by Chris Knopf
No one bit, preoccupied perhaps with settling into their seats.
“Come on, somebody must know. Fern, Peter, Charles? Are you serious? Amanda?” He looked out at the gathering and shook his head sadly, then popped on a wide grin. “That’s good, because there isn’t such a thing. I made it up. Okay fire up the computer. Let’s see what we’re getting our asses into.”
Without the ski masks and red jumpsuits the group looked like a normal distribution of types. I counted eleven—two girls, one of whom was black, two black men and an Asian guy, I thought Korean or Chinese, and the rest were white men in an assortment of ages and body types, though everyone in the room looked fit and bright eyed. No Evelyn.
The man named Charles worked the laptop and projector. In a moment a stylized image of a metallic finger, slightly curved in the natural way it would, appeared on the screen. It looked like the type of renderings we used to make with an airbrush, now composed on computer with enough shading and detail to look as if someone had lopped off a robot’s middle finger.
“The GF-Double-A,” announced Butch. “The question here before us is not if, but when and how. Or how, and then when, depending on how complicated the how is. Any questions so far?”
“We don’t know how to build it, Butch,” said one of the black guys. “So it’s hard to have any questions yet. Maybe you could give a couple details.”
Heads nodded around the U-shape. Butch looked excited.
“Of course you have questions. My God, how could you not? First some facts. Dione, how big?”
“Thirty-five and a half feet. Thirty-five feet is the height limit zoning puts on residential housing. Let’s see what six inches does to their little heads.”
Smiles and grunts broke out around the room.
“Dione,” said Butch. “What’s it made of?”
“Plate steel. Welded and riveted. Massively heavy so no one can afford to move or destroy it.”
“Edgar, where does it go?
I picked out Edgar from the crowd by his uncomfortable indecision.
“Wherever we want?” he offered.
Butch slapped his pointer on his palm in the style of an impatient field general. Then he pointed it directly at me.
“Our engineering consultant, Sam Acquillo, would like to address that.”
All eyes turned curiously, or maybe hostilely in my direction. There were too many faces to pick out which was which. So I kept my eyes on Butch.
“What do you think it’ll take to get this puppy up in the air?” he asked.
“More than a hydraulic jack. Though you guys make a decent pit crew.”
“Imagination’s more powerful than knowledge,” said the Asian guy.
“Right. Einstein. He also had a lot to say about the kind of energy it takes to control mass, especially within a gravitational field, like the one we got here on earth.”
“Let’s start with earth,” said Butch. “We’ll conquer space in phase two.”
Everybody seemed to like that line. Chatter broke out around the room. They had the easy way about them of a group who’d worked together for a long time. The bond of common purpose, secured by a strong leader in clear control. It would take more than a few minutes to judge all the interplay, but it felt like they’d bought all the way into Butch, happily, if not blindly. The old hands from Boston, Charles and Edgar, closer to my age, were likely lieutenants. The Asian guy, whose name was Scott, was much younger and also spoke with confidence. The young women looked docile, or overwhelmed. But eager. The rest looked like the subcontractors who showed up on Frank’s jobs. Sturdy, with strong hands and work clothes. Lots of scrapes and bruises, the telltales of tough, punishing labor. Edgar, bigger than Charles by at least thirty pounds, had a split lip sewn together with a pair of black stitches.
Butch let things roll along for a while, then pulled the group’s attention back to me.
“Okay,” I said. “First you need a hole at least twice the diameter of the base of the finger, and down about twelve feet, tamped level—likely be sand if you’re talking about the East End. Pour a pad to about six inches above grade with high tensile strength anchor rods set to the depth of the pad. Good quality concrete with lots of rebar.”
“It’ll take a steel fabricator at least a year to form the plates, assuming you can supply the dimensions. Flat steel’s easy, but here you’ll need some precise curving. Very difficult to pull off without sophisticated CAD/CAM, though the French did it in the nineteenth century with the Statue of Liberty. You just have work out the proportionality issues. If it’s going to look like a real human finger, which is almost as wide at the top as at the base, and articulated at two ascending points, you’ll have to cheat the effects of gravity. The steel helps, though I’m not sure what sort of interior framing you’ll need to redistribute the loads. Unless some of you have experience welding up boilers or skyscrapers, you’ll have to bring them in, which raises union issues, which I’m not up on. And a crane, size depending on the weight of the individual sections. All of which assumes you’ve worked out costs, construction permits and catering, none of which is in my purview.”
I sat back and took a sip of my drink. Butch still had the pointer in my direction, which he seemed to realize when I stopped talking. He resumed slapping it on his palm.
“So, it’s basically doable, am I right?” he asked me.
“Sure, anything’s doable that’s been done before. I’m talking the construction, not the idea,” I added quickly, reacting to another of Amanda’s gentle prompts, this time with her knee.
I scanned the faces around the U-shape, hoping to express casual optimism, something that never came naturally to me, though it might have helped me with board members and senior management, who often looked at me with the same vague confusion and disappointment as those gathered in Butch’s Main Hall of the Ancients.
Ever alert to the bummer factor, Dione jumped out of her seat and started distributing fruit from the big market bag. Everyone was equally appreciative of the nourishment and excuse to chatter with each other about something other than the focus of the get-together. As I crunched down on an apple, I looked over at Amanda to check her mood.
“You did fine,” she whispered. “They have to know. Better now.”
Butch waited for the interruption to work its calming effect before re-engaging the group.
“Okay Thoughts.”
It was silent for a few minutes. Butch seemed comfortable letting the dead air sit.
“We should re-evaluate the steel,” said Edgar, finally. “Too limiting in terms of placement and timing.”
“We could simulate the look,” somebody else said. “Make it out of something lighter.”
That started a whirl of commentary around the room that Butch let run on its own.
“But then it’s moveable. Destroyable.”
“Has to be defiant.”
“Subversive.”
“That’s the concept.”
“Steel is a metaphor of industrial exploitation. It’s like a fixed version of Modern Times.”
“The one with Charlie Chaplin.”
“Will take too long. Ruins the element of surprise.”
“What about aluminum?”
“Too space age.”
“No it’s not. It’s like early twentieth century.”
“Flash Gordon.”
“What about the rivets?”
“No rivets.”
“Then we paint it.”
“Flesh color. Like a real finger.”
“Well, then, we’re changing the concept.”
“So what? How about plastic?”
“Still too heavy, I bet.”
“It’s got to be really strong. An act of resistance.”
“Why not go the other way.” I said. “Make it out of ice or tissue paper. Something perishable. Make it about the ephemeral nature of human achievement. The illusion of permanence beloved by authority.”
That immediately ki
lled the chatter. Though I was relieved to see Amanda nodding at me as if both surprised and impressed with my conceptual virtuosity. Not shared by the room, which slowly filled with a leaden silence. But again, Butch seemed content to let the group regain its own bearings.
“That’d really change everything,” said Edgar, kicking things off again.
“Concepts are also ephemeral.”
“We’d be turning an act of disaffection into a throwaway.”
“A. consumable.”
“Temporary art.”
“Isn’t that what Christo does?”
“That’s completely different.”
That set everybody off on a trip through contemporary art theory that quickly left me in the dust. Amanda threw in an observation or two, tentatively, which I was glad no one dismissed without careful review. In fact, I found myself enjoying the flow of commentary around the room, mostly for the collegiality and respect they showed each other, even when asserting contrary points of view. It reminded me of when I’d have a team of engineers on the floor of some steaming production facility trying to root out the cause of an equipment failure, or explain why the results of a bench test were unrepeatable in full scale-up.
“Since our engineering consultant prompted this discussion,” he said, redirecting the group again, “we should ask how he’d execute an ephemera strategy. Sam?”
“I think you’ve equated a heavy steel object with permanence, which it might be symbolically, but not physically. Itd take a long time to create, but a half-day to knock down and cart off. Any commercial demolisher could do it without breaking a sweat. If I understand your objectives right, it doesn’t do the job.”
Butch looked genuinely interested.
“Okay that’s cool. What’re your thoughts?”
“Balloons.”
“Balloons?”
“Lots of them. Not the flimsy kind you blow up for parties, or the things they make for the Macy’s parade, but big like that, same size as your GF-Double-A, but made to look like a real finger. There’re lots of reinforced synthetics that are relatively easy to form into whatever you want, but tough enough to withstand the environment for a long time, and take the air pressure needed to inflate into a standing position. And a lot more affordable, so you could have a bunch of them folded up in the back of pickup trucks. You’d just need a way to anchor the base, and an equal number of compressors running off generators, so you could rapidly deploy them all at the same time, strategically. Or pop them up one at a time, which would be cheaper still. So either way, it’d be a lot easier to pull off, but equally hard for whatever ass you’re intending to shove these up to miss the point, metaphorically speaking of course.”
The room was quiet again for a long time, only this time Butch had the same look of pensive concentration as the others. Amanda was positively beaming at me, out of admiration or relief it was hard to tell. I realized then what a risk she’d taken hauling me to the fundraiser, and then over to Butch’s place. That whenever I looked at her and wondered what mysteries lay hidden beneath the citadel of her cautious reserve she was looking back at me wondering the same thing.
“Motherfucker, I fucking love it,” said Butch, breaking the silence with a sharp smack of the pointer against the big white screen. Dione started clapping, which no one joined in with, but I could see a lot of nodding and grins, producing the fragrance of general agreement.
“Cool,” said Scott. “I can see it.”
“Sure,” said Charles. “Me, too.”
“And we won’t need the WB building,” said Butch, smiling at Amanda. “Is that why you brought him here?”
“Oh, Butch, please,” she said, still too buoyant to take offense.
It took another hour to talk about various technical and logistical considerations. I told them what I could about materials and possible fabricators, and how much they could realistically execute on their own. Most of the discussion involved Edgar, Charlie and Scott, who’d clearly emerged as Butch’s middle management, all of whom had considerable technical education, learned at places like Cal Tech and on the job building Butch’s installations and theater sets. Edgar had even taken some of the same evening courses I’d had at MIT, raising the possibility that we’d sat next to each other in class, though neither of us could remember. I told them I wished I’d had them with me in TS&S, which made them happy, ignoring for a moment they’d have been helping me uphold one of the pillars of authority our current project was intended to defy. The air was thick with collaboration and bonhomie.
The others, all apparently artists-in-training or hangers-on, listened at a safe distance until Butch adjourned the council and invited Amanda and me to stay for dinner. The good vibes aside, I was feeling ready to make a break for it, which Amanda thwarted by immediately accepting the invitation.
“Wonderful. We’ll have fresh bread,” said Dione, herding us out of the Great Hall and back to the house.
In further mockery of social convention, Butch and me and the other boys settled on the screened-in porch with drinks and the women went in to put together the meal.
“You are, like, most definitely the man,” Butch said to me when the others were engaged in a side conversation. “Very cool, the balloon idea.”
“The least I could do for an oil change.”
“You were cool about that, too. I didn’t even know you used to work here. Amanda told me.”
“Selling me out at every step.”
“I downloaded a repair manual on your car from the Internet so we wouldn’t screw anything up. I wouldn’t do that to a man’s car.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “Your guys know what they’re doing.”
“No shit. They’re my sorcerers of technology.”
“Got the cred for it,” I said, invoking Gabe Szwit.
“No shit. Edgar’s a chem engineer, Charles took mechanical.”
“You all came down from Boston?”
“Amanda tell you? Yeah. Edgar and Charlie. Scott’s from the West Coast. Picked him up about ten years ago.”
“Me and Osvaldo,” said Scott, overhearing.
Edgar and Charles stopped their conversation to listen in.
“Hey” said Edgar, with a little bite in his voice.
Scott looked down at his drink.
“Sorry man. We don’t talk about Osvaldo.”
“That’s cool, Scott, no problem,” said Butch. “An Italian dude, from Bologna or something. Had this political thing about art. Too bugged out even for this crowd. Got buggier by the minute.”
“Brilliant dude,” said Scott. “I don’t know what happened.”
“We shunned his ass, like the pilgrims used to do with people caught playing cards, or dancing on Sunday,” said Charles.
“It wasn’t like that,” said Scott.
“Just kidding, man.”
“He was headed someplace else,” said Butch quietly. “I just told him he should go there without us slowing him down. It was all good.”
I felt like it was time for Dione to announce another bummer alert, but she was in the kitchen, so I filled in as best I could.
“I’m ready for another. Anyone else?”
Spirits returned and stayed aloft throughout a giant multi-course dinner, at which all of Dione’s fresh baked loaves of bread were devoured. Bottles of red and white circulated continuously and everyone but Evelyn was eager to jump in and out of the zigzag of conversation that seemed a feature of the gang’s interaction. She was civil enough, but to my sorrow I easily recognized the situation. Amanda tried to engage her a few times, with some success, but it looked like her prime objective was to get some nourishment and then get the hell out of there.
In the Grand Prix on the way back Amanda entertained me with a description of how Dione prepared the meal, in succulent detail, adding to the feeling of satiation.
“So what did you men talk about out on the porch?” she asked. “I’m guessing not baseball or the stock market.”
“Reliving old times in Boston.”
“It’s amazing to think they’ve been together for so long.”
“Lot of ways to make a living.”
“A handsome one, if you go by Butch’s bank statements, which I already said I can’t reveal, so don’t ask.”
“Then quit bringing it up.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be so voyeuristic about it, but it’s impressive when you think how hard it is for artists to make money, much less a whole lot of money”
“So I guess Osvaldo really screwed the pooch.”
“I guess so. I only met him a few times. Seemed just like the rest of them, only with a very nice Italian accent to go with a beautiful Italian face. And athletic build.”
“Quit being so negative.”
“You think Butch doesn’t talk about him, don’t even bring up the name around Dione. Unless you want to see all that kumbaya, love and brotherhood go right out the window.”
“They said he got too radical politically, quite an accomplishment.”
“That’s what I heard, but I never saw it.”
“Too distracted.”
“I’d say the same about you, except for the accent. Maybe not the face either, but you are athletic.”
“Tell me more about how Dione made the crème brûlée.”
Eddie was over at Amanda’s house when we pulled into our common drive. So much for loyalty. She made it worse by giving him another Big Dog biscuit. I might have protested, but she had a reward in mind for me as well, and being as susceptible to placation as the next guy, I acquiesced without further comment.
TWENTY-TWO
Tom split, creep. New sublet. Balcony! Hours long, pay short. So what else is new. Tom split, boo. Oh shit, if you really want to know.
SHE INCLUDED the address of her new place in type so tiny I needed a magnifying glass to read it. Allison liked to do tricky things like this with her computer, but I saw some significance in the act of diminishing the move. Or maybe I was projecting my own anxiety on her behalf. Or maybe I’d been overexposed lately to symbolism and metaphor.
