Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

I called up one of those rental places that delivers the car to your door. My taste in cars ran to the small, sporty side, but this one time, I went big, really big. Given that someone, probably a crazy fireman, had just tried to run my ass off the road, I would have rented a city bus if I could have. A Chevy Suburban was the best the rental company could do on short notice. That suited me fine. I met the woman who delivered it downstairs and didn’t bother going back up. I wanted to leave before Pam got there. She had keys and I would let her take care of me when I got back, but I needed to finish what I started.

Kid Charlemagne’s wasn’t exactly a bucket of blood, but not for lack of trying. In the seventies, the East Village was a mess, a perch from which junkies, artists, punks, and pretenders could both watch the world go down the toilet and go along for the ride. Kid Charlemagne’s wrecked and dingy decor was meant to capture a sense of those long-ago times when Joey Ramone and Jean-Michel Basquiat roamed these self-same streets. It failed miserably. To begin with, naming a faux punk restaurant-whatever the fuck that was supposed to be-after a Steely Dan song was less than genius. Steely Dan was almost as antithetical to the ethos of punk as Emerson, Lake and Palmer. And as if to make the whole thing even a bigger farce, Lady Gaga was playing when I walked in. God, it was so self-consciously dreadful that it almost seemed to be the point. It didn’t hurt that the hostess wore a purple and magenta Mohawk wig and was dressed in a ripped Sex Pistols T-shirt, studded leather pants, and red Chuck Taylors. Her lipstick was black, her eye shadow a thin rectangle of red powder that was splashed across both eyes and the bridge of her nose.

“Oi! What can I do for ya, rude boy?” she said in an affected low-rent British accent.

I was tempted to bust her balls about her not having been born until New Wave was old hat and hair bands had gone bald, but I didn’t figure on that making much of an impression. Instead, I asked to see the boss or the manager.

“Get lost, granddad.”

“Oi, Siouxsie, go play with the Banshees and stop wasting my time. Granddad is a copper,” I said in a far better accent than hers, showed her my badge, and quickly put it away.

Her eyes got big. “Sorry, I was just-”

I cut her off. “Forget it. Just take me to the office.”

The fake punk hostess kept apologizing-her accent far more Bronx than Brixton now-as we cut past the bar and through the dinning room. Strangely enough, the crowd was much hipper than the place merited. There were even some faces among them I recognized: the novelist who’d dissed Oprah, some painter I remembered from when I was looking for Sashi Bluntstone, and an actress who’d spent more time in rehab than on her syndicated superhero show. Christ, I even saw Lou Reed coming out of the men’s room. I was at a loss to explain it. I felt like the one person at a comedy club who didn’t get the joke.

“Give me a second, okay?” she said as we stopped outside an unmarked door on the other side of the restrooms. She knocked and the door buzzed open. Not smart, I thought, just buzzing someone in who might be armed with bad intentions and a gun. Then I noticed the closed circuit camera above me and to the right. She stuck her head in the office and then quickly back out. “The boss says for you to go right in.”

“Thanks,” I said, sliding past her, into the office, and closing the door behind me. When I turned around, I nearly shit.

“Hello, Moe,” he said, an embarrassed half-smile on his face. It was Nathan Martyr.

Nathan Martyr was a collapsed super nova: an artist who exploded on the New York art scene one day and then imploded in short order. After his fast fifteen minutes, he devoted his wretched life to making bad art, shooting heroin, and blogging about Sashi Bluntstone. Martyr was one of Sashi’s most ardent critics. It was on his blog that I found Photoshopped images of Sashi’s nude body being crucified, flayed, and tortured. In the end, Martyr’d had nothing to do with Sashi’s disappearance, but I loathed the asshole just the same. It was Martyr’s ex-cop doorman and toady who had tried, nearly successfully, to put me in the grave. If Pam hadn’t zapped the prick with her handy little Taser, my oncologist would have had one less patient to worry about now.

Still, Martyr seemed different somehow. He had been a twitchy bastard when we first met, but now his demeanor was calm, if not quite Zen-like. He’d been junkie-skinny back then. He’d put on a few pounds since and while he was by no means heavy, his face was fuller. He sported a tan. A tan! Jesus, talk about breaking the New York artist protocol. He was expensively and stylishly dressed. The last time I’d seen him, he smelled like he’d been wearing the same clothes for a week. Now he smelled of money.

“You clean these days?” I asked.

“Clean and healthy. I guess I owe some of that to you.”

“How’s that?”

“That thing with Sashi, it woke me up finally.”

“To what?”

“To the hole at the center of my being that I tried to fill in with hate and heroin,” he said, his voice cracked and brittle with emotion.

“Forgive me if I don’t get all choked up.”

“Hey, look, I understand that you’ve got no reason to care, but you asked.”

“I did. So, what happened?”

“Have you ever had something in your life that you thought defined you and you woke up one morning and it was gone, just totally gone and you couldn’t get it back?”

“Yeah, I know what that’s like.”

“That’s what happened to me. I was an artist one day and the next day I wasn’t and no matter how hard I tried to get my muse to dance with me again, she wouldn’t. I tried everything: all sorts of therapy, drinking-”

“-heroin.”

“That is how I got started, out of despair. I didn’t really hate Sashi Bluntstone. I hated myself.”

“Good to know I’m not alone.”

He laughed. “You are now. I don’t hate anyone anymore, least of all me. Just look at me. I’m healthy. I go to the gym every day. I eat well and I’ve got the muse back on my side.”

“Showing at the Brill Gallery again?”

“C’mon, Moe. You struck me as a bright guy when we met. You’re inside the art right now. You’re part of it today.”

“The restaurant?”

“Is it a restaurant?”

“Yes and no,” I said, catching on. “It’s staged.”

“Not staged, exactly, no. When I came out the other end of rehab, I had a vision. I saw how small and unambitious my earlier work had been, how by working in one medium at a time I was self-limiting. I also saw that the commerce of art is set up to fuck the artist. I produce a painting or a sculpture and depend on the largesse of some patron or decorator or collector or speculator to buy it. Then the gallery owner and the agent would feed on the money, leaving the scraps for me. Bullshit! I don’t know about you, Moe, but when I get fucked I want to enjoy it. Being an artist used to mean getting raped and then having to say thank you to the rapist. This place was my vision. It’s visual art, performance art, street art, participatory art. It’s living art that changes from second to second. It’s theater and chaos and it turns a big profit. Everything having to do with this place-from its seemingly inappropriate name to its kitsch and camp-was done on purpose with a purpose. Each decision was, at least to some degree, an artistic calculation. The only things left to chance are the people who walk through the doors to eat and drink.”

“Genius,” I said, not quite believing the word came out of my mouth. “You win both ways. The ones who get it get it, so it’s like knowing the secret handshake and being in an exclusive club. They get to enjoy the art and calculation. They get to feel superior, to laugh at the people who come here for a meal and are oblivious to the fact that they’re being messed about.”