Scumbler

by William Wharton

  SCUMBLER

  WILLIAM WHARTON

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to:

  ACQUIESCENCE, WISHES…

  DREAMS

  Why? Why?

  ‘Cause I’m

  Gonna die.

  That’s why.

  EPIGRAPH

  SCUMBLING: to modify the effect of a painting by overlaying parts of it with a thin application of opaque or semi-opaque color.

  —American College Dictionary

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  I THE RATS’ NESTER

  II SELF-PORTRAIT

  III SLUM LANDLORD

  IV RIDING EASY

  V THE PEOPLE’S PAINTER

  VI NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

  VII CHICKEN

  VIII MOUTH-TO-MOUTH

  IX ACCIDENT-PRONE

  X THE NEW YORK BUYER

  XI TIME OUT OF MIND

  XII FULL OF SHIT

  XIII WOMAN TO WOMAN

  XIV A MARRIAGE

  XV NATURE NEST

  XVI CRS = SS

  XVII UGLY ORGY

  XVIII FIREMEN’S BALL

  XIX A PIERCING THOUGHT

  XX MIRACLE OF THE BELLS

  XXI AUTO-DA-FÉ

  XXII 23 SKIDOO

  XXIII THE ULTIMATE NEST

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY WILLIAM WHARTON

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  I

  THE RATS’ NESTER

  Right now, here in Paris, we have seven different nests. That’s not counting our old water mill, two hundred miles from Paris. I spend half my time rousting out, fixing up, furnishing these nesting places.

  Rats’ nesting’s what it all is; can’t seem to keep myself from burrowing, digging in; always stuffing bits and pieces into one corner or another.

  Even before we snuck away from California, we had four nests and forty acres; not a single one of those places there you’d call a real home: a trailer dug into the side of a hill, a tent nestled against a cave, then the shack on top of a hill we called home before it burned down. There was also that place I built with rock and cement at the edge of a streambed in a gully up on the forty.

  We furnished all those nests complete to knives and forks; every one a hideout, places we could run to if things got too bad; holes where we could go to ground, wait it out, hide from the crazy ones, learn to like radioactive eggs, a purple sun over green skies, a stinking stagnating dead world.

  A family man’s got to think ahead these days, especially-someone-like-me,-living-on-the-outside,-ex-con, a man who had his first nest—wife, two little ones, house, everything—snatched out from under him. I’m always looking for someplace for us to hide.

  In California I cadged stuff from the Salvation Army, junk shops. Here in Paris I haunt flea markets; sometimes I can fix up a whole hideout for less than fifty bucks.

  A MAN FOR A WOMAN EACH TO EACH

  OTHER: MOTHERING FATHER,

  FATHERING MOTHER.

  We’ve been living in Paris more than twenty years now; I’m not sure why anymore; maybe I’m a new kind of bum, rats’-nest bum. Every New Year’s morning, I check with the family, ask if they want to go back.

  No, they like to stay, like being aliens.

  I still think of myself as a serious artist, paint hard and heavy when I’m not caught up in nesting fevers, father juices.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about masterpieces, museums; used to dream that war; just don’t care so hard anymore. When the end gets closer, those kinds of crazy ideas don’t mean much; everything gets sucked into the painting itself.

  ONE LEG OF A ZIGZAG. MY LIFE

  TACKS WINDWARD WITHOUT A LUFF.

  I like to rent out our Paris hideouts to last-ditch people: students and artist types, end-of-the-line people; they appreciate my hiding places, feel safe.

  One of these nests is in a quarter behind the Bastille. This part was supposed to be torn down fifty years ago. I’m nibbling around over there one day, looking for something to paint, something to fix up, something, anything; helping me delude myself into believing life makes some kind of sense, any kind.

  I’m on my Honda motorcycle. I traded a painting for this Honda seven years ago; it’s over ten years old now and has 160 cubic centimeters displacement with around 75 cubic centimeters of power left. About like me: plugging up, wearing thin, metal-mental fatigue, general sludgishness.

  I have my box and canvas strapped on my back, they rest on the carrier. Sometimes I paint sitting ass-backwards, straddling the bike, with feet jammed on the foot pegs. At my age, the back can’t take much stand-up painting without stiffening. If the back goes, I can’t get out of bed in the mornings; need Kate, my wife, to give me a push up, just to get going, moving.

  I’m scumbling, stippling around, in and out courtyards, all crowded with wooden sheds and shacks. They’re piled tight, holding each other up. I’m ass deep in broken windows, old wet mattresses, sacks and boxes of garbage—everything smelling of mold. Rats are playing in the garbage. I’m feeling at home, in my natural place, delayed decay, festering under gray Paris skies.

  There’s a marble workshop in back of a court, beautiful pieces of cut marble, sliced like cheese for tabletops to make French-ugly-type furniture.

  On top of the other smells is cut-wood smell, sawdust, greased tools. This is a furniture-making part of town, gradually going downhill, out of business. Factories are making modern, glue-together furniture—cheap, throw-away stuff, nobody gets bored. Change your furniture with your husbands, wives; hard come, easy go; the new life.

  I stop and get talking with a great older guy—older than me, even. He’s wearing a gray denim cap and could pass for Khrushchev, the Soviet shoe banger. He’s built like a four-poster fire plug. I wrestle the motorcycle onto its stand and follow him into his shop. He has a mattress business, makes mattresses from the wire up. I love seeing this kind of thing, helps me enjoy sleeping in a bed.

  He comes on with an exciting, long story. I can—sit all day listening to a good storyteller.

  Sixty years ago he jumped ship; was in the Russian Navy. He winds up in Paris alone, nineteen years old and a Jew. Fat chance.

  He starts calling himself Sasha, can hardly remember his real name anymore. During WWII, he hid from the Nazi Jewhunters, French and German, in these very buildings. He grabs me by the arm and hustles me down a tunnel and hole he’s dug into the ground under his garage.

  There’s a whole room carved out down there; stocked with food, rice, beans, canned food, even candles.

  Sasha and I could be soul mates. He invites me to lunch with him in back of his shop: cold borscht, bread, runny cheese, warm wine.

  We talk on and on for hours. He tells how he started his spring-and-mattress business, one-man operation, never hired anybody. He found himself a nice Jewish French girl, got married, had three kids; lived on top of this mattress shop thirty years.

  Now the kids are grown up, have a furniture store on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. They’re ashamed of Sasha, don’t want him around their fancy store; he’s too fat, too dirty, too old, smelly, too Russian, too Jewish.

  WE OUTLIVE OURSELVES. BECOME TRASH,

  OBSTACLES, UNWANTED. UNWANTED EVEN BY

  THOSE WE LOVE, WHO LOVE US, TOO.

  Last year Sasha’s wife died of cancer. His eyes fill up telling me about it, whips out a greasy blue handkerchief and wipes tears away without slowing down. He tucks the handkerchief in his back pocket, looks me in the eye and tells how he has a lady friend now.

  He smiles, I smile back. He says when a man has lived with a woman for fifty years he can’t live without one. He’s telling me?

/>   Men are only parking spaces for women to fill. A man without a woman is a house without windows. God, I hate to think what I’d do if Kate died. It’d sure take most of the fun out of life; not all, but a big part of my reasons for living.

  TO SEE IN SOMEONE ELSE’S EYES

  THE CENTER OF YOUR OWN AND FEEL

  LIFTED, SHUTTERING FROM THE GROUND.

  The wild part is this woman friend is forty years younger than Sasha. He’s proud as a rooster. His kids are going crazy, afraid he’ll give her his money. His woman friend is an Arab widow; he keeps her in an apartment near the mattress shop; he’s thinking of moving in with her.

  Sasha laughs; says he’s had everything else in life, so what if he has shit for kids.

  No sense me explaining the regression to the mean, so I don’t; too complicated; nobody wants to admit it anyway.

  I tell him he should have more kids with the new woman, Middle Eastern peace right here in Paris, handmade. To hell with the old kids; make new ones; maybe they’ll be more real, like him. He gives me a punch on the arm, a hard punch. You know, that’s about the closest men come to showing love for each other, giving and taking punches. That’s weird.

  I LIE HERE WEEPING IN MY WIRE

  SPIDER’S LAIR: DRY MOTES FLOAT

  FREELY IN INSECTLESS AIR.

  I ask Sasha if I can paint him. Sasha handles it in stride; wants to know how long it’ll take. I knock this painting out in an hour and a half; get a good one. I do it size 20F, about eighteen inches by two feet. I do head, shoulders, full face; great head, pig eyes, putty nose. When I’m finished, I try giving it to him.

  “What for?”

  “Give it to your kids, make them suffer!”

  Also I want to pay him back for his story, his life.

  Sasha punches me again, tough, thick, ham hands. He hangs his painting on the wall between some brass springs, tells me to follow him.

  He waddles along ahead of me and we go farther back up the alley. There’s a three-story wooden building there. It leans out in every direction, has a tar-paper roof. It’s half full of old furniture, mostly waterfall design, nineteen-twenties stuff. Everything’s dirty as hell, inch-thick dust, caked and oily. Sasha says I can have any furniture I want; all this taken in on trade years ago.

  I’m excited by the building; ask if he’ll rent it to me. Sasha laughs. I tell him I’ll turn it into a studio, have naked women in to pose. Sasha laughs louder, says wind blows through, cats crap all over, holler and fuck at night; rats eat cats’ kittens, pigeons fly in through the roof. I tell him I’ll feed the pigeons, train my rats to fight his cats.

  FLOATING, FALLING: NOTHING UP

  PEERING BLINDLY THROUGH SNOW.

  MY IGNORANCE, SKETCHING ARROGANCE.

  THE FINAL SCOPE OF INNOCENCE.

  We make a deal right there; no papers. I pay six hundred francs every three months; that’s about forty bucks a month. I promise I’ll paint a portrait of his wife from a tiny photo. It’s the only picture he has of her, one of those five-and-dime automat photos.

  A FACE AS STILL LIFE

  BUT STILL LIFE LEFT.

  I get in there and clean things up. This is grim corruption. I haul most of the furniture up into the attic; chop the worst, stack it up for firewood.

  First I put in big beams so the whole place won’t fall down on me with a strong wind; then i cut a hole through the roof to let in light. I put plastic panels in this hole and line underneath with thin-roll plastic for insulation. I cover all the walls and ceiling with Styrofoam panels and paint the floors white.

  Sasha lets me tie in to his electric line; I’ll pay a set amount every month. Then I buy two potbelly stoves at the flea market, put in long pipes to radiate the heat. I haul back down some of the furniture and spread it around. The place is light, great, looks like something between a cheap whorehouse and a surgical theater.

  ANOTHER NEST, NOT MY BEST

  YET MEETS THE FINAL TEST.

  The first thing I do there is paint the portrait of Sasha’s wife. I let myself drift, float into it, hardly looking at the photo. I’m painting her as Sasha described her to me, the way he felt about her, her soul.

  A FACE I DON’T KNOW, A MIND ECHOING ME.

  I’M INFUSED WITH ANOTHER, MOTHER, SISTER, BROTHER.

  I do this in an afternoon. Sasha says the painting looks more like his wife than the photo. He cries.

  I’m a bit psychic; it’s a nick of woman in me, I think. I might be part male witch. I’ve met two true witches in my life so far: exciting women.

  A WOMAN LIVES INSIDE ME, CONTENT

  TO PULL THE REINS OF MY CLUMSY CART.

  Next, I rent out the ground floor to a sculptor. He’s a rich young French aristocrat, pays me six hundred francs per month, cash. Everything cash. French officials are very uptight about people like me.

  I keep the middle floor for myself. The stairs come straight up from the door, so I wall off my stairs and put in another door for the sculptor.

  To bring water in, I run a line from the street spigot across the alley—strictly illegal. I bootleg this in at night using plastic hose going under the cobblestones.

  I’m out there in the dark, working with a flashlight, digging up cobblestones, when the concierge catches me. I tell her I’m looking for some money I lost. She stares but isn’t willing to call me an outright liar. The French are nice that way.

  I bring water into the downstairs and up to the first-floor studio, but can’t rig a drain system for the very top floor.

  This third floor isn’t much; the ceiling’s low and it’s dark. I figure I’ll use it for storage. To get up there, you need to go through my studio, up a ladder and through a trapdoor.

  A TRAP NEST, SPIDER NEST, PULL IT

  IN BEHIND YOU, HIDE AND ABIDE.

  Just shows how you never know. Three months later, I have a Dutch woman in for some modeling. She has a nice body and is only charging me ten francs an hour. Great, beautiful, solid, rounded tits meant for having kids sucking on them, one kid on each tit. It gets me all hot and bothered for nothing just looking at her. I’d give anything to have big working tits like that; feel like the fountain of life. I’d rent myself out as a wet nurse and learn to eat grass—regular green grass, that is.

  She starts telling how she doesn’t have a place to live; hints about staying in the studio, doing free modeling—that kind of business. To turn her off, I tell her I’ll rent the upstairs room for two hundred fifty francs a month.

  She’s one of these new, rugged, live-on-a-sewer-cover kind of wonderful women; takes me right up, moves in, money on the barrel two months in advance.

  I squirm three days hoarding enough nerve to tell Kate, my wife, about it. Kate is not enthusiastic; knows how vulnerable I am. We have a good working relationship, Kate and I, based on respect for the way each of us is. Still, despite all, sometimes it gets hard. No two people so close could be so different. I wouldn’t have it any other way myself, but easy it ain’t sometimes.

  This Traude turns out to be a neat, clean hamster of a woman; no trouble at all. I don’t know she’s there most of the time.

  She gets herself a Primus stove, cooks her meals; invites me for lunch once in a while—very domestic. She usually stays in bed mornings on cold days till I get the fires going. Some heat must move up to her place, but she comes down and dresses next to the glowing stove; has a nice, round, almost heavy body, wide hips, beautiful glutes. I get some fine drawings; good deal all around. But I’m not showing these drawings to Kate; no sense pushing the edges. I’ve fooled myself into thinking that sometimes honesty can be a cruel hypocrisy.

  The big mistake was renting to the blue-blood sculptor. First, he has the most active social life I’ve ever seen. He’s a stone sculptor, cutting gigantic five-, six-ton blocks of marble or granite. He works hard when he gets the chance but that’s not often. Most times, there are French dukes driving up the alley in limousines, tooling over to watch Claude play at being sculptor. T
hey can’t believe he’s trying to work; only peasants work. They’re titillated seeing Claude, sledgehammer in hand, goggled, genuine stone dust whitening his face like a clown, staggering around in piles of stone chips.

  Maybe the one thing worse than not having enough money is having too much. You get caught up with rich friends and relatives. Then how the hell can you get anything done?

  But my big problem is stone dust. Joseph P. Baloney, it gets into everything. Thin, light, like soap powder, it rises from his studio into mine. I run around with pieces of glass wool, putty, plaster, trying to plug holes. Nothing stops this dust. Mornings, it looks as if it’s snowed; all day long there’s a haze. It gets into my paint and into the paintings.

  My way of painting involves slow-drying varnish; this floating stone dust is deadly. Altogether—with what’s in the air, what settles on my eyeglasses and what’s getting ground into the varnish—I’m working in deep cream of wheat. My white beard gets so white it glows.

  THE BLINDING LIGHT OF NO WHITENESS

  DARK LOST IN MEMORY: A DULL CLUMPING

  OF FRAGMENTED IDEA CLUTTER GROWS.

  Finally I give up. I rent my studio to another painter, a friend of Claude’s. This guy works abstractly, sort of white bumps on white flats; sometimes light purple or green squiggles over these large white canvases, different shades of white, all very subtle. He says stone dust won’t matter.

  He’s a social type, too, won’t mind dancing bear to the royalty. I sign hire on at eight hundred francs a month. I tell Traude about it; she asks if he’s married. It’s OK with her. Traude’s money almost covers my outgo and the other fourteen hundred francs a month is pure gravy. We definitely have use for the extra money. Trying to paint truly personal paintings, make some kind of a living and be a good husband-father, can be almost too much sometimes. All that’s beside living some kind of life for yourself.

  So that’s the way we make it. We ourselves live in what used to be a carpenter’s shop. I bought the bail, that’s the lease, for five thousand, and pay eighty bucks a month rent.

  It’s a great place for living, eighty-seven square meters, plus a grenier and a cave; that’s an attic and a cellar. When we moved in, I tore everything out except for one center support post. We redid all the windows to make the place weatherproof. Then I drew a plan on paper just as if we were building a house on a lot in Woodland Hills, California. I chalked my plan on the floor directly and started building up walls. The job took six months. Kate was a little worried at first but she likes it fine now.