Everyone is Watching

by Megan Bradbury

  Bucke remembers the first occasion when he heard Leaves of Grass being read at a party. He listened to Leaves of Grass, then he met the man. The feeling was the same.

  Dream of Life

  (1996–2008)

  STEVEN SEBRING

  You wanna film me? Patti Smith says.

  Yeah, says Steven.

  What for?

  To see who you really are. To see what you do and how you do it. To understand you, Patti.

  You wanna cut me up into tiny pieces and sew the parts together? she says. If you film the outside, what about my insides? If I explain my inner thoughts to you, everything will come out, you see. Can you really communicate another person by showing them walking into the shower, or humming tunes, or eating dinner, or sharing memories? You’ll try to tell a story but there is no story. Wouldn’t it be a trick? I am right here, man. I’m growing old. So are my kids. So are you. This is the only thing I know. I don’t need to be remembered. It’s all in the art I produce.

  She shakes his hand, thanks him for his time, and walks out the door. Steven waits for the ‘I’m sorry, but’ speech from Lenny Kaye, but Lenny smiles and says, We’ll see you next week.

  17

  In the grounds of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michael Heizer, sitting in the cabin of a tractor, waves his cowboy hat and lassoes the air whilst dragging a thirty-ton granite slab over the manicured lawn.

  This is Dragged Mass.

  The commission is a breakthrough, a way to get things moving here, rip apart the marbled hallways and the monotony of the established art scene. The torn gulley that scars the lawn and the heavy weight of mass symbolize the necessary destruction of old order.

  The curator Sam Wagstaff welcomes it with a loving embrace.

  The mass sits there for days. Rain falls. The buckled gulley becomes a muddy trench. The mass, which is supposed to sink majestically into the lawn, does not sink. Eventually, it is hauled away, blown up with dynamite and removed piece by piece.

  In New York City, Sam tours the downtown galleries during the day. At night he tours the bars and clubs. This is a contrast from the world he’s left behind, the perfect green lawn (restored at great expense), the empty hallways and reverent air. There, his body was just an empty ancient vessel. Here, he can touch things, feel their weight.

  The first time Sam Wagstaff sees Robert Mapplethorpe is in a photograph on the mantelpiece of a mutual friend. In the picture, Robert, dressed in a French sailor hat, is smiling coyly at the camera.

  Who is this? says Sam.

  Robert Mapplethorpe.

  The feeling in his stomach is the same as when he looks at a great work of art.

  The first time Sam speaks to Robert on the telephone he says, I’m looking for someone to spoil. And Robert says, You’ve found him.

  The first time Sam visits Robert’s studio, he sees a pair of leather pants hanging on the wall with a baguette protruding at the crotch.

  The first time Sam meets Patti, she is barely dressed. Her hair a mess, she speaks in sweet profanities.

  The first thing Sam buys Robert is a camera. The second is an apartment far away from Patti.

  Sam tells Robert to take more photographs. They go away together to Fire Island, to European cities. Robert takes photographs of Sam as he used to take photographs of other people. Sam doesn’t mind – it is the way Robert takes the photographs.

  Sam becomes the subject of art. In Robert’s photographs, Sam is dressed or not dressed at all. Sam in the bath, pulling faces in repose, a man preparing himself for the day; at the beach, in a dark room, dressed in nothing but a pair of white underpants. There are the couple shots – artist and patron – Sam squatting in the corner of a white room and Robert standing over him, one arm over his head, Robert, the skinny kid in loose denim jeans; the wedding picture, Sam in front of Robert though it is always Robert’s face you’re drawn towards; images spread across the pages of a photo album, four eight-panel pages showing a cock bound and trussed in black leather cord – Sam’s or Robert’s, it’s not entirely clear – cord tied between the buttocks, twisted and fastened to the wrists, the front view, back view, side view.

  Before Robert, Sam didn’t consider photographs to be works of art. They were more like historical documentation or reportage to him. It is Robert Mapplethorpe who changes his mind. Sam sees Edward Steichen’s Flatiron Building like the prow of a ship emerging through the mist, the dagger-sharp blackness of the tree branch cutting through the rain-drenched air.

  It looks just like a painting, he says. Not like a photograph at all.

  And there is that feeling again: the turning of his stomach.

  Sam Wagstaff buys the photographs in auction houses and in second-hand stores. A long line of people form quickly behind him. The crowd picks up the pictures that Sam has been looking at. They want to see what Sam has seen. Sam and Robert carry the photographs back to Sam’s apartment in plastic bags and brown-paper bags. Patti comes later to organize the pictures. She lays the photographs out on the floor and orders them, catalogues them, figures out where they should go.

  Robert and Sam enjoy the thrill of the chase. But once they possess the item, it loses its meaning.

  For Sam, the subject of the photograph is not important. It could be of anything – medical photographs from the turn of the century, industrial photographs from the 1930s, anonymous photographs from any time at all. What Sam does is bring them all together so that a person can look at one and then another in one view. In their mind there will form a sequence, something of Sam’s imagination displayed in a line.

  At an exhibition of his own photography collection, Sam reads the words from the exhibition catalogue: This exhibition is about pleasure, the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of seeing, like watching people dancing through an open window. They seem a little mad at first, until you realize they hear the song that you are watching.

  Sam’s favourite photograph in the exhibition is Thomas Eakins’ Male Nudes: Students at a Swimming Hole, 1883. The picture shows a group of naked young men. Two are swimming in a lake, one is sitting on the bank, two are gazing into the water, two are getting ready to jump. One is cocked and ready, balanced on the edge of a rock, about to dive. Sam feels as though he comes to the scene by accident, strolling through a wood, the last days of summer, when the season has cooled, when the air has changed, when the day seems shorter than it should. The diver holds his position. His friends look on, frozen in time. A breeze blows in, not one of them moves. Water laps their skin. A beetle crawls across the diver’s toe. The sun shimmers on the water, catches the surface, catches the eye.

  When Sam looks at the photograph he feels the simple joy of witnessing something beautiful. These boys remain fixed. They won’t swim away. They will never grow old.

  The other photographs depict the American wilderness – Niagara Falls, the Nevada desert, the beginnings of a Western railroad, working-class portraits, medical experiments, industrial scenes. The spectacle of a hippopotamus stuck behind bars with children looking on, geese flying low over an ocean, Lewis Carroll’s Girl on Sofa, coy and perverse in the way she bends her knee and looks at the camera, knowing much more than she should. The madness of Boulogne’s Fright Mixed with Pain, Torture – the woman’s face seized with electrical pulses, President Lincoln on the battlefield of Antietam, Fifth Avenue at Rush Hour.

  And here are Robert’s photographs:

  Jim and Tom, Sausalito, 1977, the leather-clad gimp pissing into another man’s mouth, the arch of urine, suspended in mid-air, the warm, fleshy mouth, which eternally holds the piss, dark shadows, sharp against a sun-bleached wall, a streak of sunlight reflecting off leather, the men standing and kneeling, suspended. And Robert’s Tulips, New York, 1977, freshly cut, positioned in a vase, straight and true, except one, drooping off to the side.

  Sam doesn’t know why he collects the way he does. He says that an obsession – like any sort of love – is blinding.

  The camera ob
serves and records passively, without intrusion, and yet it makes an argument by organizing subjects into a two-dimensional plane within which Sam is made to understand.

  Robert says that when he takes a photograph or when he has sex he disappears. Like when you are the artist or when you are the art itself, the focal point of everything, you cease to exist.

  Sam looks for Robert in the tulip heads, the erect stalks, the black background, but there is only his own reflection in the glass.

  When Sam’s mother dies, Robert is away in London. Sam sits beside her bed and takes her photograph. He photographs her face and her hands. He photographs the bed frame and the bedspread. He photographs the bedside table, her reading glasses, water glass, a vase containing roses. He photographs the view from her window and the way the curtains are tied. He photographs the paintings on the wall, the dressing gown hanging on the door, her slippers under the bed. The pictures will preserve a silence that doesn’t exist in reality, for there is noise coming in through the open window – traffic, glass bottles being dumped upon the sidewalk. He can hear his own heart beating and he can feel a nervous twitch in his knee that pauses only when he stops to take a photograph. He takes more pictures. He thinks, If I can’t understand this thing for what it is, I’ll understand it in pieces. Then he thinks, Now that she is dead, Robert will have to come home for the funeral.

  Sam sets up the studio – white walls, bright lights: these photographs will be in colour. Patti, in a good mood, sits on the floor, tosses the feather boa over her shoulder and picks up the kitten. She laughs at Sam, who is watching her. She repositions her hat and holds up the kitten. She looks at the camera and smiles. Sam takes her picture.

  When Robert finds out he is very, very angry. He yells at Sam, Don’t you know who we are? I AM THE ARTIST AND YOU ARE THE COLLECTOR! Sam and Patti feel very guilty. All the pictures belong to Robert, the master of their universe.

  Robert decorates his Bond Street studio. He paints the walls and floorboards black, creates a giant cage out of chicken wire, places his bed in the centre. He works how he lives. This building used to house a factory but now it is filled with art. It is all about money, art, love and rent, all things are up for exchange – this is something Sam always says to Robert – remember who pays your rent.

  Robert doesn’t always remember. He telephones Sam and lists all of the men he has been with and all of the places he has gone. He lists his collection of physical symptoms – tiredness, back pain, groin strain, lice, rashes, swellings. As he speaks, Sam imagines him twirling the phone cord around his fingers like a debutante and thinks, That’s me being wrapped around his little finger.

  Jim Nelson arrives in the overnight delivery (a gift from Robert, who is in San Francisco). He is slim, attractive and new to New York. Sam buys himself a home on Long Island. At weekends and in between shows Sam and Jim rest up here and feel very grand. One thing Jim wants to do is grow wild roses. Sam doesn’t mind, except, when he thinks about the roses, he thinks about Robert’s photographs of flowers. Wherever Jim decides to try to plant the roses they just don’t grow. He tries them in a sunny spot and then a shady spot. He tries them by the perimeter wall and by the exterior wall of the house. He plants them too close to the woodland and wild deer eat the bushes before anything can grow. All the time they are in Manhattan, Jim can only think of the roses. He talks about them all the time to Sam. Jim is a hairdresser by trade. He has spent his adult life cutting things back but now the roses won’t grow.

  When Sam’s photography collection is complete he sells it to the Getty Museum for five million dollars. His critics say that this is self-sabotage. They say it is the action of a man who wants to build something up until he loves it so much he cannot help but despise it. They say the collection represents him, and he is the thing he has come to despise.

  Sam starts to collect American silver. He raids the salerooms and the auction rooms. He drags it all back to his place in black plastic sacks. He stands on the Long Island beach and scours the sand for remains of ancient shipwrecks, shoes off, wading through the soft sand, feeling for shards of silver with his bare feet. He finds pottery shards and polishes them. He commissions an artist to make them into jewellery. He does not stop looking until it is night time, and, even then, once he is back inside the house, he is looking out at the beach imagining the silver.

  His critics say that this collecting of silver is a sign of early dementia – a Polish émigré wanting to possess more silverware than the Boston museum. Others say this is just an example of his capacity to love.

  Robert comes to visit Sam in hospital but he cannot look at Sam. Sam is dying. He is no longer beautiful. AIDS has eaten away his body. His is thin and grey. His eyes are sunken. He has become an ancient, empty vessel. Sam is finding it hard to speak but he manages to say to Patti: If you want any of my money be nice to Robert because I’m giving him everything.

  Sam’s body is placed in the Wagstaff family crypt. He was a collector of art for so long and then he was the subject of art, and then he was the subject of history.

  Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Sam Wagstaff shows him staring defiantly into the distance. His neck muscles are taut. The area around his head is illuminated with light like a halo, and that makes the rest of his figure appear more definite. He is very beautiful. He has a strong jaw and forehead. He is solid and weighty, like a statue or a monument.

  18

  Edmund White follows the assistant down the carpeted corridor of the Midtown office tower. The building is a dreary sequence of office cubicles, walls covered in an array of personal effects: family photos, holiday photos, notes and calendars, sheets of white paper. Midtown and the Empire State Building are visible through exterior windows. They look grave and unmanageably high. Manuscripts reflect the towers outside, piled high on every desk, higher than the workers sitting there who are doubled over the print, shoulders hunched, the murmur of voices, telephone trills, stacks of cardboard boxes, taller than Edmund.

  Edmund’s editor shakes him by the hand. He could be in his twenties, thirties or forties. He has a universally appropriate smile. He is always pleased to see Edmund White. His handshake is firm and vigorous. Edmund is asked to sit in his office. An assistant hands Edmund a cup of coffee for which he has not asked.

  Good to be back on track, hey, Ed? says his editor. We just love what you’re doing with the book. He pats the manuscript on the desk.

  Edmund knows he won’t use any of those scenes. He has been trying to write about the Painted Boy, an update to the original story. It is supposed to be about the Painted Boy in modern times. It’s not as straightforward as he originally thought. Every time he describes the boy he thinks of himself. He no longer wants to write about himself. He wants to think about the future. But Edmund feels very tired. He wants to write about New York. He cannot tell his editor this.

  Edmund wipes his brow with the back of his hand. The coffee they have given him is very pale.

  The assistant leans over and places her hand on Edmund’s arm.

  You must be very tired, she says.

  Her fingers are very cold. She can’t be more than twenty-two.

  The editor taps the end of his pencil against the edge of his desk.

  You seem concerned, Edmund, he says. What’s wrong? Why not take the afternoon off. Go see friends. Go have some fun.

  Edmund remembers the Hudson River piers where he loved strangers in the dark. Unemployment was high in the city then. On sunny days men sat outside and dangled their legs above the Hudson. They bathed in the sun. They lay out.

  Returning to what is now the Hudson River Park, the space he finds is a long strip of manicured lawn. Cycle lanes stretch north and south. Joggers speed past. Their elasticated clothing is a multi-coloured blur. Edmund is standing with his back to the expressway. He is stuck between the rush of vehicular traffic and speeding exercisers. He is waiting for his moment to cross.

  He does not find the structures he remembers
. He is looking at the high-rise shore of New Jersey but he remembers danger, abandonment and the exchange of love. He remembers the rude dark. In the summer, when the sun was bright, it seemed a greater leap of faith to step foot inside those piers, for one step took you into blackness. Knife-sharp walls of light streamed in through injured ceilings. He loved the glory holes, the contextless dicks suspended in the wall. He loved to get onto his knees.

  He remembers the backwards nature of time when the moon was the noontime sun and walks were midday strolls in the dead of night.

  His favourite places were ordinary restrooms, alleyways, trucks, parks, subway stations. The men who used these places were ordinary people. He chose hustlers who were physically imperfect. To go with an Adonis just wasn’t realistic. There had to be an element of reality about it. It couldn’t be pure fantasy. It had to be authentic. A worn, imperfect body was a body with a past. It was into the grooves of history that he placed his desires.

  He used to wait in the piers when it was dark. He was frightened. But that was the point – you didn’t know what would happen. There had been murders, muggings, people took advantage, but this made Edmund feel alive. He waited in the dark. He could hear the lapping of the river against the posts, the repetitive slap of waves rebounding off passing ships.

  He remembers the vast internal space, the piers occupied by them. The piers were dilapidated, sure, but they were used.

  After a while he’d see somebody. They’d both be a little suspicious. Maybe he’d like the look of him and maybe he wouldn’t, but in the end there was always someone. Edmund would find a place – perhaps he’d do it right there in the middle of the cavernous shell where their voices echoed and other men crowded to see. Or maybe they’d go off and find somewhere private. Or if it was sunny, perhaps they’d go out onto the deck and find a warm spot and do it there, outside, on the boardwalk, with only the Hudson beside them and the passing ships. It was exciting, not knowing how the story would end.