Generation Loss Read Free

Bowery to get
by. There were twenty-three photos when I was done, enough for a show.
    My
central image derived from a lithograph from Redon's "La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine": a life-sized human skeleton, a plastic model I had a
friend borrow for me from the NYU art department. I draped it with a white
sheet and posed beside it, naked, my hand clutching its bony plastic fingers. I
set the shutter so that the image was so underexposed as to be almost indiscernible,
deliberately out of focus. All you saw was the skeleton, seeming to fall
forward through the frame, and floating beside it a face suggestive of a skull:
mine. I translated the drawing's original caption into English.
    Death:
I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.
    I
added these to my portfolio, and a few portraits I'd done of Jeannie and her
friends hanging out in the apartment and the back room at Max's. The pictures
were harsh and overlit, but they had a scary energy, most of it supplied by
Jeannie herself in torn fishnets and smeared eye makeup, her works on the floor
beside her, the glare of a naked hundred-watt bulb making Gillette blades glow
like they were radioactive.
    It
didn't hurt that some of the figures lurking in the background were starting to
get written about. Back in January I'd begun seeing flyers stapled to telephone
poles around town: punk is coming. I bought the first copy of the magazine for
fifty cents at Bleecker Bob's not long after. A month later the first copy of New
York Rocker came out, and I bought that too. When I got off my night shift
at the liquor store I'd walk over to CBGB's and get trashed and dance. I'd take
my camera and shoot whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth,
broken bottles, zip knives. People laughing while blood ran down their face, or
someone else's. Some people didn't like getting their picture taken while
having sex or shooting up. I got good at throwing a punch then running. I
started wearing these pointy-toed black cowboy boots that weren't good for
dancing, but I could kick the shit out of someone if he lunged for me and be
gone before his knees hit the floor. I loved the rush of adrenaline and rage.
It was as good as sex for me.
    "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