Stealing Picasso

by Anson Cameron

  One night some months before, while Marcel and Turton were enjoying a limoncello in a nightclub called Handgun, a guy laid five hundred-dollar bills on the bar in front of Marcel. Fanned them out like a straight flush. Marcel didn’t know what that money meant at first. He blinked at it and pouted at the guy, asking. When the guy licked his lips Marcel turned away, flustered. The guy laughed, picked up his money and left.

  Neither Marcel nor Turton spoke of it then. But now, hungry, rent due, the minions of Eastern Gas calling daily, Marcel remembers those five bills. Now he knows what that money means. He goes back to Handgun and sits at the bar. Suddenly it’s the only money in the world.

  He begins selling his hero to men in bars. To men who stroll down Fitzroy Street. Men who skip sideways out of the streetlight and drop, bent-backed and furtive, eyes darting, cruising to assuage an appetite they so despise that they attack it with the ferocity of rape and, when it’s done, toss money onto the dirt as if the other party in this transaction bears all the weight of its indignity. Marcel closes his eyes and races his eyeballs around beneath his eyelids, humming a tune.

  It pays well, but it is an unforgivable treachery, an impossible insult to Michael, and it sends Marcel spiralling into fits of depression every time he commits it. One night in Catani Gardens he sells himself to a Greek restaurateur who gives off airs of cologne and cuisine and whose lips have a latticework of spittle joining them as he snarls snatches of Thriller lyrics in his climax. Listening to those verses it is easier for Marcel to believe Michael innocent of the crimes of which he is accused than to believe himself innocent of them.

  Afterwards, he goes home and drinks a bottle of Stolichnaya and eats a handful of Panadol. He wakes the next day to the sound of the evening peak hour, pain flaring like aurora in his head. He showers three times before the smell of that restaurateur is off him. Cries in the shower each time, then prays to a poster of Michael for forgiveness.

  In the end Turton insists on finishing Marcel’s portrait, though there is no client for it now. He has him sit for hours, imploring him to remain perfectly still and to hold the broad, enigmatic smile they have chosen, even when Marcel complains his back is killing him and his cheek muscles are screaming with the effort. He promises Marcel a time will come when it’s wanted. It will hang in a children’s ward, he says. Or the foyer of Sony. Your portrait, in the palatial foyer of Sony Corporation headquarters.

  Turton hugs him as he leaves the studio and whispers, ‘Acquittal.’ He nods wisely at him as if it’s a done deal. Sometimes on the way home after these torturous sessions Marcel is surprised to find a dance step creeping back into his walk. And though the portrait is not one of his better efforts, Turton looks at it for a long time after Marcel is gone, smiling.

  On the suburban fringe, a place of woodyards and used-car lots and scrap-metal recyclers, in a vast metal shed chirping under the hammer of a wind that carries the fecal stench of dairy farms, Marcel Leech is watching Turton Pym paint a fanged skunk onto the Harley Davidson of a Stinking Pariah named Larry Skunk Monk. Turton is the artist of choice of the Stinking Pariahs MC and has leased this shed in outer Pakenham in order to go about his business quietly, undiscovered by the art world.

  Marcel often accompanies Turton into the wilds to this shed and his airbrush operation. Feeling comfortable in the cathedral darkness and the company of his friend, he dresses again as Michael Jackson and talks gently in his falsetto while he watches Turton work. He sits in an armchair Turton has reclaimed from a dumpster, his schoolgirl voice barely audible over the chug of the compressor.

  ‘The day I left school, I was fourteen, expelled. Father O’Brien gave me a ride down to the local Safeways. Said he’d talk to a man he knew. I waited in the car, watching the front of Safeways, people in and out like flies, all of them dull-faced – shopping, you know. Toothpaste, cantaloupes, Tim-damn-Tams. I started to feel real sick. Father O’Brien came outside with the man and introduced me and we shook hands and the man said because of Father O’Brien I had a job and if I worked hard and was reliable then la-de-da one day I’d be … I don’t even know what. I was crying, whole place swimming in front of me, the Safeways man too. Next day when I started I couldn’t even recognise which one he was to report to.’

  Marcel sips his coffee. Turton is kneeling before the Harley blowing softly to dry the angry skunk he is painting.

  ‘They had me hauling trolleys of groceries from out back in the storage area into the store itself. “Pick up any cabbage leaf you drop.” “Customers have right of way.” That first day I started dreaming that Michael was going to come into my Safeways wearing his black Fedora, a bodyguard either side of him, three abreast down the aisle, and hold out his hand to me, and say, “Come with me, Marcel.” It was a vision. I kept it up for about a year. Him walking in there, all the shoppers with their mouths open. In the last months I really had to screw up my face and concentrate to get it to play. Till one day there I was, rice and pasta aisle, my face screwed up, trying to get Michael to appear, and this old biddy tapped me on the arm with a bag of linguini and asked me if I was all right. Told me to sit on the floor so I didn’t fall. That was the last time I ever had a vision of Michael coming for me.’

  Marcel, looking at Turton kneeling there, says, ‘You must think I’m pretty weird.’

  Turton puckers his lips in judgement. ‘No. Everyone hates Safeways.’

  Two motorbikes pull up outside and their engines rev high before dying. Wal Wolverine Symonds and Larry Skunk Monk enjoy their footsteps echoing as they walk through the dark of the warehouse. Listening to the approaching steps, Marcel wraps his arms about himself.

  ‘It’s only the Stinking Pariahs,’ Turton tells him. Marcel’s eyes widen and his throat clicks.

  ‘I’m painting this skunk for one of them.’ Turton tries to calm him.

  They step into the light, denim and leather and big outlaw hair and dark shades. Seeing Marcel, Larry Skunk says, ‘Shit. Michael Jackson … beat up.’ Marcel smiles and says, ‘Hello,’ in Michael’s falsetto.

  ‘Hell happened to you, Michael Jackson?’ Wal asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No, tell,’ Larry Skunk says.

  Marcel’s eyes are swollen black from being beaten senseless by four friends of a client who had paid $500 for a night with him. Having satisfied his own libido inside ten minutes, the client figured that, as he’d handed over five big ones for the night, Marcel was still his property and he could do anything he wanted with him until morning, including making a tidy profit by subletting him for $2000 to four like-minded acquaintances he called in on his phone.

  Marcel, when he was told of the arrangement, for legitimate health and business reasons, refused to sublet himself. When the quartet of wannabe sub-lessees of Michael Jackson’s surrogate arse had Marcel’s stance explained to them by the original lessee, they were, at first, only stamp-foot angry and edgily horny. But all four, having given up other Saturday night recreations for this taste of cloned star buttocks, soon went into a huddle and talked up a moral outrage between themselves. ‘Shit. This guy’s interfered with kids.’ Then they beat Marcel unconscious.

  When Marcel finishes telling this story to Larry Skunk, the man raises his eyes to the heavens and looks at Wal Wolverine Symonds and shakes his head, and Wal Wolverine Symonds shakes his head back, acknowledging what a crazy, disappointing world we are forced to live in.

  ‘Legitimate businessperson like yourself. I’m Larry Skunk Monk, presidential guard of the Stinking Pariahs.’ He holds out his hand. ‘You need protection. What’s your name?’

  ‘Marcel.’

  ‘Arse Sell? You’re kidding. Arse Sell?’

  ‘Marcel. With an M. Marcel.’

  ‘Right. Marcel. Only, I knew a guy called Bernie who was an arsonist.’

  Larry Skunk comes from Mount Beauty, a hydro town in the mountains. Left school early and started work for the hydro company alongside the other men in his family. But one day he was la
te for work and when his foreman called him a lazy little shit in the smoko hut in front of a gang of linesmen, Larry was astonished to see that foreman turn into a grizzly bear before his very eyes. Especially astonished since that foreman had been, up until then, his beloved Uncle Bruce. No matter – a living, breathing, drooling grizzly bear needs to be brought under control, and Larry Skunk brought him under control by whipping him with a length of steel rope. Then he scarpered as the prostrate grizzly began to show signs of turning back into Uncle Bruce, trounced and bloodied.

  That event was Larry Skunk’s first realisation that he had a psychosis that blurred the lines between bears and beloved uncles. He came down to Melbourne, where a man could comfortably live with such an affliction, and fell in with the Stinking Pariahs by beating up a Bandido. After Larry Skunk had performed the Twelve Labours of Hercules: stealing the Golden Harley of the Hell’s Angel’s master at arms, homiciding Alphonse of the ten-thou heroin debt, poisoning a kennel of Drug Squad rottweilers, conflagrating the Sydney Road Souvlaki Palace, etc., the Stinking Pariahs inducted him into their exalted ranks with a coat-of-arms tattoo, a bottle of Jim Beam and the two-hour rental of a seen-better-days street-corner slut. Welcome to the gang, Larry Skunk.

  A decade of dope, LSD and speed has not helped Larry Skunk overcome his propensity for psychotic delusions. Fantastical comic-book hallucinations pop up before him like cardboard cut-outs in a shooting gallery. He is about as crazy a man as can operate within the confines of an outlaw motorcycle gang without being thrown out for being crazy. Beasts and goddesses appear before him. Tutankhamen in a white-goods store, Wonder Woman in a pub – it all adds colour to his day. The fact that he sometimes makes threats or whispers sweet nothings to thin air doesn’t bother his colleagues. If you’re having a council of war with the Gypsy Jokers in the Rosstown Arms and are at a fragile moment in territorial negotiations, when your president has just said to theirs, ‘If you want Bays-water, you give up Coburg,’ and into the dangerous silence that follows, one of your stone-hard presidential guard says in awe, ‘Throw that magic lasso, girl,’ to a super heroine nobody else can see, it gives your gang a valuable whiff of lunacy. Larry Skunk brings that to the Stinking Pariahs.

  He likes fighting and fights often. After the years of drugs he is as happily deluded as any holy warrior. Knows he is on the side of the angels, and doesn’t need any righteous justification for a fight, because he can hallucinate his own righteous justification in a trice. It might start as an argument over a parking infringement. But anybody who angers Larry Skunk quickly transforms, before his very eyes, into a slavering Hun, a Red Indian warrior, a paedophile, a terrorist, a triceratops … Any one of a cast of monsters is retrievable from his frontal lobe at a moment’s notice.

  These happy metamorphoses mean Larry Skunk never has to feel guilty about chopping down a lollipop man or trouncing a milk-bar owner. He has always defeated a fiend of the most contemptible kind. And when that fiend lies, beaten and groaning, on the ground, Larry Skunk walks away before the delusion clears and before him, once again, is a parking officer or a clumsy motorist. Larry Skunk is happy in his violence. He saves himself and his friends from the clutches of fiends several times each week, and walks proudly through his days.

  This man gives himself the assignment of chaperoning Marcel Leech into the suburbs at night to meet with clients. It’s a minefield of violent incident, babysitting a whore-poof. Right up Larry Skunk’s alley. He enjoys the work – Marcel’s self-deprecating humour, the fifty per cent cut. And it’s a blast coming to Marcel’s aid when things turn sour. A blast to beat up weasel-type faggot clients who become violent or won’t pay. You’ve got to be broadminded, because on the one hand it is, after all, a faggot you’re rescuing. But on the other it’s a faggot you’re beating up. So it’s a nil-all draw on the right/wrong scale. And as far as the drama of the event goes it’s not so different to rescuing a damsel in distress. Sometimes, on good nights, when Larry Skunk is clubbing a client who has misbehaved, Marcel transforms in Larry Skunk’s peripheral vision into a distressed damsel in an ankle-length velvet dress. This gives Larry Skunk a heroic blush. He takes big righteous breaths and stares down on the sprawled malefactor and delivers maxims at him like, ‘A lady tells you to stop, you better stop, Jack.’ Or, ‘You agree on a price, you don’t insult a lady by offering less after the fact.’ Marcel doesn’t mind being called a lady in these circumstances. Truth is, it gives him a thrill being Larry Skunk’s lady, his honour regained in that moment of crisis.

  For Larry Skunk it turns out to be cool to keep a pet as small and disgusting as Michael Jackson, whom everyone abominates. Anyone can ride with a rotty or a pitbull behind. But only a real hard-as-stone outlaw can keep a little homo sidekick crazy enough to be living out a King of Pop fantasy.

  Marcel, too, feels some comfort in the arrangement. He feels safer, at least, under the protection of the Stinking Pariahs. But he is still morbidly depressed about selling his hero as a whore. Seeing his flagging morale, Larry Skunk begins to feed him speedballs. Whenever he picks up Marcel for an assignation he palms him a little aubergine-coloured pill, and when Marcel pops it, for a few hours the significance of the life and times of Michael Jackson shrivel and deflate until that h oofer’s tribulations are no more engaging than the meanderings of a carpet beetle and Marcel knows a delightful ease – before the monstrosity of his predicament comes stampeding back at him … He cries then, uncontrollable tears. Holds his throat and rocks backwards and forwards, racking his brain to find a way to make enough money so he can stop selling Michael as a whore.

  Two days after completing Larry Skunk Monk’s skunk Turton Pym is on his knees about to kiss the new wolverine of Wal Wolverine Symonds. In his shed in Pakenham he leans forwards and tenderly plants one on the snarling animal he has painted onto the fuel tank of a Harley Davidson Fatboy. It burns his lips. ‘Yah. Bitch. Ow.’ He sucks at cold air and looks over his shoulder to confirm he is alone before blowing the wolverine another kiss. He wouldn’t want anyone to know he takes pleasure in airbrushing Harley Davidsons, or that he feels affection for fuel-tank wolverines because they can be started and finished and don’t need to carry the whole impossible weight of Art. When a Stinking Pariah commissions a wolverine he doesn’t want or expect anything but malevolence and outsized fangs. With these moderate expectations Turton finds the fuel-tank wolverine is a wondrous tame creature. There is nothing of the mutiny or ambition in a fuel-tank wolverine that there is in an Archibald Prize PM, who inevitably wants to be something more than simply a PM.

  Turton can paint vicious critters for bikies from dusk till dawn and they never give a yelp or a squirm of rebellion. He finds a deep contentment in the work. No one in the art world has ever been to Pakenham, or will ever go, so there is no danger he’ll be discovered beavering away at wolverines.

  Overhead, enamel-baking lamps crackle as they cool, agitated hydrocarbons swirl about the cigarette between his lips, the air just short of sizzling and catching fire. ‘Wolverine.’ He rolls the word deliciously on his tongue. ‘Wolverine. Wolverine. Wolverine.’ How good it is to paint this free. To be this free. Man is only truly free when hidden away from the world in a huge shed, he tells himself.

  When Wal Wolverine Symonds steps out of the dark into the circle of light cast by the overhead workstation spotlight to pick up his hog, he likes what he sees. He likes what he sees so much he says, ‘Shit, Turds. Wow.’

  ‘So – do you like it?’

  ‘It’s shit-hot, Turds.’ Wal Wolverine Symonds has a beach-ball afro and a black moustache with its ends twisted to points. He is a big man, as loosely leathered and as hair-triggered as a rhino. Forty kilos overweight, if he had had the nickname ‘Wolverine’ legitimately bestowed on him, it must have been years ago. Most likely the president of the Stinking Pariahs had sat him down with a bestiary and told him, ‘Browse. Choose.’ He leans down towards the Harley. ‘Fuckin’ ace.’ He runs his fingers across the newly painted fuel t
ank and when he gets to the bared fangs he says, ‘Ouch’ and pulls his hand away, laughing.

  Wal having paid Turton $500, they settle into chairs and smoke a joint. An odd couple, nervous grey-haired artist and outlaw rhino, they nevertheless are close at this moment. A cosy partnership of artist and patron, they blow smoke and compliment each other at intervals. Wal compliments Turton for his art and Turton Wal for his taste in a happily symbiotic union, each confirming the worth of the other. Wal reaches out every now and then to stroke his new wolverine, saying that Asp Matthews’ asp is going to have to be some fucking asp to top this. Turton observes that asps don’t, generally, offer as great an opportunity for displaying inner psychology as a wolverine. ‘Can’t snarl,’ Wal confirms. ‘Dead eyes.’

  When Harry and Mireille step into the light Wal, thinking these people guests of Turton, is unsurprised. The first of many gorgeous chicks digging his new wolverine, she kneels before the motorbike, close enough for her breath to whiten on its glossy coat. She lays a fingertip on it and marvels at the depth of the glaze, before announcing, ‘Oh, I am head over heels for this otter.’

  ‘Wolverine,’ Wal smiles. ‘Distant cousin. Fiercer, braver. Kills twice its own size.’

  ‘It is so real. It would scare another wolav …’

  ‘Wolverine,’ Wal smiles at her.

  ‘Wolverine. It would scare another wolverine out of the ball park.’

  Harry stands in the outer reach of the light smiling apologetically to Turton, who is quickly on his feet, his face pained, his hands hovering close to his sideboards, staring into the dark to see who else might be hiding there. ‘How did you find me?’