Walking the Dog (8 page)

BOMBAST

I have a new dog named Bombast. She's a scrappy Brussels griffon. The kind with the pushed-in face who always look offended. “I'm giving her to you because she's ugly,” Hubb told me. This was his version of being affectionate. But if I said, “No uglier than you,” like some of his “bros” might, he'd tell me to have some respect, or, depending on how much Adderall and meth he'd ingested, he might fire me. He'd fired me twice already for insubordination and trying to steal clients from the company behind his back. Then he'd call me on my cell and act as if nothing had happened. He'd drone out my schedule and order me to get my ass over to the office to pick up keys. Hubb wasn't a bad guy for an ex-con junkie. When he was straight, he ran a good business. When he was high, schedules went into chaos and he'd take out one of his guns and aim it at Lucinda and whoever happened to be in the office. When Hubb was in those states Lucinda would quietly fix the damage. First she'd opiate him with Percocet or OxyContin. If she was out of that, she'd shoot him with smack. (I hated watching that.) Then, when he was calm, Lucinda and I would each make a few apologetic phone calls—“His cousin died,” etc.—and post a tidy, new, rearranged schedule. Lucinda was wary of me and generally cold, but no one spent enough time around the incredibly
messy office to get in any serious long-term trouble. I had a long way to go, but I was the best trainer, and some people asked for me out of curiosity once they heard I worked there. “Didn't you know you was famous?” Hubb said. “I'd charge extra, like for a limo instead of an SUV.” He was almost proud of my reputation.

Bombast was high-strung and prickly. His expression—
Why am I here in this life?
—was comical and truly full of angst. I walked him around the West Village where he barked and challenged every dog that passed by us. Then he'd pee, having scared himself to death. His owner, Kao, was a Brazilian flight attendant whose trainer had recently quit to go to law school. From what I understand, Bombast was deeply traumatized by this. At home he'd pace the floors of Kao's small one-bedroom apartment. Then he'd jump on Kao's lap and snuggle deep in. Any sound had Bombast jump nearly to the ceiling and dash from wall to wall—a mini, psychotic medieval knight who chased imaginary mice and dragons.

I took Bombast to my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting on Perry Street. I was trying to untangle him. He'd gotten his frizzy hair all wound up in his leash after zooming in circles after a bunch of sparrows. I noticed a bunch of ragged hip-looking folks of all ages descending into the basement of the church across the street. It dawned on me that I hadn't kept my promise to my parole officer about going to meetings and didn't have much time left. I stuffed Bombast into my straw tote bag and followed the faithful down some steep stone stairs. The room had a low ceiling, stone walls, and neon lights. The floor was covered with cheap linoleum, and each fold-up chair was different and more beat-up than the next. There was a podium that was as light and insubstantial as a music stand. A lonely crooked table in the back balanced an overused
boilerplate, teakettle, and coffee machine, and some hardened sugar cookies were spread out unevenly on paper plates. If you weren't depressed to begin with, this would do the job. About ten people were smoking, which had me worried for Bombast. I stayed by the door so he'd have the benefit of the church's musty air. Bombast was happiest in my tote bag since he traveled frequently with Kao in a similar one made by the airline. I could hear him snoring.

The meeting was very crowded, long, and useless. I didn't introduce myself or say I was an addict. Because I'm not, actually. Drugs were part of the recipe that brought me down, or (shall we say) sped up my tachometer, but I never needed them; they were useful for escaping beatings, other forms of initiation, corporal punishments, and occasional torture sessions.

Afraid Bombast was going to yelp during the serenity prayer, I backed out quietly, but not before I recognized a face that made my heart go into my throat. He was completely shaved—egghead chic—and he wore red-rimmed sunglasses. He was still a towering presence, but he'd developed a softness, a slight belly under his Hawaiian shirt and typical Persian pants. He saw me. His mouth literally dropped open. I dashed out of there, but I could hear him following me. “Ester! Ester!” I wasn't ready. I couldn't go near that part of my life.

It was David Sessions. He was a popular painter of massive canvases. One in whom I truly believed. And he had respected me, too. We'd been best friends. In college we pulled obscene and dangerous pranks on each other. We slept on the floor of each other's studios dead drunk while the other was going through the torture of finishing a work. Images and colors and shapes inspired screaming fights. We hiked together and made up songs that bitched about the Guggenheim and MoMA. He
made up an opera about a painting he hated and how he ass-kissed collectors. Together we wept over the mastery of painters we adored. We were creative soul mates. He was gay, but before I met Leonard, as far as we were concerned, we were husband and wife without sexual parts. Like Barbie and Ken. These memories stabbed me. It was like pouring lava onto bare skin. “Ester! Ester!” I could live with misery, but a joyous reunion would be like slowly cutting into a vein with a dull razor. Take it away.

David had moved to Denmark months before the whole Terrartist series unfolded. His paintings had the textures of ash and mud, as if he'd lived in volcanoes at the beginning of time. He brought the life of the earth to a canvas. And yet he was a totally bitchy, highly cultured, Harvard Phi Beta Kappa PhD—a massively tall, pink-faced, chubby queen who wore Persian pants and kimonos. He drank at least two bottles of wine a day and often rolled on the base of his paintings in coal-miner overalls. I could never figure out where he found the uniforms.

After the robbery and murders I never heard from him again. He had been my mentor, my only friend in the art world, my “queer people.” And I never heard from him.

I rushed upstairs to Kao's apartment. My hands shook and I had trouble with the keys. Kao was there so he opened the door. I laid the tote bag with Bombast on his dining room table. I made my way to the bathroom. I don't know for how long I vomited. I thought I'd turned myself inside out. I saw blood.

“Carleen. Carleen!” Kao kept kicking the door. “Should I be calling 911?”

“No, no,” I coughed. “Food poisoning.”

When I finally exited the bathroom Kao gently wiped my face with a damp paper towel.

“I was scared,” he said.

“I'm sorry.” I barely had a voice. “I gypped you fifteen minutes.”

“You're devastatingly sick.”

“Please don't tell Hubb,” I begged him. “I'll make up the time.” Completely unwanted tears covered my face.

“I don't know what you ate.” Kao had kind green eyes. They reflected pity and fear. He was trying to believe me, but he probably thought I was stoned.

“Where's Bombast?” I panicked.

“Tsch, tsch, tsch,” Kao chided gently. “He is still asleep in your bag.”

I took a deep breath, a remnant of one of the hundreds of varieties of mood-management classes I'd taken for criminals or the mentally ill.

“You can keep that bag if he likes it so much,” I said. “Just please don't fire me.” I was trying not to sound whiny.

“No.” Kao smiled. “The airline—they keep designing new ones and give me one every week.”

“Oh man,” I said. “I've got to get to my next client. Thank you. I'm so sorry. Thanks. I'm mortified.”

Kao picked Bombast out of the bag. The little dog growled and went to nip his master.

“Ow,” Kao laughed. “Is that the way to treat Papa?”

I stood in Kao's doorway and held the door. I took another prescribed breath.

“Will you let me still walk him?” I kept asking owners that question. It had to stop.

“Carleen,” Kao said. “You're sick! You take good care. Bombast would rip anyone else to some shredded rag doll. Please be here tomorrow morning. I have an 8:00 a.m. to Bogotá.”

I ran down Kao's steps without a clue as to what had possessed
me. I did a quick check of the street to make sure David wasn't looking for me. I hustled because I had to be at Walker and Broadway to pick up a couple of dull brown labs named Tika and Jaka. No problems. Got their leashes on, walked them a few blocks—bim bam business done—then walked them home.

One of David Sessions's sculptures kept appearing in my brain. It was a huge boulder, crafted and shaped to look like an unconquerable peak. On the side was a small, smooth stone made of red clay or cement painted with earth tones. The stone was on the side of the boulder halfway up. There was a sense of movement with the stone where you knew it was carrying itself up and that once it reached the top it would plummet to the gravel surrounding the sculpture.
Sisyphus
was on permanent display in the garden at Storm King. David had said that when the stone reached the bottom, if it didn't shatter, it would begin its assent up the same stern rocky face again. It was dedicated to me. I was Sisyphus.

THE ART OF TORTURE AT POWELL

Fits was worse than any dealer I'd ever had. I'm talking art dealers. Dope dealers are a whole other conversation. But art dealers not only push artists to fill canvases of art so they can put them on the market or fill a show, they also cajole, guilt-trip, and manipulate. They set up competitions between their “children” that mirror dysfunctional family dynamics. They give emotional uplifts and then turn their backs seconds later. At the time, I was too young and never cared about what most adults said, but I know now that dealers' “families” are like cults. The backrooms of galleries have the smell and pain of sweatshops in the early 1900s. Fits upped the ante.

The sketchbooks she gave me were one hundred pages long, and every week I was to fill both sides of each page by 5:00 p.m. Sunday. She told me if I fucked up deadlines “there were no excuses unless my hands were chopped off.” She had a few former slaves clear a space in the back of the sewing room and took care of the guards so I didn't have to do overtime for chores. My situation might sound like an easy exchange, but to render one hundred complete pieces of art per week is close to impossible. The labor alone pushed me to the brink of mono or Epstein-Barr.

As a very young painter, my technique or my style or whatever
you call it had involved thick layers of paint into which I stuck objects like stones, watchworks, or dollhouse furniture. And, while the paint was wet, I'd take charcoal, pastel, and marker and draw pictures deep into the thick paint, scratching unpredictable drawings onto the canvas. The drawings inside the globs of paint could be ultrarealistic, cartoon, or abstract depending on the mood of my inner story. I could copy any style, period, palette, and yet somehow I twisted it so it came out as my own. I liked to make rituals, pageants, parties, and events. They were thick, sticky movies with no specific theme except my invented holiday. Themes went from tea parties to lynching. My “collage” technique, as many stupid critics called it, was unique because it “seemed to take place in colored waves of ocean, sand dunes, parking lots, piles of snow, etc., etc., etc.” I simply referred to it as “stuff jabbed into gobs of paint,” but I was able to do very complicated line drawings and portraits inside the layers of paint that took weeks to dry. It gave me a toddler-like joy to pile on a mass of paint and then draw straight through it like a straw through pudding. These pieces made me so merry I would walk around the house pounding on furniture like I was imitating a member of a child's Lionel Hampton band. But the sensual high of swimming through my paintings and jabbing sharp pens through the paint's gooey, soft texture must've been similar to what video games did later for boys, filled with guns, rockets, knives, and killing. I was an assassin—my paintings were violent even if the collage depicted an eighteenth-century family. My mother never took me to doctors or psychologists because I didn't exhibit pain or conflict and therefore was simply “spoiled and unclean.”

Years later at Powell I couldn't do any collages for Fits. I knew that the pages would stick together if I used that much paint, and the sketchbooks were too small. So after the initial
terror wore off I made a pact with myself that I'd simply attempt to fulfill her demands. If I failed, she'd leave me like a wounded bird for the vultures. If I filled her pages, the beaks that would eventually rip me to shreds would at least be filed down or aimed at other prey. I was doomed, but I'd fight it off as long as possible.

Art became a game of survival in a jungle, like one of those ever-advancing video games where poisonous creatures, bottomless holes, and excellent killers—equipped with bows and arrows, poison darts, spears, AK47s, laser beams, and nuclear missiles—lie in wait to bring down one person: me. I was still paranoid about the Royals, who still growled and clicked at me when I passed them. The other inmates jabbed or tripped me without being noticed. One guard kept saying, “It won't be long now,” and I wanted to ask, “What?
What?
” I got so stressed by my deadlines and veiled warnings that I dared to ask Fits for some Xanax. At first she said, “Yer too young,” (I was twenty-two), but then she reluctantly doled out a few a day. “As long as it don't affect your artistry,” she warned me. Soon I was eating handfuls just so my hands wouldn't shake.

The first book wasn't hard. I was adrenalized and battered into a place where I could draw every style of comic book character, classic nudes, and variations or copies of all the great artists you're required to do in school. Monet was mixed with Kandinsky. Stan Mack with Seurat. I didn't hand in the book early because I didn't want her to think I was being careless. She wasn't the type to come check on me either. She'd get what she ordered or not.

When I handed Fits the first book, I was shaking as hard as the first time I heard the metal gates of Powell slam behind me. Fits was tall, formidable, and zombielike. A golem made from sand and stale dough. She was expressionless with me. That
was it. She was a Midwestern Frankenstein's monster and I'd become her hunchback slave. If my life didn't depend on it, this would be a Mel Brooks movie. The absurdity of the situation made me want to snort with laughter, growl, scream in frustration, weep as if I were five years old. Fits didn't seem to register my emotional buffet. Her stillness was so eerie. She held out her hand. I gave her the book. She walked off. An hour later she was back. I was lying on my cot in a fetal position, praying for irrelevant and impossible things. This is it, I thought. I'm dead. “You didn't sign any of them,” Fits said in her wooden voice.

“You didn't tell me to.” I tried to sound somewhat robotic.

“Now I am telling you,” she said. “Sign every page and return the book within the afternoon.”

She marched off again.

Blindly, I signed each page, not even examining my artwork. I had to finish this first job. That was it.

No one knew how Fits lived or what her cell looked like. She was mysterious. Rumors abounded. There was a sheet hanging over the bars like a shower curtain and she never invited anyone in. She didn't eat with us at mealtimes and someone said she was allowed to cook her own meals. She'd been at Powell for years, and there were many rumors about her besides the basketball kids. She'd killed a woman who mocked her expressionless way of talking—tore out her tongue. She was at Powell because she murdered her entire family at Thanksgiving and then served them turkey. The only reason she wasn't on death row was because she'd quietly kill all her executioners before they got her. She showered alone deep into the night and hummed a weird little song, but no one dared laugh. Someone claimed to have seen Fits's naked body and said she had no tattoos but was covered with scars from stabbings and burns on every inch of her skin. A human quilt. She never had
visitors. Once a month she sent a letter to an aunt in Ohio. The aunt sent her packages the guards didn't dare inspect. Inmates spread the word that Fits's seizures conjured powerful juju whose electricity could kill you if you touched her. She was an animal. She ate flesh. Everyone claimed Fits was for sure a transsexual. The stories were ferocious and intense. But she'd been here long enough to earn an absolutely unique place in the criminal hierarchy. Even the Royals and the stone-hard lifers were not certain who she was or what she'd done.

One thing was clear though—you did not provoke Fits. She'd never strike right away, but her revenge would come when you least expected it. She shoved a lifer into a giant clothes dryer two years after the woman stabbed her with a shank. She slit the throat of a guard six months after he started raping a nineteen-year-old newbie. Her motives were impossible to discern. Sometimes revenge or justice. Once the Royals tried a meticulous mass attack on her, but she swatted the twenty women down like flies with her gigantic hands.

This was my husband, my guardian, my dealer, and my collector. I said to myself that she wasn't attracted to me. She just liked art. It was probably the most insane relationship of my life, but the most clear. She didn't abuse it.

Week after week I produced books for Fits. My eyes began to blur. My fingers were badly blistered and cramped, but on the whole it was great for discipline. I was in a medieval apprenticeship. But there were weeks when my mind was blank, and I had to create images and textures out of raw emotions. Those were some of the most interesting abstracts. Once I had an easy week and decided to draw all the members of my family, from my mom and dad to aunts and cousins and second cousins to their cleaning ladies and gardener. I had a good time, and resorted to an easy boardwalk caricature technique
I'd used at family Hanukkah parties or for a charity drive for some cause my mother was into. For once my hands weren't cramped because the technique I'd used was barely more than sketches filled in with watercolor. I handed in the book to Fits, but late that night I woke to find my roommate cowering in the corner and Fits standing over my bed. She began to beat me with the notebook, the metal spirals digging into my skin.

“I'll not accept this,” she said in her calm voice. “I do not consider carnival tricks art. This is an insult. Fix it immediately.”

I stumbled into my “studio” in the laundry room half-stoned because I lived on Klonopin or Xanax. I could barely stay awake. I took each caricature and filled it in with real portraiture. Then I took a fountain pen and wrote names, stories, recipes, diagrams—anything I could remember—over sections of each picture in different prints and styles of font. Fits sat on a stool the entire time smoking thin Nat Sherman cigars. I worked until reveille and in every break during the morning and afternoon laundry shifts. I managed to accomplish in hours what would usually take the whole week. When the last page was done Fits grabbed the notebook from my blistered hands and said, “That's better.” She walked out of the laundry room, and I could see her disappear into the steam.

Sometimes I think my time at Powell was a hallucination. They keep telling me, but I can't remember how many years I was locked up there. I don't know how many notebooks I filled. But my scarred arthritic hands are evidence of the truth. And I know exactly where the notebooks are now. I know how to get them, though I wouldn't dream of doing so. In another stage of my recovery or insanity I'll get on a plane and retrieve the boxes filled with the results of Fits's regime.