Crabapple - Drawing Blood

This book would never have existed without the faith, wit, and rigor of my editor, Cal Morgan. You are a prince among men. Nor could it have happened without my agent, Lydia Wills, who scooped me up before I knew what I wanted to do with my art, and has been my professional other half ever since. Chelsea G. Summers, a brilliant writer in her own right, spent countless hours helping me chisel the manuscript into shape, and designer Leah Carlson-Stanisic at HarperCollins has made each illustration sit like a queen on the page. Photographer Clayton Cubitt and stylist Katie Wedlund gave me the book cover portrait I most dreamed of, and Melissa Dowell, my right-hand woman, kept life running even as writing Drawing Blood ate my world.

Insomuch as it is art, every memoir is both a lie and a betrayal of other peoples memories. I apologize for all Ive gotten wrong.

Over the two years it took me to write this book, so many people advised, supported, edited, and guided me, or just made me drunk with their intellect and beauty. Thank you so much to Stoya, Natasha Lennard, Katelan Foisy, Abdulkader al-Hariri, Warren Ellis, Susie Cagle, Melissa Gira Grant, Anna Lekas Miller, Audacia Ray, Lauren Cerand, Danny Gold, Morgan Marquis Boire, Quinn Norton, Eleanor Saitta, Robin Jacks, Joanne McNeil, Kim Boekbinder, Dante Posh, Amber Ray, Jo Weldon, Yener Ozturk, Deniz Ok, Fuck Theory, Zeynep Tufekci, Kate Black, Richard Kimmel, Sean ODriscoll, Cori Crider, Kabir Khan, Laurie Penny, Buck Angel, Sarah Jaffe, John Knefel, Franz Aliquo, Sara Yasin, Akynos, Ganzeer, Patrick Hilsman, Yiannis Baboulias, Paul Mason, Travis Louie, Jos Martn, Kio Stark, Bre Pettis, Nicholas Schmidt, Amanda Whip, Anna Therese Day, Flambeux, Emma Beals, Najva Sol, Yumna al Arashi, Sultan Al Qassemi, Rick Foley, Amber Baldet, Magda Sawon, Neil Gaiman, Laurenn McCubbin, Alex Pilosov, Anna Holmes, Matt Taibbi, Mariame Kaba, Jim Batt, Cynthia von Buhler, and Yao Xiao. Thank you too to my patient editors, especially those at Vice. Ive blown too many deadlines to count.

To George Whitman: I never got to tell you the gift you gave me, when on one careless spring day you invited me to live in your bookstore, and so opened my eyes to lifes possibilities. Rest in power, old man.

To John Leavitt and Jen Dziura, oldest and dearest friends: We became what we became together.

To my mother and mi padre, who each inspired me in their wildly different ways, who loved me at my worst, and who stood by me every step.

To Fred: However awful I was while making this book, there you were, gold and smiling, keeping me from burning it all. Thank you, my love. Always.

Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell

Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 2: Devil in the Details

ILLUSTRATED BY MOLLY CRABAPPLE

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap
by Matt Taibbi

Discordia: Six Nights in Crisis Athens
by Laurie Penny

W ithout art, youre dead! my great-grandfather Sam used to say.

I never knew Sam Rothbort. He died before I was born. Photos show him as a shrunken old man, spry and lined, who liked to eat fire, stick pins through his cheeks, and hang from his feet on a chin-up bar at the door of his basement studio. Sam was born in a Belarusian shtetl in 1882. By 1905, he may have been involved with the Bund, an underground political party of Jewish communists. To avoid the draft, he fled to New York. When he got there, he paintedcompulsively, promiscuously, selfishly. He turned out hundreds of canvases: Memories of his shtetl childhood. Tableux of Moses and the prophets. Self-portraits in drag. The dreamscape of Coney Island. The communist fist. When, during the Depression, he grew too poor to paint, he sculpted driftwood.

Sam did not believe in formal education, war, eating meat, or respecting authority. Every morning he hauled dozens of paintings out onto the lawn of his tiny house in Brooklyn. He called this house the Rothbort Home Museum of Direct Art, and he was convinced it would threaten MoMA.

Make art every day, Sam used to say.

My mother is Sams granddaughter, and she followed in his footsteps. I grew up drawing by her side. My mother drew with looping, fluid lines. From her pen came a universe of Greek gods, princesses, maidens transforming into snails. She worked as an illustrator for toy companies and childrens books, drawing the Cabbage Patch Kids and Holly Hobbie from nine to five, then taking freelance jobs at night.

In our familys world, art was neither exotic nor unattainable, but instead both a family tradition and an adult way to earn a paycheckas prosaic in its way as fixing cars.

My mothers studio was a wonder, filled with things children werent supposed to touch: rubber cement that stank of poison; X-acto blades that left me with stitches in my hands; rows of foul-smelling markers and T squares lined up neatly; an airbrush she wore a ventilator to use. I knew about Pantone swatches before I knew there was a movie called Star Wars. At night, when my mom did freelance work, I banged on her studio door, begging her to let me in. She sat inside, working, sick with guilt. She worked all day and all night too, and had done so since she was twenty. During her pregnancy, when doctors consigned her to strict bed rest, she propped a board up next to her night table so she could keep turning out art jobs until she was scheduled to deliver.

I knew Id be an artist from the time my four-year-old hands first defaced a page. It wasnt a matter of inborn talent, or of any love of the results. I hated everything I drew. But I had a childs monomania, and for artists, thats the most important thing. My mother encouraged me. She bought me paper dolls of Ziegfeld Follies dancers to mutilate, and showed me her own fat volumes of works by decadent English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, and French poster artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. I watched in awe as she assembled a dollhouse from cut paper. She helped me with my first attempts at art, squeezing paint into a neatly arrayed color wheel for me. I mixed the colors together until I ruined the palette. When my Aladdin looked nothing like the one in the books, I howled till my eyes were raw.

He doesnt look right because youre drawing his nose like an upside-down seven, my mother told me, and held my hand, guiding me through tear ducts and nostrils.

When I was young, my parents lived in a house in Far Rockaway, Queens. The city had neglected the neighborhood so thoroughly that packs of wild dogs stalked through the streets. The neighbors ran a chop shop in our shared backyard, concealing the cars beneath overgrown ivy. Their two daughters played with me in the cars until the day we found a dead cat, rotting on the front seat of a gutted Chevy. After that, we hid in their basement, leafing through their fathers porn.

When I was seven, my parents divorced. The year 1991 was a bad one for my mom: her mother died of cancer, and computers hit the toy industry, making her hand-done illustrations obsolete. She had been a successful commercial artist for more than twenty years, but a field can change fast. Suddenly, she and her colleagues were no longer needed. My mother and I moved to a small apartment on Long Island, and she started dating a big Irish guy who spent the weekends getting smashed and singing Danny Boy at local bars. Money was tight. She worked a series of gigssubstitute teacher, receptionistbefore finally landing a job as the art director at a vending machine company. At least it paid for her health insurance.