Peter Heller - The Painter

I looked at him. I knew he would never ask the same question of a RISD grad. I had spent nights in jail because of men like this, men who condescended, who impugned. Getting in fights. I had paid fines, been on probation.

I said, “Is this show live? It is, right?”

Now it was his turn to blink. He didn’t understand, I could see it. But he held his smile.

“Yes, of course. That’s why we call it West Coast Live , ha!”

A flash of fear appeared in his eyes, there and gone, like the flank of a trout catching sunlight.

“Okay.” I nodded, in some kind of complicit agreement. I stuck out my hand, like for a handshake. He hesitated. He seemed relieved.

“Okay, a handshake,” he said. “Let’s shake on it. To the recklessness of the artist who is truly down out of the hills, and to the recklessness of live radio!”

He held out his long slender hand and I took it warmly like the fish that it was, and gripped it the way you grip a big brown to get the hook out, and then I squeezed. He chirped. Like a chipmunk. Then groaned. I squeezed.

He pulled away, then tugged, then he was half laughing half crying Owww! , okay okay uncle! , then he was kind of rearing back out of his stool and then he was howling and then I felt a bone snap, one of the knuckles in the first joint and he screamed, an unbridled uncensored live radio shriek, and in his panic he had knocked over the stool and two soundmen or whatever they were, stout guys in baggy jeans, shot across the floor and smothered me. They pulled me off and just half ushered, half shoved me out the double doors that led onto the bright atrium gallery and the wide steps. Nobody followed. No cops, nothing. I stood at the top of the steps with the blood pounding in my temples and looked down at the bustling crowd milling through the indoor market, the coffee shops and bookstores and restaurants, and felt the sun through the skylight warm on my shoulders and let the anger wash through me like warmed oil. A fine skim of anger on every working part until I didn’t feel it at all, except that I moved smoother, cleaner than I had in weeks.

I felt as if the ghost of my father were standing next to me, and he was laughing. Pop, I said out loud. Fuck the fuckers. Let’s go get drunk. And I bounded down the steps.

Why I remembered that now, driving through Española and onto the last stretch of highway into Santa Fe, I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was about to see Steve. For the first time in more than six months. I had been painting pretty well, through the move to Paonia, and had been shipping the canvases from Delta, a few a week, mostly small, so he had been mollified, then happy, then thrilled, and he stayed off my back. The pictures were selling. I painted, sent off the canvases, didn’t think of Steve much. But now I did. Driving into the outskirts of Santa Fe and onto St. Francis Drive and down the long hill with the view of the town spreading its pink adobes under the piñon hills, driving like an arrow straight toward the gallery—now I did. Think of him and remember that fucked up and wonderful scene on the pier after which he called me and screamed into my ear, You crazy motherfucker. You total embarrassment to the Taos School, whatever the hell that is, you blight on the community of artists of the American Southwest, you—you—you —stammering, spitting I’m sure all over his phone— you goddamn loose cannon, you—you—can dress him up but better not take him out—goddamn it, you basically redneck fucking freak—I LOVE YOU!

He loved me because all of San Francisco sat up and took notice. All of California. All of the Internet and the news channels and then the networks and CNN. They YouTubed and Twittered and the interviewer’s howl went viral. They replayed the scene on nightly news and I was a sensation and suddenly you couldn’t find a Jim Stegner painting anywhere, couldn’t touch one for less than five figures. I was a hero. Apparently it wasn’t only me who had been offended by the condescending, snotty tone of the man’s questions. It was class warfare, it was authentic, hardscrabble, bootstrap Truth vs. entitled, pedigreed, monopolizing bullshit. It was everything wrong with the art world, with the whole goddamn society for that matter, exposed in a raw scream. People loved it. They loved me. They bought my paintings. Steve was putty. It was right before I met Cristine and when she listened to the interview later she laughed out loud, and I could see that she was impressed: it was something she would do.

I pulled right up to the gallery two blocks off the plaza in Santa Fe. Didn’t bother to drive through the alley to the parking lot behind, just backed into a meter space in front and walked in. Because it was one p.m. on a weekday and the meter people take their lunch at one. They are mostly Jimenezes and their cousins and I know two of them. The Stephen Lily Gallery squeezed between a J.Crew and the Fazil, a very high end gallery that focuses on Edgy Contemporary, which mostly means erotic and cruel. One whole wall of the Fazil is always taken up with Ransteen’s painstakingly detailed engravings of torture. They are in the de Fereal School of naked and splayed girls being flayed alive by Inquisition machines and are rendered in the most fawning detail. The pictures are smallish, because they can accomplish what they are after in a small space and there is something alluring and creepy about the implied discretion of such scenes in small frames. My private collection, come this way . They must be very popular because they go for shameful prices. Also, boasted Ignatius Fazil with a little ruffle of his feathers, each one takes at least a hundred hours. Wow! I said. No shit. He knew he was talking to the slapdash king.

I walked into the front room of the Stephen Lily Gallery. Carla was hanging my Ducks in Heat . Carla stood on a small stool and she half turned from the wall and her mouth rounded into a hollow O, and her eyebrows hit the roof, and I couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh with joy or scream in terror. She probably didn’t know herself. This seemed to be my present effect. But anyway she was mute. She bent down and I kissed her on the cheek and told her that there were two new paintings in the back of the truck. Steve was standing in front of a Max Ramirez, one of his series of Demolition Derbies, a folky Mora County scene of partying Chicanos under the summer lights—a fiesta in bullfight style but instead of bulls there were colorful-cars-destroying-each-other kind of thing. I liked them. He, Steve, was interpreting the painting for a well heeled older man in a navy blazer and a bow tie. Very Ivy League maybe, but the man wore lizard cowboy boots which were disconcerting. Steve glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the door, the electronic chime, the sound of maybe money, and the color rose instantly into his boyish cleanshaven face, he looked apoplectic and relieved at the same time. This was fun. I had never ignited such powerful opposing emotions.

Steve’s whole head was beefsteak red. Beefsteak tomato red. He gulped like a fish in air. He excused himself from Boots. He must have been beside himself because he almost shouted as he left the man, “I actually adore that painting. I actually won’t sell it unless I get a written guarantee that it will hang where lots and lots of people will see it!” It was an asinine thing to say, kind of a violation of Gallery Salesman 101 First Rule: “Remember you are not a car salesman. You are an arbiter of popular culture, a High Priest, your value and the value of your work depends upon an unassailable disregard as to whether anyone ever actually buys the work or not.” Gallery owners, the good ones, seem to float magically above the trenches of commerce, and if they are among the best they are also authentic in their absolute love of the work and of their artists, and their clients grow to trust that love. Steve was one of the great ones, which is the only way I could have stuck with him all these years, and I never doubted his true and real passion, his love for me, but he had just shown a breakdown in his bedside manner and I thought it was hilarious.