He made me stay for an hour, for observation he said, although I felt perfectly okay, really good, calm and kind of blank, and again without the usual internal dialogue going on, the crap that constantly fills up our heads, and it turns out, you know, that without that script running, you can really focus down on the world around you, and if you do that everything is really interesting. Everything.
There’s a feeling you get on crank or cocaine where you think you have super powers: anything seems possible, and worse, sensible, which is why you get people painting six-room apartments with a one-inch brush or doing mass murders. But what I felt when I left Zubkoff’s office wasn’t like that at all. I felt perfectly myself, but more so, like there were forces behind me, encouraging me, stroking me. Again that kitten-licking sensation in my head. It was exactly like being a well-beloved child, it was that kind of omnipotence, at home in the universe (a book title I’ve always liked), and everything was just as it should be and everything was interesting.
Right, I keep saying that, “interesting” is the word, because as I rode downtown on the subway, the car crowded with the end of rush hour, ordinary people going home to supper and their lives, I couldn’t help staring at the faces and the patterns of the people in random juxtaposition, but it wasn’t random at all-everything was loaded with meaning, and you could point that out with art, I saw, you could make sense of it. I cursed the hours I’d spent being bored and pissed off and getting high because real life wasn’t quite perfect enough for me, and I was nearly crying with the desire to paint these faces and this choir of people arranged for me and paint everything so that people would look at it and say oh, yeah, that’s true, it all makes sense. This vibrating moment.
I won’t say it was an epiphany, because God wasn’t involved, but I knew there was something else going on, that time itself is the real hallucination, that the material world isn’t all there is of existence. I could see divine stuff peeking through the cracks, I felt supported by Creation and it was flowing through me stronger than ever, and I thought, Okay, this was what Fra Angelico must’ve felt like all the time.
I was home and in bed before it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about that other thing that had sent me running through the streets, the little boy in the red dress and the house with the strange smells and the girl with the carnations, and when I started thinking about it I realized that the people were all speaking a language I didn’t know, like Spanish but not quite, but I could understand it just like English. And who the hell was Gito de Silva? What was he doing in my head?
The next week was fairly rotten, even for my life, because I got a call from Vanity Fair. Gerstein was real apologetic, but his editor didn’t like the paintings, and they weren’t going to use them. They thought they were too spooky and weird, he said, and they didn’t look enough like the stars, he said, and I controlled my temper and I said they looked exactly like the stars, as those stars would be seen by the five old masters concerned, which I thought had been the fucking point of the exercise, and we went around the barn for a while on this, and what it turned out to be was they really had no idea that anyone had ever seen things differently from the way they do now. They thought that the current view of everything was the stone reality, that this week stood for all time.
And I guess if you’re running a style magazine with cultural pretensions, that’s the way you have to see the world. Such an enterprise can’t really handle much penetration. If people looked and thought deeply they wouldn’t read magazines, or at least not magazines like Vanity Fair. I have to say they were generous; they paid me a kill fee of a grand per painting and said I was free to sell them elsewhere.
I was pretty calm, compared to what I would have been at another time, and I couldn’t help wondering whether that was a side effect of the salvinorin, a kind of tranquilizer thing, although I didn’t feel in any way dulled out, really the opposite in fact. A kind of acceptance, maybe, of what I’ve been fighting my whole life, that I can do something extremely well that has absolutely no exchange value as artwork. People can see that quality in the old masters, or at least they write about seeing it, but not in something made yesterday.
So my work’s a complete fucking waste of time, at least where money is concerned. I used to think I’d been born out of my proper era. I mean, it’d be like a major league pitcher being born in 1500. His ability to throw a small ball at a hundred miles an hour through any sector of an arbitrary rectangle is totally unsalable, so the guy would spend his life shoveling shit on some estate, and the only time he does his thing is at the fair, hey, guys, look what Giles can do! But basically it’s not all that interesting, not even to Giles.
Meanwhile, there was over seven thousand bucks I would not be seeing, and I dreaded going around to the creditors I’d promised it to and having to eat shit, again. Mark Slotsky had left a message on my cell phone, which I hoped was about money, and I called him back, but his phone said I had to leave a message.
Later that day, I went into Gorman’s on Prince Street, the only place in SoHo where I still have credit. Clyde the bartender has a soft spot for artists. Behind the bar is a painting of mine, the original of a cover I’d done for New York magazine a couple of years back, Mrs. Senator Clinton as Liberty leading the people in the Delacroix painting with her breast hanging out. Clyde had loved it, and I gave him the painting in exchange for my bar tab and a year of free drinks. Gorman’s used to be a cop saloon when the police headquarters was still in that palace on Centre Street, and then it was artists for a while, until most of the painters moved out when the rents went up, and now it is all retail people from the boutiques and the galleries. This is fine with me. I don’t have much to say to painters nowadays; I can’t stand the hacks and the serious ones make me ashamed of myself. I’m a little isolated, actually, all alone in the big city, a cliché, but there it is. From week to week the only people I see are Lotte, Mark, and a guy named Jacques-Louis Moreau, who, as it happened, was sitting at the bar in Gorman’s when I walked in. He usually is, with a glass of wine and the French papers and a cell phone.
I wouldn’t exactly call Jackie a pal of mine, he’s actually more Lotte’s friend, a fellow diplo-brat, been to the same schools in various capitals and here in the city. Whether they’d ever been an item I don’t know, she would never tell me. Although after we broke up she’d been seeing a lot of him, and I had the mixed feelings you have about a guy who’s sniffing around your beloved even when she’s not exactly yours anymore. He’s a big guy, a soccer player, with that roundheaded neat French look, close-cropped dark hair and a ready smile. Our relationship consists mainly of drinking at Gorman’s in the afternoons and bitching about our hard lives. Maybe that’s why I went into the bar that day.
Jackie’s a painter too, but unlike me he yearns for gallery success. Unfortunately, while he has all the technique in the world he has no creativity at all. Ever since I’ve known him he’s been pursuing the fashions, always a little too late. He started out doing big splashy abstracts and then, in turn, op art, color fields, pop art, and now he’s into conceptual. One winter a few years ago I walked into his loft on Crosby Street and found him feeding big Warholian-wannabe canvases into the Ashley stove he used to heat the place. No loss, that, but he seemed curiously cheerful about it, and I recall being a little envious that he honestly didn’t give a shit about his work. He thought the whole art scene was a scam and that sooner or later he’d hit it right and cash in.