The first time I went to see Basquiat was kind of a disaster. It was before I had Pollock, so I was all alone. Basquiat’s buried out in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which, if you don’t know, is the biggest, oldest, richest cemetery in the city. I mean, there are huge monuments all over the place, mausoleums bigger and nicer than some people’s apartments, beau flowering trees in the springtime—the whole place is like a magnifique park, but with dead people. It’s where I’d like to be buried, someday, and have people walking around enjoying themselves, having picnics near me.

I thought it would be nice walking around Green-Wood looking for his grave, but even with a map, I got terribly lost. My wristscreen decided to update, so I didn’t have it to guide me for about twenty-five minutes. By that time, I had walked in a huge circle and was back at the front gate, this huge castle-like brown brick structure. I gave up, really sad, because I love Basquiat and everything about him, and I had just wanted to see him and I’d failed.

But it was almost like that failure was meant to be. I went back again, a few weeks later. This time I was less stressed out about finding his grave and thought, even if I don’t, I’ll just walk around thinking about him. And that’s what I did. I thought about how cold and alone he must have felt, sleeping in Tompkins Square Park when he was a teenager, but also how it must have been okay, because even then he must have known how great he was and that it was just a matter of time until everyone else saw it, too. I thought of him alone, at night, in a hospital bed, looking at the copy of Gray’s Anatomy his mother gave him after he was in that terrible car accident. Then I began to think of his mother—how she had gone crazy, been institutionalized, when he was just a kid. It made me think of my own mom, who had died when I was very young. I knew him in that moment, I swear, even though there are all these obvious differences between us, I knew what that pain of losing a mom was. I stopped and looked around me. I was under a bough of a cherry tree, on a path lined with them. I swear, right then, I knew Basquiat.

I looked down at the map I was carrying, and realized I had been walking on the right path, not as some silly metaphor or anything, but really, truly walking the right way to find him. I would be there soon.