This Is Gonna Hurt Page 2

  And the truth is we will never even know her name

  Cuz as long as we can fill our glasses up

  we will look the other way

  EYE OF THE NEEDLE fig.vc78

  My interaction was minimal. Nobody knew who I was, and if they did, why would they care?

  Still, I was treated with more respect and given more polite “thank yous” and “excuse me, Nikkis” than I get in some of the nicest neighborhoods in the world. They wanted to know about my addiction and recovery. They told me their dreams and downfalls. I took two hundred pictures that day, two hundred moments of hope. As I was leaving one guy asked me if I would come back and say hello someday.

  I remember getting into the van and telling Kimo that people are amazing—all they want is to be accepted. Kimo looked at me and said, “Dog, you always find the good in everything. I always learn something on these photography missions with you.” It was quiet in the van riding back to the hotel. A feeling of gratitude falls over you after a day like that. Next time I’m in Vancouver, I plan on going back there. I hope I don’t recognize a single face.

  Another model search started in St. Petersburg, Russia. I tried explaining to our translator, Andrei, what I wanted to shoot. First word I said was, “Prostitute.” He looked at me sadly and said in very broken English, “You are want me find girl for you today?” I said “Nyet, not girl…girls.” I explained how I had once rented a whole brothel in Thailand just to make some photographs. Andrei still looked confused but said, “I will see if I can find girls to take pictures of…”

  Didn’t happen.

  Next stop, Stuttgart. I asked Ossy Hoppe, our German promoter, the same question I had for Andrei. This time there wasn’t a pause, or an “I’ll ask around,” or a “nyet.” There was just a simple, “What time do you wanna go?”

  “Right after the show,” I said, sealing the deal.

  As soon as we left the stage I grabbed my camera bag and said to Rex, the tour manager, “I’m ready to go and you’re coming with me.” Rex is British and has worked with every band you can name, most notably Led Zeppelin. I told him not to be slow and he rolled his eyes and smiled. He has seen this movie or some version of it a million times.

  We arrive at the brothel. Rex runs in first, then a minute later runs back out shouting, “Let’s go!”

  Camera bag in hand, I walk in and the girl at the front desk asks, “So you want to shoot picture?”

  “Yes, like this…” I say and break out some reference art I had brought along.

  Soon, I was like honey for the bees and the girls started coming up, buzzing, chatting in German, and then it came. I explained what I wanted. All I heard was nein, again and again.

  The girl up front saw the disappointment in my eyes and said, “Okay, okay, I will let you take pictures of me.” Problem was, she was a blonde and somewhat pretty. I was looking for the seamy underbelly—the addiction, the pain, the hell that is their lives. Not some German version of a California party girl.

  I was about to grab my stuff and leave when I saw something in her eyes. Just a glimpse, but it was there—what I was looking for. I just needed to see it again and capture it with my camera.

  “Okay,” I said, and she dragged me and Rex upstairs, the madame in tow.

  I had a choice of four rooms, all pretty much the same, so I picked the red one and asked where the light was. The madame says, “Light? We don’t need light.” Oh shit, I thought, maybe not for what you do… I asked if they had any kind of lamp and after much discussion in German, a guy appeared with a work light not unlike one you would find on a construction site, harsh and way too bright.

  I looked around and saw the paper towels the girls use to clean up after sex. I draped some over the lights, making a very ugly (and flammable) diffuser. I positioned the girl to get just her eyes and prepared to shoot.

  I did a quick test, told her she looked beautiful, took the shot, and showed it to her. She smiled. But it still wasn’t what I wanted, what I had seen before.

  Okay, I thought, now this is the part where I either get the shot or I get kicked out.

  I focused the camera on her face and asked, “Do you like what you do for a living?”

  Suddenly I saw that hurt look in her eyes, snap, snap…

  Question two, “Does your mom know you’re a prostitute?”

  BROTHEL, GERMANY fig.GM2.1

  Oh, that was tough to ask. The look again, snap, snap…

  Next I asked if I could shoot her from the rear. She seemed perturbed but I snapped a quick picture and told her again how pretty she looked.

  I had a feeling I was running out of time so I had her sit on her Plexiglas heels, six inches high at least. She told me she didn’t like her ass. I told her I was shooting her shoulder, and to look out the window. I fired off maybe ten pictures, all of her ass, when she blurted out, “Do you want to drink?”

  I told her I don’t drink. Then she said, “Do you want drugs?” I said I don’t do drugs. She mustered up the last question, the one I knew was coming and I dreaded: “Do you want sex?”

  I said, “I don’t do sex.”

  She turned toward me, crawling off her heels and off the bed. She stood erect, stunned. I took a quick picture of her then, too.

  “If you don’t drink, do drugs, or want sex, what do you do?” she asked, and I said, “Oh, I just take pictures.” Then I turned on my leather Chuck Taylors and split, leaving Rex to pay the bill. I think I captured her pain and maybe even her essence. I know one thing for sure: I pissed her off. She’s got a tough life, I realize, and even though I sound like a punk, I truly respect her for surviving such a hard road.

  It’s not always easy to get the person on the other side of the camera to see what I see. When I am doing a shoot with someone, I spend as much time talking to them as I do taking pictures. I want to know everything so I can make the moment honest. These people have been told over and over that they’re bad and ugly. That they’re not perfect like us. They’ve been pointed at and laughed at since childhood. Life can be cruel. It’s been my struggle, my personal battle, my obsession to make people see that different isn’t always bad.

  But then I contradict myself. I instinctively believe that the face of an angel usually hides something iniquitous and wicked under that porcelain-white soft skin. (I really hate it when I am judgmental, but I am working on that.) Meanwhile, my experience has shown me that beneath the darkest of visages usually gleams the softest of hearts. The glow is easy to see if you are willing to open your eyes and admit that all life is beautiful.

  Unfortunately for our society, we have been brainwashed into believing the lies of the “beautiful people.”

  For example, once a year People magazine puts out a list of the one hundred most beautiful people. I could hurl at this public display of deception. Makes me sick to think that millions of teenagers and young adults are being lured into believing that some made-up list is the standard for beauty and success.

  SELF-PORTRAIT, FUNNY FARM fig.52ff

  I am not a psychiatrist, but I stand firm in believing that allowing this kind of trash into our homes via TV, Internet, and magazines is a kind of mental-health terrorism.

  It’s hard to imagine how someone’s creative energies go into reality shows like The Girls Next Door, showing the mental retardation caused by overbleaching while millions of viewers sit on the edge of their couches watching Hef’s Girls—watching them stare into a mirror so long that they believe the silicone is really them.

  I am not saintly; I just have seen this movie before and I want my money back. I want more for myself and my loved ones.

  “Entertainment” is today’s deadly poison, and we’re Tivoing it all straight into our brains. That’s how our perception of life gets distorted. It’s then that we start to believe that what’s washing over our brains is “reality.” Brainwashing, anybody?

  I want us to return to the days of hard work and harder determination to better ourselves. Not bei
ng famous for being famous. I am not wrong for forbidding People, Entertainment Weekly, and garbage Dumpsters full of other, even worse magazines into my home for my kids to absorb like deadly diseases.

  Driving to the studio today I heard a voice on the radio say, “From the same people who brought you the Kardashians, an even more messed-up family, Meet the Lamas,” or something like that. I faded off into the rain that was hitting my windshield. The new generation of puppets don’t even know what they’re in for, sadly.

  I turned off the radio and turned on some Neil Young. I felt embarrassed to be in this industry and felt sad for the viewers who think it’s OK to idolize the newest of the beautiful people rotting from the inside out.

  “Stand outside the velvet rope and yearn to be in our grace,” the message is beamed into our brains. “Try to be like us, and maybe we will accept you.”

  But what if you don’t like what you see, or maybe you even view the people in People magazine as the freaks, the oddities, the disfigured?

  Humans have always needed some version of the bearded ladies, amputees, midgets, or looming giants and other freaks.

  Is it as the photographer Diane Arbus said, that we need freaks because they scare us? Or is it just human nature: we want to fit in so badly that it feels good to point out people who will never make the grade, no matter how hard they try?

  It all gets really interesting when the self-made freaks become the stars that the “in crowd” wants to imitate. Oh, what a confusing mindfuck we are converging upon. In the 1980s I tattooed my body pretty much top to bottom. My own mother asked me, “Are you gonna join the circus?” Today, it’s almost mainstream to have your arms tattooed from shoulder to wrist. To have steel bolts catapulting from your lobes, nipples, and belly buttons. Now it’s OK to tattoo yourself everywhere and not join the circus. You can be tattooed and pierced with crazy hair and still get a job at Kinko’s or Starbucks or some other big, international chain. Thank God the lines are getting blurred by our acceptance of one another’s differences.

  I love seeing the straight-looking man in a suit and tie talking to the girl with pink hair and a pierced nose at the local coffee shop. I love sitting on a bench talking to a homeless man and us both walking away feeling good. Maybe we really are capable of progress. I think we are on the road to awareness that it takes all of us to make this wonderful world.

  If that can happen, maybe someday we’ll be capable of admitting that the one hundred “most beautiful people in the world” could possibly be the ugliest ones of all.

  There was a time in my life, after living on the fringe for years, that acceptance was granted to me, like an unwanted award. I had fought hard to not conform to a society of anti-joysticks. It infuriated me that I was asked into their social clubs, VIP rooms, and roped-off celebrity enclaves. It felt like a mockery to me—to accept these “honors” would be a betrayal of my own self. I was confused by fame and success from the beginning, always more of an artist and less of a red carpet wannabe. It all just made me angry. I don’t believe anybody set out to insult me. It just came out that way.

  The other day I found a journal entry from 1984. It simply said:

  People tell me I am a star, fuck them.

  That sentiment was comforting to me then. It tells me I was willing to stand up as an artist and not be strung up as a puppet.

  It looked to me like the beautiful people had stuck their noses under our circus tent and exclaimed, “Sorry we laughed at you. We didn’t know you would be so popular and all the rage. Now we love you. Now we wanna look like you. We’d love to introduce you to all our friends…”

  Hence my journal entry. Fuck them.

  How could I forgive them when I didn’t trust them?

  Not so long before, they wouldn’t let me in their little world, their restaurants and clubs and hotels. I remember being asked, “Are you some kind of faggot?” because I painted my nails. Suddenly I was a sex symbol?

  That was a lot for anybody to handle. I’m still trying to this day. Trying to forgive people for judging me, and to forgive myself for judging people. For becoming what I hated.

  I feel like my photography somehow ties into all this.

  I’m just pulling up to my studio here in Los Angeles. It’s aptly named Funny Farm, not only for the voices that speak to me from inside my own head, but also for the lunatics who crawl through the door at all hours to create with me. Funny Farm is not the kind of studio you’d imagine from a guy in a rock band. There isn’t a piece of musical equipment here except for a random, out-of-tune acoustic guitar in a corner.

  Between the overstuffed leather couch on which I’m sprawled and the antique, hand-carved Chinese cherrywood chairs, you can see flickering on the wall a twelve-foot-tall cross that I bought right off the top of a church. Nailed here and there are 1920s French crucifixes, thirteen in all, under antique glass and mounted on old, fading velvets. There are also some mannequins with giant spread wings, a steampunk-meets-Mad-Max child-sized mannequin dripping in raven feathers, surrounded by Persian carpets and books…tons and tons of old books. The taxidermy on the walls makes me feel like I have a million friends with two million beady eyes staring down.

  This is my home away from home, my office, my haunted haven. My photography studio.

  This is where I pull ideas out of thin air and somehow “see” them before I start the process that will end with them captured, mounted, and nailed to my walls. There is no Welcome to Funny Farm Studios sign. There is just an iron gate that needs three keys to open. So maybe it’s a bit like Fort Knox here, and that suits me and my taxidermic friends just fine. (If I told you they all had names, would you think me insane?)

  If you wander out of the lounge, you have a few choices. Turn to your left and you end up in the medical room. I have always had a fascination with 1800s medicine. It’s surreal to think of what humans had to endure not so long ago. A bone saw is more than even I can fathom. There are oversized syringes, bottles that once held everything from cyanide to formaldehyde, and illustrated medical cards from a time long past, once used by doctors to compare symptoms in order to come up with diagnoses. Encircling the dental molds and meat cleavers is my collection of jawbones.

  The wall behind you is covered in prints of my latest work, strung up on raw wire and held there by antique clothespins. I’ve taken the ceiling out, leaving the industrial inner workings of the building exposed (the guts, so to speak). Fluorescent light fixtures hang down, and inside the clear plastic covers, I’ve placed my collection of old medical scissors. When the lights come on, you see thirteen-inch shears floating above your head.

  In still life (and death) photography, I express my love of bones, and not only human ones, by the way. I do have a nice collection of human skulls. Maybe a femur or two as well. They’re all unique and all beautiful like people, and unfortunately for those around me, they all have names. When workmen come to Funny Farm, I often get a call from my wonderful assistant Sara (imagine her job) saying the painters won’t go into the studio alone or they heard noises in the other room…Good God, just think what the UPS man would say if he knew what he’d been delivering to me for years.

  Point being, death seems to take on a life of its own in my photography.

  So here’s a good question: Why, if photography makes me feel so alive, do I so often end up shooting some form of death? “I live in death, I can smell it, it’s in the air and the air smells sweet,” I’ve been overheard saying.

  The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that death is the graduation ceremony, while living is just a long course in learning and preparing for the next journey. If we acknowledge death as the beginning, then how can we fear it? In my twenties I wanted it so bad that I got it, but I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t finished what I started, so to speak, nor have I now. I don’t fear death; I welcome it with open arms and a smirk. But until that wondrous day, I will continue to savor and celebrate all those who have graduated before me.

  The m
akeup area is strung with silks and lace and painted gold, like a bordello. On the directors’ chairs I spray painted “horror” and “pimp.” (Nobody ever gets the horror/whore joke.) I had state-of-the-art makeup lights and tables put in for all the crazy shit we do here. Actually, it’s been a godsend considering the massive amount of time working on makeup, hair, and prosthetics here. I had a huge hole cut in the wall and framed like a picture so I can keep an eye on the models and makeup artist as I prep the studio and the lights.

  When I see old faded black-and-white Polaroids of me in the 1960s, I wish I could have shot them. I constantly scrounge for new techniques everywhere, from online to foreign secondhand stores to the back rooms of friends’ darkrooms. I am always exploring, always pushing myself. When I see my kids laughing, it’s a picture. My girlfriend painting, it’s a picture. And so on and so on…

  For one memorable session I did here, I needed a model who would be basically a blank canvas, but at the same time would seem like something just left of center. I needed her to do partial nudity, or else the clothes were going to date the image. Ralis, the makeup artist I hired, took the reins, knowing what was in my head and what was about to happen to the model’s face. He sent me photos of a dozen candidates and only one jumped out at me. Her name was Ekaterina, and you could see her Russian ancestry even through her glossy modeling pictures. I had a vision that involved turning her pretty face to hell. I felt that if I took a beautiful girl and disfigured her, I might be able to capture something unique in the lens. These girls usually pose to look as gorgeous as possible, so how would she respond to the camera once we were through with her? Old habits die hard. So even though on the outside she would be falling apart, on the inside her instinct tells her she is still beautiful. I was excited to see if I could capture an emotional meltdown.

  My vision was very carnival-sideshow but mixed in with a bit of androgyny. I shot her in a way that brought out her beauty and the scars equally. She could either be a transsexual, a Russian circus performer, or just a beautiful girl who had been doused in battery acid. Disclaimer: I only took the shots…the story is in your head (well, there was a story in mine, too). But I must leave you with these parting words from Ekaterina, who told me, “Thank you, Nikki. I have never felt so beautiful in my whole life.” I smiled that smile I get when I want to say, “I told you so.”