Slave To The Night: Dafna Remembers Art Basel

Slave to the Night:

Art is the most important thing in the world to me and to everyone else and also to no one. That is a big reason why I went to Miami in Florida for an art fair called Art Basel. I wanted to raise awareness about art, so I chewed 5 Dexedrine and boarded the plane.

 

But when I got to Miami, it seemed like most of the people there already knew about art. I rode the baggage carousel until they escorted me off premises, then checked into my hotel. I love hotels because it’s nothing like home: You can pop pills and die in a bath.

 

When I awoke hours later, my phone was buzzing. It was my friend Kinōt Voxing me that an amazing artist was having a show at this gallery done all in white on the beach and I should come and that I would fucking hate it but did I happen to have any Adderall.

 

The art was amazing. All this rope painted white and hung all over the place like it was waiting for the most beautiful lynching. I liked it, but I ended up spending most of the opening in the bathroom with this girl Marisoldièr who had a bunch of coke. When we finally came out, the lights were off and everyone was gone. The gallery had transformed to a totally different exhibit.

 

We began texting so furiously that Marisoldièr’s nose started bleeding so she took some of Kinōt’s dreadlock and used it to staunch the flow while I busied myself looking for muscle relaxers in the pockets of the vintage Geoffrey Beene duster I stole from a pedestrian.

 

 

Marisoldièr stopped bleeding just as I got a text from Charlotte Bell des Goffe, this gallerist I know in New York. She was at this club called Apartheid and I invited Marisoldièr but I kind of hoped she wouldn’t come since her dress had bloodstains on it which Kinōt said was a little too “New York.” Luckily she said she felt really sick and dizzy so she got an uber home. So I carjacked a bike and rode over to Ocean Drive.

 

In the VIP cage, it was me, Charlotte, and her boyfriend Max Deff – you know, the artist who used to ejaculate into jars of glitter? He was wearing this Thom Brown suit that was cut so fucking perfectly I would have had orgasms if I hadn’t taken so many tranquilizers. He’s dead now.

 

For some ridiculous reason Max had brought these two girls in town from Reykjavik. They barely spoke English but they had so much cocaine so I bummed them e-cigs and let them fawn over my vintage Chanel bucket bag that Malia Obama bought for me before we stopped talking.

 

Soon, bothof them were all over Max, laughing, whispering, hair-twirling. and Charlotte appeared to be bothered. She was smoking cigarettes like an actual fiend, and I put the teeniest bit of molly in her drink, just to mellow her out since Charlotte had the keys to our hotel room, which was actually Patrick Ewing’s old cabana at a busted-up mansion on Collins Court.

 

I was high and drunk and looked so thin but somehow I was still so bored. I started thinking about how nothing is ever truly fun, and why was that? I was still thinking intense thoughts when all of a sudden Charlotte stood up, fucking gasping and clutching at her throat wildly like those choking posters they have in shitty restaurants. Her eyes looked strange, like one of those big goldfish in the ponds they’d had at the first rehab I went to. “What the fuck!” she choked out. “What the fuck did you give me?!”

 

I have no interest in people’s dramatics and normally I ignore them avoid it at all costs, but I could tell Charlotte was in the mood to be consoled. I spoke, my voice was even. “You’re not dying. It’s Molly.” Charlotte’s eyes were widening and she pointed at the Icelandic girl, the one who was all over Max. It was so loud in there we were all screaming, “No. Molly.” Molly the DRUG. The DRUG. Not a PERSON’S NAME. I PUT it in your DRINK.

 

Doesn’t anybody read anymore?

 

Charlotte’s eyes got so wide then that I could have served a cheese plate on them, if food weren’t so inherently disgusting. Max stood up and started yelling, something about how Charlotte can’t take MDMA. He said she has a bad reaction, which is bullshit, because no one is allergic MDMA that’s why it’s the perfect drug and it makes everything better. But Charlotte continued her outburst as I crunched down hard on two Dexedrine, and the next thing I know, Max is calling an ambulance and we’re all in a taxi behind it, the Icelandic girls crying and screaming and I’m feeling a little too high so I pull hard on the bottle of Patron I grabbed from a shrine near someone else’s table before we had to had to race right out of there.

 

The hospital was a blur. Terrible lighting. Weird shoes. Charlotte’s stomach being pumped. People asked me questions while Max yelled at me, even though it’s not my fault because what kind of fascist can’t handle molly? I fell asleep on a pile of Highlights magazines on the waiting room floor.

 

The rest of the weekend passed in a jerky parabola of speed and mellow thrumming Xanax calm. Charlotte was still holding it against me for some reason and wouldn’t return my texts and I got so upset about it for some reason that I skipped the rest of the art and watched Love & Hip Hop Hollywood in my hotel room like a fat person, and got so upset about that that I cried and cried until I felt dry and used up like a thin Kleenex. I crawled out and lay on the floor of my room’s balcony, listening to the seagulls caw on the shore.

 

I’m not so sure about art anymore.