026. Eleven minutes to midnight

It is eleven minutes to midnight, and my canvas blinks back a whisper of atrocity.

Every line is a casualty. My brain burns with thoughts. A flash of hot, and two little red pills downed with water. Every word is a bullet to the flesh. The air is hot, sticky, solid. The studio reeks with sweat. My lanky body leans up against a canvas, naked flesh imprinting oils with oils. The color streaks across the blank like newly spilt blood, fresh, so invigorating.

What makes me human? What makes me different from this drip of watery red paint, separates me from a little spray of light that disappears as my blinds move to and fro? My mind is a train wreck as it slides further and further down slope. My body is my brush and I feel along the hard edge of my canvas until my breasts touch the edge of the easel. They say my work is pornographic.

Summer is a beast. It swallows up my conscious from beneath and sucks in my movements until I walk like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders. My walk is torpid, my subconscious sweats. I breathe like my fan and I exhale gallons. Everything is talking. The walls creak with the heat in the wood, and my feet and the ground make sweet songs. Everything smells like summer. Summer always reminds me of getting older, and even more, of aging. My skin is tough and grinds against the canvas. I’m dancing with the paint, I hate myself. My eyes don’t see so well anymore. Eyes, teeth, tongue. I taste the air; the air is stale. My mouth is dry. I step away.

Drip, drip, drip. Red is everywhere. It snakes along my underbelly, interlopes into my unmentionables. My toes crinkle in a puddle of red. I cry red tears and my canvas cries with me. Every outline is a martyr. I see me, I see her, I see our bodies in hardening acrylic, forming rivers on the wall. My blood drips, mixes with red, drips. You can’t tell where my body starts or where it stops.

The phone is an intruder on my harmonized insanity. I hold my breath against the hard, white plastic. Fingers trace a calling card. A dog barks outside, someone is smoking out on the gravel; his crunch makes my Headache come back. My mother is a nun on crack, reading my psalms and blowing rings into my ear. I set the phone down on her insoluble words and take a look beyond the blinds.

The man is half stooped, beneath the sycamore tree. The gravel makes ripples around his perfectly round shoes. Paint is drying around my arms and on my eyelids, and the water of my shower takes away the red. It stings my eyes and runs into my ears. The man is still there when I’m back, still smoking. He’s just standing there, his back to the studio, the streetlight making his figure a hard outline on the cement.

The heat belly dances off the cement and ricochets onto my tan skin. It makes a ripple effect against my nerves and I shake off the motions of my inner body. The man keeps quiet, so I slip out from my artistic trance to join him under a scarlet moon (or maybe it’s the paint in my eyes). He looks neither here nor there and I squat beside him, gravel scraping my knees in a short denim skirt. His eyes remained unfocused but I smell no deviants on his lips. It is midnight.

036. Call me It

“Smoke?”

I shake my head; his hand is a pale sliver amongst a rush of sleeves. “I quit.”

“I make it a tradition to pick up as many bad habits as possible.”

“Alright.” I reach out and take the solitary object between my index and middle fingers. A flash of flame and the end burns red to ashen gray. I suck in the sweet sting of nicotine and exhale a gale of twirling smoke. The night air snatches away the toxins and my rings disappear one by one.

“What do you call yourself?”

I think about this question. I think about everything I have been called, all the names that mean anything to me. I find myself concentrating on the sound of his voice rather than his words.

“It,” I reply sardonically, “call me it.” It’s my sarcastic side, but who will it hurt? Somehow my birth name seems far too complex and ridiculous for my simple existence. The man is unaware of this debate lurking beyond the corneas of my hazel eyes.

“Interesting,” he replies. He doesn’t answer his own question, and for further notice, I stick a tiny post-it on the back of my brain. I will call this unobtrusive stranger, X.

“What brings you all the way to the driveway of my boring studio? You seem like a man with better things to do.” I say, simply because the night air is crispy like autumn leaves and I want to say something brilliantly witty.

“This studio isn’t boring,” he contradicts, smiling in a suave, sophisticated manner. His teeth shine like beacons and his breath is a wisp here and a wisp there that I watch when I find it difficult to look into his penetrating eyes. “Sometimes I can see lights stabbing through your glass, the image of you and your art, you and your canvases, projected onto my world like shadows, haunting me. I’ve always wanted to come inside. I’d like to meet the art, now that I’ve met the artist.”

“The door is always unlocked,” I smile, “just in case anyone was ever curious.”

“You should be careful,” he puts out his cigarette and a tiny dot of light flickers on the wet pavement feet away, “some people can be too curious.”

But the door is unlocked and I slide in after him, his black leather jacket and scarf touching briefly a scar on my right arm. It tickles. I shut the door and lock it from behind, carefully taking precautions as I let a complete stranger claim my modest studio. X slowly soaks in the small space—the living room, the bedroom, all in one. He rests his fingertips on small but meaningful objects; the genie lamp my manager bought me last Christmas, the leering blank canvases that lean, with failures, up against a cramped corner, the tower of unmarked boxes that represent my life as I know it. The floor is covered in specks of crusty paint, a memoir from my Pollock days.

“What is this?” X has reached the 64x48 nude portrait of a disguised yet fairly obvious form. My heart rushes blood into my head and my vision turns pinkish. I reach out a finger and trace the place where my hair has made a million little lines, no bigger than a whisker.

031. Go with me?

“A project I’ve been working on. It’s nothing more than a declaration of boredom, really; a surprise for my manager and my gallery. They’ll be interested to know I’m not painting decaying corpses or figureheads any more.” I smile and try to seem genuine, although a lie is a lie, and it makes me dreadfully uncomfortable.

He joins me in feeling the mold of my form, the intimates of my figure. Somehow it doesn’t seem awkward, (should it?), and I wonder who X is, and whether or not I’ve officially gone insane. I was intriguingly reminded of a time when I was visiting my sister, and she had gone over a few of my sketches in charcoal. They were the nude equivalent of women strolling in the park, and she had said, almost in tears, “You know, sometimes I just don’t get you. You want to be taken seriously; you want to be a serious artist. You promised me you could make your painting a living and not a hobby.” When I asked her what she meant, she asked, “Do you remember when you told me you wanted to live by a harbor?” I just nodded. “You wanted to come out by the bay every day, just watching the ripples along the water. That’s who you are, not...this!” And she flung a sketch of a decomposing skull at my chest, with bitter tears in her eyes.

I don’t know why it reminds me of X, of his intense inspection of my painting, but for some reason it does, and it makes me feel guilty. I tell X this as I pour him a cocktail and light myself a Camel. He watches me suck a day away and gives me a look I can’t comprehend. What he says is: “She sounds like she cares for you more than you care for yourself. Why don’t you live by a harbor?”

I sigh and slip my feet under a crumpled Vogue magazine beneath the chair. “I want to someday, still. But I don’t want to go alone. That’s my one fear—of being completely alone.”

X smiles and says something that takes me by surprise. He reaches over with one hand and tucks a stray strand of hair behind my ears. “You won’t be alone. Go with me.”

I don’t know what to say in response, so I simply pour him another drink, and we sit in my dimly lit kitchen like that, just pausing between thoughts and wishing on futures that seem like light-years away. X finally looks up, amused.

“I should get going,” he winks and pulls on his jacket from the back of my chair, “life calls.”

033. If you were me...

I am wasted on every tired, used-up life. I watch as people float on empty dreams and broken wishes, sink into their threadbare subway seats and depression, Prozac-induced comas. I get high off of the unhappiness of others, form mountains out of crackwhores and paint every line behind transit stations, as if it were the next Madonna and Child. Does this make me an imposter? Because I write reality into a storybook plotline and carve natural imperfection into clay instead of facing it like every other impoverished person? Because I live to show others the flipside to a glamorous, pretentious lifestyle, while I, myself, am an addict to its very cause?

These days, a person needs profuse amounts of remedies to clear their mind of cobwebs and hidden staircases. They pump you so full of drugs you can’t see, but you breathe and breathe, and you can funnel creative energy that magically appears and disappears according to the supplements and the rate of consumption. I am a product of the pathetic lifestyle I aim, in my work, to destroy. Who is the true villain? Me or the Voices that control my dirty, filthy mind?

My work becomes progressively a cheat on the word Art. Casualties aside, I find myself sketching little birds on napkins and passing them out to bums on the street. My work that hangs in galleries are the hollow interpretations of what my mind tries to tell me. Sometimes I can find meaning in my brushstrokes, and I am taken back to a time and place when I could be inspired, and putting the finishing seal on a self-portrait was more exciting than it was deprecating. The critics never had more fun than when my body imprint in red paint made its way into the home of a wealthy, Hollywood business man. I remember the meeting. It was all straight talk. I found myself wondering when I made art to profit, and when I sold my work to people who’d never heard the name Rockwell.

I need a change; that is what my life calls for. A change. Of pace, of mind, of matter. And I need someone who knows change better than I know myself. I pace up and down the hall like a ghost, side by side with my reflection. I walk slowly, cautiously, one foot in front of the other; the way I have walked for what seems like an eternity. Then I see, like a beacon of light in my shrouded mind of darkness. A slip of paper. I bend halfway, stooping, to snatch it up in my hands. I am right; it is a beacon. It is a name, more or less, but I flit my eyes over the letters so all I see is “X”, all I see is what I hope for. A ten-digit-number to my escape, my salvation. I dial and wait, the ring tone singing my demise.

He picks up on the third ring. “Yes?” It’s more of an affirmation than a question. My heart soars as if on cue.

I fiddle with the cord. “If you were me...what would you do?”

There is a pause. “That depends,” he answers, and I can almost smell his wicked nerve from the other end, “what is it you want to do?”

037. Joy, as a matter of fact

We stand, just two people, just two figures like stretch marks on the horizon. I want to capture this moment, and I feel like the lenses of the camera of the sky. Through my eyes, I am perfect here, inexorably perfect. The land is perfect. The water makes me speechless with its never ending expanse. It is one living creature, inhaling as the tide pulls in, exhaling as it pushes out. The birds entertain us with their squawking and squealing, and I have never been happier.

X laughs as I jump around like a little child, so filled with an unspeakable happiness, an unimaginable glory. I wonder if this is a new kind of drug, a free kind of drug. It fills me with a high that brings me to places I’ve never dreamed of, and there is no crash, no burn. X watches me, a sparkle in his eyes that gleams and shimmers. He asks me how I can change so much in so many miles.

“It’s joy, as a matter of fact,” I tell him gleefully, and my skirt flies around my thighs, and I feel like a girl, “pure, true joy.”

X grins and pulls me into an embrace. For once, I can fall into a man’s arms without flinching within. He is the world that encompasses me, and I let him. His mouth is sweet and tastes like blackberries and the wind on a fine day. His beard tickles, and I pull away laughing. He watches as I run to the edge of the dock, my toes just extended beyond the boards.

The wood beneath my feet gives me splinters, but I twirl around anyways. The waters rush at me from all angles, and fine mist sprays my cheek, and I am exalted. The sky’s pages open to a view more spectacular than any I have ever seen. But the most beautiful point of view is here by the giant oak tree facing the harbor, where I can see X, standing off to the side, watching the place with silent, measuring eyes. His lean, gaunt figure is a contrast to the fullness of the place, but I have never seen anything more beautiful.

The end.