Me Talk Pretty One Day (6 page)

“Let me put your mother on,” my father would say. “She’s had a few drinks, so maybe she can understand whatever the hell it
is you’re talking about.”

Six
: I bought my drugs from a jittery, bug-eyed typesetter whose brittle, prematurely white hair was permed in such a way that
I couldn’t look at her without thinking of a late-season dandelion. Selling me the drugs was no problem, but listening to
my increasingly manic thoughts and opinions was far too much for one person to take on a daily basis.

“I’m thinking of parceling off portions of my brain,” I once told her. “I’m not talking about having anything surgically removed,
I’d just like to divide it into lots and lease it out so that people could say, ‘I’ve got a house in Raleigh, a cottage in
Myrtle Beach, and a little hideaway inside a visionary’s head.’ ”

Her bored expression suggested the questionable value of my mental real estate. Speed heats the brain to a full boil, leaving
the mouth to function as a fulminating exhaust pipe. I talked until my tongue bled, my jaw gave out, and my throat swelled
up in protest.

Hoping to get me off her back, my dealer introduced me to half a dozen hyperactive brainiacs who shared my taste for amphetamines
and love of the word
manifesto
. Here, finally, was my group. The first meeting was tense, but I broke the ice by laying out a few lines of crystal and commenting
on my host’s refreshing lack of furniture. His living room contained nothing but an enormous nest made of human hair. It seemed
that he drove twice a week to all the local beauty parlors and barbershops, collecting their sweepings and arranging them,
strand by strand, as carefully as a wren.

“I’ve been building this nest for, oh, about six months now,” he said. “Go ahead, have a seat.”

Other group members stored their bodily fluids in baby-food jars or wrote cryptic messages on packaged skirt steaks. Their
artworks were known as “pieces,” a phrase I enthusiastically embraced. “Nice piece,” I’d say. In my eagerness to please, I
accidentally complimented chipped baseboards and sacks of laundry waiting to be taken to the cleaners. Anything might be a
piece if you looked at it hard enough. High on crystal, the gang and I would tool down the beltway, admiring the traffic cones
and bright yellow speed bumps. The art world was our conceptual oyster, and we ate it raw.

Inspired by my friends, I undertook a few pieces of my own. My first project was a series of wooden vegetable crates I meticulously
filled with my garbage. Seeing as how I no longer ate anything, there were no rotting food scraps to worry about, just cigarette
butts, aspirin tins, wads of undernourished hair, and bloody Kleenex. Because these were pieces, I carefully recorded each
entry using an ink I’d made from the crushed bodies of ticks and mosquitoes.

2:17
A.M.
: Four toenail clippings.

3:48
A.M.
: Eyelash discovered beside sink. Moth.

Once the first two crates were completed, I carried them down to the art museum for consideration in their upcoming juried
biennial. When the notice arrived that my work had been accepted, I foolishly phoned my friends with the news. Their proposals
to set fire to the grand staircase or sculpt the governor’s head out of human feces had all been rejected. This officially
confirmed their outsider status and made me an enemy of the avant-garde. At the next group meeting it was suggested that the
museum had accepted my work only because it was decorative and easy to swallow. My friends could have gotten in had they compromised
themselves, but unlike me, some people had integrity.

Plans were made for an alternative exhibit, and I wound up attending the museum opening in the company of my mother and my
drug dealer, who by this time had lost so much hair and weight that, in her earth-tone sheath, she resembled a cocktail onion
speared on a toothpick. The two of them made quite a pair, hogging the wet bar and loudly sharing their uninformed opinions
with anyone within earshot. There was a little jazz combo playing in the corner, and the waiters circulated with trays of
jumbo shrimp and stuffed mushrooms. I observed the crowd gathered around my crates, wanting to overhear their comments but
feeling a deeper need to keep tabs on my mother. I looked over at one point and caught her drunkenly clutching the arm of
the curator, shouting, “I just passed a lady in the bathroom and told her, ‘Honey, why flush it? Carry it into the next room
and they’ll put it on a goddamn pedestal.’ ”

Seven
: I told my friends that I had hated every moment of the museum reception, which was practically true. The show was up for
two months, and when it came down, I carried my crates to a vacant lot and burned them in penitence for my undeserved success.
I had paid for my folly and, as a reward, was invited to take part in the nest builder’s performance piece. The script was
great.

“When I bleat here on page seventeen, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and ‘bleat, bleat’? ” I asked. “I feel
like ‘bleat, bleating,’ but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling through the birth canal of concertina wire, I don’t
want to steal focus, you know what I mean?”

He did. That was the scary part, that someone understood me. It occurred to me that a performance piece was something like
a play. A play without a story, dialogue, or any discernible characters. That kind of a play. I was enchanted.

We found ourselves a raw space, and oh, how I loved the way those words tripped off my tongue. “We’ve located a great raw
space for the piece,” I’d tell my outside friends. “It’s an abandoned tobacco warehouse with no running water or electricity.
It’s got to be a good hundred and twenty degrees in there! You really ought to come down and see the show. There are tons
of fleas, and it’s going to be really deep.”

My parents attended the premiere, sitting cross-legged on one of the padded mats spread like islands across the filthy concrete
floor. Asked later what she thought of the performance, my mother massaged her knees, asking, “Are you trying to punish me
for something?”

The evening newspaper ran a review headlined
LOCAL GROUP PITCHES IN, CLEANS UP WAREHOUSE
. This did nothing to encourage the ticket buyers, whose numbers dwindled to the single digits by the second night of our
weeklong run. Word of mouth hurt us even more, but we comforted ourselves by blaming a population so brainwashed by television
that they couldn’t sit through a simple two-and-a-half-hour performance piece without complaining of boredom and leg cramps.
We were clearly ahead of our time but figured that, with enough drugs, the citizens of North Carolina would eventually catch
up with us.

Eight
: The nest builder announced plans for his next performance piece, and the group fell apart. “Why is it always your piece?”
we asked. As leader, it was his fate to be punished for having the very qualities we admired in the first place. His charisma,
his genuine commitment, even his nest — all these things became suspect. When he offered us the opportunity to create our
own roles, we became even angrier. Who was he to give assignments and set deadlines? We lacked the ability to think for ourselves
and resented having to admit it. This led to an epic shouting match in which we exhausted all our analogies and then started
all over again from the top. “We’re not your puppets or little trained dogs, willing to jump through some hoop. What, do you
think we’re puppets? Do we look like puppets to you? We’re not puppets or dogs, and we’re not going to jump through any more
of your hoops, Puppet Master. Oh, you can train a dog. Stick your hand up a puppet’s ass and he’ll pretty much do whatever
you want him to, but we’re not playing that game anymore, Herr Puppet Meister. We’re through playing your tricks, so find
someone else.”

I had hoped that the group might stay together forever, but within ten minutes it was all over, finished, with each of us
vowing to perform only our own work. I spent the next several weeks running the argument over and over in my mind, picturing
a small dog chasing a puppet across the floor of an abandoned warehouse. How could I have been so stupid as to throw away
the only opportunity I’d ever have?

I was at home braiding the bristles on my whisk broom when the museum called, inviting me to participate in their new “Month
of Sundays” performance-art festival. It seemed as though I should play hard to get, but after a moment or two of awkward
silence, I agreed to do it for what I called “political reasons.” I needed the money for drugs.

Nine
: Watching the performances of my former colleagues, I got the idea that once you assembled the requisite props, the piece
would more or less come together on its own. The inflatable shark naturally led to the puddle of heavy cream, which, if lapped
from the floor with slow, steady precision, could account for up to twenty minutes of valuable stage time. All you had to
do was maintain a shell-shocked expression and handle a variety of contradictory objects. It was the artist’s duty to find
the appropriate objects, and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not
yours.

My search for the appropriate objects led me to a secondhand store. Standing at the checkout counter with an armload of sock
monkeys, I told the cashier, “These are for a piece I’m working on. It’s a performance commissioned by the art museum. I’m
an artist.”

“Really?” The woman stabbed her cigarette into a bucketful of sand. “My niece is an artist, too! She’s the one who made those
sock monkeys.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m a real artist.”

The woman was not offended, only puzzled. “But my niece lives over in Winston-Salem.” She said it as if living in Winston-Salem
automatically signified an artistic temperament. “She’s a big, blond-headed girl with twin babies just about grown. Everybody
calls her the sock lady on account of that she’s always making those monkeys. She’s a pretty girl, big-boned but just as talented
as she can be.”

I looked into this woman’s face, her fuzzy jowls hanging like saddlebags, and I pictured her reclining nude in a shallow pool
of peanut oil. Were she smart enough to let me, I could use her as my living prop. I could be the best thing that ever happened
to her, but sadly, she was probably too ignorant to appreciate it. Maybe one day I’d do a full-length piece on the topic of
stupidity, but in the meantime, I’d just pay for the sock monkeys, snort a few lines of speed, and finish constructing a bulletproof
vest out of used flashlight batteries.

Ten
: Quite a few people showed up for the museum performance, and I stood before them wishing they were half as high as I was.
I’d been up for close to three days and had taken so much speed that I could practically see the individual atoms pitching
in to make up every folding chair.
Why is everyone staring at me? I wondered. Don’t they have anything better to do
? I thought I was just being paranoid, and then I remembered that I was being stared at for a reason. I was onstage, and everyone
else was in the audience, waiting for me to do something meaningful. The show wasn’t over. It had only just begun. I reminded
myself that this was my moment. All I had to do was open my prop box, and the rest of the piece would take care of itself.

I’m slicing this pineapple now
, I thought.
Next I’ll just rip apart these sock monkeys and pour the stuffing into this tall rubber boot. Good, that’s good. Nobody pours
stuffing like you do, my friend. Now I’ll snip off some of my hair with these garden shears, place the bottlecaps over my
eyes, and we’re almost home
.

I moved toward the audience and was kneeling in the aisle, the shears to my head, when I heard someone say, “Just take a little
off the back and sides.”

It was my father, speaking in a loud voice to the woman seated beside him.

“Hey, sport,” he called, “what do you charge for a shave?”

The audience began to laugh and enjoy themselves.

“He should probably open a barbershop, because he’s sure not going anywhere in the show-business world.”

It was him again, and once more the audience laughed. I was spitting tacks, trying my hardest to concentrate but thinking,
Doesn’t he see the Botticelli hanging on the wall behind me? Has he no idea how to behave in an art museum? This is my work,
damn it. This is what I do, and here he’s treating it like some kind of a joke. You are a dead man, Lou Sedaris. And I’ll
see to that personally
.

Immediately following the performance a small crowd gathered around my father, congratulating him on his delivery and comic
timing.

“Including your father was an excellent idea,” the curator said, handing me my check. “The piece really came together once
you loosened up and started making fun of yourself.”

Not only did my father ask for a cut of the money, but he also started calling with suggestions for future pieces. “What if
you were to symbolize man’s inhumanity to man by heating up a skillet of plastic soldiers?”

I told him that was the cheesiest idea I’d ever heard in my life and asked him to stop calling me with his empty little propositions.
“I’m an artist!” I yelled. “I come up with the ideas. Me, not you. This isn’t some party game, it’s serious work, and I’d
rather stick a gun to my head than listen to any more of your bullshit suggestions.”

There was a brief pause before he said, “The bit with the gun just might work. Let me think about it and get back to you.”

Eleven
: My performing career effectively ended the day my drug dealer moved to Georgia to enter a treatment center. Since the museum
I’d done a piece at a gallery and had another scheduled for the state university. “How can you do this to me?” I asked her.
“You can’t move away, not now. Think of all the money I’ve spent on you. Don’t I deserve more than a week’s notice? And what
do you need with a treatment center? People like you the way you are; what makes you think you need to change? Just cut back
a little, and you’ll be fine. Please, you can’t do this to me. I have a piece to finish, goddamnit. I’m an artist and I need
to know where my drugs are coming from.”