I liked going to museums and seeing paintings, but my reactions fell more into the realm of the kind of modulated behavior that General Shapiro was trying to lead the two of us towards. I genuinely found walking around museums with Monica to be a satisfying, relaxing new way of channeling my often anarchic and errant sexual desires-that is, for the first few moments we were together. After that, the associations became too powerful for Monica and she couldn't stop herself. I was so turned on by her being turned on that I became her inadvertent accomplice. Most museums are filled with signs that warn, "Please do not touch the works of art." At the Boise Center for Contemporary American Painting, Monica pinned me up against an erotic painting by Eric Fischl, and a show of Jackson Pollock's action paintings at the Wadsworth in Schenectady stimulated Monica to look for action, which in this case meant straddling me in the first stall of the gallery's bathroom.
When I had to go to Manhattan to meet with the agency that gets me my gigs in the musical theater, we stopped off at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Monica had by this time become addicted to modernism. She was as addicted to modernism as she was to sex and was as desperate about modernism (and sex for that matter) as any crack or heroine addict is for drugs. Abstract expressionism was particularly a problem for her. The dripping techniques and the emphasis on action obviously touched those parts of the brain that generate feelings of pleasureand the prospect of seeing Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm, an enormous paint-spattered canvas, sent her into a complete paroxysm of desire. As we walked up the huge central staircase to the second floor, she started to grab at my testicles. Then she dug her hand into my pants. As I've said, all I need is for Monica to be in the vicinity. I can get a hard-on just having her near, but when she fondles my dick and balls and sticks her finger up my ass as she did when we approached the last few steps, my crotch begins to look like a spacious tent on a camp site. The sight of the actual painting, with its streak of yellow, made her whisper urgently, "You've got to do it to me right here, right now"
"What?"
She opened her mouth wide.
"Pee."
She dragged me by the hand. There's a little garden in back of the museum, and in front of a group of horrified mothers who covered their children's eyes, Monica got down on her knees and demanded I splatter her face with urine, the way Jackson Pollock had splattered his canvases with paint.
Sometimes you try to help people with their addictions by encouraging abstention or by just letting them wear themselves out. However, when Monica wanted something, a team of wild horses was not going to stop her. Threatening to abstain from sex with her was not going to work. She knew I couldn't resist her, and all I can say is not a day went by without some new paraphilia appearing in our sex lives. As far as sex was concerned, 1 knew there was nothing I could do to make her amend her behavior. So rather than trying to prevent her from acting out, I became her enabler. I decided to give her as much of the mixture of abstract expressionism and unbridled sexuality as she wanted, in the hope that one day she would reach what in the recovery movement they call "a bottom." A bottom is a low point; some people lose all their friends, some people get sick, some have a near-death experience. I was going to have to lie back and enjoy Monica's descent because base camp was nowhere in sight.
At one point, Monica jerked me off on a painting by the Japanese minimalist, Yoshi Yokoshida, that was showing in a gallery in Providence. We were about to be booked on a charge of desecrating private property when Yokoshida, in town for a retrospective, intervened on our behalf. We were released when he told the police my ejaculations were a serendipitous addition to his work. The experience, however, left an indelible impression on my mind. After having sex on or near a number of De Koonings, Rothkos, Nolands, a Kandinsky, and several Rauschenbergs, 1 had a new idea. "You know, honey, there are lots of starving artists who would be willing to have you roll all over their freshly painted canvases if you paid them a few bucks…."
"Do you think they would take money? Don't you think they would regard that as selling out?"
"They wouldn't feel they were selling out taking money for you to roll naked in acrylics. For them it would just be another experience-perhaps even a source of inspiration for new work."
As everyone knows, Soho, the former home of New York's art world, has been turned into a gigantic shopping mall that rivals the best that New Jersey has to offer in terms of barren commercialism. Most of the starving artists now live in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and it was there that we made the acquaintance of the brothers Ivan and Dimitri Lermontov. They weren't exactly abstract expressionists. Being Russian, they had a nostalgia for the early years after the Russian Revolution and before the advent of Stalin, when the esthetic and political avant-gardes were in sync. They loved the geometry of the Constructivists and Malevich and evinced their obsession with the square, for example, by doing renderings of linoleum floors. Still, they had no problem with Monica and me fucking our brains out on their huge freshly painted canvases. They didn't even ask for money. Even though they were inspired by an altogether different movement, they subscribed to the abstract expressionist idea that the painting was a memento of an act that once occurred. Instead of money they wanted the right to exhibit what they called "the remembrances of things past." They wanted to immortalize our modernist fucks, and we weren't averse to being their Davids.
At first I had a little trouble convincing Monica. Ivan and Dimitri weren't pure abstract expressionists. It was a little like trying to give coke to a methamphetamine addict. But once she got used to the feel of rolling in their paints, she wouldn't have her art sex any other way. This was our real introduction to the heyday of the Russian avant-garde. Monica never had much interest in words, but I became interested in a few of the poets of the era-in particular, Mayakovsky, who was a great favorite of the Lermontov brothers. The age of Russian artistic freedom was short-lived, however, and Stalinist socialist realism ushered in an era of artistic repression.
If our energies had been confined to fucking our brains out on the Lermontov's canvases, we wouldn't have had a problem. It was what occurred when we had finished working with the brothers that bothered me. Our couplings in Williamsburg were the most memorable of our whole relationship, but instead of satiating us, they made us want more and more. I was beginning to feel my years. After fucking Monica up the ass on a succession of white squares reminiscent of Malevich's White on White, I could have gone home and watched some television. But Monica, the instigator, kept seeking out higher levels of pleasure, and I was never able to resist her scent.
The art-world sex was like a powerful chain reaction that couldn't be stopped. Even though we always got the last two seats at the back of the plane on our trips home, we still ran into trouble. The only thing you're explicitly not allowed to have in your mouth on an airplane is a cigarette, but most airlines don't look kindly on blowjobs, even if they're done underneath a blanket. The sight of Monica's bobbing head and my mouth stuffed with her fingers to muffle my cries, resulted in some tense exchanges with the cockpit.