Twelve Moments
in the Life of the Artist
One: At an early age my sister Gretchen exhibited a remarkable talent for drawing and painting. Her watercolors of speckled mushrooms and bonneted girls were hung with pride in the family room, and her skill was encouraged with private lessons and summer visits to sketching camp. Born with what my mother defined as an “artistic temperament,” Gretchen floated from blossom to blossom in a blissful haze. Staring dreamily up at the sky, she tripped over logs and stepped out in front of speeding bicycles. When the casts were placed on her arms and legs, she personalized them with Magic Marker daisies and fluffy clouds. Physically she’d been stitched up more times than the original flag, but mentally nothing seemed to touch her. You could tell Gretchen anything in strict confidence, knowing that five minutes later she would recall nothing but the play of shadows on your face. It was like having a foreign-exchange student living in our house. Nothing we did or said made any sense to her, as she seemed to follow the rules and customs of some exotic, faraway nation where the citizens drilled the ground for oil paint and picked pastels from the branches of stunted trees. Without copying anyone else, she had invented her own curious personality, which I envied even more than her artistic ability.
When Gretchen’s talent was recognized by teachers, both my parents stepped forward to claim responsibility. As a child my mother had shown a tendency for drawing and mud sculpture and could still amuse us with her speedy re-creations of a popular cartoon woodpecker. Proving his to be a latent gift, my father bought himself a box of acrylic paints and set up his easel in front of the basement TV, turning out exact copies of Renoir cafés and Spanish monks brooding beneath their hooded robes. He painted New York streetscapes and stagecoaches riding into fiery sunsets — and then, once he’d filled the basement walls with his efforts, he stopped painting as mysteriously as he’d begun. It seemed to me that if my father could be an artist, anyone could. Snatching up his palette and brushes, I retreated to my bedroom, where, at the age of fourteen, I began my long and disgraceful blue period.
Two: When painting proved too difficult, I turned to tracing comic-book characters onto onionskin typing paper, telling myself that I would have come up with Mr. Natural on my own had I been born a few years earlier. The main thing was to stay focused and provide myself with realistic goals. Unlike my father, who blindly churned out one canvas after another, I had real ideas about the artistic life. Seated at my desk, my beret as tight as an acorn’s cap, I projected myself into the world represented in the art books I’d borrowed from the public library. Leafing past the paintings, I would admire the photographs of the artists seated in their garrets, dressed in tattered smocks and frowning in the direction of their beefy nude models. To spend your days in the company of naked men — that was the life for me. “Turn a bit to the left, Jean-Claude. I long to capture the playful quality of your buttocks.”
I envisioned the finicky curators coming to my door and begging me to hold another show at the Louvre or the Metropolitan. After a lunch of white wine and tongue-size cutlets, we would retire to the gentlemen’s lounge and talk about money. I could clearly see the results of my labor: the long satin scarves and magazine covers were very real to me. What I couldn’t begin to imagine was the artwork itself. The only crimp in my plan was that I seemed to have no talent whatsoever. This was made clear when I signed up for art classes in high school. Asked to render a bowl of grapes, I would turn in what resembled a pile of stones hovering above a whitewall tire. My sister’s paintings were prominently displayed on the walls of the classroom, and the teacher invoked her name whenever discussing perspective or color. She was included in all the city- and countywide shows and never mentioned the blue ribbons scotch-taped to her entries. Had she been a braggart, it would have been much easier to hate her. As it was, I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn’t want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.
Three: Away from home and the inevitable comparisons with Gretchen, I enrolled as an art major at a college known mainly for its animal-husbandry program. The night before my first life-drawing class, I lay awake worrying that I might get physically excited by the nude models. Here would be this person, hopefully a strapping animal-husbandry major, displaying his tanned and muscled body before an audience of students who, with the exception of me, would see him as nothing but an armature of skin and bones. Would the teacher take note of my bulging eyes or comment on the thin strand of saliva hanging like fishing wire from the corner of my mouth? Could I skip the difficult hands and feet and just concentrate on the parts that interested me, or would I be forced to sketch the entire figure?
My fears were genuine but misplaced. Yes, the model was beefy and masculine, but she was also a woman. Staring too hard was never an issue, as I was too busy trying to copy my neighbor’s drawings. The teacher made his rounds from easel to easel, and I monitored his progress with growing panic. Maybe he didn’t know my sister, but there were still plenty of other talented students to compare me with.
Frustrated with drawing, I switched to the printmaking department, where I overturned great buckets of ink. After trying my hand at sculpture, I attempted pottery. During class critiques the teacher would lift my latest project from the table and I’d watch her arm muscles strain and tighten against the weight. With their thick, clumsy bases, my mugs weighed in at close to five pounds each. The color was muddy and the lips rough and uninviting. I gave my mother a matching set for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike.
Four: I transferred to another college and started the whole humiliating process all over again. After switching from lithography to clay modeling, I stopped attending classes altogether, preferring to concentrate on what my roommate and I referred to as the “Bong Studies Program.” A new set of owlish glasses made pinpoints of my red-rimmed eyes, and I fell in with a crowd of lazy filmmakers who talked big but wound up spending their production allowances on gummy bricks of hash. In their company I attended grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtlenecked men slogged the stony beaches, cursing the gulls for their ability to fly. The camera would cut to a field of ragged crows and then to a freckle-faced woman who sat in a sunbeam examining her knuckles. It was all I could do to stay awake until the movie ended and I could file out of the theater behind the melancholy ticketholders, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the pale worrywarts I’d seen flickering up on the screen. True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible. Maybe I couldn’t paint or sculpt, but I could work a mood better than anyone I knew. Unfortunately, the school had no accredited sulking program and I dropped out, more despondent than ever.
Five: My sister Gretchen was leaving for the Rhode Island School of Design just as I was settling back into Raleigh. After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things is dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations. The moment I took my first burning snootful, I understood that this was the drug for me. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit? These are questions for insecure potheads. A speed enthusiast knows that everything he says or does is brilliant. The upswing is that, having eliminated the need for both eating and sleeping, you have a full twenty-four hours a day to spread your charm and talent.
“For God’s sake,” my father would say, “it’s two o’clock in the morning. What are you calling for?”
I was calling because the rest of my friends had taken to unplugging their phones after ten P.M. These were people I’d known in high school, and it disappointed me to see how little we now had in common. They were still talking about pen-and-ink portraits and couldn’t understand my desire to drag a heavy cash register through the forest. I hadn’t actually done it, but it sounded like a good idea to me. These people were all stuck in the past, setting up their booths at the art fair and thinking themselves successful because they’d sold a silk screen of a footprint in the sand. It was sad in a way. Here they were, struggling to make art, while without the least bit of effort, I was living art. My socks balled up on the hardwood floor made a greater statement than any of their hokey claptrap with the carefully matted frames and big curly signatures in the lower left-hand corners. Didn’t they read any of the magazines? The new breed of artist wanted nothing to do with my sister’s idea of beauty. Here were people who made a living pitching tents or lying in a fetal position before our national monuments. One fellow had made a name for himself by allowing a friend to shoot him in the shoulder. This was the art world I’d been dreaming of, where God-given talent was considered an unfair advantage and a cold-blooded stare merited more praise than the ability to render human flesh. Everything around me was art, from the stains in my bathtub to the razor blade and short length of drinking straw I used to cut and ingest my speed. I was back in the world with a clear head and a keen vision of just how talented I really was.
“Let me put your mother on,” my father would say. “She’s had a few drinks, so maybe she can understand whatever the hell it is you’re talking about.”
Six: I bought my drugs from a jittery, bug-eyed typesetter whose brittle, prematurely white hair was permed in such a way that I couldn’t look at her without thinking of a late-season dandelion. Selling me the drugs was no problem, but listening to my increasingly manic thoughts and opinions was far too much for one person to take on a daily basis.
“I’m thinking of parceling off portions of my brain,” I once told her. “I’m not talking about having anything surgically removed, I’d just like to divide it into lots and lease it out so that people could say, ‘I’ve got a house in Raleigh, a cottage in Myrtle Beach, and a little hideaway inside a visionary’s head.’ ”
Her bored expression suggested the questionable value of my mental real estate. Speed heats the brain to a full boil, leaving the mouth to function as a fulminating exhaust pipe. I talked until my tongue bled, my jaw gave out, and my throat swelled up in protest.
Hoping to get me off her back, my dealer introduced me to half a dozen hyperactive brainiacs who shared my taste for amphetamines and love of the word manifesto. Here, finally, was my group. The first meeting was tense, but I broke the ice by laying out a few lines of crystal and commenting on my host’s refreshing lack of furniture. His living room contained nothing but an enormous nest made of human hair. It seemed that he drove twice a week to all the local beauty parlors and barbershops, collecting their sweepings and arranging them, strand by strand, as carefully as a wren.
“I’ve been building this nest for, oh, about six months now,” he said. “Go ahead, have a seat.”
Other group members stored their bodily fluids in baby-food jars or wrote cryptic messages on packaged skirt steaks. Their artworks were known as “pieces,” a phrase I enthusiastically embraced. “Nice piece,” I’d say. In my eagerness to please, I accidentally complimented chipped baseboards and sacks of laundry waiting to be taken to the cleaners. Anything might be a piece if you looked at it hard enough. High on crystal, the gang and I would tool down the beltway, admiring the traffic cones and bright yellow speed bumps. The art world was our conceptual oyster, and we ate it raw.
Inspired by my friends, I undertook a few pieces of my own. My first project was a series of wooden vegetable crates I meticulously filled with my garbage. Seeing as how I no longer ate anything, there were no rotting food scraps to worry about, just cigarette butts, aspirin tins, wads of undernourished hair, and bloody Kleenex. Because these were pieces, I carefully recorded each entry using an ink I’d made from the crushed bodies of ticks and mosquitoes.
2:17 A.M.: Four toenail clippings.
3:48 A.M.: Eyelash discovered beside sink. Moth.
Once the first two crates were completed, I carried them down to the art museum for consideration in their upcoming juried biennial. When the notice arrived that my work had been accepted, I foolishly phoned my friends with the news. Their proposals to set fire to the grand staircase or sculpt the governor’s head out of human feces had all been rejected. This officially confirmed their outsider status and made me an enemy of the avant-garde. At the next group meeting it was suggested that the museum had accepted my work only because it was decorative and easy to swallow. My friends could have gotten in had they compromised themselves, but unlike me, some people had integrity.
Plans were made for an alternative exhibit, and I wound up attending the museum opening in the company of my mother and my drug dealer, who by this time had lost so much hair and weight that, in her earth-tone sheath, she resembled a cocktail onion speared on a toothpick. The two of them made quite a pair, hogging the wet bar and loudly sharing their uninformed opinions with anyone within earshot. There was a little jazz combo playing in the corner, and the waiters circulated with trays of jumbo shrimp and stuffed mushrooms. I observed the crowd gathered around my crates, wanting to overhear their comments but feeling a deeper need to keep tabs on my mother. I looked over at one point and caught her drunkenly clutching the arm of the curator, shouting, “I just passed a lady in the bathroom and told her, ‘Honey, why flush it? Carry it into the next room and they’ll put it on a goddamn pedestal.’ ”
Seven: I told my friends that I had hated every moment of the museum reception, which was practically true. The show was up for two months, and when it came down, I carried my crates to a vacant lot and burned them in penitence for my undeserved success. I had paid for my folly and, as a reward, was invited to take part in the nest builder’s performance piece. The script was great.
“When I bleat here on page seventeen, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and ‘bleat, bleat’? ” I asked. “I feel like ‘bleat, bleating,’ but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling through the birth canal of concertina wire, I don’t want to steal focus, you know what I mean?”
He did. That was the scary part, that someone understood me. It occurred to me that a performance piece was something like a play. A play without a story, dialogue, or any discernible characters. That kind of a play. I was enchanted.
We found ourselves a raw space, and oh, how I loved the way those words tripped off my tongue. “We’ve located a great raw space for the piece,” I’d tell my outside friends. “It’s an abandoned tobacco warehouse with no running water or electricity. It’s got to be a good hundred and twenty degrees in there! You really ought to come down and see the show. There are tons of fleas, and it’s going to be really deep.”
My parents attended the premiere, sitting cross-legged on one of the padded mats spread like islands across the filthy concrete floor. Asked later what she thought of the performance, my mother massaged her knees, asking, “Are you trying to punish me for something?”
The evening newspaper ran a review headlined LOCAL GROUP PITCHES IN, CLEANS UP WAREHOUSE. This did nothing to encourage the ticket buyers, whose numbers dwindled to the single digits by the second night of our weeklong run. Word of mouth hurt us even more, but we comforted ourselves by blaming a population so brainwashed by television that they couldn’t sit through a simple two-and-a-half-hour performance piece without complaining of boredom and leg cramps. We were clearly ahead of our time but figured that, with enough drugs, the citizens of North Carolina would eventually catch up with us.
Eight: The nest builder announced plans for his next performance piece, and the group fell apart. “Why is it always your piece?” we asked. As leader, it was his fate to be punished for having the very qualities we admired in the first place. His charisma, his genuine commitment, even his nest — all these things became suspect. When he offered us the opportunity to create our own roles, we became even angrier. Who was he to give assignments and set deadlines? We lacked the ability to think for ourselves and resented having to admit it. This led to an epic shouting match in which we exhausted all our analogies and then started all over again from the top. “We’re not your puppets or little trained dogs, willing to jump through some hoop. What, do you think we’re puppets? Do we look like puppets to you? We’re not puppets or dogs, and we’re not going to jump through any more of your hoops, Puppet Master. Oh, you can train a dog. Stick your hand up a puppet’s ass and he’ll pretty much do whatever you want him to, but we’re not playing that game anymore, Herr Puppet Meister. We’re through playing your tricks, so find someone else.”
I had hoped that the group might stay together forever, but within ten minutes it was all over, finished, with each of us vowing to perform only our own work. I spent the next several weeks running the argument over and over in my mind, picturing a small dog chasing a puppet across the floor of an abandoned warehouse. How could I have been so stupid as to throw away the only opportunity I’d ever have?
I was at home braiding the bristles on my whisk broom when the museum called, inviting me to participate in their new “Month of Sundays” performance-art festival. It seemed as though I should play hard to get, but after a moment or two of awkward silence, I agreed to do it for what I called “political reasons.” I needed the money for drugs.
Nine: Watching the performances of my former colleagues, I got the idea that once you assembled the requisite props, the piece would more or less come together on its own. The inflatable shark naturally led to the puddle of heavy cream, which, if lapped from the floor with slow, steady precision, could account for up to twenty minutes of valuable stage time. All you had to do was maintain a shell-shocked expression and handle a variety of contradictory objects. It was the artist’s duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience’s job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.
My search for the appropriate objects led me to a secondhand store. Standing at the checkout counter with an armload of sock monkeys, I told the cashier, “These are for a piece I’m working on. It’s a performance commissioned by the art museum. I’m an artist.”
“Really?” The woman stabbed her cigarette into a bucketful of sand. “My niece is an artist, too! She’s the one who made those sock monkeys.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I’m a real artist.”
The woman was not offended, only puzzled. “But my niece lives over in Winston-Salem.” She said it as if living in Winston-Salem automatically signified an artistic temperament. “She’s a big, blond-headed girl with twin babies just about grown. Everybody calls her the sock lady on account of that she’s always making those monkeys. She’s a pretty girl, big-boned but just as talented as she can be.”
I looked into this woman’s face, her fuzzy jowls hanging like saddlebags, and I pictured her reclining nude in a shallow pool of peanut oil. Were she smart enough to let me, I could use her as my living prop. I could be the best thing that ever happened to her, but sadly, she was probably too ignorant to appreciate it. Maybe one day I’d do a full-length piece on the topic of stupidity, but in the meantime, I’d just pay for the sock monkeys, snort a few lines of speed, and finish constructing a bulletproof vest out of used flashlight batteries.
Ten: Quite a few people showed up for the museum performance, and I stood before them wishing they were half as high as I was. I’d been up for close to three days and had taken so much speed that I could practically see the individual atoms pitching in to make up every folding chair. Why is everyone staring at me? I wondered. Don’t they have anything better to do? I thought I was just being paranoid, and then I remembered that I was being stared at for a reason. I was onstage, and everyone else was in the audience, waiting for me to do something meaningful. The show wasn’t over. It had only just begun. I reminded myself that this was my moment. All I had to do was open my prop box, and the rest of the piece would take care of itself.
I’m slicing this pineapple now, I thought. Next I’ll just rip apart these sock monkeys and pour the stuffing into this tall rubber boot. Good, that’s good. Nobody pours stuffing like you do, my friend. Now I’ll snip off some of my hair with these garden shears, place the bottlecaps over my eyes, and we’re almost home.
I moved toward the audience and was kneeling in the aisle, the shears to my head, when I heard someone say, “Just take a little off the back and sides.”
It was my father, speaking in a loud voice to the woman seated beside him.
“Hey, sport,” he called, “what do you charge for a shave?”
The audience began to laugh and enjoy themselves.
“He should probably open a barbershop, because he’s sure not going anywhere in the show-business world.”
It was him again, and once more the audience laughed. I was spitting tacks, trying my hardest to concentrate but thinking, Doesn’t he see the Botticelli hanging on the wall behind me? Has he no idea how to behave in an art museum? This is my work, damn it. This is what I do, and here he’s treating it like some kind of a joke. You are a dead man, Lou Sedaris. And I’ll see to that personally.
Immediately following the performance a small crowd gathered around my father, congratulating him on his delivery and comic timing.
“Including your father was an excellent idea,” the curator said, handing me my check. “The piece really came together once you loosened up and started making fun of yourself.”
Not only did my father ask for a cut of the money, but he also started calling with suggestions for future pieces. “What if you were to symbolize man’s inhumanity to man by heating up a skillet of plastic soldiers?”
I told him that was the cheesiest idea I’d ever heard in my life and asked him to stop calling me with his empty little propositions. “I’m an artist!” I yelled. “I come up with the ideas. Me, not you. This isn’t some party game, it’s serious work, and I’d rather stick a gun to my head than listen to any more of your bullshit suggestions.”
There was a brief pause before he said, “The bit with the gun just might work. Let me think about it and get back to you.”
Eleven: My performing career effectively ended the day my drug dealer moved to Georgia to enter a treatment center. Since the museum I’d done a piece at a gallery and had another scheduled for the state university. “How can you do this to me?” I asked her. “You can’t move away, not now. Think of all the money I’ve spent on you. Don’t I deserve more than a week’s notice? And what do you need with a treatment center? People like you the way you are; what makes you think you need to change? Just cut back a little, and you’ll be fine. Please, you can’t do this to me. I have a piece to finish, goddamnit. I’m an artist and I need to know where my drugs are coming from.”
Nothing I said would change her mind. I cashed in a savings bond left to me by my grandmother and used the money to buy what I hoped would be enough speed to get me through the month. It was gone in ten days, and with it went my ability to do anything but roll on the floor and cry. It would have made for a decent piece, but I couldn’t think about that at the time.
Speed’s breathtaking high is followed by a crushing, suicidal depression. You’re forced to pay tenfold for all the fun you thought you were having. It’s torturous and demeaning, yet all you can think is that you want more. I might have thrown myself out the window, but I lived on the first floor and didn’t have the energy to climb the stairs to the roof. Everything ached, and even without the speed I was unable to sleep. Thinking I must have dropped a grain or two, I vacuumed the entire apartment with a straw up my nose, sucking up dead skin cells, Comet residue, and pulverized cat litter. Anything that traveled on the bottom of a shoe went up my nose.
A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head, and called it a night.
A few of my former friends showed up at the performance, looking just as sweaty and desperate as I did. Following the piece, they invited themselves to my apartment and I welcomed them, hoping that somebody still had some drugs. It turned out that they were thinking the exact same thing. We sat around making small talk and watching one another’s hands. Someone would reach into his pocket and we’d all perk up until the hand returned bearing nothing but a cigarette. The shame was nothing I ever could have conveyed with thimbles or squirt guns filled with mayonnaise. A fistful of burning hair could not begin to represent the mess I had made of my life.
I thought briefly of checking myself into a hospital, but I’d seen what those wards looked like and I’ve always hated having a roommate. Perhaps this was something that with hard work and determination I could overcome. Maybe I could sober up, get my personal life in order, and reevaluate my priorities. Chances were that I had no artistic talent whatsoever. If I were to face that fact, possibly I could move on with my life, maybe learn a trade and take pride in my ability to shingle roofs or knock the dents out of cars. There was no shame in working with your hands and returning home at night to a glass of ice water and the satisfaction that you’d brightened someone’s afternoon with a pock-free fender. Lots of people did things like that. You might not read their names in the magazines, but still they were out there, day after day, giving it all they had. Better yet, I decided — at the age of twenty-seven — to return to art school. They’d have plenty of drugs there.
Twelve: I take my seat on the cold concrete floor, watching as a full-grown woman kneels before an altar made of fudge. She’s already put away a gingerbread cabin, two pints of ice cream, and a brood of marshmallow chicks — all without saying a word. The effect is excruciating, but I have no one but myself to blame. I find myself attending these performance pieces the same way certain friends drop by their AA meetings. I still do a lot of selfish and terrible things. I do not, however, treat myself to hot-cocoa enemas before an audience of invited guests. Minor as it seems, this has become something to celebrate.
The woman onstage has tottered on stilts fashioned from empty cans of Slim-Fast. She’s taken her eating disorder on the road, conditioning her hair with whipped topping and rolling her bangs in finger-size breakfast sausages. Just when I think she’s finished with all her props and is ready to toss up an ending, out comes a bust of Venus made from cake frosting. Looking around, I notice my fellow audience members examining their cuticles and staring with great purpose at the exit sign. Like me, they’re thinking of something positive to say once the spectacle is over and the performer takes up her post beside the front door. The obvious comment would come in the form of a question, that being, “What in God’s name possessed you to do such a thing, and why is it that nobody stopped you?” I’m not here to cause trouble, so it’s probably best to remark upon a single detail. When the time comes, I take her sticky hand in mine and ask how she manages to keep her frosting so stiff. This is neither damning nor encouraging. It is simply my password out onto the street, where I can embrace life with a renewed sense of liberty. The girl standing in front of the delicatessen stoops to tie her shoe. I watch as farther down the block a white-haired man tosses a business card into the trash. I turn for a moment at the sound of a car alarm and then continue along my way, unencumbered. No one expects me to applaud or consider the relationship between the shoelace and the white-haired man. The car alarm is not a metaphor, but just an unrehearsed annoyance. This is a new and brighter world, in which I am free to hurry along, celebrating my remarkable ability to walk, to run.