I came to in the back of a patrol car in handcuffs. Dimly, I observed a cop in conversation with Serge and the gallery clerk on the sidewalk, and then they drove me to what I assumed was their precinct and took my ID, watch, belt, and the laces from my sneakers away from me and put me in a cell, where I puked Claude Demme’s expensive champagne and some partly digested Chinese food all over myself.
Now I was officially a crazy person, and a dangerous one too. New York has a system for dealing with such emotionally disturbed people, as we are known, and I was now part of it. They are supposed to notify your next of kin, but when they asked I stayed mute. Many of us EDPs are similarly bereft, so it was no big deal. They shipped me to Bellevue with the vomit still caked on me, and there I was cleaned up, given a gown and a robe and paper slippers, shot full of Haldol, and left tied to a bed.
Some time passed. There was a painful swelling under the injection site on my shoulder, and I complained about it; they said they’d use the other arm if I needed another, but I was a good boy and didn’t make any trouble. A couple of days later, they switched me to pills and then I had my interview, fifteen minutes with an intern half my age. He asked me who I was and I told him I didn’t know. He asked me if I had someplace to go and I said I did. That was the magic answer, for it seemed that the Enso Gallery did not care to press charges. A little artistic misunderstanding, happens all the time. I got a scrip for olanzapine and a boot out the door, back into the world’s largest open-air aftercare facility, the streets of Manhattan.
Once there I fished my cell phone out of the envelope with my personal effects in it and brought up my phone book. It was my old one, with the art directors on it. Oh, good, I thought, the Haldol has kicked in. I called Mark.
He wanted to know where I’d been, and I said the mental ward at Bellevue, and he said, “Well, that was probably for the best. Are you back to being you?”
I said I was.
“You’re going to do my guy’s fresco, right?”
I said I would. In fact, I wanted to leave that very day.
“Not a problem,” he said. “I’ll call you.”
I went back to Walker Street, and my old door was there and my key worked. I looked around at the familiar environment, but it gave me no comfort. It was like I didn’t fit into that life anymore; it’s hard to explain, but I had the feeling that whatever happened I’d never live there again. I took a shower and dressed and packed a small bag. While I was packing, Mark called and told me I could pick up the tickets and the other stuff I’d need at his gallery that evening, and I did, and his black car took me to Kennedy and out of my old life.
They flew me to Venice on Alitalia, in first class. People complain about air travel a lot nowadays, but this was considerably better than being in Bellevue. I had a pint or two of Prosecco to start and the gnocchi alla Romana with a good enough Montepulciano. I was picked up at the airport as promised by a silent and efficient man who introduced himself as Franco, then taken by private launch to a boutique hotel off the Campo San Zaninovo, convenient to the palazzo, which is right on the Zaninovo Canal between the Ponte Storto and the Ponte Corona. I was just settling into my room when my cell phone rang, and it was Lotte calling. A renewed pang of terror and I refused the call. She left an angry message: according to her I should be in a psychiatric hospital and not swanning around Europe. She knew all about my recent craziness because someone at the gallery had used a cell phone camera to snap me being dragged from the gallery with blood all over my face, and it had made the tabloids, and she’d called Mark, who filled her in on the whole story, the rat. I didn’t return the call.
After a day of rest in my lovely room, Franco took me to the palazzo and turned me over to Signor Zuccone, who is the majordomo of the place and responsible to the big cheese for this abortion. Well, you know, it’s real damp in Venice, and the palazzo was built in 1512, and they probably spent fifty bucks on the roof since then, and when I looked up at the dining room ceiling I saw a sagging gray porridge, lightly smeared with angels and clouds. I told Zuccone that the whole thing had to come down. He didn’t blink, and the next day the demolishers were at work. While that was going on I had a look at Tiepolo’s cartoons. This was the actual working set, complete with the tiny holes and the marks of the red chalk pounce he’d used, miraculously preserved. So that was okay as far as the design went, which was an Assumption of the Virgin with angelic choir and saints, lots of lush clouds, no deep feeling, just pure gorgeousness. I loved it, and in a strange way it blew my recent identity problem right out of my skull. A consuming art project will do that sometimes, stifle the little voices of ego-or, in my case, madness-and let you exist in the realms of form and color when nothing’s of concern except the next stroke of the brush.
It was, of course, not a restoration in any real sense. It was a forgery. I still loved it-how cheaply sold my long-protected virginity!
The first thing I had to do was to find someone who knew fresco plaster. I thought about my father and the St. Anthony job, his great fresco fiasco, on which a Mr. Belloto was our plaster guy. He looked about a hundred years old, the last man in America to wear a bowler hat, came to work in a suit and a tie with a diamond stickpin in it, changed into coveralls at the job site, kept the tie on. The deal was that some rich bastard son of the Church had given a dining hall to a seminary in Suffolk County and there was money to do a fresco of the life of the patron saint, and of course immediately Father was Michelangelo revived. This job was his bid for immortality, so the fresco had to be right, had to last for the ages, as long as Pompeii at least. I was the apprentice, so if the quattrocento ever rolled around again, I’d be set to cash in-crazy, of course, but thanks, Dad, it eventually came in real handy.
I spent the better part of that year-I was twenty-two-doing all the things that people do on a fresco besides the actual painting, under the hand mainly of Mr. Belloto. It’s not like plastering the kitchen. The trick is that your slaked lime has to be really old. You don’t want any unslaked lime in your mix because it might slake up on the wall and generate gas that’ll bubble the surface.
Footnote: immortality, in this case, lasted around ten years. There were over a hundred seminarians in there when we started, a number that sank to around six not too long after the Second Vatican Council finished trashing the grand old Tridentine Church. So the diocese sold the barn to a nondenominational retirement home that didn’t want scenes from the life of St. Anthony staring down at the crocks while they ate; they wanted the artworks of the residents up there, flowers and clowns and so forth, so they painted a nice peach color over the fresco. No great loss, as a matter of fact, it was typical Late Dad, beautifully drawn, utterly spiritless. I think even Mr. Belloto knew that; he used to grip my shoulder and sigh while viewing each giornata.
After asking around a little I found Signor Codognola, also about a hundred years old, and he said he had a trove of plaster from before the war-I think maybe he meant World War I. He was slow but good, worked with a couple of relatives, grandsons or great-grandsons, I don’t know, took them a week to get the trullisatio in, the coat that sticks to the lath, and another week to adhere the brown coat to it, what they call the arricciato. I didn’t even pretend to supervise; mainly I toured the city by foot and vaporetto, checking out all the Tiepolos I could find to pump up my sense of how he handled form and color. One of the great natural draftsmen, yeah, but almost over-slick. The famous comic book illustrators of the golden age were all Tiepoloesques. So I am right at home. But really, beautiful work with the small brush, used like a pen. I spent my time grinding colors and waiting for the brown coat to cure up.