It seemed that if Obama won, we could redeem our whole damn country.
After the crash, opulence fell out of fashion. Someone punched out the CEO of Lehman Brothers while he exercised at his company gym, and the New York Times ran articles claiming that Manhattan’s gentry were now hiding their Bergdorf’s bags inside plain brown ones. It was either modesty or fear. In this climate, bankers stopped coming to the Box. They still had their bonuses, but it looked tacky to blow thousands a night on champagne.
The Box fell on harder times. One by one, they laid off the Hammerstein Beauties. Then they laid off the band. Management slashed wages, but demanded more from performers. The Italian acrobat doubled as a bartender. Nik Sin was drafted as a host, though he had not an ounce of hospitality.
Once, Wednesday nights had seen the Box packed as tight as a veal pen. Now the club was empty. I sat alone on the balcony, squinting at my sketchpad in the darkness.
It was the end of the boom and we all knew it, as surely as courtesans knew the end of the Belle Époque. On the Web, I read about the tent cities growing on the outskirts of Vegas. Medical NGOs set up makeshift hospitals, extracting teeth from Americans who couldn’t afford dental care. The chasm had always yawned between rich and poor, but now it was impossible to ignore. And it was embodied in this empty nightclub. After the crash, what would happen to the human luxury goods who worked here, we sparklers illuminating the face of the destroyer? Where would we end up?
I stared down at the stage, where the two remaining Beauties danced forlornly. It might as well have been a funeral procession. But they hit their marks just the same.
Years later, I smoked weed with one of the Box’s former drummers. As the sun rose, he told me that he’d never stopped adoring the club. No matter how badly they treated him, he loved the Box, long after it had ceased to be New York’s darling.
As he spoke, he sounded like Humbert Humbert at the end of Lolita, when he finally reunites with an adult, pregnant Dolores Haze.
“I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another’s child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine.”
Humbert’s words felt as real for a nightclub as for a girl.
On election night 2008, I sat with the rest of the Box’s staff watching the results come in on the club’s TV. As the states went blue, the giddiness rose. When the announcer called the country for Obama, Lucca picked me up and spun me around while I squealed.
On the street, strangers gave me hugs and high fives. The whole city was dancing. We thought we’d done the impossible: our guy was now in charge. We’d proven that America was something besides the puritans and bigots. We were the real America. Not George Bush—us.
I called my mom. “Come over!” she demanded. I rode the cab through the joyous midtown crowds. I didn’t want to be alone.
We danced in New York because we believed we’d shucked the nightmare costume that Americans had been forced to wear for the last eight years. The wars, the secret prisons, the torture, the spying, the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans—even the constant, humiliating public idiocy of US leaders. We’d proved those were anomalies. Beneath it all, we were good.
Was the sky ever as blue as it was that next morning?
Of course, redemption doesn’t come from politicians. But not all of us knew that yet.
The Box was hardly my only client. I drew feverishly for anyone who’d let me. Leavitt and I created a pornographic comic book called Scarlett Takes Manhattan, and then a web series for DC Comics called Puppet Makers, about futuristic technology in rococo France. Each work focused on depraved rich people and scheming performers. Class obsessed us both—as did the worlds of art and sex, where class could be transgressed.
An heiress hired my friends to run one of her Halloween parties. These parties, in her Greenwich Village townhouse, were legend. The heiress filled her home with celebrities, earning lavish spreads in Vogue. She considered the events her form of art, but this was true only in the way that Jeff Koons’s balloon dogs are “his” art. In reality they were the work of a huge staff of cleaners, costumers, caterers, art directors, and performers. My friends who planned the party were gods of nightlife, having performed for everyone from Madonna to Simon Cowell, yet they were not allowed to take a whit of credit for the event; in the heiress’s world, they were merely the help.
As part of the entertainment, they booked me to create a six-foot-tall painting over the course of the night. I’d make art before the guests’ eyes.
I dressed myself as a glittery little moppet: teased-out hair, hands weighed with rings, corset winched so tight I could barely breathe. I roped Fred into helping me, not knowing how I’d finish the painting I’d promised to make.
Parties are supposed to be about pleasure; rich people pride themselves on being difficult to please. Before I got going, my friends spelled out the rules, promising they’d catch hell if I broke any: No drinking on the job (performers had proven themselves untrustworthy in previous years). No networking with the celebrities, even if they spoke to us. We were to remain mysterious, decorative, and, above all, silent.
Before the party started, Fred asked the bartender if we could use his trash can. The heiress sent down a staff member to berate him. We were talent; they were waitstaff. The different classes of help were not to mingle. The Bastille had been stormed for less.
The staff member led me upstairs. We lined up, military style, in the heiress’s bedroom. “Be kind to Women’s Wear Daily, so they’re kind to me,” she trilled. Staff members guided us before Patrick McMullan’s cameras. We were a parade of Pierrots, gilded ballerinas, fetish models turned into lions, hissing and twirling their tails. I pouted with my paintbrushes while the flash bathed us all.
Then I painted. When a painting is that big, and the time you have to do it is that short, you fall into it. You get obsessed with the rhythm of wiping drips, filling in blacks. Your hands race desperately to make it comprehensible enough that, even after an hour, people can tell that you know what you’re doing—even when you have a little pink veil on your head and your feet are screaming and your corset is too tight for you to breathe.
“That’s really good,” I heard.
I turned around. Pierce Brosnan was smiling at me. His costume consisted of a plastic spider affixed to his nose. I wondered if I was allowed to say anything back, so I stayed silent. This was my friends’ gig. It covered the last three months of their rent. I didn’t want to get them in trouble.
“Pierce is a Sunday painter,” said his companion.
I tried to make chitchat with my eyes.
“Molly! Molly!” A friend threw his arms around me. Jerry was a trust-fund artist whose greatest work consisted of filling a gallery with bouncy balls. To be fair, this made it more enjoyable than most fine art.
I shrank away. “I’m not allowed to hug you,” I said. “I’m the help.”
“What?” he asked, seeming shocked.
“Yes,” I said, “the help can’t talk with the guests.”
“What do you mean ‘the help’?” asked Jerry. “Can I get you a drink?”
“Nope, the help can’t be trusted to hold their liquor.”
Jerry backed away, spooked by my ferocity.
In the fall of 2009, Fred took advantage of the falling rents that came with the financial crash, and moved into a loft in Manhattan. I finally moved in with him, though I clung to the old rent-controlled place on Roebling Street. In the new loft, I felt like a princess in a tower—even when a mosquito infestation kept us awake all night.
Before we could even finish unpacking, the New York Times photographed me for a profile. The reporter followed me around for weeks, even calling up Leavitt to ask how it felt to live in my shadow.
I told her countless things. But the article’s pull quote was a bit of cheek. “It’s not how much you cultivate your talent, but how much you cultivate your name,” they quoted me
as saying, running the words beneath a photo of me in mint-green tulle, peeking through a picture frame. The comics scene was predictably scandalized—by now I had a bit of a reputation for being cynical—but I was just trying to counter the pious lie that good artists would automatically be recognized. Talent may be its own reward, but the rewards granted by the world were distributed in a less equitable fashion.
As if to prove my point, after the Times profile, curators started writing to me.
In January 2010, Richard asked me to do a poster for the Box’s fourth anniversary. He and Simon were fighting. Simon fought with everyone who loved him. This time, he used me as Richard’s proxy, asking for dozens of changes in the poster art. He kept me at the computer for days, sending and resending sketches, jumping to meet his shifting demands: Paint the wall white, then black, then starry, then white, then add in two dancers, then Photoshop them out again.
By the midnight before deadline, he seemed mollified. But at three A.M. I got the email.
Compared to the work you’ve done for us, this piece falls flat. It is too simple, too straightforward. So little detail, so little dynamism. We are asking for an entirely new piece of work. This one is not of any use to us now.
The email came from an assistant’s account, but I recognized the hallmarks of Simon’s style.
I’d stuck with the club long after the press turned against it. I thought of all the free drawings I’d done for the Box. I thought of all the love I’d poured into that place. But I’ve always clung too long to those I loved. I’d stayed with both Anthony and Cosette well after I knew it was doomed. I did the same with the Box.
I drank some whiskey. I felt a bit of ice inside me. It gave me strength. I coddled that sliver of hate. Then I typed: “Take my work off your site.” I cc’ed everyone at the club, including Richard. I pressed Send and went to sleep.
The crash did not reverse itself.
The government bailed out Wall Street, but the money stayed pooled at the top. Rather than an elusive ideal, eternal prosperity turned out to be a lie, and the houses people thought would secure their futures became instead chains around their necks. Those who wrecked the economy rewarded themselves with bonuses. Discreetly, bankers began to return to the Box.
Simon did not return my email, but a week later, Richard called to tell me they were using my poster. He paid me, and I was grateful. We joked and flirted, as we always had, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the club.
Once I stopped working for the Box, I lost touch with its New York. That city of excess had both obsessed and disgusted me, but it also drove my art. Now I had no muse. I told myself the loss didn’t matter. I had my people. My geeks. My burlesque girls. They were talented, and unlike Simon, they were kind. They respected my work.
Melissa Dowell and I threw increasingly elaborate Dr. Sketchy’s sessions. I churned out more illustrations: showgirls with curly wigs, stages, curtains, each piece swarming with detail, whimsical animals cavorting in the audience. The style I’d honed at the Box became popular, but all I did was reproduce my old work. The Box had cut me till I became razor-sharp. I was now swaddled in the cotton wool of my own success. My hands moved with confidence, creating book covers and advertisements. They were well done. They were fine. They were nothing new.
The money was good. I told myself I didn’t care.
Back before the crash, at Miss Exotic World, a breast cancer charity had made plaster casts of the torsos of dozens of dancers, then distributed them to artists for them to paint. I received Amber Ray’s. I sanded smooth those gravity-mocking breasts, then painted them ocean blue. Having no concept at the start, I riffed on the aquatic theme, painting two punk rock Little Mermaids, with their long red braids looping decoratively. Like most of my non-Box work at that time, it was allusive, slickly painted, and created to invite professional opportunity.
I posted a photograph of the piece on my MySpace page.
The first comment was from a band called Vermillion Lies, whose avatar showed two sisters sitting atop stacks of circus trunks. Zoe beat a drum. Kim strummed a toy guitar. They pouted like stowaways from one of my drawings. They wore striped stockings, rouge, and top hats; their braided red hair connected them.
Kim Boekbinder, who ran the Vermillion Lies’ MySpace account, sent me a cabaret song they’d done, “Long Red Hair,” that reminded her of the characters I’d painted on Amber’s bust. The sisters of the song were connected, like conjoined twins, by their hair. One of the sisters married. On the wedding night, her groom was unable to get hard under the sisters’ dual gaze. Hoping to separate the two, the husband cut their braid. But it was not hair so much as vasculature. The two girls bled to death. I listened to the song on repeat as I worked on a flyer for a cupcake shop in Berlin.
Vermillion Lies toured the world. They made ten thousand dollars one night at Caesars Palace, and they bashed out songs on toy pianos for screaming fans in Moscow. Their tour van, rigged with red velour bunks, crisscrossed the United States. One MySpace photo showed Kim and Zoe vamping in front of the sign for Vermilion Parish, Louisiana. Vermillion Lies opened for the Dresden Dolls, and then their front woman, Amanda Palmer, after she went solo. Despite being independent, they were far more successful than the majority of indie bands—something largely attributable to Kim’s whip-cracking leadership. On stage, she might have been sex itself, but behind the scenes Kim was a businesswoman like I was. And, like me, she wished she could just be an artist.
We kept in touch, thinking of projects we could do together. When she invited me to create the cover for the vinyl pressing of their album In New Orleans, I drew both Kim and Zoe, their red braids framing their names.
We finally met in the spring of 2009, when we were both doing events the week of the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. I took a cab to a sinister clown bar on the outskirts of town to see Vermillion Lies play for an audience of teenagers. Zoe banged out a heartbeat on a marching drum, while Kim played accordion and sang, “I have your heart. It beats inside. It’s only three inches wide.”
In person, they looked far from identical. Zoe was a dark tomboy. Kim was taller and more angular. She wore a collar of red ostrich feathers, and her hair glowed artificial cherry. Her mint-colored eyes were huge, and lined with feather faux-lashes. Her cheekbones were high, her chin long, and she had a prominent nose above a wide, magenta mouth. I stood staring at her until the show was over. Then we hugged. I was suddenly self-conscious in my pseudoprofessional black—a sparrow to her bird of paradise.
When Kim sang she seduced and demanded. Offstage, she spoke so softly that I strained to hear. Even as our sentences trailed off, we stared at each other as if we’d known each other before and would know each other for a long time to come.
After Kim and Zoe finished, we retreated to the tour bus. Kim and I lay next to each other on a bunk. The night was hot in Austin, and their van had no air conditioning. Slick against my back, her sweat smelled like lemons. She told me how angry she was that the official festival hadn’t accepted Vermillion Lies to play. I was incredulous. They were so brilliant. If the festival had rejected them, then who the hell did they accept?
“It’s just hard being DIY,” Kim said.
She told me about the years she and Zoe had spent in a van ricocheting around North America. Years in planes, on floors, on stages. Years of seeing their faces tattooed onto breasts and bellies and legs. Years signing stacks of merch, eating McDonald’s, doing shots, then carrying their amps to their van, night after lonely Midwestern night. Doing it themselves. Years of wanting help.
I knew the feeling.
Then, to change the subject, she suggested we all do a children’s book. Plotting always cheered me up too. It was as if we’d touched pricked fingertips, exchanging art instead of blood.
A few months later, Vermillion Lies hired me to do a poster for their show at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con. I drew Kim and Zoe as superheroes, with Amanda Palmer in the center as
a blindfolded goddess of truth. I was at Comic-Con, so I stopped by their show, early enough to catch the last song. Afterward, fans lined up in a neoclassical music hall to buy merch from Kim, Zoe, Amanda, and her husband, the writer Neil Gaiman. I signed hundreds of posters, holding Kim’s hand beneath the table.
That night, they seemed unstoppable.
A month later, Vermillion Lies split.
After spending a few months in Berlin, Kim showed up at my loft in Manhattan. She stood in the door, wearing a velvet coat with lace cuffs like that of a young prince. The coat shed glitter hearts. She looked tired. I hugged her hard.
In the kitchen, Kim found a bottle of absinthe. She prepared it for us in the Czech style, balancing a sugar cube on a fork, pouring the absinthe through the cube and then lighting it on fire. Slowly, she trickled water through the cube. The sugar dissolved. The absinthe slowly turned white.
As she worked, she told me what had happened to the band. Touring is brutal, she said. Touring cheaply is an intimacy few relationships can survive. Kim and Zoe fought as bandmates—and as sisters they fought more. Then Zoe quit the band. By torching Vermillion Lies, she was also torching a future Kim had counted on. Kim had put everything into the band and now she’d have to start again. But it wasn’t just the band. She felt she’d lost her sister too. She was scared. She had no home. She didn’t know what to do, or who to be, except that the past was dead and the future would have to be invented.
Kim burned with ambition; her creative urge was relentless. As she lay on the floor, she seemed suddenly the most precious and fragile of things. I loved her, with covetous girl love. I wanted her to stay. I wanted to fix everything. I wanted to help her, to make her my best friend and to make her happy.
Drawing Blood Page 18
