Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  I was anxious to get started, but I didn’t know where to begin. So I sat on a bench with my Herald Tribune, pretending to read. Over the blurred zigzagged edge of the newspaper, I could see a teenage boy throwing up on the grass. Henri had told me that most of the kids in the park were from solid, middle-class families. I wondered what the boy’s mother thought about her junkie son. For that matter, what would my mom think of me sitting here? Before I’d left Paris, I’d called her to tell her I’d be going to Zurich—“Yeah, Ma, it’s sort of a medical story”—and she’d let out a sigh of relief. “At least it’s not Afghanistan,” she’d said, believing I’d turned a wise corner in my career.

  I spotted a junkie couple making out. They were standing in the center of the park in the empty gazebo, oblivious to the needles and the powder and the tourniquets and the hundred or so other ravaged bodies in the Platzpitz, all orbiting around them like planets in Galaxy Chaos. It would have been a good photo, but I was still not ready to shoot. I needed a plan. And if I sat there too long pretending to read that stupid newspaper, someone was going to wonder why a young, healthy-looking American tourist would choose to read her morning paper right there, on that particular bench, so close to the embers of hell. I reread the word “Tiananmen” on the front-page headline for what must have been the thirty-eighth time. I thought about Alexi and Georges and the Italians staked out in the museum and the smashed cameras.

  Back in college, during my Pussycat Lounge days, I learned that the best way to inculcate oneself into a group is by befriending a single member of that group. This is not a profound or new or even very interesting concept, but it seemed so to me back then. I was surprised and pleased when I saw that once I’d made friends with Boom-Boom, the other strippers milling about backstage had no problem letting me shoot them, too.

  Sitting there at the edge of the Platzpitz, I knew I needed another Boom-Boom, and I needed one fast. Ten minutes or so later, when I nervously glanced up from my newspaper, he was there. “What are you looking for?” the man asked in English, after failing to elicit a response using German. “Works? Powder? I’ve got everything you need.” He was short and reed thin with an enormous white splint running the length of his left forearm. His black wavy hair was dirty and matted to his head, grown to shoulder length not by design but by neglect. He looked Sri Lankan, like the men in my hotel, although he could have just as easily been of aboriginal descent. Up and down his unsplinted arm were the telltale tracks, along with a couple of nasty-looking abscesses.

  I swallowed hard, ready to lie. “No, thanks,” I said, “I’m a student. Majoring in photography.” I felt bad about lying, but then the man told me his name was Tom Jones, which made me feel better. Besides, it had only been a year since my graduation from college; I still felt like a student. “Tom” said he’d been living in Amsterdam until one of his friends told him about the Platzpitz. So he came for a visit and never left. When I asked him where he was living now that he was in Zurich, he mentioned a number of places he was able to crash with friends for free, including my hotel. Oh great, I thought, I wonder if he has a key to my room, too.

  “What happened to your arm?” I asked.

  “Abscesses,” he said. “Infections. Shit like that.”

  About an hour later, my new junkie friend let me shoot pictures of him shooting up next to the gazebo. He crouched and cooked and then stuck a needle into a vein on his left arm just above the top of the giant splint. The couple who’d been making out were now getting ready for their next fix. They watched me shooting Tom. “She’s a student,” he told them. “It’s okay.” Then the couple let me shoot them shooting up. I took a close-up of the man’s blood squirting back into the syringe, where it mixed with the boiled heroin just before being pushed back into his veins. I took a nice picture of the couple collapsed in a blissed-out heap on top of each other with the museum in the background. Soon, everyone was letting me shoot them shooting up. “It’s okay. She’s a student. She’s a friend of Sunil’s,” they all told each other. Sunil? So that was his real name. They shot, I shot, it was a big shooting orgy that lovely spring day in the Platzpitz. And by sunset, I was as high from my pictures as they were from the smack.

  ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, 1989

  ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, 1989

  I knew the photos were good. I finished off eight rolls of film that first day, and I should have just jumped on the late train to Paris and left it at that. But I was greedy. I wanted more. It was dark when I turned to walk back to the rooming house, and Tom/Sunil—ever the gallant new friend—insisted on accompanying me back there. I told him I’d be okay, but he insisted. Just before we reached the rooming house, I thought about all the copies of my key floating about and, lying once more, told him I was staying in an apartment. “It’s right there,” I said, pointing to a building at random.

  “Right there,” he repeated, staring at the building and looking slightly hurt. “Okay, well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, turning to leave.

  “Yeah, see you tomorrow,” I said. I walked in the direction of the building, tried the front door in vain, and then waited a few minutes before turning around to head toward the rooming house. When I looked over my shoulder to make sure Sunil wasn’t watching, he was. He paused there, illuminated by a few errant rays of a street light, and stared at me with his arms crossed. Our eyes locked for a brief moment, but he quickly looked away. Then he turned around, retreated into the darkness and headed back in the direction of the Platzpitz.

  The rooming house was in full swing. The men were drunk, the cigarette smoke filled the hallways, and the voices and laughter ricocheted off the water-stained walls. I tried to drown out the noise, but I couldn’t do anything about the smell of mildew and old sweat on the sheets.

  The next day in the park, I couldn’t find Sunil, but I saw a few familiar faces from the day before and started shooting anyway. This was a bad mistake. I was barely ten pictures into my first roll of film, shooting a close-up of a lighter under a spoon, when a dealer from one of the manned tables ran over and grabbed my camera strap angrily. He yelled something in German, but the only word I understood was “journalist.”

  “I’m a student!” I said, pushing him away from me. “Leave me alone.” But underneath, my heart was pounding furiously. A few of the junkies gathered around us in a circle. They weren’t taking sides.

  “Ah, a student,” he said, mocking me. “Vell, go study some-veer else.” His German accent was thick, which gave the whole encounter a surreal edge to it. I can’t help it. Whenever I hear a German accent, I automatically think Nazi. The dealer pushed me, and the junkie circle around us widened and grew accordingly. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder and whispered in my ear, “Get out of here before I kill you.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said, but when I saw him take out a switchblade from his pocket, I ran.

  I ran as fast as I could out of the park. I ran north, toward the chocolate stores and the banks and the cable cars, past the bodies and the bloody needles and the vomit. When I reached the perimeter of the park, I lost myself in the crowds of people and wound my way through the unfamiliar streets of Zurich back to my hotel room.

  The rooming house was in its usual state of curried commotion when I got there. As I made my way to my room, the Nigerian who’d stopped by my room with the extra key on that first night approached me in the hallway.

  “Your friend was here,” he said. “Mr. Tom Jones.”

  “He was?” I said, startled. I immediately thought about Sunil, standing there last night under the streetlamp, watching me. I was such an idiot, letting him walk me home. “What did he say?”

  “He said you had something for him. I told him you’d gone out for the day.”

  “Shit.”

  I ran down the hallway to my room. The door was unlocked. I was certain I’d see Sunil inside, waiting for me. But when I turned the knob and pushed it
open, what I saw sent a jolt through my body. Every drawer in the room was flung open. Socks and T-shirts and underwear and shorts were strewn haphazardly over the floor. A chair lay on its side. The mattress was pushed halfway off its box spring, the mildewed sheets peeled back in a rumpled heap. And there, rummaging through my suitcase, and there, bent over my dresser drawers, were two junkies from the Platzpitz. When they saw me they froze. I froze. We stood there for a split-second eternity, face-to-face, saying nothing. I stopped breathing. One of the men, pale, ugly and squinty-eyed with a tired, pockmarked face and long brown hair, tapped the side of his thigh with his fingers nervously. The other man had scraggly, dirty blond hair and train-tracked arms; he stared straight ahead, bug-eyed. He was looking for an out.

  Every synapse in my body was firing. My first rational thought was that Sunil must have brought them here. But where was he? And why were they still here? To steal money? To look for my film? Did the dealer who threatened me in the Platzpitz put them up to this? Did he promise them money or drugs for my film? If I ran, would they catch me? I thought about jumping out the window. The room was on the second floor, but the eaves of the building would make it easy to climb down.

  My feet, in their bouncy white Reebok sneakers, felt like lead.

  And then, the frozen tableau exploded. The blond was the first to move. He slid over to the door and slammed it shut, placing the one chair in the room under the doorknob for good measure. “Hold her!” he yelled to the ugly one, wielding a switchblade and walking toward me. As the ugly one held me from behind, my eyes followed only the knife. Was it the dealer’s knife? It looked similar: small, with a green-marbled handle. It could have been. Or was the handle on the dealer’s knife blue? I couldn’t remember. The blond grabbed my long braid and held the knife to my throat, his hand shaking, his eyes filled with not so much anger as fear.

  The ugly one now stepped in front of me, holding my wrists tightly together. I was outmuscled, and I knew it. In my mind I could picture the grisly scene—a severed throat, the blood, an ambulance. I started to cry, and I begged for my life. “Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t . . .”

  Suddenly, the blond removed the knife from my neck and sliced it into my forearm. It was the kind of cut you’d make on the skin of an orange you wanted to peel—deep enough to be effective, but shallow enough not to pierce the sweet, juicy fruit below. I screamed.

  “Leave,” said the blond. “Next time we kill you.” But the threat, like the knifing, seemed like an afterthought.

  My body was too filled with adrenaline to feel much pain. Exposed to the air, the wound pulsated and stung, but no more than a giant paper cut. When I saw the blood drops falling off my bent elbow, the room started to spin. As I sank to the floor, clutching my arm, the two men ran out the window. I could hear them yelling German to each other as their feet scrambled over the eaves.

  I ran to the bathroom, cleaned the wound with some soap, and held a washcloth tightly around my forearm to stop the bleeding, crying hysterically all the while. I searched the room for a tissue to blow my nose, but had to sit down on the bed before I could find one because I was hyperventilating too hard to stand any longer. Worried that I might pass out, I grabbed an old paper bag out of the trash can and breathed into it, trying to relax my lungs with each breath drawn—in-and-out, in and out, in . . . and . . . out . . .

  I barely remember the next hour. Somehow, I mustered the strength to gather the strewn clothes in a pile on the bed, I packed, I paid my bill, I procured some gauze and tape from a first aid kit they kept at the front desk (“I cut it on a fence,” I told the clerk, who couldn’t care less), I bought a box of chocolates, I smoked a cigarette and I sprung for a taxi to the train station. I contemplated calling the police but then quickly rejected the idea outright. When you’ve been the victim of as many crimes as I have, you learn the sad truth: few criminals ever get caught, despite the best efforts of the police and victims. Besides, I had no desire to spend another nanosecond in Zurich if I could possibly help it, and getting the Swiss police involved would probably mean at least another overnight stay, if not two or three.

  When I got to the train station, I called Marion. Marion was one of my editors at Gamma, but she was also my best friend. As she picked up the phone, I could hear the magazine pages rustling in the background. I pictured her there at her desk, smoking a cigarette and perusing the latest Paris Match in the same way all photo editors do, by flipping the pages back and forth between the photographs and the photo credits at the front of the magazine to see who’d shot what. People in the photo world have little use for text.

  “Hi,” I said, my voice quivering. I was standing in the train station, holding on to the pay phone booth for support.

  “Hello, there!” she replied, her voice as chipper as always. “Have you seen the new Match? Langevin’s pictures from Beijing are unbelievable.” She went on to say something about tanks and crushed bicycles in Tiananmen Square, but I couldn’t process the information.

  I cut her off. “Marion, listen, I was stabbed. I’m on my way back to Paris.”

  “What?” she asked, her voice incredulous.

  “I was stabbed,” I repeated, louder and slower. “Some guys ransacked my hotel room and I caught them and they had a knife and they cut my arm and—”

  “Oh, shit,” said Marion, now cutting me off. “Are you okay? Where are you? Are you in the hospital? What the hell happened?”

  “I’m fine. I’m at the train station. It’s not deep. Just bloody. I’ll explain everything when I get back.”

  “Come home,” said Marion. “Just come home.”

  The overnight train from Switzerland to Paris was scheduled to arrive in the Gare de Lyon at dawn. I should have slept, but instead I spent the night staring at the two-inch gash in my arm. The bleeding stopped before I even got on the train, but the scab was not strong. When I removed the gauze pad to change it, I noticed that if I pulled the skin around the wound outward, I could still get the blood to ooze out. I never put on a new dressing. I kept hoping that some stranger would see the laceration and the blood, ask me what had happened and offer me a shoulder to cry on. Help me, help me, I’d say. I have a bizarre job, I just spent two days hanging out with heroin addicts, my room was ransacked, I was stabbed, my arm hurts and I’m so, so lonely.

  There, there, the stranger would respond, pitying my woes. Everything will be all right.

  But no one on the train noticed my blood. It was late at night, and all of the potential saviors in my compartment were either reading about the massacre in China or sound asleep.

  The train pulled into the station in Paris, and I took the Métro to the Châtelet–Les Halles stop, a short walk from my apartment. I figured I’d stop home, get some sleep, then take the films over to Gamma for processing. Normally, I would have gone straight to the agency, but with Tiananmen gobbling up the headlines, I knew no one would be looking to publish my pictures for at least a week or so. Besides, I was exhausted.

  But when I finally arrived at the front door of my building on the rue St. Denis, it didn’t feel like home. The section of the rue St. Denis I lived on, with its ancient cobblestones underfoot and its neon signs overhead, was just off the Place du Châtelet in Les Halles. Les Halles—which means “the halls,” from its former incarnation as the city’s central food market—is a bustling tourist area in the center of Paris, just to the north of the Seine on the Right Bank. Like many of the older, cobbled streets in Paris that are closed off to cars, the rue St. Denis is what the French call a rue pietonne, which roughly translates as a “street for walkers.” This struck me as funny, considering the history of St. Denis as one of the major Parisian thoroughfares for prostitutes.

  The first day I moved into my little eight-by-ten apartment on the rue St. Denis, I was spooked half the night picturing the faces of the hundreds of women who must have lain on tattered
sheets in the very room I now occupied, staring out the very same windows, watching the very same shadows on the very same walls, trying to separate mind from body.

  The rue St. Denis apartment was the third place I’d lived since arriving in Paris less than a year earlier. As with many decisions in my life, I had decided to move to Paris on a whim. Annie and Phyllida, two of my girlfriends from college, hatched the idea of a post-graduation Parisian adventure at the end of our senior year, and I, enchanted by A Moveable Feast, Breathless and—yes, I admit it—Madeline, figured the land of Cartier-Bresson and Magnum would be as good a place as any to start my photojournalism career.

  Our first apartment was two blocks from the Tuileries. Phyllida’s boyfriend, Ben, found it a week before she, Annie and I arrived. “It’s in a beautiful neighborhood,” Phyllida called me to say, on the eve of my flight, “but it’s small.” I had never been to Europe, and I was so excited to move to Paris, I didn’t care what the apartment looked like or where it was located. When I arrived, however, I realized Phyllida’s choice of descriptive words—“beautiful” and “small”—were both slight understatements. My first glimpse of the city was the one I saw as I rose out of the Tuileries Métro stop; to my right was the rue de Rivoli with its arched arcade walkways, to my left was the Jardin de Tuileries, straight ahead was the swirling Place de la Concorde and behind me was the Louvre. Beautiful? I couldn’t think of a proper word to describe such beauty.