Unplugged Yellow

7

Rachel said

When I left you after the snowstorm I swore to myself that I would tell him everything, I would force him to see me finally. But I guess I didn't exactly know myself who I was, did I? When I got outside, he was there, in the snow, looking like a beautiful crow with a white mask, waiting for me. I thought my heart would explode and leave body parts all over Orchard Street. Who knows how long he had been waiting? He was freezing. The first thing he said was that he didn't want you to know where he was or what he was doing. Nothing had changed, nothing would ever change. We went back to 3rd Street and he said he wanted to clean up his head, stop drugs, get out of New York. I’d heard that before, but what surprised me was the empty apartment. You wouldn’t believe how many paintings he had stashed up there. Gone. All of them. He’d shipped them to my house in Haiti. He was supposed to ship them to Europe for Phil. He knew what was going on. He knew Etienne was my uncle, that in Phil’s eyes- and everyone’s, including Etienne’s, he was sending them to Etienne. Everyone thought that. And he wanted to follow his paintings to my house. It was my fault, wasn't it? My fucking guilt about you only made it more impossible to refuse him, even if I was terrified he would find out. He wanted me to go first to Haiti. I was so afraid if he stayed he would see you and you would tell him.

I inherited the house in Haiti. I sold it and gave the money to our daughter.

Rachel continued

I nursed him. He detoxed. Cold turkey. It's easy to say. He was so sick. It was hot in Pietonville, but the house is well situated. There is a breeze in the mountains. He sweat out more than the heroin, all that poison that made him run and hate himself more than anything was pouring out with it. In 8 days we were sitting by the pool. In 10 he was eating and starting to get some color. He was still so white. He was totally selfish, but wasn't I? Maybe I’m as crazy as he is, I needed him, maybe more than he needed me. I see that now. There were 10 crates of paintings, 10 paintings in a crate, under tarpaulins in the garden behind the chicken coop. What were lies? Lies were happiness. FleX was crazy happy to see those crates. My gardeners helped him to get them ready to re-ship.

FleX was supposed to send those paintings to Europe, where Etienne and Domingo were going to do an end run around Phil & Co. But FleX sent them back to me.

He talked about you a lot. He needed you, but he said I had to be the one to go for the money. I should have seen what he was doing, but who would have thought he was trying to fuck EVERYBODY, Phil, you, Etienne. But Etienne was a problem, because he had to answer to the Colombians, and as we say in Haiti, he who strikes the blow forgets; he who bears the bruises remembers. FleX thought he could use you to get around them. When I began to see what he was doing, I tried to talk him out of it. But he told me he needed you to control everything in New York, and that meant that you had some power over him. He said that he trusted your sense of greed. But then he did an about face and sent half of his work, 50 paintings, to Phil. So you could balance each other. Maybe you don’t find that logical. You can think what you want. But it's definitely not suicidal. Success meant everything to him, even though he despised everyone's art except his own. You know what he thought, that all the pressure was on production, big art. Art factories. Like Warhol. But Warhol only parodied the system. Or else just anti-something. Anti-art. The 60s were gone, the 60s were dead. I listened to him for days and days. He talked about it all the time. He couldn't let it go. Phil put pressure on him to produce, produce, produce, produce. So did everybody. So did you. But he said you were all just trying to compensate for the market's craziness in the only way you knew how, and that his way of dealing with it was an artist's. He talked a lot about van Gogh. That's where the tongue idea came from. It was a goat's tongue. FleX caught it himself in the field, then he slit it’s throat and wrote silence on the paper and we mailed it to Spenser's. That was the week after you got the crates. When you read him Phil's article on the phone he was still sick, but he knew he was getting what he wanted. He got so excited when he heard those names! Giotto! Van Gogh! He was dreaming about becoming van Gogh, revenging van Gogh, but he couldn't see what a trap it would become. FleX in a dream trap. We decided to go to Paris and stay there until summer. Eventually we wanted to live in Africa, Senegal or the Ivory Coast. But we couldn't quite go yet. I had to return to New York. But I called some people in Paris and they said we could stay with them when we were ready.

I later saw that incredible place, a ruin in the 20th arrondissement near the cemetery Père Lachaise. There was a cobblestone courtyard on the ground floor surrounded by abandoned ateliers. The windows were mostly broken. It was a squat. Anywhere from six to a dozen people crashed there. Rachel's friends, who had a group called Les Sex Pistils, had cleared out a lot of it, but there were still remains of makeshift beds and a lot of broken glass. Les Sex Pistils rehearsed in part of it. They lived upstairs and they had fixed that up a little better than Orchard Street. FleX and Rachel had been living in a square tower in the back with an old Rosier ceramic woodstove running pipe into a crumbling wall. The windows looked over the city four ways. They furnished it with a bed that looked like a movie set.

She said

At first we were as happy there as we had been in Haiti. I put off going back to New York as long as I could. FleX jammed with Les Sex Pistils. He used the name Vincent. We almost never went out. No one knew who he was. That was what he wanted. He was clean. We were free. Why did I leave him? God, how I needed him. It was a physical hunger. And here he even needed me, because of the language. I also realized then how much the drugs and his painting were all mixed up in him. Drugs and everything. I guess it's pretty obvious that he was my drug. Music was different, music cleaned him out. But he always used to say music was dead, that Sid Vicious killed it, that music died with Sid, that it was no use. He didn't believe music mattered so much. But painting did, and he took dope to free himself from his fear of it, to let himself go and get his vision on the canvas. Why didn't he paint more while we were there? Because he was off drugs? He was so excited about the money that was coming. That's why I had to go back to New York. It was the worst thing I've ever done, deserting him there. Why did we care so much about the money? I could make enough. At least I could then. But there's something that I've never told you. I was pregnant. It was yours. I wasn't sure at first, but I felt something and I was worried. When I got back to New York and saw you again, then I was sure. I was 3 months pregnant. Which makes it yours.

I learned all of this later because only Rachel could tell me what happened in Paris. Before she got back to New York the goat's tongue they had mailed to the gallery wrapped in paper on which FleX had written the word silence made the daily papers, which brought him to the general public's attention for the second time that year. It also brought the weirdoes out of the woodwork and firmed up the price of a FleX at $20,000 solid while FleX and Rachel were in Pietonville going cold turkey ("so easy to say") and shipping the paintings. When she got back to New York in late March, the short Post article was typical of the kind of thing she found:

VAN GOGH AGAIN!

The New York artist known as FleX aspires to greatness, and he is copying the old masters to get there! Taking a page right out of art history à la van Gogh, FleX has gone in for body mutilating in a big way. He mailed his "tongue," or a reasonable facsimile thereof, to the Mark Spenser Gallery where he is currently exhibiting!
Mark Spenser expressed surprise and doubts that it's the artist's real tongue. "FleX has a sense of drama," he said. Our readers may remember that the artist set off a smoke bomb during his opening at the gallery on February 13th and disappeared!
An all-points police bulletin has so far turned up no trace of the notorious artist. But at $20,000 a painting, bets are that he'll show up soon!

It was a changed and far more complicated world she returned to, even leaving my feelings for her aside, even forgetting the pregnancy. To begin with, I obviously had no idea then that FleX had sent 50 paintings to Phil. No wonder Phil had been so sure that paintings would continue to "surface." FleX knew what he was doing. But he didn't know that half of the total 100 paintings had been completely destroyed by fungal rot and mold in Haiti. Unpacking those crates was a wild ride through exhilaration, shock, and depression. The loft was littered with rusty nails, soft pine slats, and the old newspapers and magazines that FleX used when he packed them. The smell was incredible. The first moldy crate left me panicked; by the last I was sick. I stacked the good paintings against one wall and the ruined ones against another.

Despite my hatred for him and what he was doing to Rachel, the work still knocked me out.

Retrospectively it's obvious that half of mine and at least half of Phil's shipment was worthless. Later I found out that he had received a higher percentage of rotten paintings than I did. Phil's million-dollar balloon deflated to $500,000, half of which he would have owed FleX. That left Phil with a measly $250,000, which was chicken feed to a man who had gotten used to the Façade treatment. And considering what was to come, Phil had reason to be worried. I have often tried to imagine him unpacking his crates, feeling increasingly desperate as each revealed its ruined contents.

But when Rachel arrived we were still riding the wave. I was selling the good FleXes out of Orchard Street at 20 a pop. No doubt Phil was doing the same thing up on 72nd Street. The phone would ring 5 or 6 times a week with serious money on the line. They didn't all work out, but enough of them did. Spenser and Phil were scrambling to set up shows. They let me in on about half of what was going on. FleX must have had some idea of what was happening: he called me to demand an advance from Mark Spenser of 100,000, which was the reason Rachel came to New York. Spenser came up with it. There was a kind of hysteria in the air, as if we were all at a bacchanal. Debauched harmony reigned over all. Folly ruled the day, madness the night. Discord was papered over with money. This was the true opening act to the 80s, fueled by millions in drug money (I often ask myself if many artists, Basquiat for example, would have had such phenomenal success if it hadn’t been for Phil Gray, Etienne de la Terre and Domingo Santiago; not to mention all those club-going cocaine lovers). Phil invited me regularly up to 72nd Street. Charm was getting her revenge by being nice and going around with Nick Right. I bumped into them one week night at Fenelli's soon after Rachel got back. No hard feelings. Nick had a new gallery, Reality, on 57th Street. Everybody was happy about that. I knew that Charm had arranged it. She was friends with Ernst & Engle, Reality's owners. They had come down to Orchard Street and bought 2 FleXes back at $5000 on her recommendation. Phil was pushing Nick in print as a FleXus painter, of all things, which of course made Nick furious. FleX too, when he found out.

Rachel was distant with me, but her distance only sharpened my feelings. I had no idea she was pregnant with Sarah. She was ice cold. I was hurt and pissed off, but I mirrored her with my collector's cool. Maybe if I had been a little less of a calculating collector, if I had been more of the obsessive-compulsive type, she wouldn't have gone back, wouldn't have had to...But if I fought FleX head on, I knew, I would lose. She wasn't ready. So she stayed on 3rd Street. Everything around us was a speedy blur of money and paintings, and between us was a great silent field of anxiety. Mark Spenser took us to lunch in Chinatown after giving Rachel a gallery check from Chase Manhattan for $100,000, made out in her name.

He said

I've got to see him, I've got to at least know where he is. That's the last check like that I'll write. We've got shows coming on the continent and on the coast. I'm not pushing him, but FleX has to know I get very nervous when I lose contact with my artists. It's not like I want him locked in the basement, or anything like that. But it's important that he show up in the next month. I need to get my part straightened out before May. End of April. Everyone's very excited, but believe me I've seen artists go higher--not faster, I admit, but higher--and then take a dive. When they go down there's a kind of tailwind effect. They tend to pull along behind them anyone who doesn't have something else going for them. A dealer and an artist have to be able to look each other in the eye. The other thing is, how do I know who else he's with? I don't need exclusivity, but I have to know what's going on. There are already deals going down behind my back right and left. Most artists come to you one on one. FleX came with his own little team.

He looked at me.

Pass the mandarin duck.

After lunch Rachel and I walked uptown together. It was the first warm day of early spring. Her coat was open. The light sparkled off everything. She stared straight ahead.

FleX is clean. He's waiting for me. I guess you know what that means. It was wrong, what we did during the storm. It was wrong because I was thinking of him. It was desperate and crazy. I didn't promise anything, you don't own me. We're going somewhere he can paint and we can be free together. FleX isn't coming back. It doesn't matter what Spenser wants. That's why you're here. I'll be back. Because I'm the only one who knows where he is.

I blurted that she should stay, that FleX was taking her life away.

I couldn't even try to explain to you if I thought you were going to judge me. But I know how you see things, how you rationalize everything so coldly, how life is a game for you. You know everyone, but who really knows you? You're the collector. FleX is an artist. I think you collect because you're afraid of people. Anyone who has been in love knows that pain is part of it. It's a damn cliché. It's a pop song. But it's true. That love flips over into hate and back again. FleX is right about you. You arrange your paintings around you as if they were people. Your collection is a charmed circle. FleX is the genius. Everyone feeds off of him. You're different because of your collection. He needs me now. You don't need me, even if you think you want me. He's like a child now. He's clean, he's stopped taking drugs. He's playing music again. He's helpless about certain things, he's deluded; that's why he lied. I'm the only one who knows how to help him. I'm part of his life now. He'll never leave me again. Think of me, for once, if you're not too wrapped up in yourself. It's what I've wanted for a long time.

I got completely soused, alone, at Joe's, on beer and Jamesons. In the middle of the night I found myself on 3rd Street as sick as dog in the spring cold. I vomited in front of the Angels, and they laughed. I was completely delirious. In the morning my temperature was 104. It didn't matter. Rachel Aufan was gone. FleX had her. And FleX was gone. Ergo: Rachel was too. Everything reminded me of Rachel. All her cooking things were lying around the kitchen. The wok was rusting and had a spider web in it. I finally went over to the storage bins I'd rented on 2nd Avenue and brought a few pieces back to Orchard Street. I took down all the FleXes but one and put other things up in the front part of the loft. I took them down in turn and put other things up. Imagine trying to reduce your book collection to a single short shelf. The ten books, say, of your personal canon. I stacked the things I took down in the back of the loft where FleX had worked. This frivolous exercise relieved my mind. It was my only distraction.

Charm called. She sounded desperate and couldn't talk on the phone. She had to come over immediately. I ordered some Chinese food for lunch. I let her in an hour later. We sat down at the makeshift table I'd put together and she handed me an envelope with a shaky hand.

Wally left to play tennis this morning. I went through his briefcase. I found this. Wally has a sort of office at the house now with a zerox machine and I copied it.

I read:

W. DIXON
PRIVATE DETECTIVE
Eyes Only: Wallace Russler

1/12: C leaves residence Columbia Heights at 1:45 pm in Chrysler wagon. Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, north and then east on Houston. Parks on street in front of Katz's Delicatessen on Houston 2:15 pm. C south on Orchard Street to No. 212. C enters building at 2:20 pm. Exits same at 4 pm with ZW. North to Houston and west to Wooster. At 4:20 they enter 305 Wooster. At 5:30 they exit building with unidentified 3rd party (UP) and go south to Prince, east to corner of Green and enter Fenelli's bar at 5:35. They sit at table in the back room, which is almost empty, and order drinks. C has a dry vodka martini, ZW a scotch on the rocks, UP a draft beer. They talk about art. UP is a painter and C. has just bought one of his paintings. 6:15 pm: UP leaves and C and ZW order more drinks (photo #1).

There was a grainy black and white photograph of Charm and me making out in the back room at Fenelli's, undoubtedly an enlargement made from a spy camera. It was clear enough. Her hand looked pretty busy under the table, but maybe that was just my memory playing tricks. Someone had circled "unidentified 3rd party" in pencil and noted the name Jerry Sacks, who was indeed the artist in question. I had a couple of his paintings and Charm had picked up a very nice piece that afternoon. The thought that Dix & Co. was watching us for Wally at the same time he was meeting with us to find out who FleX was almost made me laugh. The report continued:

6:45 pm C and ZW exit Fenelli's bar and walk west on Prince to Meisel Gallery on the corner of West Broadway. Enter Meisel's at 6:50 pm. Opening for Jim Dine. C and ZW circulate and drink (photo #2).

Photo #2, also grainy black and white, showed a laughing Charm with her arm around my shoulder. The picture's clinical objectivity, its tabloid clarity bordered in white, came through even on the zerox. A Jim Dine wall sculpture was plainly visible. Charm was a buyer, I was the buyer's boy toy.

8:45 pm C, ZW and party of 8, exit gallery and cross West Broad to the Silver Cloud restaurant. At 10:45 pm C, ZW, and party of 3 exit restaurant and take cab to Roxy, a dance club on west 18th Street. C and ZW dance. 12:30 am C and ZW engage in sex standing up in an obscure corner of the mezzanine (photo #3). C and ZW drink. 1:30 am they take a taxi to the Mudd Club, 222 Canal Street. They drink at bar. 4:OO am C and ZW take a taxi to East Houston Street. C and ZW kiss goodnight. C takes Chrysler and returns to Columbia Heights.

The most appalling paranoia, mixed with lethargy, gripped me. It was as if we were moving and talking slightly slower than normal.

The reports start on January 12th and go up to FleX's opening at Spenser's. There are 30 pages and 15 photographs. The most galling thing is that nothing even exists between us at the moment. It's like owing money on a painting that isn't worth anything. Well, I certainly don't regret the lies I told. I would like to know, though, what to do. It is quite impossible for me to continue his game and not acknowledge anything. The idea makes my skin crawl. Not that I think he would do anything; au contraire, I think he likes it. He's homo deep down. He only likes something if he can share it with another man. No, it's over between us. It would have been over long ago if not for the collection. And the kids. It's a question of what's best for them as well. I can't stay in that house with him. I'll have to take the kids to a hotel. They'll like that, especially Kate. We'll go to the Pierre. It's on the park. That means Geraldine will need a room, too. Oh, he's going to pay very dearly for this. The asshole! Why does this have to happen now? What have you got to drink?

Charm was shaking with impotent anger. Listening to her I speeded up to real time again. Of course I felt involved, but there wasn’t much I could do. We didn't owe each other anything at that point. I knew very little of her world, actually. Would he have to pay so dearly? I felt a surge of sympathy for her, which was exactly what a jury wouldn't feel, particularly if Wally had more rock-solid evidence like this, say another set of pictures with Nick Right. Or someone altogether different, from before perhaps. The crisis did throw us together again, though, two schemers in a tight spot. Phil called while I was pouring shots of tequila. Charm and I sucked limes and licked salt and tossed them off while Phil ranted over the phone. We listened cheek to cheek.

I have to talk to him, you fucker, now tell me where the hell he is. Tell me, Goddamn it! Zach, are you listening to me? Are you there? Where is he Zach, and don't keep giving me that “I really don't know” routine. Hold on just a second, the other phone is ringing.

Phil had been all over me for a couple of days. I wasn't about to tell him that I thought FleX was in Haiti. It wouldn't have made any difference, FleX was in Paris; but I didn't know that. Phil got back on.

Jesus Christ, I can't believe it. Nick Right has been shot. I told him that alley was dangerous. They took him to Belleville.

Charm grabbed the phone.

Phil, it's Charm. What's happened to Nick?

Nick's been shot. The neighbors found him bleeding to death in that alley leading to his house.

We ran downstairs and jumped into a cab. All the way to Belleville Charm kept repeating, sotto voce, a mantra,

Not Wally, oh please it wasn't Wally and God please Nick shouldn't die...

Three hours later, we got the news that Nick was going to live. He was conscious; he remembered nothing and had no idea who shot him. Nick's mother was there with her sister. Charm and I took them out to dinner at a Spanish place on 14th Street. We ordered an absurd amount of food, ate nothing and drank a lot of sangria. Nick being shot, and the presence of his mother and aunt, divorced us from the insistent city, made us feel isolated in an emotional bubble; but the thought that Wally had tried to kill Nick continually bought us back to aggressive, nude reality. Suddenly we all had to leave.

Charm and I walked around aimlessly for a while, heading vaguely downtown on 5th. She was steeling herself to go home and face her husband. In Washington Square a reggae band was giving a concert. We sat for a while and listened, smoked some pot being passed around. I finally put her in a taxi and continued down Broadway and turned east on Houston. When I got to the head of Orchard Street I could see the fire trucks in front of the sweatshop. One of the slicker’d, helmeted firemen told me there had been a small fire on the top floor but it was out. I took the stairs 3 at time. There were cops and firemen all over the loft. The fire had started in the hall in front of my door, on which a dead chicken had been nailed. Fucking voodoo. There was some soot damage. The paintings were all right, or could be cleaned pretty easily. I made sure the door would be secured and walked to 3rd Street. Rachel was right. The place was empty. And she was gone.

End of Chapter 7

A new chapter will be published each week.

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