Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

The Ava Gardner Museum. Yes. The old woman who works there — an Ava lookalike. The lonely parking lot. Yes. Of a castle in what they call the low country. A crazy-baroque synagogue in Savannah. On the beaches, she succumbs, like a teenager, to taking pics of shells: harps, pagodas & turbans, sundials, nutmegs, periwinkles.

There: a newish prison in the middle of a city, and the bailed-out blacks who pour forth. There was actually some kind of museum of slavery next door, & the just-released prisoners would bump right into it.

She drives & drives under gusty civil war skies.

Where am I going, where have I been.

She doesn’t bother with Atlantic City. Atlantic City will do very well without her. Besides, she’s running out of film.

She settles into her room at the Chelsea. (The Professor told her he stayed there a whole month once, that’s how Jacquie got the idea.) She hates it.

She’s lost, exhausted. Wants/needs to be touched. She puts on her sexiest dress and goes to a bar, fancy one, sleeps with the first man who tries to pick her up — a DP. Movie cameraman. Two weeks later, she’s living in his apartment. All the while, she’s watching herself, watching the insane speed at which things are happening, the whole crazy city, a million miles an hour, & now Jacquie a part of it. She loves it.

Ronny hires her for his camera crew, commercials & indies. (The beginning of indie golden years/Parker Poseydom.) She loses the ambition to document her world, hangs up her lenses, still in that world though by default. (Her job. Her man.) (Which she eventually takes for a “sign.”) Getting her bearings. . missing her son. Wants/needs to forget about the Professor, which is tough, especially when Ronny’s fucking her — he’s the only one she’d been with since her beloved — Ronny fucks her well but not with the freight/impact/import of Jerome. Needs/wants to make a life for herself, a real life, a city life, still not feeling that’s what she has or even getting close. It looks like I do but I don’t. And it’s late, late, I’m getting old, how could I have stayed in Florida so long, oh how how ————— all this time shuttling to Ocala every six weeks, that’s about as long as she can stand being away from him, Jerry Jr., wanting of course her son to be with her in the big city, maybe it’s out of respect for his father, allegiance maybe, loyalty, fear, before she puts a man in his life, before she gives him another dad, Jacquie just wants to make sure (as sure as she can) this thing with Ronny is real. She finally brings him to NYC for better for worse, to have & to hold. Ronny of course saying all along how cool he was with it, bringing the boy up, he’d been very sweet, & Jacquie believed him but still needed to know, to see, if it’s real, needed Ronny to demonstrate it was real. But Ronny was fine, & so was Jerry Jr., they were good together, it was Jacquie’s own skittishness, reluctance to change/go forward, the definitive change , really nothing to do with Ronny at all .

He starts working on bigger movies, studio ones. (Going to ball games with Jerry Jr.) Now she can get in the union. She needs that security for her son, that’s real. Starts taking pics again, Ronny’s encouraging. When they move into a big loft — shit, Tribeca, frickin huge space, today there would be no way! — they move in & Ronny builds her a darkroom. She gets busy. Dusts herself off and takes cityscapes. The usual. Pigeons & vagrants on Central Park benches. Gap-toothed smiling cabbies. Penn Station porters/couples. Children at the zoo, eyes filled with wonder. Ugh when she thinks back. But really enjoying herself. When she shows him her pics, Ronny settles into an armchair with a joint and says I really like that. That’s what he always says. Which is annoyingly gratifying. Because she hates the idea of being the asst cameragirl girlfriend with the kid from another whatever who takes dumbass black&white pics on the weekends, she knows where that will end, and it does: Ronny renting a whitewashed gallery space & hanging her pix, inviting friends, colleagues, people from the neighborhood, the cheap plastic glasses with screw-in stems, cheap wine, cheap cheese, cheap crackers, cheap smell in the air, cheap art. Ronny was so sweet, he even put those little red dots beside half the pics so it looked like they were already sold, it’s very loud inside that whitewashed makeshift gallery space, a DJ, people spilling into the sidewalk, after a while nobody looks at the walls & Jacquie runs into friends there who don’t even know that’s why they’re there, because it’s her show, of her pics… as it turned out, most of what she chose to hang were from that first trip, on the road from Ocala, the Myrtle Beach pics, the sad-faced astronaut janitors & gullahville folk, & the shells (she couldn’t believe all the pics of shells!) & even a heartbreakingly empty parking lot or two, for old time’s sake. She sells seven of them, though as far as she knows her old man snatched them up himself, as far as she knows he lied when he told her a guy came off the street & bought em — some were bought by a few of her friends, & as far as she knows maybe Ronny’s reimbursing them , that’s how she was thinking, a low self-esteem thing.

On Monday, she’s back at Ronny’s gig (McDonald’s commercial) loading film, checking exposure, all that, effin’ with the ƒ-stop, there she is again, the girlfriend with the kid from another planet (though girlfriend was probably better than “wife”) whose real passion is photography , yuck, & someone on the set, some prop person that’s always on his crew that she never particularly liked says, Oh, how was the show? I heard — I knew it was Saturday, but couldn’t — I tried to go, but — did you sell any — oh that’s so exciting! Ronny told me you did—— all of it so, so, so . . . . . . . . . . …

———depressorama.

She befriends the director of a gallery that sells Mapplethorpes & various others, your Nan Goldins & Sally Manns, your Arbus & your Eggleston, premium photogs if not dead then living in the city, the South, the etc. But the gal likes Jacquie more as friend than artist. She says viz Jacquie’s stuff that everything’s there but the point of view .

The dreaded POV.. .

So—

Jacquie decides on a project: she’ll take a pic a day (fixed tripod), from the window of their loft that looks out over the city & a little park— her point of view— deciding to do that for an entire year. She thinks that maybe she’ll — well no, she’ll definitely have a book at the end of it. Maybe call it “365 Days.” Having a book might — no, would definitely— make it easier to get a gallery show, she’d wind up with a slick portfolio at the very least .

Meanwhile, she sells a few pictures to a downtown zine for $25 each, a quarterly of short stories & poems, her image graces the cover, they spell her name wrong, Jacqui no e.

She’s excited about her project. Her biggest challenge is to make sure Jerry Jr. doesn’t run into the tripod, Ronny builds a bumper box around it, and every couple of days she gives Jerry Jr. the big stern lecture about being careful.

When she gets to Month Four of the POV project, Jacquie sees a book at the Strand by a photog who took pics from her own window every day, fixed tripod, called “The Four Seasons.” She pokes around and finds three others, same deal, photographer’s POV, fixed tripod, one from a 5th-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, the other from a brownstone on the Upper West Side, & cannot believe she didn’t know about the little sub-genre. Apparently Ronny didn’t either, or if he did, didn’t tell her. She felt like a fool.