Complete Stories (74 page)

“You really should think about working here,” repeated the clerk. “You’d be good at it.”

“Thanks again.” The three of them wandered further down the mall until suddenly something caught Andy’s attention. It was the Trollbooth, a freestanding wagon filled with hideous plastic troll dolls of all sizes, creatures with big beady eyes and vile puffs of fluorescent hair. The trolls came in all sizes, and in every imaginable costume: Viking trolls, astronaut trolls, golfer trolls, starlet trolls, cop trolls, surfer trolls, caveman trolls, trolls in diapers. Andy bought so many of them that they filled a whole shopping bag.

“I wonder why they don’t have junky trolls and speedfreak trolls, and troll hustlers and hookers,” Andy said as they left the Trollbooth. “Maybe I should open a Trollbooth of my own. Take a troll on the wild side. I’d rather sell trolls than poorly produced prints.”

Carlo was slurping at a big bottle of red cough syrup that Andy had bought Dina at the Walgreen’s, along with the of Kools. “Let’s get some booze at the Safeway now,” said Carlo.

“My money’s not going to last very long in this future,” Andy said, pulling his wad out of his boot and counting it. “What if I’m stuck here for good? I suppose I could do some paintings and sell them.”

“I don’t think that would work,” said Carlo. “There’s already an Andy Warhol imitator at the flea-market, and he never sells anything. Of course he can’t draw for shit.”

“But my paintings wouldn’t be imitations. They’d be real Andy Warhols.”

“The real Andy Warhol is dead.”

“Don’t say that one single more time, Carlo!”

“Sorry. But why are so fixated on painting? Maybe you could go in with me on some driftwood art to sell at the flea market.”

“That’s a thought,” said Andy, peering into his shopping-bag and readjusting his trolls. “I could do some really ordinary kind of art. Like art for a person who’s so untalented that he can’t even think about painting. A person like you, Carlo. Make art that’s a physical object that’s supposed to be usable for something even though really it isn’t. Can you show me how to make a sandcandle?”

“Me show
you
?” laughed Carlo. “We’re talking vicious circle, dude. Please let’s get the booze now.”

At the Safeway, Andy got a block of Velveeta, a box of Premium saltines, and two-pound bunch of celery. Carlo started to fill the cart with bottles of cheap sweet wine, but then, since Andy was going to pay, he went ahead and got two half-gallons of nice clear vodka, which would be easier on his stomach, like medicine almost, like the smell when the nurse swabs your arm before giving you a shot. Andy and Dina started talking to a handsome older stock-clerk about sandcandles. The man found Andy some paraffin and string, also a little pan to melt the paraffin.

Carlo also tossed a cheap Polaroid camera into the cart with some packs of film. “Here, Andy, you’ll get off on this.”

Andy paid for everything, and they got the bus back to the old Sally Durban house. It was still raining. In the house, Andy sat for an hour or two arranging his dozens of trolls in rows, and photographing them with his Polaroid, all the while wondering aloud if he should have bought dozens of the same troll instead of one of each. Dina sat at the edge of the room, legs splayed out the open doorway, smoking as she watched the surfers on the rain-pocked gray waves below. Sipping the lovely clean vodka, Carlo felt worried that he was going to be too drunk too soon, as usual, but right before he lost it, the rain let up, and Andy suggested that they go down to the beach and make a sandcandle.

Andy and Carlo and Dina brought some scraps of wood from the house and built a little fire on the sand. They melted the fresh paraffin with the leftover wax scraps from the first magic sandcandle. Andy dug a little pit in the sand, and hung the wick into it like Carlo told him to. Decorating the pit with seaweed and shells got Andy excited, and he was lively and chuckling. Pretty soon they’d poured a humongous new Andy Warhol sandcandle. They left it to cool.

Andy wanted to do more art. He got a stick and drew in the sand for awhile—shoes and penises and people’s faces. Then Andy got some pieces of driftwood and started showing Carlo cool ways to put them together. There was plenty of rock-tumbled beachglass down at the edge of water, and Andy got into fooling with that, too, arranging pieces of glass to make a shape like a big insect wing, sort of teasing Dina while he did it, like going, “Come on, Dina, look how nice the wing is. Anything this pretty can’t be all bad.”

And Dina was all, “Get away! I don’t care how pretty the ants’ wings are. They want to fly inside my head and hatch larvae in my brain!” But Dina was laughing a little, and not being too brittle about it.

The sky cleared up as they played; and after awhile the golden sun sank beneath the horizon. Dina helped Andy dig up the cooled-off sandcandle. It was yellow and had four legs, and there were some curled up spirals of seaweed in its sides.

“If we watch the candle tonight, maybe I can go back,” said Andy. “I don’t understand why I got pulled out of my time to here anyway.”

“Maybe it’s because you were being mean to me,” said Dina. “You bugged me into jumping into the elevator shaft, remember? So Carlo got mad and knocked you in, too.”

“This time I’ll be nice to you two and hopefully I’ll get to stay where I belong,” said Andy.

They ate some Velveeta and crackers and celery. Carlo was trying not to drink too fast. The vodka opened up the cut in his tongue again. When it got dark they went down to the projection room and tranced out, the three of them. Andy lit the big new sandcandle and set it into the niche above their heads, throwing its light on the walls. Tonight the light on the wall looked spotty and scattered; it like city lights, like the lights of Manhattan.

After awhile Carlo glanced over at Andy and Dina. Andy looked vague and insubstantial, as if every flicker of the flame was causing him to seep back to New York. It was coming. Yeah, it was coming. Carlo shivered in the basement’s damp cold and the flame flickered at exactly the same rate as his shiver, and then he was moving out of himself, floating up there into the throbbing cityscape on the wall. Now Carlo was through the wall and flying through the darkness with a hot humid wind flowing around him. He could hear laughter and voices. Music was playing, something awful he’d buried in the back of his mind, some crappy disco music like…like from the 70s.

Carlo dropped down from the dark sky and landed on a balcony, almost alone there. High on a skyscraper, a penthouse apartment. Sirens drifted up from a street that must have been thirty stories below. Carlo got vertigo looking down, and pushed himself away from the rail, toward a bright doorway where the party was, with the music and laughter and so many people. He recognized a few of them, and others were vaguely familiar. As he pressed in from the dark he saw Liza Minnelli, it had to be her, laughing at some outrageous joke, her huge mascara-pealed eyes gaping like a kewpie doll’s. She vanished in the swirling crowd, and then a chubby little balding guy with glasses and pursed lips wandered past, maundering on in a venomous falsetto—Truman Capote. Across the room was sexy Bianca Jagger in a flopped-open silk dress that showed her tits, nipples and even the top half of her bush—too much!

It was another of Andy’s parties. But what a difference from the last one. These people were all shiny and wealthy; their clothes were tailored, expensive. They were sipping Cristal champagne from fluted goblets, and the designer Halston was the host. There were no public blow-jobs, no bulging blue veins freshly thumped for the needle. Carlo hadn’t felt disoriented last time, but now he wasn’t too sure of himself. He looked for Andy, and seeing the thatch of silver-white hair, he started towards it.

The people around Carlo were smiling at him and shaking his hand. Funny they weren’t disgusted, like people usually were when they saw Carlo. Looking down at himself, Carlo saw that he was nicely dressed in clean black jeans, a white silk shirt, and an expensive leather jacket.

“What an extraordinary show, Carlo,” a bald man said to him. “I bought your big driftwood sculpture of the mermaid.”

“It was a marvelous idea of Andy’s to show with you, Carlo,” said a stagily dressed old woman. “It’s the best opening that Leo Castelli’s had all year.”

Suddenly the crowd melted away, and Andy was before him. Andy stood there staring at him with a neutral, possibly amused expression, a beautiful thin model on his arm. A beautiful familiar model. Dina.

“Darling!” exclaimed Dina. “You and Andy are geniuses!” She had a waxy, polished complexion, somewhat pitted from her neurotic zit-picking. “Do let’s go out on the balcony for some air.”

Small acts of obeisance were paid to Carlo, Dina, and Andy as they ghosted through the rooms. As he walked, Carlo looked up at the chandeliers, the dazzle of lights, wondering why they were blurring and flickering, seeming to fade. It must be the tears of happiness that had come suddenly into his eyes.

Once they were on the balcony with Dina sucking on a Kool, Andy gave a sly smile and said, “Look at this, Dina, I made one piece that I didn’t hang at Castelli’s.” He reached into his black leather back-pack and drew out—a wooden ant shape with wings made of foil-wrapped beach-glass. “Zoom zoom,” said Andy, sweeping the ant through the air. “It’s going to bite you, Dina!”

Before Carlo could stop her, screeching Dina was over the balcony railing and Carlo shoved Andy and the railing gave way. Liza Minnelli screamed somewhere behind them, and then once again the three of them were falling through the fluttering dark. This time Carlo kept a close eye on Andy and, yes, for sure, Andy unfurled a great pair of iridescent ant-wings that clattered and struggled as Carlo weighed Andy down …

The humid summer night air of Carlo’s vision was replaced by a damp late-winter chill. Carlo lay very still in the dark, for a long time, like one who has woken suddenly in an unfamiliar room; one who, not wanting to betray his vulnerability, tries to discover where he is without giving any clues (to those who might be watching) that he has no idea of his whereabouts.

Finally there was a cough at his side.

“Dina?”

“Yeah, Carlo.”

“Andy didn’t come back with us this time, did he?”

“Yes I did, damn it.” came Andy’s voice. He sounded peevish. “You weirdos brought me back with you again. If it weren’t for you, I’d still be at Halston’s party.”

Dina coughed harder and harder. Carlo groped around, found the vodka bottle and took a slug. The alcohol felt like a soft kick to his tender stomach. Andy’s footsteps walked across the room and he pushed open the door. The early morning light came in; it was another cold gray rainy day. “Later,” said Andy, and went on down the hall and out the back door to the beach.

“Do you think he’s really Andy Warhol?” asked Dina once her coughing stopped. She lit a cigarette and Carlo had another drink.

“Why else would we keep having the same dreams?” asked Carlo.

“Maybe he just has a power,” said Dina. “Maybe he’s a drifter who was in the house the whole time and he’s been hypnotizing us in our sleep. One thing I really don’t dig —” She broke off to cough for awhile. “One thing I really don’t dig is the way all our dreams end with him falling down after me and turning into a giant winged ant. We gotta get away from him, Carlo. We gotta leave.”

Carlo drained the lees of the half-gallon vodka bottle and pitched forward onto his hands and knees with saliva pouring out of his mouth. His back bucked as his body attempted to vomit, but Carlo was able to hold the alcohol down.

“Screw leaving, Dina,” shuddered Carlo. “We got it made here. I still got another whole half gallon of vodka to kill.”

“To kill
you
,” said Dina, drawing a fresh pack of Kools out of her carton and lighting up. “Well if we’re gonna hang here some more, let’s ask Andy for something else. I’d like some waffles. We could get a toaster and some Eggo waffles.”

“With real Van Kamp’s maple syrup,” said Carlo. “Or maybe we should buy a camper van.”

“Go find him,” said Dina.

Andy was down near the water, staring at the waves. He was dressed the same as before: in motorcycle boots, jeans, and a wide-striped T-shirt. His skin looked pale and waxy in the morning light.

Carlo’s knees felt loose and double-jointed from the vodka; he stumbled and fell against Andy when he walked up to him. Andy gave him a sharp, unfriendly look, but said nothing.

“How much money do you have left, Andy?”

Andy reached in his boot and pulled out his wad to count it. The counting took him a long time.

“I have a lot more than yesterday,” he said presently. “An Iranian businessman named Quayoom paid three hundred thousand dollars for my triptych portrait of Dina. Not all that great a price, but he paid cash. Leo gave the money to Fred Hughes right before the party and Fred gave it to me. Which is pretty unusual. Fred doesn’t usually trust me with cash. Of course minus the commissions it looks like I only have about a hundred thousand.”

“You brought back money from our dream? You got a hundred thousand dollars?”

“It’s pretty wacky, isn’t it? Maybe we’re still asleep. Or maybe—I keep thinking that really I’m on my death-bed. How was it that I died?”

“You had some kind of operation—I think it was your gall-bladder. February 22, nineteen eighty seven. You had an operation and were doing fine and then all of a sudden you just died.”

“Was I in the place?” whispered Andy.

“What place?”

“Was I in the place where you go for that kind of thing?”

“You mean the hospital?” said Carlo, watching Andy flinch at the sound of the word. “Yeah, you were in a hospital and they fucked up and you died. Like I said before, it was exactly ten years ago last week. The anniversary was the same day I got arrested, which is why I happened to be near a TV. There was one out in the hallway of the jail to keep us prisoners hypnotized.” Carlo suddenly remembered Dina’s suspicions. “Are you really truly Andy Warhol?”

Andy ran his fingers over his pasty face with its high cheekbones. The sky was spitting bits of rain and breeze was freshening. His dry silver hair flopped this way and that. “That’s such a stupid question, Carlo. I don’t even want to talk to you if you’re going to act so dumb.”