Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

“And as we all know so very fucking well , you have got to be on the same fucking page—& if you aint, you better move the fuck on .

“So: know what we’re gunna do, Jerzy boy? Aside from moving on but as friends or whatever? We are gonna man up. We are gonna Jennifer out & Demi up , & move the fuck on to your bedroom. Mama’s gunna give you something for your beauty sleep. Cause if you’re gonna help U-Haul us — if you’re gonna help us move to the Sermon on the Mount, you have got to get your beauty sleep.

“Are we on the same page? Well, goodie! We’re already on the same page, & it aint even the end of the day!”

Unstarry Night

Jerry Jr,

the son she had with the Professor, hated her. She never understood why. There was always a tension there; she told herself it was a blood thing, something in the blood. They’d been estranged for years. She knew he was living with a girl in Brooklyn, that he was a paparazzo. She knew that he moved to the West Coast a few years ago. She knew he was a drug addict.

She knew, she knew, she knew…

… that Jerry was in touch with his stepfather, Jerilynn’s dad, & when her kid ran away— Is that what I should call it? — she called Ronny to get Jerry Jr.’s cellphone #. Ronny still lived in New York, working (fitfully) as a DP. When she told Ronny their daughter was pregnant, all he said was, “Oh. Wow.” He sounded depressed.

She had a feeling Jerilynn might turn to her brother for help. She hoped so, anyway, because she’d been beside herself. She was grateful when Jerry Jr. left a message (an unexpected kindness) that she was with him, & was fine. Relieved, Jacquie let it go. It wasn’t the time to reach out to Jerilynn.

Now her daughter hated her too… her daughter hated her and she was working in the portrait salon of Sears Roebuck. She wasn’t even taking pictures, not strictly speaking, because the camera, lighting and various angles the customers chose from a booklet were fixed and calibrated. It was like flying a plane by instruments.

The world was cruel just now, & poised against her. Sally Mann had a piece in The New York Times Magazine. On the left of the page, a black&white portrait she took of herself & her two beautiful daughters; on the right, a color re-creation of the same, taken 10 years later. One’s in law school, the other’s a painter living in Brooklyn. Her daughters looked like they loved her so———— How could I have saved any money? I used every penny to live, so both of us could live! To eat and have a roof over our heads, & the occasional luxury. She gets pregnant and now I’m the villain. Well I’m sorry.

Where did

I

go

wrong How did I—

Transient fame transient transient transient

Years ago she befriended a woman named Tierney, Tierney Gearon, fabulous name, used to be a model, famously had a messy brood of kids, four of them famously with three different dads. They met at the beginning of Tierney’s meteoric, as they say, rise to somethingness. (With indigent starless heart, Jacquie remembered her Shakespeare: When beggars die there are no comets seen. ) She was covetous — the timing of it was maddening. Only weeks after Helmut delivered his Rosicrucian-cum-Barnum&Bailey secret sauce lecture, Tierney’s nudies of her own bitsy babes erupted like fireworks in the alchemical skies of art & commerce. She never discussed it with Helmut ( or Tierney), but it sure felt like Tierney got the memo. Those weeks and months got moldy with resentment/betrayal. A Kristallnacht of legal threats, repressive fanatacism & counterpoised Free Speech hoohah lit up the careering darkness, just as the oracle foretold… beaten to the punch! There was Tierney — gorgeous, sexy, famously scattered Tierney (scattered like a fox) — actually doing what Jacquie was only in the (bare) planning stages of. Ma pauvre cher Jacqueline! Still fussing like a fool over which abstruse photographic technique to employ for her inchoate Studies of A Daughter suite; still hassling in her head/paralyzed over what venues & backdrops might effectively supplant the humdrum woodsy settings and empty beaches so thoroughly mined by the genre.

Pouring salt in the wound, Tierney’s blitz shook the ether above the Saatchi Gallery in London — London! — the very city Helmut rhapsodized as the ne plus ultra when it came to firing ranges for that first, art-full shot heard round the world. Great theater dust-up: big-tent kerfuffle in the UK. It was awkward running into her mentor when the Tierney show traveled to New York. He elfin smiled, & said, “See?” She tried for days to interpret what he meant, uncertain if it was “I told you, but now it’s too late” or “You go girl!” Tierney’s story (& she was stickin to it) sounded as if it was torn from the Helmut playbook: her naïf protests that she had no real experience as a photographer, & didn’t hardly consider herself an artist. Then how the kiddie nudes would have wound up at Saatchi, Jacquie hadn’t a clue. Not that it made any difference. They were there , & so was Tierney, she had arrived (Jacquie not yet departed), hence proving Newton’s First Law of Motion: your career will sit in the shit unless something comes along to knock over the outhouse.

She ruminated between customers at Sears.

Saatchi was further than she ever got. Jacquie wanted to show there but they turned her down, even with the fair-to-middling controversy she had going for her at that moment in time, even with Helmut’s (supposed) intervention. Turned down by Gagosian too… if only. If only she had achieved persecution on a grander scale— Tierney had been threatened with jailtime! Jacquie never was, not for lack of trying, which made her furious. Thinking back, from her position behind the photo menu counter of the Sears Portrait Studio, l’affaire Gearon had an awfully deleterious effect. Seeing the woman’s kiddlings on the beach (the beach! She had the courage to repurpose the beach!) in their birthday suits & fright-masks (for that never-out-of-fashion Meatyard-Arbus touch) made her wince; she recalled Helmut schooling her in the vital importance of pictorially referencing one’s progenitors —“or do I mean progenitals! ” he said, imp that he was. But the bugle had sounded the Call to Post. Tierney was off and running, while Jacquie brushed a hobbled horse in a forgotten stable.

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 .