Dashboard Elvis is Dead, page 25
I attach a photo of Brandy I have stored on my phone, and the scan of a drawing she did of me while we were in Wickenburg.
There are no bouncing dots this time. An hour passes. Nothing. Two hours. Three.
I turn the phone off and go to bed, tears in my eyes.
In the morning, I wake to…
FFS I can’t believe you just told me that on fucking Twitter!!!
Three days later, Rabbit unfollows me.
Even though I’m working, I can’t help but get caught up in the buzz of the multitudes flooding towards Central Park. I am excited to be on the inside of the story, not detached, not simply observing. I’m photographing the determined faces of those convinced that change is almost upon us. And I’ve picked a side. The Black in the streets outnumbers the white, as would be expected for a campaign rally eagerly anticipating our country’s first ever Black President. No-one will take it for granted; the history of Black America is not one characterized by positivity. But the polls are favorable, and I’m sharing the mood of optimism. I’ve been commissioned to photograph the event, which will involve speeches, music, and – it has been rumored – an unscheduled appearance by the candidate himself.
YES WE CAN T-shirts are everywhere. YES. That word, the positivity of it is carrying these believers – me amongst them – along on a tidal wave of anticipation for better, more equal times ahead. Even the shape the word makes on the lips of those chanting is uplifting. I hear celebratory music carried on the breeze from the Central Park stage long before it is in sight. My camera is trained on the audience more than the stage, though, just as it was twenty years earlier when Love Tractor and the B-52s played at Radio City and I was with Andi. I pick out beautiful Black people and white people, smiling, kissing, hugging in the twilight as if their time truly has come. It’s a swaying, grooving melting pot of life, stretching as far as my lens can zoom. And it feels, briefly, like a vision of the America so many have died for or suffered in pursuing.
Darkness falls over the city. The emotions build towards the final act, Stevie Wonder. From the edge of the stage, I zoom in on a woman. Mixed race too, perhaps, her features like mine, her face full of exhausted joy, wet with tears. Her expression suggests she still somehow can’t comprehend that this is happening, and she is witnessing it. Where other artists have appeared solo and acoustic, the Motown superstar has brought along a band and backing singers. I’m eye level with the stage but I’ve spent the whole evening facing the people watching it. I don’t notice the three women to the left of his keyboard until a chorus makes me turn, and standing there, alongside Stevie Wonder, is Andi Patullo, my Andi. She wears her hair longer, in dreadlocks, unbelievably, and she has put on a little weight since I last saw her, but she carries it well. She looks healthy and happy, and my heart swells with pride for her when she takes a lead vocal on ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’. Andi makes it into an ode to change and to new tomorrows.
Well, hello stranger, she says.
She leans in to kiss me on both cheeks. There’s no animosity, no bitterness after the way we parted. I’m heartened since I deserve both.
Can’t believe it, Andi, I tell her. That was incredible. You look phenomenal.
Ah, Jude, sweetie … thank you. An’ right back atcha.
She takes my arm and leads me deep backstage, to the performers’ green room. My lanyard pass doesn’t extend to this area, but Andi clears it and I’m suddenly sat on a sofa with her.
It’s so good to see you, Jude, she says.
We clink glasses.
You’ve been busy, I say.
Yeah, things are goin’ really well just now, she replies. I moved to L.A. a few years ago. It’s a weird vibe there, and I miss Manhattan, but Ash loves it.
Ash, her new girlfriend/boyfriend/manager? I avoid enquiring for now.
So, this is a huge gig, then.
Yeah, Ash knows Stevie, an’ he’s been supportin’ Barack at events for a few months. This isn’t his normal tourin’ band, but I got in when he reached out for session singers, she says, and then shrugs sweetly as if still struggling to accept she is deserving of this golden ticket.
Hey, Andi. A deep, familiar New Jersey voice.
Hi, Bruce, says Andi, with a cute little wave. We both watch him stroll across the room and pick up a beer from a long table that’s heaving with bottles.
Wow, that’s…
Yeah, Ash is producin’ his new album, she says. He hopes there might be a session job for me, but I dunno … Patti usually covers all the female vocals.
Wow, I say again, feeling like it’s the only word I know.
She was always a good singer but her journey from the night of the break-up fight to here is astonishing. First-name terms with world superstars and politicians? I’m not sure if I’m bursting with jealousy or pride, but either way, I’m hiding it behind a frozen, wow-shaped mouth.
Ah, here he comes … Ash! Over here. She beckons him, and he responds, briefly accepting an exaggerated air kiss from the Black-Eyed Peas singer, Fergie, as he passes her. He’s young, tall, heavily tattooed. He very closely resembles the actor Owen Wilson, but without the crooked nose.
Hey, she says.
She kisses him on the lips and loops her arm around his waist. I see her fingers slip into the back pocket of his jeans.
This is Jude, one of my oldest friends from NYC.
Hey, Jude, says Ash. You gotta be a musician with that name.
And he sounds like Owen Wilson too.
The anti-freeze kicks in and slowly my facial muscles start to function again.
Uh. Hi there. Um, no. Sorry. No musicality at all, I’m afraid, I stammer.
Jude is a brilliant photographer, says Andi. She’s won lots of awards for her work.
That so? says Ash. Cool.
His hippy influence has prompted her dreadlocks, I suspect. They probably surf together. He looks around, perhaps not wishing to miss someone more famous or interesting.
Really great to meet you, Jude. Andi talks about you all the time, he says to me, and then to her, I gotta catch Stevie, babe. Back soon.
He kisses her and touches his forefingers to his mouth before flicking the kiss they hold in my direction.
Well, I say, smiling, He seems—
I know, Andi interrupts. Fucking gorgeous!
And we both laugh and all the anguish of the past is suddenly behind us. Twenty years ago, I’d regularly wake sweating in the middle of the night because of some night terror, and Andi would reach over and pull me into the nook of her body, and whatever fears I was holding on to would disappear, at least for a while. Nowadays, those nightmares are less frequent, but when they do occur, I often still expect her arm to curl over from behind me to make it better.
She isn’t ever coming back to my bed, but that’s okay. It’s definitely pride, not jealousy. Had she stayed, I’d undoubtedly have held her back.
Look, Andi, I’m really sorry for the way we left it when we broke up. I behaved terribly an’…
She puts her hands on my shoulders and stops me.
Jude … I’ve missed you. I really want us to be friends again. Let’s leave the past where it should stay, eh?
Sure, I say.
I hug her. She hugs me back, and it feels to me like the safest place in the world right now. It saddens me that I never told her I loved her. Not that it would’ve made a difference to where we are now, but these were words that I could somehow never say. To Andi. To Hennessey. To Brandy. To Rabbit. I knew I loved them, but something always stopped me from telling them. I told AJ Carter I loved him when I didn’t even know what it meant. And he died the next day. I had cursed him.
My routine is now firmly established and indifferent to the workday/weekend cycle the rest of the working city is a slave to. I’m independent and self-sufficient, and while there’s the occasional relapse when I wish I had someone to share personal fears with, I’m now so used to my own company that anyone breaching it would swiftly be resented, in the same way that Erin Pressley once resented my occupation of her space when I first arrived in New York. The ways in which we are set run deep indeed. The only time away from this rigid circadian rhythm came four years ago in the summer of 2010, when I spent six months on the West Coast. Not, as you might’ve presumed, vacationing at the Malibu home of Andi, Ash and their lovely children. Predictably, I haven’t seen Andi since the night of the concert for Obama in Central Park in 2008. There’s no point in making promises or commitments that you know you’ll break.
I decided to recuperate from a double mastectomy by renting a small house on Coldwater Canyon Drive, in West Hollywood. Rosario, the lovely Spanish woman who kept the house – and me, on occasion – clean and spotless, was my only companion. Surprisingly, the consistent warmth prompted a sense of relaxation that felt almost weightless. Although the novelty of it would fade, the hazy glow and shimmering skies, the perpetual dance of the palm trees, explained why so many of the rich and famous choose to hide away in those leafy, elevated canyons. The house sat close to the bottom of a heavily guarded incline that led up to the fortified hilltop home of veteran actor, Charlton Heston. Using the NRA dollar to defend himself rather than the Second Amendment was always Mr Heston’s priority, Rosario would say. She wasn’t a fan. My contract conditions at Cooper Union – where I had recently been tenured – permitted the sabbatical on reduced pay. And an enticing publishing advance for a future memoir of sorts – the unstructured basis of which you are now reading – paid for the rental.
There isn’t much to be said about the cancer that led to this pleasant change in circumstances. It was detected fortuitously early. A screening programme at CU had a low initial student uptake so female staff were encouraged to set an example. I told no-one about the diagnosis. I paid for the necessary surgery and follow-up blasts of therapy that Delphine couldn’t have even dreamt of, and I didn’t think twice about it. When the subject of breast reconstruction was raised, I immediately said no. Only the mirror would see the scars, I told my consultant. But the physical ones are always easier to live with than the emotional ones. When the bandages were removed, I appreciated what it must have meant for Rabbit and her art on the opening night of her MoMA exhibition.
Four years on, I’m still here. On Earth. Alive. In Manhattan, in early 2014. Despite its mission, the cancer has not returned. It knows the inhospitable hostess it would encounter if it did. I’m fifty-five years old. I live the comfortable, uncomplicated and boring life of a single woman of modest means. Without the financial motivation to do so, it’s a deepening middle-age groove sliding unremarkably to the grave. I own, rather than rent, an apartment on the Lower East Side a mere baseball pitch away from the building Andi and I lived in when we first crossed the East River. That’s gone now of course. My real estate resulted from the widespread community destruction I once famously wrote about. I am reminded of this every time an assessment of my career appears in the newspapers or online.
Who said Americans don’t appreciate irony?
Beyond the disappointment in myself, the only stress I deal with is the stretched patience of a publisher, whose already generous deadline expired a year ago. My stated excuse for this is a desire to address my Scottish roots, of which I still know little. But until this year, the opportunity hasn’t presented itself.
But now it has. I’m freelancing for The New Yorker, and the piece will cover the annual Tartan Day Parade. Words and pictures. It’s another dream commission for me. The Parade has come a very long way since the first, in 1999. Back then, two pipe bands and a small but spirited group of Scottish-Americans – an adjective I now use to describe my own nationality – walked from the British Consulate to the United Nations. It has since grown to include thousands of participants, and this year, as part of the Scottish delegation, Anna Mason. Ms Mason and I have some shared history, although she may not recall it as clearly as I do.
It’s the morning of the parade and despite not drawing the crowds of the St Patrick’s Day equivalent, a sizable Scottish contingent is assembling on 6th Avenue as I pass en route to an early breakfast appointment with her. I reach the destination – The Algonquin on West 44th Street – half an hour ahead of schedule. I am handed a free complimentary copy of The New Yorker as I go into the lobby. I take it, thinking that it will advertise me to Anna Mason.
I take a tea when it is offered, and sit in a luxurious high-backed armchair that is the very epitome of Gilded Age opulence. Oddly, half an hour of it and my back starts to hurt in a way that it never did when lounging on the broken rocking chair with the missing rocker that propped open the shutter door back in Humble.
Ah, sorry. Are you okay? A man wearing a kilt has tripped over my bag and is apologizing for it.
It’s me who should be sorry, I say. I shouldn’t have left that lyin’ there.
No harm done; he says with a warm smile.
Are you here for Tartan Day? I ask, needlessly.
The man laughs and twirls the kilt in a manner of which Stan Laurel would’ve been proud.
Aye. They better not have moved it! My name’s Andy, he says. Andy Scott.
Andy Scott … a Scot from Scotland?
What’re the chances, eh?
I’m Jude, I tell him, and, without prompt, my father was a Scot.
Oh, right, where from?
A place in Glasgow called Govan, I say.
Wow, me too, he says. Have you been over?
Uh, no … not yet, I say. Hopin’ to. Tryin’ to find out more about him. I’m a journalist, I tell him, although I’m not really; not in the sense of those who once lunched here at the famous round table in the main hall.
I’m a sculptor, says Andy Scott. A modern-day Clydeside welder.
He says this quickly, and I struggle to decipher it, until he senses my confusion and repeats it slowly.
My maquettes are featuring in the parade, well, not on the march, but the route passes where they’re installed.
He shows me a photograph of them: two extraordinary horse heads made of small steel shards, glinting in the sunshine on plinths at Bryant Park. They are impossibly beautiful. Solidly powerful and transparently fragile. The sight of them takes my breath away.
They’re astonishing.
They’re Kelpies … mythical shape-shiftin’ creatures that roam the lochs an’ streams of Scotland…
It’s the type of story I used to tell Rabbit. I imagine her drawings of his Kelpies.
…An’ drown people. He laughs as he says this. You should come an’ see the real ones.
Ms Montgomery? A young woman’s voice. I turn away from the sculptor.
Yes, I say, nervously.
I’m Ms Mason’s assistant. The appointments are running late but she has asked me to show you up to the Oak Room.
I wish the sculptor well and tell him I’ll be watching for his Kelpies on the march route. He hands me a note on which he has written an address.
If you ever make it over to Glasgow, they’ll help you with your search, he says.
Upstairs, Anna Mason is waiting. She is seated, monarch-like, against the dark wood-paneled rear wall of the Oak Room. Her posture is unusual, sitting knees up, back curved, her body shaped like a question mark. It seems like the entire Scottish delegation is based here. TV crews with hand-held cameras jostle from one person to the next. Photographers – like me – wait in line for access to their subject. Anna Mason, for her part, looks calm and unflustered. Staring into the middle-distance. Contemplating the future, perhaps. These will be momentous months ahead for her, I suspect, regardless of the outcome of the vote in her homeland.
Eventually, I am at the front of the queue. I have been officially allocated fifteen minutes, although there is no-one waiting behind me now.
Hello, Ms Mason, how are you today? I ask, setting my light meter against her flawless skin.
I’m very well, Ms… She leans to look more closely at my pass. Montgomery. Sorry, she says. I don’t have my contacts in yet.
Are you enjoyin’ Manhattan?
I am, very much. There’s a real buzz about the parade, this year.
Have you visited the city before? I ask.
Yes. Many times. But this time feels – I don’t know … monumental, somehow.
I think I know what you mean. My father was Scottish, an’ I definitely feel part of the parade this year.
Was he now? she says.
I can sense her studying my features. Trying to work out the genealogy. I save her the trouble.
I’m mixed race. My momma was from Haiti, originally. Jimmy Montgomery, my daddy, was from Glasgow.
Oh, just like me, she says.
Perfect teeth are displayed as she smiles warmly at the connection we’ve made.
She poses professionally. The faintest hint of steely determination. I snap, and she maintains the gaze even as the flash lights up her face.
I’d love to come to Glasgow. To work on a feature, I tell her.
Then, Jude, you must, I insist, she says.
She reaches into her bag and hands me a card.
Contact Mary on this number, and we can continue getting acquainted in Scotland.
My allotted time is ending. I have the photos I need. I begin packing my equipment away.
Y’know, I know all about The Hyptones too, I tell her. You used to be their photographer, I add, expecting this to prompt further warmth, but instead, she stands. The smile fades. Her eyes narrow as if suddenly convinced she has been set up.
I’m not here to talk about them, she warns.
I see her looking around. Trying to catch the eye of someone who will excuse her without a scene having to be made.
Oh, I’m sorry … it’s just that I’ve followed them since Phoenix…
I really need to go, I’m very sorry, she says.
Before she brushes past me, I hold out my Polaroid snap of Jamie Hewitt.
I just wondered how he was now, Ms Mason … I used to work on Madison Avenue. In advertising … at the Camel/De Souza agency.
