by Ivan Jenson
“There is nothing left to fight about,” Milo said.
“Don’t go on and on about all the good things that are happening to you. I don’t think that Ray will be able to take it, you have to remember that you are an artist and that he is a house painter who pines to be an artist. It is his life's lament.”
“Okay, I will keep things to myself mother, don’t worry.”
Milo returned to his hotel room. Samantha left a note saying that she stepped out to have a smoke outside.
Milo lay back on his single bed. There was a part of him that wanted Samantha to go back to New York. He had become accustomed to his loneliness.
Loneliness was his friend and jealous mistress.
What does Loneliness say? “Shhh,” it says. “Don’t attempt to describe this indescribable feeling to anyone. This room, this city, this earth,” Loneliness says, “.. is not for you.”
Milo does something with his sorrow, with static time. He pours color onto a plate as if in a trance created by the urban rhythms of soul music on his radio. He props a canvas up on an aluminum table, and begins to paint. These shapes that he paints are beyond his personal issues. Beyond the tedium of his family dynamics. Pablo wants to paint too, but in the sixth, seventh or tenth dimension there is no such thing as painting.
There is no order, no rhyme or reason to the technique that Milo employs when he paints. Acrylics have no rules. When he works with water based acrylics, the whole experience is so very water logged. Milo drinks coffee and Perrier when he paints and has to piss often. He sets down his dark colors first and then haphazardly builds up a central image. Milo never washes out the color on his brush. He uses black to create definition and always pours out an ample amount of white paint. It is with white that he creates the illusion of light. Milo has no interest in background, he paints them out of focus, and they become defused “impressions” of possibilities. Is that someone else in the background? Is that some 19th century man with a top hat back there? Even Milo does not know. Now this plastic medium is beginning to harden and dry. The gel medium used to create shine and texture is emitting fumes. Coffee, diet coke, sparkling Perrier, perhaps a cigarette. All these stimulants are like God given energy. He urinates again and then returns to painting. All this activity is a perfect anecdote to the curse of unbearable longing and unquenchable desire and the pining for connection and that emptiness and that void Milo still feels even though Samantha has come to visit.
Soon Ray would come to this small city.
Soon Mother would be gone.
Soon Milo would shoot like a circus acrobat from a cannon, back into the metropolis of New York City. He just has to hang on.
On the Fourth of July, nurse Consuelo assures Milo that she can look after his mother while Milo and his nephew, Donny, head for the local fireworks without Samantha who preferred to stay at Milo’s place and catch up on some sleep. Donny hops in the back seat, and he immediately rips into sarcasm, “Well Hello Milo Sonas the great artist, I’m so surprised to see you in public and where are your body guards?”
Milo shot back, in jestful banter “Well, I feel perfectly at home here in the South of France. No need for bodyguards.”
“You know Milo,” Donny says. “You should sit down and write a book or a movie about the way that you think your life is going to be. Now that would be funny!”
Milo and Donny walked through the small local park by the lake. The crowd was ninety-nine percent white. Young married couples were everywhere. And Milo's half-black nephew sported a badly botched Mohawk.
“Man,” Donny said, “I can’t believe I am even out here with you when I could be smoking a spliff at home. This is total bullshit. I really can’t take this scene when I am not high.”
“You know Donny, you put me in an uncomfortable position by telling me that you are in possession of pot. I really should be reporting this to your mother.”
“You do that and I will beat the hell out of you. I’m not shitting you. And you know that I am strong enough to do it.”
Milo knew that his nephew was only kidding. But on the other hand this oversized teen was five foot nine, and two hundred and thirty pounds.”
Milo remembered just a few years back, he was riding Donny’s bike and he and a couple of his rambunctious twelve year old friends were in hot pursuit of Milo with their BB guns. A few blocks later five police squad cars surrounded Milo. Milo stood frozen on his undersized bike and raised his hands to surrender.
“I didn’t steal this bike. It is my nephew's. I am just borrowing it.”
One cop shouted, “You're not the perp. You are the victim. Aren't you?”
Milo was confused, “The victim of what?”
“You are being pursued by some black teenagers with a handgun.”
“Oh, that's just my nephew Donny and his buddies. It’s just a BB gun.”
Half a block away two more cops were were surrounding Donny and his scrawny friends. They were told to throw down their guns and raise their hands. Milo’s mother at this time was still in good health and she stepped outside and began to rant and rave to the cops and all that was missing was a soulful southern Tennessee Williams drawl, as she said, “Those boys come to bother my son in the afternoons. My son, he is not well, he is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and those boys, those boys who come in the afternoon, well they come to taunt my poor son. Those boys are nothing but trouble.”
Yet Milo still enjoyed his time with Donny.
Milo spotted Pablo standing, cigarette in hand, by the lake, looking pensive and out of place. He was dressed in a white slightly oversized and loosely worn linen shirt, loosely fitting slacks, and sandals. Vincent stood next to him wearing a straw hat, looking deeply tanned, in Lee jeans, and T-shirt.
Milo felt personally responsible for them, as if it was somehow his fault that they were stuck here, loitering in time. Donny was unable to see the two artists. Milo gave Donny ten bucks and told him to purchase a candy apple or popcorn from the vending truck on the sidewalk. Milo had a few words with the two dead icons.
“This is the Fourth of July, very American, don’t you love it?” Milo said to them.
Pablo answered, spitting into the lake, “I hate public gatherings. They make me queasy. I never bothered to go to embarrassing public displays of affection on my birthdays, in fact, I preferred to stay home and paint. I abhor mob mentality.”
“I would like to paint the fireworks, but I didn’t bring my easel and supplies,” Vincent said.
“It’s not fair,” Pablo said to Vincent, “that you get to paint and I don’t.”
“I guess you just got stuck in the wrong dimension.”
“Lucky in life, but unlucky in death,” Pablo said.
“And the reverse is true for me, except for the loneliness that seems to follow me wherever I roam.”
Milo spotted his high-strung half-sister Amelia further down the great lawn. She had been the first to arrive in Gold Haven and there she was in this festive park by Reeds Lake. She had just spent some quiet quality time in Mother’s gloomy confines. She looked happy to throw a blanket down on the grass and had brought a thermos with coffee. She had not spotted Milo yet.
Vincent looked anxious, his red hair seemed to glow orange in the twilight, as he said, “We are here for you Milo. We have descended onto this place to christen those that have a chance. We are here to guide you so you don’t go down the wrong crooked path. We won’t be here for long. Soon you will be on your own. Go be with your sister. You spend altogether too much time with us as it is.”
“Okay, you're right. I will see you both later. Try to have some fun, would you?”
Milo sat down on the big blanket next to his half-sister who now, three times divorced was pushing sixty and openly admitting to having given up on love permanently. They sat in silence for awhile before Milo shared with her his fears for the future. He was wondering if Samantha was right for him, he found her to be a lazy girl. She was presently back at his h
otel sleeping, This comment from him triggered in Amelia the desire to loudly lecture him on the ways of love. Amelia had a piccolo voice which pierced through sound barriers like an arrow of shrill sound. And she was telling him to stop this relentless hunt for beautiful women, including Samantha.
“Don’t you see Milo that Samantha is just a little squirt. I mean, what kind of a person naps through the Fourth of July but a lazy little girl.”
Milo pointed out that Bruce Willis who was well into his fifties notoriously dated a twenty five year old chanteuse of cinema. Nicholas Cage married a nineteen year old hostess from an LA sushi bar. And Picasso, well, we all know Picasso loved young babes.
Amelia said, “But you are not Bruce Willis, Nicholas Cage, or Picasso.”
Milo felt deflated. “But when Nick gets things going, I will be a household name. That is if he can really pull this off. I hope he can. Amelia? Do you think it is really going to happen for me?”
“Milo, ever since I got here I have noticed that you have been filled with anxiety and fear. You can’t let yourself be that way. You have to understand that things happen for a reason. There is a reason it is all happening now. Maybe before, you weren’t ready for it all.” The way that she pronounced anxiety and fear made her voice carry in the breeze past the picnicking families and it seemed to Milo like those words whisked and crackled like fireworks. It felt like she had written those words in flashing red, white and blue sparkles in the 4th of July night sky.
“Boy, your half-sister can be a real bitch,” Vincent said. Milo didn’t notice that they were now both sitting in the grass behind him. Vincent knew that Amelia could not hear him. She was not sufficiently sensitive to be privy to the voices of dead artists.
“You shouldn’t let her talk to you that way,” Pablo said. “At least answer her back. You are a man, be a man.”
“Look Amelia.” Milo said, standing up for himself, “Of course I am filled with fear and anxiety, my whole life now hangs in the balance, how much time is there really left for me. Maybe half a lifetime, and not necessarily the good half.”
“You are totally obsessed with celebrity. Did you know that?”
The sky had grown sufficiently dark and the fireworks were beginning. Paint splatters of light in deep blues lit up the sky.
“Look I have no other choice but to become famous. I have nothing to fall back on. No other skills. I am so geographically challenged that I am not even sure where on this planet I live. All that I know about are shapes and faces. Life has me cornered. I am at the end of the line. I live in a fucking hotel that rents by the month. I get high just walking down the hall from all the pot smoked in the building, and that tangy smell of crack cocaine seeps through the walls. The people that roam the halls remind me of the denizens in Night of the Living Dead. Before Nick called me, I was a nobody, nothing. I was tired. I was exhausted from twenty years of hustling my art next to vendors that sold candied peanuts, hot dogs, gyros and freaking falafels.”
Milo’s spontaneous monologue of defeatism competed with the spark and crackle and boom of the fireworks. “But all this time, I never stopped believing, even as my canvases were blown down the street by gusts of wind. I knew that I had talent and that I knew how to make something that people wanted. And now Amelia, I have been given this chance to be something, to be someone... and you know something, I am going to take it. But at the same time I think about things a lot. For instance I feel badly that Mom won’t be able to see and share in all that is about to transpire.”
“You are just going to have to let that go. She is my mother too, you know, we both have to learn how to let...to let her go.”
On this Independence Day, was there some place inside Milo where he looked forward to his mother’s death? Would that day be the one when he was set free? When he was finally emancipated?
When his career crashed and he returned to Michigan everything for the first few years felt like a second childhood. Like the time spent with his nephew as an unlikely and unruly sidekick. The two of them up to no good in the afternoon. It seemed so long ago, just yesterday it seemed Donny was a boy, and it seemed like Milo had a boyhood too, once again.
Chapter Twenty
Dead artists did not come like archangels to visit his brother as he meticulously primed the walls of another home like a madman priming the walls of his asylum.
He was pressing some wealthy man's wife up against the plasterboard as she revealed to him that her husband hardly touched her and that she would surely soon be leaving him, but it was not the practical thing to do at this time. Now she backed him up against the wall, which kicked up a little white cocaine-like plaster dust. He already felt cornered by fate, which had rendered him talentless. He too tried his hand at painting, but due to a lack of draftsmanship ability, he was doomed to a world of abstraction. Not out of choice, because if he had a choice he would make the paintings that he saw in his dreams. He wished he could paint sci-fi fantasies where Herculean men floated in cosmos with their voluptuous female counterparts, scantily-clad like Greek slaves. As he kissed this other woman, Ray thought of his wife and her fashionable but prematurely white hair and how it seemed to him that she too was having an affair, not with a man but with her indulgent need to compete in poetry slams with performers half her age. As he lay this other man’s wife down on the tarp of the interior of her unfurnished home, and began the monotony of undressing her, Ray found himself preoccupied by a plan. His flight to Gold Haven was already booked for 6:45 that evening. The plan was simple, and it was to destroy his brother’s chance at new found success.
Before, it had been Milo who was obsessed with his sister Becky's success as a director of TV ads. In fact Milo had let the thought of his sister's financial success snowball inside him. It had become so extreme, that whenever he closed his eyes, he would see her smiling tightly from a recent face lift. Milo never understood until then how simple reoccurring thoughts can grow into disturbing concepts so big that they enter the mind like the foot of Goya’s giant, destroying everything else, including the rational thoughts that come into their path.
During a particular drought in his finances Becky had sent him a check for fifteen grand and that loving gift had siphoned off all the manhood within him. When Milo deposited the check, he studied the word “gift” written on it, and it dawned on him he that would never make any real money in his lifetime. And he remembered how she had once said to him, “If I had to live in that tiny studio of yours I would have killed myself a long time ago.” He had heard that refrain before.
Again Milo’s thoughts were filled with suspicion that reality was orchestrated in such a way that after he created a magnificent body of work and shipped it to New York, he would die in some inexplicable manner and then a gallery exhibit would be held posthumously and yield enormous wealth. The only question was, who wanted him dead?
Becky had been getting a reputation for being difficult due to her burning ambition to direct a major motion picture. She had turned down many commercial accounts to keep her schedule clear for such a project. How did she feel about Milo’s new opportunity? And of course there was Ray who was surrounded by the white interiors that he painted, driving himself mad. And Luna who had been a child celebrity, certainly she wasn’t thrilled with the possibility that her youngest brother might eclipse her. Which of these souls wanted Milo dead? Who would have the guts? Who had the motivation?
As Milo walked through life he kept these fears and anxieties, as Amelia called them, neatly checked at the door. Milo tried to carry on despite the fact that he always perceived his life to be in mortal danger.
Chapter Twenty-One
“She is coming, her name is Carly,” Samantha said to Vincent with her kind smile. “And she is a very pretty girl, very pretty, I hope you like red heads. I immediately thought she would be the most perfect of all my girlfriends because she had so many of your prints on her dorm walls. The few times we got high together she had told me that she often believe
d that she was born in the wrong century. Carly always said she wanted to be a Dutch girl in the early part of the 19th century.” Samantha expertly rolled herself a cigarette on the fire escape outside Milo’s room.
Milo wondered aloud, “How did you ever convince a girlfriend of yours to travel across the country from New York City to boring Michigan to meet Vincent.”
“Well, I’ll just put it to you this way, I told her that I met this boy, I refer to all men as boys, and I said he was a painter, a loner. I told her he had an angular face and a tortured soul. And I told her his name just happened to be Vincent. And she, who I believe was high when I called her, took this as some sort of divine intervention or something and she was sure that this meant that he was the one for her.”
“So is she coming by bus or plane?”
“Neither...she is hitchhiking here.”
“Isn’t that awfully dangerous for a college girl?”
“She is twenty five, and she is extremely street smart. I am not worried about her in the least.”
“When will she get here?”
“In a couple of days.”
It was decided that in preparation for this love match that Vincent Van Gogh be properly groomed and that he should most definitely purchase some new clothing, preferably from the Gap, Old Navy, or Steve and Barry’s.
Milo and Samantha took Vincent to Supercuts, where his wild mane of hair was cut, styled, and blow-dried. Fortunately Vincent had insisted that he didn’t want a short cut. So instead he was given just a slightly shorter but more layered version of messy, and they were assured by the sensual stylist who had a dash of bright blue in her jet black hair, that this was an up-to-the-minute look for a guy. So much wonderment had entered Milo’s life via Samantha on this overcast July day. He wished his mother could share in all that was bursting forth in color bright and yellow as the sunflowers that Vincent had painted.