Dead Artist

by Ivan Jenson

  Milo looked out the car service window as they entered the airport complex. His mind slid back thirty years.

  Mother continued where Luna left off. “And so it has been decided that the best course of action is to pull you out of school where you are clearly under the most terrible influence of your truant, foul-mouthed druggie peers.”

  Milo’s father spoke softy, kindly, and under his breath, “Your mind is very different, you have the sort of ability and talent that can’t be taught. School will only be a hindrance and a liability to your creative growth. It will push you to fit into a box. And your peers, they will only bring you down to their level.”

  Now you remember the night they gave you your total freedom. Your sentence and punishment for being high was complete footloose and fancy-free freedom. You had the mornings all to yourself to wake when you pleased and you had Technicolor TV shows to delight in, the colors of Hanna Barbera cartoons, the deep contrasts of Star Trek. In the backyard you could climb the big trees and there you would think about Uncle Allen's wood carvings, trees were shapely women with their legs spread as wide as the girls who did cheer leading. And so you fantasized that you were sitting between the legs of school girls and ladies; and you sucked on the hot Santa Ana breezes and all you could think about was: ha, ha Ray was kept in school while you got out alive. And you imagined a tangled metal Doctor Seuss like mechanism, a complex machine of moving and bending pipes, that stomped and stamped commonness on the brains of other kids, including Ray. You could almost see its rickety clinking and clanking conveyer belt and you could hear its bells sounding off like sirens, sending electric shock waves of terror into the spines of students. And those prison gates, you could see them from the car when your parents drove you past school, they made the building look like a kennel for kiddies, caging Ray like a lost pet at the pound.

  As Milo waited at the gate at the Gerald Ford airport, he felt like he was waiting to see a convict, his brother, the former prisoner of education, who after getting a degree in physics from UCLA, chose to become a house painter who painted muddy abstracts in his spare time.

  Milo remembered once telling some pretty girl in a New York bookstore that he was an artist and she mysteriously said back to him with far away eyes, “oh, but have you ever painted a white room?”

  And Milo answered, “No. But my brother has.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Milo knew that there was something most definitely amiss when he saw his brother exit the gate dressed in light painters' overalls with splatters of white and off-white. He looked like he was wearing a soldier's camouflage for winter warfare. Ray had a wicked smirk on his beard-stubbled face. He embraced Becky, they hardly saw each other although they both lived in Los Angeles, then sized up Milo. “Well you haven't grown any,” he said laughing, and as they hugged he whispered into Milo’s ear, quite seriously, “it’s okay now, it’s going to be okay.”

  And then he said out loud, “Please don’t think I’ve fucking cracked. You see, I caught my flight directly after a house job and I didn’t have an opportunity to change. Plus I kinda wanted to freak you all out, but the joke was on me. Airport security checked me out like I was Al Qaeda or something. I was frisked with great determination and I thought for a moment I would be taken into an interrogation room and grilled to see if I had any terrorist leanings. Eventually, they just wrote me off as as a working class nut.”

  Ray kept talking. “The old lady sitting next to me on the plane, though, she was something. I have to admit she said the nicest thing to me. She said, 'Sir, are you an artist?' to which I answered, 'No, I am just a painter.' Then she said, 'Oh my, a painter, how wonderful, I love paintings, I especially love the impressionists.' 'No, no, no,' I said, 'Ma'am, let me explain, I am a house painter, and I do some abstract dabbling on the side, but I bet you would be just tickled to meet my brother because he is a real living artist.'”

  “After I said that, she got kinda uncomfortable but she did ask me all about you and I told her how you have this big time investor art dealer pumping money into your career, and she was thrilled. She asked me why I was flying to Gold Haven, and I said I was coming to a funeral. She said, 'Oh, I am so sorry, who passed?' and I said 'nobody, but my mother is gravely ill.' She said, 'who is the funeral for?' and I said 'for my mother' and she kept saying 'I don’t understand.' and I did the best to explain the whole thing to her, a perfect stranger.”

  “I explained the whole thing to her, how Mom wants to be alive to enjoy her own funeral, and the woman thought I was only joking, and then asked again what I was coming to Gold Haven for and I said to attend the wedding of my artist brother and she smiled and gave me a pinch on the arm for teasing her so much...so that was my surreal flight. Anyhow it never ceases to amaze me how people refuse to accept new concepts into their little box-like brains. And that’s why I am so proud of the family that I, I mean we, all come from, because everything is always so skewed with us, so very fucked up.”

  When Ray arrived it felt like the party had truly begun, the sort that would surely finish at 6:00am in debauchery and recriminations.

  Milo was thinking, isn’t this what a family reunion is all about? Wasn’t it time for celebration, wasn’t this supposed to be a tribal ritual about beginnings and endings? The ending of their mother’s reign and the beginning of Milo's union with Samantha.

  “You can either rent a room at my hotel, or stay at Mom’s house with Becky.” Milo said to Ray.

  “It’s okay. I’ll just sleep at Mom's house, that's fine with me. This way I can spend some time with Mom first thing in the morning.”

  “You might get lucky before that,” Milo quipped awkwardly, picking up on Ray's light-hearted sarcasm. Then he said, “Mom still has a sleeping disorder, so there is a good chance she will still be up when we get there.”

  “If you two don’t mind,” Ray said motioning out the car window, “I am starved.”

  So they drove through a Taco Bell and Ray ordered eight hard-shell tacos and devoured them quickly. It was amazing to Milo that his brother was able to keep himself so trim and eat like a pig. He had been a child with ample baby fat, a chubby teen and an overweight young adult until his marriage and subsequent estrangement from the family. But his wife changed all that, putting him on an almost carbohydrate free organic diet. Milo had never seen his brother so mean and lean. Ray, pushing fifty now, had the sort of rugged looks that made strangers try to figure out which soap opera he starred in. With physical appeal and standing at six foot two he could have easily become a dominant alpha winner in the corporate world. It was simply preposterous and an almost self imposed flogging of his destiny that he chose house painting as his line of work.

  As the taxi drove them out of the Taco Bell parking lot, Ray said, “I know that nobody in this family will forgive me because I didn't fly out to see Grandma or Dad in their death beds, but you have to understand, I didn’t want to be a part of the drama that everyone was making out of Grandma’s passing. As for Dad, I was complete with him a along time ago. I simply didn’t have the need to see him in that condition. But as for Mom, I do have some unfinished business with her. There is just a bit of tidying up I need to do with you as well, Milo.”

  Although Ray only said it once, Milo heard his name repeated over and over. Milo, There is just a bit of tidying up Milo that I need to do with you as well Milo. And, of course, he heard the Spaghetti Western music playing again.

  When the taxi pulled into their mother’s driveway all the lights were on. That night the half moon loomed larger than usual as it was magnified by the dense humid night air. Milo’s dog was perched on a chair in the front window awaiting their arrival.

  Ray's guilt most likely brought him to Gold Haven. His mother had been eager to find out what the hell happened to her oldest son and why had he chosen to extricate himself from the family dynamic. Becky and Milo helped Ray with his duffle bag while cricket chirp sizzled in the air like the sound of electric current. Their mother
was having another resurrection and had been up and out of her deathbed since Becky and Milo left for the airport. She was indulging her mania and cleaning the house frenetically. Order and cleanliness had always ruled in the Sonas house, and she would be damned if she would allow herself to be bedridden and leave the house a mess when Ray arrived for his first visit in nearly a decade.

  Downstairs Stravinsky emanated from the CD player. Upstairs, a Billy Joel LP played on an ancient hi-fi. Work'en too hard can give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack, You oughta know by now. Sonia Sonas was oblivious to both sounds and stood in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. When she saw Ray enter, she managed to muster up some other-wordly energy and tearfully exclaim, “Well I’ll be God-damned, it really is you Ray” in her best impression of Katherine Hepburn playing Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night.

  Upstairs the record was skipping and the stylus skated across the vinyl record to its last groove, then thumped repeatedly. Milo thought quickly of the thunderstorms that foretold Ray's arrival at the airport and darted upstairs to turn off the album. Their mother abhorred the stringent sound of CDs and still treasured her record collection.

  Ray continued the theatrics. “And, yea, there is no doubt that you are the mythic archetype known as Mother.” His delivery was blunt and listless, like an actor in a high school play or like Keanu Reeves in his philosophical surfer mode.

  “And you, Ray, are what is commonly known as my first born son.”

  “Mom,” Becky said, interrupting the dramatic reunion, “what are you doing up and out of your bed all by yourself cleaning up like this. Where is Consuelo? This her her job.”

  “I sent her out for wine and groceries,” Sonia said, leaving the theater antics behind.

  “She is not supposed to leave you in the house all alone. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Hey, I am her boss and ultimately she must do what I say. It’s my insurance that pays her salary.”

  “But nobody would be here if you fell flat on your ass and broke your hip.” Becky changed her tone and tried to throw some humor into the moment.

  “What if, what if, whatever... the fact is, there is no way I would let myself miss out on the pleasure of seeing my oldest boy, and for the first time in ten years. Or the joy in seeing my youngest boy get married. Or to hear everybody sing my praises at my own funeral. I am mighty curious as to what exactly you squirts will say in your sobbing tributes to yours truly.”

  At that moment Consuelo arrived through the back door, with wine wrapped in a brown bag, and two plump grocery bags. She slid into the room, mime-like, took out the wine, and hunted for an opener.

  In impressive Spanish Becky reprimanded Consuelo and ordered her never to leave her mother alone in the house again. Consuelo apologized and said she had only just been to the local liquor store which was three minutes away, and that she did so in honor of Señor Ray’s arrival.

  “Gracias,” Ray said. He had a rudimentary understanding of Spanish having disastrously once apprenticed with a Mexican relative who was an artist, poet and a mind blowing drug abuser and alcoholic. Sarcastically, he added, “I am especially honored that, because of my arrival, my mother's life was put in jeopardy for a bottle of cheap wine. But come on Mom, you can't drink wine, you haven’t had any food or water for two days.”

  “Ray, I am many decades over twenty one, and I don't take orders from you. I have my rights. In fact they may be my last rites, ha ha, and they are that I can drink about as much as I damn please. So please, fill-er-up.”

  And so four glasses of tart red wine were poured. Becky and Milo sipped theirs slowly, while Ray and his mother gulped their wine down in a near-guzzling. It only took Ray but five minutes before he downed two more glasses of wine and began to blush and gush like any repenting prodigal son should.

  “Listen Mom, the thing is, I know that you are disappointed in what I have done with my life. I know I cost you a lot of money, like when you bailed me out of jail.”

  “You know,” Milo said interrupting Ray's tipsy heartfelt confession, “I heard about that through the grape vine, but I never got a clear idea of what exactly went down.”

  “Oh, I know the story,” Becky chimed right in, “Ray was caught breaking and entering into an apartment in his own building. Right? Didn’t they find you in your neighbor's apartment, cash on your belly, asleep on the couch? The neighbor called the cops and you got thrown in jail. Mom had to bail you out to the tune of ten grand. You called her crying that if you didn't get bailed out you would miss out on work and your ass would be fired.”

  “And I was more than happy to be of service,” Sonia said, her voice like the creak of a rusty old door.

  “That story,” Ray bellowed, thumping his fist on the kitchen table, causing the salt and pepper shakers to quiver and a low tide wave within the wine glasses, “that story is a total crock of horse shit. Okay, so there is a slight grain of truth in it. I was shit-faced that night. I’d spent the evening in a strip club, that’s right a titty bar and a certain sweetheart there gave me some powerful body shots of Jagermeister. It felt like I was a vampire sucking the alcohol straight out of her skin. When I bit her, they kicked me out. I ended up with a bloody lip, I’m not sure how I got it, but I should have sued the shit out of them.” Ray went on, tipsy in his delivery, “Okay, so I walked the two or three blocks home, vision blurry, puking perhaps once or twice, some blood in it too. Got back to my place and find my key is jamming in my door, so I jimmied the lock with my jack knife. I was good at that, it was like stealing kisses, ha ha. The lock was a cinch and I was in right away. So I search the place, see. Shit I'm sounding like Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar. Then I search my place for Advil, extra strength, because I felt like my brain was spilling out of my skull, who knows I probably had a concussion, but then I gave up and passed out on the couch. I must have only been asleep a couple of minutes when all of a a sudden I wake up to find a cop jabbing me with his night stick and telling me I have a right to remain silent and all that jazzy TV cop show shit, and they take me in and I don't go easy. I keep yelling at 'em, 'What the hell are you cops doing in my apartment without a warrant?' That's what happened.”

  “Okay, enough already,” Becky said, her voice rising. “Don’t tell us that you didn’t know that was not your apartment, because nobody here is buying that crap.”

  Ray now looked perplexed, “I swear to God that was my apartment, the whole thing was a set up.”

  “Your apartment was next door, you had broken into and ransacked your neighbor's place.”

  After a moment Ray relented, settled down and spoke softly, “It was an honest mistake, I thought I was home...that’s right I had the wrong apartment, the wrong door. I wanted door number one and I got door number two. I really only wanted to find my Advil. Is that such a crime?”

  “The only mistake you made, “Becky added, “was drinking in the first place. Ray you a have problem. You are an alcoholic.”

  “Okay, okay, so my name is Ray and I am an alcoholic. But Becky you shouldn’t be the one to point your finger. You should focus on your own sobriety, Miss whiskey nightcap girl.”

  Milo wondered how they knew so much about each other. It was like no time had lapsed at all.

  “I have it under control. I don’t wake up in strangers' apartments. I don’t hunt for Advil in bathrooms that aren’t mine.”

  “Okay, touche to you.”

  “Touche to both of you, now stop it,” their mother said, mustering up the strength to yell almost as loudly as she did when they were kids. “I’ve had enough of your bickering. These are the last evenings I will ever have. Can you understand that? It’s bad enough for me that I will have to die in the summertime, but I guess it’s just as well. I don’t think I could tolerate another Michigan winter. The winters here have been killing me and so are the two of you right now!” Sonia Sonas was drunk. “It's bad enough to know that one of my sons lives in a flop house Downtown, living next door to r
apists and crack heads. And, it has broken my heart Ray to know that you still have only hatred for us, your own family, your own blood. What did we ever do to you to make you hate us so? Tell me what! And with your education, to choose to be...a house painter.”

  Ray retorted, unable to maintain the half-pleasant facade he arrived with, “Oh, that’s rich. Don’t you get it? You all left town, you just moved on with your lives, picked up to New York and left me, just as I was going to attend UCLA. It was as if I was a leper, it was as if I was going to catch TB on campus and it was contagious. You never came out to visit, even on the holidays.

  “Oh come on, Ray.” Becky said, “Don’t you think you are exaggerating just a wee bit. We were just leading our lives. Right, Mom? Milo needed to be in New York.”

  Their mother was tiring, and she was angry. It seemed as though her larynx was losing its elasticity. Her voice sounded dry, haunted, ill, but willful in its determined raspiness, “Look you guys, I never had a chance to go to school at all. You kids had all the breaks. I was told to go to work and give seventy five percent of every nickel I earned to my parents.”

  “Okay, so that was how it was for you,” Milo said, a crack in his voice as he quickly regressed to boyhood. “But there was no reason for you to hand the same lot down to your kids, didn’t they ever tell you that every new generation is supposed to have it better than the one before it.”