by Hoang, Jamie
“If you’re lucky, they might even include your name next to mine in the history books,” Rusty Coal said, breaking into our conversation. A slender five-foot ten inches, he sported a tailor-made, gray Dolce & Gabbana skinny suit and black tie. Sleeves rolled up to show his mural of tattoos, he looked more like a rogue runway model than an artist.
Michael rolled his eyes. “I knew that line in the New York Times about being the perfect blend of Warhol and Jasper Johns was going to go to your head.”
“Ah yes, if only I could be so lucky,” I added, giving my favorite arch nemesis a hug. “How are you?”
Rusty was my contemporary—an artist who broke out onto the art scene alongside me. Reviewers often pitted us against each other like horses in a race to the finish line. But our relationship was more akin to that of siblings; we were competitive, but at the end of the day we always looked out for each other. I loved him because he was one of those people who constantly broke the mold of stereotypes placed upon skinny hipsters covered in tattoos.
“I’m good. Working on a series for MOMA in New York,” he said.
“Holy shit Rusty, that’s awesome. Congratulations!”
“Pshh, what kind of traffic does MOMA get?” Michael said. “It couldn’t possibly be as prestigious a showing as the Michael Sanders Gallery, Aubs.”
“Only about three million people walk through it a year,” Rusty said.
“Exactly, small potatoes,” Michael replied in jest.
Best known for his pieces that combined Neo-Dadaist and Pop Art concepts into the more specific theme of love, or sometimes the lack thereof, his name was quickly becoming commonplace in artistic circles.
I first met Rusty at an art convention in Downtown LA where we were two of 231 artists from 73 different galleries nationwide. We were both looking at Willem de Kooning’s 1941 painting Seated Man (Clown) when he turned to me like we’d been friends for years and said, “Not a good painting, but proof that with time a craft can be perfected. Even still, it should probably be in the back of someone’s garage and not on display. What do you think?” I agreed and we spent the next hour ripping it apart like catty teenage girls at the prom. He made you feel like you were important and your opinions mattered, regardless of whether he’d known you for 20 years or five minutes. However, harsh judgment applied to everyone, including me, and he didn’t hesitate to tell me I needed to push things further: code for I don’t like it.
He and I often joked about how each of his pieces was the result of a broken heart, so much so that when I asked him, “How many?” he knew exactly what I referred to.
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen!”
“I had a few repeat offenders,” he smiled devilishly.
Rusty was the most emotionally vulnerable guy I knew. One of my favorite pieces of his was a 10x20-foot canvas littered with newspaper headlines about people murdering for love. The words and phrases varied in size from actual nine-point newspaper font to large, 12-inch letters, weaved in an abstract painting of a nude couple making love. Unlike so many of our peers who focused on abstract expressionism and making art weird for the sake of being weird, Rusty sought to create meaning through the conventional form of symbols. Headlines for Love was an expression of absurdity in the modern dating world: It touched on obsession, lust, and deadly romance.
Unlike Rusty, whose body of work was driven by emotion, I was hailed as being one of the best technical painters. When I was interviewed by the LA Times, the writer called me a chemist of colors because I had demonstrated how I created “Cadmium Red” by combining cadmium sulphide with selenium, which produced a warm and opaque hue. Knowing I would never again be able to mix my own colors was maddening.
My friends knew me as a bulldog with thick skin. It was they who turned to me when life slapped them in the face with public criticism, unexpected death, betrayal, creative fear, and self-doubt—not the other way around. Convinced that they wouldn’t know how to react, I vowed not to tell anyone until I myself was okay with the situation. I planned to deal with it like I did my parents’ death, by making it a non-issue.
Mentally exhausted, I was just about to excuse myself when Mr. and Mrs. Gibson approached.
“Frank and Ellen have officially added Midnight in Paris to their collection of Aubrey Johnson pieces,” Michael informed me.
“Thank you so much for your support. I’m glad you enjoyed the opening.” I shook their hands and walked them to the door. “It was so great to see you both again.” As they headed out, Mr. Gibson wrapped his arm around his wife’s shoulders and kissed her on the forehead, reminding me of my parents who, even after 20 years of marriage, walked like they couldn’t get enough of each other.
At 2:15 a.m., after the gallery had emptied out, Michael and I sat down for a breather. Of the 26 canvases on display, 11 sold. Exhausted, but proud, Michael offered a half-dozen times to get me a cab home, but I assured him I was fine to walk. I liked to be alone after my openings, to absorb and reflect on the events of the evening.
Closing up shop wasn’t my job; in fact, no other gallery ever allowed it, but Michael and I were friends, which warranted unprecedented access. I liked to spend some time alone with my pieces in the quiet atmosphere of an empty gallery. They were my babies and, like a mother at graduation, I was proud to see them succeed but sad not to have them in the house anymore. I did my customary stroll through the gallery and stopped at the one Jeff had been looking at earlier, Home. I had painted it just before moving from Houston to Manhattan, as a kind of cathartic sayonara.
It occurred to me then that Jeff had slipped out at some point without saying goodbye. I hadn’t meant to leave him alone for so long. Looking at my phone, I sent him a text: Sorry I didn’t get to say bye. Lunch tomorrow at Urth Cafe sound good? Twenty seconds later he replied: Sure. I texted back: 12:30. Cool? His reply: K.
I locked up and started the walk toward home. Disintegration of the retina… I thought the walk would lessen my anxiety, but it didn’t. Transition programs and support groups available. How could I hope for things to get better when told with scientific certainty there was nothing they could do? As I wracked my brain for any kind of upside, a horrible stench invaded my senses, making it hard to breathe, let alone concentrate. At the end of the block I found its source: a homeless guy squatting in the shadows with his pants around his ankles. He seemed to be finishing up and used the front lapels of his soiled, button-down shirt to reach under his crotch and wipe up. The pile of human excrement was foul to see and putrid to smell. Yet, it was appropriate, seeing as how the universe seemed to be taking a massive dump all over my life.
CHAPTER TWO
Change
MY apartment, a hole in the wall studio that once served as the third bedroom in someone’s house, was small but cozy. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had only one requirement: that I be near the beach. It was an incredibly naive desire considering my entire net worth at the time was equivalent to a beat-up, fifteen-year-old Pontiac Sunfire.
On the upside, coming from a three-bedroom apartment shared among four women in Manhattan, this was an upgrade. Rectangular in shape, my apartment featured a carved out nook for the kitchen to the far right, my living/sleeping area in the center, and a disproportionately large bathroom on the opposite end. I painted in my apartment, so where someone else might have had a TV console I had a simple wooden easel and stool on top of a large brown tarp. Next to that stood a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of color pigments neatly arranged in jars, a row of paintings stacked in the adjacent corner, and a small leather couch. Forty feet from my doorstep, the sand marked the beginning of the beach, and 150 feet beyond that, the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps it was the astrological Pisces in me, but the moment my toes sank into the sand, I knew I was home.
On nights when I was plagued by insomnia, caused either by stress or the terrible choice to drink caffeine before bed, I tossed and turned until the sun peaked above the horizon. Then, throwing on sweats, I’d he
ad to the beach to watch its light slowly illuminate the earth. The morning after my gallery opening was one such day.
Before the tourists could crowd the boardwalk and jam the bike lanes, I grabbed my family photo album off the shelf and headed for the shore.
The sun was already burning through the morning Pacific fog as I sat listening to the sound of waves crashing gently into the sand in front of me. Two playful dolphins surfed the breaking waves near the shore. It was a day just like this one that I got the phone call about my parents’ car accident. They’d been hit by a teenager who was texting with her boyfriend instead of paying attention to the red light in front of her. The Jeep Grand Cherokee she was driving went barreling into my parents’ Infinity sedan like a monster truck running over a go-kart. Four years had passed and I still missed them all the time.
I opened up my family album to the only photo of my dad and me. I’m seated on his lap with a cup of hot chocolate in my hands, as he tells me a story from the album. The two main characters are he and my mom. After getting married, but before they had me, they traveled around the United States and to a few foreign countries together and the album was a timeline of their love story.
I turned to a photo of my mom and dad at the top of Half Dome in Yosemite. Standing on the beak, my dad is posed to jump and my mom is standing behind him with both hands on her cheeks and a look of horror in her eyes. The first time I remember him telling me that story, he said my mom was scared but he told her not to worry. My dad apparently knew how to fly. And together they soared down the mountainside gliding over waterfalls and rivers and even saluted a roaring black bear before returning to their campsite.
My dad liked to embellish his stories. Sometimes they’d be regular travel log type stories and other times he’d add in mythical creatures or give himself superpowers. Another story he told involved him having to defend Mom from a hungry tiger. “You can’t tell from this picture, but just to the left, only a few feet away was a massive, larger-than-life Tiger. And boy was he hungry. Lucky for me, I had a bologna sandwich in my backpack, and everyone knows that tigers love bologna. I held it out and he delicately stuck it between his teeth before disappearing down the mountain.” I could still hear the intonations of his voice as I repeated these stories to myself time after time.
As I got older the stories stopped—I don’t remember when or why exactly. But looking back I regret not asking for more. Rich in memories, I valued the real as much as I cherished the fiction. When I felt lonely, the stories connected me to them and I felt their presence like a warm embrace.
I thought about how my parents would react to my news. My mom would worry—she’d give me a practical list of things I needed to do: learn braille, count steps, organize my apartment, acclimate to using a walking stick, and maybe get a dog. My dad would embrace the positive—he would tell me I’d be like Daredevil with heightened senses of smell, touch, taste, and sound. He’d tell me to pay attention to the small things and see as much of everything as I can. He’d want me to soak it all in so that I could paint it later.
I took a quick look around me, closed my eyes, and breathed in deeply. I could taste the saltiness of the ocean air. I listened to the wind blow around me, kicking up sand. I heard the waves break rhythmically as they crashed upon the shore. I could picture all of it and I smiled. Behind me, a new sound emerged: laughing children. I tried to incorporate them into the image I had built in my head by visualizing what they looked like, but I came up empty. There was no image to remember.
Before I could even attempt to blink them back, tears rolled down my face. A resigned apology from a body that knew it was failing me. I didn’t want to feel sorry for myself, but I let the tears fall until my ducts dried and my body could let go of the built-up tension my mind so badly wanted to ignore.
Back at my apartment a couple of hours later, I showered, threw on a long, navy blue cotton dress, my brown wraparound bracelet, and gold feather earrings. I slung my flower print crossover hobo bag across my chest before heading out the door. Having arrived at Urth Cafe early, I ordered my favorite things on the menu: a green tea latte and the chicken curry sandwich.
Venice hipsters gravitated to any outdoor coffee shop that sold organic, fair trade, love-the-earth products and Urth Cafe was no exception. As a result I had to wait twenty minutes for a two-top table. Despite the crowd, I liked the laid back atmosphere, but on this particular day I was nervous. Jeff and I were childhood friends, but we grew apart in college. We drifted, as people tend to, each focused on our own lives at opposite ends of the country. I went off to NYU undergrad to study art and he left for UCLA to study…well, I wasn’t sure exactly.
Just a week before my gallery opening we had reconnected at the Department of Motor Vehicles, of all places. I had gotten a ticket for rolling a stop sign and Jeff had gotten one for speeding. He had actually been issued the ticket three months prior and was only there because one more day meant he’d be facing jail time. The Jeff I knew never drove more than five miles above the speed limit. Even at 4 a.m with no car in sight, he would still chose to wait for the green light before entering the intersection.
I hadn’t seen him in person since high school, so I barely recognized him behind his scruffy beard. Wearing bootlegged Levi’s jeans, a 2006 Rise Against concert T-shirt, and Pumas, he was a typical 27-year-old, 6’2”, All-American farm boy. When I entered the traffic school auditorium, I saw him slouched down in his seat toward the back of the small auditorium, eyes glued to the bright images on his phone. I started to walk toward him and just as I was nearly convinced it couldn’t be him, he chuckled at something on his phone and his skin creased around his eyes. Like James Franco, he had three distinct wrinkles that appeared on the sides of his eyes when he smiled.
Sitting down next to him, I said, “I rolled a stop sign, what are you in for?”
Without looking up from his phone, he said, “Speeding.”
“Jeff, you’ve never been above 65,” I say, genuinely shocked.
Recognition slowly set in. “No way.”
“Yes way. It’s been forever, how are you?”
“I’m good, you look great!” he said.
“Thanks,” I replied and I instantly regretted not keeping in touch all those years. His light blue, almost gray eyes were piercing, and when he smiled at me my stomach fluttered. I still had a distinct impression of the Jeff who, at the age of five, wrote, “You’re the pretiest girl in skool” on my valentine. We dated for a half of recess before I declared holding his hand to be yucky and broke it off. Our kindergarten romance ended and we went back to being sandbox buddies. No relationship after that would ever be as simple.
“Where— what are you— how are you here?” he stumbled.
I told him I moved to Venice a few years prior and that I was an artist, which was no surprise to him. He was a high school teacher, but didn’t offer any more information. Jeff always played his cards close to his chest. In college, our friendship drifted from chatting every other day to sending cards on holidays, but when I saw his mom at my parents’ funeral and he wasn’t with her, I considered our friendship to be over.
The lecture had just begun when he took one of my info sheets and wrote: I’m having déjà vu, are we in Driver’s Ed again? I smiled. Taking the paper, I drew eight dashes and the Hangman; category: mascot. Immediately he guessed Bulldogs. I looked at him and he whispered back our high school chant: Go Big Red! I laughed as quietly as I could. The last clue I wrote, I thought was an obvious one: Rendezvous. I put in enough blanks for the word “water tower,” the place where we would meet when Jeff needed a break from the arguing in his house.
His parents fought all the time until our sophomore year when they decided to get a divorce. Had I paid attention before, I might have noticed they were never home at the same time.
“They’re better off without each other,” he had said. For as long as I could remember, Jeff had been this way—always opting for logic over emotion. Thei
r relationship lacked passion and he told me he suspected they had only stayed together for him. So one night when I was over for dinner, his parents started bickering and he flat out said, “You guys should get a divorce. Don’t stay together because of me. I’ll be fine and I’ll live here with mom because she needs me more.” I was shocked. What kid says that to his parents?
Between the two of us, I was by far the wild one. I could almost guarantee anytime we got into trouble, the blame could be traced back to me. But Jeff was loyal, always taking equal blame and never once ratting me out to get a lesser punishment. Our kindergarten stint aside, a relationship between us never progressed past anything purely platonic, though now I suddenly wondered about our compatibility as adults.
As class came to an end and he still hadn’t guessed the word, I was disappointed that the memory meant more to me than him, but that went away as soon as he asked when he would see me again. I gave him my phone number and invited him to my opening.
I was still reminiscing about our day at the DMV when Jeff arrived carrying a bouquet of flowers. “For you,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. I stood up to hug him and mistakenly reached up around his neck rather than under his arms, which would have been more appropriate given our 14-inch height difference. He lifted me into a bear hug, as he’d done a million times before and we laughed before sitting down.
“Y’all throw quite the party,” he said, tugging on the knees of his pants to make himself more comfortable. In rugged jeans, a polo shirt, and aviator sunglasses, Jeff made me nostalgic for Houston, especially when “Howdy” or “Y’all” slipped out of his mouth.
“Don’t think I didn’t notice you bolting early,” I chided as I laid the flowers on the cast iron patio chair beside me. “You didn’t even say ‘bye.’”