Olivia, however, learned to see through it, and was probably a bit irritated with herself for having been at first seduced by it. A few friendly interrogations over dinner on matters approaching the erudite were enough to reveal that I probably had not finished a book since high school. So, in the first few months of our nearly meaningless affair, back when Olivia was still at least ostensibly entertaining the possibility of allowing herself to love me, she bought me a present: a volume of the collected stories of Franz Kafka. Written on the inside front cover, in her filigreed female handwriting (but in rather assertive black marker), was the businesslike inscription: “Tristan— Here you go. Most of them are pretty short. Olivia.”
That sign-off was characteristic of her, by the way. No “love,” no “with love,” not even a tepid “best wishes.” Just her first name followed by a period, as if that alone constituted its own sentence.VII
For her I was probably at most a brief, interesting infatuation or experiment. I don’t think she was ever really in love with me. She did once tell me I was the most, quote, “fake and pathetic person [she] ever made the mistake of fucking.” Much later, she also told me she would, quote, “call the cops on [me] if [I were to] show up [at her apartment] coked out of [my] mind [in the middle of the night] again.”
• • •
But all that is beside the point. I mention Olivia only by way of explaining how it was I came to admire Kafka’s haunting allegory, “A Hunger Artist.” A man sits in a cage and refuses to eat. He is gradually forgotten by the public. He starves himself for so long that everyone ceases to care. But his art goes on—unto his death. His last words are: “I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would have stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” When he dies, they sweep out his cage and replace him with a young panther. “The food he liked,” writes Kafka, “was brought him without hesitation by the attendants; he seemed not even to miss his freedom.” The people crowd around the cage that now contains this creature so ardently alive, and “they did not want ever to move away.”
Starvation—my goodness, is that a dark metaphor, Mr. Kafka. Take a look at the cover of the book: Kafka peers out at you in grainy black and white, his dark hair slicked back from his temples, his eyes wide, wet, hunted-looking. His cheekbones are high and brutally sharp, his cheeks sunken. He looks malnourished already. We know his sisters died in Auschwitz, which is doubtless where this man’s skull would have wound up, scrabbled in a ditch along with thousands of other Jewish skulls, had tuberculosis not mercifully knocked him off at the age of forty in 1924. He died of consumption, as the Victorian euphemism goes—because the disease consumes one from the inside out—whereas I, Tristan Hurt, would set out to die of a different kind of consumption. What if—I wonder—Kafka had not coughed himself to death, but had lived long enough to be herded onto a cattle car bound for Poland, where the writer/insurance underwriter (who, like me, bitterly resented his father) would have been stripped, shaved, tattooed with a number, starved, and forced to dig his own grave? It would not have taken this wan, skinny little man very much time at all to begin to look like the men lying on the bunks and wincing at the daylight as the doors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau rolled open in the spring of 1945: horrifically thin, eyes sunken, ribs like claws. He was halfway there already. This man himself resembled the hunger artist. But in those penetrating but deeply sad eyes, evident even through the poor exposure and the fuzzy focus, there is a hunger beyond the merely physical—this man was starving not only because he felt caged in by his oppressive family and besieged by the zeitgeist of his interwar Prague, but was suffering a starvation of the soul, an insatiate hunger of the spirit.
The story was also very short, and while I quite honestly did not read very much of that book, I did at least read that story, and the beginnings of several others.
• • •
After Olivia terminated relations with me—citing as she did some pointed critiques of my personality and lifestyle—I gained a tremendous amount of weight.
Should you ever want to nearly treble your magnitude in a relatively short period of time, I recommend the following regimen: morbid depression, sleeping thirteen or more hours a day, addictions to alcohol and barbiturates, and lots of eating.
I spent much of the next year in bed. My finances were comfortable. I could afford it. I disappeared from public life. I ordered food in daily. Initially I relied heavily on pizza and Chinese food. Sometimes I ate large quantities of fried chicken. Sometimes I ate four to five canisters of Pringles snack chips in a single sitting. Sometimes I ate two or three gallons of ice cream for dessert. A typical day during this period might go something like this:
4:30 P.M.:
Rise, shine
5:00 P.M.:
Pick up phone, order three pizzas
5:10 P.M.–9:30 P.M.:
Sit on couch, watch TV while eating three said pizzas
9:35 P.M.–1:15 A.M.:
Naptime
1:15 A.M.–5:00 A.M.:
Wake up sobbing and chilled in sweat with wildly beating heart. Gobble fistful of benzodiazepines and crouch over laptop, drinking whiskey, eating ice cream, smoking cigarettes, and enjoying pornography until sleep comes again to take the artist away from this awful place
Groceries, drugs, liquor, laundry, etc.—it was almost astonishing how nearly everything that might require my leaving my home I was able to have someone from the outside bring to me (only in New York!). I spent most of my time in the nude; I donned a bathrobe to meet deliverymen at the door (sometimes). I kept the curtains drawn. No light came into my space. I did not wash my sheets either. They grew sticky, filmy. I expanded rapidly.
Ten months later, I weighed nearly five hundred pounds. Not that I was keeping track. This initial period of massive weight gain, while I was dimly aware of it, was more or less unintentional. I was not yet a Fat Artist—I was merely an artist who had allowed himself, by way of a largely sedentary and unwholesome lifestyle, to become extraordinarily fat. I was merely a fat artist.
Throughout this year I communicated with practically no one. It was surprisingly easy to drop off the face of the earth in a luxury loft apartment in a converted warehouse in Greenpoint. I did not come out, I called no one, never returned a call, nor did I answer anyone by e-mail or any other medium of communication, and I quickly became—by choice—friendless.
What drew me out of my malaise was not love, nor was it fear (not, at least, for my life), nor was it the intervention of friends or family, as I had no real friends and was estranged from my family. Rather, what drove me back into the world was the most powerful but prosaic mover in human civilization: money.
I was broke. I had been consuming a great deal, and I’d had no source of income for nearly a year. I had not sold a single piece, I had not done any hobnobbing, I had not appeared in a single photograph holding a single cocktail in Artforum’s “Scene & Herd.” I was missing in action in the art world.
I did not realize at the time that my refusal to communicate with anyone or even leave my home for a year had lent a mysterious luster to my absent celebrity. I had not been—as I had thought (as I probably should have been)—forgotten. Rather, my long and unexplained absence had acquired a strange quality of presence. I had created a vacuum of myself. At every gallery opening that year to which I had been invited and did not attend, there was a Tristan Hurt–shaped hole in the room, a phantom, a shadow, a void that was more glamorously conspicuous than my presence would have been. As if my prolonged disappearance were in fact an ingeniously crafted publicity stunt. Clearly an artist who chooses to abruptly vanish from society before the zenith of his career must be a creative genius locked in a fit of feverish productivity that ordinary people cannot ever hope to truly understand.
I do not know if they thought I was working. I do not know if they thought I was in a torturous state of nerves, for which I needed the dark romance of my solitude. I do not know if perhaps they thought
I was sleeping until four in the afternoon each hateful day and then spending my waking hours shoveling gooey clumps of General Tso’s chicken between my industrious jaws and watching videos of big-dicked men ejaculating onto the waiting faces of girls while I soporated my brain with Ambien and bourbon with my listless penis sleeping in my hand like a beanbag. I do not even know if this knowledge would have detracted from, or in fact somehow added to, their newfound romantic notion of me as an eccentric recluse.
• • •
But as I said, it was nothing more—or less—romantic than a matter of grubby economics that drove me from my long hibernation. I had not checked up on my personal finances in many months. I simply had not been thinking about it. I’d had so much money at the outset of my long period of torpidity that I had somewhat blithely assumed my bank balance would remain always as inexhaustible as the horn of plenty of legends old. I did not open my mail for nearly a year. I kept a year’s worth of unopened mail in a black plastic trash bag in a closet. Whenever a piece of mail arrived, I immediately stuffed it in the bag. For a year I was, on some level, distantly terrified of how much money I was spending, and so I was disinclined to look.
Tax day came and went without my so much as bothering to call my accountant. Eventually I received an unpleasant call from the Internal Revenue Service. This prompted me to finally steel enough courage to investigate the state of my accounts.
With great trepidation fluttering in my weak heart, I exhumed the contents of the garbage bag in which I had been keeping all my unopened mail. I ensconced myself on the floor and ripped open each cursed envelope. Every piece of mail I opened revealed my financial situation to be graver than the last. Over the past year, the fortune I had acquired had diminished to nil. It was gone. Gone! Gone up my nose and down my gullet, gone through my idleness, gone into images of naked women subjecting themselves to hideous acts of willful degradation, gone into my brain and my veins and the fat of my body and splurted out of my anal sphincter and my penis, often into my dirty socks. The cost of the pornography alone that I put on my credit cards came out to something in the order of nine thousand dollars per month, to say nothing of the drugs, the alcohol, and the food, the food, the glorious food.
I was destitute!
I looked around my home. What did it look like? First, imagine a loft space in a converted warehouse in Greenpoint with twelve-foot ceilings, large, arch-shaped west-facing windows, a beautiful view of Midtown Manhattan, white walls and warm-toned glossy oak floors, track lighting, designer furniture, granite countertops, everything tastefully accented with objets d’art. Now make it dark. Draw curtains shut over windows so that no light gets in. Take considerable quantity of soiled clothing, drape pell-mell over furniture, scatter across floor. Fill room with empty beer bottles, empty whiskey bottles, stacks of oily pizza boxes. Moldy, soiled dishes should litter floor, coffee table, dining table, countertops; heap high in sink. Leave to rot for many consecutive months. When artist runs out of clean dishes, add top layer of paper plates, soaked transparent with grease. Add thick stench of sweat, semen, smoke, garbage, etc. Add generous quantity of cockroaches. Add mice. Add rats. Allow mice and rats to skitter freely across floor. Cease to care about cockroaches, mice, rats. Cease to notice cockroaches, mice, rats. Add cloud of flies. Do not even attempt to swat/shoo flies if/when said flies land on artist’s skin.
And it wasn’t only the massive weight gain: I had been ignoring all avenues of personal hygiene. Give artist long, tangled beard and long, knotted hair. Give him long, sharp fingernails and long toenails that curl under toes like demonic yellow hooves. Do not wash the artist. Make the artist’s skin sickly pale from long period of entirely interior and nocturnal existence.
Behold the artist.
• • •
First I made a feeble attempt at tidying up my living space, but quickly became discouraged by the overwhelming complexity of the mess. Next I turned my attention to my person. I trimmed and groomed my beard, cut my hair, clipped my nails (both finger- and toe-), showered, brushed my teeth, spat a brown spume of filth and blood into the sink and brushed them again, laundered some clothes and donned them. I was now a much more presentable man, albeit nevertheless a grotesquely obese one. I even liked the rich chocolate-brown beard I had grown. A good, thick beard has a way of dignifying a very fat man.
I reentered society. I reconnected with old friends. It was not hard to get back in the scene. The art world was appropriately appalled, revolted, saddened, intrigued, amused, and delighted with my new body.
My monstrousness made me highly visible. I went back to the parties, back to the VIP openings, returned to the photos in which I stood in the company of the hypermoneyed and/or famous, holding a glass of wine—and damned if I wasn’t bigger than ever.
Through whisper campaign and providence of gossip it became known that I, Tristan Hurt, had spent almost a year in monastic seclusion, working steadfastly on my most ambitious and important project to date: myself. I had spent the last ten months sculpting my body, working as hard on my physique as might an athlete, a bodybuilder, a dancer—but not for the sake of vanity, nor for agility, not to make my body stronger, more robust, or more beautiful. Like my sculptural work before it, my body art was to be deliberately grotesque, and, as Wilde opined all art is, quite useless.
Thus it was that I conceived the installation piece that would revitalize and conclude the career of Tristan Hurt, the Fat Artist.
• • •
I obtained generous financial patronage for the project from the Guggenheim Foundation. I worked closely with Italian “starchitect” Emilio Buzzati to design the structure in which I would be kept. A large glass cube, each side twenty-five feet long, was constructed according to our plans atop the roof of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum at Eighty-Ninth and Fifth Avenue. My exhibit was constructed on top of the long, flat roof of the rectangular addition to the museum that was constructed in 1992. Each side of my glass cube except the floor was constructed of thin steel girders structurally reinforced with crisscrossing steel cables, forming a grid of twenty-five five-by-five-foot squares, which were inset with plates of glass. The floor was concrete, poured in place, sanded smooth. The room was perfectly transparent all around. Visitors would enter through two wide glass-and-steel double doors in the east wall of the cube. An extravagant bed was constructed in the center of the room, with the back of the headboard flush against the north wall, such that the person sitting on the bed—that is, the Fat Artist himself—could gaze either in a southerly direction across Central Park at Midtown Manhattan, or up through the glass ceiling at the firmament above.
The bed unto itself was a work of art. I designed it. My bed was my last piece of inorganic sculpture. In style, it is deliberately imitative of Louis Quatorze-period furniture, except that those luxurious mid-seventeenth-century beds tend to feature tall posters and canopies with thick curtains, whereas my bed allowed none of these, as I demanded maximum visible exposure of my repulsive body from every angle in the room. In a visually musical series of symmetrical filigrees, the headboard slopes upward into a central peak eight feet from the floor. It is fashioned of mahogany, ostentatiously carved with decorative designs, and gilt with a thin film of gold. The bed is longer and slightly wider than a California king, and its frame was reinforced with sturdy steel rods, in order to support the extraordinary weight that would be pressed upon it. The mattress also had to be custom-made to fit the unusual dimensions of the frame, and also required a three-inch-diameter hole through its upper center. The mattress was designed to be firm and strong, but as comfortable as possible, three feet thick and vacuum-stuffed with a hardy and pliant foam insulation. The bed was covered with a sumptuous sheet of glossy purple velvet, and then piled high with a mountain of matching purple velvet pillows with tasseled fringes of gold thread. The bed was built inside the room on top of an industrial platform scale of the sort used to weigh automobiles and shipping containers. We
affixed the scale’s large digital readout to the west wall of my exhibition chamber: accurate down to the fourth digit to the right of the zero, with data presented in both imperial and metric, numbers aglow, red on black. The bed was then weighed by itself and the scale’s zero reset so as to measure only any additional weight.VIII Behind the bed—obscured from the public’s view of the installation—a hole was cut in the bottom-center panel of glass in the north wall, and we ran a thick rubber tube through the hole, wound it under the bed and up through the hole in the mattress. On the outside of the exhibition chamber, the tube connected to a low-pressure vacuum that would suck waste out of my body and into a septic tank that flushed into the museum’s plumbing system; inside the exhibition chamber, the tube emerged from the hole in the mattress and bifurcated into two smaller tubes, one narrow and one thick: my urinary and rectal catheters. Additionally, an eighty-gallon-capacity water tank was affixed to the north wall, beside my bed. A filtered hose siphoned clean drinking water from the building’s water supply into the tank, and another rubber hose ran from the bottom of the tank and was kept coiled around a hook within my reach on the headboard. A metal ball plugged the lip of the hose when I was not drinking. When I needed to drink water, all I had to do was put the hose to my mouth and push the metal ball in with my tongue to let the water dribble into my mouth. It was essentially a large-scale adaptation of similar drinking apparatuses commonly seen in the cages of hamsters, guinea pigs, and other pet rodents. In this way I would always be kept well hydrated.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 11