by Lewis Shiner
“That’s shaped exactly like the inside of a bass speaker cabinet,” Alex said quietly as they stood in front of it.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Madelyn asked. She saw that Judd himself—barrel-chested, light-brown hair pushed back from his high forehead, full beard failing to hide his easy smile—was out of earshot. The last thing she needed was for him to overhear her half-baked thoughts about his work.
“I don’t know yet. It’s certainly nicely made.”
“He doesn’t build them himself. He has them professionally fabricated.”
Alex raised an eyebrow.
“People were scandalized when he first did it,” she said. “Nowadays it’s pretty common. I don’t know. I have mixed feelings. The point, as I understand it, is to make something that doesn’t mean anything, that isn’t trying to tell a story, that is just itself, occupying space and creating space.”
Alex nodded and she watched him drink it in, saw him look at it differently, and she had to admit it gave her a thrill.
“Interesting,” he said. “I can see that now.”
“Is this in the same category as Bernini’s David? That I can’t answer.”
She suddenly noticed a woman staring at them. When Madelyn stared back, the woman didn’t look away. She was severely thin and oddly dressed: horizontally striped knee socks in red and green, a brown tweed skirt, a long-sleeved T-shirt with thin, dark blue horizontal stripes on white, a black bandana, and a red plaid tam o’shanter. Dark circles under her eyes, combined with too much rouge and lipstick, made her clownlike. Her long, reddish brown hair fell to the middle of her spine and her cigarette was screwed into an antique red Bakelite holder.
“Hello,” Madelyn said, in an attempt to defuse the intensity of her look.
“Hi,” she said. “I was eavesdropping. You’ve read ‘Specific Objects’?”
That was the title of Judd’s 1966 manifesto. “I tried,” Madelyn said. “I found it pretty tough going. As best I could tell, he wrote off the entire history of western art, which I’m pretty attached to.”
The woman shook her head impatiently. “You missed the point. All he’s saying is, after Van Gogh has painted Wheatfield with Crows or whatever, it’s brilliant, it’s wonderful, and now it’s been done. We can’t keep painting Wheatfield with Crows over and over. Let Henry Moore keep on making Henry Moore sculptures, but don’t ask somebody of our generation to make Henry Moore sculptures. That’s all.”
Madelyn, who had been raised with Southern manners, had difficulty not finding this woman rude. Alex, on the other hand, was intrigued. He offered his hand and said, “Alex Montoya.”
She parked the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, squinted against the smoke, and gave his hand a single, abrupt shake. “Hi.”
Alex turned on his most charming smile. “Your turn.”
She smiled back at Alex. It was quite dazzling, though Madelyn suspected sarcasm. “I was never one for rules.”
“And I,” Madelyn said, “have spent my life in thrall to them, I’m afraid. I’m Madelyn Brooks.”
“From Kindred Gallery East?” The woman held out her hand. “I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Callie Janus.”
Madelyn pressed Callie’s hand gently. “I’ve heard of you.” She was one of the many up-and-coming neighborhood artists who were said to be on the verge of being ready for a show, though Madelyn hadn’t yet seen her work.
“I’m flattered,” Callie said. “That’s a beautiful space you’ve got, tastefully curated.”
“Ben makes the final decisions,” Madelyn said, “but thank you.” Madelyn knew Callie was working her, yet at the same time the compliments had authority and conviction.
“What kind of stuff do you do?” Alex asked. Madelyn felt his impatience; Callie had exiled him to conversational Siberia.
“I don’t like to be pinned down,” Callie said. “As you may have already guessed. I suppose I’m trying to find some kind of midpoint between painting and poetry.” She paused, then, deadpan, said, “And pretentiousness, needless to say. The three Ps.”
Even her self-deprecating joke seemed directed inward, as if she didn’t expect anyone else to get it.
“What do you think of this?” Alex gestured at the massive plywood box.
“I think Don is smart. Really, really smart. He’s created his own niche and fully occupied it.”
Alex said, “If I saw this sitting on the sidewalk outside a factory, I don’t know if I’d look at it twice.”
“Duchamp’s urinal. Or more likely Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s urinal, but that’s another argument.” She dropped her cigarette butt on the floor and crushed it with one pink Ked. Madelyn cringed on behalf of the wood. “Do you often see something on the street and think it’s art?”
“I’m a filmmaker,” he said, in the way he might have said, “Of course.”
“If you saw this outside a factory,” Callie said, “you would assume utility from the context. Here it’s obvious that it has no purpose. It’s not pretending to be anything or represent anything. It’s pure. It’s truthful. It has integrity. What’s funny?”
“I was just thinking. We were trying so hard to find that integrity in sixty-five, sixty-six. Folk songs, blues, jazz.”
“You can’t borrow somebody else’s integrity.”
“Wow,” Alex said. “That’s profound.”
Madelyn edged away. Alex was no longer the cocky opportunist she remembered from the Castle in Austin; he’d matured into someone more open and genuine. Even so, Madelyn was uncomfortable seeing him smitten and struggling for Callie’s serious attention. She opted to give them their privacy.
She joined the crowd around Judd, who was talking about how much he loved being in Texas. He’d relocated the year before to Marfa, the flat wasteland where they’d filmed Giant. Judd saw her and winked. “Madelyn can tell you. She’s from Texas.” He put on a drawl. “Am I right, hon?”
She had been introduced to him at a loft party a few days ago; she was flattered that he remembered her. After a moment of being tongue tied, she said, “You better believe it, sugar.”
He laughed. “You know Marfa?”
“Been through it on my way to Big Bend. It’s, uh, spacious.”
That provoked general laughter, Judd laughing hardest of all. Then somebody else hijacked the conversation, wanting to know more about how he wrote up his specifications. A couple of minutes later, Alex showed up at her side, alone.
Madelyn led him away from the main attraction. “She got away?”
“I failed to set the hook.”
“Probably for the best,” Madelyn said. “She looks like a lot of fight for not much fish.”
“I thought she was incredible. Smart, educated, gorgeous, totally her own person. What’s her art like?”
“I have no idea. And I’m not going to offer her a show just so you can get her into bed.”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do that.” He gave it a long second. “You could take a look, though, and if the work is good…”
“I’ll think about it.”
Alex checked his watch. “Is there anything else to see besides these boxes?”
“There’s the people. If you’re bored, you don’t have to hang around.”
“I was hoping I could convince you to go with me. I’ve been invited to a disco.”
“I’ve heard the word,” Madelyn said. “It’s a dance club where they play records, right?”
“This place is more than that. It’s called The Gallery, up in Chelsea, invitation only. Supposedly they have this incredible sound system, huge crowds, the dj is remixing the music as it plays. People go into altered states from the dancing.”
“Sounds interesting, but why do you need me?”
Alex looked embarrassed. “It’s, uh, it’s a big ‘gay’ scene. I don’t want to get hit on all night long.”
“So you want me to be your beard?”
“My what?”
&
nbsp; Now Madelyn was checking her own watch. “Never mind. I have to schmooze for another hour or so. If you can wait that long, I’ll give it a try.”
*
The crowd had spilled out onto West 22nd Street, and as the cab pulled to the curb, Alex began to have second thoughts. People were clustered in threes and fours, mostly male, mostly black and/or Chicano, most of them somewhere between fit and scrawny, wearing sleeveless T-shirts or vests with no shirts, or silk shirts unbuttoned to the waist, showing provocative quantities of hairless black and brown and tan skin, sleek and shiny with sweat. They wore giant Afros and fedoras and yachting caps and cowboy hats, outsize sunglasses, blonde wigs, feather boas, harem pants, basketball shorts, Cuban heels and curly-toed shoes out of the Arabian Nights. They drank wine and sniffed cocaine off of hand mirrors and draped themselves over each other like discarded clothes on furniture.
“Holy fucking shit,” Alex said.
“That’ll be two sixty-five,” the cabbie said. Madelyn paid him while Alex tried to decide whether he wanted to go in. A tall black man with a shaved head, dressed in leopard print from shirt collar to shoes, opened the cab door and said, “Welcome to the Gallery. First time?”
Alex nodded.
“Invitation?”
Alex showed him the business card that the guy from his editing class had given him, and the man made a sweeping motion with his hands as the cabbie said, “In or out, pal, I don’t got all fuckin’ night.”
They got out. Alex immediately tucked Madelyn’s arm inside his own as the cab sped away. “Up the stairs,” the Leopard Man said unnecessarily. You could hear the music clearly on the street, especially the bass, as if the amperage had turned the entire building into a loudspeaker. At the top of the stairs, Alex showed his card again and Madelyn volunteered to pay the steep seven-dollar cover charge. They passed through a steel fire door into the club.
Alex found himself in a converted industrial loft like the ones in SoHo, the exact dimensions hard to pin down because of the mirrors on the walls, the colored lights and strobes, and the sheer number of human beings, all of them pulsing to the music. A cage full of brightly colored balloons disguised the exposed girders on the high ceiling. The outfits they’d seen on the street had only been a preview. Alex saw Marilyn Monroe, a soldier in scraps of camouflage and a green beret, Elvis in gold lame, and an Arab sheik. One guy wore nothing but a skimpy loincloth and another wore a bustier and bloomers.
They pushed through the writhing bodies until Alex found a wall he could put his back to. The place smelled like the locker room at St. Mark’s, mixed with cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. The sound system was amazing—as loud as it was, Alex heard no distortion at all. He could pick out every individual instrument and feel the bass rise up through his feet. The music itself sounded like a Gamble-Huff production out of Philadelphia, with gospel-style female singers, throbbing rhythm, and aggressive strings and horns. As the long coda began to fade, the dj brought up “Money” by Pink Floyd, its looped cash-register sound effects perfectly synchronized to the hi-hat in the previous song.
He could not have pictured a place like this five years ago. Once you started knocking down walls, you never knew who was going to come in.
Alex didn’t notice that he was moving to the music until he saw Madelyn smile at him. “Feeling better now?” she shouted in his ear.
He nodded. The dancers around him ranged from people swaying in place to a few obvious modern dance professionals, spinning and making dramatic gestures with their hands. Many of them, Alex suddenly realized, were tripping. He hadn’t done acid himself in years, though the thought cheered him up.
From Pink Floyd the dj took them to “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the mgs, a song The Chevelles used to play before their breaks, as did The Other Side in Austin. Suddenly Alex’s emotions all bubbled up at once—nostalgia, loneliness, desire for that artist, Callie, that he’d just met, fear of the future, regrets over his break with his father, and yet above them all a wild exhilaration at being in New York, on his own, in a crazed and somehow welcoming environment.
He grabbed Madelyn’s hand. “Let’s dance,” he said.
*
That past June, Alex had ended up with a bs in film from ut, an acceptance in hand from nyu, and a half-dozen black and white prints of a 20-minute film called “Nimbus” that had been his final project for his degree. The film used two non-actor friends who were lovers, speaking improvised dialog and backlit by various natural light sources including, at the end, the setting sun.
He felt a sense of urgency he couldn’t clearly articulate. Nixon, after senselessly prolonging the war for four years, had finally kept his campaign promises and pulled out of Vietnam at the start of his second term. Instead of the dawn of a new era, it felt like the end of everything. Alex’s economics classes had taught him that you didn’t get runaway inflation, high unemployment, and stagnant economic growth all at the same time, yet that was exactly what was happening, and people were freaking out. Meanwhile, Nixon had been caught burglarizing the Democratic National Convention headquarters, and like some pathetic sitcom President, he’d kept piling on the lies and evasions until it looked like he meant to take the entire ship of state down with him. Integration was back in court because the US had managed to get its neighborhoods so segregated that the only way to get the races together was to bus kids from one end of town to another. People flocked to cults like the Hare Krishnas and the Moonies or turned into Jesus freaks. A research institute had published a book called The Limits to Growth that said unless we stopped overpopulating, civilization would collapse by the middle of the next century.
The time had come, he knew, for him to go out on his own and try to do the thing he wanted to do, and to take the responsibility, financial and otherwise, for whether he succeeded or not.
He had screened “Nimbus” for his parents, and afterward told them he was moving to New York. His father hadn’t understood either one, as Alex had known he wouldn’t. But Alex had hardened his heart.
It was time to grow up.
*
By two am, Madelyn had passed through exhaustion into an ecstatic high unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She was energized, clear-headed, completely happy, and full of love for everyone around her. The mood didn’t feel thrust upon her, like with booze or dope, instead felt more like returning to some primitive, Rousseauian natural state that she’d lost touch with because of too much work and the mundane depredations of the material world. She couldn’t think of a reason not to feel this way all the time.
Alex was powered by an altogether different fuel. Shortly after midnight they’d run into Jamie, the film school friend from whom Alex had scored his invitation, dressed in a motorcycle jacket, cap, and boots, a pair of white cotton briefs, and nothing else. He’d offered them coke, which Alex was up for and Madelyn was not; she didn’t care for the narcissistic and talkative person it turned her into. Alex had brought her along anyway, no doubt due to Jamie’s refusal to believe that Alex was straight. They’d squeezed onto the fire escape with far too many like-minded others, and Madelyn closed her eyes and focused on the sensations on her skin, alternating between the chill of the night and the heat from the bodies around her.
Once they were back inside, Alex had been frenzied for a time, at one point breaking into jumping jacks. Madelyn had ignored him when he threatened to spoil her mood, turning away and letting the music carry her.
At three am she leaned into Alex in mid-song and said, “I think I’ve had it.”
They only had to wait ten minutes for their turn at a cab. The party continued around them on the sidewalk, Alex with a frozen grin on his face, Madelyn relaxed and going with the flow, accepting a taste of warm champagne from a drunken threesome, ignoring the alcove of the building next door, where a man was on his knees, his head moving rapidly forward and back, hands from an unseen partner in his hair.
The cab dropped Alex off first, and as soon as he got ou
t he said, “You’re going to check her out, right?”
Madelyn blinked, her mind elsewhere. She couldn’t remember when she’d been so exhausted.
“Callie,” Alex said. “Callie Janus.”
“Yeah, sure, okay.”
“You won’t forget.”
“No,” Madelyn said. “I won’t forget.”
*
On Tuesday afternoon, one of the collectors visiting the gallery mentioned the Donald Judd show and Madelyn realized that she had, in fact, forgotten Callie Janus. She checked her file cabinet and sure enough, she had a set of slides, tucked professionally into the pockets of a three-hole-punched plastic holder, along with a business card that appeared to have been produced with a child’s toy printing press and a set of rubber stamps and cut with dull scissors from the inside of a cereal box. Madelyn wasn’t sure if she was charmed or embarrassed by it.
As to the art, it would stand or fall based on the back story that went with it. It involved paint on wooden slats, collage, and hand lettering and sketching on top. Details were hard to make out without a projector.
On impulse, she dialed the number on the card. A mumbling voice at the first number directed her to a second one, where eventually someone found Callie and got her on the line. Madelyn, suddenly wishing she hadn’t come this far, arranged to visit her loft after work.
The loft was two blocks away and four flights up. The temperature outside was 60 degrees; inside the loft it felt distinctly colder. Drop cloths and hammers and sketchbooks were piled on the non-functional radiators. Many of the lofts didn’t have running water, let alone toilets or showers, keeping the rents affordable for tenants who were still struggling for their first break. It was not a mode of existence that Madelyn could imagine for herself, though the conditions that Alex was living in were not much better.