Generation Loss Read Free Page B

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,