Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Barbara Bourland

  Cover design by Rodrigo Corral.

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: June 2019

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  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-5951-6 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-5950-9 (ebook)

  E3-20190502-DA-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Carey Logan Retrospective Coming to Young Museum

  1996 Chapter One

  2011 Chapter Two

  Prudence Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Humility Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chastity Chapter Seventeen

  Modesty & Temperance Chapter Eighteen

  Purity & Obedience Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  One Year Later Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  Discover Barbara Bourland

  About the Author

  Also by Barbara Bourland

  Reading Group Guide

  To my contemporaries:

  I made this for you,

  I made this for me,

  I made this for us.

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  Carey Logan Retrospective

  Coming to Young Museum

  The Young Museum announced today that Carey Logan, the artist known for her hyperrealist sculptures who committed suicide by drowning in 2008, will be the subject of a sweeping retrospective at the museum this October.

  Dramatic rumors of an as-yet-unseen final work have churned through Chelsea for months, and the museum confirmed today that the exhibition, BODY OF WORK, will include all of Logan’s sculptural and performance works, including the rumored final work. A source from within the institution told The Times that the final work has not been viewed by the curators, and that it will not even be transported to the museum until the exhibition’s opening night.

  Ms. Logan’s vivid, detailed representations of human bodies could be—and often were—easily mistaken for the real thing. Made from combinations of ceramics, resin, paper, ink and oil paint, the sculptures were both a visual pun on the currency of a market where the greatest quantities of money so often change hands over the estates of dead artists, and a running commentary on the subjugation and degradation of women.

  Her bodies were exhibited all over the world and acquired by dozens of private collectors. But in 2006, Ms. Logan ceased her sculptural work entirely and devoted herself to an earnest revival of 1970s performance art. In separate performances at the Eliot&Sprain gallery over the two years preceding her death, Ms. Logan choked, passed out, slept and stayed awake for days, all on public view, to mixed reviews.

  It is not clear whether her final artwork was also made at Eliot&Sprain, or even what medium it is in.

  A source familiar with the work who wishes to remain anonymous was unwilling to provide further details. “It cannot be described,” they wrote to The Times in an email. “It is fascinating, highly personal, explicit and extremely upsetting, and must be seen to be believed and understood in its full context.”

  BODY OF WORK will open October 21, 2012, and run through June of the following year.

  1996

  Chapter One

  The first time I saw the five members of Pine City, I was nineteen years old. They were standing outside what would someday become Team Gallery on Grand Street in Soho, sharing cigarettes and laughing. It seems in my memory that everyone in the intersection turned to look—that cabbies craned their necks through the half-lowered windows of their broad yellow Crown Victorias, that shop owners materialized in open doorways, that even the old women walking arm in arm behind me stopped to gawk—at those five ravishing, obscene young people on a street corner. In person they seemed like these glamorous lightning bolts, something between human and divine, the embodiment of the moment Zeus turned into a swan or a cow or whatever other thing that was not human but was still a fuckable divine being. It was shocking, to me, how they looked.

  Pine City was the name of their group—their collective—though they didn’t make work together. Three of them had graduated from the art school where I was a currently a sophomore, and all five made the type of nihilistic, shrewdly absurd work that smart young people on drugs will inevitably make, and it was of a kind, it seemed like a collective action, so they became famous together—for their work but mostly for being bad, for being attractive and defiant, for making money and lighting it on fire. And like everybody else at the Academy, I was completely obsessed with them.

  A poster for Carey Logan’s show, THE BURIAL PROJECT, had been wheatpasted on the side of the college’s non-ferrous metal forge two months earlier. Selling off meals from my dining plan at half price ginned up enough cash for a same-day round-trip bus ticket in and out of Chinatown, and so—there I went.

  The walk to Soho took only a few minutes. After rounding the corner at Grand Street, I was almost an hour early, and unprepared for Pine City to simply be there in the street.

  By contrast, anyone could tell that I was a college sophomore. Baby fat rolled over the waistband of my jeans, pushed uncomfortably against the sleeves of my thrift-store shirt, and my skin was rosy, flushed even, from crippling self-consciousness. My head swerved. Time slowed, to fractions of seconds, as I moved my eyes to the toes of my shoes. Who did I think I was? The answer, of course, was nobody.

  I was nobody.

  It took one turn of my body to become a shadow—another girl on the street—and I kept walking west on the cobblestone streets of Soho, holding myself as though I knew where I was going. Blocks away I climbed up into an empty loading dock and sat cross-legged, metal-and-glass grating pressing into my ankles. I watched people go by and wrote in my notebook for an hour until the clock turned eight.
I did know enough to know that I should wait for the party to get going. I think I ate a banana out of my backpack, and that was my dinner.

  It was my first time ever in New York City.

  When I returned to the gallery, it was packed. Spidery people poured out of the massive double doors. My first impression was the scent of fading chlorine mixed with Chanel No. 19 and du Maurier cigarettes, and my second was of secrets being exchanged, of whispers floating from lipsticked mouths to earlobes encrusted in diamond-bedecked safety pins. Somebody passed me a cold beer out of a trash can filled with ice, but before I could even say thank you, they were gone, another body in their place: a thin man in a gray flannel three-piece suit. He wiped his nose with his folded handkerchief and it came away with a blossoming red stain. He caught me staring and winked. I looked away, uncomfortable, then watched a wasplike woman—her shoulder blades sharp, like wings—pull up in a cab. She threw a twenty at the driver, the crumpled bill sailing through the divide, then crossed the sidewalk confidently in a low-cut lavender dress before compressing herself into the packed gallery and disappearing.

  The overall crowd has glommed together in retrospect into a shiny, pointy landscape of shadows—of willowy, satin-haired city people, fine and crisp, black and white, like a Stockholm funeral. Mostly, I remember feeling mortified—of myself, of my oversize man’s shirt and ripped jeans and Chucks and pink hair (Why did I think this was a cool outfit, I look terrible, grunge is over, grunge is for kids, nobody here is a kid except me). I would have left early but didn’t know how; the Chinatown bus stop was a bedraggled street corner covered in bursting garbage bags and milky puddles of sewage, no exchange office in sight. Later I would learn you could give the ticket to any driver for any bus going your way, and if there were enough seats, you were fine. But that night I didn’t know. I thought I would have to wait—so I did.

  Someone passed me another beer. Halfway through it, I started to feel a little brave. Maybe it was the contact high of everyone else’s self-possession: The people around me, kissing and hugging and drinking and talking, sincerely acted like they owned the entire world. I’d never seen such a concentration of confidence. Now I think that every single moment of every single day, somewhere new becomes the center of the universe, if only for a second—and that night, it was us. Or rather—it was them, Pine City, and I happened to be there.

  The show was roaring in the middle of the gallery, but the crowd was so dense I could barely see anything without shoving, which I couldn’t imagine doing, so I remained in the corner until a third beer. Then, emboldened, I pushed through.

  I spotted Jes Winsome first. Tall Jes, with her blue-black hair, lounged in the lap of a clean-shaven man in a tuxedo. He fed her puffs of light-blue cotton candy while one of her naked feet sat in a tub of wet, white plaster. Behind her, Marlin Mayfield—lanky, densely freckled—dumped a bottle of pink wine over her white t-shirt and white jeans. She laughed hysterically while Tyler Savage, the one who looked like a professional tennis player, ran his fingers up her stomach. The fourth member of Pine City, Jack Wells, spoke animatedly to a golden-haired teenage girl in a buttery fur coat, pale like butterscotch, that swung around her in a dream.

  Finally, Carey Logan, the smallest one, worked around them, mixing quick-dry plaster into plastic tubs at a rapid, balletic pace. Even in that room of overly confident downtown people, her confidence stood out; it was in her movements, in her posture, in her step. There was a surety in her that I envied and coveted immediately. I hadn’t seen a lot of women behave that way. Hardly any—certainly none under forty. She was twenty-four years old at the time.

  Carey cast forty-two different body parts that night, including mine, though it took me another hour and another beer to work up the courage to get in line. When she got close to me, I realized we were the same build, our hands almost the same size. Yet our bodies held space differently. Where I slumped, she was rigid; where I shrank, she expanded.

  “Don’t move your hand,” she whispered. “Not until I say. Or it’ll be ruined.”

  “You smell like grapefruit,” was all I could manage to reply. Her whole face opened up, those round cheeks and tiny pink lips drawing away to reveal a jumbled mouthful of pearl-white teeth, and she gave me a smile so luminous that I thought, for a moment, that we were friends.

  “I like your hair,” she complimented me back. “It’s cool.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, then immediately felt a rush of embarrassment. I sounded grateful and reverent—too reverent. My eyes fell to the floor, and our connection was broken. She moved on to the next setup, the next body part. I remained still and obedient.

  All five members of Pine City, Jack Wells, Jes Winsome, Tyler Savage, Marlin Mayfield, and Carey Logan, were right there. I resumed my regular slump, receding naturally into the background, where I could watch them from the safest, most invisible emotional distance.

  Jes, still perched atop the man in the tuxedo who was diligently peeling the cotton candy from its paper cone and depositing it on her tongue, watched Carey languidly. Jes never smiled—not once—nor did she speak. She was solid, like an object, like a sculpture, and silence suited her. The more conventionally outgoing Marlin and Tyler were caught up with a group of admirers, people more arachnid than human, light drowning in the hard beetle-black of their eyes. Tyler glanced occasionally at us, Carey’s subjects, peeking up and down the row before returning to smile at whatever compliment had been laid at his feet. Marlin put her arm on top of Tyler’s shoulder and ran her fingers across the shortest part of his haircut, at the nape of his neck.

  I wanted to reach out and do that, too.

  Jack had turned his attention away from the butterscotch blonde and was hovering behind Carey, watching her mix, and pour, and dip—and whisper. When someone put hands on Carey—on her arm or shoulder or wrist as she leaned in to speak—Jack’s eyes narrowed, and focused, until there was distance again. He monitored every conversation, ensuring that no one crossed her boundaries.

  I watched and waited as they danced around each other, and her, and the crowd, for twenty-four minutes. I marveled at Carey’s particular command of the room. She was the natural center of attention without doing…anything. She did not wear a bedazzled leotard, she did not wear lipstick, she did not dance, she did not perform a display in the usual sense of woman on display. All she did that night, other than walk around in worn-out blue jeans and a tank top, was talk to people and mix plaster. Ultimately, it was what would be done with the plaster that made the impression: The casts would become the highly detailed sculptures of corpses upon which she’d built her budding career.

  Her first, a woman in a bikini with strangulation marks around her neck, HARD BODY (7 TIMES A DAY), won the Young Prize. The title of the work referred to the statistical number of women killed by a domestic partner per day in America, and every piece she had made since then featured what she called “working-class bodies” in various shades of disease and decay. It was that one-two combination—of her simple (almost simplistic) way of being, and the extended shadow of her morbid imagination—that went right up the nose and into the lungs, contaminating the crowd.

  That night on Grand Street was the most informative night of my young life, thus far. Much of it was semiotic: Up until that show, even in my second year of art school, I possessed very little vocabulary for what being an artist looked like after 1960. I was only a sophomore, after all, and this was before everyone had a smartphone, before the internet was piped into your every living moment. I didn’t know how the YBAs had been living or even what Warhol’s Factory was. I think at the time I didn’t actually know what Jean-Michel Basquiat looked like. I hadn’t read the New York Times on more than three or four occasions, and I certainly didn’t know to subscribe to Artforum or Interview or any of those arty, expensive magazines; I was just a kid, and I was a painter, my world limited to a lineage of painters. At nineteen, my entire frame of reference was essentially based in old photographs o
f Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell hanging in the East Village with the vast landscapes of their canvases, their hair set into big curls like I was doing with my own pale, rosy bob.

  But beyond my lack of the most basic cultural and historical knowledge, much of my awe was relational. Pine City were three women and two men in a spiral of their own making, five people who were best friends, lovers, partners, equals. It was family and friendship and romance at once. I’d never seen anything like it, partially because I was from a town in Florida where men had pickup trucks and women, if they were lucky, had abortions, and because I was incredibly young—but also because Pine City was genuinely special, and the way they lived was rare.

  Four out of five of them were living together (supposedly sleeping in a giant bed made of four other beds) in a triangle-shaped loft at the end of 44th Street in Long Island City. Rumor had it that Johnson Reuchtig, Tyler Savage’s blue-chip gallery, would send a bike messenger every weekend with a silver briefcase full of drugs that Pine City consumed in earnest until it was empty. Then JR would deliver an entire shiva buffet from Barney Greengrass, which Pine City would eat before passing out, waking up, and starting the cycle anew. The only one who didn’t sleep in the massive bed—Jack Wells—lived on a thirty-two-foot wooden sailboat docked mere steps away from the loft on the East River, and they would sail it around Manhattan shooting rubber bullets at skyscrapers, taking photographs as the glass walls rippled but did not break.

  I was so young then, and very sheltered, not on purpose, not because someone was protecting me, but the opposite. I stood beneath, still, the shadows of impoverished white Southern swamp masculinity—bitter misogynies that stick to every particle of your consciousness, so that you don’t know if it’s possible to be anything other than a failure. You don’t know if the sun will ever come out.