Ready for Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine

Author:Susannah Constantine [CONSTANTINE, SUSANNAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Andy, Basquiat, Jacqueline and Julian Schnabel with Kenny Scharf at the opening of Indochine, 1984. © Roxanne Lowit

I wasn’t surprised by his death. He was only fifty-six when I met him but he had the appearance and bearing of someone who’d been sickly as a child. There was a damaged, fragile air to him as if he wouldn’t withstand close inspection or might turn to dust if you unpeeled his outer layers. Like a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, perhaps needing the odd repair each evening after a day’s work, a patch here, a stitch there. His skin had the look of a man rotting from the inside, as if he’d died years before and was recharged each night in his kooky private laboratory. Every morning his assistant would flip the switch and Andy would sit bolt upright, arms stiff and outstretched by his sides. Swinging his legs round awkwardly from the stretcher, dropping his feet to the floor with a light thud, he’d begin the day anew. He’d crafted a synthetic veneer for himself that he thought the public wanted – like an item packaged for sale. Just as with the Wizard of Oz, Andy, I suspect, was a small, lonely man behind a curtain doing his best to create an illusion of something bigger and better than the way he really saw himself.

The group he drew around him should have been formidable but somehow the evening was a sad one. There was something about Andy that both terrified and repulsed me in equal measure – as if you could catch a disease of the mind just by being near him, a self-destructive deviance you wouldn’t be able to resist. Everyone there seemed to need an audience to be a version of themselves they were happy with, like a group of parasites feeding off one another even though their veins had long since run dry. I’d never gone out to a dinner where one of the guests being so gowched-out on heroin was not only acceptable but went unnoticed. It seemed it wasn’t remarkable to anyone but me. I was doing my best to masquerade as an adult but the depravity of the evening frightened the life out of me. There was no warmth. No one you could turn to with an urgent, conspiratorial ‘Have you got a tampon?’ It wasn’t my understanding of what friendship should be. We were more like participants in an art installation; holding still in our places until enough people had passed by and seen us. To make sure we existed. It was a very destabilising situation and one I would never put myself in again. I’d gone in hoping to be accepted by this enigmatic group but, seeing their grotesque, up-lit faces around the table, I felt grateful to be the girl at the back of the room – able to walk out and close the door behind me without anyone noticing I’d gone.

Many people would have given their eye-teeth for the experiences I had in New York, but for me it was a lesson in how to stiffen one’s upper lip.

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