Chapter 7
Grant: I'm An Artist, Damn It
I’m an artist. Sometimes I make a living from it, and sometimes I have to resort to things like painting portraits of pretentious families to pay the bills. I don’t really do people. I do abstract, I do surreal, I do multi-media art that stuffy old people refer to as piles of rubbish, but hip kids see as meaningful and worthy of a shitload of their parents’ money. I’ll be honest, most of it is rubbish. Sure, I was all into it in the beginning. I had passion and zeal and a real grasp of how to present the problems of the world artistically and meaningfully using items retrieved from recycling bins and a lot of paint. I sculpted, I created, I painted, I built. I drank. And I drank. And I began to like the drinking more than I liked the creating. Soon I was building sculptures out of empty vodka bottles and vomit. Ok, they weren’t sculptures so much as a mess in my bedroom and living room. But they were art to me. That puke came from inside me as much as any painting.
I stopped doing shows. Well, I was stopped from doing shows. No one wants to do a meet and greet with an artist that looks and smells like he just finished a ten-day bender. And no one particularly wants to see an artist smash his own sculpture to the ground in a fit of rage because who the fuck’s idea was it to have an alcohol free showing? Oh, it was to benefit a halfway house for alcoholics? Someone should have told me. You did? Oh.
So I painted more, sculpted less, made a few appearances at Comic Cons where I sold a bunch of drawings of Aquaman and Superman making out in the last row of a movie theater that was showing Hedwig and the Angry Inch and generally became a hack.
I started painting family portraits by accident. Maybe that’s not the right word. By circumstance. No, that’s not right, either. Ok, I’ll tell you. I slept with a girl that was younger than I thought – relax, she was 19 – and her father got all bent out of shape about it and threatened to tell the owner of the gallery where I had a big show that week to cancel my appearance. Golf buddies, turns out. We came to a compromise instead. I would paint a portrait of his family for free and he would not ruin my career. Which was still a career at the time. And he didn’t want me to paint off a photograph. They were going to sit for the painting. He was going to taunt me with the presence of his daughter Christina.
The family sat the way most rich families sit for these things: on a gold velvet couch with ornately carved armrests, the mother and father standing behind the couch with the five children lined up on the seat like prizes. The father looks stern yet loving, the mother like she would not know how to exist without the instruction of her husband, grasping onto his arm like a life preserver, and the kids all looking like they would rather be playing video games or watching TV or, in the case of Christina, making out with the artist. I swear, she kept winking at me. Licking her lips. The whole time I painted, I was thinking, I have been under that girl’s dress. I have been in her panties. I have been in her. I tried using telepathy on the father. Your daughter has a lovely pussy. Your daughter has the most beautiful tits I have ever seen. Your daughter giggles after she has an orgasm. But the father stood there the whole time, stoic. I swear, he didn’t blink once. He just shot invisible lasers out of his eyes and into my crotch.
And so my portrait skills have come into play during the great Greener Valley crisis. Mrs. Beasley and Terri have settled down, but we don’t know what to do ourselves. Mostly, we just sit here terrified and clueless as to what to do about the screeching children outside. I fix the situation the way my mother fixes everything; I prepare food. Ok, it’s just macaroni and cheese and chicken hot dogs leftover from last night. It’s not like I could cook anything with the electricity out so I serve them cold. No one seems to care. We eat and clean up, trying to ignore the screaming outside and then I don’t know what to do with the crazy people and incontinent dog in my living room. They seem to be looking to me for leadership and I just want to go back in my bedroom and find the rest of the Vicodin. Maybe if I take enough to lapse into a coma, I’ll wake up when this is all over. The National Guard would arrive, the feral kids would be corralled, the town would be cleaned up and I’d wake up in a clean, white walled hospital being sponge bathed by a nurse who looks like Nicole Kidman.
Obviously, I’m not much of a leader.
Terri and Mrs. Beasley sit on the couch. Just sit there. They don’t talk, they don’t look at each other. Terri tilts her head back a bit and stares at the ceiling, her mouth hanging open like it’s too tired to bother closing. Mrs. Beasley sits next to her, prim and proper, hands folded in her lap, an expectant look on her face, as if she’s waiting for me to turn on the TV. She must watch something after lunch. A soap opera, Oprah, Law and Order repeats, whatever it is that old, nearly insane people watch. Fox News? Sasha jumps up on her lap and the three of them sit there – the dumbfounded kid, the batty old woman and the dog who wouldn’t stop peeing – and they look for all the world like a painting out of some bizarre… you see where this is going, right? I mean, why the fuck not? If this end of the world shit isn’t really the end of the world but just some short-term clusterfuck, a painting like this will be gold. I can see the write-ups.
ARTIST CAPTURES THE EMOTIONAL TOLL OF THE GREAT CLUSTERFUCK OF 2012.
Wait.
BRILLIANT ARTIST CAPTURES THE EMOTIONAL TOLL OF THE GREAT CLUSTERFUCK OF 2012.
That’s better.
So I paint. For an entire hour I paint. I paint while sharp-toothed children scream for blood. I paint while the sounds of screaming metal and small explosions puncture the afternoon. I paint while strange people tap on the window begging to be let in. Beasley and Terri seem oblivious to it all, probably in some sort of post-Armageddon shock. I imagine them to be a nightmare version of American Gothic so in the painting I put the couch out in front of a white farmhouse, which then becomes a white church, and my sofa ends up as a gold piece with ornate wood much like Christina’s. I draw Sasha with a pool of piss puddling underneath her on Mrs. Beasley’s dress and Terri with a bit of drool hanging out of her gaping mouth and I have to stop myself from making Elvis appear between them. “You guys are going to be a hit if we ever get out of this intact,” I tell them. No one responds.
“Crazy hat day.” Terri speaks for the first time since she uncurled from her Armageddon Ball of Sorrow. Of course it’s something nonsensical.
“Excuse me, dear?” Mrs. Beasley addresses her without actually facing her.
“Crazy hat day. Yesterday was supposed to be crazy hat day at school. Except they wouldn’t let us call it Crazy Hat Day even though it was called Crazy Hat Day for, like ever. I mean, it’s the day before the Winter Festival. It’s always Crazy Hat Day. The person with the craziest hat wins a prize. But they said the word crazy is demeaning to actual crazy people. Not crazy like people on Adderall and Xanax because that’s like everyone, but crazy like people who live in mental wards and get tied up in straight jackets. So I was like, Mr. Benson, why the fuck is someone who is crazy enough to be in a mental ward going to care if some teenagers in some shitty little town label their hats as crazy? That’s so stupid. And Mr. Benson was like, well suppose you had a mother or brother or even aunt who was crazy. Wouldn’t you be offended by Crazy Hat Day? And I was like uhh dude. I’m offended by this conversation. And it was so weird because who messes up Winter Festival? And that was just the first thing that was messed up and we were all like, but you can’t mess up the festival. But he took away Crazy Hat Day and we all decided to wear normal hats in protest. You know, instead of hats with like Christmas decorations on them or stuff sticking out of them or whatever. Just normal hats.”
“What hat did you wear?” I asked her. What can I say, I was curious.
“A Boston Red Sox hat.”
“That’s kind of crazy, no?”
“Why?”
“Because you live in New York.”
“Well, it’s an understated kind of crazy then. Which is not crazy at all. Just smart.”
The way she says that is almost crazy in itself. After the run on thought that was the Crazy Hat Day soliloquy, it is surprising to hear her speak in a normal, almost adult tone.
I finish up the sitting part of the painting. I’ll do touch ups and whatever else later - if there is a later. I stand back and survey my work and goddamn it’s good. Probably my best work ever. Sure, the older crowd will think it horrifying but the younger crowd – particularly the ones who said things like “The broken window in the church represents the abandonment of ourselves to religion” or “I think the drool coming from her mouth is in essence the salivation one feels at the prospect of the world ending” – will eat this shit up.