Lessons from Basquiat
I encounter Jean-Michel Basquiat twenty-seven years after his death, on a wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I step through a mirror into a chaotic circus of words and images. They trail, circle, soar, and jostle for space. My brain accelerates, my heart pauses, and I float, a crown upon my head. My husband anchors me, heavy hands on my shoulders. “Enough art for today,” he says.
I edit other people’s books for a living, trying to see through their thickets of words to their meaning. Basquiat plucked words from the air as if he were an open channel, always receiving. KING HEART SNAKE CYCLOPS ROOTBLIND CIRCUS BLOOD MOUTH VILLAIN RAGTIME. All caps, all the time, some words struck through, but still visible. Secret messages to decode.
I scrawl lists on a reproduction of Basquiat’s painting “Riding with Death”, a painting in which a desiccated brown figure sits astride a disintegrating pale skeleton. I cover the painted bones with the story of our marriage. All the ways that my husband and I have hurt each other. All the ways we have loved and cared for each other. I add to the lists daily, seeking a revelation or a balance. The phrases sprout tentacles and form a maze that grows and grows, blocking out the light.
Early in our marriage, we spent two days in the dark without power, cocooned on the couch in front of a wood fire. Wrapped in our old down comforter and each other’s arms, we watched the light change on the snow outside.
“Do you ever think about when we’re old?” I said into his chest.
“No, do you?”
“I imagine us in a canoe on a lake, two old people paddling into the setting sun. And a loon is flying overhead, emitting her lonesome cry.”
“Why a canoe?”
“That’s what you get out of what I just said, why a canoe?” We rolled over, laughing, and it became a joke between us: why a canoe?
Touch can be caress or slap, bite or kiss, embrace or shove. Fury is fire-engine red, death is black, regret is midnight blue, and love is sunny, sunny yellow. In Basquiat’s paintings, I step from one shade to the other, like rooms. The maze swallows me, and I cannot find the exit.
My husband and I play a game of our own invention that we call Hands Up. We hold our hands above our heads when we are angry, like prisoners. We can say anything we want, but we can’t touch each other.
Basquiat knew addiction. How what you most desire can annihilate you and pain becomes your currency. He died of an overdose of cocaine and opiates at age twenty-seven, three years younger than I am now. I mourn all the colors he never painted. I mourn all the words unsaid. I mourn the foreclosed future. My husband says, “I know you don’t love me.” Is it losing to leave, or winning? We are gamblers hellbent on redeeming our losses.
On our honeymoon, we leaped off a boulder into blue tropical water, and for a moment we were suspended in empty air, holding hands.
Basquiat created grids as nets for reality. He organized his chaos with lines. My husband and I section off the house spatially, walking invisible boundaries, heads down. My study, his den; his kitchen, my living room; his porch, my attic. Our bedroom: no man’s land.
I read that Basquiat’s paintings sell for millions at auction. He is monetized, packaged, branded, and people wait in long lines to view his posthumous art shows. His disembodied face adorns tote bags. What we love, we destroy. I am feasting like a crow on a radiant corpse.
When my mother died, my lover, not yet my husband, held me in silence. Words meant nothing to me when I had lost the person who loved me the most. He held me against the void, and I knew I would spend my life with this man.
My husband and I argue as if the other has the answer and is withholding it out of spite. Our needs thicken the air between us. I walk to my window and see Basquiat in the moonlight. He draws with chalk on my sidewalk: faces and fists, skeletons and crowns, dinosaurs and monsters. He notices me and writes I HAVE NO ANSWERS. But I have so many questions, I want to tell him. He draws a vampire with blood dripping from its fangs.
Words like arrows, bullet points, sharpened spears. Get a real job, you’re blaming me for your mistakes, it’s not my fault, you’ve disappointed me, you’re not the man I married, you’re lazy, you’re stubborn, you’re naïve, you waste money, I feel alone, I’m not your mommy, you’re not what I wanted, you’ve abandoned me, you don’t love me, you’re not my dad. And we sharpen the points of our spears because the spew of accusations scares us and makes us feel more alive and as if we are getting somewhere. Then we fall on each other and have hungry sex that just leaves us feeling more alone.
My favorite Basquiat is an untitled painting from 1982. The yellow outline of an angel on a sky- blue background, shadowed in cobalt and blood red, rises untethered in the air. To heaven? Or perhaps it is the chalk outline of a body, a claim to a last piece of identity.
We hike to the cliff edge in the park on a foggy autumn day. My husband walks first, and I think that with a simple push, or with a step or two of my own, all the anguish, indecision and sleepless nights would be over. Fini. I stagger back and lie on the ground, anchoring myself so I cannot move. I have my answer. We are not safe with each other. The sky wheels above me and Basquiat’s angel flies into the distance.
Bonnie Brewer-Kraus is a former architect who lives on a ridge overlooking Lake Erie with her husband and rescue husky. She is an enthusiastic member of Literary Cleveland and a volunteer reader for Gordon Square Review. Her fiction can be found at River and South Review, The Metaworker, CommuterLit, 101wordstories, and Gordon Square Review, among others, and is upcoming in The Blue Lake Review.