Everyone is Watching

by Megan Bradbury

  Rimbaud in New York

  (1978–79)

  DAVID WOJNAROWICZ

  The photograph depicts a man wearing a mask, the face of Arthur Rimbaud, that look he has, slightly askance, ready for anything.

  Arthur Rimbaud is staring at you through the crowds that pass the 25-cent peep shows of 42nd Street.

  Arthur Rimbaud is lying on a bed, looking up at you. He is masturbating.

  Arthur Rimbaud is taking a leak in a toilet. His piss arches clear before a smutty wall.

  Arthur Rimbaud lies on a bed. A man is nuzzling his naked chest.

  Arthur Rimbaud stands on a beach, the tide and a trail of rocks stretching behind him. A sailing boat is passing along the horizon.

  Arthur Rimbaud slumps against a wall. Behind him is a target. A needle is sticking out of his arm.

  Arthur Rimbaud is sitting on the subway, surrounded by people and graffiti. No one is looking at him.

  David Wojnarowicz looks at the camera. His mouth is all sewn up.

  32

  The tide is turning for Robert Moses. The public of 1965 are angry. On whose authority does he knock these neighbourhoods down? What right does he have to build a road or a bridge? He is not an elected official, yet he is allowed to do this? He is pushing out the poor and inviting traffic in. The streets are clogged with vehicles, and the more roads he builds, the worse it gets. He says to people, If you don’t like it then move out. He says, Find another place to live. He calls working-class districts ‘slums’ but these places are where ordinary people live. Without ordinary people this city would be nothing. Who built this city to begin with? The labourers and manufacturers, the shopkeepers and traders. They have always lived in the city. Old tenements must be refurbished and rent-controlled. You cannot eradicate problems by bulldozing the past.

  The public unite and take to the streets. They talk to the press. Journalists research cover stories and interview residents. They take photographs. They investigate claims of corruption. Television crews come to record the action. There are public meetings and demonstrations. Finally, things are beginning to change.

  33

  In Times Square there’s an M&M’s World, a Disney Store and a Bubba Gump Shrimp restaurant. There’s a Wendy’s and a Hard Rock Café and a McDonald’s and a TGI Fridays. Edmund strolls into the Times Square Visitor Center. This used to be a theatre once. Now, it contains information and historical artefacts. Photographs and memorabilia of Times Square line the walls. Where rows of seats once stood in the centre of the room there is now just space. On the stage a cinema screen is showing a documentary film about New York’s past. These are eras Edmund can remember.

  He remembers the look-back, the walk-up, the exchange of money for sex. He remembers the boys coming in from the country looking for a quick buck and a place to stay for the night, and the men who were only too happy to help. He remembers the dark movie houses and the cinema screens hanging over theatre stages. The real-life actors were replaced by movies, depictions of people fucking on a screen. The acting was bad but the scenes were explicit and that’s what you had come here to see – bodies penetrating other bodies. He remembers the live acts that were brought in to warm up the show. A man and woman would enter and do their business on the stage for all to see. It was lacklustre and mechanical. The audience clapped politely when the man finally came on the woman’s backside. He remembers the trash and the dirt outside the theatres, the hanging on the street, knowing everybody by different names. He remembers how good it was. Every time, he met someone new. Every time, he was a different Edmund White.

  Here is the original storefront for the Peep-O-Rama and an example of the viewing booth – put a quarter in the slot and watch the fairground ride. All Edmund sees are time restrictions and imitative art. He sees the inconvenience and the disappointment that comes from watching images shown in a booth, how the imagination cannot replace what should really be there – the touch of a real body or the smell of the streets. He remembers ordering the men who were imperfect. And so the city was the same, that filthy place, which didn’t work. What is it now? A historical exhibition of a cleaned-out place.

  34

  The residents of East Tremont in the Bronx are going about their daily business in 1950. Pedestrians can barely move down the teeming sidewalks for they are filled with people coming in and out of the tenements, entering and exiting the stores. The tenement blocks are full. People are hanging out of windows, watching the passing day. The grocery stores and butcher shops are thriving. The tailors and delis are full. The roads are jammed with trucks, cars and wagons. Everybody knows everybody here. You can’t walk ten yards without knocking into someone you know. This person is a second cousin of this person. This person is related to you by marriage. You grew up with this fellow, sat next to him in school, lived in the apartment above that one. People are watching the street through windows, from stoops, store doorways, barber chairs, bar stools, grocery stoops. Kids are playing in the streets. They play stickball, jump rope, play for penny games, tag, pram pushing, kicking cans, baseball. The kids are ragged and loud. A woman in a third-floor apartment yells down to the kids on the street. The weather is unseasonably hot. The women bring out chairs onto the street and they sit down, cross one foot over the other and lean back. These moments. Stillness in the busy street. Women return home with groceries. Now there are other jobs to do. It is all right; the kids are being watched by the neighbours. The kids play in the alleyways and under the storefront awnings, in the shade, swipe an apple or two from the grocer and run. When the men return from work in the evening they sit out on the stoops.

  One day in December in 1952, 1,530 households along a one-mile stretch of East Tremont receive a letter from Commissioner Moses telling them they have ninety days to move.

  Ninety days?

  What is this? What is this you’re telling me?

  They want us to move?

  Move where?

  What money do we have for this?

  I was born here. So were my children.

  Ninety days?

  I’m not going anywhere.

  You must be joking.

  Move from this place? No way in hell.

  The residents form a neighbourhood alliance. They protest. They petition the mayor. They gain the support of the mayor and the elected borough officials. The residents are told not to worry. This issue will be cleared up soon. It will be sorted out. Don’t worry about it. Just go on with your ordinary lives, they say.

  But they don’t know Robert Moses.

  The residents are eventually shipped out. Generations of families, neighbours, businesses. 1,530 households are packed up, moved on. In come the engineers, the construction workers, and the bulldozers. The buildings are razed. The land is cleared.

  Robert Moses and his army watch the protestors light a bonfire in the street. One of the men points to a figure being hoisted high and thrown into the flames.

  Hey, Bob, is that you?

  The figure is ablaze.

  Why, so it is, says Moses. Quite a likeness, he laughs.

  How The Other Half Lives

  (1890)

  JACOB RIIS

  A mother, father and five children are sitting in one room of a tenement, a single bed to one side of the room and a cot in the centre. The father is perched on a wooden crate and holding onto the cot. The flash has rendered the family pale, their skin white and glaring, blank. Coats, clothes are hung up in the back room, every shelf stuffed with pots and pans and equipment, the floor swept but not clean.

  Seven men are crammed into a tenement room, two men resting upon a dirty mattress, raised upon a mezzanine. One man is sitting up and leaning forward, the other lying flat on his back. Both pairs of feet are bare and dirty. Boots and socks stand upon the floor before three other men trying to sleep covered over with blankets and sheets. The rest of the room is filled with trunks and boxes. The camera flash reveals the dirty marks on the walls and ceiling.

  On
e boy is riding on the back of another in a playground. The children in the background are climbing up and down ladders that are secured over a single climbing beam. Beyond the playground is a tenement building. Some of the curtain blinds are drawn, some are open. The boy hanging on the older boy’s back is looking at the camera.

  A crowd is huddling on the street in winter before a burnt-out tenement building that is covered with ice. A hose lies on the ground in front of them. Some of the icicles hanging from the ledges of glassless windows are feet-long. From the viewpoint of a dark alleyway, the building, covered as it is in ice, is white and bright, cleaner than the crowd standing on the sidewalk, brighter than the filthy alley walls.

  35

  I have told you about the photographs I have had taken, how Eakins has captured my image and how I remain there still on paper. Mathew Brady also took my photograph. He photographed many other important men. He took photographs of soldiers in the war, those who were living and those who were dead. He photographed the battlefields. He wants people to be able to see history with their own eyes rather than rely on the subjective words of others. He wants his photographs to create an accurate history. His photographs mean these men will never be forgotten.

  I have my own memories of this time. I don’t know if they are as reliable. When I went to look for my brother the men did not look me in the eye and I was glad of it. I picked a path through them. I asked a nurse where my brother was. Brother? she said. Darkness was falling. I listened to the men as they moaned. I could not write about this stubby hill, this nightfall. I could not move. Lucky are we who live so internally – the guns can never get us, I thought. I had possibly lost a brother. The rest of the men will fall like dominoes. At the surgeon’s tent I found the doctor. His face was as grey as the bed sheets. Do you know where my brother is? I asked. There he was on the bed in the corner of the tent. George was not dead. George was alive and lying in the bed. He was not so greatly changed. There was only a scar on his cheek that would heal very soon. I felt at the time we had been saved. I realize now that death had only been delayed for it will come to us all in time.

  The tents lined up for nearly a mile – the battle had not gone well – you could see it in the faces of the dying men and in the bloody limbs scattered across the ground, in the tears in the flesh, white fat, blue veins, blue skin, fingers and arms. The outcome could be read in the flesh. The limbs at the top of the piles were fresh and pink. Some feet retained boots, too rotten to remove, though the rings had been pulled from all the fingers. I watched the soldiers sleeping. I watched death take them. Often, there were things they wanted to be known before they died. They asked me to write their letters. I resisted the urge to add flourishes of phrasing, even though the letters would have been greatly improved by this. I wanted their letters to be authentic. When the writing was done I read the letters back and felt satisfied to read someone else’s words written in my own hand. But war is not something you can describe, Bucke. You cannot do it with words or images. When we look back at something, we look back as if through a gauze. The only truth is that of the present moment.

  36

  It starts as a way to get good at something. Lisa Lyon goes for the weights the other women don’t look at. Everyone watches when she lifts those bells, her hands and her arms held high in the air. She is breathtaking. On the beach, in the sun, she wears a bikini. The definition of her muscle punctuates her body, which is not mammoth, though it is very large and strong, and dazzling in the sunlight as she lifts the bells.

  Lisa is more interesting than the male bodybuilders because she is something unexpected. She makes people look twice, once at her body, and once again, looking for the reason why. They never find the answer. They never get past the body.

  The way she sees it is that, if you’re talking about some kind of animal, a cat, a wild cat, a lion, for example, if you’re talking about a lion and you see the lion running across the plain as it chases the antelope, you don’t say, look at that female lion or look at that male lion, you say, look at that animal. Lisa says there should be no gender distinctions. We should exist only in terms of physical form.

  When Robert Mapplethorpe sees Lisa for the first time, he cannot get over the way she looks. He says to a friend it’s a shame about the scar on her face. She would have been perfect if it wasn’t for the scar.

  What scar? the friend says.

  When she comes out of the bathroom, Robert sees that she has no scar at all. The black mark on her face was just ash from her cigarette. When they meet they laugh about this.

  In the chill of the city, Lisa scurries over to Robert’s studio in the heavy coat Robert bought for her and the jewellery she spent her savings on – crashing against her chest as she walks, slamming into muscle. Covered up like this, she feels unusual, but once she gets out of the cold and into his studio, she reveals herself like a superhero. She holds herself perfectly still, her biceps flexed and taut, one leg straight, the other bent, her arm in the air, just one arm, just one bicep, the angular line of her buttocks, the square jaw, the tiny nose, small eyes, solid stomach, fully-formed thighs. Robert, his assistant and the woman who sorts his bills stand there looking at her. There are no more photographs yet she continues to flex.

  Robert sees in Lisa the same thing she sees. They are both interested in form. Together, they come up with a plan. Lisa is dressed up in all the things she can be: natural and made up, as a hero and a victim, in high heels and stockings, in all the things that are sexy: as Eve, as a bride, as a man. They get carried away. They are like children. They go everywhere together. She is a good replacement for Patti, but she does not want to possess him. She is all the male parts he isn’t and he’s all the slyness and the cunning she is not. Together they form one whole person. It is not like it is with Patti Smith, who is all art and intellect. No, this is about bodies and form. Lisa looks at the photographs, all the women she can be. But she is always Lisa.

  They make a book together. It is called Lady, Lisa Lyon. They drive out to the desert, just Lisa and Robert. As they are passing through small-town America she looks over at Robert who has fallen asleep against the glass. His hair is long and curly. He is like her beautiful girlfriend. She strokes the side of his face. She catches her arm in the rearview mirror and is taken off-guard by the ripple of muscle. This is the body she knows better than any other yet it still takes her by surprise.

  Lisa stands on the desert rock. It is already midday. The sun is scorching. Robert is distracted. Robert is getting it all wrong. She can tell by the way he is frowning and getting her to do the same poses over and over. She doesn’t tell him that the angle of light is incorrect. Oh no, she doesn’t say a thing.

  Lying in the motel room Lisa listens to Robert throwing up in the bathroom. He is ill. But they are here, the two of them, in this motel, so far away from New York.

  Can I get you anything? she calls out. Don’t you want something to eat?

  He stumbles out. He switches off all the lights. The smell of vomit wafts over her. He goes to the window and looks out. In the orange light he looks so young. He doesn’t seem to know where he is.

  What are you looking at? she says.

  He blinks.

  She holds out her hand. He lies down next to her. She pulls him in. His skinny body is cold and clammy against her sunburnt chest. She rubs him better. He snaps awake like someone has flicked a switch, and then they are fucking.

  As a child, Lisa had nightmares. As she grew up she used the physical pursuit of excellence to help her sleep at night. Sometimes she writes poetry. Other times she dances.

  Robert, are you coming to bed?

  But he is in the bathroom and he doesn’t want to come out. She wants to say to him that the longer he leaves it the worse it will be, putting off sleep, putting off dreaming, but he doesn’t like to sleep. When he does, he sleeps all day, the lamplight in his studio is his own private moon.

  They have sex in a motel room. The cheap, fascinatin
g glow of the neon sign makes Lisa think of microwave ovens, extraterrestrial life, California. What sex always does – confuses reality with fiction. She holds him in her strong arms. He is so cold but she is warm because of the desert sun – she thinks, we are like sleeping lions in Africa and nothing can hurt us.

  In the studio Robert positions the lights so that they focus on the centre of Lisa’s torso. She rolls her shoulders forward and tenses the muscles in her shoulders and her chest. She clasps her hands together. She holds the tension. She holds her face still. She pouts for him. It is all about the contrast between the beauty of her face and the strength of her body. It is all about how both of these things are the same. She holds it there, all of herself, in this position, and lets him take his picture.

  Lisa and Robert go out together all the time. They have such fun. They are the same person. She doesn’t mind the way he shows her off. She doesn’t mind flexing her muscles for strangers.

  Lisa frets about the pictures. She worries what they will show. She worries what Robert will see in them. Lisa looks at the photographs. They are very beautiful but this is not the life she hoped to see – it is a life she already knows, frozen in a frame. She sees form and she sees structure but nothing of what is inside. The shot of her body with the muscles pulled taut has been cropped at the neck. Robert says he will name her in the title but there will be no face. We do not need to see your face, he says. It’s all about the body.