LOS ANGELES, CA — This is a story that yolks together two moments, separated by some 25 years. Both moments are graced with an awful beauty and bound together with the grotesque negligence of brute destruction. For me, the two moments are two eyeballs gazing at one distant flame, their separation curling a parallax that threatens all the depth of lonely space, the black velveteen on which burst certain moments’ holy luminescence. Here’s a story of a man who glows, ‘cause he’s on fire. Watch too closely, and he burns you.
This story starts with a naked woman and man with serpentine persuasion. I watched them both, with my first Leica, in the rubble of burnt out Samy’s Camera a couple days after the LA Riots. First I had photographed the woman, in no more than jackboots amidst the charred eyes of roasted cameras in the small acre of wasteland. I knew right then I was going to be a photographer. No small feat, to know what you’re going to do with life. So I went back the next day, hungry for more inspiration, with a new and strange friend. He was magnetic in buckskin and roped jewelry. His red Lennon glasses did that serpent trick on me. I can still see the picture in my mind as clearly as the ring in the nipple of the nude on the day before. Both pictures made me know things; one set my path and the other opened a door, both dared me enter.
I did on both accounts. Years on, I’m still as enthusiastically wrapped up in image making. That was the nude’s gift to me. But the man, I didn’t follow him as closely, for I knew I might do so at my own peril. What I saw through the camera that day when I shot that beautiful snake man, was a star. I saw all his incandescence, and I saw it flame up from absolute darkness. When heaven and hell meet, they first make light, then land, then beast and then man. He raced all those stages down the Zeiss time-stopper of my magic camera. Through it I SAW, and I KNEW, and I was a little AFRAID. There in the hoary garden of burnt cameras I began to understand a man who would name himself a name most ancient and primordial: Eve.
Flash forward a quarter century, when another interested parishioner laid eyes on that same Edenic creature of a man. This time, the man watching – not me – sees something much fiercer than a simple lurid serpent. He sees some kind of monster.
The police found beside his almost lifeless body the license plate of the car that ripped through him – he, Eve, the one of gardens lost, having roared headlong into the offending vehicle and dragged its plate with him into the other litters of a Topanga roadside ditch. They followed said- plate to a nearby home and found its resident supping quietly alone. When asked why he didn’t stop after hitting a man, he simply said, “All I saw was a metal beast. I had to keep going.”
My old friend, Eve, once upon a time, Anthony, from Minneapolis – once upon a time a father with his high school sweetheart – once upon a time a boy up on stage with Grandmaster Flash ‘cause he could dance! – once upon a time a youth who held Prince enchanted with a tune – once upon a time a signed rock star whose comet was hurling too fast and barefooted and high in the Hollywood Hills. After one long night with him in his giant house filled by his band, who were also his women – I feared they might actually be vampires, really – he would strike out stoned and barefoot and wholly ambivalent to convention or perversion or retention or deflation, knowing only that if he walked out into the Hollywood night, alone and stoned and fucking barefoot, he would go places, and do and be and see and feel and become consummate with any manner of adventure. By morning, or several of them hence, he’d saunter back, still barefoot, and wiser still, to the bed of record company pillows.
My old friend, Eve, who, unable to reconcile all his urges to sing the body electric and still play the game of the record pressers, found instead that the soul of Basquiat was up for grabs. He was lonely and ready to find flesh again, was done haunting and wanted to play with paint again. As if in a shaman’s premeditation, Eve let in that wandering spirit and began to paint, all of a sudden, and as with everything before this, he writ large his name upon the next door: Artist!
My old friend, Eve, who, I imagine was having a riff on marital un-bliss with his newest beautiful consort, had left the car roadside along the Topanga curves. He wandered into the road, to piss, to stargaze, to sulk in fury, or perhaps to simply pick a flower, and then he looked up and saw the oncoming headlights. “I summoned,” he solemnly swore to me, “all of my inner animal. This metal thing was hurling down upon me, so I became metal too and hurtled back.”
He died then and had a long talk with his mom. Then he realized his mom was God.
He saw he was wearing the most amazing coat of light, its fit supreme. All his limbs so deft and strong, and glowing! And then he saw a door, above it: #3. He turned to the unseen presence who was his audience and guide, his astral Bob Barker, and said, “I choose door number three.” At that, the coat flew off him, and he opened his eyes to find surgeons digging through his shattered carcass.
Friendship is built on the premise that time doesn’t intercede. You simply slip back into the stream of togetherness as you pluck at new threads of shared involvement. I picked back up with Eve in a pauper’s rehabilitation unit out by the VA on the west side of Los Angeles. Leave it to Eve to make his loose bedsuit look so au courant. Leave it to Eve to be the confidant of every mute, the Charlie to every Angel nurse, the Hyman Roth in this casino of suffering; leave it to Eve to make a wheelchair fashionable.
Three Doors, he told me. His long yarn of the afternoon lead me through them one by one, through the wonderfully convoluted terrain of his life. The first Door, his youth when all was promise, the promise of song and dance, the culmination of which was a return as golden man to the doorstep of Minneapolis’ own first son, their fair royalty, the Prince child himself. Anthony flew in barefoot and sang him a song that turned it all around and made Prince cry, instead of he us. But somehow all that hymnal, contact, contract and promise would all burn away.
Then the next Door, this time devoted to painting. The devotional medium. Adulthood equated with a burst into color and a contemplative brush upon canvas. All brimstone concerted. All soil ground into pigment. Paint, the panacea for the holy hurts his wide-ranging youth had left him. Paint, a religion and the church a big covey in South Central that would eventually burn down by a thoughtless gesture from the newest child he’d brought to being, this time a daughter, named after Picasso’s own progeny, Paloma.
Now the third Door. Fuck, for all I cared, as the hours passed by out on the smoking bench of the facility, his new calling was simply troubadour. Story Monger. Serpent with a Tale. I was as bewitched as ever in Eve’s care and consideration. He carried me aloft to gaze out across his milky white way and then to peer down through his navel at all the dark Dante hells within him. He’s known all the levels. Vacationed through all their terraces, sang the harpies into listless revery and circled round through pitch to caulk up his trusty non-stop boat, his song, his dance, his shuck and its limitless jive.
Now the boat had wheels, but the legs were, miraculously, regaining their bearing capacity. Oh! to crawl unto man again, to hobble your way back to the shuffle. Eve has passed through Door No.3 and is seeking the newest prize. He’s ante’d up to the heavenly Vanna White ‘cause she’s thrifty, blond and tight. He’s laying his bet as he’s cribbing his odds. He’s born again, literally, for what do you name the space you’re given after severely flat-lining? He’s pinioned with titanium and buoyed with mirth. The pain meds probably don’t hurt the stream of consciousness he floats down. But it’s a very pleasant raft he casts for us. As we work our way from the blue above to the worn-down furniture that jails us, we are all broken in one way or another. If you’re not, you’re probably not very interesting after nearly a half century of beating through the creative pines. We posture back with will to our better Edenic nature. We are given another chance, a Third Door, more flocking to flight our fancy. We are given life, again, and hell, let’s make mom, God, proud.
— Written by MEENO
— Photography by MEENO
— First published in [ Issue 2 ]