Everyone is Watching

by Megan Bradbury

  Bucke writes this down.

  They are sitting in the grass a short distance from the train. Other passengers look stiff and awkward in their new surroundings. The flat land around them stretches further than is reasonable. It stretches one’s insides and pulls at the mind. But here Walt can breathe. He lies down and moves his hands back and forth through the grass.

  He remembers standing on the shoreline at Coney Island. The sand continued before him under the ocean. In his pocket he had slipped many pages ripped from books. He ripped the pages from books so that he wouldn’t have to carry such a heavy weight. He had brought them to the edge of the land. But this was not the edge because the land continued under the water. He wanted to release the extracted pages and let the wind take them so that they could be freer than him. He plunged his hand into his pocket. He waited for something to happen but it did not. In his memory he waits there still. He is poised at the edge of the water.

  This is like a photograph he has had taken in his Camden home. He sat in a chair beside the window while his friend Thomas Eakins positioned his camera. He told Walt to be still and so Walt fixed his eyes on a mark on the wall. Sometimes he thinks he is still waiting there, waiting for the picture to come to an end, which of course it never does, for he is always present in it. This is what he feels as he lies in the grass. The grass grows against him but one day it will grow through him.

  The train whistle blows. Bucke stands. Walt does not get up. Bucke walks towards the train. He catches the talk of other passengers as they walk. They are talking about New York. How excited they are to be going there. Do hurry, the woman behind him is saying. He looks over his shoulder for Walt.

  The train is moving at a steady pace through the fields. The other passengers do not seem to notice this. They are settled into their own routines, kept busy on the train with the printed word, with books and newspapers. Everything is designed to mimic an ordinary day. Lives are performed without concentration. These passengers will continue on to their final destinations. They will alight and never re-board. This is not so easy for Richard Maurice Bucke. He is in a heightened state of emotion. He is too aware of his surroundings. The fixed points are Walt’s answers to his questions. When Bucke asks a sensible question he does not always hear a sensible answer. Let me write it, Walt says. I know what you want to say. It is better to allow Walt to hold the pen.

  Walt takes the pen and ink and he takes Bucke’s pages. He hunches over the work and scores sentences out. He turns the page on its side and writes in the margins. He turns the paper over and writes additional scenes on the reverse. It is better to let him do it. He is Walt Whitman. He knows the story better than anyone. Bucke can only scratch the surface. Bucke knows how the brain works but the brain is not everything. There is also the heart.

  When the time comes, Walt will step down from the train onto the platform in New York. A porter will hand him his trunk and bag. Walt will smile and wave at Bucke. He will walk into the crowd and be lost. Bucke will lose sight of his friend. Bucke will travel on to Canada alone. Bucke will return to his family from whom he has been separated for too long. At home he will sit in his study and lay out the pages of Walt’s biography, creased and worn from the journey. He will read back his own words and he will read Walt’s writing in the margins. He will remember his friend. The book will describe him in part but not as a whole. Some things cannot be accurately described. Love is one of those things.

  29

  What happens during sex is a spiritual transformation. There are no outlines, borders, or gaps between subjects. Robert Mapplethorpe looks his lovers directly in the eye when he has sex. To have many lovers does not mean that he doesn’t love them. The constancy is not with the other person but with himself. The feeling of love comes as quickly as a camera flash.

  Robert’s celebrity portfolio includes: Kathleen Turner, sultry, sexy. Grace Jones, naked, painted, wired. Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, synchronized, elegant. Donald Sutherland, smart, intense. Iggy Pop, wide-eyed, expectant. Edmund White Horizontal. He is passive, angelic, his eyes are wide and his mouth is closed. Edmund White, full-face close up, screaming, no date.

  Robert used to visit Coney Island with his grandmother. He always ignored the beach and the fairground rides. He ran to the freak show instead. He could hear the bustle of the fairground outside, in the sun, by the beach, where other people were having fun, the rumble of running footsteps on the boardwalk. But here, body parts were on display, twisted and engorged, extra limbs, missing limbs, displayed on stage and in glass cabinets, in the dark. The freaks in this show were presented like art.

  Fully Automated Nikon

  (Object/­Objection/­Objectivity)

  (1973)

  LAURIE ANDERSON

  Laurie Anderson is walking down a Manhattan street, attracting all the attention.

  Hey, pretty lady – wanna ride with me?

  Get that sweet ass over here.

  Come gimme a kiss.

  In her hand is a semi-automatic Nikon.

  Take a seat on my lap, baby.

  She holds up the camera and takes his picture.

  What the fuck are you doing? Get the fuck out of my face!

  It is as if she has pulled a gun on him.

  Some men pose. Some find the photographic act an extension of her evident willingness to have sex – the camera is her organ and they are getting fucked. They hold out their arms, willing and eager. They flip her the bird, hold up a fist. She holds up her camera, proud and defiant. She is turning their abuse into art.

  Say cheese! she says.

  30

  The tour guide waits by the gift-store door with a board in her hand that reads ‘Hard Times’. Edmund is standing on the sidewalk.

  There are a number of things I must insist on, says the guide. Please don’t touch the historical artefacts. I will be passing items around for you to hold. Do not lean against the walls or sit down on the furniture. This tenement was built in 1863. Since that date to its closure in the 1930s the building has housed over seven thousand residents. The Hard Times tour you have selected today focuses specifically on the economic depression of the 1870s. As we explore the house you will learn more about the German immigrants of that period through the story of the Gumpertz family. Through their eyes, you will gain a better understanding of the conditions many working-class families faced in the Lower East Side in the late nineteenth century.

  Stephen Crane would have known the people who lived here, Edmund thinks. They would have been ordinary people. He would have looked into the whites of their eyes and seen the truth there. Crane would have turned that truth into fiction.

  Please save any questions you have until later, the guide says. Please let me know if you get too hot. Please respect the rules of this house. Please respect the memories of the dead.

  The memories of the dead. But they are everywhere, Edmund thinks.

  Now please follow me.

  Edmund and the other tourists cram themselves into the dark and narrow corridor. The wallpaper is hanging off the walls and a single dangling light bulb glares bare above.

  Now it’s very dark in here, says the guide. And the wallpaper, as you can see, is black. The discoloration of the walls is due to the poor conditions in which these people lived. None of these tenements had ventilation and everybody cooked on coal-powered stoves. Now turn around and look at the paintings on the wall.

  The painting behind Edmund is dirty. He can’t see what the picture is. The painting on the opposite wall shows a rural scene. A cornfield, trees, bright blue sky.

  This scene was painted to remind the immigrants of where they had come from, says the guide. They wouldn’t have been able to see the painting, however, on account of all the smoke. Would someone please switch off the light?

  Darkness.

  The only light in this hallway would have been one oil lamp placed in that window. Can you imagine living mostly in the dark? Now follow me.

  The tenement
upstairs is divided into three separate rooms. There is a bedroom, a kitchen and a parlour. Electric fans nudge warm air. A dishrag hangs on the corner of the stove. There is a cutting board with a knife and a slice of bread. Unlaced boots stand in the corner of the room. The bed is made. The eiderdown is neatly tucked. An oil lamp burns in the corner of the room. It is difficult to breathe in here. The other visitors look uncomfortable. They stand with their backs against the wall. They stand with arms folded, hands interlaced. They are looking directly at the floor. This apartment is not like theirs. They are standing in a stranger’s house. The guide passes Edmund a heavy clothes iron. Edmund holds it in the palm of his hand.

  The mother kept it hot on the stove, says the guide. Mrs Gumpertz scrubbed the floors to prevent disease.

  Mrs Gumpertz had memories of a home back in Germany, thinks Edmund. She remembered the colour and the smell of her village. She had come to New York for a better life. She thought about the lives of her children. Everything she did was for the sake of their future. She suffered great hardship – the death of a child, abandonment by her husband – yet she and her daughters survived.

  Mrs Gumpertz became a dressmaker and she sewed fine clothes for New York’s upper classes, the guide says. Her work must have been greatly admired, for she earned enough money to support herself and her children. Inspectors came to ensure her living quarters were clean because disease was regularly passed from the slums to higher society through workers in the textiles trade.

  Mrs Gumpertz was a fastidious cleaner. A filthy city does not necessarily mean a filthy home. Edmund leans against the wall. He feels the hard impressions of the wallpaper against his back. His sweat is soaking through his shirt. The dirt on the wall will now mark his clothes.

  The guide is holding up a photograph of two blonde girls in present time. They are twins, eight or nine years old. They are standing in the sunshine in a garden beside a swimming pool. They are wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts and holding tennis rackets. The guide says these are the descendants of Mrs Gumpertz.

  It is their history we are witnessing today, says the guide. There is always another story to tell. This is what we want to show you at the Tenement Museum. We want to forge a link between the past and the present. The history we describe always comes from real individuals. We never describe fictional people. The Gumpertz family really lived here once.

  The girls are smiling in the photograph. Their teeth are very white. They are rich and healthy-looking. They look like girls who don’t know about history.

  The visitors file out of the tenement. Edmund waits in empty space for a moment longer. He crosses the kitchen to the bedroom and looks at the empty bed there.

  The next tenement is empty of items except for debris piled on the floor, masonry, floorboards, kitchen cabinets. The wallpaper is falling away from the wall. Stacks of beams are piled in the corner. Exposed electrical wire is hanging from the ceiling. There is no furniture, no family portraits here. There are no personal items, no clothes, no dolls.

  This building closed in the 1930s, says the guide. The landlord couldn’t afford to maintain it during the economic hardships of the Depression. The building stood empty for fifty years until the 1980s when the founders of the Tenement Museum discovered it. Our director couldn’t believe what she had found. One day she was walking through the Lower East Side. She stopped at the store downstairs to use the bathroom. What she saw inside was a time capsule. Every room was exactly as it had been left. The landlord had repaired holes in the walls by shoving newspaper into them and papering over the holes. When we moved in we found twenty layers of wallpaper in some of the rooms. We found one hundred and fifty years of journalism stuffed into those walls. Many of the problems the city has today are the same as they were in Mrs Gumpertz’s day. Housing is still a major problem. Many people can’t afford to live in this neighbourhood now. This problem is spreading through the city.

  The group files down the fire escape. Edmund sees the glass towers ascending high above the horizon. Cranes are swinging steel beams into place. He remembers a photographic portrait he once had taken. In it, he was screaming. Edmund couldn’t look at it, this silent screaming man. Had he known from the beginning to think of his life as an ongoing narrative instead of as an accumulation of individual moments, he might have foreseen the bigger picture and thus protected his heart. They called him a pioneer. He doesn’t know what he has discovered except a broken heart.

  Outside the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, the guide says to the group:

  When the Chelsea opened in 1884, it contained luxury apartments. As the entertainment industry spread uptown, however, after the completion of the subway’s first line in 1904, rich residents vacated and moved uptown too. The apartments in this building were segmented and made smaller. The owners advertised for residents from the lower middle classes. During the Depression the apartments were again made smaller. This was when the artists came.

  Edmund thinks, They stayed in luxury suites that had been cut up and reordered. They lived in rooms with half a fireplace, half a ceiling rose. The outlines of the rooms were brand new and their borders were confusing. Ghost apartments. Ghost hotel. Artists made use of smaller quarters. They didn’t care about the size. It was the low rent that mattered and the company. The sign on the door reads Renovation In Progress. The windows of the hotel have been boarded up. Every room must now stand empty. The hotel’s residents have moved on. When the renovation is complete, it will be a tourist hotel. Visitors will come to choose their rooms from a menu. The beds will be made with clean white sheets. There will be a concierge. A neat clerk will sit behind a bare desk. This building will not now produce anything new. It will live off the memories of previous times. What Edmund is looking at is memory only. This memory is not one of his. It is the memory of a city that is always changing. Visitors will choose rooms that best reflect their characters. Will they imagine for a moment that they are Patti Smith? Will they come here for a holiday from themselves?

  Fifth Avenue has been cordoned off and crowds are gathering. Music and drums echo off the buildings. Floats creep past. Dancers are dressed as superheroes. Batman shakes his ass and spanks Robin. A marching band with baton-twirlers. The musicians are young men wearing evening gowns. There are Medusas and Evita Peróns, Marilyn Monroes and a female Elvis. Mothers and fathers hold up banners that read ‘I love my gay son’. Men dance with men. Women dance with women. A convertible with the top down drives slowly past, princess-men sitting in the back waving like the Queen of England; their make-up has smudged. Boys and girls hand out cups of water and towels. The paraders pat themselves dry and smile for the cameras. The music changes from marching bands to drum and bass, from jazz to honky-tonk piano. A woman with a shaved head plays a classical piano on the back of a yellow pick-up truck. A DJ balances on a float, one hand stuck to a set of pink headphones. She dances. Transvestite Miss Americas in sequined evening gowns wave stiffly from the back of a blue van. Banners read, Whole Foods support gay marriage; Gay Marriage = Gay Registry = Gay Clutter. Store with us!

  But Edmund remembers love.

  31

  A reporter watches a promotional film from 1949 that shows the high towers of Stuyvesant Town, an eighty-acre high-rise development in the Lower East Side that was built at the suggestion of Robert Moses. The film shows dozens of housing blocks built in landscaped gardens. Families are sitting on the grass with their children. Couples are strolling slowly along the pathways. Old people are sitting on benches and feeding the birds.

  The narration describes the miracle born to this area, once the site of slums and depravity – abandoned gas works and run-down tenements – people now have somewhere clean to live, modern apartments with grass, children’s play areas, and a perimeter fence.

  The voice-over says,

  What was once a run-down, dying section of the great city of New York has been recreated and today this section is a beautiful park-like community. Yesterday there was hardly a
patch of green to be found anywhere in this district. Today there are many acres of lawns and shady trees and miles of winding walks close to everybody’s apartment. Yesterday, children had to play on the sidewalks or fire escapes or in the dangerous streets but today there are safe play facilities for boys and girls of all ages.

  The film doesn’t mention those who lived in the Gas House District who have been evicted from their homes or the fact that the people living in the development now are all middle class, married and white.

  The reporter reads back his notes for what Moses said about this.

  It is well within the rights of the board to accept who they want into the estate. To let just anybody in would lower the value of the property and be detrimental to their annual yield.

  Also:

  What do I believe? I believe in limited objectives and in getting things done. If you want a text, let me quote George Bernard Shaw from the dedication of Man and Superman. ‘This’, says Shaw, ‘is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being the force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.’ Those were the words of a courageous man and I can add nothing to them.