Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

“The boss?” Arlene had yelled. “Oh fuck no! Excuse my French. Are you French? No you couldn’t be French, too rough around the edges. But no, I’m not the boss. Name’s Arlene. I’m a painter.”

  She had said this with a proud extension of her arms and a glance down to her paint-covered dress, which was shaped like a tent and emblazoned with squiggly lines and abstract fish. The dress swung out into a circle when she wheeled around to examine the canvas that Engales had been working on.

  “Well I can see that,” Engales had said. “But aren’t you a little . . . old? I mean, to be a student here?”

  “Old? Go fuck yourself,” she had said, thrusting a shoulder toward him. Then, with a little lift of her nose: “I’m what they call a visiting artist. Which is really quite hilarious, since technically I’ve been visiting for thirteen years. They’d never kick me out. I’m like those ugly sculptures in parks that you know were important once but are now just eyesores. Anyway, they’ve learned to ignore me.”

  Engales raised his eyebrows and gave her a nod of approval. “So you’re working the system,” he said.

  “Well that makes two of us, doesn’t it?” she said. She gave him a maternal wink, which he didn’t know whether to return or ignore.

  “They invited me back when I mattered,” she continued. “I was one of those blips on the radar, you know? Famous for ten seconds? Now they’re stuck with me. Their gain, if you ask me! Ha! Oh. And by the way? Just so you know: that painting you’re working on is a piece of shit.”

  Then she shoved a book into Engales’s chest, earmarked at a Lucian Freud painting.

  “Study it,” she said. “That’s how you paint a fucking face.”

  No one had ever cared enough to tell Engales that something he was making was a piece of shit before, and he coveted it. He had protested for show, but then had studied the Freud painting deliberately, running his finger over the smooth page, noting the way the unfinished background eclipsed the face itself, and how the shadows hung so haphazardly on the skin. It was unclear whether the painting was even finished, but Engales felt that it was the white negative space that made the painting wonderful. It was the world threatening to obliterate the painting’s subject, the universe licking at the subject’s face, about to swallow him whole. An understanding swept through Engales, and not unhappily: he was not yet great, but greatness was out there; it was available. He had then thrown his own canvas—the first real canvas he had ever painted on—into the studio’s big trash bin and started over. From across the room he had heard Arlene say, “Atta boy.”

  After that, Arlene quickly became the sort of friend one needed in New York: the friend who told you things how they were, not how you wanted them to be, but only did so because she actually respected you—otherwise, it wouldn’t have been worth her time. (In New York, Engales soon learned, time was a currency potentially more valuable than actual money; everybody claimed they needed more of it.) Arlene informed him of all the times when the studio was not being used for classes (“ ’Cause Lord knows you don’t wanna get tangled up with that whole gang of little shits,” she said). She swore a lot: she swore at her canvases and swore at Engales and swore she’d never paint again. But she was always back the next day, toting ham sandwiches for the both of them, so they’d never have to stop working. They painted alongside each other for insanely long stretches, sometimes until the edges of the morning.

  It was Arlene who had found him the free apartment; her friend François, a French essayist who had headed back to the old country for an indefinite number of months, agreed to entrust Engales with his place because he had a je ne sais quoi . . . energie positif. It was Arlene who had showed him the graffiti in the subway tunnels and the Egyptian wing of the Met, where “the hieroglyphics would blow his fucking brains out,” and the best place to get pesto pizza at 4:00 A.M. (“Pesto is a thing, right now,” she had said), and the way to call for free from a pay phone using a secret 800 number (“Look for the little blue box. It means the phreaks have hacked it”). She had taught him how to make real skin color (add the tiniest spot of blue), and how to “keep painting even when you hated it more than your uncle Booth.” (“Who’s Uncle Booth?” Engales had asked, and she had just said, “Never mind, but you’d hate him.”) They went to poetry readings at A’s—a loft space started by the Other Arleen, as she called her prolific artist friend, who wrote poems made of sounds and made videos on an 8mm camera and performed at MoMA, which made Arlene Number One “cringe and hoorah at the same time.” They frequented Eileen’s Reno Bar, where men dressed as ladies and the drinks were as stiff as the bulges in the ladies’ underwear; he’d paint the man-ladies the next day, their hairy thighs and their beautiful red lips, sucking down their fiery gin martinis. It was Arlene who had taken him to the place that would for the next seven years define him and his experience: the cereal factory turned abandoned building turned party destination turned living quarters, lovingly referred to by its dwellers as simply the squat.

  PORTRAIT OF THE SQUAT BY AN ORPHAN

  EYES: The windows, busted out, are unable to close their lids. Hence: blue tarps and duct tape, till someone sells a piece and they can buy a sheet of glass. Electricity rigged by Tehching, another of the squat’s resident nonresidents, who clipped the wires from across the street, ran them over: minimal sparking, no fires. Cheers to Tehching: a party, with lights(!), in his honor. Tehching, whose projects each lasted a year: live inside a wooden cell for a year, live outside for a year, and now: take a photograph of himself every hour of every day for this year, while he punches a time clock. Tehching, whose hair will grow out as the pictures progress, showing the passage of the year in just minutes. Who will eventually renounce art in his life, since his life had disappeared into art itself: that blurred horizon each and every artist hoped to reach, that only the luckiest or truest of them would.

  NOSE: Resin, glue, paint, booze, day-old spaghetti sauce, and stale smoke. Smells that live in the building like its residents do: with the staunch conviction that they shall stay. No one can tell the smells of the squat to leave. They are as intrinsic to the space as the artists are, who stay up all night to make banners to hang outside that read THIS LAND IS OURS.

  MOUTH: Laurie Anderson’s mouth glows red when she sings. Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah. Laurie Anderson’s mouth glows red when she sings. She taps out her own rhythm on the stick of her microphone. Ah ah ah ah ah. Her voice is being processed by some sort of computer machine: it is both music and nonmusic, sound and mood. Whoooooop. Doooooooah. The abandoned building moves its abandoned limbs to the sound that comes from that mouth, the sound that moves through that computer machine and out into the bones of the humans the abandoned building holds. The bodies no longer belong to their owners anymore, but instead to Laurie Anderson’s glowing mouth.

  HAIR: Selma Saint Regis cuts hers off in the squat’s bathroom, frames it, leaves it on Mary Boone’s doorstep, never to hear from it again.

  BODY: A projection, on the west wall of the squat’s biggest room, of a man dancing in a party hat. He’s naked, his flabby body slapping at itself. The artist herself, who comes into the frame from time to time to dance with the man, refuses to be named or acknowledged. Her face is never visible. The man is vulnerable and aggressive in his movements. The artist is guarded and careful in relation to the camera, but provocative in relation to the man: jutting out her hips. The video ends when she takes a wad of cash from the man, who looks up at her longingly from the edge of the bed, his face suddenly sweet, sad, and guilty, all at once. Then there’s a close-up of her hands, scrawling something on a matchbook. Shake it baby, oh, shake it, she writes, her hands shaking.

  LIMBS: I’ll draw on yours if you draw on mine. This from Jean-Michel Basquiat, who holds out his smooth arm to Raul Engales during one of the squat’s better parties. The two painters square off, level into each other with their eyes. Jealousy fights with desire fights with schoolboy giddiness: they are each looking into a mirror. The arm of a man whose nam
e has been floating through all of downtown’s rougher spots, but hasn’t yet been shouted to the world. The arm of a man whose presence made both women and men squirm toward him, as if he were radiating some sort of heat, whose brushstrokes, Engales had seen, yelled at the top of their lungs. An arm that Engales has the feeling will one day be worth millions. He has the same feeling about his own.

  A new New York had emerged once Engales entered the world of the squat, spinning around him like a fabulous tornado, sucking him up and into it. The squat became more than a physical space—it was an idea, a movement, a group of people who traveled like a set of tentacles around the city, sucking the art and life out of every place they landed. Engales danced to the B-52s at Studio 54, made out with models at Max’s, bummed cocaine from a performance artist with a silver-painted body, crashed maximalist parties at minimalist lofts. He hung out hungover on velour couches in illegal events spaces in what was soon to be called SoHo but was then just the nameless hellhole where the streets went rebelliously against the grid. He shook hands with old men in sweat-ringed polyester whose lawn chairs might never touch a lawn. He witnessed the quintessential fire-hydrant sprayings of the summer months, when little children screamed from the pressure of the water. He smoked cigarettes with women who weren’t wearing shirts because why would they?; never went to bed before 4:00 A.M. because why would they?; never ventured above Fourteenth Street because why would they?; and generally vibrated with the artistic adrenaline that the gorgeous downtown grime produced.

  It was the grime that was glamorous, he came to realize. The importance of destruction and decay that sidelined gain and growth, the way the artists gravitated toward the most destitute of places and therefore gravitated to one another—that made them all feel rich. In reality they were mostly undiscovered, and very poor, but somehow being poor in New York was not dire or scary like it was back in Argentina, where the electricity would shut off for weeks or he and his sister might not have enough food. This new life, even after the newness had sunken in, seemed like a surreal and inconsequential portrayal of real life. It was almost like a painting of a life. He often felt as if he wasn’t in his own body, as if things weren’t actually happening to him, and if they did they didn’t count. Simultaneously he felt everything more strongly: joy, excitement, claustrophobia, anger, pleasure, inspiration. He was more inspired to make art here than he had been in his life. Where he had began painting as a way out—out of his real life, which had become almost impossible to endure—he now painted as a way into life; he wanted to go as deep as he could into life. All the way.

  He had never before felt any influence from any other artist, but here it was impossible not to. He wanted Keith Haring’s lines, Clemente’s expression, Warhol’s bravado, Donald Sultan’s shapes. He took a sketchbook with him everywhere and often found himself in the corners of galleries, sketching something he’d been moved by. He took what he wanted and incorporated it into his own work. He morphed with the city’s mood. He grabbed faces from the streets, stole hues from the stoplights. What emerged was a chaotic chorus: paintings that rang with the sounds of New York City, paintings that, despite their influences, felt and looked and sounded like nothing he’d ever felt or seen or heard.

  Arlene noted how much progress he had made since she had met him.

  “It’s fucking crazy, really,” she said late one night, over studio beers. “How someone your age can understand anything at all about anything. Too bad you smell so fucking bad, or I’d ask you to marry me.”

  “You think I’d marry you?” He laughed.

  “No question,” she said very seriously, with a fish scale’s flash in her eye.

  He kept painting. He kept improving. He felt it in his body, in his hands: new abilities, a new ease. The parts that had at one point been difficult—composition, certain shadows, hands—began to come easily: he created hundreds of paintings in those first years, carrying them across town to François’s apartment when he finished them, stacking them against walls and under the bed. He dedicated himself to his craft, putting in the time and the hard work, telling himself that it would pay off one day, that someone would recognize him. But aside from the artists at the squat, who, by proximity had to recognize everyone who came among them, no one did. Raul Engales was making the best work he had ever made in his life, better than much of the stuff he saw at the galleries, he knew, but no one was paying attention.

  Until now, when an actual gallerist was standing like a beacon of potential in his co-opted studio space.

  “This is Rumi,” Engales said to Arlene now. “I told you she would come.”

  “It only took six months!” Arlene spat. “Hello, Rumi. Nice to meet you. Don’t fuck with Engales. I mean, you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t plan on it,” Rumi said coolly. “In any sense of the phrase.”

  “You guys are no fun,” Engales said, now tugging Rumi over to his corner, where a group of his paintings leaned against the wall in angular stacks. Engales pulled them out from behind one another and stood back, motioning toward them.

  “Voilà,” he said. “My dead paintings.”

  “I see them,” Rumi said, studying the canvases, which were covered in chaotic compositions filled with the stuff of Raul Engales’s life: highly detailed portraits of people he had met on the street and whose faces he had memorized, the faces usually twisted up in some odd expression of pain or euphoria—and then cigarette packages, insects, dream sequences, heat waves, sunflowers, a woman’s ugly foot, a woman’s bare breast, a woman’s reddened nipple, newspaper headlines, Spanish sayings, love poems, candy wrappers. But even though he had abandoned the straightforward portraits he had done as a teenager, it was the people—the faces and the bodies that made the impact in every painting—that were truly captivating. Looking at all of them together made even his own head spin: the people he had seen or known or liked or hated. His heart held itself from beating until Rumi spoke again.

  “Not only are they paintings,” Rumi finally said, “which I told you are dead, but they are portraits.”

  “So?”

  “So portraits are really dead. People think they’re dated, boring—you know we’re well past people these days. We’re onto identities. We’re off the realism and on to the metarealism. We’re off the maximalism—dare I venture to inform you that that’s what we have here in front of us?—and we’re even off the minimalism! We’re on to nothing as something. Idea as product. We don’t care about the something. We especially don’t care about the someone!”

  Engales’s shoulders fell as his ego deflated. He felt annoyed at himself for not pushing himself harder—why had he not gone beyond painting like everyone else had? He thought of David Salle, whose show he had just seen at the Mary Boone Gallery with Selma, who had yet to pull her hair stunt and was wearing it long and untethered. Smart motherfucker, Selma had said upon seeing the work. Salle’s paintings were almost collage-like, carrying and juxtaposing multiple ideas; the paintings reeked of ideas, were ideas; Engales had wondered to himself how it was done, how Salle had managed to convey that behind his aesthetic product was an intelligent brain, one that could fuse the very paint on the canvas with deep thoughts about the essence of humans, society, art itself. Everything that the spotlight touched these days was somehow intellectualized: a deconstruction, a deliberation, a test. Engales wasn’t sure quite yet what his own idea even was; he only understood that to paint was to live, and for that reason he painted. Apparently everything he’d imagined he knew about art was all wrong.

  “But fuck ’em,” Rumi said suddenly. “I love them.”

  She picked up a painting of a young girl in an embroidered tunic, whose eyes looked sad and who was holding an egg in each of her hands. Behind the girl was a cow’s skull, shattering in midair, the shards of the bone so immaculately rendered that they looked as if they might cut you if you touched the canvas.

  “This one here. It’s wonderful. I’ll take it. I’ll put it in Times
Square.”

  “What’s in Times Square?” he said.

  “Wait,” she said, squinting at the floor full of paintings. “I’ll take three. We’ll do the whole little room for you.”

  “What’s the little room? What’s Times Square?” he said again.

  “It’s a show that I’m helping with,” she said absently, lost in the paintings. “It’s small and weird and the room I’m curating is in a former massage parlor—it will be a bunch of punk kids and people no one’s ever heard of, and it will take your career absolutely nowhere. So don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

  “I don’t wear underwear,” he said. His whole body was grinning. Times Square! A show! His own little room! In a massage parlor! And this woman! This woman with a little room and a huge mound of hair and a big, wide beautiful mouth! His heart was soaring well above the studio with the city’s night birds.

  “You two are fucking disgusting,” Arlene yelled across the studio. Engales laughed. He then looked back to Rumi and tried to create a moment where they looked into each other’s eyes, and even though he couldn’t catch her eyes he thought he might catch her lips, and he leaned in . . . but Rumi held out her arm (and her arms were long), and told him, to his disbelief, that she was in fact a lesbian, and she had a girlfriend named Susan, who was an architect.

  “Well that makes me like her a little bit better,” Engales heard Arlene say from her corner.

  Engales pulled away and scrunched up his nose. “Well, what am I supposed to do now?” he said. “It’s practically midnight and I’m not about to kiss Arlene.”

  “Oh, don’t you wish!” Arlene said.

  “Tell you what,” said Rumi. “Why don’t I take you out? We’ll have a night. Or part of a night, since you seem to have co-opted most of it for this little studio tour.”

  “Does this night include meeting someone I can kiss in exactly thirty-two minutes?” Engales looked at his hairy wrist, on which he did not wear any watch.