HE WAS GONE.
Or, he hadn’t been around the bar lately, and usually he was always around the bar at night, we knew. It went on for a week, then two weeks. At first it wasn’t strange. Which is to say, the totally off-the-sheetrock stuff hadn’t happened yet (the voice we heard, almost right out of the watery shimmer of our moonlit dreaming itself), and it was simply a matter of his not being at the bar. No, he hadn’t been seen there for a while.
THIS WASN’T LIKE HIM, and what the hell, his studio was in the old warehouse building just across the street in what supposedly is our East Coast city.
And he had even worked out some deal with the bar owner to get his drinks in exchange for a painting or two. The owner, a rather crass blockhead who knew nothing about art, had gone to one of his gallery openings (was it the one with the beautiful young women, art students, in sort of courtiers’ dress, topless in embroidered corsets and wearing costume-ball masks, oh, that was something, the gallery’s idea to have them serve the usual stale canapés and the usual cheap white wine, not the painter’s idea?); maybe the bar owner was impressed by that or just the look of him, the painter. The painter had worked shitty temp and labor jobs to support himself for years, but now that he was a painter, now that the critics were writing about him, he wore the same outfit every day: pegged black jeans, a blue-and-white striped sailor’s shirt, a ratty black suit jacket over that, and a faded red baseball cap. But the outfit wasn’t worn out of any affectation to look like a painter, and in truth he was a skinny, soft-spoken, and gently nervous man, hollow-eyed. Though it should be stressed that it was the exact same outfit every day, the painter never changing the package. And it was as if you had flipped open a big American Heritage Unabridged smelling of its pulpy pages to see an illustration and below that the noun painter, or gone into some undulatingly lit fine arts Web site where it said if you wanted to continue, click the button of an icon figure in the lower right-hand corner wearing, yes, black jeans, a blue-and-white striped sailor’s shirt, a ratty black suit jacket, and a baseball cap, faded grubbily red.
A PAINTER, ALL RIGHT, and now where was he?
EVERYBODY WHO SAT WITH US at our usual corner table at night wondered. Of course, that wasn’t all we talked about, but there would come a time in every session when everybody did wonder about it, as if it were a group exercise, something we had to do.
The blue-blooded guy with inherited money who dressed like one of the Kennedys relaxing; he wondered. The lawyer who didn’t practice law anymore and just took an easy accounting job or whatever here and there to pay off his bills and keep his ex-wife and kid quiet while he chased twenty-five-year-old girls; he wondered. The writer with his mussed gray hair and boxer’s broken nose, with all his railing about the greatness of Fitzgerald, the greatness of Faulkner, how those were the kind of literary citizens he was in competition with, even if the couple of novels he’d published were pretty flat and he was saddled to an underpaid college job teaching creative writing; he wondered. The too-understanding, too-kind, too-handsome guy whose father had been a Methodist preacher in some sane place like Missouri or Oklahoma, and who fantasized about leaving his job at the library one day to open a rare books store (there was something about the blue-blooded guy becoming his partner on this, bankrolling him, but, naturally, it never happened); he wondered, more sympathetic than the others about it, saying:
“He must be busy, you know, and he does have a show coming up in San Francisco, even one in Amsterdam or something, doesn’t he? I mean, everybody gets busy sometimes”—he smiled, showing two dimples, an early-middle-aged bachelor who had the way of a concerned preacher himself, despite the fact that he, like all the rest of us, drank too much—“I mean, he’s probably over there working right now. You know how he gets when he works.”
But nobody was buying into logic like that, and it wasn’t something with the neat deductive geometry that is any logic.
The new, especially cute and especially hip young waitress came over to our table one night.
She was studying theater. Lithe, she had bobbed red hair, genuinely green eyes, and a splash of freckles across her snub nose that only reminded you how goddamn sexy freckles can be on any female past the age of fourteen. She set down her tray on the empty table next to ours, there in the bar’s corner; she removed the empty glasses, then leaned over to slowly wipe the black formica of our table with overlapping arcs of her damp cloth, before lifting from the tray the full glasses for our next round. She was wearing low-slung jeans that had almost forgotten about trying to keep in touch with her glowing, sculpted hip bones and a neon-green tube top that was perfect for her small breasts and hip in itself because tube tops today were sort of retro, with the miles of flesh—in between the jeans and the top—peachy and punctuated by a smiley-face tattoo the size of a quarter hovering over the fully visible, shadowy split of her behind. She continued in the slow arcing passes of the rag, and the tattoo was almost the ultimate in that aforementioned hipness—to have a little stemmed rose there or even the standard splash of weird new-age calligraphy would have been predictable, but how much more original, more hip, to have a smiley face looking at the world from its perch above that split of her (no scarlet thong panties, imagined or otherwise), a face that could have been saying in her own sexily slow rasp, “Have a Nice Day, OK?”
After she set down the drinks, she simply looked around to all of us seated there and said through her naturally pouty full lips, “Where’s Bud? I haven’t seen him lately.”
That was his name, Bud, a stupid name for a painter, admittedly.
Everybody at the table said nobody had any goddamn idea where he was, told her that we were just talking about it. And as soon as she left, the boyish minister’s son, having taken his first sip, abandoned his own earlier argument defending the absence, interrogating himself out loud:
“Yeah, where the hell is Bud?”
BEFORE LONG IT WAS A MONTH, and the sucker still wasn’t there.
The owner of the bar came in one night and in his block-headed way said to us that now that he thought of it, he hadn’t seen him around either.
Again, it wasn’t all we talked about, and, again, it would be a while before the stranger stuff started happening, but it came up at least once in the course of every night.
To be frank, for a couple of weeks the big news seemed to be that the guy who worked in the library and the blue-blooded guy were about to go in together on that rare books and first editions shop at long last. They had found a perfect storefront in the Warehouse District, and they were negotiating on the rent; it would be the kind of shop sorely needed, a place dedicated to worthwhile rare books, primarily good first editions of modern and contemporary literary works, not just the junk that becomes valuable for collectors because it’s popular.
“There’s popular and there’s popular,” the writer told them.
We all listened.
“Take Cormac McCarthy,” he said. “Everybody is reading him now, or everybody literary, anyway, but that’s good popular. A book like Blood Meridian with its half-hallucinatory quest for, yeah, blood in the orange desert down there in Mexico echoing the whole mad need of any civilization for empire, plus the pure muscle of the language, that’s good popular. Though now that I think of it, that was never one of his really popular books, and probably the only popular one was All the Pretty Horses, which isn’t as solid as Blood Meridian, nowhere near close to Suttree, McCarthy’s overlooked masterpiece.”
“No, I know what you mean.” The ex-lawyer, African American, said that, and he gave it an African-American angle: “Take two sisters, for instance. Toni Morrison, she’s good popular, Alice Walker, sort of bad popular.”
“There you go,” the writer said.
Every night it seemed they were getting closer to the deal on the bookshop. The handsome minister’s son consulted the human resources department at his current librarian’s job to see how he might get at some of his pension money early. Then, to really boost the viability of the project, the blue-blooded guy talked long-distance to his adult sister in Connecticut about selling off the summer house on Nantucket they had inherited from their parents years ago and which they had only been using for rentals, anyway; he explained to us that the family ski house in Aspen had already been disposed of. They started thinking of names for the store, but in the end it never happened, of course—the store, that is—and all it really took was the speech from a guy who sat down with us at the table one night. He was as big as Marlon Brando was before he died and he knew the book business, and in his mumbling, almost creepy Marlon Brando fashion (his hands were enormous, yet you could picture them gently handling a first edition of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, let’s say, dust jacket in mint condition, as if cradling a cooing dove), he told the pair of them:
“You might make it work, but it’s a long shot today. The Net changed everything. You heard of Huey Long saying something like ‘Every man his own king,’ well it’s gotten to the point, I’ll be honest with you, it’s gotten to the sad point that because of the Net you now might say, ‘Every man his own rare books dealer.’ You don’t need a store today, you don’t need anything physical, except for the books. A buyer can now view editions for sale all over the world on the Net, doesn’t have to go anywhere. The business has all changed, and it changed fast.”
Not that the two of them ever would, as we knew, actually get that store, but the prospect of it, which could have kept them excited for months, was cut short by the appearance of the hefty guy—cut very short.
Then there was what happened to the ex-lawyer with his sports gambling. He knew college sports, fancied himself an expert, and he started betting a little more than usual with the Italian guy who always drank alone standing at the bar and was a reliable bookie, guaranteeing much better payoffs than anything online. What the former lawyer (“defrocked lawyer”?—nobody really knew) did was bet on games that nobody else bet on, games where you could make some big money if you knew what you were doing, he claimed, because the line was always better, often wide open.
“I did well on a South Carolina game last week, the old Fighting Gamecocks, and got some good action going this week on San Diego State, those Fighting Aztecs.”
“Gamecocks? Aztecs? You got to be kidding.”
Any of us could have said that.
“Don’t worry, I’m not kidding,” he knowingly answered, “I’m more like counting—the loot, that is.”
He himself was a good-looking guy in early middle age, usually wearing another tasteful dark shirt that you might describe as “dressy casual,” with a sheen to it and the tails hanging out; he had melodic low voice that exuded only sexual confidence when around what he inevitably called “the ladies.”
After another solid payday on the gambling, he always seemed to be noticing more than ever the many attractive young women in the bar. He would already be planning how he might try to lure this one or that out to a good French restaurant with the extra cash he now wielded. He’d see a tall girl with a true cascade of honey hair, pushing it back in raking shoves in imitation of the way models and legitimate movie stars do, and he’d say to us with a sigh, slow and low and, decidedly, assured, “My, that looks tasty.” Or, he’d see a petite brunette with the kind of a figure that petite girls can have, what made them favorites for centerfolds in the old days because of their exaggerated proportions and because you couldn’t really tell how short they were when displayed in a magazine on the usual shimmering satin sheets, yes, he’d see a very petite girl with a group of other young women at another table, and he’d say to us, “My, that looks ultratasty.”
But by and large he seldom got very far with much of that, more in the realm of braggadocio and daydreaming than anything else, considering his age. And he really had very little gambling success lately, his windfalls gone. Apparently, the Italian guy was playing him along, began reeling him in once he had him securely hooked, letting him make riskier and riskier wagers as his luck turned worse and worse. In time it was a situation with the Italian guy cutting him off completely on new bets and working out a schedule of payment (the Italian guy arranged it with fixed dates and fixed amounts as if he were setting up an installment plan for buying a used car), while the ex-lawyer had to log more OT hours on his current routine accounting job, no chance of spotting financial daylight soon, with the depth of the debt he’d thoroughly spelunkered himself into, certainly no extra cash to spend on women.
SUCH EPISODES CAME AND WENT, kept us very occupied in talk there at the table, until one night the writer (he had been canned by his old literary agent but had found a new, less-established one who he thought might be OK), he said outright what we ourselves seemed to have temporarily forgotten:
“It’s been an awful long time, hasn’t it, like forever, since we’ve seen Bud.”
BUT MAYBE THE STORY on the painter and his background hasn’t been suitably established here. Maybe you don’t get the idea. We knew that he hadn’t taken the normal route to becoming a painter, and lately a very successful one at that (even if the success seemed to spook him, as did so much else); he’d followed a different course, completely.
He’d bounced around after dropping out of a small state college, for a while played bass in a local rock band. When he did go back to another college after his first marriage flopped, he applied himself with the kind of conviction that only a reformed dropout could. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa (honestly, he was proud of that), then took a master’s in art history. He never enrolled in a single studio art course, and therein lay the rationale for his success, possibly: he studied the confirmed greats in that major of art history while others in studio art routinely worked in college classes under the tutelage of the local ne’er-dowell faculty “artiste.” For years he painted at night and worked every sort of shitty day job imaginable. He once sold red fire extinguishers on commission door-to-door in the burnt-out ghetto. Worse, he once worked as an assistant secretary to a real secretary in a law firm, a plight right out of the tale of the guy endlessly copying more pages in squiggly black ink, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” or that was our writer’s allusion concerning it. With his second wife generating a steady income—she was a selfless woman who worked as a practical nurse, somebody who dreamed of a future life of volunteering her medical services on Indian reservations, even though there were no Indian reservations anywhere near here—he finally took a chance and started painting full-time. As those tons of graduates with studio art degrees cosied up to sleazy gallery owners (why do gallery owners always have such luridly orange man-made tans, both male and female?) and loudly bragged of their own talents, what they would someday produce, how famous they would be, he, Bud, just painted. He had no shows at first. He did the kind of things only hicks would do, like entering any contest he got word of, making slides of his work and sending them in—there was one contest in some unheard-of city in Spain he found out about on the Net, another in poky Peoria itself, no kidding, their municipal art museum there—and he kept winning, then winning some more.
One critic noticed him, then it seemed many critics did. The strange thing was that nobody knew exactly how to describe his work, which was so steeped in the full panorama of art history that none of the critics were truly able to say with any measure of precision what he was doing, but only get close to the idea of it, talk about it in more roundabout ways.
A girl named Celeste who was an artists’ groupie kept a lot of the clippings and showed them to us one night. The clippings offered as good a proof as any of the vagaries of the so-called critics (who are critics, anyway? does anybody want to grow up to become a critic, like wanting to be an astronaut or a bona fide athlete? does anybody aspire to be a critic, and the word itself, if you say it often enough, soon sounding harsh and like something rock-hard you bit into and that broke one of your back molars?), anyway, the commentary in the clips about him was so hemming and hawing, always with much prefacing, that it was tough to know what in the wide world each critic was really blabbing about even when praising. The clippings became just so many indecipherable messages.
Like:
“According to Plotinus, the eye is a microcosmic sun. This concept inspired John the Evangelist to identify Logos with light. Hence, the medieval artist depicted the divine world in the form of a ray of light traveling toward the recipient of the Logos—the Virgin of the Annunciation or Saul, blinded by a luminous ray, falling off his horse. Today, in the painting of Bud Hardesty we see . . .” etc.
Or:
“As does any painting of any period, post–World War II art has necessarily concerned itself with the depiction of luminosity, but not to the degree that it can be said to be a unifying concern, and to a much lesser degree than many other movements and styles. Nevertheless, with the painting of Bud Hardesty there is . . .” etc.
Or:
“To enter the cathedral at Chartres on a sunny day is an unforgettable experience. At first one encounters only darkness, which is confusing, as the large windows indicate a wish to let in as much light as possible; definitely, the interior light is very different from that of the square outside, until we adjust to it, start to fathom its secrets. Which leads us to the painting of Bud Hardesty, in which one encounters . . .” etc.
Or:
“We have been witnessing of late attempts to effect a dematerialization of art. Advanced art is advanced by virtue of its concern with process, concepts, systems, and energy. To speak of a new art in terms of art objects that maintain a foothold in materiality and that achieve their effects by way of some measurable objects has become increasingly difficult. The most obvious and most visible kind of energy we are familiar with is, of course, light. Who as a child has not used a prism to break up light into rainbows, or a magnifying glass to start a fire, or a pocket mirror as a ‘ray gun’ to wage war against interplanetary interlopers? What Bud Hardesty’s painting is saying is that to be a . . .” etc.
Or:
“The era of the nineteenth century in painting was supremely a . . .” etc.
But why go on?
The girl Celeste—the artists’ groupie in her bib-front overalls and brand-new, too-big yellow work boots looking like clown shoes, her hair in an old-fashioned bun, Celeste smilingly chomping fragrant pink bubble gum with a soothing rhythmic click—she admitted that she herself wasn’t sure “what the heck” all that “brainy stuff” the critics wrote meant. Sitting with us at our table, she fingered through the stack of clips she kept filed in an emerald-green folder of the sort a kid might tug out of a book bag on a first day of junior high civics class. She said that an understanding of the critics didn’t really matter to her:
“Look at these articles, look at how many of them there are! He’s broken out of the pack!”
She gathered them up as if a dealer raking in cards, carefully placed them in set order back in the emerald-green folder. (They sounded like something out of a book on painting—or probably they were out of an actual book on painting, virtually verbatim, and critics were known to pilfer and then doctor most anything in a pinch.) She stood, left our table. The ex-lawyer watched the upside-down valentine of her plump behind jello-jiggling in the bib-fronts as she walked away from us and back toward the bar, noting in his smooth, deep voice, “My, that looks intriguingly tasty.”
But the painter never fooled around with any groupies, he wasn’t that kind of guy. He seemed happy with his wife, the practical nurse who dreamed of helping Native Americans. She let him lead his own life, go to the bar every night and stay there with us till closing time. And it shouldn’t be concluded that he was rolling in money either, and what did come in from the shows all over—plenty here in this country, and one in Hamburg already and another in Mexico City—was used to whittle down his own enormous debt that he had racked up in those years of abandoning the shitty jobs altogether and trying to make a go of it just painting. That he was provided free booze, and even food if he wanted it, compliments of the owner of the bar (the gallery opening with the topless young women in Venetian costume-ball masks was indeed the gallery’s own scheme to attract publicity for the event, something the painter really didn’t like—but if nothing else, it did impress that blockheaded bar owner enormously, as mentioned, did make him decide that maybe he himself should be thinking more about art and the “action” surrounding it), true, the painter even now needing occasional help when it came to food and drink illustrated that he wasn’t quite economically liberated, though he was getting there. Not that he cared—he only wanted to paint.
With his studio just across the street, most of us had been given a tour of it at one time or another, knew what it was like: a little windowless room with black walls; whatever painting he was working on at the moment set up on an easel with track lighting above illuminating it; finished paintings stacked upright on the floor along the walls; a tiny refrigerator; a CD boom box for classical music while he worked; the bookcase that contained his art history texts from his time in graduate school as well as a lot of those somehow stupidly oversize coffee-table volumes that most people do just let sit on coffee tables, the expensive, glossy-paged things always printed in Japan or Italy and never the good old U.S., the painter pored over them; and, above all, the tangible smell of turpentine and linseed oil, because the painter knew what he liked and didn’t like, and he liked oil and he hated acrylic. However, none of us ever went there to the studio uninvited, on our own. That was his territory, that was his own world. But he had another world, too, coming over to the bar at night and just shooting the breeze with us, talking about politics or sports or women or whatever. In any case, the studio’s proximity made it all the more strange that such very strange stuff did happen when we started, one by one, going over there, each trying to rouse him at last.
We knew he was there. One of the pot-dizzy busboys from the bar’s kitchen said that during his “smoking breaks” outside he regularly saw the painter heading into the old warehouse with its brick the color of kidney beans, on his way to his studio upstairs, but the busboy, who worked both the day and night shifts, said he personally never spotted the painter coming anywhere near the bar anymore.
NOT THAT IT DIDN’T GET DANGEROUS, or close to that with some “other hours” episodes for us.
We saw each other only at night, and, of course, there were all those so-called other hours for all of us. (The waking up groggy in the morning, telling yourself while sipping black coffee made in a painfully yellow galley kitchen of a one-bedroom bachelor’s apartment that the booze didn’t do the REM sleep much good, that’s for goddamn sure; or the working of a job that never did add up to much, except a clock on the wall grazing away on the hours, as you found yourself whispering half aloud to the dead oxygen there in that office one midafternoon, the gray sky streaked with black clouds like an enormous feather outside, “How, oh, fucking how, did it all ever turn out like this?”) It wasn’t as if we ever spoke that much of our time outside the bar, and at night the hours together imbibing were for guys our age to just relax and talk “in general” over a few drinks, often laugh about something ridiculous in the newspaper or as seen on the television set high up above the long mahogany bar proper, turned on without the sound. The “other hours” weren’t to be confused with the time at the bar at night.
But the ex-lawyer went through one extremely rocky afternoon in those “other hours” when his thirteen-year-old son from his failed marriage visited him one Saturday, and he was so set back by it that he had to tell us.
“You know, I’ll be honest, I miss the hell out of the kid. I love him so much that it tears up my heart sometimes like a piece of steak you toss to the lions in the zoo and, you know, have the big gold lions just tear it up. Anyway, he’s not into sports, and I can accept that, and not every kid is into sports, so my kid doesn’t have to be. He’s into music, not playing it, but listening to it. And there’s this thing now where all these kids want to get this old stereo equipment like people used to have, or like we used to have, I guess, vintage stuff. Not so they can do any disco or rap routines, squawking vinyl records on turntables like a DJ, but just so they can have what seems to them the real thing, at last. I say it’s better than him being hooked on mindless Nintendo or something like that at his age, right? So I told him I would buy him a set of speakers when he came for his regular Saturday visit, and we were in this shop that sells a ton of that old stuff, and I was kind of getting into it myself. They were authentic KLH speakers. Remember KLH? Speakers not that big but with prime sound, in that very cool teak casing that everybody wanted back when we were listening to Motown or the Stones, you know, and I was haggling with the guy on price. My kid, who’s skinny and looks like his mom, was standing over by the speakers, kind of patting them. I don’t know how it happened, or I don’t know why I said what I eventually did say, except that it’s possibly because I do feel guilty as all hell deep down that I don’t spend enough time with him, my only kid, except on the occasional weekend like that, you know, and I’m not raising him as a man. Anyway, when the haggling on the price was done—some old hippie with a gray ponytail running the place, a reasonable, laid-back sort you could do business with—I went over and saw that my son was still patting the smallish speakers, saying, ‘They’re so cute.’ I suppose it would have been different if we were alone, but I didn’t like this ex-hippie with a gray ponytail hearing him say that, another man, and I told my kid, my son, ‘Don’t say cute, you sound like a girl.’ It crushed him, and he simply walked out of the place and then sat in the car crying, and even when I loaded the speakers into the trunk, got back in the car myself, he told me he didn’t care about the speakers. He said he didn’t ever want to see them again. They’re in my corridor storage closet now. I acted like a certified A-number-one jerk is what I did.”
Then the blue-blooded guy, lean and patrician in his usual chinos and rumpled seersucker or tweed sport coat, an open-necked button-down shirt and casual leather boat shoes, Kennedyish, or, better, looking as if he were right out of gothic-spired Yale or even more heavily gothic-spired Princeton circa the Age of KLH Stereo Equipment and being fixed up on dates with lovely, soft-voiced girls from good women’s colleges like Bennington or Sarah Lawrence or Vassar, he was pulled over after leaving the bar for the night; because it was his second DWI, this one could get tricky when his court appearance came. Another “other hours” happening. He told us about it:
“I had been on the phone with my sister that day, or for an hour of what passes for my day.” He was very intelligent, extremely well read, could have had a fine career in any number of fields, but with substantial inherited money, he didn’t have to work; we all knew that, hungover, he never got up before one in the afternoon, living alone. “It was beyond a mess,” he said. “The whole thing started with something about how she held it against me that I hadn’t gone along with her original plan to scatter our mother’s ashes in Newport. I don’t know what made her think of that, but that’s what started it on the phone. You see, the ashes were scattered when we were both out at Aspen, trying to clean out the family ski house to sell it, which we did, and my sister had brought the ashes to Colorado to scatter them there, seeing that the two of us would then be together for once, which we weren’t very often otherwise. I guess she had earlier mentioned something about possibly scattering them in Newport, on its Bailey’s Beach. She’d maybe mentioned it as just an aside, but I didn’t remember that ever being an issue. Ashes don’t mean much to me, what’s done is done when you number is up, if you get my drift. So I thought that in Aspen we had done what my sister wanted, an attempt at a family ceremony with the two of us on hand, tramping around and tossing the falling ashes on a green hill with some wildflowers behind Aspen, where it’s hilly before the real mountains, and that was that. Or so I thought. Then she calls me up now from Connecticut, there in Cos Cob, five years later, and blames me for everything. She said I always knew our mother wanted her ashes scattered in Newport, where our mother’s own family had had a summer place when she was a girl, and just because I was too busy with my boozing—that’s what she said, too busy with my boozing—I didn’t want to take the time to fly up to Newport and scatter them there in a proper ceremony, she said I only wanted to get rid of the ashes as conveniently as possible when we were out there selling the place in Colorado. She went on and on, saying things like, ‘Did you even notice where we scattered them? It was so horrible, there was a bunch of condo complexes, and you were even too lazy to drive farther out, up to the mountains. My mother’s ashes are sitting over some tacky condo complex’s septic tank is where they are. Thanks.’ It threw me for a loop, ruined the day. And I was drinking most of that day before I came over here, if you want to know the truth, and it was almost inevitable that I got nailed by the cop on the short hop back home to my apartment later, after leaving the bunch of you. They always get you late at night, when there is no traffic. The old standard cop’s lie of seeing me crossing the road’s yellow center line, the tried-and-true reason for probable cause and stopping you. I never fucking crossed any yellow line, and everybody knows cops are patent liars, it’s a given. That’s the way fucking cops work.” And we nodded, definitely knowing how cops did work, cops also not hesitant, we agreed, to routinely rig a breathalyzer test and the like.
Those were “other hours” in our lives, all right.
MAYBE THE ULTIMATE ABSURDITY would come from one of us when very drunk. It was tough to remember who said it, the cigarette smoke clouding like yellow marble right before closing time, the place emptying out. We began talking about the painter again, that it was starting to be an unbelievably long, long time since he had last shown up, even if he was possibly trying to churn out a supply of new stuff for the show in San Francisco, or wherever his latest upcoming show, in fact, was. It seems whoever spoke it (again, it was tough to remember exactly who) must have had a particularly hard time on something himself that day, and he said directly what he had to now say:
“Maybe there is no painter, did you ever think of that? Maybe he never did drink with us, maybe it’s just our idea of the painter, or our need for there to be a painter, Bud Hardesty.”
HONESTLY, THAT’S HOW FAR-FETCHED IT GOT. And granting that most of us perhaps sometimes secretly suspected that such might be the case, that there was no painter, to actually hear it said aloud was pretty crazy. The painter had been drinking with us for years, we all knew him. The blockheaded owner of the bar knew him, the girl who was the artists’ groupie knew him, everybody knew him. We all took turns answering that most far-fetched of far-fetched propositions.
“Not a chance,” the guy whose father had been a Methodist minister said.
The writer became even more emphatic concerning it:
“No painter, eh? Well, there’s a Bud Hardesty, I tell you. And I’ve got a good mind one of these nights to just walk over there on my own, go to the studio. I don’t care about this unwritten rule that nobody ever bothers him when he’s working, and this is all starting to turn preposterous. Something could have happened to him.”
To that it was pointed out again that the kitchen busboy, Frankie, had more than once seen him going into and also coming out of the studio building, but it didn’t convince the writer. (The writer himself had just been canned by his new agent in close to record time for being canned by an agent. The agent took the writer’s supposedly recently completed novel manuscript to only three publishers and quickly gave up on it after the three rejections. Apparently, many editors at publishing houses, interested only in making a fast greenback nowadays, just logged into an online service they subscribed to, run by some slick business outfit—maybe like Nielsen, which does the TV-audience-rating thing—and checked your past sales before they even read a manuscript: they could smell remainder fodder five city blocks away, and the writer’s agent flatly told the writer as much. The writer raved to us about how no real literature was being published in this country anymore, and we listened, let him rave, yet we suspected that the “new” manuscript he spoke of was probably quite poor, something older he’d salvaged from a drawer and tried to recycle.) The writer now said that everybody knew the busboy was stoned most of the time, everybody knew about Frankie’s dope habit, one worse than that of any other kid in the kitchen—what he supposedly saw didn’t amount to anything.
“And even if Frankie has seen him and Bud is fine,” the writer said, “we deserve some answers for ourselves. How would he feel if one of us didn’t show up for a couple of months?”
It was also pointed out to the writer that there were a number of guys who used to sit with us and now didn’t show up anymore—they came, and in time they stopped coming—but he didn’t go for that argument either.
“Will you listen to yourselves”—he held his ground—“we’re talking about a friend, we’re talking about goddamn Bud Hardesty. Oh, I’m going over there, oh, I’m going to get to the bottom of this before much longer, investigate and see what’s really going on.”
Others seemed energized by his conviction.
“I’m with you on that,” the blue-blooded guy said, “there’s a Bud Hardesty, no question about it.”
“A-men to that, brother,” the African-American ex-lawyer said, “but of course you’re not really a brother.” He laughed at his own joke.
Even the gum-chomping girl who just wanted to meet and be around successful artists, she realized it, and the lithe waitress, the would-be actress with the smiley face riding up and down atop her butt as she moved around the dark bar, she was sure of it. There was a Bud Hardesty.
And so, some of us did eventually wander over there to the studio, each on our own, to see what the hell was up.
IT WAS GOOD TO BE OUT IN THE NIGHT AIR, away from the smoke in the bar, away from the low noise and the clattering laughter from strangers at another table, the way there always seemed to be annoying clattering laughter from too-loud strangers at another table.
The side street was empty, except for the lumpy shadows of parked cars glistening with dew, and up above you the stars looked exaggeratedly large, as you asked yourself when you last had really looked at and fully appreciated the stars in the sky. Ah, the smell of autumn, the lingering aroma of burning leaves, though in reality our congested city was too distant from places where they actually raked and then burned heaped piles of bright fallen leaves. Or, ah, the smell of spring, the sheer perfume of the blossoms of so many flowering trees and bushes—forsythia and dogwoods and, strongest, the twisted-trunk lilacs in utter purple detonation, species also only found, admittedly, far away from the city. (But no contradiction there on seasons, and to be out of the bar at last, alone and looking for the painter, was to be in a realm where things were defined at last in the purity of the hope-filled abstractions you knew when you yourself had been twelve or twenty, when you could deeply inhale the out-of-doors air to the very tips of your socks, to say, aptly enough, “Ah, what a beautiful night!” In other words, it was all as good as both spring and fall.) Across the street rose the warehouse with its brick the color of kidney beans, a warren of cramped “studios” within the building for who knows what. (Somebody had gotten busted there the year before when it turned out that one studio was being used as storage for hot laptops, and another was reportedly a front for something shabbier, a “film school” that everybody knew was a cover for activities quite kinky—come on, who had a film school in a box little more than the size of a walk-in closet? And it also would be busted soon enough.) To get into the building was merely a matter of jiggling the doorknob of the bulky metal door enameled recently a glossy royal blue; the buzzerand-lock apparatus apparently hadn’t worked for years. The painter’s studio, as we all knew, was at the top of three flights of stairs leading up from the makeshift lobby of sorts, with a sagging sofa and a perpetually empty security desk there under dull, flickering fluorescent lights. As said, at one time or another each of us had been there, and now it was as if each of us made his way up the creaky stairs slowly, alone and excited, but apprehensive, too.
Apprehensive and then some, because (one flight of the stairs taken) what if the painter was, in fact, madly working, and (another flight taken) what if he was totally caught up in the rhapsody of transposing the strange dreams he certainly had onto the strange canvases he inevitably produced, the aroma of linseed oil and turpentine strong, and (seven steps taken on the third flight and then a creaky nine) what if to get to the hallway of his floor and the cheap old indoor-outdoor carpeting there, a filthy, frayed aqua-and-blue tweed, was to hear his CD stereo boom box playing low something like spooky Brahms or spookier Chopin while he worked, that aroma of his painting decidedly gamy now, for you to dare to knock, even pound on the door, and be met with something like this, his shouting voice, which we swore we had heard:
“Don’t bother me!”
Or:
“Go away!”
Or:
“Piss off or I’ll call the cops!”
On the other hand, what if there came some other message, such as this and the kind of thing that he also might shout:
“Do something now, at long last, with what could turn out to be your wonderful life, you’re not all that old!”
Or:
“Find the love in your heart, the glowing light, the luminescence of the ages that you know is there! The light, the light! Follow it while there’s still some time! Know the healing, feel the very balm in repeating over and over that most soothing of all ultimately soothing words—change!”
Or most succinctly, but most powerfully:
“Save yourself!”
BUT, IN TRUTH, MAYBE NONE OF US ever did knock and there was no voice. In the end, we agreed that if the painter was working, we had no right to bother him. That was only fair—the bar was one territory, but his studio in the warehouse, that was another territory, surely, his territory.
MEANWHILE, WE KEPT DRINKING, kept joking, kept shooting the breeze (perhaps it was true, there never was a painter), and it was good to have our group of guys together every night at our table in the bar (but of course there was a painter).
OR TO PUT IT YET ANOTHER WAY, the painter himself didn’t know what he was missing, we assured each other. It was his loss, and we heartily agreed that we had expended altogether too much concern and effort thinking about him.
It even got so that we almost wished him ill. Every now and then we each possibly hoped that the critics, insightful minds that they could be, would really chew the painter up on his next show, and who did he think he was to start snubbing us this way? To repeat, it was so good to have our group of guys at the bar, and, forget about Bud Hardesty, because what was currently more important was the new young waitress. She was even more beautiful than the lithe one with the smiley-face tattoo, a whitely blond number with a sexy Nordic overbite and amazing cheekbones who also was a theater student, but the kind of theater student shockingly beautiful enough that you knew was going to make it; she was that rare. True, it was really good to have this bar and our bunch of guys there at night.
But, needless to add, any of us, all of us, would have welcomed him wholeheartedly if he had suddenly appeared, the painter in his ratty black suit jacket and the faded red baseball cap and the black jeans and the goofy striped sailor’s shirt (we affectionately reminisced about how he’d once claimed he owned a dozen such shirts when we teased him about wearing the same one every day, the gentle painter shyly and smilingly embarrassed, the way he could be), good old Bud Hardesty, in the bar again at last and at last back from the dead, as they say.
OR, DON’T THEY SAY THAT? Back from the dead? Or something like that?