"Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

In 1975 I graduated from high school and started at NYU. I had vague plans of studying photojournalism.
That all changed the night I went over to Kenny's Castaways to hear the New York Dolls. The Dolls never
showed but someone else did, a skinny chick who screamed at the unruly audience in between chanting
bursts of poetry while a tall, geeky guy flailed around with an electric guitar.
After that I quit going to classes. I took up with a girl named Jeannie who waitressed at Max's Kansas
City. For a few months she supported me and we lived in a horrible fourth-floor walkup on Hudson Street.
The toilet hung over a hole in the floor; the clawfoot tub was in the kitchen. We put a sheet of plywood
over the tub and on top of that a mattress we scrounged from the street. I didn't tell my father I'd been
suspended from NYU. I used the checks he sent to buy film and speed, black beauties, crystal meth. There
was a light that fell on the streets in those days, a light like broken glass, so bright and jagged it made my
eyes ache, my skin. I'd go down to see Jeannie when she got off work at Max's and take pictures of the
people hanging out back. Some of those people you'd still recognize today. Most you wouldn't though back
then they were briefly famous, just as I was to be. Most of them are dead now.
Some of them were dead then. I shot an entire roll of film of a kid who'd OD'd in the alley early one
morning. No one wanted to call the ambulanceтАФhe was already dead, why bring the cops down? So I
stood out there, shit-colored light filtering from the streetlamp, and photographed him in closeup. I was
nervous about bringing the film to the place I usually went to. I had a friend at the university process the
film there for me.
"This is sick stuff, Cass," he said when I went to pick it up. He handed me the manila envelope with my
contact sheets and prints. He wouldn't meet my eyes. "You're sick."
I thought they were beautiful. Slow exposure and low light made the boy's skin look like soft white paper,
like newsprint before it's inked. His head was slightly upturned, his eyes half-open, glazed. You couldn't tell
if he'd just woken up or if he was already dead. One hand was pressed upon his breast, fingers splayed. A
series of black starbursts marred the crook of his bare arm; a white thread extended from his upper lip to
the point of one exposed eyetooth. I titled the photo "Psychopomp." I decided it was strong enough that I
should start assembling a portfolio, and so I did, the pictures that would eventually become part of my book
Dead Girls.
People used to ask me what it was like to take those photographs.
'"How do you think it feels?'" I shot back at the guy from Interview. '"How do you think it feels? And when
do you think it stops?'"
He didn't get it. No one does. I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those
are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they've been, what's destroyed them, even after they're dead.
It's like sweat or semen or ash, and it's not just a taste or scent. It shows up in pictures, if you know how to
catch the light. It shows up in faces, the way you can tell what a sleeping person's dreaming, if they're
happy or frightened or aroused. I don't know why it draws me; maybe because I dream of leaving this body
the way other people dream of flying. Not flying to a sunny beach or a hotel room, but true escape, leaving
one body and entering another, like one of those wasps that lays its eggs inside a beetle so a wasp larva
grows inside it, eating the beetle until the new wasp emerges.
It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course
was before I disappeared.
But taking a picture feels like that sometimes. When I'm getting it right, it's like I'm no longer standing there
with my camera, with my eye behind the lens, looking at someone. It's like it's me lying there and I'm
seeping into that other skin like rain into dry sand.
Sometimes it happens with sex. Once I brought a sixteen-year-old boy back to the apartment. I'd picked
him up at a club, dark eyes, curly dark hair, a crooked front tooth, tiny scabs on the inside of his arm where
he'd been popping heroin, still too scared to mainline.
The tooth is what got me. I'm still sorry I didn't shoot him. He was beautiful, one of those Pasolini kids who
absorbs light then shines it back into your eyes and blinds you. But I left my camera on the floor, and
instead I just fucked him, more than once. Then I lay awake and watched him sleep. When he woke in the
morning he looked at me, and I saw what had 'happened to him: his mother's death, the small apartment in