Drawing Blood Read online

I ate a donut slowly. The frosting was strawberry, delicious as something that was about to end.

  One of Wrench’s girlfriends started singing. “It’s the end of the world as we know it!”

  “. . . and I feel fine!” we answered softly.

  During the war’s first days, CNN looped footage of American bombs lighting the air above Baghdad. The bombs looked like triumphal fireworks, but the news never showed what happened to the people below. As I kept up my attendance at the protests, John busied himself with a more personal rebellion. On his own at last, he started to turn himself into the person he’d always wanted to be. He strode straighter, combed his hair to the side like a Weimar rent boy, and drowned his working-class accent beneath a torrent of verbal posh. At first I mocked him, calling him Baron von Fullovit. He adopted the nickname with glee.

  One night, after class, we walked through SoHo. The shops were closed, but we stared through our reflections into the Louis Vuitton window, our faces framing those bland bags inexplicably anointed as luxurious. The shop’s allure had less to do with what it sold than with the meaning of its price tags: to shop there, you had to have enough money to waste. I spent a year’s salary on some cuff links, whisper SoHo’s demons. Nothing can touch me.

  The Baron practiced sprezzatura, the aristocratic virtue of not caring. To be poor, as John was, meant to care too much.

  We walked up a dozen blocks until I spotted a Goodwill in south Chelsea that was still miraculously open. Remorseful for mocking John’s transformation, I dragged him inside. “We’ll dress you right,” I promised. After tearing through the racks, I found him a polyester caterer’s vest that seemed the height of sophistication, and a tailored shirt to match. The monogram on the cuffs read RLN.

  “I’ll tell everyone it means Rogers Long Nightly,” John announced.

  Fairy tales deal in sets of three, with the most miraculous event arriving last. That night was no exception. That winter, John owned a single hoodie to keep him warm. A sack of stained green flannel, it seemed more hateful each day, until it stood for awkwardness, for poverty, for the New Jersey projects themselves. From the back of the shop, I pulled a coat: long, tailored, with a nineteenth-century-style cape. John put it on and stared at himself in the mirror, transfixed. The seams emphasized his height; the cape broadened his already wide shoulders; the coat’s body fell in a sleek single line. We said nothing as he handed his money to the cashier.

  Outside the store, we threw the hoodie into a Dumpster, then kicked it for good measure. We whooped. We danced.

  “Old John is dead,” we cackled. “Baron von Fullovit is alive!”

  The winter dragged into a sleety New York spring. I walked to class past the mosaicked lampposts, their tiles peeling off. The community gardens were sugar-dusted with frost, their flowerbeds brown and dead. As I passed the Ukrainian church on First Avenue, I noticed a small parcel tied to the fence. When I looked closer, I saw it was a homemade doll. Its shiny black head was topped with straw, its eyeholes filled with glitter. Its body was wrapped in calico, sewn with charms, and it had a small bag around its neck.

  Without thinking, I took it home.

  Anthony had disappeared.

  He no longer picked up the phone or answered his email, and when I called, his mother told me she didn’t know where he was. I cried each night, deprived from the warmth of his voice at the other end of the line. I kept calling, increasingly desperate, until one day, I punched his number into a pay phone in Penn Station and he picked up.

  “You’ve been calling a lot,” he said. “We should talk.”

  We sat on my old bed, in my mother’s house on Long Island, where we used to fuck for hours when I was sixteen and thought he knew everything in the world.

  “I cheated on you with Russell,” I said.

  “Obviously. I cheated on you with Maureen.” The name registered, vaguely: she was an ordinary girl from Long Island who went to raves, and would never, ever run off to Morocco.

  I lay my head on his shoulder and cried.

  “I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” he said. “I think you’re too young for me, and all you want is to stay in this room and have sex.”

  I asked him for three months to think it over. We parted smiling. When the door closed, though, I wanted to die.

  Devastated as I was for losing him, I hated myself more for the devastation I felt. For girls my age, the heart was the new hymen—the most shameful thing a man could break.

  Our lease on the East Village room was running out, and each day the walls seemed tighter around me. It was time to move on.

  I spent hours a day on Craigslist, wading through posts from men looking to rent to girls who would clean for them naked (the live nude maids would still have to pay six hundred dollars a month for their quarters). Domestic skills were never my forte. Finally, I found a place on Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Too broke to hire a man with a van, I carried my great-grandparents’ furniture the half mile to the subway, rode the L train seated in a busted armchair from the Depression, luxuriously reading, then got off at Bedford Avenue, and, shoulders screaming, carried the chair to my new home.

  As Bedford ran south, toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the neighborhood became Puerto Rican, like the one mi padre had grown up in. Old men in undershirts played dominos outside, families barbecued, and young guys sat shooting the shit on the stoops. “Ssss! Rubia!” they hollered after me. I ignored them. “Yo, white bitch,” they shouted at my back. I kept walking, shoulders tense, furious less from the harassment than from the fact that they didn’t recognize my latinidad. To the neighborhood guys, I was just another gentrifying white girl, pushing them out of their homes.

  Only years later did I realize that I should have said hello back.

  In September, Anthony asked to see me again. I’d long pictured that day: how beautiful I would be, how much he’d regret losing what we had. In the apartment hallway, he looked the same: with his black trench coat, pale skin, and absinthe eyes.

  We fell into each other, kissing like we were the only drug we’d ever need.

  He threw me onto the bare mattress, where he pushed himself inside me. I came against him, and he inside me, so hard we could have broken.

  “I think I should leave,” he said.

  “I think you should too.”

  After, I lay on the floor with my eyes closed, imagining each moment with Anthony falling over me like a snowflake. Some were as innocent as water. Others were acid. I wondered how they would burn.

  The next day, at the cafeteria, I told John what had happened. He mocked me kindly. Anthony lives in Howard Beach, he said. He spends his time smoking weed in his childhood bedroom.

  I pouted. The girl he ditched me for was just some nothing from Long Island! Not a Great Artist like me.

  John sighed impatiently. “Maybe you should try sleeping around.”

  Love makes you a character. Losing love kills that character. You lose all the shared jokes, the stories, and the self you were. So you decide to construct another.

  If I couldn’t be Anthony’s girl, I decided, I’d be a famous artist. But my skills had so far to go. I took out a copy of Arthur Guptill’s Rendering in Pen and Ink. Bound in brown linen, it had been given to my mother by a high school art teacher, and she had given it to me. Its spine was cracked, but inside it revealed the whiplash discipline behind the work of illustrators like Edmund Dulac, Willy Pogany, and Albrecht Dürer. I studied how to draw hair like a Gibson Girl’s or to flick my pen till the ink sped like motion and blood. I used a crow quill pen, the modern implement closest to quills and ink.

  The Havemeyer apartment came with two male roommates. One was in the midst of a vivid psychiatric decline. He quit his job, grew too obese to wear clothing, stopped flushing the toilet, and filled his room with rotting food. He sometimes chased the resulting roaches with a baseball bat. My other roommate was a bartender in his forties who seldom left his room, except for the times he wro
te erotic fiction about me and left it under my door.

  Every morning, I sat at my small mahogany table—the one my mother had bought when she studied art at Pratt—trying to block out the sound of porn blaring from the moldy quarters of Roommate A.

  My first attempts at drawing faces in crow quill looked like striated meat, so I forced myself to start at the beginning of the book. Guptill instructs his readers to fill a hundred squares in careful dots, checks, and stipples. I did each hatefully. When the ink blobbed, ruining the square, I’d force myself to do it again. After a month, I moved on to drawing folded fabric, then cups, then faces. I drew a demon balancing on old books, and convinced a small literary magazine to run the illustration on its cover. I worked with mute discipline, with stubbornness rather than pleasure. I wouldn’t be happy, but work made my brain stop.

  I grew better. I worked more.

  In class, I proudly balanced my ink bottle on the edge of the desk. I drew imps, Victorian ladies, belly dancers. John peered over my shoulder. “They’re so . . . detailed,” he sniffed. With surprise or distaste? I wasn’t sure.

  John had just hustled a chunk of cash, and we were, as he put it, “drunk as poets on payday.” We hurtled down Christopher Street, past the Stonewall Inn, where black and latino trans women had fought off the cops in the ’70s, signaling one beginning in the fight for gay rights. We were talking fast, inventing pasts for ourselves that got us higher than drugs.

  “You’re Johnny Panama,” I told him, flipping his straw-brimmed hat. “Johnny Panama, who came from Appalachia and made his fortune on the roulette wheel and threw himself into the Hudson when he saw his first wrinkle.”

  The lights of Lips, the drag bar, shone lurid. Swarovski high heels, organ pink, blink, dazzle, shine. The bouncer was smoking around the corner, so John dragged me in, buying me a sticky-sweet grasshopper.

  One by one the drag queens filed out. They were striking beauties, tall and leggy, their wigs towering to baroque heights, their slim waists wrapped in leopard print. They strutted, sang, and then went into the audience, where some middle-aged female tourists were having a night out. To the hoots of her friends, one woman sat on a chair on the stage. A drag queen gave her a bored lap dance, grinding the woman through her khakis.

  I stared at the drag queen. She’d painted lime half moons on her eyelids. They glowed against her brown skin. Her lips sparkled with the red glitter she’d pressed into the gloss. She seemed bemused, shimmying her hips in the square woman’s face—but she also seemed like she’d have no problem punching people who needed it.

  The woman on the chair was not queer. She was neither desiring nor desired. Her friends shrieked at her audacity.

  I looked at the tourist women, then at John, and rolled my eyes. Then I caught sight of myself in the bar mirror. I saw my rats’ nest hair, my flaking lips, the circles under my eyes. I looked back at the drag queen. I was neglecting the possibilities extended to me.

  As Simone de Beauvoir says, “woman is not born but made.” I had attractive raw materials, but femininity is a construct. I practiced penciling my lips, marking my eyeliner with a confident swoosh.

  “Are you trying to look like a whore?” John asked. “Because that is a look.”

  I scowled and kept troweling on paint. A new face felt like a defense, even if my makeup resembled my ambition: too loud, too obvious, all wrong. I dug through a box of trimmings I’d inherited from a great aunt, pinning silk flowers into my hair and fringe onto my cuffs. I bought heels from Goodwill to replace my clunky sandals. Thinking it looked French, I tied a scrap of ragged chiffon around my neck.

  As I rebuilt myself, I decided I needed a new name. Jennifer was my childhood name, but it was ugly and unwanted. Now was the time to start afresh. I looked in the mirror. In the corner was wedged a postcard that Edward, from Shakespeare and Company, had sent me in the winter of 2002. It showed Freud and his daughter Anna, drinking at a café. “To Molly Crabapple. This reminds me of us,” he’d written.

  When I first got the card, I’d stuck it on my mirror and forgotten it. Now I reconsidered. “Molly Crabapple” was a good name: short, memorable, cutely goth amid the Internet models I stalked online—the Annie Absinthes and Vanessa Vexations, clad in only their sneers and neon hair.

  The name Molly Crabapple would fit in among them. Maybe I would too.

  Every day, I passed a dive bar called the Rain Lounge on my way to the subway. Perpetually empty, it was painted purple, its vinyl sofas spilling stuffing. A disco ball twirled overhead, casting twinkles for a party that would never come.

  That day, after class, I summoned up my courage and walked in. The owner grinned widely when he saw me.

  “Hiimmollycrabapple,” I blurted.

  “What was that?”

  “Molly,” I said more slowly. “Molly Crabapple. I’m an artist! I was wondering, um, maybe . . . I saw your walls looked empty and I have some art and maybe I could have a show here if you wanted, please?”

  He raised his eyebrows, not unkindly. “Sure. Want to do it next month?”

  I ran down Bedford in ecstasy. It was just that easy. Next month I’d have my first gallery show! (In my mind, that bar was a gallery.) All my drawings would sell, and the Williamsburg hipsters would notice me, and I’d make my mark on the world.

  I marched over to the dollar store beneath the elevated train tracks and bought every Virgin Mary painting they had. The paintings all came with elaborate gilt frames—plastic, of course, but I could paint them black.

  The guy at the cash register looked bemused.

  “You reselling these?” he asked.

  “No! I’m an artist.”

  I carried them home and pried out the Virgin Marys with a screwdriver, cutting up my hands in the process. I framed my ink drawings with an astounding lack of craft, managing to trap carpet fuzz on each dirt-besmirched matte.

  I printed out show flyers at Kinko’s, using off-white paper I told myself was fancy, then cut them out myself to save a few bucks. Each was crooked. At the Read Café, I shyly told the adorable barista: “I’m having an art show. You should check it out.”

  She told me she’d be out of town, not waiting to hear the date.

  Still hopeful, I left a few flyers by the window.

  On the day of the show, I hauled the framed drawings the half mile to the Rain Lounge myself. The bags cut bloody grooves in my hands. I broke two frames along the way.

  When I got there, the owner wasn’t there. The bartender looked me up and down skeptically. “No one told me about any art show,” he mumbled. Reluctantly, he let me hang the art.

  Night fell. My “opening” was set for eight p.m. The bartender didn’t turn on the lights.

  John came down to support me. He wore a polyester silver suit.

  “Tartlet!” he announced, grinning, sweeping his arms wide. Then he looked around. “It’s a bit dark in here, no?” he asked.

  I shrugged in my thrift-store prom dress.

  “And the art is crooked.”

  We sat next to each other at the bar, both of us staring dead forward. For the next five hours, patrons trickled in to watch a football game. Not one came for my show. John charmed a few of them into buying us drinks in exchange for drawing their caricatures. I scowled. With all the mental force I could muster, I willed them to look at my work. They didn’t even have to buy anything. I just wanted them to notice it was there.

  No one did.

  By the end of the night, half the art had fallen to the floor.

  Artists are told that we’ll be discovered. That there is a meritocratic Yahweh on high, and if only we’re good enough, he’ll reward us with magazine spreads, collectors, and a white-cube gallery in Tribeca.

  That night at the Rain Lounge, I realized that, if such a god existed, he didn’t frequent dive bars. If I stayed humble and waited for my work to speak for itself, I’d never get the opportunity to do good work at all.

  John begged off after a few hours. I stay
ed till four A.M., watching Williamsburg ignore me.

  I never picked the drawings back up.

  During my first year at FIT, I made the acquaintance of a cam girl. Rebecca worked out of a cubicle, mechanically fucking a motorized dildo that the guy on the other side of the monitor thought he controlled. She soon figured out more lucrative arrangements. She introduced me to her clients over a luxurious dinner, but sugar baby–hood wasn’t for me. Filet mignon didn’t taste like much in that company.

  Still, her paycheck awed me.

  I had only one skill: drawing pictures. But the tools that were required to become a professional artist—a website, a properly printed portfolio, a constant stream of quality supplies—cost more than I could make working retail. Meanwhile, in three hours posing for a webcam, Rebecca earned what she could have made in a week at a legit job.

  We were young women, at a bad school, studying for a competitive, ill-paying industry. What did we have to interest people besides our looks?

  It was money that drove me to the naked girl business. But I also wanted to test myself. I wanted to see if I could work in a field as fraught and stigmatized as sex work, and emerge unscathed. I wanted to burn off childhood.

  I combed through Craigslist, looking for a way in. After answering dozens of ads—“Very Open Minded Models to Shoot Erotica 4 Art-Exhibits”; “Highly Discreet”—the artist Cynthia von Buhler hired me to pose as a human statue at a loft party. I painted myself white like Venus, with my breasts out and my hips draped in a white sheet. After a night drinking absinthe with Manhattan’s moneyed bohemia, I took home two hundred and fifty dollars in tips, and swore off honest employment forever.

  I got my first regular gigs working as an artist’s model. For ten dollars an hour, I shivered before roomfuls of university students. Poses started at thirty seconds, and by the end, we stayed frozen for twenty minutes at a time. Posing had all the fascination of sitting on a cross-country bus ride without a book. My eyes would blur and my back would scream, and I’d wonder how long time could possibly last, but it lasted longer. The students would not speak to the models directly, ostensibly out of respect, instead addressing us through the teacher. Professionalism meant objectification—not the sexy kind, but the kind that turns you into an object, like a chair.