by Ivan Jenson
Milo feared Ray.
And what was Milo to do with these scary thoughts concerning his own brother, where could he channel the thoughts that terrorized him? He didn’t share them with anyone. Not even Samantha.
Anyway, Ray was through with the family, save neutral and good-natured brother Paul.
There were three brothers in the Sonas family. In the order of age they were, Paul, Ray, and the Milo.
Paul was kind and had callused hands from a life immersed in sand, sea, mountain and asphalt. Paul did it all. He scuba dived, surfed, rode a motorcycle, sailed, fished, skied, snow boarded, assembled Fourth of July rockets, mini boats. He even had a simulated rock climbing range in his own home. He was also the most consistently happy member of the family. His disposition was to agree with everything that was said to him, and avoid conflict.
“Paul is my half-brother but he is the only brother I have that is kind,” Milo said to sleepy Samantha.
“What about your other brother Ray?”
“In one word, difficult, in four words, pain in the ass. He is estranged from the family and very bitter. I wish he would change. Recently he even alienated my sister Luna.”
Luna and her family had been stranded at LAX, and called Ray to see if they could crash at his house until their morning flight and he turned them down cold. They spent the night in the airport. She vowed never to call him again.
This nuclear family had exploded.
But Nick was going to take Milo away from the cosmos of his family into another galaxy of celebrity and high society. But could Milo ever truly escape? After all, who were those faces that he repeatedly painted? Weren't they all subconscious portraits of his own family?
You are forever indebted to your parents. When your career sky rocketed in your youth it was your mother who stretched your canvases and it was your father who patiently, diligently and lovingly photographed them. You were their last hope. They were there for you at all the nightclub events and gallery shows. You have a debt that you cannot ever begin to repay.
Milo would always remember the nightclub called The Galaxy on Avenue B, it was there he had an event called “The Galaxy of Milo Sonas” and a sixteen millimeter documentary about Milo premiered that night. His father worked the projector high up in the balcony in that trendy run down club. When the cash first started pouring in, Milo supported his parents the best he could by paying them to do odd jobs for him, like putting together stereo systems, attaching Bose speakers to the loft bed, or painting fresh coats of white on some walls. He paid his mother to clean his studio and his father to photograph his paintings. He would take his parents out to breakfast, lunch, dinner. It was just the three of them. A gypsy network of three.
When Milo was young but getting older he sometimes felt guilty for becoming powerful and independent. He wanted to apologize to his parents for growing up, for becoming a man and for living on his own.
His father used to tell him to “Just do it!” long before this became a slogan for Nike.
Milo was roaming through Barnes and Noble. He saw the man with the gray hair at the cafe again. He was well groomed, with crew cut hair. He was clean shaven and his gait displayed impeccable posture. The man ordered the usual, a bagel and a mochachino.
How did these men become Barnes and Noble bachelors, living and feeding on whatever polite bits of kindness the employees provided, living on the hope that maybe today some woman browsing through current paperbacks might be the one?
Those who wander in the afternoon.
What about the other man Milo saw outside bus or taxi windows most afternoons? The man in the wheel chair who was legless and overweight, yet always took in the afternoon sun, be it the hot August sun or the cold February light. No matter the season this man was “out there” wheeling himself up the steep sidewalk like a sentry.
Or the Asian schizophrenic, dapper in his tight fitting secondhand suits who preferred the locally owned and smoke filled coffee shop that was peopled with scrappy post punk adolescents. That Asian man who was as silent as Buster Keaton and who busied himself through the day getting refills of coffee and filling his black pipe with tobacco and sucking on the smoke. Sometimes he would ask the barista for the phone book, and he would search for a business or a person. But he never made calls. He didn’t have a phone.
These were the men who were always out when Milo was out, and so it got Milo thinking, was he also one of the lonely walking landmarks? Did people look at him and say, there goes so and so again? Men on the cusp of loitering. Maybe he was one of them after all? But Milo took solace in the hope that he had a way out.
“Enjoy your leisure time,” Nick would say. “Because soon this business will take off and you are going to be very busy.”
Milo mused as to whether there would come a day when he would miss his days of anonymity as he walked his dog past trees, and the people were shrouded and shaded within the beautiful green bubbles of their lives. He reminded himself that his impending success didn’t mean that he was going to live forever, only that his paintings, like children and grandchildren, would survive him in white walled museum institutions where people from around the world would walk right up to them and if he was lucky, yawn.
Another regular in the army of afternoon wanderers was an aging anorexic lady who jogged in all white and wore oversized sunglasses like Jean Harlow. She was the last of the four lost souls that Milo repeatedly saw, and he wondered if he might become the fifth meandering musketeer, but for the grace of Nick’s rescue mission. Milo feared he otherwise might become known as that forty something “artiste” who drank Earl Grey tea, chatted up unsuspecting college students and looked eternally boyish.
But Milo was to be saved, saved from becoming obsolete like vinyl recordings, typewriters and double feature drive-ins.
Samantha was napping knowing she had summer haystacks of time left in her life. She was his ticket to longevity. As Milo grew older his girlfriend became younger. Sometimes, when he painted, he felt like he was cheating time, in fact he felt like he was producing square babies made of color. And his children would live as long as acrylics lasted. And that was forecast to be a long time considering they were made of plastic.
When times became tough like this, and Milo felt defeated, Picasso would often brew some espresso, and tell him that he should, “always be painting.”
Yes Milo should always be making more square babies.
Chapter Sixteen
Loneliness was not just a state of mind but a state of being, where one is unable to make connections anywhere in the constellation. It is a stagnant place where no e-mails could reach or where ringing phones cannot interrupt the silence.
Pablo materialized and asked Milo to explain to him exactly what it was like to feel so alone.
Milo’s response: “The message that loneliness sends me is that I cannot penetrate otherness. It makes me feel stuck in sticky time. It is like some cold entity that refuses to comfort me. And it leaves me stranded in space....I begin to feel like an unsold canvas, or like fruit which has fallen off a tree that nobody picks up to eat, like a rotten apple rolling down a grassy hill in the heat, or like luggage unclaimed at the airport. The sight of others who look so happy with their tickets, standing in lines for movies, actually brings me pain. It is at times like this that I begin to relate to the Hunchback of Notre Dame. You know Pablo, I have to be careful or it might happen again.”
“What might happen?”
“Well this feeling might snowball and maybe by this winter turn into an abominable snowman of self pity, and then boom, crack, boom I will be in the throes of another nervous breakdown.”
“If you don’t watch out, my friend, you are going to dig yourself into a hole. And bring it on yourself. Milo, you need to take a chill pill.
“Pablo, where did you learn that phrase?”
“I spend a lot of time listening and watching.”
This was the calm before the storm. If Milo could just make it ov
er this one last hump, well then he was almost there in the never-never world of what is commonly known as success.
Samantha woke after a long sleep. It was late in the evening, and she started to prepare pasta. “Milo?” She asked. “Do you think that we fell in love because of 9/11? Because before that it seemed as though we were drifting apart.”
It was true. Prior to the attack on the Towers, they were severing their ties. But, after seeing the repeating images of the planes exploding into the towers, Milo phoned her and begged her to be with him. They both walked together through the vigils on Union Square. Crowds converged, there were spontaneous debates about country and causation, and acoustic guitar strumming a la the sixties, glowing candles on the sidewalks, and photographs of the missing began to appear tacked to walls and telephone booths. This must have been what it felt like to fall in love during the bombing in London during World War II. And oh, that night when Milo had to wrap a white tee shirt around his mouth to protect his lungs from the snowing ashes and mixed into that cocaine-like substance were the remains of the dead.
It was September 12 when something unforgettable happened to Milo and Samantha.
It rained very hard in New York City. The sound of thunder made them think of aerial bombings. Milo opened the door of his storefront to see the water cleansing the city, and to let in some much needed freshly washed air. And there in his doorway stood a rain drenched girl.
“You look very wet.” Milo quipped, surprised by his statement of the obvious and his effort to sound witty.
“My umbrella broke. I just walked here from Ground Zero, I volunteered there all day.”
So you offer this young stranger the use of your facilities, to dry off, you offer her a chance to take a warm shower and a change of clothing. The girl looks to be in her mid-twenties. She has that fresh yet budding maturity that twenty six year old women have. She is filled with frenetic energy. She tells you that she had been working at Ground Zero for twelve hours straight, she is covered with dust, the dust of the dead. She accepts the offer to shower. There are no walls to separate your bathroom from the rest of the studio and you find yourself watching as she peels off her wet denims and tank top. She steps naked into your closet-sized shower, and as you watch her, Samantha is watching you. “Just what are you planning here Milo?” Samantha says.
Samantha has an almost otherworldly understanding of you, a sort of shared brain. And though it might hurt her feelings she didn't deny the folly of your love making with its quick, jagged, jerky, laughter inducing antics, like an X-rated slapstick comedy. And you with your befuddled deadpan exuberance attempting to penetrate the impenetrable.
“Okay,” Samantha says. “If this is what you want. I'm in.”
“Thank you so much.” Milo said, genuinely grateful. “Now listen if we are going to do this, we have to do this right.” Now nervous, he added, “All of my past efforts at threesomes have failed. A collector of mine once advised me that the best way to get a threesome underway is to get 'nasty pronto.' So this is how we're going to proceed...” Milo moved from nervous to clinical.
He began taking off his clothing and he advised, well, ordered, Samantha to do the same, as quick as possible. Pronto.
“Oh my,” Samantha said with a bemused smile. “Tell me you are not going to do what I think you are going to do.”
“Tonight is a special night, Sam. The world is on fire. The city is smoldering. New York has been shattered. We are at war. It feels like the end of the world. If ever there was a time to get crazy, correction, nasty, it is now.”
Naked, hairy, erect, giggling mischievously, Milo steps into the shower to discover the volunteer lathering herself luxuriously. She is tall, lithesome, clean and glistening. Milo's entrance is precise, aggressive, confident and is received soapily, favorably.
It is only later that Milo will feel remorse for hurting Samantha's feelings. After some slithering about with suds and skin, Milo signals with his wet arm for Samantha to join them, and she squeezes in. The three were sandwiched together in the stall shower as though in a nineteen seventies telephone booth during a thunderstorm. Confusion ensued when Samantha first entered the tiled shower stall and the three of them jockey for position, like passengers in an overcrowded rush hour subway car, pushing and maneuvering to gain territory.
Though Samantha tried, crouching on her knees proved to be dangerous to the stability of those standing, but it was sweet of her to attempt what she was attempting, which was to please both parties standing. Soon Samantha found herself crouching half in and half outside the shower as Milo and the Ground Zero volunteer eagerly made out like school kids. Once out of the shower, dripping, shimmering, the three of them traded kisses, naked in the narrow kitchen area. Each one in turn bumping their ass either into the mini fridge, the sink, or the laundry basket. Then they took it to the main area as Samantha and the 9/11 volunteer kissed on in a theatrical manner, as a show just for Milo's pleasure. Milo fiddled with the CD player, searching for Gato Barbieri’s seductive jazz, and prayed that this time all would go well. Milo felt his erection subside as reality hit him hard. This might be the beginning of World War III. Armed US jets flew overhead, patrolling the no fly zone above New York City. Was this the time to throw morals to the wind when the reckoning, or the rapture might be soon at hand? Of course it was, he thought.
“I want to watch you two in action.” The volunteer said slinking into a reclining mode. This request was the kiss of death to whatever sensual mood had so far been built. Entering Samantha was always a hit or miss proposition. Milo tried anyhow and this became a kind of exhibition. A clinical demonstration. A curiosity.
But feeling put under pressure to perform, Samantha, as expected clamped up, her leg nerves twitching and pulsating. Was Milo's threesome at risk?
“What's wrong?” The watcher asked.
“I have a condition, my muscles, they contract.”
“Here let me relax you.” The volunteer cooed. And next thing Milo knew the volunteer had her head buried between Samantha's knees, thereby putting to shame Milo’s ability to relax a woman properly. Shame on his half-ass foreplay.
Milo thought back on that night now with mixed emotions and though the volunteer was sweet enough, he remembered how the next day she didn’t awaken until 1:00pm. Then he had to ask her to leave because his mother surprised them with a visit to New York, and Milo strained to come up with an explanation as to why there was an extra naked woman sleeping in his loft bed. Milo didn’t tell his mother the whole story, and after they woke the volunteer, she left with an awkward goodbye.
Samantha and Milo would always have 9/11, nobody could take that away from them.
The Thanksgiving after 9/11, Milo and Samantha broke up again.
The main reason for their falling out was Samantha's refusal to get out of bed and get in the taxi to go to the airport. The plan had been for her to come with him to Gold Haven and visit with his family.
When Milo returned disgruntled from his embarrassing family visit Samantha came to pick up some of the belongings that she had left behind and, as a kind farewell gesture to Milo, she purchased from him two works on paper and paid cash for them. They were the same works that he had promised to give to her for free before their post-9/11 breakup.
They were to get back together again years later when they were brought together by another New York event, the blackout of the northeastern United States. That night New Yorkers roamed the streets holding candles, and Milo wandered into Thompson Square Park holding the hand of an an attractive thirty year old stranger, and the two of them witnessed spontaneous bonfires in the park. Around the fire a circle of young folk sang, joked and threw debris to stoke the flames.
Milo and the pretty stranger had a pleasant enough time, but sure enough when her cell phone service resumed her interest waned and she made plans right in front of Milo to go see a friend.
Milo returned home defeated. Inside his studio it was hot and dark. He lit a match
and found a candle. Just as he was preparing for sleep there was a knock at his storefront door.
“It’s me,” said an instantly recognizable female voice. It was Samantha.
Milo, still in his briefs opened the door and there she stood, dressed in her trademark frayed bell bottoms. She was with her friend who had wonderful dyed orange and pink hair, and a nasal septum piercing. The pair came in complete with a six pack of beer. Luckily Milo already had tequila in his pantry. Light had still not been restored, and all that was to take place that evening, took place in the faint flicker of candle light.
“We only seem to get together during disasters.” Samantha said that night.
“Yes, I know, it’s weird. You are like an angel that descends to watch over me during dark times.”
“I’m your disaster girl.”
Now the pilgrimage to Gold Haven to see Milo by bus, was the first first time they had reunited since the blackout. And it was the first time they were brought together by events other than terror, or the blackening of a city, or so Milo hoped.
Chapter Seventeen
Milo supposed there was no such thing as a good or convenient time for his mother to begin the painful, humbling and humiliating process of dying. But this was truly the worst possible time. His life was booming and blooming. She was in a final wilt.
