Electroboy

by Andy Behrman

  Up All Night

  Six months pass. Unemployment runs out. I’ve borrowed about $7,500, and now friends stop loaning me money. I am not getting any financial support from my family. So I pawn my watch, my camera, and my great-grandfather’s silver flask at Century Pawn-brokers on Eighth Avenue. $500. It’s not going to go too far. When Annike returns from Germany, we engage in a survival game together. She’s nervous about the D.A.’s office, but we don’t talk about it much. After months of subsisting on loans, pawned items, stealing from the deli, and the sale of my remaining Kostabi “products” (we still had some of my legitimate paintings and lithographs that we sell to some contacts in the art world), we realize we need to generate some income. One weekend my sister offers us the opportunity to paint an office space and earn some money. Nancy feels sorry for me and wants me to move on with my life, but in the meantime she tries to help out any way she can. Annike and I work well as a team: she is the leader, making the job estimates and dividing the work, as well as the real talent. I provide the energy, spirit, and enthusiasm. This leads to an abrupt decision to go into the contracting business together. We bill ourselves as Ivy League Painters. Our colorful flyers, which we post all over the Upper West Side, attract a tremendous amount of attention and get a good response. Soon we’re doing a few jobs around town, including painting and plastering. If clients want wallpapering jobs done, we do that, too, although we have no experience. Electrical work? Not a problem. We’re bringing in anywhere from $500 to $2,000 a job, so our financial problems are lessened. Finally we can pay some bills. But the work isn’t steady and I’m not very dependable—I have a hard time focusing. I lose interest in a job quickly and slack off. We both want to be dealing art full-time and think this contracting work is beneath us.

  I’m at the apartment of Sally Randall, one of Mark’s favorite painters at Kostabi World and a well-known name in the downtown art scene, to celebrate her birthday. Sally is tall, with long black hair and pale skin, and is leaning up against the kitchen door. I can’t quite get to her from where I am. The place is filled with familiar faces, and of course everyone there is aware that I am one of the alleged counterfeiters. They haven’t seen me in months, and I feel a bit uncomfortable. I’m drinking a vodka tonic to control my agitation. I don’t know why I decided to come to this party in the first place. But I make my way over to Sally to wish her a happy birthday, and she seems thrilled to see me and lets out a shriek: “Oh my God, you came! Thanks for coming, how are you doing?” “Fine so far,” I tell her. “We miss you,” she says. Doug, a painter who now has a crew cut, comes up to me and shakes my hand. “Congratulations, you kicked that motherfucker in the ass,” he says. I laugh. “How much did you make?” he asks. “Not enough to pay the legal bills if I end up in court,” I tell him. Another painter, Rick, who I don’t know very well, asks me, “How did you reproduce the paintings so exactly?” “In the same way they’re projected on canvas at Kostabi World,” I say. I’m titillated by the questions and want to talk about it, but at the same time the apartment is crowded and I want to get out and into a cab. I leave without saying good-bye to Sally. Tomorrow is Lauren’s birthday, but I already bought her a pair of diamond earrings and I can’t think of anything else to get her. She’d probably appreciate a DustBuster as much as jewelry. I walk for a few blocks and get an Amstel Light at a deli, then grab a cab and head to the Second Avenue Deli because I haven’t eaten all day. I order a turkey and chopped liver sandwich, which is enough for two people, so I take half home and leave the other half in a bag on a newspaper box hoping a hungry homeless person will find it. I’m thinking about the possibility of being arrested: when it will happen, where it will happen, what I’ll be wearing, whether anyone will see me being taken from my apartment, if I will be handcuffed. And I keep hearing them read me my Miranda rights. Stop. I hail the next cab and go to the Michelangelo Hotel off Times Square. There’s a Harry Cipriani restaurant and bar there, and I go in to see Franco, my bartender friend, who is dressed in his usual black tuxedo. I order a vodka tonic. “It’s on the house,” he says. “Thanks,” I say. I put down a $5 bill, which he immediately pushes back into my hand. “Please, Franco,” I beg him. The bar is full of theatergoers and businessmen. “How come I don’t see you around here too much anymore?” he asks me. “I moved to the Upper West Side,” I tell him. “Very fancy,” he replies. I finish my drink, leave the hotel, and walk down the block toward Times Square. The same prostitutes are working the corner of 50th Street and Seventh Avenue that were there a year ago. “Want a date?” a chubby blond girl asks me. “Not tonight,” I tell her. I smile at her and look away. I’m walking at a frantic pace, and Times Square is crowded with pedestrians. I want to take a total tally of everyone within the periphery of Times Square and find out some statistics about each one of them and how they differ from one another. Do any of them speak Swedish? How many of them have O+ blood? How many are carrying guns? How many have sexually transmitted diseases? Are any of them twins? Then I give up trying to play this ridiculously obsessive game. All these people are the same. They all eat. They all sleep. They all fuck. They all masturbate. It’s just a matter of how they do it and how often they do it. So I get into a cab and go back to my apartment and do chores. I pay bills (I owe Con Edison, New York Telephone, and Manhattan Cable for two months; it’s going to be tough with only a little more than $500 in my checking account), make piles of clothing for the cleaners, write letters to friends about my legal troubles, and scrub the bathroom tub and floor. I’m hoping the crazies will go away and I’ll be able to fall asleep. But I’m wide awake for about six more hours, lying in bed watching CNN until it’s light outside. I’m dying for something to drink, but I don’t have anything in the house. By now my body is aching, even though my head feels like I could start the day again without going to sleep. I’m agitated and decide to go out for a walk and find a diner to satisfy some craving. There are only about three or four people in the diner when I walk in, and I take a table by the window on Broadway. I order a Swiss-cheese omelette, home fries, and a bagel with cream cheese. The waiter brings me a glass of orange juice. Did I order that? The food resuscitates me, and I come home and try to fall asleep. But it doesn’t work. After a couple of hours of watching porn videos and masturbating, I pass out from exhaustion and don’t wake up until 4:00 P.M. the next day. My entire schedule is screwed-up.

  The Anxiety Shuffle

  February 27, 1992. New York.

  Still no word about Kostabi—the quiet is getting a little bit scary. But as every day passes, I forget more and more what happened. It feels like a weird dream, like I was on cocaine the entire time and reality was distorted.

  I hear through the grapevine, from Kostabi employees who bump into Annike downtown, that it looks like the Manhattan D.A.’s office is about to take some type of action against me. I panic. I need a criminal defense attorney right away. My parents find the name of one through a family connection. Stuart Abrams, a gentle but intense man in his early forties, was formerly an assistant U.S. attorney with the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. He agrees to see me the next day.

  February 28, 1992.

  I shower and dress, take the subway to Grand Central, and meet with Stuart at his office in the Helmsley Building on Park Avenue. Legal books line his shelves, and files are piled high on his desk, next to photos of his children, who have red hair like he does. I stammer through the story, impressed with how calm and non-judgmental he seems. He doesn’t even crack a smile. After about a half hour, he tells me he’s relatively confident that my case isn’t the type the D.A.’s office will take on because it’s a ridiculous one with an unbelievable witness—Kostabi. He warns me not to speak to anyone who calls me about the case and to “sit tight and wait it out” and that “hopefully the case will be dropped.” I leave his office feeling a confidence I haven’t known in a while.

  March 1, 1992.

  Lauren and Jonathan are a great comic duo wh
o play off each other quite well, and I’m always entertained by their humorous interaction. One night, when Lauren is nine months pregnant, she and Jonathan invite me over to dinner. When I arrive Lauren is in the kitchen, frantically cooking her famous lemon chicken and rice. There always seem to be too many pots and pans covering the stove and countertops when she cooks. Everything is steaming and smoking and seems out of control. While she is slaving in the kitchen about to give birth, Jonathan is lying on the couch watching television and barely picks up his head to acknowledge me. “Hey, Jonathan, you could say hello to our friend,” Lauren says. “Oh, yeah, hello, Drew, have a seat,” he mumbles. I stay in the kitchen with Lauren. “What’s wrong with him?” I ask her. “It’s just him,” she says. “But give him about ten minutes, he’ll come back to life again.” We both laugh. When we sit down at the table Jonathan suddenly perks up and tells us about his session with Dr. Kleinman today. He does a perfect imitation of Dr. Kleinman when he explains what happens when a patient starts a new medication: “He vill get high!” We all laugh. Lauren sees Dr. Kleinman, too. She’s even sent a family member to him for crisis treatment. Lauren sees him for her anxiety and panic disorder, which have really come to a head during her pregnancy. She can imitate Dr. Kleinman well, too. “Zis anxiety, it vill go away,” she says. But Lauren’s anxiety is a real issue, and you never know when it’s going to strike. We’re about halfway through dinner and she gets up from the table with a look on her face as if she’s seen an apparition. I’m not sure if she’s joking or it’s real. “Oh, no, here we go,” says Jonathan. Lauren is starting to have a slight anxiety attack, and we walk her into the living room and sit her down on the edge of the couch. “There’s no way I’m going to make it through this pregnancy. Oh, my God. I hope this baby will be normal,” she says. She jumps up from the couch and starts yawning repeatedly, whistling, and sticking her fingers in her ears. Jonathan, in an effort to comfort her, mimics her motions. “Let’s all do the anxiety shuffle,” he sings. He starts laughing and dancing with her. He and Lauren are yawning, whistling, sticking their fingers in their ears, and dancing around the living room in circles. Their apartment has transformed into a mental ward. I finally convince Lauren to sit down on the floor in front of me, and I rub her shoulders until her anxiety starts to subside. We all end up laughing while Jonathan entertains us with his antics.

  March 13, 1992.

  In two weeks Stuart calls me with the good news. The Manhattan D.A.’s office has turned down the case. Tremendous relief. I can breathe. The assistant district attorney thinks the case isn’t strong enough—there are obvious credibility problems and it will be difficult to prove that the paintings were unauthorized. But soon I’m contacted by a detective who wants to interview me, and we learn that the Eastern District (including Brooklyn and Queens) has taken on the case. The representative of the Japanese company involved is located in their jurisdiction, and this is where faxes were transmitted and monies were wired. I tell the detective I have been advised not to speak with him.

  Offshore Accounts

  In the meantime Annike and I have delusions of dealing art on an international level. Thoughts of vast sums of money being wired into my “special account” at Citibank and of transferring monies from my Swiss account to my offshore account fuel my fantasies. We actually set up shop in two different locations, my studio and her studio, with two phone lines, two faxes, and Rolodexes of dealers, galleries, and art journals, and we’re ready to get to work. Annike is confident that we can combine my sales skills and her contacts in Europe to sell paintings. She knows many international art dealers and tells me stories about their incredible successes. These delusions of making hundreds of thousands of dollars are a part of my mania and serve to repress the nightmare of the whole Kostabi debacle. But we actually start to break into a network of dealers, agents, and gallery owners, meeting them mostly by phone, by referral from dealers we already know or just by cold calling, but also some in person. Since we have no direct clients who own actual works, we’re fighting an uphill battle. For instance, we might call a dealer in Dallas and ask him if he’s looking for anything in particular, and he may tell us he’s looking for a specific Magritte. We’ll call as many dealers as we know in search of the painting. After a while, you get to know where to find things. We’re on the telephone and fax for most of the day and night, trying to interest other dealers in works we “have access to.” But for the most part, everybody has access to the same product. We spend most of our time trying to make a deal happen—FedExing slides and transparencies of artwork across the country and around the world. We think we actually come close to making deals, but the dealers are just playing the game and leading us on. A dealer in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, guarantees us that she has gone to Western Union and wired us a deposit for an O’Keeffe painting and that it will arrive the following day, but it never does. She does this every day for a week. But there is really nothing there. We sit and wait days for money to be wired into our accounts. But the only person who really has a client is the agent, who’ll keep the deal for himself. But we persist: van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso—nothing is out of our league. My determination to make a million-dollar deal is simply a way to induce a manic feeling. I forget that it’s impossible, playing along because it gives me a rush to be working again and supposedly “getting close” to a deal.

  A friend who is a dealer in the Midwest hooks me up with a young New York dealer whose family has a lot of money and an impressive contemporary collection. He invites me to meet him for lunch at La Goulue on Madison Avenue. I arrive ten minutes early and wait on the sidewalk. I spot him across the street right away. He’s wearing a navy blue double-breasted blazer, white khakis, a white linen shirt, and dark sunglasses. His dark black hair is slicked back, and he’s sunburned. He looks like he’s about twenty-three. I walk over and introduce myself. “You must be David. I’m Andy Behrman,” I say. “Nice to meet you,” he says. The waiter seats us at a table on the sidewalk, and David lights up a cigarette and blows the smoke straight above him. “Kate tells me you’re an incredibly brilliant guy,” he says. “And you know how to make money,” he adds. “I know your whole story and I don’t care. I thought it was absolutely genius.” I smile. “I’ve got a number of clients always looking for good work at reasonable prices. Maybe we can do something together,” he suggests. We order lunch, and I try to impress him with my knowledge of the contemporary French painting scene and tell him a little bit about my collection. “I’d love to see it,” he says. “It sounds like something I’d like.” He invites me to a party Friday night at his apartment, where he’ll be showing the work of a new German artist. “Don’t miss it. It’ll be a good party, too,” he says. In the meantime, he leaves me with some transparencies of works by some contemporary American artists, which I promise to show only to clients who have expressed a specific interest in them. He seems pleased by our meeting. I tell him I’ll see him on Friday. The truth is, Annike and I don’t have any clients interested in these paintings, and I return them to him at his party.

  Annike and I have isolated ourselves from everybody, and now we enter the Tofu and Banana Period. It’s all we have money for. That and the occasional stolen cheese and crackers from the corner deli. Annike has such an artful way of presenting tofu and bananas on a plate—she makes them look so beautiful, so delicious—that I look forward to each meal with tremendous delight. We are waiting to be indicted and still deluding ourselves that one of our million-dollar deals is going to come through at any minute. We’re desperate. I even borrow $50 from the corner newsstand vendor I hang out with at 3:00 A.M. We’re shuttling between my sublet and Annike’s studio in Jersey City, paying rent on neither, and waiting to be evicted from both. One morning I do not receive my usual wake-up call from Annike. I can’t find her all day. I leave message after message and fax but get no response. Later that evening my phone rings. Her voice is faint. She’s admitted herself to Payne Whitney, a psychiatric hospital on the Upp
er East Side, and she assures me she’s fine, but that they want to hold on to her for a few days for observation. The survival game has gotten to her.

  When I go to visit her, she is wearing a white hospital gown with a light blue star print. Her skin is bright white, her lips dry and peeling. I ask her if she is hungry or thirsty. She tells me she’s just eaten some eggs. I’m relieved. She tells me that they’ve put her in the same room Marilyn Monroe stayed in thirty years prior, a fact that appeals to her sense of history and drama. I pretend to be amused. But I feel isolated and alone. Annike has given up on herself and on me. She was the one who told me how important the survival game was, how we both needed each other. She didn’t come to me when she needed me. I realize how selfish and sick I am. I need her, and I will be alone until they release her from this hospital. Now I have to eat tofu and bananas on my own.

  Annike pushes to be released from the hospital and they let her go after five days. I’m even more protective of her now, like an older brother of his sister. I don’t want her dealing with the same kind of stress she’s had recently. I keep her with me at my studio for a while to keep an eye on her and stop her art-dealing activities for a few days. We’re running low on money, and I start stealing more food from the deli by shoving it in my knapsack while no one is looking. It’s pretty easy. When we realize we’re still not making progress and the pressure is about to spill over, I finally borrow $2,000 from an old friend, telling him I need to get to Europe to close a business deal. Given the sums of money I used to deal with, it seems like such a small amount to ask for, but I feel like I’ve asked for the universe—and it’ll certainly get us as far as we need to go. Annike and I decide to leave the country and go to the Basel Art Fair, then continue on to visit dealers in Germany. Our official intention is to meet some of the dealers we’ve been talking to, to solidify our relationships and to establish new ones, but we really have no specific business to address. The idea of leaving the country together is what’s really driving us, and I fantasize that we will never return.