Scumbler

by William Wharton

  THE SKY IS A HOLE, THE EARTH A DAGGER.

  I TREMBLE, STAGGERING ON THIS ILLUSION OF

  A GLOBE, HOPELESS, BUT GLAD TO BE WHAT WE

  CALL ALIVE; AT HALF PAST THREE—

  OR QUARTER TO FIVE.

  It’s dark in the room when I come to. I’m on the floor. I lie there for several minutes afraid to look, afraid to know what’s happened. My heart is pounding sluggishly in my ears, my head is spinning. I feel sick, and throw up.

  I struggle to my knees and look through the dimness to the mirror and the painting. I look away quickly; it’s like mental quicksand; I’m still too close. I search on the floor and find my glasses; both lenses are cracked, crazed webs like shatterproof glass at the scene of an automobile accident. I slide my glasses back on. I pull myself onto my chair and try putting myself together.

  Finally, I have enough strength to turn the mirror completely away from the painting. I look in the mirror through my crazed glasses and see a large bruise on my forehead where I hit the floor. I go over and turn on the lights. The fluorescent glare makes it all seem grim. i scoop up and wash away my vomit. It’s so real I almost enjoy doing this. It’s wonderful to be in normal, in-step, sequential time again, to live around it, through it, wallow in it, die of it. Time in its passing is as essential to life as food or love. Even more so, because without time there is food but no eating, love but no loving.

  I stand in front of the painting and open my box. I take up my brushes. Carefully, without using the mirror, I paint the bruise onto my head and then, with meticulous detail, paint in the shattered lenses of my glasses, scumbling my eyes with white for the reflection on the glass. Then, at last, I feel completely inside myself again. I’ve pinned that painting, me, to a moment in time, a moment from which I can again spring off in regulated time participation.

  CASTING, THRUSTING AWAY ALL CHANCE OF IMMORTALITY

  ALLOWS FOR THE JOY OF MORTALITY, MORTAL SIN,

  MORTAL PLAY—COME AGAIN ANOTHER DAY.

  I leave the paints and lock up the room. I ride home slowly on my motorcycle, drinking the Paris evening air. I deeply enjoy my dinner and rejoice in the ordinary kinds of happenings, conversations going on at home. Everybody’s glad to see me back, glad to see me smiling. Maybe I’m smiling too much, idiot smile, but any smile is better than having the world’s champion grouch slumping around. I hug, hold on to Kate and listen to the clock tick, listen to the chimes and feel blessed by time going by. I’m deeply immersed in continuity, the volume and presence of time, being part of life again with my loved ones. Lazarus must have felt like this.

  The ticking, the chiming of our clock is the baton of a conductor before a symphonic orchestra. It isn’t music he’s playing but it’s what measures and defines the music.

  TICKERS, TIMERS DIALS AND CLOCKS,

  DRIPPING WATER, EATING ROCKS.

  As I’m going to sleep that night, cuddled up behind Kate, I realize how close to death I’ve been. It could even have been a heart attack or a stroke. Dr. Jones warned me to expect it. Falling unconscious on the floor like that must mean something; it certainly can’t be a good sign. I know I don’t want to go back into the American Hospital, so I don’t say anything about it to Kate. I’ve too much to do. I also know I don’t want to tell her all the things that happened to me with that painting; it’d only worry her for nothing. I’ll have to live alone with this one.

  SECRET HOLES, TRAPDOORS TO

  MOVE FROM FLOOR TO FLOOR.

  The next day, when I go back to the studio, I take down that mirror and put it upstairs in Traude’s room; it’ll be a nice surprise for her. Then I go back downstairs and look at my painting. It seems so tortured, there’s no fantasy in it; it’s virtually faultless. I didn’t allow myself to make the mistakes which give life to painting; I tried to deny the faults and schisms that result from time lapse, breaks in concentration and the complexities of bioptic vision.

  It’s simply not a work of art, only an exercise of the mind, the hand and, yes, something else too. I can’t deny it. I know this painting is dangerous. I think of painting over it, destroying it, but can’t. I don’t really know, either, how much of me is still in that paint.

  I carry the painting home surreptitiously and hide it in the farthest-back dark corner of the attic. Nobody will ever look up there, at least until I’m dead. Maybe I’ll even burn it before then. That painting is definitely treacherous, like the San Andreas fault in California, a fault in time.

  Then, after all this, I don’t know why, but I still can’t get started with real painting again. Whatever it is that drives me, makes me go from one painting to another without too much thought, is kaput. I don’t see any reason for doing it anymore. My desire, need to pull things together out there, induce, seduce, reduce them into me, make it all mine, then design it to my private dream is gone. I don’t want to waste my time in futile smearing of paint on canvas. Something’s missing in the old Scumbler. The scum is sinking to the bottom instead of rising to the surface.

  OUT OF A MURKING OBSCURITY THE SKIN

  MOTHER LURKS, A MEMBRANE FORMED ON

  THE SURFACE AND SINKING INTO SLIME.

  XII

  FULL OF SHIT

  Now-the-thoughts-that-keep-me-from-painting-aren’t-all wrong. It’s as if I’m only missing one important idea. I’ve forgotten something and I’m-not-sure-what-it-is.-I-can-even remember myself-getting-maniac,-cross-eyed, excited about painting but I can’t do it anymore.

  It’s the same way with remembering almost anything these days. Sometimes I’ll be about to do something and be interrupted; or, more often, I’ll be having a conversation with someone, and then, while I’m waiting for them to finish, I forget what I wanted to say. I remember wanting to remember but it’s gone. There’s an empty space.

  This drives me nuts. My memory banks seem to be failing me; I can’t put anything on “hold” anymore; another slipping gear.

  NEURONS HOPSCOTCHING, SKIPPING LINES

  SLIDING GENTLY AWAY, MEMORY A BLESSING

  OR A CURSE, BUT TRANSGRESSINGLY TEMPORARY.

  I finally quit completely; lock up the studio. I’m going to find out what’s happening with painting, see if it’s me or the whole stinking mess. I visit every show in town, trying to look at things like a client, a buyer, a consumer; as if I have no ideas of my own, have never painted. I pretend I’m a man from another planet making a sociological, anthropological, archaeological study on the nature of man and his artifacts. What the hell’s it all about? Why do humans do this?

  I’m having some of the same alienated feelings I had when I couldn’t get myself to register for the draft. When that FBI man came to get me, I told him to do whatever it was he had to do; I wasn’t dodging or running away or anything. Whatever the American people thought should be done to somebody who wouldn’t go kill other people for them should be done. And since I wouldn’t take the job of somebody else to kill for me, either, they locked me in federal prison at Danbury for three years.

  I’m having a little of those same separated feelings.

  IN A CAGE, THE LUXURY OF BARS, NO NEED

  TO CREATE THEM. SO NOW I THRASH ABOUT

  LOOKING FOR VICTIMS UPON WHOM TO CAST

  MY BLAME.

  I go to all the museums in Paris. I look at every hotshot object they have to show me. I really look; wear myself out; lose ten pounds, flesh melting off me, nervous, no appetite.

  I even go through the Musée Guimet. I stare carefully, blankly into the jaws of howling Chinese dragons and vases. I go to Arts Décoratifs; concentrate on costumes, bits of buttons and braid for Napoleon. I’m truly looking, trying to see these things as important.

  I take a train up to Amsterdam, bear down on Rembrandt and van Gogh till the paintings fade before my eyes. Was it worth it to them, all the life they didn’t live so they could make those objects? Is it worth it to us, to me?

  Then, back in Paris, I hunt up every painter or sculptor, young or old, I can find. I list
en. It’s the first time anybody’s ever listened to most of them. I look at their work; try to imagine I’ve just finished these art objects; try to get inside them. I imagine each one’s the last remnant of man on earth, saved from the holocaust by being wrapped in a lead balloon or a platinum blanket.

  I waste a week doing this. My eyes are sticking out of my head; poor Kate’s pushing me to go into the American Hospital again. I must have something else terribly wrong with me: cirrhosis of the liver, Hodgkin’s disease, mental derangement. I have all those things but they’re lodged in my soul.

  I tell Kate I’m making a big decision and please leave me alone for a while. She asks if I’ve fallen in love with somebody else. Good question; Kate always asks good questions. It’s not what I’ve fallen in love with; it’s what I’ve fallen out of love with—all the way out. I try to tell her this but can’t. Soon as I start talking, I fill up; my voice breaks and I can’t go on. I’m a candidate for the looney bin all right.

  I go down to the Beaux-Arts School here in Paris. I want to talk with young French people just starting, getting immersed in the whole swing of it. I want to find what they think makes it worth doing.

  I can’t find anybody there! I walk through the whole building, a complete hulking city block in the center of Paris four stories high. I go into every last room, at least fifty of them. I find seven people in the entire building, two of them janitors. Maybe there’s a strike, a war, no school, something. I go down to the concierge, ask if school’s open, if there’s anybody around. The school’s open all right, over eight thousand students enrolled.

  “Where the hell are they?”

  I walk back upstairs. The walls are covered with graffiti, poorly executed graffiti, not an original idea, neither in content nor technique; the kind of thing you find in any public toilet. There are windows broken out; the floors are packed with mashed bits of paper, chunks of food.

  I find a huge assembly hall: chairs, tables scattered around. There are paintings on the walls, monstrous affairs, mostly commemorative, not very impressive. but somebody’s stab at communication; they sure as hell can’t defend themselves now. There are gaping holes ripped in these canvases; people, probably artists, have thrown rocks or wine bottles through them. Along the walls are statues. These are chipped off and scribbled on, ends of dongs painted red, paper airplanes stuck in hands.

  I’m wondering what kind of people do this. Can these be artists who work here? What’s happened to us? Are artists only the inept, the ignorant, stupid, arrogant kids of the wealthy; put to pasture, tucked out of the mainstream?

  “Get thee to an art class!”

  I don’t see myself that way; can’t live with it. If I can’t grab on to some real reason for doing my work, I’ll figure another—any other—way to spend what’s left of my life. I know I sure as hell don’t want to be classed with most of the hangers-on I know who call themselves artists.

  MOSTLY EATERS OF GARBAGE, MAULERS OF

  SECONDHAND IDEAS, PRESENTERS, PERFORMERS.

  HOW CAN THE HIGHEST USUALLY BE SO LOW?

  BE-LOW?

  As a last-ditch measure, I decide to go visit artist friends of ours who live in Spain. I need some rubbing up against true working artists; find out why they do it.

  These are Swedish friends, living in southern Spain. They’re a whole family of redheads: Sture, Anna, three kids. They wear high wooden Swedish shoes, stalk around towering over tiny Spaniards like praying mantises—praying, not preying. I think.

  We met them twenty years ago at the beach in Torremolinos. Their kids had dug a deep hole with a shovel and then sat in the shade of that hole reading. Sture and Anna wore huge flopping sun hats. These people live in Spain but stay out of the sun; classic alien behavior.

  TIPTOEING, TOP-HATTED WITH WILTING FLOWERS.

  COUNTING YEARS AS HOURS AND HARDLY EVEN

  NOTICING PUTTING A LID ON THE SUN, HANGING

  ONE-HANDED ON CRUMBLING SANDBANKS, HAND DUG.

  I stop by in my vague wanderings and tell Sweik I’ve had it; I’m going down to Spain. Sweik’s been watching me mope around for a month. Sometimes I’d go over to his place and just sit there staring out his window. One time I almost told him about my time trip—stopped myself just in time. If he knew about that, he’d think I’ve finally gone over the line, completely cuckoo.

  “Spain! Sounds great to me, Scum. Get yourself out from under these Paris gray skies; an artist needs light. Man, I wish I could go, watch some of those first bullfights, novilladas, under clear bright yellow Spanish sun.”

  He’s rubbing saddle soap into his shoes, actually into the hiking boots he wears as shoes. He’s just finished working some into his bags for the bike.

  We walk up to the Place Saint-Sulpice. Sweik’s carrying his bags with him. When we get there, he pulls the cover off his bike, folds it into one of the saddlebags, then attaches the bags to the bike. He works more saddle soap into the seat and even into that leather handle for the passenger.

  From his other bag, he takes out the two helmets. They’ve been saddle-soaped till they glisten. This bike smells more like the park guard stable in Cobb’s Creek Park than a gasoline combustion engine.

  Sweik kicks once and the motor turns over easily; the machine wants to start. He stands beside the bike, carefully twisting the accelerator handle, slowly gunning the motor lightly into easy life, warming it up, gradually letting off the choke, adjusting the magneto.

  “Here, Scum, take a helmet, let’s ride up to the pad where Lubar’s staying these days. He’s holed in with two women named Sandy and Dale. I’m not sure he even knows which one he’s chasing; I don’t think they do either; probably don’t care; closed-circuit situation there.”

  I figure, what the hell, why not? My own bike’s not running at all. I checked all the easy things first; spark, carb, timing, but it’s the engine itself. I pulled off the head and there’s enough slop space between the pistons and cylinder; I could slip a match between them. The rings are shot. I can get the cylinders reamed out here, but I’ll need somebody to bring in some oversized pistons from the States; then I’ll have real power. Be sort of like a bypass surgery.

  “Sure, Sweik, take me up to the den of iniquity. I’m ready for anything.”

  He laughs, puts on his helmet, hands me the other, swings his leg over the bike, pushes it down from its stand, kicks loose the two rear foot pegs.

  “Come on, it’ll blow some of the dry rot and cobwebs out from under your vaultings.”

  KEYSTONES PRESSING RELENTLESSLY OUTWARD

  AGAINST SLOWLY CRUMBLING BUTTRESSES.

  So we take off. Sweik tells me this place we’re going is way up in the twentieth arrondissement behind Les Buttes Chaumont. It’s a studio for an older American woman who does stained glass. She’s off installing some of her work at a church near Lyon, so she’s letting the girls use it while she’s gone. She and Dale, one of the girls, have a special relationship.

  I, personally, can’t figure why Lubar hangs around up there when he could have his own house in the west suburbs, a smart wife and a little son. According to Sweik, neither Dale nor Sandy has much room in her life for Lubar—at least not so long as they have each other. Maybe he’s a pointer or football in a private game. I have a harder time keeping up with these things as I get older; it used to seem so much simpler, but then maybe people just weren’t talking as much about real relationships thirty, forty years ago.

  We stop out by Strasbourg Saint-Denis to buy food. It’ll be lunchtime when we get there. We buy two liter bottles of beer, a baguette and a Camembert. It’s Saturday, so they won’t be at work.

  My own family’s out picnicking at Saint-Germain-en-Laye; I couldn’t get myself to do it; they didn’t exactly knock themselves out encouraging me either; can’t blame them. Right now, I’m the sick albatross.

  Lubar’s gotten jobs for both the girls, talking English in a conversation class with the French IBM executives. Maybe that’s why they let him hang
around.

  A FIFTH WHEEL IS A SPARE

  YOU ONLY NEED KEEP IT FILLED WITH AIR.

  We climb a steep hill and just before we reach the top, Sweik pulls into a curb. This place looks like an abandoned factory. The building’s two stories high and the part they’re living in is at ground-floor level opening off a courtyard. We knock on a door that’s at least ten feet high. A young woman, practically a girl, swings it open and stands back. With a smile she motions us inside.

  Lubar’s rolled his BMW right into the studio and has it propped up on its stand in the middle of the floor. The front wheel is off; tools and pieces are spread all over the place. There’s another woman squatting beside Lubar, watching him. Actually, she’s in a Yoga Lotus position with bare feet; and this on a cold cement floor. If she thinks she’s going to learn much about mechanics watching Lubar, she’s in for a shock.

  He looks up as we come in. He has grease all over his face, arms and hands. His goggles are on his forehead. He’s wearing black twill pants so you can’t tell, but they’re probably grease-smeared, too. There can’t be much grease left on the bike; you’d swear he was doing some kind of major overhaul from the mess he’s made.

  “Shit, Sweik, I took these brake disks off because they were squealing; now I can’t get the fuckers lined up again.”

  He’s straddled the front of his bike. He’s sitting on the floor with the wheel loose between his spread legs. There’s sweat running down his face and the T-shirt he’s wearing, besides being streaked with grease, is soaking wet sweat. Sweik and I squat beside him. I’m strictly superfluous. When it comes to mechanical skills, Lubar and I are probably about a photo finish for last.

  Sweik figures it out in minutes. He has those plates aligned and for the next while we’re all tightening bolts under his direction. I swear he doesn’t even get his hands dirty; just the master surgeon directing his assistant and nurses in closing after a minor surgery.