It took me five months. I got a job at a wino’s liquor store on the Bowery to get by. There were twenty-three photos when I was done, enough for a show.
My central image derived from a lithograph from Redon’s “La Tentation de Saint-Antoine”4: a life-sized human skeleton, a plastic model I had a friend borrow for me from the NYU art department. I draped it with a white sheet and posed beside it, naked, my hand clutching its bony plastic fingers. I set the shutter so that the image was so underexposed as to be almost indiscernible, deliberately out of focus. All you saw was the skeleton, seeming to fall forward through the frame, and floating beside it a face suggestive of a skulclass="underline" mine. I translated the drawing’s original caption into English.
Death: I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.
I added these to my portfolio, and a few portraits I’d done of Jeannie and her friends hanging out in the apartment and the back room at Max’s. The pictures were harsh and overlit, but they had a scary energy, most of it supplied by Jeannie herself in torn fishnets and smeared eye makeup, her works on the floor beside her, the glare of a naked hundred-watt bulb making Gillette blades glow like they were radioactive.
It didn’t hurt that some of the figures lurking in the background were starting to get written about. Back in January I’d begun seeing flyers stapled to telephone poles around town: punk is coming. I bought the first copy of the magazine for fifty cents at Bleecker Bob’s not long after. A month later, the first copy of New York Rocker came out, and I bought that too. When I got off my night shift at the liquor store I’d walk over to CBGB’s and get trashed and dance. I’d take my camera and shoot whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth, broken bottles, zip knives. People laughing while blood ran down their face, or someone else’s. Some people didn’t like getting their picture taken while having sex or shooting up. I got good at throwing a punch then running. I started wearing these pointy-toed black cowboy boots that weren’t good for dancing, but I could kick the shit out of someone if he lunged for me and be gone before his knees hit the floor. I loved the rush of adrenaline and rage. It was as good as sex for me.
“Scary Neary!” Jeannie shouted when she saw me coming. By then people were getting used to me. And other people were starting to take pictures too. Punk and New York Rocker didn’t create the scene, but they gave it a name, and we all knew where it lived.
By now I’d made some contacts in the city’s photography scene. I brought my photos to the director of the Lumen Gallery, and he agreed to give me a small show in the back room. Three years earlier, Robert Mapplethorpe had begun to win a following among Warhol acolytes and some prescient artworld types. The same thing was happening now with the downtown scene. I sent out a hundred xeroxed invitations to everyone I vaguely knew and scattered another hundred at the clubs where I hung out. I made sure all the musicians knew they were featured in the photos. Then I bought myself a bottle of Taittinger Brut, got smashed, and went to my opening.
It was the right place at the right time. “Dead Girls” bridged the gap between two camps, photography and punk, my staged self-portraits and documentary images of the downtown scene. The dreamy kitsch of photos like “St. Eulalia” melded into the shock of seeing Jeannie nod out while the lead singer of Anubis Uprising masturbated onto her face. I could hear the buzz as I stumbled into the back room at Lumen.
I was a hit, and I wasn’t yet twenty years old.
who are the mystery girls? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. cassandra neary’s punk provocations. They used a detail of “St. Eulalia,” cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn’t a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.
I didn’t care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB’s. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.
But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they’d seen a ghost with a gun.
This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I’d seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I’d made them, like they’d never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.
You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique; but you didn’t hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it; to see what was left when everything else was torn away.
My story was picked up by the Daily News. Then the Sunday Times Magazine interviewed me for a very brief piece. And there were the “Dead Girls” photos, and there was me, smoking a Kent and wearing beat-up black jeans and red Keds and a MC5 T-shirt filigreed with cigarette burns, my hair a dirty blond halo around a pale face with no makeup. I looked like what your mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don’t come home.
I was actually a little worried about what my father would think. He finally called me after the Times Magazine story ran. He made it clear that he had no interest in seeing the show—a relief to both of us—but he also wanted to make sure I wasn’t in any legal trouble.
“Anything comes up, call Ken Wilburn over in Queens,” he said and gave me the number. “He represents some guys, they’ll help you out if you get into trouble. I don’t know how the hell you can make money out of this stuff, Cass, but I hope to God you do. Especially if you need Wilburn.”
I never did need to call Wilburn. But I didn’t make much money, either. The Times article did its business, and all the photos sold; but I had only set the price at seventy-five bucks a pop. Jeannie bought most of them—God knows where she found the money—but about six months later they were destroyed when her apartment flooded. The girlfriend of Anubis Rising’s lead singer bought the picture of him with Jeannie then proceeded to set it on fire with her Bic lighter in the gallery, screaming “Fucking cunt!” until someone threw her out. John Holstrom bought a picture that had Johnny Thunders in the corner.
And the last photo went to Sam Wagstaff, which is how I got a book deal. I’d met a literary agent at my opening, a petite red-haired woman in a red latex miniskirt named Linda Kalman.
“This is very interesting,” she said, peering at “Psychopomp.” She was older than most of the people at the show, in her mid-thirties, and wore expensive gold jewelry and stiletto-heeled boots. I pegged her for a socialite slumming among the barbarians. She glanced at the crowd drinking white wine in plastic cups, Jeannie and her friends hooting raucously as a reporter took notes. “Do you know which one’s the artist?”