Widow Basquiat

by Jennifer Clement

  Anyway, at the time that Francesco did these paintings of me a show was being arranged at the Bruno Bischofberger Gallery of collaborations among Jean, Francesco and Andy. A few paintings of me were used in this collaboration. I later found out while having dinner with Andy and Jean that Jean was very jealous and did not know what to paint on the one painting of me by Francesco. So Andy told him to paint fire, which he did. Then Andy said to Jean, “Should we tell her?” Jean became very serious and said, “No, don’t tell her.” I said, “Tell me, tell me.”

  Then Andy said, “When Francesco was in India and the other paintings of you were locked up in his loft one of them caught fire and they all burned up. Nothing else in the loft was harmed and no one knows how it happened since there was nothing around that could have started the fire.”

  The fire happened the same day that Jean painted fire on the collaboration painting at Andy’s Factory. Jean was furious that Andy told me. Then Andy said that they named this collaborative painting—the one Jean painted fire on—Premonition.

  Jean yelled, “Why did you tell her! Now she will know she is cursed and it is better not to know.”

  That night I went home with Jean. I was asleep while he was painting and drawing. He woke me up and seemed very anxious.

  “Who is a better painter, me or Francesco?” he asked.

  I said, “Leave me alone. I don’t want to answer that question.”

  But Jean was very persistent. I was secretly happy that he was jealous. So I answered, not really believing it at all, “Of course Francesco is a better painter.”

  He was not angry. He became very curious. “Why?” he asked. “Why is Francesco a better painter?”

  And I said, “Because you paint about objects and people in the world. He paints about spirituality.”

  Then Jean said nothing else and I went back to sleep.

  Later he woke me up again. He was very anxious and presented me with a drawing he had just done and asked, “Is this spiritual enough for you?”

  It was a drawing of me sleeping with a snake floating above my head. Now he was laughing.

  BOXING

  Jean-Michel is always talking about having a boxing match with Julian Schnabel. He wants to sell tickets to the match. He wants to invite everyone and put posters all over New York. He wants people to place bets. He says he is going to wear an African loincloth instead of shorts and that throwing paint at each other is allowed.

  This never happens.

  When Jean-Michel and Andy Warhol do a collaboration at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery they make a poster announcing the show. The poster is of Jean-Michel and Andy Warhol dressed in boxing trunks and having a boxing match.

  Jean-Michel loves to see artists as athletes. He thinks it is a wonderful joke. On some of his paintings he writes: FAMOUS NEGRO ATHLETES.

  WHAT TO DO IF YOU NEED MONEY

  When Suzanne needs money she calls up Jennifer and they go to the Great Jones loft. They stand outside on the sidewalk waiting for Shenge. Shenge opens the door.

  “Hello, girls,” he says. “Do you need some money? Come back later when Jean leaves.”

  The girls walk around SoHo. Sit on a park bench and wait. A few hours later they return. Shenge opens the door. He takes one-hundred-dollar bills out of Jean-Michel’s shoes, from under the sofa and from inside the stove. The loft is full of hidden money.

  “There, girls,” Shenge says. “Go pay your rent, hum, um, um.”

  THE MARY BOONE ART OPENING

  Suzanne picks up Jennifer in a taxi. Suzanne is wearing an enormous black hat—as big as an umbrella—and black gloves.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” Suzanne says, pulling at her gloves. “I am so scared. I haven’t seen Jean for two months. He’ll be furious that I came. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Let’s go.”

  The gallery is packed with at least two hundred people. The crowd spills over into the street. Limousines are lined up for blocks and blocks. Jean-Michel sees Suzanne immediately. Her hat can poke people. She won’t take it off.

  He takes Suzanne and Jennifer to the back of the gallery. He says, “You two have to stay here and don’t come out.”

  At the back of the gallery is a little corner that is separated from everyone else by a rope. Jean-Michel’s mother is sitting there staring straight ahead of her with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Every few seconds she opens her mouth wide like a fish and closes it. Suzanne and Jennifer sit beside her and greet her but she does not answer but only nods and nods. The three women sit side by side very properly and quietly watching the opening from behind the rope. They could be on a train, at the movies, or at church.

  Everybody in the art scene was there. I had gone with Jennifer, and Jean made us sit in a corner in a roped-off area with his mother. We sat there in a row on three little chairs and occasionally waved at someone we knew. I actually did not mind this because I was so astounded to meet his mother and see her for the first time. I tried to greet her and speak to her but she was so obviously drugged up and could not communicate at all. I wanted to tell her that I loved her son and that I knew everything that she had done to make him a great painter. I wanted to tell her that I knew he loved her. But I could not say anything to her at all. So, at one point, I just reached over and held her hand and she let me.

  THE GIRL CAN ALSO PAINT

  The girl goes to Pearl. She buys oil paint, acrylic paint and paint sticks. “I can do this too.” She buys canvas and staples. “I can do this too.” On the way home she buys a bag of dope. She puts the bag deep inside her hair.

  Suzanne staples the canvas to the walls of her apartment. She paints portraits of Jean, Joan Burroughs with an apple on her head, and famous white people in blackface.

  She walks around the East Village with paint all over her clothes. When she waits on tables she has paint all over her hands. She tells the customers at the restaurant. “My hands are clean. This is only paint. I am a painter.” She pulls up her sleeves and shows them how the paint reaches up to her elbows.

  Her house smells of paint. It smells like her father, like her home. It smells like Jean-Michel. She breathes and the fumes that come out of her turn her cigarette smoke red.

  My paintings represented a creative catharsis of my relationship with Jean. I painted white famous people in blackface with red lips, like George Washington on a dollar bill or the American Express man. I painted Malcolm X and boxers. I went to my opening at the Vox Populi Gallery on 6th Street in a limousine and an outfit by Andre Walker. He made me a red, white, blue and black dress. A lot of the paintings were in these colors and in gold. I looked like the paintings. I also was wearing a big black velvet turban and black elbow-length gloves. It was really a performance piece. I painted Jean on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in whiteface. Five collectors fought over it. After the opening it sold for three thousand five hundred dollars.

  I had a big party afterwards at Mike’s American Bar and Grill. Everyone came except Jean. My opening was on a Saturday night. Maripol came to the dinner and she brought The New York Times Magazine with Jean on the cover that came out that same night. This enraged me for some reason. So I left the party in my limousine to look for Jean. I found him at Area but he would not go back to the party with me. So I went back alone.

  Jean and Andy went to see my art show the next day. I heard that they were both very quiet while they looked at everything. They did not make fun of me or laugh at my work, which was strange.

  Later Jean said to me, “You are no fool, Venus.” He said he liked the portraits I had done of him because they laughed at him.

  After this I could never paint again. I sold all the paintings except the one of Joan Burroughs, which I gave to Jennifer, and I kept three of Jean’s portraits because he said he wanted them. He told me he would buy them but I said that I would give them to him, of course. But, somehow, I never got them to him.

  A LIST OF GOOD DEEDS

  1. When Jennifer visits Suzanne one Sunday afternoon
she finds a bag lady sitting in Suzanne’s kitchen. The woman is dressed in rags and is covered with scratches, bruises and sores. The woman smells like excrement and sulfur.

  “Poor dear,” Suzanne says. She is boiling two huge pots of water. She places the bag lady’s oozing, bloody feet inside the pots.

  Suzanne says, “There, there. It might hurt at first.”

  The bag lady cries, “Ooooooh me!”

  Suzanne scrubs the woman’s feet with soap and then swabs them with alcohol.

  “We need some fresh socks,” Suzanne says. She tells Jennifer to take off her socks and give them to the lady.

  Jennifer takes off her socks. Suzanne carefully puts them on the bag lady as if the woman were a small child.

  “There, there,” Suzanne says. “These will keep you warm.”

  The bag lady says, “Ooooooooh me!”

  2. Suzanne goes to Houston Street to buy some heroin. Outside the crack and heroin house two of the drug dealer’s small girls are playing jump rope with an old, frayed piece of rope.

  Suzanne says to them, “My God, little ladies, my God!”

  She takes a taxi to F.A.O. Schwarz and buys a bright, rainbow-colored jump rope. She takes another taxi back to Houston Street and gives the girls the new jump rope.

  3. Suzanne is walking down 1st Street toward her apartment. Two Puerto Rican boys are beating up on another very young black or Puerto Rican boy. Suzanne says, “Hey, boys, stop it.”

  The boys tell her to mind her own business.

  “If you stop it I’ll give you each a kiss,” she answers.

  The boys pause, laugh and say okay.

  Suzanne gives each of them a kiss.

  4. It is 4 a.m. It is winter. Suzanne is walking home from waitressing a late-night shift. Her tips are distributed in her hair, socks and inside the pockets of her jeans.

  She sees an old man asleep in a doorway. She can see that he is shivering and trembling from the cold. She takes off her winter coat, covers the man with it and runs all the way home in only her lightweight dress.

  For two weeks she goes to work wrapped in a red and blue flannel blanket.

  5. One day Suzanne goes to the Great Jones loft. Shenge is not there and Jean-Michel opens the door.

  He says, “Shit! I have thirty-thousand-dollar checks, forty-thousand-dollar checks, ten-thousand-dollar checks. Checks and checks and Shenge isn’t here to go to the bank!”

  Suzanne says, “I’ll go to the bank, Jean.”

  She goes to the bank and cashes some of the checks. She puts the money into her blouse.

  When she gets back to the loft she gives Jean all the money. He takes some and tells Suzanne to put the rest inside the oven.

  Valda was a very tall Latvian American. She wore her hair very short like a boy. She had blue eyes that turned up at the sides the way they would if you had your hair pulled really tight in a ponytail. She was very beautiful and intelligent.

  One of the times when Jean and I broke up he took her to Culebra near Puerto Rico. I was so devastated that I could not get out of bed. Valda was involved with Jean on and off for years. Valda and I became friends even when I was with Jean. We liked each other very much and never felt jealous. Valda later told me that when she was in Culebra for two weeks with Jean that all he could do was talk about me. I loved Valda for this. That’s the kind of girl she was. Sometimes Jean, Valda and me would hang out together.

  After Jean’s death Valda took it upon herself to search for the child Jean had told her he had. Jean never told me this. However, he did tell several people that he got a girl pregnant in New Orleans on a one-night stand and that the girl had the baby—a son named Noah. Valda told me that Jean often spoke to her of this child and that he was always sending money to the child’s mother. Valda could never find the child.

  I was once at the Great Jones loft and this gorgeous black woman came over and asked Jean for abortion money. He took some money out of his sock and gave it to her.

  After she left, Jean asked me why I did not have his baby. I told him I could not have babies. He said that I was just saying that because I did not want to have his child. I just mumbled something back like, “No, no. Maybe some other time …”

  I never told Jean that the PID infection he gave to me had damaged me so badly. It would have hurt him so much to know and I am glad he never knew.

  GOING TO THE FISH MARKET

  After clubbing, at four in the morning, Suzanne and Jennifer take a taxi down to the fish market. Dressed in their black nightclub dresses they walk among the barrels filled with fish. Their feet get caught in the wet nets on the ground. They listen to the fishermen boast and brag about their biggest catch and look into the dull, large eyes of dead fish.

  Suzanne and Jennifer like to watch the sun rise. They like to examine the strange things that come out of the sea, accidentally caught in the nets: squid, crabs, a small shark, a yellow blouse, a turtle, an orange, oyster shells.

  They don’t talk about the clubs or the boys they met or did not meet. They don’t talk about where they might be in ten years. They ooh and aah over the shimmer of fish scales and talk and giggle with the fishermen.

  One night after clubbing Jennifer and I went down to the docks to talk to the fishermen. This was something we did quite often. I remember one time someone had caught an enormous red and purple octopus. It lay inside a net. When we got up close to look, it suddenly let out a great stream of black ink that spattered all over our shoes.

  SELLING THE REFRIGERATOR

  Suzanne calls Jennifer. She says she needs money to pay the rent. She has not paid the rent for five months. She is going to sell her refrigerator, which is covered with Jean-Michel’s doodles. Suzanne says that some representatives from Sotheby’s already came over and agreed to auction it. Jennifer’s boyfriend is a poet but he also has a trucking company called O’Neill Trucking. Suzanne wants Jennifer’s boyfriend to take the refrigerator to Sotheby’s.

  The refrigerator sells for five thousand dollars. Andy Warhol buys it.

  I was working as a waitress at Mike’s American Grill. Each night after I finished waitressing I would call a limousine and drive around looking for Jean. I would go to the clubs or to his loft. Sometimes he would let me in and sometimes he wouldn’t. I was really a mess. And really high on heroin. I had no shame whatsoever. I’m very embarrassed about it. I could not control myself. It was like I didn’t care how I appeared. I was always very fabulous, though. I had a lot of style and was very dramatic. Soon I stopped doing this. The limousines were so expensive that I didn’t pay my rent. It was around this time that I sold my refrigerator at Sotheby’s for five thousand dollars. I was nuts. I was obsessive. Then I realized I just had to get on with my life. I stopped stalking him and I just tried my very best to ignore the impulses. I stopped going to art galleries, I stopped hanging out with the people Jean and I knew together. I was trying to heal myself. It took everything I had inside to stop this behavior. But I did.

  Then I got a job at Hawaii 5.0. and once in a while Jean would come by and stare in the window. He would not say anything but just stare; eventually he would leave. It reminded me of the way he used to stare at me at Night Birds when I first met him.

  Sometimes he would come in with people like Lauren Hutton, Malcolm McLaren and others. He would stare at me with a mean look on his face. It was a small restaurant with only one small room so I was the only waitress and I would have to wait on them.

  Jean loved to order me around. He would say, “Waitress, would you dump my ashtray,” or “Waitress, fill our water glasses.”

  One day he came by and was just staring in the window so I went outside and asked him what he thought he was doing.

  He said, “I’m watching you, Venus—just watching you. Why don’t you come over later?”

  I said, “No!” And then he grabbed my arms and said that he missed me.

  I went to see him about one week later. He was so famous now that everything between us
was very strained. People called him from all over the world and everyone was telling him how great he was. It was very sad because he did not seem to enjoy it at all. For example, Jean would be on the telephone talking to some German art dealer and then he’d get off the phone and go into the bathroom and vomit because of the drugs. Or an art critic would come by, drink some good wine, and go on and on about Jean’s place in the art world. Jean would walk behind the guy and stick out his tongue. Jean hated art critics; he called them “maggots.”

  I left after a week and I don’t think I ever slept with him again. It was too painful because by this time he could only think about heroin. I went to visit him and I went to dinner and parties with him but I never slept with him again. Then slowly, slowly I cut him out of my life completely.