Driving through Pennsylvania at night is like running through a tunnel. It’s dark on three sides with patches of light in the front. Your thoughts and whatever music you have playing -- or not -- keep you company. Companions doze, then spring back to life. Occasionally, the lights of strip-malls illuminate hills around you. Convoys of tractor-trailers blast past, and vice-versa. Its summer and the cool but not cold night air soothes your skin, greasy from the road.
I can’t believe I’m doing this. I mean, first if all, I can’t even vote. That’s one of the punishments the great people of the State of New York -- or at least their elected representatives -- have decided to impose upon persons convicted of felonies within its borders. And, in 1991, I was indeed convicted of a felony, manslaughter to be precise, the particulars of which are a story for another day. Suffice for now to say, though, that after serving almost thirteen years, I was released on July 14, 2003.
It would not be cliché to say that fortune has smiled favorably upon me since that day. Not only have I managed to stay out of prison since my release, but I got New York University to give me a Bachelor’s degree, with honors. After that, I picked up a professional camera for the first time. A year later, I figured out a way to take pictures pretty enough so that one of the Nation’s largest daily newspapers gave me daily work, seven days a week if I wanted it, and sometimes when I didn’t.
My friends said it was the perfect job for me, since I was so good at finding trouble and all.
And, speaking of trouble, it was through an assignment that I first met Clark. He was going out with a member of what can only be described as a sort of gyno-centric burlesque performance and protest art collective in Bushwick, Brooklyn called the House of Yes. I met Larkin and her friends first, on a Saturday afternoon when they were riding the subways dressed as stewardesses in home-sewn costumes handing out bottles of water and candy to straphangers and otherwise acting as “subway service specialists,” as they called themselves.
The point was to protest a fare increase that was not accompanied by once-promised service increases. It worked, and they got their names and pictures in the paper.
For my part, my hard work was rewarded with an invitation to a party the House of Yes’s loft in the post-industrial wilderness along the Brooklyn/Queens border. It was an invitation that changed my life. For a year and a half I have covered nothing but murder and mayhem for the paper, with a sprinkling of vacuous celebrities. It was fun, and I spent many a dark night bonding with other former delinquents now armed with cameras climbing up-and-down fire escapes and through pitbull-filled yards trying to find a way around the yellow tape at the latest police-involved shooting.
But it wasn’t art. And after meeting all the folks at the House of Yes, art is all I wanted to do.
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