Only in the nighttime do I get this way. In the daylight I am ordinary, but in the night, I'm manic, I'm obsessive, and always only the thickness of a duck's webbed foot from losing all control.
During the Y&B hours as I call them for the yellow and blue of the sun and sky, I am as constant as the weather here in LaLaLand. Not that I am sunny or bright, but I am dependable, arriving exactly five minutes early every morning in a tailored blue or grey suit for my job as an accountant at Mega-Bank Headquarters in Century City. I have a reputation there as a hard worker and good employee. I am even willing to work overtime during the busy season. But I am always out before dark. Because after the sun sets, I become me.
When the mood takes me, I paint. I paint scenes of cities rocked by war. The faces are different in each place, the expressions the same. Hunger, anger and despair, all in the same face. Not that I've seen this in person. It is my own expression in the mirror that I paint onto each face, both child and elder, bearded and beautiful, victim and victor. It is my own hands that clasp the guns and blood-stained knives. It is my own chest, with the bloody entrails ripped out, attracting the flies.
In the darkness I chain smoke. It keeps the flies from my chest. Brand doesn't matter - whatever meets my hand when I lunge for a new pack twice a night at the 7-11. The Mexican and Iranian clerks know me well; we speak the same language, the garble of refugees lost in an insensitive world whizzing by in hooker red BMW's. As I dive into the shop, they toss me a pack of the cancer sticks as they would throw a hunk of rancid meat to a rabid dog to keep the fangs from their throats. But cancer is not my worry - it is a death for those cursed by aging.
During Y&B, I don't smoke. If I tried, I would only choke on the fumes. I don't drink then either, but after midnight, I smash bottles against the wall in a drunken stupor. The neighbors hate me. And I despise them, too, for I know they can hear me, my screams and growls, and probably even the hyperventilating that starts when bright headlights from outside strike my eyes and won't stop until I've immersed myself in complete blackness. Locking myself in a closet is the surest cure, but sometimes I wait because the hyperventilating adds colors to my paintings, little yellow and red explosions that contrast with the charcoal figures being blown to bits.
And the women. In the office are a few women that I find attractive. Actually, only one woman. She even seems to take a fancy to me. Let's call her Raisun, for reasons that would be apparent if you could see the painting above me now. Unfortunately, I'm much too shackled when the sunlight beats upon my skull to be able to act on my feelings and though she touches me on the arm, kisses me on the cheek and hints at what she wishes to say to me, I have not the subtlety to interpret her charades.
But when I am no longer wearing a blindfold of light, it is the women who search me out, attracted by my mania. These women are not pretty like Raisun - they're whores and junkies who grasp at my strength, alas but a thin life raft that dissolves in the corrosive green brine. The art students, both female and male, seem willing to do anything to coax the semen from my core, expecting to enrich themselves with my genius. Unfortunately for them, with my inner fluids comes not my skills but my disease. We do it in darkened alleys, inside parked cars and in broken down hotels. Those few who see my room, visit my gallery of horrors, leave before morning or never leave. It is always their choice; nobody who comes here, comes unprepared.
Except my little Raisun.
I've known since I was short that I was not "normal." And as much as my departed mother might protest, I was not a bad child, merely unusual. Not in the cruel but pedestrian "pull the wings of butterflies" brainless way. Instead, I would stare at the butterfly trapped between my tweezers, trying to learn how to fly by watching every flicker of the wings as I pinned them down. There are butterflies on my wall - in revenge for my sins they carry the napalm and gasoline bombs that rain down on the still living like manna from hell.
It was my mother who sent me to school to become an accountant. She wanted me to become a priest, but there are certain stones over which this soul can not cross. In frustration, she screamed at the poor art teacher, "There have never been any pimps, pushers, musicians, or artists in this family and never will," as she withdrew me from the class I had selected.
Beige Suit smiled when I told her this. I call the psychiatrist Beige Suit because of the beige suit that she always wore. It fit her well; she wanted to be white light, making all the world clear and understandable, but she was tinged with the grayness of her own neuroses.
It was Raisun that recommended that I visit Beige Suit. But this crisis originated from my own lack of control. The previous evening, a mirror image of Raisun, identical in face and body but dressed entirely in black felt clothing, this serious woman from Venice who doubted her own vision, after a full night of painting and fucking, painting while fucking, painting us fucking, elected to become a lifetime member of my wall of horror.
It was her choice, but it was the wrong choice. Unlike the others, she needed only another chance and the energy to reach for it. She had neither, but her vision weighed me down like a pigeon with an empty beer can around its neck. It scrapped the cement as I bobbed along. I panicked as I sat in front of Raisun the next afternoon at our usual table in the cafeteria. I panicked and in a whisper, told her that I might not be normal. She laughed. Then I mentioned a few of my less unspeakable habits of the dark. I realize now that I was trying to warn her. The Y&B man hated me, feared me so much that he was asking the woman of his dreams to abandon him to keep her from me. But she was unconvinced. However, she thought that I might feel better if I saw her psychiatrist.
My poor Raisun. So sweet. So naive.
Beige Suit wanted to hear everything. Such a stupid woman, looked up all the answers in the back of the textbook. Seductive though. Naked bourgeoisie wrapped in a blank canvas. Smiled as she told me that my father locked me in closets. Very Freudian, very plausible, and very wrong, since my father died when I was but two years old. It was my step-father who tried to beat me, but was usually too drunk to find me behind my mother's cotton dresses in their walk-in closet. From there I could hear the smack of his powerful hands on her delicate face. I could feel the wall shake as he shoved her against the closet door and ripped off her clothes, and I could hear her screams as he raped her on the floor only inches from where I sat and waited for daylight.
I enjoyed watching Beige Coat's eyes as she wondered if I was making this up or not. Still, she thinks, in psychology belief is everything. Truth is nothing. What do I believe? Certainly not psychiatrists.
What she might tell the police was much less problematic than what she told Y&B, that she was going to "cure" him of me. How, I know not, for her methods are such as a Catholic priest praying to his God to prevent a bomb from exploding. Except in the Reader's Digest version, the priest is shredded by shrapnel every time.
But her incantations had non-laughable effects. I became impotent and my drawings become commonplace, lacking in strength. The impotence didn't bother me. Not at all. To fuck or not to fuck, that is not the question so long as my vision can be put to canvas. To see weakness and light in my own paintings was intolerable. She had to be stopped. During the night, I tracked down Beige Suit and brought her, shackled, to my studio. She had never met me before, only Y&B and knew not how to react. I only laughed as she appealed to Y&B's rigid logic. When she saw the wall, she finally understood what I hadn't made up. Beige Suit was wearing her Beige Suit, my blank canvas. I painted on the suit, covering it with scenes of violent death, then drew directly on her flesh the scenes of violent sex, painting with her blood and my semen. She'll never be allowed into Heaven; they strictly enforce their dress code.
Y&B found it difficult to eat lunch with Raisun the following day. Not that I concern myself with her problems, but Y&B was angry. At me, of course, for destroying his life. He avoided her for days, until she dragged him from his solitary cubicle to a nearby coffee shop. He was petrified both by the confrontation brewing and by being seen deserting his battle station during duty hours.
She was brusque. She demanded an explanation for why he was avoiding her. Y&B could not answer. She then asked why he was avoiding Beige Coat.
He finally stammered out an answer. "She is, I heard, maybe, she's d-dead, I think. Murdered by a sex fiend."
He was losing his marbles, even his favorite cat's eye, she told us. Beige Coat was not only alive and psychiatrizing but worried why he missed his appointments.
Y&B started at Raisun's lips. Epiphany in scarlet lipstick. Without another word to her or bank authority, he went straight back to the house. One p.m.: high noon in daylight savings time. Y&B ripped open every curtain, blind, door, and window. Sunlight rushed into the room like water into a submarine gouged by the spikes of a flotilla of monster sea urchins. The photonic pressure ripped the depth from even the most debauched of my paintings, leaving only the soggy streams of chemical pigment.
Y&B stared at each painting in turn, each wall, searching for what could not be seen in the light. They were merely the ordinary drawings of an untalented wretch. He thought he understood the lie that was me that he created in order to remain himself.
He stared at the wall, my wall of horrors that was only a wall of horrible painting. He sat on the floor and stared until the shadows grew longer than life, until the shadows melted into each other and attained a new life, and then all life was shadow. He became me and I had to kill him before he destroyed me.
The methodology was obvious though not to him whose eyes could only see what had already been described to him. It was only through Raisun that I could gain control.
No need for a plan. Through the miracle of copper and electrons I brought her to me. Like a vampire, I insist my victims come invited. I have my morals. She came, many times that night, as did I as I reveled in the strength that I usurped on every stroke, every scream that escaped her lips as I gnawed on her flesh, salty with sweat. She swore her love to me as my hands closed about her throat, as we lay atop a canvas that captured our sweat, our tears, our cum, our blood, and the vomit that eked from her mouth in her last breath. Art doesn't imitate life, it captures life, becomes life itself, I thought as I painted in a sun, a desert sun to slurp on the liquids squeezed from the rocks of our bodies. I shaved off her short golden hairs, and pasted them onto the canvas as the rays of the sun. My Raysun. I loved her too, I realized as my tears dropped onto the canvas and were immediately dried out by the merciless calm of high moon.
For hours, in the dim light of a single bulb, I stared at my wall. It was actually four walls, surrounding me, each full of the horrors that man had perpetrated against man. On the east wall, Hiroshima and Shanghai, Cambodia and Vietnam, Beirut and Kabul. The north was a full wall of Sarajevo. The south wall showed scenes of Mogadisho, Guyana, Peru, and Colombo. In the west were Harlem and Watts. The ceiling showed God in his mercy allowing us to continue unhindered, nea, aiding in the cause, while painted on floorboards were the faces of victims trying to claw their way through hell's ceiling as we step upon them, flatten them with tanks, and worst of all, cover them with furniture and forget about them, leaving them to suffer alone in the darkness.
I stared through the blackness, waiting for my hour of triumph, when the sun would rise but I would still be alone to paint a dark cloud over my source of pain. But as the horizon took form, my strength began to ebb. "I killed her, I killed her," I screamed at the laughing God in the ceiling, but as the first beams of light escaped from the brackish sea, I began to wonder what it was that I had killed. As the orange light of the naive morning sun metamorphosized the blood on my hands back into red paint, I stared at my Raisun until the rays of the sun melted me into the paint that flowed onto her canvas, a smudge of blackness on the ceiling of hell.
Please send all comments, criticisms, and suggestions to dc@dcpalter.com
Copyright 1986-2008 DC Palter. All rights reserved.