Dead Artist

by Ivan Jenson

  The young man shook Milo's hand and thanked him for the advice.

  Pablo said, “That was very good advice. But my advice would have been to tell the owner of the restaurant that I would be happy to do the job in exchange for one year of free dinners. For a young artist this sort of arrangement is best, guaranteed food and no starvation.”

  “I don’t think the owner of any place out here would go for that.”

  “Then damn them. Nobody who is trying to become a truly great artist should be painting signs. There is no prestige in that.”

  “Come on, the kid is just getting started. He needs to test his wings.”

  Now Pablo added, “And besides that, you should have told him that no artist worth his salt should be living in Gold Haven, Michigan. He should be getting on the next flight out of this tiny city and immediately take up residence in London, Paris, Rome, New York, Barcelona or Berlin. This is no place for an artist. It is far too provincial. By the way, when the hell are you going to export yourself out of here?”

  “Nick will be making arrangements for that very soon.”

  “What is stopping him from taking care of that immediately? You are treading water here in this wasteland by the Great Lakes. It is imperative that you be delivered from this mundane suburbia.”

  “Nick is currently taking care of some health issues.”

  “What health issues?” Pablo asked. “Who gives a damn about health?” In death as in life Pablo was oblivious to these matters, having been a chain smoker and living well into his nineties. He continued smoking, well into his afterlife too.

  That Barnes & Noble was as close to a Parisian cafe as they could get to in that sleepy town of Gold Haven and Milo explained to Pablo that Nick was a man of 50 who was presently undergoing a hair transplant.

  “Hair transplant? Who cares about hair? I lost most of mine and I was still a force to be reckoned with.”

  Milo went on to explain that it was imperative to Milo’s artistic future that this entrepreneur maintain his self-esteem. Milo was keenly aware that this was his last chance at fame and fortune. He had hustled and scratched, and clawed his way about as far as he could take it. Disappearing from the New York scene was possibly the best thing that had ever happened to his career. The only better way that he could have furthered his career would be if he would have died.

  Milo Sonas. Dead artist.

  Milo Sonas, with his consistent relentless appearances in the streets of Soho, 5th Avenue, 6th Avenue and Union Square, as well as countless other spots made him about as famous as any building there; and now Milo Sonas, human landmark, was gone, much like the World Trade Center Towers. Oh what a terrible yet wonderful gift that clinical depression had given him. There was one song in the world that perfectly captured Milo’s sense of metropolitan longing. It was Luther Vandross' rendition of A House is not a Home.

  When I climb the stairs, and turn the keys, please be there, and still in love with me.

  It was in this song that Luther’s crooning, swooping voice captured what it was like to have love always just out of reach and what it would feel like to lose love. Milo thought back to what it was that caused his breakup with Samantha on that Thanksgiving just after 9/11. Milo and Samantha were scheduled to fly out to Gold Haven together to visit with his family on a 7:00 am flight.

  “Why didn’t you get on that flight and come with me to Gold Haven?” Milo asked Samantha as she sat on his fire escape.

  “I can’t stand getting up that early in the morning. To be honest, I felt pressured. I hate meeting a guy’s parents under any circumstances. Parents usually end up hating me. So maybe it was a good thing. You know what they say, everything happens for a reason.”

  “I don’t believe in that.” Milo was obstinate about spiritual clichés. “But today,” he said, “I will give it the benefit of the doubt.”

  He was taking refuge in her words. She was soothing him, lulling him into a feeling of safety. With her, his loneliness, like a shy phantom, had disappeared. He was so accustomed to wallowing in self pity that when it subsided, he didn’t know what to place in its void. Loneliness had become his constant companion.

  Samantha had a thing about sleep. She loved to sleep in and to nap, and it was that horizontal sleepy nature that had left him high and dry on that oh so imperative Thanksgiving after 9/11. Yet it was also her sleepy nature that endeared her to him. He decided to let go of his resentment. He forgave her.

  All of his paintings were now gone, they had been trucked to the East Coast, and they were now being scanned in order that they be turned into Giclée prints. Nick had promised to take Milo’s career all the way to the Guggenheim.

  Milo thought back to the moment when the trucks came with stacks of white canvases for him to paint on. And he had to send the first batch back because the wood frames were too thin, they were not the heavy duty size that Milo preferred. And then the boxes and boxes of paint came next, gallons of white, black, gloss medium, and then 32 ounce jars of color, more than he had ever seen outside of an art supply store. It was thousands of dollars worth of paint. More paint than he had ever had at one time in his whole life.

  He remembered when he and Nick had gone to Pearl Paint on Canal Street in New York. Four sales reps helped them as Milo pulled every color and brush off the shelf and put them into baskets. Then downstairs, in the basement of the largest paint store in the world, they pulled dozens of pre-stretched canvases, and were still grabbing more and more supplies as the sales clerks tried to catch up with them. Nick, Milo and the sales reps were at it until the store closed. But then it occurred to Nick that it might be cheaper to order online, so he told the reps to put the merchandise on a twenty-four hour hold. Then, Nick ended up ordering on the internet.

  “But will you be getting anything at all from yesterday’s order?” the Pearl Paint manager asked, his voice cracking on the phone.

  “I’m afraid not,” Nick said, canceling the order. The store manager's heart was broken.

  Nick was a scrupulous businessman. Nick had the money. Nick had the power. Nick was transforming Milo’s life.

  “The word is,” Nick said, “that you had what it took to make it all along. But the galleries would not touch your work because you were out on the streets undercutting their prices. It was your total disappearance from the scene, that created the possibility of your becoming now what you should have been all along, a superstar in the art world and a household name.”

  With all this going on, Milo still felt old. He felt time running out. He wanted to change his identity and transform himself into a Papa figure. He wished he could just let himself get thick and fat. He wanted to name his first daughter Matisse and first his boy Miro, the second girl would be named Georgia, after a beautiful and mentally ill character in his favorite Italian six hour epic movie called, The Best of Youth which told the story of the handsomely tortured soul of Mateo and his sensible and strong brother Nicoli. Milo wished his own brother Ray was less of a Mateo and more like Nicoli.

  Unbeknownst to Milo his brother was on his way to change the course of Milo's trajectory.

  Why does there always have to be a spoiler? A bad apple?

  Ray had always been, or so it seemed, an angry child. From as early as Milo could remember he envied Milo's constant creative flow. And he discouraged Milo at every turn.

  At nine Milo was obsessed with the drawings of Michelangelo, and sketched from them to the point of obsession. Ray told Milo that Michelangelo was gay, and that the drawings were of men fucking and that Milo was a faggot for loving Michelangelo.

  And when some maniac took a sledge hammer to the Pieta, Ray taunted Milo saying, “The Madonna's head is next, and then he's going to come after you.”

  Ray had kept Milo on edge, often holding their male dog in his arms when it had an erection and chasing Milo around the house attempting to thrust the dogs red penis into Milo’s face.

  And now Ray was going to show up in this time of death, and s
teal the breath away from whatever remained of their lives. Milo dreamed about that last moment on earth when he would be pressed up against that last corner of his existence and from there he would be able to go no further. But before that happened, he wanted to know what it was like to have some of the basic elements of life on earth – like love.

  That night he visited with his mother. She said she was honored and amused to be alive and to share in both her own funeral and her son's wedding.

  She said, “You must hurry with all your arrangements because I fear I am fading fast. While it will be the most memorable event of my life, it will also be the shortest memory I'll have. When I draw my last breath, I will no longer remember any of it. All my memory banks will be wiped out.”

  Milo wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Samantha was the one for him. Their connection was tenuous at best. And, certainly due to her fragile sexual condition it was a love that was hard to consummate. But sometimes love was a matter of timing. Samantha was there for Milo when New York City was in crisis, and again when the city went dark. She was back now at another pivotal point in his life as his mother was dying. She was a nick of time girl. She was his stand-in bride. She was his disaster girl.

  Milo now considered the very real possibility that money and fame might bring him unimaginable female options, perhaps soon women in artistic circles would throw themselves at him, and he would be stuck with her, a simple girl, a bell bottom jean wearing girl, a girl who clenched her knees during love making.

  Was this one big mistake?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  There was much confusion as Hollywood Becky arrived the next day dressed in designer jeans, with deep black leather luggage, a laptop, iPhone, and some new release chick lit novel. Perhaps she was hoping to buy the rights to it and adapt it for her next project.

  She was determined to transform from sleek director of television commercials to a director of films, a quest for her about as elusive as Moby Dick was to Ahab. But still she read those novels, candidates for adaptation, with librarian spectacles on her from California to Gold Haven. Her mother stretched the dying process for three additional days while refusing food or water.

  Milo picked up Becky at the airport. As she exited the gate with the other passengers on her flight he was surprised at how his sister resembled Julia Roberts (circa Pretty Woman) now, more than ever. She arrived with a respectfully mournful black summer hat, which although solemn sported a festive magenta ribbon.

  Milo was well aware that she, just like his art agent, had invested in liposuction and, in her case she had also invested in almost undetectable plastic surgery which ever so slightly widened her eyes and which also made her nose crest in an angle instead of a slight bulbous curve.

  Milo was giddy from the roller coaster he had been living on...the long overdue resurgence of his art career, the simultaneous decline and inevitable death of his mother, his impending nuptials, and now the opportunity to see his tight-skinned, impeccably-dressed but still beautiful sister from Hollywood.

  “Your plastic surgeon did a spectacular job,” Milo said.

  “We don’t talk about that,” Becky answered with a slight turn of her gaze and an accusatory tone. She adjusted her hat which was dangerously close to sliding off her deep black hair.

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s cool, I just don’t want my surgery to be an issue this weekend. This weekend is about Mom, and it’s not about my vanity.”

  “Oh okay, but it is uncanny what your surgeon was able to do. He had a Midas touch.”

  “It is a she, and yes, she is a very capable doctor, one of the five best in the country. And although I don’t want to talk about this any more, I will tell you that I showed her a photo of me from seven years ago, and she just did some very minor and hard to detect tweaking to make me look like I did then.”

  “You mean how you looked before 9/11?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Fantastic!” Milo was genuinely impressed, and wondered if it were really that easy to turn back time.

  Milo rode in a taxi with his sister Becky, and though she had rewound the clock by seven years, he knew those years had really happened. In those seven years, Milo had mentally cracked, and became the cliché of a tormented artist.

  Becky also made a healthy chunk of money directing commercials about foot fungus. The whole ad was a conversation between different sets of bare feet. The bare feet in the thirty second spot engaged in a sophisticated cocktail conversation on the subject of itching, swelling and odor. And in those same years, smooth-skinned Becky did manage to lose a husband because she wouldn't finance his career ambitions.

  “You’ve come along way,” Becky said, looking into the mirror from her purse. “You seem so much better.”

  “Are you talking about me?”

  “Yes, of course I am.”

  “Oh, I thought you were talking to yourself in the mirror.”

  “No, I was talking about you silly, you seem so much better.”

  Milo remembered how he was painting a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh one evening in New York City and suddenly stopped everything to re-evaluate his life, to re-shuffle his deck. He just didn’t have anything left and couldn't finish the painting. It was the last day he spent in that cockpit sized box in the East Village that had become his sputtering little rocket heading for a crash landing. He pressed his metaphorical eject button, jettisoned into a free fall, and saw rock bottom below. It was as if some greater force told him his days as a street artist were over.

  “I really am so proud of you,” Becky said. “You have come so far since the last time I saw you.”

  The last time that she saw him, he was forty pounds heavier and psychotic.

  “You are so lucky,” she said, “to have Nick behind you. I hope that you've finally learned how to kiss some ass. In any case please bring me up to date on how Mom is doing.” Becky's thoughts had a tendency to overlap and then run into each other.

  “Well, except for the fact that she is refusing food and water, I suppose okay, for somebody who is on the brink of... Luna has been trying to at least feed her baby food with a turkey baster, otherwise we would have to take her to the hospital.”

  “My God! I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “And Becky, have you heard the latest news? There is a new plan of action”

  “What news? What plan of action?”

  “Here’s the plan... I am going to be married and mother wants to be here, on earth, to see it, plus she wants to be alive to witness her own funeral.” Becky looked at Milo blankly. Milo went on. “It will work this way, I will be having my wedding ceremony in conjunction with her funeral. We are all trying to compress as much as we can into these precious last moments of her life.”

  “That’s absurd. You must be pulling my leg.”

  “Honest to God truth.”

  “No way.”

  “I promise you, I am not lying. This is not a time to play games.”

  “Well, then, I think you are being mighty selfish with all of this. I really do. You have to learn to let go. Look at me, I am divorced and I am resigned to the fact that Mom won’t be around to meet my future husband, whomever he might be. I didn't rush into something quickly trying to piece together my life perfectly, in the nick of time, for Mom to be around to see it. You cannot rush life or death, or marriage.”

  “Well you seem to be in a mad rush to make a movie and to stop making TV commercials.”

  “That has nothing to do with Mom dying. I have my goals, but I don’t push. You have always pushed. In my opinion that's why you had your nervous breakdown. You are always forcing things to happen on your time table. You have to learn to go with the flow.”

  “You are the one who has to learn to go with the flow, and the flow is as follows: Mom is dying and I am getting married and we are putting those two elements together. Maybe it is slightly fucked, maybe it is morbid, maybe it is twisted and
unorthodox, but that is what is going down.”

  “Tell me this much, do you even love this girl, what's her name?”

  “Samantha.”

  “Do you love Samantha?”

  “Well let me put it to you this way, she has been there for me during the most trying and difficult times in my life. She was there for me in New York when human debris was raining from the sky. She appeared when there was a blackout in New York, and she has come to me now that the most important person in my life is going to leave me forever.”

  “But you didn’t answer my question. Do you love...Samantha?”

  “I love her sense of timing.”

  “A comedian has a sense of timing, Bob Hope had timing, Robin Williams has timing. But we don’t go marrying people because they have timing.”

  “She happens to be here at the right time and place and I am a firm believer in seizing opportunities while they are there for the taking. I have messed up a lot of great chances in my life by being either wishy-washy or too ambitious, and then fluctuating between those two conditions. That’s why I am still alone at this ripe old age of forty five. I believe that life can be a lot like surfing, it’s all about catching the wave.”

  “But you've never surfed in your life, you were always too chicken.”

  “Okay, so it is a lot like body surfing.”

  “Very funny, Milo.” Becky paused to gather her thoughts. “Okay, I apologize. I must say you really know what you want these days. Especially for a person that was once involved in a wipe out and almost drowned. I am continuing with your wave analogy here.”