The kids are fine with self-entertainment in my loft, all kinds of stuff for them to play with, cut themselves with, poisons galore, and nothing’s ever happened, not a scratch; is it luck or just growing up around a non-childproof environment? While the two of them messed around with paints on the floor I went to my old Dell and Googled some of the weird stuff I’d experienced in that second drug session. I drew a blank on “Gito de Silva,” but I had a hit on “Calle Padre Luis Maria Llop,” which it turns out is a street in the old quarter of Seville, in Spain. I brought it up on Google Earth and zoomed down as far as it would let me. A tiny little street, and I could see the route he (or I) took from his (or my) house to the plaza. I told myself that I was in fact a tourist in the old city of Seville once, age nine, with my father, and therefore it was some kind of dredged-up residual memory.
Had a good time with the kids, our usual drawing contest, we all sat around and drew each other and Rose won by popular acclaim like always. She’s pretty good for four years old; maybe she’ll be a famous artist like her daddy, God forbid. Milo can draw too, but I think he’s mainly a word guy. Walking down the street behind them, I almost had to cry. Milo is so frail and Rose is such a sturdy little truck, and she worships him, it’s just going to tear her apart, when…Another thing I have to talk to Shelly about; he’s a research guy, maybe there’s some program I can get Milo into, or move to a country where you don’t have to be rich to live. But what he needs is a new set of lungs.
After they were asleep I went out on the fire escape and smoked some dope and had a funny little reverie about my first and only gallery show, and it was interesting because of the contrast between it and what I’d experienced on the salvinorin. Or maybe the salvinorin was somehow enriching the experience in some neurophysiological way. Anyway, I recalled being late because I’d decided I had to drop some stuff off at an ad agency in midtown, and then I had to have an after-work drink with a couple of people from the agency. A couple three drinks or so, and then I called Suzanne from a phone booth and told her to go on without me, I’d be there soon. The show was in Mark Slotsky’s gallery on West Broadway off Worth Street, and she got all steamed at that, was I nuts, this was my big break and I was screwing around with some crappy ad, and didn’t I know who’d be there, Mark had called in all these chips to get a good crowd and had spent a fortune on the spread, not shitty wine and cheese but catered from Odeon and so on and so on. What it was, she wanted to make an entrance with the star, and now she’d have to just walk in like everyone else.
I remember walking down West Broadway and feeling like I was going to my execution. I was still wearing my work clothes, paint-smeared, not that clean, a hoodie and jeans and really awful raggedy-ass sneakers, and I felt embarrassed, like I had wanted to look like this to impress all the art lovers that I don’t give a shit about.
And I arrived, the place all lit up and people spilling out on the sidewalk, chattering and holding flutes of champagne. They looked at me, and I felt like the skeleton at the feast, but then I was recognized: Mark shouted out my name and he and Suzanne came running over to me, my wife dressed in a black spaghetti-strap outfit that would have been racy underwear in my mother’s day, and I collected slaps on the back and kisses, and they were all beaming and happy, because the show looked to be a hit, there were little stick-on red dots on many of the paintings, they were sold, I was selling, this is success. And then I had to meet the buyers, the art hags, women in black with ethnic jewelry hanging from neck and ears, and chunky gold and diamonds like fetters on their wrists, and I was trying to be happy like them, and I heard how wonderful it was for them to have paintings that look like something, and Mark was talking a mile a minute about appreciation, he means appreciation in value, a good investment, they were getting in on the ground floor with Charles Wilmot, Jr.
And while this was going on I was chugging champagne as fast as I could grab the flutes off the silvery trays; the bubbles brought up a froth of bile from my stomach and I wanted to vomit. The paintings on the white walls were unbearable to look at, the paint looked like shit, muddy and dull, and all the avid faces around me looked like birds of prey, carrion beasts. Yes, neurotic, self-destructive, I know it, and I was wondering why I thought about that show just then. It’s a memory I don’t treasure, except that was the night I first saw Lotte Rothschild, although I was able to turn that into shit as well.
The next day I took the kids off to their school and I came back to my place and borrowed Bosco’s van to take my rejected paintings from the magazine offices in the Condé Nast Building over to Lotte’s gallery. The place was empty and we had a nice talk, almost like old times, so much so it made my heart hurt. And then I recalled that fire escape reverie and I said, “Do you remember my first show?”
“When we met,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
And naturally I was not going to tell her about sitting out on the fire escape doing dope while the kids were with me, so I said, “No reason, really, but I was just thinking about it last night and I remembered how I felt, the sensation of…I don’t know what you’d call it, terror, revulsion.”
“Yes, you seemed miserable. And I couldn’t understand why; you were selling out the show and the paintings were wonderful.” Here her face fell a little. “Our old tape. Do we have to run through it again?”
“No. But I remembered how I noticed you in the crowd. You were wearing a green velvet jacket with glass buttons, a lace blouse, sort of very pale ochre, like parchment, and an ankle-length skirt, in some rustling material. And red boots. Everyone else was all in black.”
“Except you. You looked like a derelict or an ‘artist’ in quotation marks. I thought, Oh, no, make him not a poseur, he’s too good for that.”
“I noticed your eyes too. Les yeux longés. Wolf eyes. You used to say you fell in love with me through my paintings first.”
“I did used to say that,” she answered, looking straight at me, those beautiful eyes, huge and slanted and gray as clouds, but without the warmth I often used to see there. “What a pity you never did any more like them.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard this, and added, “And then I didn’t see you for years afterward, and Suzanne and I broke up, and then Mark dragged me to the college reunion, the fifteenth, and there you were, dating a friend of mine-”
“Don’t remind me!”
“How did you ever meet up with him? I forget.”
“I forget too.”
“And I stole you away from him right there in the Hilton ballroom. We eloped to that club on Avenue A, one of those black basements, and we danced until three in the morning and I took you back to my loft.”
Saying this, I grabbed her and led her through a few steps, but her body was stiff as a manikin, not like it used to be.
“Chaz, what are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing, just thinking about old times. I’ve been spending a lot of time on memory lane recently, you know, bullshit about my life, how things could have been different, if only…”
“Yes, but that’s something you have to work on yourself. I can’t get into that with you. I tried once, if you recall, and it nearly killed me. So, you know, you can’t come around here and be all sweet and loving and expect me to leap into your arms.” Looking bright darts of flame at me.
A little moment of heartbreak here, and then she pulled away and said, “So let’s see what these look like.”
We stood the paintings up against a wall. Paintings always look so helpless and wan against a white gallery wall, like they’re crying “save me!” but she thought they were terrific and decided right then to combine them in the show she was planning to open that Friday, guy named Cteki, from Bratislava, does Hopperesque alienation scenes from central Europe, empty cafés, rusting factories, people in shabby overcoats waiting for the trolley, not my idea of something for the living room, but he can draw at least, proud to have my crap on the same wall as his crap.