Unplugged Yellow

4

When I got home, Blue was sitting in front of my door with mascara and tears running down her face.

She wailed

I’m leaving my husband, and it’s your fault! I want my work back! I want my work back now, you fucking bastard!

Blue's leaving her husband, the Bennington dancer, was catastrophic. I tried to calm her down by appealing to the collection as a higher good, which really set her off, but she accepted an offer to come in for coffee. FleX's heroin works were in the kitchen, scattered among the beer cans and coffee cups. Leaving Blue in the kitchen, I looked in the back. FleX was asleep on his futon with Rachel. The heater was blasting and they had kicked off the covers. A record skipped at its end on the KLH stereo, which FleX had brought over from his place. Rachel’s dreadlocked head hung like a black tulip on the long stem of her neck, her nipples were like tiny pink rose buds, her sex a scarlet slit. She was so black that at first against the dirty white sheets you might have said she had no features, like a shadow. Then she came into focus and everything else went blurry. My blood felt a couple of degrees warmer. FleX slept curled like a fetus with his hands between his knees. Something sparkled on his black hair and white skin. He had the belt cinched around his head.

I stared until my eyes bled, turning the world red.

In the kitchen Blue was dutifully pouring coffee. We sat silently sipping. I stared out the window and my face looked back at me in the dirty, wired glass. I couldn't get the two bodies I had just seen out of my mind. My thoughts raced like a pornographer’s on acid. I wanted to scream. It just didn’t seem possible that such a creature existed, and that she was his.

A turn of the head and there was palpable Blue. Hopelessness incarnate. Despair manifest. Between us 5-year-old Eaton Patz smiled on a milk carton. He had disappeared on Prince Street a few months before. His parents had let him walk to the school bus alone for the first time. And he disappeared forever. I heard that he was pictured in a pedophile catalogue on the Internet years later, when he would have been too old for the trade, meaning he was probably dead. I don’t know how his parents went on living.

A couple of cups of java later, my mother called.

I'm at Spike's. You've done an incredible job. I told Spike that I taught you everything you know. Not to mention that I'm your primary source. Spike wants me to invite you over for dinner here tonight.

Seeing my mother and Spike for dinner was the last thing I wanted.

I'm going to be staying down here for a couple of days, angel, with Spike. And I've decided you're right. I've been limiting myself. I need to develop more contacts in the city instead of just sitting on my ass and waiting for people to come to me. I'll be over to see you later. I want to see your place when it's not wall-to-wall people. By the way, Spike hasn't stopped telling me what a genius you are.

Blue thought my mother was another lover calling. She finally left, eyes blazing with crazy ambivalence, but she left. My mother arrived a couple of hours later. She too had a manic glint in her eye. She was in love with Westman. I decided to stay as far out of it as possible.

Don't worry. I told Spike I absolutely will never sell him a single thing. Anything he wants he's got to get through you.

She stayed a week in the city and came back the week after, still manic. If things ran their usual course, she would be down off her high in a couple of months at most. Some of us don’t like our parents to change, even for the better. Today I know I was wrong. She and Spike are still together.

Thanks to Blue, I put in an alarm system. It wouldn't do much more than make a cheap-sounding noise, like a lap dog on crack, but at least no one could get in without my knowing it. FleX worked everyday--almost. By late November he rarely went to his place on 3rd Street, except to change his clothes. Rachel came and went. When I ran into her, she literally knocked the breath out of me. I had to force myself not to stare at her. I felt like I had a sign around my neck saying 97-POUND WEAKLING. So I tried block her out, spending as much time seeing Charm Russler as possible.

Charm thought I needed to get out of New York. I got a kick from her outrageousness, her grand gestures, her operatic hysteria. She literally swept me off my feet. We flew to Italy together and spent a week in Milan. The city was shrouded in its famous yellow mists. Charm simply wanted to sleep in a great hotel, eat, drink and fuck, buy art. She proved fluent in Italian and sexually insatiable. When she'd had enough to drink, she didn't care if the chambermaid watched us fucking. Actually, I think she liked the idea. She once hiked up her dress and pissed in the street. A gaggle of middle-aged whores all clutching white and red purses watched her and laughed.

Charm spent the rest of her time talking up FleX.

FleX is what's best about America. You must have him now, before the rest of Europe. You must position yourselves. He's strong and tough and at the same time smart and questioning. Those marvelous American combinations. Practical, inventive, quick. He's restless and full of energy, a singular individual, and so buoyant, so exuberant. Everyone's buying. You're so dense and political here, my darlings, so in need of FleX.

I didn't see the Italians getting too excited. They were busy pushing Arte Povera, and wanted her to buy it. Count Fillipo Bellavita, a small man with a big collection, had a castello outside of town where we were invited to dinner.

The count said

Yes, yes, your painter, I understand. One has to react to Pop. One has to deny all that cold commercialism. It's obvious. Imagine a world where Pop is all there is. Like being trapped in a television. But painting is not the answer. Not since the '50s. Personally, I don't want anything to hang on my walls any more. A world is more than walls. Political, you say, but since '68, what else can one be? To be conscious in Italy is to be political, to tear down walls. The map is changing. It is always an internal map, but how to project it is the problem, no? So that others may find their way in this new world. Yes, the old world is the new world. Paradoxes do not disturb you, I'm sure. Of course, we are all in awe of your supermen, your boy wonders, your cowboys. So simple, you cut through so much so fast. So easy. No history. Life is complicated here, we are haunted by ruins. Our great painters are all dead. Why paint today? I would feel like a fool standing in front of a canvas with a paintbrush.

Most of Italy was swamped in Pop, but Count Fillipo took the high road. He was a rich anarchist at heart, he truly believed that art could save the world and not just himself.

Back in New York Charm started planning another trip, this time to London, in February. I could see now she was a split-personality collector. She had a European side of private, almost secretive connoisseurship; but the American in her was capable of the great hype and spectacular theatrics that I loved and lacked. I was the strategist, the quiet sluggard working methodically and slowly behind the scenes. Charm and I attracted each other as opposites attract. When her American side came out, she went with me around the downtown studios. My artists were going crazy, they all wanted her to come and buy their work. She loved the drama she created, a collector's drama. Then she would withdraw to the Heights and ask me to pick things up for a trial hanging at her place. Her collector friends started buying some of the same work, and I took a commission on things I brought around. Of course the primary beneficiary of this action was FleX. We agreed to tell Phil as little as possible about what we were selling out of my place. And I started buying pieces cheap behind Charm and her friends. Often artists would give me work if I arranged for a sale. I rented second and third storage bins and stored everything in them while FleX continued working at my place.

The fact that I was selling so much out of studios had an unanticipated side effect. I was getting the cold shoulder from once friendly galleries. Nick Right called me.

Dig this, that greedy son-of-a-bitch Morrison is threatening me! He thinks he owns me! And now I need a fucking lawyer! And don't laugh, he says he's including you in the suit. He says he's entitled, dig it, entitled, to 50% of every painting I sell, whether it moves through his damn gallery or not. We had an unwritten contract, he says. He wants 5 grand for each of the paintings you sold. That's assuming they're worth 10. It's not the money, it's the principle, the sanctimonious bastard says. But wait. He says he'll take paintings as payment. I mean he has to, right? So what I'm going to do is paint a couple of canvases, once we've agreed on how many, that say things. Kind of postmodern graffiti, know what I mean? Only they're going to say FUCK YOU MORRISON, YOU SON OF A BITCH! How's that? I'm looking for another gallery. I mean, I'm starving to death here. What the hell does he want from me? I can't let him get away with it. And besides, it'll get my name around. The publicity can't hurt. Look at FleX.

This would be part of the artist's restructuring by the art world that Phil was always harping on. They felt they owned Nick. At the time I thought Nick was making a mistake, but I was glad to know that they thought a Right could go for 10,000. Charm Russler paid 8000 for the painting I got her, which to my eye was one of his best. I had 2, and I paid 1000 a piece for them 5 years before. It was a considerable investment for me at the time, eating up two months of my buying power and reducing me to beans and rice. Back then they were going for twice what I paid, so now they had doubled and redoubled in value, the first time that happened to a piece in my collection.

Sometime in the middle of December I went into the studio in the afternoon as it was getting dark. FleX was working. He had a tape playing full volume of the Velvet Underground made at Max's, a cigarette in his mouth, a wide brush in his hand. He didn't see me. I watched him, and his pleasure was palpable. There was something extremely sexual about it; he kept reaching in his jeans to squeeze his balls. I laughed the first time, but he couldn't hear me with Lou Reed and company making so much noise at Max's. He went into the paint pot as if it was liquid lust, and he made love to the canvas (he was using stretched canvases now that he could afford them) as if it were one of his FleXible teenyboppers. He was a solitary god dancing. I left him to meet Charm at Fenelli's. I don’t think he knew I had seen him.

I went to Mass. for the holidays. I took my mother a silver-backed Victorian brush and comb set in a red velvet box. Amazingly enough, the manic glint persisted in her eye, not yet extinguished by her excesses.

Spike's taking me to Turks and Caicos for 2 weeks. His friend loaned us a house there! I have to leave early tomorrow morning. I've never been to the islands! It's so exciting, honey, and you know, I think this time it's for real. He's so good to me! And he says I'm so good for him. He says we're a perfect fit. It's the first time since your father died that I've felt so complete with someone. I used to think that maybe I'd been poisoned by my flea market mentality, that men were no different from all the things that I collect and buy and sell: objects come, objects go. But now that I've met Spike, he's such a complete man. He's self-made, but he's no island unto himself. And he's opened me up to so much in myself, and so much outside of myself. I'm discovering new things every day. Art. I never imagined so much existed. I love Spike's sculptures. Sculpture is like men. It comes in 3 sizes, small, medium, and oh my God! And he has sculptures in so many cities! He's finishing one for Atlanta now. We may stop there on the way back from Turks and Caicos to supervise the installation.

We had a long talk that night in the Mass. quiet. I was glad to see her so happy, even if it did make me nervous thinking about the downside which I thought was coming sure as shit. I didn't much like the fact that Spike was bringing her so close to my orbit, but there wasn't much I could do about that either.

Still frankly I felt stuck and anxious. My room papered in maps seemed like a trap I couldn't think my way out of. All the days we had spent together culling the flea markets and selling blended together into an image of her composed of a million objects. Collage mama. I am her son, all right.

Or maybe some intuition of things to come was stirring.

She left in the morning. I stayed another day, looking at old photographs of her and me: at 6 months, that’s me in the baby carrier on the flea market table among the depression ware; then there we are in Albany, the loaded Volkswagon van behind us, my mother in a tie-die dress, me in jeans and a T-shirt, my hair shoulder length.

I took Amtrak back to the city out of Albany in a snowstorm and was on Orchard Street late in the afternoon of the 27th. It was snowing in the city too. I took a taxi at Grand Central to watch the big flakes falling. Cars were sliding all over. Orchard Street was gorgeous in the snow, pulsing with music, smoky with kebabs. Its casual flamboyance was tonic. In my building the sewing machines were rattling away. They were loading the elevator so I took the stairs. Through open doors I saw the legions of women hunched over old Singers, surrounded by wracks of flame-like finished articles or bolts of colored fabric, florescent lights and pale green walls and scarred wooden floors.

FleX and Rachel were there. My sink was full of dishes, there were a lot of empty Guinness bottles and overflowing ashtrays lying around. I listened to my messages. 5 from Blue and 1 from Phil making sure FleX and I were coming to the New Year's Eve party at his place. I checked the mail. A Christmas card from Charm and Wally Russler. FleX and Rachel were dressing. I made some tea. They asked me if I wanted to see THEY EAT SCUM, a para punk film by Nick Zedd, at Max's. I wasn't up to transgression cinema, but I should have gone. It would have swept away the Christmas residue in a cleansing assault. Instead I sat in the kitchen looking at a Nick Right I had hung there recently.

Eaton Patz still smiled on a milk carton, the same or another. The Nick Right fell to the floor with a thud as I stared at it. The rusted nail I had hung it on had broken. The frame was cracked but the painting was ok.

I went into the studio. The painting I had watched FleX working on was stacked with rest of his work along the walls, drying. It takes a long time for a painting to finish itself once the artist decides to stop. Phil would say that a painting is never finished, that it changes with each viewing. This was FleX's (and every painter’s) curse: the moment he stopped he began to disappear from the life of the painting. And that was the moment my interest began: the moment I could make it mine.

I wanted Rachel and she was FleX's. At the time I couldn’t articulate my distress so simply. I felt like someone had ripped out my lungs and replaced them with pangs, like I was carrying a pumpkin around in my chest. FleX was actually crazy enough to love someone. To me, to love was to overestimate, a collector's disease that I had ironically taken care not to catch. I thought I was incapable of overestimating or distorting anything, I thought in series and relative worth. I thought I was cruelly incapable of inaccuracy or distortion. Life as a trade off, a flea market deal. But Rachel made mash of all that without trying. And I was the flea that came with the market. One can learn to live with anything. Look at Eaton Patz’s parents.

FleX and Rachel and I spent the 30th at Joe's. It was decorated with Christmas lights blinking behind the bar and silver and gold garlands, which only made the place seem more dismal than usual. Charm was with her family and I hadn't returned Blue's calls since I got back. We were working on our 2nd pitcher of beer. Rachel was the only black, and almost the only woman in Joe's. At last I learned who she was. Or thought I did. The only problem was that she omitted everything that truly mattered.

I'm from Port-au-Prince. Pietonville, really. It's up in the mountains half an hour from Port-au-Prince. But my parents have an apartment in Paris where they spend most of their time. My father's a doctor who is known for his voodoo. He's a 1st world doctor who believes in local wisdom and herbal cures. Not only Haitian. He's a legend in French Africa. He has suppliers in the Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Morocco. People send him cures and medicines from all over the world. My father has more European than Haitian patients. They're very conservative, strict people, my parents. They were furious with me for dropping out of Yale. Since I started modeling they don't know what to say. I earn my own money. They can't control me. It's my life. They were always a little ashamed of me. My parents are light-skinned, much lighter than I am. They hide their feelings behind their pride, but they don't like it that I am so black. They think I'm a throwback. When I started with Ford they were completely shocked. Even when they saw me in the magazines, I know what their first thoughts were: "She's so black." Twice I went to Paris for the shows and didn't call them.

I could picture the doctor's girl growing up in the privileged places of Pietonville, Paris and Dakar. Her impossible childhood, its distance from the flea markets of Massachusetts, not to mention Joe's, just killed me. But the truth is that Rachel was in deep with the Haitians who were running cocaine from Colombia through Haiti to NYC, the same people Phil was laundering money for. She had been supplying the Yale campus when she went there, and she was one of the main distributors for the fashion industry in New York City. The fact that Phil knew her uncle Etienne has always bothered me, but I think finally that’s just a coincidence. She hated Phil. And what happened went far, far beyond him.

We played some 3-way pool. The toothless guy at the end of the bar was having an animated conversation with his invisible friend. I played every Hank Williams song on the jukebox. FleX talked.

I was alone on Christmas Eve and went out to see my mother and father. I haven't seen them for years and my father just had a triple bypass. If I lived to make them happy I would never have been anything. Anyone who is anything comes from nowhere. Like Christ. I believe that. We make ourselves up. We are shots in the dark. But I went back anyway. A moment of weakness. A kind of anti-metamorphosis. He was smoking and drinking his gin and tonics. Mom was making them. TV going all the time. And the two of them still looking at me like I killed my brother. Jason. Jason and I were like two peas in a pod. I would have killed myself before I killed him. They just stared like I was a murderer. I had to get out of there. What the fuck am I telling you this for?

Why FleX invented this past for himself has always mystified me, but he did have a thing for working class misery. And his story about the brother’s tragic demise did prefigure his own end, at least in it’s broad outlines. Rachel pulled him to his feet and they rocked back and forth in each other's arms to the music. I thought about my family and FleX's family and all the fucked-up families in the world. I was feeling pretty beery. I called Nick Right. There was a small party at his place, a converted stable in an alley on Rivington Street off the Bowery. I went to get rid of some of the beer and when I came back Blue was sitting at our table. She was all in white with a ton of make-up and looked haggard. I wanted to bolt but I made myself go over and sit down. She started in right away about not returning her calls.

She burst into tears. I was paralyzed, waiting for FleX and Rachel to rescue me, but they just swayed obliviously in each other's arms. Suddenly Blue jumped up, her chair tipped over backwards, the table moved, the beers spilled and an enormous meat cleaver materialized in her hands.

Happy New Year! I’m going to put a fucking cunt in your forehead!

I stood and the cleaver glanced off my left shoulder and fell to the ground.

Nobody noticed.

Blue and I stared at each other.

She went for the cleaver and I grabbed her. She struggled. I pushed her backward over a table. Her head landed with a sickening crunch just as "I'm Sorry For You My Friend" came on the jukebox. The glitter went out of her eyes. I felt blood between my fingers.

For a second I thought I’d killed her, but the blood was my own. I lifted her head and saw that it had landed in a big plastic ashtray full of peanut shells. They were stuck in her hair.

FleX and Rachel and I bailed out, leaving Blue bewildered. We went to FleX's to look at my arm. They washed and bandaged what turned out to be a superficial wound (but a ruined coat). FleX had an idea of what had happened. I tried explaining to Rachel about the cleaver-swinging woman artist in Victorian dress. The more I tried the funnier it became and soon we were all laughing on the floor together. We went to Nick's party and danced for hours to great music. FleX had 3 grams of coke and we had burned through half of it by the time we crashed on Orchard Street.

I could only picture them, white and black against the dirty sheets, as I lay in bed unable to sleep for hours.

I got up as the sun was going down. Rachel and FleX came out together around 7. We took turns showering and got dressed high punk for Phil's and Agnés's. We did a few lines and took a taxi up to 72nd and 5th Avenue. There was still snow in the park. The uniformed doorman ushered us in, with a crisp, white-gloved salute, to the white marble lobby lined with palm trees. One of the attendants took us in the private elevator up to the penthouse. Rachel took it like a queen. The doors opened into the apartment's foyer. The Paik TVs were blaring and shifting. A butler took our coats and escorted us up the wide curving staircase to that impressive multi-level room with wrap-around windows and a bar, where now maybe seventy-five people were clumped together in groups of four or five. All heads turned in our direction. There was Etienne de la Terre and Domingo Santiago, Etienne waving in our direction, at Rachel I now realize. Someone was playing a white baby grand I didn't remember from our last trip there. We were getting drinks as I picked out the museum trustees in the crowd when Agnés appeared wearing a St. Laurent number that showed off her tits for once. She took us straight to Phil, who was holding forth to three couples, scotch in one hand, cigarette in the other. He was wearing make-up and a monkey suit. I remembered Juno telling me he liked to wear women's panties.

FleX, the artist whose work we have been admiring downstairs. Accompanied by Zachary Willis, downtown collector par excellence, and Rachel Aufan, certainly one of the most beautiful women in New York. Toujours ravi, mademoiselle.

He kissed her hand. Etienne and Santigo appeared. Rachel kissed them both hello and she and Etienne said a few things in French to each other.

Then she said

Etienne says you’ve met. He’s my uncle.

Phil cut in and said

I must show you newcomers where Agnés has hung our FleXes. It's quite exciting. I smell a movement. Indeed. The next copy of "VALUE EQUATIONS" is dedicated entirely to FleX. Since the historic night of October 31, FleX has increased in value 100%. That's 50% a month. Don't chuckle now. No other legal investment comes close. You buy a FleX today for 4,200 and I'll buy it back from you next New Year's Eve for double, if you'll sell it to me. But you won't. Believe me, you won't. Primarily because you're lovers of art, and this art will ravish you. These paintings are language magnets; words are their context and renewable resource. X marks the spot. I have an article coming out in January in TODAY'S ART, where I have just been named editor, on the critical E-Y-E. The critic's truth is that discovery is creative. The discovery of the wheel was a creative act, a flash of insight. When an art critic sees relations among objects he creates those relations. The artist is a prophet, and the critic is a priest. But a priest in the sense of magician, transforming the flesh of the object into the spirit of language. Marcel, our father in art heaven, went half way. Let's not chicken out. He's counting on us. All we need is a name.

FleX said

FleXus!

without skipping a beat, and Phil started to overheat.

It's perfect! It'll put a hole in all that fluxus bullshit that's been floating around for a decade and a half too long already. FleXus!

Today Phil must rue his words, if he ever reflects on them. FleXus extinguished itself in infancy by its own excesses, and today fluxus pieces are in every major museum of modern art in the world. But I'm not one to rub it in.

The X is a double slash, the spot producing Zeitgeist. FleXus is dedicated to the slash in annihilation slash enhancement. FleXus is dedicated to the WORLD OBJECT. This is not the same as the world of objects, nor the objective world. WORLD OBJECTS are subjective universals. WORLD OBJECTS ARE WORD MAGNETS. FleXus is dedicated to Manhattan, where real estate is FleXus. FleXus is dedicated to the 80s. FleXus is the artist before your eyes. And it is so much more. People are tired of flux, they want FleX.

FleX said

I'm a movement of 1. FleXus is for the individual against the mass. That's it. That's the truest thing about me.

Santiago said

Phil, a man of your means should have the good sense to stick to blue chips. The real poetry. Picasso. Klee. Those paintings in your dining room are, well, talented. Time is any painting's true test. It used to take decades for a heavyweight artist to come into his own. Now it takes years. Pretty soon it'll be months. Sorry kid, but the paintings I saw are in too much of a hurry to be modern. Our time is chaotic, but those paintings haven't lived it. I came into a Mondrian last week. He's a little bit too much of a control freak for my taste, but you see he knew chaos. Not only knew it, he lived it. Of course, I paid a little more than 4000 for it.

Phil came back:

You’re a good student, but old Phil’s going to give you D + on that little discourse. Mondrian's too anti-nature. You can't exclude form. Not completely, unless you pursue it to the point of zero. FleX reverses that line: the forcefulness of the static/tectonic balance is transformed into the kinetic/flexible. FleX. Plus double or nothing on your money, guaranteed.

Etienne said

Hey, double your peanuts!

Phil said

Trust me, there’s more actual profit coming in contemporary art than in any other investment you can bring to the table.

In all fairness to Phil, he was one of the few, along with me, and perhaps he even more than me, who saw that early what was coming to the world of contemporary art. Our little discussion cooled off when Richard Pierce, the producer, came up and took Phil by the arm. He'd heard about Phil's offer to buy back any FleX for double by the next New Year. A waiter stopped with a tray of caviar, followed by one bearing glasses of champagne. Rachel went off with her uncle. Agnés walked FleX around the room like her latest thoroughbred around the yard. I saw John Morrison, Nick Right's dealer, at the same time he saw me. He came over. He looked like a banker, like he counted his money twice a day.

No hard feelings, kid, I got a deal worked out with Nick. You know, you could have ruined him, and he's got a nice little career going with me. I made Nick what he is, I took him on when nobody else would touch him with a 10-foot pole. You hear what I'm saying? Without me, Nick would be a sous-chef in some health food restaurant somewhere. Or a bitter taxi driver with nothing but paint under his fingernails. I'm getting some paintings from him, and like I say, things are going to be all right. I don't mean to hammer the point. Bygones are bygones.

FleX joined us, sans Agnés.

So, this is FleX in the flesh. I got a slot open for you. Late spring. We can get shows up in Europe at the same time. I saw your first catalogue, and I'd like to get out another. What do you say? Why don't you come by the gallery next week and we can talk about it.

Phil answered

We're keeping this artist out of trouble for a while.

Phil held FleX's arm, buddy-buddy, and they started doing their weird dance again, pushing and pulling each other all over the room, a man in a monkey suit and a punk painter about to fight or tear each other's clothes off. For a second I thought it might turn really violent, then FleX winked at me. They stopped, and Phil was already winded. The room was quiet except for the piano. All eyes were on them. For a second all I could think about was Morrison's face when Nick delivered those paintings, that and the fact we had sold 12 paintings of FleX's that Phil knew nothing about. Phil was bound to run into someone sooner or later who had bought a FleX through me.

Agnés started to sing, a party strategy she was famous for. The faces all dipped into their drinks and looked away. The mild conversations recovered, the party talk flowed again, pouring like water over the black rock of our presence.

Phil led FleX and Rachel and me to the downstairs dining room where FleX's paintings were hung. Agnés had stripped the old paneling off the walls and had redone the room in high-tech rubber, black granite and plastic. The effect was dramatic, a black and gray and white room with a wall of windows overlooking the park and the 3 paintings hung between them. Phil turned the lights out.

This was Agnés's idea, and I think it rather good because the paintings react to changing light in a way I hadn't realized until I saw them here. Night light is fantastic, artificial and glittery, bringing out the innate organic warmth. The daylight hangs over them like a veil, making them more mysterious. Etienne and Santiago are interesting, don't you think? That feeble attack on FleXus, which, I commend you, is a fabulous moniker for our little project. I mean, if that's all they can come up with...they are very conservative investors, but don’t worry, I’ll get them to come in; and when they’re in, prepare yourselves for an avalanche of cash. Most people think the true collector is someone with something in him or her that's bigger than a wallet, the true collector is passionate about the artists, supports them, finds what's needed in their work. But that’s bullshit. You guys know as well as I do that the real collectors are passionate about only one thing: themselves. And that's how it should be. They're like addicts. Each hit is satisfying, but not for long.

FleX said

I'm glad you're into FleXus. I thought it up a couple of years ago. I think it'll do all right. Just don't fuck it up, o.k. Phil? I mean, get 'em hooked. All right, my friend? I mean, make me the monkey on their backs. We got to split, man, we have another party to go to.

Cool, drunken Phil followed us as we wandered out past a DeKooning and a Still and a Dine to the butler and the coats. At the elevator door FleX turned, walked back and kissed him on the mouth.

Happy New Year, Phil. Van Gogh’s revenge, that’s what I want. Remember that Phil: van Gogh’s revenge.

Phil tried to wipe the brown lipstick off with his hand and said

Van Gogh’s revenge! Paint me something with that title! I simply have to have it!

We went by the doormen and grabbed a taxi downtown. Midnight ticked over us in the cab, somewhere around 34th Street. The 80’s were officially upon us.

You've got to give Phil shit. It keeps him in line. Did you see him? I'm going to call my next painting Midnight Fill Up. He's going to take all the credit for FleXus, wait and see. He's happy we left, so he can show off his new word toy. But so what? Phil's working for us. Let's go home. I just got a couple of grams of some H called red head. It's not really red, it's more like dusty brown. Let's put some music on and paint all night.

The cab bounced down Broadway. Rachel sat between us holding both our hands. The New Year was on.

End of Chapter 4

A new chapter will be published each week.

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