Free Dead Stars by Bruce Wagner Page A

the shoots, which felt weird toward the end when his sister was getting tits. He would at least have respected her if she’d taken skinnygirl pornshots but apparently MoMA never had the heart; her shit turned out like “subversive” David Hamilton.
How fucking pathetic. The bitch who thought she was so incendiary couldn’t even light the fuse. Total rampant pussification.
    It
was
far out, tho, to watch her work, a real education that maybe he could learn from. From his teens, he scoped haughty MoMA’s cynical traveling circus with its floating galleries & carefully orchestrated, county-by-county 1st Amendment uproars; the ensuing staged-for-maximum-PR-effect local library bans of her books; the rote howls of the conservative media; the rote, smug rebuttals of the liberal media; the pious ACLU voices advocating in her behalf, shoved between sports and weather—and there was MoMA, ever MoMA, with her recondite emotions, quietly nobly preening, stealthily thrilled with herself, all her bullshit-fancy monographs frontloaded with fancy bullshitting essays by bullshit-fancy fake geniuses, fake poets and incomprehensible tenured pervs—skunkhaired Sontag lites + other sundry putative superstars, meaning anyone MoMA deemed worthy to co-opt/seduce/fuck into sponsoring her barfy, exploitative, flat-chested body of work—well, Jerzy thought his new boss was
so
much cleaner in the pursuit and publication of his quarry,
so
much more the accidental
artiste
than MoMA because he didn’t try to hide behind Art
or
his upskirts, didn’t dress it up to be anything but what it was: xxxxxtreme pervation. Pervomatical pervatoriness. His nocturnal prey
signifying
what MoMA was too chickenshit to nail to the wall. MoMA hung out in the shadows. MoMA cockteased her collectors with a silver gelatin tween’s sexless come-on. MoMA pimped out her oblivious daughter’s cobalt palladian thighs.
    There was a space in time when Jerzy aspired to be the new Weegee—or Son of Johnny Pigozzi, anyway—but it never worked out. He was a vulturazzo in Manhattan for a while, staking out hospitals & clinics & the offices of Park Ave docs with a camera, waiting for skulking celebs. Facelifts, freakouts & O.D.s. He shot Michael Douglas in the subway, scrawny & disoriented from chemo, poor schmuck, leaning on one of his kids. (Jerzy used to buy coke from his son Cameron.) Stalked Michael J. Fox when the actor was in town, waiting for that elusive Parkinsonian pantspiss, which sadly never came. Would’ve paid the rent for a year.
    But it was cold in NY and Jerzy was burned out. The streets didn’t make him feel brand new, no dreams to be made, nothing he could do—not the Jay-Z experience. The move to LA felt right, but nothing had clicked. Nothing until he met Harry.
    On the way home from the apartment office of THE HONEYSHOT! he got the idea of his life. He’d become Harry’s secret weapon, his sniper, his 5-
honeyshot
General, Commander-in-chief of the Smarmy Army. He would enlist for 18 months, then hopefully, with his patron’s blessing, gather up his edited work—nip slips, honied moneyshots & everything in-between—and show them at Gagosian.
    He’d take another new name.
    Some kinda cross between Weegee & Banksy: Squeegee, maybe.
    MoMA won’t even know what hit her.
    . . .
    â€œFor me,” said Harry, “after Emma, I got a bit depressed. It was like,
Where can you go from here?
But I’m moving on. You know what
honeyshot!
I’d like to get? I’ll tell you. And it ain’t Kate or Pippa, let somebody else get em, it’ll be soon enough. Cause Emma was the
real
royalty. And it ain’t Amanda Knox, either. You know who I’d like? Gabrielle Giffords. That’s right—mybelongs to Gabby. Jesus, did you see the picture of her in
People?
Post-headwound
svelte
. Wearing denim, with that little trake scar . . . thumb hooked in her jeans,