THE PHOTOGRAPH BLUE
There wasn’t much of an explanation. After talking to people about the photograph for the last eight years, putting the pieces together, I still haven’t figured out the most important of questions: why?
I suppose most things don’t go well asking ‘why’. From subway train advisories to the birth of the universe, asking these kinds of questions is like smashing your own head against the same wall and receiving no injuries.
The fact remains that the photograph in blue had many arms. All of them leading to a couple of wrists, then to some palms, splintering into two, ten fingered paths, like a willow hanging, scraping the dirt. I have charted these vein-like explanations for years now, beleaguered by something unexplainable but familiar, like a mist on my skin, but not knowing where it came from.
I’m not talking about death. People die everyday. I’m not talking about illness either. People get sick everyday. There was more to this fog, elements that cannot be explained save that they are all part of this one blue photograph. The structure of the chemicals in the development phase, to the processing of the image, to the hands of the developer, to the building it was made in. They all ended up in flames.
The blue photograph was of four musicians in a band, four silhouettes, all frozen in action. All the hues were blue, save for the red ambers bursts in strange places. The photograph was taken on a Nikon 60mm lens camera with small purple letters in ink smeared from my finger on the back.
The picture was taken in 1988 in New York City. At the Go-Go Room, which doesn’t even exist any more. Now at the corner of 17th street and 8th Avenue there is a parking garage. Solemn tiers of metal supporting BMW’s and Escalades, piled upon each other like those mausoleums in New Orleans, the dead stacked in slots above ground. If you walked by the intersection today it’s sad to see the corner conducting its trafficked business. This was where the blue photograph was taken inside the Go-Go Room in 1988.
Saturn Moon, that’s the band. Notice above the lead guitarist’s head the odd burst of amber and gold over the blue-black shadows. These are the lights from the truss above his head, but it looked like a halo burst. The guitar player was Jim Hastings, born Des Moines, Iowa.
Over on the left side of the photograph was the singer, Markey Sullivan. I could tell who he was because I knew the band. The photograph showed Markey, his two lanky arms draped to the stage, locked in a worshipping stance.
In the back, behind the gleaming silver drums, was Billy Dixon, a New York native from Queens. Actually we knew about Billy Dixon long before because his mother had died. She was trying to walk past a scuffle on the 7 train and got pushed on the tracks. She died when the train split her in two. Billy Dixon became the face everyone had remembered from the Post that week, tears running down his 8 year old cheeks, surrounded by photographers. His sister told me his love of drums sprung from pounding out his rage and not hurting people in the process.
Less tragic was the bass player, Jason Whitman, holding his instrument like a weapon against the black shadows of the audience. He was the recipient of many arms reaching up toward him from the crowd. Jason and I shared many after-hours drinks once the Go-Go Room closed its doors at 5am. He was a natural comedian and women were drawn to him in a preternatural way. This is why most of the shadowed stalks of arms in the blue photograph reached towards the center of the stage.
I remember that corner in New York. Wild throngs of young people, anybody from ragged punks to new wave hippies, to the leather clad bikers and cruising party boys — all drank at The Go-Go Room. It was a regular carnival. In those days the corner of 17th and 8th was the center of the tornado, a no mans land. The cops were non-existent until people started getting hurt. One of the bikers smashed some tourist’s head on 17th street. Someone got shot around the corner, but we didn’t know them. People overdosed in the bathroom. We didn’t know them either.
The photograph looked sewn together the more I stared at it. Little fibers quietly laced, stitch by stitch. I pushed my finger across the image, the blue-black hues spotted by the red amber diamond explosions.
My first theory was that the amber exploded in a pattern, like a diagram connecting these musicians and their futures together. That mighty halo burst over Jim Hastings head was interesting, the way he slowly turned his cheek to the ‘praying’ Markey Sullivan, it looked like maybe, just maybe, something religious was happening.
If you look close at the photograph where Markey Sullivan’s lanky arms fall to the stage, there’s many little specks of red amber at his feet. I used to think this meant that Jim and Markey shared a secret, and it was both of their talents that led to numerous records being sold in 1990. This was just my theory.
Everybody knows Bill Dixon left the band soon after the photograph was taken and drank himself to death in Philadelphia in 1993. It wasn’t so much the alcohol. That was the polite way of saying he shot large amounts of china white heroin while drinking copious amounts of alcohol in a rooming house in Philadelphia. No one mentioned the Hepatitis C. No one was surprised. His mother was killed on those tracks in Queens and it was only a matter of time before he was going to find a way to join her.
You could tell Markey Sullivan was going to be successful. It was because of my theory of the amber lights. That’s how I figured it out. If you count the small ambers by his hands the number comes to 17. Strangely enough, it was on January 7, 2006 that Markey Sullivan was diagnosed with throat cancer.
I did the math. January, the first month added to the seventh day — 17. And the year was 2006. 2 plus 6 equals 8. If you use the principles of simple math and add the 17 together, you have the 8. He was a singer with throat cancer and there was no worse irony than that. I didn’t even care about Numerology. These principles are principles of simple math and 8’s were everywhere.
A car hit the owner of The Go-Go Room and his name was Robert Rosenbaum. The car twisted his spine in an accident on 8th Avenue, but I’m not going to make any connections with that, even if it did happened in August. I gave up that ‘8th number’ theory back in 2000.
The rest of the band was fine. I mean, as fine as you could get. Jason Whitman got a girl pregnant after the photograph was taken. She demanded they leave the city to raise the kid. When I went to find her in Albany, she had told me that Jason’s drinking had made him a different man. He left her and their 7-year-old daughter to go out West and even the lawyers couldn’t find him. The only thing they could find was his note. It said: “I’m sorry.”
The girl was obviously distraught, and kept asking me questions about why I tracked her down to find Jason. I explained I was writing a piece for a magazine. Luckily, she didn’t ask me which one. I showed her the blue photograph, feeling it brittle and hard in my hands. She started shaking.
“I was there. That was the night I met Jason. At The Go-Go Room,” she exclaimed.
I felt a cold gauze crawl up my arm. I left, driving back to New York City, keeping my eyes on the little flickering white lines of the freeway so that I didn’t doze off in the darkness.
I heard the photo shop where the blue picture had been processed was burned to the ground. I told Jim Hastings about it at a coffee shop in the East Village. Jim’s face went white as if he was just cast in porcelain.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“That’s so weird.” Jim said, the creases in his cheeks looked like they had been dug out with a razor.
“I just think it’s a little strange. You know who took that photograph, don’t you?” He asked.
I shook my head.
“Dana. Dana Valey. You remember Dana Valey? That rock and roll chick, always drinking at the West Side Lounge?”
It was unclear. “No,” I said.
Jim leaned in. “Dana Valey died in a fire in her apartment. How did you get a copy of this?”
I told him I got it from a scrapbook that was lying around The Go-Go Room before they closed. It was a free for all of memorabilia that night.
“Yeah, well, either way,” Jim said, slugging a backpack over his shoulder, “Dana got burned alive. Passed out with a lit cigarette which caught on her curtains. She was so drunk she didn’t wake up before she choked to death on the smoke.”
I questioned him about the backpack he was wearing. Jim Hastings told me he was leaving to Europe for good. He took the last of the money he made from the Saturn Moon records and was trying to start a new life in Berlin.
“You’ve got quite a thing there, man,” he said, leering at the photograph. “That shit is bad luck.”
“I don’t believe in luck,” I told him as he walked off around the corner.
I stuffed the photograph in my pocket and went briskly back to my apartment.
Alone sometimes, I still look down at the blue photograph and the smeared date of ink on the back. I traced my fingers between the red amber explosions surrounding the blue-black silhouettes. All the connections to where the photo was taken, and where it was developed, and who took it, were all gone. The band members, all except Jim Hastings, had disappeared or were dead. I wanted to tell Jim about the glow around his head and shining red ambers. Let him know that maybe that’s what saved him. I didn’t want to worry about.
I should have. It was years later I heard Jim Hastings was found dead in a loft apartment June 6th, 2012. I read about it in the Times. A famed, 80’s bandleaders’ mysterious death in Berlin. They mused about drug rumors. They mused about suicide.
I tried not to do the math. The day I read those words: famed 80’s bandleaders’ mysterious death in Berlin. I tried not to do the math.
I took out the photograph from a hardcopy book and stared at the laced fibers of blue and black and the red amber bits of light. I tried not to count anything or start making any kind of connections with the numbers I conceived or the stories that I had heard. I went right to my sink and scratched a match and lit it. The blue flame seared the photograph. All the brittle pieces fell from my hands and circled down into the drain.
The date on my phone was 11/9/2013. I let the water faucet run, just to flush out the silence of the room. I opened a fresh bottle of whiskey, staring down at the pieces of the photograph, as the sun set through my windowsill. I tried to keep my mind from thinking.
Maybe the alcohol would work, this time.
