. On the last day, I got up my nerve and asked him for his address so I could send him the annual Christmas card that I design myself. He very kindly wrote it down on a torn piece of paper in that same handwriting I knew so well from his work. I almost swooned. He even spaced it badly with the letters scrunched at the bottom. What do you do when Cy Twombly writes something down for you? Throw it away after transferring the information to your private address book? Hardly. Frame it? Maybe not. Call the editor of the next volume of Cy’s drawings-on-paper catalogue raisonné and ask to have it included? Well, it’s tempting.