Unknown - The Genius

Without Victor Cracke, I stood alone in the vast white space, watching the pages of the drawings billow gently. I took off my shirt, bundled it behind my head, and laid down on the floor in front of the nearest canvas, feeling like a child confronting the ocean for the first time, overcome by its vastness and its melancholy.

I LIKE TO ORGANIZE MY LIFE in five-year fragments, give or take. My mother died when I was five. When I turned eleven my father, tired of listening to me, sent me off to boarding school. Then came about five years of getting kicked out of various educational institutions across the globe. Let me see if I can remember the correct order: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Brussels, Florida, Connecticut again, Berlin, Vermont, and Oregon. By the time I got back to New York I knew how to say dime bag and blow-job in several dialects of American English, as well as Turkish, German, French, and Russian.

When I turned sixteen, a despairing Tony Wexler—he, rather than my father, had been the one managing my woes—phoned my half-sister, Amelia, and begged her to put me up for a while.

Amelia and I had never been close. She lives in London, where she has been since her mother and my father divorced in 1957; that also gives you an idea of the generation gap separating us. I saw her once in a very rare while—at my own mother’s funeral, for instance. Certainly I had done little to endear myself to her. I regarded all three of my half-siblings not as peers but shadowy semiparental figures not to be trusted. My half-brothers, who I saw a least a few times a month, are brownnosers extraordinaire, and at the time I had no reason to believe that Amelia would be any different. I set out for London with a hard, hard heart.

To everyone’s astonishment—not least my own—I thrived. The wetness of English weather aligned with my adolescent sense of impending doom, and the dryness of English humor made more sense to me than the rampant goofiness of American pop culture. At school I managed not to get expelled, and with private tutoring I managed to graduate. I made some of my best friends during those years, friends I still keep in touch with and see whenever I travel abroad for work—which I do more often than I need to, just to catch up. In certain ways I feel like my real life is still over there.

It was Amelia who first stoked my interest in art. Her husband is a lord, and while he spends his time drafting legislation in defense of fox hunting, she spends his money in support of radical aesthetics. During my time abroad she took me to openings and parties at the Tate; I was the charming younger brother, the tousle-haired, devil-may-care Yank. I loved the pageantry, the snobbery, the love and loathing that infused every conversation. People cared—or seemed to, anyway, which is what mattered to me at that age. After living with my father, legendary for his stoniness, my time in London felt like a beautiful, melodramatic dream.

Amelia taught me how to see not through my eyes but through the eyes of the artist, how to accept a piece on its own terms, a skill that enabled me both to understand contemporary art and to explain it to others. With her guidance I used my own savings—money that accrued to me from my mother’s bequest when I turned eighteen—to buy my first piece, a Cy Twombly drawing that I took with me when I returned to the United States to attend Harvard, where I lived in a dormitory that had been occupied by my half-brothers and my father and my grandfather and great-uncles before me, and that made people laugh when they learned my name. You live in Muller Hall?

Without Amelia standing guard, I slipped back into my old ways. My next five-year period consisted of me drinking vodka, breathing cocaine, having sex, taking enforced “time off,” and flunking out.

You have no idea how difficult it is to flunk out of Harvard. They will do anything to rid themselves of the stink of failure. I finally succeeded by getting into a brawl with one of my professors in the middle of a seminar room, whom I drunkenly—but correctly, mind you—declared a “know-nothing yeast infection.” Even then, I had to throw the first punch.

After retrieving me from Cambridge, Tony Wexler sat me down and told me that unless I got a job I would be cut off.

It obviously hurt him to have to threaten me, and though we both knew that he wasn’t giving the orders, I despised him for carrying them out. I used my last thousand dollars to get on the next flight to London, where I showed up at Amelia’s door, virtually flammable from the countless Tanqueray-and-tonics I’d ingested on the way over.

She took me right in. She never asked how long I planned on staying, never asked what had happened. She fed me and let me sleep and never judged me, perhaps knowing that I would come to judge myself harshest of all.

With nothing to do except sit in the garden and read, I began to understand what a mess I’d made of my life, a realization that left me sad and lonely but most of all angry. I remember sitting on a bench at the end of the arbor, listening to the birds and feeling jittery after two days without a drink or drugs. I got up and went to the cabinet where Amelia’s husband kept his single malts, fully expecting it to be locked. Tony had probably called ahead and told her to clear out the cupboards. I resented her in advance for pretending to like me, for being no better than the rest of them, just another one of my father’s minions.

The cabinet was open. Burning with shame, I closed it and slunk from the room.

The breaking point came a few days later, when Amelia asked in passing what had become of my Twombly, the one we’d bought together and that I’d loved.

Only then did I realize that I’d left it at Harvard. My departure had been so abrupt, so hazy, so filled with lawyers and ultimatums, that I’d forgotten to take it. As far as I knew it was still there.

I called up a friend from the Fly and asked him to go over my room. The Twombly hung above my bed, where it attracted the immediate attention of everyone who entered. Those in the know—art history concentrators, always, and mostly girls—tended to assume, until corrected, that I had picked it up at the Fogg’s semesterly Print Rental, where even the hardest-up scholarship cases can plunk down thirty bucks to own a Jasper Johns for two semesters. When I told them that no, in fact, the drawing was mine and all mine, they tended, these art-history-concentrating girls, to sleep with me. I loved my chosen major for many reasons.

At any rate, my friend called back to say that as far as he could tell, the Twombly, like everything else I had abandoned, had been carted away with the trash.

That killed me. For the first time since losing my mother, I cried. Amelia’s husband, unequipped to deal with such a wanton display of self-pity, avoided me for days. Amelia brought me tea and held my hand, and gradually it dawned on me that the real tragedy was not the loss of my drawing but the fact that I couldn’t muster tears for anything save a piece of paper.

To this day I have no desire to drink. All the black thoughts and bitterness that fueled my self-destruction have been channeled into two new areas of expertise: art and hatred of my father. Fair or not, we all have our outlets.

With Amelia’s help I got a job at a gallery in London, and when I decided to go back to the States, she called her friend Leonora Waite, who ran a gallery on the fourth floor of 567 West Twenty-fifth Street.

Leonora and I hit it off famously. A lusty, chain-smoking lesbian from the Bronx, she leaned toward feminist art, pulp novels, and slasher flicks.

She laughed big, threw incredible parties, and hated Marilyn Wooten with a passion, threatening to fire me when Marilyn and I started dating.

She didn’t. Instead, she sold me her space at a shamefully low price when she retired after September 11. Six months later she died, and I had the sign out front changed to MULLER GALLERY. In her honor, my first show consisted of new works by the Lilit Collective, a self-sustaining artistic community in rural Connecticut whose cofounder, Kristjana Hallbjornsdottir, would soon become my artist.