Twenty
Not Climbing Mount Everest
The route to Rimsky was chipped
into my vision; I had been mentally videotaping its confines all through my
week at Spirit Mountain. I didn’t drive
there so much as track my way in, like a homing pigeon following his
radar. I had, however, forgotten the
Koffeehouse’s unusual hours – they didn’t open until seven p.m., and it was
just three-thirty when I arrived.
I didn’t want to sleep curbside
like some homeless person, so I went for a walk. It’s a good thing I had my artist-mojo going,
or I might have felt intimidated, a middle-aged white woman strolling through
little groups of surly-looking ethnic teenagers in East Side Portland.
I ended up at the water, on a
bridge overlooking the Willamette. Large towers rose up on either side, rigged
with cables and gears so they could raise the entire middle section for passing
boats. A slice of sunlight cut through Portland’s resident cloud cover to turn
the water a gorgeous jade green, scribbled here and there with marble-like
swirls of eddy and current. The park on the west bank looked lush and inviting,
but I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast - and I was eating for two now,
wasn’t I? I never imagined myself saying things like that.
I went back to my car to fetch my
jacket, then headed south in search of food.
It was a long walk, but I kept my focus until I found my treasure, an
actual Mexican taqueria. I can’t
remember the name but it translated as The Happy Skeleton. The walls were painted in bright colors only
someone with Aztec blood could get away with, and there were also red-pepper
Christmas lights, Pancho Villa news clippings and, of course, grinning
skeletons. The surest sign of authenticity,
though, was that the guy at the counter could barely speak English. He seemed pleased when I tried to order in my
weak, high-school Spanish, and soon I was happily consuming a chicken tostada
and tamarindo soda at a table of artfully scratched-up, bleached wood.
I got back to the Rimsky just
after opening, but still I missed out on the hydraulic Brahms table - or the
rotating Dvorak table. I settled for
Puccini, tucked away by the kitchen door.
The staff was evidently still setting up, as no one seemed in any hurry
to take my order. I took out my holy
Indian casino cards and laid them out in a seven-tiered pyramid, a brand of
solitaire that was almost impossible to win.
After my third failure, I was greeted by a slim waitress with short chestnut
hair, large black-rimmed spectacles and the kind of resounding whiskey voice
you might hear in a Jersey diner.
“Hi,” she said. “Sorry I took so long. We’re a little weird and erratic around
here.”
“That’s fine.” I found myself a
little shaky about conversing with a fellow being. I assembled the next sentence in my head,
just to make sure.
“Is there any chance I might be
able to talk to Hessie tonight?”
The waitress smiled; I had
uttered the magic words. “Oh! Are you a
friend of Hessie’s?”
I was pleased that my first foray
had brought such a jackpot. “I’m sort of
a… postulant… at the Convent Bel Canto.”
“Pauline,” she said, extending a
hand.
“Sandy,” I said, shaking that
hand.
“Any friend of Hessie’s is
royalty around here. Although it’s a
lesser kind of royalty, considering all the friends she’s got. Oh, and to answer your question – Hessie
usually does swing by on Thursdays, so I’m guessing she’ll be around.”
“That’s very good news,” I said.
“So what would you like?” Pauline
asked with a smile.
“Could I have a nasty double
Mexican mocha with whipped cream and cinnamon on top?”
“Oh-hoh! A serious
aficionado. And a dessert?”
“Frozen lemon cheesecake.”
“You’ve been thinking about that
one for quite a while,” said Pauline, slipping me a wink. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”
“Thanks.”
I suppose it was the elation of
imagining a talk with Hessie that made the subsequent drop such a
rib-cruncher. Pauline pranced up to my
table with a Mexican mocha and a newsflash.
“Hessie’s in London! She won’t be
back for two weeks. She apparently
picked up a copy of the London Times at Powell’s bookstore, saw some new play
she just had to see, and headed straight for the airport. I love that about Hessie – she does the kind
of things the rest of us only talk about.”
My face must have dropped a
couple inches.
“Ah, man!” said Pauline. “You were really looking forward to seeing
her, weren’t you? I’m sorry. I’ll be
right back with your cheesecake - maybe that’ll help.”
I tried to take some focused
pleasure in my mocha, but my taste buds refused to participate. What the hell was I going to do now? I hadn’t
even thought of making this decision alone.
I played solitaire. I sipped my mocha. I ate my cheesecake, a delicacy I used to
think was the next best thing to orgasm, but then it was orgasm that got me
into this fix in the first place, wasn’t it?
The coffeehouse filled up a little, but sadly there was no live music
scheduled – just some Chopin over the P.A.
What’s a girl to do?
SHRRRRK!
I had just lost my pyramid game
by one lousy stinking card when my table erupted with a kind of industrial
raspberry, and shook so hard that my mocha staggered away like a drunk. Startled, I let out a shriek that sounded
like a crow being run over by a tractor.
Then I began laughing at my own reaction with great cackling Phyllis
Diller peals. The rest of the
coffeehouse, having processed the rude secret of the Puccini table, joined in,
creating a crowd-size wave of merriment.
All this excitement proved too much for my tattered nerves, however, and
I found to my utter dismay that my laughter was turning into spasmodic
coyote-like sobs. The more reasonable
portions of my brain were signaling desperately for a time-out, but then my
eyes welled up and I was gone for good.
I dropped my face to the smooth, cool glass of the tabletop, fuzzing out
Puccini’s fine-boned face.
The rest of the coffeehouse had
gone utterly silent. I was shaking now,
and I think that my left arm was sort of flailing, like a wounded seagull. I felt a hand on my back, the space between
my shoulder blades, and opened my eyes to find Pauline’s concerned brown
pupils.
“I am so sorry!” she said. “I thought maybe you could use a laugh, you
looked so down, and this table’s sort of our new toy… Are you gonna be okay?”
I had no resource but absolute
truth. “No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“Oh goodness.” She sucked on her
teeth, thinking. “Tell you what… let’s
get you upstairs. I’ve got a place you
can rest for a while.”
She lifted me by the elbow and
guided me up the steps, past the thousand-woman collage, and then we were in
the hallway. The doors were posted with
Alice-in-Wonderland signs like “Not this room,” “Certainly not this room!” “This room? Are you kidding
me?” and “Now why the hell would you be wanting to look in this room?”
This last one, oddly enough, is
exactly where we went. It was completely
dark inside, and Pauline seemed to prefer it that way, mumbling something about
not wanting to give me any further shocks.
She guided me to a futon against the back wall, then scuffled around in
a closet and brought back a crocheted blanket.
It seemed like an odd thing for a
nearly complete stranger to do, but I was grateful when Pauline leaned over to
touch my hair and kiss me on the forehead.
“Just stay here and sob it all
out, Sandy. I’ve got to get back to
work, but I’ll come back later to check up on you.”
I heard the scuff of Pauline’s
footsteps, then the click of the door behind her as the shaft of light closed
up. I found a big, soft pillow and
pulled it toward me like the last good thing on God’s green earth. I intended to soak it with tears, but my old,
pregnant body had had enough, sending me into a liquid indigo free-fall of
sleep.
What I awoke to I can barely
describe. It began with a thunk and
clatter, and then the visuals kicked in.
I blinked my eyes and made out a wiry hermit with a beard and dark
hooded eyes. The walls behind him gave
off a rainbow shimmer, crystal cockroaches that squiggled around the room when
I moved my head. The hermit scratched
his beard and put a hand on either hip.
“Who the fuck are you? Goddammit,
I told Hessie to keep this room locked up.”
He knelt next to a plastic bag
and sorted through its contents, lots of small objects that he clacked around
with relish, no doubt enjoying their effect on his drowsy intruder. I raised myself on an elbow.
“Bicycle reflectors.”
He gave me an annoyed look. “No shit, Shirley.” And went back to his
work.
I reached under my quilt to make
sure I at least had clothing on, then ran a hand along the wall behind me. The reflectors were lined up seven-deep,
triangles, circles, squares, rectangles and ovals in orange, red, green,
yellow, blue, even purple, coating the walls in a jungleburst of color. The whole room was done up this way, even the
windows and doorjambs, which were trimmed in fire-engine red. The morning sun shot through a side window
and lit up a swath of amped-out sparkle, like citric acid made visual.
Hermit-guy sat on his haunches,
having sorted out a dozen orange triangles, and took a good long study of me.
“So what’s your story,
futon-girl? Too many frozen lemon cheesecakes? Triple-mocha heart attack?”
“The Puccini Table.”
He let out a rough, squeaky
laugh. “Ah-haha! I told them that
fucking thing was trouble. Liabilities,
man! Lie-uh-bilities.”
“So,” I said, sweeping a hand at
the room. “Is this one of Hessie’s
preposterous notions?”
“This,” he said, “is my
preposterous life’s work. The canvas,
yes, was provided by Madame Nygaard, as was a seriously sweet commission. Hessie is a goddamn artist’s wet dream, and
although this setting does lack a certain mobility, it will get much more
exposure than some fussy millionaire’s living room.”
I looked at his triangles. “So are those for the orange cross-hatches
behind you?”
“Ah, futon-girl has an eye! Yes,
although I intend to fade them out along the top, just to be a prick, and then
I will weave some snaky yellow ovals to steal away the symmetry.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Approval is nice,” he said. “But it’s not what I need. What I need is to not give a flying fuck
about what anyone thinks until I’m done, which is why I wanted this room locked
up. Nothing worse for clouding the
vision than worthless fucking mid-work commentary. Afterward, you can love it, hate it, throw
dog shit on it, so long as I’ve reached the point where there’s not a damn
thing I can do about it.”
“Could I tell you it’s one of the
most gorgeous things I’ve ever seen?”
Hermit-guy stood and clapped the
dust from his hands. “Now that,” he
said, “is the kind of generalized ass-kissing that a guy can deal with.”
“Oh, it’s not ass-kissing. I’m an artist myself.”
He delivered a theatrical slap to
his forehead and looked to the ceiling.
“And she was doing so well.
So. How long have you been an
artist?”
I was not about to actually speak
the words “three weeks,” but my expression gave me away.
“How many apartments have you
been kicked out of?” he said. “How many
credit cards have you run into the ground? How many lovers dumped you after the
three-month excitement of dating an artist wore off and she realized you were
broke? How many times… have you purchased gas for your car… with the pennies
rolled up from your coin jar?”
“I… uh…”
“You get the point, Gladys? You
use that word ‘artist’ around some of my long-suffering friends, and we might
have to glaze your white yuppie ass and stick you in a kiln.”
“Yuppie?”
“Oh yes. No one ever thinks they’re a yuppie. Look at that perfect coiffure, sister. Check out that Sedona sweatshirt. You may as well be wearing a Three Tenors
baseball cap, for Chrissake. And I’ll
bet anything you drive some junior SUV with a CD player and removable seats.”
All true, of course. But I would have given anything if he could
sense my sincerity, if he could understand the month-long rebirth of my
eyeballs. He seemed to reconsider,
scuffling a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.
“Oh, I’m sorry already. I’m just a bitter old artist. Feel free to stick around and watch. Quietly.
You like jazz?”
“Sure.”
“Okay then! That’s a start. Name’s Jonathon.”
“Sandy,” I said.
Jonathon grunted and switched on
a tape deck covered with smears of black and gray. Out came Sarah Vaughan, that funny
pseudo-British lisp, a swingy version of “I Feel Pretty.” I loved watching the
track of his thoughts, a little bullet that traveled from eyes to head to
hands, then burst forth in matador sweeps as he dabbed a reflector with
adhesive and fixed it to a perfect spot.
After an hour, I had to let out a question or I would burst.
“So how long?”
“Isn’t that kind of personal?”
“How many years,” I scolded.
“Twenty-three torturous,
impoverished, glo-ree-uss years.”
“Any big successes?”
“Every single thing I’ve ever
made. Every time I ignored some
flat-head who told me I should do something more practical. Including the painters, I might add. They hate this shit.”
“Money?”
“Sold a piece in Seattle last
week… a ten-foot sunrise of yellow, orange, little flakes of red. Ten thousand dollars.”
“Wow!” I exclaimed, a bit too
much like a cheerleader.
“And three years ago the Grand
Ronde tribes commissioned a bunch of huge-ass geometric things.”
“Ohmigod! The Spirit Mountain
Casino?”
That was the first thing I had
said all morning that seemed to make an impression. He stopped and scratched his beard. “You’ve been there?”
“Yesterday morning I woke up
there. I was sort of… working on my
vision.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he sighed, and
turned back to his triangles. “I’m
sorry, but you forty-year-old women and this Native American thing…”
Okay, now he was pissing me off.
“Native American craps dice?” I
asked. “Native American playing cards?”
“What about them?”
“I use them in mosaics.”
He thought about that. “Okay.
What else?”
“Frosted glass.”
“Sea glass?”
I nodded.
“I love sea glass,” he said. “It’s so…”
“Random? Organic? Fusion of man
and nature?”
“Say! There may be an artist in
there after all. Y’got any slides?”
Having passed through such fierce
gauntlets, I took this as the highest of compliments. “I’ve got the actual mosaics,” I said. “They’re just outside, in my… SUV.”
“Oh-hoh!” he roared. “Yuppie girl! Yuppie girl!”
“Yeah, yeah, so I got money. All the more reason for you to kiss my ass,
honey. Let’s see…” I counted the points
on my fingers. “Loaded yuppie lady,
crazy about art, crazy about your
art, might want to pay ridiculous sums of money for your art…”
“Stop right there!” said
Jonathon. He stepped down from his
footstool and rubbed his hands on a rag.
“What do you say we head outside for some fresh air?”
Jonathon had some blunt critiques
– the pastels could have been manipulated more carefully, the six-section piece
was much too anal-retentive – but when he got to my craps-dice, his eyes lit
up. “If you’d really like to be an
artist,” he said, “you can start right here. Such sly humor!”
We were both feeling like some
exercise, so I took him to my raisable section of drawbridge, where we watched
the Willamette’s glacier-like course.
Jonathon evidently had a thing for bridges, because he gave me a pretty
impressive rundown: Hawthorne Bridge, built in 1910, one of the oldest lift
bridges in the world, both feared and beloved by the locals for its rickety
steel-mesh roadways. I was almost
disappointed when he brought up his wife, a painter who created real-life
scenes populated with primitive, cartoon-like figures. She took the narratives from a childhood of
incest and molestation.
“When I first saw her works, I
was in such a state of awe – the sheer bluntness, the incredible courage it
took to portray such ugliness. It made
me feel like my own work was too… I don’t know, decorative, socially
irrelevant. But then I took her to my
studio, and she loved it! She said she was amazed by its imagination and humor
– in fact, she saw in my work what was perhaps lacking in her own. Our personalities fit into a surprisingly
common pattern: the intense artist who’s incredibly easy-going, the humorous
artist who can be a real prick… as you found out this morning.”
He fell silent for a moment, lost
in the river. I played a little game,
testing my vision.
“I love the water here,” I said. “It reminds me of…”
“Green marble?” he said.
“Exactly.” I wrapped my hands
around the railing, smooth and cool in my grip.
“So do you and Marta have any kids?”
“No. Marta wanted to cut the
string. Not that she was concerned about
herself – she’s the gentlest person on the planet – but the very act of
child-bearing would bring back too many shadows. It also gave her a chance to pull the drain
on a very toxic gene pool. She was their
last chance.”
“Do you ever feel like you’re
missing out on something?”
He edged up to my shoulder. “There are a lot of things I’m not
doing. I’m not climbing Mount Everest,
I’m not swimming with dolphins in the Virgin Islands, and I’m not playing mid-striker
for the Argentinean World Cup soccer team.
If you think too much about the things you’re missing, you’re apt to
miss out on the things you’re not missing.
Look at that room I’m working on.
I’m getting good solid American currency to revel in color and light on
a daily basis.
“No.” he continued. “Rather than
giving the earth more children it doesn’t need, I will leave behind lovely
radiant works of art. That room at
Rimsky’s? His name is going to be Jerry. He’s a terrific little kid… and once I’m
gone, he’ll have all kinds of friends who come to visit and ooh and ahh at the
very sight of him. Are you all right?”
I couldn’t help myself. That same slice of sun was knifing over
Portland to sow Jonathon’s beard with a ring of sparks. I reached out to gather them in.
“Who are you, Jonathon, who do
you work for, and how is it that you know all the answers without knowing the
questions?”
Jonathon broke up his beard with
a toothy grin. “I’m nothing all that
much,” he said. “I’m just the reflector
man.”
Photo by MJV
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