Widow Basquiat Read Online Free PDF

Hepaints
Self-portrait with Suzanne.
He paints her speaking her chicken-chatter, “PTFME E a a a R M R M O AAAAAAAA.”
    They do coke six or seven times a day. He tells Suzanne she can only wear one dress. It is a gray shift with white checks. He tells her she can only wear one pair of very large men’s shoes. He does another line of coke. Suzanne walks clunk-clunk-clunk, her feet wading in the shoes, around the loft. He tells her she can’t wear lipstick anymore. He says she can only buy groceries and detergents. Then he says no, he will buy them. He does another line of coke and paints
Big Shoes
, a portrait of Suzanne in big shoes. He calls her Venus. He says, “Hey, Venus, come and kiss me.” He says, “Venus, go get us some coke.” He writes “Venus” into his paintings and says Suzanne is only with him for his money.
    Jean-Michel sticks black paper over all the windows so that they won’t know if it is day or night. “The day is too light,” he says.
    Soon Suzanne stops cleaning and Jean-Michel stays at home all day.
    Suzanne finds a place to live under a small table, like a small cat that finds a hiding place. From here she watches Jean-Michel paint, sleep and do drugs. He picks up books, cereal boxes, the newspaper or whatever is around. He finds a word or phrase and paints it on his board or canvas. A fewtimes a day he crawls under the table with Suzanne and gives her a kiss on the forehead. Sometimes he pulls her out, has sex with her, and then puts her back under the table and continues to paint.
    Sometimes Suzanne weeps a little and Jean-Michel says, “Shut up, Venus. I know what it is like to be tied up and fed, with a bowl of rice on the floor, like an animal. I once counted my bruises and I had thirty-two.”
    Suzanne moves from under the table into a closet in the bedroom. In here there is a green trench coat, a pair of moccasins, black and pink pumps, a tin frying pan, a supermarket plastic bag full of bills, two large boxes of chalk. Under one moccasin Suzanne finds a small box of birthday candles.

BLACK TAR SOAP
    Jean-Michel’s favorite soap is Black Tar Soap. He uses it every day. It makes a gray lather. No one else can use it. It is his joke. Jean-Michel draws it on his paintings.
    Everything was symbolic to him. How he dressed, how he spoke, how he thought, who he associated with. Everything had to be prolific or why do it and his attitude was always tongue-in-cheek. Jean was always watching himself from outside of himself and laughing.
    When he had a blonde girlfriend from a WASP upper-middle-class family he dressed like a preppy, like a Kennedy. But he would do just one thing to throw the whole thing off, like keep his hair in crazy dreadlocks—and not the dreadlocks you see on anyone.
    He tried to make people notice him, wake them up, by using a symbol out of context. This occurred in his paintings and in his actions. He never took anything as it was. Any idea, any belief, any norm was very quickly examined and used in his art.

A GENEALOGY OF HEROES
    Jean-Michel loves boxers and musicians. His heroes are Hendrix, Joplin, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Joe Louis. He loves anyone who died from a drug overdose. He says he loves Suzanne also because she is the first woman he has ever met who is a living, walking, breathing cartoon.
    Jean had a pair of red boxing gloves. He said he liked to put his hands in them and just lie on the bed and watch television. He said he could feel thunderbolts in them. Sometimes he would bounce and box around the apartment hitting the refrigerator and the walls.

BROKEN BLOSSOMS (THE YELLOW MAN AND THE GIRL)
    On the television screen the girl makes herself smile by pushing up the corners of her mouth with the tips of her fingers.
    When not serving as a punching bag
    to relieve the Battler’s feelings, the
    bruised little body may be seen creeping
    around the docks of Limehouse.
    Jean-Michel and Suzanne are in bed under Suzanne’s Superman blanket. They