People say that I’m fortunate. After all, I’ve pursued my career as a sculptor without the constant struggle and financial strain with which most of my peers have had to contend. In college my studio art professors praised me highly and, as unlikely as it seems, I began exhibiting and selling my work even before I had completed my degree. In the years since, critics have written flattering articles about the ironic juxtapositions and the multiple worlds I present in miniature. Today patrons pay increasingly large sums of money for my creations, galleries in major cities exhibit and sell them, even a few small museums have added them to their permanent collections. Though I am certainly not among the top rank of working sculptors, nevertheless my living (if one could call it that) is assured. Yet despite the appearance of success, I readily confess that I am a hopeless failure, a complete fraud, a pretender to my own talent, a vulture feeding on the eyes of a corpse.
As a child I was shy and sickly, largely ignored by other children. But unlike many with a delicate nature, I cared little for books. Instead, my genius manifested itself in a meticulous attention to detail and a keen interest in building. For hours I would sit by myself among my plastic blocks, creating fantastic palaces and imaginary cities. At the age of twelve I began building model airplanes, a task my patience rewarded with handsome results. I even won some contests sponsored by local hobby shops.
At first my parents were delighted. They saw how my successes helped my confidence and they encouraged me to continue. Soon my bedroom was filled with realistic-looking replicas of candy-colored hot-rods, gray battleships, red Fokker tri-planes, and camouflaged Spitfires. When I whined that I needed more space for my work, my parents obliged me by converting our detached two-car garage to a hobby room. They even gave me the key.
“I’m so happy you’ll finally have room to spread out,” my mother told me, though she really meant she was glad my paints and in-progress models would no longer be on constant view on a card table in the living room.
I quickly made the space my own. My father built me a large workbench and lined the walls with wooden shelves. I hung several dozen finished airplanes from the ceiling rafters and lined the shelves with plastic cars, ships, dinosaurs, military vehicles, monsters, animals and a series of anatomical models which I had special ordered from a medical supply company and two of which I was particularly proud: a human heart with all its secret valves and chambers, and a wonderfully realistic-looking eyeball. I set up my portable stereo in the room and played tapes of my favorite music while I worked, cutting molded plastic pieces from their trees with a sharp knife, sanding away the rough edges, painting in the tiniest details prior to assembling each model. I was fascinated by the properties of glue, how it seemed to eat away the plastic as it permanently fused the parts into a greater whole. Many times I witnessed this small miracle under my magnifying glass.
On weekends I ate lunch, and sometimes even dinner, at my workbench. I let it be known that I didn’t like to be disturbed. By the time I was fifteen I became so protective of my little kingdom that I took to locking the door. No longer did I welcome anyone inside, not even my few friends from school. “I’m working on something really big,” I told my parents. “It’s going to be a surprise.” By that time, of course, I’d stumbled onto the concept of synthesis and had already begun the slow, deliberate, inspired process—the mixing, the bringing together of opposites, the seamless joining of images, the fantastic coupling that would in time become my masterpiece.
Because I had no intellectual understanding of the work and relied purely on my intuition and inspiration to guide me, I developed a kind of primitive, quasi-religious ritual. First I would select one of several tapes to play—the specific music no longer seems important, only the fact that I was surrounded by sound. Then, seated on my high metal shop stool, amid my wooden toothpicks, pots of model paint, thinner and brushes, I would carefully squeeze a large mound of clear glue onto a pie tin (early on I realized the tubes themselves were difficult to control and messy) and place it directly in front of me on the bench. Then I leaned closely over the tin, my hands supporting my chin, and stared at the glue, meditating on its colorless consistency and strong odor until I could see exactly what needed to be done next.
During this time the music seemed to grow increasingly more distinct—not louder really, but focused, intense, hypnotic—and produced in me an effect similar to that of a nocturnal animal caught in the headlights of an on-coming car. My vision, too, seemed greatly enhanced. By vision I don’t mean that I could read smaller characters at greater distance or any such nonsense. Rather, I could simultaneously see details set within their widest context and could thus reflect upon the specific and the general at once. I saw, through the same lens, a black cat slinking within an entire city, a lost ring upon the vastness of the ocean floor, a grasping hand among the killing fields of history, a woman’s lips hovering in the sky above the world. This remarkable facility made it so each of my choices built upon what had come before in an ever-deepening aesthetic progression. Somehow I had stumbled onto a secret world and through it discovered how beauty and love were all-inclusive; they were what held the universe together, what helped us make sense of it all.
Over a single summer my sculpture blossomed, a huge flower reaching toward the sun. I sanded, painted and fit together thousands of plastic parts from many hundreds of models. As it grew, the work devoured some of my finished models whole; others I disassembled first and incorporated piece by piece. Slowly the sculpture expanded, spreading in every direction until it filled the garage from wall to wall. I had to borrow a step ladder from the tool shed to continue work amid the swirling mass of motorcycle engines, gothic spires, dismembered limbs, railroad tracks, trolls and soldiers, pirate ships’ rigging, doll house decorations, decapitated heads, military paraphernalia, animal skeletons, brick facades, steam locomotives, historical panoramas, jesters and saints, painted genitalia and other hand-carved ornaments and flourishes.
The ladder, of course, was my undoing. It encouraged me to go higher than I should have gone, to cut away at the rafters until the roof began to sag, to begin hacking through the roof itself. That’s when they came for me, with loud knocks, shouting and pleading, but I wouldn’t let them in. In time my father grew impatient and broke down the door. Then my mother rushed inside and wrapped her arms around me like dark wings. She was crying as she led me outside into the fierce sunlight.
Later she told me I’d been laughing and crying at the same time when they found me atop the ladder. I don’t remember what happened next, except that I somehow ended up at a clinic in the country, where I stayed several days. Then I went to live with my grandmother for a while. It was a period of whispering in other rooms and great concern for my health. I slept most of the time. Whenever I asked about the sculpture people became silent and changed the subject.
When my parents finally came to take me home again they picked me up in a new car, a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. I sniffed at the new vinyl in the back seat and remembered how I had used the right quarter panel from an earlier model of the same car as a crib for the baby Jesus I had placed within the bombed out French farmhouse next to the giant football helmet and the hinged rattlesnake jaw. After he pulled the car into the driveway, my father stopped and told my mother and me to get out. “I’ll park the car,” he said, nodding toward the garage.
“No!” I cried, running toward the side entrance. I tested my hand on the knob and found it locked. Already I could hear the gears and a chain pulling the heavy double door. I rounded the corner and saw that the garage was empty.
It’s taken me years to forgive my parents. I realize they had no idea what they were doing when they destroyed my sculpture. “We cleaned everything up,” my mother explained. If only I had thought to take photos from different angles or to make detailed drawings—a schematic rendering—I might still have some hope of re-creating it. Now, however, after so many futile attempts, I can only aspire to capture occasional parts of the vision, flat sections without scope or grandness, which return to me suddenly or in dreams.
This is the bone yard of scattered fragments from which I scavenge my fortune, gather my praise.
I wake up horny. God’s punishing me again, testing my endurance, so I fall to my knees and pray for strength. But evil thoughts course through my mind like a polluted stream. I try my best to purify them. I am chlorine, lava soap. I bubble and foam, but in the end it happens again anyway. It’s always the same. My soul screams at the exact moment of my body’s release. It’s a righteous voice that wells up inside me, a deep and hoary voice that comes out of the wilderness and is filled with the indignation of the ages. It inspires in me a kind of holy terror and afterwards I shake for a good five minutes.
Though I won’t eat today, I allow myself one cup of instant coffee. Then I go into the garage and give myself fifty lashes on my bare back with a leather strap. Afterwards I climb up on a stepladder and take down the cross I keep suspended from the rafters. I built it myself from heavy lumber, wood screws and angle braces I bought at the hardware store. I had to carry the beams six miles home with me in two separate trips because they wouldn’t fit in or on my car. That was months ago, back when I still had a car. It was mid-summer then, and under the sun’s whip the sweat dripped from my vile body as I walked and melted my impure thoughts about beach girls in their bikinis. I was already learning how to suffer.
There are leather straps on the cross for me to hold onto so that I can keep it balanced as I walk. The first few times I used it I kept dropping it on the sidewalk and by the end of the day my hands were full of splinters from trying to catch ahold of it when it started to slip from off my shoulder. Like I said, it’s a very heavy cross, and long enough so that if it were put into the ground, and raised up on end with me nailed to it like it’s supposed to be, it would still be plenty high to keep me way above everyone so they could see just how much I’m suffering up there. The splinters were actually never a problem, as they only added to my suffering and my contemplation thereof as I pulled them out with tweezers at home later, and it’s nice for the cross to hit the sidewalk once in a while, where it makes a huge noise, though better, I think, for me to fall with it, to one knee or even right onto my face, which happens more often now that I’m actually strapped to it, but once a woman with a baby carriage was walking past me and I kind of leaned over a bit to look at her and just as I was getting a good peek the cross started to slip and only the grace of God spared her child, though the carriage was damaged beyond repair. Praise be to God.
Since then the police have kept close tabs on me. It was even their idea to use the leather hand straps. They’ve given me a few simple guidelines to follow as well. It’s a free country, they tell me, but I’m not to bother people. And they’ve asked me to stay out of the mall, which is where I had a little trouble another time on account of the over-zealous security officers there who accused me of disturbing people with my wild stares and weird cross annoying the young girl shoppers who mill around eating salted pretzels and sucking orange drinks through straws. The security guards wanted to grab my arms and guide me forcibly to the exit. When I refused to let them abuse my rights to freedom of religion and expression they ended up calling the police to have me arrested for disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. Except for those two times, the police have been nice enough whenever they stop their cars to check in with me along the sidewalk downtown. There is even a young lady officer who wears her tight blue uniform shirt with the badge pinned right over her swelling chest, though none of them can keep themselves from winking at each other or chuckling. They know I’m not a criminal, but, even so, they still like to imagine I’m some kind of kook. But that laugh-about-it-all attitude is understandable given all the wickedness and depravity they witness on a daily basis.
I strip down completely and wrap the loincloth I made from an old white sheet between my legs and then twice around my waist. It’s modest but authentic. I fasten it tightly at both the waist and legs with safety pins to keep the cloth from falling down and my private parts from spilling out as I grapple with the cross. I won’t stand for people having any lewd thoughts or fantasies about an act that’s meant to purify. And I certainly don’t want to be humiliated in public. Outside I hear the wind blowing rain against the garage door as I get ready. No doubt about it, today I’m going to suffer.
On the street I see one of my neighbors, dressed in a yellow plastic raincoat, stooping to pick up her newspaper. She waves to me briefly before she scurries back inside her house, even though she knows I can’t wave back because my hands are holding onto the wet straps of the cross. She’s an attractive young woman who works in an office. Sometimes I see her getting out of her car in the evening, her tight skirt riding up her thighs, her high heels gleaming in the late afternoon light. Only recently married, she and her husband have lived on my street just a few months. For a second I catch a glimpse of her legs as she stoops, and I wonder what, if anything, she’s wearing under the raincoat. Even at this distance I can tell that her breasts are full and round. Her big red nipples puff out and stand erect beneath the cold plastic, begging for my tongue’s devotion. Her hot host is already moist with the anticipation of everlasting joy, of paradise on earth, of things to come.
But God loves me. My thoughts are interrupted by a car at the corner that splashes the cold and holy water of repentance upon me as it passes through a puddle in the road, drenching my budding lust in its wake. My hair clings limply to my head and rainwater runs down my face as I struggle against the weight of the cross, the cold, the wind that sends chilling spikes of pain up and down my legs. Sharp pebbles press into my bare feet. I pass through residential neighborhoods, and as I do I know that temptation lurks behind every door, every window. I avert my eyes, cast them downward. Along the sidewalk I see drowned earthworms that have been flushed like so many unclean corpses out from their soaked graves. Bent beneath my burden I contemplate my life and its eventual end. As the sky weeps, so do I, for my sins are great and many.
Downtown I walk past rows of storefronts, windows full of worldly goods. I don’t let myself look inside or think about the shopgirls standing in their short skirts—how they pull their pantyhose up over their long legs in the morning, how they push their firm breasts into the cups of their lacy bras, how they splash perfume behind their ears and knees in anticipation. Finally I take my position at the center of town, stand silently in the rain at the intersection of Broadway and Main. People drive past in their warm, dry cars, listening to pop songs about love, or more often about love-making—the words barely clothed in a fine, see-through mesh of metaphor that leaves little to the imagination. Some of them honk their horns at me. Perhaps they know me. In better weather they might speak to me, offer me their blessing or ask for mine. More likely they recognize what I represent, why I am here. They understand that safe inside their cars they are swimming in filthy thoughts, vile debauchery.
A man and a woman in a blue Mercedes drive past slowly, staring at me with unbelieving eyes. The man wears an expensive suit, the woman a silk blouse under a tweed blazer. No doubt they’ve just come from a motel where they’ve been engaging in every illicit sex act conceivable. No doubt his penis now hangs between his legs swollen red, bruised and sore from pounding inside her tight and hungry hole. No doubt her vagina likewise feels ragged and sore from their debauch, its soft walls stretched and battered from the satanic thrashing action of the devil’s massive, oversized piston. It takes a long time for the car to turn the corner, an eternity. All the while the woman looks into my eyes, first through the hysterical waving arms of the windshield wipers, then, head turned sharply to the side, through the passenger window, a harlot, a fellow sinner in need of spiritual guidance, pleading for help, for compassion. I am here for her, a beacon set firmly in place in the midst of a storm. I loosen my hand from its tether to signal and the cross slips, pulling me with it to the wet concrete. When I touch my face, my hand comes away bloody. She is gone.
I could have saved her. I could have taught her how to love. I could have taken her by the hand. I could have undressed her with my teeth. I could have . . .
By the time I get home it’s nearly dark. I’m soaked to the bone, skin blue and shrivelled, feet numb and bloody, chilled, shivering, feverish. I wrap one towel around my head, another around my shoulders, a third over my legs and sit in front of the television for hours drinking hot tea and watching cable network evangelism. The first hour features a fiery preacher who explains the sufferings of Jesus for Mankind while threatening me with eternal damnation and a gospel rock singer with lips made for fellatio. Later, before my very eyes a blind woman has her vision restored by the love of Christ and a cripple walks when he accepts the Lord as his personal savior. As the camera pans the audience to show the radiant faces of the true believers I see a pretty woman in the third row that I want to fuck. I am exaulted, mesmerized, shivering uncontrollably.
At eleven o’clock I switch off the television and pray on stiff knees in total darkness for an hour and a half. That night I go to bed exhausted and hopelessly horny.