Slaves of New York (29 page)

But I made it to the subway. I got on an uptown express train that would stop at Seventy-second Street. Then I planned to get out and walk the ten blocks uptown. But it didn't stop: the conductor announced the next stop would be 125th Street. "Goddammit," I said. And a man sitting across from me said, "You can change trains here." As if I didn't know! So I had to say, "Yes, mister, I know. I'm from the city. But these trains are fucked." After that he didn't speak to me again. But there was no denying I was right.

At 125th Street I saw the downtown train come in: I dashed up the stairs and down the other side and flung myself onto the

train, which said it was a local.
But it was no local.
At Eighty-first Street it didn't stop, nor at Seventy-second—I let out a scream. The other passengers looked up from their newspapers at me. "Goddammit!" I said. "If I was in Rome the goddamn fucking subways wouldn't do this to me. The fucking train says it's a local and it doesn't stop. What kind of shit is this?" I glared at them all. But nobody else even seemed perturbed. They were so resigned about their lot they didn't even utter a fuss.

There was a terrible stink in the car. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I looked down to the other end of the car. There was a bum-girl sitting there. This person smelled so bad the entire car stank, and yet they allowed her to ride the subway. She couldn't have been very old, shrouded in wet newspapers and a blanket, which she constantly plucked at to rearrange upon herself. A tremendous smell, not easily cultivated. Did she not notice it on herself? And she was without shoes; God, I was sorry in my heart and yet filled with fury—in Rome there were no bums on the trains. With all this money in the United States, they couldn't find this bum a better place to sit out the winter?

With a groan she rolled over onto her side, filling up the whole seat. There under the seat was a pair of jogging sneakers, missing the sides and backs, mostly rotted away. Which had a lot to say about how I felt about joggers; and this was the only thing this creature had to slog along in.

It was devastating. Why I could not feel more compassion for this person I did not know. Is there no harnessing human emotions into something useful? But meanwhile half my brain was blabbing on about the disgustingness of the subways, doing nothing but burbling to myself. By now there was hardly even any use in going to the museum: I had spent the whole day resting up, my watch said it was well past four. If the museum closed at five there was little sense.

But I sloshed back up anyway; I had to change cars while the train was in motion, and for a second, poised between cars, I considered stepping off and throwing myself onto the track.

Though, knowing me, I would not be killed but maimed for life. Still, if I had genuinely set my mind to it, I could have bumped myself off: I saw before me, in my damp misery, the next ten or twenty years of my life, broke and unknown, to end up no doubt like the bum riding the train endlessly. Then the second of contemplation passed: I had my date with Lacey to look forward to, after all, and if I continued to live I would sooner or later be able to teach them all a good lesson. Hah!

When I got off the train at Eighty-first Street, I went down the wrong exit, not the one that led directly into the museum. There on the stairway was still another bum, poised halfway up the stairs, able neither to walk up nor to come down. Wearing flipflops on his feet instead of shoes—and emitting that same stale, hideous reek, neither urine nor sweat but something much worse: the formaldehyde of decay.

An old Toulouse-Lautrec of a bum, unable to go up or down the stairs, with ponderous hunch and hunch along. He clasped the railing: I had to brush by him, thinking, Ah, what is the use if I help him up or down, when what he will arrive at will be the same at either end, probably worse than where he is now?

The measliness of myself and humanity struck me to the core.

But luckily the museum was open that evening until six, which made matters a little better. For I believed that museums should be open twenty-four hours a day, and should not cost anything, as was the case in England, so that I might roam about the African Plains Hallway at four in the morning with thoughts of the African veldt deep in my head.

Meanwhile, I was scrounging in my pocket for some money to buy my way in. There was a sign that said, "Pay what you wish, but you must pay something. Adults, $2.50."

I did not wish to pay $2.50. No, I would pay what I wished. And I was standing there, searching for some coinage, when the girl who was working the register looked at me with a smile and said, as if reading my mind, "You can pay whatever you wish, you know."

"I know," I said. I handed her fifty cents, but abruptly I saw myself as she must have seen me: soaking wet, wearing gray pants covered with paint, my long hair chopped and ragged. And umbrellaless; for this article I had lost a multitude of times. With some green paint on my face, which I later noticed when I went to take a piss; and shaven badly, for as it is said, the greatest artists don't give a damn about the physical amenities of society.

But I went in. I was at the entrance where the great Indian canoe full of wooden Indians was built. Which had been there for as long as I could remember—how many times had I seen it as a child and longed to climb in.

Oh, there were many exhibits that moved me greatly: the African peoples and their baskets, and the costumes made of shells and straw, like a large house to wear upon one's person.

I spent the most time in front of the king cobra. This animal filled me with glee. The skin, for one thing, a rippling cheesecloth of the other world. And its immense, incredible power, for it could kill in a matter of minutes.

There was a new exhibit: artificial and not real, of a group of army ants. These in the middle of completely devouring a large horse tethered in their path which could not escape.

These ants never settle down but march constantly, devouring everything in their path; never deviating they go onward, cutting a swathe many feet thick through the ranks of the living creatures on their trail. Vultures fly above to eat the small animals which their coming start from cover, the rank smell of carrion surrounds them. Ah, how human and more than human! Because they must search everywhere for food for the eighty thousand adults and the squirming brood of young.

I wandered down to the African veldt and jungle. How cleverly the small exhibits were put together. The perspective had to be painted on the background so keenly that it blended in with the foreground. It was all painted like in the old Hudson River School. If only I was rich enough to purchase a stuffed warthog. I would have built a room just like one of these for it.

Only I would not stick to recreating perfectly the animal's natural environment, but would add laser guns and flying horses and all the rest of the modern world to the background.

I couldn't help but be impressed with what had been done here. Like two gazelles and a heron down at a pool of water. Using a piece of glass and some old leaves, the designer had made it look like real water. And the pride of lions—with withering hair, aged, fusty lions, with partially bald backs. It was very well done. But the air had deteriorated the grouping a little. Still, these things had all been there for eternity.

And in the background the hooting of children sounded. Oh, there was loads to see, and I was in a very cheery mood. I witnessed dinosaurs, evil and forlorn, some without skin and just bones, others with skin added. The allosaurus, with his large head designed as a weapon of destruction. A meat eater who did not need to stalk his game—the other dinosaurs were too stupid to run—but simply needed to pit his teeth and claws against weight and tail.

There were only two forms of defense against this ferocious dinosaur: one was to get out into the water and stay there, the other was to grow armor. Not easily done in a hurry.

Everywhere I went I saw how similar other forms of life were to mankind. Only mankind was the worst. And the art world— the business part—was worse than that. I would have numbered myself in with the rest of humanity, only I was one step above it: by that I mean I was an artist, which redeemed me.

After this I went off to Sherman's opening. But Ginger wasn't anywhere to be found, which was sad, because I wanted to hear once again from her lips that I was a genius.

I wandered around the Borali Gallery. The whole room was like a steam bath; there were so many people crowded into the place I couldn't even see Sherman's work. There was Lacey, my date, crushed next to a wizened poet/art critic named Rene LaRoue—they already knew each other and were talking, but I ignored him, for once when I had admired one of his poems

that was framed on the wall of the Gulag Archipelago (my favorite bar) word got back to him and he tried to ask me out on a date, the thought of which made me sick.

I went over and kissed Lacey; I wasn't unhappy to see her. On this, our first real date, she looked even more delightful than I had remembered—clad in something black and smoldering, and belted with the skins of leopard and various orangutans. "These were made from old coats that belonged to my grandmother in the twenties," she said. "So I cut them down and accidentally I kept cutting and cutting and all that I ended up with were some belts."

"You look great," I said. "I had no idea that you were so adorable." And I became certain that we would go out with each other. Whispering in her ear I invited her to come to dinner with Sherman and Willow and myself and Sherman's dealer, Borali. This was to take place after the opening. It was supposed to be a secret that we were all going out. Sherman didn't want to offend any of his friends who weren't invited.

Lacey breathed heavily into my ear in one corner of the room, while I was talking to different friends about Ginger: how at last a decent dealer had agreed to take me on. My life was going to be uphill from now on, I could see that. And the general consensus was that I was very lucky, for Ginger was going to be a hot new dealer in a matter of time, and we would make a great team.

When the room cleared out I found Sherman: he was barely able to stand on his feet. In his hand he was holding a glass of white wine that I guessed was not his first or his fifth. "How are you doing, Sherman?" I said. "Fantastic show. Are you pleased?"

He scowled at me, but I did not take it personally.

"I invited Lacey to come with us to dinner," I said. "Which I'm sure is all right."

"Why not?" he said. "Nice to see you. What's that around your waist, dead rats?" But Lacey did not answer, merely smiled mysteriously. "Go across the street for a drink," Sher-

man said. "Willow and I will come by in a few more minutes, and then we'll go to dinner."

I wandered around the room for a bit more, so I could get a look at Sherman's work. Well, the room was too small for such massive pieces. They possessed a great deal of energy. Sadly, they were nothing that anyone would want to hang on the wall. It wasn't that they weren't pleasant to look at: they weren't. But it was more a question of how many people would have a fifteen-foot wall that they would want to inflict such large girders of pink and blue upon?

While I was thinking about this I bumped into Jeff Smyll, another one of my roommates from art school whom I couldn't stand. He was small and ridiculous, filling me with loathing. I was sorry to run into him; here I had fantasies of being nominated for sainthood, I considered myself a saintly kind of guy, and yet more and more I was realizing there were thousands of people I couldn't stand.

I tried to think of what it must be like for him. He had always had a thing about his height, and now for him to bump into me like this at an opening, when I was doing so well and he was still just short, must have been painful for him. He was basically a smart guy, basically talented. But the basically that I'm speaking of is basically mediocre. I had to live with him in room 132, back when I still lived in the dorm my first year. He looked like John Denver, and that made it worse. I tried to smile. "Jeff," I said. "Jeff, how are you?"

"Marley," he said. "Marley Mantello, right?" As if he didn't know. He grinned and smiled at Lacey. But sadly Lacey's name slipped momentarily from my mind, and so I didn't introduce them. Because all at once I was remembering why I couldn't stand him. This made my lack of saintliness a little easier for me to accept.

"Eaten any ham lately, Jeff?" I said.

When this guy was my roommate, he never did any work. He always seemed to get by miraculously. For his art project he spent a whole semester copying three fruit carton labels

onto little graphs. This was years after Andy Warhol had already thought of the idea. Jeff spent four months on this project—he was the biggest pothead in the world, with a terrible taste in music. But I was still thinking of the ham. I asked him what he was doing.

"You know, I'm home for vacation," he said, grimacing. "I sell pizzas in L.A."

Had I no sympathy? Was I reduced to gloating over a marijuana freak who had spent art school replicating labels? But still, I remembered what he had done, and taking Lacey to one side I told her the story, before she could warm up to him too much.

This guy had bought a ham, a canned ham. He put it on the shelf in our dorm room. I said to him, "Jeff, you have a canned ham—" I was a pretty hungry guy in college. The canned ham gave me ideas.

"Yeah," he said, "I'll make it tomorrow or something."

So I went back to work, but I thought to myself, When you cook that canned ham, buddy, I'll be right here. Because I had to live with him, I might as well get to share in the good things, too.