We are all quiet.
We know that we cannot repel ghosts.
Michael Holman, who used to be a member of Basquiat’s band, Gray, reminds us of the drug dealer on 3rd Street between Avenues A and B. We used to stand outside his window and call up to the third floor, “Raton! Raton!” An empty plastic cup with a drawing of the Jetson family on one side would be lowered out the window on a string. We would fill the cup with money and the man would pull it back up and into his apartment. After a few minutes of waiting we’d call out, “Raton! Raton!” and once again the cup would be lowered with drugs inside.
We walk through the gallery pointing to the large painting Eyes and Eggs that Suzanne named, as she did many of his works. It is a painting of the cook at Dave’s Luncheonette, a place we all would go at four in the morning, starving after a night of dancing and drugs at the Mudd Club. We look at the painting and remember the coffee and scrambled eggs and egg creams. We recall the bright stainless-steel light, cigarette smoke, and the prostitutes and pimps hanging out at the next table with black and brown Doberman dogs outside tied up to parking meters.
We walk quietly for a while looking at the paintings of famous boxers.
“What happened to Annina Nosei?” Michael asks, referring to Basquiat’s first art dealer.
“She’s a professional ballroom dancer now,” Suzanne answers.
“It’s so strange what happens to people, where they go and what they become,” Michael continues. “I heard about a woman who fell in love with the Eiffel Tower and married it! I think I remember this because the Eiffel Tower was always too big for me, just too damn big for me.”
In a back room of the museum Suzanne and I are suddenly confronted by her old refrigerator covered with Basquiat’s doodles and the words “TAR, TAR” scribbled on the door. It had always stood in her kitchen at 68 East 1st Street. She sold the refrigerator at Sotheby’s for five thousand dollars. Andy Warhol bought it. As we look at it we remember her apartment that was covered with Jean-Michel’s paint splatters on the walls and paint stick melted into the floor ridges in the wood floor.
I remember what it was like to open that refrigerator in 1983 and find a half-eaten pastry, a red and white milk carton, a box of Domino sugar, a pair of red high-heeled shoes, a dish of bracelets and a cup of earrings. Suzanne even kept her Jackie O sunglasses in that refrigerator and a couple of books. “I don’t lose the things I keep in there,” she used to say in her singsong, songsing voice.
As we contemplate the refrigerator in the cold and reverent gallery space with a white sign beside it that says “DO NOT TOUCH” and protected by alarm wires and a museum guard, Suzanne and I turn and look at each other, really look at each other.
Suzanne says, “You know, I kept no souvenirs. I did not want to be a tourist in my own life.”
Jennifer Clement
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JENNIFER CLEMENT is a poet, biographer, and novelist. She is also the author of the novels A True Story Based on Lies, The Poison That Fascinates, and Prayers for the Stolen (awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Literature). She was part of the New York City art scene during the early eighties, but she now lives in Mexico City. She is a member of Mexico’s prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores and is also cofounder and director, with her sister Barbara Sibley, of the San Miguel Poetry Week. Clement was the president of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012.
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