Unplugged Yellow

1

My name is Zachary Willis. FleX and I met in 1979, at a loft on Canal Street in NYC. He was the first flex; he had the handle before the DJs, the dotcoms and the industrialists. He spawned them all, from flextime to flexgeist. When I met him, his big gig was his early noise band, the FleXibles, in which he played lead guitar and sang. The FleXibles were more than just another blast of Jack Daniels and speed with a weird rockabilly undercurrent and unintelligible lyrics, but they never had much impact beyond the vortex of that musical moment. They were at their best that night when someone slid open the loft’s pulsing steel door. Maybe 50 people milled around, a few dancing wildly, a lot of them stoned on heroin (anyone remember “White Widow?”). Holes gaped in the floor, and it was hard not to imagine what might creep out of them. Then the electricity crashed, stranding everyone in a murmuring penumbra of dark creatures.

FleX was a Vicious clone, as in poor dead Sid, although he was taller; spiky black hair, dark eyes, emaciated face, a toothpick who didn’t own a toothbrush. Sid beat FleX to hell by about a year and a half. Not that FleX wasn’t trying. Naturally, he consumed all drugs within reach, and there was always something going around. As the zombies and vampires slithered out to the Mudd Club or the Pyramid or God knows where, FleX and his base player (‘The Horn,’ as he was known: a tattooed rhinoceros who dispensed Quaaludes like a Pez machine) shot up with the White Widow.

I hated needles, but certain junkies intrigued me. I’m just too pusillanimous for all that bliss.

FleX said

Hey man, you know, what I really fucking love is to paint. Painting’s like jerking off. You’re just really concentrated and it feels great, man.

I collected paintings. Hugely. I had a warehouse in Jersey City filled with paintings, two entire floors of them at the time. Plus my loft on Orchard and Rivington: 4000 sq feet. I was a confirmed collector of painting in NYC, in 1979, exactly when the art market there was at its absolute bottom, back when artists played volleyball on Sunday afternoon on West Broadway. Artists would do anything BUT paint. No one had any idea at the time that we were just beginning a countdown to the impending gonzo ride of art, drugs, money, sex & glam that we all were on until the city collapsed in the early 90s into a miasma of corruption and crack.

And it wasn’t just the art world lost in its own present. In 1979 I had never heard the word Internet, and wouldn’t buy my first computer for another 10 years. The first rap song hadn’t come out. In 1979 Irak elected Saddam Hussein president. The Russians invaded Afganistan. The Iranian hostages were humiliated on TV, but that wasn’t all we were watching: Steve Martin hosted the season première of “Saturday Night Live”—he played the Pope, an aspiring male model, and Carole King’s boyfriend—and nearly half of America tuned in.

Nobody knew what was about to hit.

I wanted to see FleX’s work. It took a while, but eventually he got his guitar unplugged.

It’s not a Gibson 335, man, but it looks exactly like it. Same double f holes and everything. But it’s a Hofner Verithin, an exact copy of the Gibson except it’s hollow and almost extinct. You can’t find one anymore because when people started smashing guitars on stage they all used the Verithin. It smashes great. It just shatters. One of those solid body Gibsons will break your elbows. You know they’re made to withstand 6 fucking tons of pressure. Plus with a Verithin, man, you like almost automatically get that sound like you’ve been out of food for a week. But the main thing is it just explodes by itself when the time comes.

We made it to the street, FleX lugging his Verithin, and caught a cab. Chinatown rolled by in a psychedelic volley of red and blue neon, then the Bowery in black & white & grey fluorescents heading up to East 3rd Street. That view of the Chrysler Building still knocks my socks off, always has and always will. FleX pointed out 222 Bowery, the bunker, & Rothko's old studio. He wasn't an idiot, but I just didn’t get what he was trying to tell me, not even when we stopped finally just west of the Hells Angel's headquarters on 3rd Street, in front of the facing graffiti-covered cinderblock wall in memory of Big Vinnie, a freshly-dead angel: WHEN IN DOUBT KNOCK 'EM OUT 1928-1978 (the wall gone too now).

Angels don't all die young.

FleX led the way up the worn slate stairs of 268 to the 6th floor.

Love these shit-brown walls. They keep my mind alive.

Sometimes he sounded weirdly like Emily Dickinson with the scales fallen from her eyes. His apartment reeked of linseed oil, was literally encrusted with pigment like some Claus Oldenberg installation. He had painted everything, lumpy patched walls, doors, ceiling and floor. I didn’t know it, but a lot of the brown stains were blood from cleaning his needles by squirting them at the walls. In the kitchen were brushes and empty bottles and the boards he mixed on. A rag-tag army of roaches scurried for cover. The living-bedroom, stacked with plywood, masonite and canvas paintings until there was only a fraction of the space to live and work, faced onto 3rd Street. A vintage KLH stereo and a lot of records made a kind of strange altar at the head of a futon. He leaned his Verithin in a corner. Could Peggy Guggenheim have felt like me when she found herself in Jackson Pollock’s studio for the first time (One thing you can say about her: she had testicular fortitude)?

We stayed up all night looking at his work, talking, listening to music. I learned his “real” name, Chris Price, and his first lies: he was a hardcore suburban recidivist, a glue-sniffing mall rat in search of big city apotheosis. As if he wanted to be a male Patti Smith. He showed me a few paintings.

This is one of my early works, before I made the leap to pure abstraction, a portrait of my first girlfriend. Jesus, I used to dry hump that bitch for hours. In 8th grade, she owned my tongue.

It was actually a pretty good painting. He told me about his brother.

Peace kills more people than war. Don’t look at me like that. My brother’s dead. He was 10 when he died. Some people actually say I killed him. We used to play by the train tracks. We would go out on a steel bridge, dropped down between the rails and sit on a girder while the trains went over. There your head is about 12 inches from steel wheels on steel rails.

That’s also a good description of his music.

One day my brother just dropped like the sick suicidal son of a bitch that he was off the girder to the road; a station wagon full of girl scouts ran him over.

FleX stared at the wall; his cheek twitched.

We used to put these coins on the rails.

He took a necklace off a nail in the wall, a handful of flattened coins with holes pierced in them, odd-shaped smears of metal traced with squashed Indian heads and Abe Lincolns.

Later he tried to give me a painting, as he occasionally did to people he liked, but I insisted on paying $1 for "Unplugged Yellow." It’s one of my quirks. I like to pay for things. Around 11 that morning we had scrambled eggs and Guinness at the Greeks on 1st Avenue and I went back to my loft on Orchard Street with the first of his paintings to find its way into the collection. The 5' x 3' painting floated me down the street in the morning New York breeze like a sail.

I leaned the painting against the black brick wall in the space I kept filled with late 70's painting and sculpture. Because painting was officially dead, Orchard Street was a kind of personal museum. No one ever came there at the time. The end-of-paint prophets actually made my fortune. No prophecy ever did more for me. Many things I had up at the time, Nicole Blue, Marsha Liberty, Noe Noyes, Cassandra Flynt, Nae, Ken Tisa, Nick Right, turned out to be pretty good investments. I had been buying art for 5 years. My strategy was to cut a wide swath, buying young and cheap. Even if as little as 10% made money, I was happy. Every painting and sculpture I bought I stamped, the way museums put stamps on engravings.

Urban destiny is real estate, and like everyone I knew I depended on cheap space to survive. 350 bucks for 4 thousand sq. feet without a C of O, which left me on average a grand a month to buy art. I had the top floor of a sweatshop; below were 4 floors of wall-to-wall Chinese immigrants turning out T-shirts and underwear. September was too early for the ice stalactites to have formed under the skylights, but I had identical galvanized steel buckets scattered around to collect water when it rained. A lot of pieces I kept under plastic sheets in the back of the loft. In winter, with the windows covered in plastic, it was quite a little environment.

Now as I contemplated "Unplugged Yellow," I felt like an angel or an airplane -- the view was much bigger. It was a true painting, the kind everyone dreams of if they want to do anything at all. It drew when it wanted to; it possessed opulence and majesty, completely uncharacteristic of the '70s. There was a yellow disk dead center.
I've always collected. My father died before I knew him. My mother worked the flea markets in Massachusetts, and I was raised a flea market rat. We spent most of our time setting up tables and selling or else driving through western New York State and Maine, buying. I collected maps, loved their symbols, lines, colors, names: Renssalaerville, Phoenicia, Amsterdam, Mooselookmeguntic, Caucomgomoc. I papered the walls and ceiling of my room with them. Ashtrays, lamps, tin types, books, records, calendars, clocks, jewelry, boxes, comics, baseball cards, hats, salt and pepper shakers, nothing ever existed for me except in relation to others of its kind. I understood young, as I sat in all weathers and took good money for matters of taste, that markets run on an economy of desire, not need; or that collectors experience desire as need.

Possession is all.

But because of my upbringing, I was never a garden-variety, obsessive/compulsive kind of collector. I was always the calculating, Henry James type. I collected all of the typical preadolescent male things (coins, baseball cards, etc.), and one hit big: comic books, my first driving passion to prove profitable. I made some money from the sale of doubles in my comic collection, traveling alone into Boston to do it. I used that to start buying Victorian silver plate just before it became hot (thanks, Mom). Five years later I had quit school, left home and moved into Orchard Street. I went buying much farther than my mother ever did. Illinois, Wisconsin and Ohio were my favorite states. I got off on the way new towns revealed themselves to me in their auctions, garage sales, Salvation Army stores and flea markets. Lives turned themselves inside out, generations emptied their houses for me, whole families reduced to remnants filled my van. I packed the loft with hundreds of deco lamps, bead purses, more Victorian silver, old photograph and postcard albums.

Then came green ware. I bought a second van and hired a part-time gopher, Bob, a kid not unlike me at his age, and started a profitable sideline in books and records. I took a permanent table at the weekend flea market in the parking lot at B'way and Canal, which has now moved up to 25th Street. You can still buy there from Bob; he took over when I got out.

That's how I met Juno Carrol. She was a painter, married to a stock broker. It was Saturday, the crowd was buying. I didn't know many people in New York at that point, except for the other flea market folks. I had no social life. She was a little older, 30, sauntering her way down the alley toward me, picking through the bricabrac. She had on blue jeans, sneakers, an old sweater. She zeroed in on my green ware. One of my mother's specialties at the time was green ware, and I had practically unlimited stocks of green ceramics to tap in Mass. Green ware was in downtown, and Juno had the bug. She fondled the stuff and argued me down. She bought the best of what I had, and I delivered it at the end of the day. She lived in tony bohemian digs in the West Village, studded with green ware. She showed me her studio, a glassed-in room off the back. Her paintings were full of ripped shapes and glued on pieces of fabric. Hard core decoration mode, and not bad, but at the time I thought they were a joke. We had a drink. Her husband arrived in his jogging suit.

Jesus H. Christ, Juno, more green junk? Where the hell are we going to put it? Are you the one selling her this stuff? Look, do me a favor and if you got any more, hide it. My wife's not responsible for herself. She's not in control.

She was particularly crazy about anything from Star Ware, a factory that turned out a special shade of green during the depression, and began trading for it. A watercolor for a vase, a painting for a platter.

One Saturday she said

How’d ya like to go to an opening?

It was for a second-generation abstract expressionist named Gary Roth at Meisel's gallery on Prince Street. I went. The paintings were big, full of "repressed energy that liquefies their geometry and pushes it beyond the canvas' edges," as reported in Art News.

Afterwards we went to a party at Spike Westman's converted parking garage on Barrow Street, my initiation into the monied universe that oxygenates the world of art. Spike's converted garage dazzled me. Everything about Spike was big. He was 6'2", 250 pounds, with a shaved head and a walrus mustache. He made grandiose steel sculptures on the lower levels and lived above. His living area was three stories high. He had a Rolls Royce and a Harley Davidson parked in the studio. Spike soon became one of my best customers and provided a crucial link in getting me out of the flea markets and into the studios and galleries.

He also married my mother.

What Juno showed me made green ware and Victorian silver look like the proverbial peanuts. My bibelots were bullshit. My game, collecting, became a pure passion, a withering of vitals. In 2 years there wasn't a single piece of green ware left on Orchard Street and I was collecting contemporary art, concentrating on painting, trying to get the cream before it rose to the top. You find someone who's really good and you know it. It's impossible to explain. It's not technique alone, it's like music that hits you in the right place. Someone who can create a world, not someone who tries to fit into a system. FleX had his own tonality, a recognizable style. It's like trademark color: Coke red, Kodak yellow, Hermès orange, Tiffany blue, Dior grey. Yves Klein understood that when he actually trademarked his Yves Klein International Blue. I get asked all the time how to tell if a piece is good. The only rule is, if in doubt, wait. Time checks memorability. Don't get lost in the Big Bang. If a painting is memorable, it will develop "narrative." Recognize cycles. I eventually learned I wasn't alone, although there weren't many of us, to catch a late wave as the MOMA decentralized its real power into the galleries, just before the prices started to jump.

Juno felt like she had created a Frankenstein. It was not just my single-minded devotion to collecting art.

I know you lie to me. Don't worry. It doesn't bother me. All collectors go through a promiscuous stage. My shrink says we're all anal retentive. Promiscuous anal retentives. Such a thing is possible, I suppose. I mean, this is the 70s. Anything is possible.

Now I wanted more Chris Price, more FleX. I felt like a snake had bitten me. I had no doubt that I had met a great artist. He was a 19th-century luminist translated into an abstract, punk, late 20th-century urban landscape. Hopper on heroin. He was looking for degree zero.

He called me the next day; we met at Joe's Bar on East 6th Street. Joe's was about as far out and down as you get, with a pool table and antlers on the wall and jukebox loaded with lugubrious country western. Permanently amber light and a formaldehyde odor, slightly diluted that afternoon by the warm sun and breeze coming in the open door. Joe's Bar was the kind of place to ruin yourself in private, run mad, commit a crime.

I once went out with 2 punk Lolitas gone crazy on my music. Followers of David and Lou and Richard Hell, not to be underestimated. Totally uninhibited. Completely in control. They just led me into their fantasy land. And one of their dearest fantasies was fucking me. I had fantasies when I was their age, but I rarely acted on them. Girls grow up faster than boys. I wrote a song about them called "2 Timing Teenagers." They hung around for a couple of weeks. They came to all my gigs. I heard they’re in LA.

I told him I liked women I could collect. That was one of my lines at the time.

I hadn’t met his girlfriend, Rachel.

We agreed to go to my place. I wanted to show him how his painting looked.

He paid and we left, walking down Avenue C to Houston Street under the shimmering green phosphorescence of alcohol-enhanced autumn sunset, surrounded by blaring, ragged salsa and then meringue as the corners shifted from Puerto Rican to Dominican and the drug dealers kept up their staccato chorus, all the barbed names for derangement: sinse, White Widow, angel dust, ignition.

On Orchard Street the last stores were closing, the wave of shoppers that washed in every afternoon had subsided. My door was between a Puerto Rican store selling leather jackets, counterfeit designer jeans and T-shirts and a Jewish notions place. The building hummed like a hive with Singers as we took the elevator. Most people freaked a little on that big elevator with its bare floorboards and no walls. The stairs, with their wide double flights, dangling electrical wires and bad lighting were funky too, but I could get big items in and out both ways.

I had emptied the loft's front half and ridded it of the galvanized buckets, leaving only "Unplugged Yellow." This painting, which to my knowledge only FleX and I had ever seen, and which later became so well known, fit in that space as if it had been painted to go there. The loft caught the city light in its skylights and diffused it over black bricks and painted gray floor and whitewashed plaster and wired-glass windows. The place opened up interior/exterior play in FleX’s painting.

I said

I want to have a show of your work here.

He said

I’m into it, even if it doesn't make any difference. I like just messing around and seeing what happens. The best work here now is being done in the East Village by people who barely speak English and really don't give a shit. Straight from East Berlin to the East Village and too cool to know any better. Meanwhile I'm known as a line man when really I'm into color. Color to me is like music. When you move from one color to another it’s like turning the volume up and down or hitting the high and low keys on a piano. Colors are notes, colors are chords. Not that I'm anti-line. Sometimes all I want to paint are perfect circles. Giants grow slowly.

He saw the rest of the place. I pulled the plastic off my collection and went through it. He recognized about 2 in 5. He liked my Ms. Blue laundry line, which was strange but definitely fell under the decorative sculpture heading. This was at a time when all kinds of things were being classified as decorative, including fabrics. Blue was a long shot that had not yet paid off; the price was high, financially and emotionally. FleX came to know her story, as she was hanging around quite a bit. Blue was a thin, gap-toothed girl with a heap of hennaed hair who often dressed like a wedding cake in frothing masses of Victorian lace. I paid 250 for her piece in the early summer in her White Street loft while her husband, in a leotard, improvised dance around us. He had been graduated from Bennington that spring and was dancing with Merce. They had married 8 months before in Madras in a Hindu ceremony. I had to look at the wedding pictures. Blue invited us to Puffy's Bar to celebrate her sale. It was one of her first and she completely blew it all out of proportion. She had never had a one-woman show. My eye said yes. Sheets on laundry lines, in white plaster, were all she did for years, except for her early linoleum paintings, which I find inferior. The laundry lines were best coming out of a corner. Very nice abstract/concrete work, getting the proportions exactly right. Sculpturally she had an impeccable pedigree running back through Barry Flannagan. Later she did fences, mostly found, picket, barbed wire, post and beam. Then ladders. I kept buying even after she tried to kill me. When we became lovers, she told me her husband was gay but still horribly jealous. She left him. She wanted me to move to New Jersey with her.

It's simple, Zach, life is simple. Simplicity itself. We just need to get out of this hellhole and get our feet back on the ground, good old terra firma! Think of the laundry lines! I know a place that's for rent in Peapack. It's fabulous and it's got a great studio. Huge. There's a pond you can swim in. I'll cook for you every night. Mexican. Italian. French. We can have a wine cellar. Think of all those bottles lined up in their racks! That gives me an idea for a piece. Oh God! We can rent that house and look around for a place to buy. We'll keep your loft. We'll have a place in the city! Maybe you can open a gallery in Peapack. There's money out there. Jackie Onassis lives there. We'd be so fucking happy fucking all the time! And besides, what is there here for you? You don't have any friends worthy of the name. They're all a bunch of backstabbing bastards. How can you compare anything about this city with the life we'll have together?

FleX and I climbed the ladder in the kitchen (graffiti-covered refrigerator, hot plate, sink, shower) to the roof, which was tarred silver. I called it the silver beach and often ate there in good weather. All of the great skyscrapers were visible like glass and steel mountains seen from a brick and tar valley, from the then-recently-finished and now-gone Twin Towers to the Citicorp’s Building on 53rd. The city's light reflected off gray cloud cover streaked with green and black. Close up in the valley of the Lower East Side the rooftops buckled and slanted crazily, as if a drunken cubist architect had thrown the whole thing together in a fit and slathered it with tar. It looked like if one piece went, the whole might go. We peered down into the trough of Orchard Street, now deserted except for a few kids. Off the back of the building, looking east over Queens and south over Brooklyn, other rooftops folding in on themselves rolled off into the distance. There were a couple of pigeon coops. This was the New York of FleX's paintings, not the midtown grid of the monks of Minimalism. We could see into the facing tenements, rear window live, fragments of music and fights and flickering televisions. On the 4th floor a red curtain opened like a wound in the building and a shirtless Chinese man with a cigarette in his mouth leaned out and began tying cooked ducks and chickens on the laundry line that stretched across the alley separating us. His fowl dripped grease onto the clothing drying below. FleX howled at the rising full moon.

Art and life! Fuck you moon! Fuck you! Come on down here!

He was ready to plunge into the moon, as drunk as Li Po in his row boat. Instead we went back down.

Blue, dressed like a wedding cake, was standing in front of "Unplugged Yellow."

The door was unlocked. It's not like we're strangers.

I wondered if she had secretly made a key. In 4 months Blue would transform herself from a difficult artist into a bitter, vituperative menace intent on vengeance who would do anything to get her piece back, including murder. I'm not implying that she deserved what she got, but I don't accept the guilt that Phil Grey, among others, tried to push off on me.

I asked her what she thought of "Unplugged Yellow" before introducing her to FleX.

It's so male. I want to see more. It's east/west. It's not what I would do. It’s way too flat for me, but there's something about it that I can't pin down. At least he's not another pattern painter. I love that yellow hole in the middle. I mean the light thing is definitely the coast, you know, like glowing, but it feels so New York, like tough. I like the color. It seems like a very aware painting, but it's not self-conscious. Maybe it's a little cynical, but it's also idealistic. It's insane, I mean yellow in general is kind of crazy. If yellow didn't exist, who would think of it? That's what an artist does, don't you think? And by the way, where's my work?

I let them drag out Blue's laundry line and went to call Phil Grey.

End of Chapter 1

A new chapter will be published each week.

Copyright (c) Richard Dailey 2008. All rights reserved.