Pollock No. 5

by Todd Cohen

  I went to look for the money to pay them, but something was missing. My wallet.

  Ah, shit. I checked all my pockets and then ran over to my car and checked the driver-side door slot and the compartment between the driver and passenger. All likely places.

  “Maybe it slid to the side,” I thought. I bent over and looked on the sides, but no luck. No wallet to be found. Racing over to my place, I checked my warm-up jacket and any other logical places. Then it hit me. After witnessing that terrible fucked-up sight with my wife and “that asshole,” I had left my wallet in the kitchen drawer. I went over and over the sequence of events: down the stairs, grabbed the keys from the mudroom, and then out the door to Alex’s. “I left the damn wallet in the kitchen drawer.” I smiled internally. I went upstairs to my bedroom closet, opened the door, reached in the back behind the shelf where I kept my socks, and found a large wad of money rolled up, held together with a thick rubber band. I counted out the necessary amount and, putting some extra in my pocket, went back to my two patient helpers.

  “Here it is, two hundred bucks apiece plus a fifty-dollar tip each. Thanks for the help,” I said, somewhat out of breath from that fiasco.

  Mustache Man and his sidekick walked down the block. “Much appreciated,” I heard the sidekick say.

  Chapter 28

  Mr. G was still cranking out front on the Weisbergs’ driveway. After a full day of menial labor, I almost didn’t notice its lawn mower-type roar. The loud roar was indistinguishable from the sound of the ocean in the distance after a punishing day of heaving and hauling. Hardly even noticed it. All it did was drown out background noise. But what kind of background noise was there in the Hamptons—especially well off the beaten pathway, on a private peninsula after a major hurricane or at least hurricane-force winds? AND WITH NO POWER TO BOOT! No background noise whatsoever. Could have used Mr. G at my place back in the burbs in Port Washington.

  Speaking of Port Washington, Jason just sent me a text:

  “Dad, still no power. Mom and Bridgette are playing Bananas in front of our gas fireplace in the living room. Lucky our stove and hot water heater also run on gas. Trees on the bluff downed the power lines. Looks like it will be two weeks before we get power back. We’ll get by. How’s ‘the shed’? J”

  I thought my family in Port was lucky to have so many things running on gas. “Imagine a hot shower.” I thought. Not here. Not in Quiogue. There was no gas in our neighborhood. If you were lucky you had propane. But all I had in the Hamptons was nada, Zip!

  I typed into my phone: “House still okay. Neighbor’s place a mess. Please keep warm. Let me know if you need me. Just trying to salvage our next-door neighbor’s disaster. Love to all, Dad.” I pressed send and off it went.

  The kids knew nothing about what happened between Shari and me. That was, unless Shari had said something. To them things were “same old same old.” I did not have the courage to tell them. I also did not tell them about my job!

  I looked at Mr. G’s gasoline gauge and the red arrow was on empty. I shut off the generator and grabbed another five-gallon tank from the back of the Honda Pilot and filled it back up. Ah, Peace and Quiet. I pulled the generator out to the road and onto my property.

  Even though this was considered a lightweight generator, it still took a bit of work to get it back over to my place. I needed it to drive my sump pump in order to dry out my basement and give me some light. Perhaps run a few appliances. Grabbing a long, heavy-duty extension cord, I waddled through the water in the basement to the pump. I disconnected the pump’s plug from the basement outlet, attached the orange cord, and extended it out the small back window. Once it was attached to the generator, I gave a quick pull to restart the machine. The lawn mower-type engine sound was back, and within seconds the pump was shooting out water through white PVC tubing towards the wetlands. As I glanced towards the bay, I could see my damaged dock, torn apart, and hoped at least some of it was salvageable. The tide was the highest I’d ever seen—to the point that the wetland grasses themselves were fully submerged.

  “If only I had a working generator,” I thought, “there would be no water in my basement.” Fortunately, the burner had been off before the storm. I was not prepared to fire it up now. Who knew whether it would even work, and if it did, perhaps it would short out immediately. The weather was still mild enough that I could live without heat.

  What I really needed was a hot shower. I examined the hot water heater. It had a separate electrical outlet, which I connected to the generator extension cord. The bottom coils of the heater were badly damaged. Nonfunctional, but the upper part was unfazed and seemed to be working. After one hour, the water was pleasantly warm. I waited another hour and by then, the water was hot enough for a soothing shower.

  The shower relaxed my aching body. I was in pretty good shape but had not been prepared for all the heavy hauling. The physical labor was much more than a full day at the hospital—even with our intensive cardiac procedures, plus the strain of wearing twenty pounds of lead-radiation protection (vest plus skirt) that was required during each case.

  “Ah, that felt good,” I said to myself as I left the shower. I went over to my oversized square Carrara marble coffee table in my living room and pulled out an old book I had purchased at a garage sale.

  Chapter 29

  The book was entitled Jackson Pollock, a relatively small paperback authored by Frank O’Hara. O’Hara was a well-known assistant curator and poet who worked at the MoMA, and it is conceivable that he may have had something to do with the art selection for the 1972 MoMA show, where I first was introduced to Pollock, his close friend. Yes, O’Hara was a Pollock expert. The cover of the book had a small photo of Pollock with a furrowed brow and a wrinkled forehead, with his left hand supporting his tilted head and a cigarette butt between his index and middle finger. He looked perplexed. It was next to another more colorful Pollock painting with swirls of whites and greens, orange and yellows. The book had its price on the cover: $1.50. “Those were the days,” I thought. The cover said that the book contained “over 80 reproductions, 16 in full color.”

  Maybe the one from the Weisbergs’ house was reproduced inside?

  I looked inside and found that the book was published in 1959 by George Braziller, Inc., from New York. Searching for the painting, I thumbed through the pages. I could not find the Weisberg painting. Maybe I missed it. It certainly was not a complete catalogue raisonné of his works, but showed many with different styles, particularly as they related to color, swirls, and curves. I went through the book one more time, page by page, until I came to plate 34 in black and white.

  “34. Nr. 5, 1948. Oil on composition board. 96 x 48. Collection of Alfonso Ossorio.”

  To me this painting seemed nice, but not anything out of the Pollock ordinary. In fact, the author did not even discuss it separately, and it wasn’t even chosen as a color plate.

  How could this be one of the world’s most expensive paintings?

  I read on about Pollock’s classical period with a little digression on page twenty-three about his first “numbered” painting. Number 1—that digression said it all.

  Digression on Number 1, 1948 (plate 32)

  I am ill today but I am not

  too ill. I am not ill at all.

  It is a perfect day, warm

  for winter, cold for fall.

  A fine day for seeing. I see

  ceramics, during lunch hour by

  Miro and I see the sea by Leger;

  Light, complicated Mezingers

  and a rude awakening by Brauner,

  a little table by Picasso, pink.

  I am tired today but I am not too

  tired. I am not tired at all.

  There is the Pollock, white, harm

  will not fall, his perfect hand

  and the many short voyages. They’ll

  never fence the silver range.

  Stars are out and there is sea

  enough beneat
h the glistening earth

  to bear me toward the future

  which is not so dark I see.

  I was unsure whether those words were from Pollock himself, or were they from O’Hara who was well known for his own poems? So, I reread the words, but I was still confused. My guess after the reread was that it was O’Hara’s poem, with Pollock in mind. It was strange and different, and I guess that was what Pollock was all about—strange and different.

  The sun was close to setting and I had attached one more extension cord to a large standing lamp in the living room and my HiFi and played some Coltrane to drown out the noise of the generator. Coltrane was one of the fathers of jazz. And jazz was the thing that seemed to get my mind off of all my troubles, and relax my spirit. I opened up a bottle of Heineken, finished the beer, and turned off the stereo to extinguish the light. Normally, pure quiet out in the Hamptons, but tonight there was the additional roar of Mr. G.

  After the beer, it was time to collapse. I walked to my bedroom, flashlight in hand and went over to my bed. I turned off the light and then reached underneath the bed. This was kind of a ritual out in the Hamptons. I felt for it. It was always there. A reminder.

  Chapter 30

  It was my bat! As I collapsed in bed, I drifted back to 1972.

  My alarm went off. I looked up at the clock--eight a.m.

  Within seconds, Mom and Dad and Sis arrived at my bed and sang “Happy Birthday.” I had fantasized about receiving a surprise from my parents for turning thirteen, namely, Yankee playoff tickets. But they did not make the playoffs.

  We lived in a modest Victorian house in a little North Shore town known as Sea Cliff. My mom told me it reminded her of San Francisco. Both locales had steep rolling hills with beautiful bay views. I went down for breakfast, and there was my favorite spread. Bagels and lox with all the trimmings. The trimmings included whitefish salad, tuna salad, and pickled herring.

  “Nice trimmings for a gentile,” I said to my dad.

  “We have acclimated well to their foods,” he joked. “Eat up quickly.”

  Dad was a modest jeweler who for many years had a small store, in Great Neck, called The Great Neck Jewelers. He worked there six days a week, and I helped him during the summers. This Saturday would be his sixth day of work. He had taken the day off, a rarity for my workaholic father. The Great Neck Jewelers was closed for my birthday, and he had a surprise in mind.

  “Eat up,” he said, “then get ready. We’re going to the city.”

  Within an hour all four of us hopped into a black 1969 Cadillac Seville, a statement of mild success, and headed into “the City.” The City to me was not just New York City with its five large boroughs -- it was that one majestic borough known as Manhattan. We parked at the Park and Lock, on Forty-Second Street, and took a taxi up to Fifty-Third off of Fifth Avenue, to an art museum. The MoMA.

  “Not my Momma?” I joked to my family.

  “Nope, MoMA”— my mother responded by emphasizing the long “O”—“MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art!” she said emphatically.

  Art was an important element of our Sea Cliff home. Every wall contained a well-framed poster from some famous museum. The posters were very realistic and included a Rembrandt self-portrait entitled “Portrait of the Artist at his Easel,” from the Louvre: a Renoir, “Two Young Girls at the Piano,” from the Met: and an Ansel Adams photograph, “Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park”. Mom, liked to paint and copied two Picassos: “The Seated Harlequin” and a somber reproduction of Picasso’s almost sickly looking “The Guitarist” from his Blue Period. The more cheerful “harlequin” sat on our mantel, whereas the starving guitarist was hung on a sidewall in our kitchen. The latter was perhaps strategically placed to encourage us (meaning me and my sister) to eat. Today, MoMA was featuring a temporary exhibit entitled “Contemporary Masters of the 20th Century.”

  We walked in and got our tickets. Inside we headed over to a very long horizontal painting that didn’t look like art at all. It looked like someone just dripped paint all around the painting. It was nine feet high by eighteen feet wide oil and enamel on canvas. But, as my father explained, this canvas was not painted in the usual fashion.

  “This is one of the great geniuses of our times, an artist by the name of Jackson Pollock. He didn’t paint with a brush. He would throw, splash, splatter, and drip paint of all colors on canvas. And his canvas was not up on a wall or an easel, but on his floor in his studio at the East End of Long Island. He would even piss and throw cigarette butts right on the canvas.” Dad enjoyed abstract art.

  The painting was entitled, One: Number 31, from 1950. Jackson Pollock.

  We walked through the rest of the exhibit. There was not a single Ansel Adams, but there were two Picassos. Each more bizarre than my mom’s reproductions. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” from 1907. The eyes were twisted, noses exaggerated and disfigured, and everything disproportionate-seeming. Another was from his Cubist period and was called “Girl Before a Mirror,” painted in 1932. The painting consisted of bright colors, with a geometric background and oval lines creating the girl’s face, breast, and belly. One large oval formed the mirror, and similar curved lines formed the mirrored image, but colored differently.

  After MoMA, my family took me to the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue near Fifty-fifth Street to celebrate. We ordered corned beef and pastrami on rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing. Washed it down with Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda. Then Dad pulled out a box from the duffle bag. I tore off the silver wrapping paper and opened the box. Inside was the most fabulous present I could have ever imagined. A Thurman Munson–signed Louisville Slugger bat.

  I awoke from the dream, felt under my bed and pulled out the bat. It was heavy—thirty-five inches long and weighed thirty-two ounces. Surprisingly, it had not browned despite the nearly forty years of time that had passed. It had the traditional Louisville branding. A brown oval, and inside it said: “Louisville Slugger 125, Hillerich and Bradsby Co., Made in U.S.A., Louisville, KY.” Across the bat it said, “Powerized,” with two lightning bolts. Sandy! I thought. Then I looked at the signature, in black—not a smudge, but clearly written in cursive, “Thurmon Munson No. 15.”

  Munson was not just any catcher—he was the team’s beloved captain who led the Yankees to three consecutive World Series appearances. And he was my hero. One who met an untimely death. Right after he received his pilot’s license, he crashed a small plane, a Cessna Citation, and perished! What a loss.

  As I thought back, Munson’s death was accidental. Pollock, on the other hand, also died in a crash. Not so accidental! Pollock was drunk, disturbed, and twisted. His mind was quite different than the more even keeled Munson’s. I put the bat back under the bed and started thinking about the Pollock I had seen, nearly forty years ago, at the MoMA. I could visualize the large horizontal painting that was more than double the size of the one I saw today. There were no bright colors. At least, how I remembered it; only blacks and whites swirling on raw canvas. Was it just a faded memory? Could I only remember in black and white? Or was there something much deeper and more somber in Pollock? The one I saw today seemed more somber still than the one I saw at the MoMA. Today’s Pollock was deeper in its intent, and also had more of a depth with respect to the buildup of the paint itself. Something was disturbing the artist. Yes, something was irking him. Was it his wife? Or his work? Or his own inner demons? His friends and inner circle? His art critics? The “art business”? The drinking and its effect on his brain? Or all of the above.

  “He did kill himself,” I said to myself. Yes, but he also killed someone else and his mistress, Ruth Kligman, was in the car! Pollock’s career was going down the tubes. Sound familiar? Pollock had lost his ability to paint. That’s a real killer! Was he suicidal? It was 1956 and Pollock was on the outs with his wife, who was away in Paris. He was carousing with two much younger women. Drinking and driving in East Hampton! Not a good combination, to say the least. He was heading around a c
urve on Spring-Fireplace Road, in his blue Oldsmobile convertible with the two hotties, arguing over a party, and accelerated off the road, hit a tree, and decapitated himself, also killing one of the gals. His mistress survived and wrote a book about their torrid affair, which I read between college graduation and medical school. Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, by Ruth Kligman. It was a great summer read, but now it hit too close to home. You know what I mean, with my marriage being fucked up and all. And the alcohol was just the least of it.

  One theory regarding another great artist, Vincent Van Gogh, involved the possibility that he ingested a local flower called foxglove, which contained the cardiac drug digitalis, to treat his epilepsy. This drug, in too high quantities, could disturb the mind and make everything look yellow like the many Van Gogh sunflower paintings. And foxglove was out in the Hamptons. Could Pollock have ingested foxglove? It was just a thought, and a very improbable one at that. It was more likely that he ingested other substances. Alcohol was his demon! He had abused alcohol most of his life and struggled with depression. Did the alcohol have a twisting effect on Pollock’s brain? It had to! Or was it sheer mental illness? He had received intensive psychotherapy. But how good is therapy, anyway? Everybody knew of his struggles with depression, but maybe he had more of the combo deal found in bipolar disorder, like so many other creative individuals. Was this mania or depression?

  There seemed to be black and brown and grey drizzled paint that swirled around and built a base in my neighbor’s Pollock. A base that looked more like a nest than anything else. On top of it there were thinly drizzled whites and yellows. The complete painting’s milieu was a cacophony of Pollock’s emotional physicality, plus his disturbed mental state. The end result—a Jackson Pollock masterpiece!