To pull her out of her depression, I joked, “We should show your fans our absinthe party.” I turned on my webcam, then tweeted that we were hanging out. Twenty people signed on to watch a livestream of us. We waved at them, holding our absinthe toward the camera. It felt like a small party, close-knit yet disembodied.
Then I had an idea: Why didn’t Kim move into my old apartment on Roebling? She paused. I turned to the webcam. “Should Kim move to New York?” I asked the Internet. Then I loaded a poll in the chat window. “Tell her to move to New York,” I wheedled. Our viewers checked their boxes and the poll bar slid over to Yes.
“See? The Internet is telling you to do it. You should listen,” I told her, sounding more daring then I felt.
Then I kissed her. Her lips were soft and her mouth tasted like licorice and when we parted, we both wore conspirators’ grins.
“Okay, I’ll move to New York,” she laughed.
Kim moved into the Roebling apartment a short time later, with a few stray possessions—an amp, a looping pedal, a battered suitcase spilling dresses she’d collected from Moscow and Austin and Berlin. She covered one wall of the room with butcher paper, then, in marker, started planning what came next. I sat and watched her.
At the top of the paper, she wrote in vermillion ink:
“The Impossible Girl came to me in a dream one night in Berlin,” Kim said. “This song presented itself fully formed. When I woke up, I remembered every beat, every word.”
Kim got a musicians’ residency at Goodbye Blue Monday, the bar where I’d danced after I recovered from my abortion. On her first night, a dozen fans gathered in the audience, including me. The stage was crowned with blue fairy lights. Her red lips parted, and she sang.
Stripped of Vermillion Lies’ cabaret trappings, Kim was a different woman onstage. Gone were the striped stockings and tiny top hats of the Vermillion Lies days. Now she raided thrift stores, hacking together sequins, leopard-print fabrics, and beads into vagabond finery. She stood with her long legs planted wide, a cape of crow feathers over one shoulder, and looked into the crowd like a dare. Her voice was naked, sweet in its raw vulnerability. In some songs, she used the looping pedal to create duets with her own voice. She sang like she was heartbroken, like she’d break your heart. As she sang, I thought of the cities she’d played in, all the beds she’d slept in, and how soon she’d leave again. I missed her in advance.
That spring, Kim and I lived in a fever of creation. I drew her as a mermaid, and as Madame X. I inked her portrait, Kim smiling coyly, wearing New York’s buildings as a crown. That spring, I made dozens of drawings for money, but Kim I drew for love. We worked like we wanted to fuck each other full of art. As a test for a stop-motion film, we videotaped our hands defacing a tablecloth. Against the dark living room walls of my Roebling Street apartment, a filmmaker shot Kim as she sang one of her looped songs. On film, her hair stuck up in a shock the color of Skittles. Her shoulders were bare. Around one bicep, she’d tattooed a ring of bees.
Kim commissioned me to make her into a paper doll. In the illustration, my rock star stood in a corset and stockings against a violet background; around her I drew a circle of objects: an old-fashioned diver’s helmet, tentacles, antlers, and wings. None of the objects fit like proper paper doll’s clothing, but that was the point. She was impossible, after all.
Kim had funded the first half of her first solo album, Impossible Girl, using Kickstarter, a new crowdfunding site that helped artists raise money for projects. On Kickstarter, artists offered rewards for fans who donated. It was half charity, half presale, and to succeed at it, you needed to foster an emotional interaction with your backers that was not unlike a cam girl’s bond with her patrons. To help cover the remaining costs of recording the album, Kim sold posters of my paper doll.
She toured for months at a time, passing through Berlin, San Francisco, New Orleans, Montreal. None of these cities was her home, but neither was New York. She’d show up unexpectedly, bearing gifts: mermaid pins she’d sculpted, silk slips from Oklahoma that were too narrow for any rib cage but mine. I stripped and tried everything on in front of her.
Kim and I both had brains that turned against us. We never thought our art was good enough. To fix ourselves, we made more art, only to decide it had failed us again. Art was our heroin, injected compulsively chasing a lasting high that never came.
“Is it good?” I asked, holding my drawing of Amber up for Kim to see.
“Yes, Molly.”
“No, really, is it? Is it?”
“I already told you. But I’ll tell you as many times as you need.”
Crash or no, New York was more expensive than ever. Each week a new art space shuttered, and each week artists fled. Mars Bar, the legendary East Village dive, slowly shut its doors, and on Coney Island, glittering old boardwalk stores closed at the behest of something called Thor Equities. Developers even bought the Chelsea Hotel, hoping to turn it into a luxury hotel. Every day, the city found new ways to signal that it belonged to the rich alone.
Kim and I were artists, so we went places we’d never otherwise have been allowed. Publicists invited us to parties where we’d pose on a bathmat serving as a red carpet in front of a wall of sponsors’ logos. Inside, we snickered over free drinks. Other nights we put flowers in our hair and hid in the cloud-blue booths at a private club called the Norwood, splitting a twenty-five-dollar hamburger. I rested my head on her shoulder. We made out till we dissolved.
In April, Kim and I wanted to make something bigger, something elaborate, laborious, and eye-popping. We ran through ideas—a print portfolio, stage sets, a giant painting—before settling on something I’d long dreamed of: an animated music video. I’d always wanted to see my creatures move.
The first time I’d met Kim, at that Austin clown bar, she was singing a song then titled “The Organ Donors’ March.” It told the story of a girl with a bad heart who gets a new one, only to find herself transforming into the heart’s former owner. A drum beat a cardiac rhythm through the song. Poring over the lyrics, Kim and I reimagined the story, creating a new version of the song as the basis of the video.
Kim renamed the song “I Have Your Heart.”
We went on Twitter to look for an animator. Several replied, but only one was any good—a lanky, soft-spoken former game maker in Melbourne named Jim Batt. He was full of ideas: We wouldn’t make the animation with computers. No, we’d do it in the real world of magic and accident, using paper puppets, shot with stop-motion in a sprawling paper city. The puppets would move and blink, love and die. It would be so much work, but who cared? The three of us Skyped, drinking absinthe and laughing shyly at the possibilities before us.
The Impossible Girl performed all over New York: in illegal lofts, warehouses, in a makers’ space in Brooklyn, standing in front of a giant wall of paper flowers she’d laboriously crafted by herself. Together we watched Courtney Love play a mediocre show in some vast industrial space in the Meatpacking District. When I had been an angry punk kid, Courtney Love had been my dream girl; now she was raspy and tired, a middle-aged Buddhist. I wished Kim could take her place.
After shows, Kim, Jim, and I developed the story for “I Have Your Heart.”
A central European city. A hideous family. A frail maiden. And, of course, a swashbuckling queer girl pirate. I named the maiden’s parents Mertrude and Jasper. I drew Jasper as a ball, his tiny legs leaping into splits when he walked. We imagined he was the lord of a vast twine fortune, which he’d squandered collecting ornamental pigurines. Mertrude was tall, emaciated, except for a bustle upon which I sometimes drew Jasper riding. Over Skype, Jim pushed me to stylize the bodies even further. I drew until I’d filled pages as big as me.
In May, Kim played in a Village jazz club; she was the most gold-and-silver thing on its tiny stage. Afterward, as we sat on my apartment floor drinking, we told each other about our secret dissatisfactions, which we could never tell anyone else.
We both
wanted to make ambitious work, work that would sear the eyes. I wanted to do murals the size of buildings. Kim wanted to play to stadiums. But we were both caught in a vicious circle, never having enough cash to do the major work that would prove that we deserved to get the cash to do major work. My paintings, Kim’s tours, it all cost so goddamn much to make—not to mention the cost of surviving in this city.
I lay my head on Kim’s back. Her speaking voice was as sweet as her singing one, but when she was angry it came out faster.
To make art, we needed money. To make money, we needed to be more famous. But fame cost money too. We poured ourselves another round. I chewed a bit of dead skin on my lip. It bled.
We lay next to each other on a stained futon and whispered, for once without shame, about wanting to be Bowie or Picasso or any of those men who had stood before the world and taken it all with entitlement, never asking if he was good enough. They lived in freedom. They could do anything, make anything, be anything. We wanted to be them, and we would fucking die if we were not.
My eyes grew heavy. I passed out.
I woke up with the sunlight too bright in my eyes and staggered to the kitchen, where I poured beakers of water into my parched mouth.
Kim was gone. She had left pink glitter rolled up in my sheets.
Kim spent more time with Jim on Skype. She told me they were planning music videos for her new album. The three of us were still plotting the story for “I Have Your Heart.” The main character, Cora, would be a little sickly rich girl who’d fall in love with a cat-headed pirate. He’d die, in a satisfyingly bloody way. Her doctor would cut out his heart, then implant it gorily in the rich girl, saving her life but giving her a pirate-style defiance. We sketched the story in frames, then tightened them into a storyboard.
Gentle voice aside, Jim was an eager dictator, instructing me on how to make the components of our paper world. Under his supervision, I inked huge pages of brick and ivy texture. He cut them up to make the walls of buildings. He sent me plans for paper ships and he had me redraw them, then printed and assembled the ships in Australia. He gave me long lists of expressions Cora would need to make during the film. I drew different heads for her—furious, blinking, alarmed, romantic—from the front and from the side.
Slowly, the project grew real between us. Then it grew outward, into the real world. In one key scene, the cat pirate would throw Cora a handkerchief embroidered with a heart. There was no doing this with puppets. We’d have to animate it properly, frame by frame. I stood atop the flat files; Kim knelt on the floor, throwing me a piece of cloth on which I’d drawn a sloppy heart. Fred videotaped us throwing the cloth back and forth. Then we digitized the video and broke it into frames, and I used those frames to draw the handkerchief flying through the air as it spread and folded. I drew it thirty times.
As I groused, Kim and Jim stared at each other through the tunnel of Skype. She was on one side of the earth, he on the other. I didn’t realize that they were falling in love.
In June 2010, the lease came up on my apartment on Roebling. Kim decided to move on. She’d go to New Orleans, and from there to Australia to meet Jim.
I started giving away my possessions from the last eight years, things I no longer needed. The apartment grew sadder and barer. The landlord couldn’t wait to gut the place and then triple the rent.
Kim played a final show in New York. The room could have been lit up by her joy. After the show, we sat together in the Norwood’s high armchairs. Kim wore a silver beaded purse from the 1920s that I admired. We licked the salt that lined the rims of our cocktails. Then she went back to the bare apartment on Roebling Street. She’d given away her mattress, so she slept on the floor.
Before Kim flew away, she left that silver beaded purse on my drafting table. I opened it up. Inside sat her farewell note, scribbled on music paper.
The video for “I Have Your Heart” came out two years later. In his loft in Melbourne, Jim had used my art as the raw material to construct a world. He had built a Victorian street, a garden, and then a harbor. My heart leapt as the camera swooped over the paper galleons. But even more impressive than the scenery: the characters were alive. Jasper, Mertrude, Cora, the corrupt doctor, and the cat-headed pirates. Out of a few simple expressions, printed on paper heads, Jim had created real feeling. I gasped when the pirate’s blood poured over the cobblestones I’d inked, and I snickered when Jasper scuttled over the docks to prevent Cora’s escape.
“I Have Your Heart” took two years to make, and three minutes to watch.
Jim and Kim are still in love.
In November 2010, my cell phone showed a call from a familiar number.
“Darling! Gorgeous! We’re opening a new club in London.” It was Richard, his voice bubbling with enthusiasm.
“Yes?” I forced myself to sound bored.
“We want you out there! We want you to paint the whole place. The stairs. The rooms. The mirrors. The tile. The wallpaper. The everything. Think of it as your Sistine Chapel.”
I paused. I’d never done a mural before. But Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, was my idol. He took years to paint the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, living on his scaffolding, fucking on his scaffolding, wearing guns at his belt to wave at anyone who dared criticize him.
I wanted to be Diego. I wanted to paint walls as elaborate love letters between me and the Box’s staff. When the audience entered, they’d be forced to see that they were the pigs in this hellscape. The performers were the gods.
“Yes, of course. I would love to,” I told Richard. “I adore you.”
That December, the Box flew Melissa Dowell and me out to London. From the airport, we took the tube to Piccadilly Circus. “Cockfosters,” the mechanical conductress’s voice announced, indicating the direction of the line. We burst out in giggles.
The Box Soho was taking shape in the shell of an old strip club, surrounded by gay bars, jack shacks, and bookstores with signs blinking “Sex! Sex! Sex!” When we arrived, it was a construction site, unheated in November, festooned with asbestos warning signs. A desperately polite British staff fought to get it ready in time for its scheduled opening date, while Simon and the designer made capricious changes. The budget spiraled. Simon disappeared for days at a time.
My job would call for ninety feet of murals in two weeks. When we showed up, the site didn’t even have scaffolding. The builders cobbled together a platform, then watched us as we balanced on the rickety thing in our miniskirts and Doc Martens. Neither Melissa nor I knew what to wear on job sites. After the first few hours, we were caked in grit. The green dust came out in our snot.
“Don’t fall. We don’t have insurance,” one of the staff warned me as I balanced a ladder on the staircase.
I didn’t care. Wobbling on that platform, I just wanted to paint.
I started on the staircase, sketching so loosely that only I could understand my marks. “I know your secret,” Melissa snickered. “To do the Molly Crabapple style, just draw like you have epilepsy.”
Out of those lines, my friends started to emerge. I painted Buck, Flambeaux, and Nik Sin. Melody Sweets sang next to Rose Wood, whose tits were as massive as her cock. Waitresses in towering wigs served pig customers. When I was alone, I’d kiss the wall. “This belongs to you,” I’d whisper to whatever girl I’d just painted.
I drew and Melissa filled. I shaded and Melissa gilded. We worked feverishly, racing to complete enough of the wall that Simon wouldn’t tell us to tear it down when he returned.
Days passed. Simon still didn’t show. We hadn’t seen each other since our fight over the poster, and I started to worry that the whole job was some sort of trick. Every day, I grew more certain that Simon would appear like Rumpelstiltskin and order everything sandblasted off the walls, as whimsically as he might order a staircase torn out. The morning Richard texted me to tell me Simon was back, I hid under the hotel bed.
At the job site, a new Simon approached us. He’d lost weight, tri
mmed his beard, and seemed to have stepped right out of the bath. “Love it, Molly,” he said, hugging me. “Absolutely love it.”
“That’s who you were whining over?” Melissa laughed. “From now on, I’m calling him Sweet Philanthropist Simon.”
In the Box’s antechamber, I painted pigs riding the eternal symbols of Britain: lions and unicorns. The pigs were dressed as fox hunters but hunted a faceless man. Pigs threw money from trees. Women chased the fox-man. He ran up the staircase, where Rose Wood presided like a goddess. At the other end, he was thrown back out, in pig form, to persecute humans alongside his friends.
The walls were raw linen, which soaked up the paint. I diluted the paint with water, then scrubbed it in with brute force. The paint water froze. My hands cracked, then bled. Melissa added constellations in gilt.
We worked mostly nights, from eight in the evening till four in the morning, after the construction workers left. Halfway through our shifts, we overhead drunk Brits pouring out of the bars. “Why the fuck you looking at me?” one shouted. Angry grunts in reply. Then the sound of breaking glass. When we complained about the November cold, the Box gave us a heater that resembled a flamethrower in a cage.
On the builders’ radio, we blared the Pogues. We screamed along, gorging ourselves with champagne and potato chips from Tesco. No matter how much she drank, Melissa never got tired. “Alcohol is a beautiful woman,” she told me. “I’m not going to ditch her before the end of the night.”
Artists are the fanciest of the fancy. We’re presumed to exist in a rarified space requiring silence and deep thought. Because of this, the world often ignores the physical reality of what we do in favor of the ideas that animate it. The work of artists often involves skilled and demanding manual labor. Yet we’re often treated more like sophisticated pets than like true workers.
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