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CHAPTER ONE
OVERDOSING ON ART
"If you had only twenty-four hours left to live, what would you do?"
"I don't know. I'd go hang out with my mother and my girlfriend, I
guess."
--video interview, Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston, 1986
Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great Jones
Street, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burning
sun. Inside the two-story brick building, Jean-Michel Basquiat
was asleep in his huge bed, bathed in blue television light. The air
conditioner was broken and the room felt like a microwave oven.
The bathroom door was ajar, revealing a glimpse of a black and tan
Jacuzzi tub. On the ledge of the tub was a small pile of bloody syringes.
There was a jagged hole punched in the bathroom window.
Beneath it was scrawled the legend "Broken Heart," with Basquiat's
favorite punctuation, a copyright sign.
Kelle Inman, Basquiat's twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, was downstairs
writing in the journal that Basquiat had given her. He usually
slept all day, but when he still hadn't come down for breakfast by
midafternoon, Inman got worried. When she looked into the bedroom
to check up on him, the heat hit her full in the face, like a wave. But
Basquiat seemed to be sleeping peacefully, so she went back downstairs.
She and the housekeeper heard what sounded like loud
snores, but thought nothing of it.
A few hours later, Basquiat's friend Kevin Bray called. He and
Basquiat and another friend, Victor Littlejohn, were supposed to go
to a Run-D.M.C. concert that evening, and he wanted to make plans
with Jean-Michel. Kelle climbed back up the stair's to give Basquiat
the message. This time, she found him stretched on the floor, his
head Jean-Michael on his arm like a child's, a small pool of vomit forming
near his chin.
Inman panicked. She had never seen anyone die, although Basquiat's
drug binges had made the scenario a constant fear. Now it
seemed like the worst had happened. She ran to the phone and called
Bray, Littlejohn, and Vrej Baghoomian, Basquiat's last art dealer.
"When I got there," recalls Bray, "Kelle said she had called an
ambulance. She took me upstairs. Jean-Michel looked like he was
comfortably out cold. He was on the floor, lying against the wall, as if
he had fallen down and didn't have the strength to get up, and was
just taking a nap. There was a lot of clear liquid coming out of his
mouth. We picked him up and turned him over. We shook him, and
we just kept trying to revive him. It took a long time for the ambulance
to arrive. But for a while, after the guys from the Emergency
Medical Service came, we thought he was going to be okay. They
were giving him shocks and IV treatment. Victor had to hold Jean-Michel
up like this so the IV's would drain," says Bray, stretching his
arms out in a cruciform.
Bray couldn't take it anymore. He went downstairs, where Inman,
and two assistants from the Baghoomian gallery, Vera Calloway and
Helen Traversi, were trying to stay calm. "We tried to take his pulse.
His skin was so hot," says Calloway. Baghoomian called the studio
just as the paramedics arrived. He was in San Francisco and Helen
was forced to act in his stead.
"It was almost like it was some sort of business transaction," says
Bray. "They put a tube in his throat and they brought him downstairs.
They wouldn't tell us whether he was dead or alive and they took him
outside. He had this beautiful bubbling red-white foam coming out of
his mouth."
"We all hoped some miracle would happen," recalls Helen, who
begins to cry at the memory. Outside on the pavement, a small crowd
had gathered in horror and fascination. "I was about to leave on vacation
with my wife," says filmmaker Amos Poe, who was a friend of
the artist. "We watched as they loaded his body into the ambulance. I
saw his father pull up in a Saab. I kept saying to my wife. `Jean-Michel
is dead.' He really lived out that whole destructo legend: Die
young, leave a beautiful corpse."
At Cabrini Medical Center, Basquiat was pronounced dead on arrival.
The cause, according to the medical examiner's death certificate,
would be determined "pending chemical examination." A later
autopsy report stated that Basquiat had died from "acute mixed drug
intoxication (opiates-cocaine)." In the months before his death, Basquiat
claimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.
Basquiat was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn five
days later. His father invited only a few of the artist's friends to the
closed-casket funeral at Frank Campbell's; they were outnumbered
by the phalanx of art dealers. The heat wave had broken, and it
rained on the group gathered at the cemetery to bid Jean-Michel
goodbye. The eulogy was delivered by Citibank art consultant Jeffrey
Deitch, lending the moment an unintentionally ironic tone.
Blanca Martinez, Basquiat's housekeeper, was struck by the alienated
attitude of the mourners. "They were all standing separately, as
if it were an obligation," she says. "They didn't seem to care. Some
looked ashamed." People began to leave the cemetery before the body
was buried. Ignoring the objections of the gravediggers, Martinez
tearfully threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin as they lowered it into
the grave.
Basquiat's mother, Matilde, looking dazed, approached Baghoomian
to thank him for his help to her son during his last days. Gerard
Basquiat later admonished his former wife not to talk to the art
dealer. The scene was already being set for a bitter battle over the
estate of the artist.
The following week, appraisers from Christie's set to work taking inventory
of the contents of the Great Jones Street loft: finished and
unfinished paintings, other artists' works (including several dozen
Warhols and a piece by William Burroughs), a vintage collection of
Mission furniture, a closet full of Armani and Comme des Garcons suits, a
library of over a thousand videotapes, hundreds of audiocassettes,
art books, a carton of the Charlie Parker biography Bird
Lives!, several bicycles, a number of antique toys, an Everlast
punching bag, six music synthesizers, some African instruments, an Erector
set, and a pair of handcuffs.
There were also a number of paintings in warehouses: following
Andy Warhol's advice, Basquiat had tried to squirrel some of his
work away from his ever-eager art dealers. According to Christie's,
Basquiat had left 917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171
paintings.
Artist Dan Asher walked by his old friend's loft and was astonished
to see a number of Basquiat's favorite things in a Dumpster: his
shoes, his jazz collection, a peculiar lamp made out of driftwood, Sam
Peckinpah's director's chair. Asher salvaged a few items; he sold the
chair to a collector.
It would be another year before Gerard Basquiat ordered a tombstone
for his son. But for several weeks after the artist's death, he was
commemorated by a small shrine some anonymous fan had placed by
his door. Shrouded in lace, it held flowers, votive candles, a picture
of Basquiat, some carefully copied prayers, and a Xerox of a David
Levine caricature of the artist, complete with a caption: "In an age of
limitless options and limiting fears, he still makes poems and paintings
to evoke his world."
A formal memorial service was finally held at Saint Peter's
Church in Citicorp Center, on a stormy Saturday in November. Despite
the rain, wind, and bleak gray sky, several hundred people
crowded into the church. Behind the pulpit hung a portrait of the
artist as a young man, superimposed on one of his faux-primitive
paintings. One by one, his former friends and lovers remembered
Basquiat.
Gray, the band with which Jean-Michel had played at the Mudd
Club, performed several songs. John Lurie played a saxophone
solo. Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview magazine, read a eulogy.
Ex-girlfriends Jennifer Goode and Suzanne Mallouk tearfully read poems.
And Keith Haring, AIDS-thin, reminisced about his friend. "He
disrupted the politics of the art world and insisted that if he had to
play their games, he would make the rules. His images entered the
dreams and museums of the exploiters, and the world can never be
the same."
Fab 5 Freddy, who knew Basquiat from his old graffiti days, "interpolated"
a poem by Langston Hughes. "This is a song for the genius
child. Sing it softly, for the song is wild. Sing it softly as ever you
can--lest the song get out of hand. Nobody loves a genius child. Can
you love an eagle, tame or wild? Wild or tame, can you love a monster,
of frightening name? Nobody loves a genius child. Free [sic] him
and let his soul run wild."
After the service, everyone went to M.K., the bank-turned-nightclub
on lower Fifth Avenue. Owned by Jennifer Goode's brother,
it was one of Jean-Michel's favorite places. In fact, it was his last
destination the night before he died. He had come to the club looking for
Jennifer. Now people stood around the big television set, sipping
champagne and watching a flickering black-and-white video of Basquiat.
A photographer from Fame magazine snapped pictures of the
known and not-so-known: the jewelry designer Tina Chow, and her
sister, Adele Lutz, David Byrne's wife. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. It
was the perfect send-off for the eighties art star; part opening, part
wake.