The Sexxx Lives of Famous Black People

All famous artists' studios are the same—a droning ambient hubbub of syncophantic house-nigga activity. All the same of course except when they're not. They are then instead more like the habitat of one more filthy rich and unhappy Czarist family. By which I mean more like something escaped howling mad as a hatter from recombinantly ripped-out pages by Wharton, Tolstoy, and Nabakov and then cut-up with Burroughsque savor faire by a snap queen with a flinty-arrow.

Such was frequently the controlled chaos that went down in the studio of my art world dungeon-mistress, The Lord-Lady Lillian Robeson—a distant cousin to the also legendary Paul by way of marriage, just in case anyone out there really, truly cares.

All the above was especially the case on those weekends when Mz Lillian chose to open her studio practice up and fill it with cast members specially selected from places both creepily high and dingily low. A motley bunch who all considered themselves luckily chosen to play parts major and minor in her next body of exquisitely overbooked starfucking works. The motley bunch of the moment presently under discussion had been casually culled from various celebrity collectors, old friends, recent neighbors, fellow citizens, and a dozen or so more random strange and beautiful characters chosen with discerning care by Lillian's go-getter street-team. The latter posse of pavement-prowling eager-beavers were the most essential for Lillian's purposes. Their job was to go out and discover an abundance of folk who represented of what Lillian described (per the fabulocious Michaela Angela Davis's term), as "unmolested Black beauty." Since Lillian's procurers worked in Gotham City, the world's most fashion forward African cattle-call, her street-teams never failed to return to base without an embarrassment of negrocious riches. Each one of whom appeared as nature, Mama Afrika, and the hand of the divine had intended: beyond the reach of Conde Nast, Hollywood, or MTV.

I had gotten my start with Lillian working on a street team over a decade ago. I had gradually worked my way off the block and inside Lillian's operation. Progressing, in true Winky Dinky Dog fashion, to assistant to Assistant Crew Chief. I am now enjoying my second year as Studio Manager and have become the second most tenured and trusted employee in Lillian's operation. This is a position equivalent, on a scale of being and nothingness, and in late 1960s jazz terms, to being the second to last cat to exit the legendary Miles Davis Quintet. Like Herbie Hancock right before he went off to form the Mwandishi band and Headhunters group and yet not unlike your friend still holding down that head librarian position at your alma mater where he's on year eight of finishing up his dissertation on some no-brainer topic like "Tragic Magic Realism, Creative Mutilation, and the Graphic Village 'Literatures' of Romare Bearden, Amos Tutola, Toni Morrison, and Bessie Head": a work destined to disappear on contact with the air and which no one, not even the writer himself, ever expects to be mistaken for a heartbreaking work of staggering, swaggering genius.

In other words I was like so many of my kind, stuck in my mid 30s waiting for a better idea worth pursuing in my own work. I would likely spend the rest of my 30s praying to not spend my 40s stuck inside of Lillian's world. All the while knowing it was game over should Patrick the studio's reigning grey-haired eminence, Lillian's stalwart Man-Friday eternal first-protector of the throne, suddenly and catastrophically abdicate or announce an emergency retirement or just plain split after having Lillian's back since forever and a day. Or at least since she first began showing work not long after grad school way back whenabouts.

Patrick had found his way to Lillian in the aftermath of some personally tragic events in Algeria. It was there that his longtime Austrian boyfriend Pitr (twenty years by Patrick's side in North Africa...