He was mystically inclined, drawn to all things spiritual, but, as I say, mostly concealed his passion from us, although there was no reason to conceal it, because New Yorkers were just as much in love with weird belief systems as he was. He found a witch, a m?e-de-santo in Greenpoint, and in her cramped terreiro he followed her in the worship of her favored Orisha (a minor deity) and of course of the Supreme Creator Oludumaré as well. But he was unfaithful to her even though she instructed him in sorcery, and followed with equal enthusiasm a Canal Street Kabbalist named Idel, who was an adept in the ways of the forbidden Practical Kabbalah, which sought through the use of white magic to affect and change the sphere of the divine itself, and the world as well. He also went eagerly, led by friends who found his eagerness seductive, into the world of Buddhist Judaism, and meditated along with the city’s growing cohorts of “BuJus”—classical composers, movie stars, yogis. He practiced Mysore yoga and became a master of the Tarot and studied numerology and books bought in antiquarian bookstores that explored the black arts and gave instructions concerning the construction of pentacles and magic circles within which the amateur wizard could be safe while casting his spells.
It was soon clear that he was an exceptionally gifted painter, of a technical facility as great as Dalí’s (though put to better use), figurative in an age of conceptualism, his male and female figures, often nude, contained within, or containing, or surrounded by, or surrounding, the symbolist icons of his arcane studies, flowers, eyes, swords, cups, suns, stars, pentagrams, and male and female sexual organs. Before long he had a studio space off Union Square and was making vivid portraits of le tout New York, the elite ladies (yes, mostly ladies, though some striking young men as well) who were overjoyed to strip off for him and to be painted into a lush world of high spiritual meaning, wrapped in tulips or swimming in the rivers of Paradise or Hell, before returning to the temples of Mammon where they lived. Because of his remarkable technical control he developed a rapid fluency of style which meant he could usually complete a portrait in a day and that, too, endeared him to the fast-lane crowd. His first solo show was in 2010, curated by the Bruce High Quality Foundation in a Chelsea pop-up space, and took its title from Nietzsche, The Privilege of Owning Yourself. He began to be a famous artist, or, as he put it with a kind of cynical comic modesty, “famous on twenty blocks.”
America changed them both, Petya and Apu—America, that divided self—polarizing them as America was polarized, the wars of America, external and internal, becoming their wars as well; but in the beginning, if Petya arrived in New York as the heavy-drinking polymath who was afraid of the world and found living in it a constant hardship, then Apu came as the sober romantic artist and promiscuous metropolitan, flirting with everything that was visionary yet with a clarity of vision that allowed him to see people plain, as his portraits showed: the panic in the eyes of the fading dowager, the vulnerable ignorance in the stance of the ungloved boxing champion, the courage of the ballerina with blood in her slippers like the Ugly Sister who cut off her toes to squeeze her foot into Cinderella’s glass shoe. His portraits were anything but sycophantic; they could be very harsh. Yet people hastened to his door with fat checks in their hands. To be done by Apu Golden, nailed to his canvas, became desirable, valuable. It became a thing. Meanwhile, away from his studio, he ran voraciously through the city, embracing it all like a young Whitman, the undergrounds, the clubs, the power stations, the prisons, the subcultures, the catastrophes, the flaming comets, the gamblers, the dying factories, the dancing queens. He was his brother’s antithesis, a gluttonous agoraphile, and came to be thought of as a magic creature, an escapee from a fairy tale, though nobody could say for certain whether he was charmed or doomed.
He was a far more flamboyant dresser than his older brother, and his look altered frequently. He wore contact lenses in many colors, sometimes different colors for each eye, and until the very end I did not know what his natural eye color was. His clothing embraced all the fashions of the planet. On a whim he would abandon the pashmina shawl and put on, instead, the Arab dishdasha, the African dashiki, the South Indian veshti, the bright shirts of Latin America or, sometimes, in a Petya-low-key mood, the buttoned-up gravity of the bespoke English three-piece tweed suit. He might be seen on Sixth Avenue in a maxi-skirt or a kilt. This mutability confused many of us about his orientation, but as far as I know he was conventionally heterosexual; though it is true that he was a sort of genius of compartmentalization, he kept different groups of friends in sealed-off boxes and nobody in one box was even aware of the existence of other, different containers. So it’s possible that he had a secret life beyond the frontiers of heterosex, maybe even a promiscuous one. But in my opinion that is unlikely. As we shall see, he was not the Golden brother for whom gender identity was an issue. In his mystical explorations, however, he certainly did develop a number of peculiar, occultist affiliations which he didn’t care to discuss. But now that everything is known I can begin to reconstruct that life he kept concealed.
We had the movies in common, and liked to spend weekend afternoons at the IFC Center or Film Forum watching Tokyo Monogatari or Orfeu negro or Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie. It was because of the movies that he shortened his name to echo Ray’s immortal Apu. His father objected, he confessed to me. “He says we are Romans, not Bengalis. But that is his preoccupation, not mine.” Nero Golden found our movie dates amusing. When I came by to pick up Apu he was sometimes waiting in the small backyard that gave out onto the communal gardens and, turning to face the house, he’d roar, “Apuleius! Your girlfriend’s here!”
One last note regarding his name: he spoke with admiration about the second-century author of The Golden Ass. “The guy inherited one million sesterces from his father in Algeria and still wrote a masterpiece.” And regarding his older brother’s name as well as his own: “If Petya’s the satyr, or even the satyr-icon, then I’m definitely the fucking donkey.” (Then, a dismissive shrug.) But late at night, when he’d had a few drinks, he inverted the thought. Which felt like a better fit; because, to tell the truth, of the pair, he was the priapically satyric one, while poor Petya was very often the long-eared ass.
On the night of the Goldens’ party in the Gardens, Petya and Apu met the Somali woman, and the ties that held the clan together began to break.