Miles Walker, You're Dead

by Linda Jaivin

  I was not interested in discussing the merits, such as they were, of Wollongong. My mind was very much on the box of slides in my hand. I handed it to Trimalkyo.

  ‘Let’s see vat you huff brought me, hey?’ He fed the slides slowly into the projector, which was set up on a table next to his chair.

  Winking at me, Oscar went off to make the coffees. I could feel my legs shaking, though I wasn’t sure if it was the jitters or if Gaea was pinching a nerve in my thigh.

  ‘Zo,’ Trimalkyo began, still feeding in the slides, ‘Tell me somesink more about yourself. Vat motivates you. Vy you are an arteest-o.’

  My mind went as blank as a Robert Ryman painting. The topic of myself, my motivation and my art was something to which I devoted much—some might even say excessive—thought. But, for the life of me, I could not at this moment imagine what conclusions I’d drawn. I stared at him, panic-stricken. Up close, his smooth, fair skin had the finely wrinkled quality of a deflating balloon.

  Oscar spared me further embarrassment by entering with a tray on which were three thimbles of espresso and a plate of pistachio biscotti. As Trimalkyo reached for his coffee, I noticed the square, spade-like shape of his hands, not unlike mine, which I supposed explained our common ability to do one-handed rollies.

  ‘Let me tell you somesink. Zere are three types of talent-o.’ Trimalkyo stared hard into my eyes as he spoke. ‘A, B und C. Ze As are za geniuses. Zey know zat, everyone else know zat. Bs are good, but zey are not As. Zey know zat, everyone else know zat. Cs, zey are not so good. Problem is, zey are only ones who don’t know zat. Zey sink zey’re As.’ With this observation, or caveat, or whatever it was, he held up the projector’s remote control and pressed the button.

  Trimalkyo’s little speech had done nothing for my self-confidence. With the first ca-chink of a slide dropping into the little bay, my stomach rose into my throat and then pushed its way towards my ears. Looking at the colourful images projected on the screen, all I could see were glaring errors of shading or proportion, inadequacies of composition. I wanted to drink my coffee but I was afraid I’d be unable to swallow. My cup clattered back down on the saucer. Ca-chink. I saw how hopelessly self-referential my art was. Ca-chink. Projected on the screen in this room, the subject matter of death seemed trite. Christ. What was I thinking?

  More relevantly, what were Oscar and Trimalkyo thinking? I could scarcely bring myself to look at their faces and, when I did, I found Oscar’s brow furrowed in what looked to me like dismay. Trimalkyo’s expression was unreadable. Ca-chink. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was a C who thought he was an A. I leapt to my feet with the intention of leaving, taking with me a few final shreds of dignity. Hasta la vista, baby, and all that. I was out of there.

  In my haste to decamp, I neglected to take account of Gaea’s topological terrain. Designed to resemble the stump of a tree, it featured low twisting roots that dribbled away from the base. As I strode out, my foot connected with one of these, and I flew forwards, my arms reaching out just in time to break my fall. My palms landed like miniature aquaplanes on a sea-green scatter rug which rippled forward over the floorboards. I thus found myself stretched out on my stomach with my face to the floor and my arms extended in front of me, fingertips just inches from the tips of Trimalkyo’s shiny Italian shoes, in the classic supplicant posture of the kowtow.

  ‘Very moofing gesture, but most unnecessary.’ Trimalkyo sounded amused. ‘I like your verk very much. I’d like to invite you to ‘ave a show mit us as soon as ees feasible. Perhaps eef you vill recover za vertical, zen we can talk beesknees. Are you eenterested?’

  Giggling, Oscar offered me a hand. ‘You tickle me with feathers, girlfriend.’

  I winced. The skin of my palms stung and my face was hot with embarrassment. I scrambled awkwardly to my feet. ‘I…I really don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Well, “yes” would be a good start,’ prompted Oscar. ‘I told you he was fab,’ he said to Trimalkyo, clapping his hands in delight. ‘And I discovered him.’

  They looked at each other and then back at me. Trimalkyo nodded at Oscar.

  Oscar bit his collagen-enhanced lower lip and cleared his throat. ‘There’s just one condition…’

  Trimalkyo and I shook hands, and Oscar gave me a peck on the cheek. He slipped me an envelope that rustled when I took it. The door closed behind me and, as I strolled up towards Oxford Street, I breathed in the calming scents of Paddington’s rampant gardens. Wisteria, jasmine, roses and chocolate…I was passing a specialty cake and truffles shop. The window display consisted of an edible version of the Book of Nostradamus and a caramel asteroid crashing into a mint chocolate earth. I found some change in my pocket and, adding it up, realised I could either catch a bus or buy one handmade chocolate.

  I chose a truffle with a dark and bittersweet centre. Just like me.

  As I turned up Burke Street towards Surry Hills, I paused for a moment to consider the sign on a pub door: ‘The Judgment Bar.’ That’d be right. I’d be judged, for sure. ‘Just one condition…’ I needed a drink, but I had no more money. Then I remembered the envelope. By the time I came out of the bar, it was dark.

  Fuck doubt. Fuck what other people thought. The world was changing. I was going to have an exhibition. It was going to be brilliant. The critics would love it. I was going to be famous. I was going to achieve, at last, the recognition I craved. Success without compromise? Not quite. But at least I’d be around to savour it.

  I visualised the exhibition. The paintings would be hung just perfectly, a dozen or so large canvases anchoring the show, counterpointed by smaller studies and drawings.

  The opening would be first-rate. None of that cask wine in plastic cups. Proper wine. In bottles. Proper glasses. There’d be collectors with fat chequebooks, beautiful women in sleek black dresses, cute young girls with sparkles on their cheeks, and critics like Jean-Paul d’Esdaigne. My breath caught. What would the reviews be like? Would they be able to perceive the eternal narratives in my work, the wry classical references, the way I interrogate tradition even as I draw on it, the sophistication yet playfulness…

  Brakes screeched. The red-faced cab driver was leaning out the window and shaking his hammy fist at me. ‘If brains were Vegemite, mate,’ he spluttered, ‘you wouldn’t have enough to part yer hair.’

  ‘You’re mixing metaphors,’ I pointed out, cocky from the great imaginary reviews I was receiving.

  Another car honked. ‘Multiculturalist!’ the driver cursed.

  Hurrying up Cleveland Street, I returned in my mind to the opening. My friends would be there too of course, scruffy and attitudinal and drinking all the free piss they could—just the way Oscar described them that first day we met. Or would they? Despite the balmy evening air, I felt a chill.

  All my daydreaming about the exhibition, I realised, was a way of avoiding thinking about the rest of the bargain. Tomorrow wasn’t very far away.

  I needed to talk to ZakDot. He’d understand. Either that, or he’d dissuade me from doing this crazy thing before it was too late.

  Pushing open the door to the warehouse, I was greeted with the sight of Thurston flapping his arms and dancing about the lounge in a tunic made of overlapping tabs of leather. Around each row of tabs was tied a strip of cotton. He was gritting his teeth and chanting ‘dretch dretch dretch dretch dretch’. He didn’t notice me come in until I was practically on top of him, at which point he treated me to a grin so cheesy I could’ve grated it.

  ‘Thurston. What are you doing? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘I’m shaping my klibanion,’ he replied, with a peculiar mixture of pride and embarrassment. ‘It’s hot,’ he added, puffing with exertion. ‘Just hardened the lamellae in the oven, so they’re still a bit warm.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I know you must think I’m a bit of a knar,’ he said, his feet now still but his hands fanning away.

  ‘Nar,’ I said. ‘Where are the others?’

 
; ‘Maddie’s band’s playing at Club Apocalypso. ZakDot and Sativa went along as well. Didn’t they tell you about it?’

  I’d forgotten about Maddie’s gig. I’d promised to go. Maybe I could talk to ZakDot there. I tossed my stuff on my bed and raced out the door and back to Surry Hills.

  Performance art (with police)

  Lynda Tangent opened the underground Club Apocalypso after she closed the Triangle Factory. She didn’t have any more teaching to do, as we were the last class to graduate before Clean Slate closed all the art schools. She funded the club with the money she’d earned from those triangles I’d slashed.

  I will give her this: she put a lot more effort into the club than she’d ever put into her art. She covered the walls with wallpaper patterned to look like a cityscape. Then she ripped and scorched the wallpaper and onto its scarified surface painted the shadows of burnt trees and melted bicycles.

  Artwork leaned against the wall here and there or lay tossed in corners as though abandoned by fleeing refugees. The imagery was sexual, decadent. Not a triangle in sight. It complemented the smell of sweat and sex and cigarettes that swept over me in waves as I made my way through Little Hiroshima to Hieronymous Hall (the names of the rooms were written in neon) and towards the Armageddon Room, where Cellulite Death were thrashing away at their instruments.

  In Hieronymous Hall, Titian McLesion, the rumpled master of hard-edged abstraction, leaned against the wall pontificating to a dewy-eyed young groupie, one of the sort that flocked to clubs like this hopeful of picking up artists, not believing their luck when it happened, not realising just how easy it was. It always had been very easy to pick up artists. Titian taught me for one term at art school. I waved, but he looked straight through me. I thought that was weird until I noticed he was wearing a badge with the symbol of the painters’ strike: like a no-smoking sign, except there was a paintbrush under the red slash. The strike had been a wild success. Call me cynical, but I think most of my fellow painters embraced it as the best excuse for not working they’d ever come across. As I’ve mentioned, painting had a credibility problem long before Destiny came along. If my peers were going to snub me for not joining the strike, fuck ‘em. I was moving on.

  I remembered what I’d come for. Where was ZakDot?

  I searched the dimly lit room. In one corner, the comedian Mannick de Press slumped in a chair picking at his fingernails while Cynthia Mopely talked at him with excessive brightness. As it were. In another, a baseball-capped fellow with a video camera interviewed some Koori elders. I was momentarily distracted by the sight of a striking Asian woman holding forth to a gaggle of young artists while wearing nothing but clingwrap and a few Christmas decorations. I recognised her from photos. Kaneko Itedaku: the post-zen, post-scatter artist superstar whose work consisted of raking gravel over the lawns of modern art museums or standing naked in dark rooms while sushi menus and Japanese porn flicks were projected on her body.

  Before the arts had been driven underground, few famous international artists like Kaneko ever bothered visiting our country. Now they flocked here to thrill at the illicit atmosphere of clubs like this one and to experience vicariously the thrill of persecution. We were particularly popular with artists from countries that used to be communist, for whom there was an added element of nostalgia. Wherever they came from, they’d raise glasses filled with our excellent beers and fine wines, making toasts to artistic solidarity, and fly out again feeling good about themselves. Their concern for our plight could be predicted to grow to a near-frenzy from November to March, when the climate of the little country was particularly welcoming. It was early December now, high season for the tourists of oppression.

  I spotted Sativa, looking sensationally bored even as she held a brace of visiting French post-trans-avant-gardists in her thrall. I passed, unnoticed or ignored, through Hieronymous Hall and into the Armageddon Room. A big presence on the small stage, Maddie stomped her feet and slashed at the air with her hands as she bellowed out the lyrics to Nixon Bates’ ‘Plinth’. Nixon Bates was another classmate of ours; last I heard, he’d become a punk rock star in the Czech Republic.

  Klimt’s extinct and Dali’s gone and Picasso can’t be found

  And the only way that you’ll find Klee is digging in the ground

  Ad Reinhardt to the artists that are never coming back

  He’s finally found a place to rest that’s very square and black

  Girls in skimpy summer gear pogoed in front of the stage, tits jiggling, heads bouncing as if on springs. Boys in tshirts and pants, either so tight they were endangering the future of the species or so baggy they were hanging halfway down their cracks, jumped about punching their fists into the air. ZakDot was in the midst of it, platform boots giving him an even greater advantage in the height stakes. I watched him dance with something that felt like longing. I was terrified of losing his friendship once I told him what I had agreed to do.

  No longer missed misogynist Willem de Kooning

  Georgia O’Keefe is underneath the graveyard flowers blooming

  No more exists the Dadaists and fish bowl final score

  Magritte is beneath our feet and Warhol is no more

  Fishing out a beer from the tub filled with ice by the door, I rehearsed my case. Saying no to Trimalkyo would mean forfeiting my only chance to exhibit in the gallery I’d always dreamed of showing in. Eventually, of course, I wanted to have shows in places like New York and London, but I didn’t want anyone to say I couldn’t make it at home first. I’d be foolish to throw away this opportunity. Wouldn’t I?

  Lichtenstein liked comic books and Pollock was just messy

  But they got respect and healthy cheques from Mr Jean Paul Getty

  Mr Jean Paul Getty…

  Sweat was running down Maddie’s face and neck and plastering her t-shirt to her chest.

  The song evoked an era that was, as ZakDot would say, ‘so over’. I was launching myself into the era that was about to be.

  And if you say you haven’t heard about the semiotic word

  And exactly what it means in this postmodernist dream

  And if you don’t know where you stand

  And if you find blank canvas bland

  Then you just don’t understand

  You just don’t understand

  It’s hard to believe that all this happened only about a month ago. Looking around me that night, I felt weirdly sentimental, as if I knew that it would be the last time I’d ever see most of these people, or be part of the scene.

  As if I had ever truly been part of it. I mean, I didn’t understand blank canvas.

  I could no longer wait. I made my way across the dance floor to ZakDot, bouncing a little on my heels so as not to seem too out of place but too self-conscious to let loose and dance. ‘Hey, Miles.’ He shouted over the din of the band. ‘“Boogie on down”.’ I was relieved to see he air-quoted this phrase.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’ I shouted in his ear. ZakDot slugged back the rest of my beer as he followed me to the other end of the room. ‘What’s happening?’

  The guy with the video camera loomed up. ‘Yeah, what’s happening?’ he repeated.

  ‘A private conversation.’

  ‘All discourse is public,’ replied the video-meister, his finger still on the record button. ‘In a sense.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘In a sense.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Mind repeating that? I want to get a close up.’

  ‘How many times,’ I growled, ‘do we have to flush before you go away?’ Young Antonioni shrugged and moved off to where Kaneko Itedaku was slowly unwinding her clingwrap.

  ‘I love it when you talk tough,’ ZakDot purred. He was still bouncing to the music.

  ‘ZakDot. I need to talk to you. It has to do with painting.’

  ZakDot blew out his cheeks. His eyes flickered back towards the dance floor. ‘I mean, sorry, Miles, I know the whole world revolves around the application of pigmen
t on canvas, but this is a party.’ He started to do his John Travolta imitation. Then he stopped and stared over my shoulder in the direction of the band with a funny expression on his face.

  ‘You don’t understand, ZakDot,’ I pleaded. ‘This is important. Look at me.’ ZakDot’s eyes were glued to the room behind me.

  ‘You’re not even listening to me.’ My shrill complaint rang out into what I noticed was a sudden hush. I swivelled around.

  The members of the band, along with everyone in the room, stared at the foyer. About a dozen police stared back, their hands on their gun holsters. A raid. One of them prodded an artwork with his toe, a knitted vagina fitted with dentures. The dentures chattered; he drew a bead on them. My hair stood on end.

  ‘PIGS!’ Maddie broke the silence. Everyone wheeled about to look at the stage. Satisfied she had the complete attention of the room, Maddie reached into her boot and drew out what looked like a Colt .45. Within an instant, the police were ranged around her, Smith & Wessons aimed at her head. Their leader told her to lower her weapon. My breath caught in my throat and my knees slammed together. The next few seconds seemed to stretch out into infinity. The only sound was a just-audible whimpering of some theoreticians and the slight hum of the amps. Maddie laughed her beautiful laugh, raised her head and drew her gun in an arc until it was pointed at the ceiling. She fired, shooting out a thick stream of water and letting it splash down on her upturned face and into her open mouth.

  Some of the girls started to ululate and the boys whooped and hooted. The cops looked around, uncertain what to do next, when the video guy bounded up to them and started filming. They shook their heads and tried to escape him at first, but he was persistent, and in the end they were mugging for the camera, striking James Bond poses with their guns. Kaneko Itedaku knelt in front of them begging to be handcuffed. Mannick de Press leaned on their shoulders, making donkey’s ears above their caps with his fingers. Gabe worked a ‘D’ into frame. It was all rather jolly, really, until Maddie let off the smoke bomb.

  In the coughing and screaming and general confusion that followed, I saw Gabe take a hopeless swing at a policeman with his D, following which he was pounced on, handcuffed and led out. I could just make out Lynda Tangent arguing with the sergeant. I was disoriented, my eyes were watering and my lungs felt like they’d been tarred and feathered. Someone placed the fans near the windows and the smoke began to disperse. I cast about for Maddie and ZakDot, but both seemed to have disappeared.