Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  The implications are obvious. Even my father, the fucking drunk, the loser who didn’t have a damn clue how much of a loser he was, would have smacked me up side the head if had woken up and heard me reciting that one. Being able to recognize when people are talking about us, even when they aren’t actually talking about us, is what separates us from animals like Buck.

  Bully for us.

  CIII

  The museum sucked. I think we all pretty much agreed on that. What didn’t suck was our lunch at BIG BAD HAMBURGERS and our trip to the observation deck at the top of the city’s tallest building. Even the chaperone, a young, pretty, just-out-of-university arts teacher was wowed more by the view up there than she was by the museum. At three hours, the museum tour was too short for an arts fan, and too long for a bunch of kids whose idea of great art was touched-up teen-mag posters of Ricky Schroeder or a floppy-breasted Miss October centrefold. The guide led us past all the biggies: Picasso’s red and blue massacres-on-canvas — Guernica and The Rape of the Sabine Women; Jackson Pollock’s twisted wire and greasepaint drippings with twigs and bits of garbage thrown in for that extra dazzle; the wan and insipid masterpieces of that wan and insipid eunuch, Warhol. I don’t know what the arts teacher, or even the principal of our school, was thinking when they took us to the Modern Art Museum. Kids can’t figure that stuff out. Hell, adults can’t figure that stuff out. I’ve been there since, in an attempt to cultivate myself, and I think that the basic problem with most of the art of the Consumeristic Period is that it makes no attempt to communicate.

  Anything.

  To anybody.

  That was Gertrude Stein’s problem too, with her “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” garbage. This, in and of itself, wouldn’t be so bad. What makes it bad is that all of us are too afraid to say that Jackson Pollock’s garbage is really garbage. All of us are afraid to be called stupid. So we spend millions of dollars on some loser’s artistic abortion and make him a legend. Then we donate it to one of the big museums so some kid on a school trip can say to his teacher, speaking for everybody else in the world, “What kind of drugs was this guy on, anyway?”

  Except for one notable exception. The thing that made me want to be a writer.

  It was in one of the smaller low-lit side rooms to the left of a long hallway. The guide, who was getting tired of all the smart-ass comments and rushing us past everything but the Pollocks and Picassos and Warhols, hadn’t bothered to stop. I would never have seen it if I hadn’t bent to tie my shoe and got behind the group. It was in a room by itself, but there was no big write-up, no big fanfare. Probably some museum collector had taken a liking to it, bought it, and set it in there as a kind of private obsession, not to be included on the regular tour. As soon as I saw it, I got it. This sucker communicated. Boy, did it ever. Even from a distance I saw what it was about. This was before I even knew what it was called. My sneakers making just the tiniest squeak on the ceramic tiled floor, the laughs and shouts of my classmates fading as they retreated further into the bowels of the great museum, I approached it slowly, cautiously, like it was a holy thing.

  It was simple, really. A plaster of Paris base set on a column about waist-high. The base was rough hewn — deliberately scored — the usual Consumeristic Period inattention to detail and obsession with the unfinished look. No matter. Above the base were hands. Life-sized, three-dimensional, sculpted white plaster of Paris hands cut off expertly at the wrist. Each hand seemed to float magically above the base. I peeked under and saw that each was supported by a thin metal band connecting it to the column below.

  If you were standing up like you were supposed to, the hands looked like they were unsupported, just floating there above the base. And like real hands, these hands were doing all sorts of things — shaking with each other, palms up begging for money, balled into a fist, beckoning forward, palm out telling whoever stood there to go away. One hand was touching the top of another hand, like they were in love. Another was flipping the bird. They were doing everything that human hands can do.

  Over all the other hands, the highest, supported by another of those thin metal wires, was the hand that got to me. This hand was pointing — accusingly, angrily, index finger straight as an arrow, thumb and other fingers folded stubbornly away — at whoever happened to be looking at it. I glanced at the bronze plaque fastened to the front of the base. I hardly needed to. I had counted the hands and had been to Sunday school. There were thirteen of them, including the topmost hand. The name of the work was The Hand of Judas.

  I didn’t know exactly what it meant to me then. All I knew was that it meant something. I would grow into the intellectualizing and theorizing later. Sometimes I think that all our high-blown theories, all our wry thoughts and award-winning arguments are just elaborate justifications for that which we already know, for that which has always had meaning for us, before we could start questioning it. That’s the way I have always felt about The Hand of Judas. I stood in front of that little-known sculpted masterpiece, my legs shaking, my breath caught in my throat, feeling an incredible joy in my stomach and a massive weight in my bowels. It was only later that I came up with a theory to explain it.

  The Hand of Judas, like all good art, told me what I already knew. I was both Judas and the man he pointed at. I was both the observer and the observed, the artist and the object, all crammed into one. There is no evil but that which we create and that which we allow to happen. Only a thirteen-year-old kid with a drunken loser for a father and a life that existed pretty much between the covers of books could know so completely what it meant to be both the betrayer and the betrayed.

  CIV

  June went apeshit over Easter. Dawes told me all the retards love Easter, even more than they love Christmas. Probably because of all that chocolate, which, according to the nurses, they sometimes eat so much of that they throw up these cocoa-coloured horrors in the middle of the night. What fun!

  Only one problem. June was as allergic to chocolates as I was to apricots. Even more so. One bite of chocolate, so the nurses told me, and June’s face, arms and hands would swell up like the chest of an Austrian nationalist during a heartfelt rendition of “Edelweiss.” So the Easter Bunny brought June carob instead of chocolate. Of course, after she finished all her carob June would, inevitably, manage to bum some real chocolate from her fellow inmates who weren’t allergic; she would be swollen and have trouble breathing by dinnertime, and in all likelihood would have to make a trip to the infirmary later that night. Every year the nurses tried to stop her, and every year June managed to get by them and lay her hands on some of the real stuff.

  In this respect, I could see some resemblance between June and her cokehead younger brother.

  Anyway. When I visited June at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope on Easter Sunday, I brought carob. I spent the whole of Saturday looking for some in the shape of an Easter Bunny. I couldn’t find anything, but one speciality store did have a carob statue in the shape of Brigham Young. (Besides believing in polygamy and that North American Indians are the lost tribe of Israel, the Mormons don’t drink coffee, smoke tobacco, or eat chocolate. Ideologically speaking, they make the Salvation Army look like the Hell’s Angels.) I bought the carob statue and told June that it was the Easter Bunny’s younger brother.

  “Easter Bunny’s Bubby!” shouted a delighted June.

  Her attachment to “Bunny Bubby” was short lived. Even with carob, chocolate’s goody-two-shoes-younger brother, June was a total pig. Without any hesitation, she proceeded to eat the head off Brigham Young. In just ten minutes she had carob smeared all over her hands and face, and was looking up with this big idiotic smile on her face. I made her leave “Bunny Bubby” and go to the bathroom and clean up a little. While she was gone, I broke a piece off the decapitated Brigham and tried it. It tasted like shit.

  Poor fucking June. She might have been retarded, but she wasn’t stupid. No wonder she went looking for the real thing before the day was half over, even
if it did make her swell up like a Polish sausage. When June came back, having only smeared the chocolate further over her arms and face, she went at Brigham until she had pretty much demolished him. I felt nauseated just watching her. She left me with hardly a word, looking for real chocolate, and I left the Sisters to go to work.

  CV

  Easter at the Salvation Army is a lot less fun than at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope. The clients, and whatever RAs are unlucky enough to be on duty, spend most of Friday night in the chapel listening to the gory details of how Christ was nailed to the cross, who shoved whose sword through His side, who grabbed at His feet, and all that depressing jazz. On Sunday we went back to the same chapel to hear how Christ got so bored with being dead that He got up and wandered out of His tomb after only two days.

  Bully for Him.

  If it is at all possible, if anyone will switch shifts with me or if I can influence the woman who draws up the schedule with promises of flowers and future marriage, I avoid Easter and other religious holidays at the Cocaine Corral. All the clients are poked and prodded and cajoled into trudging over to the chapel at the men’s shelter next door in a great ecumenical herd. The trouble starts almost immediately after dinner, when some guys claim food poisoning and lie groaning in their beds when I come to make sure they are getting ready. I make them get up and go anyway. No one skips chapel, no matter how sick they are. Like group therapy and morning encounters, it is a nonnegotiable part of the program — attendance is required. When I first started working here it was made clear to me that Resident Assistants had to go if they were working on Sunday night or a religious holiday.

  “But I’m not a Christian,” I said. “And I never go to church.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I was told. “It’s required of all RAs, regardless of their beliefs. It sets a good example for the guys.”

  “But isn’t that illegal? You can’t make people attend a chapel just because they work for you. Doesn’t that break some kind of freedom of religion law?”

  “It breaks a whole bunch of them. You still have to go. You don’t have to sing, or read, or even pay attention if you don’t want to. You can sit in the back and think of whatever you want, as long as you look like you’re paying attention, are quiet, and are not disruptive.”

  I could have made a case of it, I suppose. I could have taken them to the Supreme Court for violation of my freedom of religion. But I didn’t have the energy. Also I needed the job. And the stories. So, whenever I worked on Sunday night or Easter or any other holiday I went to chapel just like all the other poor oppressed addicts robbed of their right to worship in the church of their choice. I didn’t sit in the back because all the rummies off the street sat in the back and most of them stank so bad you were praying your ass off for absolution by the end of the service. I sat up in front, with the treatment guys, and left the rummies, who were allowed in as long as they were not disruptive, alone in the rear. No matter how down and out we are there is still a hierarchy, even in the supposed house of God.

  Losers who know they’re losers up front. Losers who don’t know they’re losers in back. No chocolate. No Easter bunnies. Not even any carob in the shape of evangelical religious fanatics.

  In the Salvation Army, Easter is a serious fucking holiday.

  As the chaplain said first thing that night, “He is risen.”

  And as I answered back silently in my head, “Halle-fuckinglujah.”

  CVI

  Dagnia said, “Let’s make it interactive.”

  What she meant was, now that she knew me better and had told me the truth, let’s skip the written reports. Let’s be friends. Let’s talk every night on the phone while I was at work. What she really meant was that she couldn’t afford to pay me the hundred dollars anymore. The Dagnia gravy train had derailed, at least for me — unless of course I was to develop brain cancer.

  I reminded her that she never did tell me why her brother didn’t want to see her again.

  “It’s complicated,” she said.

  What human affair isn’t?

  “Okay,” I said. “But he hasn’t even told me about his illness yet, so how can I possibly convince a guy I hardly know that he should go to chemotherapy and be a good little boy?”

  “Be a guardian angel,” Julie said. “Be a good human being. Watch out for my little brother for me. Please?”

  It was hard to resist the wily charms and tricky machinations of Julie Jekyll and Dagnia Hyde. We spent hours on the phone while I was at work, after lights out and bed check. No small feat for two people who supposedly didn’t like each other. We got to that point when two people on the phone will talk about silly, everyday things, or nothing at all. I’d hold the phone to my ear and write in the RA log and sometimes forget she was even there. Dagnia would work on her English as a second language lessons for the next day.

  “The young executive is blank by ambition,” she read to me. “The old lady was blank to the store by her son. The husband had blank his wife crazy with all his money-making schemes.

  Name the one verb that can be substituted for all of these blanks.”

  As ashamed as I was to admit it, I didn’t know. I was fortunate that I already lived in this country and spoke fluent English, or else I’d never have passed Dagnia’s course and been ready to write my citizenship exam. I didn’t even know all the words to the national anthem.

  “Don’t be daft,” said Dagnia. “It’s ‘driven.’ Driven by ambition. Driven crazy. Driven to the store. It’s not that hard, is it?”

  “Not once you know the answer. Nothing is that hard once you know the answer.”

  “Can you tell me how he looks? Is he eating anything at all? He doesn’t eat enough. He should be eating all kinds of greens, but he hates them.”

  “I don’t know what he’s eating,” I said. “We went out for pizza once, so I know he’s eating pizza.”

  “What kind of pizza?”

  “The gourmet kind. Spiced Thai chicken, sour cream, and peppercorns.” There is no such thing as plain pizza anymore. Mushroom and pepperoni are as blank to pizza as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez are blank to prime-time television.

  Passé.

  “Doesn’t sound very healthy,” said Dagnia. “Next time you go out, insist on a salad bar.”

  “I hate salad bars. If I had three tons of iceberg lettuce oxidizing under a Plexiglas sneeze-guard, I’d put up an ‘all-youcan-eat-sign’ too.”

  “You’re not dying of brain cancer.”

  “I won’t be dying of starvation either. I’ll eat where I want to eat.”

  “Okay,” Julie said. “No salad bars. Just invite him down to dinner once in a while and cook something healthy, will you?”

  “Are you going to be paying for that? I’m not feeding all of Lime Street, you know.”

  Julie started giggling. Dagnia never giggled. “You sound so churlish and childish when you get mad.”

  “Yeah,” I said humourlessly. “Whatever. Listen, I gotta go, okay? Time for bed check.”

  “Call me when you’re finished. I’ll be up.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Four hours a night. Max.”

  That, I thought as I hung up the phone and picked up the ring of bunched house keys, explained one helluva lot.

  CVII

  Coincidence, say the wise ones at the Sally Ann Treatment Centre, is God’s way of maintaining his anonymity. So what, say I. If God was so concerned about keeping everything hush-hush, he shouldn’t have written the Bible, or the Koran, or the Vedas, or the I Ching, or the Talmud, or whatever else they blame him for. As a kid in Sunday school I knew there was something wrong for this guy to have been so active for two thousand years and then nothing. Not a peep. God is like a guy who starts out telling a really great story and then just gets tired of it and fills in the last bits with loosely related incidentals and half-assed conclusions. “Oh, you know. There’ll be this really great ending. I’ll send my Son back, or the Hindus
will be right and we’ll live in this really neat place called Nirvana. Just don’t ask me when. Or how. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  And then, nineteen-hundred-and-some years later, everyone gets really pissed off when Nietzsche For Dummies comes along and says God is dead. Shoot the fucking messenger, why don’t you? What Nietzsche was really trying to say, being as human and confused and just a little bit smarter than the rest of us, was this (paraphrased, of course): I can forgive God His cruelty. I can forgive God His indifference. I can even forgive Him His absolute bloody-minded insistence on making everyone else pay for His mistakes, over and over again.

  What I cannot forgive God is His silence.

  So let’s just kill the bastard and move on, shall we?

  Peace, brother.

  CVIII

  These are the things that I will miss from the last part of the twentieth century, great discarded legacies of the Consumeristic Period:

  1. The Avon lady, daily glass-bottle milk deliveries, the Fuller brush man and door-to-door Electrolux salesmen.

  2. Homemade ice cream and popsicles, Popeye cigarettes, and Moonrocks — a candy that fizzes and pops in your mouth due to some chemical reaction when combined with saliva. (Every day I wait to hear a Surgeon General’s announcement of some bizarre cancer showing up in men and women my age who ate a lot of Moonrocks when they were kids.)

  3. My mother’s Tupperware parties where nobody ever bought any Tupperware. (Want to know how obsolete Tupperware is, even if they do still sell it? My spell-as-you-go word processor puts a big red slash under the word when I type it in. Doesn’t recognize the word. Let me try: Nintendo. No problems. No red slash. See?)

  4. Three’s Company, The Dukes of Hazzard, Mork and Mindy, Dallas, Friday Night Videos, Good Times, The Edge of Night, The Jeffersons, Bewitched, and The Waltons. (The TV show list goes on and on. I’ll spare you.)