After all the tests were done and I was dressed again, they led me to a small conference room with the other guinea pigs and I saw Shelly himself, now a far cry from the pale slug he was in college, a man with a tan and longer hair, with the flossy rich-guy cut they all have and that aura of authority they must bolt on when they give out the med school diplomas. A dozen or so people in the room, all arty types, about evenly divided between the sexes, mostly younger than me. It looked like Sunday brunch at any hip place in Williamsburg.
Dr. Z took us through a PowerPoint show about salvinorin A, the drug we were about to pollute our bodies with. On the screen a picture of some dusty Indians sitting around in a circle, Mazotecs from the deserts of Oaxaca, who used a plant called Salvia divinorum, the diviner’s sage; their shamans used it to break loose from time and see the future and the past. Silly them, because according to Shelly it was all happening in the damp meat of their brains, like everything else we perceived. Over the last few decades, researchers had extracted the active principle of the Indian herb-salvinorin-and discovered that it was not an alkaloid like most of the psychoactive drugs, but a much smaller molecule, a diterpene, and unique in that respect. It was a kappa opioid agonist, I recall that, something to do with the control of perception. The drug had a variety of different effects, we learned, and these varied considerably between users. Of particular interest, though, was its ability to create the illusion that you were reliving a portion of your earlier life. Dr. Z said he thought that since the retention of childlike wonder and freshness of perception was widely considered to be a central element in the creative process, maybe salvinorin might enhance it, which was why he’d selected his subjects from artists and musicians. Then there was some technical stuff about how if they got psychological effects they would use tracers and so forth to try to pinpoint the areas of the brain that did creative stuff, and then he closed with assurances that while the drug was extremely potent, it appeared to be quite safe and nonaddictive.
Then the usual questions from the floor, which Shelly handled, I thought, with a smoothness that had not been apparent in him as an undergrad, and the meeting broke up. I went up to him afterward and we shook and did the whole small world thing, and he invited me for a private chat in his office. Which was very nice, golf clubs in the corner, all kinds of awards, blond wood desk and chairs, flat-screen monitor, framed kids’ drawings on the walls and a small amateur oil of flowers in a vase, maybe by the wife, a happy family man it seems, good for Shelly. No talk about old times; he boasted and I listened. His great career, his beautiful family, his house in Short Hills. He said he saw my stuff in the magazines all the time, he thought it was great. He thought I was a success, just like him.
He said he particularly wanted me in this study because it was really going to penetrate to the roots of creativity and even lead to ways of augmenting it. I thought that if he wanted to do that he better bring his lunch, but I didn’t say anything; why rain on the guy’s parade? I was happy for him, the poor schmuck, and it was a hundred bucks a session to me.
After that he turned me over to Ms. Blue Scrubs and I had my first dose of salvinorin. They’ve discovered that the best way to ingest it is via the oral mucosa. They can heat the drug and shoot you the fumes, or they can give you a surgical sponge soaked with a solution of the drug and you have to keep that in your mouth for ten minutes. The first way brings on an intense reaction in a few seconds but it fades in half an hour. The sponge works best; the reaction lasts for a full hour, more or less, and then drops off over the next hour. It’s a way to provide a controlled dose but still imitate chewing the leaves, which is what the Indians down in Mexico do.
She took me to a little room, like an examination room, with a low-slung recliner and left me with an observer in a white coat, nameplate HARRIS, young woman, all business, notebook, tape recorder, and a comfortable chair to sit in, like psychotherapy. I made a joke to that effect, minimal response. Message: this is serious research. She opened a plastic tub marked with a numbered label and extracted a damp surgical sponge with plastic tongs. She stuck it in my mouth and told me to chew on it for ten minutes starting now-clicked her watch-try not to swallow, and then she dimmed the lights.
I chewed on the cloth and kept the liquid it yielded in a cheek pocket, like a country-boy pitcher on the mound. Faintly herbal, a little like turkey stuffing, not unpleasant. After ten minutes I was allowed to expel the wad. Then nothing for a while. I thought about the Vanity Fair project, about money, the usual sad, self-pitying thoughts about how essentially and irreparably screwed up my life was, floating mind-crap. After a while I felt a certain relaxation, like I was looking at Chaz thinking this shit and finding it amusing; I guess I actually laughed a little then. Next a feeling of vague physical discomfort, like my muscles were starting to cramp, that claustro coach-class airliner feeling, and I got up and went for the door.
Harris said I couldn’t leave, so I sat down, got up, sat down, paced back and forth, energy flowing through my body, electric, vibrational and crunching over gravel and dead leaves, the air chill and damp and I’m just drifting, not really sad, but somehow feeling a déjà vu as we’re walking toward the grave site at the head of a column of mourners, quite a few of them, more than I had expected really, my sister in her nun’s head-scarf, they’d dumped the black clothes by then, holding on to my arm. I stopped and stumbled a little from the force of the disorientation and she asked me what was wrong. I told her and said I’d never had a déjà vu that strong, and she said no wonder, it’s not every day you bury your father, and we walked along and the rest of the funeral played out.
Charlie and I got a little drunk later and she told me she was thinking about leaving the religious life. She liked helping the starving millions in the world’s nasty places, but the good they could do seemed so paltry compared to the extent of the evil. Yes, it was good to give twenty girls a year a convent education and keep them from being raped by older guys, but there were hundreds and hundreds they couldn’t help, the mothers would bring them to the school in Kitgum, crowds of women and girls begging for admission, knowing it was hopeless, but what else could they do? And somehow now that our father was gone a lot of the reason for it (as she now admitted) was gone too, and she felt she wanted to move into the world, not to leave religion exactly, but to be of some greater service. We talked about that for a while, what different orders of sisters did, and she asked me how my painting was going and did I think I would start painting for myself now and not just to piss the old man off, and I laughed at that.
We stayed up late talking, just like we’d done in the old days when we were kids, and she kissed me good night and then I went up to my old room. It hadn’t changed at all, the Indian blanket on the bed, my old hockey stick on the wall next to the painting of my mother, and that damp wicker smell from the old furniture. I got out of my clothes and was going to go to bed but remembered I hadn’t closed the French doors leading to the terrace and if the wind shifted in the night the rain would ruin the carpets, so I put my old blue plaid robe on and tried to open the door. The door wouldn’t open, and I rattled the knob and pounded and kicked at it, and there was a hand on my shoulder, which scared the shit out of me because I was alone in the room, and I turned around and this woman was there in a white coat with HARRIS on the tag and I was back in the drug study.
Now, you absolutely have to understand that this was not a reverie or a dream, nothing like that at all. I was there. I was back in time twenty-two years, inhabiting my younger body, talking to my sister in the living room of my father’s house, full color, stereo sound, the works. I said, holy shit! And my knees gave way and I had to lie down on the couch, and Harris was all over me about what had happened. It was hard to reply at first. It wasn’t that I felt drugged, or dull, or extra sharp like on coke or speed, but more detached, a very subtle variation in consciousness, and there was a beating in my head, a pulse like a kitten licking my brain four or five times a second, thnick th
nick thnick, in just that delicate way.
At the same time I felt both extremely focused and detached, as if experiencing my life for the first time without the blurring of worry and regret. Not in the least like hash and the furthest thing from acid. She asked me a bunch of questions she read off a printed sheet, and I answered them as best I could, yes, I attended my father’s funeral; no, I can’t guarantee that what I experienced was a memory and not a fantasy. It seemed perfectly real, just like talking right then to the silly woman seemed real, although if you informed me that I was still in my room on the night of the funeral and that this interview was a fantasy I would have said sure, right.
She kept me for another hour. The kitten licking faded after a while and I returned more or less to normal, although at that point I was no longer sure what normal was. On the way out I lifted from the reception room table a tattered old People magazine with a story about Madonna in it. Back at the loft, I set up a small gessoed wood panel and dug through the chests until I found an old theatrical costume that would do, plum colored, with gilt threads and a straight, high bodice-some Juliet must have worn it in the Edwardian age, stank of mothballs, but in good shape. I hung it on my manikin, propped her in an armchair, arranged the lighting, pinned Madonna’s face up on the wall nearby, and got to work.
I drew it out in charcoal, a figure from the waist up with her arms demurely folded, pale hair in ringlets falling to the neck, showing against a cloudy background and a little city with walls and towers back there. Underpainting in warm gray-ochre, mixed a little Japan dryer in because I’m a commercial artist, can’t wait for the paint to dry, and who cares if it cracks and blackens in fifty years? So when the imprimatura was touch-dry, I built up the masses, laid on glazes, and then the fall of the drapery, and it went terrific, I painted for hours, it got dark outside, I got hungry, I ignored the phone ringing. Was it different? I guess. I can often get lost in the act of painting and forget for a while that what I’m doing is essentially commercial crap, but this session was even more so, I was totally into it, with my body, just letting the paint flow out onto the fresh white surface, magic.
My stomach was growling by then and I wanted to give the underpaint a chance to dry, so I took a break and walked over to Chinatown for some noodles and took the People with me to read and study Madonna some more. Her face in the cheap printing showed the mere mask of the celebrity, and the job was to find the interior behind it, and of course you can’t do that from a photo, that’s the point, the handlers want to control the star’s image, revelation not wanted, so I knew I’d have to imagine it. And naturally I thought about Suzanne, a singer at a vastly lower level of celebrity but a face I knew well, and I worked with that. The People photo was a typical lowering Madonna shot, the overbit mouth pouting and a little downturned, the eyelids at half mast in a way meant to be read as sexual according to the conventions of beauty shots.
When I got back to my place I opened her mouth into a little gape of astonishment and put into her eyes the deep loneliness and insecurity of the famous performer. And the not-so-famous, as I knew from experience.
And the bambino. They hadn’t asked for one but I thought it added the right touch. So I pulled out an old baby picture of Milo and painted it in freehand. Milo had a kind of sly expression, you know the kind, the secret and unknowable joy of the pre-articulate child.
I glazed the underpainting all night, and when I looked at it by daylight it was certainly a credible Leonardo, no sharp outlines, everything smoky-sfumato, they called it-and the background is pretty good. I threw in some of those flat-looking quattrocento trees, which I always thought were an artistic convention until I went to Italy and saw they had taken them from life-I never learned what kind of trees they were, I always call them quattrocento trees. Amazing really; I would have futzed around with something like this for weeks, and so if Shelly thought the drug enhances creativity, I have to say yeah, it does.
And it got better. I did five paintings in five days, by far the most productive period of my life, I mean without coke and speed. And it was nothing like the frenzy I used to have when I was drugged out, it was just like…shit, I can’t say what it’s like. Being supernormal, maybe, not getting distracted, total focus, total pleasure in the work. When I was four or around there I could sit forever in my father’s studio while he worked, with big sheets of newsprint on the floor, drawing with my crayons or painting with watercolors. Time stopped, or flowed at a different pace, and there was nothing but the moment before I made a mark; and the making the mark; and looking at the mark afterward. And again. That week was just like that; for some reason all the shit that usually runs through my brain-worries about money, about the wives and kids, about what I’m doing-all seemed to take a little vacation, leaving a stripped-down Chaz who just painted. Wonderful!
A couple of days later I went back to the med school for another session. They took a blood sample, and I got a quick physical; I told them I felt fine, great in fact, even if I did lose almost ten pounds, and I had to fill out a form about how I fared the past week. Interesting the stuff they were checking on-paranoid ideation, sleepwalking, violence, convulsions, catatonia, hallucinations, uncontrollable laughter, excessive urination, no urination at all, reverse ejaculation, eating unfamiliar foods, priapism, impotence, paralysis, dyskinesia, and there’s a section for changes in creative process, where you can rate your creative functioning on scales of one to ten, and I gave myself all tens. Unless that was a hallucination. How could you tell?
Then the same little room with Harris, she said, we’re going to try a slightly lower dose, and she hooked me up to various meters, including a brain-wave device. Chewed my wad. Same as before, one second I’m in the little room, the next I smell the cologne my mother always used back when she was alive, lily of the valley, and I’m in her lap on our deck looking over the Sound, a gray day, it must be early autumn, and she has me wrapped in a brown velvet throw; Charlie is away somewhere and Mother’s lovely and I am perfectly happy.
She’s telling me a story, always the same story, about the brave little boy whose mother is kidnapped by an ogre and taken to his castle, but the brave little boy fights through many dangers and drives the ogre out of the castle, and the brave little boy and his mother live happily ever after in the ogre’s castle.
Okay, the same as before, I’m there, it’s real, and now something happened that was even more weird. I’m sitting in her lap, and then the scene darkens and the smell of the water and of her perfume fade, and they’re replaced by heavier smells, meat cooking and scorched feathers, and a sweet/sour smell like sewage and lavender fighting it out, and I’m still on a woman’s lap, but it’s not my mother, and I’m not me.
But I also know she’s my mother, and I’m also me in a strange way, as if the two little boys are the same boy, both the same age, one on a deck overlooking Long Island Sound and the other in this room. A familiar room, familiar comforting sounds and smells. My mother is wearing a black velvet dress that smells of lavender, and there are other women in the room moving about and my mother is talking to them, discussing domestic affairs, how to cook a chicken, the need for more beans. I am wearing a dress too, of some stiff fabric, bloodred, with a lace collar. The room is small, with a low beamed ceiling, and dim-the light comes through a narrow casement window made of round lenslike panes.
My mother puts me off her lap and stands, and another woman grabs me by the hand and leads me out of the room into a courtyard flooded with strong light; overhead is the hot sky of some southern region. This too is all familiar, a fountain lined with blue tiles playing in the center of the courtyard, and I am fascinated by this blue and how the water changes the color of it. I splash my hand in the water and the sensation is real, actual; I look at the blue of the tiles and the blue of the sky and I think that this has some importance but I don’t know what it is. From outside I hear the noises of the street, vendors’ cries and the snort of horses and creak of cart wheels. A dark-skinn
ed woman comes in through the gate with baskets of flowers, red carnations. I stare at the flowers and I conceive a desire for them, I want to hold the perfect red of them.
But someone shouts, and the flower woman darts away and does not latch the gate, and I slip out into the street, although I have been warned not to, warned the Jews will steal me. I follow the flower lady through narrow streets; she knocks at doors, enters or is shouted away. While I wait I play with a stick; I poke a dead cat into the sewer that runs down the center of the street. I am careful with my shoes, I am not to get them wet with the filth.
The flower seller leaves the narrow lanes of the neighborhood and enters a broader street. She walks faster and I have to trot to keep up with her. She no longer knocks at doors. Now we are in a plaza full of carts and animals, and many people; most of them are shouting out the names of foods and other things. The flower seller has disappeared.
Some men are looking at me, talking, but I don’t understand what they are saying. They are dark men, wearing unfamiliar clothing. One reaches out to grab me, but I am suddenly afraid, and I dart away. I am lost, I run through the crowd crying. Maybe the Jews are following me, they will steal me and drink my blood, as Pilar the nurse has often assured me that they love to do.
I run blindly, tripping and bumping into people, I knock over a hen coop, and then I am swept up off my feet and held, a man in black, a broad hat and a cassock, a priest. I beg him not to let the Jews get me, and he laughs and says there are no Jews anymore, little man, and who are you, and why are you crying, and I say my name, Gito de Silva, and my father is Juan Rodríguez de Silva, of the street of Padre Luis Maria Llop, and he says he will take me home, and I am glad to be saved but also terrified that I will be beaten and so I struggle in his arms. The priest says, hey, take it easy, buddy! And I find myself struggling with a UPS man in a brown uniform.
The Forgery of Venus Page 6