The
tooth is what got me. I'm still sorry I didn't shoot him. He was beautiful, one
of those Pasolini kids who absorbs light then shines it back into your eyes and
blinds you. But I left my camera on the floor, and instead I just fucked him,
more than once. Then I lay awake and watched him sleep. When he woke in the
morning he looked at me, and I saw what had 'happened to him: his mother's
death, the small apartment in Queens where he lived with his father and sister,
the after-school job at a pet shop. Cleaning fish tanks, measuring out
birdseed. He told me all this, but I already knew; I could see the light
leaking from his eyes. I wanted to photograph him, but suddenly I felt real
panic. I gave him coffee and money for a cab and literally pushed him out of the
door. The look he gave me then was crushed and confused, but that I could live
with. What I couldn't deal with was the knowledge that he was so close to dead
already. The only thing that had made him feel alive was fucking me.
I
tried to explain this to Jeannie. She looked at me like I'd spit in her face.
"You're
crazy, Cass. You're, like, a nihilist. You're in love with annihilation."
"Yeah?
So is that a bad thing?"
She
didn't think that was funny. She left me soon after and got a job at a massage
parlor. I didn't care. I stayed in the apartment. By then I'd gotten messed up
with a rich girl from. Sarah Lawrence who liked slumming with me. She split
when the school year ended, by which time my father had figured out what was
going on—that I'd been kicked out of school and was no doubt spending the
checks he sent on drugs. He was surprisingly calm. He made sure I knew he
wouldn't give me another dollar until I straightened out and earned enough to
put myself back through school, but he also let me know I was always welcome
back home. I thanked him and kept in touch intermittently, usually by postcard.
I
bought a tripod and began doing a series of pictures, black-and-white
photographs of me dressed and posed like women in famous paintings. I called
the series "Dead Girls." There was me as Ophelia, wearing a
thrift-shop bridal gown and ribbons, floating in a tenement bathtub filled with
black-streaked water—dye bled from the ribbons so that it looked as though
blood flowed from my dress. There was me topless, sprawled in a Bowery alley on
my back as Waterhouse's dead "St. Eulalia." For Munch s "The
Next Day" I lay on top of my plywood bed with empty wine bottles scattered
around me. I used a similar setup for Walter Sickert's "The Camden Town
Murder."
It
took me five months. I got a job at a wino's liquor store on the Bowery to get
by. There were twenty-three photos when I was done, enough for a show.
My
central image derived from a lithograph from Redon's "La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine": a life-sized human skeleton, a plastic model I had a
friend borrow for me from the NYU art department. I draped it with a white
sheet and posed beside it, naked, my hand clutching its bony plastic fingers. I
set the shutter so that the image was so underexposed as to be almost indiscernible,
deliberately out of focus. All you saw was the skeleton, seeming to fall
forward through the frame, and floating beside it a face suggestive of a skull:
mine. I translated the drawing's original caption into English.
Death:
I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.
I
added these to my portfolio, and a few portraits I'd done of Jeannie and her
friends hanging out in the apartment and the back room at Max's. The pictures
were harsh and overlit, but they had a scary energy, most of it supplied by
Jeannie herself in torn fishnets and smeared eye makeup, her works on the floor
beside her, the glare of a naked hundred-watt bulb making Gillette blades glow
like they were radioactive.
It
didn't hurt that some of the figures lurking in the background were starting to
get written about. Back in January I'd begun seeing flyers stapled to telephone
poles around town: punk is coming. I bought the first copy of the magazine for
fifty cents at Bleecker Bob's not long after. A month later the first copy of
New
York Rocker
came out, and I bought that too. When I got off my night shift
at the liquor store I'd walk over to CBGB's and get trashed and dance. I'd take
my camera and shoot whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth,
broken bottles, zip knives. People laughing while blood ran down their face, or
someone else's. Some people didn't like getting their picture taken while
having sex or shooting up. I got good at throwing a punch then running. I
started wearing these pointy-toed black cowboy boots that weren't good for
dancing, but I could kick the shit out of someone if he lunged for me and be
gone before his knees hit the floor. I loved the rush of adrenaline and rage.
It was as good as sex for me.
"Scary
Neary!" Jeannie shouted when she saw me coming. By then people were
getting used to me. And other people were starting to take pictures too.
Punk
and
New York Rocker
didn't create the scene, but they gave it a
name, and we all knew where it lived.
By
now I'd made some contacts in the city's photography scene. I brought my photos
to the director of the Lumen Gallery, and he agreed to give me a small show in
the back room. Three years earlier, Robert Mapplethorpe had begun to win a
following among Warhol acolytes and some prescient artworld types. The same
thing was happening now with the downtown scene. I sent out a hundred xeroxed
invitations to everyone I vaguely knew and scattered another hundred at the
clubs where I hung out. I made sure all the musicians knew they were featured
in the photos. Then I bought myself a bottle of Taittinger Brut, got smashed,
and went to my opening.
It
was the right place at the right time. "Dead Girls" bridged the gap
between two camps, photography and punk, my staged self-portraits and documentary
images of the downtown scene. The dreamy kitsch of photos like "St.
Eulalia" melded into the shock of seeing Jeannie nod out while the lead
singer of Anubis Uprising masturbated onto her face. I could hear the buzz as I
stumbled into the back room at Lumen.
I
was a hit, and I wasn't yet twenty years old.
who
are the mystery girls? ran the
Voice
headline a week after my show
opened, Cassandra Neary's punk provocations. They used a detail of "St.
Eulalia," cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign.
It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn't a bad take, since I was being
castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.
I
didn't care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB's. I loved the rituals of
processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for
an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the
negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right,
until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.
But
best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that
incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a
black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a
tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they'd
seen a ghost with a gun.
This
is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I'd seen them
and taken the picture but feeling like I'd made them, like they'd never have
existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or
sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing
you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.
You
read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and
technique; but you didn't hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a
gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and
something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at
least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just
yanking to see what was behind it; to see what was left when everything else
was torn away.
My
story was picked up by the
Daily News.
Then the
Sunday Times Magazine
interviewed me for a very brief piece. And there were the "Dead
Girls" photos, and there was me, smoking a Kent and wearing beat-up black
jeans and red Keds and a MC5 T-shirt filigreed with cigarette burns, my hair a
dirty blond halo around a pale face with no makeup. I looked like what your
mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don't come home.
I
was actually a little worried about what my father would think. He finally
called me after the
Times Magazine
story ran. He made it clear that he
had no interest in seeing the show—a relief to both of us—but he also wanted to
make sure I wasn't in any legal trouble.
"Anything
comes up, call Ken Wilburn over in Queens," he said and gave me the
number. "He represents some guys, they'll help you out if you get into
trouble. I don't know how the hell you can make money out of this stuff, Cass,
but I hope to God you do. Especially if you need Wilburn."
I
never did need to call Wilburn. But I didn't make much money, either The
Times
article did its business, and all the photos sold; but I had only set the
price at seventy-five bucks a pop. Jeannie bought most of them—God knows where
she found the money—but about six months later they were destroyed when her
apartment flooded. The girlfriend of Anubis Rising's lead singer bought the
picture of him with Jeannie then proceeded to set it on fire with her Bic
lighter in the gallery, screaming "Fucking cunt!" until someone threw
her out. John Holstrom bought a picture that had Johnny Thunders in the corner.
And
the last photo went to Sam Wagstaff, which is how I got a book deal. I'd met a
literary agent at my opening, a petite red-haired woman in a red latex
miniskirt named Linda Kalman.
"This
is very interesting," she said, peering at "Psychopomp." She was
older than most of the people at the show, in her mid-thirties, and wore
expensive gold jewelry and stiletto-heeled boots. I pegged her for a socialite
slumming among the barbarians. She glanced at the crowd drinking white wine in
plastic cups, Jeannie and her friends hooting raucously as a reporter took
notes. "Do you know which one's the artist?"
I
dropped my cigarette and stubbed it out with my sneaker. "That would be
me."
"Really."
Her eyes narrowed. She gave me a small smile then extended her hand.
"Linda Kalman. I'm working on a book right now with Chris Makos. Do you
know him?"
"Yeah,"
I lied and shook her hand. "Cass Neary."
"Cass.
Are you with a gallery?"
"No."
"Mmmm."
She looked at me sideways, opened a little red clutch purse. "Well. Here.
Take my card. Call me. Let me know who buys your pictures. And good luck."
As
it turned out, she got in touch with me when she read the piece in
New York
Rocker.
"So."
I could hear her drag deeply on a cigarette on the other end of the line.
"Have you sold any photographs yet? Do you know who bought them?"
When
I named Wagstaff, she sucked her breath in sharply. "Sam Wagstaff?"
"Yeah."
"You
know who he is, right?"
"Yeah."
A collector and curator with deep pockets; Mapplethorpe's lover, though I'd
heard they were on the outs.
"Well,
Cass. Are you interested in putting a book together? Because I have an editor
who's very interested in what's happening downtown. She can get someone to
write an introductory essay, I think she said Macey Claire-Marsden from the
Eastman Foundation might do it. It's not huge money, but it would be good
exposure for you."
She
hesitated. "I think you should do it. Not just for me. This kind of
opportunity doesn't come that often, Cass. Not for someone as young as you. You
don't want to blow it."
"Let
me think about it." I didn't say anything, didn't hang up. I counted to
five then said, "Yeah, okay. Sure. I'll do it."
But
you know what?
I
blew it anyway.
2
a
year later
Dead Girls
came out and got good press. Good reviews, good
coverage, and the first printing sold through, which for a fifty-dollar
coffee-table book by an unknown twenty-one-year-old photographer was pretty
decent. This was back when you'd see books by Helmut Newton and David Hamilton
in the front windows of Brentano's and Rizzoli Books.
Now
you started seeing
Dead Girls
too. I was written up in
Interview
and
WWW.
Word got out that I was funny: I got on the radio and even had a
fleeting appearance on the Merv Griffin Show.
But
I was fucking up big time. I showed up at interviews drunk. I insulted people.
I came on to the women hired to talk to me, which pissed them off, and pissed
off the guys too. A reporter referred to me as a lesbian photographer, and I
reamed him out about it when I saw him a few nights later. I wasn't a lesbian;
I wasn't straight. When it comes to relationships, I'm an equal opportunity
destroyer. I fucked whoever I wanted to. Women just seemed able to put up with
me better than men did. For a little while, anyway. The
Soho Weekly News
did
a story on what a mess I was, quoting liberally from the interview I'd given
them. I thought I was a fucking rock star, I thought I was Iggy fucking Pop;
but no one was paying to watch me fall off the stage.