Free White Girls by Hilton Als

someone else’s mind, artists and writers for the most part, images that might include this one: a city girl walking somewhere, sometimes with a purse in hand, her fur wrap pulled tightly around her, a little snow falling, the memory of a lover’s kiss somewhere on her person, so many opportunities; sometimes life offered a quick, synthetic fix that felt like a million roses smothering them but then nothing, and that remarkable white girl rose from that temporary death to soldier on, and then her body struck down by some uncontrollable internal malady and tell me, SL, or someone, what’s left of that body and its own memories, the beautiful things artists who admired her made out of her? Wallace Stevens got it right when he said, in “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” that his white girl was actually “This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” I can’t write one complete sentence about her because she was her own complete sentence, and her sentence about herself was better than anyone else’s because she uttered it sort of without thinking while thinking too much, I can’t tell you how unusual that is in a world where, nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script. Still, her brilliance was in part contingent on knowing how the New York City script—a story of youth and ambition and race and blood and money—works and needs to work in order to be a story and therefore of value to other people; the human mind cleaves to details and what-happened-next so it can imagine what happened next, and I haven’t even told you enough of the story so you can imagine who she was and take it from there. She was a white girl who, while growing up in New Jersey, read Kurt Vonnegut and listened to punk music, and jazz. In high school, she sported a beret à la RickieLee Jones. She was a newspaper freak and, as a young woman, wrote letters in support of Rajneeshpuram despite the facts. She wanted to protect the faithful from the faithless. She regarded SL’s vegetarianism as a kind of faith, and she admired it, but how could she give up her belief in bacon? Her attraction to men who had language was profound. Sometimes she’d visit me at the weekly newspaper I worked at back in the day because she was also drawn to a pasty gay journalist who spread his body anywhere there was available space. She called him the Answer Grape because he looked like a grape, and he had all the answers. She was the daughter of Europeans, immigrants who’d survived a world war to find something like stability in North America, and their survivalist instincts may have contributed to her own, which included being very protective of her fun. When she was up to no good you could see it on her face, so, to some extent, she was always an innocent, albeit one who thought: You could consider doing the right thing, but you could consider doing the wrong thing, too. For as long as I knew her, she walked a moral balance beam in high heels without chalking up her hands; she was as interested in sometimes falling off that beam on a friend’s bad side as well as their good.
    The first time I saw her she was a waitress in a gay bar, were we even twenty-one years old? She was the lovely, ebullient, practical mind artists always love having around to remind them that the world exists, and Con Edison would like to hear from you—all while they painted her portrait. She worked in that bar in 1980, or 1981, and she was close to Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988, the summer shewent to Europe with her first husband, a beautiful Berber boxer who was so kind to me, and when she got back from Europe we drove out to Brooklyn in her little car to visit Jean’s grave, just me and her, SL didn’t even know about that pilgrimage until after 2007, and at Jean-Michel’s grave in that Brooklyn cemetery, she kept saying, Poor baby, poor baby, as she toed the dead leaves away from his grave’s mouth. Standing there, looking down