Widow Basquiat Read Free

in the house that could break.
    Jean-Michel visits his mother once a month. He takes his drawings and paintings to show her. Matilde looks at them and says, “You are moving very fast.”
    Jean was particularly close to his youngest sister, Jeanine.
    Jeanine was very sweet and naive and dressed in white frilly blouses and tartan skirts. Jean’s father didn’t want Jean to give the girl any money. But when Jeanine came over, Jean would hide one-hundred-dollar bills in the pages of books and give the books to Jeanine as presents.
    I was never invited by Jean’s father to go to his home, even though I was one of the closest people to Jean. He never expressed an interest in getting to know me. I was always polite and respectful toward Gerard but he always gave me that feeling that I was a one-night stand or a casual girlfriend.
    Jean told me that when he was about fourteen the family moved to Puerto Rico. Jean ran away and lived with a disc jockey who worked for a local radio station and he told me that this was his first homosexual relationship. He lived in Puerto Rico for about two years and spoke good Spanish. Soon after they moved back to Brooklyn Jean left home for good. He told me he lived on benches in Washington Square Park and on friends’ couches.

TU ERES BLANCA COMO EL ARROZ
    Some days Jean-Michel wakes up in the morning and can only speak in Spanish:
Sí. Sí. Leche. Arroz. El niño come platanos. La niña tiene canicas. Tu eres blanca como el arroz. Mi nombre es Juan.
    Some days Jean would wake up and just speak Spanish. I understood very little. He’d go on and on for hours conjuring up everything he could remember like a song in his head. The presence of his mother was with him and he was with her in the words.

FIRST SALE
    Suzanne loves polka dots. She is dressed in a wide polka-dot skirt. She and Jean-Michel do a couple of lines of coke and go to the Mudd Club, Tier 3, Club 57, Studio 54, the Roxy or the Continental. Jean-Michel is dressed in big, baggy pants with paint all over them and a big T-shirt and shoes that are way too big. Sometimes they go out and see the Contortions (who later become Jones White and the Blacks), the Lounge Lizards, DNA, Arto Lindsay or Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
    Jean-Michel sells his first painting to Deborah Harry from Blondie for two hundred dollars and spends the money on one expensive dinner with Suzanne. He leaves a fifty-dollar tip.
    When he could, he always left enormous tips. He loved to shock, even shock with generosity. It was like punching someone.

LOLLIPOP GIRLS
    Suzanne is waitressing at the Binibon restaurant. One Friday night she comes home and finds Jean-Michel doing coke with three white girls dressed up in ’40s dresses, false eyelashes and high heels, and looking like fluttering dragonflies.
    “We’re celebrating,” Jean-Michel says. The girls giggle. “Annina Nosei is going to represent me.” He picks up a knife off of the kitchen table and carves an “S” into Suzanne’s wood floor.
    “We are going to be rich just like I told you,” Jean-Michel says, laughing. The girls laugh also. Suzanne takes her waitressing tips out of her pocket and throws them at Jean-Michel.
    “Here,” she says. “Get some more coke for you and the girls.”
    Jean-Michel leaves the apartment with the three lollipop girls skipping behind him and doesn’t return for three days. Later someone tells Suzanne that Jean-Michel was seen at the Mudd Club with a Puerto Rican boy.
    When I first moved to New York I was a cigarette girl at the Ritz. Even when I left this job I kept my red wooden cigarette box. One day Jean found it and, thinking it was just a piece of wood or something, he did a painting on it. He painted a face with a crown and the word “AARON” on it. I was very angry at the time. But I later sold it to Annina Nosei for one thousand dollars.

BACK TO CANADA
    Too much furniture. Nowhere to move without poking your thigh or hip into a pointed corner of some