Electroboy

by Andy Behrman

  One of the painters at Kostabi World, Annike Brandt, has a particular interest in me. She is a petite German with frizzy red hair, ashen skin, an elfin grin, and an infectious laugh. She often hangs around my office talking about art and films. She is a conceptual and performance artist, who works under the pseudonym Lore Schopf. She seems interested in the sales aspect of my job—targeting a gallery, making a sale, and closing the deal. One day she casually and quietly asks me if I’d like to have a drink with her at the corner bar up the street, a place nobody from Kostabi World frequents. We make a plan to meet the next evening at 6:30, and for some reason I feel a nervous flutter in my stomach.

  I arrive at the bar about fifteen minutes late because I’m closing a deal with a German dealer who is planning a big opening exhibition and party for Mark. Annike sits alone drinking a screwdriver. I see her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There is a stool next to her and a screwdriver on the bar waiting for me. I thank her for the drink and apologize for being late. She asks me a little bit about my day while she puffs away on a cigarette. I notice how small her hands are, how covered with paint. As usual, she complains about the general working conditions at Kostabi World—the late paychecks, the long hours, the vile art, and Mark’s childishness. I nod in agreement. She complains about the time clock that Mark makes the employees use when they come and go—but she’s figured out a way to beat the system: employees just take turns punching in and out for one another. We have a few good laughs over the lousy art—she is just completing a painting of a faceless figure playing golf. The Japanese love this stuff. We do a lot of custom painting jobs for dealers and buyers: tell us what you want us to paint, we’ll Kostabi-ize it! The bar is starting to fill up with people from the neighborhood, and Annike moves closer to me. Then the tone of the conversation takes a serious turn, and I become a little concerned. Annike looks down slightly and begins speaking softly. “I’ve been watching you for several months,” she tells me. “And I feel comfortable that I can finally trust you.” My hands shake with anxiety. I need another drink. I order another round of screwdrivers from the bartender. Annike tells me that she dislikes Kostabi very much for what he is doing in the art world and wants to play a small joke on him. “Are you interested?” she asks. “It depends. What kind of a joke is it?” She asks me first how I feel about him. I explain that he’s my employer but I think that I had made it clear to her during our previous conversations that I think he’s a fool. She looks around the bar for a few seconds and then explains to me a scheme she’s been thinking about for months. “This is between the two of us,” she warns me. “It goes no further.” I accept her conditions. She explains that she will paint reproductions of Kostabi’s work and sign them, and I will sell them to foreign dealers. “Are you talking about painting fakes?” I ask her. “You want me to sell fakes?” “Reproductions,” she responds. “Reproductions, whatever,” I say. She wants me to pay her a mutually agreed-upon fee for each painting. I will be free to charge my clients as much as I’d like for each painting. “Are you interested?” she asks. This exchange happens in what feels like a split second. I’m wondering if the screwdrivers have gone to my head or if I’ve just made up what I’ve heard. “Are you serious?” I ask her. She takes a puff of her cigarette and looks at me laughing. “Totally serious,” she says. I’m at a loss for words. Without a bit of thought, I go ahead and tell her it sounds like an incredibly ingenious idea. I’m thinking it sounds like a lot of fun, too. All I can do is smile and giggle. It’s a funny gimmick. And the next thing I think is that I no longer have to split 90/10 with Kostabi World. Now I’m the factory and can set my own prices, competing with Kostabi directly. I tell Annike I’ll have to think about this and I’ll get back to her over the weekend; can we meet Monday at the same time? She suggests a different location, the Film Center Café on Ninth Avenue. The whole concept seems entirely logical. This is the most exciting proposition I’ve heard in years, and I’m tingling. But why is she choosing me? She mentions something about my being an Aquarius. She gets up to leave and tells me to hang around at the bar for about five more minutes. She doesn’t want anybody to see us leaving together. I feel very special for being chosen, like being singled out in elementary school by Mrs. de Lime. How could I turn it down? I wonder if this is a trick being played on me and she’s wearing a wire and Mark is outside with the police waiting to arrest me, but I banish the image, just like I dismiss any thought of the consequences. I leave the bar in a frenzy of excitement and start doing some quick arithmetic as I’m walking up Ninth Avenue. It looks like it could be a pretty lucrative deal. I’m thinking we can produce fifty paintings that I can retail for $500,000. Maybe I can buy that apartment I looked at in the Century on Central Park West after all.

  Around this same time Lauren has me interested in co-producing a documentary film about a group of homeless gospel singers and musicians that she had found singing in the subway, called Emmaus the Group. They actually live in a homeless shelter in Harlem called Emmaus House. She wants me to come hear them perform and convinces me that this is an important story to tell. I go uptown to meet the group and hear their music and am really moved; I know immediately I can’t refuse. I agree to co-produce the project with her. We form a production company called No Roof Productions, and I put up the first $10,000 to produce A Six Voice Home.

  The Playboy Survey

  The breakup with Allison is still very much on my mind. My family and friends urge me to move on, to stay busy, and to start dating again, but I have been connected to this woman for more than twenty years, and I’m still living in the apartment we shared and among the things that we collected together. I cannot function without her. I feel sick. I took care of her for so many years, when she had the flu or when she was so badly sunburned on vacation. Where is she? I am losing control. I hear through a friend that she’s found an apartment only ten blocks from mine. This is a difficult blow. She is surviving without me. Days later I learn through a mutual friend that she has become serious with the short gentile. I am enraged. Had it been a fling, I could have understood, but here she is seriously involved a year later with that same guy—the pain of the rejection is overwhelming. My behavior becomes tremendously obsessive in all directions. I begin dieting and exercising compulsively again and working twelve- to fourteen-hour days. And that day I become an official stalker. I am compelled to drive and walk by her apartment building, look up and count to the tenth floor to see if her light is on. In an effort to respect her wishes that I not communicate with her, I never call to chat, but I start sending gifts: expensive lingerie, a pair of earrings, books—anything I see that I think she’ll like. On one of my scouting expeditions to her neighborhood, I see her getting out of a Honda Accord with Connecticut license plates. The boyfriend’s car. Progress. I now know where he went to college and what fraternity he belonged to—he has stickers on his back window. I am relieved that he has gone to a less-than-mediocre school in the Midwest and isn’t too bright. Now I have a marker—the navy blue Accord. All traffic is rerouted by Allison’s apartment for at least a year. I know when the boyfriend is sleeping over, when they are going away for a weekend, and if they are living together. I keep notes. One day I’m sitting on a bench across the street, peering over my copy of The New York Times like in some pulp detective novel. I see them get out of his car and walk into the building. I wait about three minutes, walk over to the car, and open the passenger door. I check his registration: Kevin Parker. I have his address, too. Now I can contact him directly. I spend a few days planning the call. One night I dial his number, identify myself as a pollster from Playboy magazine, and tell him that we are doing a study about single men and their sexual relationships with women. I ask him basic background information: address, age, height, weight, college education, job, salary. He doesn’t paint a very impressive picture of himself. I’m wondering how Allison is going to finance her lifestyle on his salary. I have a list of twenty questions, ranging from the serious
to the ridiculous. What part of your girlfriend’s body do you like the most? (Answer: Breasts.) Like the least? (Answer: Feet.) I am certain now I have the right guy. How many orgasms can you give her? (Answer: Fifteen.) How many can you have? (Answer: Ten.) Now I’m certain that he’s playing with me; he knows what’s going on here. Nevertheless, I’m surprised and aroused by his forthcoming responses and start fantasizing about having sex with Allison, from his perspective. I tell him I’ll call back if I need any more information and about a week later I call back with follow-up questions. He’s not so dumb after all. He’s trapped me. This time he is recording me. Allison calls me the next day and threatens to call an attorney if I don’t stop the harassment. I’m frightened, yet somehow I feel like I’ve won the battle.

  Prozac: The Wonder Drug

  I finally stop seeing Dr. Levitt because talking to him is like talking to a piece of Danish modern furniture. All he wants to do is discuss my childhood, and my mother and father. But there’s something wrong inside my head and I’m starting to think it’s in my system. I also give up seeing Dr. Dworkin because I don’t feel like I’m making great strides with him either. (Allison had stopped coming with me months before our breakup, and I had continued to cross the George Washington Bridge in the rain and snow to trek from the highway to his house.) He’s an incredibly nice guy, but he’s a problem solver and I think I’m in a crisis. When I arrive at his office, I sit in a chair with a big cushion next to his. He proceeds to do what I call the intake—a process much like blood work. Basic background questions to fill him in on the previous week’s activities. It just takes up time. “Andy,” he says, “I think you need to learn to listen more carefully to what people around you are saying to you because you often make quick decisions that affect you and your relationship with them. The next time you find yourself in an argument with somebody at work or even a friend, just take a step back and listen to what he or she has to say. It’ll give you time to respond more accurately.” I don’t want this kind of coaching. He’s not giving me the slightest opening to talk about how I’m feeling, about the crazies. I leave each session frustrated. At the recommendation of one of my general practitioners, I start seeing Dr. Howard Wexler, a middle-aged psychiatrist who greets me at his office wearing a navy blue blazer, gray flannel pants, and a bright red tie, looking more like a mâitre d’ at a bistro than a psychiatrist. He’s extremely stiff and smells like cologne. His office is impeccably decorated in a contemporary seventies style, glass and metal. Behind his desk is a realist oil painting of a horse that looks like it should be hanging at a steak house. I take a seat on a black leather ottoman across from his glass desk and start right in with my psychiatric history. He scribbles on a pad as I speak and asks very few questions. He has an annoying tickle in his throat and keeps apologizing for it. I feel like he’s just processing my story as opposed to probing it, and when I try to underscore my feelings of madness and depression, he just continues to scribble. At the end of our session, he comes to the quick conclusion that I have a narcissistic personality disorder and suggests that we see each other twice a week and that I join his once-a-week therapy group. I don’t feel comfortable with group therapy, and more important, I don’t like Dr. Wexler very much. I cancel our next appointment an hour before. Bills from him collect in my mailbox for years. I never pay them.

  A few weeks after my twenty-eighth birthday I realize that something is not functioning properly, and I’m convinced I should go for a CAT scan. I feel like I have an abscess swelling deep inside my head—I imagine that there’s pus within the depths of my brain—just waiting to explode. One day it’s going to burst and some unfortunate cleaning lady is going to be called in to mop it up off the floors and scrape it off the walls. Or maybe I’ll be on the crosstown bus and it’ll splatter all over the other passengers and the windows. You see, it works like this. When I wake up in the morning, I receive a signal that tells me, for example, whether to pack up and head to Los Angeles or to catch the next flight to Morocco or to just lie immobile in my bed and watch CNN all day or scrub the bathroom floor and tub until my hands are blistered. The decision is already made for me. It’s somehow predetermined. I don’t have a say. I don’t call my own shots. I’m not really in control anymore. I guess that’s why I finally make the appointment to see Dr. Herbert Kleinman, a well-known psychiatrist on the Upper West Side. Because every other psychotherapist and psychiatrist has failed me in the past, I have no expectations of our first meeting. Actually I figure it will be another three-month relationship that will probably end in another unpaid bill, resulting in a collection agent coming after me.

  May 15, 1990. Upper West Side.

  My meeting with Dr. Kleinman is at 7:30 A.M. I’ve never heard of a doctor who starts seeing patients so early. I’ve had only three hours of sleep and barely pull myself together. I look like shit, unshaven and unshowered. I wet my hair down, throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and try to cover the dark circles under my eyes. Dr. Kleinman is an older man with a mysterious European accent, and I am struck by his kind manner. He makes me feel very welcome in his office, and he smokes a cigar, which relaxes me. He seems confident and ready to attack my problems. I tell him that I am quite disturbed over my recent breakup and that I’m trying to erase the thoughts through incessant activity—working, socializing, drinking, and doing drugs. I tell him that I’m hypersexual, and he tells me that he is not surprised, since I was used to having sex on a regular basis. I discuss the issue of not having control of my life. We talk for forty-five minutes, and he confidently tells me he thinks this is simply a case of depression. And he has the perfect solution. He prescribes a new drug on the market; it is called Prozac and has shown some very good results. He thinks it should clear things up right away. I leave his office with a prescription and an appointment to see him in two weeks, and a feeling of hope.

  That night, I take my first 20-milligram yellow-and-green Prozac. I dream that Dr. Kleinman is driving an ice cream truck around the Upper West Side, passing out Popsicles in the shape of Prozac capsules, and people are lining up for miles. In the morning I check to see if I feel any different. The next morning I look into the mirror. No change. I take an extra 20-milligram capsule before I go to work, just to speed things up. About two weeks later I’m in the shower washing my hair and I realize that I’m in a really good mood for the first time in a long time. I feel like I could be doing a commercial for shampoo—lathering up my hair, singing and smiling in the shower. I go back to see Dr. Kleinman and he puts me on 40 milligrams a day. The Prozac seems to keep me on the high side, and I don’t slip into any depressions. I also happen to be moving faster than the speed of sound. I call my parents and tell them about my success with my new psychiatrist and medication, and they are relieved.

  The World’s Tallest Building

  June 27, 1990. New York.

  I’ve got a million meetings today, and none of my list making is helping to keep things connected. A meeting with Ellen Salpeter, the young representative of Dyansen Gallery, a large chain of art galleries across the country, about an exclusive contract with Kostabi World to publish a limited-edition graphic series, which will mean huge revenue for Kostabi World and a sizable commission for me. A meeting with Lauren and the Du Art film-lab people—I don’t know why I ever got involved in this project. It’s costing me a fortune and taking up a huge chunk of my time, although Lauren is taking care of all the production details from hiring the cinematographer and crew to organizing the shooting schedule. But I love Lauren to death, and I promised to see the project through to the end—$75,000 at final count. But Lauren could convince me to jump out the window of a skyscraper without a net below me. And we’re shooting footage in Pennsylvania over the weekend with Emmaus, and we’ll all have fun driving in the van and shooting the lead singer performing at his childhood church. Then I’ve got an F.A.O. Schwarz presentation for revamping our William & Clarissa marketing plan. Dinner at Arqua with two Japanese dealers who are int
erested in a one-hundred-painting deal.

  I’ve begun taking on tremendous responsibility for the direction of the studio’s everyday operation. This includes production of paintings from the think-tank stage through painting, titling, invoicing, and shipping. I am also negotiating deals with the large galleries for orders of large numbers of canvases and limited editions of graphics. The goal is to raise enough money quickly—about $800,000—so that Mark can purchase an apartment at the CitySpire Building on West 56th Street. The Prozac is making me feel highly motivated and energized, and I’m more productive than ever. But while I’m traveling the globe trying to raise money for his apartment, Mark is completely focused on his project for the world’s tallest building, where he plans to house the new Kostabi World as well as live. It will be a building for art, for artists, for galleries and museums. He spends his days drawing sketches of it and actually goes as far as hiring the architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox to draw the preliminaries. It’s all he talks about. I’m pretty pissed off that he’s wasting his time on this ridiculous project. When I press him about how serious he really is about it, he expresses surprise. This building has become his passion. His desk and floor are covered with blueprints, and the idea people are busy sketching the world’s tallest building from every angle, around the clock. He is already starting to figure out how he’ll divide the space in this multibillion-square-foot megastructure: between museums, artists, residences, commercial space, and public space. He is racing around Kostabi World in his suit and tie as if he were Donald Trump, not giving any consideration to how it’s all going to be financed. I wonder what the architects are thinking about the whole thing. Mark points to the highest level of the building on a blueprint. “That will be my living space,” he says—yet we still haven’t figured out how to buy his apartment at CitySpire. Now I realize I’m dealing with a lunatic.