The Writer’s Life
(21 weeks)
MONDAY.
Incapable of writing the monologue for this week’s radio show, I head to the CBC cafeteria.There’s a self-serve fruit salad bar, and I’ve gotten into the habit of seeing how much fruit I can cram into the little containers they give you. It’s a bit like a game of Tetris. As I walk back to my desk I imagine pitching the cup against the wall and watching it explode. A Molotov fruit cocktail. Packing the fruit cup proves to be the most productive part of my day.
TUESDAY.
Still in need of inspiration, I set out for the Dollar Cinema to watch He’s Just Not That Into You. When I get there, though, I learn there was an error in the ad, and the theatre’s been rented out to a Sri Lankan community group for the evening. But since I’m already there and in the mood for popcorn, I stay for the screening.
It’s a romantic comedy and, although not subtitled, I do a decent job of following along—until the moment when the male lead, for no apparent reason, leaps off a balcony and graphically splits his head open. When he reappears in the film’s closing credits, dancing, I decide that the death might have been a dream. Or perhaps the credits are a dream. Narratively speaking, Sri Lankan cinema is more complicated than Finnegans Wake.
On my way home, trying to make heads or tails of the movie, I cross paths with a skunk. It sees me and stops. We stand there, face to face.
I can’t think of a single person I know, in the last twenty-five years, who’s been sprayed by a skunk. Maybe it was the kind of thing that was bigger in the seventies— something that went out with the hula hoop or sitting backwards on kitchen chairs. Back in those heady days, everyone was bathing in tomato juice while listening to the Doobie Brothers, but in recent years, it seems as though our two species have reached some kind of armistice.
A part of me wants to be sprayed, like I want proof of an urban legend—if not an excuse to avoid writing my monologue. We stare at each other. We wait. Finally, the skunk runs under a balcony. I find myself feeling oddly rejected.
THURSDAY.
I’ve been working from home. I’ve told myself I wouldn’t leave the apartment until I’ve finished my monologue. It’s been three days now and my supply of martini olives is running dangerously low.
I allow myself to step onto the porch to check the mail, and I find a postcard from Starlee. It’s of an elephant swimming underwater, using its nose as a snorkel. I pin it to the wall above my desk. I can’t help thinking that the elephant looks like he’s smiling, like he’s pleasantly surprised to have stepped into an impossible world where he is as light as smoke. Perhaps he is willing himself to believe that he’ll never have to leave, that he can live among the fish for as long as he likes. Somewhere deep down, though, he must know that eventually he’ll have to leave. I am not unlike that elephant, content to abandon elephanthood— until the olives run out.
As I walk to the grocery store in the drizzling rain, I catch sight of myself in a store window. I look like a liveaction version of Pig Pen from Peanuts. This is confirmed by two pamphleteering Greenpeace workers who allow me to walk past them without a word.
Back at home, I spend the evening alternately staring at the computer screen and the rain outside the window. At about 11:00 p.m., I hear a knock at the door. It’s Tucker.
“New shirt?” he asks, walking into my apartment. “The blue really brings out the despair in your eyes.”
“You smell like pizza,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says. It turns out he’s brought some over for me.
At the end of Save the Tiger, Jack Lemmon, who in 1973 was already playing sad old men, says that he just wants the girl from the Cole Porter song, someone who can walk all night in the rain and still smell of perfume. If the smell of pizza is a kind of perfume—and I would argue that it is, or at the very least better than skunk—I guess I’ve found the girl from the song. Sadly, but maybe not so sadly, it’s Tucker. And if he keeps up with the pizza delivery, I should be able to maintain the lifestyle of the shut-in artist that I’ve grown accustomed to.
PICASSO GOLDSTEIN
July 29, 1912
It has been days since I’ve produced any art or left my studio. My assistant, Claude, passes me food under the door, and as a result I eat mostly sliced meats, thinly cut cheeses, and flattened baguettes which often bear the stamp of Claude’s boot heel. In return, I slide him out coins. I peer under the door and see his greedy fingers pry them off the floorboards like spiders eating flies.
I cannot leave my studio because to leave would mean opening the door, and opening the door, even for a moment, would mean allowing Picasso to slip in and set his thieving eyes upon my art. I’ve come to believe he’s not a painter at all, but a pickpocket and a shape-shifter. I must hide myself from his gaze lest he steal my very soul!
Since banning Picasso from my atelier he has become fiendishly inventive and as agile as a howler monkey. At night I see him in the shadows, creeping along the sill outside my window. Several days after blanketing over the glass with newspaper, word reached me through Claude that the Evil Genius had begun making collages. Out of what, you ask? Why, newspaper, of course. I give him nothing and still he takes.
August 3
The sick, sad, twisted irony of it all is that my name, too, is Picasso. Picasso Goldstein. It is a childhood nickname. I was originally named Pegasus by my father, a scholar of ancient Greek, but my brother Maurice, a blowfish-brained imbecile, could never pronounce Pegasus and when he tried it sounded like “Pegabo,” which my grandmother, a shrewish, near-deaf nitpicker, heard as Peccadillo. Once the census-taker, an illiterate alcoholic slob, arrived at our door, my fate was sealed. “Picasso” was the name he scrawled across his clipboard. And that, as they say, was that.
Sharing the evil bandit’s name has not been easy. When introduced in society as Picasso the painter I am met by glazed-over looks.
“I am not that Picasso,” I say, my lower lip trembling and my upper lip sweaty.
Picasso has stolen my best ideas. He has stolen my patrons—who have included marquises, counts, viscounts, barons, and one British Columbian prince; he has stolen my galleries, my women, and my friends. He has even stolen my very name. He has left me with nothing.
August 12
Some back story so you do not think me completely mad: The thievery all began in the summer of 1901 when a young Pablo Picasso was brought to my studio by a mutual acquaintance, a Madame Voillard, who carried about a curly lap dog.
“Pablo is an artist, too,” Madame Voillard said, introducing us.
I showed the balding little homunculus kindness, patting his head and encouraging him in his hobby.
“What’s this?” he asked, gesturing towards a large painting of a nude. It was made entirely from various shades of blue.
“It’s a naked woman,” I said, pinching his Buddha-like belly good-naturedly. “Never seen one of those, eh?”
“But it’s all in blue,” he said.
“I was too lazy to get up from my stool and fetch other colours,” I said.
It was several months after Picasso left my studio that I saw in Le Journal a rave review of his new show. It featured works of his “Blue Period,” as it would later be called. I went to bed that night gnashing my teeth.
I feel Picasso out there, his horrible eyes which see through studio walls! His alien brain which is psychic and robs me of my ideas at the moment of their conception! But I remain steadfast, thinking nothing, saying nothing, looking at nothing. I keep my mind as blank as my canvases, for as soon as I create, he appropriates, turning what is starkly— boldly—original into a facsimile! The genius of his theft is how he leaves in his wake the crown of banditry upon my head! To be forever perceived as the thief of my own work!
August 19
Yesterday, waking up with the fires of creativity burning, I felt the need to paint, and so I undertook some tiny watercolours—no more than the size of cufflink buttons. In this wa
y, I reasoned, I could hunch over them, protecting them from invisible eyes.
I set upon my subject from memory: my childhood violin instructor—a taciturn, ungenerous Aunt Doris type with the perennial expression of a perplexed bonobo. With careful, teeny brushstrokes I captured the upturned slant of her horrid smile, and for the first time in weeks I managed a smile of my own. Sweet, sweet art!
It was only as I poured the excess coloured water down the drain that a cold shudder ran through me. I imagined Picasso down there in the pipes, licking his chops like a sewer rat, a pan lifted above his head to catch the dripping of my brushes, readying himself to run home and, in his alchemist’s laboratory, separate the black water into colours—my colours! To decode my tints, my half tints, and—the thieving guttersnipe—my quarter tints!
Never! I crushed the tiny masterpiece with my thumb and drank the remaining paint water. I then vowed never to paint again—not until I knew with certainty that France was rid of Picasso.
September 1
Claude tells me that Picasso has exhibited a painting called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He slipped a shoddy sketch of the abomination under my studio door in his pudgy idiot’s hand. Even with his crude,
caveman-like draftsmanship I could see what it was: a blatant rip-off of my drawing Les Putains Malades, a study of herpes sores I’d drawn for a medical textbook last year. The composition! The poses! It was all my work, ingested and regurgitated. On my hands and knees, I screamed under the door crack that Picasso was the devil.
“And so, Claude, are you!” I shrieked. “Tête dure! Salop! Swine!”
September 7
Claude has been starving me out. He has slipped neither meat nor cheese under my door in several days. I know that he now works for Picasso. From the day I met him, I knew Claude was not to be trusted. At this moment I wish nothing more than to be able to pluck my dandy stick from the umbrella stand and beat the back of his calves a cerise red as I did in better days. I know that I am now truly alone.
September 15
I am done with painting. It, along with Picasso, has destroyed my life. I have spent the day in a rage, breaking my paintbrushes into tiny pieces and flinging paint against the walls and unused canvases of my studio. Everything is a mess of drippings and
splatter. At long last I am satisfied for I have created chaos, and the beauty of chaos is that it can’t ever be stolen. The agency is sending over a new assistant tomorrow. A prematurely bald drunkard by the name of Pollock. I’ll let him deal with the mess.
A Still Shark Is Still a Shark
(20 weeks)
SUNDAY.
In my parents’ living room, my father reads a book on the couch beside me while my mother exercises in the other room.We are having a visit.
“Two hundred twenty-five,” my mother calls from her bedroom. She’s been giving my father and me an update on the calories she’s burned riding her exercise bike.
“She’s cycling herself into non-existence,” my father says, getting up from the couch to use the washroom. He’s gone for twenty calories, and when he returns, he is distraught.
“Instead of sitting down on the toilet seat,” he says, “I sat on the closed lid. Did you close the toilet?”
I confess that I did, and my father is outraged.
“This has never been a closed-toilet-lid family,” he says.
“I really feel part of a rich tradition,” I say.
I explain that closing the toilet lid is something I started doing after reading an article in a science journal about the molecules of toilet water that escape with each flush.
“Your toothbrush might as well be a toilet brush,” I say.
“Two hundred forty-five,” my mother says.
“This place is a nuthouse.” My father picks his book back up, and we continue our visit in an easy silence that will be broken only by the next chime of calories.
MONDAY.
Five hundred. According to the McDonald’s website, there are five hundred calories in a McRib, half of which are from fat.
I’m studying up on my prey in anticipation of dining out with Josh. Though I have never eaten one, the McRib is a sandwich that’s fascinated me for years. For one thing, if it’s popular, why not keep it on the regular menu? And if it isn’t, why keep bringing it back every few years? Either people want it or they don’t.
On the drive to McDonald’s, Josh explains his theory.
“The McRib is fleeting, and its ephemerality stirs anxiety in the hearts of men. Any day one might walk into McDonald’s and the McRib will no longer be there. One must seize it before it is driven back into oblivion. It’s like the green Shamrock Shake, but without the stabilizing tie-in of a St. Patrick’s Day.”
“Maybe the McRib could be tied in to national heart disease awareness week.”
Josh thinks that might be the stupidest thing he’s ever heard.We argue the point passionately.
Another point of fascination is that the McRib is composed of meat that’s been shaped into the form of rib bones. In terms of its immanence and use of self-guise as disguise, the McRib is probably the most postmodern item on the McDonald’s menu.
At the restaurant, the cashier tells us that they stopped serving the McRib a day earlier.
We are both a little crushed.
On our way to Chinatown for dumplings, we cheer our spirits by rolling down the windows and arguing over the difference between dumplings and kreplach. We do so intensely enough to make passersby stop and stare.
THURSDAY.
While watching a documentary about sharks, I become saddened that sharks don’t seem to be scaring me the way they used to.When I was a kid, about eighty percent of my time was spent worrying about being eaten by sharks.This was during the seventies, and with all the movies—Shark!, Jaws, Jaws 2, and Jaws 3 in 3D—everyone was. Going to the beach was an act of daredevilhood. I remember dropping a hard-boiled egg into the surf to see if a shark would come and get it—to see if it was safe to swim—and my dad yelling to never mind the shark, he was going to murder me for wasting eggs.
But nowadays, or at least on some days, being eaten by a shark doesn’t seem so bad. I mean, it would be bad, but after the first couple bites, I suspect no worse than missing out on McRib season or listening to someone talk about their RRSP contribution.
I’ve financial matters on my mind this evening because I’ve promised myself, despite its being a major anxiety, to get a head start on my taxes. But instead, I continue to watch the documentary on sharks, nostalgic for old fears and still unwilling to confront new ones.
A Place to Hang One’s Cape
(19 weeks)
FRIDAY.
While reading The New Yorker, I tear out a poem and slip it into my wallet. It’s where I keep the things most dear to me, but as I keep my wallet in my back pocket, I must be economical in my curating, for too much dearness will damage my spine. The rump of a Greek god is one thing; the rump of a centaur is another.
I get up to go to the bathroom when I realize that my bathroom door hasn’t been able to shut all the way in God knows how long. I guess I’ve been living alone too long. Maybe someday I’ll become the kind of classy older bachelor who’s comfortable buying himself flowers on the way home from work—a man who takes calèche rides through the park with his poodle while sipping cognac from a flask. In this scenario, I’m seeing a cape featured prominently. And an apartment suited to my station in life—with doors that close and hooks to hang one’s capes.
SATURDAY.
I turn on my computer to search Craigslist for apartment listings. The wireless window pops up, and I realize with some regret that all I know about my neighbours is their wireless network names: Krypton, Space Balls, Couscous, and Scarlet. From this I can tell little else than that they’re fans of Superman, Mel Brooks, Middle Eastern cuisine, and the colour red. I look out my window, wondering whose house is whose and what private food and entertainment consumption occurs in each and how I will ne
ver get to know.
SUNDAY.
Gregor comes over to help with my apartment search.
“I’m thrilled about this move,” he says. “I intend to keep monetizing you long after you’re dead, so we need a place people can continue to come visit and celebrate your memory—a Canadian Graceland where European tourists can say, ‘It’s so much smaller and stinkier than I imagined.’ As your manager/real estate agent, I’ll find you a proper home by nightfall.”
“Nightfall?”
“We Ehrlichs are a persistent bunch. My uncle Perry Ehrlich, armed with only a dessert spoon, was said to have once chased a canned peach all around the bowl, across the length of the table, and along the waxed pine floor of the dining room. He eventually trapped the renegade fruit slice two hours later under a basement armoire.”
“And then what? Did he eat it?”
“I believe he had a stroke.”
“That would make some canned peach commercial.”
MONDAY.
With Gregor having turned up nothing but a refurbished school bus and a ten thousand square foot loft in Chelsea, New York, I pick up a newspaper to comb the classifieds, old-school. When I return home I find Boosh on the kitchen table. It appears she has eaten half my flowers.
She gives me a meaningful, almost soulful, look.
If only Boosh knew a few words. I’m not saying enough to explain her obsession with squirrels, or the meaning behind her howls when the theme to As It Happens comes on the radio, but a couple of words. “Good morning.” “What’s up?” “Nice to be sitting here with you.”
I return her look, gazing at her searchingly, looking for answers—if not for where to live, maybe just what to have as a mid-afternoon snack.
I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow Page 9