by Jonathan Dee
At some point he resigned himself to the idea that Molly, wherever the hell she had gone, was not going to come back; but the most alarming aspect of this realization was how little effort it took to resign himself to it. He had never felt as though he understood women anyway. Still, he wondered what had come over him – barely two months ago he had been ready to throw everything away for her, he had been fixing up a villa to surprise her with on their honeymoon. His ex-wife would never have recognized him.
The lawsuits were settled. The artists had dispersed, back to the lives they had forsworn in order to come to Virginia, though the blow was softened for most of them by their considerable savings. Mal let Colette go with a year’s severance, money that came out of his own pocket. Every morning he drove from his room in the Sheraton to his room in Shays’s office building, where he now sat by himself, answering the phone when it rang. One morning, as he tilted back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the whorls on the stamped-tin ceiling, his cell phone went off in his pocket: it was his contractor, calling from Umbria. The marble bought at great expense for the small terrace facing the hillside had cracked in the first frost; the quarry was refusing to replace it, insisting that the problem could only be attributed to incompetent masonry. When Mal hung up fifteen minutes later he felt less depressed, his energies less scattered, than at any time in the last few months, and when he thought about it he realized that he had managed to forget that he did still have a home somewhere in the world after all, even if it was one he had never lived in. Then there was Italy itself, a country he had always loved, a country that understood the ancient verities, unlike America, which masked its cultural rootlessness with the constant exaltation of the new, which had, in place of a sense of eternity, perfected the art of forgetting so as to be able to learn the same things over and over again with undiminished enchantment.
Though his contractor assured him it wasn’t necessary, Mal flew overseas to settle the dispute over the marble; he told Shays not to expect him back anytime soon. His plan of action is simply to read, manage his estate, live in leisurely obscurity as an expatriate country gentleman. His sense of things is that if he disappears, people will forget him, and when that happens, it’s only a matter of time before they start asking for him again.
* MESSAGE *
THESE ARE REAL PEOPLE
NOT ACTORS
ABOUT TO FIND OUT IF THEY’RE HAVING A BABY
HUMANITY IS THE STONE
Entertainment is itself an ideology.
My goal is to destroy all my possessions. I have been making an inventory of everything I own, and it comes to 7,006 items, from televisions to reading material to records to old love letters to my Saab 900. These are the things I have accumulated in the 37 years of my life. Some of them are hard to part with, like my father’s sheepskin coat, which he gave to me many years ago. But I have made a conceptual decision as an artist to shred and granulate everything.
“You always have to consider that,” he said. “But you can’t exploit reality.”
*
A REPORTER CAME to see them in their cell. They tried not to get excited: they were under no illusions anymore about the intelligence or the political sophistication of most reporters. Still, it was an event. Part of the reason for going to jail was to serve as an example; in order to spread the word of that example, you needed help. And the guy was from the AP.
They were back in jail because the judge had tossed them in there for disrupting the trial again. No negotiations this time. Jack Gradison had lost it during one of the prosecutor’s objections, calling him a liar, shouting out statistics about wealth concentrated in the hands of a diminishing few. To Jack an argument was a fight, and he was not going to allow himself to be pilloried without responding just because they happened to be inside a government building. The judge had found Liebau in contempt too, even though he had said nothing, but Liebau had no problem with that. If you were a revolutionary then you should simply consider jail one of your addresses.
It was supposed to clarify the mind. A jail cell was existence stripped to its essentials, and so there were no distractions, nothing to cloud your thinking. Antonio Gramsci, one of Liebau’s heroes, had done his best thinking in jail, had written the invaluable Prison Notebooks there. Still, Liebau had to admit that this notion of existence stripped to its essentials wasn’t totally borne out by his own experience. Jail was, more surprisingly than anything else, an unbelievably noisy place. For hours at a stretch he found it hard to think at all.
The series of buzzers commenced, far away at first and then gradually louder, and by the time the last door was opened Gradison and Liebau, in spite of themselves, were standing expectantly behind the table. The guard watched them with a focus that looked like sleepiness, like an alligator’s.
The reporter’s name was Suarez. A good sign; minorities often were more receptive to the whole notion of concealed power. He asked them a few basic questions about their background, their court case, questions which, Liebau could see, Jack was a little miffed an AP reporter wouldn’t already know the answers to.
“So,” Suarez asked. “Let’s start then with your first meeting with John Wheelwright.”
The first meeting he was talking about was the first day of their first jury selection, many months ago now. Liebau smiled tightly and said that while their lawyer had subsequently told them that Wheelwright had been in the gallery that day, they hadn’t met him then. In fact, they had refused to meet him.
Suarez apologized and wrote hastily on his little notepad. But then, for some reason, the questions about this Wheelwright, this bagman, this insignificant lieutenant to the cultural fascist Osbourne, just went on and on. What did you say to him when he saw you. What did he say to you. How did he look. How did he act. Did he mention anything about … well, about anything. How did he strike you?
“He struck me as a worm,” Gradison said. “Listen, what the hell sort of interview is this?”
Then it all came out, how this insufferable gofer, who smiled at them all the time and offered them the moon if they would just agree to shut up, had flown back to his plantation and watched one of his underlings set fire to himself in the name of advertising. This guy was wound a lot tighter, apparently, than they had thought. Not that they had really spared a thought for him at all at the time, or even now.
“And apparently,” Suarez said excitedly, “there was a woman.”
Liebau was stunned and dispirited. This was what they had been steeling themselves for? They had gone to jail to await rebirth as minor players in some monumentally irrelevant soap opera about people they didn’t even know? It wouldn’t have surprised him a bit to learn that Osbourne had contrived this entire thing, to trump the growing public interest in Culture Trust and obscure the motives of these two men who couldn’t be bought, to keep them from getting famous for their dissent by making them famous for something else.
Contrived or not, that’s pretty much what happened. Search engines were becoming society’s short-term memory, and thus the names of the two cultural guerrillas were now bound forever to the name of the flunky who supervised the maniac who thought his own gruesome death would make a nifty Banana Republic ad. The galleries were full now for every day of their trial. Their judge seemed enraged by all the attention. She refused to grant any more mistrials; the defendants wouldn’t shut up, though, satirizing their captors, provoking their anger, refusing to legitimize the proceedings by sitting quietly through them. Her solution in the end was to put them back in their cell with a TV connected to a closed-circuit hookup. They sat on their bunks and watched their own trial on television, cursing at it, hurling unheard insults at all the participants, as if they were watching a beauty pageant or a football game.
They were found guilty and fined $500 each. When they refused to pay, the judge waived the fine and commuted their sentences to time served.
They were free, and undefeated; but it wasn’t the same w
ithout Osbourne on the scene. Their creative edge was lost. The thing they were fighting against seemed too diffuse now. There were ten thousand people doing something like what Osbourne had been doing, only not as provocatively, nor as well.
Six months later, broke, with nowhere else to go, Liebau convinced Gradison that their best option was to go back to the University of Eastern Washington and ask to be reinstated, at least as adjuncts. To their surprise, the petition was granted. Gradison taught English, Liebau anthropology, and Liebau had to admit to himself that he generally felt calmer – Kimiko, his wife, pointed out that his health had improved as well – as a result of this retreat into the world of artifacts, into the realm of dead culture. Still, a retreat was what it was. Like many college campuses these days, theirs sometimes seemed to him like a kind of retirement community for bitter or self-aggrandizing old radicals.
Gradison, though, had more trouble coping with his withdrawal from guerrilla life. The two men saw less of each other for a while. Then one night Jack drove out to Liebau’s remote A-frame, which, when they were younger and stronger, he had helped his old friend build, and announced – pacing up and down in front of the picture window, while Kimiko banged things around disapprovingly behind the door to the kitchen – that he had decided to turn himself in for a certain activity he had been a part of in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1971.
Liebau knew the activity to which he was referring.
“Are you crazy?” he said. “That’s not some five-hundred-dollar fine. That is the whole rest of your god damn life in federal prison.”
“I want to do it,” Gradison said sullenly.
“You can’t do it!”
“What’s the fucking difference!” Jack shouted. “Is there somewhere else I need to be?”
A door slammed, and moments later they listened to Kimiko driving off in the car. The two men wound up crying and getting very drunk. Through the wide picture window they saw the sun light up the forest, before they fell asleep.
A year later, Liebau’s tenure was restored. Gradison, according to the minutes of that fall’s English department meeting, had asked for and been granted a psychiatric leave.
* MESSAGE *
Have you met life today?
Rebel. Express yourself. Take your creativity to a whole new level. Express yourself.
Through the Ad and intent of the Advertiser we form our ideas and learn the myths that make us into what we are as a people. To Advertise is to Exist. To Exist is to Advertise. Our ultimate goal is nothing short of a personal and singular Billboard for each citizen. Until that day we will continue to do all in our power to encourage the masses to use any means possible to commandeer the existing media and to alter it to their own design.
In “A Tale of Two Rooms and a Blind Man,” the artist – who spent time in prison in China for making subversive art – invites us to feel, smell, or sense objects in a pitch-black room and then describe them – in a stark white room – to an elegant blind man, who then sculpts them from clay. Through 4/20.
*
FIRST JOHN DROVE up to Durham and stayed in a little bed-and-breakfast he found there, just reading, walking through the dignified campus and past the frat houses with the wading pools and legless couches in the front yard, feeling that particular pang one feels as an outsider in a community of the young. He was happy that way for almost a month, even as the gregarious curiosity of the old couple who ran the B&B turned into a more restrained suspiciousness at his ability to pay every week on time, in cash, without seeming to do anything for a living or to speak of any place he needed to get back to. When the semester ended and the town emptied out he drove – top down, wind roaring in his ears, the Porsche drawing admiring or challenging stares on the highways – to Savannah, where he hadn’t been since he was a boy, just to look around; and from there to New Orleans, where he thought he might stay to see Mardi Gras, just because it seemed like one of those things one ought to be able to say one had seen.
He wasn’t so naive as to expect he would run into Molly anywhere on the road. Ten years earlier he would have been looking around for her reflexively at every red light. Now, though, if anything he tried not to think about her, not out of regret or resentment but because he felt that his unchecked thoughts of her tended of their own accord to grow increasingly unfair. If you were too focused on yourself, then it could seem like it was Molly’s destiny to come into men’s lives, give them something to long for, and then withdraw again, with no residue but the longing. But then you started to turn her into a metaphor, which wasn’t right: which, in fact, couldn’t be done, because to equate her with anything else was to miss the point of her anyway. And meanwhile, she had to go on living her life.
In New Orleans he phoned Shays’s office, took a deep breath, and asked to speak to Mal. Shays got on the phone instead.
“John!” he said, his stagy courtroom drawl growing a little shaky with age. “Mal’s not here!”
John didn’t want to leave the number where he was, a French Quarter rooming house. “When will he be back?”
Shays laughed, entirely inappropriately, John thought. “Don’t know!” he said.
More questioning elicited the mystifying news that Mal had gone to Italy to settle some dispute regarding his house in Umbria. He hadn’t said when he would return, but John assumed that had to be an oversight on somebody’s part – maybe Shays’s, since he was, after all, a little deaf. Mal wouldn’t stay away for long. John still had his cell phone number; but in light of this news, he suddenly felt a bit hesitant about using it. He asked Shays to leave a message for Mal, saying only that he had called to check in, and would call again.
In the end, the town he was most charmed by was Oxford, Mississippi, and when he got tired of driving he went back there and rented a little two-story house near the university. To keep busy, and to meet people, he took a volunteer job as an illustrator for the Sewanee Baptist Church. Nothing too Bible-thumping, just illustrations to accompany Sunday-school texts, newsletter design, pamphlets for the troubled about alcohol abuse, marital difficulties, things like that. John hasn’t found religion himself; never in his life, in fact, has he felt a particular pull in that direction. But the work is pleasant and undemanding; John likes to draw; plus, he can’t help but be aware that there’s a certain integrity to it. He is putting his considerable talents – talents whose expensiveness his kind employers would never in a million years suspect – to good use, in support of certain strong, sincere, uncompromised beliefs, beliefs he respects, even if they aren’t necessarily his.
* MESSAGE *
Where do storytellers get their stories?
In some quintessentially Jeffersonian way, Puppy renders all who see it equal. With its coat of many colors, Puppy straddles a cosmic fault line separating the hilarious and the insidious, the architectural and the organic, the temporary and the timeless. In some Machiavellian way,
There’s No Future In Advertising.
In exchange for the $40,000 for the first academic year, they are expected to wear their First USA clothing whenever they make public appearances on their campus or others for the company. Each has to maintain at least a C average (Mr McCabe was a straight-A student in high school; Mr Barrett got A’s and B’s) and live up to the terms of amoral clause – if they misbehave, the deal is off. But Mr Filak said he fully expected to “re-sign” them for the full four years of college.
*
THE OCEAN SEETHED all day, low waves, too low to attract the surfers even if it had been warm enough for surfing, which it was not. That was the appealing thing about winter in the rambling beach house: the cold weather kept away the trespassers, the partyers, aimless scraggly young people not caring what they befouled on their rambling path to hell. The less appealing thing was that the cold inside the house had to be fought off via heating oil, which meant money, which they didn’t have. Lately they had been setting the thermostat at fifty-six degrees, and Richard had overheard some grumbling about it.<
br />
He watched the restless back-and-forth of the ocean – like an animal, he thought, like a tiger miserable in its cage – from behind the uncurtained picture windows. He would have opened the door to the porch, just to hear the surf for a moment, were the cold air not likely to antagonize the others even more. The beach house had been given to them, outright, by a former disciple. Gone now. And while the house itself had been his, all its contents, it turned out, had previously been granted to his ex-wife in their divorce. There was nothing in the five bright rooms now except about twenty sleeping bags, and in the dining room a portable altar from which Richard, every evening after dinner, sermonized.
Seven months ago there were twenty-eight of them there. Eleven had left, three new members from the local college had joined. Richard had to remind himself not to get too discouraged about that. When he thought about overall numbers, he worried, but when he thought about each of those eleven defectors as individuals, he couldn’t regret that any of them were gone. There was no room for weakness or hypocrisy, to say nothing of downright heresy. True, they were commanded to be fishers of men, but at the same time the purity of the group, the purity of their mission, couldn’t be diluted, or else he would ultimately lose them all. It was a delicate balance.
