LIFE & DEATH // Kiki Forever
~ with Mary Blair Taylor
Life and death: They go together like peanut butter and chocolate, like macaroni and cheese, like the lotus and the mud. And so, THE LIFE & DEATH ESSAY is a series of thoughts and ideas, in longer-ish form, that help us reflect on that. If, for some reason, you cannot find time in your day to read the full guest essay offered here, please at least scroll down to the last two sentences which contain an insight we all need to consider.
I once made my friend Mary Blair Taylor a sweatshirt that said, “Hard 2 kill.” You might have to know us both and our shared sense of what’s worth poking in the eye-hole in order to swallow that one … but suffice it to say she’s a woman who knows a helluva lot about how a certain and prolific brand name disease shuttles folks across all manner of terrain—sometimes all the way through the doorway between here + there, and sometimes not. As you’ll read here, she’s also someone who knows (intimately, intellectually, for better and for worse) art and the art world. Since closing the magnificent art/object glassware house Asp & Hand last year, she moved from Bellingham to Brooklyn to Blue Hill, Maine where she writes essays, press releases, and interviews for artists, galleries, and publications such as F Magazine. Blair is now Cancer-free and as hard to kill as ever, which is rad for her and her two kids and her two cats and her boyfriend, and all the gazillions of people who call her a treasured friend. This essay, about her beloved dog but also kind of about everything, originally appeared in Pure/Impure Dialectic, her Substack chronicling a recent interaction with runaway cells, invasive surgery, and slippery slope treatments.
November 19, 2021
Kiki died a year ago. This week my close friend Nora lost her 20 year old cat, Donna, too. Her grief is acute just as mine was last November. I know for a goddamn fact there is nothing I can really say to Nora to ease her pain. The initial mourning of a pet like Kiki or Donna is like a shower of fire.
When I say like Kiki or Donna, I mean a pet that a person merges with just after being released from the institutional education phase. I’m talking about a furry companion who comes into your life the moment you begin trying to decide what to do with it. In Nora’s case and mine, these animals saw us clean through to becoming mothers of human children. This relationship, 16 years in Kiki’s and my case and two decades for Nora and Donna, represents guidance through the entirety of early adulthood.
Early adulthood was a very chaotic and exciting and for me turbulent time. It was like puberty minus support structures. Having an animal to work through that with was so helpful. I slept with my baby blanky into to college and then with Kiki every night until far enough into my marriage that my husband could say, “babe, we’re gonna get lyme’s disease if we sleep with this dog every night,” and I would hear him instead of just leaving him.
People being shitty to Kiki was always the fastest way to get my blood a-boil. I had screaming fights with taxi drivers, delivery people, cops, bums, shop owners, white guys, and strangers of all stripes especially ones with other, larger dogs, because Kiki had a taste for blood (her own mixed with other canines’). These doggie dust-ups were just part of my life. I didn’t think too much about them until I left New York City, whereupon they faded immediately, and I realized what populous living does to the day-to-day cortisol levels.
I knew I wanted a dog as soon as I was “grown enough” to live on my own and adopt one. I think there is a segment of us in the population who get companion animals immediately upon moving out on our own. I remember being bored to tears of my first job, at Gagosian Gallery, and deciding I would devote most of my time there to researching dogs and finding a dog. My deal with myself was that I would quit as soon as I located the dog, because I knew of course that Larry would never allow me to keep an animal in the gallery. I found Kiki on “Yahoo! Pets” and went to collect her from a very chill family outside of Trenton, New Jersey who periodically bred their two Boston bitches with their male Boston, Studly Bo-Dudley. Kiki was trying to kick her dad’s ass when I got there. I took her back to my apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn and cried all night worrying I would be a bad dog mom.
I was definitely a bad dog mom sometimes, wow. If you hung around with me in my twents, you understand that my passion for making merry into the wee hours was immense and dominant. Kiki went everywhere with me, to so many parties, bars, bad trips, witnessing so much insanity. I brought her to all my gallery jobs. I brought her to the Armory Show for a few years, which was the only redeeming quality of the Armory Show. I remember the year they switched piers, and I reported for duty with Kiks, and we were unceremoniously TURNED AWAY, as if my contempt for art fairs needed a nail in its coffin.
Kiki was an incredible sales assistant, and overall we did great work together. There were a couple of special art world moments: She peed quite a bit in Maccarone on Canal Street (house training). She peed in Gagosian Madison Ave. She pooped in lots of important art studios. Kiki attacked S.I. Newhouse’s pug in Mary Boone Gallery. Viciously.
Her crowning art world achievement, though, went down on her first day with me at Hauser & Wirth Gallery. It was the gallery’s inaugural show in America: Allan Kaprow’s “YARD” 1961 as reimagined by Pope L. throughout the three story townhouse. My office was on the second floor. The whole first floor was left dark and filled four feet deep with used automobile tires, body bags filled with materials to simulate decomposing corpses, amazing red and white strobe lighting on a looped program, and a very ominous and compelling voiceover performed by an Obama impersonator.
It had not been easy to convince my superiors that I should bring my dog to work with me, but they kindly allowed it in the end. On Kiki’s first afternoon with me, I noticed that her rear end was shaking. Never a good sign. I had had a lunch meeting and left Kiks with the gallery’s preparators, who, I would learn much later, decided to share their spicy Thai curries with her. In the moment, innocent of this information, I understood that she needed to go outside. I grabbed her leash and signaled for her to head to the door. She took off slightly ahead of me down the stairs, and, when I caught up, it was to find her finishing an explosive diarrhea on the stair landing, Pope L.’s light show periodically illuminating the putrid scene in the dark well. Horrified, I looked up and noticed a man standing there, perhaps slightly within Kiki’s splatter range. It was Adam Lindemann, one of the “biggest art collectors” in New York.
At the time he would pretend to be “cool” and even use the incident to try to work with me to purchase art instead of with my Swiss German boss. No doubt he thought it would be easier to manipulate me for better pricing. He also asked me to the movies, which, like, really? I declined it all. Some five years later, I would encounter him again in a different job, and he would tell me I “should have had my dog destroyed.” I detest him. He is a monster. The only way I allow thinking of him is in the stairwell with Kiki’s shrimp curry shit spattering across his pressed trouser leg. I was allowed to continue bringing her to work, by the way. She was that charming and wonderful.
She was my courage, my protective coating for early adulthood. She was a passionate animal in a man’s world, just like me. With her, I felt stronger wherever I was. I could put my coat down anywhere, and she would curl up immediately thereupon for a sweet nap. We were versatile together; she helped me feel resilient in an environment that would keep testing me.
Not too long after the Lindemann episode, I left art gallery life for good. Kiki and I moved West to be with Eli, and then East to have babies with him. Then back West. She loved running around outside even more than she loved marking New York City. She put up with the kids and Chief, snapping at everyone daily to remind them that she predated them all.
As she climbed into old age she went stone deaf. I never stopped talking to her, though. Eli was always reminding me that she couldn’t hear me. “I know, I just can’t break the habit.” Kiki and I were entwined as a single being: invisible ligaments and tendons connected her to me. As her sight faded as well, I started keeping her even closer to me at all times. I knew she could smell me, and it helped her body regulate. She rode shotgun with me, and I organized a wall of pillows around her to hold her in place as the car jostled.
She began to try to get away, seemingly hoping to get hit by a car or lost in the woods. I was constantly distressed by her wandering off (she never did this in her lifetime), and finally got to know our neighbors as the lady who couldn’t keep her old dog in check. We dug up an old baby enclosure and used it for Kiki, who hated being enclosed and would howl longingly for release.
Finally, one night, she managed to escape our house and make her way down to the beach we had used as a family for years. She loved that beach, reliable as it was in offering her dead things and tidal smells and mollusk-y seaweed slimes. The next day, when we realized she was missing, I knew in my guts that it was final. Eli got a solemn call from a day-tripper who’d bravely read Kiki’s collar tags. When I touched her cold little body, I was seized by a sensation of being cut in half. Cleaved. I wailed, “I’m sorry” over and over and over. “No.” Eli held me and cried, too, against my chest. Nora came to me immediately and held me. She knew we would share this extra large helping of grief, even though Donna would die one year later.
My dear friend’s brother died the same night as Kiki. When the days grow darkest, the veil grows thinnest, especially in 2020 it felt like. Ironically, escape hatches are easier to locate without the glare of sunlight. I guess you find the hatch doors only with your fingertips. I mourn my young life with her as much as I mourn losing her. I miss being her buddy. I miss her being my familiar. I still don’t feel reset and likely never will. She teaches me now that loss and pain are not bumps in the road, they are the whole road. The vehicle is love.
"The idea of you is a part of my mind. You influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don’t realize it. You really are a part of me.” Willa Cather My Antonia