The Manatee: Hiroya, Part I

Hiroya was a fat young Japanese man with a broad, round, jovial face. He wore red, paint-spattered overalls over a striped T-shirt. His coal-black hair was long, wild, unkempt. “I be famous painter,” he told us when we met him, about a year after Susan and I moved into the Chelsea. “I come to Chelsea for art. Now I paint. I make money. I be famous.” He didn’t speak English well—though he spoke it quickly and at length—and at first we couldn’t understand him at all. He was raving, manic: a lunatic. It wasn’t long before he was dragging his paintings out into the hallway on the eighth floor, setting up a show for us, explaining his technique and his symbolism in as much detail as we could bear. We loved his work, however, and—because Susan insisted; I was far too cheap—we were among the first people in New York to buy his paintings.

Hiroya’s art was like his person: wild, colorful, unrestrained; he splashed it over large canvases. He had his own symbolic language that he used in his paintings: railroad tracks, ghosts, crosses, coffins, all in giddy profusion. Graffiti-inspired, Hiroya’s art could be somber and eerie or buoyant and playful, but it was never less than energetic.

Hiroya’s capacity for work was huge, as was, apparently, his budget. (He was from a wealthy Japanese family, who had sent him to New York—it’s my theory anyway—to get him out of Japan. Obviously he would have been an embarrassment to any halfway respectable family.) Every day he would set out rows of canvases that I had never seen before, large, ambitious paintings, stringing them all up and down the hall, and there would be an art show in the hotel. Hiroya’s art may not have been strictly original, but he had enough vitality in his person to make up for it and to lend to his art a reflected life.

I, too, inspired by the thrill of being in New York, was going through a period of heightened creativity at this point, writing story after story, and I think I saw something of myself in Hiroya.

Hiroya’s true originality, and the thing I envied in him the most, lay in the art of self-promotion. He would lurk in the lobby and pounce on the unsuspecting, trumpeting his artistic talents and achievements, his one goal being to lure his hapless victim upstairs to look at his paintings. He would show his work to whomever he could convince to look at it: art critics, rock stars, tourists, auto mechanics, didn’t matter. “You buy now, soon won’t be so cheap,” he would tell these people. “I be in gallery, then you talk with dealer. He charge much, much more. A hundred times.” If you had come into the Chelsea looking for a colorful bohemian character, then this was your lucky day. And if you were really lucky, Hiroya would perform a Butoh skit for you right there in the lobby. Many people, including some famous ones, bought his paintings, even though Hiroya had a perverse, self-defeating habit of refusing to sell to anyone he didn’t like, no matter what the price.

As you might imagine, Hiroya was a polarizing figure, and opinions of him soon fell into two camps: those who loved him, or at least tolerated him, and those who flat-out despised him and could scarcely bear the sight of him. His energy and his talent and his playful sense of humor were what people loved about him. Because he was quite funny. He was a trickster; he knew how to press people’s buttons. He had a talent for ridiculing people who took themselves too seriously, a rare gift for exposing their pretensions. He would find out what they were sensitive about and keep harping on it until it drove them crazy. For instance, if you were a pompous, self-important artist, he would find a really stupid picture in a magazine, and insist that your work was just like that, and that that was why he admired it so.

There was a dapper man named Jimmy who used to hang around the lobby a lot, waiting for it to get late enough to go to a bar and get drunk. (Not a bad guy, though rather long-winded and self-important; I myself drank with him many a night at the El Quijote next door.) One time Hiroya asked him, “What you do?” and Jimmy, one of the few people in the hotel who had no creative pursuit, made the mistake of saying, “I’m rather a man-about-town.” Forever afterward, that was what Hiroya called him, mockingly, every time he saw him.

The desk staff, in particular, disliked Hiroya, I would almost say loathed him, with a passion that knew no bounds. It was understandable, I guess, since they had to deal with him every day, and over time his act must’ve worn quite thin. When there was nobody else in the lobby to talk to, Hiroya would pester them mercilessly.

When Hiroya first arrived in New York, he didn’t know anyone in the art world. The New York art scene is an insular one, and they don’t just automatically let people into it because they say they’re great artists. So Hiroya needed some sort of publicity stunt to draw attention to his work. He found his gimmick in the Bunny paintings. These are just what they sound like: generally small in size, but ranging from 8-by-12 inches up to, say, 23-by-48 inches, these canvases, in bright neon colors, depict a bunny, simply drawn and usually holding a carrot, above Hiroya’s overlarge signature. Sometimes these paintings also bear a slogan, such as 180% Cool, or I Love Chelsea Hotel. Hiroya produced hundreds of these in a range of color combinations and of varying degrees of complexity. First he handed them out to anybody in the hotel who wanted one and then he started hawking them around the neighborhood. He gave them to all the shopkeepers, and soon you couldn’t step into a deli or a dry cleaner or a shoe store anywhere near the hotel without seeing a Hiroya Bunny, sometimes displayed proudly in the window or behind the counter, at other times wedged in behind a cooler or a cabinet.

It seemed that no one could refuse the Bunnies: they were cute, after all, and Hiroya was such a friendly guy, so insistent, and so weirdly charismatic. The culmination of this phase of Hiroya’s career was what he referred to as “The Seven Hundred Feet of Bunnies.” In the Barnes and Noble store on Sixth Avenue Hiroya hung dozens of bunnies, in all the shades of the rainbow, from the railings of the second floor overlooking the retail floors of the book and music departments. I can’t imagine how he convinced them to let him do this, but in the end it was indeed quite a spectacle.

But Hiroya was impatient. When nothing seemed to come of the Bunnies, when they didn’t get him the attention he craved, he started drinking heavily and put on even more weight. Hiroya had never been much of a drinker before, and so this was a surprising development. He seemed desperate for some sort of artistic identity: he drank because he became convinced that that’s what painters were supposed to do, and he drank even more once he saw that it annoyed people. Unfortunately, he couldn’t hold his liquor well, and at one point he got so drunk that he passed out in the lobby and couldn’t be revived, and they had to take him to the emergency room. I, too, was drinking heavily, smoking, getting fat and unhealthy myself, and I contributed to Hiroya’s problem—more knowingly than I really like to admit—when I gave him a quart of bourbon one Christmas. I liked to see people in the same boat as myself, I guess. Hiroya was even more of a clown, more entertaining, when drunk. But I think it’s likely that the drinking affected his judgment and weakened him for what was to come.

Hiroya’s fatal flaw was his desire to please. That was the flip side of his relentless self-promotion. He needed to be tough, as self-promoters usually seem to be, but for Hiroya, his self-promotion was a fragile thing. He was desperate for approval—you could see it at times—in a rather pathetic and ultimately self-defeating way.

One afternoon I came home to find that Hiroya had mounted yet another of his impromptu exhibits in our hall. Hiroya himself was nowhere to be seen, but a tall, skinny, fortyish, blond-haired woman, in a long skirt and Birkenstocks, was standing there amidst his paintings. “I’ve commissioned your neighbor, the artist Hiroya, to undertake a painting for me,” she said, speaking in a pompous, affected tone.

“That’s great,” I replied.

“He is absolutely a wonderful artist. I just admire his art so much.”

“Oh, I do too.”

“That’s why I’ve commissioned him to undertake a painting of a manatee.”

“A manatee?” I asked, incredulous.

“A manatee is a large sea mammal,” the woman informed me, condescendingly.

“Yes,” I replied.

“I simply adore sea mammals,” she explained. “I think they’re among the finest sort of mammals. Don’t you? Especially manatees. So noble and intelligent.”

I almost burst out laughing. But the woman was serious, and I didn’t want to upset her. “They are pretty high up there on the list,” I said. Despite the fact that there were a dozen large canvases spread out in the hall, I wondered if she had even really bothered to look at Hiroya’s art.

The woman was obviously disturbed. Not that it was any surprise to meet a disturbed person wandering our hallowed halls, but this woman was disturbed in an unusual way for the Chelsea: she was a New Ager, a nature lover, the kind who go around with T-shirts with pictures of lovable wolves on them. And that’s the kind of thing she wanted Hiroya to paint: a cuddly T-shirt portrayal of a manatee.

I found the whole thing rather hard to swallow. When I talked to him about it later, Hiroya, sensing my disapproval, was apologetic. “She pay five hundred dollars,” he said. “It no good, I know. But I make what people like.”

The New Age woman was the kind of person Hiroya would have ridiculed if he had had his wits about him. Instead, befuddled by his craving for approval, seduced by the least show of attention, he produced a cartoonish gray manatee, frolicking beneath a yellow sun in a foamy sea of aquamarine. The woman even made him paint the noble sea mammal on an oval canvas, of all things! The result, predictably enough, was a complete piece of junk.

Ironically, Hiroya kind of looked like the manatee he had drawn: fat and rather sluggish, yet cute in a roly-poly sort of way. I came to view the manatee painting as a tragic self-portrait. Intentional or not, Hiroya always did have a good sense of humor about such things.