by Lorin Stein
Another thing about blue. My model has varicose veins which fascinate me. Did you ever see a really good showing? I don’t mean the beginnings, those immature spiderwebs with their picky little microscopic traces. I’m talking about your great over-hanging ropes, your great knotted, clotted masses of bulging misshapen inoperative veins that are congealed like wet cotton. What shades of blue! From dark to light, sea to sky, fire to ice. The picture I’m working on now, with my model bent over so that from the rear I can see her patch, is all varicose vein. Title: Varicose Veins at Sunrise. I keep her standing all day in a tub of cold water. It brings texture, adds depth to the blue tubes. She’s fifty-three, afraid I’ll fire her and get a younger girl. I talk about breasts that stay up and flesh that holds together and she breaks down, blubbering. But I wouldn’t have a younger model. Give me the flesh that shifts, the breasts that sag!
Snow is blue, and when you walk on snow that’s blue on blue, but of course Stark doesn’t make any tracks when he walks so he can’t know what I’m talking about. But snow is pale blue really, the color of chipped china or faded blotters. I thought of that yesterday during the heat wave. If I feel up to it, and the pain isn’t so bad, I put snow in my pictures, lots of fat flakes with a footprint or two. If Jenny can shiver when I paint so much the better. She has rheumatism and shivering comes easy to her. I make it simple by keeping her in a bucket of water, her large blistered feet rubbing the sides of the rusty iron tub. Sometimes if I leave a window open in the dead of winter, which I’m liable to do, it looks like a colony of mice is running beneath her skin. Then when I see her shake I get inspired and often do six or seven completed nudes in one day. Titles: Jenny Shivering in a Bucket of Water, Jenny Under Delusions of Cold, Jenny’s Veins, Jenny Without Food For Three Days (and its corollary, Jenny Fainting From Lack of Food and Falling Head First into the Iron Bucket), Blue Jenny, Jenny In Between, and my big one, Jenny Jumps. The last one is the size of my wall. I wanted to do a big picture and nailed canvas to one of the walls, propping chairs and tables and ladders against it so I could hop around on my one good leg and fill the canvas with lines. I had Jenny jumping from one of the ceiling beams in the loft. I wanted to get that look people have on their face when they go through the air. Have you seen that look? It’s like modeling a face in damp seersucker shorts. The mouth has this absentminded look about it, the eyes seem to be hurricane centers. Jenny jumped, her blubber trailing behind, adding buoyancy, floating like potato angels. Jenny is all fluff and old chocolate, and when she jumps, she expands. This is art, that expansion. I’m doing a sequel to Jenny Jumps. Jenny Lands. Setting: Old broken cement, blistered sidewalk all cracks and acne, dry bones for plants and rustred blood scattered like pandemonium seeds. In the middle, in parts, lies Jenny, full of hope, her mouth bleeding belief and the shock of the real blended miraculously into her limbs. Great stores of curious onlookers and large cities burning in the background, crucifixions and pilgrims walking, bombs exploding and lovers opening letters. The surroundings of Jenny. It will be the greatest thing I, or anybody, has done yet. It’s what I’ve been trying to say for years.
Golub says he’ll buy it to cover a hole in the wall.
I’ll take praise wherever I can find it.
Stark, who should know, says Jenny Lands can hang side by side with Giambo.
I’ll tell you more about Golub as soon as the pain goes away. Golub sleeps during the day on a small canvas cot upstairs. If Stark or I feel like waking him we pound on the pipes with a monkey wrench until he stirs. With that noise he’ll run out into the street thinking his building is falling down, and just to convince him we sometimes throw things out the window. Packing crates and type fonts and baby carriages with little nephews. Then he’ll run to the phone booth and call the Health Department, complaining that the “Roooskeeies are coming,” and he’s getting the first bomb.
I don’t think I told you about the pain. There are two kinds. Professional and amateur. In between is Golub. I’ll talk about that later.
Half the numbers under ten are prime, so there must be a connection there somewhere. But try to tell that to Stark! I asked him about emotion in painting. I told him I thought it was a net full of feelings, some of which poked fingers and toes into the picture. All he said was that I had too much blue. Here here here and here he said, too much blue. Change this to vermilion, this to ochre, that to beige, and this to sienna. I leave him alone he kicks my paintings. I have to put ropes around him when he comes into the studio. He doesn’t understand blue. Paint by the stars he says. He pulls out his astrology handbook, a Carrol Richter special, mumbles some Latin names and comes up with exact dates and times when I should paint. Stark, floating two inches off the ground, says I should paint on the twenty-third of March at two-thirty in the afternoon, again on the twenty-fifth at seven, and then wait until the sixteenth of April when I can paint the whole day.
One day I showed him a new picture which he said was out of my horoscope and kicked a hole in it before I could hit him with my iron easel. I painted around the hole. But what can you do with a critic?
When Stark gets excited he rises, and if he’s really enthusiastic about something he floats up to the ceiling. Jumping after him doesn’t do any good, he’ll just bob along the ceiling like a moth after cotton candy.
Remember that faggot farmboy in Nebraska who killed eleven people? I’m doing a series on him. Three-quarter profile set in plaster of Paris surrounded by a movie marquee, rerun of an old George Brent picture. Halloween death mask and magic lantern eyes under dime store plastic rims and larger than life proboscis. Munger leveling his gun and out pops a flag, love. I like things surrounding other things in my pictures, and I like people hiding, using masks and stepping out of dark alleys wearing capes and frightening drunks. But try to get that into a painting. And that’s just the beginning. When you add up the trading stamps and the formica counters and the bedwetters and the high school Spanish teachers, where does that leave you? In Toledo with El Greco. The canvas isn’t big enough. I’ll have to block off the intersections and lay my linen in the streets, paint with dripping buckets from tenement roofs.
Stark is taking lessons to fly, so he can’t understand. When you look down, what can you see? Only birdshit and slugs, if you happen to be a bird. I tell Stark, what do you want to fly for? He thinks it will help his art. When I try to explain about art he’s bumping his head against the ceiling. So who can you talk to about art?
Much more on Golub later.
Sinkowiz is calling now. I think I’ll tell him about the pain. Did you know the monarch butterfly will go thousands of miles just to get a good piece of ass?
Talking to Golub after I’ve taken down his pipes. I take him up to my studio and show him my paintings. I flip though canvas after canvas, put slivers in my fingers, and smile. Golub is not one of your wishy-washy art owners. He buckles his shoes every morning. Buttons on his pants. Who can beat lead pipe enlightenment like that?
When Stark floats, he fills himself up like a blowfish. Huff and puff, taking in great balloons of air, inflating his cheeks. His skin distends, his face changes from purple to red to pink. He floats above our heads, a network of veins. Golub looking up.
Golub would be a hunchback if he had the choice, but lacking the will to deform he stares popeyed. I have a thing in yellow. Title: Golub Staring. I have a hole in my floor where I build most of my fires and I put him in this. There were three stages. Golub in the hole, me painting over him on the floor, and Jenny above both of us on a swing. I fixed it so Golub could look up her dress and when he did, then I had the look I wanted. I could have titled it Golub Staring Under Jenny’s Dress or Golub in Discomfort, but I liked the neutral tones of Golub Staring better. His forehead is freckled, and what occupies the center of the picture is this forehead, this sandy, speckled forehead. The more I looked at his forehead the more it reminded me of a beach, so I painted it as a beach. Sand, with grey wood and broken shells and faded glass. I didn’t use
a brush but scraped large clumps of crusty oil on the canvas. I used paint that had dried, sticking it on in sections, like a statue. I mixed some sand in with the paint, and far off, in a wrinkle of the left brow, I had a beach city burning, concrete bunkers exploding and dog legs falling through storm clouds and old newspapers with faded ocean print spelling forgotten tragedies buried under the sand. All that was on Golub’s forehead, staring up. And much more. Golub has acne, pits of flesh that insult the eyes, his adolescent blitzkrieg. These became pop bottles with lost notes inserted by myopic teenage girls who worked from dawn to dusk in glass factories dreaming of orgasms. Old bones (naturally), insect bodies blowing like dry bamboo in the Philippine wind, spittle damp and bubbly drawing together hundreds of grains into a small spitball. Women’s liquids, deposited in secret places, harsh droppings, folded under thin straw-colored leaves and spent in quick spurts. All that was on Golub’s forehead. I worked fast, in a rage, throwing paint, building this forehead up like a plaster wall. And underneath, dim but not lost, two faint firefly eyes shining through the wind, looking hopefully up at Jenny.
Sinkowiz gave me a good price for it, almost enough to pay off my lawsuit.
If Stark takes to flying too much I can’t have him in my studio, I made that resolution yesterday.
The pain starts in the left leg and runs up through the right testicle like a silver wire, where it shorts over to the left ball, down the right leg where it gathers in little hair balls, which is what happens if you’re not careful and swallow hair. Then the surface of the leg goes bad, and no matter how you slap it, from thigh to knee, nothing is felt, you might as well have plastic for skin. I told the doctors about it and they told me it was sciatica compounded by a pinched vein. I thanked them and paid my bill, slapping my leg, which still felt like plastic. When the pain comes I can’t talk much and that’s not because it hurts. Pain is squeezed out of me and coats my walls. I have an aching knee over by the window that must take up a good four square feet. It’s almost an inch thick, and on bad nights it vibrates, crumbling the plaster in its tendon fingers. I sit smoking, watching it. How can I paint then, watching that wall shake, my knee ache, with such pain? Pain jumps too, and one flew out my window and landed on a bum below, crippling his other leg. Sometimes when the pain comes I try to paint my big picture, but often the walls shake so that nothing is steady.
Jenny talks with Golub and that’s when I’m sure they’re plotting something even though all Golub can talk about is lead pipes. And his driving tests. Golub is a great conversationalist. He fascinates. He is beyond the bore. With him it is a matter of reality, like dropping a plumb line to the center of the earth. What you find there you talk about. Golub dropped and found. Lead pipes and driving tests. Take your number three lead pipe, he’d say, and indeed I had already taken it the night before and dropped it out the window, letting it fall in the cellar doorway where he and I have our agreement. Did I tell you about the agreement? Take your number three lead pipe, he says, talking as if he had a cigar in his mouth. Conforms to your ASA specifications as cited in code number thirty-seven of the plumbing and heating contractors. Golub tells me all about lead pipes, about shear strengths and thread pitch, about decay factors and incessant vibration strain. I like that last one, the one about incessant vibration strain. I thought it applied somehow. To something. I let it roll around on my tongue, coating the consonants with saliva and tickling the s’s on the roof of my mouth. Golub has a winner there, in that incessant vibration strain.
Goddam that Stark!
He’s getting to act more like a bird every day. Soon as he comes in the first thing he wants to do is fly up to a rafter and drop bird shit on the forks. No manners at all and he’s constantly shedding. What good is he up there, on the rafters? I brought him down one evening with my Crossman, lead pellet in the wing, because he was making tracks over my canvas.
Golub tells me about his driving lessons. What he does with the clutch and how he turns the wheel with one hand and signals with the other. Golub’s feet on the pedals: small, tiny little hooves gloved in leather and reaching a delicate point at the front. Golub has weak legs and can’t press the pedals hard enough, too cheap for power brakes and automatic transmission. Last Tuesday during one of his road tests he smashed into a bread truck. I got a call on the phone and rushed down, paints in hand. Used a lot of yellow and red. Noticed that when metal bends it turns yellow. Used the flat of the spatula, quick strokes like cutting turkey. Golub leaning his head through the cracked window, thoughtfully bleeding and I had a tube of vermilion that did the job nicely. I like the warm shine of vermilion, and the rich sheen before it dries. I have since tried to rework it in blue, but a certain power is missing.
Golub fails driver’s tests with alarming regularity. Stark came down from the ceiling long enough to make a suggestion. He told me to look for connections. Before I could ask him what with what, he flew back up again, and since he’s out of range of the Crossman I’ll have to be content with that enigmatic phrase. Typical of Stark.
I didn’t tell you about my big picture yet. Invited Steinmetz up to talk about it. He’s the only one left. He’s a cigar store clerk downstairs and I suspect also a friend of Golub’s, but what can you do when you’re trapped? Steinmetz listens to me, sucking his teeth. He’s good at lit matches, and just this week almost burnt down my studio. That would have gotten Stark out, but I’ll have to watch Steinmetz because I think he talks to Golub. Did I ever tell you why Golub is always taking driving tests? Clutch chatter and low octane knock are second nature to him. He wishes he could get his hands greasy. Stark just dropped another egg. Two since this morning.
Steinmetz brought his mother over, and that’s something even Sinkowiz won’t do. His mother is Danish and smokes cigars and that’s how he got his start in the business, but of course he’s German. She wears long black gabardine dresses that come down to her ankles and has a small charcoal mustache at the corner of her mouth. I wanted to do a picture of her and Steinmetz, title: Steinmetz’s Mother, but with him in the picture since I thought he was a part of her. All blacks and shoe-polish browns, like the one I did of Golub’s feet, title: Golub’s Feet on the Pedals, size eight pumps in soft calfskin, hand stitched and shivering, dancing in the air. I painted Golub’s feet from underneath, to get the character, and I wanted to do the same with Steinmetz’s Mother, showing old smoke and forgotten tobacco and falling folds of garbadine, locked rooms and stained books with bitter scenes, Who is to remember this? Hanging over the drawing room like a long Danish winter night. But try to get that in. All black and brown and colors they don’t have yet. Try to mix them!
Anyway I couldn’t do it, working in blue now and I don’t see those lips in anything but long brown rolled cadavers of tobacco wrappers.
Golub tells me that Stark refuses to pay rent since he’s a bird. I can see he thinks Stark is setting a dangerous precedent.
My big picture, the one with everything in, is going to be in blue. I told Sinkowiz about it and he says he’s got a buyer lined up but the only one I can talk to about it now is Steinmetz’s mother. I’ve given up on Steinmetz. He spends all his time sucking his teeth. Yesterday he swallowed two fillings, gold, and his bowel movements are watched with great eagerness.
The big picture. Everything has to be in it. I’ve decided to do a falling picture. Things falling. I think blue will put that across best. How big should the canvas be? Don’t know. Might have to knock out a wall. What falls? Jenny, Golub’s Feet, Steinmetz’s Mother. But that’s just a start.
I used to get invitations from Sinkowiz to go to openings, but now he feels I work best through a front. I still haven’t met his mother. She wears chrome-rimmed glasses, and her face, like my leg, is plastic. I’d love to see that face, but Sinkowiz is adamant. No mother, no plastic face.
People will fall two ways in my painting. Head first or feet first. Eisenhower will fall head first, but Jenny and the Virgin Mary will fall feet first. Steinmetz’s mother
wanted to know if she could fall in my picture and I said yes. Not that I consider this a compromise since I’d planned to have her falling anyway. I gave her a choice of head or feet first, and she took head first. She’s afraid that if she falls feet first her dress will billow up over her head. Everybody is in blue, the Duke of Windsor is in navy-blue plus fours while his wife is in sky blue tennis shorts and an off-blue polo shirt. Naturally they fall holding hands. Steinmetz came up and he wants to fall too, though he’ll settle for whatever way I put him, feet or head first. He’d like to fall with his cigars. Golub wants to fall too, but he wants to fall with his driving lessons, and I told him that just people will be falling in this picture. He wants to know if he could fall with a gearshift lever in his hand, maybe a brake pedal or two. I’ll have to think about that. I think I’ll put Golub falling in between Mao Tse-tung and De Gaulle. He asked if he could fall in his blue serge, and I told him yes. Sinkowiz came up and wanted to know how the big one was coming and I told him, but he wanted to see. Funny about Sinkowiz, he never listens to words. He has ears, but I think they’re sealed over on the inside. He must read lips. I think I’ll have Sinkowiz falling in my picture, upside down next to Eisenhower, reading his lips. Sinkowiz would fall good. He has that look about his face, the look of someone used to falling, eyeballs detached, cheeks inflated like a parachute, hair grabbing for air. Some people are good at falling, and some not. I’ll show this in my picture. My picture takes place in an elevator shaft. Everybody crowding in at the top, falling in the middle. There is no landing. Nobody ever lands. There will be arms and legs and dog heads twirling past elevator cables, some people will slide, holding onto the greased cables with bloody hands and a look of automated horror. Others will ignore the cables and fall like Buddhists burning in Saigon, arrow sure. The grabbers will reach out, twirl, shiver, and fall like animated cartwheels in a firecracker carnival. Everyone will fall in my picture. Heads of state, models, safecrackers, highway patrolmen. I’m considering other things falling. Alarm clocks and forks and crutches.
