In the early years of the 1980s, the East Village, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had a population of roughly sixty thousand. But the worlds of art, music, and literature operating east of the Bowery and Third, south of Fourteenth, and north of Houston felt far smaller. The neighborhood of low buildings and crooked streets, a place so hollowed out and reduced to rubble that it resembled postwar Vienna, was intimate. Everyone seemed to be only one degree of separation from Madonna, from Jean-Michel Basquiat, from Keith Haring—from people on the cusp of changing the world but who were still, for the time being, well known only in New York.
The community was so small that a gallerist estimated that 3,500 members of the art world lived in the neighborhood. Another number discussed was 500. The “Fabulous 500” was the coinage of fashion designer Dianne Brill to describe “the conceptual movers and shakers of everything” who made up the Village. Brill, with her big, bleached blonde hair and aheart-shaped smile, was herself one of the 500. In his 1988 work Andy Warhol’s Party Book, the wigged-up artist would observe, “Dianne Brill . . . was the first young girl in decades to really play up a big body with big curves and big cleavage. [She] operated full tilt all night all over New York as the ultimate Party Girl and earned herself the title ‘Queen of the Night.’”
Michael Jerome Stewart wasn’t among the Fab 500. Still, he was very much a part of their world. The modeling job he’d told Patricia Pesce about had been for a spread in Mexican Vogue featuring Brill’s fashion. Michael hadn’t taken a single bad shot, the designer later said. “He always gave gorgeous faces.”
Michael was also tightly connected to the Pyramid Club, the nightclub on Avenue A, just off Tompkins Square Park, where he’d met up with Pesce that night. Once a Ukrainian haunt frequented by local babushkas, the club fell on hard times until, in the early 1980s, new managers decided to dramatically alter the joint’s appeal. They left the tiles embedded in the pyramid shape of the floor that had given the club its name, but changed pretty much everything else.
At the Pyramid’s grand reopening in 1981, the reconceptualized establishment on the Village’s perimeter announced itself as the place to be for the pansexual, the punk, the queer, those in drag, and anyone else comfortable in the milieu—anti-hierarchy; no velvet ropes; an alternative, coiled energy. On opening night, a classically trained dancer in a bustier, a red wig, and black-painted eye sockets performed The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian as a nod to the gay icon. For the finale, he flipped himself over a railing and pretended to die—all while made up in, as he later put it, “glamorous gender-fuck punk drag.”
The celebration was titled On the Range, a nod to the “frontier” that was Avenues A through D. Depending on whom you asked, it was also variously called Alphabet City, Loisaida, or just “the neighborhood.” Incredibly, real estate vultures had already begun to circle, but back then, it was still a mostly rundown, desolate area that was so quiet, one tabloid claimed, that “you can hear a rat crossing the street.” The neglect stretched from one end of the neighborhood to the other: Avenue A was dotted with empty storefronts, while there were lines around the block on Avenue D to buy heroin. A local poet, seeking solace, observed that such conditions would ward off gentrification, at least for a while: “. . . keep it looking messed up / Maybe the gentry can’t set up shop.”
The Pyramid, thoroughly impervious, was printing money. Future indie rock royalty like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore was among the many willing to pay the ten-dollar cover to enter what he viewed as “the most significant spot in the East Village.” Night after night, a scrum of bodies rubbed up against one another, figuratively and literally. And what bodies! The patrons, observed one attendee, were “the right mix of lunatics, friends, drunks, and intellectuals.” It was a largely white and often queer crowd, but Pyramid regulars were intensely accepting. It was an odd oasis in which gender, sexuality, and race didn’t determine whether you got through the door.
Michael, hired as a busboy, was welcomed there with open arms.
*
Michael Stewart was born on May 9, 1958, to Millard and Carrie Stewart of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The Stewarts had left Kentucky three years earlier, during the Second Great Migration. Mrs. Stewart, a short woman with a thin smile, worked as a public school teacher. Mr. Stewart, whose tall, thin frame his son would inherit, was a veteran of World War II and Korea and now worked for the Transit Authority. Michael was the eldest of four children, all raised in a two-story home on a block of old brownstones within arm’s reach of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
What Michael loved, from the time he was a little boy, was to draw. In elementary school his passion was obvious. “He would write imaginary stories and illustrate them,” his mother said years later. “He started sketching on paper napkins or drawing on top of photographs, or doing strange kinds of things that maybe you wouldn’t really call painting—or even artistic—but he started making things that seemed strange to other people but made sense to him.”
Michael wasn’t academically minded, but he gave higher learning a try. After a year at City College, he enrolled in a summer program at Pratt Institute, a four-year university in Brooklyn that had graduated many eminences in the worlds of music, film, and fashion. There, he further developed an interest in art, working backstage on sets. Even after the program was over, Michael continued to orbit Pratt’s campus, which wasn’t far from the Stewart home. Sometimes he’d come straight from his job at the phone company, still clad in a dark blue jumpsuit and gear, his locs tucked under a hat.
On an October night in 1981, a pair of Pratt students were at the Mudd Club in Manhattan to see the band Liquid Liquid. One gestured to Michael, who was wearing a Joy Division T-shirt. It was easy to notice Michael, who stood out in predominantly white spaces. The student knew him as the deep and sotto voce host of a show on the campus radio station, WPIR.
Located on the first floor of the Willoughby dorm, WPIR had become a home away from home for Michael. Its deejays were divided into two camps: the art students, who played punk, rockabilly, and the like; and the engineering students, who preferred disco. Michael aligned himself with the art students. Allergic to the chart-toppers, his crowd gravitated toward the abstruse. Michael fit right in, collecting albums from labels like England’s Rough Trade Records, which distributed the Raincoats and a Certain Ratio. His musical tastes, said an awed deejay, “were pretty reaching at that point.” It didn’t bother anyone that Michael had a radio show despite no longer being a Pratt student.
After his show was over, Michael would hang around the station, dancing along to music in the listening room adjacent to the studio, or making faces at whoever was on the air. Late at night, after the security guard stopped checking up on them, the deejays would gather to drink, play records, and make out.
In those years, Michael would leave home, portfolio in hand, to return in the early morning hours after a night of drinking and dancing. Dancing was an activity he particularly loved. He and Cheryl Ricelyn “Rice” Jackson, a close friend of several years, entered contests around Manhattan: at the Ritz, the Peppermint Lounge, Save the Robots. Wearing fashionable clothes they found while dumpster diving in SoHo, they would do spins and dips in sync to Blondie and Talking Heads. No matter how hard they tried, the pair always finished second. “Every little beat, every little intonation of a song, of a record—even if we’d never heard it before—he could hit that beat, he could hit that note,” Jackson said. “The music was just inside of him.” (She and Michael would watch Looney Tunes with contemporary music on, so the escapades of Bugs and Elmer Fudd would sync in funny ways.)
To his friends, it was obvious that Michael loved music, but the pull of art had intensified in his life. By 1982, he was developing his own style, creating murals at street level and drawing on Polaroids that he would then glue to Manhattan subway walls—a sort of public installation. And he began entertaining visions of making art on a larger and larger scale, with the idea of blowing up photos and painting on them.
Artists at the time considered New York as one colossal canvas. Michael, too, engaged in more traditional tagging in the subway stations. On at least a dozen occasions, after finishing work at the Pyramid, he and Arthur “Chino” Ludwig, who was in charge of the club’s security, went out on the town with cans of spray paint. Michael favored green, yellow, and black. “We would go all over the place,” Ludwig recalled. Union Square, Forty-Second Street, to Second Avenue and Eighteenth Street on the F line. Sometimes they’d venture as far as Fulton Street in Brooklyn.
During these outings, while Michael worked, Ludwig stood guard. It was well known that police targeted taggers. Still, despite taking precautions, Michael and Ludwig had the occasional close call. One night, they went to 138th Street in the Bronx, not far fromwhere Ludwig’s mother lived in the projects. At Third Avenue, flashlight in hand, they walked along the tracks for about a quarter of a mile, until they reached an old station. It was lit up and covered with graffiti. Other taggers were there, too, and they knew Michael. All was well—until the police arrived. Everyone scattered. But not fast enough, and several of their number were arrested.
On these nights, as Michael sprayed, he and Ludwig would talk about family, girls, the crazy Pyramid patrons, drugs, and their life aspirations. As Ludwig remembered it, “He wanted to go on and be real famous. He wanted to do giant murals across the country. He wanted to travel to Germany. He wanted to go to Prague. I mean, he spoke about the world and how he wanted to just travel and become famous and do that. That was his goal. He really wanted to be worldwide.
“That was his end game.”
If Michael wasn’t yet one of the Fab 500, he planned to be.
**
September 14, 1983, a Wednesday, had been a typical day for Michael. That afternoon, he biked across the Brooklyn Bridge (clack clack clack). (That’s the recollection of Patricia Pesce. However, in a 1988 interview with an attorney, Millard Stewart said he last saw Michael at 8 p.m., which suggests that Michael would not have been in Manhattan so early in the day.) He spent time at the studio he rented. Later, he met up with his sometime girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk, for drinks at Lucky Strike. He was special to Mallouk, an intense twenty-three-year-old, stylish in her oversize clothes, with short dark hair and bangs clipped just above the eyes. She tended bar at the Berlin, where Michael visited her on many nights to play tic-tac-toe and eat olives and cherries fromthe bartenders’ supply. They had known each other for over a year, having met the summer before, at the Pyramid. At the time, Mallouk was broken up with Basquiat, who was just emerging into fame. Mallouk and the artist had had an on-again, off-again relationship, and after one of their breakups, she began to date Michael, even as she continued to have deep feelings for Basquiat.
Mallouk thought Michael was handsome and caring, but mostly he reminded her of her younger brother. She had real affection for him, but she didn’t love him. Meanwhile, Michael adored her and wasawed by her proximity to Basquiat. The year before, when Mallouk had been hospitalized over the holidays for pelvic inflammatory disease and confined to bed with an antibiotic IV drip, Michael visited her every day. On New Year’s Eve, he kept her company in the hospital room, and the two rang in the New Year together.
Michael had lived with Mallouk for a while in her apartment on the Lower East Side, but then she asked him to move out, as she realized that her love for Basquiat made it impossible for her to be “fully present” in their relationship. So, Michael left, moving back in with his parents in Brooklyn. But the two stayed close. That night at Lucky Strike, Suzanne apologized for how she kept flitting between the two men. “Yes, yes,” Michael had said, stroking her arm. He was understanding, unfussed.
After leaving Lucky Strike, Michael had met up with George Condo, a visual artist, and a friend of Condo’s named Freddie. The trio tried to get into a party at Haring’s Broome Street loft, which had become something of a quasi nightclub in the neighborhood. Haring, known for his vibrant white-chalk-and-ink drawings of faceless people and barking dogs, was a big deal, having been anointed by Rene Ricard, pursued by Warhol, and exhibited at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery, the new locus of the city’s contemporary art. The artist, acting as the evening’s doorman as well as its host, had bounded down from the third floor when they arrived. Haring knew Michael from around the Pyramid, and well enough for a greeting and a salutation hug. Condo and Haring eventually would become close, but at the time, they hardly knew each other. It was Freddie who was the real obstacle to the group’s gaining entry—he’d swindled Haring out of a thousand dollars, and the painter was still angry. Haring refused to let the group in.
So, the three men had moved along to the Pyramid Club instead. When they arrived, Basquiat was standing outside. Condo asked if he could borrow some money, and with the painter’s ten dollars, Condo and the group went inside.
Michael seemed to enjoy the show, listening to music and drinking with his friends. While he appeared relaxed, his financial situation at the time was fraught, and a source of anxiety. Two months earlier, he’d been fired from his thirty-five-dollar-a-night gig as a busboy at Pyramid. He had lacked the aggression necessary for one to ruthlessly wade through a crowd to empty a table or ferry a tub of glasses held high above his head. Michael had wept when he got the news. He liked his colleagues, after all. One coworker had brought him back to her house for home-cooked meals. Another partied with him at Danceteria. She had vivid memories of their trips home on the A Train and had been immensely bothered that, in a crowded subway car, Transit Authority police always, somehow, ended up standing next to Michael. “It’s all right,” he’d tell her. “Don’t worry about it.” And he’d been close also with the Pyramid’s regulars, with whom he would dance until daybreak. Sometimes he’d go straight home afterward, but sometimeshe’d head into the subway, can of spray paint in hand.
In the two months since being fired, Michael had drifted. Still, despite his precarious finances, he expected brighter days ahead. Aside from modeling jobs, like the one he’d done for Dianne Brill, he was deejaying, too, and that might prove a source of steadyincome. Just a month before, he’d spun records at a party thrown by Maripol, who’d earned acclaim as a fashion designer and photographer—capturing intimate Polaroid portraits of Warhol, Grace Jones, and Basquiat. Michael had also deejayed occasionallyat the Pyramid, and as he told Pesce, he was set to play at Lucky Strike in a few days.
Whatever pressures or optimism he may have felt, he’d stayed at the club long enough to watch the night’s featured performer, Tanya Ransom, a progenitor of punk drag. Afterward, in an unusually garrulous mood, Michael had sat talking with former coworkers. “He seemed to be all bubbling,” one of them later said. He’d then stopped by the dressing room to see Ransom. Michael may have had a few beers, but to the performer, he seemed “fairly lucid.”
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