Drawing Blood Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Molly Crabapple

  Endpapers

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  was drawing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

  I sat in the courtroom at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, watching a pretrial hearing for the 9/11 military commission in a room bisected by three layers of soundproof glass. On one side sat a few dozen legal observers and journalists, minded by soldiers. On the other, the tribunal hashed out a new, Orwellian form of law. We listened to the proceedings as we watched them through the glass—the audio delivered on a thirty-second delay, through CIA-controlled video monitors. One woman, whose husband had been burned alive in the towers, sat in the front row. Holding her husband’s photo, she tried unsuccessfully to meet Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s eyes.

  The court took a break. Through the glass, I stared at the alleged mastermind of 9/11 as he chatted with his codefendants. With fruit juice, he’d dyed his beard an implausible orange. He wore a camouflage hunting vest that accentuated his paunch.

  I sketched frantically, pens held between my teeth. You’re the man who blew up my city, I thought. You beheaded Daniel Pearl. The American government kidnapped you, tortured you, drowned you till near death. Now you’re in this prison, filled with innocent men, being used as its excuse.

  I was in Guantánamo Bay researching the story of one such wrongly imprisoned man. It was easiest to visit the base during a military commission, so Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s hearings gave me a reason for being there. But, during the commissions, Guantánamo forbade members of the press to see the prisons themselves. So instead I sat in the courtroom, drawing KSM because he was there.

  at Vice (vice.com)

  It’s a strange kind of disassociation, to stare into another’s eyes only to make those eyes into shapes on paper. To draw is to objectify, to go momentarily to a place where aesthetics mean more than morality. I shaded the alleged murderer’s brow bone. I rendered the curls of his beard so they would fall across the page in an interesting sweep.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed smirked at me through the glass. I’m watching you like a zoo animal, I thought. You want to watch me back? Fair enough.

  I turned the page, switched my markers, and started another sketch.

  During my seven days at Guantánamo, the prison kept us from seeing any detainees besides the 9/11 codefendants. The other men, 152 in all, remained entombed in Camps Five and Six. The military press officers were forbidden even to speak their names. These prisoners’ absence hung heavier than any presence could. I drew compulsively, hoping that sketches of Gitmo’s facilities could serve a purpose something like the chalk outlines of bodies at a crime scene, delineating space around the lost. I drew signs flaunting the base’s motto: “Honor-Bound to Defend Freedom.”

  Guantánamo is built on erasure. But art is a slippery thing. The prison may have had guns, razor wire, and oceans of redactor’s ink, but I had pictures. By the end of the week, I’d filled two sketchbooks. With each brushstroke, I thought about drawing the men back into existence.

  at Medium (medium.com)

  I was twenty-nine when I stood on the Guantánamo ferry. By that time, I had been drawing for twenty-five years. For me, art was obsession at first sketch. Each new drawing was at once an escape and a homecoming. The pen was a lockpick, the paper a castle I could hide within. To draw was trouble and safety, adventure and freedom. Art was a stranger making eyes through the smoke of a foreign dive bar. Art was my dearest friend.

  But before I could try to draw anyone else out of trouble, I had to save myself. I grew up angry, kicking against the boundaries of childhood. Unable to pay attention in school, I turned my worksheets into illuminated manuscripts. Demons frolicked around my biology handouts, and mermaids sprawled across my unfinished algebra tests. These early works earned me a punishment called “in-school suspension,” which involved sitting in a windowless room for eight hours, staring at a wall. Deprived of my sketchpad, I scratched drawings into the desk with my nails.

  Authority may have controlled the rest of my life, but in that four-cornered kingdom of paper, I lived as I pleased. There I was the actor, not the acted upon. When my mind turned in on itself, I drew anyway, learning that art can’t save you from pain, but the discipline of hard work can drag you through it. My pen became my life preserver.

  Once I was out in the world, the art that so horrified my teachers would become my way of gaining the attention of politicians, criminals, nightclub barons, and porn stars. It slipped me past doors marked “No Admittance,” past velvet ropes to rooms where dancers glittered, their lips the purest red.

  As the world changed, my art changed with it. The sketchbook I held on that Guantánamo ferry took me to protests, refugee camps, and war zones. Drawings became means of exposure, confrontation, or reckoning. Every line a weapon.

  Each time, my hand raced to finish before the kids scattered, the fighters noticed, the curtain rose, or the cops showed up.

  Drawing reduced me to essentials. Hand. Eyeball. Pencil.

  Fused with my subject, I was alone in the clean work of creation.

  This is the story of a girl and her sketchbook.

  Without art, you’re dead!” my great-grandfather Sam used to say.

  I never knew Sam Rothbort. He died before I was born. Photos show him as a shrunken old man, spry and lined, who liked to eat fire, stick pins through his cheeks, and hang from his feet on a chin-up bar at the door of his basement studio. Sam was born in a Belarusian shtetl in 1882. By 1905, he may have been involved with the Bund, an underground political party of Jewish communists. To avoid the draft, he fled to New York. When he got there, he painted—compulsively, promiscuously, selfishly. He turned out hundreds of canvases: Memories of his shtetl childhood. Tableux of Moses and the prophets. Self-portraits in drag. The dreamscape of Coney Island. The communist fist. When, during the Depression, he grew too poor to paint, he sculpted driftwood.

  Sam did not believe in formal education, war, eating meat, or respecting authority. Every morning he hauled dozens of paintings out onto the lawn of his tiny house in Brooklyn. He called this house the Rothbort Home Museum of Direct Art, and he was convinced it would threaten MoMA.

  “Make art every day,” Sam used to say.

  My mother is Sam’s granddaughter, and she followed in his footsteps. I grew up drawing by her side. My mother drew with looping, fluid lines. From her pen came a universe of Greek gods, princesses, maidens transforming into snails. She worked as an illustrator for toy companies and children’s books, drawing the Cabbage Patch Kids and Holly Hobbie from nine to five, then taking freelance jobs at night.

  In our family’s world, art was neither exotic nor unattainable, but instead both a family tradition and an adult way to earn a paycheck—as pro
saic in its way as fixing cars.

  My mother’s studio was a wonder, filled with things children weren’t supposed to touch: rubber cement that stank of poison; X-acto blades that left me with stitches in my hands; rows of foul-smelling markers and T squares lined up neatly; an airbrush she wore a ventilator to use. I knew about Pantone swatches before I knew there was a movie called Star Wars. At night, when my mom did freelance work, I banged on her studio door, begging her to let me in. She sat inside, working, sick with guilt. She worked all day and all night too, and had done so since she was twenty. During her pregnancy, when doctors consigned her to strict bed rest, she propped a board up next to her night table so she could keep turning out art jobs until she was scheduled to deliver.

  I knew I’d be an artist from the time my four-year-old hands first defaced a page. It wasn’t a matter of inborn talent, or of any love of the results. I hated everything I drew. But I had a child’s monomania, and for artists, that’s the most important thing. My mother encouraged me. She bought me paper dolls of Ziegfeld Follies dancers to mutilate, and showed me her own fat volumes of works by decadent English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and French poster artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. I watched in awe as she assembled a dollhouse from cut paper. She helped me with my first attempts at art, squeezing paint into a neatly arrayed color wheel for me. I mixed the colors together until I ruined the palette. When my Aladdin looked nothing like the one in the books, I howled till my eyes were raw.

  “He doesn’t look right because you’re drawing his nose like an upside-down seven,” my mother told me, and held my hand, guiding me through tear ducts and nostrils.

  When I was young, my parents lived in a house in Far Rockaway, Queens. The city had neglected the neighborhood so thoroughly that packs of wild dogs stalked through the streets. The neighbors ran a chop shop in our shared backyard, concealing the cars beneath overgrown ivy. Their two daughters played with me in the cars until the day we found a dead cat, rotting on the front seat of a gutted Chevy. After that, we hid in their basement, leafing through their father’s porn.

  When I was seven, my parents divorced. The year 1991 was a bad one for my mom: her mother died of cancer, and computers hit the toy industry, making her hand-done illustrations obsolete. She had been a successful commercial artist for more than twenty years, but a field can change fast. Suddenly, she and her colleagues were no longer needed. My mother and I moved to a small apartment on Long Island, and she started dating a big Irish guy who spent the weekends getting smashed and singing “Danny Boy” at local bars. Money was tight. She worked a series of gigs—substitute teacher, receptionist—before finally landing a job as the art director at a vending machine company. At least it paid for her health insurance.

  Every other weekend, mi padre made the three-hour drive to pick me up from my mother’s apartment. As our car crossed the Verrazano Bridge, he had me recite the names of New York’s boroughs—Brooklyn. Manhattan. Staten Island. Bronx. Queens.—repeated like a catechism. The green cables holding up the bridge flew past, the water swirled beneath us, and the skyscrapers pulled into the distance. It was an impossible city, a silver Babylon.

  Mi padre came to New York as a child. His own father, mi abuelito, had escaped the sugarcane fields of Puerto Rico by joining the US Army. After World War II, abuelito married a seamstress, moved to Brooklyn, and had four kids. They lived in one room. He got a job in a factory, which gave him the cancer that eventually killed him, and augmented his wages by making loans and buying property that he rented out to other Latino immigrants. Because he was brown, the factory he worked at refused to promote him. Every Saturday, he drank till he passed out, sometimes in tears, because he had to train the white men who would become his supervisors.

  Growing up, mi padre worked the midnight shift loading trucks with copies of the New York Daily News. He rode shotgun, throwing bundles of papers out at the stops, though the driver refused to deliver to black or Puerto Rican neighborhoods. My father’s intellect crackled around him in sly, sarcastic sparks, and eventually he won a place at Brooklyn Tech, one of the city’s elite public high schools. From there he went to the City University of New York and finally to Columbia University.

  When mi padre was in his early twenties, he got into a motorcycle crash. My mother was riding on the back. His shoulder was dislocated, which saved him from Vietnam. Her leg was shattered. She spent nearly a year in a cast up to her hip.

  Mi padre became a professor of political science. He was also a Marxist, and he was eager to introduce me to Puerto Rico’s history of resistance. On our car rides, he entertained me with stories of Jean Lafitte, reimagining him as a communist pirate who liberated plantations across the Caribbean—a spiritual precursor to the independentistas, the anti-imperialist Puerto Rican political party that was persecuted by the FBI.

  Mi padre raised labor issues with similar bravura. One day, he made up a story about a factory worker whose boss would not give him time off to sleep. When fatigue finally overcame the man, his hand was ripped off by machines, and he bled to death on the shop floor. Later, the story went, the man’s hand came back to strangle the boss.

  Mi padre grabbed me by the back of the neck.

  “The hand!” he screamed.

  I screamed right back, fear mixed with delight.

  He’d sit with me in his woodshop, holding a hammer, and tell me how the worker added value with his labor, and the capitalist made money only by paying the worker less than the value he added. He taught me to see each object as the culmination of a whole chain of such anonymous, exploited efforts.

  Mi padre had a chip on his shoulder, as I do now. Not many people wanted either of us to win. He’d been kicked around by life, and he taught me to kick back. But our edginess left scars—on others and on ourselves. Like me, he keeps grudges for decades. We are both small, dark, bug-eyed. We look like angry owls. I see flashes of him in my own face when I am too determined. It’s not a feminine look. I try to hide it. It comes out anyway.

  Mi padre gave me New York as my birthright. He taught me every inch of the city. The brownstones of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where his parents lived. In immigrant fashion abuelito had ripped out the ironwork and marble of his home and replaced it with the plastic schlock he considered modern.

  Fort Greene then was still the barrio; New York’s gentrification lay far in the future. In summer, kids pried open the fire hydrants to dance in the jets of water. When he was young, mi padre built boats to race in the rivers the open fire hydrants made.

  Mi padre argued politics with me beginning when I was eight, making me cry until I learned my way around an argument. From that point forward, no one ever made me cry again, except the men I loved. He’d tape-record his fights with university adversaries, then play them back for me. “Listen,” he’d say. “Who thinks they have the power here? Who really has the power?”

  Despite my loving parents and comfortable upbringing, I hated being a child.

  I would happily have doused my childhood in gasoline and lit a match. I would have dropped it in battery acid, then stood nearby and cackled. I would have fed my childhood a poisoned apple, locked it in a glass coffin, and forbidden all princes from the land. I loathed it to my tiny core.

  It wasn’t just my childhood I hated. It was the concept of childhood itself. Being a child meant having no control over my life. I bristled every time I had to ask permission to go to the bathroom during class—or to take an aspirin during school when I had cramps. I recoiled when a lady stopped me as I walked to the library, demanding to know where my parents were. The ride to school filled me with such foreboding that I faked a twisted ankle in order to be allowed to stay home. That worked until my mom caught me walking without a limp.

  Hating childhood meant I didn’t like other children much either. I drew portraits of the popular kids as gifts so they wouldn’t hit me, but I kept a secret notebook where I caricatured them cruelly. I gravitated toward anyone who seemed as bratty or boo
kish as I was, trying to enlist them to help me create an alternate world of art and adventure. Mostly they ran away.

  Reading obsessed me. I crossed the street with my head buried in books—a biography of Cleopatra, or an issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Books showed me a future. When I was eighteen, I vowed I’d turn myself into a chimera of my favorite characters: an artist/Folies Bergères dancer/spy. I hid books in my lap during classes. After school, I climbed the tree that grew in a park near our apartment. Shielded by the leaves, I sank into reading. The world faded. The sky grew dark. I pretended I was grown.

  When I was twelve, I found my consolation in punk rock.

  Nineties alt was a kingdom whose flags were the smeared pages of Maximum Rocknroll, the stripes of faded Kool-Aid pastel in a sad boy’s hair. It was a place where my loneliness and bizarre interests could be validated—if I could just mimic the right cultural markers. I stalked through school’s hallways, a brat in shredded black, wearing my superiority complex like a shield. I pierced my ears with safety pins. I scribbled cheerleaders tearing their own heads off. I worshipped Kurt Cobain as a martyr.

  In art class, we were assigned to create dioramas of our favorite artist. I chose Toulouse-Lautrec. An alcoholic little person with syphilis, he was the poster artist for the Moulin Rouge. While other posters attempted to portray wholesome fun, Lautrec’s art captured all the ambition and darkness behind a cancan girl’s ruffles. I sculpted him in papier-mâché seated at a café table with an absinthe bottle and a sketchbook. A dancing girl stood frozen behind him, her gartered leg kicking high. I wanted to be Toulouse-Lautrec—to draw beautiful women and sell my art to obscure magazines.

  My first attempt didn’t go well. In ballpoint, I drew a nude anorexic in front of a spiderweb. Requium, I wrote at the top. I didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded deep. With great hope, I sent the original art to a Xeroxed goth zine whose address I found in the zine directory Factsheet Five. They sent the drawing back. “We don’t accept art that isn’t spelled correctly,” read the publisher’s note.