There were the more garish (in terms of hue—the hue they emanated, a synesthesiatic chakra felt most probably by me and me alone; and like all jabs made at the expense of others, let’s not discount the fact that the following could be merely the fruit of projection on my part, an eager snuffing out of my own worst qualities in others, an expurgation of my own sins from the ledger of their graces) characters among the cast: Montego, deracinated Spaniard, took his cues from depictions of Dalì in popular films (I suspect). A man advancing in age, forty-some-odd, a mid-forty, whom I have to admit aged gracefully—which is to say: he kept a humble distance from the general “group” Julia was at the helm of, all half his age and out of respect for this fact, and in keeping with his maturity, his appearances at functions where I would have seen him were generally kept seldom—yet all the more tragically because of this grace. Montego, you see, was your larger-than-life breed of artist which proved so rare when set in relief against the rest of us, a generation marked by self-conscious mannerisms, ironic detachment—his was a grease that answered to a higher calling, you see, a cerebrospinal fluid, and, perhaps because of his outsider status from the Downtown scene, due as much to temperament as age, it served not any desperate popularity-polyathlon of self-demeaning self-gratifications but rather a personal vision; so to speak; religious in character rather than hyper-literate, if this that we the younger generation barraged ourselves with on the internet can indeed be termed a literacy; unconvincing but admirably earnest, charming with the charm of the father’s generation which his son’s calls naïve, and his daughter’s calls “cute”; a sea along the coast of the dreamscape. In keeping with this his ilk, he preached the venereal, the corporal and the sensuous: I remember Julia introducing him to me as a sculptor, her telling him how I’m also an artist, a writer, the implication being we were cuts of the same cloth; to which he replied, characteristically speaking a language I know nothing of, “Casi casi,” with an equally characteristic sweeping and constricting of the hands—because, you see, the language of the body, for Montego, was paramount, and the language of language—what with your words, your sentences, the dominion of the brain—vastly subordinate thereto. Montego was a sculptor, he worked with his hands; Montego loved to work with his hands, he needed to work with his hands, directly with the material, for above all, Montego must needs feel, and even to live, to exist, is to feel and push through, forth, an atmosphere of feeling, sensation—it could even be argued, and more often than not it was to be him treating of the subject, that Montego was himself but a feeling, no man nor animal nor god, no, an emotion, a veritable hunch, a feeling of Montego—the measliest clay-pigeon could hardly be wrought but that Montego felt his way through each and every most punctilious step from inception to insemination (I wouldn’t put it past him, but let’s say only metaphorically) to conception to parturition—he was an avid dancer, he was seducteur, he kept his heart on his forearm above the rolled-up sleeves of his silken shirts of exuberant color or pattern or both; he deferred always to what is commonly referred to in popular vernacular as the “language of love,” but which for him was the language of uglies bumping, boots knocking: a language of lust, of love unchurchly, of not naked, lascivious bodies but (he would term them) liberated ones—a language of nature.
Which is what rendered the whole affair—the whole affair of the thing of the man, his chest hair, his accent, the crouching and gnawing and yawing of labile trunk as he danced and his quite moving pronouncements on the virtues of heat, jungle and sex—so pathetic. Tragic—pathetic. Montego the dignitary of substernal intuition and romantic consignment grew older and older and day by day he was drying, drying out, like the cold plaster dregs of an opus now-a-memory smudged and clumped on his broad and immaculate hands. Sure, truly the mind too grows old and withers and dies; truly there is no solace under the sun, under the stars, on torrid earth; truly man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. But—to see the way he dances! The way he grips at their mouths and sways at their hips! You’d think he thought he was still in the old country! so bold, so untrammeled his advances, his mots doux chiseled so directly into the as-a-rule multifarious earrings (congenital cultural artifacts) of the as-a-rule older woman—for he definitely has a type—decorative beads partout, a penchant for rum-and-tonics and dresses of a floral pattern, flowers too in her hair (along with, again, beads, seemingly sweated out of her), her hair he’d probably describe as “black as a raven,” and a posterior chain likewise as “endowed as with el verdugado del traje de flamenca,” the entirety of her body-mass-index conspiring there; her dress would be of a fabric not dissimilar from papyrus left to soften in a jar, in a cave somewhere for several millennia, molting and sand-blown in the desert; she would never yawn; she has never yawned in her life, even upon first waking, even at extreme hours of the morning, extreme hours of night, she merely continues to glare and swallows stray spittle; she was the sort of woman who was not attracted to looks in her men but to animal charisma—actually, the uglier the better, the more of a boon to his tribe-scabbed aura of killing and being killed, and fucking—occasionally creating massive butterfly-figures out of corrugated metal, new-age polymers, ionized ore—she’ll have a moonface but a decrescent one; but whoever she may be, whatever feeling Montego may be today, what is sure is that he will contort into them—in a dazzlingly public display of protolithian orgy. In fact, there may be some confounding variables at play, for if he had a “type” at all it’s only that he liked women who danced, and who could dance well, particularly in Montego’s preferred somatico-linguistic dialect, the whispered whiskings of Latin America and of crowded-basements-overflowing-out-onto-marble-plazas, lemon-fresh-autumn, botellón Madrid; and then, as it so happens, women like this might share a few errant physical characteristics. For this reason, it would be misleading to call his a “type.” And I’d be lying were I to suggest for any reason that Monty was some sort of superficial type of person. Flesh-deep, yes, but that’s not to imply anything allegorical—flesh goes very deep indeed. Where I was attracted to the intangible essence of the face, Monty was attracted to blood.
Whence the tragic, the pathetic aspect of all this, since these women seem to love Montego and everything he stands for, just as much as he loves them, loves dancing? What’s uncommon is not his advances, his physicality—what’s uncommon, untoward about the whole thing, is simply his age. I can’t help but think, when I think of Monty, that is, of the unsustainability of it all.
No, he’s not old yet. Not so old; not so, not yet. Montego was not old yet, and in a realer sense, he’d never get there—the only reality of Montego was the limbic flesh of the moment, goose pimples on the cubist hips of another; his own perfectly bald head comically large balanced atop his thin body, like a head impaled on a pike, or a brussel sprout on a fork; an ant Atlas-shrugging a grape; not only did he worship at the temple of the flesh, of health, in that word’s crasser capacity as used to describe a silhouette, wellness as defined by evolutionary psychologists and fitness as defined by evolutionary biologists—not only this, but he renounced, near heresiologically, the very notion of decrepitude itself—which he saw as one of those “horrors of the world”: horrors of the world unworthy of his attention as a matter of principle. The sickly horrors that nature bestows upon us, horrors of violence and crime against one’s fellow man—I won’t bother mentioning aesthetic horrors nor will I pretend that I am any way an informed or reliable judge on such matters, especially in the visual arts, but I don’t imagine he includes among his list of atrocities those of taste—he takes an oddly stoic pose on all this, odd because of how incongruous his what turns out to be borderline struthious, “what Mamì don’t know don’t hurt her” detachment to horror, looks beside the child-like wonder, ooh-ing and awe-ing at the pleasures of touch, the pleasures of feeling, the unequivocally capital-G Good prospect of desire, and of obtaining this that one desires.
Desire, desire—another talisman of Montego’s, another word, like feeling, to trump all once cited, so many beads strung onto his grandmother’s rosary, the one she kept with her always, always beating, beating at the motion—the very notion—of the quadriceps femores, a remnant of his childhood days in the rain-fallen plains, desire, Dalì, yes, Dalì, oh, and Picasso… As Monty and his cognate swelling of magma mitose and mitose in perpetual glitch, as would also theoretically occur at the entrance of a black hole—as the cantante yelps, his band swelling too, the fracas of tambourine and maracas already at a boil near berserk—the fever pitch of the black-purple light, vibrato, vibrato, and Gracias, good night—the band leaves and the crowd, the swellings, settle, simmer, retract arms jut longingly, but not so quickly, no, infinitely slowly, drawing out the moment of contact, the event horizon, caught in the soup of gravity and centrifugally flung, but now devoid of reference in the vacuum again.
Unequivocally he kowtows to this desire, kowtows towards it, ever encroaching, in a bid to make the surprise leap from kowtow position and grab the thing of the the desire itself, finally hold it in his hands, the very same strategy used to catch pigeons… Never suspecting something unseemly lurking beneath the surface, puppetmaster Satan the whole time pulling the strings. To what end, all this sweaty jungle sex promulgating and promulgating, this proliferation of sweat and waste? Capitulate; recapitulate… Should one cultivate a library as well as a garden? What would you rather have, a gay son or a slut daughter, and is it pleasure we feel at the touch of another, and, if so, is that pleasure cowardly, or is it cowardly rather—not even cowardly, merely nonsensical—yes, irrational—to build castles in the air which would have it so? Should it hurt to look your way?
To live in the pleasure of contact. Let’s not forget—swirling, bubbling, bulling magma in our sights, foggèd undergrowth—that they never do conjoin, and never will be able to—certainly not to the degree self-stylèdly amorphous Montego might wish. Even as they gyrate into one another in mush, mush, slide, there’s always the slide: the fact is, Montego and his partner du jour (du soir—perhaps even ne que de l’une chanson) are “morphous” each, their respective offal each decidedly repulsed from the other’s by a meddling layer of skin—like the reader’s sentiment from a novelist’s work by the rigid molecular structure of tight, marmoreal prose. Except for the occasional conjoining at the mouth, which is usually impossible, and not even desirable, while doing the tango—their inexorable dancing, to the music, was more like the perfect interlinking of cogs than anything organic. Not to mention the act of consecrated love itself! The notion that Montego’s dearly beloved Sex was anything more than purely mechanical was finally quite ironic.
Montego had a circle of friends, also older, all sculptors, glass-blowers, and mixed-media pasters and globsters, and who must have also largely kept to themselves because I only ever happened to run into them “out in the wild,” as it were—not at any literary frat-party, not at one of Julia’s soirées, salons, but just out by chance at some bar in SoHo, or some wide and empty expanse in Brooklyn, the catch of a glance and a nod raised over a glass of beer. To be fair, none of them were very much greasy or slimy, aside from Montego, bald yet slick of hair-gel—who, being fair again, did manage to wear his grease in a way that suited him—no, they were decidedly matte, on the opposite end of the spectrum, and utterly banal (again, besides Monty), almost as if they stumbled upon their careers as artists after bar-trivia one night. Apparently, as I understand it, there’s enough Montegian dinero being gladhanded around the world of personalty-markets and concrete (sometimes literally) objets d’art—laundering machines, essentially (although again, sometimes literally—see, “The Laundromat in the 21st Century: a Found Object Perspective on the Immigrant Experience,” opened at the MoMa last winter), for the rich and concertedly not famous, often card-carrying commies in a certain Chinese-oligarchical (and umbrella’d) bracket for whom no publicity is good publicity and any funds still liquid at time of wash are liable to be drained—that they can’t possibly get enough MFA groomees to pump the stuff out fast enough, most of their ears still wet by the time they get financially comfortable enough to remain nebbish idealists their whole lives. Meanwhile, we writers operate in a form that by its very nature must be infinitely duplicable and transferable, so as to be sold in airports or downloaded onto an e-reader for a reduced price, not to mention emprunted gratis to any homeless drifter with a library card, also gratis. As a writer, then, one’s worldly ambitions are necessarily a bit constrained. And there are those who still bemoan that writers in America aren’t taken seriously, as serious intellectuals. Indeed, even if you hold, as most do, that to have your book sold in an airport is a highest honor, it still strains the dignity of one to let the Montegos of the world slap our backs as they buy us a drink.
One of his friends, Thichael, blew glass (his “medium,” you see) and had a penchant for wearing illegally-tinted sunglasses even, as in the one occasion I can remember actually meeting him, at pitch-black hours of the night; and maintained a laconic demeanor that appeared impassive and impressive, that is, until he would finally deign to speak up—usually what he’d give voice to was a kvetch, a cavil, the squeal of a dyspeptic teacup pig who in point of fact is under no risk of slaughter—though pitched down, of course, to the sonorous resonance of a grown man with a whole adult life’s worth of practice of laryngealization under his belt. The whole lot of them smoking cigarettes one night in deep Park Slope, where I chanced to find myself for some reason or another that I now forget (likely I was attending solitary court at a bar far from Downtown, a retreat from the palace full of tongues, of eyes and ears and into the woods—ruthless, dreadful, deaf, and dull—into Brooklyn; a getaway, so to speak—a break); Montego—Maestro, Caballero—had the good rearing to flag me down—with all the vigor of an unabashèd eccentric who makes no secret of his love for all mankind—and introduce me to them one night.
Through the rolodex of others, maybe five or six in total including Monty, none of their names really stuck, until—“And this is Thichael.” A curd nod from the shaded man in question, a greeting less warm than from the rest of them; infallibly cool, jowls and hunched over with his hands in his pockets; cold, but jacket forborne, natch (“cool” after the fashion of schoolchildren); the only one not smoking (I imagine he had a hereditary lung defect, perhaps a sensitivity to air some or other peanuts-degrees warmer or colder than room temp; certainly, noxious smoke from cigarettes will tend to exacerbate the dyspeptic viscera superiōra).
“Michael?”
“Thichael.” Him now, reaffirming.
What were they doing? I didn’t ask but Montego perspicaciously inferred my question, perhaps reading the way I tried to hastily say goodbye, move swiftly along. A band from Cuba (embargo and travel-ban recently having been lifted) was playing (what I can only assume was) salsa music at the bar down the block, and I just needed to come with them. Ah, that explained it. They—Monty’s artist friends, laconic, nebbish—were the lonely sorts, easily taken into by exuberant persuasion. Monty would say, You must come!, and come they would. Eminently nonchalantly, but come they would. I know the type well, could peg it immediately (We are going to hear salsa music, you must come) due to the fact that I was perfectly eye-level with them. I know the type well. I am it. The lonely type, the type that reluctantly accepts every invitation as if it will be their very last. At the bar down the street, Cuban band, salsa music, etc.—Sure, I’d love to come, why not—and he never asked me what I was doing, if I must have had plans, traipsing along by my lonesome in a strange part of town; either because—and I’m going to first throw out a reason I’m sure is false—he didn’t notice, or because he knew the type too, the lonely type, the type that traipses so and so far from his loving and lovely Queen of the Downtown, with her events of import undoubtedly spiraling rapaciously round her personage right that very moment which I was carelessly, carefully avoiding—he knew the type, knew my loneliness, and wanted to invest it to something which vibrated at a higher frequency of life and of pleasure and of desire—shun Julia and shun the Downtown, as if to say, but shun not life, man! Come with me and my minions and invest, infuse yourself, with the spirit of love dance pleasure—the spirit of Spanish libertinism. Of course I went along, I was meek and I had absolutely no other plans and—who am I kidding—I am not and never have been too proud to wince at drinks paid for by another, not Montego, nor perhaps Thichael, nor anyone else.
“Rum and tonic!” No what-do-you-drink, just rum-and-tonics, all around. The place was small but opened to an even smaller backroom where the musicians were to perform; strands of red-lights along every bolection and floorboard giving the place an underworldly glow, red the color of lust and fire, giving Monty’s baldpate the look of a puddle under a traffic light and giving the dark hair of everyone present (no blondes) the livid quality of frostbitten toenails—and providing, perhaps ironically although perhaps this was by design, no actual light. Luckily tonic water takes on a phosphorescent quality in such environments so one could make one’s way like Santa Lucia descending into vomitorium. It was in Brooklyn, so the type of neighborhood-y place where you can hang your coat up without risk of having your identity reappropriated, and pot-bellied locals with beards and anachronistic hats chatted friendlily down the bar and sidled along the walls exactly as if they would had they crawled from the woodwork, which they probably had, amateur carpenters all. The music was too loud to make any decent conversation, so I’m not sure what they were all chatting about. For our purposes, however, the music was our why and wherefore—to the backroom post-haste.
It was there I saw Monty and his swellings of magma, his enamorate, metallurgical passions—yip yip, arriba! His friends and I hugged along the back of the humid encampment, sweat palpable like passion, a new atmosphere of sheer physical warmth away from the street, stodgy and all and sundry readily subsumed into night air, and all the proximity of a bog—except, and again, maybe it’s a generational thing (nostalgic gestures towards a rock’n’roll era), one by one they all entered the fray, the sweat and the heat of it, they picked their target, habited in polka-dot dress, and they garbled and swayed and yip yip!’ed too; and there I was, the last man comfitingly endowed with faculties of reason in the whole square-meterage of the place… What, needed I to get drunker? Needed I a tranquilizer, perhaps, anything to shut the brain off, abdicate and let the body, body, take over? Everything so loud, too loud for a decent conversation… All I could manage was a bob, a slight bending at the knees, a knocking to one side, then the other, barely more than an uncrinkling, the full weight of myself felt in their hinges; and a nodding, a metronome yes, yes, yes: the characteristic dance of the shy and the meek and the just-happy-to-be-included. Conversant with myself—writing in my head, basically, what I revert to when I’m in public spaces, expected to be engaging with the people therein, and want to look concentrated intensely enough to fend off people either curiosity or concern towards the shy loner; deep in thought, best not to disturb him—he probably would be dancing, were he not so deep in thought, about something quite important, no doubt. In one corner, right against the musicians, an older woman sat—a woman who looked like Monty’s precise type, though with the addition of decades—Monty liked women his own age, around forty, so she must have been sixty, perhaps—many wineglasses in front of her, empty, closing her eyes and dancing where she sat, her face contorting with an obvious, concerted pleasure, her head swaying intently. Leaning against the curtain at the back of the room, bobbing as I was, I allowed my eyes to close, willed the spirit, Take me! There in the dense promulgacy of it, the singing of macaws and salsa expressionists, arriba!, I closed my eyes; willed myself to live through this world like the bat. I wouldn’t flutter and falter, no, I would dance! The music carried on playing, the heat-map of the room carried on morphing in much the same way; nothing changed. I still heard the percussion of blood in my eardrums. I still saw the darkness of the red cave that opens up before closed eyes—the room, within myself, within the backroom, ambiance matching the red paneled lighting of the main bar-room outside. Nothing changed, their—their, them all—general pleasance didn’t change, and I didn’t change, nothing changed, that’s what was so frustrating. Nothing changed except my eyes had closed, and I tried to sway more feeling-ly. It felt “against type”; felt ridiculous. All I felt was the lulling of sleep.
In the cold outside again, intensified by the accumulated sweat of the backroom—the singer had said buena nocha, the odd-shapen instruments were all being packed in their bespoke cases, and they were all smoking cigarettes again; I was able to bum one—grabbing for the topic of conversation most readily at hand, i shared my experience from the backroom dance floor with him. He thought it was quite cute, quite American—typically repressed, I suppose.
“In Colombia, it’s not a real party until there’s dancing,” he said, and was so excited to say he nearly bleated it, punctuated by the udder-milking squelch of hands, one of which leaking cigarette contrails, a minor thrust of hips (still under residual influence of the band) and an exclamatory unbelting of knees, a spasm riveting across him lengthwise, a reverberation of shank.
So he was from Colombia! Shows what I know. Not from Spain after all. Of course, he was undoubtedly of Spanish provenance, likely a very esteemed one, so entirely without blemish as to be pure, pure white (incidentally matching the pate of Montego’s head, his overall lily-esque tone). He probably grew up in the wealthiest district, were I to guess—family with ties to the centers of power and the real movers and shakers of the Colombian business world, a house on a hill overlooking the vast favela: just his being in the States, in New York, spoke to that.
He has the best of both worlds: a proprietary visa granting him the right to file US taxes as an IRS-certified Artist—because his dad is chums with the ambassador—but he retained his accent in order to keep the (admittedly ignorant either way) New York society-folk in the dark. Now, I’m sure Montego (Caballero máximo estimado) relishes nothing more than to dish out, veritably swimming in heavy ladles of plausible deniably, the fact of this his germination in Colombia, and the gullible admiration for his third-world internationality—his having-overcome-all-odds, the poor thing—that he receives from eminently wealthy girls: sympathetic to the point of condescension, everywhere evident stateside as a most healthy contingent. (Monty is ingratiated in the world of artists and “creative types” too, you must remember—what’s more, in New York, with its all-mitigating rent—so however populous these women may be elsewhere, here double it.) I see the same type in my own neighborhood—Harlem, but more often than not, as I myself did, you grow up above and beyond halfway decent; Harlem too boasts a middle-class, as does Colombia, I’m sure. Yes, I didn't grow up poor; alas, this is my cross to bear. On more than one occasion I've seen the progeny of such Harlem middle class tout their “street” bona fides out and about town, usually to bolster an art installation (always with these visual artists…) or to rally up audience “sympathy” (see above) on a press tour—I’m talking of the most visible examples, of course, your politicians, actors, indie film directors, public figures, but I can always recognize the impulse—from experience—oh so tempting experience—I can always recognize the impulse, far and wide, whether big or small, pubic or private; from the publicity tour to the quotidian interactions of your most menial middle-class Harlemite. It’s true: you can open a lot of doors, or even just garner a little bit of supplementive sympathy, if you can use being from a place associated with ravishment, and marginalization, to your advantage. The only things worse than growing up poor is not being able to use it as an excuse. Now, for a guy like Monty, he still had to have talent, sure, but what’s more impressive, a guy who makes trinkets out of PVC hoses—in a bid to “discover himself” before formally ascending to his seat at the family board of directors, retire at forty (again, fully speculation on my part, I should clarify)—or some barefoot kid who does similarly? So what if he’s not poor—and hey, maybe he is (he most certainly isn’t, but maybe)—everyone loves an underdog story. Everyone loves an underdog story—in a perfect world, there’d be no other type of story! Everyone loves an underdog story—and there’s no good reason why we can’t all be underdogs after all!
Grisaille; a night that tastes like tonic water, air with the viscosity of tonic water; the residential streets of Brooklyn are emptying out and we’re the last ones left, Monty extolling the chops of the band, the rest of the drab lot of them eerily talking shop and draining smoke into each other. No, it’s not “Michael”—it’s Thichael. The only reason it all sticks with me is recently, some months ago—and maybe a little more than a year after I first met shivering him, obstinately refusing to smoke, to take off his glasses, in the decirculated and de-nominated part of Park Slope that is solely responsible, despite its tempo, for the restoration of Greater New York’s total period fertility rate out of “sub-replacement” levels—I heard from a friend (and mutual admirer, as all ruthless shit-shooters are, of the zealous zaniness of Montego) that Thichael was charged with murder in the New York State court. Cherize, my friend, had the news-item to prove it. He killed a person! A girlfriend of his, practically a common-law wife—for, unlike me, Thichael was after all completely entangled in the warp and woof of society and all its customs and laws, as his accusation very well proved (despite however much he, like all artists—even the wealthy ones—probably liked to think otherwise)—ten years his junior, she was a fellow glass-blower; he struck her over the head repeatedly with a punty. Can you imagine—he actually killed a person? (And then some inane place-holder responses, Completely random…—What the fuck…—No, I can’t imagine, I can’t believe it!) A patrol-car on a routine sweep nabbed him after Thichael felt the ingenious inclination (par with his creative output, I’d say) to dump her body in the Gowanus Canal, like he was in a mob movie. Even with the full respect owed to the victim (“Friends say Bushwick will never be the same without her,” read the obit), Cherize and I mostly shared a bewildered laugh at the news, numb to the fact of her, basically incognizant, unbelieving, unable to believe—and stuck mostly on the Hydean transformation of the twee “artiste,” who made sculptures in glass of the human heart, who was even a pioneer of the “conceptual glass art” school, with its imbricated panes like faults of the earth; and who was friends with Montego despite the two of them having apparently nothing in common.
It tended to confirm a suspicion of mine, let’s say.
Montego, Thichael and the gang were all of course associated to Julia by virtue of Nadya, and her Gainful Employment pet-project-within-a-pet-project, the visual arts survey. The visual arts survey was a big thing for Nadya; was very important to her, for personal reasons, for reasons of posterity and grandeur, of largesse; important to her for reasons of importance itself. Oh sure, she liked the words, too—especially as they were used to describe everything oh-so-glamorous and now, noteworthy (in a virtuous cycle, noteworthy by the very fact that Gainful Employment noted upon it, but also written up in the first place because the writer—sometimes Nadya herself, by the way—wanted it to be noteworthy) about the little micro-scene she herself had spearheaded: the personal essays, testimonials really, that I imagine she saw as primary-source documents for future historians of the Great Culture of our contemporary Downtown. But the visual arts—it was the visual arts that was a part of that vision more directly, and it was with them that the cockles of constabular Nadya’s heart truly laid.
Nadya already had this idea of herself, see, as an elder statesmen; though of course she was quite young: it was the role of elder, to her, that mattered; and she wanted to take, to be able to take, to be sought after as the person who was the person to take, young artists under her matronly wings (or perhaps “patronly,” as in the Medicis or suchlike, though moreso a moral supporter than a financial one; and “matronly” without really any connotations of “maternal,” either). The Gainful Employment visual arts addendum formalized this preestablished relationship, you could say; and Gainful Employment, clearly, figured as a convenient vehicle for this purpose, though a provisional one, since it was already associated with Nadya and it was Nadya’s first project to really blow up, providing the clout necessary to serve the function Nadya needed it to serve. That’s not to say that the said blowing-up was ever planned—it was hoped for, inevitably it was hoped for, but the local hubbub and the nationwide coverage came as a surprise to her—and just as inevitably, you might say—a welcome surprise, a surprise the two handled with poise and great, cynical hability—but of course a surprise. If she and Julia had never cooked up Gainful Employment, rest assured, Nadya still would have hit upon a platform, and sooner rather than later; but for the moment, the platform she already had—the happy dumb luck of its precocious success, its runaway success and all the name recognition so garnered—was more than capable of cementing Nadya’s place as a Downtown, art it-girl whom now you could really reckon with, so why not use it. Also: they had started the paper under the principle of planned obsolescence: like the scene itself, it would be hot, and one day it’d disappear—like a thief in the night. When that time comes, Nadya would move on to her next, assurèdly bigger vehicle.
Montego, though, and perhaps too the slightly younger Thichael, to a lesser extent—but mostly Montego and his main crew—he, and they, were a slight exception to all this. First of all, by the time Nadya met Montego, he was a well-established senior figure of sorts in the art world—oddly, or maybe he saw it that way, since he got his start relatively late, and only moved to New York relatively late in life besides, and came up with a class of artists ten to twenty years his junior—was a senior figure, in other words, solely by virtue of his age, not his creative generation; second of all, when they did meet, it was pre-Gainful, Nadya was still in college, going through her Bushwick phase—before she had even started making the art-world connections that soon became her primary MO; before she had any clout, or pull, to speak of; was just another prototypically “lost” city kid, college-aged, going into Brooklyn for the sole reason that she knew she was at least interested in the arts, wanted to do something with art and big “creative” things, capital-C Creative things, and, most importantly, wanted to associate with artists, with other people who were interested in those sorts of things; wanted to be seen and understood as someone whose concerns and whose private fate revolved around the sphere of art and of artists. That was the time when Bushwick was the place for young people with such interests, and especially, the lost young people, the young people hopped up more on conceit than ambition, and more disposed to vague machinations than action. It’s where everyone goes when they first come to New York—dreams of being an artist, of course—but don’t know where to actually get started. (I know I sure did my time; being from Harlem notwithstanding.) Most of whom ended up getting what they wanted—getting what they actually wanted, all along: they crafted an identity as the artist who never bothers to make any art; they joined a tribe, so to speak, as simple as that, and realized—perhaps justified to themselves, in your more stubborn cases—that connection, genuine human connection, and feeling like they belonged, that there was a tribe for them to be a part of, was more important at the end of the day then some paint daubed on newspaper or some sculpture they could have made—well, in fact a sculpture they would have probably also made out of newspaper (newspaper was the hot medium then; I can only imagine how many back issues of Gainful Employment ended up as paper mâché trinkets, or acted as canvas for the abstract portraiture done of some lesbian). And since they only associated with each other, relatively speaking their careers were always a huge success. Of course, Nadya was different from most of them because—well, first of all, because she was from New York in the first place, she knew Bushwick’s reputation as the proverbial isle of deadbeat wannabes, and quite frankly she should’ve known better, like I should’ve known better. And because she actually had ambition, Nadya did—had it in droves—quickly, she put her Bushwick days behind her, very quickly: like anyone who finally gathers the wherewithal to realize Manhattan is the place to be if you ever want to make something of yourself, Nadya did like Odysseus and came back home again. And eventually, she proceeded to rise above the heap.
But more on that later. Montego was the kind of guy, the kind of artist, who you see sometimes, that wants to be where the action is—and in the better cases, like Montego’s, is already established, on the payroll so to speak, and thus has nothing to prove—and starts haunting the greater Bushwick area thinking it’s some sort of Left Bank. They think, well, since Manhattan is literally the “left bank” of the East River, it couldn’t possibly be the true New York equivalent of the Parisian bohemian quarter of yore—that’s just too easy. It must be Brooklyn, on the right bank. And to all outward appearances, that does sometimes seem to be the case: you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail in grand ol’ Bushwick without smacking a half-dozen or so youngsters with paint splatters on their corduroys and a hungry glimmer in the eye. I know I already said that me and Nadya (and so many countless other city kids) should’ve known better than to fall for the trick—but goddamn it if it doesn’t really seem like the Left Bank. If it’s not unforgivable, at the very least it’s as understandable as all moments of weakness are. But at some point—and I won’t delve into it all again, but at some point this notion of “fostering community” took a hold of the place and suddenly “community murals” and “community theater” and “community gardens” became the word of the day rather than landscapes or playwriting or bodega sandwiches (the diet of a true bohemian artist, mind). Anyway, a guy like Montego, he doesn’t want to be a sellout, you see, that’s quite simply the last thing on this Earth he wants to be—so he thinks he’s being all rough and tumble by telling his masters over at the gallery his commute’s about to get longer and he’s moving across the River. And he doesn’t think twice when the rent’s exactly the same as it was in Manhattan.
And the thing is, he’s such a good guy, Montego—he’s an otherworldly nice guy, and so eccentric, larger than life—that right away he develops a whole network of so-called “working” relationships with the natives. A perverse symbiosis arises where Montego flatters the young artists by responding enthusiastically, encouragingly, to their work (he thinks to himself how great it is that they’re a young Left Bank artist and how, what the hell, they might just make it: After all, at the end of the day, my work’s not much better than theirs—which it wasn’t, it’s true, but Montego’s also genuinely naïve enough to think it was his work that landed him success, instead of his personability and aided in no small part, too, by his whole little Dalí impression—his foreignness, his intensity); and in turn, the young artists allow Montego to carry on his infantile fantasy of being a real bohemian artist despite the fact that he has a savings account, and despite the fact that within the “creative community,” the coterie, salon of artists he’s surrounded himself with, there are no Bretons and no Henry Millers and—I hate to say it, but—no Dalís, least of all not him. The world just isn’t darkening their doorstep anytime soon—outside of Montego, that is, but it’s not other artists and iconoclasts and influences that are calling his name but businessman and money-launderers—they were never inspired by his work, they were never intrigued, if anything they started buying his work (his work in particular, in particular, amongst his contemporaries—all else being equal, as is indeed the case) as an inside joke between the few and the powerful around backroom poker tables of the world. What Bushwick had—instead of the true artists, the true innovators—the true seers who carry the torch of a collective spirit of creation and beauty as they churn down the steppes of the history, the history of consciousness, of an élan vital that transcends the act of the brush or the keyboard and enmeshes itself instead into an invisible world of longing and obsession, and possession, and struggle, raging inconsolably against the confines of the material and the visible and the superstructure and the knowable—none of that, none of these visionaries, geniuses, were to be found in Bushwick, and what Bushwick had instead were glorified knitting circles. The best of them wanted to be starving artists but were too afraid to starve so they started their own advertising agencies out of the warehouse artist they used to paint in. I can respect that. But the worst of them—the most shameless of the bunch—were the ones that starved anyway and the only thing they had to show for it was a greatly distended adolescence.
Nadya was actually interested in art, however, and not political organizing; besides, the warehouse parties that Bushwick could keep her occupied with in the nighttime, where in the daytime all it could offer was an emotional void, soon became a drag. Montego was one of the curios from that period she managed to glom onto back when she had nothing to offer, so he’s stuck around in his own small way—a little of Montego goes a long way, it must be said, and to his credit—although you can tell he regards Nadya, her subsequent progressions, in a sort of askance way, like he finds it an enigma how someone once so lost, so sensitive, could become as unfeeling and successful as the Nadya who it was that I later came to know—could be so sensual and yet never reduced to blind amoebic groping. As I said, he never goes to her parties. The only reason I’ve ever even met him is one time Julia dragged me out to one of her friend’s plays out in Greenpoint—or maybe it was a friend of a friend or even a friend of a friend of a business partner of a former model and former Downtown it-girl of a friend—in fact, I think it was. At any rate we ran into Monty there and she introduced us; and, oddly, it’s almost an uncanny thing, but I swear, every time I cross over the East River I run into the guy.
To his credit, however, and to the credit of the rest of the other little Montegos and the Thichaels running around town—at least they actually made art. What it is is they represent an old guard; they came of age when you didn’t wear your grease on your sleeve, you emitted it into your art. Either this, or: for today’s generation of artists, personality—appearance—identity—is coeval with their “work”; Russian restaurant-cum-open-invite-party-hosting-venues, their veritable galleries; their approach to relationships and the intimacies of their private life, post-Internet and decidedly avant-garde. The eccentric artist made the indelible palatal drift from artist to muse to painting: his eccentricities once collateral damage, for Genius-you-see, the blast zone of aloofity and charmingly-disorganized Bushwick studio-space that you take with the nuclear fission; then perennial subject, his project, the question ever at-the-back-of-his mind like a lifer’s swastika, throw out the baubles and conceits of yore and hitch unabashedly your sidecar to personal destiny as it rolls on fortune’s wheel, your auto-fictive writers who write novels then write novels about writing novels, tunneling inwards like a cavity in the brain; then finally its the eccentricities itself which begin to take center stage, life as art, sculpting your mannerisms and affects with the hone and craft of a kotō no togishi, Jackson-Pollock-dribbling these your wares across Downtown for the benefit of a few true connoisseurs amidst the unappreciative masses.
Thus their personal lives are not only not off-limits as the subject of art columns, but fundamental to such a degree that it would be professionally negligent for the rising art-critical class to tactfully avoid mentioning every detail thereof, being as it is the artist’s general oeuvre—their flirtations, their insecurities, the former blithely licentious and blindly imposed, doubtless—wanton with the blindness as well as the passion of mirrored contact lenses—doubtless staving blithely in the general suctive direction of the meatus, the latter, doubtless myriad, each—in fact, are the only reason the art-critical class exists, fed so variously and so richly by the “artists,” their personal lives, that the denegrable medium of the art column is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. A gangrene allayed by further constriction. What they amount to is freakshow barkers, and what the billionaires stashing away funds in contemporary “high art” are buying is not any painting—a few nominal scratches of color here or there, just enough to be respectable, then signed and framed and the painter let loose on the gallery-going public—but rather a receipt for the cultural memory itself, a cynical memento vivi, a good laugh all around. And it’s the art columnists jobs to let the memory, and the market, live on. It’s the art columnists job to keep it that way.