Dead Stars (31 page)

“And as we all know so very fucking
well
, you have
got
to be on the same fucking page—& if you aint, you better
move the fuck on
.

“So: know what we're gunna do, Jerzy boy? Aside from moving on but as friends or whatever? We are gonna
man up.
We are gonna
Jennifer
out
&
Demi up
, & move the fuck on to your bedroom. Mama's gunna give you something for your beauty sleep. Cause if you're gonna help U-Haul us—if you're gonna help us
move
to the Sermon on the Mount, you have
got
to get your beauty sleep.

“Are we on the same page? Well, goodie! We're already on the same page, & it aint even the end of the day!”

EXPLICIT

[Jacquie]

Unstarry Night

Jerry Jr,

the son she had with the Professor, hated her. She never understood why. There was always a tension there; she told herself it was a blood thing, something in the blood. They'd been estranged for years. She knew he was living with a girl in Brooklyn, that he was a paparazzo. She knew that he moved to the West Coast a few years ago. She knew he was a drug addict.

She knew, she knew, she knew . . .

. . . that Jerry was in touch with his stepfather, Jerilynn's dad, & when her kid ran away—
Is that what I should call it?—
she called Ronny to get Jerry Jr.'s cellphone #. Ronny still lived in New York, working (fitfully) as a DP. When she told Ronny their daughter was pregnant, all he said was, “Oh. Wow.” He sounded depressed.

She had a feeling Jerilynn might turn to her brother for help. She hoped so, anyway, because she'd been beside herself. She was grateful when Jerry Jr. left a message (an unexpected kindness) that she was with him, & was fine. Relieved, Jacquie let it go. It wasn't the time to reach out to Jerilynn.

Now her daughter hated her too . . . her daughter hated her and she was working in the portrait salon of Sears Roebuck. She wasn't even taking pictures, not strictly speaking, because the camera, lighting and various angles the customers chose from a booklet were fixed and calibrated. It was like flying a plane by instruments.

The world was cruel just now, & poised against her. Sally Mann had a piece in
The New York Times Magazine.
On the left of the page, a black&white portrait she took of herself & her two beautiful daughters; on the right, a color re-creation of the same, taken 10 years later. One's in law school, the other's a painter living in Brooklyn. Her daughters looked like they loved her so————————
How could I have saved any money? I used every penny to live, so both of us could live! To eat and have a roof over our heads, & the occasional luxury. She gets pregnant and now I'm the villain. Well I'm sorry.

 

Where did

I

go

wrong How did I——

Transient fame
transient transient transient

Years ago she befriended a woman named Tierney, Tierney Gearon, fabulous name, used to be a model, famously had a messy brood of kids, four of them famously with three different dads. They met at the beginning of Tierney's
meteoric,
as they say, rise to somethingness. (With indigent starless heart, Jacquie remembered her Shakespeare:
When beggars die there are no comets seen.
) She was covetous—the timing of it was maddening. Only weeks after Helmut delivered his Rosicrucian-cum-Barnum&Bailey secret sauce lecture, Tierney's nudies of her
own
bitsy babes erupted like fireworks in the alchemical skies of art & commerce. She never discussed it with Helmut (
or
Tierney), but it sure felt like Tierney got the memo. Those weeks and months got moldy with resentment/betrayal. A Kristallnacht of legal threats, repressive fanatacism & counterpoised Free Speech
hoohah
lit up the careering darkness, just as the oracle foretold . . .
beaten to the punch!
There was Tierney—gorgeous, sexy, famously scattered Tierney (scattered like a fox)—actually
doing
what Jacquie was only in the (bare) planning stages of.
Ma pauvre cher
Jacqueline! Still fussing like a fool over which abstruse photographic technique to employ for her inchoate
Studies of A Daughter
suite; still hassling in her head/paralyzed over what venues & backdrops might effectively supplant the humdrum woodsy settings and empty beaches so thoroughly mined by the genre.

Pouring salt in the wound, Tierney's blitz shook the ether above the Saatchi Gallery in London—London!—the very city Helmut rhapsodized as the
ne plus ultra
when it came to firing ranges for that first, art-f shot heard round the world
.
Great theater dust-up: big-tent kerfuffle in the UK. It was awkward running into her mentor when the Tierney show traveled to New York. He elfin smiled, & said,
“See?”
She tried for days to interpret what he meant, uncertain if it was “I told you, but now it's too late” or
“You go girl!”
Tierney's story (& she was stickin to it) sounded as if it was torn from the Helmut playbook: her naïf protests that she had no real experience as a photographer, & didn't hardly consider herself an artist. Then how the kiddie nudes would have wound up at Saatchi, Jacquie hadn't a clue. Not that it made any difference. They were
there
, & so was Tierney, she had
arrived
(Jacquie not yet departed), hence proving Newton's First Law of Motion: your career will sit in the shit unless something comes along to knock over the outhouse.

She ruminated between customers at Sears.

Saatchi was further than she ever got. Jacquie
wanted
to show there but they turned her down, even with the fair-to-middling controversy she had going for her at that moment in time, even with Helmut's (supposed) intervention. Turned down by Gagosian too . . . if only.
If only she had achieved persecution on a grander scale—
Tierney had been threatened with jailtime!
Jacquie
never was, not for lack of trying, which made her furious. Thinking back, from her position behind the photo menu counter of the Sears Portrait Studio, l'affaire Gearon had an awfully deleterious effect. Seeing the woman's kiddlings on the beach (the beach! She had the courage to repurpose the beach!) in their birthday suits & fright-masks (for that never-out-of-fashion Meatyard-Arbus touch) made her wince; she recalled Helmut schooling her in the vital importance of pictorially referencing one's
progenitors
—“or do I mean
progenitals!
” he said, imp that he was. But the bugle had sounded the Call to Post. Tierney was off and running, while Jacquie brushed a hobbled horse in a forgotten stable.

Everything went Tierney's way: galleries teeming, barristers double-teaming, Scotland Yard's knickers twisted, Big Ben alaruming, bobbies on bicycles 2 by 2 . . . Tory threats & Saatchified fêtes . . . Jacquie still shared espressos with Helmut yet couldn't help wonder if the bloom fell off the rose, the
schaden
off the
freude
, the rider from her saddle. She became paranoid: could it be that when Helmut was away, he was a guest at the Gearon estate? Because if it all wasn't so fucked enough, Tierney happened to be famously wealthy, father lived on an island somewhere, father & daughter famously got along famously . . . Helmut probably had been not-so-secretly in love with her from the beginning, Jacquie was 5th-string (if that), Tierney magnetized men, Jacquie enraged&repelled them, Tierney tethered them to the maypole of her gemütlich sexuality, why not add Helmut to the orb & fasten him by his own whip. Tierney was six years younger than she; Tierney was the Nude Kid on the Block (Jacquie wasn't even the girl next door); her naked progeny awash in bright stupendous Egglestonian progenicolors, with Jacquie left in the
dirt
.

Brava Tierney,

brava——
in the years that followed their initial acquaintanceship—after Tierney made her bones—she had more time to hang out, & they saw each other a nice handful of times a year. Jacquie of course never told Tierney what she was working on, it would have come across as rip-offy.
Keep your work close but your frenemy closer.
She was relieved upon learning that Tierney's new oeuvres was not of the prepubescent ilk. But it was Helmut—always Helmut!—who finally offered some helpful remarks.
Just do it, dear heart, you won't be ready to show for a few years, by then the wheel will have turned, the market will be ready again.
In the meantime, it was rough to watch Tierney's sold-out shows, when Jacquie had nothing to show but her unconvincing sangfroid————

Brava, Tierney!

Brava!

Sitting behind her little counter at Sears, on a slow morning, reliving when the
unthinkable
happened (Newton's Second Law of Motion): Scotland Yard swooped in,
The News of the World
demanded the gallery be closed, headline-blasting
‘A revolting exhibition of perversion under the guise of art'——

Take it down take it down take it down!

Now museum, now you don't.

Word circulated that Ms. Gearon was facing a possible 10 years for daring to thumb her nose at the Child Protection Act. Publishers were ordered to remove hundreds of copies from bookstore shelves . . . but the Sturgis Effect kicked in, each banned book acquiring a weedy, hard-to-kill, proliferative 2nd life . . . the numbers were climbing, the sales were soaring, and . . . she's . . .
off—& running!—
— Tierney played it demure & perplexed,
very
very smart, stating again & again for the record that she was
just a mom . . .
mom
first
, artist
second . . .
who are these people that wish to pillory a mom? To destroy her for daring to see her children through a child's eyes?
J'accuse!

&
again
the unthinkable (Newton's Third):

THE CROWN RELENTS!

NO CHARGES FILED!

Tierney was actually supportive when Jacquie had her Media Moment in the tail end of 2003. She was gracious, never making Jacquie feel like she'd
appropriated TG's work
. She was one of the first people Jacquie showed her pictures to, inviting her over to the house to see them. Jacquie felt compelled to remark just once that she'd begun shooting her daughter before ever hearing about or seeing Tierney's portraits. Tierney was unruffled & even generous of spirit.
She can afford to be,
thought Jacquie.
She can famously fucking afford to.

. . .

There she is, having a bite in the Sears employee lunchroom. She imagines forgetting why she sought the job in the first place, not that she knows exactly, only that her instincts told her
there is something here . . .
but now a greyish depression enfolds her like a flu & she imagines what it would be like to soon forget what her instincts said, just to have the job, no grandiose motive behind it . . . or even worse, to realize she
has
no viable instincts anymore—though maybe that would be better than where she found herself
now,
today,
at this
moment
, being that place of beaten down, too-much awareness. So maybe it
would
be for the best to simply forget the vague, bullshitty reasons she made up for herself to explain why she'd been compelled to work at Sears, all for the best to just start forgetting a little day by day about who she was or
thought
she was, who she
imagined
herself to be by definition of her so-called career, maybe to forget or cut off at the root her impossible daydreams of resentment & impossible eventual triumph, forget about all that & just become a hardworking, pleasant demeanored, dreamless dumbass full-time employee, that would be better, much, might just work out, anything would be better than being the loser she'd begun, with unruly stamina, to consider herself these bygone days.

In the unmedicated flu of depression—like one of those Point Dume ladies who make Schnabelly collages from broken shells & hunks of yarn, or paint eternities of gloopy red acrylic valentine
s, Brentwood ladies who go thru “wearable art” phases, in their clunky La Jolla boutique-bought precious stoned necklaces & their
bold, striking color summer dresses
to wear on cruises—no—another fantasia intruded . . . she'd become the
maker
of those things, pathetic little craftswoman struggling to pay the rent on her Eagle Rock/Reseda/Studio City sublet, with the dusty clangy Calder knock-offs & a 70-lb. chalcedony purple-mawed healing shard plunked clumsily atop the corner of the welcome mat, New Age paperweight overkill . . . in her fever of insignificance, her fluish narrative of oblivion & loss of self, she became the servant of a widow who travels the world taking pictures for submission to
National Geographic
's reader photo contest (a woman who'd won three times in 10 years): mist-filled, dentist's calendar-worthy, Cambodian temple ruins; fly-swarmy, cretinous-smiling, Machu Picchu vendors dressed in
bold, striking colors
; spectral Varanasi ghats neutered by that very calendarized eye. (It was telling that in her grim idyll, Jacquie's employer was the picture-taker, not she.)

Lots of gremlins today!

Another dismal reverie that somehow alarmed her with its aura of veracity began with Jacquie, improbable survivor of multiple metastasizing cancers, meeting a rich alcoholic slob on a cruise, the broken-bloodvesseled type who wears a captain's hat. Now when she gets tipsy, she gets maudlin (the figment of her in the scenario, because in real life she never got tipsy, in real life she got
shitfaced
), wondering what her charming new friend will think when she spills that her two grown children refuse to speak to her anymore, & she's never met her grandkids.
Will he judge me?
All she could do was see her with him in the dining room, then having an intimate talk on deck, saw herself breathe deeply, close her eyes & hope he maybe had a similar history—
some
kind of estrangement, wickedness, at least a little unexpected child death, something,
anything
but a healthy thriving relationship with his kids,
Lord please no
,
not that.
She already saw him (in her fluish head) nodding off in his ludicrous cap as she told him about Jerilynn & Jerry Jr., coming to from his nod, shaking his head in empathy, or making a damn good show of it, when the
truth
of it is he's muttering under his breath
Jesus
THIS
cunt must be some piece of
WORK.
To have
2 kids
, not one,
but 2
blow her off! She's probably fucking nuts but the crazy ones give the best head