Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“He seems nice,” I said.

“I mean the Motherfuckers,” she said. “They were a political street gang. Late sixties. They went around pretending to assassinate people with toy guns. I think they ‘killed’ Didier de Louridier, who’s coming tonight. That should be interesting. Eventually they put away the toy guns and stabbed a landlord. It was all so lurid and we wouldn’t even know about it except the father, Jack Model, was a friend of Stanley’s, a janitor who worked around the art department at Cooper Union when Stanley was teaching there. The two of them became close. Stanley hated academics and said Model was the only person he could relate to at Cooper, this blue-collar guy from Staten Island who lived on vodka and cigarettes. The darkest phase of Burdmoore’s wasn’t this ‘Motherfucker’ business but when he gave up being an anarchist tough and started making papier-mâché sculptures. Burdmoore got it in his head, in the wake of his landlord-stabbing phase, that art would put him in contact with some… thing, some kind of emanation. He had no permanent residence — he was on the lam, for all we knew. Stanley let him keep his art supplies and a bedroll here, gave him a small work space, and we tried to suffer through the phase, this art-as-transcendence crap. He’d work furiously on these ugly figurative constructions, and make us listen to his confused rants about the female body and Mother Earth. Shaping crude forms and talking about art moving up the thigh of Mother Earth. Art ‘parting her labia’ and so forth. It was a real regression for someone whose father had pushed a mop, worked like an animal in hopes his son might get a high school degree, maybe join the police force. Instead, he was a dropout, and with such tacky ideas about art.”

Gloria had a way of insisting that I track her comments, agree with them, as she spoke. I nodded in assent as she went on about how bad art could not save itself and could not be saved, as she spooned sauces, all of them the same ocher-orange color, into bowls. Helen Hellenberger, just arriving, peeked her head into the kitchen and blew an air kiss to Gloria. Helen looked around the kitchen, passing over me as if I were Gloria’s assistant, hired to help out for the night, and then left the room, to chat with the men.

As Gloria went on about Burdmoore and bad art, I nodded and privately hoped I was on the side of good art. I was not making papier-mâché, obviously. Or declarations about parting labia. And I was safe in another essential way: I had not put myself out there yet. I could delay it until I knew for certain that what I was doing was good. Until I knew I was doing the right thing. The next thing would be this Valera project. It was half art and half life, and from there, I felt, something would emerge.

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste. She said the Motherfuckers’ actions were interesting, in the context of the dreadful hippies of that era. The Motherfuckers were about anger and drugs and sex, and what a relief that was, Gloria said, compared to the love-everyone tyranny of the hippies.

As we all took our places at the table, Sandro came over to kiss me, say hi, because he was at the other end, next to Didier de Louridier, victim of the Motherfuckers. I didn’t mind being seated so far from him, although sometimes Sandro would speak later to whomever I’d been next to. “So-and-so said you were very quiet.” As if I had some duty — to Sandro — that required me to be more assertive, to entertain his friends. So-and-so talked nonstop, I’d say, and he’d laugh. They all talked nonstop. That is, if you didn’t intervene. They were accustomed to being interrupted. Whoever was hungriest to speak, spoke. I wasn’t hungry in that same way. I was hungry to listen. Sandro said I was his little green-eyed cat at these parties. A cat studying mice, he said, and I said it was more like a cat among dogs, half-terrified. “You shouldn’t be,” he said. “You always have something interesting to say, but you withhold it. The only one besides me who knows you,” he said, “is Ronnie.” Which sent a curious wave through me. I wanted to believe it was true that Ronnie knew me.

We were at a massive, outdoor-use picnic table with ancient-looking messages knifed into its top. “Kilroy was here” and “eat me” and “fuck” and “fuk.” Its gouged surface was lacquered over in glossy black. The Kastles had purchased it from P.S. 130 in Chinatown, which, Gloria announced somewhat triumphantly, was selling everything but the smoke alarms to keep from closing down.

Burdmoore turned to me. “That’s who you’re here with?” He gestured in Sandro’s direction.

I said yes.

“What are you, eighteen years old?”

“No,” I said, laughing. “Twenty-three.”

He was looking at Sandro and about to say something more when Gloria started in about the purchase of the table, how they’d found someone to strip it and lacquer it, and how it had to be lifted up the elevator shaft, end-on, with ropes and pulleys. Burdmoore concentrated on the chicken tandoori, the problem of its sauce in his beard.

“Enough about the fucking table,” Stanley said.

He and Gloria squared off in lowered voices. As they argued, Gloria got up and went to a sideboard and I had the terrible thought that she was going to pick up Sandro’s cap-and-ball pistol and point it at Stanley. But she retrieved a tea towel and a bowl of water and set these in front of Burdmoore so he could clean his beard.

Sandro raised his glass and said he wanted to make a toast. He gazed warmly at me across the table, his smile punctuated by dimples, and I thought perhaps he was going to toast me, my ride across the salt flats.

“To Helen,” he said, “and to the future, our future. Let’s hope it’s a long one.”

As I drank to Helen, I understood that her elegant Greek air, like Gloria’s stern air, was not an attack on me. The important thing was to be patient. To not make enemies. I would even try to befriend Helen, I thought.

The common table conversation had lulled and people were breaking off into smaller groups. Burdmoore and I glanced at each other awkwardly. Each time I thought we’d speak, he smiled in a stunned or stoned way, nodded enthusiastically, and said nothing. I heard Ronnie tell someone that if you weren’t sure where the camera was focused in an image you were looking at, as a general rule you could assume it was the crotch. A man named John Dogg was talking to Helen about his art, too excited to tone down his sales pitch. Only a certain kind of pushiness works in the art world. Not the straight-ahead, pile-driving kind, which was the method John Dogg was using.

“Malevich made the white paintings,” he said in a loud voice. “And then we had Robert Ryman. Ryman making them, too, more academic and provisional than Malevich, the religion subtracted from the facture. Little test canvases of white, like bandages over nothing. White on white. Now what I do is I make white films . Just light. Pure light, and what’s fascinating is—”

He didn’t seem to notice that Helen’s face had gone blank, as if she’d been summoned elsewhere but had left an impassive mask behind, for his self-promotion to bounce off. John Dogg pressed on, hoping to recapture her attention. It wasn’t going to work. But I admired how convinced he was that his work was good, good enough to show to her, and he simply needed to get it seen. As if that were the main stumbling block, and not the problem of making art, the problem of believing in it.

“They made the white paintings. I make the white films. I’ve been rather protective of the conditions of display but I’m coming around to the idea of making my work more accessible. In fact, I’m open to showing them to you. I’m enormously busy but I could make time. I could bring the reels by the gallery. No projector? Well, I could bring a projector. Oh, I see. Or perhaps to your residence, then. I’m not opposed to the idea of making a visit to your home. Why don’t we say tomorrow?”