by Ivan Jenson
Dead Artist
A Novel
by
Ivan Jenson
HEN HOUSE PRESS
Published by Hen House Press
Copyright 2011 by Ivan Jenson
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters are products of the author's imagination and any likeness or similarity to persons, living or dead (except for dead persons identified by name), is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9834604-2-8
To my father who sat shirtless in the summertime, typing out on his Smith Corona all four hundred handwritten pages of my first novel, written at the age of 13.
To my mother who each morning at 5:00AM reads my pages with red pen in hand.
And lastly to Dr. B who always said, "Good" when I told him I had been writing but never lived long enough to see my dreams come true.
Chapter One
In the heat of the afternoon Milo stood, unschooled, untutored, untamed hair, self taught. He was an artist.
The summer dropped light on this small town like a hot white sheet straight out of the dryer. The movers were at work wrapping all of Milo’s paintings in bubble wrap. They were taking the paintings Milo had created and shipping them to his new dealer's home in New York City.
One of the movers was lanky, shy, and looked eighteen. The other one was bald and had his gaze fixed on one of Milo’s large-scale paintings when he said, “This one here, this woman you painted with the cascading hair, she looks just like my wife right down to the pouting lips, if you had just made her eyes green, I tell you I would have bought this painting on the spot. Who is this?”
“She came straight from my imagination. I didn’t use a model at all.” Milo lied.
“You got some imagination there,” the bald mover said. He was tall and thin, and all smiles. The day had clouded up and it hailed in June. The hail was the size of silver dollars.
“Look at that weather,” the mover said. “It must be a sign that something special is about to happen for you.”
Milo hardly listened to the man. His mind was preoccupied. Watching the hail fall outside the garage studio, he began to feel almost hypnotized.
Now, in his mid forties, Milo felt like a woman with her biological clock ticking and desperately longing for marriage and children. He thought back to the women he had loved in New York. He pictured them now, freshly showered, hair sleek and dark like a fresh pot of coffee. Suddenly it was all rushing back to Milo. The days of abundant sex and money. It had been a long time since he was last famous and now his second chance was coming. It was like a second wind. He could hear in his mind the voice of Nick, his new art dealer and how just a couple of weeks ago he had said, “I am going to make Milo Sonas a household name.” Nick had said this to Milo at the Kennedy Airport terminal, and then added, “I am going to make you lots and lots of money. All you have to do is paint, have fun and enjoy the ride.”
What a trip that had been! Nick had wined and dined Milo and taken him to the best VIP strip clubs, given him a hundred dollars and told him to get lap dances. And Milo stayed at Nick's house which was like a museum dedicated to Milo's paintings, collected by Nick over the years
Milo hadn’t painted in half a decade. And when he saw those early works, he said to himself, “So that's what I am, I am an artist after all.”
The movers were lifting Milo's Portrait of Van Gogh and placing it in a cardboard box. Here in this garage in his mother's home, he had painted these works. Being a lonely widow, his mother enjoyed having him around. While his father was alive, Milo never in his heart acknowledged him as his sole father. Instead Milo insisted that he had many fathers. One of them was Picasso... the robust, stalky, prolific cigarette puffing genius who married classic beauties twenty years younger than himself. Milo had a hard time modeling himself after his father who was a failed novelist and who, during the last half of his life, toiled on the rewrite of the same novel, and was still submitting it to agents when he died, fortunately enabling him to avoid the disappointment of the inevitable rejection letters.
Milo had always postponed and sacrificed all worldly possessions and status in society in anticipation of the time when true success would find him. He knew right away that school was not for him, that it was not necessary. In school he played the role of the manic class clown.
His sixth grade class once took a week-long field trip to a Southern California mountain camp. On their first morning in the campsite, Milo dressed in nothing but a sheet from his bunk bed, stood at the edge of a cliff and pretended to be Jesus, gesturing as if he had the power to make the sun rise. He commanded it to rise, chanting, “I am your Messiah! I am your Messiah!” Even the camp counselors broke a smile. However Milo was not punished by his teacher, she thought it was an imaginative, and historically accurate prank.
Milo had the opposite of paranoia. He now believed the entire world was conspiring to help him. And so he coined the word, “Posanoia.”
There was a time when he felt that success eluded him. This bothered him so much that, one December six years ago, he let his mind get trapped like a hamster in a treadmill of obsession and no matter how close he got to having it all it was always “close but no banana.” Once in the The Pinebrook Mental ward reception area, he saw a bowl of fruit on a desk next to the receptionist. He demanded to have a banana. The staff told him the fruit was just for show and not for the patients' consumption. Milo pleaded. He said there was a reason why he wanted the banana, an important reason. So they gave the banana to him. That was the only time he got the banana in life, or so it seemed.
But now Nick had promised him the whole bunch.
As Milo continued to watch the movers wrap his canvases, Milo considered calling a friend and saying, “take a look at me now.” But Milo lost all his friends. Even the one he vowed to be friends with all his life. They had met in an elementary school coat room and promised to be friends for life. Milo through the years entertained his best friend with his humor but things stopped being funny when that friend started earning a six figure salary and Milo was still selling his art on the streets of New York.
Milo had always been funny at parties. “The life of the party” that's what they called him. Blatantly insulting guests with sharp wicked improv, some friends paid for him to entertain at their weddings just so he could spice and lighten up the event. But in the end the joke was on Milo. He ended up living in poverty in a dive in New York City. His only relief came when young girls would visit his “cave.” His studio was called a cave because it was dark and cavernous and had only one small window. It was a storefront on the ground floor, with a front door that opened to the sidewalk. Milo remembered one girl with theatrically made up eyes who had asked him, “Don’t you want a wife and a family?”
“I can’t afford any of that,” he had said.
And then she put the whip cream on his naked body.
There was a time when women tracked him down, and followed him to hotel suites. They hunted him. When he was famous.
Milo’s thoughts were interrupted.
Milo heard his mother calling fro
m her upstairs bedroom. He went back in the house, headed up the stairs and entered the attic room where she was sitting up in bed. “How are they doing down there? Are they doing a good job?”
“Yes they are, everything is fine.”
“Come here,” his mother said.
He sat down on the bed and she took his hand.
“You will find someone and have everything. Don’t worry Milo. Looks like I won’t last long enough to watch it. I have noticed how all your life you are thinking about things, no matter what is happening around you, your mind is always somewhere else. Try to, as they say, to be in the here and now.”
Milo’s mother was devastated by her illness. Her feet were swollen from lack of circulation. She had quit smoking a year ago, but it was too late.
Milo was thinking about how much he would have liked his mother to meet his new wife. The problem was, he hadn’t met her yet himself.
“I better get downstairs, and oversee what the art movers are doing,” he said. Sometimes it was just too much to be near her.
Chapter Two
Milo sat on his second-hand sofa in the garage and continued to watch the movers wrap up his paintings, and thought back to the ragtag days when he was a street artist. He missed the hustle. He missed systematically handing out cards to every pretty girl he saw. He used lines on the girls like, “You look Picasso-esque. You look like a woman from a Fellini film. You look like a painting I made last night.” One night in Washington Square Park, a girl warned him that she had mace in her pocket. So he backed off. Sitting on his second-hand sofa, Milo thought, he would never have girl trouble again.
Fame is something paid for and arranged. And the arrangements were now being made for Milo Sonas.
Just months before, Nick paid for Milo to fly out to the east coast. He showed Milo a good time. Besides the strip clubs, he took Milo out to a Brazilian Churrascaria in Times Square where waiters with sword sized knives sliced slabs of beef, lamb, pork and chicken. Milo and Nick indulged like carnivorous Romans.
Nick had said, “I am doing this all for you, because I think you deserve it.”
It took twenty years of selling on sidewalks to get here.
As his new paintings were being packed he thought back to how it all began.
Milo was the last child living at home. Each one of his six brothers and sisters had found someone or something and flown the coop. He had been especially close with his sister Luna. But at the age of nineteen Luna found someone too. She met him when she stubbed her toe during a vacation in Costa Rica -- he was the ER doctor that treated her. She never came home again. Their mother was very close to Luna and when Luna left home she started acting erratic. A crisis team came at 5:00 am. The counselor said, “A family is like an organism that sometimes splits apart and one member feels the strain the most.” The doctor gave Mrs. Sonas pills to relax her so that she could sleep.
One night his mother took all the pills at once. She claimed she only wanted to sleep, but it was perceived as a suicide attempt. She was taken to the County Hospital Psychiatric Ward. “Get me out of here,” she pleaded a few hours into her mental ward lockdown. “Whatever you do, get me out of here now!” So her family got her out.
When she came back home the crisis team came to visit again and the counselor told her, “It's okay, you are feeling the pain of a loss.”
“Yes,” she said, “it is like a hole in my chest. What can I do to fill it up again?”
“You can’t fill it up again. There will always be a void. You have to learn to live with it.”
Milo's mother’s eyes looked so hollow that night, like Grandmother’s eyes looked before she died. It looked like the angels forgot to come.
The Sonas family were a lot like gypsies. After Luna left home, Milo, his mother and his father moved into that house in Pelham, in October. His father was retired from a job he never had and was working sporadically on his novel again. To support the family, Mrs. Sonas cooked for a nunnery.
Then came that fateful day when Milo threw color on paper, grabbed some rope from the garage, and took the Metro North to New York City. He strung his paintings on a line. Everything changed.
That cosmic aura of success touched him. He was an instant hit on the New York streets.
Luna drove up to the garage. Smiling, she got out of her car. She could never have anticipated this comeback for him. When Milo had first come to Gold Haven he was a total mess. She had waited for him at the airport. He looked heavier, unshaven, and sported a weary smile.
Luna:
Look at my brother now. It was just five years ago that he arrived at the Gold Haven Airport terminal looking like a castaway wearing clothing that didn't fit. In fact my brother Milo looked like he was wearing a dead man's clothing. My husband drove us all home and he said, “Milo I understand what you are going through, you have arrived at middle life and now you see that your dreams are not going to come true and that you will never achieve the heights in your career again. So your dreams are dead and yet you still have half a life to live. What do you do now? Look if I had lived the life that you had led, I couldn't have hung on as long as you did. I would have committed suicide long ago.”
Those were my husband’s exact words. But Martin was only trying to be honest. He may have thought he was being helpful. But I think he was being unwittingly harsh. And you should have seen the look on Milo's face when he heard Martin’s speech. It looked like the angels hadn’t come...
But what can anyone do when somebody is having a nervous breakdown?
But soon the new paintings would arrive at the collector's house. And Milo would soon make it out of Gold Haven, Michigan.
This was sure to be his last summer in this small town which felt so dead. All its residents had headed to summer cottages by Michigan lakes. The gym where he worked out and prepared for fame had been deserted. By day reading books like The Secret, Think and Grow Rich and a book on ESP, by night, in his room he raised his arms in the air, as the ESP book directed. And with arms raised high, Milo called forth the cosmic forces of the universe to transform his life. He longed to see the end of his heretofore unending loneliness and excruciating alienation.
It was because of his mother that Milo got discovered in New York in the first place.
At first as street-artist-in-the-eighties he had wished to be as famous as Andy Warhol or Keith Haring. And he was complaining to a girl, “All the big artists are showing in the clubs. Every artist wants to have a painting in a club called Pantheon.”
Just then his mother called and said, “How would you like to have a painting at the Pantheon?” The Pantheon was the most famous club in the world. It was perfect synchronicity. His mother worked for a catering company, and a painting was needed behind a Sushi bar at a fashion event.
So mother Sonas sewed together two canvases and Milo created a ten foot by ten foot painting, called Man of the Eighties. He remembered entering the club and seeing his painting as the song Su-Su-Sudio played. It was his mother who told him to try to paint with foam brushes from the hardware store. That painting, at the top of the club, looked out at the sea of dancing people. Milo had arrived.
Now after a twenty year dry spell, it was all coming back. It had taken years of going to psychics, reading Louise Hay, working, wishing, praying, doing cosmic work. If he could just make it through this one last hurdle and reach the banana.
You see, the rest of his family would be arriving soon to Gold Haven, to pay their last respects to their mother.
Milo walked through the Woodbridge Mall where he spent many afternoons wandering. Perhaps he really was one of those people who simply wandered in the afternoon. Victoria’s Secret mannequins beckoned him enticingly. And he couldn't take his eyes off the big blown up glossy photos of women in lingerie. Over by the food court a young mother with long legs and firmly defined calves ending in high heels was pushing a baby carriage. She was truly a trophy wife, pristine and skin yellow as a banana peel.
&nbs
p; Milo watched her bend over to tend to her little girl. He is mesmerized.
“That’s exactly the sort of wife that you must find,” a voice with a heavy Spanish accent said to him. Milo turned around and there he was, Pablo Picasso sipping a Diet Coke through a straw. His skin was deeply tanned and orange colored and he wore loose linen shorts. He didn’t look a day over eighty five. But as usual he made eighty five look like sixty five.
Milo was not at all surprised to see Pablo. These impromptu visitations had been happening for some time. Milo saw dead artists. These magical modern art mirages were a welcome relief from the mundane Muzak-drenched loitering that he indulged in most afternoons.
“So how are things going, Milo?”
“Nick will be flying me to New York for a photo shoot. I just need your opinion, do you think I should whiten my teeth. I will be meeting so many people.” Milo grinned for Pablo as one might in front of a dentist.
Pablo leaned in close and examined Milo’s teeth. “For one thing you have a chive between your two front teeth.”
“Oh shoot. Where? Here?” Milo said, turning his head to the side to give Pablo a clearer view.
“No the next tooth over.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Is it gone?”
“No.”
“Hold on.”
Milo headed for the Woodbrige Mall restroom. He saw his tooth with the chive in the wall-spanning mirror. The chive was lettuce and it was bright green. “Damn it,” he said to himself.
When Milo exited the restroom and rejoined Picasso, he said, “Well you never answered my question, are my teeth too yellow?”
“You're asking a man who has chained smoked all his life about yellow teeth, get over it. Hey look, there's a tanning center. Now that’s something we both need, especially you, before your photo shoot. Can we go? Can we?” Picasso sounded childlike.