Everything went Tierney’s way: galleries teeming, barristers double-teaming, Scotland Yard’s knickers twisted, Big Ben alaruming, bobbies on bicycles 2 by 2. . Tory threats & Saatchified fêtes. . Jacquie still shared espressos with Helmut yet couldn’t help wonder if the bloom fell off the rose, the schaden off the freude, the rider from her saddle. She became paranoid: could it be that when Helmut was away, he was a guest at the Gearon estate? Because if it all wasn’t so fucked enough, Tierney happened to be famously wealthy, father lived on an island somewhere, father & daughter famously got along famously. . Helmut probably had been not-so-secretly in love with her from the beginning, Jacquie was 5th-string (if that), Tierney magnetized men, Jacquie enraged&repelled them, Tierney tethered them to the maypole of her gemütlich sexuality, why not add Helmut to the orb & fasten him by his own whip. Tierney was six years younger than she; Tierney was the Nude Kid on the Block (Jacquie wasn’t even the girl next door); her naked progeny awash in bright stupendous Egglestonian progenicolors, with Jacquie left in the dirt.
Brava Tierney,
brava—in the years that followed their initial acquaintanceship — after Tierney made her bones — she had more time to hang out, & they saw each other a nice handful of times a year. Jacquie of course never told Tierney what she was working on, it would have come across as rip-offy. Keep your work close but your frenemy closer. She was relieved upon learning that Tierney’s new oeuvres was not of the prepubescent ilk. But it was Helmut — always Helmut! — who finally offered some helpful remarks. Just do it, dear heart, you won’t be ready to show for a few years, by then the wheel will have turned, the market will be ready again. In the meantime, it was rough to watch Tierney’s sold-out shows, when Jacquie had nothing to show but her unconvincing sangfroid——
Brava, Tierney!
Brava!
Sitting behind her little counter at Sears, on a slow morning, reliving when the unthinkable happened (Newton’s Second Law of Motion): Scotland Yard swooped in, The News of the World demanded the gallery be closed, headline-blasting ‘A revolting exhibition of perversion under the guise of art’—
Take it down take it down take it down!
Now museum, now you don’t.
Word circulated that Ms. Gearon was facing a possible 10 years for daring to thumb her nose at the Child Protection Act. Publishers were ordered to remove hundreds of copies from bookstore shelves… but the Sturgis Effect kicked in, each banned book acquiring a weedy, hard-to-kill, proliferative 2nd life. . the numbers were climbing, the sales were soaring, and. . she’s. . off—& running! — — Tierney played it demure & perplexed, very very smart, stating again & again for the record that she was just a mom. . mom first, artist second. . who are these people that wish to pillory a mom? To destroy her for daring to see her children through a child’s eyes? J’accuse!
& again the unthinkable (Newton’s Third):
THE CROWN RELENTS!
NO CHARGES FILED!
Tierney was actually supportive when Jacquie had her Media Moment in the tail end of 2003. She was gracious, never making Jacquie feel like she’d appropriated TG’s work. She was one of the first people Jacquie showed her pictures to, inviting her over to the house to see them. Jacquie felt compelled to remark just once that she’d begun shooting her daughter before ever hearing about or seeing Tierney’s portraits. Tierney was unruffled & even generous of spirit. She can afford to be, thought Jacquie. She can famously fucking afford to.
. .
There she is, having a bite in the Sears employee lunchroom. She imagines forgetting why she sought the job in the first place, not that she knows exactly, only that her instincts told her there is something here. . but now a greyish depression enfolds her like a flu & she imagines what it would be like to soon forget what her instincts said, just to have the job, no grandiose motive behind it. . or even worse, to realize she has no viable instincts anymore — though maybe that would be better than where she found herself now, today, at this moment, being that place of beaten down, too-much awareness. So maybe it would be for the best to simply forget the vague, bullshitty reasons she made up for herself to explain why she’d been compelled to work at Sears, all for the best to just start forgetting a little day by day about who she was or thought she was, who she imagined herself to be by definition of her so-called career, maybe to forget or cut off at the root her impossible daydreams of resentment & impossible eventual triumph, forget about all that & just become a hardworking, pleasant demeanored, dreamless dumbass full-time employee, that would be better, much, might just work out, anything would be better than being the loser she’d begun, with unruly stamina, to consider herself these bygone days.
In the unmedicated flu of depression — like one of those Point Dume ladies who make Schnabelly collages from broken shells & hunks of yarn, or paint eternities of gloopy red acrylic valentine 
s, Brentwood ladies who go thru “wearable art” phases, in their clunky La Jolla boutique-bought precious stoned necklaces & their bold, striking color summer dresses to wear on cruises — no — another fantasia intruded. . she’d become the maker of those things, pathetic little craftswoman struggling to pay the rent on her Eagle Rock/Reseda/Studio City sublet, with the dusty clangy Calder knock-offs & a 70-lb. chalcedony purple-mawed healing shard plunked clumsily atop the corner of the welcome mat, New Age paperweight overkill… in her fever of insignificance, her fluish narrative of oblivion & loss of self, she became the servant of a widow who travels the world taking pictures for submission to National Geographic’s reader photo contest (a woman who’d won three times in 10 years): mist-filled, dentist’s calendar-worthy, Cambodian temple ruins; fly-swarmy, cretinous-smiling, Machu Picchu vendors dressed in bold, striking colors; spectral Varanasi ghats neutered by that very calendarized eye. (It was telling that in her grim idyll, Jacquie’s employer was the picture-taker, not she.)