I dropped my cigarette and stubbed it out with my sneaker. “That would be me.”
“Really.” Her eyes narrowed. She gave me a small smile then extended her hand. “Linda Kalman. I’m working on a book right now with Chris Makos. Do you know him?”
“Yeah,” I lied and shook her hand. “Cass Neary.”
“Cass. Are you with a gallery?”
“No.”
“Mmmm.” She looked at me sideways, opened a little red clutch purse. “Well. Here. Take my card. Call me. Let me know who buys your pictures. And good luck.”
As it turned out, she got in touch with me when she read the piece in New York Rocker.
“So.” I could hear her drag deeply on a cigarette on the other end of the line. “Have you sold any photographs yet? Do you know who bought them?”
When I named Wagstaff, she sucked her breath in sharply. “Sam Wagstaff?”
“Yeah.”
“You know who he is, right?”
“Yeah.” A collector and curator with deep pockets; Mapplethorpe’s lover, though I’d heard they were on the outs.
“Well, Cass. Are you interested in putting a book together? Because I have an editor who’s very interested in what’s happening downtown. She can get someone to write an introductory essay, I think she said Macey Claire-Marsden from the Eastman Foundation might do it. It’s not huge money, but it would be good exposure for you.”
She hesitated. “I think you should do it. Not just for me. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come that often, Cass. Not for someone as young as you. You don’t want to blow it.”
“Let me think about it.” I didn’t say anything, didn’t hang up. I counted to five then said, “Yeah, okay. Sure. I’ll do it.”
But you know what?
I blew it anyway.
2
A year later Dead Girls came out and got good press. Good reviews, good coverage, and the first printing sold through, which for a fifty-dollar coffee-table book by an unknown twenty-one-year-old photographer was pretty decent. This was back when you’d see books by Helmut Newton and David Hamilton in the front windows of Brentano’s and Rizzoli Books.
Now you started seeing Dead Girls too. I was written up in Interview and WWW. Word got out that I was funny: I got on the radio and even had a fleeting appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.
But I was fucking up big time. I showed up at interviews drunk. I insulted people. I came on to the women hired to talk to me, which pissed them off, and pissed off the guys too. A reporter referred to me as a lesbian photographer, and I reamed him out about it when I saw him a few nights later. I wasn’t a lesbian; I wasn’t straight. When it comes to relationships, I’m an equal opportunity destroyer. I fucked whoever I wanted to. Women just seemed able to put up with me better than men did. For a little while, anyway. The Soho Weekly News did a story on what a mess I was, quoting liberally from the interview I’d given them. I thought I was a fucking rock star, I thought I was Iggy fucking Pop; but no one was paying to watch me fall off the stage.
Dead Girls never went into a second printing. Punk had crested; the violence of the scene made industry people nervous about even using the word “punk.” They started slapping stickers on new EPs and 45s that said this is power pop music! Farfisa organs began to dull the edge of guitars. Kids wearing skinny ties and wraparound shades were everywhere now. The scene got bigger, hipper, imploded then exploded. There were celebrities and celebrity suicides, and celebrity photographers to cover them. When I saw a seventy-five-dollar ripped T-shirt in a Fiorucci boutique with a brace of black-leather-collared miniature poodles tied to a meter outside, I knew that was it.
Punk’s ugly little glittering perfect moment had ended. And so had mine.
I knocked around the city, at loose ends. People saw me, they recognized me, the skinny girl with ragged blond hair and chewed-up nails, striped boatneck shirt and shaky hands. But no one wanted to be reminded who I was, and after a few years nobody remembered.
I still had the apartment on Hudson Street. I got a job working in the stockroom at the Strand Bookstore. This signaled to everyone that I was truly finished.
One other thing happened back then. On my twenty-third birthday I was down on the Bowery, leaving CBGB’s, late, as usual. I was drunk, as usual. I was barefoot—I’d been dancing and left my shoes inside, even though it was late October and the streets were cold. I was alone, until a car pulled up alongside a broken streetlamp. Someone was repeating my name, a low, insistent voice. Piecing it together later, I think he must have said “Miss, miss.”
I heard Cass. Cass.
I stopped and turned. The car door was already open. There was a knife. It happened fast.
I don’t remember much. Or no, I remember a lot, but it’s all scattered, like those discarded photos you find strewn outside an Instant Photo booth.
This is what I see: a burned-out vacant lot. Me on my knees. A cut on my bare heel where I stepped on broken glass. Blood above my pubis. Blood and semen on my thigh. Me running across chewed-up asphalt. A man’s head protruding from a car window. Me screaming in the middle of the street. A police car.
I see these things, but I don’t really remember them. I remember floating above the vacant lot and looking down on two shadows, one moving, the other still. I remember a car. There was a knife.
They asked me, did I fight?
I didn’t fight. I couldn’t describe him, or the car. My mind had been wiped clean. I don’t talk about it much. It happened; I’m not in denial. I’m not ashamed.
But I know what that other set of photos would look like. The drunk young woman, the leather miniskirt, tight T-shirt, no bra, no shoes. That street, four am, late October. A bisexual punk who took pictures of dead boys. I didn’t fight. My whole life since then, the only thing that matters to me is those three words.
I didn’t fight.
You’ll wonder what it’s like to live with this. I’ll tell you. It’s like having a razor blade clamped between your teeth: you move your mouth too much, your tongue, you smile or talk or kiss someone, you cut yourself open. You could drown if you swallowed that much blood. You could fucking bleed to death.
3
I shut down after that. I didn’t clean up my act, just went through the motions of behaving like a normal person, punched the clock, blew my paycheck at clubs and bars and bookstores. My dealings with most people had always been so ephemeral that no one took much notice when I stopped making even cursory efforts at emotional connection. I made no attempt to get a better job and little attempt to be civil to the Strand’s customers. I had no interest even in getting promoted to stockroom manager. I went to work and opened packages and sorted books. I stole books as well, until store security got too tight. After a few years I got a tattoo incorporating the scrawl of scar tissue above my pubic bone into a frayed red banner with the words too tough to die emblazoned on it. I still took pictures, going to downtown gigs and occasionally selling my stuff to the Soho Weekly News. When no one else would buy them, I gave my pictures to a D.C. fanzine called Vintage Violence in exchange for copies that I sold for a dollar a pop.
I continued to photograph things that moved me, which were mostly things that did not move. Pigeons flattened upon the curb; a corpse washed up on the shore of the East River, flesh like soft gray flannel folded into the mud; a stripper at a Broadway club sleeping between acts, her exposed breast like a red balloon where the silicone had leaked beneath the skin. I liked to think of my talent as something I’d honed to a point, a spike I could drive right into the eye of the viewer. You’d think that the 1980s vogue for decadence, for breaking taboos, would have created an audience for these pictures, but time and again they were dismissed. Too grisly, then too evocative of others’ work—Mapplethorpe, Weegee, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—then ultimately not evocative enough.