It’s been nearly fifty years since the world met Tulsa. I look at my soft-back version of it on the kitchen table, grainy black and white imprints of teenage boys with needles and shaking legs, a strange thing to see next to your coffee and eggs. The ‘71 review of Tulsa in the Detroit Free Press is printed on the back. “This is not a picture book that will lie quietly and without protest on coffee tables,” it reads. Which is the usual purpose of most art books; minor conversation starters for your nonexistent dinner parties, but when they open Tulsa, they grimace. They flip through for a while, brows knitted together. Larry Clark, like Kids, Larry Clark? they ask. Yes, I say, as I hand them the Ed Ruscha collection instead.
People from Oklahoma know Larry Clark, but he hasn’t quite reached the hero status of Will Rogers or Toby Keith (the image of that name on the Moore water tower will haunt me forever), perhaps because Tulsa turned over the rotting underbelly of its city precisely fifty years after the Black Wall Street Massacre, and over a century after the Indian Removal Act. It’s a less pristine picture of the plains than Oklahoma!, but perhaps a more truthful one.
There’s one photo I keep returning to; in it, a teenaged Billy Mann, identified in another portrait, holds a faceless boy’s arm. The faint outline of the other boy’s ear is luminous against dark hair, hand clenched like a stilted punch, and the needle, of course the needle, glints like a knife in the lower left third. Everywhere in Tulsa, there is a needle. Even when absent in the frame, it hovers just beyond, immutable and omnipresent.
Billy faces the light, forehead wrinkling like folds of dough; lips parted like he just heard something surprising. He looks to someone beyond the camera. Not Larry, someone else, someone besides. I think how beautiful Billy was, not for the needle and its implied, disturbing romance Larry conjures at this point in the book (quickly slapped away by the pregnant belly and the baby in the casket), but for looking like a boy playing man. I think this, then remember how he OD’d on morphine then got put in a book.
Billy Joe Mann is the boy on the cover and is “Dead,” so says the title of the photo—the one that made Taxi Driver, Drugstore Cowboy, and Nan Goldin. You know the one, with the revolver and the smirk. Circa 1963, Billy’s raw, wiry, like a scrappy terrier in trousers and socks. He looks equal parts James Dean and neighborhood prankster, whose mere breadth of energy is at once magnetic and repellent.
He died in 1970; Tulsa was released a year later. Without Billy Mann, there might never have been Larry Clark as he is today, artist-slash-filmmaker, but Billy Mann wasn’t an actor, he was a kid from Tulsa like Larry Clark was a kid from Tulsa. He was born in 1943, also like Larry Clark, and he shot up like Larry Clark shot up. But he wasn’t lucky or perhaps “gifted” enough, as some will say, to be on the right side of the lens.
We could imagine Billy’s tragic potential, some hero or genius that lost his way in the scuffle of poor decisions, but if not for shooting up, it might’ve been something else, some other form of self-annihilation. It’s easy to deify the dead. It’s cleaner that way, a through-line tragedy where people die pretty and kind, but being missed isn’t the same as being remembered. Larry Clark says as much when he writes, “death is more perfect than life” next to Billy and the revolver. We become characters, alive in remembrances and celluloid. That’s what Larry Clark means when he says death is more perfect—photographed in black and white, morality delineated like an obituary. The living are contradictions by nature; complicated, sinful, humane, but being dead is very simple.
He had two daughters, one of whom wrote a piece about her father for a small Oklahoma magazine. She reached out to Larry Clark for more information on her father, and although he was receptive at first, willing to help, he got busy. To date, he hasn’t provided her with the bit of 16mm film of Billy from sometime in 1969 that he promised. Without Tulsa, Billy Mann’s daughter would never know what either of her parents looked like (personal photos from that era are long lost or destroyed).
More often forgotten and no less disturbing is the story of Deanna Mann, Billy’s wife, who was 19 when she died from a bullet to the head two weeks after she tried to leave for California, but couldn’t get the cash. In Tulsa, she is the woman in the housecoat. Larry Clark placed her on the right side of the spread as if she’s looking at her husband on the adjacent page—mid-drag, lying on an unmade bed with a baby on his stomach (quite possibly the writer of that small-press piece). The portraits of the couple face one another, a mirror of loss and disillusionment; they both look so tired, so unhappy. They don’t look at the camera, but the baby does, and you feel implicated in the pleasure you deride from looking at these pictures.
Deanna Mann didn’t shoot up, but she felt the inevitable blowback. It’s impossible to break down oneself without taking others along with you. And I think of this as I read that Deanna Mann’s death was ruled “suicide” and “accidental” and “undetermined” in a single report, and she was buried at the back of a Catholic cemetery with all those whose death was sinful or messy.
I was seventeen. He was my boyfriend intermittently. We spent most nights together, and I was always around, but on nights when I wasn’t, there were plenty of girls who were ready and willing to hold my place. On weekdays, we’d wake up, and I’d make coffee while he did a line, then we’d smoke a bowl and have sex. Sometimes I’d go home, but more often, I ran around with friends while he went to work. On Fridays, he’d get barred out and then crossed at a party; he’d take me home, swerving the road. On weekends he’d pick up from a friend of a friend, someone much older, whose house reeked of rotting trash. He never did injectables to my knowledge, but he did everything else. And even as I find myself drawn to the men in Tulsa, I am frightened of them, too.
From all accounts, Billy Mann was an abuser, an addict, a thief, and a runner. Still, it’s hard not to absolve the boy in the photo looking up to the light, mouth opening, hands tightening, a child who doesn’t see that he’s becoming an adult and becoming dead at the same time. He made a choice when he was very young, and it followed him for the rest of his very short days.
There are lines in the sand delineating “acceptable” behavior, and the first time you cross one, it’s a high in and of itself. Teenagers feel invincible because, in many ways, they are. There’s always a way out, an escape hatch. Everything’s new, and you could be a different person tomorrow; evolving and changing so rapidly, the you of yesterday is unrecognizable, a cipher even, and perhaps especially, to yourself. You lay out your life without much consideration, combing and leaping beyond those firsts that are impermanent and changeable until, all of a sudden, they congeal, harden or else haunt. And sure, Larry Clark got out. Kind of.
I look at the foreword in Tulsa:
i was born in tulsa oklahoma in 1943. when i was sixteen i started shooting amphetamine. i shot with my friends everyday for three years and then left town but i’ve gone back through the years. once the needle goes in it never comes out.
Clark turned out fine and got famous, and has undoubtedly changed drastically in the intervening decades since he took those photos, but he will never entirely be rid of the sixteen-year-old version of himself. At sixteen, I skipped lunch and threw up my dinner and continued to do so for almost two years. All those lines in the sand, the degrees of destruction you allow for yourself and others have a cost, waiting for the one you can’t take back, irreversibly harmed.
There is no returning; only life in the “after.” Your previous self, unlearned and unharmed, becomes like a blinking light beyond the tunnel partition behind you, dimmer with every step forward. I inched further and further down the line, doubling down on my sickness, even when I knew it wasn’t sustainable. Still, I kept going. I answered every single one of his calls. There was no end in sight, nor did I want there to be.
While shooting up and starving are both acts of destruction, one somehow feels more dangerous, more obviously harmful. Maybe it’s that the danger from substances is mostly acute; overdose cases in individuals, especially men, are alarmingly high. And that’s not to say that the death rate of anorexia is anything insignificant, but harm from starvation is chronic and gradual, ghosting your own body. A pathetic vanishing act, quietly wafting out of your existence until there’s no corner of you that hasn’t already left.
For me, it never got this far. I did pass out on multiple occasions, but I was never hospitalized, and other than a brief relapse at twenty, I have kept to the road of recovery. Deep down, there is a self-preservation that holds me back from going over the edge, beyond that next line. I might have an addictive personality, but I’m also ambitious to the point of being consumed in a different, socially acceptable way. Or maybe it’s the same problem, the same impulse that made me sick makes me a wildly productive person, so when I became the age at which I was supposed to accomplish something, I got clean and started to eat.
That’s not to say it’s over. It’s never over. I keep my illness at arm’s length, but she hovers like a specter. There are thousands of times that I have almost gone back, almost reverted, but I have managed to stay healthy, stay okay. When I think of the men I hung around when I was seventeen, I think of Billy Mann, and the revolver, and the unseen gun upstairs, pills and lines in tiny Altoid tins, black socks, white bedsheets. I imagine I’m in the housecoat quietly watching the man with the dark hair, the cigarettes, and the baby implode. Like a black hole, I am taken, too. Taken in.
Larry Clark started at sixteen, as did many of us. The contents of oneself, the darkest parts, cannot be erased. Remnants of the worst of you lay around, scattered, waiting for you to pick them up and see how well they still fit. The needle goes in, and so it doesn’t come out, and I cannot entirely disappear from my sixteen-year-old self.
Larry Clark is seventy-seven.
Works Cited
1Jennings, Shantelle. “Tulsa Revealed.” This Land, This Land Press, 9 May 2012, thislandpress.com/2012/05/09/tulsa-revealed/.
2Meule, Adrian. “An Addiction Perspective on Eating Disorders and Obesity.” Eating Disorders and Obesity in Children and Adolescents, 2019, pp. 99–104., doi:10.1016/b978-0-323-54852-6.00016-1.