Back To Venice

Back To Venice

by Michael Grant

Copyright 2011 Michael Grant

Smashwords Edition

DEDICATION

To Garrett, Cassidy, Erin and Sean. May they always see the beauty in the world

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Sandi Nardolny and Elizabeth Nardone for their careful reading of the manuscript. If there are any mistakes left, the fault is mine. Special thanks to Bob Mescolotto for his thoughts and suggestions.

CHAPTER 1

It all started with a toilet bowl. A red one.

I guess it was my own damn fault. No, I know it was my own damn fault. What could have I been thinking? Did I really expect that I could spend an entire night downing Ambush shots with a couple of chronically unemployed artist buddies—who, incidentally, also happen to be world-class functional alcoholics —and not expect something weird to happen?

But… it was O’Malley’s, my favorite neighborhood watering hole in the Village, and I’d had a really, really bad day.

It started that morning when I met with a SoHo art gallery owner whom I was hoping would give me a showing.

A brief aside: The area in New York City known as SoHo is so named because it is SOuth of HOuston Street. Get it? It’s pronounced House-tin, not Hus-stin, because it was named after a Dutch farmer and not the guy from Texas.

For some reason that escapes me, New Yorkers have become obsessed with conjuring up cute and snappy acronyms for areas that just used to be called neighborhoods. TriBeCa, for instance, stands for the TRIangle BElow CAnal street. And in Brooklyn there’s DUMBO, which stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. I, myself, live in RIRCHRLSFWSS, which stands for Rat Infested, Roach Controlled, High Rent, Lilliputian Space, Freezing in the Winter, and Stifling in the Summer. It’s an area that can be found—well, actually anywhere in the city where the rent is less than a thousand bucks a square inch. You don’t hear about this area very often, probably because it’s so hard to pronounce. But I digress.

I picked SoHo because it has more art galleries than Dublin has bars. And besides, I had already been rejected by every other art gallery in the city. It was rather grandly named the Westminster Gallery of Art, which I though a tad ambitious, given that the gallery was of the approximate dimensions of a subway car—cut in half. It was on the ground floor of a sliver building that clearly had been constructed as an afterthought. Apparently, when building seventeen and building eighteen were completed, it was noted that someone had carelessly left a sliver of space between the two buildings. Given the value of real-estate in New York City, even in the years before the turn of the century, the twentieth that is, the space was judged to be way too valuable to be left as simply another dark alley from which unemployed miscreants could ambush prosperous citizens. And so they wedged this tiny building in between and gave it the address: seventeen-and-a-half.

The owner of the gallery, Geoffrey Abelard-Hamptonshire, was tall and thin with an aristocratic bearing that was marred only by a permanent sneer that suggested that he—or someone nearby—had stepped in something quite vile. He stood back to get a better look at my paintings, which wasn’t very far, given that the gallery was barely six-feet wide. After staring at my paintings for an inordinate amount of time, he offered me his professional, unadorned and succinct opinion. This really is shit, old man.

I guess I should have been offended, but somehow, with his British accent and all, it didn’t seem quite as harsh as if an American had said it. Really? I asked, squinting at my paintings. Um, in what way?

"Where to begin. They’re too…photographic, too…real, too…lifelike. My God, man, you’re going over the same tired ground that has already been done to death by the likes of Caravaggio, Wyeth, and even, shutter, Rockwell. I could never sell...this…this…"

Shit? I offered helpfully.

Exactly. Listen, old man. Do yourself a favor. Spend some time at MOMA. Perhaps an afternoon among truly great works of art will stimulate your quaint approach and open your mind to the possibilities of the twenty-first century.

Surrendering to the inevitable—and, I might add, not unaccustomed—defeat, I wordlessly packed up my pathetic collection of too-photographic-too-real-too-lifelike paintings and slunk away into the early morning smog of lower Manhattan.

I could have told him, but didn’t, that I’d visited the Museum of Modern Art not once, but hundreds of times and, quite frankly, I think most of what’s on display there is, to use the gallery owner’s own eloquent, if pejorative description of my work—shit.

This is probably a good time to make a confession here. I am, God help me, a classicist. I can’t help it. It’s like being born with one brown eye and one blue eye. I unabashedly admire the works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Caravaggio. I even like the Impressionists—well, most of them. But I draw the line at calling it art when some wild hairy primate working for bananas ice-skates across a blank canvas with paint-soaked shoeshine brushes strapped to his paws (do they even have paws?), or an artist who stands on a stepladder and bombards a canvas with open paint cans, or…well, you get the idea.

And don’t get me started on artists who title their paintings with numbers—a dead giveaway that they have no idea what the hell it is that they’ve painted. Call me a snob, but I happen to believe that a painting should represent something. Am I being unreasonable here? I don’t think so. Shouldn’t a painting communicate something? Shouldn’t it move the viewer in some profound way? And I don’t mean his bowels.

Enough said.

To continue. My morning went badly, but my afternoon went even worse. I met my girlfriend of seven months for lunch down the street from the Wall Street brokerage house where she spends most of her waking hours convincing marks to sell low and buy high. We dined at my favorite bistro—the corner hotdog stand. Did I mention that artists who insist on being classicists are always broke?

Over dirty-water dogs and diluted lemonade, the conversation, which wasn’t going too hot to begin with, took a turn for the worse. Mark, she said, wiping a dab of mustard from her very pretty chin, you’re thirty-two and—

Thirty-one.

Whatever. The point is, are you ever going to get a real job?

Cue the laugh track.

Linda, I reminded her. I have a job. I am an artist.

I’m not sure if it was her very unladylike whooping hoot, or the way she slapped her knee, or it could have been the way the tears of laughter cascaded down her cheeks, but then and there I just knew we had no future together.

As I walked away from her for the last time and into the gloomy caverns of Wall Street, it occurred to me that, more and more, my life was beginning to resemble a very sad country song. Got no job. Got no money. Lost my girl. It’s a good thing I don’t own a dog. That’s all I can say.

And so, later that evening, feeling exceptionally sorry for myself, I repaired to O’Malley’s to seek out the empathetic camaraderie of my fellow artists.

Hey, asshole. You sell anything yet? yelled Quin, the part-time bartender and fulltime unemployed artist, as soon as I walked in the door.

He was standing down at the artist corner of the bar with Xanto and Varana, two of the most eccentric artists in a community of very eccentric artists in which I had the distinction of being the only one in the group to possess a front and back name.

Xanto had a unique style. He insisted on painting with only the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue and never mixing them. Not surprisingly, he didn’t sell much. There isn’t a big market out there for paintings that look like cartoons. Varana, who always dressed in black, was, as usual, wreathed in a cloud of smoke—cigar smoke, oddly enough. How many of you can say you know a woman who chain-smokes Garcia Vega cigars? Her painting technique, equally self-sabotaging, involved spraying her completed canvas with turpentine so that the images and colors ran down the canvas. She explained the look as being representative of a universe in tears. Almost everyone else explained it as the result of being a bipolar who never took her meds.

Quin carefully lined up six shooter glasses on the bar. What’s that? I asked.

Ambush shots, Xanto said, downing one.

Made with Bushmill’s whiskey and amaretto, Varana explained, waving a lethal cloud of black smoke away from her chronically bloodshot eyes as she downed hers.

It had been, as I’ve said, A Very Bad Day. And I was feeling mighty low, as the old Negro spirituals so often put it. But more than that, the idea of downing Bushmill’s whiskey and amaretto seemed like an excellent idea. At least it did at the time.

After we put away God knows how many shots, the conversation turned—as it is wont to do when ever two or more drunken artists are gathered together—to the subject of What Is Art? If there is anything that will turn reasonably sane artists into foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics, it is the subject of What Is Art?

We took turns belittling the usual suspects.

Caravaggio. Xanto hissed. Why not use a camera and save the paint?

Quin chimed in. Hey, what about Van Gogh? Now there’s a prime example of why crayons and speed don’t mix.

And finally, Varana. Did you ever notice, she intoned in a voice three octaves lower than a foghorn, that all Michelangelo’s women look like men with tits?

I refrained from joining in the disparagement of the latter because I don’t care what anybody says, Michelangelo is the greatest artist of all time and he is my hero. In his prolific eighty-eight years he produced unsurpassed masterpieces in the fields of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He was even a fair poet. No one has ever been able to equal what he did. Nor will anyone.

I saved my vitriol for the greatest fraud of the modern era—the great soup can painter, Andy Warhol.

Any jackass can paint a soup can, I declared. My denunciation might have been more impressive had I been able to avoid slurring my words.

Bullshit, retorted Quin.

I staggered to my feet, the better to deliver my stinging riposte. Oh, yeah—and then I uttered the fateful words that would start me on my strange, strange journey—I’ll bet I could paint a… a… toilet bowl and sell it.

And before I could say, Hey, how about another round? a virtual blizzard of money descended on the bar in front of me, bringing to mind the obvious question: Where did these starving artists get all this money? But it wasn’t just them. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of the action—even the non-artist regulars who never spoke to us and treated us like benign aliens from a faraway galaxy.

Quin counted the money. Five hundred bucks, he said, with a much-too-satisfied grin. Breen. You’ve been called out. Time to put your money where your big mouth is.

Too late, I realized I had wandered into an artistic minefield of my own making. In my alcohol-induced state I’d forgotten that I alone stood on the side of the Old Masters. With this crowd, you could declare with impunity that Rembrandt was a mere copyist. But for some reason, a reason which has always eluded me, these yahoos considered Andy Warhol an icon.

My first instinct was to laugh it off, but five hundred bucks was, well, five hundred bucks. My rent was due at the end of the week and I was—as my accountant brother-in-law gleefully enjoyed pointing out at every opportunity— chronically financially embarrassed. On the other hand, if I lost the bet, where was I going to get five hundred bucks? What is it the Brits like to say when they’re about to commit to a hopeless situation? In for a penny, in for a pound.. I slammed my hand down on the bar. You’re on.

It was agreed that Quin would hold the money. The details of the bet—how much I’d have to sell it for, and the deadline for delivering said painting—were all pretty much a blur. I do remember thinking that as soon as I got back to my apartment, I would have to paint it immediately, because if I waited till morning, when I was sober, I knew I would have called the whole thing off.

Why I painted the toilet bowl red has since become the subject of heated debate.

Blog sites abound and entire forests have been denuded in the service of providing paper for commentators opining at great length on why I used the color red. Reasons postulated for painting the bowl red range from the obvious—it’s the color of danger, to the perplexing—it signifies repressed communist leanings. In point of fact, the reason I used red was because it was the only full tube of paint I had.

The next day with pounding head and gambler’s remorse, I brought my little red toilet bowl painting to the only gallery owner in SoHo whom I considered unprincipled enough to display it. Emil—he, too, of only one name—was a recovering lawyer who had made a killing in the I-have-a-cough-so-I-must-have-asbestosis litigation feeding frenzy. Guilt ridden from fleecing multitudes of equally avaricious clients while personally participating in the bankruptcy of several Fortune 500 companies, he turned his considerable talents to fleecing unsuspecting patrons of the arts.

Emil looked startlingly like a human hedgehog. He was short and rotund with a sharp, pointed nose. His hairline, his most unusual feature, wandered down his forehead like out-of-control kudzu until it almost met his eyebrows. He had unruly black hair with the texture and look of bristle. To keep it under control, he cut it short, which gave him the unfortunate look of someone who had just stuck his finger in a wall socket. If they ever make another Batman movie, they should hire Emil. He would be the perfect foil for Batman. Dr. Hedge Hog, arch villain, out to undermine the world. Can Batman stop him in time? And he wouldn’t even need makeup.

He squinted at my painting while I peered over his shoulder. In the light of day and in a state of cruel sobriety, I had to admit it certainly wasn’t much to look at. Against a white background, I’d painted a very ordinary looking toilet bowl. In fact, I’d used the one in my apartment as a model.

What the hell is this? he asked finally.

A toilet bowl.

I can see that. Are you going commercial? Is this a bathroom ad for Sears?

No, it’s a serious painting.

The hell it is.

My façade of the serious artist quickly crumbled and I was reduced to groveling. Emil, please. You’ve got to help me out. We were drinking shots in O’Malley’s last night and I made a bet that I could sell this.

Diminished capacity.

Excuse me?

No jury in the world would convict you of reneging on the bet. You were drunk out of your gourd, Breen.

Recovering lawyers, I have learned, still see everything in the context of the law.

He held the painting up with a look of undisguised distain. "Behold, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Exhibit A. I ask you, what chance did my client have of selling…this piece of crap?"

It’s not that bad, I retorted, albeit weakly.

Mark, it’s a painting of a toilet bowl!

Emil, do me a favor. Just hang it on the wall for a week. That’s all I ask.

No.

All right. Four days. And you get the usual commission.

You’re a sport, Breen. But sixty percent of nothing is still nothing.

Three days. That’s all I ask. I’ll tell you what, if I win the bet, I’ll give you half. That’s two-fifty, plus your commission. What have you got to lose? Certainly not your reputation, you miserable sonofabitch. Of course I said that last sentence to myself.

Emil studied the painting and shrugged. What the hell. It could be good for a laugh. Two days and that’s my final offer.

That night I hardly slept. Every time I dozed off, I dreamed I was wandering the streets of lower Manhattan pushing a gigantic shopping cart and searching for empty cans and bottles so I could pay off my debt. At five cents a pop, all I needed was ten thousand cans and bottles. Ten thousand!

As I wandered through my dream/nightmare, which seemed like an an eternity, I eventually, and to my utter amazement, managed to fill up the cart. The pile of ten thousand empties, defying gravity, was so high I couldn’t even see the top. Overjoyed, I carefully and slowly headed for the supermarket. But then, just as the supermarket came into view, I was waylaid by a gang of homeless men who pummeled me into submission and took every single bottle and can, leaving me with an empty cart. Once again, dejected and forlorn, and feeling vaguely like Sisyphus, I returned to the deserted streets to start over. After another eternity, I managed to fill up the cart again. Triumphantly, I pushed my valuable cargo toward the supermarket. There it was—in the distance, a shining beacon of hope and salvation—the supermarket. All I had to do was cross just one more street and avoid the ignominy of Chapter Seven. But then, as I pushed the cart into the street, I heard an ominous roar. Startled, I turned and saw—a phalanx of yellow taxicabs, all driven by crazed men with beards and turbans bearing down on me. In an instant, they were upon me. The first taxi, crashed into my cart sending my precious cargo spinning into the air. Then, taxi after taxi zoomed in like Zeros attacking Pearl Harbor, each one exploding a hundred bottles, crushing a thousand cans. And in the blink of an eye, it was over as fast as it had begun. And I was alone with an empty cart and ankle deep in crushed cans and pulverized glass.

I woke up in a cold sweat and couldn’t go back to sleep.

The next day the phone rang. It was Emil. I figured he’d come to his senses and was calling to tell me to get my ridiculous painting out of his gallery. Instead, he said in a tone of awe that one usually reserves for witnessing miracles, I just sold it.

"What? How much?" I asked, my voice cracking in desperation. I’d just found out this morning from Varana that I’d agreed that if I didn’t sell it for at least a hundred bucks, I would lose the bet. I must have been drunker than I thought.

Two.

"Two hundred bucks?" I exhaled in a sigh of relief. "That’s great, Emil."

No, not two hundred, he croaked. "Two thousand."

My heart sank. Emil, Emil, you’ve been had. It’s one of those bastards from O’Malley’s. That check is going to bounce higher than—

No, no. Listen. One of my regular clients bought it. A Park Avenue broad with tons of money. Thank God, she has absolutely no artistic sensibility.

I was so happy that I let the slight pass. I had won five hundred dollars and sold the painting for two thousand, less Emil’s commission. I remember thinking: life is good.

At the time I had no idea how wrong I would be

CHAPTER 2

Ignorant of what lay in store for me in the future, I was, for