by Bruce Bauman
We moved in early July to a spacious and inexpensive fifth-floor apartment in the Kreuzberg district, with cathedrallike ceilings and windows. Unpatched WWII bullet holes pockmarked the outside walls, and coffee and spicy odors from the Turkish café down the street mingled with polluted air that wafted from the East. I had my own room/studio with a bank of windows and a tiny Juliet balcony, where I’d sit and peer to the East at a group of forcibly vacated buildings, a reverse Potemkin village. (Nathaniel said the East German government kept those buildings empty because when people lived in them, too many tried to make it over the wall.) I imagined myself levitating, waltzing in the air above the watchtowers and the East Wall piled high with barbed wire like a black, thorn-filled rosebush sprouting above a barren field of land mines. The East, a lifeless, indecipherable blankness of the enforced silence smashing against the particles of neon light, bursting with possibility, in the encircled yet unbound West sector.
Though it was about a half hour from Kreuzberg, we enrolled Alchemy in the John Kennedy International School, which taught its classes in English and German. He showed a natural ear for languages and adjusted within weeks.
Nathaniel immediately immersed himself in the university life and in political groups in both East and West Berlin. He asked me to think about teaching some art classes. Think about it is about all I did. He and male his “colleagues” gathered on Friday nights for eating, drinking, and opinionating while the women sat like docile appendages. In what I thought was a sign of maturity, I suggested to Nathaniel that it was better for me to stay home with Alchemy because I might cause a scene. He wanted me to go. When one of them blabbered his claptrap, “The Wall is the great monstrosity of postmodern, postwar Europe,” I answered, “You’re wrong. The Wall is action. It’s beautiful. It’s the only true masterpiece of the twentieth century. True People’s Art. Someday it will be the reason communism dies. Maybe then you’ll recognize your myopia.” They all pooh-poohed me. Ha. I was right. I cried in happiness when the Wall was breached, and in sadness when it was torn down in a tyrannical act of aesthetic demolition. They should’ve rechristened it the Wall of Freedom—refashioned it as a monument to man’s stupidity and a gateway to the future. Now it’s only a memory, destined to be a mythical Atlantis of art.
I started skipping the Friday night gatherings. I did accompany Nathaniel to the East, where he made connections with dissidents. Unlike the West Germans, most of them spoke almost no English so he always had to go with a translator. It thrilled me, until I breathed in the city’s Gravity Disease. The Stasi, the ubiquitous East German secret police, served as the toxic communicators of the city’s societal tetanus. Only the East’s club scene had any attraction for me, and that held no interest for Nathaniel.
We began to live certain aspects of our lives separately, which suited both of us. I made my own friends. Among them were Arnost and Zdenek, or A and Z, two gay exiled Czechs whom I’d met at the Descungle nightclub. Owners of PhDs, A in art history and Z in poetry, they were overqualified Berlin taxi drivers. One night they took me to the SO36 club, and the twenty-two-year-old lead singer of the Wannaseeyas, Heinricha Von Priest—a tattooed, multipierced, multicolored-bobbed-hair, doll-faced Louise Brooks look-alike (yes, yes, it’s true, Brooks claimed to have had an affair with Greta)—eased in front of me while I trance-danced to an early bootleg of the Bronski Beat, which was the HQ for the punk arty scene. “Arnost claims you are Salome Savant.” I nodded. “I’ve idolized you for years. I have a photo from Art Is Dead on the wall of my squat. Can you sign it?” Quelle hor-ror! Heinricha was young enough to be my daughter. At forty-two, I was a relic.
A, Z, and Heinricha became my emissaries to the epicenter of Berlin decadence, the legal clubs of the West and the illegal and underground—literally—of the East, which made the drug and sex scenes at Studio 54 feel as innocent as a Doris Day movie. Whips, cuffs, chains, poppers, and paraphilia party favors were the ho-hum accoutrements of Berlin nightlife. The Wall made it possible. Every day after I dropped Alchemy at school, either A or Z drove me to a different spot along the Wall. With my clunky video camera (until the batteries ran out), I filmed ordinary Berliners and tourists taking pictures of themselves with the Wall as backdrop. I shot prostitutes, pickpockets, skinheads, transvestites, drunks peeing and puking, old women who looked like they could be Gloria Swanson’s sisters in Sunset Boulevard, the outcasts not only of Germany but all of Europe, who had migrated to Berlin.
I was excited by my cohort and with my film. Nathaniel was energized by his students and the political activism. He began work on The Further Adventures of Bohemian Scofflaw. Alchemy became precociously obsessed with his music. Every Sunday the three of us picnicked or biked in the Tiergarten. We were a happy family.
When winter descended, hooding the city like a death shroud, I became a walking hoarfrost corpse with camera; Zephyrus defeated by the exhaling breaths of Boreas, that for eons had trilled through the icy veins of Aryan falconers. I took refuge in the steamy warmth of our apartment and surrounded myself with newspaper and magazine photographs from the Nazi era. With A and Z as my interpreters, I contacted libraries and individuals with personal archives—which led me to the trove of Klaus Grimmelshausen, whose uncle had been an official Nazi party photographer. Z and I took the train to Grimmelshausen’s Nuremberg home. Sifting through the stacks of cataloged photos, I held in my hands, without consciously knowing it, what I’d been searching for—why I’d been brought to Berlin. My breath stopped—Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner with his nameless adjutant, whom I recognized as the future father of my dead child, standing by his side.
I made copies of that photo and many others, and took them to Berlin. I sang to dearest Art, “You were right. I should’ve trusted you. You smelled his evil.” I relived the civil war inside my womb, my DNA struggling—not to betray me but to cleanse me by strangling the oxygen from his offspring. Suddenly that long, suspended moment of misunderstood and tortured babydeath within me became quiescent, settled in the static of nontime. My Gravity Disease lightened; my soulsmell freed itself from the lingering guilty odor of infanticide.
I wanted to call Ruggles. No, that would be a defeat. He might want me to tell Nathaniel, and I wasn’t prepared to tell him just then.
When Xtine came for a visit, I met her at the Zoo Station and we went directly to the O Bar. I placed the photo on the table. “Teumer.” Horrified and anxious, she grasped my hand.
“Are you sure it’s him?”
“Yes. I could never forget that face. And it’s wonderful.” I leaned closer to her and kissed her cheek. “It all makes sense. It’s inspired me.”
I showed her my first collages of me and Teumer, and so began the Baddist Boys series. I contemplated showing them then. I didn’t. It was not yet the proper time.
Instead of the collages, I presented another performance almost twenty years after Art Is Dead, a symbolic death this time. Xtine helped me construct a life-size body cast of myself. I covered its vag and nipples with gold stars. I installed the sculpture in a street near us that dead-ended at the Wall and encircled it with barbed wire, papier-mâché, and synthetic bones. Alchemy stood with Nathaniel and his colleagues, who gazed agog as dusk surrendered to the night. Heinricha’s band played. Xtine began filming as I stripped down naked. A and Z bathed me in blood-red body paint. Between phrases on the wall—DON’T MESS WITH THE WONGS and CRIST DYED 4 U—I hugged my body against the West Wall and my silhouette merged into the celebratory mural, free from curators, critics, and pretension. Still dripping in paint, I lit a torch and set the entire installation aflame, dousing copies of the Teumer photo and Xeroxes of Duchamp and Greta with lighter fluid and flinging them into the embers. Their smoky visages commingled within the pyre. No one saw my tears as I danced around the ashes inseminating the Berlin night sky.
39
THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2008)
It’s Alive!
As the January opening drew ever closer, Moses felt as
if he were trapped in a horror movie where everyone awaits the coming apocalypse, but despite all the precautions, nothing can halt the onslaught. The Enquirer article was not yet scheduled for publication, while Alchemy’s lawyers and PR people searched for a way to squash it.
His preparation included agreeing to Jay’s plan, slightly adapted. Prior to the Members’ Preview, there would be a lunch for fifteen, twenty prime movers, tastemakers, and close friends, which they’d attend.
On the Tuesday morning of the Hammer luncheon, Jay found Moses sitting half dressed on the closed toilet seat cover, hands pressed against the throbbing blood vessels in his temples, trying to clear his mind from the two Xanax he’d taken at 4 A.M. He’d dreamt that he was hanging upside down from a tree in Central Park while the rubber-hosed arms of whinnying cops flogged his back, and on the grass beneath him, his brother lay atop Jay as cameras snapped all around them.
“Moses, are you going to be able to go? You want some more coffee?” He didn’t look up. She inched over to him from the bathroom doorway, already dressed in an olive green alpaca sweater and powder blue jeans. “Let’s cancel.”
“Jay, I’d prefer to go alone.”
“What? Why?” Jay’s eyes opened and closed and opened again in disbelief. Sure, they had some problems. Who didn’t? But they were still a team. Bound by love. ’Til death do them part.
“Why?” Moses said just above a whisper. The cap blown off his self-editing mechanism, he spewed the unmentionable. “Why’d you have to fuck him? That’s why. Were you fucking him while you were fucking me?”
Jay’s insides clenched in fury and desolation, her emotions awash in a dizzying eddy of confusion. “I don’t …” Unable to finish her sentence, Jay faced an ineradicable truth: No matter what he said, time had not healed this wound and in his heart he’d never forgiven her for sleeping with his half brother before they’d goddamned ever met.
Holding her head high, she turned and wobbled out of the bathroom, choking back tears, and retreated to the confines of her backyard office.
One hour later, upon entering the Hammer lobby alone from the garage, Moses was reassuring himself that, when Jay cooled down, she would understand that he attacked her out only of fear and insecurity. He hadn’t meant it. He’d plead for her to have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of. And he was so sure she loved him. His thoughts stopped when he spotted Curt Scoggins, the gangly, curly-gray-haired curator with a tortoiselike neck, officially welcoming the guests. He pointed to the wide staircase. “Salome is upstairs. She’ll take you through the show later.” Moses inhaled and was submerged into the flash of a daymare.
A woman, head covered by a mourning veil, launches her baby carriage down a flowing waterfall above a marble staircase. It’s Shalom, the dybbuk, singing softly, “99 crying babies on the wall …” A lifeguard rushes from behind to catch the carriage before it reaches the ocean. Shalom strips off her clothing and the lifeguard stops to watch. She cackles as the carriage crashes, and the baby spins through the air, disappearing into the sea. She sings on, “… 98 crying babies …”
That same morning, as Alchemy downed his second cup of coffee, Xtine, who had flown in for the festivities, walked in from the guest house. “Your mother is in a nasty mood.”
“No kidding. She knocked on my door after one last night threatening to boycott the entire week.” He mimicked her peevish tone: “ ‘I won’t perform like an art monkey waiting to be fed some gruel by her museum keepers.’ As always, her timing is excellent. Ambitious keeps calling me when he is drunk, leaving crazy, apologetic messages, or when I answer he just curses me out for being a two-faced prick. Mr. No Bullshit giving me only bullshit.”
Xtine clasped his hand in hers as she had done since he was a little boy, when her hair was dark brown rather than white, her figure svelte rather than round, and she towered over him rather than coming up to his shoulders. They strode to the guest cottage. Salome was already dressed. Not in a flamboyant outfit or a pantsuit befitting an attractive woman of sixty-five. She had chosen a purple sweatshirt with its hood over her head, a black scarf around her neck, sunglasses, no makeup, too-short baggy brown pants, and work boots.
The Salome contingent arrived at the Hammer twenty minutes before the scheduled lunch. Tom Hayden awaited them in the lobby entrance; he assumed care of Nathaniel, his wheelchair-bound protest pal, and they commiserated about old times and present frustrations.
Alchemy’s cell rang not two minutes after they arrived. He didn’t pick up but waited for the voice mail message. “It’s Jay. Moses is coming alone. We had a fight. He’s in terrible shape. He can explain.”
“Fuck. Fuck. Triple fuck,” he said to no one and called her back. She didn’t answer. Distracted, he entered the first floor’s Project Room, which held the just-erected Pillzapoppin’ and Electroshocked Ladyland installations. He hadn’t found time to preview the exhibition. A 10′-×-10′-×-8′ chamber, composed of thousands of multicolored psychotropic pills, which held a Salome-designed table connected to a mock ETC machine where you could lie down and be administered a mild shock to temples and ankles while the headphones played Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at top volume.
“Try it. Experience a scintilla of the pain inflicted upon your mother.” Alchemy turned to see that Salome had put on black silk gloves and powdered her face but still wore the sweatshirt and work boots.
“Maybe later.”
“Brave boy.” She took off one glove and pinched his arm, making sure her chartreuse-manicured nails dug into his skin. “It’s no more painful than that.”
He foresaw the karmic wheel spinning toward a long day that would unleash Salome, homicider. “Let’s look upstairs,” he offered as innocuously as possible.
The first four rooms contained a retrospective covering the gamut of her almost forty years of creative output. The last room housed never-before-exhibited silkscreen prints and collages. Immediately, Alchemy’s gaze was drawn to the wall that read Baddist Boys. He examined the first print, a brownish-yellowish wash with Photoshopped images of his father and Salome in a rapturous pose inside a bathroom. The title card read Getting Bent.
“It’s a funny piece, no? I won’t sell it.”
“Jesus, Mom, I’ve worked to keep this from the public for fifteen years.”
“Oh, grow up. The fact that reprobate has survived so long augurs well for you.”
“I wish you’d asked—”
“Asked what? Your permission?”
“Not asked. Informed.”
“Consider yourself duly informed. My boy, when it suits you, you’re as sensitive as a baby’s ass,” she hissed.
Ignoring her, he examined the second print, titled Which Whore, Bitch? His eyes caught sight of the third print. He froze at the image of a seminaked Salome, a gold star covering her vagina and a Jewish shawl draped over her shoulders and partially covering her breasts, holding a plastic bag in her hand, while she danced for a German soldier. In miniswastikas she’d scrawled “Arbeit Mocks Frei.” The title card read Mal de TeuMer.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled. The veins in his neck pulsated as Mose, the art dealer Marlene Passant, the catalog essayist Frank Peters, and three others whom he didn’t recognize approached.
Salome stripped off her sweatshirt to uncover a sheer purple blouse. She shook out her shoulder-length dyed light-brown hair and wrapped a red scarf around her neck. Her eyes sparkled and her voice became filled with an almost youthful brio as she began to elucidate her work. “I could’ve done a few score more of my Baddist Boys, but I chose these lovely cads. I used photos of myself that Xtine had taken and photos that I’d taken or found that I then reconfigured.”
Moses, nodding to the third print, squeaked out, “Who is the man in that piece?”
“His name was Malcolm Teumer.” Salome paused, glancing at Alchemy, who slung his arm over Moses’s shoulders. “I met him when I was a clueless teenager who loved to fuck. I still love to
fuck, but I am no longer clueless. Twenty or so years ago in Berlin, I got the clues on Teumer. If you look closely at the piece, you’ll see a fetus in the bag.” As a group, they stared at the faded fetus. “We had a child who died in childbirth. When I discovered Teumer’s past as a Nazi killer, I understood why our son needed to die.”
The crowd hushed, waiting for Salome to say more. It became apparent she was done explaining. Soozie Daye, a local arts writer who often acted more like a groupie, asked the follow-up question: “Do you really believe it was better that the child died?”
“He died and I was given my son, Alchemy.”
Moses didn’t hear Salome’s answer. He’d fled the museum. He called Jay on the way to his car. She didn’t pick up. He left a message on her voice mail. “Please. I have to talk to you. It was worse than I could’ve imagined. I’m leaving now. I love you.”
As he drove down the block to their home, he saw that Jay’s Honda was gone from the driveway.
40
MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Totem and Taboo Hoo, 1999
The day of the intervention I meander downstairs, after being out ’til dawn, minorly hungover. Alchy’s sitting alone on a green wooden folding chair in front of a bridge table with three empty beer bottles, a three-quarter-filled one, two empty Cokes, an ashtray full of butts, and three chessboards. One was a computer game, one was a game he had going with Nathaniel, and the other was a “classic” game he was studying. The room had twenty-five-foot ceilings and skylights and this white marble floor that looked like a hockey rink with a bus-size couch in front of a monster-screen TV. A chair by some artist friend of Salome’s named Longago, which hurt your damn butt when you sit down. A great sound system, of course. The Seeburg Select-o-matic jukebox from the ’50s for those thousands of forty-fives.