12x16 Acrylic/ glitter/ resin coated. Ready to hang.
I’d been sleeping it off for weeks. It was scary, waking up in the dark and not knowing if it was morning darkness or night darkness. Not knowing how many days had passed or what day, or month, or year it was. You forget what water is as thirst overcomes you. There's no calling anyone because the ability to place numbers to names in a phone has long since been gone. You can’t read anymore, you can barely speak. No matter what you do, you know you’ll be in trouble, so you’re always afraid. Always running. Always jumping at the sound of a phone ringing. Always hitting cancel on an incoming call. You’re getting evicted soon, and you don’t know how to care. So you lay back down, shut your eyes, and hope that soon somebody will bring you something so you can be well again, or at least stand-up.
It’s the wigs, glitter, and outfits everyone talks about never the fear or isolation in a packed room. Or the great pretending that goes along with everything in life being about what it all looks like on the outside. The desperation, unmanageability, and isolation of it all.
He had knocked on the door of my 14th-floor apartment just as I’d closed my eyes. I crawled to the door, opening it on my knees. He rushed in, not noticing. We never noticed each other. That’s why it worked. It’s what we knew.
“You haven’t left this place in months. I’m taking you to a movie.” He says. He has nothing to make me functional, so he wraps me in a bedspread and calls a cab. Yes, a cab. It was 2003.
“This is the coolest movie I’ve ever seen. I thought of you the whole time and so we’re going right now and I’m watching it again. It’s the only thing I have ever seen that’s like what our lives are like, and it’s so beautiful. It’s so fun. It’s so party.”
I fell in love with the movie Party Monster that night. Even though I could barely walk, and I was suffocating on thirst, and if I drank water I was convinced it was bleach. I loved their fabulous outfits and lives, and yeah the whole murdering the dealer with angel wings at the end was a drag but who cared about that? They looked amazing. They were special. They were different. Nobody cares about tomorrow when so much effort is put into terminal uniqueness. I should know.
I’m still not super sure how but I made it out of that lifestyle and mindset alive. It was a gradual, 20-year process. I still love costumes. Fake eyelashes are triggering, as is loud music in dark rooms, and seeing the sun come up. Every once in a while I catch myself gazing at all of the spoons I have in the kitchen drawer. It’s a partial silent prayer that I'm not looking everywhere for a spoon. And a partial floating away feeling because I don’t like looking at spoons.
Now, when I think of Party Monster all I can think of is how sick I was that night, and all of the young people that lost their lives to the lifestyle, jails, institutions, and death. They didn’t live to grow out of it.
There is a very famous young artist who is currently on a meteoric rise to fame. It’s like James St. James, Cyndi Lauper & Stevie Nicks became a solar system and birthed their first planet, Chappel Roan.
Chappell is 26. I love her music and her style. But I hope most of all she doesn’t live the other side of that story, the one they don’t put on TV, in the way that so many countless others, myself included, a generation before her, did.
This painting is a portrait of the darkest dark & flashiest, most sparkly light. It is a portrait of balancing the duality of needing the darkest dark to know the brightest light.
