Lorette C. Luzajic ~ A Crown for Jean-Michel Basquiat

 

1. Haunt

I paint ghosts, Basquiat told at least one col­lec­tor who remem­bered it after. The client thought he was smart, dri­ven, cre­ative, and so what if he was moody. To Repel Ghosts, the artist scrib­bled once in oil stick, and young Black poet Kevin Young wrote about it lat­er, the title of his book of poems. Basquiat did paint ghosts, just the extra­or­di­nary, for­got­ten, every­day dead: Black men he couldn’t bury. Athletes, writ­ers, jazz.

2. Graffiti

The 80s are being born, in boom­box beats and bill­boards boast­ing spray paint tags. Hip hop and Happy Meals. Guyliner.  Acid wash and tie dye and glam rock and safe­ty pins. Jean-Michel and Diaz are twen­ty and angry at the world. Black boys falling like flies in the New York heat.

3. Asbestos

CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON. TEETH. DIAGRAM OF A HEART PUMPING BLOOD. ORNITHOLOGY. KNEE/STOMACH/ LIVER. DEXTROSE. LARYNX. HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS – 1940. POPCORN SUGAR CANE TOBACCO. FIVE CENTS. DIZZY GIL. CROWN OF THORNS.  ASBESTOS.

4. Black

Paint it black. Everything he had giv­en her and asked her to return. Madonna tells her sto­ry lat­er, the one of her his­toric brief romance with the it artist of the third mil­len­ni­um. “When I broke up with him, he made me give the paint­ings he gave me back to him. And then he paint­ed over them.” She knew he was an epic star, “an amaz­ing man and deeply tal­ent­ed.” She didn’t want to leave him but she did. “He wouldn’t stop doing heroin.”

5. Caviar

Suzanne Mallouk, the wid­ow Basquiat: We went from steal­ing bread on our way home from the Mudd Club, to Cristal cham­pagne and a fridge full of caviar. And the par­ties, oh the par­ties. Once upon a time, oh the par­ties, oh, you would not believe. Oh, you would not believe, the music. You could see in voodoo, you were still up to see the sun­rise, flood­ing the world with light. And you were still up to see it go down. Basquiat, he bought arm­loads of Armani to paint in. His par­ties had hills of cocaine.

6. Crash

 I DON’T WANT TO SIT AROUND HERE AND WATCH YOU DIE, Kevin Bray scrawled on a scrap of paper at his friend’s loft stu­dio. Up and down, back and forth, to and fro. It was no way to live and no way to die. Up, up, up, Jean-Michel would fly, turn­ing tight and clenched when the stim­u­lants turned into pan­ic. Down, down, down, the anti­dote could always bring you home.

7. Crown

By reg­u­lar­ly using the crown motif, the artist rec­og­nizes the majesty of his influ­encers and heroes, some­one wrote much lat­er. A friend, artist Keith Haring, paint­ed some­thing like that, for him, A Pile of Crowns. For Basquiat. Whose first crown in ‘81 was his self-por­trait.  He must have known. His own ghost story.

~

Lorette C. Luzajic is the edi­tor of The Ekphrastic Review. She writes small sto­ries and prose poems, usu­al­ly inspired by art. They have recent­ly appeared in Trampset, Ghost Parachute, Axon, Unbroken Journal, and more.