by Chris Gilson
Uh-huh, Kevin thought. Just like this reporter, he’d grown up on the street. Even his baby teeth had been kicked in. Kevin knew exactly what desperation looked and smelled like, and he couldn’t let Grace think he was getting over on him.
He stopped walking, and Grace stopped in synch with him.
“So, Philip, you bump into a lot of other newspeople on your beat?”
“Not too many.” Philip sounded a little guarded, not so cocky.
“Well,” Kevin pressed, “all due respect, but I was wondering if maybe you started out chasing Madonna and Leo, some real celebrities, but you couldn’t handle the competition.”
Kevin might as well have thrown a pail of ice water on him, because Philip froze. But, to his credit, he recovered quickly.
“See, I figured you for a man liked to dig in, Kevin Doyle. Yeah, I had my special problems, gainin’ access. Got me three TROs last year.”
“What?”
“Temporary restraining orders,” Grace said proudly. “The white celebrities start cringin’ when a black man jumps in front of ’em.”
“And the debutantes don’t?”
Philip laughed. “Damn, you don’t give a guy any room. Let’s just say I learned you gotta create a niche for yourself. Too many reporters out there. So I stake out my segment, debs worth dishin’, and do my homework. This Cornelia Lord, she’s a disaster searchin’ for a photographer.”
Kevin thought about the spoiled rich girl’s eyes in the photograph. She’d been searching for something, but definitely not a camera. “You’re saying, she’s asking for it?”
“Don’t matter. The public’s got a right to know. You seen Corny yet? Man, that’s a one-woman show. How ‘bout I buy you somethin’ to eat, we can talk about her.”
Kevin felt the emptiness of his stomach and his wallet. But the only thing worse than hunger he could think of, even worse than being a servant, was being for sale.
“No thanks.” He put his hands in the cold, frayed pockets of his leather jacket and flashed Philip a grin so he’d know this wasn’t personal. “Just so we’re clear, I gotta issue you my personal TRO on any resident where I work, okay?”
Grace started to speak, then stuck his hand out so Kevin had to shake it again, one businesslike pump.
“Well, I’ll see you ‘round the building, Kevin Doyle.” Grace smirked. “Both gotta fight for our art, right?”
He strolled off, whistling.
Kevin looked at Philip Grace’s card and wondered if he’d just done something stupid, passing up a fistful of cash. Then he tore it up and scattered the pieces in the wind.
He walked to Third Avenue, listening to his stomach gurgling. He had one dollar and some change in his pocket. Coffee or a subway token, but not both. He stopped at a coffee shop no wider than a bowling lane; a dirty blue neon sign announced, “The Waldorf-Estonia Luncheonette.” Thanks to his neon teacher, he recognized the stylish letters as an example of the 1930s German Bauhaus school of signage.
The coffee shop looked generically shabby. Booths were jammed close together around the same chipped Formica tables as his building’s staff room. Somebody had just swabbed the floor. He gagged from the smell of ammonia.
Regular working people hunched over the counter, sipping coffee and scarfing down Danish. The booths belonged to plumbers and other trade aristocrats who made their own hours and took time to order eggs and pancakes. He took a booth toward the back, then once again checked his pockets for spare change.
Kevin’s eyes went glassy as he read the menu, four pages long, single spaced. The smaller and seedier the luncheonette, the more items they had on the menu. Where did they keep all this stuff?
“You want to order?”
A young waitress with a whiny voice stood over him, a mustard stain on her white sleeve, rolled up to reveal bleached hair on her arms with tiny black roots like an ant farm. She held her pencil stub to her pad as if Kevin were putting her life on hold. He asked for a small pitcher of hot water with a teabag on the side.
When the waitress left his water and complimentary soda crackers, he looked around to see if anybody was watching. Then he took the clogged-up bottle of Heinz ketchup and tapped on the “57” etched in the glass; the ketchup spurted like lava into the cup of boiling water. Kevin stirred his instant tomato soup. It scalded his tongue, then filled his throat and chest, and finally dulled the aching in his stomach.
He snuck three cups of his homemade soup and six packages of crackers, watching to make sure the waitress didn’t catch him. But she was busy snapping orders in shorthand through a window in the kitchen.
Kevin checked the time on the watch his father had lent him, an old promotional one that said on the rotting band, Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. He would really need to buy a more dignified watch for the job. But he already owed Uncle Eddie $2,000 for getting him the job. “The vig,” Eddie had called it. Kevin snorted. That was Eddie Feeney deluxe, trying to sound like a loan shark to scare him. At least he wouldn’t have to pay Eddie until Christmas Day, after he got his tips.
His eyes closed. He thought about the fact that he couldn’t totally explain to himself, let alone Philip Grace, about the neon saint.
Because that’s what Mom wanted.
On his eleventh birthday, she balanced Art of the Renaissance on her lap and pointed to the color reproductions of paintings like The Adoration of the Magi. Kevin stared at the halos, which popped out at him like golden saucers.
“The saints,” his mother breathed. “Look at the coolers.”
The colors. His mother loved an artist whom he thought she called Jotto, like the New York lottery. She pointed out all the paintings Jotto created, the frescoes inside churches with names like The Ascension with Jesus Christ taking off like a 747.
Jotto, he discovered, was really a fourteenth-century Italian painter named Giotto. And Giotto painted stories that had a kind of moral, if not always physical, beauty. One of Giotto’s paintings of Francis of Assisi made Kevin see why the saint was a big deal to the Irish, because Giotto zeroed in on the saint’s character. Francis grew up a spoiled young rich man’s son who got sick and learned to be humble, then gave all his possessions back to his father and spent his life in poverty. He made his whole life an offering.
But his mom’s favorite saint was St. Sebastian. The young Roman had served as an officer in the Praetorian Guard, protecting the Emperor Diocletian. Then Sebastian, that arrogant Roman prick, somehow got what his mom called a “spark of the divine.” He became a true believer, a persecuted Christian, along with the poor people and the lepers. Diocletian liked Sebastian, so he ordered him to renounce his faith. When Sebastian refused, Diocletian threw an imperial-sized fit and ordered Sebastian shot by archers in his command, dishonorably fragged by his own men.
In Art of the Renaissance, Kevin’s mother reverently pointed out Giotto’s little-known Lost Saint Sebastian, stolen and then recovered from a Swiss bank vault. She told him it was the first painting she had ever seen. She had found it in the National Museum in Dublin, a culchie country girl with skinned knees trembling in front of the triptych of Sebastian with his chest full of arrows. She said it changed her life.
Just thinking about it made Kevin’s chest hurt. Those sharp arrows probably made a hell of a thump even going into a tree. He wondered how they must have felt tearing through muscle and pumping arteries.
Kevin was jolted out of his reverie by the waitress speedwalking past him.
“Can I have another hot water, please?”
She ignored him and went to another table to take an order.
Kevin closed his eyes again for just a second. He saw Saint Sebastian hanging. The archers started to bang their bows on the ground. His eyes opened and his waitress was banging silverware on the table in front of him. He smiled at her.
“You were snoring like a pig in a trough,” she said, like she’d caught him walking out the door with the cash register. “You
see a sign outside, Eat ‘n’ Sleep?”
“No,” he said. “I was just drifting.”
“No more crackers, you cheap shit,” she yelled, making people turn and stare. “Go outside. The cold’s free.”
“The cold’s free in here.” Kevin sighed, and got up to pay at the counter. He couldn’t work up much hostility for the waitress. The tips must suck at the Waldorf-Estonia Luncheonette, and at least one of the customers looked like he belonged back in the psych ward at Bellevue.
A middle-aged man with a red face, who had missed about half his thick whiskers shaving, sat at the counter wearing a seedy old business suit. Nobody sat near him, because every few seconds he would suddenly jerk back on his spinning seat and wave with both hands, like a spring-loaded toy.
Kevin had seen plenty of people do that at Bellevue, wrestling with invisible demons or maybe thinking they were doing a breaststroke across the East River. He looked away.
On his way out the door, he snuck a curious look back and stopped. A fly landed on the man’s food. Kevin watched the man jerk his body back and do his breaststroke again to chase the fly away. But the fly zipped right back a few seconds later, insanely persistent like all insects, and landed on the man’s greasy hash browns.
Kevin stared, wondering how he could turn his observation into art. Someday, after he fixed Sebastian’s halo, maybe he could create a neon sculpture about somebody like that. Somebody who looks from a distance like he’s acting crazy. Then, after you get closer, you see he has a good reason.
Chapter Four
Ignoring the screaming wind on Lexington Avenue, Kevin looked for a phone booth that wasn’t being used or vandalized.
His mom could play the Irish martyr sometimes. She could have asked his dad to carry the turkey up the stairs for her. Or waited for Kevin. Why hadn’t he gotten there early enough to help her?
He couldn’t crawl any lower than being responsible, even in a small way, for his mother’s death. Or maybe he could. No matter how rotten things got, they could always be downgraded an extra notch. He felt a vague panic that he could still fail at neon sculpture and die his own Art Death. Then, for the rest of his life, he’d be a doorman.
At the corner of Lexington and 52nd, he found a pay phone that worked and punched in the number of the Stinson Gallery in SoHo. This was the sixteenth call he’d made to the owner, Jessica Fernandez. He hoped that this time she’d be there, since she’d never call him back.
“Stinson. Jessica Fernandez speaking.”
“Jessica? Kevin Doyle. How are you?”
“Kevin, darling.” She sounded pleased. “Come right over. I have something I’d like to speak to you about.”
“About Sebastian?”
“You must be psychic. I’m on another call, sweetie.” Her laughter tinkled before she disconnected him.
Kevin felt the gnawing in his stomach smooth out slightly. Jessica’s greedy-merchant giggle promised good news. And she had invited Kevin to the gallery, not her habit. She practically lit matches to keep her artists away.
Kevin walked eighty-two blocks against the freezing wind to West Broadway, the main street of SoHo. Here, dozens of galleries dangled Real Art before the leather-and-Lexus crowd. Every Saturday, middle-aged lawyers and dentists struggled to pull their jeans over growing paunches. Then they drove to West Broadway to buy the kind of art they couldn’t find on Madison Avenue. This crowd liked the gritty, nothing-to-lose artists of Alphabet City. But their Lexuses could disappear from Alphabet City in a puff of exhaust fumes, or crackheads might cut their leather jackets off their backs. Instead, they visited the Stinson Gallery. At the Stinson, SoHo’s premier gallery, Jessica Fernandez showed the work of Alphabet City artists where it was safe for the patrons to see it. He suspected that Jessica Fernandez didn’t know much about art, but she sure knew how to hype artists.
Kevin entered the vast, well-lighted space, carved out of an old cast-iron building with black Grecian columns. Slabs of glass faced the street, allowing sunlight to pour in. A tiny plaque outside read “Stinson” in letters designed to be illegible, to make buyers believe the gallery was their secret.
Jessica Fernandez, thirty-ish, was perched with her legs crossed at a small white desk, holding a phone between two fingers with nails painted blue metalflake. She looked voluptuous with moussed jet-black hair worn in a wanton, pillow-ready style, wearing a sleek black dress and silver jewelry. Her eyebrows stood up in little peaks while her eyes lazily appraised Kevin, and her candy-red lips made an insinuating smirk. But he never heard her talk about anything but business.
“Evan, it’s not selling,” she kept saying into the phone.
Kevin knew she had another forlorn artist twisting on the other end. He felt sorry for Evan, whoever he was. But he also felt a terrible worm of delight wriggling in his chest.
Another artist taken out!
He hated letting that selfish thought creep in. Young artists in New York fought to survive. They exposed their work bravely, hoping no one would smell their fear. Most would be poisoned to death. Only a few would get lucky. Now poor Evan felt Jessica’s fangs locking in through the phone. The good part, although Kevin hated to admit it, was that Jessica’s getting her venom out on another artist meant she wouldn’t be hungry for a while. He’d be spared his Art Death this time.
Kevin made a point of looking at other pieces in the gallery before homing in on his Saint Sebastian. It seemed more businesslike, less desperate.
He started through the sleek but soulless space. The relentless white of the drywall sometimes disturbed him, suggesting a clinic for sick art.
“Evan, nobody cares what some artist thinks,” he heard Jessica tell the phone, exasperated.
He approached his neon saint. It stood up on its pedestal in a corner of the gallery, roughly where the kitchen door would be in a restaurant.
Kevin contemplated his Sebastian. Giotto might have painted the first three-dimensional saints, but Kevin Doyle had sculpted the first saint that lit up.
Emotions laid bare, rendered by simple lines was the phrase he’d read in his mom’s art book, describing how Giotto made the divine look human. He identified easily with Giotto, who started out a peasant. He’d cut and stripped saplings for his frames, mixed his own paints from patches of colored earth he dug from the ground.
It had taken Kevin two years to achieve the level of technical perfection in front of him. Two years and $995 a month to the New York Institute of Art and Technology—barely made each month thanks to his lousy night jobs, and a little help from his mom. At NYIAT most students make neon advertising signs. But a lucky few got to work with Max Freuhling, who Kevin considered a real neon artist.
Max taught him the science of flameworking, how to cut and splice the opaque white-glass tubing that was only a quarter-inch in diameter. Then how to bend the fragile tube over a fire, careful as a diamond cutter. He showed Kevin how to pump the noble gases of krypton and argon through the tubing to achieve the bright neon colors. He gave him the ability to take meaningless tubing, shoot it full of gas, and plug the creation into a wall socket to buzz lightly and throw off a brazen light that wasn’t beautiful or subtle, but packed a rude look-at-me power.
Kevin had to admit that he brought a certain grace to flame-working. He had carefully sculpted the glass tubing so his simple design could be instantly recognized, and not just from the arrows sticking out of Sebastian’s chest like a porcupine. His sculpture laid bare the character and emotions of Saint Sebastian through simple lines and curves. It hummed loudly, almost proudly, from the electricity stirring the juice of the noble gases pumping harsh and violent color through his saint.
He designed the sculpture to be life-size, but a little smaller than his own body because ancient Romans had been smaller than Americans. He created it with tubular strokes and squiggles. Sebastian’s profile was proud, an uptown saint. The suggestion of arch features and curly hair worked, too. He had given Sebastian the outline of a broad c
hest, and bent two tubes perfectly to portray sinewy arms on either side of it, tied behind his back.
For Sebastian’s flesh, he used a pink tone, as close as he could find to real flesh color. For the arrow wounds, he added little red circles around the holes he’d created with thin wires in the blank space of his chest. That’s where he mounted the slim, pure white arrows. It was hard work getting the arrows right, keeping the shafts pointed out naturally and kind of gracefully, with the hint of feathers at the end. He could have faked them, made it easy. But, in his art experience, the easy way was always the wrong way.
Except for the garish colors and the slight bend of the halo, the sculpture was as good as any neon sculpture he’d ever seen.
Still, the track lights several feet over Sebastian’s head made the buzzing tubes look stark and kind of flat. Kevin had struggled to give Sebastian an inner glow. His instructor’s own neon work shimmered more subtly, although he used the same tubes Kevin did. Like real art. Kevin could never get that look.
And the saint’s halo still disappointed him. It wasn’t gold like the shiny halos Giotto crafted painstakingly, buying scraps of leftover gold leaf from artisans known then as gold beaters. Neon gases didn’t burn gold. So, instead, he used the next best thing—a small curve of light blue that looked like the sky around Sebastian’s head.
In blazing pink and white with little drops of red, Kevin had outlined both the pain and hope of the flesh-and-blood martyr. At least it felt that way to him.
In the two years it took him to get it right, he tried to ignore the other neon students who had laughed their asses off at his subject matter, not to mention his attention to detail. But if he didn’t make it perfect, what was the point?
The only thing that could make Sebastian’s colored gases look less like a beer sign was if they adjusted the spotlights on the ceiling mount over his head. He’d ask Jessica for a ladder to do it himself, to make zero trouble for her.
“I’m hanging up now,” Jessica Fernandez said loudly into the telephone. He heard a short scream escape from the receiver before it clattered into its housing. Jessica smiled brightly.