The Ground Beneath Her Feet (69 page)

But for millions of music-lovers 1987 would be remembered as the last great year of VTO. (Even the new leader of Angkor, the composer of over eighty songs, all of which dutifully topped the local charts, named Ormus and Vina as his “#1 Inspirational Lights” and invited them to play in Phnom Penh, an invitation which they were unable for pressure-of-work reasons to accept.) The year culminated in the huge free Concert in the Park at the end of the summer. After that they gave up performing in public—that is, Ormus retreated from view, he went home to bake bread, and the others had no choice but to accept his decision.

Goodbye, VTO, wrote Madonna Sangria. Once you made the city lights burn brighter, cars go faster, love taste sweeter. Once you lit the violence of our alleys like a Vermeer and turned the metropolis into our lyric dream. Then, guys, you turned into a pile of garbage I wouldn’t throw at a f *cking cat.

Vina was upset about Ormus’s unilateral
fiat
—at forty-three she was nowhere near ready to quit—but for external consumption she maintained
full solidarity with her husband. In spite of all my urgings to run away with me, she stood by her man, declaring to anyone who would listen that their love was as strong as ever, that she looked forward to the exciting new phase of their careers which would shortly dawn.

The three other band members broke off all relations with the Camas and announced the formation of a breakaway shadow band called OTV, which failed to make any impression on the record-buying public, especially after Vina cruelly revealed that on
Doctor Love and the Whole Catastrophe
and other albums, including “live” albums, the entire rhythm guitar part played by the breakaway band’s new frontperson, a stone-faced blonde named Simone Bath, had been replaced in the studio by jobbing axemen, because poor Simone’s performance just hadn’t been up to the mark.

Meanwhile, forty was proving as difficult a hurdle for me as fifty was for Ormus. Without success, I’d tried everything I could think of to prise Vina away from her increasingly cryptic partner. Don’t start with me, Rai, she’d say. I don’t come to you for a hard time. I can get plenty of that without leaving home. So much for the perfect love match, I thought, but I buttoned my lip and turned to lighter pleasures. Which failed these days to induce in me the old delirious joy. I had committed the back-door man’s cardinal sin of hoping for more than was my right or due. I wanted the front-door key.

To console myself, and of course to provoke Vina, I turned to other women. I even got in touch with Anita Dharkar in Bombay, because I thought it might usefully provoke Vina if I took her tip and rekindled this old flame; but television had captured Anita as I never could. The Indian videocassette information and music services that were the forerunners of the imminent satellite invasion had made her a star. She had a weekly “Lite News” hour and a music show and, reborn as “Neata Darker,” had become an icon of the Westernized—and the rapidly Westernizing—urban Indian young. She sent me promo shots of herself got up
à la
rock chick and I found myself mourning the serious, patriotic journalist I used to know.

There was no continuity in human lives any more, I thought. Nineteen eighty-seven was the year of
The Last Emperor
, the Bertolucci movie that proposed that a human being—Pu Yi, the eponymous
Emperor—could genuinely and sincerely change his nature so completely that, having been born the god-king of China, he could end up happily accepting his lot as a humble Chauncey of a gardener, and be a better person for it. A case of communist brainwashing, perhaps, dryly wondered Pauline Kael, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we just jump tracks more easily than we think. And (I’m back on the subject of Anita now) maybe rock ’n’ roll helps you do it better.

That year, to put distance between myself and Vina, I went back to Indochina to take the pictures which were afterwards published in my book
The Trojan Horse
. My idea was that the war in Indochina hadn’t ended at the time of the ignominious U.S. withdrawal. They’d left a wooden horse standing at the gates, and when the Indochinese accepted the gift, the real warriors of America—the big corporations, the sports culture of basketball and baseball, and of course rock ’n’ roll—came swarming out of its belly and overran the place. Now, in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, too, America stood revealed as the real victor. Indochina became just another consumer-serf of (and supplier of cheap labor to) Americana International. Almost every young Indochinese person wanted to eat, dress, bop and profit in the good old American way. MTV, Nike, McWorld. Where soldiers had failed, U.S. values—that is, greenbacks, set to music—had triumphed. This, I photographed. I do not need to say that the pictures went down big. This (with the exception of the sweatshop material) was news that many Americans wanted to hear. Even the old-time anti-war demonstrators were pleased. To my eye, the pictures contained large dollops of ambiguity, of tension. They were, I suppose, ironic. The irony, however, was largely lost on many who praised them. What’s irony when you can celebrate this new Cultural Revolution? Let the music play. Let freedom ring. Hail, hail, rock ’n’ roll.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes
. Discontinuity, the forgetting of the past: this is the wooden horse at the gates of Troy. Whose occupants burned, are burning, will surely burn the topless towers of Ilium. Yet I myself am a discontinuous being, not what I was meant to be, no longer what I was. So I must believe—and in this I have truly become an American, inventing myself anew to make a new world in the company of other altered lives—that there is thrilling gain in this metamorphic destiny, as well as aching loss.

On the subject of forgetting: after my return I briefly became involved with Ifredis Wing, who was now trying to be a photographer herself and arrived at the Orpheum as Johnny Chow’s assistant. Chow lived on the first floor and Ifredis gradually worked her way up, via Schnabel and Basquiat, to the penthouse, and me. She still had the sexual appetite of a nympho rabbit—Vina, who else, had given me a detailed account of the shenanigans at Tempe Harbor—and her looks had, if anything, improved. Her blond hair now worn boyishly, spikily short, her body still womanly and long. But as a photographic assistant she was a total bust, on account of her terrible memory, which led to a number of film-processing disasters that none of us found funny. It’s one thing to laugh about living in an amnesiac culture and quite another to have an amnesiac labeling your rolls of exposed film.

I’m sorry, I no remembrance have, she apologized when I screamed infra-red murder at her in the developing room. But this also means, she added, brightening, that I will not your discourteous words tomorrow morning remember, after I have slept on your arm.

Otto, by the way, had moved on from Buddhism to super-capitalism, had married a billionairess fifteen years his senior and was now a prominent figure both in Hollywood and on the Eurotrash party circuit. He no longer made art movies, having turned his attention to seventy-million-dollar action flicks instead. He had become the unquestioned master of what were known in the biz as
whammies:
the climactic set pieces, full of explosions and derring-do, on which such films thrived. (I once saw him on tv, being interviewed at the Cannes festival and shrugging off critical drubbings to explain his new cinematic philosophy:
First act, lots of whammies. Second act, better whammies. Third act, nothing—but—whammies!
)

For a time, I found myself strongly attracted to memoryless Ifredis Wing, who bore no mortal person any malice, reserving her wrath entirely for god. In the aftermath of her desertion by Otto she had entirely lost her faith. Once the god-squaddie supreme, she was now possessed of the zeal of the apostate and came on like an atheistic stormtrooper. Devotees of Indian mahagurus, Scientologist movie stars, Japanese cultists, British sports reporters repackaged as the Risen Christ, American gun-lobby crazies bunkered down in the desert with charismatic prophet-leaders telling them who to make babies with and
how often: Ifredis spent a lot of her non-fucking time soliloquizing on the follies of such as these. The great world religions took a trouncing too, and I have to say I found all this pretty enjoyable. It wasn’t often I met someone more thoroughly disenchanted with the world’s credulity than myself. Plus, she really was wonderful in bed. Sometimes she lazily played at adolescent sex, all finger-fucks and blow-jobs; more often she just came at you like Octopussy, all arms and legs and whoops-a-daisy. Either way was fine with me.

It fizzled; she drifted away, as I knew she would. Nothing really went wrong between us, but then there really was nothing between us to go wrong. We were both filling in dead time, and one day she woke up and looked at me and had forgotten who I was. I went to take a shower and didn’t hear her go.

After my return from Indochina, I began to rethink my work. Journalism and its sneering sidekick, cynicism, no longer seemed enough. In a way I envied Ormus Cama his madness. That vision of a literally disintegrating world held together, saved and redeemed by the twin powers of music and love, was perhaps not to be so easily derided. I envied its off-the-wall coherence, its controlling overview. Also, I confess, I was in the market for redemption myself. Something had to stop me dreaming about a dead man’s shoe, about a heel that twisted sideways to reveal a roll of film that would change its finder’s life. I had left so much behind, but that memory never seemed surplus to requirements. No matter how light I traveled, it was always there, in the pockets of my dreams.

These were days of guilty uncertainty. Ormus had found his way of dealing with the Zeitgeist. Even that dreadful junk band, what did they call themselves, the Mall: they had a plan. My way seemed to have fizzled out in a dead end. With Vina, with myself, I was getting nowhere.

My fellow “Orphics” on East Fifth Street had all abandoned photojournalism for good, and the eagerness with which they were pursuing other interests aroused my envy, an emotion that’s always reliable as a guide to the secret heart,
le secret-coeur
, as Hulot’s Nebuchadnezzar partner Bobby Flow used to call it in his broad Yankee Franglais: that is to say, our deep neediness, the substitute in a climate of godlessness for the bleeding heart of Christ. Aimé-Césaire Basquiat, our beautiful
young shaven-bodied Francophone, was using an old eight-by-ten plate camera, long exposures and gorgeous high-definition lighting to give a lapidary, Renaissance-classical look to a sequence of formal head-shot portraits and, more contentiously, to classically composed scenes of what were, to me, utterly stupefying sexual practices. The content of these out-there photographs made me feel like an innocent country boy who knew nothing of the world’s true diversity, who in spite of staring into the maw of horror had never begun to guess what ancient impulses were really swimming in our lightless, hidden depths. It was Basquiat’s simple idea to bring these things out of the dark into his sumptuous light and thus change our idea of what beauty is.

His third project was a sort of photographic reply to his namesake Césaire’s celebrated poetic affirmation of
négritude
, the
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
. Basquiat, who had left Martinique as a baby and defiantly stayed away ever since, was slowly creating a photo-essay—
Cahier d’un exit
—about exile, about rootless slip-sliders like himself, photographing them as if they were beautiful aliens floating an inch off the ground, as if they were blessed as well as cursed. Sometimes the three projects blended into one, and I was startled one day to see a powerful portrait of Basquiat’s fellow Martinican Rémy Auxerre, haloed in light and ingesting, in extreme close-up, what was all too evidently Basquiat’s own cock, an organ we all knew well because of its owner’s penchant for nudity.

It’s easy to say—and after his early death, all wasted body, wizened skin and frightened eyes, there were many who were quick to say it—that Basquiat was on a fast road to nowhere. But what I remember was the exaltation on his face each day. That was a room to which I also desperately wanted to find the key.

Johnny Chow and Mack Schnabel were involved in less edgy but equally rewarding careers: fashion and advertising work to support the high Manhattan society life they both adored, and more personal photo-essays for the good of the soul. Schnabel—a small man with a huge hawk’s head and more than his share of nocturnal demons—would go to Italy twice a year for the Milan collections. Afterwards he headed off to Rome and took eye-popping pictures of the half-mummified, decayed, skeletal bodies in the catacombs. From that he progressed to taking pictures of civilian cadavers on a regular basis, fascinated
by deaths democracy. Violent death didn’t interest him any more; just the fact itself, our shared inheritance, James’s distinguished thing. The young and the old are the same age when they’re dead, he’d say. They’re
as old as it gets
. Other differences vanished also. Klansman and bluesman, Hamas fundamentalist and Jewish settler, Afrikaner and Sowetan, Indian and Pakistani, town mouse and country mouse, the farmer and the cowman, Mr. Tomayto and Ms. Tomahto, there they were, side by side on the slabs of his photographs, stripped of their frontiers, equalized for all time. To this continuing portfolio he gave the grandly Shakespearean tide
Golden Lads and Girls
, who, you’ll recall (
Cymbeline
, act IV, scene 2), all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

As for all-action Chow, that driven, gambling-crazy roadrunner who called himself the ideal New Yorker
because I’m like the city, man, I don’t fucking sleep:
he was busy with his fifteen-year study
Queens
, a portrait of the polyglot borough. But he was at least as proud of the advertising photographs he took for Heinz. Multi-cultural street life, man, that’s already rich, he told me. It’s got texture, depth, does half your job for you. You got any idea what it takes to make interesting the surface of a cream of mushroom soup? Now that’s a challenge.