Dead
Girls
never went into a second
printing. Punk had crested; the violence of the scene made industry people
nervous about even using the word "punk." They started slapping
stickers on new EPs and 45s that said THIS IS POWER POP MUSIC! Farfisa organs
began to dull the edge of guitars. Kids wearing skinny ties and wraparound
shades were everywhere now. The scene got bigger, hipper, imploded then
exploded. There were celebrities and celebrity suicides, and celebrity
photographers to cover them. When I saw a seventy-five-dollar ripped T-shirt in
a Fiorucci boutique with a brace of black-leather-collared miniature poodles
tied to a meter outside, I knew that was it.
Punk's
ugly little glittering perfect moment had ended. And so had mine.
I
knocked around the city, at loose ends. People saw me, they recognized me, the
skinny girl with ragged blond hair and chewed-up nails, striped boatneck shirt
and shaky hands. But no one wanted to be reminded who I was, and after a few
years nobody remembered.
I
still had the apartment on Hudson Street. I got a job working in the stockroom
at the Strand Bookstore. This signaled to everyone that I was truly finished.
One
other thing happened back then. On my twenty-third birthday I was down on the
Bowery, leaving CBGB's, late, as usual. I was drunk, as usual. I was
barefoot—I'd been dancing and left my shoes inside, even though it was late
October and the streets were cold. I was alone, until a car pulled up alongside
a broken streetlamp. Someone was repeating my name, a low, insistent voice.
Piecing it together later, I think he must have said "Miss, miss."
I
heard
Cass, Cass.
I
stopped and turned. The car door was already open. There was a knife. It
happened fast.
I
don't remember much. Or no, I remember a lot, but it's all scattered, like those
discarded photos you find strewn outside an Instant Photo booth.
This
is what I see: a burned-out vacant lot. Me on my knees. A cut on my bare heel
where I stepped on broken glass. Blood above my pubis. Blood and semen on my
thigh. Me running across chewed-up asphalt. A man's head protruding from a car
window. Me screaming in the middle of the street. A police car.
I
see these things, but I don't really remember them. I remember floating above
the vacant lot and looking down on two shadows, one moving, the other still. I
remember a car. There was a knife.
They
asked me, did I fight?
I
didn't fight. I couldn't describe him, or the car. My mind had been wiped
clean. I don't talk about it much. It happened; I'm not in denial. I'm not ashamed.
But
I know what that other set of photos would look like. The drunk young woman,
the leather miniskirt, tight T-shirt, no bra, no shoes. That street, four am,
late October. A bisexual punk who took pictures of dead boys. I didn't fight.
My whole life since then, the only thing that matters to me is those three
words.
I
didn't fight.
You'll
wonder what it's like to live with this. I'll tell you. It's like having a
razor blade clamped between your teeth: you move your mouth too much, your
tongue, you smile or talk or kiss someone, you cut yourself open. You could
drown if you swallowed that much blood. You could fucking bleed to death.
3
I
shut down after that. I didn't clean up my act, just went through the motions
of behaving like a normal person, punched the clock, blew my paycheck at clubs
and bars and bookstores. My dealings with most people had always been so
ephemeral that no one took much notice when I stopped making even cursory
efforts at emotional connection. I made no attempt to get a better job and
little attempt to be civil to the Strand's customers. I had no interest even in
getting promoted to stockroom manager. I went to work and opened packages and
sorted books. I stole books as well, until store security got too tight. After
a few years I got a tattoo incorporating the scrawl of scar tissue above my
pubic bone into a frayed red banner with the words too tough to die emblazoned
on it. I still took pictures, going to downtown gigs and occasionally selling
my stuff to the
Soho Weekly News.
When no one else would buy them, I
gave my pictures to a D.C. fanzine called
Vintage Violence
in exchange
for copies that I sold for a dollar a pop.
I
continued to photograph things that moved me, which were mostly things that did
not move. Pigeons flattened upon the curb; a corpse washed up on the shore of
the East River, flesh like soft gray flannel folded into the mud; a stripper at
a Broadway club sleeping between acts, her exposed breast like a red balloon
where the silicone had leaked beneath the skin. I liked to think of my talent
as something I'd honed to a point, a spike I could drive right into the eye of
the viewer. You'd think that the 1980s vogue for decadence, for breaking
taboos, would have created an audience for these pictures, but time and again
they were dismissed. Too grisly, then too evocative of others'
work—Mapplethorpe, Weegee, Nan Goldin's
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
—then
ultimately not evocative enough.
"It's
too raw," Linda told me when, after six years, I had finally put together
another portfolio, enough pictures for another book. "It's too much like
being right inside someone's head."
I
stared at her, the late afternoon sun in her uptown office, her gold jewelry
and Armani jacket. "It
is
inside someone's head, Linda. It's the
inside of my head."
She
pushed the portfolio across her desk back toward me. "I know," she
said. "Maybe you should show them to someone else, Cass."
I
left. No one else wanted me.
Twenty
years passed. I participated in a few group shows at hole-in-the-wall
galleries. Now and then someone would buy one of my photos, and there was the
occasional mention of
Dead Girls,
usually as a footnote to work by Cindy
Sherman. When the time came, I didn't switch to digital. It wouldn't have been
hard. Light is light, you just have to know how to find it, where to look for
that slant of shadow, that moment when someone's eyes first open and you can't
be certain if they're dead or asleep. I could have ditched my old Konica, just
like I could have gotten another job or bought better clothes or gotten
involved with someone.
This
is what you have to understand about me: I could have changed. I didn't want
to. I fucked people I'd meet at clubs: men, women. Nothing ever lasted long.
Ravaged as I was, I was still good-looking enough. But I was a bad drunk.
Eventually I could walk into most cafes in the East Village and watch every
person hide behind a newspaper or laptop.
Despite
that, in 1998 I got involved with a married woman named Christine Conti, a
professor who specialized in the French Nouvelle Vague. She was thin, dark,
chic, emotionally intense, a recovering alcoholic with issues. We were a good
match sexually, but we argued a lot. After a while we argued constantly. I
drank too much. Eventually Christine left her husband and got her own place,
down near Battery Park, but it still didn't work out between us, not really.
She said I wasn't a fully integrated person. I refused to quit drinking. I
refused to go to an AA meeting. She refused to leave me.
Then
I hit her. She called the police but then said she wouldn't press charges if I
promised to get help. I suggested maybe she was the one who needed help, for
staying with me, but I went. We saw a counselor. I sat there while Christine
threw out words like
predatory, detached, obsessive.
The counselor came
back with
dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, affective disorder.
The
counselor recommended a psychiatrist, who put me on a regimen of lithium and
antidepressants.
I
took the medications for a week. They made me feel as though my brain had been
shot full of strychnine. I refused to ever take them again. The doctor
suggested other drugs, but I never went back to her.
"This
is as integrated as my personality gets," I told Christine. "So get
used to it or get out of here."
Christine,
for whatever reason, continued to see me.
We
didn't fight as much, but I still drank. My few other friends lived lives less
marginal than my own. I think they kept me around as an eidolon of the sort of
bleak bohemianism they'd lost—still listening to the same old music, still
going to work with a hangover, still sleeping in my ratty rent-controlled
apartment on a piece of plywood with a foam mattress on top.
Finally
even Christine had enough. Gradually, I stopped seeing even my few remaining
friends. I stopped going to clubs to hear live music. I shot fewer and fewer
rolls of film and lost the few contacts I'd kept in the dwindling rock press.
When I didn't have enough money to buy the photography books I wanted, I'd
steal them.
Then
Christine died. She'd called really early that morning and left a message: she
was meeting someone for lunch at Windows on the World. Would I meet her for
coffee first? We could talk things over. It might be better. It had been a long
time. Maybe she was starting to get over some things. Maybe I had changed.
I
hadn't changed. Not enough, anyway. I erased the message and didn't call her
back. A few hours later the sirens started, the smoke. The sky was ice-blue.
The phone rang, Phil Cohen screaming into my ear from Hoboken.
"Do
you see it, Cass, do you see it?"
I
looked out the window.
"Oh
fuck"
I yelled and dropped the phone.
When
I stuck my head out, eddies of ash and paper were showering onto Hudson Street,
the stink of jet fuel. People stared up with mouths open like they were
catching snowflakes on their tongues. Shouting.
It
was like being inside a breaking glass. Christine was already dead, though I
didn't know that yet, didn't know she had gone down there anyway, early,
thinking I might show up. Thinking I might have changed. You never know.
I
lifted my face to where a single white contrail blurred into the rain of black
grit and glass and ember. A charred fragment of paper fell onto the back of my
hand and stuck there, damp, warm. I peeled it from my skin and read it.
For
when first we
I
smoothed the scrap against my palm then placed it upon my tongue. It tasted of
petroleum, scorched metal. I swallowed it: a moment later began to vomit
uncontrollably.
No
one ever contacted me about a memorial service for her. I wouldn't have gone,
anyway.
The
wars began. I drank even more. For a while I saw flyers downtown with her face
on them—her ex-husband and parents put them up. Every time I saw one I wanted
to scream. I wanted to kill someone. Finally I began ripping them down,
ignoring the angry looks I got from people on the street. Sometimes, alone in
my apartment, I did scream. She was gone, it was all gone, there was nothing I
could have done, nothing anyone could ever have done about anything. Why the
fuck was I the only one who understood that?
That
dead light that comes in late afternoon in winter, that light that makes
everything look like it was cut from black ice—I could feel that light on me in
the middle of summer; in the middle of the night. For a few months I got
headaches, a blinding pain in my right eye, as though a spark had burned my
retina. The ophthalmologist found nothing, but I could feel it, the hole left
by a molten wire, a
bit
of ash or ember. I stared at my eye in the
mirror, looking for a scar or scratched cornea, but there was nothing. It got
so I had to drink three shots of bourbon just to get the nerve to pick up my
camera.
I
tried to forget I had ever been involved with Christine, or anyone else. Like
the song goes, you can't put your arms around a memory. I was forty-eight, and
my life had been over for decades. That was when Phil Cohen called me about
Aphrodite Kamestos.
4
Phil
was an old crony from the East Village who now lived in Hoboken, a one-time
drug dealer and music promoter who did freelance work for various print
magazines and websites, along with writing a blog called Early Death. The rise
of hip-hop and crap pop had reduced his job security significantly, but his addiction
to speed had left him with admirable work habits, and he still got me meth or
black beauties when I needed them. He seldom slept, he wrote compulsively, and
he was constantly, obsessively, in touch with anyone who might give him work.
If the city were to be flattened by a nuclear bomb, Phil would be scrabbling in
the ashes, sending up smoke signals to other survivors in Hoboken. He resembled
Don Knotts circa
The Incredible Mister Limpet,
only not quite as
good-looking.
Still,
Phil had always looked out for me, with mixed results. I ran into him at a
coffee shop one rainy morning in October.
"Hey
hey hey. Cassandra Android, how you doing?"
"Phil.
It's fucking great to be alive."
"I'm
glad to hear that. Hey, look—I was going to call you. Got a sec?"
We
squeezed behind a table by the window. I sipped my coffee and stared at him. A
few months ago Phil had shaved his head. He'd immediately realized this was a
bad move and tried growing it back, with the result that he now looked like
what you'd get if Edvard Munch had painted Chia pets.