The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  Ladies love cool Jonjay, said Jonjay, looking up from some pictures in a flat file.

  That reminds me, said Wendy, swinging her Gremlin’s keys around her finger. I gotta go. Need to get back to No Manors and help Rachael and Twyla put my package together for UPS by five, and there’s still entire panels that need inking. Guys? Ready to go?

  Justine tiptoed back to her chair, fell into a catlike position with legs crossed at the knee, wagged her ballet flat at the end of her toe, and said, Well, don’t collect your money, drink my champagne, and take off, that’s rude. I mean, really, stick around. Blow off UPS. Do you at least have ideas for your show, Jonjay?

  Oh sure. Watercolours and drawings of bristlecone pines from the White Mountains. Dried skull mushrooms from Japan. Documentation of an event. Traces of a geological formation. That’s what I have so far. And a bottle of what I call Ruthvah, Jonjay said, grinning idiotically.

  Justine swooned with a contemporary art fever when he said Ruthvah was the name for a scent.

  The watercolours and drawings of the bristlecone pines were done. The dried skull mushrooms from Fear Mountain were glazed for preservation. These and the beautiful pictures from his time lost in the White Mountains were more than enough. Why clutter the space? What he had was beautiful on its own. But Jonjay was impartial to beauty, he wanted more material, he wanted clutter.

  Justine Witlaw wanted a show this year but he told her he wasn’t ready.

  In fact she had him down for a solo in September. Postpone, he said. And she said, You’ve got more than enough for two shows. Compared to Abrams. And she’s had three shows in three years. Look, we’re even, aren’t we? I paid you back.

  Yeah, thanks, said Jonjay. But it’s still my decision when I’m ready to have a show.

  Wendy shook her keys again and pointed to her wrist as if there was a timepiece there and said, UPS waits for no woman.

  But as if conversation was a cliff and she was clinging to it for dear life, Justine began to digress into a portrait of her gallery. Listening to Justine talk about herself, we saw this skittish, frail woman in a designer wardrobe who was either very dismissive or making big demands of people, and you thought better of getting too close. We knew from gossip back at the manor that in the early seventies, when she started out, Justine Witlaw’s wealthy father bought half the work in almost every show, so she would have the red dots needed to attract interest. The strategy might have taken seven or eight years but it worked eventually, for now Witlaw dealt exclusively with a blue-chip clientele, most of them based on the West Coast, collectors who—in her words—lived in three homes, owned two yachts, and piloted a floatplane to an island getaway. A few of her artists were in the permanent collections of minor American and European museums—but at her own admission there were years she sold everything she exhibited and years she sold nothing, the white walls were cursed, the concrete floor was hexed. Some months she sold nothing but made more money than sellout shows, by doing backroom deals on the secondary market, matching buyers for sellers, acting as an intermediary who was quieter than an auction. Not selling her roster of artists. She told us that she sold little Picassos her clients owned and needed urgently to sell, Renoirs and Thiebauds that surfaced after deaths, divorces, job changes, and sordid so ons. A frequent problem for shifty art collectors was the unstable value, because according to Justine unless you had exactly the right buyer, most of what you bought was impossible to resell, worthless in the short term. Justine Witlaw had an exceptional eye for hot new art, but most collectors knew her better for her intrepid nose. Matchmaking in the secondary market was an art of its own. She could see how to shape an artist’s trajectory; whether she was capable of making that happen was unclear. Her Rolodex was filled by her ability to find a buyer for a little Teraoka watercolour, or one of Nengudi’s squiddy pantyhose-filled-with-sand sculptures, sometimes in under twenty-four hours. Snap her fingers it was done, she claimed. Justine was a lot of times a safer bet for a collector living on Russian Hill than an auction house based out East. Sotheby’s rebuffed a local collector of Tanaami and Yokoo who hoped to sell for at least a third more than paid. Justine put the owner on hold, sold the prints to a collector on the other line for double. For these services her cut was fourteen percent.

  This was a city in thrall to rock memorabilia they thought was fine art, Robert Crumb, Cal Schenkel, and Keiichi Tanaami were taken very seriously. Former park-dwelling hippie turned Silicon Valley nerd turned drug kingpin turned defence lawyer. Money to burn on their nostalgia for the time they used to waste. You could sell a silkscreen of a Tadanori Yokoo for the same price as a Clyfford Still canvas out West; in California a Chris Burden went for as much as a signed Doors concert poster silkscreen; Justine sold an autographed painted cell of the Evil Queen from the Disney film Snow White faster than an exquisite piece of Marcel Duchamp paraphernalia—eventually to the same buyer, an Oscar-nominated character actor.

  That a curator from the Guggenheim had even visited a commercial gallery in San Francisco was enough to perk up heads in the culture circles, gossip rippled out as far as the comic shops in Berkeley. Justine was certain the turning point would be a major solo show with Jonjay, in the way that only his mercurial standoffishness could crack the East Coast, his work, his style was bound to attract the kind of media attention her gallery deserved, notices from critics and calls from curators, museums, other galleries in SoHo, and magazine editors. Considering it’s been a decade in the business, he would establish Justine Witlaw’s gallery as the real centre of contemporary American art, since no one represented the true avant-garde of the eighties better than Jonjay. If Jonjay would only agree to a show. He had more than enough work.

  He said, Naw, don’t have enough stuff. All I got so far is decoration for the main event. I need to create a certain mood of, I don’t know, ambivalence.

  You mean imbalance? said Justine.

  No, I mean ambivalance. I’ll come next Friday and pick up the rest, okay? Ready to burn rubber, Wendy?

  As he drove us home, Wendy asked him why he didn’t take Justine up on the solo show, and all he said was, Not until I get my money.

  What about Mark, should he give Justine some of his pictures?

  She doesn’t owe you money, so …, Jonjay said. He looked out the side window as he drove, left arm dangling out in the wind while the right hand steered her Gremlin through the usual insane traffic. No, my dealings with Justine are like a cautionary tale. See, if I was a kid living in San Francisco who made a lot of abstract paintbrush squiggles on small sheets of paper, the first thing I’d do is print a comic book. Small run. Drop it in the right shops. Get the heads talking. Send some copies to the Guggenheim so you can say you’re in their permanent collection. Then show some pictures with Justine Witlaw.

  Wendy wasn’t sure if Mark heard, his eyes were closed but maybe his mind was open. The Gremlin carried us up the steep hill of Stoneman Street to the dead end where the white van was still parked. We drove over the extension cord.

  Does she have a TV in there or something? Wendy asked.

  Yeah, said Jonjay.

  What does she watch?

  Soaps. Solid Gold.

  Wendy scowled. She got out and opened the garage door, and Jonjay parked inside the carport.

  He got out of the car and, leaving Mark passed out in the backseat, closed the door of the garage. He said he thought the door needed something to spruce it up. It was corrugated aluminum that lifted up and slid into a shelf near the ceiling, and it was painted black. What else did he want?

  Wendy said she couldn’t handle it, she had to know if Jonjay was going out with that damned surf pixie, she obviously wasn’t just some new friend from the desert highway, was she? Was he sleeping in her van with her or was he sleeping with her in the van? Because it seemed to Wendy like the latter.

  He didn’t make eye contact with her as he said, Sort of but not really. Manila is serious about me, and she saved my life, so. But I’m not
with her. I’m with nobody, he told her. I don’t date, Wendy. That’s not me. My lifestyle is unpredictable. Plus she’s just a girl.

  Oh, yes, you’re much too old for her. Wendy combed her fingers through his hair. You’re ancient, aren’t you? Like a mountain.

  Eternity is a tough gig, baby. And sexual solitude is essential to my meditation regimen, he said in all earnestness.

  Fine then, fine, have it your way. Wendy walked away into the manor ahead of him. I’m determined to live life to the fullest, she said, even if all you want to do is sneak sex with a kewpie doll and stare vacantly at a wall. Some men find me very attractive. She winced. Then she turned around and came back and asked him for help with rent. At least you can do that.

  I’ll come up with some dough, don’t worry.

  Whatever. Just go to your secret bank account.

  He looked around. No one else within earshot. (We would not learn until much later about the secret bank account with supposedly over a million dollars in it.) You and your misnomers, he said. Hey, you want this? He pulled the fifty from his pocket and snapped it open so Ulysses S. Grant’s portrait faced her. That’s the only tune I can play and that’s no lie.

  Wendy struck on an idea. Let me kiss you once or twice and I’ll let you keep the fifty.

  16

  Who were we supposed to believe, Jonjay or Wendy, or our own skin? Twyla Noon tried to woo him, too. Little did she know about the kooloomooloomavlock.

  Put some time between her moves and Wendy’s attempts at rekindling whatever it was happened between them up in Canada—so at the tail end of the summer of eighty-one, when Manila Convençion was back on the road and the leaves on the trees turned yellow and red, and hormones, instinct, and brute physical attraction take over like a suicide mission, Twyla caught Jonjay in the living room smoking through a bag of weed and watching reruns of Twilight Zone on late-night TV while Mark, in the fetal, snored on the chesterfield surrounded by empty cans of Old Milwaukee. Kittenish, quietly on her hands and knees, she pawed her way up to where Jonjay was lying on the other sofa, meowed, and threw her hair back.

  He startled. Didn’t see you there. What are you doing, Twyla?

  She tiptoed her fingers up his chest and whispered in his ear, Lord, I think I want you.

  Say what?

  Without meaning to she called him lord. She meant it as an exclamation but it came out sounding more like how she really felt at the moment, like a servant crawling at the feet of her desire, a vassal at his beck and call. Behind his back, we competed to describe Jonjay. Viking. Druid. Centurion. Prince. Olympian. Mephistopheles. Bacchus with biceps. Romanesque. Hypnotizer. Pulchritudinist. He didn’t just pay attention; we felt his eyes locked so hard it felt as though while you spoke he was listening not to your words but to your soul. Most of all he was a heartbreaker.

  That boy’s on a higher plane of existence, Biz would say. You’re all just fuckin’ floccinaucinihilipilification (and in a word dismiss our dreams). This was the night Twyla found out the literal truth of Biz’s comment.

  Lord, I think I want you. Already unbuttoning the fly of his Levi’s. Come on, I brought a condom. Now’s the time, she whispered. Let’s do it. Right here.

  Dang, timeout, Twyla. Wow, hey, this is cool but what about Mark?

  Twyla was sleeping with Mark at this time. She looked at her on-again-off-again and said, He’s dead to the world.

  Look, wow, I’m sure we’d be a phenomenon in the sack and all, but I’m on the natch. No more fucking until I capture the kooloomooloomavlock.

  You can’t be serious, said Twyla. It’s been months.

  This was the name for a mental animal more desirable than the elusive simultaneous orgasm. Instead of sex, Jonjay would sit lotus on Hick’s exercise mat, balance lit candles in the palms of his hands, and go into an hour-long hypnogogic trance he called Hunting the kooloomooloomavlock. He’d sit there in his crawlspace or in Hick’s old bedroom go into a deep state of being. Staring into space, flying through the blue skies of pure thought into the smog of opinion over the valley of ignorance, and through the caves of suspicion. Glasseyed in the manner of a vampire in the dormancy of his daily coffin. His meditation was catatonic, his eyes stopped blinking and white droolcicles hung from his chin. The Kooloomooloomavlock was a precosmic wraith who stole from mankind the key that unlocks the gates of all-knowing. To hunt the Kooloomooloomavlock was as close as a mortal could get to the gardens of enlightenment. It was how Jonjay said he spent all his pineal energy.

  He was a trained climber in a trance and on foot, and was the leader of two ascents on the Paro Chu, plus the solo he did the year Hick died of the Osorezan, the Kanchenjunga a decade before, and he was a teammate on many other expeditions, some of which he alone survived. As for astral projections, his experiences were more vast. He knew many of the world’s mountains through deep meditation. The deeper he went into himself, the higher he could climb in astral projection. One day he turned the insides of No Manors into a practice mountain, to keep his skills fresh, and attempted an ascent from the basement to the attic without touching floors or furniture. Only the walls and ceiling. He carried chalk powder on him, to dust his hands with periodically, and a few bagels in case he got hungry as he crimped the edges of Victorian finishings, underclinging from Edwardian doors. He rested in the pockets of high art deco cartouches, and pinched, palmed, and pulled himself steadily up the maze of five storeys, not just the main floor, to the flat-top peak. The tendons in his forearms and neck stretched at the skin as he frogged from high corner to baseboard and back up, making good time. He ate the bagels in a cubbyhole on the third floor’s front hallway and arrived at the attic’s summit by dark. No one took pictures, so he repeated the climb a week later for the sake of documentation.

  In the attic at the top of No Manors there’s a little window that opens onto the tiny flat roof, it’s about the size of a tabletop. There you can see an almost three-sixty view of the Bay, Jonjay said of his view at the peak. All the traffic. Gosh. All the freeways. Lanes and lanes of cars speeding back and forth, in and out of the city, hundreds every minute. Exits. On ramps. And you should see how houses blanket the hills, houses and apartments and buildings seriously cover everything. From up there, Golden Gate looks like a park with a swing set. All these cars. It’s a beautiful view, it helps you remember that it doesn’t matter what direction you go, someone is always going the other way.

  Jonjay was slightly dangerous, in that he had no impulse control when it came to acting on an idea, no matter what whim. He woke us up this one time, it was three in the morning, the middle of summer and a Thursday, probably this was in eighty-two or eighty-three. He still hadn’t had a show at Justine Witlaw’s and at this point she had only paid him back half what she owed him (cash he had to remove himself from her purse while she drank sangria). C’mon, Jonjay said, help me set this up.

  Set this up. We didn’t know what this was when we hopped in Wendy’s lime-green Gremlin—she was fast asleep for this one. Jonjay had the trunk weighed down with at least a dozen eighty-pound sacks of Checkers icing sugar and he wouldn’t tell us what for. He took us through town to the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge was amazing to see at that hour, when the sun was moments away from the horizon and the bridge’s long red body was totally silent like a sleeping dragon stretched out on a bed of lowlying fog, a fog full of glittering multicoloured metallic particles, and not a single car before or after us rode its great outstretched back. It was just us and the road eventually joining the horizon.

  Jonjay stopped the Gremlin—skrrch!—in the middle of the bridge. Good, perfect, we’re alone. Okay, someone stay behind the wheel and leave the car idling, watch for traffic, especially the fuckin’ cops. He popped the trunk and got out.

  What are you doing? Patrick said. Oh hell no, he’s not going to jump, is he?

  He’d live anyway, said Rachael. She scooted from shotgun to the driver’s seat and eyed Jonjay through the rearview as he took a sack o
f Checkers from the trunk and used a knife to rip the sack open and dumped the white powder on the bridge. We watched in silence as he tore open all the sacks and caked both lanes with a pile of icing sugar. Then as soon as that was done he jumped back in the Gremlin with the empty bags, squealing, Go, go, go! and so Rachael pumped the gas and away we went. Twyla slapped his shoulder and said, What the fuck was that about? You’re out of your gourd.

  Sugar dump, Mark Bread repeated in an escalating falsetto. Sugar dump, sugar dump sugar dump.

  Did you forget to take a picture of this again? For your documentation? Patrick asked in a contemptuous tone, rubbing the bags under his eyes. He said, I can’t tell what’s art for you and what’s a joke. Is how tired I am a part of your art?

  Relax your false tribulations, Jonjay said. He giggled. He stuck his arm out the window to feel the breeze as Rachael got us off the bridge, the Pacific Ocean rippling under us, the dark skies above sparkling, and maybe the icing sugar was like a clod of moon dust fallen to Earth. A dream that we didn’t wake up from. As soon as we got home Jonjay turned on the local morning news and there was a helicopter hovering over the sugar on the bridge.

  Multiple VCRs got set to record. We tuned in to different stations on different TVs as news coverage of the icing sugar expanded to other networks and Jonjay wanted to capture it all on tape. Soon every station in America was broadcasting footage of the icing sugar. It was on one channel or another all day long. CNN did a segment. But nobody knew what the sugar was, it was this mystery white powder on the Golden Gate Bridge backing up traffic for miles in both directions. By noon the bridge was on complete military lockdown. Nobody was allowed on or off without clearance. The ocean was being patrolled by the navy in black Zodiacs and wearing frog suits. And the whole nation’s attention was turned to the bridge as the situation made us a nervous wreck. The Pentagon’s scientists—the Pentagon, Jonjay—microsampled the powder, they tested it for everything from anthrax to bananadine. Jonjay laughed for hours watching anchormen and anchorwomen make paranoid assumptions about the mystery powder thought to be the work of Russian agents, sweating over the mysterious white powder being analyzed as we speak … this act of terrorism had the Golden Gate out of commission for eight hours while hazardous-materials specialists ran parallel rounds of tests in CIA labs—CIA labs, Jonjay!—to identify anything that might lead to a culprit. Culprit, Jonjay! We watched as the story made headlines all over the world when the labs came back with Checkers brand icing sugar. The news repeated the confirmation that evening, Checkers brand icing sugar, the bridge was once again open, and it was on to current events without a punchline. Jonjay considered the piece a success—he had seven VHS cassettes loaded with six hours of footage each, including hours’ worth of the aerial shots of the icing sugar pile from a helicopter and an hour-long panel discussion with SFPD toxicologists who labelled this a level one, and a perceptive criminal psychologist who guessed either a shipping truck mishap or an adolescent prank.