Two months before she turned 39, Patsy Desmond got her first tattoo–the name of her cat, Cecil, in small capital letters just above her navel. She’d taken in Cecil, a stray, in 1988, when he was a kitten. To commemorate the event, Patsy decided to throw Cecil a Sweet 16 party at Gallery Augusta, the Humboldt Park space she’d opened a few months before. At her request, artists she knew and admired paid homage to Cecil in paint, steel, comics, photography, and even found fabrics. A guitarist and trumpeter played “What’s New Pussycat?”
“Patsy’s the one with the nine lives,” her sister Mary remarked.
Patsy was gregarious, hyperactive, game for anything, and at times obnoxious. She once kissed a stranger on the street because she thought he was a dead ringer for Isaac Hayes. She persuaded Ozzy Osbourne, Allen Ginsberg, and George Clinton to sign the back of her driver’s license as organ-donor witnesses, after meeting them at (respectively) a video shoot, a lecture, and a concert at Metro.
Patsy charmed prospective employers into hiring her on the spot. In six years she held at least seven jobs other scenesters would have killed for. She cooked at Bite, though she had no culinary training. She worked at H-Gun video, Facets, Thrill Jockey Records, the now defunct record distributor Cargo, the Empty Bottle, and Leslie Hindman Auctioneers.
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Once you got to know Patsy, she could be less than charming. She sometimes expressed her opinions with a righteousness that forced her friends to play devil’s advocate. She could be mercilessly demeaning. Her mother had died when she was a toddler, and she says she used to believe everyone would eventually disappoint her. She had such high expectations that people often did: one friend took to calling her Patricia Perfecta.
In the early 90s, Patsy never could have imagined the kind of trouble she was headed for. But she feared it nonetheless. When her father, John, was dying–he’d been paralyzed in a car accident and then diagnosed with cancer–she wrote in her journal, “I wonder sometimes if I don’t get my shit together . . . dump the baggage and get in gear–if my life will be as tragic as his. Will I end up like that?” She wrote that she sometimes felt as though she were caught in a “cycle of tragic heredity.”
Patsy thought she’d like to be a photographer, an interest that was sparked by a black-and-white photo that her first love, a senior when she was a freshman, had submitted to their high school yearbook. She thought it was the coolest thing in the world: he was on the beach, shirt open, Jimi Hendrix faintly superimposed over him. When she graduated from high school, her sisters gave her a Pentax camera. “It was almost like we gave her a pot of gold,” says Kathleen.
