Peter Heller - The Painter

His instincts and what he was supposed to do were now at war and the crow was weighing in. I felt a little sorry for the horse.

I poured another ginger ale and thought about putting a coal train in the desert beneath the cliff but knew that was just a self-destructive impulse. It would add too many elements, complicate the simple proposition between the horse and the crow. I had fucked up all my life, especially when things were going well, going smoothly with a lot of clean light in the picture, but I had fucked up very few paintings. I seemed to always know just where to stop, I was not a painting wrecker at the end like a few other good painters I know.

Looking at the painting, I wasn’t sure the crow was doing the horse a favor. One of the things I had read about crows somewhere is that they are much smarter than their station in life. I mean, unlike other birds, it takes them about two hours every day to secure enough food to survive and the rest is play time, electives. They are so clever and they get easily bored. I had read about crows in California that ate the eyes out of baby seals and sea lions, for fun mostly. Because they could. Seemed more like something a person would do. I imagined Dugar, in the Big Sur landscape of his dreams, witnessing such a thing. So crows must spend a lot of the day wondering what they are supposed to do now, what they are here for, and that seemed like a cruel existential dilemma for anyone who didn’t have TV. It made me look at the painting in a different light: that the crow was more mischievous than he seemed at first. He was handing off this idea of choice to the horse the way the serpent handed off the apple. Poor horse. It was leap and die or live and be haunted by the ability to choose. Which when I think about it, might be one definition of consciousness. I pitied just about everybody.

I lay down on the big bed. Flat on my back. Smelled like starch. The cover was starch white. Like lying down in a snowstorm. Which is another way to give up all choice is what I’ve heard. Once my doctor friend in Taos recommended it to me as a way to kill myself if it ever came to that. He was trying to be helpful. Mitchell Gershwin is a very good ER doctor and probably a better fly fisherman. A devout Buddhist with a good sense of humor and a crazy great poet wife. I met him when I came in late one night with a small knife gash on my forehead. Don’t ask—I used to get a fair share of those. He sewed me up and he bought a bunch of my paintings and we fished together sometimes in the Lower Box. Another friend of ours, a sculptor named Duff, was dying badly of pancreatic cancer and I told Mitchell that I would just shoot myself if it came to that, and he said, “Hey, don’t leave a goddamn mess for your friends, just wait for a fine cold clear winter day and have a few drinks and take a shower and go out and stand wet in the wind or lie down in the snow. You’ll chatter for a few minutes and then you’ll go numb and warm and it’s really peaceful.”

I thought about that. I said, “What if it’s summer?”

“Use the gun. Stand in a pond.”

Never thought of that. Standing in a pond. I loved how he didn’t even hesitate and I chalked it up to that acceptance thing Buddhists do, the way they are supposed to look at everything straight on, but I know he was just a great guy and he would have said that even if he were a Baptist. Funny, but I couldn’t help thinking of the crappies and sunfish in the pond eating my brains.

I lay on the bed and I wasn’t sleepy. I was exhausted to the bone but not sleepy and didn’t feel a bit like offing myself, so I got up and shrugged on my barn coat and went out onto Don Gaspar Avenue.

Just then I wished it were winter. Winter nights in the mountain towns of northern New Mexico can have a stillness like nowhere else. I craved that right now. The stars like rivets, the air cold and absolutely motionless, the snowbanks like stone. I would not have it, not tonight.

Early fall here is full of movement. Everything is shaking off a summer languor. Harvest, tourists, storms, the leaves that never rest, gusts from the southwest that shudder the windows. It was night when I crossed the wide porch of the hotel and stepped onto the sidewalk. And breezy. I breathed it. It felt good and I felt drunk. Not woozy anymore but leery of time: what time was it? Not what it was supposed to be. And: fuck it. I don’t care if it is yesterday or next year. Walk. Tighten your cap down on your head and walk.

It can be a dangerous place to be, for me. Displaced in time. I am not fully responsible for the now because the now has repudiated me, and one way to get its attention and to nail myself back into the moment is to crash a truck into an embankment or knock some condescending asshole’s head against the bar. Like that.

So I knew myself well enough not to drive and not to go into a bar. I walked up into the plaza. Music spilled from the balcony of the Marble Brewery. I walked under the covered gallery where the Navajo sat on the ground along the wall in daytime and showed their silver jewelry to the tourists, and now there were two Indians curled up asleep in a pile of quilts on top of their jewelry boxes. Couldn’t tell man or woman, shocks of long black hair and blanket. The cops left certain families alone and were merciless with others. Some ancient feuds. The breeze blew leaves out of the few big cottonwoods and chased them up the street.

I walked up to the dark cathedral and followed the high adobe wall down to Alameda. At Paseo I turned south into the wind, and at a bronze sculpture of two dancing sheep, I turned left up Canyon Road. Did I just want to get mad? Maybe. Now it would be solid art galleries both sides for the next quarter mile. A half dozen restaurants but otherwise a relentless gauntlet of art. Maybe I thought it would make me mad enough to shake the weird vertigo I was feeling. Because most of this art was made with brazen pander. The sight of one blue coyote howling at a blood moon was enough to arouse my pity. The sight of a dozen made me furious. Same with fall landscapes that include an adobe house with smoke coming out of the chimney and a red 1935 International pickup parked in the drive. Strings of red chilies hanging from the porch. I didn’t get it. Why didn’t these people just deal drugs or something? They could make more money with less work. Once I went into a gallery with one of these nostalgic cartoons in the window and found a young clerk who wouldn’t know who I was and asked about the picture with the house and the truck. She was very excited and tried to sell it to me. Apparently one of the most wildly popular artists in the Southwest. Value increasing by the week. I didn’t know. I went home and researched the artist and found out he was a former stockbroker from Connecticut who had changed his name from Wiggins to Garcia Vega. Well. Wasn’t Gauguin a stockbroker first? Didn’t matter. Once you got to the work it wasn’t supposed to matter, and I guess a painting was a painting and I suppose I might have loved Wiggins/Garcia Vega’s pictures if they had been any good. Or even just a little brave.

I walked, breathed. Why was I so hung up on anyone being brave? So what if 90 percent of artists, or people for that matter, were meek? Just wanting to get through the day without getting yelled at or run over? Just have a good meal. Most people wanted to do one thing today with a small portion of pleasure like maybe weed the garden and pick tomatoes, or make love to a spouse, or watch a favorite TV show. Maybe they wanted to sell a painting. So what? What did it matter to me?

In Penstemon’s there were blocks of color bisected by strips and geometries of other hues a la Diebenkorn but without the merciless compression that led somehow to freedom. I dug in my pockets and found an old pouch of cigarillos and, thank God, a lighter. I stepped into a doorway and lit up. Better. The smoke ran into my head and shirred along the veins. In Mariel’s there were eagles made from bone and feather and tin milagros, the little stamped metal devotional charms shaped like trucks, legs, houses, cars. They were ragged, Catholic looking birds, maybe good at praying but not too good at flying. And life size bronzes of mountain lions, lynxes, curled fawns out front. I could imagine the conversations between them in the middle of the night when no one was looking. The gallery was perfect for the ski chalet crowd that needed something indoors and outdoors, something a touch folky but ironic as well as something a little awesome but safe like a bronze cougar who will never tear your throat out.