Fortunately he didn’t ask my opinion on the crucifixion as art. For the rest of the evening we exchanged histories and got more and more comfortable with each other. We went to bed around three o’clock in the morning, and although I was feeling tired by then the drink seemed to make me wakeful rather than sleepy. For a long time we lay quietly like two spoons, his front against my back. Roswell’s breathing sounded wakeful too but neither of us spoke; I think we were both getting used to the idea that maybe we weren’t alone any more. We fell asleep after a while and when we woke up each of us found the other still there: nobody had gone away. ‘You can look now,’ I said to the nutcracker. I turned him around so he could see how things stood and he seemed pleased.
26 R. Albert Streeter
Here in the Big Apple I am doing it ‘my way’. If one can make it anywhere, one can make it here also. Well, it goes. From time to time a change is good, is it not? In financial matters and also in others. Particularly for the jaded (is there any other kind) hedonist. One tries this and one tries that: sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Through an advertisement in a publication called Model World, I have found a most interesting new talent. His name is Dieter Scharf, and he has made for me a miniature realisation of a scene adapted from a story by M. R. James. Victoria introduced me to this writer and reads to me from him. Horror has its erotic aspects and our new toy has given to Victoria and me fresh stimulation. Ah, that dreadful hopping creature! Who knows the manner of its pleasures? ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’! I am now reading H. P. Lovecraft and thinking of Cthulhu rising from the sea out of his dead city of R’lyeh. Cthulhu and Fay Wray? For this I hear perhaps ‘The Good Ship Lollipop’. Possibilities of this new direction will not soon be exhausted! I foresee many commissions and so I have started at a lower figure than with Clark.
I am in close touch with Folsom Bray at the R. Albert Streeter Museum of Art. He tells me there are a great many entries in the competition and I swell with pride at the thought of undiscovered talent that will because of me have its day in the sun. Possibly even at the bank.
Life is good, not always in the same place, but good.
27 Roswell Clark
The R. Albert Streeter Museum of Art at the southern end of Hoxton Square was a misshapen white thing that seemed to have hopped out of nowhere to pounce on the square and rend it from the decent quiet of its pre-modernist past. Already the Lux Gallery near the southwest corner flaunted the glass of its pretensions next to the modest brick front where a blue plaque murmured that James Parkinson, 1755–1824, physician and geologist, had lived there. Rebel Music and Tiger Beer (with a yin — yang logo) carried the trend of change up to the northern end where St Monica’s Catholic Church drew back, shaken, from the self-exposure of the new museum visible through the bare winter trees of Hoxton Square Gardens. On the eastern side Apollo Dispatch looked busy and Thomas Fox & Co, Engineering and Transport, had not yet become a coffee shop but letters were falling from its name.
The sky looked ready to snow. The ground was black with artists and their entries all round the square and into the street leading from it. I’d hired a man called Nigel to take my entry in his van to the museum and Sarah had come along to help and to see what kind of talent I’d be competing with. We sat in the back with my brown-paper parcels and timbers that looked as if they’d be more at home in a skip. When assembled, they now had a title: The One for the Many. A policeman in a neon-yellow jacket waved us on out of the square to the distant end of the queue and there Nigel dropped us and our burdens and left.
I’d brought along a home-made dolly, a small carpet-covered wooden platform on casters, and with careful stacking we were able to get the figure parcels on it. Sarah took charge of that while I took the timbers of the cross and those of the easel structure that supported it. I paid Nigel, he drove off, and there we were, queueing with people and works that might or might not be the future of what might or might not be Art. The various lengths of wood I was lumbered with were tied together and were quite heavy; the queue was moving very slowly and I dragged my burden with me as we inched along with more stops than starts.
‘It might be easier for you if you assembled the cross and put it over your shoulder,’ said Sarah.
‘Maybe this Easter,’ I replied.
Ahead of us in the queue was a tall dark-haired young woman wearing jeans, a mangy Persian lamb coat, a Russian hat of the same material, and something of a lip-piercing nature in her lower lip. Her entry seemed to be the contents of a Boots carrier bag. ‘That’s yours?’ she said, indicating the timbers I was dragging.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What do you think of my chances?’
‘What do you call it?’
‘Boogie Nights.’
‘Not a bad concept but it’s, you know, a little retro.’
‘What are you entering?’
‘I’ll give you a clue: it happens every twenty-eight days or so.’
‘This too will pass,’ said Sarah. ‘Used or new?’
‘Have a look,’ said she of the menses. Out of the bag she took a bundle of saturated tampons tied together with a small alarm clock, wires, and batteries, like a time bomb.
‘Wow,’ I said, ‘that’s a dynamite entry all right. What’s the title?’
‘Annunciation.’
‘Have you ever heard of Cyndie Dubuque?’ Sarah asked her.
‘No, is she a conceptual artist?’
‘Clitoral,’ said Sarah. ‘Paintings.’
‘Sounds very sixties,’ said the annunciatory woman, and turned away.
The man behind Sarah was a weedy individual with a quilted anorak, woollen cap, spectacles, pale face, receding chin, burning eyes, and a dustbin. ‘What’re you entering?’ he said, pointing to the parcels on the dolly.
‘The dolly,’ said Sarah. ‘These other things are just stuff I bought on the way here.’
He leered at her in a friendly way. ‘Title?’
‘Hello, Dolly.’
‘Not bad, but I think the judges are going to want something a little more serious.’
‘Like your dustbin?’
‘Right. You can see that it’s had a lot of use; it’s all dented and battered.’ He lifted the lid. ‘It’s never been washed — smell it. It’s empty.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Sarah. ‘What do you call it?’
‘The title’s down at the bottom, you have to look inside to see it.’
‘I won’t.’
‘All right, you win: it’s My Life, spelled out in orange peels,’ said Weedy, hanging his head modestly.
‘You’ve spelled out your whole life in orange peels?’
‘No, no, that’s just the title: My Life.’
‘Poor you!’ said Sarah. ‘Your life at the bottom of a dustbin. Do you spend much time in it?’
Weedy straightened up sharpish. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, if your life is inside the dustbin, why are you out of it?’ said Sarah.
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘Never,’ said Sarah.
Weedy’s eyes started out of his head a little. ‘But this isn’t to be taken literally,’ he sputtered. ‘It’s a metaphor!’
‘For what?’
‘My life!’
‘Which is what, an empty dustbin?’