1 It was getting late in the day, but I couldn’t make myself get out of bed. Even as my wristscreen lit up with messages from my dad. Even as my Cavachon, Pollock, stood next to the bed whining those little whines that broke my heart. He wanted to go out so badly, but I couldn’t get up. I looked at his little brown-and-white face, practically a teddy bear’s face, but I still couldn’t get out of bed. Bernice was coming and I couldn’t make myself do anything at all to prepare.
I had to get in a car soon to go to my dad’s in-state compound. I knew. I knew. But, like a lot of days, I couldn’t make myself do anything.
Where are you?
What are you still doing in the city?
My dad’s messages kept lighting up the screen as I reached down to scratch Pollock behind the ears. He made tiny grunts of pleasure and for a second I felt a little less guilty about making him wait to walk.
My dad worries about me a lot, like I’m a child or something. Actually, when I was younger, he was even worse. I remember when we first moved to New York. There were neighborhoods that my dad told me not to go to, ever. He said that the kind of people who lived there would take one look at my clothes, my shoes, my hair and kill or rape me or something. I remember those days. Once, when I was thirteen, because I thought my dad was wrong and everywhere was good and everybody was equal, I went to one of those places on the subway. I got off the train and smelled urine. There was this guy pissing, just pissing in a corner where the doorway was. I looked over and caught a glimpse of his cock, and it wasn’t even studded with pearls like anybody who has any bodmods has. I ran away. I couldn’t believe any of it. That people lived that way. And I didn’t think my dad was right, necessarily, that these people were all bad, but I realized he was right that there were places I shouldn’t go.
But the nice thing was that the older I got, the more those places disappeared. The whole city became nice, and clean, and everywhere around me crummy old buildings started getting ripped down and new, remarquable buildings, the kind with swimming pools on the roof and magnifique doormen, went up. The poor people went away. I didn’t know where they went, but I guess things must have gotten better for them. You didn’t have to feel bad about people asking you for money on the street when you were just out trying to have a good time with your friends. There were never any of those awkward moments when you didn’t know if someone was homeless or just dressed way down—they were just dressed way down, ten times out of ten. I was so happy that the city had cleaned up, and the homeless shelters weren’t full, and everything was good for everybody who lived there. That’s progress.
I wasn’t thinking about progress, though, as I got ready for the storm to hit. A lot of things were going through my head as I lay in bed, with Pollock whining, breaking my heart. The city hadn’t progressed much in a way that could combat the storms. All of us knew to get out, most of us had places to go. The ones who didn’t, I felt bad, but I didn’t feel that bad. I mean, when the last storm hit, I felt this twinge because my friends from the city and I went to my dad’s in-state compound and had a fabuleux time, weathering the storm, drinking mojitos, doing move. I felt kind of bad, later, having had a party when people were suffering. But people who stayed in the city were doing the same thing. When I got back I asked the guy who does my laundry what he had done, and he said, “Had a storm party.” We talked for a while. I talk to everybody, I’m just that kind of person. And his party wasn’t so much different than ours—drinking, drugs. The only difference was that he had stayed, and we had left. I still felt a little bad, though, when I realized that things had been a little worse than I’d thought they would be. I gave one of my paintings to an auction for charity. It was a painting that I loved, too, but I felt good helping people who had less.
I’d tried to get ready for Bernice, throwing things in boxes that I would have driven in-state with me. Then I thought back to the second storm, Maxwell, that had happened after I bought my little apartment in the Lower East Side. That’s when I laid down.
My apartment is the dream space I’ve always wanted to have since I moved to New York. It’s a beau ground-floor two-bedroom in a historic building. It’s just so quaint that I couldn’t resist buying it when it came up for sale. My dad said it wasn’t the greatest investment, that I should have got myself a condo in a newer building, or a place in somewhere up-and-coming, like Allentown. But that’s totally hypocritical, because he invests in these buildings all the way out in Brooklyn, which he says are safe because they’re so far in. But, anyway, this building that I bought my apartment in had this brown brick facade, and a big kitchen that I redid (not that I cook a lot, but I’m always hoping that someday I’ll meet someone who does), and two bedrooms with windows that let in the morning sun and open into this raggedy little garden below that all the neighbors are crazy for and take care of like we’re in the suburbs or something. It’s so cute and quaint.
The first storm when I lived there, Fiona, wasn’t so bad. Water got in a bit to the basement, and the apartment owners had to have the mold it caused professionally removed. So I didn’t think that when Maxwell hit there would be much more damage besides that. I was wrong. Water got into the ground floor and ruined a lot of my things. The antique mahogany headboard on my bed that had belonged to my grandparents got waterlogged and warped. It was really sad because it was the first gift my grandfather had bought my grandmother when he got his first real job that actually paid him more than what he needed to live on. I had wanted to keep it forever, then give it to my kids. But it got destroyed. The same thing happened to my all-organic-material mattress. I had taken the rare books I collect off the bottom few shelves of the bookcase in my living room and placed them in boxes up higher, but the water had still risen high enough to destroy my signed first-edition Fountainhead and some of my first-edition lithograph books. And, worst of all, it traveled far enough up the wall to damage the Basquiat my dad bought me as my first serious piece of art when I graduated from Parsons. I loved that painting so much. It was the first thing that ever made me feel full. When my dad gave it to me, this kind of whatever feeling I have a lot of the time disappeared in this wave of color and emotion. It was so bold, so jagged, that I couldn’t help but feel so much. That’s the way it’s been every time I get a new piece of art, but never quite like that first time. God, I love Basquiat. I kept kicking myself for not taking it out of the apartment, but it was my home, you know, my home. I didn’t think something that bad could happen in my very own home. I laid there thinking of that painting, how beautiful and irreplaceable it had been, and how it was gone now. I started to cry a little. That’s when Pollock started to cry, too. He’s very attuned to my feelings. Sometimes even more than I am, I think. He pressed his wet nose against me, digging it into my arm, my armpit, my cheek, as I lay in bed crying.
The parties in-state stopped after that storm. When my friends and I saw each other back in the city after Maxwell, we all wondered the same things. Why were we staying there? Why were we hanging on to this city that was falling into the ocean? There were so many other places we could be. And, sure, New York City had always been a mecca of arts and fashion and food and magnifique things, but the more storms hit, the less it was. One of my favorite restaurants, this little place with brick walls and old oak tables and waiters who are about a hundred years old each, closed up because of storm damage, and the last I heard their chef had opened a place inland in New Jersey, because he said it was a safer bet.
I had learned my lesson during Maxwell, and was going to get most of what was valuable out with me. The things that really mattered most: my paintings, my more expensive clothes, things I couldn’t stand the thought of losing, or that wouldn’t be okay if they got wet.
I started to get frustrated as I went along packing. I don’t have a great attention span because of my ADHD, and I couldn’t get my prescription filled again this month because of all the business types who use the drugs to work long hours. I laid down, feeling overwhelmed, and I didn’t get back up.
Finally, Pollock’s cries were just too much to bear. I think that’s why my dad got him for me. I can tend toward the depressive side (my dad calls it ennui), so sometimes I think he bought me Pollock so I’d have to get out of bed. It never fails. I love that dog, and I’d never let him go too long being hungry, or thirsty, or having to use the bathroom. So finally, I stood up, got his leash, and called someone to come and pack my boxes for me. I’m so fortunate that there are services for everything in New York these days.
So Pollock and I had a bit of free time before we had to leave the city, and I tried to think to myself what I’d really like to do with that little bit of time. I would walk Pollock, of course. But also, I’m not so far from Brooklyn, and the car services hadn’t closed down yet in preparation for the storm. So I figured we would take one out to Brooklyn, to see Basquiat. Pollock would take a walk in Green-Wood.
The first time I went to see Basquiat was kind of a disaster. It was before I had Pollock, so I was all alone. Basquiat’s buried out in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which, if you don’t know, is the biggest, oldest, richest cemetery in the city. I mean, there are huge monuments all over the place, mausoleums bigger and nicer than some people’s apartments, beau flowering trees in the springtime—the whole place is like a magnifique park, but with dead people. It’s where I’d like to be buried, someday, and have people walking around enjoying themselves, having picnics near me.
I thought it would be nice walking around Green-Wood looking for his grave, but even with a map, I got terribly lost. My wristscreen decided to update, so I didn’t have it to guide me for about twenty-five minutes. By that time, I had walked in a huge circle and was back at the front gate, this huge castle-like brown brick structure. I gave up, really sad, because I love Basquiat and everything about him, and I had just wanted to see him and I’d failed.
But it was almost like that failure was meant to be. I went back again, a few weeks later. This time I was less stressed out about finding his grave and thought, even if I don’t, I’ll just walk around thinking about him. And that’s what I did. I thought about how cold and alone he must have felt, sleeping in Tompkins Square Park when he was a teenager, but also how it must have been okay, because even then he must have known how great he was and that it was just a matter of time until everyone else saw it, too. I thought of him alone, at night, in a hospital bed, looking at the copy of Gray’s Anatomy his mother gave him after he was in that terrible car accident. Then I began to think of his mother—how she had gone crazy, been institutionalized, when he was just a kid. It made me think of my own mom, who had died when I was very young. I knew him in that moment, I swear, even though there are all these obvious differences between us, I knew what that pain of losing a mom was. I stopped and looked around me. I was under a bough of a cherry tree, on a path lined with them. I swear, right then, I knew Basquiat.
I looked down at the map I was carrying, and realized I had been walking on the right path, not as some silly metaphor or anything, but really, truly walking the right way to find him. I would be there soon.
Finding his grave was hard in a lot of ways. I thought it would be one of the huge fabuleux ones, one of the obelisks that reached to the sky, or a stern angel. But no. I searched and searched the general vicinity on the map before it suddenly dawned on me—the row of low, square, plain graves that looked like pauper graves—that’s what marked this man who had so obviously loomed above all the other people buried here.
I started to cry a little. As I walked down the row of inconsequential graves, I spotted one that appeared to be covered in garbage. The sobbing came full-on when I realized it was his.
For a minute, the tears blurred my vision as I thought, This is it. You live your life in the hugest way, you make the most magnifique art, and this is the way it ends. Under a pauper’s grave somewhere, covered in trash. But then my eyes cleared, I saw the little items on the grave had all been placed there so lovingly. A cigarette, a paintbrush, a piece of malachite, a paper with a crude crown drawn on it that said SAMO underneath. I wondered about all the of the people who had come looking as I had come looking, who had left here all these little garbage-treasures of theirs as an offering after walking the path to the grave, and maybe even understanding him as I did. The tears started again.
I almost started crying then, on my way there in the car with Pollock, as the storm was about to descend on New York, thinking about it. But I pulled myself together. I patted Pollock’s soft fur. My therapist often says that I should pick him up when I’m sad because touch is a wonderful antidepressant. I patted him and looked at his soft brown eyes. And I started talking to the driver.
“Where will you go?” I said.
“Excuse me?” he said, turning down the radio.
“I’m sorry to pry,” I said, “but I talk to everybody, just about everybody. Where will you go when the storm hits?”
“I don’t live here in the city,” the driver said. I peered at the license in a plastic sheath on the rear of his seat. His name was Hameen. His English was slightly broken, but my wristscreen was translating what he said onto the screen so I’d have no difficulty understanding. “So I will go home.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Out in New Jersey, about an hour away. I drive to the city every day, then drive people around all day, then I drive back. Then I drive my children to their sports, then I drive my wife to her work. It seems like I live behind a car wheel sometimes.”
“You’ll be safe there?” I asked. Pollock was making low noises of happiness as I scratched behind his ears.
“The storm shouldn’t hit us too hard. Things are safer out there in many ways. When I was younger, people were afraid. There were so many reasons, they sometimes wouldn’t get in my car, they called me names, they did not like my name, or where I was from. But . . . things have changed a bit for us. My children are safer, now, than I was.”
“Things do get better,” I said, sitting back. And it was nice, that this man believed that, too, after what he’d been through. The Water Wars have given us so many immigrants that it’s hard to believe that, even when he was younger, things were that bad. I mean, people should be used to people coming over. I thought for a second, maybe I should start a nonprofit for these issues. Then I thought of what he said, that his children were safe out in New Jersey, playing sports and having fun even. Things always get better, they have to. Pollock yipped once, as if in agreement.
We got closer to Green-Wood. Normally, I walk to Basquiat’s grave from the main entrance, which is through the entire cemetery. I like experiences. But today, I had the driver take me to the entrance nearest where he’s buried. It would be a brief walk for Pollock, but there was really no time for strolling through the whole place.
I handed the driver an extra twenty dollars and asked him to stay put until we came back out. I hurried to that little gravestone nestled in the row of people he was so much greater than, Pollock running to keep up. The wind had blown a lot of the little gifts people left behind off the top of the grave. I knelt by the stone, my hand on the ground. I could almost feel the greatness his poor body had contained radiating out of the ground. Pollock was pulling at his leash. I always struggle with what to say when I get there. Usually I just end up thanking him and going, but this time felt different. I felt like I might never be back. I cried a little, for the first time since initially finding the grave. Still, I could not figure out any words that would match what I felt for him, for his art, for the life he had lived.
I took a hundred dollars out of my purse and put it on top of the headstone with a little rock holding it down so the wind wouldn’t blow it away. I do that every time I come. Maybe someone who was so much like him will show up one day and need it. I wondered if they would take it, a person standing there with nothing, but feeling it had been left as a tribute to him. Probably it just blows away, eventually, every time.