Dead Artist

by Ivan Jenson

  Milo had ordered a twelve inch sub at Blimpie's and his plan was to share it with his mother. When he arrived at her house Moon was licking his mother's lips. For her mouth was open, her eyes were closed, and she wasn’t breathing. And just like that it seemed the era of his mother was over, and he dialed 911 as she lay breathless on the living room floor. After he got off the phone with Emergency his mother suddenly spoke in a voice as weak as a clogged vent, “I had a cousin, I’m not sure if he is still alive, his mother was quite beautiful. They lived in Mexico City and he was very close with his mother, and you know something, that is okay. He also, like you Milo, could not find a wife for most of his life. His mother lived just long enough, or so it seemed, for him to find somebody. The girl he met was a simple girl, a street vendor, she sold flowers on the plaza. In any case she looked just like his mother. He brought her home to meet his mother. They ate rice and beans and tapas. That evening they played cards and drank tequila. That night his girlfriend slept over. They made love and conceived their first child. In the morning they woke to the smell of four sunny side up eggs burning on the stove. His mother lay dead on the kitchen floor, wearing an apron.”

  “Is that what you are going to do when I fall in love?” Milo asked, looking down at his mother resting peacefully on the carpet.

  “It’s just family lore, that's all. But it is true, I think the universe will sigh with relief when you find love. By the way, are you sure you want to have a gallery show in New York City? Isn’t that what chewed you up and spit you out?”

  “I am sure nobody even remembers me. It has been twenty years...twenty years since I was anybody. They have surely moved on with their lives and might not even be in the art world anymore.”

  “Okay, whatever you say, I am very tired now and want to take a nap. Let me sleep now.”

  “Okay, mother.”

  Milo helped his mother to her room and waited for the ambulance. When it arrived, he told the paramedics it was a false alarm and that his mother was feeling better.

  After twenty years of obscurity, it was all coming back to him now.

  He remembered that first day that he took his art to the streets of Times Square and had made his first hundred dollars. He had come home, and his mother had said, “you get back out there.” On the second night a couple bought all his paintings, took him out to dinner, and proposed a toast, “To Milo Sonas, a great artist,” they said. And within six months he had his first one man show, and a string of one night events at every happening nightclub in New York. One event took place at a penthouse night club in the center of Times Square called Ecstasy. Its owner was a man from India who never appeared in public. He only spoke to people on the phone. Milo became an “artist in residence” at the club. The man was named Shamon. He arranged for a limo to take Milo to and from his night club. Five hundred FIT and NYU students and trendies waited for the doorman to let them past the velvet ropes. As Milo got out of the limo they all shouted; “Milo! Milo!” The bouncer greeted him with a pat on the back. He rode up the elevator to the top floor. There his paintings were up and big windows showed a breathtaking panoramic view of all of New York City. There was an open champagne bar for an hour. That night he met a young actress, long legs, blonde, drunk, and danced with her till 3:00am. She came home with him in the white limo. They made love in the back seat, not realizing that the driver’s two way dividing window was rolled down just enough for him to witness everything. The Indian driver watched Milo’s ass rise and fall, he could catch glimpses of the girl's small model-like breasts, and Milo’s hands grasping for them, and then his lips pressed up against them and the car rattled and shook from their backseat acrobatics.

  Some sort of force had all of a sudden beamed down on his life. For soon, he began to make the scene at gallery openings in the East Village and photographers took pictures of Milo as soon as he stepped in the doors.

  “What happened to you?” his sixteen year old nephew Donny said to him as they cruised suburban Gold Haven, “You live in a motel in Middle America and spend your afternoons in coffee shops getting free refills.”

  Milo didn’t answer his sometimes obnoxious nephew, instead he turned up a hip-hop song on the radio.

  “Check out this rap...” his nephew began to holler out a rhyme:

  Milo, you are fat as fuck

  and you live in a hotel

  and you can’t get fucked,

  you used to be a famous artist in New York City

  and now you’re all depressed and you can’t get no titty.

  The hyper-kinetic song's rhythm thudded on and Milo laughed and shouted. “Now let me take a verse...”

  Donny yelled back, “take it...take it...”

  Now Milo began his rap:

  You’re sixteen and weigh two hundred pounds and about as fat as it gets,

  You want to be a baseball star, and play with the NY Mets

  But the truth is you’re just a fat fuck with Tourette's.

  Donny was laughing when he came back with:

  Mr. Milo Sonas can’t rap for shit

  and he has to face the fact that his life is shit,

  he thinks his New York collector is going to save his ass,

  but that's because Milo is living in the fucking past.”

  Milo, tiring of the game, shot back:

  “Hey fuck you kid, who do you think you are,

  I’m the one who is hip ‘cause I’m driving this car.”

  And Donny responded:

  Your aren’t hip, man

  you're forty five,

  and you just learned how to drive

  and you only get to drive this car while your mommy is alive.”

  Milo drove them to the gym where the two played an extremely loud game of racquetball. Milo and his rowdy sixteen year old nephew yelled at the top of their lungs and the sound reverberated in the racket ball court. They had no regard for what the other gym members or staff might think. Here was Milo in his mid-forties still living the life of a teenager. “You get to be a boy all over again,” Dr. Hyatt had said to Milo. “Lucky you.”

  Donny and Milo shared many afternoons together, they went to the local mall, they lunched at Blimpie's where Donny would order extravagant sandwiches with meat balls, bacon and layers of melted cheese. They went to sushi restaurants together, Donnie's treat. He was a generous kid who stole cash from his parents' wallets.

  Donny often bragged about his youthful sexual conquests during these lunches. Milo could not score in Middle America. Milo admired his hyper-kinetic nephew who spewed out obscenity laced raps, scored with women his age, played tournament winning tennis and pitched a mean game of baseball. He was a teenage wonder of testosterone. He was even a ping pong master. And there was a good chance this kid was going to making millions one day in the hot afternoon sun playing that all American game of baseball.

  After dropping Donny at his house Milo wondered if all of this was really happening. Was he truly going to be rescued or would he end up like those that wandered the streets and the book stores and loitered away the afternoon, like the old man with dry gray hair who was always fixing or cleaning the thick lenses of his glasses in the local coffee shops? Or the extremely tall bearded and balding man who dressed in Goodwill sweats and rolled cigarettes and conversed with anyone who would listen; openly admitting that he had just been turned loose by the local mental hospital? Milo understood that there was a fine line between an artist with potential and the homeless whose potential had been misspent.

  How could it have come to this? Milo’s only friends were his rowdy sixteen year old nephew and two dead artists. Milo lived in an “old timers” hotel. This was the station that life had brought him to and he resigned himself to a fate where he was to become a caricature of a towny, a modern day hobo, somebody who lives under the radar, an eccentric who dresses meticulously in second hand clothing. He waited and lived in low class purgatory until his number was called. All this good luck beckoning was just in the nick
of time. This was Milo’s chance to be something unimaginable to him until now, to be something most people only dream about, he had a real shot at fame. All thanks to Nick.

  Milo knew that fame and fortune were knocking at his door when Nick had called him nine months ago and said, “I have been having dreams about you, I see this image of you speaking on the internet, on YouTube, you are giving a commentary on famous artists like Van Gogh and Picasso.....it’s a sign.”

  Already Milo had been living with visitations from these greats, so it was synergistic that the collector had been having these dreams too.

  “I think I can make you a household name.” After a short pause, Nick went on to say, “But this is not something that is going to happen overnight.”

  “How long will it take?” Milo asked and then he felt ashamed for seeming impatient.

  “Six to nine months,” Nick said with certainty. “But, I am awaiting financing.”

  Death was the gift that facilitated the financing that would soon transport Milo into the stratosphere of fame and fortune.

  The story goes that Milo’s dealer Nick volunteered to spend time at a senior home where he had befriended an old retired businessman. Nick had shown diligent loyalty to this stranger every Saturday afternoon for five years. When the man died, he willed Nick hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  Death was working for Milo.

  There had been another agent who had tried to save Milo’s career, he was an older local art consultant. They had lunched, but when this man lost his wife to a particularly aggressive form of cancer he did not have the heart to carry on.

  Death can be a deterrent or death can be a tool.

  “You were once hot shit in New York,” Donny said before getting out of the car at his parent's house. “You’ll see, you’ll get your shit together, we believe in you Uncle Milo.”

  He was a good kid after all.

  But how did it ever come to this?

  Milo sometimes indulged in paranoid thoughts. In these fantasies, his dealer would sponsor Milo to create a huge inventory of new works and then promptly kill him and watch the value of the art shoot up.

  The prospect of fame and fortune was having a profound effect on his family. His brother Ray simply could not understand how this change of tide had happened right under his nose. Everything, Ray thought, had been as it should be. Milo's failings boosted Ray's ego. Things were so much simpler that way.

  Coffee was stronger and bolder with a washed up brother.

  The bright sunlight of June was radiant with a marginal brother. A brother on the fringe. A brother on the margin.

  Now how would Ray measure his own worth? How could he destroy this? Maybe by helping he could hurt Milo? Perhaps if he could offer bum advice, he could somehow rust what would soon be gold?

  When Milo got that call from Ray, it did seem odd; since for all intents and purposes, the brothers had been estranged for years. “I just called to say that I am so sorry for what I said the last time we spoke. I really shouldn't have said that. It was just a plain mean thing to say,” Ray said, his voice familiar and grating.

  Milo knew exactly what phone call Ray was referring to. It was a few years ago and Milo was telling him how one day, if he could ever get his feet on the ground, he would to move to a big city again like Chicago or New York. Ray had said, “Maybe there are some halfway houses that you could move into.”

  That cruel comment was like a knife wound in Milo’s ribs.

  “Listen man,” Ray said. “I was just kidding when I said that. The truth is I am really happy for you. But look, I never liked seeing you down and out and living in a hotel. I will be the second happiest person in the world to see you do well. I am just hoping that for your sake this time you know how to hold on to it. I just don’t want to see you fuck the whole thing up. Okay, hold on, there I go being harsh again. Sorry.”

  “Listen, for your information, I didn’t fuck anything up.”

  “Then what happened, how did you lose your whole career?”

  “I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

  Ray heard Milo’s voice break, and it wasn’t because the telephone reception was bad, it was because Milo felt like he was about to break down, and cry.

  “I feel like I could...” Milo said that night on the phone with Dr. Hyatt.

  “Like you could what, Milo?”

  “Like I could break.”

  “You can break but you will never be broken,” Dr. Hyatt said.

  Chapter Seven

  Girls used to track him down in hotel rooms, like the one in Atlantic City. Milo was hired to draw instant brightly colored portraits at a convention. The crowds waited for hours in line to get their turn to be drawn by Milo Sonas. And there he was inhaling the fumes of big fat fluorescent Japanese markers called Sakura. They paid him twenty five hundred dollars for a day's work. Pretty employees of the company accompanied him to lunch. Milo was nervous in front of beauty. Success came at him hard, strong and sensual and he had no manager, no agent then, no collector, no Nick. It all just suddenly happened at him, and he had to navigate his way through the deals, the personalities, the women.

  That night in the Atlantic City hotel suite, he tried but failed to wash the fluorescent colors off his fingers. Pink, Blue, Green, Crimson, Pilot marker black.

  The phone near his bed rang, and it was a woman's voice on the other end, “Hello, I saw you, what I mean is, I was admiring you. The speed at which you drew. Do you remember me watching? You drew so many people. I hope you don’t think I am a stalker calling you like this...but, the company you work for gave me your hotel room number...”

  It wasn’t long before she was knocking at the door of his hotel room. Okay, she was not a model, but she was lovely, fragile, Latin, youthful, lean, with lithe features that seemed to stretch and grow taller as he looked at her. She was unknown, new. With her he walked the boardwalk, played the slot machines and won some change. When they returned to his hotel room, there were messages from Milo's two best friends wanting to visit him in Atlantic City. “Not a good time,” Milo said. The Latin girl was there with him, doing things to him with her soft hands and cold lips.

  “Bastardo,” Milo said to himself as he thought about his girlfriend back in the city. The first Tina of many Tinas that he would date. This Tina was a blonde Long Island girl, the perfect church going gal, with the perfect middle class family. They didn't like Milo much until he started pulling in a cool ten grand a painting. That family had never seen anything like it. All that eighties-styled money pouring in from of all things, making paintings.

  In the arms of this Latin stranger, he thinks about Tina. Oh, Tina the college girl, only eighteen. Milo was twenty six and they'd communicate in high pitched Mickey-Mouse falsettos. Baby talk. “Do you want hand-y?” Tina would ask, “or mouth-y?” Her voice so high, it made him wince.

  “I want mouth-y.” Milo would squeak back.

  “No, just hand-y today...,” she would answer. “No mouth-y.” And so that's why he was out with other women. Milo wanted mouth-y! He was a naughty boy who wanted lots of mouth-y.

  And that is what today's dark-skinned Latin art groupie provided.

  All of that had been over twenty years ago. But, it could happen all over again. Nick believed in Milo. And sometimes that is all it takes.

  Milo prepared for fame by attending Weight Watchers and running outside. Milo wanted to be beautiful for fame and fortune. He wanted to be the last great crazy artist.

  This was his last summer as an unknown.

  So it was that after twenty years of toiling, Milo Sonas would become a household name.

  All of his life he had survived on favors.

  There was his robust young friend Anton who had loaned Milo twenty bucks here, a hundred bucks there through the years. Anton’s refrain was, “I know this will all come back to me when you become world famous.”

  Milo had many a karmic debt to return.

  Milo used to be maniacally f
unny and friends flew him to their weddings to lighten the mood and to add the cache of having at least a formerly happening artist at the festivities. As the nineties droned on, Milo returned to selling on the streets. And watched all his friendships fade away.

  Chapter Eight

  “When you move back to New York,” Pablo said, “you don’t have to go to every cocktail party that you are invited to. You should instead focus on creating.”

  “Let him have his fun,“ Van Gogh said. “When he goes out he can soak up all that night life and express it in his canvases, as I did.”

  “You have achieved immortality, yes, you have made your mark. But, in the history books, it always comes back to me, Picasso. There really is nobody else that comes close.”

  “Okay, you two, cool it,” Milo said. “Let’s just try to make nice with each other. I am about to start a new life and if you two are going to be going at it all the time, then I won’t want you around.”

  “What about a girl?” Vincent asked. “What about love?”

  “What girl? What love?” Milo said.

  “There is no girl now for Milo. Milo only dwells in the land of the lonely. He confronts the self, the soul. A woman would only cloud up his view,” Pablo insisted. “Anyhow, this guy has lost his ability to get laid, he has lost his touch. He needs lessons from the master.”

  “Listen to Pablo,” said Vincent.“ He knows of what he speaks.”

  Milo turned to look at Vincent who was holding Milo’s dog Moon, and staring out the window and thinking back upon his desolate, yet creative life. “Yes Milo, don’t listen to me, the only women I ever got were women of the night.”

  “When you want to posses a woman,” Pablo said, “you must confront her squarely in the eyes. You must be the Centaur, the beast.”