Peter Carey - Theft - A Love Story

This was when I first noticed the GENERAL LAWLESSNESS pedestrians disobeyed the DON'T WALK sign on Third Street and the so-called AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS. The Melbourne cops would have pulled the SCOFFLAWS back onto the footpath and given them a loud lecture on their mental health. The police on Third Street gave not a TINKER'S FART, to coin a phrase. They carried their big batties down the street—they should have used a wheelbarrow—and I was still a free man when Olivier came out of the Bazaar with a brand-new folding chair beneath his arm it was thirteen dollars black and shiny as a Mercedes Benz. Olivier put his hand around my shoulder then he took me off to show me why I should be very happy with my life.

This is your town, old boy.

Olivier's hives were calmer since the HYDROCORTISONE only the big welt on his neck hidden by the turned-up collar of his IMPORTED COAT. He was very handsome, a Wimbledon ace returning to the back line, loose in the knees, his head hung down in response to the applause.

Olivier now taught me to never call the Avenue of the Americas anything but Sixth Avenue. Everyone would know I was a New Yorker straightaway. Once this was set in concrete we walked for a while and then turned right into Bedford Street where I learned I could sit outside the laundromat without a permit.

Soon we met a man called Jerry who had a hoarse voice and a handkerchief around his head. Jerry said I could come and bring my chair there any time I liked. He said he always wanted to go to Australia. I said it was a very nice country but do not try sitting in the street without a permit.

After this I sat on Sullivan Street between Prince and Spring.

Then I sat on Chambers Street.

Old boy, you are a genius at this sort of thing.

Finally I sat on Mercer Street below the artist's loft Butcher had stolen from the NEW SOUTH WALES GOVERNMENT. I rang the bell but no-one was home. Either that or my brother was playing possum.

Olivier now revealed he had to go off to do business with Marlene elsewhere in the city.

I asked would he destroy her.

This did not make him laugh this time. He stared at me very hard and said he would now teach me how to get from Mercer Street to the Bicker Club by myself.

I apologised for what I said.

Hugh, he said, you're a great man. You're wonderful.

But I feared I could not reach the Bicker Club unaided. I had sparks in my long muscles and a click in my head like a catching latch in need of oil.

Olivier gave me a striped capsule which I swallowed without water. Come old fellow, he said, you're a New Yorker now. He took out a notebook and drew me a map. Like this: See old chum, he said. Nothing could be simpler.

The pill was not working.

If you get lost, said Olivier, you get in a cab and say take me to Gramercy Park.

I said I would not know what to pay.

Give them ten dollars, he said. Say keep the change.

Then he gave me a roll of notes with a rubber band around them.

When he hailed a cab I folded my chair, but he slammed the door, save us, the taxi drove away. I chased after the tail lights, but it would not stop. I ran back down to the apartment but my brother would not hear the bell, poor puppy, so I ran to the other end of Mercer Street, all the way to Canal Street where I dented my chair by accident against the metal pole. Tail-lights receding in the night.

I forgot the name of GRAMERCY.

At Houston Street, I got it back.

Gramercy, Gramercy, Gramercy.

Poor puppy no-one heard him bark. I was sweaty, smelling worse than carpet. On Houston Street three taxis tried to run me down. The fourth one stopped.

Gramercy Park, I said.

Which part, he asked. I think he was a Chinaman.

Any part.

As he was a Chinaman, I held the map in my hand to make sure he would know the way but he set off in another direction and in the end he slid shut his window so I could not speak to him.

I was doubtless smelling very WOOFY by the time I looked out the window and saw, by chance, Olivier standing beneath the portico of the Bicker Club.

Stop, I said. I gave twenty dollars. Keep the change.

Olivier now wanted me to walk back to Mercer Street. I asked him what game he thought he was playing. He was my friend and I did not wish to damage him but he fell down.

Olivier then picked up my Dekko Fastback and gave it to Jeavons. Jeavons brushed down the Italian coat. Olivier drew on his gloves.

He said Jeavons should make me a chicken sandwich and bring me a beer in my room.

I asked him how he felt.

Never better, he said. Never better old chum.

As a result of jet-lag, I began crying on the stairs.

I have never been able to look at paintings with another human being—everyone else too superficial, too solemn, too impatient, too slow. But now Marlene Leibovitz and I moved around MoMA like partners in a waltz. She was the angel. I was the pig, drunk, endlessly enquiring, staring at Cezanne's Lestaque, finally understanding—at my age—that Braque had no sense of humour, getting myself in a tussle with a fucking fourteen-yearold who was willfully obstructing my view of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

"Shoosh," said Marlene. "Leave him. He's a baby."

My competitor was a tall pimply boy with a safety pin in his tiny girly ear. I will not say I hated him exactly, but it broke my heart, to think how it might be to stand inside his stinky shoes, to know this masterpiece at fourteen years of age, or argue with it, and do it all as easily as I had once walked along the dull footpath from the shop, up Gell Street, to the sale yards on Lerderderg Street.

"I know," she said, although I had not spoken, and for this alone I would have worshipped her, but my God—the shape of her face, the bones, the slightly narrowed eyes, the taut lovely funny upper lip.

"How did you shrink the Leibovitz?"

She kissed me in reply.

Did I like New York? I loved her. If she had been with me every day, I doubt I would have picked up the ink sticks, but the business of the Leibovitz dragged on. So when my genius little thief went out like a pooka playing tricks, I put on my twentydollar coat and took my ink sticks and sketchpad, first down the block onto Canal Street, then on to Chinatown, East Broadway, then the deep charcoal shadows beneath the Manhattan Bridge, and from there to an awful place beneath the FDR at 21st Street, the undercarriage of a crashed machine, abandoned, scabs of rust and concrete falling as I worked.

There were many other places I might have gone to draw, but I did not really question why I drifted further and further from the streets and places I celebrated with Marlene. Now it's clear enough to me—the city scared the shit out of my small-town soul, and it was this that pushed me on and on, a ridiculous effort to somehow conquer, to "get on top of it", a quixotic quest that finally took me out to Tremont on the D train where I became, it seems, the only human figure on all that cruel Cross Bronx Expressway. And it was here that the 48th Precinct coppers found me, just before the George Washington Bridge itself, just at the moment where the huge Macks and Kenilworths shift down a gear before descending into the storming bolted belly of the beast itself.

"Get in the fucking car you fucking fuck," is what the nice policeman said.

As Milton Hesse later told me, I was lucky they did not take me to Bellevue rather than the subway station. I never showed Milt the drawings, but there seems little doubt that they would not have saved me from Bellevue for they were black and dense as soot on a hurricane lamp, a rubbed and broken carapace of dark around the struggling light. These works are very bloody good, but they would have been so much less if I had bought the "right" materials. As it was, the notebook pages were too small, the paper too fragile for my constant erasures and, on more than one occasion, I wore clear through the stressed-out surface. As is true so often, it was the limitation of the materials that made the art, and they are so filled with a wild ugly sort of struggle which was only made bigger when, finally on Mercer Street, I patched A over B, and joined A to C, and so on. Anticipating this last stage I had rode the train down to the Village, my hands as black as a coal miner's, eyes cold and mad in my overactive face.