Radiant Days (5 page)

“What, did you live on Fritos back in Norville?” Clea shook her head, sipping her wine while I scarfed down papadums and vindaloo at the Taj Mahal.

“Pretty much. Pancakes and Karo syrup—my mom used to make that for dinner a lot.”

“What’s Karo syrup?”

“And fried potatoes. I dunno what Karo’s made of. Sugar? And potato chips smashed up in cottage cheese. That’s really good.”

“White trash food.” Clea laughed. She leaned across the table, close enough that I could smell her, jasmine and cigarette smoke. “Right? You little white trash wild girl. Give me some of that vindaloo.”

She paid for everything. Afterward we’d lie in my squalid room on Perry Street, the window open to let in the scents of car exhaust and honeysuckle, kids from the nearby projects carrying boom boxes that trailed funk and go-go, a bass pulse that kept time with the beat of my blood. The truth is, I didn’t care much one way or
the other about sleeping with Clea; what I wanted was to capture that sleek, detached beauty on a wall or page or fold of canvas. I thought of my father deer hunting back home, before my mother left: how he’d be gone for a day, sometimes an entire weekend, only to return empty-handed, his old Remington cradled in his arm like a puppy. He never bagged anything, but he never looked happier than when he’d seen a buck in the woods, or spied on a feeding doe beneath his tree stand.

“You never saw anything so beautiful, Merle,” he told me once, popping a beer. “That doe just came right up and browsed, so close I could’ve done like that—”

He let his hand rest gently on my head, just for an instant. “That’s how close she was. I could smell her breath. Like sweet fern.”

“How come you didn’t shoot?” I asked.

He sipped his beer. “I could have,” he said after a minute. “Easy. But then I wouldn’t have been able to watch her. I decided I’d rather just look.”

That’s how I felt about Clea. She knew a lot about artists, and I liked going with her to the Hirshhorn Museum, and listening to her talk about people I’d never heard of—weird names, Rothko, Ruscha, Miró—and some I did recognize, like Andy Warhol and Picasso. And I liked that she liked my work, though it soon got uncomfortable in my life-drawing class, where I knew some of the other students were aware of our relationship.

Mostly I just loved drawing her obsessively, stretched across the mattress, her hair silvered with cigarette ash, sweat pooling
in the declivity around her navel. She was so beautiful, and I loved it when she was asleep and didn’t even know what I was doing. It was like sketching the ocean then, or clouds, something unfathomable that momentarily could be seen through the haze of smoke and dust in my bombed-out room. I painted the walls with acrylics I stole, painted the door. Once I painted the floor around the mattress while she slept. She woke, panicked—she was late to meet Marc—and threw a fit because the paint hadn’t dried yet.

“Goddamn it, Merle, I have to go!”

“So wait five minutes, it’ll be dry.”

She swore furiously, grabbed her bag, and tried to jump over the wet spots. She didn’t make it.

“You stupid,
selfish
—” She staggered to her feet, a grid of gamboge and black across one leg of her designer jeans. “You and your redneck shit.”

What Clea really hated was that she couldn’t take along the floor. Whenever she left my room, whatever I’d drawn that afternoon went with her—paintings, sketches, portraits done hastily on wadded-up paper bags, torn cardboard. I don’t know what she did with them. She lived in Potomac, a ritzy suburb. In all the months we were together I never saw her house, never met her husband.

I didn’t complain, not about her taking my sketches, anyway. It seemed like a fair shake. She picked up the tab, bought my dinner at places where we wouldn’t run into anyone she knew; paid for my cigarettes and gallons of cheap bourbon from Central
Liquor, pastel pencils and drawing paper, charcoal, oil pencils, tubes of paint and brushes, Magic Markers.

And in April, she took me to New York City for a long weekend.

“Marc’s got a bunch of interviews in Chicago. Get your stuff, meet me at Union Station. A friend of mine’s got a fellowship at Berkeley this semester; we can crash at her place in the Village. There’s a train at five. I’ll meet you after I get done with my Wednesday seminar.”

We arrived in a downpour. There was trash in the streets, rats humping along the curb outside Grand Central while a scummy little river rushed past, filthy water carrying cigarette butts, wads of newsprint, a child’s sneaker. The air smelled of roasted chestnuts and hot dogs, marijuana smoke drifting from a darkened doorway, the wet-laundry reek of steam hissing from manhole covers. I huddled beneath an overhang while Clea snagged a cab, ignoring the shouts of a businessman running up behind us.

“Hey, that’s
mine
—”

We piled inside, and she slammed the door in the man’s face.

Clea’s friend had a loft downtown, in an abandoned warehouse turned into studio space for artists, spare steel-and-brick cages crosshatched with rooms and tunnels assembled from plywood, cardboard, rusted metal culverts, chain-link fences, all of it ringing with music pumped from dozens of boom boxes and turntables. A different beat from D.C.’s bass-heavy go-go: faster, louder, metallic—voices synthesized so you couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman singing, human or robot. It was the sound of
things falling apart overlaid with the shriek of things being put together—welding torches, canvases hammered out of scrap wood and torn clothing, old TVs and Bakelite radios cannibalized for machines designed not to move but to explode.

The Corcoran’s studios and classrooms had been a monastery, muted and orderly. This was a madhouse forge, sparks flying everywhere and everyone dressed for some crazed masquerade in tatty crinolines, neon-yellow jumpsuits, uniform jackets covered with plastic flowers, leather loincloths, corsets and bondage pants and Lycra tube tops. A girl wearing a dress made from an American flag handed me a mirror with some white powder on it and a straw.

“We’re going to Hurrah later, if you wanna come.”

Clea seemed nonplussed by it all. “I liked her old place better,” she said, surveying our sleeping arrangements: a car’s passenger seat atop a mound of unwashed clothing, surrounded by chicken wire.

“Makes my place look pretty good,” I said.

“No kidding,” she said, and pulled me onto the makeshift bed.

Those were radiant days, sun streaming through the scrim of new leaves on the ailanthus outside and igniting dust in the air once the rain stopped. I thought we’d go to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan. Instead Clea took me to a bunch of galleries downtown, which were less like galleries than squats with an open-door policy. Tattered sofas and chairs, overflowing wastebaskets, skinny guys and girls hanging around in a haze of cigarette and pot smoke. There was stuff on the
walls, sometimes in frames, usually not: penciled scrawls, blobs of viridian and cadmium-yellow acrylic. Once Clea sank into an armchair leaking foam stuffing and with a curse leaped up, the seat of her jeans torn by a spring poking from the upholstery.

Some places were like the insides of people’s apartments, scabbed kitchen counters overlaid with clay or multicolored layers of paint that had dried like dripping candle wax, refrigerators and stereo speakers kitted out with knitting needles, animals twisted of coat hangers and mesh. After I’d seen two or three, I realized they
were
apartments. Saturday night we attended an opening where a guy wearing a kilt made of aluminum foil served drinks in laboratory equipment—test tubes, beakers, stuff like that. In the middle of the room a toilet had been filled with chocolate mousse. There were no paintings, only hundreds of columns of text painstakingly written on the walls in colored pencil and Magic Marker. When I tried to read them, I found they were in an invented language of symbols and ideograms, tiny characters that spelled out some arcane history that would never be deciphered and, according to a xeroxed press release, would be painted over the next day.

It reminded me of the D.C. Metro, where I’d gaze out the window of some nondescript train car and see another world rushing past. I loved that feeling. In New York, Clea wanted to take cabs everywhere. But there were some places where cabs refused to go, so we took the subway.

And I discovered graffiti.

I’d seen it before, of course, in D.C., painted on the sides of housing projects and beneath underpasses, on crumbling walls in
decaying neighborhoods like Shaw and on bridges, like that Beltway overpass near the white spires of the Mormon temple where someone had spray-painted
SURRENDER DOROTHY
. The D.C. Metro had opened two years before; the trains only ran until midnight, and a round-the-clock cleaning crew washed down the subway cars each night, inside and out, erasing every trace of graffiti: every tag, crew name, aerosol blip, and penciled phone number.

Here in New York, though, that chemical army had not yet been successfully deployed against the battalions who bombed subway cars in rail yards and lightless tunnels.

“Holy shit,” I breathed as we stepped onto a stinking subway platform. A group of boys carrying boom boxes loped past, weaving between concrete pillars and a broken pay phone. From the tunnel’s black mouth echoed a grating shriek that grew deafening, a relentless hot blast that flattened my hair and sent a whirlwind of newspapers and grit flying into my face.

I rubbed my eyes and shrank from the platform’s edge. On the opposite side of the tracks, a train abruptly ground to a halt in an ear-popping frenzy of brakes. Grimy windows gave a glimpse of the crowd of people inside, thronging toward doors that opened onto the platform opposite.

But all I could see were the outer walls of the cars that faced me, gray sheet metal lost beneath a hallucinatory whorl and splatter of bubble-painted images—names, cartoon faces, numerals, clouds, lightning bolts, arrows—in an explosion of fuchsia, cerulean, acid green, black, barn red, turquoise, sunflower yellow.

Before I could even register what I was seeing, the train ground back into the tunnel. Minutes later another thundered
past without stopping, a bright blur like those luminous spots you get when you press your knuckles against your eyes. Glowing letters erupted in the air and faded as the train roared into the darkness. When our train finally arrived, Clea and I elbowed our way into the car and sat. I looked around eagerly.

I was disappointed: here the walls and seats were covered with crude scrawls in Magic Marker and black ballpoint. Obscenities, names, phone numbers, and addresses covered advertising posters whose logos had been defaced with childish renditions of genitalia. It was grim and dispiriting, like a noisy, moving high school bathroom, and I quickly hurried after Clea when we reached our stop.

Outside a warm wind scattered white petals. A faint smell of the sea mingled with diesel exhaust and cigarette smoke. The sky was a brittle, lacquered blue, and you could see more of it. There weren’t as many tall buildings here, though in the distance I could see the twin monoliths of the World Trade Center. The streets were wider, the sidewalks littered with broken bottles and burst trash bags. There were no taxis but a lot of trucks and, surprisingly, limousines. Old men were passed out in doorways; young guys, too. A swaybacked mongrel nosed at the hand of a girl my age with tangled platinum-blond hair. She leaned against a shuttered storefront and stared at us with glassy blue eyes, a life-size Barbie doll in a ripped fifties cocktail dress and one high-heeled shoe.

“The drugs here are so bad.” Clea pulled me close to her. “It’s like a goddamned war zone.”

We walked past vacant lots and blocks where buildings had collapsed into piles of broken brick and plaster. Ragged figures
huddled around a pile of smoldering mattresses, passing a brown bag between them. The graffiti here seemed less defiant than desperate, illegible zigzags or black starbursts on crumbling walls and sidewalks.

Then I began to see the messages.

That was the first one. On the next block I saw another.

And then a third:

I stopped and gazed at dripping red letters on a plywood wall. I realized I’d seen the same name near the warehouse where we were staying, painted on a bench, trash cans, the door to a street church.

“Who is SAMO?”

Clea shook her head. “No one knows. Some graffiti guy. It’s
Same
-o, not
Sam
-o.”

“What does it mean?”

“You know. ‘Same-o, same-o.’ Same old shit.”

“SAMO.” The name felt like an incantation. I traced the
letters slowly, the splintered wood rough beneath my fingertips. “So it’s a person?”

“Like I told you, no one knows. But yeah, it’s some guy with nothing else to do. Come on, we’re almost there.”

“There” turned out to be the corner of a long, low building of gray stone. Its windows had been covered with huge rolls of white paper on which someone had printed
NEMO GALLERY
in big red letters. The door was propped open with a headless mannequin, also painted red, wearing a red T-shirt with the gallery name on it.

Inside smelled of fresh paint. About a dozen people stood talking and staring at a series of sheets of plywood covered with broken glass—wine bottles, liquor bottles, shards of plate glass, pressed glass, jagged bits of cut crystal.

It was like staring into a landfill. I wondered how the glass stayed on the plywood—Krazy Glue? Bondo? Whatever it was didn’t hold all that well: a woman shrieked as a wedge of green glass fell at her feet and shattered.

A dreadlocked man in his twenties ran out with a push broom and began sweeping up the glass. I picked up a pebble-size chunk that landed near my foot. The bottom of a beer bottle—Rolling Rock.

“That’ll cost you two grand.” I turned to see a slight woman dressed in black. “Kidding!” she said.