by Dave Hickey
MAYFLIES, AN ENVOI
"I am very free now,” he said.
We were sitting on the verandah overlooking the dry lake bed. The angle of the shadow fell across his face so I could only see his lips and chin. They were smooth and well-made. Patrician features, I suppose, expressing no particular sense of strength, nor any sense of weakness, either. He was just a pleasant looking young man wearing a fresh linen shirt, pressed black linen slacks, and a pair of rubber flip-flops. He sat in a tall rattan chair with his legs crossed, his hands resting in his lap, his head tilted back into the pyramid of shadow.
“I am very free now,” he said again, sounding calm as he said it, although I couldn’t see his eyes. “I am more free,” he said, “than any member of my family in the past four hundred years. Of all those who have gone before me, I am the one most free.”
The young man’s declaration didn’t seem to require a reply, or, at least, I couldn’t think of one, so I nodded to acknowledge what he had said. He nodded to acknowledge my acknowledgment and continued.
“For instance,” he said, “I used to gamble. I thought that was required of me. So I did it. Now, I can see that I am too free even for that, and when you are too free even for baccarat, you are extremely free.”
“More free than I am,” I said.
“Yes, but you are extremely lucky,” he said. “And that is a lot better than being extremely free.”
I didn’t want to discuss it. It seemed to me that he was extremely lucky, too. Lucky to have found a friend when he needed one. I looked off toward the pink mountains.
“They say Coronado marched through here,” I said, raising my arm to point, “right through that notch in the mountains, on his way north.”
“He must have felt at home,” the young man said. “This is a landscape in which I feel at home. It is very old.”
“Old,” I said. “But not very free.”
“Landscapes cannot be free or not-free,” he said. “Unless you are political. But it is interesting to think about. Perhaps one of us, one of my family, came riding up through here with Coronado. I do not know for certain. It is not documented, as the connection of my family with Columbus and Velázquez is documented, but it is very likely nevertheless. Wherever there are beans, there will be those to count them. Particularly if they are government beans.”
“Bean-counters,” I said.
“Bureaucrats,” he said, “civil servants, pirates of the quill. That is the traditional calling of my ancestors.”
“My ancestors were shopkeepers,” I said.
“Shopkeepers speed things up,” he said. “My ancestors devoted their lives to slowing things down, to stately progress that was so stately, it was not, in fact, progress at all. I have one ancestor who devoted his adult life to discrediting Don Diego de Silva Velázquez. Day in and day out, while the great painter was painting, my ancestor was diligently scrutinizing his accounts, searching for some implication of fiduciary irresponsibility. The idea was to deny Velázquez his knighthood, of course, and my ancestor was not successful in this. He did succeed in slowing things down for many years, however, just by industry and innuendo.”
“You family is very old,” I said.
“Compared to yours, perhaps. Compared to this landscape, we are a few generations of mayflies. So why should I bother about them?”
“Because they are a very old family compared to mine,” I said.
“A good point,” he said, with the faintest of smiles on his lips, “perhaps I am rationalizing my obligation.”
“You don’t have to rationalize anything,” I said flatly, “if you intend to pay me.”
“So, perhaps I am slowing things down? Engaging in dilatory stratagems? Expressing my genetic proclivity? So, perhaps I am less free than I said I was.”
“So, perhaps you should make an effort to get as free as you say you are,” I said. Actually, I was in no hurry. I was tired of driving and had no intention of pressing matters toward their inevitable conclusion, since that would require my getting back behind the wheel. Still, the kid was getting on my nerves a little bit.
“Do you know the great tragedy of my family?” he said, continuing to slow things down. “The great tragedy is that we nearly had a Pope. That is what my great aunts would tell me when I was a child. They would be dressing me for mass and they would say, ‘Remember, we nearly had a Pope. We would have had a Pope,’ they would say, ‘were it not for that drunken sodomite from Avignon.’”
“Which drunken sodomite?” I asked.
“Oh . . . some French Cardinal,” he said, waving the fingers of one hand in front of his face as if he were brushing away a fly. “It’s a family legend. The details vary according to the person you are talking to. Either this arrogant frog refused to stay bribed and allowed the smoke to go up for an Italian. Or the noble Cardinal died stinking drunk in the arms of a young priest on the night before the election. With the same consequences.”
“Is that so bad?” I said. “Not having a Pope?”
“Well, perhaps not. But having a Pope is a very great honor. So, many of my great aunts date the decline of our family from that moment. From that moment we nearly had a Pope.”
“So you lost the Super Bowl,” I said, “and the franchise went to hell.”
He nearly laughed at this. “You are an extremely American person,” he said.
“I play the ponies, Paco,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me about bloodlines.” I smiled when I said this because I was trying not to be angry with him. He was really not such a bad kid.
“Please, don’t be angry with me,” he said, picking up on it. “I bought this place so I could be alone. And now I am a little lonely in it.”
“I understand,” I said.
“You do?” he said.
“Yes. I understand that I have driven all the way out here to collect a loan that I made to a friend. And I understand that he is not going to pay me until he has told me everything that he wants to tell me. Everything he thinks I should know.”
“So you do understand.”
“That much, at least.”
“Well, understand, too, that I have really stopped gambling. I look forward to visiting you, and not gambling the whole time I am there.”
“You’re always welcome,” I said, “whether you gamble or not.”
“I am ashamed that I lost so much, so foolishly, you know. But I am also a little ashamed that I can afford it.”
“Now you sound like an American,” I said. “But that’s not what you wanted to tell me.”
“No,” he said. “I wanted to tell you about the greatest of my great uncles, the greatest of my ancestors. And about the greatest adventure in European history. The voyage of Columbus. That was a great adventure, was it not?”
“As adventures go,” I said.
“And my ancestor was on that voyage, you see. But he was not an adventurer. He was a spy for the King. He was sent to spy on Columbus, of course, but most of all to spy on the Queen’s spies, who were spying on Columbus—and to make sure there was no breach of fiduciary responsibility in the expenditure of hemp, canvas, and biscuit.”
“A bean-counter,” I said.
“A transatlantic bean-counting snitch on the greatest adventure in the history of Europeans,” he said.
“That was his job,” I said.
“Yes, and my ancestor did it well,” he said. “He died in Hispaniola, of some American disease, I think. Or perhaps he was murdered. I don’t know, but there was no disgrace in it, since he left exquisite records. Some of them were used later to prosecute Columbus.”
“And that bothers you,” I said.
“Well, how should I feel? I understand bean-counting, the need for it, and the need to slow things down, but when I was a child, I told my friends that my ancestor was a great adventurer, a dreamer. That he was with Columbus, not against him, trying to slow him down. Of course, if he had been with Columbus, he would have been in the vast minority on
that voyage, since nearly everyone was against him, spying on him, or counting beans.”
“So you wish somehow to redeem the guilt of your greatest ancestor. That is very American.”
“No. I merely wished to transcend bean-counting, to speed things up, for once. So I sent my money forth to battle the baccarat shoe and hoped to follow it. But it sailed away into the slot and left me sitting there, where you found me.”
“A lesson for us all,” I said.
“A lesson for me, at least,” he said, drawing a folded check from the pocket of his white linen shirt. Leaning forward, he handed it to me.
I unfolded the check. “This is for the full amount,” I said. “Are you sure you can afford it?”
“All too sure,” he said.
“I don’t want to leave you short of walking-around money,” I said.
“If I intended to walk around,” he said, “I would not be short of money to do it with.”
I slipped the check into my billfold and smiled at him. “You realize this leaves me with no reason to come back and visit you,” I said. “If you only paid me half, I would have a reason to come back.”
“Well, then I will come and visit you.”
“And not gamble,” I said, rising to my feet.
“And not gamble,” he said. “From now on I will neither slow things down nor speed things up. I will ride the pulse of things and look at the desert.”
“You have a nice place to do it from,” I said. “Very nice.”
I extended my hand to him. He rose to his feet and took it.
“Thank you, my friend,” he said, clasping my hand in the two of his. “Of course, the floors are not yet what they should be, but I plan to work on them. Out here, where no one can see me working. Then, when the floors are correct, I will really be free.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Since this book comes out of the air, I must express my deepest gratitude to those whose words and gestures I have snatched out of it and appropriated for my own purposes, especially to Dawn Rice Sanders, whose narration of her life as a lady wrestler I have simply typed up, and to Waylon Jennings, whose fugitive observations on the performing life I have conflated into an uncharacteristic soliloquy. Thanks to Waylon, as well, and to Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, and Hank Williams, Jr. for their insights into the life and art of Hank Williams; and thank you to Isaiah Berlin, Jane Jacobs, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Nathalie Sarraute, and Leo Steinberg, who are uncredited in a text upon which their writings have had considerable impact. To Gary Kornblau, editor deluxe, my affection and respect for once again having the style to disdain fashion. To Mary Jane Crook, Marshall Chapman, and Susan Freudenheim, who suffered at close range the eccentricities made manifest in this text, my undying affection—and to my wife, Libby, love unadorned.
Finally, since the experiences recounted in this book have been compressed, elided, collaged, and occasionally disguised to protect the guilty, my apologies to those who remember it differently, or remember it all too well.
“A Home in the Neon” appeared in Art issues #35 (November/December 1994) and was reprinted in Art & Design #51 (November/December 1996); “Simple Hearts” appeared as “Parrot Fever” in Art issues #44 (September/October 1996); “Shining Hours/Forgiving Rhyme” appeared in Art issues #40 (November/December 1995); “Pontormo’s Rainbow” appeared in Art issues #45 (November/December 1996); “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz” appeared as “A Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz: Liberace and His Amazing Museum” in Art issues #22 (March/April 1992); “The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market” appeared in Art issues #42 (March/April 1996); “A Life in the Arts” appeared as “Chet Baker: A Life in the Arts” in Art issues #19 (September/October 1991); “My Weimar” appeared in Art issues #41 (January/February 1996); “Freaks” appeared as “Freaks Again: On Psychedelic Art & Culture” in Art issues #31 (January/February 1994) and was expanded from gallery notes written to accompany “The Contemporary Psychedelic Experience” at the Chapman University Guggenheim Gallery (March 17–April 27, 1993); “The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll” appeared in Art issues #39 (September/October 1995) and an abridged version was reprinted as “Rage and a Haircut” in the Utne Reader #73 (February 1996); “Dealing” appeared as “Art is Cheap” in Art issues #47 (March/April 1997); “Magazine Writer” appeared as “Grover Lewis: An Appreciation” in the Los Angeles Times on June 25, 1995; a shorter version of “A Glass-Bottomed Cadillac” appeared in Country Music Magazine (January 1984) and was performed by Barry Tubb at Lubbock or Leave It: Butch Hancock’s Performance Space in Austin, Texas during a four-week run beginning on January 11, 1996; “The Little Church of Perry Mason” appeared in Art issues #36 (January/February 1995); “Romancing the Looky-Loos” appeared in Art issues #46 (January/February 1997); “The Heresy of Zone Defense” appeared in Art issues #37 (March/April 1995); “Air Guitar” appeared as “Critical Reflections” in Artforum Vol. XXXIV, No. 1 (Summer 1995); “Lost Boys” appeared as “Lost Boys: Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage” in Art issues #14 (November 1990), with parts taken from the author’s interview with the artists that appeared in Interview Magazine (August, 1990); “This Mortal Magic” appeared as “A Matter of Time” in Parkett #40/41 (1994); “Godiva Speaks” appeared in Art issues #38 (Summer 1995); “Frivolity and Unction appeared” in Art issues #43 (Summer 1996); “Mayflies” appeared in Silence Please: Stories After the Works of Juan Muñoz (The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Scalo Zurich–Berlin–New York, 1996).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Hickey has written for most major American cultural publications, a great many minor ones, and some publications that are not cultural at all. He was owner-director of A Clean Well-Lighted Place Gallery in Austin, Texas, and director of Reese Palley Gallery in New York. He has served as Executive Editor for Art in America magazine in New York, as Staff Songwriter for Glaser Publications in Nashville, and as Arts Editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 1989, SMU Press published Prior Convictions, a volume of his short fiction, and, in 1993, Art issues Press published The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, which was reissued in 2011 in an expanded version by the University of Chicago Press. Hickey received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism in 1994 and is currently Distinguished Professor of Criticism at the University of New Mexico. He lives in Albuquerque with his wife Libby Lumpkin.