Dead Artist

by Ivan Jenson

  Milo had an answer for that one. “You don’t know women these days. Until I am in the bucks, no matter how I confront them, all I am going to do is get a yawn at best. I am over forty, slightly overweight and currently residing in a hotel for people who live on Government checks.”

  “Well then, “Pablo boomed, “call that goddamn dealer of yours and tell him to get a move on it and to relocate you back to New York, Paris, the French Riviera, anywhere but here in the Midwest.”

  Milo knew that he could not pressure his dealer. He had learned not to force things in life but instead to let them flow. Something was better than nothing. Time itself would eventually rescue him, as if he were floating on a raft in the turbulent high seas that would one day deliver him to the sands of an enchanted island.

  “I’m going out,” Milo declared to those two restless passionate greats of modern art who came to visit him and to stay at his apartment and make it feel much more like a home.

  He wandered aimlessly, like the last of the disenchanted, a post-bohemian. What if this time it still does not work out? Millions of poor souls live with such let downs. Everything in life does not necessarily pan out. And yet people cope, they don't fall apart, they even put wedding rings on their fingers, they become happy, loving couples. They walk babies in strollers, they maintain their status quo. But Milo had sacrificed all of that... the comfort of a body in bed, of a hand holding his hand, of home cooked dinners smoking on the stove. All in the hopes that one day that champagne wave of financial riches might crash over him.

  Milo was just grateful to be sleeping at night. He remembered when he could not sleep. He remembered how life hooked him like a cane pulling him off the talent show stage of life. There are people who die from lack of sleep. He could have died!

  Milo had only one thing, his talent. Okay so he cracked some jokes and had a way with hitting on young college girls. He used to be able to maintain long term friendships. He remembered his pal Eli. The two of them, buddies for life, drank beer outside a Brazilian nightclub in Copacabana. They sat next to two young hookers who smoked cigarettes and were busy chatting among themselves in the musical language of Portuguese. When he was broke and recovering from clinical depression from a career that tanked, and exhausted from years of the hard sell hustle on 5th Avenue, Astor Place, and Union Square, it was Eli who was his last friend and invited Milo on an all expense paid trip to Rio. They had a couple of women and he had some laughs, but he had no idea where life's tide would take him. The doctors let him go. And Ray told him he was being irresponsible, as usual. Ray told him to grow up and get a life.

  Tonight he dreamed his brother Ray took hold of his throat and he desperately tried to pry loose from the strangle hold. Milo awoke to discover Moon resting her head on his neck as she slept. All that commotion had awakened Milo and his dog Moon.

  “Whoa, are you okay?” Vincent said. He was sitting on a wooden chair staring past the neon sign to the empty street.

  “Oh I just had a wicked nightmare.”

  “What was it about?”

  “I dreamed my brother was strangling me in my sleep.”

  “You always go on and on about your bad brother, your mean brother. But why don’t you ever talk about or think about the good one. The one who sails and sky dives and surfs and hang glides and all that good stuff. That brother to you is like my brother Theo was to me.”

  “Excuse me, but I need to be alone for a bit.”

  Milo took Moon out for an after midnight walk.

  Chapter Nine

  The streets could be tough at this hour and peopled with pimps, crack heads and the homeless, but at least at this hour, the streets almost reminded him of New York at night.

  When Milo returned to the hotel lobby he saw that old man again, the one who sat on a wooden church pew and just stared out at the Avenue. He also saw the black cat named Cleo that lived in the lobby and slunk about like a shadow around chairs and tables, and often slept on the ledge of the front window. The hotel was called “The Berkshire” and Milo’s monthly rent was a cool twenty five bucks and it would stay that way until Milo got his feet back on the ground. This was government subsidized housing. “Some day,” Nick his agent would often say, “this will all just be a bad memory.”

  Milo was on this way to his second floor studio and the lobby smelled of pot and cigarettes. Up the elevator, through dark halls he walked until he was startled by the sight of a figure standing in the shadows by his door. He stopped for a moment, and Moon gave out a feeble bark. The girl was dressed like a hippie, complete with frayed jeans, a loose fitting tie-dyed T-shirt and colorful scarf wrapped around her fashionably tangled hair. By God it was Samantha, looking even younger than the last time he had seen her which was over seven years ago. As Milo got older his girlfriends seemed to get younger. Samantha had traveled far to be with Milo. How did she find him?

  “Mother and father,” she said in a drowsy voice because she had been sitting in the dark dank hall so long, “forbade me to visit you here. Father said that he will stop sending me money if I went through with this quest to see you, Milo. He says you aren’t ambitious enough. He doesn’t think I should be with a street artist.”

  “How 'bout hello?” Milo said.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  They embraced and then Milo whispered into her ear, “I have not been a street artist for years, ever since my last episode.”

  “My father doesn’t want me to be with somebody who has suffered from clinical depression either.”

  “Then why did you come across the country to see me without even calling first?”

  “Because you begged me to come.”

  “Begged?”

  “More like pleaded.”

  “I don’t remember doing that.”

  She dropped her dufflebag and let her back pack slide off her shoulders and fall on the hallway floor.

  “It was during your breakdown.”

  “Oh, no wonder I don’t remember, I don’t remember most of what I said during my breakdown. Anyhow, that was five years ago. You’re a little bit late. If you would have called then, when I called you, maybe things would have worked out differently.”

  “You think that if I had come to see you it would have prevented you from your breakdown?”

  “It is amazing what getting laid can do for a man.” Milo laughed.

  “Apparently.” Samantha returned his smile.

  “What did you come here for?”

  “To save you.”

  “Okay.”

  He inserted his key and opened the front door. They went inside.

  “And just how do you intend to save me?”

  “By giving you hope,” she said.

  “I think you came here because you got wind of all the good shit that is going down for me now.”

  “A man with potential is only viable when he is under thirty five, after that it just seems creepy if he still has hope. At this point in your life, you have to already be there, you have to already have arrived to impress a woman. I didn't get on a Greyhound bus to watch the rest of you wither away.”

  “So I take it you are not impressed by the prospect of my becoming a world class artist.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will ask you one more time, why did you come?”

  “Because I am a sexy dumb twenty-six year old who doesn't know what the fuck she is doing.”

  “So you're twenty-six now.”

  “Yep. Nobody stays nineteen forever.’

  “Would you like a beer?”

  “Sure”

  “The fact that you would get on a Greyhound bus and travel for two and a half days to see me, for me, is an omen that things are starting to happen.”

  “Yes, I have suffered to see you again. In the past two days, on that nasty bus I have heard a baby cry for eight hours, I have heard the sound of retching vomit and I had the honor of sitting in the only available seat next to the toilet. Oh yeah and I also
saw a couple, I think they were trailer park newlyweds, anyhow they were getting it on in their seat. They get kudos for ingenuity, as she straddled him, she looked directly into my eyes, as if to dare me to tell the bus driver what was happening. The rest of the passengers were asleep....it was sexy scary, if you know what I mean.”

  “All this, you went through just to see me.”

  “Just to see you.”

  “You know Greyhound is running a special, two can travel round trip for the price of one, that means I have one free return ticket. Do you want to come back to New York with me? Waddayou say?”

  Milo wanted nothing more, but he couldn’t just leave now, not while his mother was in critical condition, not now while all his family was flying out to Gold Haven just to see her one last time. These were the last loose ends that he had to tie up. The least he could do was to stay for the end of an era. The era of his smothering, loving, cruel and wonderful mother.

  Milo said, “My agent, Nick, said that he will send for me in the fall, this is my last summer here in Gold Haven.”

  Before they headed out into the night, Samantha and Milo jumped right back into their former pattern -- they instantaneously threw off their clothing, and wildly attempted to make love and Milo was reminded of why it was that the two of them broke up in the first place. Sure enough Samantha still had that condition where her vagina constricted during intercourse making it nearly impossible, and certainly cumbersome for a penis to penetrate her, even if she was willing. And so the fucking became a slapstick endeavor in which Milo would try to slip inside her while his erection lasted and she invariably would clamp her thighs, shutting him out. Milo would then attempt to gently but firmly pry her legs back open, and she would unwillingly resist. Making love to her was like trying to open a giant resistant mussel at a seafood restaurant. It was frightfully unsexy and finally during the wrestling match Milo would lose his erection and Samantha would eagerly perform fellatio and when he was hard again they would resume the process. This X-rated sitcom pattern would repeat over and over again, but to no avail, and she would end up offering to finish him off with her weepy lips or her nervous hands as she apologized for her physiological hang-up, assuring him all the while that she really wanted to, but that she could not due to her involuntary inner muscular psycho sexual contraction.

  Tonight Milo passed on her offer for a sexual favor as a form of completion, he was too flustered to enjoy.

  Instead they ate Chinese at a fast food joint called Ming Garden which was just about to close when they arrived. The two shared General Tsao chicken, Coke, tea, and let the atonal twang of Chinese pop music temporarily wash away the reminder of why it was they just might not be meant to be.

  “What I just witnessed was total embarrassment.” Pablo said later that night as Samantha slept.

  Milo was up, drawing in a sketch pad by the window.

  “First of all, you should not have been watching me, number two, don’t blame me. And you can’t blame her either. I really don't want to talk about it.”

  “Of course I am going to blame you,” Pablo was smoking a cigarette and clouding up the room. “It’s up to you to relax her and to properly seduce her.”

  “I did, I tried. You saw me, no matter how long I spend on foreplay the same thing always happens.”

  “I still think you could be more patient. The girl loves you, why don’t you marry her. Marriage can be very useful to a man. Did you know those were my last words?”

  “How can I marry her? I don’t feel ready.”

  “You are ready. Marry her, and you will see things begin to happen. I promise you that.”

  “I will think about it, Pablo.”

  Chapter Ten

  “It’s me.”

  It was Luna.

  “What’s up?” Milo said.

  “Mother's in the hospital.”

  “What happened?

  “She was having heart palpitations.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Mrs. Sonas shared a hospital room with another old lady, and she was not happy about it. All that Sonia Sonas wanted was to be home. “Let me die at home,” she kept repeating, her entreaties ignored. “It’s enough that I have to die in the Midwest. But I refuse to let myself die with a withering old roommate next to me. Also I refuse to die until I get to see success return to your life, Milo. Besides you owe me... money.” She said this halfheartedly, “Thirty five thousand dollars, that’s the exact amount. Remember you promised me you would pay your old mother back.”

  Milo remembered and nodded obediently. Truth is, he never really thought that the day would actually materialize when he could repay his mother for all she had done.

  She would not relent. She said, with gravelly voice, “In a drawer, in my room, on the cabinet next to the TV set, I have the financial records...go take a look at them if you want.”

  “I am sure that Milo will be happy to repay you for all you have done,” Luna said. “So you better stay healthy for us, so that you can get all those dollar bills!”

  Mrs. Sonas smiled for she said all these things in cloying jest. But Milo knew deep down she meant every last word, and expected back every last penny. She loved her son, but a debt was a debt.

  “Mother, this is Samantha, from New York,“ Milo said, changing the subject. “She was the girl that I was dating during 9/11. Remember the one who never quite made it out to your Thanksgiving that year.”

  “Hey,” Sonia Sonas said. “You owe me too. I paid for that plane ticket, the one you never took. It’s okay dear, I forgive you.”

  “I am sorry about that. I truly am, I just couldn’t wake up that morning.”

  “I tried and tried to wake you, to catch the flight but you just wouldn't get the hell up.” Milo said to Samantha.

  “Can we not go into this right now?” Samantha put her finger on Milo’s lips, silencing him.

  “Do me this one last favor,” his mother said, “Go to the house and read the files, and you will see, Milo you owe me. Please go there now.”

  “Okay, we will. Don’t worry, I promise to repay you. I do.”

  After their awkward visit with his mother, Milo and Samantha had some coffee in the hospital diner. Milo had a thing for hospital diners, it was fun and comforting to dine with doctors, nurses, orderlies, all in blues and whites. One could feel their camaraderie. This diner had a low ceiling, and served mashed potatoes and meat loaf, and featured an unspectacular salad bar.

  They took a taxi to Mrs. Sonas’s house. Milo let himself in with his key, and in her chilly basement office area he found his mother's journal and sure enough there were all the records. He randomly flipped through the handwritten accounts:

  Breakfast with Milo. $14.99 1999

  Gallon of white acrylic paint purchased at Pearl paint. $80 1991

  $550 rent for October 1991

  $550 rent for December 2000

  Milo told Samantha that reading these meticulous and obsessive accounts got him down. So Milo and Samantha walked to East Town where they ordered some latte from a thriving little locally-owned coffee shop, and strolled down the mostly empty streets.

  “Why now Mother, must you do this... this summer on the cusp of everything opening up for me?” Milo railed.

  A striking young mother dressed in sheer white summer Gap pants held hands with her husband as their child wandered ahead.

  A barber shop was broadcasting soft rock from tiny outdoor speakers, the music carried by hot summer breezes. As they walked, it occurred to Milo that Samantha surely looked like his college-aged daughter with her hair still wet from a morning shower. Her thick mane of hair took forever to dry. Usually it didn’t dry until night.

  Of all the times to start dying, why now?

  June was for weddings, for outdoor rock concerts and for landscape painters like Vincent who they spotted standing with his easel on Main Street, painting the one outdoor cafe in town. And summer was for the skateboard kids that playfully circled Vin
cent, and for the town schizophrenic dressed in sweats with thick blue winter socks and a dress shirt. He spent his days at that cafe rolling his own cigarettes and taking advantage of the coffee refill policy, which was bottomless.

  Vincent winked at Milo as he, with loaded paint brush created his thick impasto vision of the cafe. The iron chairs, the banister, the big window, the schizophrenic at his table. All of this on the canvas looked twisted, tortured and vibrating with color intensity. Vincent took a boring afternoon scene and made it buzz.

  “There is somebody that I would like you to meet,” Milo said escorting Samantha by the arm in a gentlemanly fashion from the Cafe across Main Street to where the world famous painter was busy dashing, and almost whipping the canvas with his brush.

  “Samantha this is Vincent Van Gogh. Vincent this is Samantha Tristan.”

  Vincent looked at Milo like he was out of his mind -- introducing a girlfriend to him. She will never see me, thought Vincent and then she will turn against Milo and he will lose her. People don’t see the world the way Milo does. And now this Pace University student, who skipped class to sleep in on the morning of 9/11, this lovely lucky girl will just think you are plain crazy. Don’t self sabotage your love, Milo! Vincent's eyes widened and seemed to radiate the message, “Don’t do it!”

  But Milo with his new found confidence just didn’t care.

  “Hi,” Samantha said unaffectedly, with her natural likability.

  Vincent was so taken aback with surprise that somebody else besides Milo could actually see him, that he let the yellow soaked brush fall out of his hand. It landed on the sidewalk looking like scrambled eggs. With his hand now brush-less, he extended it and shook her small warm hands. Samantha stepped forward and accidentally stepped into the paint. She was wearing only flip flops and her orange painted toe nails were now blending yellow.

  “Whoops,” he said.

  “It’s cool,” said Samantha. “How many girls get to have a pedicure from...well, from the father of modern art. But then again, you look too young to be a father.”