GOOD SAINT ANTHONY COME AROUND
The story goes that Chapman, leaving a meeting in Seattle — this was the seventies, he was still designing posters — looked up toward a noise in the sky and got hit in the face with a fish. No one saw, no one pointed and said, “Christ, man, that’s a fish!” but there it was, flailing on the cement. Up in the air, two cormorants still fought loudly. Chapman picked the thing up: a six-incher, cold and dense. He ran with it down the street, shouting at people in his way, dodging bikes. Around a corner and into a Vietnamese takeout place. “Cup of water!” he yelled. “Cup of water!” And when the woman didn’t understand, he grabbed a cup from the trash and filled it at the soda machine and dropped the fish in headfirst. Later he’d carry it to the ferry docks in a borrowed bucket and dump it back in the bay. The fish wasn’t doing well and would just be easy prey again, but what was he supposed to do, take it to a vet?
My point here isn’t that Chapman would do anything to help you out, although that’s true. My point is, he was the kind of guy stuff happened to. Some people live their whole lives according to the laws of probability. If there’s a one in six thousand chance of getting hit by lightning, they won’t. They won’t win the lottery, either. Because someone like Chapman will. Someone whose stars made strange and intricate patterns at the moment of his birth.
Chapman met Francisco Ling the same way he met many great artists of the late eighties: He knocked on his door one day and punched him. He’d had the idea over drinks with a friend. “I want to punch Keith Haring in the face,” he’d joked, and the friend had said, “Do it.” And somewhere along the way, the idea became serious, became the seed of a great photographic series: famous and influential artists, right after Chapman hit them in the face. Chapman would ring the doorbell, wait for the artist, and punch him square with his right hand, clicking the camera with his left in time to catch the artist’s shock, pain, blood. And if the artist fought back, Chapman kept clicking. He’d explain what he was doing, and — if you can believe it — most of the artists understood and forgave and were even flattered. The series was called anXiety of influence, and he would patiently explain its Oedipal undertones, its message of forceful reinvention. Aperture ran an article and Chapman let them publish his Haring photo (cowering, bewildered, bloody lip) and the Rauschenberg one (mouth agape, shouting) before the series was even complete. His reputation was made.
Was Chapman inspired by that fish hitting him ten years earlier? Possibly. Which is to say, we all became aware of the fish incident through the interviews surrounding his eventual solo show. Journalists would ask if he’d ever been surprised like that, if he’d ever been hit in the face, and he’d tell the story.
By the time he got to Francisco Ling in May of 1988, the Aperture article had run, there had been hot debate over Chapman’s decision not to hit women (chivalry, or a move to exclude them from the canon?), and Francisco Ling, looking through his peephole, recognized the guy.
He called, “I’m sick. You’re not hitting me today.”
“Okay,” Chapman said. “Can we stage something?”
So Ling opened his door onto the hallway of the Hotel Chelsea and saw the man rocking on his heels. Chapman’s beard and flannel shirt did nothing to make him look straight — they were almost an ironic gesture — and his eyes (the way Ling told the story) were wet and brown and strangely apologetic. Perhaps this was because, as soon as the door was open wide enough, he swung anyway and hit Ling in the nose.
Ling bent double, his mouth filling with blood. The camera clicked and clicked. Ling spat so he wouldn’t drool, and then he said, “I have AIDS.”
“I know.”
“Check your hand. Check that you didn’t cut your hand.”
Ling would later credit Chapman with not checking his hand at all, with saying, “Let me get you some ice.” Chapman would always maintain that he was just busy shooting the rest of the roll — sometimes the best shots came later — and thinking pragmatically that if he’d cut his hand, noticing sooner wasn’t going to make much difference.
They wound up on the couch in any event, Ling holding a Ziploc of ice chips to the bridge of his nose, Chapman drinking orange juice from a small glass. They talked about the heavy rain, about Ling’s new sculptures, about how he wanted, like Yves Klein, to patent his own color.
I told you Chapman was the kind of guy things happened to, and maybe what I mean in part is that he let things happen to him, let change wash over him. Because within a week, anyone who dropped by Ling’s found Chapman now living there, too, moving his stuff from the East Village one cardboard box at a time. In seven days, Chapman and Ling had settled into a quiet companionship that seemed built on thirty years’ intimacy.
Ling threw a party at the end of the month — or really the two of them did, as we discovered when we showed up, wine bottles in hand — the purpose of which was to announce their pairing to the world. It was nice for Ling, we conceded, even those of us who’d last seen Chapman when he hit us in the face, even those who still felt a pulsing in our cheekbones when it rained. Ling’s nose was bruised, and when Chapman leaned in to kiss him, we winced.
Over canapés and cava, a few of us whispered that we didn’t trust Chapman. Keep in mind that we didn’t yet know about his years of struggle, his earnest and energetic paintings. We feared that his life was a gimmick, that he himself was a gimmick, and we feared he was using Ling to advance his own career. But look at the way they leaned on each other’s shoulders! Look at the way Chapman brought Ling his pills and his carrot juice as the party died down, the way he insisted on the couch and blanket, the way he picked up Ling’s cat and held it to his own chest.
We sent Juney Kespert in for reconnaissance. “Take him for lunch,” we said. “Find out what his deal is. Find out what he wants.” Juney was a photo-realist. It made us see her as rational, objective, though that certainly wasn’t true.
You have to understand that Francisco Ling was someone we all adored with a ferocity that had nothing to do with his sculptures or even his suave Brazilian smile, but with his generosity. He was fifty, older than many of us, and to me, at least, he was New York itself. I’d come there from Indiana, a twenty-year-old boy with no more connections than meat on his bones, and although Francisco Ling wasn’t the first person I met in the art world, he was the first who welcomed me. He asked me to show him my work, and I nervously did — a small portrait of my brother — and he closed his eyes and sighed as if deeply and finally satisfied. I discovered later that a lot of us had similar stories, but even then I didn’t doubt his sincerity. The idea that someone might take advantage of Ling’s kindness, of his vulnerability, panicked us.
And so Juney invited Chapman down to Veselka late that summer, and we waited for her pronouncement. She called us one by one. “He’s a decent guy,” she said. “There’s not much to tell. He drinks too much, but who doesn’t?”
I said, “A decent guy who punches sick men?”
“He has a good heart. He needs to be needed, I think. One of those. But tell me why that isn’t perfect for Francisco right now.”
That “right now” stuck with me, and I found myself thinking about it later that night in a cab, my eyebrow against the cold window. This would be the last boyfriend Francisco Ling would ever have. We didn’t need Chapman to be perfect, or even faithful. We just needed him to stick it out till the end. We needed him not to leave Ling on his deathbed. Ling had gotten tested in 1985 with the rest of us — we lined up for that test like Russians for bread — and, like so many, had no idea when he’d been infected. No one was living more than a few years beyond diagnosis those days. I’d bought a suit just for funerals.