THE LAST TIME SHE CALLS
The last time she calls up Jean-Michel on the telephone is when Andy Warhol dies.
She says, “Jean, Jean, I am so sorry about Andy. How are you? Do you want me to come over?”
Jean says, “No.” His voice is slurred and Suzanne can tell that he is very high on dope.
Suzanne keeps insisting, “Should I come over? Do you want me to come?”
“Come and give me a bath, Venus,” he says.
“Okay, Jean,” she says. “I’ll be right over.”
When she gets to the loft Shenge opens the door. “Go home, Suzanne,” Shenge says. “He is asleep, um, and dope-sick. Go home.”
Suzanne kisses Shenge’s hand. “Yes, yes,” she says.
I called Jean when Andy died. I knew he would be very upset. But he could hardly speak to me he was so out of it. In a slurred whisper he kept asking me, “What fables do you know?”
RUBY DESIRE
Suzanne changes her name to Ruby Desire. She has a big cowboy belt made that has a big brass buckle that says “RUBY D.” The buckle is so large and heavy it looks like it could tip her over with its weight. It makes her walk leaning her body slightly to the left. She cannot run or skip anymore.
She sings, “Do, re, mi, fa. Do, re, mi, fa,” over and over again until it becomes her own private language.
When people stop her on the street and say, “Hi, Suzanne,” she answers, “I am no longer Suzanne, I am Ruby Desire. Do, re, mi, fa.”
I decided that I wanted to sing. So I started taking voice lessons with a jazz singer. I went three times a week. I saved up all my money and went into a little studio with an engineer and produced and made a demo tape.
I booked myself a show at Area and hired two big black bodyguards and a sax player. Everyone came. I sang two or three songs. I think I was probably really bad. But at least the hype was good. I had my hair done up like Priscilla Presley in the ’60s and it took a lot of guts.
I made the bodyguards follow me around everywhere and light my cigarettes for me. I called myself Ruby Desire. I looked all over town for a red limousine but couldn’t find one. So I knew all these East Village guys that drove old ’60s classic motorbikes. A whole pack of them came with me and the leader had a red motorbike so I drove with him but with a scarf over my head so as not to ruin my hairdo. It was great. I sang “Fever” and another song that was very poor that I wrote myself.
After singing I mingled with the crowd and my bodyguards followed me around everywhere. I heard someone say, “Who the hell does she think she is with those bodyguards?” It was really a lot of hype. I put myself out there and was surprised at how good I was at promoting myself.
At this time I didn’t talk to Jean at all. I wanted to be famous for myself and not as his girl.
I did other shows at Madame Rosa’s and I started to really become known as Ruby Desire. To myself, though, the whole thing made me laugh. I never took any of it very seriously.
Around this time I met Jonathan Hood, who was a singer and a songwriter. He really liked my voice and wanted to work with me. We started seeing each other and he soon moved into my apartment. I barely knew him. He was signed to Crepuscle Records based in Belgium. Jonathan was able to convince the record company to let me do a remake of Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” This record got a lot of club play in New York and I started doing shows all over the place. Jonathan and I also started doing shows together as Ruby Desire and the Hood.
We did one really big show in the Michael Todd Room at the Palladium. I had two beautiful black girls dancing behind me. We also had two bodyguards standing at the front of the stage wearing mirrored sunglasses. It was a really important show and it was very professional. By now I was pretty good and more relaxed and I was still studying voice.
Jonathan was friends with Mark Kamins, who was a big record producer. He came over to my apartment one day to play Jon something new he was working on. He just had the music down. It was sort of an African chant on top of a house beat. Jonathan convinced Mark to let me do the song and I wrote the lyrics for it.
The day I was recording the song, in walks this six-foot-five-inch Rasta from Guyana with dreadlocks to his waist and tribal scars on his face. He was quite intimidating. His name was Warren Doris. It turned out that the song was his and he did the African chant or chorus on the song. The song turned out so well that within one month I was signed, along with Warren, to Capitol Records.
Soon the song was released on a compilation album called The Black Havana Dance Compilation. It had nine other new artists on it.
As soon as the album came out it started going up the dance charts in America and England. Warren and I were sent on a tour to Europe with three other artists for one month and a half.
As I was the only white person on the tour, Warren protected me as best he could. He was into Santeria and made me wear magic beads under my costume and he would sprinkle me with holy water before we went onstage.
The whole experience was a nightmare even though we found out that the album had gone to number five on the dance charts in America and to number one in England. It was also the first time that I had been clean from alcohol and drugs for so many weeks.
After that tour I decided that I hated the music business and so I quit.
RUBY DESIRE PUTS AWAY HER COWBOY BELT
When Suzanne returns from Europe she puts her cowboy belt away at the back of her closet. New York feels different. She doesn’t want to be who she was. She thinks it is because she needs some heroin. She thinks she needs to see Jean-Michel. She also needs a job.
When people on the street call out to her, “Hello, Ruby!” she answers, “I am not Ruby anymore. I am Suzanne.”
She buys pink ballet shoes and wears them tied up her calf like a ballerina. She dyes her hair blue-black and cuts it short around her ears.
She goes to see Jean-Michel at the Great Jones loft. He lets her in.
He says, “I always let you in, Venus.”
He is so thin he seems transparent. He stumbles when he walks and fans himself constantly with his hands. His teeth are covered with a yellowish film of dirt. His long arms are dry and covered with needle tracks. There is paint on his face and in his hair and sores on his cheeks.
He says, “Why have you left me, Venus?”
Suzanne soothes him, caresses his hands, sucks his fingers and says, “Things change, Jean. I have never left you.”
“Everyone has left me,” he says.
“Let me give you a bath,” Suzanne says. “You always like that.”
She takes him to the bathroom, undresses him and puts him in the tub. She washes his hair and scrubs his skin, being very careful not to hurt his sore arms. This is a body she no longer knows.
She thinks he looks like a starved ten-year-old child. She rubs his clavicle bones and his hip bones.
“You have to get clean, Jean,” she says. “You have to just stop it.”
“I always loved it that you were the one person who never said that to me,” he answers. “I’m sick and tired of people telling me to get off drugs.”
“I am sorry, Jean. I won’t say it again,” the girl answers.
Jean-Michel lets Suzanne brush his teeth. He opens his mouth wide and says, “Ahhhhhh.”
When I got back from Europe, which had been hell, I immediately went to see Jean. He was a mess and so I bathed him like I always used to. His paintings were all facing the wall so that he would not have to look at them. It was very strange. The only one I saw was Riddle Me This, Batman that was against the wall of the bathroom. In the center of the painting Jean had written “NOTHING TO BE GAINED HERE.” Further down in the painting he had written, “COWARDS WILL GIVE TO GET RID OF YOU.”
It was the first time I had ever seen him feeling sorry for himself. He was usually so gutsy.
After the bath we watched television and went to sleep. When I woke up he had already left the loft. He had left me a note that said, I remember
it perfectly, “Venus, morning glory, sweet potato, I have the money and you have the gold. JMB.”
Later I saw those words “morning glory and sweet potato” in a painting of his, Eroica I, one of his last paintings. On that same painting he had also written “man dies” four times.
HE WAKES HER UP
One night Suzanne is asleep alone in her apartment and the doorbell rings. It is Jean-Michel. He asks if he can come in. Suzanne presses the buzzer and waits for him to come upstairs. She waits two minutes, three minutes, ten minutes and he doesn’t appear.
Suzanne laces up her ballet shoes and runs downstairs but she can’t find him. She walks around the block but she can’t find him.
She is wide awake now and takes a taxi to buy some dope. On the way back to her apartment she asks the driver to go past the Great Jones loft. All the lights are turned off there and she goes home.
In her apartment Suzanne sniffs the heroin and her room looks round and blue. Words come to her mind in a great rush: Euclid, Newton, Galileo. She wants to look into microscopes and be surrounded by formulas and equations. She thinks about Gray’s Anatomy and how she and Jean-Michel, high on coke, used to look at the book for hours as if they were reading a book on magic.
Suzanne remembers how Jean-Michel would paint and suddenly yell out to her, “Venus, read me the names of the bones in an arm.” And she would call back, “Humerus, ulna, radius, carpus.”
Two weeks before his death, at two a.m., he came and rang my buzzer. I let him in but he never came up. He was in a very bad state and sounded desperate. But this was as much as he could do. He had crossed the line, the invisible line in drug addiction. Every heroin addict has some sense of where that line is. It is a choice to cross it. I chose not to.
I know that he came to say good-bye and this is the kindest thing he ever did for me. I know he came to say good-bye because he knew his death was imminent but then he must have suddenly changed his mind. He didn’t want me to see him in such a terrible state, ravaged by heroin.
THE WEIGHT OF ARMS
Suzanne gets a job as a bartender at Tunnel. She works there five nights a week. This pays her rent and gives her enough money to buy heroin every day. She sniffs it before work, during work and when she gets home. It has turned her into a skeleton with great big black holes for eyes. The heroin keeps her warm and safe. It is animal fur around her bones.
On August 12, 1988, Jean-Michel is found dead from an overdose of heroin. He is found leaning in front of a fan as if he were trying to get some air to breathe. It is determined that he choked on his vomit. No church agrees to perform the funeral service because Jean-Michel was not a member of any church. Finally the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel agrees to hold the service. This is the place where all the jazz artists’ funerals had been held.
I don’t remember much about this time. I remember I rode over to the Great Jones loft on my bicycle just as Jean was being carried outside to the ambulance. I leaned against a wall covered in yellow graffiti that said “LISTEN, WATCH, MOON,” and watched the shape of his body covered by a sheet being placed into the ambulance. I watched until the ambulance was out of sight. His body looked so small and flat under that sheet as if no one were really there.
I remember Rammellzee telling me that “the mutherfucker is dead!” I remember Rene Ricard saying, his teeth chattering, “You are a widow now.” And, I remember calling Jean’s father and asking him if I could go to the funeral because it was going to be a private funeral.
The casket was closed because he was so destroyed by heroin and because an autopsy had been performed.
My left arm weighed two pounds and my right arm weighed six pounds. I wanted to cover my mouth. Over and over I’d place my hand over my mouth. I knew that if I covered my mouth the knowledge of Jean’s death could not get inside of me. It took two weeks before I could stop doing this.
Now, whenever I am around the Great Jones loft I will do anything not to walk near it. I cross the street or go around the block.
Even after all these years people are always looking for me. Strangers call me up. Dealers, collectors and biographers call me up. They all want to know what it was like to be with Jean. Sometimes I tell them. But they never get it right. I walk the places he has been.
SUZANNE
Suzanne covers her mouth with her hands. Over and over again, with quick birdlike gestures, she covers her mouth. She sleeps with a piece of cotton cloth over her lips. There are no teeth inside her words: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
After Jean-Michel’s death in 1988, Suzanne withdrew from the New York art world and everything that went along with that lifestyle. She went on to college and medical school (where she graduated both times with the distinction of summa cum laude). She now works in New York City as an addiction psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She specializes in treating artists.
POSTSCRIPT
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960–1988)
THE BEYELER RETROSPECTIVE 2010
AND A HANDFUL OF FRIENDS
For Tony Frazer
In Basel, Switzerland, banners that announce the great art exhibitions line the streets and blow and soar like flags. For the next few months, above the streets these signs read: BASQUIAT. Glued to poles and walls are the almost life-size posters of Jean-Michel sitting barefoot in a chair wearing a black Armani suit and tie that are covered in splashes of red paint. He holds a long paintbrush in his hand and looks straight into the camera’s eye. This photograph was used for the cover of The New York Times Magazine on February 19, 1985. This year, at the Beyeler Foundation, the largest retrospective ever of Basquiat’s work is being exhibited in order to celebrate what would have been Basquiat’s fiftieth birthday. A handful of his friends have come: Dr. Suzanne Mallouk, Michael Holman, Fab 5 Freddy, B-Dub and myself. This year we have all been celebrating our own middle-aged birthdays of the living.
We meet in the foyer of the gallery and walk together among the paintings. I listen to the voices of these friends around me just as I used to listen to them when we were in our early twenties in New York City at clubs and shows, in the subway and on the streets. As we move in the large exhibition halls, we comment on the paintings we know well and marvel at the ones we’ve never seen. Basquiat’s work takes us back to our old lives: our young lives.
Under the painting Red Man, Fab 5 Freddy asks, “Do you know where Jean-Michel is buried?”
Suzanne says, “Yes, of course. In Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Section 176, Lot 44603.”
“You really amaze me!” Freddie exclaims. “Dr. Mallouk, you’re something else! Have you been there? I want to go there. Let’s go. When can we all go?”
Suzanne tells us a story that no one has ever heard. “After Jean died some rich socialite, who had been his lover, had a court order issued to the coroner to take a blood test to make sure that Basquiat had not died of AIDS.”
We stand quietly for a moment thinking of those who are not here because of an overdose of drugs or because of AIDS. We think of Cookie Mueller and her husband, Tina Chow, Keith Haring, Joseph’s boyfriend, Klaus Nomi and John Sex.
“Jean did not have AIDS,” Suzanne confirms.
For a moment we also remember the writers. NYC graffiti artists always called themselves writers. They’d say “Let’s go writing” or “Are you a writer?” or “What do you write?” This writing was used to communicate among the city’s straphangers. Walls were paper and trains were books. And reading graffiti meant reading backwards as this was always a first step to understanding the words.
There was also artistry in how the can of spray paint was used. The paint could not drip, and if it did, the drips were called “tears.” If it dripped very badly we would say it was “crying.” I remember once walking down 1st Avenue past Tompkins Square Park and reading some graffiti that wept blue all down the wall. The rounded, balloon letters said: He Makes Me Eat Meat. Under these words was written: Why Do Fathers Walk Out on Their Kids?
Jean-Michel, as SA
MO, wrote all over the Lower East Side one summer. He wrote: Which of the following Institutions has the most political influence: A. Television B. Church C. SAMO D. McDonald’s. This wall was immortalized in one of Lisa Kahane’s photographs.
We remember Rammellzee’s loft with his robot creatures on skateboards and where each skateboard stood for a letter of the alphabet and we also remember Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery. Patti was the first art gallery in NYC to show graffiti art and she was instrumental in bringing hip-hop culture into the mainstream white art world.
In Switzerland, we feel the small street gang of New York City ghosts around us: Dondi, A-One, Bear 167 and Rammellzee. Some of these ghosts had premonitions when they were alive and even tagged TDS (The Death Squad) all over the subway trains and walls. We think of Michael Stewart who was killed by seven policemen for writing in a subway: PIR NEMA PIR NEMA.
We remember how at the beginning of Jean’s rise to fame, he used to make canvases out of anything he could find. We stand and look at Portrait of VRKS, Untitled (Hand Anatomy) and Low Pressure Zone. He used any old sticks nailed together with no attempt to create a ninety-degree corner so that the cloth was stretched and stapled onto sticks without wrapping around the back.
We stop and look at the painting Irony of Negro Policeman and I whisper, “Irony. Irony. So, what do we all think about the fact that the abuser is in charge of the legacy of his victim?”
Widow Basquiat Page 10