The Love Artist—9

Chapter Two: Wednesday



ØØØ34:635:72

I tried to convince myself it was just a job, like parking cars, that a bad day at the office was inevitable. —Entertainment I was—a service that made people feel a certain way. I understood that I could not provoke an anticipated response but loathed that my competition with the translator’s idiotic certainty had rendered my own life so pale. I wanted so bad to have the unpolished truth shine higher than committeed compost.

—But I am just one man—Van Gogh painted potato eaters!

So I never told people what I was up to and got much of my material verbatim from overheard conversations. It’s easy enough to get people to reveal things by going first, by intimating a similar secret, but somehow, when I approached the more complex stuff, the only shit that mattered, the only shit that anyone thinks about anymore, all ears shut down —I am not the word, I am not the way—not the light. —So I could produce without cliché no better than they could hear the truth—even though their introduction made the whole sentence a secondary source and by definition bunk. What delicious options lie between cliché and confusion if only I could transmit the boundaries. But I’ve consumed for so long that to create thoughts, even my own, is beyond my miniscule span. And even then they come out reheated! Or insane! How to talk, how to talk. . . converse..., —ate. With an apple grenade? People’s packaging expectations alone could ruin my entire life, and I love them and so want to comply—no one wants to be lonely. Aren’t I doing everything I can? Why then the black hole?

My brain overtook me at this point and clamped down on a food service products catalog—a welcome if depressing distraction. —Beard nets, powdered latex gloves, sneeze guards, and shirts in color schemes engineered to make people hungry all flapped and flowered by like a poorly animated pigeon. I imagined a new employee at the glove factory. How confused by her product she must be, dreaming of a land that reserves such quantities of gloves.

I pulled a post-it from my pocket and wrote “surplus labor = DNA damage.” A familiar dread swept across my forehead and down over my stomach and genitals. Everything was receding …turning in on itself.

The street collapsed into the two inches in front of his eyes, and even the air was blurred by the film of sea that swamped my eyelids. As fucked as I felt, though, it was not unknown, and in a way the familiarity of these bad chemicals offered their own statuesque relief. My temples went numb and I felt my eyebrows tuck in at the ends. My thoughts slowed and settled around the prospect of leaving the planet—not as an act of violence or even one of self-negation but as an average concern—like any number of others, like the laundry—it can’t stay dirty forever.


ØØØ34:135:45

What seemed like two days later I woke up with my hands throbbing. They felt like they had been cut off and re-attached. With potential, though. My feet too.

Their emptiness shook me entirely. The straight front of my body felt like a winter prairie, desperate for clouds, grass, buffalo, even the insulation of snow—anything but another hour, day, another week, another month of wind. I was past the dry mouth and aching head—flopping over and trying to get rid of ten more minutes but waking up two hours later—my condition was wheezing and painful. I had been born on the wrong planet and improperly fitted with vital organs. My stomach hurt and my face was full of snot. I couldn’t breathe through my nose. And I needed to piss.

The television from the other room was yelling. I had balanced my coffee cup on the remote the night before, or two nights before—whenever it had been—to make it think I was watching. I guessed we matched cause I couldn’t hold a thought either. I match machines like miners match dirt, like accountants match desks and pencils and folders—they’re my thing. Most people will tell you they’re different. I’m not different. I’m the same. I’ve learned so much from busses, fallen for freeways like Thoreau did ponds and shit. My people are so busy. And my concentration’s a necessary sacrifice—my peace a panacea—to be spread like the weak manure it is. To study, to reflect, is to become if you can do it well. Disdain or detachment is only a sign of...

I turned over, pulling the gray sheets tight around my butt and pressing the excess between my knees. I had an erection that barely let me think, and my whole skin felt tight and almost good. I clamped my eyes back down and spit my gold-colored mouthguard—the high-school football type—onto the pillow next to me. I always have two pillows. What I need is a more free flow between lust and love, between friendship and fucking. It amazes me the motivated quantity of paperwork and rationalizations (sounds like Rations doesn’t it?) we pull tight to obscure our hearts and groins. I wake up with one desire and go to sleep with another, and all day I run like a crack head from both, trying for ten minutes—for ten more minutes—of solace, and thinking of a story that will allude well enough to the truth to tell people who I am. But even if they had the time… —it doesn’t matter —and I become as crass and blatant as everything else in their life. Aorta, aorta, aorta, Aorta! Never a capillary unless for effect—are we all so advertisers? —and then they really like me. But what was I saying? —Virtue? —nothing but an attempt to mediate pain. I’ll save you four years—a hand just inside your thigh during the movie and brushing her cheek as you kiss is the only reason you should ever lovingly submit to the clock. And I’d get it in writing if you can—it’s hard to love a man in full submission. I was neither awake nor asleep, but trapped between the two. It was late for getting up.

I had first seen her, as the dream that spit me out reminded me, three months before. Three long-ass months. She had been delivering papers with the guy who does that and as I came out of my front door and into the parking lot, into the pale late morning sunshine, her eyes met mine from the back seat of his car. I remember exactly how she looked because I’m infatuated with this gaze—girl behind safety glass sporting a chrome halo, question mark in her eyes. Usually it’s out of the back seat of her parent’s sedan. The sun flew off the front of her head in reflection and her head seemed to both contain and radiate light at once, as if it were exploding of unappreciated grace. My eyes hurt but wouldn’t turn away —I must have looked like a letch.

She could have been any age—that pure was her being—but she looked young and uncorrupted—she still believed. Looking out the window was for her not to lay waste or contradict, not to change what she saw, but to absorb, as if discovering a forgotten leaf or twisted piece of wire would complete the just burning picture of life she composed within. So if I felt welcome in her eyes that is why—she tempered my base motives with disbelief—with belief—she had learned neither my disease nor felt my compromise. The anxious fear of the front seat had not yet crept back and for a few more years car rides would still be a wonder.

This light, I thought standing before her, must have once captured more women —and for more years. Am I dreaming? Is there no fluid song to counter man’s loping diction? My thoughts drift back to this reflected sun often. When women are no more than men, then girls will be made over in their image, like nuns drafted to keep the soul of a race dead. —Men too—and there’s little room to grow up. I decided I must know everything about this girl, this woman, that I must meet her and watch her hands, figure the direction and angle of her chin. I must be careful, though, not corrupt her, she’s but a tiny match for the shadow of a half-saved man like me. I would distill her equation without a touch and spread the results for all, as a condemnation complete in its solution, in its love—the perfect weapon—and destroy through replacement as never before. —Just let the shit wilt.

She glanced up at me a second time. I don’t—and didn’t—know how long I’d been standing there. She was rubber-banding the pile of newspapers that took the place of the front passenger-side seat.

Her eyes came at me with force this time and she sliced through my brow. I ducked my head instinctually. Now she knew. Our engagement had begun. This is what I must not do, I thought. My head swung down and to the side —I pretended I was moving—but it was of little use. My temples burned and I felt her amusement on my back as I slunk away.

Now I was disgusted. Not as I walked away, but as I woke up that morning and remembered it. Disgusted because all I could press to my chest was machine-sewn and dyed blankets delivered in cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic and disgusted because now my future, full of women, undoubtedly, who came to a similar gaze only by pose or neurosis, seemed cement. I thought of the asexual women I had tried to shake alive, the confused women whose depression I had offered to carry as my own. I thought of rejections as shallow as my own motives, of how I had shut out the rest, unable in my feeble pride to accept a woman as human as myself. In our insecure streets the ether of intimacy, boiled down to advertised cleavage and waxed backs, clouds even my ability to be close. No, my title is a farce. I know nothing of love, —I was raised on impotent desire.

But impotence has nothing to do with women, unless it’s our mothers, it’s simply the cowardice of our lives creeping into more important realms of being.


ØØØ34:653:22

The game of school is to see how little work and how much disruptive humanity can be managed. In the third grade I convinced the two biggest boys in my class to be my bodyguards. I can’t remember that I needed them for any physical reason, but like any luxury, as soon as I realized that I could have it I did [sic]. (If only I could have carried this kind of will through one year of middle school!)

So I made it known as far as I could that I was protected, by Rodney and Anthony, two of the biggest kids in the third grade, and with their help felt safer from whatever perceived danger I faced. They also enabled me to throw my first punch—at Lee, a short and mouthy kid who probably deserved it—and go crazy on the really weird chubby kid that nobody liked one day when he decided he couldn’t leave me alone. I had never fought offensively before but he wasn’t much of a foe and within a minute I had him pinned and crying.

A crowd quickly encircled us and I was just about to give them a flurry of third-grade ‘float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee’ superstar shit when a strange look swept across the face of my victim. I punched him a few more times before I heard what was dropping from his mouth between sobs.

“I deserve it, I deserve it.”

I couldn’t tell if anyone could hear him but was upset that the delicious billow of my violence had been deflated. I realized that I had tied myself intimately to the school’s biggest loser.

But the surging crowd was hysterical for more—this was, after all, the kid who bothered everyone constantly. “Kill him, kill him!” they screamed—desperate for some action and hoping it would come before a teacher showed up. I looked up at the ring of pumping arms and exposed molars—I couldn’t see past the first row but could feel and hear the crowd growing as kids from all over the playground ran over. No one had heard him but me. I hit him in the chest.

“Hit me more! Hit me more!” he sobbed, “I deserve it!” He thrashed his head as if suffering demonic blows and started screaming. I punched him a few more times—half-heartedly now—in the chest and on the side of his head —I can’t remember if he had a bloody nose—and finally I stood up to take my love from the ecstatic crowd.

But mostly the job entailed nothing, I would walk out to the playground with a bodyguard on either side, like an eight year-old mafia hack surveying kickball prospects. Their presence allowed slight relief but it didn’t last long. And the novelty had worn off when we learned to sneak out to the ravine across the street and smoke smokeweed. I still had to hide out from the fourth-grade girl with the ugly mouth and big butt who decided she hated me for no reason but at least I knew every route back from the lunchroom.

Anthony lived in the CD, the black neighborhood where the kids who tried to take our bikes came from—and the ones who hit us up for money if they caught us on the playground after school. He had been to my house but not me to his. I was scared and made up excuses whenever he’d ask but eventually it got too corny and I agreed to spend the night.

On the designated Friday I took my stuff to school. After the final bell rang I met up with Anthony and we walked down below the playground to the street where the busses stopped. His mom was waiting behind the wheel of her hot rod—the one I liked to draw instead of doing classwork—it was dark purple with a yellow stripe and chrome headers. Cool shit.

She pushed the seat up and we squeezed through into the back with his sister. There was a blanket over the cushions and the car seemed junkier than its paint job had suggested. I never imagined how it might look inside.

Anthony’s mom asked us all how our day had been.

—We had been talking about it at recess and Anthony had told me it could so I whispered to him and he asked his mom to peel out. We made faces at his little brother—sitting in diapers in the front seat—and taunted him until he fell over and Anthony’s mom told us not to mess around. —I guess she wasn’t going to peel out for us now. We stopped but couldn’t stop laughing, and hoped his mom wouldn’t get mad because now his brother was looking around and falling over repeatedly. It was a beautiful day and everyone was excited.

“Now Julius, make sure you call me Mom, none of this Missus Batelle stuff.” Anthony’s mom—Mom—turned up the radio loud. She listened to much cooler music than my parents, and had a stereo and speakers that had been custom installed—a huge deal to kids like us who would routinely stand at the fence yelling “mine!” at certain cars. —And this was before there were any cool ones. The trick was to see the good ones first—that’s what was cool. —Sometimes I wonder if my well endowed fellow travelers are thankful to the pimps and hustlers who pioneered their rims and tire size. And the Cholos responsible for their systems.

—So we bounced along on our little bad-ass raised back wheels, and jerked around corners cause the shit was so big. —Anthony and his sister on either side of me, messing with each other and yelling over the music and tailpipes about whatever had been served for lunch—they got hot lunch, I brought mine from home. —There was a big difference —and from a distance each difference, or the sum of such differences—getting lunch at school, cool cars, cool mom, being more—being loud, more confident—had been a source of envy, but as I sat in the middle, now that they all overlapped—and surrounded me—I felt overwhelmed —like I couldn’t keep up. The music was too loud and the car was too loud, and the people —and the window was open and his little brother in diapers looking back at me and his mom getting mad.…

As we pulled in front of their house we all agreed it would be the best night ever. I was relieved that the car and the music were gone—we would stay up late and make forts in the living room after dinner and eat chocolate pudding. Anthony’s sister offered a few ideas in the spirit of things but we shrugged her off cause she was a girl. To speed things along and ease my discomfort I agreed with everything.

Mom had prepared a special meal for my visit: barbecue spareribs, cornbread, vegetables, and baked beans—and we set the table and placed a cold can of orange Faygo just above each spoon. The table was long and stretched from the kitchen almost into the living room. It was covered with a white sheet.

The barbecue was thick and spicy and did strange things to my mouth and nose. It was good but I’d never eaten something so sweet for dinner before. Everyone watched eagerly as I sampled each dish. I was certain they could hear what I was thinking and see through my compliments and smile but I kept on. The beans were weird so I spread a few around my plate to make the pile smaller and asked for more cornbread and butter.

“Sure, honey.”

As dinner finished and it got dark outside, I knew I wasn’t going to make it through the night. I felt alone in the small strange house—and scared. My mom called and I told her everything was fine. Everyone crowded around the phone and nodded when I spoke. I tried to use a voice that would transmit my dismay in code and hoped there was something wrong that would necessitate my rescue. There wasn’t.

“Well, have a fun night honey,” my mom finished cheerfully, “I’ll pick you up tomorrow.”

“Okay mom.”

“I love you honey.”

“Alright, bye.”

I hung up the phone and suggested some TV while we waited for dessert. The distance between what I had just heard and where I found myself had startled me into action and I knew if I started the fort it would get too late and I’d lose my chance—the cushions from the couch were already on the floor. Finally, after twenty long minutes, as Anthony’s mom delivered our pudding she asked me if everything was alright. Her eyes were compassionate and slightly sad, as if she knew everything already. I must have looked like a ghost.

I told her I wasn’t feeling well and explained my condition nebulously. It started in my stomach but moved quickly to protect her integrity as a cook. Anthony and his sister’s faces fell away from their ears as I talked. Even the baby stopped banging his spoon in the kitchen. My condition got worse in the silence.

When I had endured all the eyes I could take, I put it out quietly: “Maybe I should call my mom and have her come and get me.”

I called my mom. She knew what was going on. She suggested I see how I feel in an hour and give her a call back but I assured her it was terminal. I hung up —and softer than the sound on the TV announced that she was coming to get me.

“Well, the pudding’s ready. —No reason not to eat good pudding.” Anthony’s mom said.

“Yeah.” Anthony answered. His sister echoed.

But if I ate pudding then I couldn’t be sick—“I’m not very hungry.” I said.

No one responded and as the pudding was distributed in silence I went to Anthony’s room to get my bag. It was my favorite—a black tote bag with a yellow outboard motor logo on it and a broken zipper —perfectly round at the ends. I stared at it as I stood behind the couch, alternately watching the TV, Anthony and his sister eat their chocolate pudding with milk, and the ground.

“I’m sure you can come back some other time.” Anthony’s mom said. “I’d be happy to give you a ride home so your mom doesn’t have to go through all that trouble.”

“That’s ok, she’s probably already left by now.”

I prayed for my mom to drive fast.

Finally, as Anthony’s mom collected the empty pudding bowls, I heard a honk outside and the words I had been rehearsing leapt from my mouth.

“Well, see ya at school on Monday Anthony.” —Slightly too fast. “—Sorry.”

“Yeah, guess so.” He responded. His voice was thin, —the bodyguard asked to take a bullet for his boss.

“Bye,” I said to the room, —generally.

“Bye J.”

“Bye.”

I went to school with Anthony for eight more years and as a year or so passed so did our attempts at cordial relations. This event had poisoned the well. By the fifth grade, he would sneer and threaten in front of his friends to kick my ass. I never told anyone why he singled me out, or that we had both picked mosquito bite scabs to become blood brothers with Casey in the third grade. —As he became bigger, and meaner—blacker—as he joined the football team and lifted weights and became an All-State defensive back—it became much easier to believe his hatred as groundless —that I had nothing to do with it—or that it had gone on so long that it had become cruel. And I guess that’s the appeal of a nice white power—eventually it becomes its own justification. Through fear. —Just like that sentence. We can run shit and be right at the same time—it’s not us, but We... —and privilege is to never have to learn anything different.

All this I’ve learned from people we’d call black.

> > >


But just once did I want to wake up and remember none of this—be quiet. People are gorgeous when they’re quiet. Have you ever watched your lover sleep? She is irresistible, breathe the air that rifles off the heat of her shoulder. —Follow the line of her neck down, as far as the covers allow. Memorize her smooth palm clutching four wrinkles of sheet as carefully and intent as she had you the night before. My best work comes around sleep. —The Surrealists were right: use every accident. Sleep introduces neurons that are out of place, using the brain for thought when it wants to do other or vice versa provides great mistakes —to capitalize —and learn on. If someone says something you don’t understand, say thank you —that’s the future—prophesy. —Like Rodin. Stuff you can’t make up. And new thoughts provide waves and eddies—relief from the serious rut of our constant lunge forward.

But this is what I wanted to remember none of—not who I was, not what I did the day before nor my unfortunate personality with mouth open, vocal chords flexed. How much higher I could rise without words, I thought. If I were transparent like I feel—you would love me despite it all —despite these horrible words and clothes I’ve pushed to match what I thought looked good —in the mirror —what I thought you wanted, what I thought you might want.

So something finally worked and my feet got to the floor —each cold step of tile to the bathroom made me feel twice my years. I was still hard and pissed a bit on the seat and eventually brushed my teeth. I could smell myself in the heat coming back into to the room and turned the crank on the sill to open the window a bit. A crisp flow of air brushed by my nose and raised my eyelids unnoticeably. It smelled like leaves.

I sat down on my bed and held my stomach, the tide of mucus was subsiding as my chemicals prepared themselves in the dead anticipation of another day. I wondered what I could do to avoid a similar fate the next morning.

I stood up and walked to my blathering television. It was turned down all the way but still making plenty of noise. I’d unplugged it the week before and TransWestoR™ was now threatening to repossess. I thought of artists who drove to studios filled with paints and gesso and blonde turtle-necked assistants named Chastity —who worked six hours a day and went home to their wives. Was that impossible? Six fucking hours? I could definitely get more work done somewhere else but I wanted to stay softened by sleep, not rise up and meet the lowered expectations of my peers, architecture, myself. —Stay low and let the garbage wash over, don’t respond or give it a shore on which to break. I needed to destroy machines, make room for some quiet—and clean—but all I had was disquiet and dirt. Somehow, I prayed, let my self-hatred pollute even itself.