The Made-Up Man

by Joseph Scapellato

  Right, she’d say, because you tell our stories so correctly. Correctly Stanley, that’s what they call you. Correct me, Correctly Stanley! I’m an error!

  I’m not saying you’re incorrect. I’m saying you’re not correct.

  And I’m not saying you can’t admit when you’re wrong. I’m saying you can’t admit when you’re not right. I’m also not saying you’re a dickhead, I’m saying you’re Head Dick.

  I laughed out loud. The clerk, ringing up my purchases, was unaffected. He looked like he laughed just once a week when he fell off a bar stool. The fact that I didn’t matter to him any more or less than anyone else made me feel almost as good as I’d felt in the ossuary. The columns of cigarettes behind him did not batter down the door to my addiction. He handed back my change. I said, “Děkuji.”

  He looked up from his phone. “Prosím,” he said, as though it broke a superstition not to.

  When I got back to the apartment the pesticidal stench had dissipated. I put the drinks in the fridge and went to the couch with a can of pop. The couch squeaked.

  I opened my laptop. The background on my desktop had changed.

  It had been a color picture I’d taken of a mound at Cahokia. It was now a black-and-white picture of me, framed through a filthy window. I was seated, glaring—it was from the train I’d just been on. It took me a moment to realize that my glare was directed at the grim girl, who wasn’t in the shot. I looked like I was contemplating committing a criminal act.

  My brother had predicted less intrusiveness from Uncle Lech and the artists. My father, more.

  To me it didn’t matter: my strategy was set.

  I changed the background back. I checked my sent-box. I checked my in-box. Manny had written me:

  Ciao Stanley:

  I will be arriving at 16:15, di Firenze, and will be in molto need of a recommendation for a ristorante that will disappoint me but slightly. Va bene? I leave in one hour, and while I am eager to enjoy the opportunities of Golden Praha, and to reconvene with T, already I miss Il Bel Paese, where all things are più semplici.

  A presto,

  Manny.

  Manny was T’s best friend from high school. They’d stayed close. Although I’d only seen him a few times, he had given me many rotten moments to remember him by. Last winter he flew from Berlin to Chicago for the holidays. T and I took him and his companion, Inna, out bowling. To make conversation, to try like T had wanted me to try, I’d asked Manny where he’d been traveling lately. He’d said, like he was wearing a cape, “Everywhere and nowhere.” It made me want to punch him in the glasses.

  13

  Stanley Recalls the Last Time He Talked to Manny

  “Everywhere and nowhere,” he said.

  I finished my beer. Pins cracked across the lanes.

  He picked up his bowling ball, a kid’s model labeled OUTTA THIS WORLD. “But do not get the idea that I am a ‘traveler,’ Stanley, or a ‘tourist,’ or a ‘volunteer,’ or any other synonym for ‘the unambitious.’”

  He bowled the ball between his legs and struck the head pin. Only five fell.

  T, sitting next to Inna on the other side of the console, grinned at me. Her grin hit gorgeous, grateful, and pitying—it seemed lifted straight from the face of some famous sitcom character—and it made me angry, which made me sad.

  14

  Stanley Naps

  No email from T.

  I said to myself: It would be worse to hear from her than to not hear from her.

  Myself said: You don’t believe you.

  I do and I don’t.

  You don’t.

  I closed my laptop and lay down on the couch. The cushions had an unplaceable smell.

  I dropped hard into a dream I wouldn’t remember.

  15

  Stanley Remembers the Dream

  I was napping on a couch in a room in which every surface was a couch.

  An invisible lid, very wide and thick and heavy, slammed closed on me repeatedly.

  I had the sense that the lid was doing this without actually opening.

  I had the sense that I was inside the space at the center of myself that wasn’t me.

  I had the sense that being inside the space at the center of myself that wasn’t me should be providing me with helpful information, but wasn’t.

  The lid slammed and slammed and slammed without a sound.

  I had the sense that there should have been an echo.

  16

  Stanley Wakes Up as Manny Arrives

  The door buzzer squawked.

  I pulled myself to my feet. I buzzed Manny in, unlocked and opened the door, and stepped back.

  The door downstairs whomped shut. The staircase crackled and wheezed like it was more than one Manny coming to stay the night, more than one Manny who’d nobly endure me until T’s arrival tomorrow afternoon. He paused in what sounded like the middle of each flight. In these silences I imagined him cataloguing architectural flaws, or constructing condescending questions, or converting the things that T had told him about recent events in my life into a sequence of backhanded compliments, or planning the timing of the ending of a story that was meant to suggest to the women he was interested in that his pseudo-intellectual elitism was the front to a sensibility so tender, so secretly compassionate, and so unfairly unrecognized that he had earned the right to a gentle hand job from the world.

  He reached my floor, and paused. He walked the hall to just before my doorway, and paused. He appeared.

  Manny was skinny but broad-shouldered somehow, tanned, his eyes so wide he’d look bewildered if it wasn’t for how he never hid his sizing-up of everything and everyone he saw. His glasses and watch were hip. He wore a white T-shirt and dark slacks. The slacks were pressed.

  “I have been deceived,” he declared.

  I’d forgotten how deep his voice landed. His arms, which I’d never seen, were matted in sweaty hair.

  “The location is exceptional. The apartment is not.”

  He walked past me and into the kitchen, where he opened and closed every drawer. In the bathroom he pushed aside the shower curtain to examine the tub, and in the bedroom he shoved aside my luggage to peek under the bed, and in the living room he sat. The couch tooted.

  I closed and locked the door.

  He picked up both of my books, one from the coffee table and one from the floor.

  I went to the fridge for another pop.

  He read out loud from my guidebook: “‘Unlike many of their neighbors, the citizens of this small, landlocked country have rarely resisted as armies marched across their borders, often choosing to fight with words instead of weapons.’” He smirked. “Not one Czech in all of Prague would approve of that passage.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  He flipped to the phrases in the back. “Ne,” he said. “Promiňte.”

  He shut the book and frowned at the ceiling.

  “Dobrý den!” he said, conducting with his hands. “Prosím! Nashledanou!”

  His accent sounded right to me, but what did I know.

  “Stanley,” he said. “This is merely your first day in Praha?”

  I said it merely was.

  “Stanley,” he said. “T was mysterious. T is seldom mysterious. How did you come to occupy this apartment?”

  17

  Stanley Recounts His Aunt Abbey’s Birthday Party

  Back in July I went to my aunt Abbey’s birthday grill-out at her and Uncle Lech’s house in Rogers Park. Her birthday was one of the three times a year that my dad’s side of the family got together, minus Busia, who refused to set foot in the city—my dad drove up from Joliet, my brother took the L from Lakeview, and I rode the bus from Lincoln Square. T had been invited. One reason she didn’t come was that she was tied up with a play, the final run before their trip to Europe. The show she starred in, Black and White and Dead All Over, had been accepted to a big-name festival in Prague. When they’d found out mid-rehearsal, she said, they�
��d stripped to their underwear and run in screaming circles.

  The other reason T didn’t come was that she’d moved out of our apartment and into the apartment of several of her castmates. We weren’t broken up but we were on a break. I’d proposed and she’d said no.

  The party was the day after celebrations for the Fourth, and a fat heat sat on the city. The lake-wind way up in Rogers Park brought relief to the neighborhood. As I walked from the bus stop, cool gusts kicked blown bottle rockets and plastic cups around the alleys. I practiced looking like I felt okay.

  Their house was the only crummy one on the block, a gloomy two-flat propped between a pair of tidy renovated greystones. I bumped open the gate—a tangle of grotesque wooden dolls, hung where bells might be expected, clattered and clapped, their little heads looking dumbstruck. Aunt Abbey leaned out a window near the end of the house, from the kitchen. Her silver-streaked hair was done up in a bun and her face and neck were flushed from the kitchen’s heat. She wore a simple sundress she’d designed and sewn herself. In it, she looked more like my mom than my dad, despite the fact that my dad was her brother. Her face smiled without smiling. Even if she weren’t my only aunt, she’d be my favorite.

  I gave her a bottle of Chopin and told her to hide it better than she’d hid it last year.

  She spoke into the cap like it was a microphone: “Every hiding place I know was his first.”

  Then she fumbled the bottle—I caught it by the neck before it hit the concrete.

  “Drinking already,” I said, handing her the bottle again.

  She pulled back into the kitchen. “If only!”

  My dad and my brother were in the backyard, beers in hand and playing bags. I hadn’t seen my brother since May, when I’d quit the dig at Cahokia.

  “Holy smokes,” he said, “who invited the beard?”

  “You play winner,” said my dad.

  My brother tickled my beard and in a baby voice said, “Wook whose gwoing up! Stanwee! Stanwee’s a bwig boy!”

  I asked if anyone was low. My brother presented his cup. I took it to the keg by the warped sunporch, plucked my own off the cup-stack, and filled them. The backyard was small, crowded with planter boxes and piles of garbage pickings. We played bags in the only available open lane of weedy grass. The garage—massive, mounded in creeping vines and suckers—was our uncle’s workshop. We’d never entered it. Displayed throughout the yard were its poisoned fruits, the “seasonal exhibit”: on that day, life-sized 2-D flats of men and women, sawed in such a way as to make them look like they were emerging from and disappearing into the garden, the gutters, the patio’s ruptured concrete, the fence’s slats. They’d been painted in a kind of highly stylized grayscale, with suits and ties and dresses and hats, and were closer to silhouettes than not. It was like we’d walked into a film-noir-themed shooting range.

  I tried to remember what the summer exhibit had been the year before and couldn’t.

  Next to the keg was the card table laden with platters of pierogi, gołabki, potato pancakes, and beet salad, and next to that, the sausage table, a multi-plattered abundance of grilled, roasted, and boiled kiełbasa, smoked and fresh, ringed by a sliced assortment of cold sausages and cheeses and pickles, and bread.

  I made a plate and carried it between the two cups. While I walked I forgot to remember that we weren’t supposed to enjoy anything about being there.

  My dad landed one bag on the board. He missed with the rest.

  My brother hit two in the hole.

  “I’ve seen crazier comebacks,” said my brother.

  My dad helped himself to the food I offered. As he ate he made angry affirmative noises. There was a bandage on his neck.

  He noticed my new beard but said nothing.

  I asked if the artists were in the garage or what.

  “Can’t you hear it?” said my brother, baffled.

  I stopped chewing.

  “You can’t?” said my dad. “How? Tell me how, so I can’t too.”

  Something in the garage sounded like a hog. Then it sounded like a bunch of hogs, and then not at all like hogs but like many dire men saying things as deeply as they could. And maybe a saxophone.

  “They must be having Mass,” said my brother.

  My dad grunted. “If they are they’re eating the priest.”

  I studied the garage. Between vines twinkled a magnificent stained-glass window. Stained glass was how Uncle Lech made an obscenity of money, our dad had claimed, but it sure wasn’t what we ever saw him making. When we visited for Christmas Eves, Easters, and Aunt Abbey’s birthdays, he was perpetually mid-project with his commune of who we took to be his fellow recently expatriated foreign artists, probably Poles like him, and like him, certifiable. They lived on and off in the garage. They wandered through the yard and the house, performing.

  18

  Stanley Recalls the Artist with the Drawings on His Face

  He’d pretend he couldn’t see you. If you met him in a hallway, he’d bump you gently until you moved. He was built like a washing machine. The drawings on his face, different every time, imitated patriotic tattoos and always depicted a bald eagle taloning his nose. Sometimes the bald eagle was obese. One time it had boobs. Its boobs dripped drops of milk that turned into eggs that hatched American flags.

  19

  Stanley Recalls the Artist with the Laugh

  He’d dress like different white American stereotypes—a hipster, a hick, a yuppie, a dude-bro—and as soon as you came close enough to hear him, he’d laugh. His laughter, which wasn’t “in character,” was always the same: disbelieving. If you looked at him he stopped. If you looked away he started up again.

  20

  Stanley Recalls the Artist Who Pretended to Be Homeless

  He’d set up in the house. With the help of makeup and latex, his face took on different devastated textures, from a sallow tubercular glow to a ripped-up dryness to a matrix of shining open sores. He’d speak frustrated nonsense words and nest in cardboard boxes by the bathroom door or under the dining room table, shaking a cup or holding a sign.

  21

  Stanley Recalls the Artist Who Pretended to Be Asleep, Comatose, or Dead

  She’d be sprawled facedown in a hallway, dressed as a minimum-wage employee, often a fast-food worker. You’d step over her. Later she’d turn up in a more challenging place: on top of a bookshelf, under a rug.

  22

  Stanley Recalls the Artist with the Easel

  He or she wore an American-flag bandanna on his or her face, a patriotic baseball hat, and a smock that was a frumpy suit blazer put on the wrong way, back to front. When you sat to eat, he or she would set up behind you with an easel. If you shifted, he or she would shift to stay at your back. The quick sketch he or she made in charcoal was of an artist sketching you from behind, except the artist in the sketch wasn’t the artist, it was you.

  23

  Stanley Reflects on Uncle Lech’s Art

  If you came to Uncle Lech’s you were the audience for and subject of an art project, one that hit the intersection of performance art, conceptual art, and the plastic arts. Although the artists appeared to pursue individual projects, Uncle Lech regularly turned their energies toward the completion of more ambitious group projects, phases of which we sometimes witnessed.

  My brother loved it. It made him laugh. He loved to hear his own grand laugh. After writing computer code all day for his incompetent boss’s incompetent bosses, he said, he toggled his brain to OFF, and what was better for the entertainment of an OFF brain than art made out of practical jokes?

  My father despised it. He despised Uncle Lech, his sister’s marriage to Uncle Lech, and the artists, who he never called artists, only “the creeps.” Their art wasn’t art, he’d say, it wasn’t even jokes, it was tricks, and every one of them was on whoever the hell happened to be nearby.

  Aunt Abbey, when asked, invoked aesthetic categories: “There is art that engages, and art that estranges. And the
re is art that engages-estranges, in equal measure, from beginning to end.”

  I was undecided.

  “You mean ‘uninformed,’” T would say, whenever it came up.

  I had to admit that I’d never seen his work exhibited.

  Before we met, T had encountered my uncle and his work at a pop-up gallery in Wicker Park. The evening’s featured artists were either established heavyweights or talked-about up-and-comers. T’s friend Sarah-Joseph, a talked-about up-and-comer, was exhibiting a sequence of cosmologically themed sculptures, which T had modeled for. The sculptures had scored positive write-ups in important art magazines, no small feat, but the evening’s magnetic center was my uncle’s installation Country-Western Country. For this project, he and his artists had formed a fake country-western band (the Achy-Breakies), played semi-parodic songs that alternately enchanted, confused, and enraged the audiences at country-western bars in downstate Illinois, Chicagoland, and Chicago (most notably at Carol’s, in Uptown), and documented the experience with photos and audio and video, with performance reviews and news articles, with cracked instruments and half-shattered beer bottles and blood-smudged bar napkins. This exhibit was the only one to claim its own entire room in the gallery.