With a groan she rolled over onto her side, filling up the whole seat. There under the seat was a pair of jogging sneakers, missing the sides and backs, mostly rotted away. Which had a lot to say about how I felt about joggers; and this was the only thing this creature had to slog along in.
It was devastating. Why I could not feel more compassion for this person I did not know. Is there no harnessing human emotions into something useful? But meanwhile half my brain was blabbing on about the disgustingness of the subways, doing nothing but burbling to myself. By now there was hardly even any use in going to the museum: I had spent the whole day resting up, my watch said it was well past four. If the museum closed at five there was little sense.
But I sloshed back up anyway; I had to change cars while the train was in motion, and for a second, poised between cars, I considered stepping off and throwing myself onto the track.
Though, knowing me, I would not be killed but maimed for life. Still, if I had genuinely set my mind to it, I could have bumped myself off: I saw before me, in my damp misery, the next ten or twenty years of my life, broke and unknown, to end up no doubt like the bum riding the train endlessly. Then the second of contemplation passed: I had my date with Lacey to look forward to, after all, and if I continued to live I would sooner or later be able to teach them all a good lesson. Hah!
When I got off the train at Eighty-first Street, I went down the wrong exit, not the one that led directly into the museum. There on the stairway was still another bum, poised halfway up the stairs, able neither to walk up nor to come down. Wearing flipflops on his feet instead of shoes—and emitting that same stale, hideous reek, neither urine nor sweat but something much worse: the formaldehyde of decay.
An old Toulouse-Lautrec of a bum, unable to go up or down the stairs, with ponderous hunch and hunch along. He clasped the railing: I had to brush by him, thinking, Ah, what is the use if I help him up or down, when what he will arrive at will be the same at either end, probably worse than where he is now?
The measliness of myself and humanity struck me to the core.
But luckily the museum was open that evening until six, which made matters a little better. For I believed that museums should be open twenty-four hours a day, and should not cost anything, as was the case in England, so that I might roam about the African Plains Hallway at four in the morning with thoughts of the African veldt deep in my head.
Meanwhile, I was scrounging in my pocket for some money to buy my way in. There was a sign that said, "Pay what you wish, but you must pay something. Adults, $2.50."
I did not wish to pay $2.50. No, I would pay what I wished. And I was standing there, searching for some coinage, when the girl who was working the register looked at me with a smile and said, as if reading my mind, "You can pay whatever you wish, you know."
"I know," I said. I handed her fifty cents, but abruptly I saw myself as she must have seen me: soaking wet, wearing gray pants covered with paint, my long hair chopped and ragged. And umbrellaless; for this article I had lost a multitude of times. With some green paint on my face, which I later noticed when I went to take a piss; and shaven badly, for as it is said, the greatest artists don't give a damn about the physical amenities of society.
But I went in. I was at the entrance where the great Indian canoe full of wooden Indians was built. Which had been there for as long as I could remember—how many times had I seen it as a child and longed to climb in.
Oh, there were many exhibits that moved me greatly: the African peoples and their baskets, and the costumes made of shells and straw, like a large house to wear upon one's person.
I spent the most time in front of the king cobra. This animal filled me with glee. The skin, for one thing, a rippling cheesecloth of the other world. And its immense, incredible power, for it could kill in a matter of minutes.
There was a new exhibit: artificial and not real, of a group of army ants. These in the middle of completely devouring a large horse tethered in their path which could not escape.
These ants never settle down but march constantly, devouring everything in their path; never deviating they go onward, cutting a swathe many feet thick through the ranks of the living creatures on their trail. Vultures fly above to eat the small animals which their coming start from cover, the rank smell of carrion surrounds them. Ah, how human and more than human! Because they must search everywhere for food for the eighty thousand adults and the squirming brood of young.
I wandered down to the African veldt and jungle. How cleverly the small exhibits were put together. The perspective had to be painted on the background so keenly that it blended in with the foreground. It was all painted like in the old Hudson River School. If only I was rich enough to purchase a stuffed warthog. I would have built a room just like one of these for it.
Only I would not stick to recreating perfectly the animal's natural environment, but would add laser guns and flying horses and all the rest of the modern world to the background.
I couldn't help but be impressed with what had been done here. Like two gazelles and a heron down at a pool of water. Using a piece of glass and some old leaves, the designer had made it look like real water. And the pride of lions—with withering hair, aged, fusty lions, with partially bald backs. It was very well done. But the air had deteriorated the grouping a little. Still, these things had all been there for eternity.
And in the background the hooting of children sounded. Oh, there was loads to see, and I was in a very cheery mood. I witnessed dinosaurs, evil and forlorn, some without skin and just bones, others with skin added. The allosaurus, with his large head designed as a weapon of destruction. A meat eater who did not need to stalk his game—the other dinosaurs were too stupid to run—but simply needed to pit his teeth and claws against weight and tail.
There were only two forms of defense against this ferocious dinosaur: one was to get out into the water and stay there, the other was to grow armor. Not easily done in a hurry.
Everywhere I went I saw how similar other forms of life were to mankind. Only mankind was the worst. And the art world— the business part—was worse than that. I would have numbered myself in with the rest of humanity, only I was one step above it: by that I mean I was an artist, which redeemed me.
After this I went off to Sherman's opening. But Ginger wasn't anywhere to be found, which was sad, because I wanted to hear once again from her lips that I was a genius.
I wandered around the Borali Gallery. The whole room was like a steam bath; there were so many people crowded into the place I couldn't even see Sherman's work. There was Lacey, my date, crushed next to a wizened poet/art critic named Rene LaRoue—they already knew each other and were talking, but I ignored him, for once when I had admired one of his poems that was framed on the wall of the Gulag Archipelago (my favorite bar) word got back to him and he tried to ask me out on a date, the thought of which made me sick.
I went over and kissed Lacey; I wasn't unhappy to see her. On this, our first real date, she looked even more delightful than I had remembered—clad in something black and smoldering, and belted with the skins of leopard and various orangutans. "These were made from old coats that belonged to my grandmother in the twenties," she said. "So I cut them down and accidentally I kept cutting and cutting and all that I ended up with were some belts."
"You look great," I said. "I had no idea that you were so adorable." And I became certain that we would go out with each other. Whispering in her ear I invited her to come to dinner with Sherman and Willow and myself and Sherman's dealer, Borali. This was to take place after the opening. It was supposed to be a secret that we were all going out. Sherman didn't want to offend any of his friends who weren't invited.