“Scary Neary!” Jeannie shouted when she saw me coming. By then people were getting used to me. And other people were starting to take pictures too. Punk and New York Rocker didn’t create the scene, but they gave it a name, and we all knew where it lived.
By now I’d made some contacts in the city’s photography scene. I brought my photos to the director of the Lumen Gallery, and he agreed to give me a small show in the back room. Three years earlier, Robert Mapplethorpe had begun to win a following among Warhol acolytes and some prescient artworld types. The same thing was happening now with the downtown scene. I sent out a hundred xeroxed invitations to everyone I vaguely knew and scattered another hundred at the clubs where I hung out. I made sure all the musicians knew they were featured in the photos. Then I bought myself a bottle of Taittinger Brut, got smashed, and went to my opening.
It was the right place at the right time. “Dead Girls” bridged the gap between two camps, photography and punk, my staged self-portraits and documentary images of the downtown scene. The dreamy kitsch of photos like “St. Eulalia” melded into the shock of seeing Jeannie nod out while the lead singer of Anubis Uprising masturbated onto her face. I could hear the buzz as I stumbled into the back room at Lumen.
I was a hit, and I wasn’t yet twenty years old.
who are the mystery girls? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. cassandra neary’s punk provocations. They used a detail of “St. Eulalia,” cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn’t a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.
I didn’t care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB’s. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.
But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they’d seen a ghost with a gun.
This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I’d seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I’d made them, like they’d never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.
You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique; but you didn’t hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it; to see what was left when everything else was torn away.
My story was picked up by the Daily News. Then the Sunday Times Magazine interviewed me for a very brief piece. And there were the “Dead Girls” photos, and there was me, smoking a Kent and wearing beat-up black jeans and red Keds and a MC5 T-shirt filigreed with cigarette burns, my hair a dirty blond halo around a pale face with no makeup. I looked like what your mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don’t come home.
I was actually a little worried about what my father would think. He finally called me after the Times Magazine story ran. He made it clear that he had no interest in seeing the show—a relief to both of us—but he also wanted to make sure I wasn’t in any legal trouble.
“Anything comes up, call Ken Wilburn over in Queens,” he said and gave me the number. “He represents some guys, they’ll help you out if you get into trouble. I don’t know how the hell you can make money out of this stuff, Cass, but I hope to God you do. Especially if you need Wilburn.”
I never did need to call Wilburn. But I didn’t make much money, either. The Times article did its business, and all the photos sold; but I had only set the price at seventy-five bucks a pop. Jeannie bought most of them—God knows where she found the money—but about six months later they were destroyed when her apartment flooded. The girlfriend of Anubis Rising’s lead singer bought the picture of him with Jeannie then proceeded to set it on fire with her Bic lighter in the gallery, screaming “Fucking cunt!” until someone threw her out. John Holstrom bought a picture that had Johnny Thunders in the corner.
And the last photo went to Sam Wagstaff, which is how I got a book deal. I’d met a literary agent at my opening, a petite red-haired woman in a red latex miniskirt named Linda Kalman.
“This is very interesting,” she said, peering at “Psychopomp.” She was older than most of the people at the show, in her mid-thirties, and wore expensive gold jewelry and stiletto-heeled boots. I pegged her for a socialite slumming among the barbarians. She glanced at the crowd drinking white wine in plastic cups, Jeannie and her friends hooting raucously as a reporter took notes. “Do you know which one’s the artist?”
I dropped my cigarette and stubbed it out with my sneaker. “That would be me.”
“Really.” Her eyes narrowed. She gave me a small smile then extended her hand. “Linda Kalman. I’m working on a book right now with Chris Makos. Do you know him?”
“Yeah,” I lied and shook her hand. “Cass Neary.”
“Cass. Are you with a gallery?”
“No.”
“Mmmm.” She looked at me sideways, opened a little red clutch purse. “Well. Here. Take my card. Call me. Let me know who buys your pictures. And good luck.”
As it turned out, she got in touch with me when she read the piece in New York Rocker.
“So.” I could hear her drag deeply on a cigarette on the other end of the line. “Have you sold any photographs yet? Do you know who bought them?”
When I named Wagstaff, she sucked her breath in sharply. “Sam Wagstaff?”
“Yeah.”
“You know who he is, right?”
“Yeah.” A collector and curator with deep pockets; Mapplethorpe’s lover, though I’d heard they were on the outs.
“Well, Cass. Are you interested in putting a book together? Because I have an editor who’s very interested in what’s happening downtown. She can get someone to write an introductory essay, I think she said Macey Claire-Marsden from the Eastman Foundation might do it. It’s not huge money, but it would be good exposure for you.”
She hesitated. “I think you should do it. Not just for me. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come that often, Cass. Not for someone as young as you. You don’t want to blow it.”
“Let me think about it.” I didn’t say anything, didn’t hang up. I counted to five then said, “Yeah, okay. Sure. I’ll do it.”
But you know what?
I blew it anyway.
2
A year later Dead Girls came out and got good press. Good reviews, good coverage, and the first printing sold through, which for a fifty-dollar coffee-table book by an unknown twenty-one-year-old photographer was pretty decent. This was back when you’d see books by Helmut Newton and David Hamilton in the front windows of Brentano’s and Rizzoli Books.
Now you started seeing Dead Girls too. I was written up in Interview and WWW. Word got out that I was funny: I got on the radio and even had a fleeting appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.
But I was fucking up big time. I showed up at interviews drunk. I insulted people. I came on to the women hired to talk to me, which pissed them off, and pissed off the guys too. A reporter referred to me as a lesbian photographer, and I reamed him out about it when I saw him a few nights later. I wasn’t a lesbian; I wasn’t straight. When it comes to relationships, I’m an equal opportunity destroyer. I fucked whoever I wanted to. Women just seemed
able to put up with me better than men did. For a little while, anyway. The Soho Weekly News did a story on what a mess I was, quoting liberally from the interview I’d given them. I thought I was a fucking rock star, I thought I was Iggy fucking Pop; but no one was paying to watch me fall off the stage.
Dead Girls never went into a second printing. Punk had crested; the violence of the scene made industry people nervous about even using the word “punk.” They started slapping stickers on new EPs and 45s that said this is power pop music! Farfisa organs began to dull the edge of guitars. Kids wearing skinny ties and wraparound shades were everywhere now. The scene got bigger, hipper, imploded then exploded. There were celebrities and celebrity suicides, and celebrity photographers to cover them. When I saw a seventy-five-dollar ripped T-shirt in a Fiorucci boutique with a brace of black-leather-collared miniature poodles tied to a meter outside, I knew that was it.
Punk’s ugly little glittering perfect moment had ended. And so had mine.
I knocked around the city, at loose ends. People saw me, they recognized me, the skinny girl with ragged blond hair and chewed-up nails, striped boatneck shirt and shaky hands. But no one wanted to be reminded who I was, and after a few years nobody remembered.
I still had the apartment on Hudson Street. I got a job working in the stockroom at the Strand Bookstore. This signaled to everyone that I was truly finished.
One other thing happened back then. On my twenty-third birthday I was down on the Bowery, leaving CBGB’s, late, as usual. I was drunk, as usual. I was barefoot—I’d been dancing and left my shoes inside, even though it was late October and the streets were cold. I was alone, until a car pulled up alongside a broken streetlamp. Someone was repeating my name, a low, insistent voice. Piecing it together later, I think he must have said “Miss, miss.”
I heard Cass. Cass.
I stopped and turned. The car door was already open. There was a knife. It happened fast.
I don’t remember much. Or no, I remember a lot, but it’s all scattered, like those discarded photos you find strewn outside an Instant Photo booth.
This is what I see: a burned-out vacant lot. Me on my knees. A cut on my bare heel where I stepped on broken glass. Blood above my pubis. Blood and semen on my thigh. Me running across chewed-up asphalt. A man’s head protruding from a car window. Me screaming in the middle of the street. A police car.
I see these things, but I don’t really remember them. I remember floating above the vacant lot and looking down on two shadows, one moving, the other still. I remember a car. There was a knife.
They asked me, did I fight?
I didn’t fight. I couldn’t describe him, or the car. My mind had been wiped clean. I don’t talk about it much. It happened; I’m not in denial. I’m not ashamed.
But I know what that other set of photos would look like. The drunk young woman, the leather miniskirt, tight T-shirt, no bra, no shoes. That street, four am, late October. A bisexual punk who took pictures of dead boys. I didn’t fight. My whole life since then, the only thing that matters to me is those three words.
I didn’t fight.
You’ll wonder what it’s like to live with this. I’ll tell you. It’s like having a razor blade clamped between your teeth: you move your mouth too much, your tongue, you smile or talk or kiss someone, you cut yourself open. You could drown if you swallowed that much blood. You could fucking bleed to death.
3
I shut down after that. I didn’t clean up my act, just went through the motions of behaving like a normal person, punched the clock, blew my paycheck at clubs and bars and bookstores. My dealings with most people had always been so ephemeral that no one took much notice when I stopped making even cursory efforts at emotional connection. I made no attempt to get a better job and little attempt to be civil to the Strand’s customers. I had no interest even in getting promoted to stockroom manager. I went to work and opened packages and sorted books. I stole books as well, until store security got too tight. After a few years I got a tattoo incorporating the scrawl of scar tissue above my pubic bone into a frayed red banner with the words too tough to die emblazoned on it. I still took pictures, going to downtown gigs and occasionally selling my stuff to the Soho Weekly News. When no one else would buy them, I gave my pictures to a D.C. fanzine called Vintage Violence in exchange for copies that I sold for a dollar a pop.
I continued to photograph things that moved me, which were mostly things that did not move. Pigeons flattened upon the curb; a corpse washed up on the shore of the East River, flesh like soft gray flannel folded into the mud; a stripper at a Broadway club sleeping between acts, her exposed breast like a red balloon where the silicone had leaked beneath the skin. I liked to think of my talent as something I’d honed to a point, a spike I could drive right into the eye of the viewer. You’d think that the 1980s vogue for decadence, for breaking taboos, would have created an audience for these pictures, but time and again they were dismissed. Too grisly, then too evocative of others’ work—Mapplethorpe, Weegee, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—then ultimately not evocative enough.
“It’s too raw,” Linda told me when, after six years, I had finally put together another portfolio, enough pictures for another book. “It’s too much like being right inside someone’s head.”
I stared at her, the late afternoon sun in her uptown office, her gold jewelry and Armani jacket. “It is inside someone’s head, Linda. It’s the inside of my head.”
She pushed the portfolio across her desk back toward me. “I know,” she said. “Maybe you should show them to someone else, Cass.”
I left. No one else wanted me.
* * *
Twenty years passed. I participated in a few group shows at hole-in-the-wall galleries. Now and then someone would buy one of my photos, and there was the occasional mention of Dead Girls, usually as a footnote to work by Cindy Sherman. When the time came, I didn’t switch to digital. It wouldn’t have been hard. Light is light, you just have to know how to find it, where to look for that slant of shadow, that moment when someone’s eyes first open and you can’t be certain if they’re dead or asleep. I could have ditched my old Konica, just like I could have gotten another job or bought better clothes or gotten involved with someone.
This is what you have to understand about me: I could have changed. I didn’t want to. I fucked people I’d meet at clubs: men, women. Nothing ever lasted long. Ravaged as I was, I was still good-looking enough. But I was a bad drunk. Eventually I could walk into most cafes in the East Village and watch every person hide behind a newspaper or laptop.
Despite that, in 1998 I got involved with a married woman named Christine Conti, a professor who specialized in the French Nouvelle Vague. She was thin, dark, chic, emotionally intense, a recovering alcoholic with issues. We were a good match sexually, but we argued a lot. After a while we argued constantly. I drank too much. Eventually Christine left her husband and got her own place, down near Battery Park, but it still didn’t work out between us, not really. She said I wasn’t a fully integrated person. I refused to quit drinking. I refused to go to an AA meeting. She refused to leave me.
Then I hit her. She called the police but then said she wouldn’t press charges if I promised to get help. I suggested maybe she was the one who needed help, for staying with me, but I went. We saw a counselor. I sat there while Christine threw out words like predatory, detached, obsessive. The counselor came back with dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, affective disorder. The counselor recommended a psychiatrist, who put me on a regimen of lithium and antidepressants.
I took the medications for a week. They made me feel as though my brain had been shot full of strychnine. I refused to ever take them again. The doctor suggested other drugs, but I never went back to her.
“This is as integrated as my personality gets,” I told Christine. “So get used to it or get out of here.”
Christine, for whatever reason, continued to see me.
We didn’t fight as much, but I still drank. My few other friends lived lives less marginal than my own. I think they kept me around as an eidolon of the sort of bleak bohemianism they’d lost—still listening to the same old music, still going to work with a hangover, still sleeping in my ratty rent-controlled apartment on a piece of plywood with a foam mattress on top.
Finally even Christine had enough. Gradually, I stopped seeing even my few remaining friends. I stopped going to clubs to hear live music. I shot fewer and fewer rolls of film and lost the few contacts I’d kept in the dwindling rock press. When I didn’t have enough money to buy the photography books I wanted, I’d steal them.
Then Christine died. She’d called really early that morning and left a message: she was meeting someone for lunch at Windows on the World. Would I meet her for coffee first? We could talk things over. It might be better. It had been a long time. Maybe she was starting to get over some things. Maybe I had changed.
I hadn’t changed. Not enough, anyway. I erased the message and didn’t call her back. A few hours later the sirens started, the smoke. The sky was ice-blue. The phone rang, Phil Cohen screaming into my ear from Hoboken.
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