by Greg Ames
“Look,” I said, “what we’re doing is not fair to the Artist. We started with good intentions, but let’s be honest, this pursuit has become more about us than about her. Our egos are involved now.”
Clive jabbed his index finger into my solar plexus. “Ridiculous,” he said. He branded me a hack journalist, a charlatan, a poseur. “You’re the one holding us back, Brendan.”
I could hear the voices of my compatriots behind us: “Drive him from the fold, Clive.”
Somebody grabbed me from behind, pinned my arms behind my back. Another biographer kicked me in the ankle.
Celia put a stop to the attack. She told them to let me go. “Maybe you don’t have what it takes, Brendan,” she said to me. “Maybe you aren’t really an unauthorized biographer, after all. Only you know the truth.”
I panicked, fearing another attack. Where would I go if I lost my community? What would I do?
“Hey, I was just testing you guys,” I lied. “To see if you were up to the challenge.” Then I related the bicycle incident to them, embellishing it with strong emotional conflicts, mythological references, Good vs. Evil, Innocence vs. Experience, all that. “I wasn’t trying to steal her bike. I thought it might fuel her creative juices, you know, challenge or inspire her. I did it for inspiration. I did it for Art, yet she has produced nothing, despite my efforts.”
The others watched me closely. “What?” I shouted. “What?”
In one motion they all looked away from me.
2.
On the trail of another man, the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
—PAUL MURRAY KENDALL, The Art of Biography
The Artist is now twenty-eight. She works at a bagel shop on Grant Street. I have been battling depression, though I am against taking medication. The best and most timeless art is borne (they say) by struggle. This unauthorized biography I am writing will be the Boswell of its class, or at least the Diana: Her True Story. The others have lost faith in me, but I don’t care. Proust went into his cork-lined study and nobody knew what he was doing. What am I saying? They don’t know what I’m doing? Or do they know what I’m doing? What if they are watching me? What if this interest in the Artist is merely a front for a more insidious surveillance? Are they secretly writing tell-all biographies about me? They are diabolical, fiendish, are plotting to kill me, and they must be stopped! That’s absurd. They’re my friends, my closest allies in the fight against lies and misrepresentations. I will continue on, as normal, for now.
Each morning we huddle together, watching the Artist through the bagel shop’s front window. The red and brown leaves swirl around our knit-capped heads. We blow hot breath into our cupped hands and rub our palms together. I’m wearing all of my shirts.
“She’s spreading the chive cream cheese,” Evelyn whispers into a handheld recorder. “The customers appear to be pleased with the amount. She doesn’t gunk it on too thick, but she’s not stingy with the stuff either.”
“Masterful.” Clive nods in approval. “It’s a statement piece. She’s pushing the boundaries by making the ordinary extraordinary.”
But these moments of enthusiasm are rare. We have become despondent, and many of us have turned to the insidious pleasures of drink. “We’re all going to hell anyway,” Don says, sipping bourbon from his thermos. The sun is out today for the first time in months, burning carrot-orange in a hazy white sky, and despite the chill there is a spirit of rebirth in the air. Behind me, the others scribble notes into their pads or whisper excitedly into tiny tape recorders. I cannot help but think they are talking about me.
At closing time, the Artist takes out the bagel shop’s garbage. We scramble for cover, diving behind parked cars.
Later that night, I rifle through the trash bags searching for clues she has left behind. Her work does not move me deeply, but I believe close scrutiny of the material might reveal something enlightening. I shove a sodden tea bag and half-eaten ginger cookie into my coat pocket, new evidence that I may or may not share with my compatriots. I am dying to be present for what I’ll later call Her Breakthrough Years.
In the morning I wake up to find that the ginger cookie has been stolen from my pocket. The teabag remains where I left it, having thoroughly soaked through the fabric of my pocket. I study the impassive faces of my colleagues, pacing back and forth before them, scanning their chests for crumbs or granulated sugar. Who has stolen my research materials? My guess is Don.
A shocking development interrupts my investigation: Evelyn bursts through the door and reports that the Artist is visiting the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. We mailed her a free pass last week. We pile out of the apartment, hop on our bikes, and ride across town.
The Artist shows little interest in contemporary art—the bulk of the gallery’s collection—but the Impressionism hall seems to pique her interest. We tiptoe behind her, scribbling notes, murmuring into our voice recorders. Not without reason, I hope that she will go home and start sketching, her fingers blackened with charcoal. I close my eyes and consider the possibilities. But the worst possible thing happens, an event we could not have foreseen: She meets a young man in the gallery’s café and they chat for well over an hour.
When the Artist hands him her phone number, we nearly leap up shrieking “No!” from our corner table. A casual romance artificially assuages a young artist’s hunger to create. We must drive a wedge between them.
Her apartment is tiny, just one room. She lives alone. Two windows and a hardwood floor. Futon, stereo. The usual. Lamps, candles, incense. Sometimes Dave, the guy she met at the gallery café, comes over with a twelve-pack and spends the night, but mostly she sits around in her bathrobe, drinking coffee or watching TV.
“The television again,” Benoit whispers down to us. He’s standing on our shoulders, his nose pressed to the glass. “Always the television.”
“What’s she watching?” Eduardo asks, pen perched over his notepad. It is 10:30 at night. A coal miner’s lamp affixed to his forehead shines down on the page.
“Don’t know yet,” Benoit whispers. “It’s a commercial.”
“Is she creating any fucking art?” Gunnar asks. He’s been living off a grant from the Swedish Coalition for Contemporary Art for fourteen years now. His patrons are demanding to see a product soon.
“Non,” sighs Benoit, shaking his head. “But now she’s … Hold on, she’s clipping her toenails.”
“Moving from the largest toe to the smallest?” I ask, shivering in anticipation. “A gradual recession in size, a sophisticated system that might suggest—”
Benoit shakes his head. “Pas du tout. She’s clipping one of the middle toes. She started with a middle toe, if you can believe that.”
“Innovative,” Gunnar says. “Groundbreaking.”
“Describe her posture to us.” Celia looks up from her notepad. “This could lead to something.”
Benoit presses his nose to the glass. “Well, she’s got one foot up on the coffee table,” he says, “and she’s kind of hunched over. Wait. This is interesting. There is a bowl of ice cream on the table.”
“Flavor!” Don shouts, stomping around on the fire escape. “What’s the goddamn flavor we’re dealing with here?”
“Shhh, Don,” we hiss at him. “Relax.”
So many nights pass like this. We lose parts of ourselves out here beneath this brilliant white moon. I vaguely remember my early childhood. Sometimes it comes to me like light exploding from a Kodak flash. Oh, how I loved to crouch behind trees, mailboxes, and old dogs. I felt both a part of the world and protected from it. And I relished peering through a keyhole as my parents attempted to conceive another child, a sibling for me to study. They tried without success for months but one had to admire their innovations.
As the Artist moves from one room to the other, Benoit narrates the action. “Ah, putain, she’s shutting it down for the night,” he says, and rakes his hand
though his hair. “Who wants to watch her undress?” Nobody takes him up on the offer. We have seen it all before.
I am awoken from a standing dream when the Artist flings open her bedroom windows and shouts: “What the hell do you people want from me?” Her eyes are swollen and unattractive. “Why do you hate me? I don’t understand.”
We’re shocked by the question. We love, revere, adore her. And yet the truth is our job would be much easier if she were dead. A tragic accident, I hate to say it, would increase her appeal. But she is so damned careful.
We drift off to sleep on the Artist’s fire escape, our legs and arms entwined, a many-headed animal of biography. At 3:00 in the morning, Jim Sheehan, a popular local novelist, rides his rickety ten-speed bicycle on the street below. Sheehan’s well known in Buffalo for his so-called “dirty realism”: spare, minimalist narratives about earnest blue-collar workers.
Personally, I take issue with the concept of “realism.” What is that? Realist for whom? Its practitioners and adherents are far too concerned with appearances, in my opinion, to engage the full complexity of modern existence. Any literary work, including one that pretends to a realistic sketch of life, remains an artificial construct. Only the absurd gets close to an adequate depiction of the berserk experience of being alive. Why waste your limited time on earth skimming the surface of the appearance of consciousness?
“Real art had the capacity to make us nervous,” Susan Sontag argues in Against Interpretation, and I’d go even further than that. A work of art must dislocate me, wound me, force me to reevaluate my positionality. If it doesn’t, if it leaves me unmoved or complacent, then the artist must be destroyed.
We carry rocks in our pockets expressly for dirty realists like Sheehan. Gunnar heaves a sharp one. The minor writer ducks his head, pedaling much faster now. Celia hurls a hunk of concrete into his spokes. Sheehan spills over the handlebars. The bicycle clatters on the pavement.
“Police,” Sheehan shouts. Down on one knee in the street, he presses his hand to a bloody gash on his forehead. He kneels like a penitent in the posture of prayer. “Somebody help. Call an ambulance, please, the cops. I’m hurt bad.” He looks up at us. “What the fuck? Why did you do that?”
Don laughs. “How you like that for reality, tough guy?” He descends the creaking iron steps of the fire escape. “Come on,” he calls up to us. “Are you with me?”
We don’t have to be asked twice.
We run down and pounce on Jim Sheehan, pulling his hair and kicking him in the face, ripping his clothes and pummeling him until he says no more, until his eyes close, until nothing remains in the night but silence, and the sounds of us, only us, breathing hard.
PLAYING PING-PONG WITH PONTIUS PILATE
In the YMCA sauna, Bill Drucker, a pharmacist, was holding forth on the subject of mutual funds, pros and cons, when the door banged open and an icy blast of air slapped everybody’s cheeks and chests. Pontius Pilate strode in, his wool robes shushing against his naked hairy ankles. “Hello, boys,” he said. Father Delmont, who was seated next to me, cinched his towel at his waist and left the sauna. Pilate insinuated himself between Drucker and me on the wooden bench and tapped my knee with his white-taped fingers. “I have been looking for you,” he said. “We’re on at three, my friend.”
He was referring to the YMCA table tennis tournament. Earlier in the day, I had been loitering at the bulletin board, eager to see who I would play in the third round of the tourney. When the results were posted, I shuddered at the name of my opponent.
“Tough draw,” said Brad Thomas, reading over my shoulder.
In the cramped sauna, it was hard to ignore Pilate’s presence. He shook his thin body out of his robe and cozied up next to me. The stale stench of athlete’s foot and musty wool assaulted my nostrils. Humming what sounded like “Good Day Sunshine,” Pilate ladled water over the hot ceramic rocks. “Warm enough, my friend?” Greasy mustache hairs curled down into his mouth. His bearded face was sharp and narrow, like an ax blade covered in moss.
I ignored him. Sweat rolled down my cheeks in the diabolical heat. “Talk to Ed Ramos about those mutual funds, Bill,” I said to Drucker over Pilate’s head. “He’ll tell you what’s what. He’s a financial advisor, I think.”
Pilate nodded. “That,” he said, “is an important job. I was once the governor of Judea. Thankless work, all in all. But it had its perks.” He smiled. “I sentenced people to death on a whim, things like that. But I find ping-pong a much more soothing activity, don’t you? Of course, one must retain something of the executioner’s calm concentration to be truly effective. See you at three.” He strolled out of the sauna, whistling a dirge.
Bill Drucker mopped his shiny dome with his towel. “What the hell is that getup—a Halloween costume?”
I laughed. Pilate was an odd number, all right. But we were all deranged in one way or another.
“They should revoke his membership,” Drucker said. “He creeps people out.”
Two other members, both seated behind us on their towels, joined the discussion. “But what if it’s not a role he’s playing?” one of them said. “I mean, what if he’s really the historical Judas or whoever?”
“You mean Pontius Pilate,” the other said. “The guy who sent Christ to the cross. Don’t you know anything?”
“So sorry I’m not caught up on my Bible homework.”
“Guys, hey, take it easy,” I said, turning to look at them. “Don’t worry about Pilate. I’ll beat him.”
As the reigning champion, I felt pretty good about my chances. But Pilate was formidable in his own right. Nobody really knew what he was capable of. I had to admit, I was worried about facing him.
We were scheduled for table one in the Tony Carlucci Memorial Room on the second floor. In the locker room, I reviewed all that I knew about my opponent’s style. Pilate used an unorthodox variation of a Korean penhold grip. His forehand was crisp and accurate; his backhand confident, reliably defensive. He would commit very few unforced errors. He was patient, calculating, and cruel.
What can be said about Pilate’s footwork? Occasionally, in a tough match, he used a lateral crossover technique that seemed all but impossible in his heavy robes. When performed properly, the crossover is the most graceful way to cover four feet of floor space quickly. Crossing one dusty sandal smoothly behind the other, Pilate could move from the backhand corner to the forehand corner in the blink of an eye. In short, he had an all-around game. No weaknesses.
Most guys wore lightweight shorts and T-shirts. It could get awfully hot during summer, and there was no AC in the main building. But Pilate didn’t seem to register the heat. He always dressed in wool robes and sandals. His dirt-encrusted toes (jagged yellow nails, never clipped) poked out from beneath the frayed hem of his robe. An adversary could not monitor Pilate’s legs for clues as to which direction he might lean on his returns, and he often baffled his opponents with cross-table winners. We’d all heard the rumor that a dress code would soon be instituted banning strange and unconventional attire from match play, but I argued against it. We didn’t need to start discriminating, I said. Where would it end? Surely the weight and hang of Pilate’s vestments counteracted any advantage he received from them. No matter how you sliced it, though, he was a tough opponent.
I had two hours to kill before the match. I sat by my locker and tried to pray, mouthing the words I’d been taught in rehab, but I felt foolish and hypocritical.
At Hurley House, they told us to get involved with activities, to stay busy, and to say a prayer when we felt squirrelly. Go to meetings. Make phone calls. Don’t sit around and waste time, they said. My mind was a dangerous neighborhood, they said, and I was supposed to stay out of it as much as possible. I joined the YMCA the day after I got out of Hurley House. The Y was perfect for me, a place I could go during the day, a place to hide. Within a year I had mastered most of the group activities. I’ve always been good at games. Ping-pong pleased me in a way that not
many other things did. I enjoyed the repetition of it and could get lost in its rhythms. I stopped obsessing about drugs and alcohol. I made some friends. Started to look people in the eye. Every night after work, I took the bus to the Y. Ping-pong, in some ways, became a religion to me.
At one minute after three, Pontius Pilate bustled into the Carlucci Room with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He was a wiry little dude, short in his sandals, and he exuded an aura of self-destructive confidence. The pungent smell of chlorine and cherry cough drops wafted behind him. “I need to stretch my limbs,” he said and dropped his duffel by the humming Coke machine in the corner. “Or are you in some big hurry to begin?”
The mind games had already begun. He knew the match was scheduled to begin precisely at three. He was attempting to determine my threshold for frustration.
“Fine,” I said. “Do what you gotta do.”
He winked at me. “Thanks, babe.” And he launched into a ferocious display of violent kickboxing and tae kwon do maneuvers. “Hi-ya! Hi-ya!” He punched and kicked the air. Then he segued into light aerobic exercises—“One, two, one, two”—twisting his torso from side to side. “Busy day in the pool,” he said, and dropped to the floor. “Newborn babies and their dads.” He pulled each thigh to his chest, counted to seven, then released. “Kids under the age of twelve should not be allowed in a pool. They urinate.” Pilate scissored his hairy legs above him, his hands on his hips. “A little chilly outdoors, eh? Supposed to be sunny today. High of seventy.” He leapt to his feet and turned his back to me. As he bent over to touch his toes, he flipped aside his robes and addressed me from between his legs. “Ever read the Gospel of John?” he asked. “A fair assessment of my role in history. I found no fault in Jesus and attempted to release him.”
“Hey, man,” I said, “no more theatrics. Are we gonna start soon or what?”
He held up his wrapped index finger. The soiled adhesive tape was sweaty and unraveling. Jagged edged, it still bore the teeth marks where he had bitten it off. “First things first,” he said and bowed his head. “Let us pray to Jupiter.” After what appeared to be some form of silent meditation, during which his lips moved quickly, he peeked open one eye and grinned at me. “Ready?” he said.