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 answers: why?
I suppose most things don’t go well asking ‘why’. From increased service advisories on subway trains to the birth of the universe, asking these kind of questions is like pushing a body against the wall hard. Instead of a fantastic explosion, you are left with a hiss out of the mouth, like air from a balloon.
The fact remains that the photograph in blue has 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, beleaguered by something like a misty layer falling on my bare skin.
I’m not talking about death. People die everyday. I’m not talking about illness either. People get sick everyday. Or the accidents. There was more to this fog surrounding me. Elements that cannot be explained save that they are a part of this photograph. The DNA and the structure of the chemicals in the development phase of processing the image, to the hands of the developer, and the building it was made within. I swear to you it is like smashing your own head against the same wall and receiving no injuries.
This one blue photograph. Four members of the band, four silhouettes, all caught in some form of action in the photograph. All the hues showing the blue, save for those red ambers bursts in strange places. A photograph taken on a cheap Nikon with 60mm lens, developed in the tradition of 1988, with small purple letters in ink smeared from my finger on the back.
1988. New York City. At the Go-Go Room which doesn’t even exist any more. I believe at the corner of 17th street and 8th Avenue now 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 on each other above ground. If you walked by the intersection today, as I have at least 107 times, it’s sad to see the corner conducting its trafficked business. This was where the photograph was taken inside the Go-Go Room in 1988.
Saturn Moon, that’s the band. Notice above the lead guitarist’s head and the odd burst of amber and gold over the blue-black shadows. These are the lights from the truss above his head, but it looks much like a halo burst, some kind of holy thing. The guitar player, Jim Hastings, born Des Moines, Iowa, is the lead guitar player. There would be no way you would know Saturn Moon unless you lived around the Go-Go Room in 1988.
Over on the left side of the photograph in the shadows was the singer Markey Sullivan. I could tell who he was because I knew the band. Most people would have to use the process of elimination because the photograph only shown two lanky arms draped to the ground in a worshipping stance within in the blue darkness on stage.
In the back, behind the gleaming silver drums booming from the raucous show was Billy Dixon, a New York native from Queens. Actually we knew about Billy Dixon long before because his mother had died many years ago. 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 half. Billy Dixon became the face everyone had remembered from the Post that week, tears running down his 8 year old face, surrounded by photographers. His sister told me his love of the drums was about pounding out his anger on them and not hurting people in the process and I believed her.
Less tragic was the bass player, holding his instrument like a weapon against the black shades above the audience. He was the recipient of many stalk arms reaching up toward him from the crowd, all little silhouette bulbs at the bottom of the photograph. Jason Whitman and I shared many of after-hours drinks once the Go-Go Room closed its doors at the bleary eyed hour of 5am. He was a natural comedian and women were drawn to him in a preternatural way. This is why most of those shadowed stalks of arms in the blue photograph reached towards the center of the stage. For him.
I remember that corner of 17th and 8th in 1988. Wild throngs of young people, anywhere 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 a tornado. The cops were non-existent until people started to get hurt. One of the bikers smashed some tourist’s head on 17th street on a Thursday night. Someone got shot around the corner, but we didn’t know them. Someone overdosed in the bathroom of The Go-Go Room once. We didn’t know them either.
The photograph looked sewn the more I stared at it. Little fibers quietly laced together, stich by stich, creating this wild moment from 1988. I pushed my fingers across the image, the blue-black spotted by the gold embers exploding in some particular order.
My first theory was that the embers 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 fan to the stage, there’s a myriad of little specks of red amber like a shattered diamonds at his feet. I used to think this meant Jim and Markey shared a secret, which led to Markey leaving the band to start a new act with Jim Hasting’s, which then led to numerous records being sold around the cusp of 1990. That 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.
Markey Sullivan sold records. You could tell he was going to make it the way he was praying in the blue. That’s how I figured it out. If you count the small amber shinings beneath his worshipping hands, the number comes to 17. Strangely enough, it was on January 7, 2006 that Markey Sullivan was diagnosed with throat cancer years later.
I did the math. January, the first month added to the seventh day—17. And the year was 2006. 2 plus 6 equals 8, and if you use the same principles of simple math and add the 17 together, you have the 8. He was a singer with throat cancer. It only seemed obvious to me. There was nothing worse than that. This being just one theory. I don’t even care about Numerology. These principles are principles of simple math.
The owner of The Go-Go Room was hit by a car and his name was Robert Rosenbaum. The car twisted his spine in an accident on 8th Avenue just after 8 o’clock, 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 in 2000.
The rest of the band was fine. Jason Whitman got a girl pregnant after the photo was taken and she demanded they leave the city to raise the child. I went to find her in Yonkers, that provincial town upstate, and when I did locate her, 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. His note said: “I’m sorry.”
The girl was obviously distraught, and kept asking me questions about why I tracked her down to find Jason Whitman, her make up smears odd down her cheeks.
I explained I was writing a piece for a magazine, and luckily, she didn’t ask me which one. I showed her the blue photograph, feeling it brittle and hard in my hands. She explained, eyes going total white blurry, pointing to the celluloid I held between her face and mine.
“I was there! That was the night I met Jason!” I started to feel a cold gauze crawl up my arm and 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 photograph had been processed was burned to the ground. I told Jim Hastings about it at a coffee shop in the East Village. He was there and I was there. Jim’s face went white as if he was cast in porcelain when I told him.
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s so weird.” Jim said, the creases in his cheeks and around the eyes looked like they had been dug out with a dull 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 Meld. You remember Dana Meld. That rock and roll chick, always drinking at West Side Lounge?”
I was unclear. “No,” I said.
Jim leaned in. “Dana died in a fire in her apartment. How did you get a copy of this?”
I froze. I told him I got it from a scrapbook that was lying around The Go-Go Room before they closed. It was sort of a free for all of memorabilia that night.
“Yeah, well, either way,” Jim said, slugging a backpack over his shoulder, “Dana got burned alive. She had 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, and Jim Hastings told me he was leaving to Europe for good. He took the last of the money he made from the Saturn Moon albums and was trying life in Berlin.
“You’ve got quite a possession there, man,” he said, eyeing the photograph. “I hope you’ll treat it better than Dana was.”
As he walked away, I couldn’t help to shake this sense if impending doom. I stuffed the photograph in my pocket and walked 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 surround in a sea of blue-black silhouettes. All connections to where the photo was taken, and where it was developed, and whom it was taken by have all gone away. The band members, all except Jim Hastings, have disappeared or were dead. I wanted to tell Jim about the glow around his head. Let him know that maybe that’s what saved him. But I had a thought that nothing would save him on some dark road in Berlin and I didn’t want to worry him.
I should have. I heard Jim Hastings was found dead in a loft apartment June 6th, 2012. I read about it in the Times. Famed 80’s bandleader mysterious death in Berlin. Local celebrity in 1988. 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 bandleader mysterious death in Berlin… I tried not to do the math. I took the photograph that I had kept in a hardcopy of The Brother Karamazov and stared at the laced fibers of blue and black and the red ember shinings. I tried not to count anything or start making any kind of connections with the numbers I conceived or the stories I had heard. I went right to my sink and scratched a match and lit it. The celluloid caught fast and the blue flame seared the photograph. All the brittle pieces circled down the drain. The date on my phone was November 9, 2013. I let the water run long and opened a fresh bottle of whiskey as the sun set through my windowsill and tried to keep my mind from thinking. Maybe the alcohol would work, this time.
