Bruce Bauman: Broken Sleep

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I quite liked your ARTillery show.” That was my first solo show from a year before.

“Really?” I sounded too excited. “I got the idea from this military museum in Riverhead. When I was a girl, my dad and I would drop by and I played with the tanks and jeeps and all kinds of phallic equipment on the grounds.”

“I liked the way the humor underlined the seriousness. The way you symbolized how the establishment keeps the war game going and how you manipulated toy tanks, guns, and bombs into art objects. I especially liked the ‘lamps’ and ‘dildos.’ I came to one of your performances with the cannons.”

“Thank you. Only I suppose that means you didn’t like yesterday’s um … performance.”

“I support euthanasia in its place, but this represents nihilistic flimflam. Someone died.”

“He wanted to. I loved Art. He was very sick. I would never have done it otherwise.”

“Maybe.” His fists slowly unclenched as he talked. “Or maybe it’s money for you and that vampire Horrwich and Murray Gibbon, and for your mutual fame. The world is undergoing a revolution because it has to, or we are doomed to a virulent extinction. These people here”—his eyes indicted them—“with a few exceptions, are a bunch of monomaniacal bullshit artists.” He crunched his lips together. “And that sucks. That art should be dead .”

His abject negativity stunned me. Everyone else had been so enthusiastic. Even the ones who were repulsed had found some merit to it, or so they claimed to my face. Some were jealous. I expected that.

“I want to change the world,” he continued. “Irony without empathy is empty and juvenile. Art is not dead. Real art is alive.” He sounded so sure of himself. I leaned over and inhaled. He backed away. Amid all the pot and cigarette smoke and cooking fish coagulating into a hardened plume of nauseating odors, I inhaled his essence, his soulsmell.

“You inhale like wet greasewood, it’s the best smell in the world.”

“What, I’m a clown to you? Well, yeah, I guess I am.”

The band had turned up the decibel level to around twelve, and he thought I’d said “greasepaint.” I corrected him and said that I could taste his purity in my nose and throat.

He asked, “What do you smell like?” He’s the only one whoever turned it on me. The only one. Dr. Barnard Ruggles, my favorite shrink here at Collier Layne, tried to do it in the session after I informed him he reeked of little shards of rancid, mayonnaisy potatoes marinated in mothballs. Only then, as I told him, it was too late.

“I am half-burned, still smoldering autumn leaves left to wilt in the rain.”

“Is that good or not?”

“It’s not like the fresh, hopeful smell of leaves just after a cleansing rain but the odor of nature unnurtured and abandoned. Abandoned.”

He squinted and then his eyes widened behind his glasses, unsure of what to make of me. Urso, elbowing his way back between us, started pecking away again. “So Brockton, you making time with my fuck, are ya? Eat me or you’ll get burned.”

“Oh, shit,” I muttered. This shy not-so-shy guy was Nathaniel Brockton, Ivy Leaguer, Vietnam vet — turned — counterculture icon with the publication of his novel Tag, You’re $#it . His narrator, Bohemian Scofflaw, an aspiring anarchist who got kicked out of college, was drafted and sent to a futuristic land resembling Vietnam, where Scofflaw and his cohorts’ battle cry was, “Eat fire and burn, motherfucker,” as they savaged village after village. The phrase became a campus rallying cry.

Damn, did I feel stupid — and I didn’t feel stupid often.

I tried to recover by being so unnaturally obsequiouasskissy—“Oh I’m so, so — I love your—” Duchamp and his entourage, making their histrionic entrance, pushed into the room. Nathaniel coughed as if a brackish odor had oozed into Max’s, waved bye-bye, shrugged, and receded into the crowd. Suddenly, I felt so lonely. As if my atoms had deflected the atoms of everyone else in the room so we couldn’t connect. I found Horrwich in the bathroom getting sucked off underneath the graffiti that read FAME IS THE BLOW JOB OF THE WAR HOLES . I felt so unhinged. Startled, I felt Duchamp standing right beside me. Our eye contact said, “Let’s fuck,” and the game was on. “Ah, ma petite artiste , you are so vivacious looking tonight.” I’m not sure what happened next. This is where my memories mishmash. Maybe it’s repression. Maybe it was the joy drugs or the Collier Layne psychotropic shakes or their demonic hot wire. Maybe a spell. Probably all of them.

We ended up at his studio on 11th Street. He immediately disappeared into the bathroom and then waltzed out dressed in nothing but a woman’s wig, his face a mask of lipstick and rouge. It was laugh-out-loud outrageous — this old man as drag crone. His alter ego was Rrose Sélavy and I’d seen photos of him by Man Ray — pretty sexy, actually — as a woman. He grabbed my hand and tugged me into an enclosed room. He began to undress me and almost forced me onto a tarp on the floor next to a sculpture of a woman and got on top of me. The old farceur left me decidedly unravished.

“Look.” He rolled over and flicked on a single overhead lightbulb while I lay there, naked. “You cannot tell anyone you see this, especially Lez-lie. He would be so jalous . I am doing interviews with him, but I have not given him the privilege of a viewing.” My eyes focused on the nude woman. My body went limp. I started to shiver and sweat, and I said shakily, “She looks like Greta Garbo.”

A tiny leer crawled onto his thin lips. “A little this. A little that. A little her.”

“Did you know her?”

“But of course. We meet during the war at the apartment of the genial art dealer Betty Parsons. Have you been introduced to Betty?” I shook my head. “Ask Lez-lie. She would just want to eat you.”

“What about Garbo?”

“I see her often for the few months she says she is interested in serious art. She is not serious. Almost never after that.”

“What else can you tell me about her?”

“Nothing. You should dress and go.” An aggrieved scowl erupted and his features became exaggerated, as if to say, I had you, now get the hell out of here, you inconsequential putain . Normally, I would’ve dismissed him with my no, — I-had-you, — you-ancient-fart gaze. I couldn’t. I didn’t understand why he’d become so mean. I should have smelled it, but my senses were blocked. I asked, almost pleaded, “Why did you want to show me that? Because I look so much like her?”

He answered with an unsuppressed belch. “You must leave this room. I must work.” I stared one more time at the body that became his masterpiece Étant donnés . He gave me a push and closed the door. I dressed in the main room. I couldn’t bear to go to Horrwich’s right then, so I fetaled up on the couch and fell asleep. When I awoke, Duchamp and some other geezer sat at a table playing chess. Duchamp never even glanced up from the chessboard. He merely ordered, “Silence, please.” I left.

I thought about going to Greta’s and standing outside her window and screaming, “Why did you give me up?” Her melancholic Scandinavian heaviness, that forlorn face exhausted me. No. I wouldn’t succumb to groveling for my birthright.

I took a taxi to the Port Authority and bought a ticket for the next bus to Greenport. While waiting, I realized I couldn’t handle the Orient Point crowd. They might’ve stoned me. They would blame me for Art’s death. Suddenly everything about my childhood in Orient haunted me. It wasn’t simply the vision of Art’s disembodied corporeal being. I felt my baby churning and gasping and dying again inside my belly. I left the station. I couldn’t go back to Orient. I took a cab to Horrwich’s loft. He never asked where I’d spent the night.