by Nina Siegal
“Certainly,” I said.
“We’ll see you at the opening tonight,” she said again. She didn’t wait for my answer. The glass door swooshed softly closed behind me. I was back out on West Twenty-fourth Street, a gray block of cement buildings with an abandoned stretch of railroad overhead, garbage strewn into the rutted pavement. I smelled the vague scent of rancid meat and motor oil.
Okay by me. I was tired of all that purity.
11
Gone Fishing
When I got back to the office, I found a note on my desk, scribbled in the looping script of Rood’s hand:
Gideon, gallery assistant. Don’t phone.
Meet at Twilo, Saturday Night, 3:00 a.m.
(I gather he means Sunday.) The Power Bar.
Blondie. And I’d forgotten to say good-bye.
I shredded the note and looked around for Rood, but he was unaccountably absent. Despite the previous night’s downpour, the newsroom was still on heat-wave tempo. Clerks glided somnolently back and forth like ducks in a shooting gallery. Randy Antillo was sling-shooting rubber bands into the Manhattan map on the office wall. Clint Westwood was replacing his penny loafer insoles. Rusty Markowitz was cursing at his monitor, “Active quotes, damn stringers! How can I use this crap?” Battinger was wearing her headset tipped back like a tiara and typing, a burger in her kisser.
Jaime called out, “Firehouse pre-bit coming along?”
Firehouse. Right, Firehouse. “Yes, just fine,” I said. The Wallace file was covering up the Firehouse file, so I switched them. I put an article in front of me and dragged my eyes over the words, but nothing sank in. I picked up the phone and dialed Betty Schlacter, the DA’s flack. When I asked her about the Wallace case, she said his name back to me, as if he were already filed on microfiche.
“Graffiti guy. Queensboro Bridge. Saturday.”
“Doing follows now on obits?”
“You know how slow it gets in summer.”
“What was the name again?”
I told her and there was a click. She left me with Bernadette Peters singing Oklahoma from the soundtrack. Just when the wind was sweeping down the plain, she returned. “That case is still active. You know we can’t discuss anything under investigation.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know that.”
“How about this: I’ll let you know when we’ve solved it and give you everything. I still have your number around here somewhere.” These government flacks had a way of making you feel small. Fishing wasn’t allowed at city hall. But before she’d let me beg off, she asked, “Do you still have any juice with Buzz Phipps, Valerie?”
“It depends on how hard I squeeze him.”
Silent pause. “I have something new on the supermodel slaying,” she said. “But never mind, I’ll call Tracy.” Then she hung up. It was a low blow, and I had to sit there and take it. Tracy was getting “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and I was getting the dial tone.
I tapped the eraser of my pencil on the desk for a while. I needed to get something on Wallace—anything—enough, anyway, to get Cabeza off my back. Enough to satisfy my newfound curiosity about him too. But how would I do it? News hawks didn’t get their information from flacks, did they? Gumshoes didn’t go around asking press agents for scraps. Jake Gittes knew he had to go to the orange groves. Marlowe had to go to Mexico to find Terry Lennox. But how did he know? And when did he know?
I scanned the collection of reference books on my cubicle shelf: a Zagat restaurant guide; a hot pink guide to Manhattan sex haunts; a thick Gotham’s Gate special edition, “Who’s Who in the Hamptons”; and a thin volume of celebrity yoga gurus. These would have to go. I’d need serious journalistic tomes. The Pentagon Papers. Speeches by MLK, something by Chomsky, and that book We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will…Something, Something. A guide to digital reporting. That was all the rage. I’d need to get a little cap that made me look smart. Maybe dye my hair and get a cut? A wristwatch. I made a list. It was a short list, and when I got finished, I noticed Jaime watching me. Firehouse.
I pulled out the Firehouse file again and started jotting notes about her “ground-breaking” feminist performances, including her 1981 piece, “Nympho/Pyromaniac,” in which Sally masturbated while self-flagellating, and then set fire to her panties. Very soon I had a couple of pages of notes for a story, but it was just about the trickiest bit of cultural translation imaginable, like turning a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner into a bedtime story. I couldn’t politely conjure a tenth of Sally’s act. I tried to describe the protective sheeting and fire-resistant jelly, which she called her “special-formula K-Y,” and resorted to the phrase “unsuitable for a family newspaper” five or six times. I drifted back to wondering about Wallace.
Rood arrived an hour later, like Jimmy Cagney back from the joint, smiling and snickering and flashing his gums, while lurching across the newsroom. “Miss Vane,” he said, cordially. Then he coughed what sounded like acreage of phlegm.
“Mickey,” I said, nodding. “Are you all right?”
“Nothing a few dozen surgeons can’t fix,” he said. “Or so my doctor tells me.”
Mickey had already had one lung removed; I knew that much. I couldn’t imagine what they’d be able to do about the other. I was pleased when he opened up his filing cabinet and took out his brown bag. When he started peeling the layers off his lemon sugar wafers, I was reassured. After he’d finished, he opened a folder on the desk, laid out the clippings from the file, and leaned over the papers like an overgrown toadstool. I looked at his wide back for a while before I asked: “Mickey, you worked in the cop shop, right?”
“Fifteen years,” he said.
“Ever solve a crime the police couldn’t get?”
“Not too often, but a couple of times.” Rood leaned back until his chair hit his desk, and he reached for a cigar box he kept next to the picture of his granddaughter. He took out an unfiltered Lucky Strike. “One case was sort of a mistake. A serial rapist attacking prostitutes in the Brooklyn projects. Cops picked up the suspect and I was on the follow. I was collecting string from victims’ neighbors, and folks started telling me the cops got it wrong. Then I knocked on one door, and there was a guy there, looking pretty ragged. ‘Do you want to talk?’ I said. Bingo, confession in my lap. That wasn’t anything I did, either. Just knocked on the right door and out comes this cranked-up kid thinking I’m a priest.”
“I guess that’s a big break.”
“Dumb luck.”
“And the other?”
“That was all me. That was the big feather in my cap,” he snickered like he didn’t mean it. “It never ran. Some time I’ll tell you all about it, but not now.” He tapped the Lucky on the desk’s surface and placed it between his lips. He didn’t light it. He took it out again and plucked a speck of tobacco from his tongue.
“If you had to do that again—go out on a limb, check something out on your own—where would you start?”
“If I had to, I’d start in the most logical place, with the known facts. I’d follow all the facts back to their source, see if the facts lined up right. Usually they don’t. So you find which fact is wrong, you work from there. Then I’d cover my ass. I’d make sure I did everything on the up and up. No side dalliances, nothing that would stop the brass from accepting my word as scripture.” He tapped his Lucky on the desk. “You wouldn’t want to tell me any more about this thing you’re trying to follow, now would you, Vane?”
“Me?” I said. “Oh, nothing. I’m actually just trying to find some of my dad’s relatives. Old family history.”
“That’s good,” said Rood, sitting up straight. His chair whacked him in the back, making him cough again. “Because I wouldn’t want you checking into something that wasn’t within your current realm of expertise. That might lead to a story that was too big for Obits. And that would get certain editors so worked up they’d muss their hair.”
Cabeza’s call came an hour later. He didn’t bother with courte
sies. “Did you get news on the Stains?”
“Darla says she sold all of them,” I said. “That’s all she said.”
“Did you get any leads?”
The answer was no. “I can’t talk about it here,” I said.
“Claro,” he said. “I’ll be on the Queensboro when you get off work, shooting footage.”
“Footage?”
“I’ll be there after five. There’s a bike ramp on the north side.” Before I could ask for directions, I was listening to the dial tone again. I hated that.
I riffled through papers in the Stain morgue file. I picked through the bruised clips. There were lots. I found a N.Y. Reader item dated 1985, “Skirmish Disturbs ‘Equilibrium.’”
* * *
Everyone knows that the artist Jeff Koons isn’t serious. A guy who showcases Hoover Convertible Vacuum Cleaners in Plexiglas cases just can’t think he’s painting the Mona Lisa, right?
At his most recent show, called “Equilibrium,” Koons had a basketball suspended in a fish tank. Some patrons didn’t get the joke. One visitor to the gallery, an artist named Stain, pulled Koons’s basketball out of the tank, tossed it to one of his cohorts, and pretended to play hoops with his friends against the framed Nike posters—also Koons’s “art.”
“That was so funny,” said one of the teenagers who came with Stain. “But they got upset, as if we ruined something. Come on, man. It’s just a basketball.”
But the gallery owner, the patrons sipping Pinot Grigio, and Koons weren’t so amused.
“This show has nothing to do with basketball,” said Koons after the show. “It deals with states of being. I worked with physicists for a year to get that ball to stay suspended.”
Apparently, those scientists didn’t quite attain their goal. The ball will stay suspended for a while, but eventually it will hit the bottom of the tank. That will turn this piece of art into, well, a basketball in a fish tank.
Stain, the graffitist who won critical acclaim for his first solo show at Darla Deitrick Fine Art four years ago, said he didn’t see Koons’s work as sacred. “This doesn’t do anything but promote Nike,” Stain said. “Koons is selling out my people and he doesn’t even know it. My response was conceptual. We didn’t hurt anybody.”
Asked if he thought Stain was a good conceptual artist, Koons said, “No.”
No?
“This show isn’t about basketball,” Koons repeated. “It’s about artists using art for social mobility. We’re no different from these guys. We’re using art to move up to a different social class too.”
Maybe that would be true if Koons wasn’t himself a successful stock trader until last year. Though I suppose downward mobility could qualify as social mobility, of a sort.
* * *
I had to like this reporter’s style. It was cranky. It didn’t tell the whole story, but it told the good parts. On page two, I saw something else that interested me, a photo of Wallace arm in arm with Darla in front of the SoHo gallery. They looked to be pretty swell pals. She was even putting a few teeth in her smile. In the background was another face I now recognized: Cabeza’s. He was twenty years younger, maybe about ten pounds lighter, and his hair had no sign of gray. He was behind Wallace with his arms folded. He had a look of disapproval on his face, but he was leaning sideways, almost as if he wanted to get into the frame. It reminded me of kids who stand behind on-air TV newscasters, mouthing “Hi, Ma!”
Based on what I could find in the clipping file, the incident at the Koons opening hadn’t improved Stain’s public profile. The next few items I found focused on his public decline: a 1986 story in the Daily News, “Staining His Own Reputation? Wallace Undermines His Work with Silly Stunts,” followed by a Village Voice feature, “Sell-Out Stain Gets Religion,” a four-page rant about how Wallace had no right to start “speaking for the people,” when he’d already become a parody of himself. A New York Post gossip item asked, “What former art star should be voted ‘Most Likely to Exceed’? The wall-scribbler named Stain, who can’t stop putting his rather large foot in his sizable mouth.”
Here it was: the media machine that had built Wallace in his early career was turning on him, taking him apart one pull quote at a time.
The Paper reserves a special place in its heart, and on its fourth floor, for its critics. While most of the reporters who fill the ever-expanding culture sections make their homes in cubes, the critics get offices with walls that smack the ceiling and doors that shut and lock. This alone gives them reason to feel haughty.
Curtis had an office on the floor’s west wing, just a few feet behind Tyler Prattle’s. He shared it with the second-tier film critic, a British Mensa cardholder named Marvin Everett with the byline M. E. Smarte. I rapped lightly so as not to disturb Smarte, in case he was deconstructing the new Kubrick release. No one answered. I rapped again, this time a little harder. I heard a noise inside, and then the muted rolling of wheels, until the door snapped open.
Curtis was in his chair, his head was tossed back lazily and his eyes were a little misty, as if I’d interrupted him reading Wordsworth. He had a dreamy Sunday kind of look on his face, like he’d just put away a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and was coming up with excuses to skip the Week in Review.
“Well, I have to say, you missed some serious Bollywood,” he told me, and I almost confessed that I’d have preferred to go to the Film Forum than to a funeral. He got up and made ceremonious with the door, then rolled Smarte’s chair out from under the other desk and offered it to me. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? Sushi hand roll?” He had a smooth, high voice that kept its pitch.
It had been only a day since I’d last seen Curtis and I should’ve been able to pick up right where we’d left off, but something had come between us in the last twenty-four hours.
“So, I’ve got tickets to Celebrate Brooklyn tonight,” he said. “Beastie Boys and Kid Creole. Any interest?”
Before I could think of a good excuse, his phone rang. Curtis twisted to answer it. “Just a sec,” he said, picking up the receiver. “Culture.” He winked at me. “Hey, Clive. Sure, I know—it’s in my heart but not in my budget, man. Sure, I’ll come down anyway. Sure. Save me a seat up front.”
He hung up the phone. “Sorry about that.” Before I could answer, the phone rang again. “Oops! Sorry, Val. Just this one.”
“Culture,” he said. “Berta! Girl! It’s been ages!…No kidding.” He continued on for a while, scribbling something onto his desk calendar and thanking her profusely for the invite I was sure he wouldn’t accept. Every box in his desk calendar was already covered with jots: hundreds of invitations to rock concerts, music hall openings, movie premieres, and film festivals. All New York was bumping elbows just to get on Curtis’s schedule. Poor culture contenders. The hopes of a slew of aspiring pop stars could be dashed with a single spill of his coffee cup.
“Sorry about that,” Curtis said again. “My buddy at Irving Plaza. Screw the Beasties. You want to see Bad Brains tonight? They’ll comp me plus one.”
“I can’t tonight.” The moment to offer an excuse came and went, but I didn’t know how to tell him I was meeting another man. We rolled around a little on our swivel chairs until the awkwardness went away. “Now, Val, I know you didn’t come up to hear me yak on the phone. How can I make myself of use to you today?”
“I was thinking about our conversation yesterday, about the artist you mentioned, the graffiti guy.”
“Wallace? The Golden Gadfly. Are you thinking we should’ve done more on him?” he said. “You know, it wouldn’t be bad. The trouble is I really don’t have the time. But if you were interested, I’d back you up with Battinger to work on something on spec.”
“I guess I’m a little interested, but only because you mentioned it. I mean, if people are complaining…”
Curtis thought it over some more. “You know what? This could be a good story to help you get back into The Paper again. If I don’t interfere too much, y
ou could get a byline. I’d be really happy to help with that. Maybe even pitch it to Moore and Lessey, or Buzz. Would be nice to get back in Style, huh?” He laughed again, realizing the pun—the same one he’d made the day before. “Sorry.”
Curtis’s office wall was covered with clips from his two decades as a culture reporter, first at the Voice, later at The New York Observer, and then ten years at The Paper. He’d been a witness to punk at CBGB’s, park jams in the Bronx, and even break-dancers before they were in Gap ads. “Maybe if you could tell me a little bit more about why you think he’d be worthy of a larger treatment, I could start to follow a few angles, you know, just to see where they lead? Do you think Wallace was something?”
Curtis killed the phone again. “I’m actually not a big art buff—you know, music’s my thing—and graffiti never did it for me, personally. I was really a young kid when Stain was Stain, so I missed the real fireworks. But Tyler gave him serious props as an artist, I know that.”
“It sounded yesterday like you thought he was just sort of a pain in the ass.”
“Later, when he was in his prime, he was cool as hell.”
“Genuinely?”
Curtis sat up in his chair and lost the dreamy look. “Oh, absolutely. Wallace was a very vivid character. I remember the first time I met him. It must’ve been about 1985, 1986, somewhere in there. I was still enrolled at NYU and I was trying to break into the Voice, and Mike Andatte, this great photographer, was going to shoot some graffiti kids in the East Village and I asked him if I could tag along.”
The phone rang again; this time he tapped a button on the receiver to send it to voice mail, which was either out of respect for me or for the memory of Wallace. “It turned out we walked into a great little moment in history. You see, like a week before, Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were supposed to be part of a group photo of East Village artists for the cover of some magazine, but the three of them had all bagged it. They’d just never shown. Major betrayal. So the other East Village artists thought they had gotten too big for their britches, and now they’re part of the SoHo scene. All these writers are pissed off. So, when Andatte and I got to this apartment, we find this whole crew of writers all dressed in zip-up white suits like exterminators—like Devo.”