Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

family loved the hospital portraits. The experience of going to their Northridge home with proofsheets — watching Ginger bend like a scholar to look through the loupe — was something Jacquie would never forget. The husband was at work, & Jacquie was glad. For a man, the death of his infant was a cold, finite event; for two moms, a chance to commune with a firefly soul that seemed just then to be as present as it was incorporeal. Yet for all Jacquie’s supernal rationalizations — the baby’s quicksilver, inextinguishable life force must be grieved over yet not mourned, a specious riddle reinforced by the mom’s truly spiritual equanimity, born, reasoned Jacquie, by the knowledge of the Great Mother that we are wont to finally seek that plot of infinite lilies of the field — for all Jacquie’s tiny, supernatural theories, each calculated to minimize and repress, to expunge & make palatable the horror of what happened, on the way to her car she felt the unbearable, queasy sorrow of living-mother/dead-child aloneness like a gust of hot propeller wind at her back & feared with each step she might turn to stone.

. .

She was still searching for a way to reclaim her own firefly soul; that of the artist she’d begun to fear was no more. Her life had capsized, trapping her beneath.

Then she read something that yanked her back with some hilarity to HelmutWorld & the boomboom years of his mentorship, her artful schooling in the theory & practice of all things photoshock. According to DailyMailOnline, there’d been a great to-do down under. A peer of Jacquie’s who’d shown at the Guggenheim and the Venice Biennale was in hot water. A major show in Sydney had been cancelled due to complaints over pics of a nude 13-year-old girl; a clear case (for Jacquie) of déjà nu. Child protection advocates were incensed; the exhibit was shut down; images seized by police under the Crimes Act. Naturally, the Newtonian Laws of Negative Press prevailed and held true — a censorship hurlyburly ensued on a national level and the revolted Prime Minister leapt dutifully into the fray. But the artist needn’t fear, as celebrity help was on its way (Newton’s 2nd Law) in nothing less than the form of Cate Blanchett captaining her team in pursuit of Australia’s prestigious A Cup. Newton’s Third wrapped things up nicely in the end with a press release: The New South Wales Dept of Public Prosecutions announced that no charges would be filed.

Jacquie had a wild, mad laugh about it, the kind of huge, careless, orgiastic, toxin-busting guffaws that borderline personalities are known to indulge in the privacy of their homes. She sorely missed the man, his dry wit and wry level-headedness, his kinks & lighthearted gravitas, the charm and wisdom of his cynically uncynical counsel too. Now that she was having another non-career crisis, where the fuck was Helmut when you really needed him? She had the great good fortune of supping with him the night before he died. Jacquie had been oeuvre-hustling in LA, she was a bit rusty and out of her league but Helmut graciously insisted she join them for dinner at Il Sole: he & his wife June, Uma Thurman & Andre Balazs, Benedikt/Angelika Taschen, plus Jacquie & her date Pieter Wogg, a specialist at Christie’s who was a fan of way more than Jacquie’s pictures. (She used to say, “You only love me for my body of work.”) Helmut told everyone at the table how excited he was because “tomorrow, Cadillac is giving me an Escalade!” The next day, pulling out of the Chateau garage presumably to take the car for a trial spin, he dropped dead behind the wheel and crashed into a retaining wall.

She tried to hear his voice in her head, telling her what to do next, propping her up like he used to with trilingual pep talks, propounding that she still had it, if only she could step out of her own way, promising her that inspiration would come as long as she cultivated that certain je ne sais quoi shtick- to-it-iveness. But it was an old CD. Jacquie had never really been able to escape Phase One of Newton’s Master Plan. She’d never even made it from hairless to bush leagues… something happened, she’d lost her faith & self-confidence, & began to spend her days trying to figure out how not to die instead of how she might live. Whatever artistry left in her was stunted, remedial, irrelevant. She failed miserably at the 2.0 thing, failed to transform herself from Mann manqué cartographer of flat tit mysteries/pretween genito-urinary landscapes into a swan that knew exactly what it was — a mature artist, take her or leave her.

Lately, she’d come close to feeling the breath & hand of her wily mentor, in that she alit on a few things she thought he’d have heartily approved. Jacquie saw something on the CNN site about a 76-year-old Tokyo man, a former travel agent with a wife & children now making his living as an actor in the booming genre they called “elder porn.” She seriously considered flying to Japan to take his portrait—& tracking down other salami men —but it took lots of money to travel around like that. Unless she had a really strong feeling about it, which she didn’t, there wasn’t much point. She couldn’t afford to be lukewarm quixotic.

Another thing that got her attention was an article in People that came out in the weeks after Gabrielle Giffords got shot called I SURVIVED A BULLET TO THE HEAD. Among the gallery of unfortunates was a 21-year-old cheerleader turned dental assistant whose injury necessitated the removal of a bizarrely visible chunk of skull and brain; her head looked like a clock missing that slice of 9-to-midnight pie — nothing but airspace. She was fully functional, arriving at her own homecoming queen ceremony in wheelchair & helmet. Another fine specimen was a young man who miraculously recovered from a bullet fired into his cerebellum when he was 5 years-old — the shooter was his dad, who killed his brother, strangled his mom then shot himself to death. Far be it from me to suggest psychotherapy. Jacquie thought maybe she could hit the road with the goal of taking 25 portraits of Americans who survived those kind of head wounds. She clipped something the cheerleader had said, “This is my new normal,” which Jacquie thought would make a helluva title for a book: The New Normal.

Um, well, I have a new normal too: career death & poverty, and severely damaged children who hate & rob me.

Ain’t that a kick in the head?

. .

She couldn’t believe it: Pieter was friend requesting. They’d been out of touch for a few years. He was living in London now, coming to L.A. next week. Hey let’s just pick up where we left off, he wrote, in a light & funny way, so he wouldn’t feel so rejected if Jacquie was in a relationship or whatever.

He took her to a wonderful Moroccan restaurant called Tagine that he’d been “obsessing about.” (A typically gay Pieter phrase.) He told her that James Franco recommended it to him — the actor recently collaborated with Gus Van Sant & Michael Stipe on a mixed media installation at the gallery Pieter worked for in the UK — as a place where the odds were good for running into cast members of Glee , the show he said he was unfortunately “ still fucking obsessed with & it’s so over .” O boy , he’d gotten so much gayer than she remembered. “James said the glee club gather at three distinct watering holes: Tagine, Sur or The Little Door. So before I blow this town, I’m going to take you to each one.”

They jogged/ambled down a rather short & narrow Memory Lane — they’d only had a six-month thing. Oddly, the cork in the affair had been the dinner party at Il Sole; they spent the night together, & that was that. They’d only seen each other a handful of times since Helmut died, in ’04.