by Don Lee
Charlie Chan—made portly with foam padding—was in a tweed three-piece suit and bow tie, with slicked-back hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He was bowing slightly, his palms pressed together.
Suzie Wong had her hip cocked to one side, fist resting on it. She was in a form-fitting cheongsam, the silk the lightest blue with a hint of lavender, accessorized with a matching hair band and open-toed pumps—the outfit Nancy Kwan had worn in The World of Suzie Wong when she modeled for William Holden’s painting.
What made the mannequins distinctive, though, was that Bruce Lee and Charlie Chan had their zippers open, baring erect penises and scrotums. Suzie Wong’s cheongsam also had an open zipper, but the zipper and the vulva that it exposed (a clone of Jessica’s vulva) were horizontal, an allusion to the old myth that Asian women had sideways vaginas. Framed by the lashes of the zipper’s jagged teeth, the labia resembled a slitted eye. There was a one-yuan coin stuck between the folds.
The dental alginate molds Jessica had made of Joshua’s and my genitals had been the first of a four-part process. For the second, she had poured plaster of Paris into the molds, then dismantled the alginate to reveal the casts of the plaster erections, which she filed and sandpapered and filled with spackling paste to fix voids and defects. After that, she applied a coat of acrylic polymer to smooth out the surface even further, then painted on a thin layer of latex rubber molding compound on the plaster, waiting twenty-four hours for it to dry before painting another layer, repeating until she had accumulated ten coats. She then dislodged the latex molds from the plaster penises, sprayed the insides with a release agent, filled them with two-component RTV silicone, and suspended the molds inside two-liter soda bottles with the tops cut off (the water in the bottles equalized the pressure, since the weight of the silicone had a tendency to bulge). After another twenty-four hours, she peeled the rubber off to uncover the replicas.
They were, in fact, exact replicas. Contrary to Jessica’s assertion, all penises did not look alike. I identified mine right away. It was on Bruce Lee, and I could see every vein, ridge, and anatomical detail, every little bump and crease and crinkle. It was, as far as I could tell, a perfect facsimile, although I looked much thicker and longer than I had imagined—far bigger, I was pleased to see, than old Charlie Chan (Joshua).
But there was one anomaly in sacrifice of verisimilitude—the color. Jessica had made all the genitalia bright fluorescent yellow, and what’s more, they glowed in the dark. Spotlights overhead were programmed to alternate what was illuminated and what was not, a face, an arm, a leg, sometimes making an erection or labia dramatically luminescent.
Among the group, there was a lot of twittering and giggling, but I was, relatively speaking, assuaged. When Jessica had described her plans for the installation and enlisted my help, I had feared it’d be a stunt, a one-off for which she would be ridiculed and humiliated, yet there was (almost) a tenable integrity to the mannequins, and the political implications were provocative, the stretched silkscreened rubber of the faces making the Asian icons seem as if they were yowling in horror and agony, eyes monstrously slanted.
Characteristic of all of Jessica’s work, there were hidden elements, pieces within pieces. She had carved a cavity in each head, prying their mouths open, and inside each maw was a menagerie. In Bruce Lee’s mouth were miniatures of dogs—dozens of them in every variety, running, leaping, lying, snarling, shitting. In Charlie Chan’s mouth were rats. In Suzie Wong’s mouth were snakes. And the miniatures were fluorescent yellow, glow-in-the-dark as well, creating a spooky, contrapuntal incandescence whenever the spotlights changed, as if the skulls were lit from within, while the genitals appeared disembodied, floating apart. Moreover, since the mannequins were mounted on platforms, you had to get on your tiptoes and lean close to peek into the mouths, and the figures were purposely positioned so you couldn’t avoid brushing or bumping up against the genitalia, contributing to the exhibition’s gestalt of discomfiture—indeed, of disorientation.
After the preview, we migrated to the house on Walker Street for the usual potluck. The group included Jimmy, Trudy, Grace, Leon, Jay, Cindy, Phil, and Annie—the smallest turnout we’d ever had. We congregated in the kitchen, unwrapping and heating up various dishes: yakisoba, salt-and-pepper squid, cucumber sunomono, bean sprouts, chicken karaage, gyoza.
“I have to admit,” I told Jessica, “I had my doubts, but the exhibit works. You pulled it off. It’s pretty fabulous.”
“Hear, hear,” Joshua said.
“You really think so?” Jessica said, flush with relief. “I knew I was taking a risk, doing something so different, with huge potential for disaster, but I kept following my instincts.”
“The stretched faces, the mouths, the lighting—it’s all really ingenious,” I said.
“I didn’t have time to finish the installation part. I was going to have these Judd-like boxes and some table sculptures.”
“You didn’t need them,” Joshua said. “The mannequins have enough depth on their own.”
I went outside to the deck to barbecue kalbi on our grill, and Joshua soon joined me there, bringing a bottle of Tsingtao out for me. “So what’d you really think?” he asked.
This was the lesson I’d learned about being friends with artists: at first, you were honest in your critiques, just like you had been in grad school. But when you were honest, you’d find it would cause days, weeks of tension and bruised feelings, a rift that would sometimes never fully mend. You learned what artists really wanted from their friends. It wasn’t honesty, it wasn’t constructive criticism, it wasn’t the truth. They’d get the truth soon enough, from dealers, editors, directors, agents, grant-makers, foundations, critics, and the public. What artists really wanted from their friends was simply support, and encouragement, and, if it wasn’t too much of an imposition, unconditional adoration. About works in progress, they wanted you to tell them: It’s perfect. You don’t need to change a thing. It’s good to go. About works that had already been released to the world, fait accompli, they wanted you to tell them: It’s brilliant. You’re brilliant. I love it. I love you. What was the point of saying anything else? Yet, this did not prevent us from disparaging our friends’ work behind their backs.
“It’s not as silly as I thought it’d be,” I said to Joshua, “but it’s still kind of silly. What about you? What’d you think?”
“Ditto.”
“I wish she’d kept going with her latest paintings. Have you seen the series in the basement?”
“No.”
“They’re my favorite of anything she’s ever produced,” I said. “I guess it doesn’t matter. No one’s ever going to see this show, anyway.” Gallery 57 was small-fry, almost a nonentity, in Boston’s art world.
“It’s pretty wild, though,” Joshua said, “seeing your breakfast burrito up there, isn’t it?”
I rearranged the kalbi on the grill. “When Jessica was making the mold of you, what was she wearing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” he said. “I don’t know. Jeans, a T-shirt. Why?”
“Did she do anything to you?”
“Like what?”
“You didn’t have trouble staying stiff?”
“My piccolo never needs prodding. Yours did?”
“She never, like, handled you? Even when she was checking out your shaving job?”
“She used chopsticks to turn over my dick, which I have to say was a little antiseptic, not to mention ironic and insulting and not very erotic,” he said. “She didn’t use the chopsticks on you? What the fuck happened between you guys?”
“Nothing happened,” I said, and flipped the kalbi. For the moment, no one knew that the penises on the mannequins were casts of Joshua and me, everyone believing they were scrupulously carved sculptures based on dildos.
In the dusk, I looked at the crocuses and daffodils that had bloomed. Glancing up at the pink flowers of the dogwood, I saw the lights on the second floor, in the master bedroom, turning on
. Joshua noticed them, too.
“You know, you could invite her down,” I told him. “She doesn’t have to stay in her room all the time. We have a lot of food—more than enough.”
“She doesn’t want to,” he said. “I’ve asked her before, but she’s shy.”
“When there aren’t so many people around, then. She must get bored up there all by herself.”
The other week, after coming home from work, I had slipped into Noklek’s room. On the second-floor landing, I had thought I smelled something burning. I knocked on her door, waited, then entered the master bedroom. She had a hot plate on the bureau. I put my hand over the coil element, and it was still warm. She must have just cooked something. Beside the bureau was a small refrigerator, and in the bathtub there was a dish rack, a freshly washed pot and bowl drying in it. A braided nylon rope stretched across the bathroom, laundry clipped to it. She had few possessions overall—the Buddhas, the framed photographs. On the neatly made bed was the pig piñata that used to hang in Joshua’s attic, which he had named Claudette, in homage to Claude, the pig piñata that Pynchon had owned when he lived in Manhattan Beach, where he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow. Otherwise, there was not much personal in the bedroom, just a stack of celebrity gossip magazines.
“I’ve been thinking—” Joshua said. He picked up a slab of kalbi from the grill with my tongs and bit into it. “Ow, that’s hot—of marrying Noklek.”
“What?”
“So she can get a green card. Jimmy told me she’s worried about getting booted out of the country. Her visa’s expired. I’ve been talking to Grace about it,” he said—Grace, the immigration attorney.
“Joshua,” I said, “that is utterly fucking nuts. Did she offer you money? Or something else.”
“I offered.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Nothing,” Joshua said. “My intentions are entirely honorable. I haven’t laid a finger on her. I just feel sorry for the kid. I mean, yeah, there are things to be concerned about, like being financially responsible for her for ten years, like her maybe trying to take me for a ride down the road with a divorce and busting my balls over a settlement. But I’d have her sign a prenup.”
“You realize what the penalty is if you get caught?”
“Up to five years in prison and two hundred fifty thou.”
I had not actually known the penalty. It was more severe than I had assumed. “The INS is always trying to crack down on these sorts of scams,” I said. “You can’t fuck around with shit like this.”
“That’s why we wouldn’t do it right away. We’d wait at least six months. We’d be careful. Even though she’s illegal now, if everything went through, she’d be entitled to residency.”
“She says she wants to do this?”
“We’ve talked about it. She hasn’t said yes for sure yet, and neither have I. I’m gathering facts. Grace told us we need to build evidence of a relationship history—you know, ticket stubs to events and vacation photos and birthday cards, shit like that. I’m thinking we could go to the Virgin Islands together—to St. John this time.”
“What are you looking to get out of this? You’d be risking a hell of a lot just to get laid regularly.”
“I like having her around,” Joshua said. He pinched the kalbi by the ribs and, with his teeth, tore meat off and gnawed on it. “You know a couple of weeks ago she cleaned the entire house top to bottom? She even mowed the lawn.”
“That was for Songkran,” I told him.
“Songkran?”
“New Year’s in Thailand. It’s a ritual, to clean your house. You don’t know anything about her, do you? She’s not as tough as you think. You know her entire family is dead?”
“Jimmy told me.”
“Tell me the circumstances,” I said, as if I were testing him.
“Ferry accident,” he said. “Her parents and little sister were on holiday, and Noklek got left behind with a neighbor because she was sick. The ferryboat captain tried to cut across the path of a chemical tanker, and the ferry got cleaved in half. Eighty-seven people died.”
I thought of the black-and-white head shots, the paper burning and curling in layers of ash.
“She’s an orphan, just like me,” Joshua said. “She’s all alone in the world. You’ll laugh at this, but maybe, I mean, who knows, maybe we’ll even fall in love and it’ll become a real marriage.”
“Don’t do this,” I said. “Don’t fuck with her. She’s a teenager. She’s practically a child. You know you don’t want a real marriage. You want a maid, a concubine. That’s the only reason you’re considering this.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Joshua said. “You know I consider us a family—you, me, Jessica. I would love it if we could live here together forever. Love it. But I know someday you guys will meet someone, maybe even get together with each other finally, and you’ll want to move out and have a place of your own. You’ll be tired of having old Joshua around all the time. Then where will I be? I mean, I know I’m no prize. I know I’m a pain in the ass. I’m demanding and strident, I’m lazy and messy and difficult. Who would have me? No woman in her right mind, that’s for sure. I don’t want to get married, not for real. I don’t want to have kids. All I want to do is write.”
“You might change your mind someday,” I said. “You might fall in love and want a family. There’s always the possibility of that happening.”
“No.”
“I saw you dancing with that little girl at Leon and Cindy’s wedding. You were enrapt.”
“I never told you. I had a vasectomy.”
“You did?”
“Years ago,” Joshua said.
“There’s always adoption,” I said, and saw him flinch in distaste. “Or you might meet a woman with kids.”
“I’m not going to change,” Joshua said. “People don’t change. If there’s one thing I’ve learned by now, it’s that. I’ll never fall in love, because I could never trust that I wouldn’t be abandoned. The only problem, the only noisome little contradictory wrinkle, is I don’t want to be alone. The truth is, the idea of dying alone terrifies me. Remember those journal excerpts by your hero, Cheever, about ending up cold, alone, dishonored, and forgotten? An old man approaching death without a companion? As much as I try to thwart it, I know that’s my fate. That’s why I’d never arrange for a memorial service. I’d be afraid no one would show up.”
“You won’t die alone, Joshua. I’ll always be around. So will Jessica.”
“You say that now, but you can’t guarantee it. You guys have been the only true friends I’ve ever had, but sometimes I’ve felt I had to buy your friendship.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If I didn’t have this house, would you—or anyone else here, what’s left of the 3AC—be hanging out with me at all?”
“That’s an absurd thing to ask.”
“Is it? I don’t know,” Joshua said. He finished the rest of the kalbi and chucked the bones over the crocuses into the shrubs. “Sometimes I’m just barely hanging on, you know. Just barely hanging on. And I’m beginning to feel there’s only so much more I can do to keep us together.”
The second floor of the City Hall Annex housed several municipal offices that encircled Gallery 57, including the Animal Commission, which issued dog licenses. On Monday, one of the clerks who worked at the commission, Maryanne Costa, called Councilman Vivaldo Barboza, a fellow Portuguese American parishioner at St. Anthony’s Church, and complained about the sculptures to him. The mannequins were still sequestered behind the temporary partitions and draped by sheets, but Mrs. Costa, curious about the exhibition, had availed herself of a sneak peek, and had been appalled.
Vivaldo Barboza had been on the City Council for four years. Campaigning on an unimaginative platform of quality-of-life (noise abatement) and traffic (on-street parking) issues, he had been, to everyone’s surprise, elected to two terms, and was now the chair of the Public Safety Committee. He went to examin
e the sculptures in Gallery 57 himself and, equally horrified and disgusted, took matters into his own hands.
He bore down on the erections with his full weight and broke them off the Bruce Lee and Charlie Chan mannequins. He tried to pry the vulva off Suzie Wong as well, but couldn’t gain purchase on it enough to tear it off, so he simply yanked closed the horizontal zipper, the one-yuan coin plinking away to recesses unknown, never to be found again. He hid the erections underneath his suit coat and marched around the corner to City Hall, straight into the city manager’s office.
In Cambridge, the nine members of the City Council were elected at-large through a proportional electoral process, and the members themselves appointed a mayor and vice mayor from the council, but the city manager, John Toomey, was the true chief executive of the city, with the power to enforce laws and ordinances and hire and fire employees.
Barboza dumped the erections on Toomey’s desk and demanded that the exhibition be dismantled at once. Toomey—amused rather than outraged, which infuriated Barboza—told him that it was neither the city manager’s responsibility nor purview to decide what was or wasn’t art, and Barboza would have to take his grievances elsewhere.
It was two p.m. From January until June, the City Council met on the first Monday of each month at five-thirty, and Barboza entered a last-minute emergency item to that evening’s agenda. At the meeting, he summoned the director of Gallery 57 and the members of the Cambridge Arts Council (only two of three could appear on such short notice), and asked them to account for themselves. How could they have sponsored such an offensive and obscene exhibition? How could they justify showing such rubbish in a public space? What in the world had they been thinking? Never mind what they owed their constituents; they had left the city vulnerable to a sexual harassment suit by its workers, and by God he wouldn’t blame them one bit if they filed one.
“This is not art,” he said. “This is pornography.”
The council recessed the meeting so all the members could read Jessica’s artist statement—about addressing issues of cultural appropriation, ethnicity, identity, sexuality, and stereotypes in media representations of Asian Americans—and go to Gallery 57 to view the exhibition, replete with the lights. Two councilmen held the erections in place on the mannequins, and there were some oohs and ahs when they discovered that the pieces glowed in the dark and there were hidden caches of miniature sculptures in the heads. They resumed the meeting in City Hall, and Barboza called for the Gallery 57 director and Arts Council members’ immediate resignations. They refused, so Barboza submitted two proposals: the first to hold a public hearing to investigate the Arts Council’s selection process, the second to include, on all future arts juries, a councilperson and a representative of the clergy. The first proposal was accepted. The second—only the motion about a councilperson, the stipulation about the clergy roundly dismissed—was tabled, pending review. Barboza then asked for an injunction to cancel all current and future exhibitions in Gallery 57 until the hearing was held and resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. The injunction divided the City Council, but ultimately was shot down. The show could go on, with a few caveats.