Haunted

  And Sister Vigilante holds up one hand, her wristwatch glowing radium-green in the dim hallway. Sister Vigilante shakes the watch to make it flash, and she says, “Today is going to be as long as I say it will be . . .”

  To Mrs. Clark, she says, “Now show me how to turn on the damned lights.”

  And the Missing Link drops her slipper feet to the floor.

  Clark and the Sister, they feel their way off into the darkness, patting the damp hallway walls, moving toward the gray of the ghost light onstage.

  Mr. Whittier, our new ghost.

  Even Saint Gut-Free's stomach growls.

  To shrink their stomachs, Miss America says some women will drink vinegar. That's how bad hunger pangs can hurt.

  “Tell me a story,” Mother Nature says. She's lit an apple-cinnamon candle with bite marks in the wax. “Anybody,” she says. “Tell me a story to make me never want to eat, ever again . . .”

  Director Denial hugs her cat, saying, “A story might ruin your appetite, but Cora is still hungry.”

  And Miss America says, “Tell that cat, in a couple days he'll qualify as food.” Already, her pink spandex boobs look bigger.

  And Saint Gut-Free says, “Please, can anybody please take my mind off my stomach.” His voice different, smooth and dry, for the first time without food in his mouth.

  The stink is thick as fog. That smell no one wants to breathe.

  And, walking toward the stage, toward the circle around the ghost light, the Duke of Vandals says, “Before I ever sold a painting . . .” He looks back to make sure we'll follow, and the Duke says, “I used to be the opposite of an art thief . . .”

  While, room by room, the sun starts to come up.

  And in our heads, we all write this down: The opposite of an art thief . . .

  For Hire

  A Poem About the Duke of Vandals

  “Nobody calls Michelangelo the Vatican's bitch,” says the Duke of Vandals,

  just because he begged Pope Julius for work.

  The Duke onstage, his scruffy jaw, scrub brush with pale stubble,

  it goes round and round, kneading and grinding

  a wad of nicotine gum.

  His gray sweatshirt and canvas pants are flecked with dried raisins of red, dark-red,

  yellow, blue and green, brown, black and white paint.

  His hair tumbles behind him, a tangle of brass wire, tarnished dark with oil

  and dusted with sticky flakes of dandruff.

  Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

  a slide show of portraits and allegories, still lifes and landscapes.

  All of this ancient art, it uses his face, his chest, his stocking feet in sandals

  as a gallery wall.

  The Duke of Vandals, he says, “No one calls Mozart a corporate whore”

  because he worked for the Archbishop of Salzburg.

  After that, then wrote The Magic Flute,

  wrote Eine kleine Nachtmusik,

  paid by trickle-down cash from Giuseppe Bridi and his big-money silk industry.

  Nor do we call Leonardo da Vinci a sellout,

  a tool,

  because he slopped paint for gold from Pope Leo X and Lorenzo de' Medici.

  “No,” says the Duke, “We look at The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa

  and never know who paid the bills to create them.”

  What matters, he says, is what the artist leaves behind, the artwork.

  Not how you paid the rent.

  Ambition

  A Story by the Duke of Vandals

  One judge called it “malicious mischief.” Another judge called it “destruction of public property.”

  In New York City, after the guards caught him in the Museum of Modern Art, the judge reduced the charge to “littering” as a final insult. After the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the judge called what Terry Fletcher did “graffiti.”

  At the Getty or the Frick or the National Gallery, Terry's crime was always the same. People just couldn't agree on what to call it.

  None of these judges should be confused with the Honorable Lester G. Myers of the Los Angeles County District Court, art collector and downright nice guy. The art critic is not Tannity Brewster, writer and knower of all things cultural. And relax, no way is the gallery owner Dennis Bradshaw, famous for his Pell/Mell Gallery, where just by coincidence people get shot in the back. Every once in a while.

  No, any resemblance between these characters and anyone living or dead is a complete accident.

  What happens here is all made up. No one is anyone except Mr. Terry Fletcher.

  Just keep telling yourself this is a story. None of this is for real.

  The basic idea came from England, where art students go to the post office and take stacks of the cheap address labels available at no charge. Every post office has stacks and stacks of these labels, each one the size of your hand with the fingers straight but held tight together. A size easy to hide in your palm. The labels had a peel-off backing of waxed paper. Under that was a layer of glue designed to stick to anything, forever.

  That was their real charm. Young artists—nobodies, really—they could sit in their studio and paint a perfect miniature. Or sketch a charcoal study after painting the sticker with a base coat of white.

  Then, sticker in hand, they'd go out to hang their own little show. In pubs. In train carriages. The back seats of taxicabs. And their work would “hang” there for longer than you'd guess.

  The post office made the stickers with such cheap paper that you could never peel them away. The paper tore in specks and flakes at the edge, but even there, the glue would stay. The raw glue, looking lumpy and yellow as snot, it collected dust and smoke until it was a black smear so much worse than the little art-school painting it had been. Folks found that any artwork was better than the ugly glue it left behind.

  So—people let the art hang. In elevators and toilet stalls. In church confessionals and department-store fitting rooms. Most of these, places where a few paintings might help. Most of the painters just happy to have their work seen. Forever.

  Still—leave it to an American to take something too far.

  For Terry Fletcher, the big idea came while he stood in line to see the Mona Lisa. The closer he got, the painting never got any bigger. He had art textbooks that were bigger. Here was the most famous painting in the world, and it was smaller than a sofa cushion.

  Anywhere else, it would be so easy to slip inside your coat and cross your arms over. To steal.

  As the line crept closer to the painting, it didn't look like such a miracle, either. Here was the masterwork of Leonardo da Vinci, and it didn't look worth wasting a whole day on his hind legs in Paris, France.

  It was the same letdown that Terry Fletcher felt after seeing that ancient petroglyph of the dancing flute player, Kokopelli, after seeing it painted on neckties and glazed on dog-food bowls. Hooked into bathmats and toilet-seat covers. When, at last, he'd gone to New Mexico and seen the original, hammered and painted into a cliff face—his first thought was: How trite . . .

  All the dinky old masterpiece paintings with their puffed-up reputations, the British post-office stickers, what it meant was, he could do better. He could paint better and sneak his work into museums, framed and wrapped inside his coat. Nothing too big, but he could put double-sided mounting tape on the back, and when the right moment came . . . just stick the painting on the wall. Right there for the world to see, between the Rubens and the Picasso . . . an original work by Terry Fletcher.

  In the Tate Gallery, crowding the Turner painting of Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, there would be Terry's mom, smiling. She'd be drying her hands in a red-and-white-striped dishtowel. In the Prado Museum, butted up against the Velázquez portrait of the Infanta would be his girlfriend, Rudy. Or his dog, Boner.

  Sure, it was his work, his signature, but this would be about heaping glory on the people he loved.

  It's too bad that
most of his work would end up hung in a museum's bathroom. It was the only space without a guard or security camera. During slow hours, he could even step into the ladies' room and hang a picture.

  Not every tourist went into every gallery of a museum, but they all went to the bathroom.

  It almost didn't seem to matter, how the picture looked. What made it art, a masterpiece, that seemed to depend on where it hung . . . how rich the frame looked . . . and what other work it hung beside. If he did his research, found the right antique frame, and hung his picture in the center of a crowded wall, it would be there for days, maybe weeks, before he got a call from the museum staff. Or the police.

  Then came the charges: malicious mischief, destruction of public property, graffiti.

  “Litter,” a judge called his art, and slapped Terry with a fine and a night in jail.

  In the cell the police give Terry Fletcher, everybody before him had been an artist, scratching away the green paint to make pictures on each wall. Then to sign their name. Petroglyphs more original than Kokopelli. The Mona Lisa. By names that weren't Pablo Picasso. It was that night, looking at those pictures, Terry almost gave up.

  Almost.

  The next day, a man came to his studio, where black flies circled a pile of fruit Terry had been trying to paint when he was arrested. This was the lead art critic for a chain of newspapers. He was a friend of the judge from the night before, and this critic said, yes, he found the whole story funny as hell. A perfect story for his syndicated column about the art world. Even with the sweet smell of the rotting fruit, the flies buzzing, this man said he'd love to see Terry's work.

  “Very good,” the critic said, looking at canvas after canvas, each of them small enough to fit inside a trench coat. “Very, very good.”

  The black flies kept circling, landing on the spotted apples and black bananas, then buzzing around the two men.

  The critic wore eyeglasses with each lens as thick as the porthole on a ship. Talking to him, you'd want to shout, the way you'd yell to someone behind an upstairs window, inside a big house and not coming to answer the locked door.

  Still, he was absolutely, positively, undeniably NOT Tannity Brewster.

  Most of the best pictures, Terry told him, they were still in lockup as evidence in future trials.

  But the critic said that didn't matter. The day after, he brought a gallery owner and a collector, both of them famous from their opinions being in national magazines all the time. The group of them look at his work. They keep repeating the name of an artist famous for his messy prints of dead celebrities and signing his work huge with a can of red spray paint.

  Again, this gallery owner was not Dennis Bradshaw. And when she spoke, this art collector had a Texan accent. Her red-blond hair was the exact creepy orange-peel color as her tanned shoulders and neck, but she was not Bret Hillary Beales.

  She's a totally made-up character. But as she looked at his painting, she kept using the word “bankable.”

  She even had a little tattoo that said “Sugar” in lacy script on her ankle, just above her sandaled foot, but she was in no way, absolutely not, nope, NOT Miss Bret Hillary Beales.

  No, this fake, made-up critic, art collector, and gallery owner, at last, they tell our artist: Here's the deal. They have millions invested in the work of this messy printmaker, but his current output was flooding the art market. He was making money with volume, but driving down the value of his earlier work. The value of their investment.

  The deal was, if Terry Fletcher will kill the printmaker—then the art critic, the gallery owner, and the collector will make Terry famous. They'll turn him into a good investment. His work will sell for a fortune. The pictures of his mother and girlfriend, his dog and hamster, they'll get the buildup they need to become as classic as the Mona Lisa. As the Kokopelli, that Hopi god of mischief.

  In his studio, the black flies still circled the same heap of soft apples and limp bananas.

  And if it helps, they tell Fletcher, the printmaker only got famous because he murdered a lazy sculptor, who in turn had murdered a pushy painter, who had murdered a sell-out collage maker.

  All those people are still dead while their work sits in a museum, like a bank account every minute snowballing in value. And not even pretty value, as the colors go brown as a van Gogh sunflower, the paint and varnish cracking and turning yellow. Always so much smaller than people would expect after waiting all day in line.

  The art market had worked this way for centuries, the critic said. If Terry chose not to take this, his first real “commission,” it was no problem. But he still had a long future of unsettled court cases, charges still outstanding against him. These art people could wipe out all that with a phone call. Or they could make it worse. Even if he did nothing, Terry Fletcher could still go to jail for a long, long time. That scratched green cell.

  After that, who would believe the word of a jailbird?

  So Terry Fletcher, he says: Yes.

  It helps that he's never met the printmaker. The gallery owner gives him a gun and tells him to wear a nylon stocking over his head. The gun is only the size of your hand with the fingers straight but held tight together. A tool easy to hide in your palm, it's only the size of a package label, but does a job just as forever. The sloppy printmaker will be in the gallery until it closes. After that, he'll walk home.

  That night, Terry Fletcher shoots him, three times—pop, pop, pop—in the back. A job faster than hanging his dog, Boner, in the Guggenheim Museum.

  A month later, Fletcher has his first real show in a gallery.

  This is NOT the Pell/Mell Gallery. It has the same black and pink checkerboard tiles on the floor, and a matching striped canopy over the door, and oodles of smart people go there to invest in art, but this is some other, let's-pretend kind of gallery. Filled with fake smart people.

  It's after that Terry's career gets complicated. You might say he did his job too well, because the art critic sends him off to kill a conceptual artist in Germany. A performance artist in San Francisco. A kinetic sculptor in Barcelona. Everyone thinks Andy Warhol died from gallbladder surgery. You think Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. That Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe died from AIDS.

  The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

  This whole time, the critic says if Fletcher backs down the art world will frame him for the first murder. Or worse.

  Terry asks, What's worse?

  And they don't say.

  Leave it to an American to take something too far.

  Between killing every sell-out artist, every lazy, sloppy artist, Terry Fletcher has no time to do his own art well. Even the pictures of Rudy and his mom, they look rushed, messy, as if he couldn't care less. More and more, he's knocking out different versions of the dancing, flute-playing Kokopelli. He's blowing up photos of the Mona Lisa to wall-sized, then hand-coloring the photos in colors popular for room decoration that year. Still, if his signature is at the bottom, people buy it. Museums buy it.

  And after this year of being famous . . .

  After that year, he's in an art gallery, talking to the owner. The same man who lent him a gun the year before. NOT Dennis Bradshaw. The street outside is dark. His wristwatch says eleven o'clock. The galley owner says he needs to close up and get home himself. Whatever happened to that gun, Terry doesn't know.

  The owner opens the front door, and outside is the dark sidewalk. The black-and-pink-striped canopy. The long walk home.

  Outside, the lampposts are glued with the little paintings of people you'll never know. The street is pasted with their unsigned artwork. It's this long walk into the dark that will happen, if not tonight, then some night. With this next step, every night will be a walk into the world where every artist wants a chance to be known.

  8

  We're in the Mayan foyer, the walls covered with plaster, pitted to look like lava rock. The fake lava rock is carved to look like warriors wearing loinclo
ths and feather headdresses. The warriors wearing capes of spotted fur to look like leopards. The whole room telling the story it wants you to accept as the truth.

  Carved plaster parrots trail tailfeathers in rainbows of orange and red.

  From fake cracks and crumbling places in the plaster stone, made to look ancient, high above our heads sprout chains of fat purple orchids made of paper.

  “Mr. Whittier was right,” says Mrs. Clark, looking around. “We do create the drama that fills up our life.”

  Only dust dulls the orange feathers and purple flowers. Fake-leopard-spot fur covers the black wood sofas. The sofas and leering warrior faces and fake lava rock, they're all cobwebbed together with strands of gray.

  Mrs. Clark says, Sometimes it seems that we spend the first half of our lives looking for some disaster. And she looks down at her straight-out chest—a look made almost impossible by her enhanced lips. As young people, she says, we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children—a life of constant dashing around.

  “We still create the drama and pain we need,” says Mrs. Clark. “But this first disaster is a vaccination, an inoculation.”

  Your whole life, she says, you're searching for disaster—you're auditioning disasters—so you'll be well rehearsed when the ultimate disaster finally arrives.

  “For when you die,” Mrs. Clark says.

  Here in the Mayan foyer, the black wood sofas and chairs are carved to look like the altars on top of pyramids where human sacrifices would go to get their hearts torn out.

  The carpet is some lunar calendar, circles inside circles, patterned black-on-orange and sticky with spilled sodas. At our feet spreads a moldy stain branching arms and legs.

  Sitting down on the fake-fur cushions, you can still smell popcorn.